Doing what I want.

For those of you that are my friends on facebook and have been paying attention to my posts on Tuesday, I have been coming to the Starbucks close to my house and writing. More importantly, my writing has been focused on a story that's been in the back of my mind for two years now. There are others that have been gestating for even longer than that (War of Time wins that contest), but this has been the most nagging, irrepressible and so far enjoyable one to write out of them all.

As much as I've wanted to write it, the desire to is greatly outweighed by the desire to write in the first place. I love writing, but it's something that I don't do nearly as much as I should. Even now with Tuesday's being singled out primarily for writing, I want to do more of it. I'm sitting in Starbucks right now, on a Friday, writing this, but I want to hurry and finish so I can go back to my story. Writing has become addictive enough that I look forward to Tuesday more than any other day, and even then it's not enough.

This is what I've wanted to do since I was a freshman in high school, and even though it's taken 16 years I'm glad I've finally knuckled down and gotten at least moderately serious about it. I want to be a writer more than most things (wielding a lightsaber while riding a hoverboard wins that contest), and I firmly believe that I have the potential to be one. This little story I'm writing, it's not going to be my best. It will be my most personal, and potentially my most important, but I will always strive to do better.

I plan on publishing it as an e-book when I feel it's finished enough, and I'll be surprised if I make more than a dollar for it. Profit won't be the point, because that way is a congested, potholed mess of a 16 lane freeway. I'll be taking the scenic route, which, while not exactly deserted, is much more enjoyable and will get me where I'm going in due time. I'm very excited to be on my way to where I've wanted to go since I was a kid; a writer.

Memorabilia

There's been an important slip of paper in my wallet for the last few years, a list of sorts, and for whatever reason, I've been worried about it. Beyond losing my wallet I can't honestly say that anything will happen to it, but I have recurring and unnerving thoughts that something may happen to it. It's just a slip of paper at its most basic form, but it represents a memory so potent and vibrant that I could never bear to part with it.

I seem to invest a lot of worth into objects, and I don't see a problem with that. There are a lot of memories that I have tucked away inside my mind, but they can be so buried underneath the years that they're not so easily recalled unless I see a corresponding object. Whenever I come across my old CD player I remember all the times it carried me through the tough times I had in high school. There wasn't much that couldn't be solved by turning the volume up, and I never hesitated to do so.

In the late 90's my favorite thing to do was going to the movies, and I have the ticket stubs to prove it. Since the ink wasn't exactly the highest quality the writing would fade, leaving only the soft pink or green color of the paper behind. I didn't want to have a collection of blank tickets so I bought a pack of plastic sleeves for baseball cards. They worked really well, and even today they read as clear as 11-14 year old ticket stubs rightfully should. I keep them in the top drawer of my dresser, so I see them whenever I root through it for batteries or a credit card I never use.

My guitar is another piece of my life that has memories intricately tied to it, but since I have it next to my bed I tend to forget them. I've had it for over 11 years, and it was the coolest thing I had ever bought with my own money until my truck less than three years later. Next to a car, an electric guitar was what I dreamed of having the most (okay, lightsabers and hoverboards aside), so to actually have one was like fulfilling a life's dream. I'm not as good as I could be, since I'm entirely self taught and I only play for fun, but I know enough to get by.

For all the memories I have that are attached to physical objects, there are immaterial things such as songs that cause the memories to well up. One song in particular stands out, and one particular instance of it playing will always be clear, cherished and kept safe. The moon was so full and bright that I could have driven on that back road with no headlights. It was cold outside, but I didn't notice or care because of who I had next to me, her head on my shoulder, holding onto my arm. That moment would be special to me even if there had been no song, but Whatsername by Green Day was playing, and it made the moment perfect.

I put a lot of significance into things like that slip of paper, so it's not surprising that sometimes I worry about losing them. I know I'll always have the memories, it's not like I can lose them, but I like having the keys to unlock them. It makes them seem more tangible, and less likely to be forgotten.

Taking a drive... somewhere

As I was watching TV earlier tonight, a Taco Bell commercial let me know that their Nachos Supreme are 99¢ for a limited time. To me, cheap, edible and nachos are three words that go really well together, and as I was hungry, I decided I'd go and get me some. Now, a funny thing happens whenever it's the middle of the night and I'm about to make a quick five minute drive.

