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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Happiness is a list of bullet points

I have every topic in the world to talk about. I could talk about how happy I've been lately. I could talk about how I've been jogging and cutting out smoking and getting good grades and going to class and fleshing out a plan for after college and all the other things that have been peachy lately but...

...I'm also feeling downright uninspired. For all good that's come to me I feel completely incapable of expressing it in words. I've gone through three completely separate drafts for Thresher columns and toiled over two different works of fiction in my spare time, with each literary endeavor failing to meet whatever strange expectations I've come to place upon myself.

Writing is funny like that.

I know I have a lot of things to say. But every little caustic thought is trapped up in my noggin, where I don't have to worry about burning anyone else. You know me-- I like spilling my guts. I was raised to believe it's therapeutic but, then again, I was also raised Protestant.

Life doesn't need to get easier. I can handle this. I can handle everything and I am happy, I'm not just saying that. But I do need something. I need reassurance. I need to know that all this hard work, all this electrical engineering, and all my life's current endeavors are going to lead me to a happy place. That I'm not wasting my time. It doesn't have to be the place I expect now and it doesn't have to be soon.

I sure do have some weird expectations.

I've gone introvert

It's been a over week, I know. I actually have four half-written posts sitting in the drafts purgatory. The funny this is that I get about halfway through writing something really funny for thought-provoking, then decide that the idea is stupid or that I'm not spending enough time crafting it into a feature worth reading. I've also tried twice to write a follow-up article for the Thresher only to discover that I'm not really mad about anything enough to warrant a 750-word feature. At least anything campus-wide.

I've hated parties lately. Why do I hate parties lately? Maybe it's the fact that I'm not running them. Maybe it's the certainty of knowing I'm going to be alone at the end of the night. Maybe it's not just being alone but watching everyone else be so damn happy while I'm not. It's all so tedious. You sit around for four hours grinding your teeth and making fake smiles into cameras, talking to the same six people over the course of the night and hoping that maybe someone put something pharmacological in the punch so you won't remember anything the next morning. Or maybe that's just me.

I've thought about NOD, and how I'm either skipping it altogether or... well, I don't know. Parties are starting to piss me off something awful. Parties are the dynamic I thrived on for two years at Rice and now I'm just about sick of them. NOD is the worst party for me in this sense. I can't dress up all naked like the rest of campus because I have the body of your decrepit old uncle, I'm not in the market to carry some drunk Asian girl back to my apartment at the end of the night, and the theme sucks this year. Plus a good number of my friends will be gone at Voodoo Music Fest. I might as well just sit at home and count the number of sharp objects I could use to go emo on my wrists.

No, no, Kyle. Don't talk about how parties make you mad. Parties make everyone else happy. Saying you hate parties is like personally insulting everyone who reads your blog for the off-chance that you'll connect with the one or two people in the world that might agree.

Fine. Bullet-points.

• Heroes sure is awesome.
• Weeds is getting a little weird for my taste.
• But I'll still watch it.
• My computer needs... I need a new computer.
• Fuck you.
• Fuck you.
• You're cool.
• Why am I in such a bad mood?

It was the best of times, it was...

My first two years at Rice can be summed up as follows: take a diverse group of top-tier high school grads, throw them in a two-by-two box with a bunch of booze and a few digital cameras, and watch as they try to kill each other in the most roundabout, socially passive-aggressive ways possible. I mean, fuck, it's college. As such, Rice offers students many, many opportunities to see their peers at their worst. I don't necessarily mean that you get to watch them spewing vomit upwards like a geyser in the middle of your common room at 5AM on a Tuesday, though you do get to see plenty of that, too.

I'm talking about the shouting matches. The 3AM-and-I-must-be-lonely blues. The crying and the heartbreak and the depression. The idle punches at brick walls and the soccer balls kicked high into the sun-scorched branches of the trees, just to ruin some poor squirrel's day. The "you don't give a shit about anything but your fucking flag football game and your XBox," and the ensuing make-up sex that shakes the entire building. I've seen it all.

Except I haven't, and that's the point. I used to think that the real hipsters on campus were the ones that had their moments of brooding and heartache and even a tinge of anger. The ones that weren't happy all the time. Those were the kids everyone wanted to connect to, or so I thought. Not the real emo kids or the ones with the Invader Zim lunchboxes, but the ones with the pinstripe vintage suits and an ironic T-shirts.

But then I up and found out that it's all a lie. As time went on, the real harbingers of the social scene were the ones that never took a stand. It's easy to be liked when you don't show anything but your drunk face. The ones that never got depressed or never made a girl cry-- they are the real champions.

The startling conclusion I reached on this otherwise stupid train of thought was that I actually have friends who never get angry. Ever. Or at least they never show it. I have friends who never seem to be sad or depressed or upset or anything besides jovial. It's creepy, I know, but what's creepier is that I never actually considered them to be shallow people. Just happy people. I envied them from afar, not only because everyone thought they were cool but because they honestly seemed content.

