A post-race mindset

I was a little choked up by the time I finally crossed the finish line on Saturday night.

To be fair, you would be, too. Apparently it doesn't matter if you've been hardened by years of love and loss, international politics, the monotony of day-to-day life and the soul-crushing process of watching your hairline recede. Disney has a way of getting to you. And so does running.

~~~

Last Saturday my brother and I ran the Disney Wine and Dine Half-Marathon. It’s was a 10,000+ runner shuffle through the Walt Disney World campus just outside of Orlando, starting at the Wide World of Sports complex and winding through both Animal Kingdom and Disney Hollywood Studios before finishing with a gigantic drunkfest at Epcot. I finished in 2:23.20.

The run itself was so masterfully executed that I couldn’t help but spend the entire jog in awe of, well, everything around me. The sidelines were littered with heart-tugging distractions. There were Disney characters in full regalia posing for photo-ops with runners. There were employees, families, volunteers, and drunk revelers all screaming and shouting your name as you nimbly leaned into each turn off the Oceola Parkway.

And while I was in awe, I didn’t really come to appreciate those perks until I was out of Animal Kingdom and entering the seventh mile of the race. It was during that lonely stretch (look between 6 and 7 on the map above) that the nature of my training-- its successes and shortfalls-- became apparent.

Fitness was not the issue. While Orlando itself is a flat sack of swamp not unlike Houston, the course was littered with overpasses and upward inclines through the artificially elevated sections of the parks. In this way I was actually lucky that I spend the past four months training on a treadmill with an incline setting rather than dashing through the sweltering, flat expanses of the Houston Heights. Coupled with the distance-building regiment I followed to reach my goal, I’d say the run itself was fairly painless.

I mean, it hurt. Oh god it hurt. But physically, I never doubted myself throughout the entire race. My lungs were tar-free and my heart was pushing ruby-red, oxygenated life force to my legs. Have you seen these legs?

I had to part ways with my brother around the fifth mile marker because cruel asthma was tightening its icy grip around his airways. That felt like a scene out of a war movie, with him belting out “go on! go on!” between breaths. And barely a mile after that heart-wrenching moment, I looked around at the costumed couples and the families on the sidelines and this place from my childhood and I felt very, very alone.

Crap.

~~~

Now, running and I have a long and somewhat complicated relationship going back decades. No kidding. It all started in kindergarten-- no, wait. It starts with me in a stroller, being pushed by my grandparents up and down paved sand dunes in coastal small town America. They were runners.

Then there I am, in kindergarten, a skinny and slightly blonder version of myself winning mile-long fun runs with my dad. He would coach me to the last 100 yards or so, then “go, Kyle, go!” and I would take off in a sprint to the finish. He was quite the runner, too.

I’ve got a cigar box back home full of blue ribbons from these events. Almost all of the Christmas Morning pictures from my childhood feature this small, blonder, but just-as-white image of young me donning a way-oversized commemorative T-shirt from some fun run that me and my dad ran together.

As I passed from elementary school into middle school, running became less of a thing for all of us. I was focused on computers and games and this new concept of homework and making friends. I became a little more thick and stout and my achievements all shifted toward academic performance. My dad began experiencing some tightness in his knee and after he tore his ACL coaching my 7th grade soccer team, that was about it for him and running.

Then he got cancer, and that was really, really it for running.

At the behest of a therapist and my mom a few months after he died, I tried running again as a way to help deal with it. Instead it only reminded me how out-of-shape I was, and how I had peaked physically in kindergarten and that, above all, I would never really get the chance to run with him again. I would do it from time to time, but usually as a way to placate my mom than for any self-motivated reasons.

During my senior year of high school I was able to start running for myself. Something about the prospect of leaving all of those bad memories behind coupled with fact that, no matter what, my time in Panama City Beach was almost over. I lost a little weight, felt free for the first time ever, started seeing a girl on the weekends, blogged and expressed myself like a madman, etc etc.

My first few years at Rice saw running as a personalized expression of the come-and-go college workout fad. Running definitely wasn’t a regular thing, but I did it from time to time, and I still wore it like it was a big part of my life. In reality it had been a big part of my life, but it wasn’t at the time.

Then in late 2008 I started running a lot. Like, a lot a lot. And I don’t really remember why. At one point my girlfriend at the time had to sit me down and have a serious talk with me about how running twice-a-day in Houston, in the middle of the summer, with little shade around the perimeter of Hermann Park was probably a bad idea.

So I calmed down a bit but ran religiously until the beginning of my senior year of college. It was the best shape I’d been in to date, I could eat whatever I wanted without remorse, and I felt almost as free and confident as the day I left for college.

