You only have until 10:00PM Eastern Standard Time to nominate me for A Bloggie for “Best Non-Weblog Content.” And, after you’re done, feel free to listen to the double-Trio i’ve posted for your Non-Blog-Content pleasure ;)
by krisis
off-topics
Six college students sitting around on a Sunday afternoon after a late brunch. You might imagine us taking part in an enlightened conversation, going outside to get some exercise, or even making plans to see a movie or go shopping.
You would be wrong. Try again. Whoops, wrong again. Here, let me just tell you what we did.
The six of use opened up a collection of Millers, WineCoolers, and CiderJacks, and whipped out the Sorry! board. Now, being an only child with a significantly less-than-average amount of friends, i apparently didn’t get to experience the entire broad horizon of board games. However, i think i can safely say that Sorry! is the meanest game i could ever inflict upon a child. It’s similar to Parcheesi in that your two main purposes are to get your piece “home,” and to fuck over everyone else. And, trust me, four slightly buzzed college students with a cheering faction of two is pretty good at fucking.
We played Sorry for two hours, during which i might have been threatened with physical removal from the game area if i didn’t “shut up and sit the hell down.” Yes, this means i won the first game and that everyone was pissed — can i help it if i am a blood-thirsty player and not a sore loser? (Apparently pointing that out directly after doing one’s victory dance is considered bragging. Did i mention that we were drinking?) After my stunning come-from-behind victory (two pieces landed home in two turns) we invented a drinking game and a turbo version.
I knew that higher education was good for something…
Here’s where i’m scheduled to say something profound.
This week was already shaping up as a busy one on Monday night, and so i made myself a neat little list of things to blog about. That way i’d have at least one thing to write about every night, and i could compose in my head over the course of the day. The list for the days that have passed read: Journalism Essay, Under My Skin, Bloggies. Electronically penciled in for Friday was one word: “Selina.”
A year ago today was the first night of that fateful week where i saw her every night, and we counted it as the start of our relationship. I didn’t even hint at it on here until a few days later, and uncharacteristically didn’t mention it outrightly for over a week. Tonight i’m in a similar place… i spent my allotted AM blog-time last night just staring into a white box, and then grudgingly heading off to sleep. I had something to say, but no way to say it. This morning evoked a similar reaction.
At the beginning, everything was magical and perfect… there i was with this beautiful girl who was smart and talented, and actually seemed to find me attractive. But, from the start there were tiny nibbling doubts that i ignored, just assuming that they were the natural followup to the initial butterflies in my stomach. Too many things have muddied my hindsight in the year that has intervened for me to objectively say what went right and wrong, but i do know that we both served as an important piece of each other’s lives. And that it wasn’t really meant to be.
I always say that i never regret anything… that i’d never take anything back. It remains true here; just because Selina and i ended on a bad note doesn’t mean i would take back the entire experience. What’s sad is that my life has been relatively empty of tangible romantic entanglements since then, and so i couldn’t help but become all the more embittered about the entire situation — especially when hardly anyone i know seems to be very fond of my ex. Suddenly, this week, i find myself having funny little conversations with her, and wicked jokes under the din of a cappella rehearsals. Despite all the emotional and lyrical fists that i have balled up and thrown since then, i finally seem to be able to see through it back to the person who intrigued me so much to begin with.
So, maybe we’ll wind up friends in the end… at least a little bit. All of my life a year always seemed to be such a large quantity of time… it always seemed to make such a big difference in how life worked. Some things don’t change; I might not ever miss Selina. I miss butterflies, though, and she is forever inexorably connected to them because she taught me how to get past them to something a little more real.
Happy Anniversary.
Two years.
Seven hundred and thirty one days, exactly.
Nearly right down to the minute.
It’s hard to say something important or unique about a song that comes up in nearly every conversational context possible. I’ve already described writing the lyrics, talked about the recording process, uploaded take after take of developmental recordings… and here i am two years later at a loss for what i’m supposed to be saying.
All i can say is that i’ve spent one tenth of my life living with “Under My Skin” … not only living with it as a song, but living with having written it and with why i wrote it. Living with the song is sometimes the hardest part; “Under My Skin” is easy to like, even for me, and i feel like it eclipses other songs that i’ve worked much harder on. Living with having written it isn’t so bad: at first it felt like a wall i had built to avoid having to express myself in any other way, but now it stands as an emotional landmark rather than a roadblock.
Living with the reason i wrote it is still strange. In the past I would agonize over it, asking myself “how do you kiss someone and then just let it go?” Now i know exactly how, because i’ve done it. It happens. I guess the real question i have is “After life crystallizes for one perfect moment, how do you go on living imperfectly?” I don’t really know the answer to that one, and i don’t expect to find it out any time soon. Sometimes that one moment i lived is almost like a fantasy in my head that never really happened, and sometimes it’s the only thing i can see. It is still both, and all the shades found in-between
“Under My Skin” became more than what i originally intended it to be when Laurel came into the studio to sing it with me last year. Ever since she willingly added her voice to mine i feel as though i don’t wholly own my words… they aren’t only mine anymore. Laurel’s voice singing them on Relief, and any other time i’ve caught her humming along, suddenly transforms “Under My Skin” from a song in the first person to a shared narrative — with its words and all that they are saying awkwardly shared between us both.
It doesn’t bring the moment back. Life doesn’t suddenly make sense the way television does. But, one moment that seemed so selfish and impossible when it first happened is now just a tiny seed that has sprouted into a flourishing garden of songs, friendships, and memories that will last me a lifetime.
And one very good song.
I don’t know that it’s an idea, so much as simply how my body tends to balance itself out. Left to my own devices during the summer of 2000 i actually split each day in half, sleeping from five to nine in both the morning and evening. This sounds ridiculous, but given a healthy and active list daily schedule it actually suited my needs perfectly and kept me highly energized through my grueling turn as an Orientation Leader.
Of course, there are problems with giving the body exactly what it seems to be asking for. With the exception of my magical two weeks of two-in-one days, my body tends to operate on a clock that is much nearer to 30hour days than 24hour ones, which means if i don’t have a set time to sleep i’ll stay up a handful of hours later every night until finally i’m sleeping the day away because i’m so locked in to my overly long internal clock. Furthermore, my attempts to correct my own sleeping habits tend to make the situation worse; for example, i should have never gone back to sleep this morning rather than do my best to stay awake all day — and here i am blogging about it past 2am.
The solution that has had a larger impact on my days than my quirky sleeping habits (which are endlessly remarked upon in derisive fashion by my roommates) is that i really just don’t waste time anymore. Sure, you could argue that i’m wasting time right now, but i mean something closer to not spending time idly. If i’m on the internet, i’m either writing or catching up on my daily reading … not aimlessly wandering from link to link. If i’m playing guitar i’m either writing or practicing … no idle ad-libbing for hours on end. I tend to break this rule just as much as i follow it, but keeping the idea of maximizing my resources stuck in the back of my head somehow netted me all A’s last semester — something i’ve never accomplished with such a rigorous course load Sure, it involved putting some thing off until the last minute (and stressing my way into the hospital), but somewhere along the way i finally learned to cut down on time-wasting (and unsatisfying) activities like reorganizing my cd collection and rereading my archives when i could be cooking dinner or writing a paper instead..
This semester has an even more ridiculous free-time to work-time ratio than last, and so i’m interested to see how i fare. Also, it would be nice if i could factor actually working into the equation somewhere between sleep and cd reviews, because money is never as evil as they say it is ;)