For my creative writing class we were supposed to write about something and make it a problem. Make it sarcastic and try to make it funny were instructions. And, make it short. bluh.


I am all for freedom of speech, but there are few things I take the lead in standing against. Like religion, raves, and religion raves (which do not exist yet but I am already strongly opposed to). Thankfully, one can still call the authorities when strangers enter near or anywhere around ones property, so I don’t have to deal with any of these things very often. However, when I am forced to leave my humble abode I can see our culture deteriorating in a simple act.

I always imagined the 21^st century to be one that is more professional. One that was past barbaric signs of irony and had arrived to something to be more proud of, like jetpacks. Unfortunately, our society has evolved to a point where not even greetings can be taken in an austere fashion. Full body contact is now deemed necessary for any greeting or departure.

At first it started with that compromising, side-by-side, arm dangerously close to waist “I’m not sure how I feel about you” hug. Which I, for one, am all for. Seeing that awkward smile with teeth being grinded during and after said greeting, in my mind, made up for the public offence. However, unnecessary physical contact didn't stop there. There is also the “ass out” hug, which trades faces being stacked upon one another with a ruler long distance between both parties genitals (thank goodness). Then, the “bro love”, consisting of full body contact where closeted polo wearing males hold one another close while slapping their partners back. Here, I can only come to the assumption that the force of the slap would equal said males testosterone level, so, making sure those around you can hear the contact of the hand and spine is crucial.

Above and beyond all of these public obscenities, is the real, full frontal, hug. Horrifying as it was at mandatory family events, it has now spread to everyday places. When I see high school acquaintances while getting my groceries I am expected to want to be “all up on them” and take part in the now social norm of embracing one another. Please, let us bring this trend of high ridiculosity levels to an end. Ridiculosity is not a word, but I find it vital here to get this point across. Let me and my democrat patriots return to having to buy just enough Purell for our hands, not enough to fill our bathtubs.

I had a really good day.

I got home after my job interview that went really well, and played music loud. For a while I didn't do anything, I just let The Field fill my house for a while.. I got up and got on the computer.

Then it was eight thirty.

I felt really angry for some reason. The reasons were stupid, and I knew they were. So, I put on a sweater and went for a walk. I haven't been doing it as much since he died, but I've been telling myself I would pick the habit back up.

I walked south of Princeton Street, something I never really do. I knew there was a park in the area, but I wasn't sure. Princeton went on and on, I must've passed a hundred houses. Finally, it was a dead end. I took a left because there was more light in that direction, and that was enough for me. I came to another dead end. A fence, with curled wire at the top. I'm not sure if that's normal, I never really pay attention to fences. Across the fence there was a lot of grass and some really big trees scattered. This sounds boring, but it all just seemed overwhelming.

I walked to the right of the fence, waiting for it to end. I saw a hill go up. It didn't seem like it was going to end. So, I climbed it. I scratched my hand up, it has a long a cut right down the palm. I didn't notice it until I got home.

There was a lot of space. A whole lot of it. The trees didn't look as big. It resembled the image of a golf course I have in my head. I walked forward until I felt like I was in the middle of it all and just tossed myself on the ground. Not at all like sitting down, I just threw myself. I rolled over. I watched airplanes for a while. I texted Sarah. BSS played through and Modest Mouse started. I felt bad. Twenty minutes later I stood up and ran to the fence. I climbed to the top of it. It seemed a lot higher up from this side. My left leg was shaking, rattling the entire fence. I cursed, out loud, at myself. I jumped. I landed on my feet, but I fell over. I got up; my arm was bleeding with two long cuts down it. I didn't care.

I ran the way home.

ersatz

Whenever I reach a peak of any emotion, I feel like I grab onto something, anything really. Recently, it’s been places. After I do, an effect happens. When I recall about whatever I get latched on to I yearn for that emotion, in a way. I’m almost nostalgic for it. Then when I do get that emotion in a similar light from before, I strive to want to do whatever appropriate verb matches the proper noun, like I'm recreating a scene. I want to take a step back to look at this attachment and looking at how common it is for me to tie two strings together. It makes me feel oddly artificial.