Now, let’s fast-forward in our story to about a year ago. That’s when my brother completed the Wine and Dine Half-Marathon by himself. At a point in my life when I was feeling less than capable of doing the bare minimum, he had been able to balance his courseload at UCF and train for a half-marathon and finish it. It was exactly the inspiration I needed-- a reminder that there’s potential in my genes-- to get me off my ass and back to pounding pavement.

~~~

So, about that race.

Where was I? Right. I was talking about the shortcomings of my training. Running on a treadmill can only take you so far.

It’s one thing to watch three back-to-back episodes of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives while galloping in place three times a week. It’s one thing to do leg presses with an ear full of Stuff You Should Know. But this first half-marathon was over two hours spent inside my head, navigating a sea of sweaty strangers while facing down every doubt that popped into it.

That’s why I wasn’t prepared for that weird, lonely feeling that overcame me halfway through the race.

I was by myself. There was no one running alongside me to help me keep pace or compliment my form. There was no friend on the sidelines shouting, “go Kyle!” or “nice legs!” There was no girl to impress. No music or distraction to retreat into. I was alone.

And a short time later it hit me. I was doing a hard thing-- a good thing-- by myself, for myself. No distractions. No shortcuts. I was being selfish in the good way, where you do things for yourself because they’re good for you. Not the selfish I was used to, where you take things for yourself because they make you feel good.

As I mentioned earlier, I have felt truly free a few times in my life. Once was that stretch of time before college, when I was younger and felt the infinite possibilities before me. And another time was the last seven or so miles of my first half-marathon. I felt like my own person again, separated from the complex of validation I so often seek.

I kept moving. I smiled and appreciated the encouragement from the random people around me. I laughed at the characters and costumed runners around me. I cheered and pumped my hands up when random Disney songs would suddenly be blaring around me. I let loose.

In that last mile before the finish line, I couldn’t help but feel like the half-marathon was going to be a really cool turning point in my life. A point when I stop taking shortcuts and the means to getting where I want to be are just important as the end to which I’m trying to reach. A point when goals are real, and not just a consequence of a lifestyle I want to live. A point when I start living.

When I did finally cross the finish line, I laughed a little bit and thought to myself “so what’s next?”

We’ll see.

Appreciating the Brent

Without getting too personal or too mushy, I figure the best way to spend this Houston-bound afternoon flight is to reflect on the very reason I’m making this trip: My brother.


This year for my birthday, my brother sent me the following items.

1. 5 lbs of Haribos (gummy bears).
2. Moleskine notebook.
3. DVD copy of The Room.
4. Pair of silvered aviator sunglasses.
5. Texas flag.
6. Gundam Heavyarms scale model, direct from Japan.

I’m not sure whether this list says more about my brother’s creativity or my completely eclectic, crazy personality. Together, they’re the best birthday package I’ve received in a long, long time.

Look. Apparently, siblings can be a complicated thing. I have sweet, innocuous, reasonable friends who constantly battle with their blood relatives. Some of these otherwise reasonable friends of mine won’t even speak to their respective brothers and sisters. More commonly, though, there’s some rift—a lack of common ground or an age difference or an insurmountable distance—that keeps them from enjoying what might otherwise be a very rewarding relationship with the closest thing to a clone that nature and nurture have to offer.

With that in mind, I’m practically the luckiest guy in the world when it comes to siblings. I only have one. We’re separated by an age difference of two years. We see each other at least twice a year. And by some divine providence, we have the same warped, meme-tastic sense of humor, which is something I demand from each and every person I chose to bring into my closest inner circle.

We love YouTube Poop, /b/ memes, the weirdest shit that Adult Swim has to offer, Bret Easton Ellis, cheesy videos by Paul Wall, the collective nothingness of Charles Bukowski, jaded liberalism, trolling our friends, TV shows that haven’t aired since 1998, professional wrestling and, above all, our mother.

Aww.

Now, it would be unfair to keep going without first mentioning that we do have our differences, too. These are things we have learned to set aside in light of everything we have in common. He drinks beer and I chug it, but we both can sit down to a beer and laugh about the latest stupid thing we read on the Internet. That’s what being brothers is all about, I think. I’m hardly the expert on people.

I’m lucky to have a brother like Brent. I’m also incredibly proud that he’s been able to excel at everything he’s put his mind toward: His degree in literature, his relationship with Dina, his out-of-college job, and just about everything but keeping his room clean. Heheh, lol.

So congratulations on making it this far. I'll see you in three weeks.

Bad Things Come

So how are good people supposed to feel when terrible people die?

In the aftermath of Monday’s late-night announcement that Osama Bin Laden was killed in a spectacular firefight, I’ve seen all sides of the argument. My Facebook news feed has been a mishmash of rabble, apathy, opportunistic joking, disgust and celebration. Some of my friends have already penned eloquent responses to the news. Others drop precision-guided cynicism bombs loaded with the potent fact that Bin Laden’s death will not stop America’s continuing military endeavors in the Middle East.

And then you have the sanctimonious humanists. These are your far-left political cartoonist types who only see the world in shades of “do not kill.” My Twitter feed and (to a lesser extent) my Facebook feed were both hit with a deluge of messages reminding me that killing is wrong, no one deserves to die, and that even Osama Bin Laden has a family. Well, they’re less reminding me of those things and more reminding me how bbbbad I am for cracking a smile at the news. Moral posturing might be another name for it.

I miss having a prepackaged moral compass because it makes dealing with these sorts of situations a whole lot easier. Back when I had a head full of Vonnegut, I’d be up on that hill pointing and huffing at anyone who posted this song last night. And on the other side, there was once a time in my life when I’d have been downright ecstatic to hear that Osama had taken one between the eyes. Either way though, I would sleep soundly knowing my position was right.

My experiences throughout the past five years have taught me that the world is a highly complicated place where no canned response is a truly fair response to news of this magnitude.

• Cynicism is an insult to the well-meaning individuals who have died in the past ten years trying to bring an awful man and mass murderer to justice.
• Blind enthusiasm over Bin Laden’s death does nothing to improve the human condition. Obviously, this world isn't going to get better with more death and destruction.
• Pacifistic piety is selfish and, though sometimes well-intentioned is also ignorant to the complexities of a world where crazy people who hear voices are trying to kill innocent families for no reason other than to prove a point.

The only thing I really knew in the wake of the news was that I was unsure about my own feelings. This made me feel unprincipled. Big news tends to do that lately. I can’t jump into a respectful argument and see it through to the end without stopping to second-guess myself or concede to the other guy. But I decided to take this opportunity to really sit down and trace out my feelings, point by point, until I’d actually made a position on this issue.

So then how am I supposed to feel now that this dude is dead? I started by thinking about the dude himself.

Listen: Bin Laden was not promoting a progressive social agenda. He wasn’t fighting for the proletariat or the little guy. He’s no Che Guevara (who maybe kinda arguably had violently-executed good intentions) and he’s no hero. I think anyone who dedicates their life to murdering innocent people and disrupting peace has a place in this world that’s situated about six feet underground. And whether the means to that end is an expensive military raid or a less-expensive missile or maybe an expensive raid followed by an expensive spectacle of a trial, it’s the ultimate justice a man like Osama Bin Laden deserves.

So that’s how I feel about him.

Here’s how I think we’re supposed to feel about his death: Justice was served. Whether you frame that feeling with a smile or an uneasy, suspicious slanty-face is your prerogative. But Osama Bin Laden’s death is not the sort of occasion on which you can build a convincing argument for either pacifism or warmongering. There are millions of people all over the world who deserve your undivided sympathy and compassion more than him, his followers or his family. Conversely, you can’t argue after ten years, billions of dollars and thousands of dead Afgani civilians that the ends justified the means.

A bad man got what was coming to him at a great cost to the world. America did what it said it was going to do ten plus years ago and affirmed that you can’t just murder 3,000 Americans and expect to get away with it. A man once thought to be invincibly illusive is now shark food. Anything else that might be said is just noise or a portent to some bigger issue that is not the death of Osama Bin Laden.

So, he’s dead. And I feel pretty good about that.

The Bus

Through darkness he could hear the school bus pulling away from soft, wet sand and gravel. The air was hot and held itself like a hand over his face. He could feel straps digging into his frail frame, gluing him in place as the rickety yellow machine built momentum over the dirt road.

And it was loud. Voices like sirens grew louder with every step he took down the aisle. The drone of the diesel motor shook his uneasy feet along the floor.

His weak arms tested the void ahead as he fumbled for a seat. More yelling. More sirens.

Then his outstretched hand found refuge in another, and it pulled him close.

“Danny?” an angelic voice shouted through the chaos.

“Me! I’m Danny!”

“It’s your sister.”

“Margeaux!”

“I thought we were going to lose you there for a second,” she said jokingly, cradling his small head against her shoulder as the bus bounced over tree roots and potholes.

“Is it like this every day?”

She laughed and patted his hand.

“I promise you’ll feel better once we get there.”

He took no solace in the unyielding darkness of the early morning hours. With his eyes clinched shut, he pictured the blurry tapestry of oak, pine and moss as it had whizzed by him so many times under an overcast sun. His sister weaved her hands through his tangle of blonde hair, and he imagined the thick, damp Louisiana air blowing it around as it had on so many trips to town with his mom in her beige, wood-paneled station wagon.

