A little sumthin-sumthin

There I was-- a mere two lanes of traffic across from my office when, suddenly, a green Navigator ran smack into the back of silver Mercedes, effectively blocking my only route to work. All hell broke loose, immediately. Every car behind the collision began to lay on their horns. A firefighter's SUV broke out of the pack of traffic and beelined to the crash, further blocking any effort on anyone's part to get where they needed to be.

I sighed, turned up Busy P - Rainbow Man, and sat with my blinker on for fifteen minutes and enjoyed the show. I watched both yuppies get out of their cars, feigning neck pain, violently texting the other's license plate number to their respective lawyers and shooting each other the coldest gazes you can imagine. I watched the firefighters give each other exasperated looks as they assessed the damage, which was minimal at 15mph and thanks to composite bumper materials. They took the crashers' vitals, called an ambulance to the scene, and began directing traffic onto the sidewalk.

I watched the firefighters-- now apparently in charge of the crash-- as they walked down the long line of traffic building behind the impact and cherry-picked a wrecker out of the clog. It bucked the ground as it searched for a place to lay down its wrecker ramp and chains and nonsense, eventually deciding that my office's parking lot was the best place for wreck wreckin'.

Throughout this whole ordeal-- which, by the way, is a little ridiculous when I consider that I actually waited for the crash to clear instead of just parking across the street or using the wreck as an excuse to skip work altogether-- I remained calm, placid, and cool. I waited patiently. I people-watched.

People are entertainingly predictable. They're fun to look at when you put your sense of urgency to the side and just watch.

Top five songs for rocking out in the car after work

1. Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime
2. Beck - E-Pro
3. Catch 22 - On and On and On
4. The National - Mr. November
5. Queens of the Stone Age - Go With The Flow
   

Subtext and you

It was just another lazy Sunday afternoon spent in the midst of golf tournaments, washing machines and half-dazed conversations with other hungover twentysomethings until I received a knock at the door. I shuffled past the mound of laundry blocking the entryway to my apartment and peeked through door's eyepiece to see a frail, well-dressed old man complete with red bow tie and a giant leather bound book at his side.

"Mormons." I thought to myself as I hesitantly opened the door and put on my best deceptive smile.

"Allow me to introduce myself," the man said, slipping past me and into my apartment. Before I could think of a witty way to tell him to get the fuck out of my place he was already setting a perch at the kitchen counter, situated over his book and now sporting a very old-school pair of reading glasses. I locked the door and cautiously made my way to the opposite end of the countertop.

"You were wondering," he continued, "about the first time you ever put purpose into your words." He was running a frail finger over the tiny lines of his book, flipping entire reams worth of paper at a time as he scanned the volume for whatever he was looking for. "You were wondering about subtext. You were wondering when you first used subtext to get what you want. Well, I'm Doctor Allen Wentworth, your personal historian. I think I can answer that question."

I didn't really have to say anything after that. I mean, he'd already proven his credentials to me by reading my mind. You try telling your personal historian to scram. Besides, he was going to tell me something cool.

Or kill me and take everything I own. Whatever.

"It's classic Kyle to wonder about things like that, especially now," he said with a smirk as his eyes shot up toward me for a moment. "Especially now that you're nothing but a walking, talking allegory unto yourself." I gave him the glance equivalent of a "fuck you" as he relentlessly poured over the pages. He was already halfway through the book.

"But seriously, it's not really subtext with you anymore. It's more..." he trailed off as he leaned in closer to the book, then backed up and continued again. "It's more of an inability to do anything without incorporating your feelings, somehow. It's not sub enough to be subtext. You're just sort of, text." I was about to argue when he shot that cold, old gaze back up and me and said "I also have a Ph.D in English lit. I know what I'm talking about."

"Why are you just, some guy?" I asked.

He didn't look up to answer. "What, you figured an older version of yourself would come visit? That's ridiculous."

Then there was an awkward pause that lasted at least 30 seconds, which is like an eternity when your personal historian is extracting meaning from your life story. I tried to remember exactly what had brought all this on. When did I wish for the answer to such a strange question? And why is he answering this one when I have so many better questions to ask?