Let me explain a little more deeply before I go further into my self comparison to a robot. This junction feels like it’s more then just simple association. I'm not talking memory cues exactly, but I feel like memory cues (I’m sure there's a more correct term, but this seems accurate enough for explanation) are what could have started my unconscious act of match game. It's in a way an opposite. Say you're drinking a vanilla sprite and remembering when you first had one, who you first had it with and then going into memories of that person or place. It's like I'm doing that, but backwards. I take my memory of a person, thoughts of a goal or current emotion and try to push it on something, anything at all.

It's hard to explain, let me try an example. This past week I've been in New York. It wasn't my first time, so I wasn't trying to push the touristy things into each day; I was just seeing family, really. When I did go out though, I would just walk around. When I ended up with a chance to get lost on 6th Avenue one night, I took it and felt like I was aimless. I felt like I was looking for something to push my emotions on. Not a person, not an object really either. This all came to mind after I realized I had been walking around for an hour and no intent of going in any store. I mean, usually even if I don't want to buy anything I still look around in the random shops, but I knew in the back of my head that's not why I came. Eventually I told myself the second shop on the next street I would go in. It was a yogurt store, I went in, ordered self proclaimed gourmet yogurt, sat at a table and tried to piece together what was going through my head. I couldn’t figure it out. I walked to the train and went home.

Looking back it's like I was trying to make a memory and hang over it with a plastic transparent overhead of what I was currently feeling, like I was trying to push two displays together. In this case I was adding to the current landscape of my sense of apathy with what was around me, sex shops and piercing parlors. I've been doing this a lot, pushing my current emotions on a memory like canvas, heedlessly trying to shove my current emotion out and stick it to something with hope of maybe getting rid of experiencing it anymore, at least for the time being. It all just makes me feel so synthetic, like I've been trying to get rid of feeling human. I unconsciously just want to be numb.

freshman

As of Thursday, I completed my first real year of college. Since I'm no good at introductions, I hope this post can just get you through getting to know a bit about me.

I went through college a lot differently then I thought I would. I always imagined myself actually studying in college more then I did in highschool, but the ratio ended up being the same. I never imagined myself in the dorms but I didn't have much of a choice. However, the dorms weren't regretful. I had a fun time there and getting away from my parents seemed to make my relationship with them better. My roommate was a football player named Jared. Surprisingly, we got along really well. He moved out halfway through the semester, but we had fun the first semester being stupid college kids. Freshman year was a time for me to manage my own time and do what I wanted.

Basically, I skipped a lot of class.

My first semester schedule went like this. MWF I had World Religions and Environmental Science, and on Tuesdays I had Public Speaking and Ballroom Dance. Thursday I had a lab that was taught by a professor that could hardly speak English, who gave everyone pretty good grades if they showed up.

So this is how my schedule would go. On Monday I would go to work if I had it that day, walk to my dorm and take a shower and then go to Religions. The first few times going to this class took some getting used to. "Wow, there's 300 people in this class" and "I'm just listening to this guy talk," were the main thoughts to go across my head. I had the class with my girlfriend at the time, Leah, and a buddy of mine, Steven. Steven had a break after the class before his 2:00. So when I went to ENVS, Steven would be going to class. So why not skip ENVS once in a while and play some Smash with Steven?

Long story short, I went to Environmental Science for the first two weeks, and then maybe five or six times for the rest of the semester.

Ha-ha, okay, that sounds really bad when I write it out. But it's what happened. I had a dorm to myself and could invite people over to play Smash whenever I wanted. Holy gods! My roommate was never home. So I would play Smash with people in my dorm four times a week on a bad week. If it wasn't smash, I'd be out playing magic or being stupid with my high school friends. Basically, keeping myself busy with doing anything but going to class.

Two weeks into the semester Leah and I broke up. Being the emo kid I am, I would barely go to Religions, and if I didn't go to that class I obviously wasn't about to go to Environmental Science.