He smiled and his grip loosened. His sister held firm.

“No, I’m here with you,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

“Okay.”

“Think about our first road trip. To Auntie’s house. You were only four years old.”

It felt like so long ago. He focused through the noise and the shaking and imagined an open road cutting through gently rolling hills and pastures of farmland. The road was black and smooth—just like in town—and it stretched on for miles and miles and hours and hours. There were big, brown, silly cows lazily grazing over acres of green grass.

“Remember racing that train?” His sister asked with a hint of sadness in her voice.

“I said ‘race it, race it!’” he replied with a big smile.

“That’s right,” she choked.

There was a pause.

“I love you, Margeaux.”

“I love you too, Danny. It won’t be long now. Just stay with me. Stay with us.”

He thought of his mother, and his sister, and his whole family, and his dog, Barkley, and kept going. He remembered his first day of school, and meeting a very pretty girl on the playground. He thought of his friends and throwing his cap high into the air at graduation. He thought of throwing a white veil over the soft brown hair of that pretty girl and kissing her like it was the first time. He thought of her face, beet red and glistening, as they held their newborn daughter.

He released these thoughts and smiled one last time before he drifted to sleep.

...

The old woman said nothing to the paramedic. He gently removed the oxygen mask from the old man’s face. Tubes and cords swayed back and forth around them as the drone of the diesel motor finally came to a stop.

Oh, Tonight

I'm having a great week. Today I started reading William Gibson's Neuromancer and, well, things are looking up.

In a very coincidental way, I've been priming myself for this book all week. Monday I had lunch with Davers and we talked about art, culture, Internet, and the catharsis of expression. You know, Davers things. And yesterday, me and Higgy traded witticisms and insight over the process of creating writing.

So-- of course-- today I was sucked into the book that defined cyberspace and inspired a generation of nerds to build a world of their own creation. Tomorrow, I'll probably get visited my Morpheus.

I become entranced by something dark and familiar when I read about cyberpunk power brokering and bleak cityscapes that offer nothing but anonymity. It's the same feeling I get when my old mainstay, Turn on the Bright Lights, kicks through my car stereo at night. The feeling escapes words but it's definitively me. It's nighttime. It's gritty but not vulgar. Carefree but not cruel.

Say what you will about memory biases, but I swear: This feeling has welled up in me since I started listening to Interpol.

Oops. Gibson has totally borked my writing voice. I'm spending way too much time trying to thread together sentences that convey emotional whims with machine-like precision. Time to unjack from this terminal.

Note to self: Figure out how to update Blogger from Lynx.

On a More Positive Note!

I'm really excited to see how much attention The Social Network is garnering from critics in the run-up to the Academy Awards. When I saw the movie with my mom earlier this year, we both left the theater quite impressed with its performance on all the traditional moviemaking benchmarks: Reznor's brilliant but not overbearing soundtrack, the cinematography and Sorkin's trademark wit sharpened by the lens of incredible acting.

More importantly, though, I left the theater feeling downright capable of doing something magnificent on my own. I felt empowered. Not over-empowered, like I could be the next boy billionaire. More like... I dunno. Like I might one day have an idea that could touch a lot of peoples' lives. And that felt good.

Hollywood (and art as a whole) has a social responsibility to warn us-- within reason-- of the dangers and tradeoffs that accompany wealth, fame, and an unchecked hunger for power. But they also have a responsibility to inspire us. The Social Network did both, and I think that's really, really cool.

The first

My Friday nights used to kick off with a heist. I remember me and a few of my friends, jacked-up on the hardest stimulants we could pilfer, racing down Back Beach Road toward our destination: A calculated, well-planned assault on a fine art warehouse. Or, you know, the middle school equivalent of fine art.

Video games.

Checking video stores on Friday nights for the latest and greatest PlayStation games sure felt like a heist. We would rush the door and file through the magnetic anti-theft pillars, scoffing like they were some advanced motion-detection system we'd hacked moments earlier. From there, we would all split up and take separate routes to our respective console's section of the store. And after a few moments, a victorious shout.

"They've got the new Metal Gear!" Or "Dude, the new Bond game!"

That was the thrill, perhaps more so than the games themselves. We would give proud, condescending glances to anyone who passed us as we were leaving. Don't bother, we thought. You snooze, you loose. And one confused parent would drive in silence as the car of over-caffeinated kids poured over the game's instruction manual and speculated about how good the "graphics" were.

I was always a fan of the party games, like Super Smash Bros. or GoldenEye, because by their very nature they avoided the situation I came here to talk about: Being the first. Everyone is equally inexperienced starting off a new party game. And no one person's skills come into focus. It's great.

But with single-player games, someone has to be the first to try it out in front of everyone else. Certainly not me. I would always find an excuse not to be the first to play the game when we all got home: It's your console, man. Your mom drove us. You didn't get to play first last time. Nah, I hate 3rd person stealth shooters.

I would literally say whatever it took to avoid being humiliated by the first five minutes of a new game. The last thing a middle-schooler with zero confidence and zero athletic skills wants to hear is that he really sucks at gaming, too. So I would let the bravest among my friends have the first pass at guiding Solid Snake through Shadow Moses.

Eventually the first player would die in some stupid way and one of us would make some snarky, immature comment about them sucking. You know, the way middle school friends treat each other. And then the question would be posed: Who's next? Oh, not me. That shit looks hard. Better let the other expert take the reigns instead.

I was 12 and already defeating myself at every minor opportunity to succeed. Even something as stupid and trivial as a video game.

There would always come a point, either later that night or the next day or maybe a few months down the road, when I would angrily think to myself "why am I not as good at Metal Gear as my friends?" Well, because I didn't have the practice. That didn't dawn on me back then, and I would shift into another unproductive mindset thinking that I'm just not as naturally skilled as my friends.

Those negative mindsets have stuck with me to this day, albeit surfacing in more adult situations. What's the point in apologizing? I can't ever make it up to them. I can't humiliate myself by talking to her. I'm not interesting. I can't do this, I can't do that.

And those thoughts and situations inevitably lead to sitting back, watching my friends excel and wondering if I'm just not as good at life as them. Wondering why people can program faster and more elegantly than me. Wondering why my brain feels so un-pliable and unreceptive to the prospect of new experiences.

Well, you may not ever be the best at the game, but dammit, you gotta play to get better. If you take this fact for granted, and you're thinking "well duh, Kyle," then at least consider for a second that it's not easy for everyone to place confidence in themselves, especially when defeating yourself has been a ten-year habit.

I wish I'd have learned this lesson when video games and a few derisive middle school insults were at stake, rather than my human soul. But I'm tryin', dammit. I figure that humiliating myself by trying is a lot better than humiliating myself by not trying.

Efficiency

Efficiency. Doing things in the shortest amount of time with the fewest resources has always been an obsession of mine. It's why I went into engineering. It's why I get such a kick out of helping businesses work efficiently with well-designed software solutions. It's why I've Google Maps'd, tested and re-tested the hell out of every route and shortcuts to and from work.

I may not be 100% efficient 100% of the time, but dammit, there's an untold elegance in getting a jobs done simply and quickly. And I'm quirky about it.

I caught this article in the latest issue of Wired about the IOI: The International Olympiad in Informatics. The kids are savants on a level that is both foreign and frightening to me. But my god-- is there anything more beautiful than 22 lines of Pascal tearing through a multi-dimensional dataset? I posit not.

Reading through the article, you'll notice that the USA doesn't excel at the IOI in a way you might expect the birthplace of the Internet, personal computer and Furby to excel. Perhaps our performance is a criticism of this country's math and science education standards. Maybe we need to start teaching programming at a younger age. But I doubt it. After all, do you think China and Belarus really have better math and science programs than the United States?

Eh. Actually, maybe they do :-/ But no. The quality of education isn't necessarily the issue.

I just don't think American culture, as a whole, appreciates efficiency the way other nations of the world have learned, out of necessity, to appreciate it. The America I see every day cares about jobs done right and gives bonus points for efficiency. The rest of the world demands efficiency out of necessity. Lack of food. Lack of space. Lack of labor. Lack of technology.

I'm not saying the best coders in the world grew up poor and hungry. Hardly. What I'm saying is this: When you have a deep, personal connection to the realities of scarcity-- maybe in your neighborhood, maybe in your own home-- you begin to make efficiency a part of everything you do. And that sort of edge can really make all the difference, whether you're in a high school coding competition or vying for a promotion in your company.

Something to think about.

I need a more efficient way to find good new music. Any of you Belarusian kids out there wanna design me the next Pandora, so I can get my electro on?

Think Small

It's weird how inspiration can come from the most random places. An inspirational link and a quick conversation with my brother and, quite suddenly, I'm ready to start writing on this thing once again.

It all started quite innocuously this morning: Get to the office, throw on a cup of coffee and check reddit for all the easy-to-digest liberal nerd rage I can bite off with my dulled political chops. Years of caring too much have turned me from a youthfully deaf, rabid Michael Moore wannabe into one of those more sage, jaded liberals who believes in the goodness of sharing and equality but is disheartened by the empty promise of politics in America.

