lxxviii

“You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.”

-Laurence J. Peter

            For a lack of a better term, it’s weird being here, at this house annually rented by people that I have only known for a week, watching my team (also a weird term to use) lose to a Midwestern power-house. I am laughing and singing with a new group of people that have only known me for a week. I am dancing and cursing with thirty new others that still don’t know all my quirks and my little inappropriate tendencies, the stories of my awkward underclassmen years and the quiet words that I type on this keyboard.

            But I can’t help feeling comfortable around them, though, these new friends who share the same immature humor and the same underlying sense of seriousness. And that’s all that matters, as strings of swear words and jokes playfully jump around the room to the tune of the college football announcers on the screen in front of us.

            New people? Dancing in front of strangers? I can handle this.

lxxvi

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

-Nick Carraway/F. Scott

            My fluorescent lights are all flickering off I my room and I am finally allowing myself to fall asleep, after letting the five-year-old inside of me get distracted for the past few hours by whatever cancelled space opera television show is still silently streaming on my muted laptop. Three o’clock in the morning has become my normal college bedtime, a calculated stab at independence. It is not, by any means, a healthy form of parental and social rebellion, but only one that drains my energy.

            Settling into the cushioned groove of my pillow, I find myself about to fall asleep only to be subconsciously distracted by the single, bright blue light of my printer’s power button, shining strongly into the empty blackness of my room, illuminating every dirt-speckled crevice, mischievously peeking into my twitching left eye.

            It being so late at night (or early in the morning, whichever is preferred), I can’t seem to summon the energy to turn the damn thing off. All it would take is a simple push of the button, in order to quickly end whatever slight discomfort I may be experiencing. But with every passing second, I find myself less and less motivated to get out of the warm cocoon of sheets around me, tip-toe across the thinly carpeted floor, and turn off the light.

            And while it’s probably laziness, I can’t help but think that there might be something else forcing me to hold back on my quest for an enveloping darkness. And, while this is all starting to sound very highfalutin, the surrounding blue light is almost peaceful and, if I strain my de-contacted eyes hard enough, it becomes a pinpoint spec in the far-off corner, a color-shifted Daisy’s dock that I can barely bring myself to go towards.

            And so lying in my bed, waiting for the cold sleep of 3:47 now to take me, I become top-hatted Gatsby for a moment, floating silently in the carpeted sea, bed against the current, borne back sleeplessly into tomorrow.

lxxv

“Happy Birthday to you, you live in a zoo, you smell like a monkey, and you look like one too!”

-Me, ten years ago

            It is my youngest brother’s birthday today. He is twelve years old. I have sent him a subpar DVD edition of a subpar movie adaptation of his favorite, surprisingly decent book series. I hope that he appreciates it.

            He is so far away. It is the first birthday that I have missed. And I will probably miss it every faraway year from now on because I will be in college or in law school or at my job or millions of miles away.

            I miss him. And I hope that the BluRay copy of Percy Jackson and the Olympians can convey that better than nine silly simple sentences can.

lxxiv

“Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.”

-Roman Polanski

            Sitting in this worn-out cloth-covered chair, the slowly-dimming lights of the movie theater humming softly against the quick cuts of the previews, I find myself not paying attention to the gaping screen in front of me and, instead, worrying. Typical. I am worrying about my Business Calculus homework, left unfinished and nervously due. I am worrying about that one girl that I met, who might have taken my normal, slightly sexist joke a little too seriously. And I am that my humor has become too refined, too stuck-up for the likes of the only-slightly witty dialogue and the common thread of plot running through every TV show and movie that I have watched.

            Half-asleep, distractingly checking my bright texts, I force myself to laugh at the predictable, the smug comment and its companion retort which had simply just been copy-and-pasted from the past fifteen movies about teenage girls struggling through high school. And, after the movie is over, the bleary-eyed audience and the friends of mine who I actually know nothing personal about murmuring excitedly about the absolutely hilarious scene in the middle of the movie and the positively wondrous part that closed the film, I can’t help but shrug at the mediocrity of it all, every film cell, every reel.

            I have started to expect only the absolute best out of the four-dollar-ticket price: acting, story, dialogue, humor, and action must be superb for me to consider a movie “good.” And I guess, up to a point, this pickiness is good, stemming from my incessant need to check movie rating websites, trying to pluck the best cinematic experience for me, personally, out of the newspaper stars and television reviews.

