The world we live in is, and forgive my understatement, a highly organized world. We live in a world where no one can even go on a vacation to France without a little booklet that outlines name, age and appearance filled out in triplicate, stamped, and verified. We live in a society so complex and ordered that the people living in it have to go through at least 12 years of education just to figure out how to live in it. Almost everything in today's society, from the process one must take to operate an airplane, to the alphabet of letters which I'm using to write this essay, is representative of mankind imposing order upon the world in which it lives. People attempt to create a semblance of order in an unordered world.

Many a time, particularly when I've a metric ton of homework to do, I sit back, and find myself thinking "Why?" (Actually, it's more of a WHY?!!?!, but, I digress...) Every day, I go to school, receive upwards of 5 hours of homework a day, then go home and do it, only to be rewarded the next day with more work. What sort of dormant masochistic tendency inspires the human spirit to say ‘Well, I could keep on sleeping, but if I get up at six o' clock in the morning, I'LL GET TO GO TO SCHOOL! JOY AND RAPTURE!,' or ‘Gee, I think I'll take AP basketweaving next year. There is seven hours of reading a night required, but it will help my GPA!' The fact that the youth of America (and, in fact, EVERY American, at some point in their lives) voluntarily submits themselves to this arduous life course is not directly a sign of an instilled, masochistic tendency to work, but has its root more in the fact that going to an education facility for seven hours, five out of every seven days, adds a rigid feeling of structure to our lives. This feeling transcends itself into the adult world, where a similar schedule dictates the working hours of the people in the society. If this arbitrary self-imposed pattern was lifted from society, the community would undoubtedly find a way to reorganize itself.

The very calendar man uses to keep track of his busy schedule is a shining, concrete example of man's attempt to make order of an otherwise chaotic world. Ever since man realized that the moon went through its cycles on a regular basis, that the seasons followed each other in the same order each time, or that this whole looping process the earth went through took about 365.25 days (days, which are, in turn, a man-made measurement of the time it takes the earth to rotate), he has sought to impose regularity upon time. Months resulted as an attempt to keep track of the moon's cycles. As irregularities in the cycles came about, man took it upon himself to set in concrete an exact number of months, and how many days each one had. These numbers seem somewhat arbitrary. Why do they all have a different number of days? Why is the extra ‘leap-year' day added in February, as opposed to, perhaps, at the end of the year, appended to December? Precisely why these arbitrary values were assigned may not be specifically discernable, but the fact that they are so meticulously recorded and followed demonstrates just how careful we are about our nice, neat, cut-and-dry, little methods of organization.

Oddly enough, at this point, life is so organized, the organization seems to defeat its own purpose. I'm reminded of my cousin, who, in one day, had a baseball game at noon, soccer practice at two o'clock, and another soccer game at four, all in one day. His parents needed to keep up with this process, as well as with their daughter's scheduled band concerts, their own designated jobs, heading down to the pre-ordained food purchase buildings to buy easily-accessible pre-packaged foodstuffs (to eat at pre-determined eating times the next day), and watching a little televised entertainment, starting precisely at eight o'clock, and ending at 9:30. In other words, human life is so organized as to seem chaotic at times.