I noticed one particular headline that suddenly cranked my fatigued morning brain into overdrive:

This is interesting: Julian Assange's old blog. (web.archive.org)

A blog written by an academic from 2006-2007 touching on some high-minded topics such as freedom of information, love, life and humor? Interspersed with random snippets of useful Ruby code? All on a very non-flashy, flat-style page? Totally fucking early 2000's nostalgia! Where do I sign up?

To me, Assange has never been the enigmatic, borderline Aspy with a serious case of US butthurt that many media outlets have attempted to mis-characterize. To me, he's a man who values the academic principle of openness more than the academic definition of journalism. And that pragmatic attitude garners a lot of respect from me.

Professors and pundits alike may argue all day about the proportions of journalism, recklessness, integrity, fairness and freedom that constitute the WikiLeaks initiative. At the end of the day, though, WikiLeaks itself (especially with this latest iteration of leaked cables) is not dismantling the institutions it highlights. At least, not on its own. They're dismantling the facade. They're exposing the way the world works in a very candid way, leaving the accountability in the hands of those who dare to lie, mislead or at the very least not educate the public at large.

I think that's cool, because history tends to favor openness and expression.

Anyways, back to that blog.

Breezing through the international pariah's random, somewhat intimate wisdom, I found myself awash in one big, awesome thought: He blogs for the same reason I have to blog. To put my ideas out there. To reflect and check myself in a public space. To share and clarify and sharpen my position instead of keeping it in my head. I feel like those higher goals are evident in Assange's blog as they are in this one.

Blogging for me has always been more than just an indulgent exercise in narcissism, though I'd be lying if I said that wasn't some significant part of it :-) It's a giant "you are here, and this is where you've been" map for life. I do re-read my shit on occasion. I bet you're not surprised.

Honestly, I know myself well enough to know that I have never been able to keep track of myself well in my head. I lose myself. I make myself crazy with the sort of deprecating, self-defeating nonsense that left me depressed and insular for the better part of this year. But when I unleash the stream of consciousness into a finite bitstream for public consumption, well, those self-defeating thoughts get pulverized like errant letters by a springy, loud, 80's style backspace button.

So thanks to Mr. Assange for helping me realize and see the importance of writing on my blog once again.

I also chatted a bit with my brother today and, together, we came to another conclusion: That each blog post doesn't have to be some big odyssey of a tome. It feels like everything I've written in the past year or so is some historical essay on the recent life I've been living up to that point. But that sort of defeats the purpose I was just talking about. What I ended up with this year was three or four giant characterizations of my life based on those pivotal moments when I was so emotional or worked-up that I just exploded with prose. But those aren't honest. They're moving, but they're not necessarily me on-the-whole.

The odyssey isn't each constituent post. The odyssey is the blog.

(oops, I ended up saying way more than I thought I would. oh well. I promise the next post will come soon, and be small. twss?)

Tap on Glass, Talk About Future

This Saturday, in front of friends and family spanning the strata of human experience, my old friend Phillip will be getting married to his college sweetheart, Alana, up in Spokane, Washington. I had the good fortune of spending a few cozy dinners with them while they were in Houston for various academic and job-related conferences. Of course I've known Phillip since I was in kindergarten, and I could tell that he was quite in love with her the first time I saw them together.

And against what I consider to be the insurmountable odds of my own construction, I will be standing up there, too, as one of Phillip's groomsmen. And when I say "insurmountable odds of my own construction," I'm not just trying to be wordy. I mean: I thought that between my rock-and-roll lifestyle, my complete emotional abandonment of Panama City Beach, and surrounding myself with people who are equally scared of commitment, I wouldn't be attending weddings in any serious capacity until I was 30.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't necessarily think it's weird for two people who are ready to make that sort of commitment to get married. I don't have anything against getting married. It's just a concept that is so completely removed from my own experiences and where I am in my own life that I have a hard time understanding the mindset that can lead to that sort of... I dunno, "leap."

And so it does beg the question: If I'm so unable to empathize with the married man's mind at 23, then where is my life taking me? Or, as they asked in all of my job interviews this summer: Where do you see yourself in five years?

I. Have. No. Idea. I've never been able to see five years down the road. Or two. Or even a few months. It's weird.

In fact, there's only been one future for me: The Distant Future. It was purchased for me by my mom and every person who ever told me "you'll make a great father one day" when I was depressed about my condition and needed a future to see. It's the American dream that Hunter S. Thompson was trying to warn me about. It's a two-story house filled with all the gadgets and accouterments and toys of a Family Man. And it's the only thing that has ever come to mind when people ask me about my future.

Seriously. When interviewers, counselors, whoever would ask me about my own thoughts on the future, I would conjure up what I believed to be my destiny and interpolate backwards. Where do I see myself in five years? Well, ten years away from being the father of a five year old living in Cypress, TX, or something. And rich, of course. The image of me pushing a lawnmower over a chemically green plot of suburbia while my kids try to kill each other with pool noodles is so incredibly (and admittedly) strange that, well, many of my friends are probably laughing their way through this very sentence.

I guess you could say there's a divorce between the future I've always envisioned and the reality I'm living right now.

In the past few months I've started a new job, marginally come to terms with the self-destruction of my most stable and enjoyable relationship to date, supported my family through some emotionally rough rigmarole, looked for a new place to live and, oh yeah, graduated. Any one of those events would be enough to get my gears spinning about my place in the world, but the wedding thing is really the icing on my introspective, hard-to-swallow Cake of the Future.

So now, in the wake of everything, I'm finally coming to terms with what may be the first hard truth about myself I've ever learned: I'm not going to be a family man. Or, at the very least, it's not going to come easy. I'm too damaged to commit. Too clingy to make hard decisions for the good of the family. Too invested in myself to pay dividends to anyone else. Too historically untrustworthy to be trusted anymore.

It's okay.

I know that I could become this person if I wanted. If I wanted to make that life a goal, I could drop every selfish habit of mine and work toward being an A-type Archetypal American Man. But it's certainly not going to just happen to me. More importantly, for the first time in my life, I'm coming to terms with the idea that it's okay-- and likely-- that I won't. For now I just need to work on my insecurities, my shortcomings, and try to maximize the different possible directions my life might take. Clarity will come.

But if the only vague future I've ever known is gone, then what am I working toward? A legacy? An empire? Fame? Importance? Being really clever? I don't care about those things like I used to.

For now, I guess I'm just working toward tomorrow.

The Selfish Accelerated Reader

It was noontime and I was 12 years old, and all I really cared about was living a few more months.

See, I had dreamed about my 13th birthday since before I turned 9. Not for the presents, of course— though I had heard through the colloquial grapevine that they're quite good when you turn 13. A neighbor of mine from back in Virginia received an iPhone for his 13th birthday. Engraved under the ubiquitous Apple logo were the words "To Our Young Man With Love."

Forget the phone, I remember thinking. I wanted those words. I wanted to be a teenager. I wanted to join the ranks of the non-childish and command more respect from my peers and my superiors and my parents after I crossed that all-important threshold. People would start to notice how mature I was for my age once I turned 13, or so I figured.

Instead it was noontime and I was 12 years old and in a few hours I would be definitively prevented from turning 13, due to death.

I looked down at my last meal. Great. There was not a single morsel of refined sugar or high-fructose corn syrup to be found in my unassuming red lunch pack. Nothing to take the edge off.

My loving mother would have certainly packed things differently if she'd known about her son's impending demise. Every death row inmate has a right to a Dublin Dr. Pepper, even if their scheduled execution happens to fall on a no-sodas-allowed weekday. And Gushers, too. And a fistfull of the Halloween candy my mom oh-so-wisely rations during the rest of the year.

That would be such a fitting culinary finale: Indulgent, childish and cheap. My achy, busting gut would lead me outside and to my final resting place in the dirt pit next to the swings on the playground. And when the body blows finally stopped, I would die with a half-pound of sugar numbing my frail, broken body.

How sad, I lamented as I jabbed my small, white straw through the foil cap at the top of my Big Kid's Juicy Juice.

No, no, wait. Mom is more than kind, I thought— she's smart. And she loves me. If I had told her about everything at the beginning of the week, she would have definitely hidden a few throwing stars between the slices of ham in my sandwich. I could even picture my quilted napkin stained with an encouraging note.

"I packed you something extra to get you through your fight with Tommy. XOXO, Mom."

But Mom didn't know, so she didn't pack me any weapons, keep me home from school or anything.

I paced my slow, methodical bites with every other tick of the giant black-and-white clock hanging above the lunchroom. I was sitting off by myself because I told my friends that I needed to be alone with my thoughts. They had conceded and dispersed with urgency as to imply that I needed as much time as possible to get my affairs in order. To plan an escape. To save my own ass.

1) There is no escape.
2) This is happening to me for a reason.

I vacillated between these two thoughts for an eternity before the 12:35 bell snapped me out of my melancholic stupor. Guilty and literally alone, I left the lunchroom feeling like I had wasted my only opportunity to solve this problem myself.

