There’s that moment that’s like, 

“Well, I wanna have my first child by 30, but I wanna be married for at least two years before having a kid, and I need to date my husband for at least two years before it’s acceptable to get married, and I mean, Jesus Christ, that means I have to get married at least by age 26, which means I have four years after getting my BA to get my life in order and find the right guy, but I don’t even know if any of this will play out because I’ll be a crazed graduate student, and I won’t have time to brush my teeth, let alone start a family.”

Which is followed by a moment like,

“Who the fuck made those guidelines anyway? My reproductive organs aren’t a fucking time bomb. Why do I need to be tied down to a man in order to mother a child? Shit, I can just adopt a cute Asian baby whenever I’m ready.”

And finally,

“Fuck this world.”

If I were to look into the mirror carefully though, leaning forward deliberately without the squinting and adjusting of facial muscles that all people do to avoid seeing their imperfections that say I Stay Up Late At Night Thinking About All These Fucking Things I Said Read Wrote Saw Heard…

onlyshallow:

What Kafka’s stories have, rather, is a grotesque and gorgeous and thoroughly modern complexity. Kafka’s humor not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane — is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.

And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance.[2] It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens…and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.

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I have felt discouraged in these past weeks by people who have given me so much disappointment.