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...