~~~

Close your eyes. Imagine for a moment that you've been standing in a 4-way intersection, blindfolded, for hours. Cars race by you indiscriminately. You can hear engines everywhere. You can feel them warping the air as they push toward their own respective destinations with no regard as to why there is a blindfolded child standing in the intersection. But you can't see them. And then suddenly, you feel something begin to press on your shoulder. You accept your fate and flinch and hope that the next blow is the conclusive coup de grace.

That's how I flinched when James tapped me on the shoulder after English class. The time was now seconds after 1:35. Less than two hours until my own personal Iwo Jima. My body was electrically tense.

"Whoa there," James rebounded. "Didn't mean to scare you."

I tried to casually turn my head and acknowledge my well-meaning friend, but instead my head bobbled and jerked like a crazy person. I was giving him the Sideways Stare by the time I finally made eye contact.

"He-ey," I said flatly, trudging along as James stepped alongside me.

"Dude, come on," he began immediately. James was about to try and cheer me up. "You know this isn't like, the end. All the guys I've talked to think you're being downright melodramatic about this fight with Tommy."

"James," I began, "while I appreciate what you're doing, there is no way for me to convey to you the isolation and hopelessness I'm feeling right now. If I could, you would understand why downplaying the situation certainly will not cheer me up."

"Hmmph." He motioned toward the goth kids clustered at the end of the corridor, playing some trading card game. "You think they know your pain?"

I grinned. God damn, he's good. There goes my veil of melancholy. It's a lot easier to deal with people when they think you're a sad pile. That, definitely, the goth kids would understand.

"You're retarded," I countered with age-appropriate instinct. We pushed through the heavy fire doors at the end of the hall. The change in lighting and scenery seemed like a good opportunity to also shift the conversation a little bit. "What made Tommy so violent, anyways?"

He looked at me like, duh, we all know what you did. He didn't have to say anything for me to get the point.

"No, no no," I continued. "Like, Tommy is a pure sociopath. He's the guy everyone warned me about when I moved here. What makes him so— "

"Fucking evil? A natural psychopath?" James energetically shrugged with a smile.

"Exactly."

James' smile turned to a glare and he didn't say anything but walked by my side as I approached my locker.