I get the urge to take a road trip.

If I have a number of days off in front of me the urge is intensified, because I have the time to actually do it. When I unlock my car door I think of how quickly I could pack a bag, toss it in the back and go. It's intoxicating. When I pull out of the neighborhood I look at the moon and imagine driving until it's sunk below the horizon and the sun rises behind it. I'd make sure to call home around 9 or so, and let my family know where I was, what I was doing and that I hadn't lost my mind. I can be fairly persuasive when I'm flying by the seat of my pants.

The only issue would be where I would go on my impromptu (yet prepared for) road trip. Driving down Vancouver or 27th I begin to get a few ideas. I could go to the Seattle area, but I get lost there so easily that I'd spend half the trip trying to find my way out. I could go to Spokane, but it's such a short trip that I wouldn't feel as if I was truly "getting away." Then the inevitable pops into my head, but I'm at the drive-thru so now I need to think about what I want to eat. Cheap, edible nachos of course.

I get my food, get back on the road and resume my thinking. I should explain that my thought processes work much like an old Sony Walkman, in that I remember exactly where I left off and continue exactly from that point on. My friends can confirm this with great enthusiasm. So, anyway, I snap right back to the inevitable place I would direct my road trip ambitions, and that place would be Missouri. Come on, tell me you're not surprised. I dare you.

If you are surprised, I'll happily explain. My friend KaTrina lives there, and I miss her. It'd be great to surprise her by suddenly showing up, and that would make the drive there worth it. The drive back would suck, which tempers to outright erases any and all chances of my ever making that trip. I would need a hell of a souvenir to break even on the investment.

So, as I turn into my neighborhood, my food sitting quietly in the passenger seat, I decide that a road trip, while awesome, wouldn't be the most practical of things to do at 1AM. I instead decide that blogging about it would be enough of a cathartic release, and much, much cheaper. I don't think I could say how many times this scenario has happened (cheap, edible nachos involved or not), but I never actually got around to blogging about it. I guess when I'm standing in the driveway the fancifulness of my daydream ebbs away, and I no longer feel like taking the time to write it out.

Tonight though, as I stood in the driveway, I looked up at the moon just hanging there in the sky, slowly slipping toward the horizon. The excitement of making such a trip sparked again, and I felt the desire to write about it. Maybe one of these days I'll take such a drive, and I'll enjoy to the fullest getting away from it all. Until then, I'll think about it every time I drive somewhere close on a warm summer's night. Some of the best things in my life have happened while driving late at night anyway, so it might not be a bad idea.

The Weather

The weather is a very boring topic. I should be a bit clearer and say that nice weather is a boring topic. Things like ice and lightning storms are awesome, and easily spice up any conversation, but nice weather is what strangers discuss. Yet as boring as nice weather may be, it's still lovely to have and worth enjoying. That's what this blog is going to be about: how I enjoy nice weather, and summer weather specifically.

The first thing I think of when warmer weather rolls around is driving at night. Not just driving at night, but driving at night in flip flops, a t-shirt and shorts, with the windows down. It gives me that feeling of "this is great" and "I should do this every night." After all those months of having to bundle up before going out it feels refreshing to do little more than slip on some footwear and go. It makes 1AM trips to Wal-Mart enjoyable instead of a chore, and that's an impressive feat. Why someone would go there at such an hour is known only to those that have, but we know and that's why we go. Besides, if you're up all night you need something to do...

When I was younger, I made a habit of staying up all night when I was on summer vacation. At first it was just to do it, but over the years I found a perfect reason: breakfast. Let me explain. Where I used to live there was a park just across the street with a smattering of trees, and it was in the middle of the neighborhood. In the park, there was a table in a prime spot for watching the sunrise. When the time came I would get a bowl of cereal and sit at that table, eating my breakfast while watching the sun rise. I must have been 14 or 15 when I first did it, and I remember just feeling satisfied.

My parents were never too happy when I would stay up all night, but the simple act of having breakfast like that was worth it and I'm very happy I did it. For something that happens every day, the sunrise is one of the best. It's very calming, but exhilarating at the same time. I can't recommend watching one enough, especially when the weather is as nice as it is on a summer morning.

