When I wake up I'm in a fury

If we've ever met you probably know that I am a miserable person. I hate pretty much everyone I meet, have no patience for other people's children, frequently litter and at least once a day like to say something horrible about someone else to boost my own self esteem. It's not easy being this awful, in fact most of the time it's exhausting.

I'd give almost anything to be one of those dumb-dumbs walking around with their eyes closed not noticing the terrible things going on around them. I wish I could live in a world where I couldn't see girls wearing garish mint colored pants, or hear people say literally when they mean figuratively or feel the jarring brush of a stranger when they forego all common decency and touch me without my permission. I do not live in that world; I live in a land where it seems as though sometimes I am the only one who has any idea what's going on.

To my surprise every once in a while my clarity will be clouded, and I am able to walk around in a good mood for up to thirty minutes at a time. Sometimes this change in temperament is brought about because of a particularly long and lovely nap, while sometimes it's because I just had an eggroll with my lunch. I'm having one of those moments right now, where I can feel the air in my lungs and Taylor Swift's music sounds uncharacteristically not terrible  and I'm just happy to be alive.

This must be what taking mood stabilizers is like, so I better go enjoy it while it lasts, I probably have a good ten minutes left before I turn back into a curmudgeon. 

Wake up! Wake up on a Saturday night.

Have you ever read "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin?  If you haven't read it then you must have never taken what was supposed to be an American Literature class that ended up being more about penis theory than literature. If you have read it I'm sorry for divulging into this terrible summary.

So, "The Awakening" is about a woman in the 1800's or something who after living her whole life wanting to marry the right man who can take care of her financially she finds him, marries him and then spends her time wanting things that are still out of her reach. She has a husband and kid she doesn't love and a house too big for them to afford. She finds herself having spent her entire life wanting all of the wrong things.

Eventually she discovers that what she really wants out of life is sex. That's it. She just wants to get pounded, over and over if possible. So she meets a man, has an affair and for minutes is blissfully happy.  She vacations at a home near the sea and one day she walks into the ocean. She doesn't stop to build a sand castle, she doesn't sit in the surf to feel the waves wash over her. Instead she walks into the water lets the water go over her feet, over her calves, her knees, her waist, her shoulders and her head. She finally figured out what would set her free so she made a decision and even though it was ridiculous she followed through with it.

Now you're caught up and I can tell you why I brought this terrible tale into your life. See, I too am having an awakening though not of the sexual kind, that happened in 1998 when I saw my first Britney Spears music video.

My awakening is just about wanting.

I've spent most of my adult life so far having no idea what I want. While everyone else I knew was getting married, starting careers and moving away, I was doing something altogether different.

Like the protagonist of "The Awakening," it's like I've been asleep for 27 years and all of a sudden my eyes have fluttered open and through the blurriness I see the shapes of all of these things that I never realized were something I even wanted, but now are all I can think of. I now realize that the things I want, no matter how numerous or ridiculous are things that I deserve.

So I'm making a promise to myself to go after the things that I want. I'm not going to listen to people who tell me I can't. I'm not going to let myself change my mind. I am going to walk into the water, feel the water enter my airway, feel the sting of raw panic scratch my brain as I begin to realize that there may be no way out. Then just as quickly as it began, I'll surface, turn around back the way I came and lie on the beach, happy knowing that I did what I set out to do.

It's tax season

It is tax season and for the very first time I owed money to the government. I fought the man and the man won.

In Review

On paper or even a digital medium like this it would seem to most people that I had a banner year. I’ve had more opportunities than I’ve ever had in the past. I’m mere months away from earning my degree and maybe moving away and doing something new with my life. My triumphs this year have been numerous, but if sitting in a million undergraduate history courses has taught me anything it’s that years are not remembered by the good things but by their tragedies.

For instance no one remembers anything good from the year 2001. In that year there were countless babies born, astounding innovations in technology and some greatly terrible movies such as Zoolander. No one thinks of those things however. You only think about the tragedies, you only think about the crumbling buildings and the lives lost. I’m not saying that the good things don’t count but that the tragedies always trump them.

Back to me, this year I’ve done a number of things that I should feel incredible amounts of pride in. I am finally a legitimate published writer. I’ve had my name on the pages of a newspaper at least a hundred times in the past few months. I’ve made real inroads into other forms of media such as radio, where I’ve been freelancing since my internship last summer. I even got the chance to be a marketing intern for Microsoft. MICROSOFT! None of it matters.

Our years are only counted by the tragedies and not the triumphs. 2012 will never just be the year that I started my career in earnest. The year will always be known by me as the last time I spoke to Son Tran. The last time I saw his face or made him laugh. The year that should have been one of my best was instead marred by this one terrible thing.

