Share your good news! — Page 53

I’m standing in line for a free burrito right now.

Have a job interview coming up which will be nice.

My application has been accepted, and I will be starting online classes for a diploma in pastry arts tomorrow! 🥳

I got a job at my university. I’ll guide a weekly study group for an introductory analysis course.

Job interviews went well and I should hear back from both soon.

Have a date coming up which is nice

I was approached by my professor about writing my bachelor thesis at her department. And in general this semester is going great, everything involving algebra and number theory is fascinating. The only course that I struggle to enjoy is elementary differential geometry, there is simply too much arithmetic involved. The greatest thing about leaving school mathematics behind was not needing to memorize that many formulas any more. Well, this course turned out to be just like that all over again.

I just got out of one of the worst emotional periods of my life.

For months, I’ve been trapped in an endless cycle of overblown paranoia, violent urges, and anarchist fantasies. There’s just been so much BS in the world recently (especially in the USA where I live), that it almost became a form of escapism for me to fantasize about how I’d use violence to set things right. Once I start a revolution, kill everyone who pisses me off, and become the new leader of the free world, everything will be fine, right? Or, so I told myself. In reality, it was just an illusion, a lie I told myself to avoid the feeling of powerlessness against a rigged system.

It was only today, when my fantasies reached their climax, that I was finally able to break out. Someone very important to me (who I won’t name here) had been subjected to my rants for long enough, and was finally done. They called me out on my crap, and finally drilled in the lesson that had flown over my head for years: why violence is wrong. According to them, it’s impossible to eliminate injustice completely. Killing one bad person won’t stop countless more bad people from abusing the innocent for their own personal benefit. But if I murdered them in a vain attempt to stop them, that would just result in my morality being squandered. I would rot in a jail cell for the rest of my life, and everyone would just know me as “the psycho who killed all those rich people”.

I attempted to refute their arguments, but I couldn’t. Deep inside, I knew I was wrong. So, I started to cry: something I hadn’t done in years. When I was done crying, and I finally admitted that they were right, it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I was free to be myself again: to work on being the best person I can possibly be, not get irrationally upset about issues I can’t solve.

I’ve always been fond of this quote from Errico Malatesta, an anarchist*:

“Violence (physical force) used to another’s hurt, which is the most brutal form of struggle between men can assume, is eminently corrupting. It tends, by its very nature, to suffocate the best sentiments of man, and to develop all the antisocial qualities, ferocity, hatred, revenge, the spirit of domination and tyranny, contempt of the weak, servility towards the strong. And this harmful tendency arises also when violence is used for a good end. […] Anarchists who rebel against every sort of oppression and struggle for the integral liberty of each and who ought thus to shrink instinctively from all acts of violence which cease to be mere resistance to oppression and become oppressive in their turn are also liable to fall into the abyss of brutal force. […] The excitement caused by some recent explosions and the admiration for the courage with which the bomb-throwers faced death, suffices to cause many anarchists to forget their program, and to enter on a path which is the most absolute negation of all anarchist ideas and sentiments.”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-violence-as-a-social-factor

*Equating anarchism with chaos always triggers me. But I can’t fault the noob for that.

I have a girlfriend

I had lost my wallet and yesterday I got a letter from the lost and found office. I went there today to pick it up and not a single coin was missing.