14 CHILDREN DEAD IN TERRIBLE ACCIDENT

There was last week, then there was fall break, and now there’s now.  Where did the time go?  Feels like my last post was just yesterday.  That’s the wrong way to look at it, though.  Two down, two to go, and then there will be one and none.  I’m sure you will all be terribly saddened over the loss of my ever insightful thoughts.

Oh yeah, I guess I should explain the title.  It has absolutely no bearing on this post.  I named it that for the sole purpose of making you click on the link.  See?  I’m a nice guy.  I tell you right up front when I lie to you and betray your trust.  So you can now be all hurt and sad and leave, or—and this is the much better option—you can continue to read and be entertained in a different manner.  How, you might ask?  Why by reading all about my life experiences as a college student, of course. 

For those of you who did not know, I am a freshman.  I was also homeschooled my entire life up to this point.  And that means that this is all entirely new, to a level that is beyond newness for most freshmen.  I mean, having a bunch of people doing the same schoolwork in the same classes as me?  What’s that about?  A bunch of random strangers living with me instead of my siblings?  Who do I mercilessly tease when I’m bored? 

That brings up the socialization I’m being forced into.  Seriously, I don’t know you and you don’t know me.  Unless we’re going to talk about something other than school, go away.  How many times do I have to say it?  You don’t know me!  You don’t know my life or my story!  The worst part is that there are no corners to crawl into and cry in.  Can I get some privacy?  Maybe just a few seconds alone?  Can’t even eat in peace.  There’s always people talking, talking, talking, endless talking, and when I think I’m done with it, more freakin’ talking. 

Why?  Why won’t you let me be the peaceful loner I’ve always been?  It’s not that I hate you.  It’s that I don’t care about you.  Not to be offensive or anything, but you’re people.  There are far too many people here.  Too many people that don’t get me and my razor sharp wit.  It’s so sharp I cut myself sometimes, and it hurts.  You people completely miss it though.  The concepts aren’t hard to grasp, the thought processes aren’t difficult to run through, yet all I get are blank, uncomprehending stares.  It’s not that hard to understand sarcasm.  I know I have incredible deadpan delivery, but come on!  Most of what I say is so far beyond plausibility.  Put a little effort into it, guys. 

Have I mentioned that there is this uncanny desire prevalent all over campus to get utterly wasted on the weekends?  What’s that about?  Why would you do that?  Why would you ever do that?  Life is short already.  I do not need to be missing my memory on three nights out of each week.  That is at least one whole day out of each week gone, depending on the level of drunk you get.  Never getting’ it back.  That means you’re losing 50 days of your life a year, if not more.  If you do that for all four years of college, that’s a spectacular 200 days of your life that you flushed down the drain, right along with the contents of your stomach.  I’m talking minimums here too.  Take a second, think it over, and if you can give me one good reason for that blatant abuse of what we call life—especially what is supposed to be the four best years therein—I will go out and join your debauchery. 

For now, though, I am quite content to have a few bros over and crack open a case of beer.  Root beer, to be precise.  Because you can get plenty high on the stuff, and still retain complete memory of what you did while you were high.  That makes a lot more sense to me.  I like knowing what I did so that I can proudly claim it as my own. 

To recap, college life is far too much work and inconvenience.  I have to deal with not only school, but also people, work, food, and money.  Not cool, guys, not cool at all.  This is far more trouble than it is worth, therefore you must excuse me.  I am going to go make a pillow fort and catch up with my real friends (they are too real!).  You can’t come.  Cause you don’t know the secret code. 

So there. 

Alone?

The boy is alone.

The group is full of laughter and everyone is enjoying it, even the boy, yet he is alone.  He doesn’t know it. He would never admit if he did know.  Because no one wants to be alone.

So as the group laughs in its game of late night Apples to Apples, the boy joins in.  He accepts the general feelings of inclusion and well being as his own.  As the game continues, he plays with grace and good will, always friendly, always eager to join the jokes.  It seems to work.  He laughs and they laugh with him.  Companionship is acknowledged with no real connection.  The feelings are all on the surface, prepared to blow away with the slightest gust.  That gust turns out to be the end of the game. 

Goodbyes are said, people head to their rooms, the group splits. The boy sits in his place, smiling and waving as they leave until he is the last.  Still he sits there with a smile on his face.  A smile of good times remembered, for now that is all he has.

He doesn’t stay for long.  Tomorrow is family day and his will be spending the whole day with him.  They will arrive early, so he needs a few hours of sleep, at least.

