free to be you and me

i am officially an insomniac and it's pissing off my sisters but i am reading existentialism: a very short introduction & the dharma bums simultaneously which makes me very happy and ecstatic and the "david" shortstory is really coming together and i fucking love sartre and adore kierkegaard. i wish more of my heroes were female and a problem that's been plaguing me is the concept of freedom and what is it really? in today's society can we really achieve it? money, politics, the law, all remove the freedom to choose. and can we say that we have freedom when simply living in a country like america, hong kong, or in the upper middle class means day to day life directly removes someone else's freedom? also, can i say that i have freedom when i have to close my eye to certain atrocities to feel i am free? and if the answer is no to those questions, then can we ever live in a world in which we are all free to choose? is that what equality is? it is plaguing me because my i feel like i am answering no to many of the above questions, which means i am not free. that bothers me.

"the individual is above the universal."

gah! add heidegger to the list of lovables.
(hopefully next it isn't someone dead white & male)

also (before that hope goes into effect), i adore camus. & i come to the same conclusions he does about life, not because i believe that there is nothing out there and the universe is hopeless, but because i believe that i just can't know, and all i can do is focus on the here and now and how to live the life i have. this i guess, is what makes me an existentialist. but absurdism is so appealing to me. let me just finish the myth of sisyphus.

my brain is on fire! i cannot sleep.