Wasting my time (default) // 恥ずかしがりや

It's funny that there's a hit song from about 8 years ago called "Wasting My Time" by Default because I'm about to talk about both wasting my time and how it relates to 「default」という言葉(a word called default).

But I'm a weird person. I say I don't like to do things like watch movies because I think it's a waste of time--couldn't you spend those 1.5-2 hours doing something else? In reality, I'm neither thinking nor completely being honest. I completely lost interest in movies when during high school and before that I was too proud to go to movies with my parents or family and when I didn't have the means to go with friends alone to the movies. Or something. I had a weird social situation back then. Movies got left out of my life at one point and they never really made a comeback, or a convincing push for one. That's more like why I don't watch movies that much anymore. When I was a kid, why not? But still, when I watch movies, I anticipate them being over, or try to predict the story, or check how much time has passed.

I stopped playing video games together with my friends during high school, too, or at least the friends with whom I played them switched, which was sad because I had seen those friends all my life beforehand. Because of personal insecurities about being gay and coming out I stopped hanging out with those friends. The era of Goldeneye with three people in particular is long, long gone. But anyway... at that time, correspondingly I lost interest in playing video games by myself. (The lone exception is DDR.)

During high school, I had to read so much for class and do so much homework, and for some reason I threw myself completely 100% into this mess, trusting the school to take care of me as I did all the work for it... well, I got a prize for it and I will never forget giving that speech. But as a consequence I stopped reading on my own for pleasure. I read during the summers, but I still feel like I do it as an obligation when I read. (Haruki) Murakami is the lone exception. I read all of his books after the class I took on him was over--note, that means I only read him because I had to, although I DID choose to take that course--but since then, I have hardly read at all. Murakami, interestingly, writes about this, in a story (is it "Pinball, 1973"? or whatever the year was?) where he describes a girl who talks about how whenever she reads, it's more like an experience where she just wants to finish the task of getting to the next page. I often feel like that when I read. I can be very interested in a book, but I will still look at what page I'm at and tell myself I should be getting further, faster. Gone, maybe, are the times where I can just lose track of page numbers.

What's happened to me? A psychologist would diagnose me with ADD or something. Forget that. My diagnosis is that I'm afraid of wasting time. I'm even afraid of learning; I always ask myself whether I'm learning the right things. Actually, I think that back in high school I could lose the page number easily, maybe; either that or I was just good at motivating myself to go further when I was reading what I was assigned to read. But I think I'm afraid to get lost.

I am lost. When I and a group of people were drunk looking for a club a few nights ago, the other people were getting aggravated (I thought they needed to chill) that I was constantly checking the map and that I made the wrong decision on direction earlier on. No, I just constantly check. (It helps me win math problems. But not life problems.) What this shows is that when you're too afraid of getting lost, you can get lost anyway, and worse yet, you can get your ability to control your path taken away from you. That's actually what happened that night - I had to surrender the map to someone else. But in the larger, more abstract sense, this is what happened during high school. I don't know if it's happening now, but I certainly can't let it. My only choice now is to... get lost.

This is what Nadja does in Nadja by André Breton. Actually, she loses herself in free, in-one-ear-and-out-the-other thought to such an extent that she gets put in an insane asylum at the end, but Breton (as character) complains about it at the end--who can really tell who's insane and who's not insane? Why, furthermore, are the most free called insane? I saw a man reading this book today at the train station. I smiled. One of the more enlightening books I've (had to) read in recent times.

"Read" is a homo-something (homograph? homophone? or just gay?), just like "wind" and "Polish," although apparently that doesn't count because it's a proper noun. Apparently "read" doesn't count either because the two different possible pronunciations are just different conjugations of the same verb, but whatever, maybe it should. There's also "minute"; think about that the next time you see "Minute Rice." Wait, what's so unimportant about your rice? Also think about it when you see a sign that says "Entrance." Whoa, you hypnotized me!

Okay, enough, I'm done. I'm freewritten and I'm smiling.

Oh, the 恥ずかしがりや part- I was thinking about how I would explain to my host mother if the time ever came up (yes I do this sometimes for certain social situations) that I'm a shy person in French. I'm not sure whether embarras or embarrassé is the correct adjective, so I thought of an alternative and, my brain not completely wired right, I thought of the Japanese. 恥ずかしがりや (hazukashigariya) means "shy person," but you note that they get in one word what we get in two words. Either that or I just can't remember the synonyms in English for "shy person." The sense of the word, though, through the waves of Japanese culture, means "easily embarrassed," and not really just "shy person"; or at least that's what I instinctively think. Because in Japan, well, it seems like everyone's shy, at least after they're shamed into not acting like kids anymore. Shyness and being embarrassed are easily linked; it's really your ability to get over your embarrassment that sets you apart from other people. And 恥ずかしがりや is a perfect word to describe somebody who just anticipates horrible embarrassment and will try to avoid doing things as a result. That's me.