Hi, I'm Sadye, and these are my contradictions.

Well, no, I'm not going to name them for you.

But I am going to delve into the prickly thicket of contradictions and see where I get. Let me begin by saying that we are mentally battered on a daily basis with impossible situations, hopeless exploitation and, yes, a never ending stream of contradictions. The world is full of them! And the more I try to find a solution to these problems and carve an ethical path through the fearsome tangle that is everyday life the more contradictions I discover inside myself. I see the danger of hyper-consumerism yet I keep buying new things in every place we go (by the way, I excuse this by claiming they are "gifts"); I see poverty and exploitation reducing good, beautiful people to shrunken skeletons on the side of the road yet I don't reach out to them or even offer a kind word; I give scraps of food to mangy flea bitten dogs yet consciously avoid the mumbling toothless woman who is tugging at my sleeve. Arg! And the list goes on, as you can imagine. Of course, these are some of the darker contradictions and there are many little ones too. I drink Coke sometimes cause it is amazingly satisfying, even though I hate that corporation with a fiery, undying passion for all the wreckage it has left in its wake. And the list goes on and on, and day after day I wake up humming a tune and little birdies alight upon my finger and I skip off to class only to be battered again.

What to do? Let's compare our contradictions to a pet hermit crab. You have to love them and give them attention, but not really too much, cause they aren't much fun to play with anyways. Actually, if you get too involved with them and start poking your fingers into their shells they might pinch you, and then you get angry with the hermit crab even though you should have been minding your own business in the first place. Still, you must accept that they are in your life, and tend to them kindly, look at them from afar and ponder their grotesque beauty. You can't just let them die because they smell, and let me tell you from experience that that is one stench that does not just go away...it clings to you and infiltrates your dreams and you cannot for the life of you ever forget that you let that little thing die.

We must accept these things and move on. Life is too short, and art and beauty is too important to live with our minds caught in the muck of intellectual masturbation. Let's take a picnic to the creeping forest of existential crises and look around for a while, but then lets come home, cook a meal and bask in our ignorance and relish our undying curiosity. The world is so freakin' huge! And all we can do is try our best, think as hard as we can, and lighten up a little.

Groovy.