His room is dark, lit only by the streetlamp shining through the blinds.  He lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for slumber.  The moments before sleep are the clearest moments of life.  It is the time he sees everything in his life, good and bad, and cannot escape it.  The naked truth is difficult to accept.  The truth he sees now is the truth he refused to see before.  He is alone.  Terribly alone.  And even now he will not accept it.  He pushes it away and reasons that is natural for this time, that there is nothing wrong. This allows him to drop into sleep.

He wakes the next morning, refreshed and reassured.  As he heads to the shower, life looks much brighter than it had the previous night.  Why shouldn’t it?  His family is coming today.  In fact, they will arrive in a mere hour. 

After the shower, he eats breakfast, taking his time and enjoying the warm and pleasant morning.  His phone vibrates with a message informing him that his family has arrived.  He meets them in the parking lot with much joy, for what is better than reuniting with family after months of separation?  Not much, the boy realizes, not much.

They spend the day wandering the campus, enjoying each other’s company.  The boy teases his younger sister and jokes with his older.  He staves off the many questions of his mother and attempts to reassure her on countless issues, smiling all the while.  For what was once annoying has become something that simply displays affection.  He smiles, content with those he loves.

The day passes quickly.  Conversation, lunch, games, and time all slip by.  It ends too soon.  His family must return home—to his home, the place of his childhood that will always be home.  And he must stay behind.  He walks with them back to the car, quietly reflecting.  When they arrive, he hugs each of them, perhaps a little longer than usual.  They climb into the car, pull out, and drive away.

He watches the car until it is out of his view and trudges back to his dorm.  Night has come again and it is dark.  The brightness is gone.  He reaches his dorm, pauses outside the door and looks up at the black sky.  It is then that he truly realizes it.  It is then that he accepts it.

The boy is alone.

Is this you?  Is it me?  I don't know.  Do you?  Perhaps, when you read this, all you can think is "how can anyone be alone here?"  If that is your thought, I'm happy for you.  Continue, enjoy, have fun.  On the other hand, if you read this and found yourself nodding, I'm still happy for you.  You are self-aware.  This can be a good thing, as long as you want it to be.  Your worst enemy is yourself, so be a friend instead.

Me?  Well, it's up to you to decide what I am.  If, by reading this and other posts by me, you can decide who I am, feel free.  The conclusions you reach may be accurate, or wildly off target.  I honestly cannot tell you what conclusion you might reach, or even if you reach the correct ones.  Life is constantly changing, and I constantly change with it.  All I can tell you is that I am not the same person as when I came.  Nor, I would hope, are you.

Enjoy your time.  You aren't getting it back.

Read and You'll Find Something

Tonight is one of those nights.  You know, the kind of night where you feel like writing about absolutely nothing with no point whatsoever and sounding ever so sophisticated in the process.  I’m sure you’ve had the feeling.  It’s universal, right? 

Whether it’s universal or not is, however, beside the sophisticated point I’m making.  A point that has great importance to the topic at hand.  I mentioned a topic, didn’t I?  I didn’t?  Oh dear.  If I’ve already written this much without a specified topic, the rest of this post is in grave danger. 

Oh wait, I remember.  I do have a have a topic, and don’t worry, it is a very sophisticated and intelligent and economically ethical topic.  I have no idea where those last two descriptive words came from, but I thought of them as I was preparing to put the period on the end of the sentence, so I included them in order to make it sound better, while in reality it simply lengthened the sentence that had no need of being lengthened any more than it already was. 

Pretty sure I made a couple comma splices—or some other fancy term relating to commas and full sentences—in that last sentence. But nobody cares about that right now.  Why?  Because topic!  That’s right, I have one!  You wanna guess what it is?  No, of course you don’t.  You’re the reader.  I’m supposed to tell you everything right off the bat.  There’s not supposed to be all this indecision and inner author dialogue between me and myself. 

This, however, is a special post indeed.  It is a post in which I shall do whatever the crap I want because I can.  And I will do it in such a way that it sounds intelligent and not at all like some rambling lunatic with a keyboard.  Because if you could hear the music I’m listening to right now, that’s exactly what you would think.  It’s probably what you think anyway, but then I can’t tell you what you’re thinking because I’m simply the writer of this post.  I don’t know what you’re thinking, nor do I know what I’m thinking.  Thoughts are coming and going rather quickly at the moment, so it’s a bit mixed up in this brain.  In a couple minutes it’ll probably explode in a bright and colorful display of shimmering glory.  Because brains are glorious and filled with glitter.  Well, that one vampire from that one lame book series has a brain full of glitter, but nowhere near as full a brain as his girl’s brain.

I am not going to tarnish this post with any further mention of those two individuals.  They disgust me and should be abolished from what is considered literature.  In fact, in my definition of what is literature that series does not qualify.  Therefore, it is not literature. 

