Justify your existance. Part I
Think on this:
I often wonder why I do things. Some days I feel like I go through the day on autopilot, like someone else is driving me around. After great consideration, I realized it wasn't some days, but most of the time. After carefully considering this phenomena, I realized that my actions seem to be the result of a sort of inner struggle: a struggle between myself and the monkey.
I find that I act like a car that has 2 steering wheels; at one sits a semi-intelligent entity (me), at the other sits a monkey. This entity and the monkey often at odds on where the car should be going. When the monkey gets thirsty, hungry, tired, or sees an attractive female, it will attempt to follow it's instinctual drive to satisfy itself, and because it is whiny, importuning, and discouragingly stronger than the thing at the other wheel, it has a large say in where the car goes. Much of the time, the entity must merely sit and wait for the monkey to finish fulfilling itself.
With the time the monkey isn't messing around, the entity attempts to get the car somewhere more useful than the next random desire that strikes the monkey. Sometimes the entity is able to lecture the monkey into behaving for a while. Other times, the monkey knocks out the entity, and all hell breaks loose. Sometimes the monkey and the entity want to go to the same place, other times, there's a direct conflict of interest.
For instance: the entity goes to chemistry class and tries to pay attention and take notes, the monkey goes to class and obsessively sips water and tries to fall asleep (turn off the car...). The entity sits at the computer trying to work. The monkey will drain several quart water bottles, then suddenly realize that if it doesn't pee soon, there will be a serious beating from the entity, and seizes control of the wheel, depriving the entity of a particularly interesting irc conversation or derailing the previously important train of thought. Usually the monkey goes to dinner, and the entity is left to entertain itself with The Simpsons.
The entity can justify everywhere it takes the car.
No one can justify the monkey.
Bad Monkey.
1/31/03