            But there hasn’t been a movie in a while that has pleased me, that has satisfied my need, my drive for perfection. I guess I’ll just have to make my own.

lxiii

“Sing…sing a song…sing out loud…sing out strong.”

-Joe Raposo

            A thought: singing in Church is supposed to bring you closer to the Lord but all that it brings me is dirty stares from the people around me.

            I love to sing, whether it be in front of a mirror when my roommate isn’t there, in the shower when, hopefully, my roommate isn’t there, or in front of a crowd of people who know that I know that I cannot, should not sing. But singing off-key, in the Lord’s House, isn’t one of those three places and, while I absolutely love to just belt out the first few stanzas of “Open the Eyes of My Heart,” I think I’ll take a break for the next few Sundays and let Someone else do the singing through the quiet in both my heart and mouth.

            Just for a few weeks.

lxxii

“I usually try on at least 20 pairs of jeans before I find something that looks good on me. And even then, I have a trustworthy friend tell me if my butt looks big!”

-Amanda Peet

            Today was the first day of the school year where I felt cold, where I felt like it was a poor decision to not pack any long-sleeved shirts with me, instead reserving the luggage-space for a Nerf gun and my hardcover copy of Watchmen.

            But the brisk, small dagger in the air also means that it’s time to bring out the four pairs of blue jeans that I’ve stuffed into the back of my closet. Four pairs may seem excessive for a heterosexual male but I have my artsy factory-ripped pair, my trendy factory-bleached pair, my factory-hemmed cowboy pair, and my factory-regulated regular pair.

I Sleep in My Blue Jeans

Sometimes,

when I fall asleep,

I’ll forget to change out of the my clothes.

And then the next morning I will be completely dressed

in the same sweaty t-shirt and wrinkled jeans of the faded yesterday.

And, I know it sounds uncomfortable but, recently,

I have had some of the best

seven-and-a-half hours of sleep

of my life.

It is almost as if my mind wants to keep moving

                                                                 walking

                                                                 living

while my awkward body rests on my three-hundred thread count sheets.

And I walk through my always-black-and-white dreamscapes,

interacting with some synapses of my imagination,

those graying illusions of grass

are painted only with a pallid, frayed brush,

dripping with only the most worn-out, tattered shade of

blue.

lxxi

“I’m going to make it through this year, if it kills me.”

-The Mountain Goats

            Every time I add a new number into my phone, it feels like an accomplishment, like I have put myself “out there” (there: that scary, bleak unknown of social limbo) successfully. And the fact that this is happening more and more often, that I am herding more and more contacts into the specially-partitioned “Aggie” group, gives me great comfort.

            I’m going to make it through this year. I promise.

lxx

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see. 
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

-William Shakespeare

            This cheap wooden cubicle in the library is at least twenty years old, at least as judged by the scratchy dates scrawled into its ancient paneling. There are drawings and messages marked onto the sides, permanently Sharpied down to the corners, forever reminders of students sitting in the same creaky chair as me right now, the only thing that they have left behind.

            I want to leave behind my words, these roman numerals, this physical/digital (depending how this is being respectively read) account of my breaths and trials and shortcomings. And I want to leave behind this poem:

Driving On Sunday Mornings

The favorite part of my week

is that warm of a Sunday morning,

you know, when there’s no one

                      absolutely no one on the roads

and the cement super-highways glisten with their patented chemical dew,

waiting for me.

And I’m just flying down the Interstate,

in my goddamned, beat up mini-van,

the same color of a half-cleaned oil spill in the Gulf.

I’m heading South because

why the hell not?

                               And because

I want to see just how far, exactly, I can really go

without having to step on the brake pedal

or even acknowledge the existence of

another human being.

For that twenty-four-and-a-half minute car ride,

I’m racing down all the skid marks of the week and,

by the end of it,

all that’s left,

all that really matters,

is me

    my God,

    and that sweetest smell of gasoline

    that’s wafting into my swift Sign of the Cross.

