Nothing In Particular

After a long period of activities that don't include writing, I'm going to attempt a new post with the hopes that it doesn't end up being too boring. It's been quite a while, if you haven't noticed, so forgive me if it's a little off. Anyway I don't have anything in particular in mind as I begin writing this, so I'm just going to ramble a little bit. I hope you don't mind.

This post comes as summer begins to come to a close. I'm not sure when the transition from summer vacation to back-to-school began, but I feel like it's here already. It's just arrived without me realizing it. Maybe it's like when you go to the bathroom at a restaurant, and when you get back, your food is already at the table. Or when you're driving to (or from) somewhere you're really familiar with, then you just go into autopilot. Before you realize it, you've already arrived at wherever you were going without consciously getting there.

On things that appear without you knowing how they got there, I recently found a very irregular shaped bruise on my thigh. I spent a good deal of time contemplating where it came from, (since I have nothing better to do in the summer,) and finally realized that it's where my keys sit in my jeans pocket. Although I deduced the probable cause of my bruise, I still have no idea how I bashed my keys into my leg hard enough to sustain a bruise. It's rather infuriating. The bruise itself is kind of strange because it's empty in the middle. It looks kind of like the Zelda triangle thing, if you know what I'm talking about.

I'd like to put it on the record that I have never played Zelda or Final Fantasy or World of Warcraft, and that I am, in fact, not what most people would consider a "gamer." My one video game vice would be Pokémon. Yes, I know the keyboard shortcut for the accent over the é, but that's only because I took French in high school and had to type some assignments. I'm using it now to have correct spelling. I thoroughly enjoyed Pokémon when I was nine, and I thoroughly enjoy it now. I think I mentioned this in another post.

This morning, as I huddled in bed in a state of semi-consciousness, I realized what a technological marvel the analogue clock is. They seem immensely complicated. I guess that it's just working out a bunch of gear ratios, but there're three hands to deal with and they all rotate from the same place at different rates. It's crazy. Or maybe it's just crazy when you're half asleep.

I'd really like to be a musical virtuoso. I'm just gonna throw that out there without an explanation or commentary. Think of it as a fun fact about the author.

I don't remember when the last time I wrote one of these posts was. It's been at least two and a half months, because I know that I haven't written one since before I started my summer job, and that was the last full week of June. Yeesh. I'm slacking too much. I don't even know what I've been doing with my time. I usually wrote on this blog when I had time to waste during the school year. I know I had tons of time to waste this summer, but this is the first time I've written anything. Weird, huh?

Anyway, I'm about done now, so I'll leave it at that. Happy living.

I Don't Like It One Bit!

So I've come to the conclusion that my writing has severely deteriorated over the last month or so. I'm not aware of the causes of this, but I simply don't enjoy my writing as much as I did before. It lacks the same character, the same enthusiasm, the same humor that it had back in the Golden Age of my blogging career. (When you do things for brief periods of time, you can talk about brief periods as ages and eras. More on that later.) Anyway, I've chosen to write a little about how much I dislike my writing right now.

I'm not funny. I do give it a little effort, but it just doesn't come to me as easily as it did before. This idea of not being able to be funny is depressing, which makes my writing even worse. It's a downward spiral, like if I were a pigeon and some delinquent kid threw a rock at me and broke my wing mid-flight and I started falling out of the sky. At this point I'm about to hit the ground. Or maybe I'm already on the ground, and the delinquent kid saw what happened and is trying to take care of me, but I'm freaked out because I'm a pigeon and pigeons are afraid of humans because of evolutionary traits to ensure survival, so I'm hopping away because pigeons don't really walk, and I'm trying to nurse my wing back to health but I don't have medical care because I'm a bird. Anyway it's a bad situation.

Metaphors are fun, but I don't really think that they're quite the same as what I started writing. If you go back to my other posts, towards the beginning, like "A Conversation," those posts were actually good, in my humble, totally non-biased opinion. I enjoyed writing them, and I mostly enjoy reading them. For the most part, I enjoy the ideas behind them. What I no longer enjoy is the ideas behind my newer posts. I think it's because I've been writing them in situations where I'm not just writing. I'm usually listening to a lecture, or trying to pass time, or waiting for something to happen. I'm not thinking about writing. It's a problem.

This post may turn out the same way. I'm not really doing anything else, but I'm also not fully devoted to writing this right now because it's pretty late at night and I kind of want to go to sleep. However, I started writing this and I feel like I should finish it because if I stop and leave it for tomorrow I think I'm going to lose my train of thought that I kind of have going right now and it will turn out even worse than if I finish it now.

I'm typing very poorly right now. You can't tell because I'm going back and fixing all my errors as I'm going, but I'm writing pretty slowly because I'm deleting every other word to fix it. It's like if I were trying to get somewhere, but each time I could only get halfway there, then I'd never actually get there, but for most intents and purposes I'll finish because it doesn't matter if I'm still half of a half of a half of a half of a half of a half of a half of a half of a half of the way away from being done because I'll be close enough that it doesn't matter anymore. That's like one five-hundred-twelfths away from being done. Totally did that math in my head. I'm smart like that. Kind of. Not really...