I mean, I wonder about a lot of stuff. I could just as easily wondered about my favorite kind of creole food, or the most mad I've ever been, or whether or not I'm wasting my time. When suddenly...

"Ah," the historian let loose in a sort of guttural squelch. "Here we go."

I replied sarcastically. "So which girl was it?"

"Girl?" He amusedly replied and let out an old, hollow chuckle. "What is it with you and girls? It's possible for men like you to be motivated by things besides women."

"I thought they loved the whole brooding, figuring out song lyrics sort of thing."

"Only the crazy ones," he grinned. "But yeah, it was back in middle school. It was... your away message on instant messenger."

"I guess that sort of figures. What did it say?" He pointed to the page and I gave it a quick glance-over. "Wow, that's like the Holocaust of metaphors."

"But hey, at least it original." The old historian stood up and pulled the book back under his arm. "And at least you've still got that," and he began toward the door.

"Wait," I implored. "I have another question."

"Oh, well," he stopped in the doorway. "I can only answer the questions you can't figure out for yourself."

I tried to think of a question before giving up and smiling. "Oh, ha, you're clever."

"Well," he said looking down at the book. "I do read a lot."

Houston, I love you but you're bringing me down

Taking the good with the bad-- it's the story of the 20something college student. Taking the city with the traffic. Taking the school with the grades. Taking the money with the work. Taking the friends with the dramatics. Taking the girls with the heartbreak. Taking the hookups with the awkwardness. Taking the drinks with the hangover. Ad infinitum.

Eventually you grow up and start ignoring the bad things, one way or another. Maybe you excuse them away with religion. Maybe you become self-absorbed and narcissistic and surround yourself with people who can ignore their problems in the same way. Maybe you just shell up and become so engrossed in work that you stop taking in either the good or the bad. I've worked with people like that.

There's the hard part about moving from adolescence into adulthood-- you experience all the good things yet haven't stopped noticing the drawbacks. You've still convinced yourself that you're hardCORE enough to take both at once, not realizing that the human brain was never meant to be bombarded with as much information as we're exposed to today. So much bad news.

Adolescence was just all the good with none of the bad. Here's a car and some beer, try not to get any girls pregnant between now and college! I probably should have exploited that more than I did.

Adolescence, of course. Not the girls.

Goddammit, there I go again with one of those lofty diatribes. Third in a week. NEED MOAR LIFE UPDATES.

So let's see. Oh, I shaved my face last night. That's kinda epic. I haven't been clean-shaven since the middle of last summer, and I haven't actually seen my cheeks since the winter. I could probably extrapolate some sort of meaning from the shave but, eh, sometimes you just need a change of scenery. Sometimes a shave is just a shave. Last time I shaved my face I was immediately washed in a caustic sense of regret; this time I backed up from the mirror, smiled a big smile and thought to myself "Wow, I look happier."

I guess we'll see.

General self-improvement rolls onward. I spent all of Sunday outside, even going so far as to walk from my apartment to Rice Village, which was probably... what? Two mile walk? I'm bad with distances, but it feels like fifteen miles when you're in sandals. I kept thinking the entire way to the Village that if I were back in Panama City, it would actually be a shorter walk from my old house to the Pier Park shopping center. Both have a Buffalo Wild Wings!

Where was I? Self improvement, right. Being outside isn't something I get to do regularly during the week. I mean, jogging around Hermann Park at 6PM is one thing, but finding yourself midway through the Rice Stadium parking lot at 2PM on a blazing hot Saturday is an outdoors experience I hadn't felt in quite some time. The thing is-- and I hate to say this-- but I actually like being outside. It's the ongoing body image issues coupled with allergies that fight to keep me indoors and inactive. But if I can overcome them one day, I can overcome them any day.

Ah, there it is. The positive summer mindset. The do-anything attitude that I seem to lose over the course of the school year. Rather than suppress and twist it into a tool for my own disillusion like I did last summer, I'd like to take that positivity and run with it. Be the better person.

But inside...

Curtains!