            Is that too much to ask?

lxix

“I wish that I had Jessie's girl. Where can I find a woman, where can I find a woman like that? And I'm lookin' in the mirror all the time, wondering what she don't see in me. I've been funny. I've been cool with the lines. Ain't that the way love is supposed to be?"

-Rick Springfield           

            Brandon Wainerdi’s Sixty-Ninth Irrefutable Law of Life and Love in General: Every single mildly-attractive girl that a certain eighteen-year-old, curly-haired college freshman meets in various social situations and organizations and class rooms is guaranteed to be in a long-term, serious relationship with a muscular, twoyearsolder douche-bag who does not even attend said college, and, thus, said girl is completely off-limits.

                                                                       

·      Addendum 69.1: Said girl could also be just coming out of a long-term relationship with said douche-bag (long-distance, optional) for the Law to apply and, thus, she will “not really be looking for anything right now.”

·      Addendum 69.2: Said girls are caught off guard and mildy impressed and amused by douchey tokens of tomfoolery, (i.e. gimmicky business cards professing certain levels of “bad-assery.”) But only mildly.

·      Addendum 69.3: For every mile walked on immediate campus, a certain eighteen-year-old, curly-haired college freshman is guaranteed to “fall in love” with at least two and at most five mildly-attractive girls getting to class. So this freshman will no doubt find somebody.

           

            Preferably one wearing a Star Wars shirt. But I’m not picky.

lxviii

“Well I've been afraid of changing, 'cause I've built my life around you. But time makes you bolder, children get older, and I'm gettin' older too...”

-Stevie Nicks

            My roommate is not in our dorm from nine in the morning to eight at night.

            So, naturally, this gives me time alone, time that I can use to study and to read great literature and to sleep. Or time that I can use to curl up on my bed, stare at the ceiling, and let that one playlist that I made all those months ago blast from my iPod’s speakers. This is my yoga, my therapy, my prayer, my daily exercise.

            This is all I need.

lxvii

“Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.”

-Don Marquis

            My procrastination has grown in leaps and bounds during my month-long stay in BIGCOLLEGETOWN. Instead of boasting about grades and test scores (which, besides the point, I have relatively few of), I can only brag about the number and variety of complete television series that my hungry eyes have devoured, still hopefully leaving in their place a semi-vibrant social life to which I cling to.

            It has forced me to not study for Astronomy tests and to not fill out Astronomy online homeworks and to not create a thick collection of Astronomy-themed flashcards, but instead to focus on pulling sentences of poor grammatical structure and overused topics out of an already-tired mind, forcing inspiration from the 12:45 air.

            Because writing can never be put off until tomorrow.

lxvi

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.  I miss you like hell. 

-Edna St. Vincent Milla

            Is it bad to say that I am not missing very many people from high school? Yes. Am I going to explain this seemingly-terrible opening phrase within the following four half-paragraphs? Of course.

            It’s hard to forget that I’m not in high school anymore. Friends from the khaki pants and polos still text me and each other with gossip and stories of typical teenaged events, as if we had never left the desks and the white boards and the monks. And I ended up going to the big state school where, relatively, quite a few of my close friends were also attending. So, for the past few weeks of bicycle-riding, laundry-detergent-fueled newness, I haven’t had too much of an adjustment problem, still retaining my terrible sense of humor and frowned-upon sci-fi movie selections in the comfort circle of sheer familiarity. Everything else from the past is drowned in a sea of forgetfulness and, in some cases, indifference.

            There are some people I have realized that I just don’t, just can’t give a damn that they are no longer in my life.

            But the exceptions to this statement are the ones I truly care about. These are the people that I miss more than the Seinfeld seasons I accidently left to wither away on the family DVD, more than home-cooked meals of my mother(sometimes), more than my bathroom mirror which always deceptively made me look good before a high school Friday escapade. These are the people that I would want nothing more than to talk with face-to-face, rather than through the Skype screen of my blindingly bright LCD monitor. These are the people that I cannot wait to see for brief, probably football-filled hours during Thanksgiving break, the people that are the cause for silent prayers of brisker temperatures and a rapidly approaching November.

            These are the people that I need to have in my life, whether through letters being rushed to them or through text messages at one-o’clock in the morning.

            And, hey, happy birthday. To one of them.

lxv

“Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.”