And not a hateful envy, like when your neighbor gets an iPhone and you've still got a RAZR and all you want to do is pin Steve Jobs' corpse to their mantle with a nailgun. Nothing like that. I'm talking about the envy you feel when you see two brothers at Target playing cowboy in the toy aisle with plastic guns still wrapped in cardboard and you just wish you could have that simplicity in your life. You wish you could go back.

Of course, everyone at Rice gets mad. That was just a gross generalization from my twisted perspective. The ones who keep it together are the ones who reap the social harvest.

And from all this, we can learn. Or I can learn, and you can play along by reading my blog. Thinking about how people seemed content, whether they actually are or not, I realized that a good deal of my own self-inflicted agony torment depression problem-stuff stems from refusing to be content. You know-- always thinking that there's something better around the corner, and all I have to do is completely change my life-plan in order to make it work.

But I'm working on it. Feeling content, not changing my life-plan.

And isn't it ironic, dontchathink?

I think it's funny how I always expect the big days of my life to offset all the shitty little ones. Yesterday, Dis-O, was no exception. It's not like I necessarily had high hopes about the day or anything in particular, I just wanted to walk away from it with a better taste in my mouth than when I arrived. After all, I've been working hard these past few weeks. I deserved something to go my way.

No such luck.

It all started well enough, anyways. But by the time 11pm rolled around, I had been stood up by so many of my friends on so many different occasions that I was pretty much ready to break into the registrar's office, pull my file, cash in my tuition, and start a new life up in northern California. I felt so taken for granted. Not included. On the backburner.

I have this sense that the general feel of last night is going to play heavily into my attitude for the rest of the semester. I'm no longer excited about anything. I feel like school is just another form of work, complete with a spectrum of people surrounding you that range from funny and tolerable to evil and two-faced. Except school requires me to use my brain in place of my biceps.

I needed Dis-O to be fun, and it was for the first few hours. The new freshman class at Rice is promising as ever. But after none of your friends call you for six or seven hours and everyone else is running around high on hormones and Hennessey and you just need one person to come rescue you from yourself and it doesn't happen... well, you get the point.

Ah, let's see... I need to talk about something more positive so people don't get all "OMG R U OK" on me. I followed through with my Sunday lunchtime tradition today by driving down to Chipotle and having a barbacoa burrito with everything on it. I read the Houston Press and felt like I could easily walk into their office with a printed copy of my blog and get a job on the spot.

I think it's pretty absurd that the mainstream newspaper in Houston-- the Chronicle-- is actually a liberal paper while the the Press seems to be falling into a more and more conservative bias. I mean, it's fucking Houston. You'd figure that the Chron would be run by cowboy meth addicts who carry around six-shooters and lynch black people after church on Sunday. And you'd figure that the alternative press in Houston would be run by liberals so far out on acid that they were fired from their jobs as at the Austin Chronicle.

Nevertheless, it's my tradition to sit there and read the sardonic wit of Richard Connelly as he talks about such Houston mainstays as ferret owners and corroded sewer pipes that pump oil refinery waste into your bidet. And they have This Modern World and The City, which is cool.

It's important to have traditions that you can adhere to when the rest of the world is busy hitting on guys and girls and tripping on mushrooms, metaphorically of course. There's something about a huge, disgusting burrito, a cold Dr. Pepper, and an alternative press rag that can inspire even me to get out of bed in the morning.

Throwing thought-darts at the concentric colored rings of right and wrong

I sat here and tried to put into words how I'm feeling. I had a few little nuggets that grazed the surface but, in the end, all I could come up with is this little request--

I hope that when I die, willing it be many many years from now, people greeted with the news-- co-workers, acquaintances, and friends of my friends-- decide that the entirety of my life was more important than one day and a keg of beer.

Yesterday, I watched in complete disbelief as many people chose that one day and that keg of beer over respecting the death of a Rice student. And it's as clean-cut as that.

I should be doing laundry but...

...instead I'm going to dump my brain on the Internet. Here's a random assortment of thoughts that have jumped the neurons in my noggin over the past few days.

If someone doesn't break my junk before the time comes, one day I'm going to have a kid. And one day I'm going to have to look that kid straight in the eye and tell 'em that I never did drugs, that drinking excessively is dangerous and not fun, that there is a higher power that beats down on us and causes the cogs of the world to spin. I'm going to put forth my super seed in order to help make my genius baby, then I'm going to lie to it like no one's business just like all parents lie to their kids. Because lying is the secret to raising a kid who isn't a dysfunctional monster.

Just think of anyone who was raised on absolute truth about all things, then think about how fucked up they are. Of all the people I can think of-- my close friends and people I knew growing up-- the kids who were raised on facts and truth on the part of their parents are the ones who are now in a very dismal condition. Most are depressed, very few of them have any ambition, and they're all real selfish buggers.

That's because parenting is a race to see if you can keep your kid innocent long enough for them to comprehend the true nature of the world. Twelve-year-olds can't comprehend the dangers of drug use; six year olds can't fully grasp the concept of death. You have to wait until they've taken in enough of the world on their own to reveal the truth from a parent's perspective. And that's that.

