There's really no correct answer to the question, "What do you want to do with your life?" but an especially super-un-correct answer is "I don't know." Actually, there are a lot of questions that I think up on walks, and in the shower, and as I'm falling asleep, were I to take the time to answer them, for which my answer would probably be wrong.

Why do I choose to take buses instead of walking or biking when experience clearly shows that I am exhilarated by exercise? Why do I have this perverse need to get to where I am going faster, only to have that perverse need clash with my perverse fear of too much free time? What is this rushing around only to languish at home wishing I was still outside? What makes me spend my days inside surfing the internet for useless information when experience clearly shows that this gives me a headache and makes me depressed? It's not like heroin; it isn't even that fun while I'm doing it. I'm not euphoric, high-energy and babbling to anyone about how excited I am, and I'm not slumped in a narcotic daze of perfection; what I am is hunched, tense, and slightly spellbound, but only slightly, at things that will not matter in the next second. Yet I will submit myself to this every day at the cost of the headache, and the depression, and, long-term, the complete waste of life it will make up, viewed as a whole. This is a question I would almost like to go into neurology just to be able to answer. Why we would evolve to have our base instincts be so dead, dead wrong.

Our instinct is to eat fatty, empty-calorie food, and it eventually kills us. Why? Well, I know the answer to that one. We haven't evolved past the human - nay, animal - drive to gorge, to stockpile, to be prepared for famine. I guess the question we don't know the answer to is, is is even possible to evolve past that.

Historically, the reason we have evolved to avoid certain things, or to embrace certain things, or to behave certain ways, is to make it at least past reproductive age, and to have greater reproductive success. We avoid poisonous food because it immediately kills us. And, to simplify this criminally, we perform certain social behaviors because it makes us more likely to reproduce. But our diseases now - depression, heart disease, diabetes - they don't kill us until we're old. They let us reproduce, before we feel the effects, and then they kill us, past the point where evolution has any hope of intervening. Sure, certain acute stress related things that result from severe, severe stressors can keep a young kid from making it, or at least from being fertile. But merely sitting around being lazy, unhealthy, depressed, and unproductive isn't making the human race any less prolific.

And on that note (being questions with no correct answer), why do bookstores make me so sad?

That's where I just came from. A Barnes and Noble, which, for some reason that may be worth noting later, makes me way sadder than libraries. I go to bookstores mostly when I'm in a wandering mode, and thumb through every section. It takes me hours. And I get sadder and sadder until I'm thisclose to crying and I have to leave because it's not socially acceptable to cry in a Barnes and Noble. One day I should just do it. Then I could write about it. Because the secret to happiness appears to be to do something unconventional and then write about it and happily be lauded as the expert on whatever unconventional thing it was that you did.
The only thing I'm an expert on is uncertainty. I guess I'm an expert at observation too. I can observe the hell out of anything. I can write about a girl eating and have her fork's journey to her mouth take paragraphs and paragraphs, mostly consisting of tangents.

But I am a record-speed-reader and a record-speed-forgetter. I estimate that in my life I have read about five thousand books. I have read, and been briefly fascinated by, completely obscure things that I immediately forget. The trajectory of asteroids. What scientists predict will happen when the volcano under Yellowstone Park erupts. Multiverses and how they would be stacked together in spacetime. How an aye-aye makes an omelet out of his dinner of bird eggs. The history of lesbian relationshops in feudal China. Do I remember any of these things? No. Do I wholeheartedly regret that I don't? Emphatically yes.

I would love to be a walking encyclopaedia. Going back to the beginning, my most accurate answer to the 'what do you want to do with your life' question would be, 'I would like to travel wherever my fancy takes me and keenly observe and record everything that I see.' And since I am a member of this culture, I of course cannot be satisfied with simply observation and recording; I must draw conclusions! I must come up with hypotheses and test them through stringent and rigidly controlled experiments! Having come up with a conclusion, I must now relate it somehow to the vast moving living library of human knowledge, find a niche for it, tuck it in there, hold it up somehow as a way for improving the human race.

And if I am to do that, the more things I can pull out of that squishy, lunging library to relate my observations to, the better.

Of course, for me, that isn't the real reason, or at least not the only reason. The primary thing, for me, is that it's fucking fun to know things. It is eminently enjoyable to sit back and let ideas and knowledge flood your synapses, even - especially - if the knowledge isn't originally your own. It's less tiring if it isn't. You get to bask in some stranger's knowledge, their epiphanies, without having to lift a finger or a synapse to do all the work that led to it.

That's why bookstores make me sad. I don't have time to know all this stuff. I don't have time to sit down and become acquainted with it all, and even if I did, the second I put the first book down to pick up the second, I'd forget the first. And even if I did remember everything I read, by the time I put down the last book I'd be an old woman, ready to die, without having fulfilled the crazy social pressure to ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING! I would have just spent my life sitting around reading about everyone else's accomplishments, and that would be all the time I was given.

I've forgotten already all the names of the books that I grabbed for hungrily, only to stuff back on the shelf in my thirst for another one. I don't carry a notebook with me even though I keep telling myself I should. Instincts again. Wrong again. It is not easy to do the 'right' things. I don't have an answer for the questions that I ask myself because it is not easy to answer them.