-Dr. Laurence J. Peter

            My right eye has been itching at the most inopportune times for the past few months now. It’s been unnecessarily tearing up (as in tearing up because of sadness, not tearing up my heart because of the ‘N Sync) during the end of romantic comedies, or my Business Calculus II class, or the last five minutes of LOST finales and so, armed with my trusty mini-bottle of Bausch and Lomb Opcon-A®, I’ve been forced to regularly cleanse my watery right tear duct to prevent a very slight discomfort.

            Life sucks.

            What’s even worse is when, because of this very slight discomfort, I rub my right eye with my right backhand and my right contact falls out. And what’s even worse than this is when it happens in the darkness of a Ben-Affleck-directed-Boston thrill-ride in the local cinema.

            So for the last hour-and-four minutes of the movie I had to awkwardly, and rather constantly, wink at the projected Jon Hamm on the screen in front of me. But it made me concentrate on the movie more, forcing me to focus on the supposedly-critically-acclaimed dialogue and the Academy-lauded-pained-expressions. It made me concentrate on any of the deeper themes or over-arching, subtle metaphors. I couldn’t find much, especially with my poor depth perception even more fucked up than usual.

            Conclusion: the movie wasn’t that great, one contact missing or not.

lxiv

“I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

            My idea of dancing is simple. Much to the bemusement of some of my newer friends and acquaintances, this simplicity is comprised of moving the lower seventy-five percent of my body at very rigid 48° angles while simultaneously punching the air with my right hand and singing into a very imaginary microphone positioned snugly in my left. Air guitar solos, involving full body spasms and power slides, can be interchanged when appropriate and the songs must be from either the Billboard Top 100 or from fifty years ago for me to recognize it.

            But down here in BIGCOLLEGETOWN they play mostly country music, a genre where head-banging and fist-pumping (both which sound incredibly inappropriate upon their respective typing) are both unnecessary and frowned upon by the local population.

            So I have had to learn how to two-step, a dance that requires actual skill for the co-eds to actually be impressed but has already prompted the creation of a surprisingly effective “pick-up line”: “I don’t know how to two-step. Can you teach me, please?”

            In recent months, I’ve also figured out that I am near-deaf in both my ears, especially when the unseen DJ of the dancehall has raised the volume of “Livin’ On A Prayer” to a 7.2 on the Richter Scale,  as evidenced by me screaming, “WHAT? WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? SORRY!” to every already-nervous girl in front of me, as she tries to ask me the bland questions about my major and my hometown, as we boringly rotate counter-clockwise across the dance floor. I need to learn how to twirl these anonymous, sundressed partners so that they stop trying to have a conversation with me. And I need to get me hearing checked.

            I guess I’ll just add it to the ever-growing to-do list, along with finding some country songs with heavy guitar solos.

lxiii

“Having fun isn’t hard, when you’ve got a library card.”

-Arthur the Aardvark

            When I was younger, my favorite place in the world was the library, filled with Jedi Apprentice chapter books and Dewey-decimal-plastic bindings. But now, tonight at 11;57 PM, the night before the first Psychology test, before the first college test of my life, the library has lost some, if not most, of its general appeal.

            It’s almost closing time. And all if I can think about is if they have any Star Wars novels.

lxii

“I can be your hero, baby…”

-Some Song on the Radio

“Like every young boy who feels stronger on the inside than they look on the outside, any skinny boy basically who wishes their muscles matched their sense of injustice, God, it’s just the stuff that dreams are made of, for sure…”

-Andrew Garfield, the new Peter Parker

“If you could be any fictional character, who would it be and why?”

-FLO Application Essay

            Like any uncoordinated kid who has ever wanted to make a stand for himself, like the part inside each of us that is still seven-years-old, I want to be Spiderman.

            Actually, I’m not picky. I’ll go for any of the superheroes that cluttered the panels of the comic books that I still have underneath my bed. I want to have the intellect of Batman, the strength of Hulk, the do-good spirit of Superman.

            When I was younger, I never really watched sports, I never had the chance to idolize a quarterback or tape posters of Michael Jordan onto my bedroom walls. Instead, Wolverine and the X-Men, Iron Man and the Avengers came into my life, giving me self-assurance in myself and in how I perceive and act in my surroundings.

