I imagine...

That Marvin the Robot from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was so depressed because he was an economics major.

Refocused

og. That's just how scatterbrained I am. My train of thought goes from one thing to another without necessarily finishing one thought. When I was a kid, I wanted to be in the video game industry, and then I got sidetracked with theatre for four years. Granted, it was a very fun four years and I hope to get sidetracked with it again, but it did distract me from my video games for a very, very long time.

This blog was to be finished last night, but distraction kept that from happening, too. Getting sidetracked is just a part of life, I think. Given the number of things that we all take in and do over the span of a day, it's impossible not to become distracted to the point of actually forgetting what you were doing in the first place.

Take rehearsal tonight, for example. It was supposed to be a complete run of the first act of Arabian Nights. The first act begins with a dance number, though, and we ended up rehearsing that for the first two hours of tonight. Then we only got through roughly the first hour of what we were supposed to get through.

We had a specific goal in mind coming into this thing, yes, but we ended up diverting from that for an insane amount of time. And it upset me a bit, and it tired me a lot, but the fact of the matter is that the dance is probably going to be better because of it, and the first act can be finessed later. It takes less practice than a very intricate dance scene.

So it was a good thing that Robin got sidetracked tonight, and decided to work on the dance. Even if it was crap to do it there, it will pay off later.

But getting sidetracked isn't always a good thing. Sometimes it can lead you to stay up for about an hour or four more than you wanted to one night. It can even lead you to break a promise you made to a friend, or cause you not to see that something in front of you is better than something in your peripheral. It can cause us to get distracted from the bigger picture, from what you've got.

Sometimes getting sidetracked will take you to heights you wouldn't normally achieve, but more often it's a negative thing, and all you can do is hope that you can get back on your original track before too much of an impact is made.

Bad fries, questionable rings, and a pretty good chicken sandwich

The title doesn't have much to do with the topic of this blog, I don't think. It's just the product of Tiger Inn, where I got some bad fries, saw one of the workers pick onion rings out of a deep fryer bare-handed, and got a pretty good grilled chicken sandwich.

In the past week, I've had my American government professor tell me that I seem more depressed recently not once, but twice. I don't know what he bases this notion on. At all. I can't feel any noticeable change in my behavior now compared to when I started his class, other than the fact that I've learned since starting his class that it is far less about American government as it is about the War on Terror, which he regards as the defining issue of our generation (in spite of the fact that nobody in class feels the same way), but as far as my overall attitude goes, I don't think that he could logically base his view of my mental health on three fifty-minute windows of time during which he sees me. Still, I'm not one to take somebody's observation of how I've been acting and just throw it out the window.

I went to my director Robin midday on Friday and asked him if I seemed like I've been depressed lately. He said that he wouldn't call it "depressed," but that I've been acting somewhat different lately. More introverted, perhaps, but not really depressed. This still surprised me, because I don't really think that I've been more introverted this year, especially compared to last year.

And my friends Caitie and Kathryn have also talked to me about how I tend to say things that are really depressing. Even people that I talk to online say that I've been acting withdrawn lately.

Still, I don't notice what everyone is talking about. I'm starting to wonder if I'm wearing my heart on my back and I just can't tell that I'm dumping all of these negative feelings out, or if this is like when you have something embarrassing written on your forehead, and people tell you, but you can't see what it says for yourself, because you're too close to yourself to see it.

In those instances, you always have to find a mirror in order to see what's going on.

I took an online screening for depression today because I was curious as to whether I would test yes to that. My results told me that I was more likely to have bipolar disorder than depression, so I took the online test for that. Three minutes later, I was told that I don't likely have bipolar disorder, and I was out the door and into the coffee shop just in time to get a muffin and a chai latté just before the lunch period started. Still, so many people are telling me I don't seem like myself lately.

Can anybody hand me a mirror?

Lunacy and lunarcy

It is often a practice of mine to do things that I have absolutely no intention of revisiting, even though they're incredibly funny or poignant at the time that I do them. A very recent example of this -- now invalidated by my talking about it on my blog -- is the night of Arabian Nights rehearsal during which I spread water on my butt while I was offstage because my character ran into the scene complaining about diarrhea. It was a stroke of genius brought on by my visit to the water fountain and my incredibly random nature.

