Back in New York last week, I had a big fight with my mom about my newly pierced eyebrow ring. I want everyone reading this to realize that fights are natural occurrences and that I am not just airing my dirty laundry online. Anyway, so my mom told me that she is worried about me; she thinks I changed. An eyebrow ring, at least for me, does not constitute a change as I’ve always wanted one but at the same time, understood that high school was not the proper environment to have one. Hanging out with my old friends one night, driving the familiar streets of the upper west side, familiar scents lingering in the air, the inevitable conversation about change began. Details ignored, here is how I changed.

Basically I am a better version of me. Imagine if “Avi” was a way of life, like Samurai. Now you can be a good samurai, like Yojimbo, or you can be a nasty badass samurai like Ghost Dog, or you can be a total wanker like Tom Cruise in that new samurai movie he is in. So in following the way that is “Avi,” I have gotten better at it. Senior year, I discovered the way, but not until this year have I accepted the way. And I don’t want to go into specifics, but basically, that is it. I am a better Avi, not new, just improved and I think that’s what the eyebrow ring represented for me.

On this trip a few nights ago, I discovered that life is a celebration of nothingness. It was a Tuesday night, we were partying, I was screaming about how amazing this weekday is, and my friend said that his was his weekend, that he had Tuesday and Wednesday off. And then it occurred to me, that the weekend is a celebration of having off. How can you have off? Off is a negation, it is a lack of work, it is nothing. Obviously, you cannot have nothing; you can only not have anything, and hence, the weekend, as a concept, is simply a celebration of nothingness. This theory went way to far perhaps, and I began rambling about how everything that is good in life is nothing, well not nothing, but that pleasure is essentially the realization that there is nothing. Getting an A on a paper for instance, well your happy because there is no blemish on your GPA, because the paper is over, because you don’t have to worry. You have a huge pile of bills on your desk, you are happy when you are finished paying them because you don’t have to pay anymore – and by that time, you probably don’t have any money. So we celebrate having nothing. The way of Avi is essentially a perpetuation of nothingness and its celebration. But as I said, this went a bit far. Patterns began emerging everywhere.

Let me go.