it's been awhile

two cups of boba in my hands and i'm on top of the world. hope my friends don't mind me ditching them halfway through our workout. hope they don't suspect a thing either. as i cross the soccer turf, i'm grinning to myself at how much of an idiot i must look, grinning like that. but let the world laugh, i say to myself. they're just jealous.

-------------

collapsing onto the frozen field, i find myself buried in nearly two feet of snow, surrounded by bags of leftover 2-liter bottles and party snacks. home is a mere minute's walk away, but i feel completely lost in the dark. and i'm tired... so, so tired. more tired than i have ever been, and in likelihood, than i ever will be. i had spent more energy than i could afford to borrow, and the sinking feeling that it was all for naught is just too much to bear right now. for once in my life, i feel entirely without resolve to get back up. i want to just lie here in the cold forever. and so i do just that. time passes. get up, I tell myself. you've got to keep moving, even though you don't know why.

-------------

driving home on the 101, going probably too fast to be remotely considered legal. if i crash and burn, at least this joke of a life will be over with. wonder how the cop would react when he sees me breaking down in front of him, should i get pulled over. what had i done wrong? where did i start screwing it all up? never before had i had felt so confident, so sure of myself. for once in my life, i knew what it was like to believe in myself. to think that i was worth somebody's attention. and then to have it all come crashing down on me. a large part of me is still in shock from it all, but deep inside i know - i had seen it coming. good things don't happen to me. why would this time be any different?

-------------

sitting at the back of the lecture hall, watching as the initiation ceremony proceeds. there's hardly a face i recognize in here. i really should be more social with people my year or below me. but what's the point? i won't be here for much longer. it's great to be an officer who doesn't have a part in the ceremony - i can just chat and surf the web on my laptop. all of a sudden, something... no, someone enters the room and catches my eye, and i find myself paying closer attention to the ceremony. i message my roommate, saying there's a cute girl being initiated, and he jokes that we should all sit next to her during dinner and hit on her. they start calling roll, and the next thing i know, i'm typing excitedly into my laptop. "holy shit. her name's also..."

-------------

curled up in a hotel bed that's too large to be comfortable, far away from home. far away from both homes. one helluva dream, i tell the empty room. so far from reality. "was it worth it?" stop kidding yourself. you were expecting too much. wanting too much. everybody else is fine with it, so why shouldn't i be? get your head out of the clouds, and stop dreaming about silly things. i'm just another normal human being, no more deserving of attention than the next awkward idiot who comes along trying to be friends. but i'm different, i say. i'm special. yeah you are. special. so's everybody else.

i will post this

The ratio of drafts to actual posts in this blog is approaching 10:1. The lengths of those drafts vary across the spectrum of one-line thoughts to pages written and then tossed aside. Some of them I'm too ashamed to actually release into the wild, for fear that it gets read by people I don't want to read, and others just never came out in the way I meant them.

Part of the problem is that my thoughts seem to collect together just fine as I'm driving (or, back in Boston, walking) around or as I'm about to drift off to sleep. But the moment I try to put it all down into concrete words, everything sounds silly, tiredly repetitive, trite, or otherwise pointless. Half the time I'm just copying what someone else has already thought of or said anyway. The rest of the time I'm just copying the way they've said it.

Not that originality matters, but when it feels like nothing I can come up with on my own is worth posting, I just stop trying.

in some far galaxy...

    Out of nowhere, she appears in the seat next to mine on the Red Line train. She begins talking with the familiarity of one who's used to telling me about her day. I look at her intently, smiling at the happy coincidence of seeing her on the way home. Her hair is shorter than I remember it to be, but she still looks great nonetheless.
    "Oh my god, some guy tried to hit on me today with the worst joke ever."
    "Can I hit on you?" I ask playfully, taking her hand. I think about my own worst joke ever involving spaceship pants and something being out of this world.
    She attempts to withdraw her hand for a moment, and I squeeze it just a little. As if changing her mind, she stops and squeezes back, our hands now firmly in each other's.
    "Maybe."
    The train arrives at our stop and we get off, hands still clasped together. As we stroll alongside the tracks, I think about how happy I am. How happy we are.
    All of a sudden, the realization hits me.
    "None of this is real," I tell her abruptly, halting our step. "The impossible fact that you and I are together right now means that all of this is just a dream."
    She looks at me, the mixture of fear and incomprehension apparent in her eyes.
    Thoughts flash across my mind. I don't have much time - this would all end at any moment. But if only I could somehow preserve this reality. Maybe this IS all real, but simply in some other world. I finally decide that it would be better to leave this world in a good state rather than one of admitting defeat, so I pull her closer to me as the world around us starts to disintegrate...

everything's connected

From Atlas Shrugged to Idiot America, from The Omnivore's Dilemma to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Axemaker's Gift ... I can't help but think that they're all connected, all rooted to the same problem or set of problems.

The basic premise seems to be that science has gotten itself into quite an interesting predicament today. It thrives when it's convenient and/or makes money for the consumer, but utterly fails where it matters most in terms of preserving our health and our environment... mostly because the latter requires a fair bit of inconvenience on our part. But the writing on the wall across all these places is that we're on a road to self-destruction, both because of and in spite of our continual advances in science and technology.

Or maybe I'm just drawing a whole bunch of connections that don't really exist. Science by nature is impartial to one or the other. It is the human that drives and uses it that does either harm or good to us and our environment. Laziness and ignorance are the two biggest crimes we're committing against ourselves, and science has merely been a tool to performing these crimes.

I was planning on writing more on this. Maybe I will in a bit, but for now I have a computer game to play and a fast food dinner to finish.

like a razor

I don't want to be well-rounded. I want to have one thing and be really really fucking good at it.