July 23, 2006

Klaproth's hungry maw surged from beneath the sands, gaping wide as a sea of fire as his bladed toad-tongue snapped away yet another one of my creations.
I was frustated at first.
No, frustated is the wrong word. All wrong.
I was fucking pissed.
No.
I was... mad at myself because I thought I could do better than provide filler and things upon which to sharpen teeth.
But, my real problem was that I didn't read the sign that said "Tuck your pride in your coat pocket and leave both at the door." I should've. It would've saved me some grief. But I suppose I'm starting to get it now. Only through struggle can we become better, right?
I want to write action somehow...but I lack the ability. In my opinion there is very little good action writing out there. Too much of it seems to be all fake breasts and chosen one's. But the good stuff is out there, the only problem lies in the fact that I'm neither a plagiarist nor a mime. I have a wicked originality streak that comes from doing a lot of art throughout my life. And I don't mean "I am already so unlike everyone else" type streak, that's not a trait I posess, but I really have to be something different and something from deep inside of myself. I don't know what it is. I can't put my finger on it. Hell, I couldn't put England on it if I wanted to, it's that unkown to me.

"It's over...here. No, here. Wait..."

And in the meantime everything is going by. Time is passing.

Continents are shifting, empires are falling.

And here I am floating through space without form because I haven't found me. However, I have found that I have these dreams, these great great dreams. But all these dreams were recorded on an Etch-A-Sketch that my ego is using as a soccer ball.

Every golem wants to be made of diamonds, right? Wants to shine, wants to be the brightest.

I don't know, it seems to me that people see obstacles as so commonplace, so everyday, so lunch hour and paperwork that they've lost their flare. They've lost their power. They've lost that possibility that they might be insurmountable. Obstacles no longer dazzle or inspire.

I did this!
Oh, everyone does that. Keep it down, I'm busy.

I read a statistic today that people live their communicable lives in 85% negativity. They talk about the bad stuff on the news, who's at war, what's wrong with the world, who is in trouble with who, etc. And my friend really freaked out about this and went on a rant about how terrible that was and how we need to count our blessings and I told him that all he was doing was proving the point.

I don't think we communicate eighty-five percent negatively because we are evil or anything. I think we communicate eighty-five percent negatively because it's in our nature to fix things, and it's in our nature to lose hope. I don't think we'll ever fix this planet, not unless we all leave it and let it do it's own thing for a million years and come back completely balanced and enlightened and decide that goddamnit, we're going to do it right this time. That, goddamnit this planet deserves love and a people that will take care of it. That, goddamnit (insert inspiring resolution here)!

I really am lost though. Really.
But that's okay, I'm enjoying myself.

It's been some time since I've written (anything at all, really), so I thought I'd try getting back into the swing of things. Within the past 3 months I've made the decisions to A) Move back to Boulder from Tacoma, B) Transfer from the University of Puget Sound to CU, C) change my major from Philosophy to Pre-Journalism, and D) take summer classes. All four of which I'm starting to regret.

In trying to explain to people exactly why it is that I transferred I always seem to come up just short. "I did it for financial reasons", or "UPS didn't have a journalism major", but here and now I'm stuck in a place of intellectual downsizing on top of being left as a junior standing with little chance of getting into the actual Journalism school without first taking a mess of intro level courses along with 500-600 other freshmen. Alas, I suppose I really just should have figured things out sooner. I told myself that Boulder was going to be the better place for an outdoorsy guy like me, yet I'm starting to feel more and more like I'm being "compared" to everyone else as to just how much I'm willing to be so. It's not like it's subtle either. Everyday when I bike to class I see other's biking along the same path, passing me with stares of complete ambivalence to someone who's not as decked out in gear as they are. The 70 year olds in full bike attire are just as unlikely to smile as the even more so 30 somethings. And this is just one source of pretension I'm seeing in this new place. As I've walked around I've come across more girls with the exact same combination of fake looks, a lack of intelligence, dulled personalities, and outright fraudulence than I'd care to count. And their boyfriends are the very meatheads that I went to private school to avoid. There's only so much laughing you can do before the negative attitudes start to wear on you. I feel like my happiness can only extend so far before its worn into that something that's just as bad as everything else. Who knows, maybe it's just that everyone there is in summer session and are upset with the heat in addition to classes. Or maybe I just simply haven't found my niche of friends, either way it had better get better during the fall-- at least I'll once again have my mountains to escape to.

To top this all off I've fallen in love. But it's a conditional and finite love that I haven't treated as either. We fell during the very last weeks of school, knowing full well that I was transferring, and she was staying. Her name is Julia, and she's my complete opposite. We'd been friends-in-passing since freshmen year, and she would always come over to chat with the guys in my house. I'd thought of her as a little loud, but never in the annoyed sense of the word, just bubbly and outgoing. Never did I once think we'd get along as a couple. Then one night we were in her room, it was late, after a party, and I decided to take a ridiculous chance. Of course, my original justification had been that I was leaving anyways and didn't particular have much to lose on the whole thing. But that's were it all began. I ended up staying the night, and while we didn't have sex (then), I felt totally and completely at ease just kissing and talking and cuddling and spooning (with the most minor of naps in between). Somewhere within the second night I'd realized that this was love, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out where it had come from. I confessed it, and she did too. We spent the next two days in bed, emerging at times to make food in her kitchen but always ending up back where we started. It was no suprise that her housemates became intrigued, for I was the first steady "boyfriend" she'd had that year. At our end-of-the-year party out in Vantage, WA we first came out and started showing our affection publicly. It instantly became a subject which everyone felt they had to address. The drunken conversations went a little like this:
(them): "does this hand-holding stuff mean you guys are like, dating?"
(us): "yeah"
(them): "oh, huh, I never saw you two coming together, but it's, like, a totally great match"
(us): "thanks, dude, we think so too".

It became such a process that we decided to give it up a little earlier and retreated to the tent to be alone. From inside we could hear the party raging beyond us, but we only cared only about each other, it was total bliss.

Summer began, she went back to California and I to Colorado. She came to visit just a few weeks ago, and it allowed me to completely forget all my woes about my new home. Of course we again spent most of our time in bed, but I tried my best to get us both out to see the town. We'd go to dinner and could just stare into her beautiful eyes and fall in love with her in some whole new light, feeling entirely complete and meaningful and loved in return. I'm going to see her in just over a week, and I'm taking two days off of both my Principles of Journalism and Bioethics courses to do so. At this point I'm starting to think that I should just drop them both in order to extend my stay, thinking that, as far as priorities go, she is by far the superior to either. She's going abroad to Prague next semester, so I may just be able to convince my parents that with the amount of money I'm saving on switching from a private to an in-state public school I should get funded for a little European vacation.