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.

Clenchè

So what's a boy to do, waiting to be cleared through security at 6AM two days before Christmas?

Fidgeting is not an option in the Expert Traveler line. Pausing for the slightest moment holds up this so-called fast lane and makes you the target of businessman ire: You can practically feel the hate seething off their thumbs and into their Blackberries if you don't continue the slow shuffle forward. But the queue moves too fast to start unpacking your laptop or removing your boots. Reading is stupid and moot and puts off a pretentious air that's completely unappreciated so early in the morning. And I'm totally self-conscious when traveling by myself.

So, what's a boy to do?

My bored eyes busied themselves by searching the crowds as they often do, looking for odd behavior or cleavage or well-done pedicures or ironic T-shirts or hair styles I should consider trying down the road. Anything to keep me from breaking down into nervous, tired twitches-- I hear that's how you get chosen for a cavity search.

During this idle waiting time I started to notice a certain, particular behavior shared by every potential passenger: Clenching. No one passes through the metal detector without tightening their rear cheeks, and no one relaxes until they're waved on to collect their belongings.

At first, I thought it was some sign of guilt. Those people must have condoms full of heroin stashed up there. Maybe they're hiding some CP on their laptops. Maybe they know they're going to set off the metal detector with their C4-lined Mujahideen briefs. But then I noticed that even kids as young as seven or eight tighten up with fear as they pass through America's second-most-ominous arch. Husbands, wives, geriatrics, and 20something hipsters alike all pinch up painfully as they prepare for TSA judgment.

So why does this universal behavior exist, anyways? Houston Hobby has to be one of the more likely places you might find a completely guiltless Christian person who could pass through security with their conscience clean and their ass relaxed. It also happens to be the sort of place where you might find asses so big that clenching is just too much effort. Is it some sort of mass post-9/11 phenomena that speaks to our culture of fear? Or is it a certain distrust of technology, knowing that these metal detectors go off even when you're ferrous-free? Maybe the entire country really is on drugs and everyone worries whether they forgot to take the pocket pipe out of their apple-bottom jeans before heading home for the holidays.

I was lost in these thoughts as I went through the traditional motions: Step up, grab the gray bin, throw your Docs in with your laptop, throw the backpack on, top it with the plastic baggie full of allergy meds and Tide stain sticks, watch your stuff disappear into the magic false-color X-ray machine, and then...

I stared ahead at the kind-looking TSA attendant on the other side of the beige arch. She smiled but held her hand up, signaling that it was not yet my time to pass. I glanced at the bar of LED lights on top of the detector as it fluctuated with randomly-changing electromagnetic fields. I was about to be the guinna pig in my own little experiment: Can you really pass through this thing without tightening up?

She waved me forward, like Neo ready to take on Agent Smith. Her gesture was some sort of dare. But I knew I could do it. I tried to reassure myself. I turned my pockets inside out before I put on my pants this morning. The last guy made it through no problem, and his teeth looked loaded with fillings. No turning back now. This isn't just an experiment. This is a challenge to discard the past eight years of fear-mongering American life and...

...and...

...and by the time I opened my eyes from the feighned blink, I was on the other side of the detector, handing the TSA agent my boarding pass like I always do. I sighed and relaxed.

Christmas in July

We eagerly dashed across the street, heeding the flashing orange hand and countdown that beckoned us out of the neighborhood and into the lights of the city. The remaining hues of daytime were now gone. They'd been replaced by steady greens and reds and sodium yellows and halogen whites that bled and hovered over the brick and stone and glass pillars of the Medical Center. Behind that lingering urban fog was a was a darkness that begged for illumination.

It was almost nine o'clock by the time we finally reached the METROrail stop. Our northbound journey took us winding alongside the overgrown oaks of Hermann Park, shifting and bumping and jerking as the train held loosely to the metal rails below. We all stared through the windows at the streaks of city as they whizzed past. Our sealed lips held back devilish grins. I took comfort in the fact that spacing out at the beauty of the night is a commonplace on trains.

The doors of the train hissed open to madness as we marched out into the crowds. Neighborhoods stretching from West University to Midtown had all converged on Hermann Park to watch the night's spectacle. We continued our urban migration alongside the area's luxurious high rise apartments, where residents were leaned half-awake on their balconies waiting for the night to begin. A quick-paced current of families and couples pushed against us, headed in the opposite direction.

Finally, we reached the parking garage of my own apartment complex. Our nervous, eager legs knew only acceleration as we pushed our way up the stairs to the roof. We counted the floors-- four, five, and finally an unmarked door that opened to a most spectacular view of Downtown Houston.

I took a deep breath of night air and looked around. There was an overwhelming sense of childhood innocence that jumped from smile to smile between the young and old residents gathered on the roof. The children were armed with small American flags, waving them viciously around as their parents leaned over the edge of the roof, tending their half-full beers with one hand and holding their respective others'. College students like us dangled their legs over the edges of pick-up truck tailgates.

From the roof we could see every inch of the Harris County skyline, from the Galleria to the far-off tower at the University of Houston and even specks of lights coming from Galveston. As the proverbial clock ticked seconds closer to 9:30, we began to hear small cracks and bangs from all over the city. Then one large snap far off in the distance hushed Houston like a deadly shockwave.

An explosion of florescent color sent shards of light bouncing in every direction, shimmering off the sharp edges of the skyline and projecting an eerie chromaticity onto the city below. Fiery specks of light moved through the air and painted it with Day-Glo trails and streaks of smoke. We stood and watched this with our mouths gaped open, our eyes fixed to the north. Patterns of hearts, faces, and planets emerged from the initial blinding flashes. As the intensity of the eruptions increased, as did the choir of oohs and ahhs and deep breaths and shuffling feet around me.

I was ecstatic by the time the bright lights of the finale dimmed against the faces around me-- faces that wore expressions of hope, celebration, bewilderment, reflection, and a lifetime of Fourth of July celebrations past. It truly was Christmas in July.

A Very Domestic Christmas

From left, going in a semi-clockwise to right thing.

• J-Crew Hooded Sweater (sooooooo comfy)
• Reese's Cups
• Pez
• Argyle Socks
• 12" Skillet WITH Teflon coating AND a glass lid!
• Framed Albums: Dire Straits, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Tom Tom Club
• Toolkit
• Asus eeePC 8G (hump hump hump)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Special Edition 2-Disc Set
  
• Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos
• Chocolate Covered Goodness

Another wonderful Christmas, if you ask me. Charlie Wilson's War at four, and Christmas turkey now!

Obligatory Chistmas Eve Junk

Does Bono know he needs a haircut?


Gotta make room for Andy Dick!


The curse of being a man.

From the Barnhart Compound to you, Happy Holidays. HAPPY HOLIDAYS. A very all-inclusive, wonderful, non-commercial, secular holiday season to everyone.

Kyle