Habit-Forming

The Overly Long Intro

It’s been more than 15 weeks since I last wrote anything on this blog.  That’s way too long.  Luckily I have job applications to avoid so here i am.

Some of you may remember when I ran an experiment on my myspace blog to see if I could write one post a day for a month (an idea that I stole from W. Kamau Bell).  I lasted 15 days before I got bored.  I did learn some important things about myself from that little experiment.  Firstly, I realized that working under pressure really changes the blogging experience for me.  Rather than just casually posting a blog whenever i feel like it, I found myself stressing each day to make sure i had a blog done by 12:00.  It became less a hobby and more a responsibility.  As such, I took it a bit more seriously and I’d like to think that the quality of my content improved a little.  More importantly, I began to realized that I don’ really want for things to write about.  I constantly have ideas that could eaily become blogs but, for one reason or another, most of them never reach the internet.  Today, I shall try to correct that.  From this point forward, I will write no less than one blog per week.  I’ll let you all know when I come up with a suitable schedule.

 

The Update

There is sort of a good reason that I’ve been M.I.A. around these parts as of late: I got a job.  For the past couple weeks I’ve been spending most of my time standing behind the customer service counter at my local national electronics chain store.  It’s kinda sucked, quite honestly.  I don’t really mind the work itself and most of my coworkers are pretty cool, but business is always slow so I’m usually bored as hell.  Also, I’m broke as hell.  $7 an hour isn’t really any money at all.  Therefore I’m looking for a 2nd job, to supplement or replace the mediocre wages that I’m currently living on.  As a matter of fact, the main reason I’m writing this blog is to distract myself from the applications I should be filing out right now.

 

A Story

Inside the store I work at there is a little kiosk selling cell phones.  Working at this kiosk is a young lady whos name i don’t remember.  I first saw her sometime last week.  ”She’s kinda cute,” I said to myself, but she wasn’t cute enough for me to care for more than a minute.  One minute later, I stopped caring.  I’d pretty much forgotten about her by the time I strolled into work this morning.  I started off my day like I always do, getting right to work before I even have a chance to greet my coworkers (my job is hella boring but for some reason there’s always hella shit going on at the moment I step into the door).  When things got back to their normal glacial pace, I took a moment to behold my surroundings.  All was as usual, but when I looked to my right I saw an unusal sight: a really cute girl sitting at the cell phone kiosk.  I spent the next couple hours trying not to stare and almost succeeded at paying her no mind until she randdomly struck up a conversation with me.  At that moment, I suddenly realized two things: The girl I’d given no more than a minute’s thought a week before had changed her hairstyle and somehow made herself about 13 times cuter and I was smitten.  I spent the rest of my shift wondering if she liked me and being extremely self-conscious.  I wonder if I’ll still care about her when I go to work on monday. . . 

 

The End

If you stare at a lit flourescent lightbulb for a long enough time, you may begin to ponder the very nature of your eyesight.  Or maybe that’s jus me. . .

Botanical Provinces

My mind works in mysterious ways. To put it less blasphemously, my mind works in non-linear ways. The phrase “train of thought” has always seemed a fallacy to me, as it seems to imply that thoughts should all be on one vessel heading in a set direction along a track. Mine never do that. They run off in every direction like children playing hide and seek, some to be found, others to reveal themselves when they please. Clearly this is not a frame of mind that lends itself to understandable writing. In the past, I’d either try my best to piece my thoughts together as best I can so that I might record them all before they slip away or pick the one I liked best and run with it. Tonight I’m trying something different. Here are three of the many thoughts that crossed my mind upon watching the movie Garden State.

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So I just sat through Garden State for the 2nd time*, and it affected me just as profoundly as the first time around. It’s really weird because the first time I saw it was on the night that I broke up with my girlfriend and I was a fucking emotional wreck. By the time I finished the movie I was so agitated that I ended up just pacing in circles around the room before excusing myself to drive really fast until I could find an ocean to scream into (because it wasn’t raining). Ever since then that movie has been closely associated with one of the most emotionally traumatic nights of my life.

When I sat down to watch Garden State tonight, I fully expected to watch it like I watch any movie the second time around: with a stoic face and a wandering mind. Somehow that didn’t happen though. I still found myself hoping desperately for the ending I already knew was coming. I still felt myself feeling that indescribable feeling between contemplation and depression. I still wished, if only for a moment, that I was capable of tears. And it didn’t have much of anything to do with the memories. I wasn’t trying to cry because I was reminiscing over lost love or anything like that. I was trying to cry because I was seeing my life play before me on a screen and realizing what a tragedy I truly am living. Yet at the same time, this movie motivated me in a way that few other things can. I couldn’t watch it with apathetic eyes. I cared what happened to these characters I was observing and I cared whether or not I do or could face similar issues. Because I care, I am seriously thinking about changing my life and seriously making plans to do so (even if any such plans only last until the movie’s spell is broken). Garden State is my Rosetta Stone. As I learn how to translate my own feelings and desires, hopefully I can begin to decipher the mystery of who I am.

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For a moment I considered editing my Myspace and Facebook accounts, deleting all of my personal information and writing, in the “about me” section, “Questionable Content, Garden State.” Then I thought about it for a moment and saw it through ethnic eyes. I had to wonder: Why are the only stories that are meaningful to me those written by and about white people? But that question soon led to another, more important question: Why do (most) black authors (that I’ve read) never write these types of stories? Why is it so hard to find a story that I can fully identify with. On the one hand, it shouldn’t be an issue because if I identify strongly with a character it shouldn’t matter what their race is, right? But every time I really start to think about this type of thing, I can’t help thinking, if even for a split second, that maybe I’m idolizing the lives of white people. Maybe, as a person of an oppressed people, I find myself idealizing the values of the dominant culture. But I know in my heart that that isn’t it. I think I just stopped giving a fuck about race, not in a “racism doesn’t exist, what are all you black people complaining about” sort of way but more so in a “we have more in common than not.” And by “we” I mean whoever it is I find myself identifying with. I guess race is no longer the primary identifier for me. Lately it seems that I care more about perspectives, positions and outlooks in and on life. And though race can be a factor in these things, it’s no longer the most important. Certainly it’s not a prerequisite.