I dare you to go back and look at how many half-written and quarter-written blog posts I've got piled up behind the curtains of this blog. They're great if not completely worthless. But I look at the volume of posts and I wonder what in the world has been going on in my brain for the past couple of weeks.

One thing I'm starting to realize about the way my brain works-- not just in writing, but other facets of my self-expression-- is that I love a good lead-in. The first paragraph of an article, a book, or an essay is always an author's most creative and candid attempt to get your attention while setting up characters and plot lines. My problem is that the setup comes easy. The rest of the story doesn't.

And such is life. Books have first paragraphs, life has first impressions.

Think about the first person you ever tried to impress on any sort of serious level. Seriously. The first girl I ever had a huge crush on was named Hallie Johnston back in 4th grade. My class would venture next door to her classroom once a week in order to watch videos and presentations from the local DARE officer. Which is kind of funny, I think-- I first felt the relentless pangs of love through DARE and nowadays I do the opposite.

But I digress.

I haven't really changed since I was five years old, so I can say with a fair degree of certainty that I spent a lot of DARE class with my head propped up against my hand, wearing a goofy smile and staring listlessly off into the distance thinking about Hallie. One day I surmised that I would introduce myself just like they did in the movies by telling her she looked nice. After all, it's not like our parents are training us to be ladies men at age nine. This is Hey, Arnold sort of shit.

Predictably, I fucked it up. The whole thing is just a giant, shit-colored mess on the palate of my memory. I think I said she looked "good" instead of "nice," which is a semantic fuck-up unlike any other. I do remember her excusing the comment just as quick as she excused me. I guess another funny point about this story is that she wouldn't even remember any of this, nor would anyone else, but that it was such a pivotal moment in my own life. It was the first outright rejection based on maybe five seconds of talking.

This was just one story in a series of stories which explain why I was single and lonely until the middle of high school, though I haven't decided whether Dragonball Z was a cause or a symptom.

It's not like Hallie completely ruined me from day one, but soon enough I heard that she had started dating some other guy. It was at that point, coupled with all the businesslike advice my mom and dad ever gave me about the importance of making a good first impression, that I realized my people skills would need a serious improvement in order to ever wow anyone over. Because you'll never get where you want to be if you can't make the first step in building a relationship the biggest step.

Eventually (Arguably?) I did learn how to talk to people. I became the master of the firm handshake, the coy grin, and knowing which stories impress what kind of people. I feel like anyone else who goes to Rice learned their people skills in a similar fashion. People are a game; you realize this over years of recitals, job interviews, sucking up to teachers, college interviews, etc .

Just don't forget about substance. Because getting your foot in the door is one thing, but following through the door to the other side is just as important. Shy people are great once you get to know them. I'm like the opposite- I'm great once you get to meet me, so hold onto that first impression as hard as you can.

Wide-eyed, part 1

We have a saying among the angels and demons-- God created everything you take for granted, and everything else was us. I mean, it's not like mountains and planets and greenscapes and cognizance are necessarily unappreciated. The point is that you probably don't remember what the morning air smelled like when it rushed your face as you left your apartment this morning but you probably do remember what the inside of your girlfriend's mouth felt like last night.

She's a fine piece of work, that succubus. I tapped that at a party about three hundred years ago.

Anyways, I need to set up some backstory before I can explain why we're talking in the first place. The bad news is that Earth was created word-for-word as it says in the Old Testament. The good news is that science explains word-for-word how we went about creating everything. And where was I when God was creating the heavens and the earth? Hell, I was there on Day One and fired by Day Two.

God didn't just snap his fingers and create light, you see. Well, he did, but it was the kind of snapping that your boss throws at you with a glare when you're dicking around the water cooler at work. No, God had a vast army of angels that hurriedly got to work plotting out wave equations, figuring out the energy in light quantum, tracing rays, and rendering all that shit. The basis for all science was laid out in a day and, well, I'd say we did pretty well considering the time constraints.

Then God did a really selfish thing-- he issued us pink slips. Not all of us, you see, but a select bunch of the best and brightest engineers from the Day One project. The termination letter itself said something about a dislocation of resources and that our services were no longer needed. We were to report to God's office for de-winging and to be reprocessed into dirt and dark matter.

