Everything Is Ridiculous
How to know nothing and mean even less
I am a ridiculous person.
Have you ever been looking for your glasses when they’re actually on your head? I have panicked about not being able to find my keys while actually driving my car.
I was so tired the other morning I put both contacts in the same eye. I figured it out pretty quickly since I couldn’t see, but it reminded me of a time I forgot I slept with my contacts in. When I woke up and I could see perfectly, I immediately believed my eyes had spontaneously fixed themselves. For someone who considers herself a logical person, that’s a ridiculous reaction.
I have a couple other outstanding memories of a similar nature. Once, in high school, my friend and I were getting into my car with a giant pan of manicotti to take to her house. I guess I forgot to turn off the wipers from earlier because they made this horrible shrieking sound on my dry windshield as soon as I turned the car on. I might have figured it out sooner if we both didn’t scream, leap out of the car, and proclaim it was some kind of manicotti monster. Once we calmed down enough to realize what actually happened, we laughed so hard we went silent and tears streamed down our faces.
Another time, I was playing basketball with my family and our friends, and someone made a shot that ended up getting stuck, with the basketball wedged between the wire hoop and the backboard. Until someone else spoke, I was convinced that time had stopped and we were all frozen in it. It felt like the longest second of my life, and when it passed I was quite relieved not to be stuck forever in time, in abject terror, mid basketball game. I don’t even like basketball.
Why does my brain go to the strangest places when something odd happens? Probably the same reason I’m obsessed with the paranormal and anything “unexplained.” I love reading and listening to people tell their personal ghost stories, or talk about psychic moments they’ve experienced, or just wax philosophical about existence. I’m not really interested in the ghost hunter genre, anything exploitative, or people and shows that are hellbent on proof. I’m interested in the stories we tell ourselves about what we don’t know or understand.
I’m an optimistic nihilist most days, but there’s still a part of me that wants to believe, just like Fox Mulder in X-Files. Only it’s not a belief in alien conspiracies or anything religious. It’s philosophical: I believe that we don’t, and we can’t, know everything. Maybe we don’t even know anything. So there’s just no way I can unequivocally discount weird phenomena, because really, how on earth would I know? Have I got such an amazing grip on the nature of our reality that I can be absolutely certain what happens to us when we die? Ha! No. My grip is tenuous at best, as you have seen. Maybe there really is a manicotti monster, you can’t prove to me there isn’t!
But more importantly, if I can’t be absolutely certain about anything, no one else can be either. I am automatically suspicious of anyone who claims that they are certain, or that they have the answers to such existential questions. I guess that’s part of why I’ve never been a religious person.
Believing we don’t know everything/anything is, to me, both comforting and thrilling. I like that no one can tell me how things are, and I like that the possibilities for what could be are seemingly endless. But certainly not everyone feels the same way. I watched What The Bleep Do We Know? with my mom back when it came out on DVD (and hadn’t been so widely criticized) and I was still in college. We both found the implications about creating one’s own reality to be mind-blowing, but I loved it while my mom really hated it. She asked me afterward, “Didn’t you find the movie terrifying?” And I thought, honestly, it never occurred to me that it might be scary for anyone.
But I’m someone who loves the potential meaninglessness of existence, a meaninglessness so profound it creates its own meaning. If there’s no deity out there making plans for me and deciding my fate, then I get to make those decisions myself. I get to define what’s important, what the purpose and meaning of my existence are. Fundamentally, I am my own god. What could be better or cooler than that?
For my mom, denial and compartmentalization is better. For a lot of other people, religion is better. Turns out, not everyone enjoys contemplating the possibility of knowing nothing in a meaningless existence. Sometimes I think it’s just me. Weird.
But, like I said, I am a ridiculous person.
