Tundra of Despair

They tell me that Orlando is the coldest that it has been in twenty years and I live in an apartment with roommates who have, in their infinite wisdom, decided to circumvent the unrealistically low utilities cap by leaving the heat off for the winter. As I sit at my desk, shivering despite my long-sleeve shirt and jacket, my roommate pops in to reassure me by reminding me that his aunt deals with temperatures colder than this in the summer. She lives in Sweden. That’s her fault. This roommate of mine is wearing a T-shirt. I hope he contracts pneumonia and dies slowly and painfully. This tragedy would be entirely his fault, as too is the fact that my apartment is an Arctic wasteland. It saddens me to think that this frigid realm in which I live and this twenty-year low in central Florida meteorology perfectly reflect where I am in my life right now.

I realize that this is hardly a perfect analogy – though summer will come for Orlando, my life, I suspect, is perpetually stuck in a frozen rut – but what can you expect from an already subpar brain functioning at below suggested operating temperatures. And yet the failure of my attempted correlation creates two points at once – my tragic stasis and its cause. I’ve been in school for nearly three years now, and unless a new field opens in biocardioengineering/journalism and I am able to hybridize the majors that I have attempted to pursue, I’ll still be here in three more.

I am simply psychologically unable to focus on one course of action. I choose, with absolute certainty, that I will be a SeaWorld employee, and it takes me eight months and twenty-eight credit hours to realize that I don’t like dolphins. I simply cannot commit to one course of action. I feel as though my mind is suicidal, choosing a Cliffside trail, then jumping off every time the slope becomes too steep. Don’t misunderstand; I’m not suicidal. Because the source of my depression is the fear that my death will be the conclusion of a long series of failures, killing myself at such a low point would render my fears self-fulfilling. Of course, if and when success does grace my life (I would say ‘when hell freezes over,' but by the look of my frostbitten fingers, it already has), I suspect I won’t want to kill myself either. A conundrum, but I digress.

My evolutionary inability to pursue and/or commit has of course strangulated my love life as well, or perhaps I should say my ‘potential for love life,’ as there never was much of one to be strangled in the first place. So of course, there is no one to warm my bed on this coldest of nights . Thus, lacking sufficient blankets to insulate my body from the harsh realities of the world, I find myself fully, or well past fully, clothed sitting at my computer, wasting time and waiting for the cold to set in so that, like Jack in Titanic, I can simply let go and slip away into unconsciousness.

Until then, I am at a loss.