Sitting in work-study today, I watched a few episodes of Scrubs, listened to a podcast from IGN Wii-k in Review (while I sat in reverie at the games coming out this and next year. We are looking at another shot at the gaming Golden Age right now), and tried many times to get my iPod to connect to the internet. Being that I'm sitting at the front desk's workstation right now, it's safe to say that my attempts failed.

The failure did, however, allow one of my iPod's more interesting features to shine through. The feature, you ask? My calendar.

While wholly spectacular inventions in and of themselves, calendars have been mostly overlooked by the general populous as simple chotchkies to be hung on the kitchen wall and ignored until you need to know what day or year it is for the check that you're writing. But the idea of extensible calendars, which allow for much more information than can fit in a 1 1/2 square-inch box, is bringing the practicality and -- let's face it -- fun back into having places to be at certain times of the day.

Perhaps one of the most interesting calendars of the non-extensible form, however, is the giant stone one located in Latin America, cradled in a Mayan ruin. The calendar gives proof that the Mayans were at least dilligent timekeepers, as it has on it the dates of lunar eclipses and other celestial happenings. But unfortunately for anybody visiting the Mayan ruins and wondering what the stars will be doing in 2011, the Mayan calendar only keeps up on such information until December 12, 2010: the day which the Mayans playfully describe as "the end of the world."

Having heard of this back in my junior or senior year of high school from a member of Bellevue East's forensics team, and having been exposed to stories of the calendar before then, I made, in a stroke of random whimsy, a schedule of events for December 12, 2010. I bring this up now, because the very same schedule somehow migrated from Google Calendar, where I first wrote it out, to my iPod's calendar, for me to stumble upon this afternoon. Here's what I've got myself doing:

12 AM - Panic
2:30 AM - Panic some more
6 AM - Spongebob Squarepants
9 AM - Eat breakfast at McDonalds
10 AM - Panic
1 PM - Late lunch
2 PM - Prayer
3 PM - Prayer
4 PM - Prayer
5 PM - The Simpsons
6 PM - Prayer
7 PM - Prayer
8 PM - Work on forensics piece
9 PM - Buy a hammer
10 PM - Build sculpture of Campbell (my forensics coach)
10:30 PM - Destroy sculpture of Campbell
11 PM - Panic and pray

In my exceptional genius, I planned out this schedule and excluded an hour for eating dinner. I'm sure I had a reason at the time for why I don't eat any kind of final meal, maybe in reverence to all of the foods that I should have tried by this point but hadn't, maybe in a kind of observance to God that I'm not full unless I have Him dwelling inside me, or maybe it was just because I knew that I probably wouldn't be hungry that night. In any case, why would it take me an hour to find and buy a hammer?

More reveries from slumberland

Today hit me kind of hard. There was the American Government class, which is aksumg me for a debate paper in a week on whether or not the war in Iraq was justified. There was acting, which never really hits me hard, but involved running around today, and I have the cardiovascular capability of a chain-smoking obese 12 year-old (oddly enough, this becomes an invalid when I'm dancing). And then I was hit by German, in which I have an assignment to now hand in late, and an assignment due on Friday, but this is still manageable. Then there's the wonderful hour of today that was macroeconomics. You know you're paying enough for college when you learn two days before the 3-5 page paper is due that you have a 3-5 page paper to write. Yes, I probably should have foreseen this kind ofthing coming, what with my having been at a faculty-excused drama conference the day it was assigned and Septober's natural ability to screw with my perception of what is utter bullcrap, but my life just wouldn't be interesting were it not for the self-inflicted pain I suffer.

But I have evidence to support my belief that this, too, is manageable. The one thing I don't know is manageable or not is something that one would expect to be abundantly manageable: my own body. Notwithstanding the incredible cinnamon-flavored fiber cookies it's had me discover, my GI tract is still my mustachioed enemy in this, the melodrama that is my life (hooray, that came out incredibly emo) (as a courtesy, I now take the time to remind my readers that melodramas are actually comedies). So I am off to the doctor's office tomorrow, that I may hope to bring the resurfaced threesies to an end once and for all.

The funny thing is that when you consider that this is my own body rebelling against me, this, too, is self-inflicted pain. And believe me, you can call TMI as often as you want, it's still not even close hearing it as it is experiencing it firsthand.

