Instead Of or In Spite Of

So. Why do conversations start with "so" so often? I dunno.

So... what else is there? Well, there's the ELE lab I should have written up 2 days ago when I had the chance, the Kant that I could have been reading the past 3 or 4 weeks that leads into the midterm paper that's due midnight Sunday when it's actually Monday, the get-rich-quick-by-winning-an-algorithmic-investing-competition which I should be working on since it's something I'm legitimately semi-interested in, the card room 2 miles down the road where $220 fell out of some senior citizens' wallets and into mine because Joey was 2 hours late and that's how I spend free time, the $219 pool cue I got as an early birthday gift from my parents (on Halloween, strangely), the ~$300 trip to Boston to watch the Red Sox play Game 7 of the ALCS, the Bartending 101 class I just paid $100 for, the "I'd Eat That" t-shirt I designed with a picture of a cute puppy dog waiting for me in a mailroom in Princeton, NJ, the erratic sleep cycle I'm working on which is why I'm awake at 2:56 AM, the (second) trip to Gainesville in a week that I got back from yesterday morning which included $26 on dinner as my way of celebrating my poker exploits, a half-baked birthday party, stealing 2 cases of beer from the birthday boy, a drunken/hookah filled poker game, and napping in fits on the loveseat while scrunched into a W-shape, and ... what am I missing? Oh yeah, the sobering realization that this is not the life I really want to be living.

It's not all bad though. It's not even a little bad. In fact, it's pretty much 99.99% good. What do you call it when you start complaining about something that for all intents and purposes must seem like a pretty damn good life from what you might call an objective point of view? Ungrateful? Spoiled? Unappreciative? Crazy? Depressed? Doesn't everyone wonder what would happen if instead of lazily piloting their cars along the black asphalt, following the straight and narrow yellow line to my left or the intermittently existing whiteness on my right, they just hooked the steering wheel hard right and the car with it into that truck coming up alongside? Maybe you really can pass under the trailers of those things, just like in the movies. What the hell, it'd be a bloody good show either way. Well, bloody at least. Good? Why not?

Maybe the problem is not in the 99.99% that's good. Methinks I hear Captain Obvious waiting in the wings. Show yourself! Never, he shouts from the shadows, and slinks back into the recesses from whence he cometh. Is my English get worse?

What I would not give for that last 0.01%. She has no idea. If I ever get to meet her though, I'd want to know if she of all people knew what I meant.