This comes to you in three parts: Semantics, Philosophy, Stories.
Semantics
My name is…don’t worry about it. I’m going to college a year early and leaving all of my friends behind. This is my first ever blog post and the first and only Saturday letter. Just kidding. I’m an inconsistent person (see my soccer-playing, *good* writing, and interpersonal relationships) so I’ll undoubtedly have another Saturday letter, but for now it looks like Tuesday is going to be my day. I hope to post weekly…or maybe bi-weekly…I don’t know.
In fact, let’s get all of this hashed out right here.
1. I don’t know if I should start two separate blogs, one for family (to keep track of academic achievements and good sleep habits and etc.) and one for friends (to post updates on recent drug escapades and late-night alcoholic confessions of love for random people from HS). It occurs to me that if people read this I’ll have a rather broad audience and that kinda scares me, because when I write for individual people it’s fine, but I honestly don’t know who this’ll go to and, y’know, who they are and how they’ll react.
2. When I wrote “y’know” it gave me a red underline. Which means that either I’ll have to get over it or somehow WordPress will have to adapt to my idiosyncrasies. Which raises the bigger questions of “Why WordPress?” and “If you get sick of it, will you switch?”
I chose WordPress because of a blog I happened to find totally by accident (while sitting like a loner in the library hiding behind the two full-height bookshelves in the HS during lunch, reading) called “uncomplicatedly.” See, I didn’t do any research as to which blog site would be ideal for my purposes, but the writer of “uncomplicatedly” strikes me as someone who would do such a thing, so essentially I’m trusting her judgement. And I don’t think I’ll switch. I wonder if there’s a bunch of fonts to choose from and whatever to personalize but I just want to write this first.
3. I want to do a music tab for music…in case you happen to like music. I’ve heard that a significant statistical portion of the population isn’t moved by music at all, and that terrifies me. Also: Bm7 is a music chord, in case you were wondering where that came from. It’s one of (if not) my favorite chords to play on guitar. I joked in my speech at my “graduation” party (I didn’t graduate) that my parents were terrified I’d become a music major, so this is a feigned, jovial step in that direction.
4. The purpose of this is primarily to update people who might happen to care. Now, the predominant purpose of most of my writing is to be therapeutic, that is, to me; I often write as a way to save myself. I’m not sure if that’s healthy but I certainly believe it’s healthier than, say, alcohol. Anyway, this isn’t for that. I have plenty of other writing that can go towards that. I’m saying this mostly to myself.
5a. This blog does not serve as an accurate account of factual events. I say this in case I ever get into any legal trouble. Similarly, all of the names we can pretend are fake, like how at the beginning of fiction books there’s that little disclaimer, y’know, “Any resemblance to persons living or dead blah blah blah…purely coincidental, blah blah blah,” etc. The names aren’t fake, but they also are.
5b. Now, my intention isn’t to lie. I don’t want to lie to you, because you and I (reader and writer) have a sort of contract where, frankly, I don’t lie. But if “you” happens to mean “the police” then I deny any illegal confessions that happen to end up here. I mean, my intention isn’t to commit any crimes, either. This isn’t sounding right. Nevermind.
6. I don’t have any classes on Tuesday, so I’ll try to do Tuesday letters. I don’t know why I’m calling them “letters.” I just made it up. Maybe it’s because I just finished reading Perks of Being a Wallflower and so I’m in the “Dear Friend” mindset (but please don’t think I read your average teenage novels because I…well I do, but I also read a lot of other stuff). This has been a lot of crap you probably didn’t need to read, so here goes the actual substantive part.
Philosophy
Today’s Saturday (I’ve said that). I leave on Monday morning. I’m going rafting for a week with other incoming freshmen and then orientation week starts right after that. Then, the week after that, classes start. I’m nervous but not in an excessive way, and I’m also very excited. I’ve been saying “goodbye” to people, and that’s been sad. People have quite the way of blowing shit up right before you leave, i.e. breaking up and whatnot. But I mean that’s all just a part of me not being there next year.
I’ve noticed that people have nice, healthy lives, and then they start to have a single crappy idea or way of thinking that just loops around obnoxiously in their mind like a toy train and screws the whole thing up. Think, “This is not the real world and we must die to wake up,” the idea that consumes Mal and ultimately leads to her suicide in Inception.
Anyways, I’ve been trying to identify these ideas or ways of thinking in myself so that I can tell myself to knock it off so that it doesn’t eat at me. Now, I’m first and foremost a liver, as in a person who lives, not the thing that dies slowly the more beer you drink, but I’m also a writer and a creator, which means I have things to think about in those regards as well.
As a liver, the current crisis is missing out on things.
We only live a single myopic linear narrative and only get to play bilateral, often minuscule roles in the lives of others and we’re always missing out on something. I’m currently missing out on senior year and all of the joys and miseries that supposedly come with it. As far as missing out goes, that’s pretty mild on the scale. For example, some people couldn’t make it to my “graduation” party, and they really missed out. Just kidding.
