It is such a ruinous and painful circumstance to have all of my ambitions, values, and one of my center most pillars of self-esteem hinge on a grade that I cannot seem to make in a class that is unconquerable for me.

I failed a math quiz yesterday; it is not the first. Each time it happens, I cannot help but feel my life's passions slipping further away.

I can hardly feign the self-esteem to hold my head up. I am embarrassed to my core. My chest aches, and my fists clench in spontaneous bouts of rageful frustration.

I am being defeated, and what is my life worth if I cannot muster the competence to fulfill my own objectives?

How much more of my own ineptitude will I be able to sustain before I renounce my values and give up? What will become of me if I do?

I can't live that way. I will not go through another five years of nihilism and self loathing. I'd end myself before that, my pride intact.

2/22/10 UPDATE: I have projected my grade over the rest of the semester and shown that moderate adjustments in my approach to the class should allow me to recover from this academic slump. This is the second time that I have attempted the class and I reason that several more attempts would be in order before my goals seemed implausible. The prospect, however, of having my goals delayed further, when they already promise to be so delayed, frightened me. I panicked before fully assessing the danger that my goals were in. That fact shames me to some extent.

I must rediscover an outlook that would alleviate my anxiety over such stressful occasions. I had such an outlook before. I don't know whats become of it.

"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic"
-Joseph Stalin

One-hundred-and-sixty-thousand bodies are irrevocably broken every single day, and I am not phased by it, but let die one misfit classmate, who I didn't particularly care for in the first place, and I am suddenly shocked and crippled over the fear of my own mortality and by sentiments of sympathy that I cannot articulate. How can I or we be so unphased by the tragedies of the great many and yet be debilitated with mourning over a single man, simply because we knew his name and can recollect his face and voice? How is that fair? How is that rational? It must be a primal emotional response.

The impact it has had upon me is that of a severe reminder. It's easy to be lulled into thinking of death as patient pursuer, as something lurking in the far distance that, with the right tools and knowledge, might be chased back, temporarily if not indefinitely. Yet happenings like these are frightening because they remind of the frailty of the human body and of how simple, brief or trivial a folly might rend it.

Death needn't wait patiently for me over some distant hill, allotting me the time to gather my weapons against it. It might come for me suddenly and decisively in the night. It might be a lapse in judgment on the interstate, or a careless crossing of the street, or a stray lump of lead shot at me without regard, or a meaningless verbal confrontation, or a prick of the finger, or a wisp of something in the air, an abrupt malfunction in any critical organ. After instances like this, all I see around me are opportunities to die.

That young man and his friend didn't die of old age or because of gradual accumulations of health related defects. They died abruptly and without warning because they stopped to lend aid to a motorist and were struck down by another vehicle. He was alive and well one moment and dead the next. Death didn't wait for him. How do I know how long it will wait for me?

I am so afraid.

When I speak of sports in the general sense, think of football, basketball, golf, baseball, soccer and things of the like where the primary objective is to reposition the ball to some arbitrary point, thereby demonstrating finesse or cardiovascular intensive athleticism.

I dislike most sports. They are non-immersive, non-practical, repetitive and structured around arbitrary objectives and rules. They lack purpose, and the religious devotion of sports fans to any given team is, in my eyes, one of the most ludicrous forms of fanaticism to ever stalk the surface of the Earth.

I've been criticized before for the fact that I am a fan of games (preferably for Windows), which are plainly related in premise to traditional sports and maybe called a species of sports in themselves. I contest that the attraction of video games is less in the pointless demonstration of superior hand-eye coordination, and more so in the matter of immersion. If such electronic games are a sport, then they are distinct in that they appeal to the player's imagination in a way that a basketball court simply cannot. No matter how steeped I am in the action of a tennis match, it will likely never transport my intellect to a place where my feet are not. No matter what, I will remember that I am in a court, ridiculously dressed and, silly me, striking a tiny yellow ball over a net. I will also note that electronic games combine seamlessly to the arts of literature and film. This is a dimension that the NFL could never possess.

One of my chief complaints about these traditional sports is their arbitrary nature. In golf, for example, there is no point to the constituent parts of the sport outside of the context of the sport itself. At no point outside of the game of golf would someone be called upon to drive a tiny ball across an open field with an iron club, nor tap it into a tiny hole. Those mechanics are only there as a demonstration of finesse; they have no other purpose. The demonstration itself has no use, so I deem the sport pointless. Why would I want to tap this ball into a hole with a club? Can anyone explain to me the motivation behind this? There isn't one. The goal is arbitrary and has no relevancy or reference to anything outside of itself. This brings me to my next thought.

Most people who are vaguely familiar with me are surprised to learn that I fence and quite enjoy the sport. They have a difficult time reconciling previous knowledge about me having contempt for most sports with the idea of me training and competing in one. When the fact comes up, I have to explain why I can savor every moment of a fencing match, but utterly cringe at the idea of chasing a ball across a field.

The difference between fencing and, say, soccer is plain. The goal of fencing, as well as the rules that govern one's pursuit of that goal, is not arbitrary. It has purpose and relevancy to things beyond the competition. Fencing is not a mere show of athleticism; it is a simulation of actual combat, as its origins dictate. It is the art of handling the body and blade in such a way as to inflict harm without sustaining harm. That is a meaningful purpose that appeals to real-world motivations that are as personal as the urge to feed and drink. Moving a ball into a net with my feet offers no such motivation.

However, there is more to the enjoyment that I derive from fencing. I enjoy the simulation of violence itself. Everything that it means to feel human is so much more potent under the illusion of combat. There is the fear of pain and death; it sits, at every breath, only an instant away. A brief folly and it's upon you, and you feel that. There are the seconds of predatory fury, of relief, of confidence, of doubt, of vengeance lust, and somewhere at the core of it all is a primal hunger for malicious subversion, for the infliction of contemptuous pain upon the other in the knowledge that it is either you or he, and it's all interwoven with the intricacies of blade and foot work.

I suppose that's all I really wanted to do for now, reflect upon why I enjoy the sport and why it seems distinct from others.