A New Years resolution was not to be less pessimistic.

So i came back to Meadville to do some writing, my thinking that was the solitude would motivate me to do... Anything. I have, of course, not done anything. I've been productive, to a certain degree, laundry and cleaning and the gym — all those things i normally never do, and only do now of cour cause i need to avoid my real obligations.

I was in a good mood today, bubbly and chipper, until I saw my advisor at the gym. He made some crack about how long my comp is, which is something i haven't discussed with him, which means he and River joke about that in their inter-departmental tet-a-tets or whatever. That feels fantastic, to know you are a u joke. I can't wait for the semester to start again, to walk through the halls of the vuk, and see the faces of faculty and friends hide all those things that they are thinking, covering them with an embarrassingly superficial hello.

The art history professor who taught the visa class i had to take nailed it right on the head. In his comments about my "journal", and he did put it in quotes, he mentioned that no one doubts my intellect, but i need to rethink how I address and present my own motivations.

He was right.

He noted that this clearly was a introductory level course for a minor i had no enthusiasm for. He was right. I feel like i want to email him an apology or something, I feel guilty that i didn't care. I think this guilt cmes from the fat that he was able to say something about me and my work. He read past the obvious, he knew that i knew what i needed to say, but knew that i couldn't care to say it.

Clearly there were clues to his conversations with Amara about my minor. The difference right now between my major and minor (apart from passion) is that while both sets of professors are equally disconnected from the material, the minor folk seem less disconnected from me. When Keeley and Branch put me on probation for being a shite worker, they were complimentary of intellect and talent, but completely oblivious to everything that made me so upset about the job. Yes, i did come out of that meeting wishing i had been a better employee, but only because of my own will and autonomy, not for any compassion or dedication to them, or the department.

Next semester will be nice, having only one remaining class for my minor, and one that is actually not really connected to the frog dirt that is collegiate community service. I also have my comp, but i will probably have a lot of freedom there, i feel like if nothing i have established an attitude that says stay out of my way. I would have loved to really be integrated with the department, to be river's pet like she requested me to be in our private chat outside the vuk one day, but i don't have it in me. I don't have it in me to give a shit about Allegheny anymore. This is advanced senioritis, the sort that is onset early in sophomore year and fucking stagnates.

So i wold love to talk to those im actually close to here, just to make me feel like all my time here hasn't been a waste. Some of them respond. Some don't.

I wish the ones that didn't did, so i could feel like i made an impression on the ppl that matter to me during a time when my school completely failed to make any impression upon me.

I guess i can say with confidence that in some manners, i am Allegheny. Impressionless, superficial, and scaly.

Location:Allegheny St,Meadville,United States

I need to rethink how i blog.

I need to rethink how i blog. I had a pretty almoar fun entry from new yeRs, but it was mainly my stream of consciousness and i rarely ever deem that worthy of a blog entry.

Which is why i only have, what, five or six? Each of which try way too hard at beng meaningful and constructed. I need to loosen up. I thick i am, though i might enjoy thinking otherwise, pretty formulaic when it comes to writing and creativity, which is about a depressing thought s any,

But in keeping with my resolution to NOT BE SUCH A DOWNER, i will instead see it as a catapult for gout, and hope that over the next year i can learn to care less about perfection in performance, just writ something and get it out. I realize that my knack for writing papers under the gun is merely symptomatic of only ever writing papers under the gun...

I feel like while i put off from academic writing, what i am still forced to realize is homework, is a combination of being uninspired and lazy. What keeps me from my creative and personal writing is a fear of imperfection, and also laziness. I misspelled imperfection, good thing for auto correct. I wish i could auto correct real imperfections.

Image. You are texting your friend drunk and you say "dewd last new years as bachelor go nuts". With auto-correct in life, that text would change to "please stop texting me and please don't get married, you are ill prepared and crazy also, you fuck."

Here is an excerpt from my attempted new year's eve blog entry: And as 2010 ticked closer to its final seconds, i beat my father in chess for the first time in my life. The two of us barely spoke during the game, but that is hardly out of character.

With no one to celebrate, i came at midnight. Not the second of, because I am not that precise, but i have no regrets. I entered 2011 with a bang.

This is actually a huge deal(I'm speaking again of beating my sage-like papa I chess, not masturbation) and it shows as i had a I've dream about chess a couple nights later. I wish i had started this blog with the dream, instead of ending with it, because then i might remember the details. As it stands, last night i was lying next to Katrina on gym mats in a room from the Vukovich building at school. We only had one mat though so I pulled another one, but it was a disgusting brown color. Te. There was a cross country adventure, and that is the part i have forgotten. Cripes.

I need to rethink how i blog.

what do you do when you get up?

