Dangers of Daydreaming

When you're a kid, or at least when I was a kid, everything I heard and everything I watched had a theme.  And those themes weren't the kind that you had to write a five page paper about before 4:30.  Barney taught us how to share and hug people, and it was that simple.

There was also this big thing about imagination, and how the world can be awesome if you believe it is or if you use your imagination.  It was everywhere.  Pretend it's a cake.  Pretend you're married to him.  Imagine that this box is really robot pirate island.

I guess for most people there's nothing wrong with it.  It's normal, and when you grow up and have real pirate friends and real cake, you don't need your imagination anymore.  But we still see movies, right?  We still dive into something totally fictional, something that is a complete product of the imagination.  And it's good for two hours and then it's back to the real world.

Sometimes I think that I have a dysfunctional brain, and yes a lot of people think they have something shorting in their head, and you can tell me I'm a hypochondriac, and I'll ask you if you know what a jerk is.

I had this theatre teacher once tell me that if you have your imagination, you'll never be bored, because when you are bored, you can just play a little movie in your head and sit back and enjoy.  If I had a dollar for every time I did that in church, I guess I'd have twenty bucks.  We all do it.  I just feel like I do it too much.  It was a great coping strategy when I was 4, but I'm older now, and I need to stop.  It's also good for acting and writing and all that stuff, but again, it doesn't work in college.

Broke

Everything starts out vague.  Birth.  Your vision is blurry.  It’s cold.  And after all that stress of getting pushed out of your mother’s love canal, your memory forgets the whole 6 hours of labor (which in hindsight is probably the a good amnesia to have.)

So there was once a girl that liked technology.  She liked it ever since she remembered - ever since her vision was clear and she had memories.

She thought it started in the fourth grade.  That’s when her parents caved and bought a computer – and when she heard the shrill of the dial-up modem, a chill went down her spine.  It was like it was talking to her.

Then she got her first boom box.

Her parents didn’t like the modern radio stations.  Radio stations sung about sex and drugs, and they didn’t want that to invade her mind, so they told her she couldn’t listen to the radio, she could only listen to the approved list of tapes and compact discs – the ones that came from the Christian bookstore down the street that sold the lame records.  You know those boy bands that substituted the words “baby” and “sexy” with “Lord” and “Jesus” and “You.”

But every day after school, she would go into her bedroom, lock the door, and do homework in the corner farthest from her door.  There she would turn her little stereo to her favorite FM station, and she would listen to the quiet buzz of the DJ and the bubble gum pop, and she would pray that her mother wouldn’t hear that stereo playing.  She would even set up simulations.  She would turn her radio on, leave her room and close the door just to make sure the music wasn’t audible to outsiders.

She would concentrate so intently on that music that she wouldn’t do her homework.  Her grades started to fail.  Her relationships with her peers began to suffer.  Her parents sent her to a different school the next year. 

Things would change, people would move away, but that stereo was always sitting on her bookshelf.

In the fifth grade, she wrote poetry about her secret love affair with the radio.  The teacher approved.  Her mother thought she was crazy.

And then, one day, it stopped singing for her.  It was no longer functioning.  It broke.  She didn’t know what to do.  The bottom of her little, low decibel world had fallen out.  The obsessed was clueless concerning her obsession.  She cried.  She never cried, but on this particular, she cried for her stereo.  She thought that maybe if she cried, her sadness would go away – she would have some kind of catharsis, but that never happened.

It was almost like someone quitting cigarettes.  She had to learn to eat and dance and enjoy things again.  The music didn’t even do it for her anymore.  She had to recondition.  She had to fake it till she made it.  She couldn’t love anymore – she had to teach herself how to feel again – to feel like she did about that radio.

To this day, she’s still trying to recover.

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I'm coming back down now.  The air is starting to get sharp, and I hate it and love it.  When I go home, maybe I'll try to get a tan.  I don't like looking like a ghost.  Maybe the warmer my skin is, the warmer I'll feel.

This one time, I considered becoming a drug dealer.  Don't worry, I'm not, but I thought about it.  And I didn't just think, "Hey, maybe I'll become a drug dealer."  I considered the logistics.  Where would I get wholesale?  How could I avoid getting caught?  What would my street name be?  If I went to jail, what would that mean for me?

I chose not to become a drug dealer.  I guess there are better things to do, but I wasn't doing it because I was lazy.  It was a long time ago, but I think I wanted to become a drug dealer because I could get some money.  I told my friends about my plan, and the sad thing was that they were totally digging it.  I think it was entertaining, not just for them, but for me.  I mean, imagine telling your kids that when you're all old and wrinkled at the nursing home, "Yeah, I was a drug dealer."  Imagine all the adventure that would go along with it.  The knives and the fights and running from the cops.