So meanwhile, I'm really enjoying these new playlists I made. I made three the other day. One of them has a good mix of early post-punk and generic Britishness called "the darker 80's." It's chocked full of Joy Division and Gang of Four and Chameleons and Echo and Wire. Then I have one called "the lighter 80's" with fair amounts of classic 80's fare. Blondie, Huey Lewis, Elvis Costello, Michael Jackson, etc. Then I made a good little "post-punk revival" playlist with basically every band worth listening to since 2000 on it. Yeah, I know. I'm in a very post-punk mood lately. Throbbing bass and all those dark undertones.

Allee asked me if Ian Curtis kind of looked like the lead singer from Muse. I just told her that every British lead singer from the past 30 years has that whole sunken-in cheeks AIDS look going on. I think they aren't feeding those Manchester boys very well, or something.

I made a YTMND. Check it.

I absolutely hate doing laundry. I'm starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, I can put it off until Christmas break. I figure by then someone very close to me, either Louie or Allee, will just do it for me.

I really shouldn't post my genius plans on the Internet.

Today at dinner I realized that if it weren't for my family, there really wouldn't be a whole lot of reason for me to go home for Christmas. I think a Christmas with my Rice pals would be something interesting if nothing else. And fuck me if I haven't purchased one paltry present for anyone yet. I'm going to get my ass beat when all my friends and family get a donation to the Human Fund from yours truly.

Finally, I'm four pages into a story I started writing a week or two ago. Delicious, single-spaced pages. It's the second time I've been able to get more than two pages into anything written of my own volition. The first time was this really great story about life in Panama City Beach written about three years ago that I might post one day. I don't know. I used to impress girls with it.

I'm outtie.

Turkey Day 2006

There are so many great things about coming home for Thanksgiving, the least of which certainly isn't the food. God, I ate so much food today. But sitting here in my room-- which my mom up and decided needed to be painted canary yellow for some deep-seated philosophical reason-- I realize what I am truly thankful for.

Two-ply, expensive, silky toilet paper.

It was the first real sign that I was home. After five hours in the air, a heaping plate of chicken Marcella in Pensacola that fell on a bed of pretzels and Mr. Pibb in my stomach, and a two-hour car ride home down I-10, I was ready to do my business. I'm not exactly the most exciting or sexy person to think about in the context pooping, so I'll try to spare you that little mental thought, unless you already had it in which case I apologize. Just replace me with Brad Pitt or something.

Anyways, I dropped by deuce and during the "we-all-do-it-because-we're-human" act of wiping, I noticed a feeling that had been foreign to my bum for over three months. It wasn't pleasure-- I mean, I wasn't getting any kicks out of it. It was more like relief. I suddenly realized I wasn't wiping my ass with the fine, one-ply slices of the sandpaper tree that Rice University stocks in every on-campus facility. My mind drifted to those commercials for toilet paper that I had always mocked before going to college.

"You know, toilet paper is toilet paper," I had always told myself. It didn't matter if it was the quilted kind or the brand infused with essential oils (essential oils are, of course, made of the souls of kittens and the skins of kidnapped fetuses). Then I went to college, whose bathrooms were honestly worse than the only other public bathroom that I had frequented up to that point: the Bay County School bathroom. And those weren't all that bad. Bay County School bathrooms were stocked with TP that was, at the very least, made of two sandwiched sheets of something.

I told my mom how thankful I am for good toilet paper today at the lunch table, relatives and her fiance and his daughter all gathered around. She thinks I'm losing my mind in college. And I am.

My past two nights have been sort of typical of life here in Panama City Beach after high school. There are people sitting around an apartment, playing Gamecube or watching HBO or the Real World. It's not exactly a whole lot different than what I do on any given night in Houston except, for some reason, it feels a whole lot more desperate and depraved here in Panama City Beach. Maybe it's the fact that the people in Houston are generally cleaner and smarter, and that little safety net makes me feel comfortable.

I went to a bar last night, 2 Le Monde, which was a seedy joint teeming with underage drinkers and run by a solitary, squat little Indian man. After getting over myself and how utterly ridiculous the situation was-- with all of the redneck scum and the tanned scenesters with the pierced eyebrows-- I gave in and helped kill a few pitchers of Amber Bach with Matt, Kevin, Steven, etc. All in all it was a good night and, if anything, was an exercise in enjoying myself in really not-me situations.

Every year, around this time, I bitch about how hopeless my friends are. Not all of them: just a few in particular. And they're still a little hopeless, but I'm just past making it a point of contention. The more I hear my friends talk about their plans, the more I realize that they're happy with the basics. All of their squandered potential aside, I'm definitely not in a position to be telling them how they can be happier. I'm jealous of the fact that they at least feel content in a world that constantly bugs the hell out of me.

I guess my biggest qualm is that some of them don't want to leave Panama City as much as they should. I think it's an awful thing to not see more of this big world while you still can. Backing that thought up with some sort of high-minded philosophical reasoning is pointless. It's just the way I feel. You only get one life to live, and I still think that you should make the most of it in a way that makes you happy.

So I'm sure everyone else is having a good holiday. Gobble gobble, motherfuckers.