The takeaway, I guess, or the thing we have to tell ourselves in the face of the fact that we’re always missing out, is that, well, we’re always missing out. So we have to make the most of our experiences and what we do get to be a part of. That’s fairly easy for me to say, because college is going to be awesome. I just have to keep reminding myself because a couple of my friends are, well, going through a breakup, so it sucks to not be there for them, although I’m sure they’ll be fine, and I’m sure there’s all sorts of fun senior year things I’ll be busy not experiencing. But that’s okay.
As a writer, my current crisis is that my writing sounds really good and feels really good when I’m writing it, and then when I revisit it a day later, it sounds like crap.
Secondary crisis: my dad’s making fun of how loud I type; he’s on his computer, too, and now he’s slamming loudly on all of the keys. I actually like the way it sounds; it’s quite the satisfying smacking sound, especially when it means that meaning is being synthesized.
Anyways, I think the real crisis is just a self-esteem thing, and I’ll get over it.
Stories
If I were to direct a movie about my life, I’d probably do it the way my mom tells stories. Which is to say that I’d start right smack-dab in the middle, and then flash back to two seconds before that, and then five minutes before that, and then to the end, and then to the beginning, etc.
Essentially it’d be a big mess of unchronological scenes with plenty of redundant connections between them that becomes, at best, annoying.
So here’s that!
//
I sat as Sam made fun of Carol for “pre-cutting” her pancakes and Hanna silently judged Sam for judging Carol and Henry speculated on the emotional duress of trying to cut waffles because you don’t want to break the walls of each little cell because that lets the syrup out, so you want to cut it just perfectly so that each wall is split evenly so that neither side is compromised…and ultimately it’s not that big of a deal because you can just use the freshly-cut piece to mop up whatever syrup you spilled, but it’s that sort of micro-angst that defines probably more than half of our days….
I recalled a Tumblr post about someone who was eating with a friend who was on his/her phone and not paying attention. Due to this neglect the first person decided to launch into a big narrative of their epic adventures in a drug cartel and all of their moral dilemmas and emotional scarring while their friend sorta just nodded along… whereupon the person telling the story looks to the right and notices that the people in the booth next to them are just staring with dropped jaws at them because they were listening to the entire thing.
Sam responded by saying he thought that my mini-story would end up with the friend (distracted by the phone) having choked on his/her food. He said he thought that maybe the friend would’ve been dead and the story-teller oblivious to this until he/she looked up. And then Sam started choking on his food, which we all found quite ironic and hilarious.
“The foreshadowing couldn’t be better.”
“Yeah it’s like, ‘It’d be funny if they’d choked on their food.’ *Starts choking.*”
//
Henry and I played a quickly-improvised version of “Cough Syrup” by Young the Giant on top of a water tower while Carol and Maddie sang.
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I went to Maddie’s house and I watched her pack for the second time in a month, and petted her cat, Cuddles, and she packed four hats and told “Alexa” (her voice-activated speaker) to skip an Ed Sheeran song. Meanwhile I thought about leaving and leaving and leaving.
//
We saw a bee on the ground and it wasn’t walking around that much and wouldn’t fly so we crouched down on the pavement and I used a little pine needle to try to prompt it to flight but it refused. Meanwhile she talked to it, as if it could understand and be encouraged by her. When I left she was still there next to the bee in her driveway and I thought about how she could do anything she set her mind to, even if it was just to run a yellow-jacket recovery clinic.
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Carol sent me a thing she wrote about the Maya Angelou poem that was used in an Apple commercial aired during the Olympics. The poem is called Human Family. The poem is as beautiful as what Carol wrote about it, and I really hope she continues to write and share her writing.
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In a dimly-lit restaurant (though not dim enough to even border on “romantic”) my step-mom asked my sister (4 years old, and 5 days) what she’d miss about me. My sister asked if they’d all be sad when I left, and if the neighbors would be sad. No, little one, the neighbors won’t be sad.
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I had breakfast with Emma and it was just really good to see her.
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I got an Emoji pillow and a stuffed animal and a lot of money and a new guitar and giftcards and a travel mug and, more than all of that, a better understanding of the fact that I was loved, unconditionally, by more people than I deserve.
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Henry and I stood outside of cars in downtown Kirkland at 11pm and hugged for a long time.
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Henry and I stood in the middle of the street in downtown Kirkland (the street was closed b/c of a fair) at 3pm and hugged for a short time because it was “too hot to hug.”
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My mom sat at the dining room table and confessed that she’d thought she was doing alright but then started crying right there in front of me and so I hugged her and told her it was okay.
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I talked to two old friends, a girl who used to have a crush on me (and who I hope doesn’t still) who showed me her beautiful beautiful college essay and a girl who currently interns at an observatory in Arizona.
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I sat at a park bench in Kirkland and wrote a poem about hummingbirds and psychology. I sat at a different park bench and wrote about surfing. I sat on a blanket in a park and had a picnic with Maddie’s family.
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Carol and I contemplated stealing canoes.
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I think that’s enough. That’s over 2K words. I hope it was worth your time. Thanks for reading.
bm7 