Every night I have been having incredible, beautiful, adventurous dreams.  I wake up on my air mattress, get up to go pee, and have the same argument with myself every morning.  Do I wake up and start the day?  Or do I try and return to those dreams.  I go the whole day without dreams, and only in this dawning of the subconscious do they seem so attainable, and almost tangible.

But then I start to feel like sloth incarnate.  Worshiping the surreal dimensions of my mind, and justifying this because these modes of experience are so fleeting.

So today, I woke up.  I wrote down my dream, and refused to let myself back in bed.  The comforters look so warm and soft and inviting.  No, I tell them.  Please? They ask.  OK, I'll blog undercovers, but I am not going to sleep! I say.

...

I just woke up from an amazing dream where I was running along the rooftops of a rural village, kicking around chickens, when I had to land because someone had told me my email address wasn't working.  I got down, but then suddenly I was in a van, and being interrogated with questions about [something very important].  He turned the lamp directly into my face, as those villainous characters always do in the movies...

An obnoxious beam of light then bleared my eyes open, and though I still heard the interrogator shout at me, the vision of his face was replaced by my dusty floor between the proscenium of my oh-so-warm blankets and my oh-so-soft mattress.  I squinted, reality came into focus, and like the tides washing into sea, the voices and questions and interrogations were swept away from consciousness.

I hate being awake.  You have to fill you head with ideas of inspiration, motivation, determination to give the conscious life purpose.  When you sleep your mind does a pretty good job of filling in all those blanks for you.

In which the Country Mouse has a boner for the city

I love being a fake New Yorker.  There are few other comforts right now that can put me in such a dizzying dazzling darling mood.  Summer in the city?  It's clear, it's clear, it's clear. I write in cafes.  I read in parks.  I do yoga on my fire escape.  I walk around naked in my apartment with the curtains open to be that guy.  

When it rains, I can see the reflections of the awesome skyscrapers in puddles, where the giant monolithic structures are extended from the sky and sent jutting into the depths of the earth.  I say awesome in the old, biblical, almost angelic sense.  Not that I believe skyscrapers to be images of the Divine, but they impress upon me such a sense of awe and mystery, humility.  I am afraid.  I am inspired.   

In tandem with how I've been living my life for the past two years, every day I just start walking.  Occasionally I have a destination, usually not, but I always arrive somewhere. 

A double decker tour bus drives by, an elderly korean man points to something near me, everybody looks.  I am exhilarated, for the people (who on this particular day are all looking absurd wearing their "SEE NYC" mandated yellow trash bags to keep dry) only see me as one of so many.  A New Yorker.  They don't know that I'm lost because I walk with determination and a firm step.  I'm fooling them.  As I do everyday, I am playing a part.  I haven't lived here a month, but I sell it like I was born and raised. I am reveling in a performance of which I am the only true audience member.  Like the groove your ass finds on the couch, so have my feet have found on the city sidewalks. 

I feel just as much home here as I did in Erie, in Meadville, and honestly, in India.  Is home where your heart is?  Could it be your feet?  Cause lately, I don't know where my heart isn't.  

A dusty foot philosopher.  (let's pretend this is more applicable this is)

They call me dusty coz my feet have been through a lot

The wisdom of my survival that's just due to a lot

So I'm not gonna sit here and whine like crushed grapes

My mind leaves you speechless like duct tape

Vampires are no longer cool

There are quite a lot of things that come to mind when walking through New York City.  Metropolitan chaos, arson, butter churning, thick air, and of course, squirrel muzzling.  But if there is one thing that today's march through this city that never sleeps has impressed upon me, it is vampirism.

To my left, the epic and often gothic skyline of New York City, hiding under a grand quilt of cloud, soft and billowing, yet heavy and dark.  To my right, translucent clouds of pink and pinker, corseting the sun, and smurf-blue skies peaking out from behind.  My head suffers a constant beat that rivals eminem's newest baseline, while light assaults my senses, driving dull plungers into my sockets and probing my... eye-to-brain-connecty-tendons.  I want a cape to wrap myself up in, to kill all the light and save my skin from smoldering underneath the harsh and Godly waves.

Luckily, not a block a way from my apartment is a nice little shop called Vampire Freaks, where any blood-sucker can find all the essentials.

Mucus is dripping down my nose, rain pours through city gutters, people scowl at their sloshy shoes.

Today is just a different view of the city.  Not one from an ambitious country mouse, but from a lecherous ghoul.

True Blood will premiere in a few nights.  I'll be in my coffin until then.

taking apart technology.

 I saw my first iPad through the lens of an old spyglass that dates back to 1896.  I don't actually know the year, I make things up sometimes... my dad lent it to me for a movie prop, not knowing he was going to lose it forever, but how could I ever give up an authentic pirate spyglass from 1896?

