Pledging has been difficult lately as usual. It is especially difficult because it happens to interfere with two of my best opportunities to talk to Chowon. I have to refuse to think "I could be talking to Chowon right now" and instead think "this will help me in the future." I sometimes wonder how people can become a member of the house without learning to hate it. I mean... What does pledging do? We stand still and cold while they yell insults at us, and we work until our eyes fog up while they continue to yell. It's really twisted that this is expected to breed loyalty to the house. The process is logically flawed, yet it has worked for generations, hasn't it? I wonder sometimes if I can finish pledging without hating the house and the members therein by the end of it.
...
I think what happens is we learn to associate the masks and the nervous psychological preparation with that feeling of disdain or contempt, and it's the encouragement and the soft-tones between events that keep us positively disposed toward the house. Like in Lord of the Flies: when the kids' faces were hidden they were regarded as (and regarded themselves to be) different people. In that way, when we prepare ourselves for a pledging event we create within ourselves a false reality -- the only reality in which we could deal with the events while keeping our sense of dignity. In the new reality the people who we know and respect in the house are disassociated with their real identities, allowing them to be assholes all they want with minimal damage to character; the building and campus and world become a cramped underground chasm where we, the pledges, from fear of losing self-respect or being exiled from all humanity, do whatever is expected of us until our bodies fail. Here we refine the practice of finding pockets of energy hidden by our bodies. When the evening is over that world disappears, but our body remembers and fills us with anger and dread as we next approach the house, imagining the fun which the members completely intend to have at our expense. We aren't allowed to hurt them for their handshake, but regardless of how quickly we pry their fingers open we are insulted.

If a world such as this can be willed into existence and burned into the pit of our stomachs, then what does that imply for the rest of the world? Can I, by remembering the process which my mind goes through, generate a world in which I am an extrovert? Can I make the world a place where all the food taste good, the homework is fun, and my love will be near me satisfyingly "soon"? Can I make a world where the days are short and still productive? Can't I just skip the next 5 weeks and have everything done that needs to be done? Do I really have to do all this? Can't I just disappear from consciousness until the time when I needn't stress, while my body continues to efficiently learn material and productively deploy it.

I just want to skip life and be at the place where it ends. I want to look back on a life that I can be proud of, but I don't want to work for it.

It is better to think "There is no way for me to skip the work" than to think "How can I skip this work". Because even though I know that nothing is impossible, I know that God has design the world in such a way that the only way to be honorable is to suffer silently and to even have an appreciation and favorable disposition toward mundanity (as in the quality of being mundane) simply because having more of it makes you more favorably disposed toward it.

"See how dirt naturally generates filth?"