Knee-high Boots and the Meaning of Accomplishment

On sunday I engaged in a little retail therapy to recover from the weekend, mostly done at Target thank you very much. I found the Holy Grail of chunky-calved girls everywhere, the knee-high boot! And I found it in black and in brown! And in suede! I gotta tell you, before the boots I was feeling pretty shitty about myself. The night before I had gone out and done something so monumentally stupid and yet so clearly what I wanted that I had to be both punished and congratulated. So I punished my wallet and congratulated my closet with my two new pairs of boots. What was it that I did, you might ask? Well, here's a list of things, and you see if you can make out what it was:

Vodka Gimlets
Co-workers and soon to be ex-coworkers.
More Vodka Gimlets
Rides home

I have this horrible habit of putting my mind to something that I have no business putting my mind to and being able to pull it off with little to no effort on my part. But only when it's hooking up with completely inappropriate people or causing my enemies to have unexplained cosmic accidents (like getting laid off from the police force or breaking a limb) or getting everyone that I hate at work to quit or move to a different department. Never anything for the good of mankind or the curing of diseases. Why can't I use my power for good instead of evil? Why was I drawn bad?

Wait, i'm not Jessica Rabbit. I wasn't drawn bad.

I guess ultimately the lesson here is that I can really only accomplish things with Maciavellian expediency when I don't have a dog in the fight. When I have nothing to lose and really, nothing to gain either, that's when i am up to the challenge, when the gloves can come off and I pull no punches. When there are no stakes except my own internal narrative, I perform beautifully. So why can't I take that devil may care attitude and translate it into the rest of my life? Why can't I regard the LSAT with the same savoire faire as a Saturday night at the bar? Why can't I laugh off the pressures of paying my bills on time and in full in the same why I laugh at some random guy who hits on me? The easy answer is that it matters more, but does it? Does it ultimately matter any more? Are all things equal? Should I be able to go through life putting my mind to every task ahead of me with the same determination and yet lack of pressure that occasionally blesses my mental doorstep?

Should is probably the wrong word. I don't know how to turn off the caring. I don't know how to say that all things are equal, because I don't know if I believe that. I do know that every so often (and by every so often I mean about once a day) I want to shrug off the societal constraints of modern life and just do whatever the fuck I want- run away and join the circus, travel the world, take this very decent and well paying job and shove it, you know, the usual. Is it that I am selfish and morally bankrupt? Is it that I want to run away from responsibilty? Or is it that I want to do as Thoreau did and "live the life I've imagined", which in this case involves me doing whatever I want whenever I want. I suppose it could just be me being 24.

The problem with this is that there are consequences. I'm not Paris Hilton, there isn't infinite amounts of money available to me. If I drop off the face of the planet for a while and bum around Europe, I'm still going to have to get a job eventually. If I sleep with everyone that I want to, inside relationships or out, there are still emotions and other messy ugly stuff to contend with. The only way to live a truly independent existence is to live it independent of people. That way the only one you are hurting is yourself.

But is independence worth the loneliness?