Zengeisty

I was taking this screenwriting class, and one of the lessons highlighted clarity: trimming down the material to exclude the fancy-pants words so it’s easier to understand. This rule goes against the way I speak naturally. If the first thing that comes to mind is ‘aphorism’, why on earth would I start looking for a banal synonym like the ‘truth’?! That ‘aphorism’ stays in, god damn it! It stays in!

Actually, that’s one way I find my tribe. It’s when they start delving into the dark side of the dictionary: ‘zeitgeist,’ ‘schadenfreude,’ and other German words that infiltrated the English stronghold. They’re great, though - they express so much with such minimal space - they’re like the antonym of man-spreading: ‘POW! Spread eagle!’ I seem to find this tribe affiliation in all sorts of places. Sometimes it’s just about something silly like: ‘The prolonged ambivalence I find myself in when staring at a naked pic of myself - to send or not to send - is obfuscating.’ I’m like, ‘Respect, where my people at!’

Everybody has a favorite fancy-pants word they love to use. Out with it! Don’t worry, this is a judgment-free zone - unless your word is ‘ubiquitous’. Then we might have to talk. That word is everywhere!

Zooming in on zeitgeist - the spirit of our modern times. It’s all about being constantly connected yet strangely distant. It’s like joining social media just to be reminded how rubbish you are at socializing. Our zeitgeist - juggling a million things in such little time, continuously worrying about its passage. Yes, we’re constantly fighting time - I guess that’s why they call it ‘time boxing’. Don’t be fooled though, time fights back. It’s got some menial servants doing its dirty work - Procrastination for example is a nasty bare-knuckle fighter.

Well, time management doesn’t quite go hand in hand with OCD. I am a bit of an Overly Clean Disarray, from the way I leave things neatly around the house to refusing to drop a task until it’s perfect. I tried getting rid of Perfectionism, that bloody time henchman, but it keeps coming back till my to-do list is a Pulitzer prize winner. Over-Correcting Daily is exhausting. It’s like running a marathon just to straighten out the mile markers - only to realize they’re in kilometers. And we’re back at the start, 40 km to go... I also fixate on things I can’t remember until they finally click. No better example than the time I obsessed over the O in OCD. What does the O stand for? What an obstinate obstacle - obfuscating indeed. O Brother, Where Art Thou?

We’re all a bit OCD, obsessing over the future and the past, never really in the moment. Future-you is always judging past-you. It’s like you’re constantly the worst version of yourself. Poor past-you doesn’t stand a chance. It’s like being bullied by time’s shadiest hitman: Regret. If ever future-you agrees with past-you, that’s a tear in the fabric of time itself! That’s when you truly find the present - discovering zen, not the zenth thing to worry about! Scoreboard, Me vs. Regret: 40 - love.

I’m trying to stay zen, or at least that’s what I say when Procrastination comes around. I don’t like boxing, so I kind of disregard this notion of time. I don’t look at how old or how young people are. If they can say ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ without blinking, they’re my tribe, and that’s all that counts. Ding! An aphorism just dropped! That’s not the only way I ignore time, quite often I don’t answer my phone when time calls. Yeah, I’m habitually ghosting time, and I guess that makes me pretty zeitgeisty. Or better said: zengeisty! It’s a word now - go spread it out into the world! Spread eagle, POW!

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