Obligatory

IV

"Meditations on Apathy"
By
Abraham Mader

Published in Desert Springs Community College Scroll
8 March 1999

Your major doesn't matter. It'll change if you transfer anyway. You study british literature here and end up compromising business ethics at whatever Cal State will accept you.

I'm sorry.

I don't mean to be a pessimist. Or to question the academic integrity of an entire student body. I think it's just my way of getting your attention. Or at least hoping that if I piss you off enough to disagree with me, you'll at least be conscious of what you're defending, aware of why you've been slogging through coursework at this wonderful educational outpost on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

It's what the admins give us isn't it? All their talk of expanding our opportunities and being guides on a noble quest. We want to believe we know what we're doing. We do so, even when we don't know we're kidding ourselves most of the time. We hold out hope for some ambiguous and indistinct future waiting for us on the other side of this AA or welding certificate. Some blue-collar mobility that will give us the satisfaction of adequate maintenance. That's exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to not starve to death. This, I think, was a most admirable goal. Now I can think of doing that with a little luck. If I muster up the energy to give a damn.

I think the breaking point came when I broke up with my last girlfriend over irreconcilable philosophical differences. I was an existentialist at the time and she was an nihilist. "Bullshit," she'd say. "What you're doing is bullshit." For hours on end she'd tell me that I was just feeding my own purposeless existence and should just shove off the grid and find new planes. We couldn't even agree on a basic understanding of reality, much less the purpose of it. So we parted ways before we ended up doing too much damage to each others' epistemes.

The irony is that now she's at Stanford, preparing to go into doctoral work for cognitive psych. Motivation theory's her specialty. I should be thankful she didn't take up an interest in clinical. In the meantime, I've meandered my way through six semesters with no real reason to leave and no desire to stay.

I write all this after having been repeatedly accused of being dangerously apathetic. I've contested this claim most of the time. Because I do believe in things and that things exist. It's just that the things I believe exist other people don't recognize. I believe that we'll never really know where we are or how we're getting to the next point, and the only reason we make plans to to hold onto the little control we have over our own destinies. It's believing that free will and fate have nothing to do with god, but only with circumstance.

I've been called directionless, but that's because Frost and Dylan never gave good details about diversions and conditions of roads. They just mourned them. I dislike the destination so I just want to take the backwoods somewhere else.

Which is why I moved out here. A hot and dusty place where things come to die.

And I don't know what I'll find. But I'd rather weave in and out moral and pedagogical swamps than fool myself into thinking biological foundations or some irrelevant "fact"-based history course will give me insight or greater tools for such a mythical discovery. I'm sure to get lost, but at least I won't worry so much about starving to death.