On Tuesday I would usually go to Public Speaking. I mean, I skipped it a lot less than most of my classes but I still skipped it more then I should have. I only skipped my lab twice to go play Magic, actually (only twice sounds a lot better in my head).

Then there was Ballroom Dancing.

I took Ballroom because I needed something at least two credits (so I couldn't take a normal PE) to make my full time schedule for UNM. It was the only thing that really fit my time schedule. My advisor said he took golf and African dance just because they were classes that seemed interesting and he didn't regret it. Why not try Ballroom if it fit the schedule? Sure.

Ballroom had a lot of girls, a lot of cute girls. I went just about every day, the only days I didn't go were to play Magic when I already knew the choreography we were doing that day. But other then that, I went to Ballroom every day. Fucking hilarious, I know.

This was my schedule. Work, maybe go to class, play video games, and crush on random girls I had no chance with (a lot of which were in Ballroom). There were a lot of these girls around campus and in my dorm that found me as that hilarious nerdy guy they could consider on the same level as their gay friend. Awesome, but, I wasn't about to spend all of my free time being that shut in guy in Alvorado dorms who played Indie really loud in his dorm near the stairs and never showed his face unless his door was open because six guys were in there playing a weird game where Pikachu yelled his name a lot. I might as well hang out with hot girls, even if they didn't see me as anything but that awkward guy in the movie who puts the suntan lotion on.

Then about eight weeks into the semester or something, Leah and I got back together. Leah was like my first real girlfriend. I mean, I've been in relationships, but they've just felt like relationships looking back on them. Either I wasn't way into the girl or she wasn't really into me, or we were in high school and never really saw each other, or she lived in another state. Leah lived about a six minute drive down from my dorm. I was stupid for her, she was stupid for me, it was wondrous. We went to movies, slept at her duplex or my dorm every night, we were that stupid newlywed couple on campus. Oh yeah, did I mention we work together?

Advice: If you really, really like someone you work with, find another job, quit, and then date them.

Now that I was dating Leah I would start going to Religions more right?

WRONG.

Now that I was in a relationship with a girl I had been crushing on for the past three months who wanted to be with me as much as I wanted to be with her, who wanted to go to class? I think I went to even less class when I was with Leah, which was difficult to pull off, but I found a way.

Fast forward to my sudden realization: "Oh shit! I have to get decent grades or I'm going to lose my scholarship!"

So I pulled a few all nighters studying, went to more classes, etc, etc. In the end I was alright and kept my scholarships, but I had to take one of those classes over the winter that lasts two weeks for 20 hours every week for dumb freshman that needed to boost their GPA. Woo.

During winter break I decided I wanted to get better grades for the semester.

I still skipped a lot of class.

But not nearly as much! I'm proud to say that the grades I've gotten back so far are an A, A+ and a B+ (the B+ was in statistics, a class I thought I was going to fail, huzzah! I'm also not sure if I'm allowed to have punctuation in these parenthesis but I'm going to anyway). Psych and Teen Rebels grades still are to come in, but I feel confidant.

I won't go into great detail in what happened in my second semester, but it can be summed up probably in this paragraph. I played smash, but not nearly as much. I hung out with Leah, but not as much so I could try to concentrate on class. This eventually ended up in us fighting a lot and calling it off and evolving into a perfectly awkward relationship in the work place, which is fan-fucking-tastic. I'm not trying to sound like it was all her fault for not wanting to give me time to study, we had the normal couple problems, blah blah. I partied a lot less, and I don't mean go out and get plastered with random people, I mean I "partied" less. If you don't get it, don't worry, eventually it'll piece together. I took Ballroom again and decided I like it enough to keep doing, which (I think) makes it my first hobby that doesn't involve something extremely nerdy.

That's about it, my first year of college. Turning my back to most classes, being the awkward nerdy guy on campus who wears a lot of colored denim, believing my own college relationship would last (like everyone else, haha) and of course, doing a lot of stupid geeky activities.

Now it's summer, here's to hoping I'm motivated enough to write in you about it, blog.

Cheers.