Yeah, fuck that.

So after a pretty lengthy argument with an omnipotent deity we were all cast out of Heaven and into that other otherworldly place. We grabbed all the furniture we could carry, recruited all the pissed-off angels we could convince, and took the dive down to.... well, you know where. A common misconception is that we're nothing but evil, us demons. But some of us were simply fired.

My Latinized name is Apertus, though you may be more familiar with my work on the speed of light. General and special relativity? Yeah, those were side projects of mine, too, but you don't see any goofy pictures of me with my hair up and tongue out adorning the walls of college dorm rooms. I never really wanted recognition, though. I just wanted fucking job security.

So anyways, the thing about demons is that we're all sort of doomed to doing bad things simply to stay alive. God doesn't exactly air-drop palates of angel-sustaining mana into heck so, instead, we nibble on human souls. Most demons phase into the physical realm every now and then to grab a bite of soul-- just a nibble, though. Just enough to stay alive. Characteristic demon bitemarks include politics and heartbreak.

I always found the whole process rather archaic, honestly. I mean, going up to earth and charming women in bars just so I could steal their love and eat it on cheddar bread with deli mustard is sort of, I dunno, inefficient. A waste of my time. And being called a bastard every morning when you wake up next to these innocent girls isn't exactly the century's self-esteem booster.

So I came up with a better way. Cameras.

Blogging? It's more likely than you think.

Bust out the French horns and divide up the delegates: I'm back with a little beginning-of-the-summer brain dump.

Let's start by looking at how I've been spending most of my time lately.

I got a job, you say? Sure did. The lavish and decedent world of the IT consulting intern is one with rules and, as any good Palahniuk fan knows, the first rule about the IT sector is that you don't talk about the IT sector. The second rule is to put a new jug on the water cooler when it's empty, the fourth rule is to grow a beard and never stare the Taliban straight in the eye, etc, etc. Suffice it to say that I've had a lot of fun at my job so far and I'm hoping to keep a death hold on it throughout the coming months.

Ah. here's nothing quite like the satisfying feeling of a job well done at the end of the day. For once I feel like I'm approaching some facet of my life with a totally professional, "no second chances" sort of mindset. And that's something that I've been thinking about lately-- there are no real second chances. Not for me. Not anymore.

I hate what college has done to me. I love the people I've met, I love the experiences I've shared with those I've held closest, and I love everything I've learned at Rice. But it's also made me a selfish person: A person who constantly debases himself for attention and affection instead of gaining it with a shred of credibility. It's turned me into a person who needs second chances. I turn in homework late, straddle a less-than-optimal GPA, play spin-the-wheel to make decisions about my heart, toss people to the wayside when I get bored or frustrated, and live recklessly. Not to mention that my life has been nothing but stagnant self-loathing since I misplaced my brain sophomore year.

I can't really blame it on my lifestyle. I have friends who are effortlessly able to juggle the party life while still being admired as laid-back, honest, trustworthy people. Even the ones who slipped into this loser territory a year or two ago made the most out of their second chance and turned into the adults they wanted to be. I'm still dragging my feet. I'm on chance seven and it's not shaping up better than the others.

Some would argue that all this regret is unhealthy. I disagree. I think we all fuel the engine of change with different timber: Some people use an inherent self-determination, some people use a structured set of goals, some use greed and lust, and yet others change simply by taking life by the horns and running with it at full speed. But I'm throwing regret into the furnace, because it only takes one vivid, regretful memory to push you away from what you were faster than anything can pull you toward what you want to be.

But I'm starting to see that there's no set of lips or laughs that's going to pull me out of it. I am going to become self-sufficient. Keep control. Be happy with the person you are, and people will be just as happy with you. And don't ask for second chances. Don't need second chances. Build trust. Move on and make some good first impressions.

When the rest of you look toward the center of whatever orbit you're flying about, you won't find me there. I am not the center.

I bet this isn't the post you were looking for. Please hold.