"Look, you need get one thing straight," he then started once I popped the locker open. "Your frustration with this situation that you caused is absolutely separate from Tommy's nature as a human being."

"That's absolutely not true," I retaliated, confused as to why my own friend would want to argue about such a seemingly cut-and-dry matter right now.

I mean, I'm about to die, I thought. If anything, I wanted him to lie to me, to tell me that Tommy's an animal-torturing nutjob living with an emotionally-abusive, alcoholic, ex-cop grandparent. I wanted to hear how said grandparent methodically recounted gruesome, violent crimes to his grandson every night before bed. Tell me that's why I'm about to die, I wished.

"You are being punished for committing a very popular crime of passion that has been met with similar consequences for centuries. Just think of Tommy as a very effective executor of said consequences."

"You're missing the point of my question entirely," I sigh with unfriendly exasperation as I slam my locker shut. "You wouldn't break every bone in my body if I'd done the same thing to you."

"If you did the same thing to me," James snapped back, "I would torture you. I would manipulate and ruin you in ways that lumbering, remedial, lonely jocks like Tommy simply cannot comprehend."

"Well, I guess that makes me the luckiest guy in the world."

"But you are," James continued coldly. Then, breathlessly and with animated hands shaking near my face, "Your so-called 'torment' will be over in a matter of hours. Every god damn student at this school will consider your punishment to be adequate and the lasting consequence of your reckless and irresponsible actions will be a slight tarnish on your reputation and you don't even care about your reputation or else we would be having a completely different conversation right now."

Bewildered, I asked him what that conversation we should be having.

"If and how you can really make things right with Tommy, instead of taking the easy way out."

There was no one standing around us— the bell had sounded in the midst of James' tirade. Frustrated by my confusion and with no grandiose points left to make, James hurled his heavy messenger bag over his shoulder and began to walk away.

"Well, can I?" I shouted as I inched backward toward my next class.

