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(me at the National Gallery of Art in late 2006)
I’m incubated.
I’m locked into that cycle of in the house doing work, out to class to spend hours in lectures, and then back into the house to do more work. I broke this down with my friend today. When an able-bodied young man finds himself watching 4400 at six p.m on a random Tuesday evening then you know something is wrong. But this is real life.The reality of certain things were unveiled to me when I moved off-campus two years ago. Firstly, when you live seven miles away from a social hub (i.e college). There willl be no one to speak to save your roommate, and no where to go. Secondly, you desire to do less. Basically everything else becomes important. How well food tastes, how comfortable your bed is, how funny that romantic comedy you watch by yourself is, etc. I was walking to class today listening to an Our Lady Peace album, Spiritual Machines, and it sounds like the soundtrack to my life right now. Track 4, “Life”, starts out with a few questions that everyone can relate to:
“How many times have you been pushed around? Is anybody there? Does anybody care?”
“How many times have your friends let you down? Is anybody there? Did anybody stare?”
Introspective questions run abound in this track, and then it goes into a melancholy (yet oddly uplifting) chorus, where leader singer Raine Maida tells me that ‘Life is waiting for you’. The Peace has been known to drop sometimes cryptic lyrics onto their fans, but I felt chills hearing these questions asked to me by someone I don’t know. Then, on track 7, “Are you sad?” it asks even more questions:
“Are you sad? Are you holding yourself? Are you locked in your room? You shouldn’t be….”
Too often I have felt like this person… sometimes a bit trapped by circumstance, or something else. Its the working grind of the world that keeps us in that bubble of limited social interactions.
Even though I do have classes with people I interact with THEN, when the day ends everyone goes their separate ways. I go home, and listen to depressed millionaires sing about their life’s discourses.
I think this is part of being a writer, or an artist. I’m not just sitting by myself staring at the ceiling, getting familiar with little cracks in certain spots, I’m being proactive. I sit, I write, I design, I do a lot of things. But as I told my friend from a class today, “If no one knows you, no one can ever know you are talented.”
I think I’m having an off day again. The work load of school is normalizing. This means for me that things are reaching a natural order where I know what I have to do to maximize my time in classes and so forth, but dammit it gets really lonely sometimes. Its also starting to get cold, meaning if I am going to get in the groove with some people, i’ll have to do it soon. Or I will be “holding myself” in my room, amidst the eerie pluckings of some faceless man’s guitar.
No one can really describe certain kinds of loneliness. It sits on your tongue like the leftover taste of flat soda, and tugs at your hair like an inattentive child. I’m sure the loneliness a business CEO with 14 hour days, millions in the bank and no time to socialize is uniquely different from a college kid who spends his days writing and doing classes. But at the end, they are both suffering from a mild form of social disconnect; a lack of options.
I don’t think i’m sad, but man, sometimes I feel like i’m halfway there. But I will press on… keep writing, with my eye on the prize.
Okay.
My title is horibbly deceptive. Last week wasn’t the greatest week, but I did feel like I accomplished a lot. With an 18 credit load, lack of sleep and feelings of mania crawling up my back, I still managed to do a lot of design-work, kept blogging and deal with my course load for classes.
My most interesting part of last week were my late night trips to Kinko’s to make this birthday gift for my ex-girlfriend. Yes, yes, I know what you are saying, I’m a loser.
I went to a meeting today for my school paper and one of the offered articles related to OCD. I wonder if I have a compulsion when it comes to design and writing. Maybe its my outlet, or my mojo or whatever. But there was one night after traveling for about an hour in total time (walking, waiting on bus, then walking some more) the Kinkos I went to was locked. I thought about smashing the large glass pane and doing my copying then. But I doubt the officers would believe I was trying to spend a few bucks doing copies.
So it was a long, involved week, with emotional ups and downs, and the release of that emotion during the weekend. It got released because the week ended. Today was an amazingly productive day. I did a ton of homework, two cartoons for the day, a presentation for class, and i”M about to start doing some script editing. Maybe I’m not doing as much as say–the CEO of GE, but i’m trying to maintain. I’m idle and e-mailing random people on the “w4m” section of Craigslist as a social experiment. Who knows, maybe it will give me something to write home about.
ciao
Today isn’t a great day for me. As you can see i’m doing my second blog of the day. I’m hurting a bit right now, because of an event that happened on Friday night that I can’t get into. So, like most people, I’m trying to distract myself by either eating too much, watching tv, or spending money. As it stands, I really don’t want to go down a self-destuctive path, so I decided to research the new Ipod, a.k.a “The Ipod Touch”and blog about it. I wouldn’t call myself a technophile, and I am a skeptical early adopter (I learned my lesson after the Ipod Video came out). This new version of the Ipod excites me somewhat. Hey, I’m bored, single with nothing to do. A cool device that has a cyborg like sexiness has appeal in our wired world of today.