I last spoke to him just a few hours before he died. Though the conversation was completely frivolous, I can’t help but playing it in a constant loop in my mind. I was studying for my first government test of the semester with the notes he had taken when he took the class. He called wanting to talk, and I told him that I was busy. I knew how he worked and that if he persuaded me to push off my studies that we would end up on the phone for hours. I could never have a short conversation with him, it was always hours long. As I was about to hang up he asked me if he should spend $200 on underwear. I don’t remember the brand or type of the undergarments, only that he had just received his student loan check days prior and wanted to blow some money.

I told him that he’d be an idiot to spend that kind of money on something like that. He eventually agreed with me and I got off the phone. I often wonder how things would have changed if that had happened differently. If I had put off my studies would we have talked for hours causing him to be too tired to go out that night? If I had told him I thought that $200 was a perfectly reasonable amount to spend on underwear, would he have felt so guilty for having ordered them that he would have stayed home that night to save money? Would he have died? Would he have lived?

I say this not to make it sound like I blame myself for what happened, but what if it had changed something? Would I have just been delaying the inevitable? Would someone who was so funny and fragile and leaning precariously on the edge have eventually met the same fate whether it be on that night or on a million other possible occasions?

If he had lived would my year have turned out any differently? I’m not always sure what I believe in, but what if all the great things that happened to me this year were given to me as a sort of peace offering? Some celestial being saying, look, I know I dealt you a hard hand when I took your friend away, so have these opportunities, take these things to ease the blow.

I would trade those things for him. I would trade my name in newsprint if it meant things could have turned out differently. I’d trade the paychecks for not having to feel like I can’t breathe whenever I drive past the spot where it happened. I would trade the whole year for him to have one more day. None of that matters, those things aren’t real.

I’m looking forward to 2013. I’m looking forward to moving on and branching out. I’m hoping that in 2013 for the first time the good things will finally outweigh the bad.

Now I'm in this corner trying to put it back together

We once watched a Britney Spears interview together in which she talked about how when she's sad she tells her assistant that it's raining. After that whenever you were having a bad day you'd call me and tell me it was raining. The sun could be bright but in your world it was storming. I did the best I could to be your umbrella ('ella, 'ella).
Now it's my life that has the inclement weather. Son, it's raining and I wish you were here.

When you're sinking like a stone...

A handful of months ago I had a lot of unfocused hopes for the future. Nothing was set in stone, but I had a fairly realistic plan of what I wanted to do with my life. Some of it was fantastical, but then again so is nearly every plan I have. Then something happened, and I was crushed and aimless.

I deflate easily. Like a balloon you're too cheap to pay to fill with helium at Party-City, and instead decide to expel your hot carbon-dioxide into. I lose sight of where I'm going with only the slightest of provocations. It's part of what makes me such a terrible driver. It's also part of the reason why I am where I am in life right now.

Though the bright part is that I start dreaming really fast too. Two weeks ago I started an internship. A couple of days later my friends asked me to move to Austin (where they will be living in the very near future) when they graduate. Suddenly I'm looking at apartments, and furniture at IKEA. I'm planning to transfer from the company I'm interning at into one of their Texas branches. I'm researching graduate schools in the area, I'm ordering a GRE review book. It takes almost nothing to get me going.

But I like the up-and-downess of my life. In a weird way it keeps me steady. If I didn't get discouraged easily, I'd live perpetually in that land of fantasy I am prone to escaping to. If I didn't get excited easily I'd live in a constant state of melancholia. This way I'm fairly balanced.

Needless to say I am both terribly excited about what might happen while at the same time waiting for someone to kick me in the nads just hard enough to get me to calm down.


(By the way I wrote this in the Blogger app. If it comes out well I might actually be posting more due to the sheer ease of the process.)

Kelli should probably copyright these things so that I can't pass them off as my own

Cool Things

Bryant and Kelli are coming in this weekend! 

Last weekend when I and some of Son Tran's closest friends threw him a memorial birthday party at a bar in which a man playing a guitar honored our request of playing Lucky by Britney Spears for him.

The buckyball things which I bought as a gift for someone, and decided to play with myself.  That shit is really cool, and also totally confusing.

Girl scout cookies are back.  I have the seven empty boxes of Samoas to prove it.

SMASH, which although is mildly embarrassing to admit that I watch, is still kind of like the more affluent person's Glee.

Uncool Things

If someone in a bar ever tells you to try an Irish Car Bomb, do not buy one for all of your friends and spend sixty dollars on them (like I did last weekend) because they are fucking terrible.  Seriously, just fucking awful.

People who I need to interview for one article or another, refusing to get back to me in a timely fashion.  Seriously, what is that about?  If ever someone thought I was interesting enough to warrant a feature story---I'd fucking grant an interview, posthaste.

When you realize that on more than one occasion you attended a birthday party/sleepover with someone who has now been convicted of owning child pornography.

Waking up with hangovers for four Saturdays in a row. 

That feeling I sometimes get that reminds me of things that I don't particularly feel like dealing with right now.