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.