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It seems that as soon as one turns 14, exits middle school and enters high school there is never enough time. With the stress of APUSH, Chemistry, and Calculus constantly looming, your life becomes filled with assigned readings and problem sets so that in your few moments of peace you neither have the ability or desire to do anything but take a moment to finally breathe.

Therein lies the beauty of summer vacation. In summer you have time to earn minimum wage at the local pizza shop, see your friends and watch enough TV to turn your brain to mush. During the school year there is never enough time, but during summer you have all the time in the world.

Before high school, I devoured books, but once freshmen year started I stopped reading entirely unless it was for class. Even worse, some of the assigned reading was expedited by the use of Sparknotes and Wikipedia. So the summer after freshmen year I started a tradition, one which I have honored every summer until now (my senior year of college). Every May I choose two books, two classics, and read them over the summer. While it may not seem like the largest commitment I could make, I always seem to choose the thickest books available and having never liked an English class which I have taken, it is a rather impressive feat for me.

From Don Quixote to Crime and Punishment I have loved my tradition but this past summer (2014) I couldn’t bear to finish my second book, The Portrait of a Lady. The summer of 2013 I had a girly summer where I picked two classic romance novels – Madame Bovary and Gone with the Wind (insert groan here). Madame Bovary was first and I absolutely hated it. Not for the writing, but because of the main character, Emma Bovary, who consistently whined about her boring life and did nothing to “fix it” but have an affair and ruin her husband’s life. So when Scarlet O’Hara appeared on the pages of Gone with the Wind I was hooked. Here was a girl who went after what she wanted and did not allow social niceties to stop her. SPOILER ALERT So when things did not work out as planned in the final pages of the book, I was angry. Finally I had found a character I related to, liked and respected and after a 1,200 page investment in her she ends up miserable? I was not happy. This caused Isabel Archer’s appearance in The Portrait of a Lady not to be exciting, rather scary. Scary because I worried that her free thinking would lead to her demise and that I would end my summer disappointed once more in a tradition which I had grown to love. Because of that, the book remains lying on my desk with the bookmark dangerously close to the end. Maybe some night I will find the courage to finish it. Or maybe May will come and I will find a book that does not have a strong willed, relatable, female protagonist.

One of the more recent documentaries on rock star legend Jim Morrison entitled “When You’re Strange” offers an interesting new perspective on the celebrity. Jim Morrison is an infamous figure, known for haranguing his audiences in between performances, frequent altercations with the law, and open admission to illicit drug use.

Although his band’s music was a popular, Morrison’s personal image struggled. Even though Morrison would self-identify as a poet and creative genius, the public felt his antics were uncalled for, his belittling attitude towards his fans arrogant, and his unpredictable, reckless actions menacing. Morrison’s behavior is not unlike hip hop star Kanye West’s today (Kanye actually refers to himself as this generation’s Jim Morrison, interestingly enough).

However, as the documentary I mention above notes, Morrison’s awareness of his identity being an integral part of his music was quite clear. One excellent example is the song LA Woman, and the famous refrain “Mr. Mojo Risin’/Gotta keep on risin’/risin, risin…” – the emotional and musical climax of a radio hit, and a song frequently requested live. As band members note, Morrison invented this phrase on the spot, and later revealed that it was an anagram (he just rearranged the words of his own name – like Tom Marvolo Riddle in Harry Potter).

This particular moment of studio session songwriting brilliance is emblematic of a larger point – Jim Morrison’s wild “bad boy” persona fueled his band’s fiery sound. As band member Manzarek notes in interviews, “he would do things just to see if he could get away with them. To say he did them.” One might even risk the thought that if Morrison was aware of his persona and its relationship to his music, perhaps his wild behavior was in fact a form of performance art.

Jim’s antics on stage, according to his band members, could be highly energized, or highly dangerous – one could never tell. On bad days, Jim would consume so much alcohol and LSD that he would yell at the crowd, or pass out, forcing the band to continue without him.

Another time, Jim blacked out on stage from drinking heavily and dosing on LSD and proclaimed, “I AM THE LIZARD KING!!! I CAN DO ANYTHING”. The Doors’ label later released a band compilation entitled “Lizard King” – concretizing Jim’s physical performance into a musical object.

During this holiday season, as my family was heading back from Jirisan, a mountain in South Korea, I was listening to the audiobook of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (narrated by none other than Stephen Fry) in the car. Never before had I even considered listening to an audiobook, but it was a fairly long drive and I get carsick easily if I have my head bent over a book whilst in a moving vehicle.

Interestingly enough, I was at the part, where the massive computer named Deep Thought, revealed that the answer to life, the universe, and everything, is 42. I chuckled a little. Not saying British humour isn’t hilarious – because there were other parts of this novel that had me laughing considerably harder – but I suppose the joke hit me with a pang of bleakness. Nobody and nothing knows the secret of life dummy. You are chasing a fools errand.

But this emotional pitfall quickly resolved itself, for me anyways, because I swiftly recovered by remembering that life may very well be, incredibly, shitty if we knew the answer to such a question. And by that, I mean shitty all the time. It is a hunch. Nothing more really. I may very well be wrong. It may very well be the case that if we knew the answer to that non-question, we would live like gods.

Yet, isn’t it the fact that we have both the inability to resolve such dumbfounding queries whilst also having the ability to conceive of them in the first place, what makes us human?

And at that very moment, as I heard the passage in my earbuds, we were passing by exit number 42 on the highway.

What a coincidence I thought, and how appropriate that such a coincidence would happen whilst listening to a book that features an invention called the Infinite Improbability Drive.

It was then that I thought, it is when moments like these happen – moments of pure chance, amidst all the universal chaos, when the stars align to make something like this to happen – that I get this jovial feeling that everything will be ok. That not everything will go to shit. Well eventually, things do go to shit, but life offers you small victories from now till then. Just don’t panic.