And, while it might sound immature and slightly naïve, I definitely would not be the person I am today, headstrong and confident, without the speech bubbles and right-hook punches of the spandex-clad superheroes.

I still have the action figures, filed neatly away into drawers at my house, patiently waiting for the next few years, so that I can give them to my kids, from one aspiring superhero to another.

lxi

“For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith toward God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything.”

-1 Thessalonians 8-9

            The sweaty and loud Protestant minister at the loud and sweaty Christian Bible Study I went to last night brought up an interesting question: “What is your personal idol?”

            Whenever someone even mentions the word idol during a long-winded homily or a theology class, I immediately think of the Chachapoyan Fertilty Idol, which for centuries had been hidden in forested temple in the shadows of Peru, until it was found by an archaeologist: Henry Jones, Jr.

           

            So, basically, I’m saying that the extent of my knowledge of idol worship rests in the hands of Raiders of the Lost Ark rather than a heavily dog-eared copy of the Good Book, a fact that I find relative comfort in.

            My idol, though, is probably not golden and shrunken and naked, waiting to be plucked up by the steady hands of Harrison Ford, to be delivered from the caverns of my heart by whipping through chasms and booby traps. My idol is something much deeper, a small urge in the back of my mind to thwart the spears responsibilities being constantly thrown at me, to accept the pits of maturity as they open up beneath me, to resist being suffocated by the quick sands of growing up.

            And I don’t plan on Indiana Jones to be coming to rescue me any time soon.

lx

“…i ducked behind the drapes when i saw the moon begin to rise,

gathered in my loose ends switched off the light.

and down there in the dark i can see the real truth about me.

as clear as day, lord if i make it through tonight

then i will mend my ways and walk the straight path to the end of my days.

st. joseph's baby aspirin,

bartles and james,

and you or your memory.”

-You Or Your Memory, The Mountain Goats

            Sometimes, I will find a song on my iPod that I had never heard before, that I had no idea existed within the digital bowels of its music-playing, rubber-protected circuits. I have downloaded so many new pop jingles and rap freestyles over the past few months that I have not been able to keep up with each one, as they lie unused and untouched for months at a time.

            Or until the glorious Shuffle angel picks them up and places them gently in my ear, and I forget the familiar walk back from Psychology and remember the lyrics of a new favorite song.

lix

“We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.”

-Chuck Palahniuk

            New ritual: emptying the trash on a Sunday evening, right before I turn off my combination lamp/iPod player and dream about three days before. And as the Freeze-Pop wrappers and water bottles flood to the bottom of the bin outside my creaking dorm room, the insecurities and worries of the next week fall out as well, into the ghostwhite plastic garbage can and out of my tired thoughts.

            And then I can sleep

lviii

“Laundry day, see you there, under-things tumbling/Wanna say, “Love your hair.”/Here I go, mumbling.

-Dr. Horrible

            I’m no good doing my own laundry.

            It should come as no surprise, really. I’ve never been very good at the more, for lack of a better word, matronly aspects of daily routine; my room is still recovering from the past week of clutter neglect and my refrigerator reeks of steak tacos, as they slowly wither away in the back Styrofoam corner of my personal mini-Hoth locker. I blame it on the excessive amounts of testosterone.

            I have discovered that mid-afternoon on a Saturday is the best time to enter the dingy laundry room, because it is empty and quiet. While everyone is getting ready for the evening’s festivities, with alcohol or without, I am alone with the four washers and six dryers, waiting for my impossibly-sixty-minute cycle to end.

            My LAUNDRYDAYBOOK, the one that I lug downstairs every week, is The Habit of Being, a collection of letters by the probably-senile Flannery O’Connor. It was a gift for my eighteenth birthday and I have not touched it since. The binding creases are non-existent, resting in the paper shadows for a gentle touch and a smooth bend in their threadings, as I finally find something of note, of audible importance, of mental-note application to my own life.