Tomorrow might be good. Here's to the night.

Life's little lessons

As I enjoyed my mostly blogless fall break, I did several things that I don't normally do: first, I videotaped myself trimming my toenails, and second, I revisited the Matrix sequels, two films which I quite enjoy, but haven't watched in well over two years.

While the toenails are a bit harder to explain, the movies are the sum of the remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Matrix. Plus, I really like them, in spite of what everyone else on Earth thinks of them. Concordantly, I got a rush of nostalgia from watching them, and suddenly remembered a ton of stuff pertaining to the two years before my senior year of high school. Vis-a-vis, forensics, theatre, journalism, mixed chorus, English 11, precalculus, and some other stuff, all rushed back into my mind. But there was a problem: all I could remember of the subjects were bullet points. There was nothing of substance in my memories, no recollection of the events, just the facts that I wrote such and such a column, and that I made it to state, but didn't qualify for finals.

It was some time in the middle of my watching The Matrix Revolutions that I got an email from an old friend of mine, who graduated back in 2004. Actually, he was much more than a friend. He was certainly something that I would call an idol. He was valedictorian of his class, he could act, dance, sing, place in state finals, everything. And it was at that point that I felt, "Wow... There's something behind this."

And so I went for my trademark walk around the cross-country track. I go out there a lot, when I need to think about things that are going on in my life, and this was certainly something. I began talking out loud to myself, concerned primarily about the fact that 2004 was rushing back to me, yet I couldn't remember any of it, and that since it was decidedly the last year before the major life changes began to take place, it held some significance in my current predicament.

And I made some important discoveries on my walk, mostly that it's fun to yell things in a public area while nobody else is around. But the revelation I feel like I was meant to make didn't come until Monday. I had just gotten back to my dorm from lunch, and was watching some of the specials on the second disc of Revolutions when I discovered as I walked to my sink to brush my teeth that my sink was nearly full of rust-infested water. Long story short, some calls were made around, and then the plumber on campus came in to look at my sink, remove the U-bend, stick a snake tube in to remove the obstruction, realize that the obstruction was much further down than he had thought, get a bigger snake tube to go further down, and finally unclog my sink.

It was after all this, as I was brushing my teeth, that I figured out what I was supposed to learn from all this: when you don't like the way something is, change it.

I'm sure that all of you are probably zOMG'ing about that no-duh revelation, but honestly, it wasn't something I had considered before. I was so used to letting myself believe that things in life will happen how they will happen, and that there isn't much that we can do about any of the circumstances we find ourselves in, but there it was, a solution to my sink problem.

And maybe there is merit to try, trying again. As much grief as I gave the concept in one of my earlier posts, the obstruction was cleared after the plumber went and got a different tool.

And I think that's what made me a happier person before my snior year of high school. I didn't accept circumstances as they were, I set out to achieve my goals even if I was afraid to do so. I think that's what I need to do now. I need to fix things that I have problems with, even if it'll take a little work.

Ergo, I hereby rescind any and all times in which I might have said that "this is just how things go."

How far I've come

There are defining moments that we each hit over the years. Events that, however big or small, somehow stick within us as more prominent than the rest of our story. I remember my first day of school as being fairly rainy on the drive down to the strange H-shaped buildings that formed the complex that my first elementary school was. I remember that my bullies' names through the years were Rachel, Justin, Kelley, Molly, Spencer, Spencer, Spencer, and Spencer. I remember that The Lion King had a scene with just a ton of orange on the movie screen.

And as easy as it is to call up some memories, there are other events in my life that I can't remember so well.

Before my junior year of high school, The Matrix Reloaded came out in theaters. And I'd watch that movie so often I could recite something like the first ten or fifteen minutes of it. Remembering that made me think that my junior year was my absolute nerdiest year.

But thinking back on that year, I realized that I actually couldn't remember... nearly any of it. And that freaked me out a bit. Not because I blanked out on an entire year, but because what I do remember of it tells me that it was a pretty good year. I was Le Fou in Beauty and the Beast, I went to state in forensics that year, I... heh, I think that was the year that my friend James managed to get the entire cafeteria to applaud me (though I'm sure a good number of them didn't know that they were applauding me).

