This afternoon, I have a test. More specifically, I have a test in an hour, but that's not the point. In between "preparing" for the exam and lunch and the actual test, I am taking this opportunity to record a few thoughts.

First, we live in a mad world. A Tears for Fears song from the 1980s, so wonderfully coved by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews for the Donnie Darko soundtrack claims that "When people run in circles, it's a very mad world." And that's entirely correct. To some extent, whatever your ambitions, anything you do that does not bring you closer to what it is that you want to be or who it is that you want to be is running in circles. Playing the game. Being alive, but not really living. To those of you who are who you want to be, and are what you want to be, congratulations. To the rest of us, our objective should be to stop heeding the convention, and start listening to ourselves. Get out of the circle.

Second, I have been accused of being intellectual, perhaps to a greater degree than I even acknowledge, especially in my writing. And it is here that I attempt to avoid sounding superior, but I (as well as many of my closest friends) suffer from what I like to call the "curse of the brilliant." In a nutshell, being intellectually-abled and not being able to hide (not that one should) these abilities results in difficulties relating to a lot of people. As a result, people view you as either cold, aloof, or, in some rare cases, scary and abrasive. This is simply not the case. The brilliant people, or at least all brilliant people I know, simply have more to think about and exercise their thinking to a greater extent than most. In my case, at least, I think about things, critically (this naturally goes back to my admission that I really hate conventionalism). Do I think about things too much? Do I over-intellectualize things? Do I make the mundane more important than others? The answers to these questions, naturally, are highly subjective. Feel free to draw your own conclusions, but as for me, I think that thinking about things in a critical manner increases the likelihood that you'll make the right decisions in your own behavior, even if these decision come a little later than they might.