            Luckily, I haven’t shrunken any of my clothes, yet. Apparently, though, I have used over half of my teddy-bear-emblazoned fabric softener bottle in only one wash load, leaving my batch reeking of flowers and spring and whatever other chemical smells that have been witch-brewed into the plastic cap. I need to take my head out of my LAUNDRYDAYBOOK, a book that I have no hope of understanding,  just once in a while, and pay attention to my surroundings, and pay attention to the slow spinning wardrobe in front of me, which is obviously having a much worse, much soapier day that I am.

lvii

“I'm feeling like a star, you can't stop my shine/I'm loving cloud nine, my head's in the sky/I'm solo, I'm ridin’ solo/I'm ridin’ solo, I'm ridin’ solo/Sooloooo.”

-Jason Derulo, property of Beluga Heights

            Everyone around me is pairing off rather quickly, as if there is an imminent, apocalyptic flood that I have not been informed of, a flood of Noah’s Ark proportions. Everyone around me, bearing proudly the same “Class of 2014” maroon shirts as me, has seemed to have gotten a “significant other” within the last three weeks, either picking up a girl here in BIGCOLLEGETOWN (without custom business cards, somehow) or by dragging a high school relationship out to the University, clinging onto the familiar that I have ohsocasually dropped out of my life.

            Not that there is anything wrong with it all, of course. I am not here to argue about people’s life choices, however flawed or immature I think them to be. But there is something to be said for being single, at least at this point in our collective collegiate careers, for being free to meet new people and to explore every inch of opportunity, without being shackled to another person that you loooove.

            There are some people that I know that obviously really like each other, that are very compatible with one another, peanut butter to the other’s jelly, ice cream to the other’s pickle, that have committed to sticking through to the bitter end, through the smooth and the crunchy. But then there are the others (you know who you are) who have latched together out of insecurity, out of fear of the eighty-thousand people tromping through campus. And that is not admirable or necessary.

            But me? I’ll just continue to judge them as I wait for the right one to come along and, until then, jam to “Ridin’ Solo” in front of my bathroom mirror when nobody’s looking.

lvi

“No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap.”

-Carrie Snow

            For the past three weeks (and some change), I’ve been feeling on top of this whole “studying” thing, this ideal. But today, faced with the looming deadlines of busy-work assignments and quizzes that I need to study for, I finally feel like things are getting out of control. Just a little bit.

            For the past three weeks (and some change), I’ve been feeling on top of this whole “social” thing, this ideal. But today, faced with the idea of eating by myself in a busy dining hall or not having anything to do tonight except study and watch grainy, 32 bit videos streaming on my laptop, I finally feel like things are getting out of control. Just a little bit.

            For the past three weeks (and some change), I’ve been feeling tired. Sleep will take care of all this. All of this.

lv

“…in the end, that’s OK/we’re still brothers, you and me.”

-Relient K

            It’s good seeing old friends. It’s good seeing old friends, specifically ones who haven’t started prestigious runs at universities yet, ones who still revel in the stillness of summer.

            It’s almost surreal to have them here on campus as I lead them around lamppost-illuminated boulevards at two-o’clock in the morning, as they laugh at my terrible jokes, as they spread gossip about all of our friends. As if nothing has changed in our lives, immediate or future.

            And that’s why they’re the constants in my life, my friends.

liv

"They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines."

-Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes

            Today was the first day that I auditioned for anything since that last time I bowed on the high school stage, an unimportant part crying tears of sadness and of loss of friends and experiences. And today was the first day I found my love for performing back since the unfortunate experience of the last fall.

            Recently I found my college essay, my journal entry from those months, and I would like to share the infamous “Richmond Essay.” My writing style hasn’t really changed much during this past year. I’m glad I can get away with this. Because I’m tired:

            “‘It’s time,’ mouths the stage manager.

            I hesitatingly tip-toe over to the edge of the backstage, perilously close to being seen by the attentive audience. Ever since intermission, I have been waiting behind these tall curtains, running nervously over my lines, sweat ruining the wrinkles created by layers of heavy makeup. With a cue from the orchestra, I gallop, stick-horse clenched tightly in my fist, onto the beaten black stage. The stage lights bearing down on my face highlight my long white wig bouncing up and down, as I make my way to center-stage. I look, and feel, like an idiot.

            The audience applauds.

            I’m caught off guard, my gleaming handle-bar moustache hiding a wide smile. I know, affirmed by a quick glance to the crowd, that the source of the applause is a large group of my friends from school. They understand, on this hectic opening night, the amount of time that I have put into this production, the amount of sweat and tears and slowly-tumbling grades that have gone into this moment.