"I don't think it's in your nature," he shouted back.

~~~

Tommy stood over me like a giant, chiseled idol erected by fearful savages of an era passed. It was now or never. I'd spent the last hour reaching through layers of meta-cognition to find the words that would express my guilt and sorrow. And on the other hand, I knew I had to say what I meant and not what he wanted to hear to get out of the situation.

It was now or never.

"Look," I began with a hundred thousand eyes directed down on me. "I've had a lot of time to think about what I've done, and I understand that I must not only accept the retribution you're about to deliver, but that I must actually beg for it with open, upturned hands. I have wrecked whatever notion of love and trust and peace that you had in your life and replaced it with the same lonely, insecure feeling that haunts me on a daily basis and propels me toward my dumbest decisions. But I don't want to be an infectious agent of evil and mistrust in the world. I want to do good. And I'm not trying to convince you to change your mind about beating me up. I'm only trying to make things better. I'm trying to do my part to really, really affect some positive change in your life, so that whatever happens today makes tomorrow better for all of us."

The tears on my face were all that I could feel.

Tommy's patchy, adolescent mustache twitched as his determined sneer turned into a sort of neutral, unfeeling, blank expression. I had no idea what I'd done. Everyone within an earshot of my desperate soliloquy was silent, while those standing upon higher, more distant perches in the distances buzzed with all the confusion of a bloodthirsty, uninformed mob.

"You mean that?" He finally asked after an eternity of unblinking, exasperated fear. I nodded.

He beat me relentlessly, cursing and grunting the entire time.

After the fight was over and the murmur of the crowds faded into every different direction, I rolled over onto my back and just laid there. Everyone was gone. Everyone except James.

"Tuck and roll, man, tuck and roll," he said when he was facing me. He extended his hand and pulled me up.

"Ha ha," I coughed.

"So, how do you feel right now, on a scale from one to ten?" he asked.

"Thirteen," I groaned, and flinched as he patted me on the back.

---
I wrote that during my unemployment downtime, along with lots of unrelated bits and pieces I'll be finishing over the next few months. Stay tuned: I'm not done yet.

The Great Literati Divide (or How to Kill a Student Newspaper)

Every Sunday evening, without fail, I would space out for an hour while the section editors and shakers of Rice's undergraduate newspaper argued about factual accuracy and page layout. My job as the Thresher's satirist was to give readers something to laugh at while they're taking a crap in Duncan Hall between classes, not to win a kiddie Pulitzer for the most hard-hitting investigation of campus inefficiencies. So, naturally, I often resented the fact that I was required to attend these meetings.

To the extent that I did listen, though, there was one resounding lament that I heard over the course of my tenure as Backpage editor: The Thresher's general decline in article quality. The news and copy sections have been embarrassed a number of times this past year thanks to awesome ineptitude demonstrated by the news writing staff. Check out the erratum in nearly every issue published in this year's volume. Last fall, the front page ran an article that reported one in five students was infected with H1N1 (when the number was closer to 2%). The downward trend hit rock bottom in February when Rice's administration was forced to write-in and correct glaring factual errors two weeks in a row.

Personally, I'm more upset about the decline in quality of another section: Op-Eds. The weekly editorial columns that the Thresher receives from the student body have all but flatlined in terms of caliber and general interest. Case in point: The Thresher's most prolific student author also happens to be the most out-of-touch when it comes to campus culture, writing in about how Houston is inferior to New York City and why final exams should be optional. This is the kind of thing I should have been writing about in my satire section and yet, somehow, columns like hers are still showing up on Page 3.

Pinpointing that "somehow" interests me severely. What happened to the Rice Thresher? Is Coffeehouse poisoning the staff with ayahuasca? No, because the Thresher doesn't receive free Coffeehouse coffee anymore. Thanks, Evan.

We are then left with a few reasonable explanations:

• There are no more good, dedicated writers at Rice University. They all graduated in '09.
• There are good writers at Rice University, but their work is purposefully sabotaged by the Thresher's editorial staff for some incomprehensible reason. Goddamn it Casey.
  
• There are good writers at Rice University, and they're just not writing for the Thresher.
  

Let's ignore that second point for a moment while we critically consider what has changed the landscape of Rice's undergraduate writing community over the past few years. Obviously, the first thing that comes to my mind is the Rice Standard (because Alice Townes is always on my mind, zing!). It's a student-run, university-independent magazine/blog that has really taken off in the past few year. Oh, and don't forget about Open, Rice's literary sex magazine. Open is like an episode of The Big Bang Theory with less blonds, more nudity and more frankness about nerds not getting laid. And then there's Catalyst (the research journal for kids).

Did I miss anyone? Probably. It seems like every niche at Rice has its own publication these days.

But if you take the time to read any of the publications mentioned above you'll realize that my first guess—that the good writers have gone the way of the dinosaurs—simply can't be true. The Standard (mostly) holds itself to an intellectual... standard that borders on cosmopolitan. There are a few exceptions to this rule but, on average, the essays posted on the Standard possess a quality and readability that easily exceeds that of the contemporary Thresher. While Open and Catalyst don't generate nearly as much content per year as the Standard, their existence still necessitate a certain amount of hard work and dedication from their respective editorial staffs, writers, and girls willing to show their butt-cracks to the campus. God bless you, youthful rebellion.

And so here we are, finally, at my thesis. Despite their respective intentions, publications like the Rice Standard are sucking the life out of Rice's student-run newspaper. Their crime is not a malicious crime but, instead, a crime perpetrated by sheer existence. They are draining the literary-oriented campus talent from its former, centralized location at the Thresher and directing it toward niche audiences with limited perspectives and smaller readerships.

The issue is simply a matter of limited resources. Rice's small campus has a fixed number of individuals willing to write for fun on a regular basis, and even fewer willing to read, edit and layout pages. These are busy kids. Future leaders, I'm told. And they're smart. They're going to write to maximize their exposure to interested readers, minimize the work involved in getting published and, perhaps most importantly, they're only going to write when they have the time to do so leisurely.

The Standard's WordPress format makes it easy for any member of Rice's literati to contribute a couple hundred words on a topic of their respective interest. They don't get paid, sure, but no one (except for it's own editorial staff) is writing for a living at the Thresher anyways. Standard writers also receive instant gratification and can easily and quickly engage their readers through a familiar commenting system. The Thresher's College Publisher-based website is laughably clunkier than the Standard; the rules governing when and how writers can comment on their articles on the Thresher's site are contrived and confusing.

On the other hand, the Standard's online-only format severely limits its ability to reach the entire campus. College newspapers-- at least, our college newspaper and most other small college newspapers-- don't necessarily follow the national trend of declining print newspaper readership caused by increased online readership. Picking up a free Thresher on Friday mornings is still a tradition well-ingrained in campus culture. There's even one particular professor who likes to talk to me during Friday ELEC lab about what he has read in the Thresher. The Standard, on the other hand, may reach students but not necessarily alumni and professors: It's just the nature of the beast.

And so, owing to convenience and prestige, the Standard has effectively stolen the campus' best writers away from the student body and directed their efforts toward reaching a smaller and more niche audience.

For that niche audience, though, convenience and prestige are a great thing. The Standard has a certain feel to it. Articles feel smarter. The site looks good. The pool of individuals who regularly comment on articles is small and personable. They laud intellectual discourse and shun stupidity. And while I have no doubt that the Standard is daily reading for some members of the campus administration, it is not scrutinized by the same pool of prospective students and their parents, alumni or faculty members who love to make a fuss when the Thresher does anything slightly subversive. Autonomy has made the Standard interesting.

The Standard, however, is not the face of Rice. The Thresher is the face of Rice. And when those same prospective students, alumni and faculty read yet another half-brained, last-minute opinion piece presented under the Thresher's masthead, they have to wonder what sort of students are running the student-run newspaper. Or what kind of students go to Rice.

It's in everyone's best interest for publications to present their best, most high-quality copy to the campus. But things have to change in order for that to happen. The literati have to branch out. The publications have to innovate and recognize that if any one of them is going to flourish, they have to sustainably manage their most valuable resource.

And lastly, I have my prescriptions. No giant rant pointing out the obvious would be complete without some ideas about where to go next.

For the Standard:

• Recognize that the Thresher is hurting as a result of your existence. This was, after all, one reason that the Standard was formed in the first place: As retaliation against what the founders perceived to be bias and lack of Rand-esque autonomy and free enterprise at the Thresher. Or because the founders were mad they couldn't inject their wacky, neoconservative opinions into the student newspaper. In any case, it's time to make nice.
  
• Encourage writers to increase their exposure by re-working their opinion articles toward the campus as a whole and submitting them to the Thresher. That's how activism works: Pounding every available outlet with your brand of the truth.
• Stay open to new ideas and collaboration with the Thresher. They have something you don't: Money. And they're probably willing to share it in the pursuit of readership.

For the Thresher:

• Realize where the good writers have gone, why they left and admit that you have suffered as a result.
• Work on writer incentives. Standardize (lolz) a workflow that makes it easier for writers to participate in the editorial process, provide commentary online and minimizes the amount of time they have to spend writing articles.
