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.

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.

How do high school seniors argue?

Surprise, high school friends! I took a little trip in my time machine back to a time when my liberal douching could set fire to the unaware passerby and my cache of argumentative ammunition was well-stocked. Check out these Xanga posts from back in 2004:

When President Bush decided to hop in his jet and stump down in Panama City, you can bet I had something to say about it. The cartoon in the link below is a sort of jab at all my friends who decided to attend the rally.
http://www.xanga.com/a_good_example/119693789/item.html

Of course, there was the occasional breakthrough of logic in my head. I still get those every once in a while but I've learned to suppress the logic in favor of smoking a cigarette. Oh, and me harping on heartstrings is just something you need to read anyway.
http://www.xanga.com/a_good_example/105596143/item.html

A discussion of whether I even matter. Definitely a good example of high schoolers at their best.
http://www.xanga.com/a_good_example/103900176/item.html

But it wouldn't be fair if this post was exclusively masturbatory. Check me being a true liberal douche, calling Michael Moore a "well-researched activist." Someone gag me with a mayonnaise-covered hot dog before Michael Moore eats it.
http://www.xanga.com/a_good_example/99299687/item.html

If there's one thing I still have, it's my ability to piss people off. I guess that hasn't changed at all. What I'd be more interested to find would be if my friend's political views-- especially the ones who argue tooth-and-nail in those above links-- still hold as strong to their views today. I know I don't.

High schoolers argue with an inflated sense of the world and their effect upon it. When you're limited to a school of 1200 students and teachers that get a kick out of seeing kids argue, you get the encouragement and audience necessary to feel like you're affecting something. These days, I feel like the true geniuses are the ones that see the futility in political discussions.

No one changes their minds anymore. No one is open minded. So you have to take clever, more intricate routes to changing minds.

That's where Kyle 2008 steps in to bitchslap his former self circa 2004 while, at the same time, appreciating all the fervor that put me here in the first place.

Saturday Free for All Op-Ed - Panama City News Herald - 1/5/2008

I got a call this morning from my mommy that my Letter of the Editor made it into the Saturday Free-For-All section of the Panama City News Herald. I haven't seen it yet, but below is the text I penned in one angry night.

The article pretty much explains itself. If you want to read (or even participate!) in the Squall Line and call me a pompous ass (clever!), you can find it at:

http://newsherald.com/squall/

Sitting down to a the News Herald-- the local paper that taught me about the media's role in local and state politics-- has been a breakfast time tradition for me since middle school. With my pancakes stacked high, I work my way through the front page, the national news, and eventually hit the lovable and progressive letters to the editor that Bay County has to offer. And whether I agree with the opinions or not, it has always been a pleasure to know that this town has some highly educated, politically active free thinkers. Yet since I left the Redneck Riviera to study in that oil refinery-lovin', gun-totin', culturally devoid but otherwise lovable city they call Houston, I've come back home at the holidays to find a scenic obstruction in my otherwise clockwork perusing of the paper.

The Squall Line.

I think that most rational people, including those who operate the News Herald, would recognize that the Squall Line is about the most morally and intellectually unproductive way that a print media institution could possibly utilize its page real estate. And that's directed towards a paper that sometimes features local politicians.

See, I spend a lot of time on the Internet. It's a place of uninformed, ridiculous opinions slung like mud back and forth between people hiding behind the anonymity that the Web has to offer. Hey, and half of the time that's why it's entertaining. The Squall Line is an extension of this unproductive mudslinging. It allows the community a public forum to say ridiculous things like "global warming is dumb," and "I sure hate this politician," and "go GATORS!" When granted anonymity, relatively intelligent people will act pretty silly.

If the Squall Line was indeed a joke it might be a funny one. But the News Herald advertises for the Squall Line as if it's an alternative to writing an informed letter to the editor, asking its readers to "sound off!" So rather than research their opinions, back them up with facts abounding and sign their names proudly at the bottom, today's News Herald readership can conduct some seriously brainless arguing using a local number or, even worse, that Internet thing I was talking about earlier.