One of my favorite memories is being woken by those first rays of sunshine, after taking a short nap in my car. I had been driving around all night, enjoying the wonderful weather we were having. That's not something I could have done in January. You need June weather or better. I'm happy that I live in a place that has distinct seasons. It makes beautiful weather much more special, and it's just, well, nice.

The Stalwart Lily Bart and the Traits and Tools of a Coward

_____Of all the things that Lily Bart from House of Mirth may be (temptress, manipulator, spoiled, etc.), a coward is not one of them. A coward is someone who seeks out the easiest way to go through life, and even then they will find a way to expend the least amount of energy in doing so. For example, Lily intentionally botches her chance to marry Percy Gryce, and subsequently into money, just so she can spend time with the man she loves. She can feign surprise at Percy’s sudden urge to flee, but she knew what she was doing. When she let slip a few extra drops of her sleeping medicine, she knew what she was doing. She remembered the chemist’s warning, though she paid it little real thought, and took the one in a hundred chance knowingly (Wharton 342). Though she played with her life and lost, she had as much intention to lose as any time she played bridge or any other game of cards.

_____It’s easy to see why some people may believe that Lily consciously took her own life, or even subconsciously as the text indicates on page 342 (“ –darkness, darkness was what she must have at any cost.”), but that’s a matter of interpretation rather than indisputable fact. It doesn’t make any sense that Lily would force herself to write a check to Gus Trenor, only to not get the satisfaction of showing his pompous assed self that she was nothing if not true to her word. She had been ground to dust, leaving a thin layer of it on the floor of her former social scene, but she wouldn’t be swept away so easily. Killing herself would have made it all too simple for those she once counted as friends to well and truly brush her off their conscience and their shoulders.

_____Going beyond those fair-weather friends, there was also Selden to think about, which she did. As she slowly passed from the cruel waking world to the mercifully benign realm of sleep she remembered that there was something she must tell him. There was a word that would make everything better between them, and it scared her that she might forget it before she woke (Wharton 343). More than the check that had already been written and prepared for delivery, talking to Selden was a vital priority that demanded she wake up in the morning from her drug induced sleep.

_____I can’t say what that word is, and I’m sure even Wharton can’t say without a few grains of salty doubt what it is either, but I will venture a guess and say that it was marriage. With the money allotted to Trenor, and the incriminating letters to Selden burned, Lily had no reason to not accept Selden as her husband. It would no longer be a marriage based on money, but based on love, and if love isn’t a reason to get up in the morning then I shudder to think of how few options there remain to do so.

_____So with self-worth and love on the checklist of why Lily didn’t intentionally kill herself, I present the future for inclusion on that list as well. When Lily visits Nettie Struther’s apartment she sees a life of happiness, despite being in such close proximity to failure and poverty. Witnessing such love and dedication to living stirred something in Lily, and that something was her own resolution to making her own future. That future is shown as the baby Lily holds while she slides into her drug induced sleep. She takes great care to cradle the newborn, “…holding her breath lest a sound should disturb the sleeping child” (Wharton 343).

_____That baby, figurative as it may be, is the new Lily she alludes to on 328. Lily has succeeded in fully creating her new self, and there is no point in making and nurturing that new self if she’s going to kill it off with a few measly drops of soporific. It’s ludicrous to think that Lily Bart knowingly killed herself when she had given herself so many reasons to live. Suicide is a coward’s tool, designed to injure loved ones and escape what was never pursuing. Lily Bart is not a coward and she would never do such a horrible thing to those she loved or to herself. She just wouldn’t.

The Social Network Not-Review

I've just finished watching The Social Network. The credits are rolling at the moment and there's a very soothing kind of ambient music playing as the text rolls by. The credits are over now though, because I checked a few facts on Wikipedia and Google (Mark's birthday and proper italicization (that's a word?) rules respectively) so the following blog entry will be 'correct.'

I'm halfway tempted to play it again from the beginning just so I can have it playing as background noise while I write this, but the menu screen is a few minutes long and is surprisingly conducive to my writing. Anyway. The one thought that popped into my head within the last few minutes of the movie was this, 'This is my generation's Catcher In The Rye.'

Granted, my generation's Catcher In The Rye already is Catcher In The Rye, but The Social Network comes damn close to echoing what makes that story so powerful: I hate this world, but I want to belong.