So I've lost something in the past month. I'm not really sure what it is. Maybe it's the dedication. Maybe it's the inspiration. Maybe it's the ability. Maybe it's topics. Maybe it isn't actually anything and I just don't like what I'm writing for some strange reason but I'm still writing just like I did before. Who knows? I don't think that I do, but it's very possible that I do, since I've come to accept that I don't know what reality is and I don't know who I am either, in some bizarre philosophical sense. 

Philosophy does that to you. It's kind of cool, but kind of annoying. Like before, I just accepted that I am myself; that I have a body and a life and I live and the world exists and all the people around me are real and the food I eat and the feelings I experience and the things I do are real, and that they have consequences and mass and stuff like that. All the normal things that we associate with life. Now, I have no idea what's real. I'm not sure if I exist, I'm not sure if I have a body if I do exist. I'm not sure that what I perceive is real, I'm not sure if what I'm actually doing what I think I'm doing.

I mean, for practicality's sake, I accept that I'm here, that I'm typing this, that I need to go to sleep, and eat and drink, go to school, talk to people, get out of the way of projectiles moving towards me in a fashion that could do my body physical harm, etc. It would be stupid for anyone to live his or her life going about his or her business as if he or she didn't actually exist and as if he or she had abilities like Neo in The Matrix. He or she would die. Rapidly.

I'm going to go to bed. I'm not sure if it's because I'm tired or because my writing is actually improving, but this post may be slightly better than my last few. I hope you liked it too. Actually, it really doesn't matter because I haven't totally accepted that you exist. So go share your opinion elsewhere, imaginary reader.

Retrospect

So the school year is pretty much over. I'm really happy that it's almost summer. I'm also kind of bummed, but I think that I'm more happy than bummed. It's nice that there's no more school to worry about, but all of my new friends are going home and I still don't have a job. Anyway, I'm gonna be a little retrospective now.

So I've learned a lot this year. Life lessons were selling at ten on the dollar. College is like that. It's a journey of self-discovery and stuff like that. Here are a few things I discovered this year.

The plot of the first season of the Pokémon television show is an epic journey. Ash Ketchum is the hero, and he faces obstacles and enemies and hardships and stuff on the way to becoming a Pokémon Master. Watch the show and you will be amazed by all the parallels that can be drawn between Pokémon and the Odyssey. Kind of. But Pokémon is a great video game and show.

Don't bike when groggy. You will eventually get in an accident. It is inevitable. The same goes for operating heavy machinery and driving and other activities that could possibly cause serious bodily harm. This is why early morning classes are a terrible idea.

The more time you spend with people, the less you like them. While not always true, I would say that it's usually correct. This is why we all hate annoying clingy people. People who latch-on to groups without contributing anything are particularly bothersome. I encountered this most often in high school when there were more stupid and annoying people, but they are inescapable because they are everywhere.

People do really stupid stuff when they are intoxicated, but most of the time it is pretty reflective of who they are. Girls who are normally slutty get sluttier and guys who are sleazy get sleazier. People who are annoying get more annoying, and people who are intelligent get stupid. What is most amusing and interesting is when quite, restrained people go crazy and do things that you would never expect. But drunk people are generally stupid, so don't drink.

Learn from your mistakes. If you didn't study in high school and think you can't study in college, try it out. But if you fail a midterm, start studying. If you don't fail your midterms and can manage to stay with the curve without studying too much, props to you. I wouldn't study either in that situation.

Email lists are both awesome and terrible. If anyone is getting together a list for a study group or making a study guide, get on that list. While you have to put up with all the nonsense that people post that isn't a study guide, and bothering you to contribute to the study guide, nobody is going to take you off that list. Then you get a free study guide. The bad part is that you have to filter through way too many emails to find the study guide, or anything else useful.

Get out of the dorm. Unless you're really antisocial and can't make friends, you should try to find people who aren't forced to be your "friend." While people in the dorm are conveniently located, there are way more people outside your dorm for you to meet than there are inside the dorm. When drawing from a larger pool, you're more likely to find people you'll like, especially if you look in groups/organizations/clubs that you're interested in, because that means they have similar interests.

Showering barefoot is really nice. Things you have at home and don't have at college are all pretty nice. Like a full-size refrigerator. And sleeping naked. And your own room. And pets. And space. And not having to share a bathroom with lots of other people.

Nudity is underrated. It is really nice to walk around in the nude, especially when it's really hot and you don't have air-conditioning. You also get a great tan.

I don't know what reality is anymore. Crazy thought, but college will do that to you. We learn a lot through our readings and our classes and our professors, but sometimes you just have to go and live a little, and you'll uncover things you never even thought about before. 

Think.