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In one defining scene in Garden State the main character, Andrew, explains to his father that he’s been “numb for most of my life” due to the Lithium-derived drugs his father/psychiatrist has had him on since a young age. That numbness and Andrew’s attempts to remove himself from it, is one of the major themes of the movie. It’s possible that when he wrote the script Braff was speaking solely of the effects of over-medication. I took it a different way though. To me, the word “numb” seemed a bit broader of a term, a sort of a catch-all for any lack of feeling and even though I’ve never really been on any serious medication, I identified strongly with that aspect of the character. In a way, I too have been numb most of my life. For reasons I don’t completely understand, I’ve always been a little adverse to emotions. I’ve never cried from sadness, only from extreme frustration and even then, only once every few years. I sometimes wonder if other people get as excited as I do when they watch a movie and it actually makes them feel something. I wonder if they would even use such a term, with its implications of feeling nothing the rest of the time. Wondering such things can make one feel quite alone, which may be (one reason) why I love this movie so much. It’s a story of a person who’s fucked up in much the same way that I am. But he gets the girl in the end, even if she’s equally as fucked up as he is. Perhaps Garden State is nothing more than a fairy tale for people too jaded to believe in fairy tales.

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Mmmm. . .

I made some Grilled Cheese Pancakesand they were delicious.  It turns out that because the mix itself contains no sweeteners, pancakes can actually be prepaared any number of ways including, as we just learned, with cheese, Italian spices, and salsa.  Now that I’m full and happy, here’s some pictures for you to stare longingly at when you think of me.  =D

I’m 19 years old and Broke as f***!

So as of today I am officially an employee of Circuit City (I get my hours tomorrow).  That is the good news.  The bad news is that I haven’t gotten paid or anything so I’m still quite broke.  And between me and my brother (who is conveniently also my roommate) there is not that much food in the cupboard.  This blog doesn’t have much point really; I just felt like bitching because my stomach is empty.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make a grilled cheese pancake.

Therapy

So the last two blogs I wrote were pretty fucking emo, right?  Well it turns out that that type of thing is somewhat therapuetic.  Between all that venting/writing and the pint of Cherry Garcia I’m currently working my way through I dare say I feel a bit better.  Thanks Ben, Jerry, Tom and. . . ummm. . . is there no person who represents WordPress?

 

Anyway, What I was supposed to write about today was how utterly in love I am with a certain webcomic.  Questionable Content is possibly the greatest webcomic I have ever read.  That was not even hyperbole.  Let me put it this way, this webcomic is like the person you are so in love with that you ignore their obvious flaws.  QC makes jokes about music that I usually don’t get (the bands are too obscure), makes jokes about fine art that I don’t get (Picasso’s blue period?), and shits on bands that I love (what’s wrong with Bloc Party and The Killers?), but I still keep coming back.

I’m not sure why I have such a strong connection with this particler collection of words and pictures.  Maybe it’s the fact that I identify with nearly all of the characters, with their various emotional issues, imperfections and all around human-ness (i don’t care much for the word “humanity”).  Maybe it’s the art, which was really good to begin with but has steadily gotten better and better as the strip has progressed.  Maybe it’s the balance between serious issues (suicide) and outright absurdity (gay robot sex).  Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good story.  But whatever it is, this comic has captured my attention in a way that few other things ever do.

The point of all this?  You should read this webcomic, for it is awesome.  I’ll even link it again so you don’t have to scroll up:

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1223

 

 

 

P.S. Sorry for the glut of posts; I guess I was a little backed up.

Pity Party! Everyone’s Invited!

So one thing I’ve always tried to avoid in my bloggings is devolving to the point where I become one of those people who just pukes his life onto the screen for the world to see.  I always thought that people who did that were

a) not very creative

b) pathetically begging for attention

Well luckily for me I currently have no ability to do anything remotely creative or productive but I have a pretty compulsive need to write something regardless.  So here it is:  some random shit that happens to compose the make-up of my life at the moment:

Money: I have no job, $1 in my wallet, -$79 in my bank account and rent due on the 15th.  Time to go beg my parents for money.  Oh joy.

Music: First I broke my external hard drive and couldn’t recover anything from it.  Then my ipod broke and I had to delete all the songs on it in order to reset it.  All told, I lost about 17,000 songs.  I don’t have any money to buy music (which sucks because the record store is like 5 minutes away) and this computer is has too little bandwith, memory, and speed to download (read: pirate) music in any great amounts.  Also, my dad hasn’t sent my guitar yet, I blew out the speakers in my (only) headphones, and this computer is also too slow to run FL Studio.

Social Life: I basically know 5 or 6 people in this entire city, most of which are my brother’s friends, and I don’t have any money to go out so I’m pretty much stuck in the house all day every day. 

Miscelanious: All the spiders that call my bedroom home are jumping spiders.  It is hot as balls. I ran out of chapstick.  I’m effectively addicted to Questionable Content.  I’m almost out of ice cream.  I’m starting to feel really silly sitting here thinking of reasons to feel sorry for myself.  I guess that means I should stop.

 

Stay tuned for my next blog where I will be writing about something other than self-pity.