The Mark Zuckerberg we see in the movie, which isn't the real one, is attending Harvard. He's in an exclusive club with back doors that lead to lucrative and powerful positions all over the world, but that's not what he wants. He just wants to have access to them. To know that should he ever decide to use them, he can. But he can't. They're not listed among his Membership Benefits. He's got a Silver Account instead of a Gold or Platinum. To counter this, he starts his own club and succeeds wildly. He's now the youngest billionaire in history, but he's still the guy who just wants to belong somewhere.

I can relate to that. Not the billionaire thing, but the desperation to feel like I belong. I have friends, and if you scroll down you'll see a lovely piece I wrote about how much they mean to me, but I just feel like it isn't enough sometimes. Of "friends" on Facebook, I have 79 while other's number in the hundreds. There's nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't make me feel any less secure when I think about it. I've been told I'm a great guy, but there's that number staring me in the face. It's not even committed enough to laugh at me.

I've also been told that I have this amazing talent for writing, and though I've seen it for myself, I sometimes can't help but think I'm being lied to. If it was there, I should have already written reams upon reams of poetry, fiction and essays. But I haven't. The ideas are there, rattling in my head, fresh as the day they cropped up, but they're stuck there. They want desperately to be put to paper, even if it's digital, but they can't get out. I want them to come out perfect, but that's not going to happen unless they come out. Even this rant is having a hard time finding its way onto the screen and it's not even fiction!

I want to write, but I can't. I tell myself I will when I have time, but I already have it! I sit on my couch with the TV on and Facebook open, hoping people read what I post and comment on or even Like it. I post song lyrics and YouTube videos in vain attempts to grab somebody's attention, forgetting how well it went the last time. I'll post those, but I won't post how miserable, lonely and disappointed in my life I am because I think it's a petty grab at attention towards my too small audience.

I hate my life at the moment. I say 'at the moment' because I can't see (or stand to bear for that matter) how this life could last into my 30's, 40's and beyond. Yes, I'm in school, but not the one I want to be in. I still live at home, and though I'm surrounded by all my possessions, it all seems so meaningless. I hate my job that I can't quit and something else I deleted though it's no secret what it was I'm sure. I'm scared because I have no idea what I'm supposed to do next, but I refuse to accept help because that's what weak people do. I'm a walking Catch-22 if ever there were one. I'm only happy when I'm miserable, but I'm always miserable so why aren't I happy?

I just wanted to write about how much I loved The Social Network. I wanted to say that Mark isn't an asshole. He's awkward, smart and a good guy, but damn if the good guy part doesn't get lost in the shuffle. I know what it's like to not fit in when by all accounts you should, and to then go about being alone with a stiff upper lip. It sucks. It's soul crushing work that goes unrewarded as long as it goes.

The film ends with Mark tapping F5 intermittently, silently waiting for the reason he's there to respond to his friend request. This blog entry ends with me posting a link to Facebook, warning people not to read it for how dreary and depressing it is. Then I'll be going to sleep. When I wake up I'll wring whatever joy I can from those few fleeting seconds where I can't remember what drove me to write all of this in the first place.

Good night.

'Tough' and 'Competent'

____There usually isn't anything good on TV from when I get home from school until I leave for work. So instead of good, I settled on mildly interesting and began to watch a special about the Space Program titled "Failure Is Not An Option." It wasn't long before the show went from mildly, to genuinely interesting, and it was cool to learn about the various successes and failures of the program. It eventually came to the Apollo 1 fire disaster.

____It didn't shy away from showing how reckless NASA was being. The fire and subsequent deaths of the astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee were because of that recklessness, and they could have easily been avoided. It was a tragedy, but it was by no means the end. Gene Kranz, flight director for the mission, gathered everyone together on the Monday morning after the disaster and delivered a stirring speech. It was at this point the show went from interesting to damn inspiring. The speech, which Kranz can recite from memory, is as follows...

____"Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we.

____The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!' I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.

____From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: 'Tough' and 'Competent.' Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.

____When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write 'Tough and Competent' on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."

____There's no particular reason I posted this other than I really like the speech and I'm glad that I heard it, but I think that everybody should at least read it. It's inspiring and poignant, and I challenge anyone not to be moved by it.