• In today's world, no one expects a print institution to provide the same sort of time-sensitive information that the Internet and social media provide. If an Op-Ed isn't time-sensitive but has potential, send it back for another week of revision. Work on articles for months at a time if you have to. The point is to recover some of that quality that has been lacking for the past year or two.
• Pay writers more money. If it's supposed to be an incentive, make it an incentive. Ten dollars per article is a joke to writers exhausted by their respective workloads.
• Stay open to new ideas and collaboration with the Standard. They have something you don't: Quality. And they're probably willing to share it in the pursuit of readership.

For the other campus publications:

• Just... I dunno. Write something for the Thresher and the Standard every now and then, even if it turns out to be a shallow promotion of your publication. Their editorial staff can always turn you down.

Now, what to do about armchair experts too selfish to write for any campus publication is another story entirely...

It's Christmastime

It's Christmas Eve in Truckee, California. My family decided to exchange gifts tonight; it's an unfamiliar but welcome departure from our usual crack-o'-dawn tradition. Instead, we're all planning to ride snowmobiles around Lake Tahoe tomorrow at 9 a.m. I can't think of a more unique and enjoyable way to spend Christmas Day.

I passed all of my fall semester classes. Actually, I excelled in my fall semester classes and completely surpassed my own expectations. All the time I spent flustered for the past weeks and months—worrying whether I would be allowed to graduate in May—seems to have been a complete waste of time. Perhaps not a waste but, you know, I could have been proactively positive rather than a negative Nancy the entire time. Straddling the edge, tripping over my responsibilities and worrying whether my next clumsy step will see me into another one of life's ditches... well, it's a recurring theme in my life.

My dad warned me a long time ago that he, too, spent too much of his youth worrying about things and not enough time actually doing the things that needed to be done. It must run in the family.

One of my winter projects is finished: All of the music, movies and pictures on my hard drive are now organized into nice, neat little folders. Shuffling old images reminded me how long I've been going at this whole college thing. Half a decade now. The amount of weirdness, badness and disappointment I'd blocked from my collective memory of freshman and sophomore year is startling and staggering. What else don't I remember? Would I be a better person now if I had remembered?

Would I be worrying so much about things I can control?
Would I worry more about the things I can't control?

What a decade.

I was 12 when Y2K happened. I stayed up late and watched one of Dick Clark's last New Years Eve broadcasts with my dad. I remember trading a weird, disappointed glance with him when the power didn't go out and planes didn't fall out of the sky at midnight. Barely two years later he died of esophageal cancer and his eighteen month battle with the disease is still very vivid and real in my mind. And nearly three years after that I received my acceptance letter from Rice. My good friend Phillip was there next to me when my mom came running at us from the mailbox, holding the letter and wearing the most proud smile a parent can ever hope to wear. Phillip's getting married this summer.

And what of the second half of the decade? I made do, I suppose. I had a lot of fun—both superficial fun and real, earnest, ear-to-ear smile fun—and had some great, priceless life experiences with great, priceless friends. I also did some stupid, selfish stuff that I'll never be able to undo or atone for completely. I did some bad things to people who either were my close friends or, miraculously, remain friends with me to this day. Five years of pushing the extremes for purposes that, in retrospect, boil down to selfishness, stupidity or entitlement.

But it wasn't all bad. I remember O-Week at Rice, meeting Andrew and Augusta and Louie. And even before O-Week, getting to know Sam and Allee and Leslie and all the clever nerds who were so earnestly excited to experience college. Sharing Southern sensibilities with people like Julie and Sarah who seemed like old, familiar friends the instant I met them. Austin City Limits Music Fest, both in 2006 and 2008. Road tripping across Texas to Port Aransas and Matamoros, Mexico, for spring break during my sophomore year. And to Shiner and Fredricksburg for spring break last year. Meeting a girl named Cristina who shared all my weird interests and made me feel comfortable and confident and happy while pushing me to be the better man. And those parties that saw me outside Baker College 'till 5 a.m. talking with Stef or Britt or Johan about life, love, movies, music &stuff.

Not bad for five years. Not at all. And, deep down, I know that the person ending this decade is the same person that started it: The one who is surprised when planes don't fall out of the sky.

I'm the last person awake here in the little vacation cottage my mom won for a week in a contest several months ago. Goodnight, blog.

Thanks for the trip I took

(Reporting from Atlanta. Can't blog from Houston anymore. I've decided that's the problem. My house is a void of pure evil that saps both the heat and the will to write out of my body.)

You know, I'm always surprised when I don't see more Rice students begrudgingly shuffling around the Atlanta airport the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It's a major hub, ya know. In my four or so years of making these trips to-and-from Panama City Beach and Houston, I think I've run into roughly five people I recognize and only one I knew well enough to sit down and talk to. The girl I sat next to from Panama City to Atlanta is in the same gate area as me right now right now, heading back to Houston, too. But her sweatshirt says she's an Aggie so, you know, whatever.

I had a good time in Panama City Beach this time around. Ran into Bob at Borders on Black Friday, had a few drinks with Roy at Fridays. Things seem to have calmed down a bit. There's not a lot of shuffling in the dark looking for personality or individuality. People are settling into their lives, completely outside of and separated from their youth. I'm not sure I exude the same sense of maturity. I am, after all, still a Kid.

I'll admit it: That's something I'm always scared of when I go home. It's the reason I don't go out of my way to see people while I'm in town. I don't always feel like I've lived up to being the Great White Hope that my family friends packed their dreams into before shipping me off to Rice. I'm not graduated and making that six-figure salary that defines "success" among the simple people who saw so much promise in the drive and work ethic of yesteryear.

(Interjection! There's definitely someone wearing a "Rice Athletics" shirt in the terminal now, but hell if I know who they are. And hell if they'd recognize me. Though I am famous.)

And yet, somehow, I once again feel a restored sense that everything is going to be alright. It only takes a few kind words from the people who know you best to reassure you that you haven't gotten any stupider, that you still are the Great White Hope and that you still boast the qualities that saw you out of Florida in the first place. I watched Up and welled up at the emotional parts and it felt good to know that there's still a mushy kid with true feelings hiding inside my sarcastic, selfish, insecure Houston persona. Somewhere.

I have lots to be thankful for.

Lamenting in two dimensions

How I didn't spend my summer vacation

If you've been in mourning for the past few weeks because you figured I was eaten by rats, fear not: I've not fallen prey to rats or fleas or vampires or anything in the complex ecosystem thriving under my floorboards. Instead I was swallowed up by the summer and a very fire-and-forget lifestyle.

For the past few months now-- summer, essentially-- I've been neglecting my blog and instead Tweeting my life away in 140-character blurbs. Every day I wake up, drive to work, and spend every moment of my downtime following Tweets about Houston restaurants, Billy Mays, fonts, social media, open education, and local drink specials.Then I throw my own two cents in to the mix. And since I'm the social media guy at work, I spend a good amount of my "uptime" perusing Twitter and Facebook. It's a job most guys would kill to have.

...except I can feel the toll it's starting to take on my personality (and my brain). I was built to do and reflect, not to do and forget. Twitter and other tools of the so-call social revolution put so much emphasis on the "now" that it's easy to forget to stop and smell the roses. Whereas I used to pause and carefully consider the implications of the respective past few days in my semi-regular blog posts, Twitter allows me only 140 characters to state the bare minimum before moving on to the next big event in my life. Or your life. So many lives, so much information.

If this blog has served any purpose in the past eight years, it's at least been a good place to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I have honestly reached the limit of how much data I can consume and regurgitate and sort in one day. I go to bed feeling like the 1997 New York Stock Exchange is trading Microsoft in my head. And for all this processing and grief, what do I have to show for it? Nothing. I retain little or nothing more than the ability to gloat about hearing news first, whatever that news may have been.

I've got to push something useless out of my head before classes start back up. Gotta make room for senior year in there, somewhere.

Severely not blogging

It's a real travesty when I get into a good grove re: blogging all the time and then, quite suddenly, life throws the kitchen sink at me. Apparently this phenomena runs in the family. Bullet points, perhaps?

• Moved into new house. It's great, except for the rat(s?) and broken dishwasher and dryer. Suddenly the advantages of living in an apartment complex begin to shine through. I am, however, loving the extra space and backyard and place to grill. If anyone knows how you get a landlord to do the things he says he's going to do on-time, please let me know.
  
• Started taking classes at Rice again. Diffy. Homework every night eats up my free time in the worst way.
  
• Still working too much. Building a blog/social networking experience for my employer. Basically the best summer job anyone has ever had, ever. And I really like how my current is turning into a career segue for some very hands-on, technology-minded marketing job down the road. I would be a lot happier if it didn't chew up my summer days.
• 2x 2 miles/day jogging regime around the new neighborhood. There's quite a lot to see around the Richmond/Montrose area.

Something ranty will follow soon, I promise.

Not Quite Dorsia, but it'll do

Dinner at Benjy's with the bro!

My New House

I really, really need to get a new camera. After all, how am I supposed to gloat about my awesome new place without any accompanying pictures?

Google Street View, I guess!


View Larger Map

...so fucking creepy.

Anyways. Yes, I am now a proud resident of the lower Montrose/upper University Place. Now I can trade my white-collar Museum District pretension for the tastier, trendier pretension of living in the most liberal part of town.

Friends are like friends, man

Oh, TMCM. I've been a fan of this alt-weekly comic since the late 90s, when my aunt would ship bundles of the Austin Chronicle with chocolate and presents from Texas to my podunk home in Florida. Hipster since the age of goddamn 11.

[Too Much Coffee Man - 5/11/09]