I come from a school of thought-- an archaic one, perhaps-- that demands a certain amount of accountability from its press institutions. When was the last time any Pulitzer-worthy newspaper was caught printing uninformed one-liners from people too lazy to make a sustained argument to back up their opinions? Don't mistake the Squall Line for "local flair," either. Local flair is something that I've been proud of since I was old enough to recognize it. Local flair is on the Saturday Free-For-All page. Local flair is printed daily, with substance, in the Forty-One Cent Forum and has been (albeit under different names according to the postage rate) since before I could read at all.

In all its grand irony, the Squall Line on page two replaced a feature that was very near and dear to me. Remember reading about what happened on this day in history? I do. I used to soak up the daily history lesson featured on page two of the News Herald. Now that history lesson has been cut down to a few lines sandwiched between the funny pages and the daily Sudoku puzzle. Perhaps that, my local friends, is the best metaphor for the day and age we live in-- the ridiculous one-liners are on page two while the truly educating material is buried next to "Pearls Before Swine" and "Garfield."

Then again, I think Garfield has taught me more than the Squall Line.

Kyle Barnhart
Rice University
Houston, Texas

Like a lungfull of needles, and I love it

I woke up with the crisp fangs of winter chewing on my nose for the first time since I moved into the Esplanade. And I loved it. I love the things that remind me of the season.

I fucking love winter.

See, I think it all goes back to growing up in Panama City Beach with some of the most gorgeous people you'll ever meet, both guys and gals. It was a very superficial world centered around tanning beds, going to the beach to tan, and hitting the gym before going to work on that tan. Winter was the great equalizer, drastically so back home; no longer did the pudgy and the pale feel the sting of inadequacy because God thought it would be funny to make them ugly and fat.

Winter undoes God's cruel joke and shoots the sun out of the sky. It forces us to bundle up. With enough layers of wool everyone looks like a giant, walking Hershey Kiss.

Winter is the American burqa.

Then our personalities come out to play. Our true selves are revealed, not pressured by the world of self-involved, masturbatory obsession on looks. Winter means having to hold a conversation. Winter means knowing what to do with yourself when the sun's not shining.

I am happier during winter.



Thanksgiving break was amazing, albeit short as always. I feel like I connected with my friends a lot better this time around since most of them are finally at real people college. It was a good prelude to the upcoming winter break. Winter break is going to be amazing.

Most of the Christmas gifts from my mom were bought on Black Friday. Check my two favorite.



Sexy.

I have another Thresher article hitting the stands Thursday night. But what I'm really waiting for is public reaction, because I'm ready to grab some friends and shakedown anyone who dares to argue with me.

Big bites of summer, now devoured

Ah, let's see. I don't even know where to start.

I guess I'll start with what's fresh in my mind. I re-read Less Than Zero on the plane ride back from Orlando last night. It's not like it's my favorite book. I mean, it's very much non-plot driven and basically exists to shock the reader into understanding why contemporary society is bullshit, as is the case for most of Bret Easton Ellis's work. But like I've mentioned before, that book has an eerie connection to me. Every page seems to strike a chord with some facet of my life.

Like the idea that you can feel nothing for... weeks. That you can go days and days without giving a shit. Or that maybe you are feeling, it's just on a completely different level than anyone else can possibly understand. Ellis gets it. No one else gets it, but he pens it as I feel it. Or don't feel it, you know.

And then there's the whole hating your hometown thing. I've lived so many nights back in Panama City Beach just like Clay lives his nights back in LA. I've lived them fast, substance abound, staring out from the corner of a really nice house onto a hardwood floor teeming with people I swore I'd never speak to again. It's weird to think that there are people out there like me who sip their beer with complete contempt for everything, wanting nothing more than to be back at the college that welcomes them with open arms.

You might as well turn the clock from early 80's to 2007, rename Clay to Kyle, and move the story from LA to PCB. Seriously. So yeah, if you want a little insight into my internal dialog and what it's like for me on Christmas breaks, pick up a copy of Less Than Zero and give it a whirl.

