For Sale or Trade

Wanted: Approximately one person with the intestinal fortitude to kick the everliving fuck out of me every time I put off a project or paper until the last goddamn minute.

I am so mad at myself right now. I could be hitting hour six of a good, REM-filled sleep session but instead I'm up to my ass in Earnest Hemingway, multiplexers, and the need to fill my lungs with savory and cheap Pall Mall cigarettes. No, I don't mean smoking-- I mean littering stuffing an entire pack of twenty cotton-filtered sticks down my windpipe and hoping that my lungs figure out how to turn them into pure euphoria.

Instead of sleeping I'm reveling in awe at this awesomely bad paper about moral ambiguity in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and wondering how I could possibly attach my name to it. I mean, the physical body of Kyle Barnhart sat and typed every word but the damn thing reads like the dissertation of a 13-year-old who huffs oven cleaner to get his rocks off. If I ever have to type out the title of that story again I'm going to shit pineapple grenades all over the floor of my suite and that's really going to make my roommates mad. And fuck Hemingway for writing a story with dialog that goes thirty lines without referencing who's actually speaking. Imagine this:

"I ate a dog today," said the man.
"Yeah," responded another man.
"It was good."
"Yeah."
"Yeah.
"Good."
"Okay."
"Yeah."
"Huh?"
"Oh, nevermind."
"I'm going to Cabo."
"I'm too old to go to Cabo."
"Let's change subjects."
"Horse dick."
"Leprechaun."
...

And it keeps going like that for twenty more lines, only referencing the speakers at the top of the page. Little things like that piss me off because they add nothing to the style; I reckon it's just Hemingway's morbid way of making me read his shitty dry dialog twenty times and making little notes about the speaking order on my course packet. Fucking pious bastard.

But wait, my day can only go uphill from here. I have so much to look forward to besides turning my paper in, like getting my moderately dismal results back from an oral exam I took last Thursday in my Waves and Photonics class. Talk about exciting! Then, for the rest of the afternoon up until midnight I get to finish a computer engineering project that was due last Friday! Let's hear it for ten percent of my grade! Oh, and then I have to do a three-hour take home exam for the same class. I'm going to stop using exclamation points to hint at sarcasm because, honestly, it's not funny.

I would rather be opening little, pink exotic drink umbrellas in my urethra right now but instead I have roughly twenty more hours of awake time to pile onto my tired and broken brain. The great thing is that even if I make it to Tuesday with all my work done it's going to be another trudging week where I pull more all-nighters and then on Friday my mom comes into town. Maybe she'll let me spend the entire weekend catatonic on the fold-out couch of the Hilton she's staying it. Maybe.

I used to employ Google Calendar to remind me when things were due but, honestly, I'm starting to realize that I'm more of an "obscene amounts of neon Post-it notes all over the computer screen" kind of guy. All I know is that if I don't get some sort of system down soon my brain is going to turn into sleep-deprived goo-- it's going to transform into the kind of generic Gak that you get at an arcade for 500 tickets. Seriously, I need people to ask me what I have due soon. I also need those same people to follow up with a swift tire iron to my gonads if I tell them I have anything due soon that I haven't started.

Judging by how hard it was to write all that down, I can safely assume that the next twenty hours are going to be fruitless and that, per the usual, I will barely skate by with a passing grade on everything I've done today. Well fuck me.

I heart my mommy

Valentines Day came a bit early for me. Mommy really knows how to make me smile.

Blast from the past

What follows is a letter I wrote to myself back in 2002. It was an assignment for my biology class and, shockingly, it actually found its way back to me five years later.

Enjoy.

Dear Future Self,

It's the sophomore year of high school and there's not a whole lot to say. I'm hoping you remember your old computer and the sleepless nights of Counter-Strike and the sorts. Hah! No, really, you were this smart when you were in high school..

Speaking of smart, I hope I (you) got into a good college. MIT? We can only hope. What I really hope is that I (we, whatever) won that darn vala-whatever award. If you did, then I knew we could do it! Otherwise... shame!

Hope you grew a beard and ditched the contacts. It'll be the college look that drives the ladies wild! Speaking of ladies... heh heh. Hope I end up with one of the ones I was attempting earlier this year. Yeah. I would just love if you called one of them up sometime (if you're not already "occupied"). Hopefully you're not as dirty as I am. And a ton smarter.

Let's hope this letter reaches the future genius I know I am. Particle physics forever! It's all theory...

Cheers,
Kyle Barnhart
Former Self

It's not just sort of weird to look back on that letter-- it's downright fucked up. When people say they were "different people" back in high school, they're probably using gross hyperbole compared to me. My brain straight-up lived in a different world back then. Like, I don't know what kind of kid would honestly want to go to MIT when Rice is closer, cheaper, and obviously more fun.

Then again, I WAS a sophomore in high school when I wrote this.

This letter also reminded me of the full-circle nature of my academic interests. Back then I was into "particle physics" simply because that's what Gordon Freeman from the video game Half-Life was into, and I thought it sounded cool. Then I drifted towards computer science and engineering during the later years of high school and early college. I even thought I was going to be a mechanical engineer at one point. But now I'm back to electrical engineering and quantum electronics which isn't a far cry from particle physics at all.

FAR OUT, MAN.

I'm not even going to comment on how inept I was when it came to girls. I think I still believed in cooties at that point. At least I can stand proudly with my hands fixed to my hip and laugh like a pirate about it now. Because I totally understand women these days.

*chirp, chirp*

HAVE THAT CRICKET MURDERED IN MY SLAUGHTERTORIUM.

Thursdays are weird.