They say your eyes are the windows to your soul

Instead of calling my mommy and explaining why I haven't spoken to her in over a week, I'm going to flex my prodigal muscles and spend the next hour writing about my spring break on the Internet. Thank God for the Internet-- a series of tubes where people with Facebook can be force-fed my blog and the ten child molesters other people that actually type "http://www.confusednation.com" into their address bar can get their rocks off to my stunning wit and charm.

That's the spring break crew to your left, minus Louie and Mikey.

By the way, I'm probably going to spill some ill-sentiment about people and their actions on the trip. Some of you people seriously pissed me off over the course of the week and I'm not one to be coy about it. If you can't put up with me calling you a dumbass on the Internet for doing shit like-- for example-- drunken, half-naked backflips in the middle of Horny Rapist, Mexico, then you should probably sell me back the title to our friendship. Besides, I'm a pale and overweight white kid on a goddamn blog. Come bitchslap me in real life and watch me cry and apologize.

Jesus Christ, I just re-read those last two paragraphs and I sound fucking bitter. Okay, Kyle, squeeze your balls between your thighs and try to write like a man and not an Internet Tough Guy.

Okay...

So I've been sitting here for twenty minutes trying to discern what I can and can't write about on the Internet concerning my trip. It's seriously like trying to separate the cheddar and the wheat bread on a piping hot grilled cheese sandwich. It's a moot exercise in masochism. Instead, I'm going to bullet point the big, fun things I did and explain some sentiments rather than write the most boring and watered-down expository ever excreted onto the world.

Fun things I did that you can tell my grandma:

• Had a bonfire on the beach in Port Aransas.
• Drank dollar Coronas and three dollar margaritas in Matamoros, Mexico.
• Visited the first Whataburger in Corpus Christi.
• Spent four days in a town that very oddly reminded me of downtown Panama City. It was like being home, kinda. And you could tell that the locals had the same disdain for me that I always have for spring breakers back home.
• Saw Explosions in the Sky again.
• Somehow managed to pull my savings account under the $2000 mark.

I think I understand the social dynamics of my little clique of friends a whole lot better after this trip, too. It's only when your friends start pissing you off and you can't escape to the solitude of your room that you realize certain things about people. You start to see how people break down under stress. You see their most selfish sides-- a lot. You see how relentless people can be. Conversely, you get to see good light in people that you might have dismissed in the past.

Basically, you get to see them out of their cage and in the wild. I know a lot of my more dark and brooding and anxiety-attack personality traits came out over this past week.

I guess my biggest qualm with the trip was watching people have fun at the expense of others. In Mexico, for example, it became the burden of anyone with less than three drinks in their stomach to take care of the people who had downed more than fifty. This involved taking their drunken complaints and insults in stride, carrying them more than ten blocks back to the US-Mexico border, seeing them through customs, etc etc etc. That kind of behavior is more than just reckless abandon-- it's downright disregard for the people they call friends.

But I don't know why I complain in a public forum. By this time, I'm sure they've rationalized their behavior in one way or another and everyone else has forgotten about it.

The sad fact is that most of the caretakers ended up being the drivers who had watched their alcohol intake the entire day. So you've got this group of six to eight super-drunk, hyper-belligerent and completely stubborn walking bags of cheap tequila and beer who are embarrassing themselves left and right in the middle of another country-- we're talking way outside the hedges here. And then you've got this small group of sober people who drove the four hours to Brownsville and are dreading the four hour drive back and instead of relaxing, they have to worry about corralling everyone back to the states and making sure no one gets kidnapped or raped. If nothing seems wrong to you about that situation, I'll go ahead and call the oncology department so you can have your tumor-riddled brain removed.

The Mexico situation and others like it that cropped up over the course of the break are probably best explained by the completely surreal sense of security that Rice provides its students. Getting drunk on campus is a luxury not afforded to the rest of the collegiate world. A bar in Houston, or Matamoros, or anywhere is not the same as Willy's Pub. If you act dumb enough anywhere, the skeezy guy in the corner WILL be there to flip you over his shoulder and throw you in his rape van and sell you to some human trafficking organization for $250.

I'm not saying that the responsible people on the trip found it particularly burdensome to watch out for their friends. What I am saying is that the complete and utter lack of respect for said responsible people doesn't go unnoticed, and I'm not the only person to feel this sentiment. I'm just the one dorky enough to write about it on a blog. We watch out for each other on campus all the time and it's a thankless job because it's an easy job. But when I'm pulling people by the arm back into a seedy bar to save them from the oogling stares of poor beggars (after driving for four hours and drinking very little), I expect a little goddamn thanks. I have yet to hear a sincere apology from anyone that fucked up in Mexico, though I guess a few margaritas and Coronas would do me just the same.

Oh yeah, and don't for a second think this is the pot calling the kettle black. I apologize for my selfish actions and try to do my best to make up for them. And most of them don't occur on vacation. The title of this post is a reference to the fact that I was so stressed out that, at one point, I popped a blood vessel in my eye. My entire eye was just blood red for two days. Instead of asking how they could help me calm the fuck down, most people just said "cool."

I did have a fun week, though. And I got my bitch rant out. Now it's time to call my mommy.