I've been on two trips since we last spoke. I made a New England trip to see Allee and see all the sights and sounds of New York and Philly. Every time I go back up north, I'm reminded why I'm so lucky to be at Rice. The air is static and dry up north, with everyone you pass on-edge and waiting to pounce. Everyone is just dying to use that trademark New York/Philly vernacular to hit you with curse words you've never heard before. I'll take the down-home, blue-collar southern feel of Houston over that crap any day. But it was still a fun experience. Me and Allee hit up all the places in NYC worth hitting up, I got to ride a train, and I ate a big fat cheese steak at Gino's.

Then after a week or two of straight-up IT at Rice and finishing my summer math class, I traveled down to Orlando to see my brother and assist as best I could with his move-in. We hit up Magic Kingdom and just generally had a good time. I guess my biggest regret is not getting to spend any one-on-one time with him; we were a group of people the entire time. Hopefully he'll come visit me here in Houston now that I'm not living in the world's only multifunction nightclub slash cesspool slash warzone (you know, the WRC 90's). But I was actually pretty bummed when I left.

The next two weeks are guaranteed to be a little bit like hell on earth. I've got to start pulling overtime in order to amass the cash I need to make it through the year. And everyone's coming back to Houston, which means my able-bodied arms are going to be loaded down with bookcases and boxes and anything else that people need toted about.

I need to clean my apartment. I need to Swiffer and dust and I need to do dishes. I need to put things in their places. I need to start working out and I need to shave more often. I need to start taking things more seriously in my life and get in touch with reality.

Disappear here.

Sheer Middle-Class Exhaustion

Jesus, what a vacation.

I saw a grand total of four friends on a personal basis, and a few other people at my brother's graduation ceremony. Thank you, friends. Everyone else-- you're dead to me.

Just kidding. I know how busy and exciting Panama City Beach can be.

Anyways, right now my car is packed to the taint with every random piece of wonderful-ness that my mom could stand to part with. I'll probably be getting around 4 MPG (highway) in my 2003 Honda Accord with all that shit suffocating every interior inch.

Thanks for letting me take a break from the site and enjoy doing absolutely nothing. Now for the adventure of driving cross-country by myself, signing over a thousand-dollar check to some apartment lady, and moving in with the help of my lazy wonderful, able-bodied Rice friends.

I was trying to figure out how I'm going to watch House and 24 next year without paying for it. I could just download everything, but that takes the ritual out of Monday and Tuesday nights. Fuck that. Did you know that HDTV is broadcast FOR FREE? It is. But I don't have an HDTV tuner in my HDTV-heady TV. So here's the idea.

HDTV SIGNAL --> UHF/VHF Antenna --> USB HDTV TUNER in laptop --> S-Video or VGA or something connection to TV

If you have any ideas about how to get better-than-NTSC-quality programming to an HDTV-ready TV without paying out my ass for digital cable, let me know.

I'll be funny once I move in, barring a complete emotional breakdown. I mean, I'm pretty lucky, but this is more work than I'm used to doing on my own. Builds character, they say. I'll get through it. It's all worth it. It's most definitely worth it. At least I'm not bitching because I failed nine hours of coursework and I double-booked my 10AM slot with BOTH the hair dresser AND the Asian nail ladies. Cough cough.

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.

Goodbye, round two

Back to Rice today.

Thanks for the amazing summer, PCB kids. Houston, I'll see you tomorrow.

Big things

Ben's monitor setup. Thirty-seven inches of fun, which happens to be the name of the porn me and Matt watched last night.

Oh my God, Phil has applied the Figure Four! This match is over!

So, more about those tickets

I think it's a prime childhood fantasy to make a ticket eater gobble up a string of tickets that reaches all across an arcade. Friday night, Matt made it a distict reality by winning three grand prizes on this rediculously easy game. It went something like this...

Here's where it starts. I think it took Matt a grand total of five tries to hit each grand prize which spit out more tickets than any child should be entitled to.

Yes, it extends all the way from one end of the arcade to the other.

After the string of tickets broke partway through, we decided to have a ticket eater race. Here's Kevin and Matt loading each end of the ticket eater.

Almost done...

End result.

Yeah, I'll be the first to admit that the time leading up to Friday night is some of the most boring time I've ever lived. But boy, once those Friday nights get rolling...

Snitches get stiches!

For life!