I knew exactly where he kept the old thing, but he doesn't know that.  The old trunk.  The one that in our old house he kept tucked away in the back corner of the crawl-in closet directly left from where he hid the Christmas presents every year.  I remember sneaking in on all fours, contorting my whole skeleton like a mouse to fit through the maze of closet junk to finally arrive at that elegant and out-of-bounds cedar chest.  The chest was full of.... guns... and guns were off limits.  Ask my Luke Skywalker toy whose blaster was ripped from his plastic grip by mother the day he was drafted into my armada of playthings.  In our new apartment, where his entire room is about the size of that closet, he keeps it underneath his bed.

Just as I did when I younger, I would sneak into his room, go through the cedar chest, disassemble the civil war era revolvers, the b.b. guns he used in the depression to kill his dinner (often of squirrels), or to just marvel at the gadgetry of it all.  And the sounds, the glorious metallic sounds of springs loading and gears falling into place...

When I asked for the telescope he said yes, but stalled as he remembered where he kept it.  I didn't chime in with the answer, and I let him figure it out.  Eventually, he pulled out an old dusty trunk from underneath his bed, blew off some dust, wiped away some cobwebs, and creaked it open.  Silently reveling in the joy of antiquities, he pulled out the dented and rusted bronze telescope from the bed of retired rifles, knives, and other wonky weaponry.  It was bent and warped and you couldn't even collapse or expand the shaft, and let's be honest, isn't that half the reason we all play with telescopes anyway?  The shook-scchhuck sound, the phallic implications...

The iPad: sleek, sexy, and simple(they say), cheap(they say), great to use as a cheese platter(they probably don't say).  I really wanted to run out of the house,  across the road, and into the yard where this family is hovering over their new toy, their new technological centerpiece, and steal it away!  I watch them marvel at how magic it is.  One embarrassing evening, I was patrolling the web with squinty eyes and got very excited about those damn mac ads promoting the thing; the fit brit guy actually compares it to wizardry.  It becomes magic, apparently, in my inability to understand how it works and my marvel at the fact that it does.  Suddenly using an iPad gets me THAT much closer to Hogwarts.

A friend recently illuminated Harry Potter to me in a way that I always knew, but like so much that I know was not able to eloquate.  "We all love Harry because we are that different and we are that alone."  And much like Harry, at home over the summer, I've been feeling pretty estranged.  In my sister's [finished] attic, no job or money, a time where when I'm not reading or drawing or kayaking, I am spying on the more-than-fortunate neighbors with big boats and kids with toy hummers they drive around the boulevard.  No one really to spend the time with, except my lovely and spoiled niece, my less abrasive Dudley.  Things blend together at the seams, and suddenly it is a week later.  I need to get out of this town, this mugglian suburbia.  And I need to bring my telescope and pretend it is my wand.  Don't need no fuckin' iPad.

On the train to New York (after buying some Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans off the food trolley) I tinkered with the broken down trinket.  There is a lot of time in summer, a lot of pet projects.  Such as fixing a telescope, starting a blog, cooking my own batches of jam, taxidermy...  Anyway, the thing collapses and retracts again, whoopee!  Shook-schuuk.  Also, wonderful living images somewhere between 75 and 100 yards jiggle in immaculate focus.  Do that, iPad.  although in some distant future, when iPads are attached to our heartstrings at birth like teletubbies in the United States of Apple, I am sure that the little camera will not only have an incredible zoom, but also shoot home movies in 3D.  I like having the spy glass with me.  It keeps me connected with some form of rustic and adventurous history that I have no real connection to, but try to emulate in every day life.  So pissed, by the way, that modern trains don't have a caboose with a back patio thing like in all the movies.  Western movies.  With train robbers and stuff.  Maybe they got rid of the caboose patios because that is where all the robbers were getting in.  Maybe I shouldn't continue to write my stream of consciousness.

I feel somewhat like a pilgrim.  I feel somewhat maudlin.

New York City and no where to go.  Two legs and not a single place for them to take me.  It'd be nice if the subletter would let me stay a night early in my summer apartment.  Or if my friends would answer their phones so i could stay in their summer apartments.  But that ceased to matter after my phone died.  Even further from communication, further from what I know.  More like a pilgrim.

I know, I'll go to Ellis Island.

Or at least look at it through the lens of an ancient old pirate telescope.  The ferry costs money.  There is a person on the ferry with an iPad.  Fucker.  Suddenly, I feel very much in the same place that I was a few weeks ago, with less money, fewer friends, and nothing knowable.  But as I learned from the fit bit guy, things unknowable are that much more magical.

Cause even though I can't get that green statue in full focus, I am feeling a lot more magic.