I guess this kind of explains why I can't come to any kind of career choice, because my first choice was drug dealer.  There isn't a lot that lives up to that.  Maybe a hitman could brag to a drug dealer.

Oh.

Something about this makes my mind work - like it did when I was young and normal.  I can't explain it, but it's freeing - like new shoes and the bottom of my salad bowl.  I love it.

Sometimes I realize how lonely I am.  There's something not right about me - not right about all of us eighth graders that went out together.  They screwed us over.  It makes me hate private schools.  Maybe we should have been taught to think for ourselves.  We're all cursed, don't you think?  Maybe not.  I'm sure some of you are happy.  Some of you feel good.

I have Latin tomorrow at 11.  Every time I walk into the class it reminds me of the pattern that I'm stuck in.  I'm stuck in the ninth grade looking for true love and looking for somewhere to fit in.  I want a resolution, and even if I don't have that, I could go for some conflict, some real-life conflict that makes me feel like there's something I'm working towards.  Sure, we have our eternity mapped out for us, but I need some goals.  I've never made goals.  No one ever told me to.  I don't have a post-graduation plan.  I don't have a plan at all.  I've never had plans.  Plans are for people who are scared the future won't go their way.  I don't even need the future to go my way - I just need it to go.

Okay, so you're reading this and realizing how depressing I am.  Psychologists say that depressed people have the better grasp on reality.  But I guess if you have a better grasp on your reality, you slowly begin to realize how bad reality sucks.  Fine, tell me to grow up.  Reality is a fine wine, but I don't see the bittersweetness in my reality, and I suppose that means I either need to find it or I need to put on the rose-colored glasses of the happy people.  Reality isn't a lightheaded buzz - it's sobering.

Don't bother me with your solutions though, because chances are, you're wearing the glasses and I'm not, and I won't be able to understand what you're talking about because my world is blue and your world is pink.

Gorillaz - Superfast Jellyfish (HD)

Bring It Back ya bleep.

Let me be honest - and normally I am, but sometimes - and actually a majority of the time, I'm not.  Ya dig?

I would curse like a sailor in this shin-dig I call my blog.  I would shout profanities.  I would make satellite radio look like your local cable channel.  But I can't because I'd feel bad.  If my future in laws read my lovely string of bleeps and bloops, they might disown me.

If you ever want to become educated and feel like a malicious donkey at the same time, Google a curse word and read the Wikipedia article on it, and you'll soon learn that there's no reason to give a, uh, you know a poop.  It's all Germanic stuff.

Speaking of Germany - everything evil comes from Germany.  The beer, the pop music, those terrible suspenders with the fedora hats.  Why do you think the German people came up with all those expletives?  They had to describe all the horrific things they were seeing and tasting.  I mean, imagine back in the middle ages the guy down the street in Berlin is trying to sell beer made from pine bark - you would be calling it something too.


Okay, I'll admit, you can take it a little overboard.  I mean we all like sprinkles on our ice cream, but not the other way around.  In the show Spongebob Squarepants, they called them "sentence enhancers."  So of course, they shouldn't overpower the sentence - use sparingly.


If you have an accent - especially a very thick southern accent, you should NOT use sentence enhancers.  They actually tend to have the opposite effect - it's like giving Ritalin to a kid that doesn't have ADD.


If you are a man with an exceptionally deep voice, don't curse.  You'll lose the trust of your employers and the women in your life.  You will also sound like a 'roid ragin' animal.  No one wants to be around that.


Since there are a lot of dimensions to these rules, let me demonstrate with a brief illustration:

East Side versus West Side versus Broadside

To those who aren't reading this - you are a double negative.  Get out of here.

And to my faithful readers - to people like Natalie and my stalkers - I love you.

Nothing has occurred in my life.  I'm trying to get money, but then I end up spending it (it's good for the economy).  I'm still doing stuff I shouldn't be doing, like sleeping in and vandalizing government property.  I still own a set of ginormous speakers.  If anyone's interested in purchasing them (they'd be quite the steal), let me know, otherwise Puja is going to wake up to the sound of booming electro every morning.

I babysit everyday, and I wouldn't really call it babysitting - I'd call it chaperoning and refereeing - but it's sitting nonetheless.

I don't have much of a social life.  It died when I got diagnosed with all these mental illnesses, but I can't complain - there's much worse out there in Kenya.

Peace