Wow.  Okay then.  That was a lot easier than everyone made it out to be.  They’re always complaining and saying the books should be burned and blah blah blah, when the solution has been in front of their noses the whole time.  I’m a genius.  I always knew it, but it’s nice to have it reinforced every now and then.  You’re welcome.

Oh hey, guess what?  You don’t want to guess?  Gosh darn it, you aren’t a cooperative reader.  I mean seriously, it’s not nice.  You should take a class in manners, because your mother clearly skipped over that part of your education.  Why yes, I did just go there.  What are you gonna do about it?  Oh, okay, well, if you’re going to get nasty I’ll take it back.  That’s right.  I’m a nice guy and want to prevent our world from succumbing to…dang it.  I lost my train of thought.  I couldn’t spell the word succumb and it took a few minutes before I could get it close enough for spell check to be able to find the right word.  I hate it when that happens.  It was a really good point too.  Stupid spell check needs to be smarter and more tech savvy, whatever that means.

Dude.  Check it out.  I have discovered the topic/purpose/point/slash of this post.  You want to know?  That one was rhetorical, shut up. 

The point of this post is to demonstrate that I have discovered the fact that I can begin a post with no point or purpose and continue to write two partially coherent pages, even though they may be completely useless.  This constitutes as something I have learned as an experience outside of the classroom.  It is a most valuable experience that will serve me well throughout the rest of my living days. 

Thank you for your time, your patience, and your cooperation.  Or lack thereof. 

Many More Words Than Necessary to Describe the Events Contained Within the Post Below

And then there were two.

Meetings that is.  With Amber.  What else would I mean? 

So this second meeting started much smoother than the first.  As in, I did not spend thirty minutes wandering around pointlessly.  We sat in the same spot, in the little ring of chairs at the bottom of the stairs in the BLUU and discussed many things of multiple levels of deepness and not to mention of some depth also (please note the way in which I invoke the same words in differing manners in order to lengthen sentences that would otherwise be short and to the point—something I am making special note of so that it is not attributed to mere laziness, seeing as how I have elevated this practice to an art of sophistication that has never before been reached).  

Things like school.  And tests.  And vacation.  The many varieties of depth contained within these topics fascinate the scholar, and bore the writer.  Guess which one I am?  That’s right.  Not the scholar.  Thus I searched for a topic that would prove to be more interesting.  This took the next twenty minutes or so, in which time I did not find that topic.  Conversation was slow, jerky (not the beefy good kind), and full of awkward pauses. 

It was at this point that my conversational partner, Amber, the person with whom I was engaging in the act of exchanging verbal communication, mentioned books.  Or rather, the fact that part of one of her classes involved reading a book in English.  She had recently finished a work known as Animal Farm, by that one author guy who wrote that other book 1984.  In fact, I’m pretty sure she had read 1984 also.  She was not a big fan of either books, upon which I agreed with her sound judgment.  Much too depressing, those were.

It was at this point, which is completely different from the aforementioned point, that she inquired as to which book I might recommend for her to read next.  Being the avid reader that I am, and obviously must be considering my chosen field of education and enlightenment, I had a bevy of choices to, well, choose from.  The question now was which one, which one?  Oops, better hurry, I’m expecting company.

We interrupt your previously scheduled broadcast to bring you this breaking news.  AKA, my apologies.  I will restrain my impulse to insert random quotations into the middle of nonrelated discourses.  We will now return you to your previously scheduled program.

The Book:  Watership Down.  The Author: Richard Adams.  The premise: Bunny rabbits in search of a new home.

Yes, I am being dead serious.  And any of you who have read the aforementioned book will know exactly how serious I am.  For this is my single favorite book.  I use the word “single” with specific purpose for I have many other favorites, but those are all series of books and I am unable to single out one book from a series without defeating the purpose of the series.  Let me repeat the word “series” and series of times more in order to seriously drive the point home.  Yes, I do know serious is not the same as series, but they sound close enough so it works.

All that being said, let’s return to the amazing book known as Watership Down.  My favorite single book.  Except, it does happen to have a sequel which is most interesting.  But the merit contained in the sequel is derived completely from the first book.  Without the first, the sequel would be pointless.  Come to think of it, that’s probably the case for pretty much every sequel in existence.  So it kind of invalidates the point and purpose of this entire paragraph.  However, I like this paragraph, so I will keep it for it now holds a special place in my heart.

Now, the end point of all of this is that I told Amber that Watership Down is the most amazing book ever and she absolutely must read it.  After having said that I offered her a copy of the book that I happened to have back at my dorm.  Directly following that offer we followed the yellow brick road (I said I’d stop quotes, not references) all the way to my room where I snagged the book, handed it to Amber.  Then we scheduled our next meet and then bid each other a fond adieu.