I can't find oblivion. I'm seeking her and yet she eludes me. All that I want is to turn off my thoughts for a while. To truly relax. Not to do nothing, but to think nothing. I cannot remember the last time that I had nothing on my mind; Months upon months ago. My mind has become white noise to me. I can choose, and often do choose to focus on certain things in my life. To think about and dwell on these one or two or three problems for the moment. But even if I choose to focus on none of them. If my choice is silence instead, I can still hear all of my thoughts in the back of my head. The only relaxation I find is not to turn my thoughts off, but rather to turn something else up so that I drown out my own white noise.

There is a line in "The God's Must be Crazy" where one ladie in an office building turns to her co-worker and asks, "Does the noise in my head bother you?"
I used to laugh at that line every time I watched the movie, and yet now I can't seem to turn off the noise in my own head. I watch movies and listen to music, often not because I want to see that particular movie or hear that particular song, but simply because it gives me something to concentrate on that isn't complicated. That isn't difficult or personal.

I keep so many things simmering in my mind. Things that I don't think about perpetually, but that I always come back to. As if my mind were a stove top with three or four ideas boiling up front and a dozen times that staying warm on back-burners; waiting for their turn to boil with thought. It's an endless cycle of moving pots around. More and more often I just want to turn off the heat.

Who needs these thoughts? This dull ache of the chronic ringing in my ears. Is this the "joy" of mature adult life? That we lie to ourselves, saying that we gain some kind of moral victory by juggling a dozen fragile thoughts in our minds? How deluded are we that we embrace this pain as a standard and then how self-righteous are we for condemning all other life-styles, even that of our own children, as "simple" by comparrison?

I need to find a new definition of happiness or of success. That or a new way of achieving this same definition. No suggestions, please; I've already got enough noise to listen to.
Does the noise in my head bother you?

There is a certain sadness.... A bittersweet melancholy that I can't shake. I think it feels like I'm longing for something, but I no longer know what I'm longing for. It feels weird, too. Since I was in High School, even before that, I've always had something that I was persuing. Usually it was more someone I was chasing, actually. This etherial Beatrice figure that I've spoken of before. My ideal of the perfect girl... the one who would make everything perfect and happy if she would only see me.

But I've lost that somewhere. It's a harsh bit of reality, maybe, that is coming on at last. There IS no perfect girl. And of course I've always known that in some kind of objective way... but.... I don't know, maybe this is finally some manner of wisdom setting in.
I've found a girl, I have a girl.... and of course she's not perfect... but I think more than anything else, what I'm missing is the idea that she was perfect.

In the movie High Fidelity, John Cusack spends the entire movie overthinking everything, and fantasizing about everyone. He romanticises every girl until the end of the movie, when he realizes that, were he ever to actually go out with them, they would prove to have the same real problems that we all suffer from. That's a harsh lesson, ladies and gentlemen, that no matter how hard you wish it or how deeply you think about it, nothing is ever going to be perfect. And worse, all that wishing and thinking builds up a ficticious image in our minds. So that now, when I think about how perfect I thought [girl of your choosing] was, the real girl was almost nothing like what I had been obsessing about.

I'm not sure if it's funny or if it's sick how many different times I've gone through that same cycle. Or with how many girls. Probably someone reading this right now has been idolized in my head... you should be complimented.

But that isn't the point. The point is that I have someone right now, and that I am happy. So why do I miss that longing? I've been on the edge of heartbreak for so long, hanging on the edge with nothing but hope... I guess I'm not used to being content. Am I longing for that same pain, then? How masochistic is that?

It was a sweet depression. It was a bittersweet saddness. Goodbye, Dreams.