            I have been acting all my life. I began making movies starring my faded action figures when I was four and experienced a career-changing role at the age of eight when I played a ridiculously clumsy Scarecrow in a summer camp’s adaptation of The Wizard of Oz.

            With the heavy workload of high school, I managed to only squeeze enough time from my schedule for the Cistercian spring production during my Sophomore and Junior years. My experiences during those two productions were perhaps some of the most enjoyable of my entire time spent during high school. I loved the friendships with the upper-classmen that were enkindled. I loved the adrenaline rush when I first walked onto the stage. I loved acting.

            And so it was with this state of mind that I audition for a production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew at the area’s all-girls’ school, during my already-hectic Senior year. The enormous flier boasting the times of the auditions had been plastered over our school’s bulletin board and, on a careless whim, I decided to try out.

            Of course, Ursuline desperately needed male actors to fill up the holes in their cast list; so, naturally, I was given a part. Flipping through the script, I realized that it was a small, but important part; I called it the “perfect Senior role”, something I was willing to take on enthusiastically.

            But, as I was quick to discover, this theater department was much different than its Cistercian counterpart. The strict atmosphere mandated by the stern director almost ensured that an environment of laughter and friendship, like the enjoyable Cistercian stage, would be almost impossible. The weeks dragged on. My “perfect Senior role” devolved into a nightmare. I was required to go to every practice, even if I wasn’t needed (as often was the case.) The nights crept by and my love of acting slowly began to slip away.

            But I persevered, somehow.

            The rest of the cast felt the strain, as well, and the show obviously was suffering. I began to show heightened support for the actors around me, as we collectively pushed towards that final closing of the curtain. In one instance, a simple phone call to a distraught cast-mate provided enough strength for the both of us to show up to practice the next day.

            The director’s attempts at excessive strictness ultimately failed. The cast emerged collectively stronger, bound together by a common resilience and shared experience.

            And so when I raced onto the stage, my heart pounding out of my chest, the exuberant cheers from my friends made every day of the on-going struggle worthwhile. I turned my head slightly, looking around at all my grinning cast-mates. I knew that I was a stronger actor, a stronger friend, a stronger man.”

            The University of Richmond was the only college to wait-list me.

liii

“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”

-Doc Brown

“The road goes ever on and on..."

-Bilbo Baggins

            Skyping people is great, I guess. I love seeing friends that are millions of miles away, in other cities, in other worlds, through the time-and-space-traveling DeLorean of my MacBook. But it’s sad, watch them living new lives, making and replacing friends, moving slowly away from memories of me and times spent together. We're all on the same journey, the same road to a new life.

“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”

Prophetically uttered by Christopher Lloyd at the end of the first Back to the Future movie, his time-machine blasting into the blue sky, this classic line has become more than just a quote from a cult eighties sci-fi movie for me. It’s become a sense of purpose, of how to conduct myself in my everyday actions, of how to force myself to be the best person I could be.

But, perhaps, I’m reading too much into it. Thanks Robert Zemeckis.

When I was seven years old, my dad brought home a torn-up VHS copy of the movie from Blockbuster, put it into our grainy old television, and made me and my little brother sit down and watch it. By the end of the movie, I was at a loss for words: I had never seen something so imaginative and fun, a quick joyride that my seven-year-old brain could barely understand. And that last line of the movie stuck with me, inviting me to spread my imagination past the physical familiarities of the world around me. It taught me to pretend wildly and carelessly, letting myself explore new worlds and new adventures.

As I grew older, and with each yearly repeat of the movie, the end quote slowly evolved from this beckoning towards imagination into something else completely. It became a reminder that there will be a time, far from now, when none of these cement pavements, none of these physical realities, physical things will matter because, one day, we will not be here in this world of responsibilities, repressions, and roads.

So now the quote serves, not as an call towards a life of make-believe and joy, but rather as a reminder to focus on the important, existential things in life like relationships, familial and spiritual, because, one day that I cannot and will not be able to predict, Doc Brown is going to show up at my front door in his time-traveling DeLorean and take me away from all that I know, forever.

            I think that’s how this whole “life” thing works, anyway. And, don’t worry, I’ll be just a Skype call away.