I’ve owned almost every version of the ipod ever made. This hasn’t been by choice. I bought the third generation thinking it was a godsend. I like the way little red lights lit up the buttons on the Ipod face, and even though it was pre click-wheel, it was still pretty easy to navigate. One night I went to a club my friend worked at. It actually wasn’t a club, but this cool Sushi restaurant called Japone in Dupont circle. Either way, I was chilling in the the back where there was a bar, talking to this cute bartender. As she commented on my hair (it was a huge fuzzy muff of blonde at the time) I rested my man-bag on the bar chair. I took a thirty second walk to the front of the restaurant and when I came back my Ipod inside the bag was gone. I was upset because I had never had a device stolen from me in that way, but it wasn’t that bad. The third gen had a terrible battery life (mine capped at 8 hours) and it would “crash” on me occassionally. A little while later, I sold a bunch of stuff on Craigslist and then I bought my fourth gen (with clickwheel!) That wasn’t bad, but I only owned it for one week. I went on a business trip with a few classmates to checkout the Investment banking world. Seeing all those droopy eyed, highly paid college grads only a year or two older than me made me cringe. Investment banking wasn’t for me. I did read the paper however, I see that a new “Ipod Photo” was coming out in… a week.
I almost screamed, because I had bought my Ipod just recently, but as soon as I got back to DC I put it for sale on CL and bam! It was gone. So I bought my Ipod Photo soon after, and I must say I was the most pleased with this Ipod (even more than the Video). The Ipod photo felt very sturdy and it had an amazing battery life, it went up to 21 hours on a full charge. I used this Ipod for at least a year, then I heard about the Video. I researched it for a while, hating the fact that the battery life was now a paltry 16 hours and that you couldnt’ adjust the brightness on the screen. “No matter,” I said to myself “It is new tech. And New tech is F-ing cool.” So I bought the new Ipod with most of the Photo sale money and I was very dissapointed. The screen was marginally bigger and the menu was cool-ish, but the battery life for me was almost cut in half and I didn’t like watching video on it. The screen was too small to really enjoy full length video, and it was a task actually putting movies on the device itself. So after owning the Ipod video for about two months, I sold it.
Later I would horribly regret this, when I eventually wanted a portable music player and had none. Either way, as a birthday gift I received an Ipod Nano and I’ve been using that for over a year now. Naturally my head works in tens of gigabytes, and its a huge drop from 30 gigs on the Ipod Video (or 20 gigs on the Photo) to a measly 2 gigs on the Nano. But, I organized my playlist, made sure everything was okay, and I’ve been using it ever since. My happiest accessory is a pair of those Bose headphones they sell at the Apple store for 150 bucks. (I bought mine for $85. Ah…Craigslist). I had no desire to ever get an Ipod video again. I knew sooner or later, Apple would drop an Ipod that would wow the masses again. When the Iphone came out earlier this year, I didn’t bat an eyelid. Only a crazy person (I thought) would camp out to get a device with slow phone service, severe data limitations just because it looks “cool”. I fiddled with the phone at the Apple store, and I agree it IS cool, but not 600 bucks worth of cool.
But now I hear about the Ipod Touch, and my heart feels warm. I’m so used to my 2 gig nano that 8 gigs sounds like a lot of space. I like the fact that it has more functionality as well for my money. The $299 price tag doesnt’ sound that bad either BECAUSE it has so much. I can access wifi points and surf the web, I can browse my music by tapping my fingers, and the battery life isn’t 16 hours, its 22. Its also thinner than the Iphone (take that At&t!). So if I can, I think I’ll be heading to the Apple store to get my touch and be an early adopter of THAT product. Then I’ll hear about the “Ipod Touch II” which comes out in January which has 20 gigs of Space for $299 and then i’ll rush to sell my little 8 gig. But until that time comes, we’ll see what happens. This has nothing to do with my usual blogging about writing, but I needed to vent about something and the Ipod gave me a really good excuse.
