Carpe diem blah blah blah

Don't go on squirting lemon juice in my papercuts before you hear me out. When you're done reading and you still want to inflict pain on me, please be gentle and stay away from any possible sources of stomach aches and/or canker sores [muchly appreciated].

I was trying to provoke myself to think intelligent thoughts on my way home from school on the subway today and I succeeded [please forgive me for my subtle way of saying that I am intelligent...when provoked]. My holidays officially began when I finished my last exam of the semester. Now that I have two weeks off before returning to work, I tried to think about what I should do with myself for those 20,160 minutes [at least the ones I haven't wasted on useless calculations]. Ah ha! I thought to myself, carpe diem quam minimum credula postero [well, I actually only thought carpe diem. The rest I had to look up to score points on the intelligence meter]. And not a second later, I thought, nah.

There's nothing wrong with me, well, apart from my chronic laziness. But my well-documented and never-debated disease isn't what makes me sound like a lethargic and apathetic person. Can you seriously honestly imagine what it'd be like to seize all 20,160 minutes [or 13,440 if you sleep 8hrs a day] over a two week period? I think I'd pass out from exhaustion.

I'm not about to debate with anyone what the purpose of life is. But, I don't think it literally means, as some thinks, "Don't let a minute go to waste". I don't mean to sound presumptuous, but I think some people take the carpe diem thing to an absurd extreme. There's no justification for doing glorious things every minute. Am I wasting precious moments if I don't spend it calling everyone I know to tell them I care about them? What if I refuse to travel the world? I hope these "monstrous" thoughts don't make you gasp or spit in my face in disgust [moreso the spitting than the gasping].

The important thing we have to keep in mind when trying to live our lives to the fullest is that there is hidden value in a lot of the things that we do. For every extra hour a kid is watching tv, it may be an hour he's not fighting with his siblings. For every week I don't go off on vacation in an exotic hot spot is a week I get to stay at home and spend more time with my family. Take me blogging my time away as an example. It may seem like I can spend that hour volunteering at the hospital instead. I don't want to knock volunteering [it's truly great] but what you don't see is the pride I feel and the satisfaction I get from capturing insightful ideas and expressing them in [what I hope to be] an honest and psuedo-witty manner [In all seriousness, it feels like the honesty with which I write exposes a piece of myself to you in each of these blogs. In exchange for my vulnerability, I merely ask that you jot down a comment to make me feel that my soul-bearing is not wasted. And to those who already do, thank you. =)]

Carpe diem is in the eye of the beholder. Learn to value the things that you do. Although I wholeheartedly agree that it is important to spend time wisely [please don't twist my argument to validate a couch-potato existence], it is equally vital to supress the urge to take bigger steps than you can manage.

"Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans" - John Lennon