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I pulled an all-nighter.  My projected bed time was 3am, and wakeup time 7am - so I didn't really see the point of the four hours.  So I just took a couple Greek lessons.  I would type out some of the stuff that I learned, but it's too much time.  If you see me, tell me to say something.  I'll say "the women and the men run," only in Greek.

I'm in the lobby watching TV.  When one channel turns the infomericals on, I go to MTV.  They still play music videos, but only at odd hours of the morning.  Music videos make me laugh.

I feel like Music runs on it's own time.  The meaning put in a couple lines is kind of like Inception.  The deeper you go, the longer it lasts, so when song is converted to music video format, it's like the infiniteness of a song gets restricted to a movie - an introduction, a conflict, a rise, a fall, and a fade to black.  But in the end, you realize the man running in the movie isn't telling us about the song, the song is telling us a story about the man.

I am just a confusing music video.  There's dancing and a couple of guitars and a really vague plot about romance.  The music - the music is a little fuzzy.  One of the channels keeps cutting out.  The bass sucks.  Crap - some man with a key-tar just popped out!  No, he's gone now, but here comes a tall blonde woman wearing overalls made of fabric sheets.  What does it mean?  Two white rappers appear to be dancing around a pot of gold!

But the music!  If only we could hear what the singer was singing - maybe we could makes sense of this.

Gahhhh I need that stereo.

Whatever hatred saves the number.

If it's happy, then you know I'm faking, but...

Someone, and by someone, I mean the entity that is Wikipedia, once told me that Aristotle said, “Friendship is one soul in two bodies.”  I’m sure that when he said it, it came out Greek, but the English quote gives the basic idea he was conveying.

I don’t think people went to college in ancient Greece, but if they had, Aristotle probably would have been a college student with long blonde hair and sideburns, closely resembling my friend Nathanael.  If they had pipes in ancient Greece, I’m sure Aristotle smoked one too.  But I’m getting off topic.

When I moved away from home, I realized how dumb high school was, and when I realized how dumb high school was, I realized how dumb home was.  I have friends and family there and I love them, but I hated the town.  When I moved to Boone, it was like something out of an Aristotle quote.  It was like I found another bunch of bodies with pieces of my soul in them and it just worked.  I don’t mean dead bodies; I mean a bunch of different people that I clicked with.  It was like a puzzle that had been solved.

And then I kept twisting it around in my gray matter.  Maybe that’s what life is.  Maybe it is just this big journey where you find all those little scattered pieces of your soul, and you love them.

Okay, life is more than just that, but I think that Aristotle described a nice chunk of life in such a little sentence.

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.