And yet, the only reason I remember that last bit is because my friend James reminded me of the event in the first few days of him being here at college. And as for what being in Beauty and the Beast was like... I really can't explain it to you. My forensics stint? I only really remember practicing in front of the class and then not making it to finals at State.

I feel like I should be disturbed. That was arguably the best year I'd ever had, and so much of it is lacking in clarity. And I feel like maybe the reason I can't remember any of it is because of things that came after it. So much happened, in my senior year of high school alone, to reshape what I was then into what I am today. And when I think back on my junior year, I feel like I was so carefree then, so much younger in the sense of my mentality, than now.

If I could physically go back, and see who I was then as I am now, what would I see?

If at first, you don't succeed...

That's the creed that we learned by repitition when we were kids. What we will likely tell our own successors. Try, try again. Because everything in this world can be earned if you fight for it, relentlessly and whole-heartedly.

It's even the theme of one of the stories in Big Fish. The one, ironically, where the main character's father is explaining the courtship of his mother. He takes every opportunity to learn more about her, what she likes, where she lives, what she does. And the son of a gun gets the dame. They get married with the little money that he has, and they live together happily. Not likely ever after, but happily all the same.

When I think about that now, I also think of when I worked on staff at my high school newspaper. Everyone on staff, except for a couple of lucky souls, were editors or co-editors of one section or another. What being an editor entailed was putting together the page layout of your section, deciding what stories would run every month, and the usual reporting slag that everyone on staff had to subject themselves to. After all, we were a newspaper of about 12 workers strong.

And usually things went running pretty smoothly. Sure, it was a grind writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting (no joke, four draft minimum). But we did it because there was something to it all that we felt, this was fun to do, and it was worth doing. The people need news.

But there were times when life outside of the newsroom would take over. And it wasn't that we couldn't work on the paper. Rather, we let our stories slide because it felt good to not write up a draft this day or that day. We were all guilty of it at least once, so there isn't anyone who can or should shoulder all of the blame.

Still, when we counted on others to do their share of a section, it was on them. We would do everything we had to in order to get our parts of the final product to the printers, and if they needed help, we were glad to offer (it was our asses on the line, after all).

But when it came right down to it, we had made an agreement that we would split the work. To make deadline, we would all rely on each other.

And putting your hope in somebody else can sometimes lead to a deadline being missed. It's a disappointment to be let down by somebody else, but if you don't make every effort to do everything you can do, the person you should really be disappointed in is yourself.

Others have their own stuff to do. Their own stories to write. If them doing their own thing lets you down now and then, all you can do is make a late deadline, and give the next shot your all.

Nobody likes reporters.

News and revelations have a very interesting paradigm all their own.  It's strange, being on the receiving end of bad news.  I really like how Lemony Snicket put it when he compared it to climbing a staircase in complete darkness:  Your foot reaches for one more step than there actually is, and there's a sickly feeling of dark surprise as your foot plunges through the air.

Mr. Snicket was, of course, referring to the death of a loved one, but I feel that in my experience the same sensation is experienced from many other kinds of news, not necessarily even pertaining to loved ones.  Maybe you come home one day to find that your house has been robbed, or the check you sent to last month's electric bill bounced.  Maybe you receive an e-mail that very quickly thrusts five very large tasks at you, all of which require your immediate attention.  Maybe you turn on the TV one day and see reporters saying that they believe the gunshot came from the Texas School Book Depository, or that the second plane hit within the same hour as the first.

Regardless of the details, sometimes the sheer instant nature of news makes it feel like it's hitting you harder than any bus ever could.  We often refer to such news as "life-changing."  We're absolutely sure that this new tidbit of information is going to alter how we see and act forever.

I think the bigger news, though, is something that nobody ever really tells you: most of the big, life-changing news we hear... usually only ever affects 5% of our life, and that is a generous yield on my part.  Yes, being robbed sucks, but how much of "I'll never feel safe in my own home again" is just feeling?  When we find out about bad stuff, and when there's still a bit of light on the subject, I think we attribute too much feeling to our shellshock.  And that can really be a dangerous motivation for your actions.  It rushes you into decisions you might not have made if you just never heard the news to begin with.  And a few weeks down the road, what's going to have the bigger sting: the old news, or the decision you pushed on yourself?

September 26th... happy anniversary.