Getting things done
I ran into this guy I used to know from my old middle school the other day at Publix. I was standing in line at the pharmacy waiting to pick up my dad's prescription and he looked at me and said, “Hey, what's up? Did you used to go to Community Christian?” I remembered his name, even---my middle school class had like 25 people in it, so it'd have been hard to forget. Shit, middle school was like eight years ago. But there was a line at the pharmacy and neither of us were going anywhere for a little while, so I did what any introvert would do when confronted with a person that he doesn't know really at all but who he feels obligated to talk to because the two of them occasionally acknowledged each others' existence almost a decade ago: I avoided eye contact and mumbled some syllables to the effect of, “So, what've you been up to since middle school ended?”
“Prison,” he said. “Jail. Whatever you want to call it.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I didn't really do anything that bad,” he said, after a short pause. Then he asked me about the other people in our middle school graduating class. I told him that I hadn't talked to most of them in a very long time, but that I was sometimes informed of their activities passively through Facebook. He'd never heard of Facebook, which would seem to suggest that he really had just spent a significant amount of time locked up in some kind of deep dark place.
He paid for his prescription with a short stack of cash, and the top bill was worth $100. Presumably this would mean that he doesn't have health insurance, which is really a shame.
So a lot of people were and are under the impression that I am going to do the AmeriCorps thing next year, and the reason they think this probably has something to do with the fact that that is what I spent like the last two months of school telling them whenever they asked what my plans were. But things have changed since then, and after a great deal of thought, several late-night bitching sessions over IM, and some long talks with my parents, I've decided that AmeriCorps is not for me and that I'm going to need to find something else to do with myself for the next year or two while I see about getting into grad school. I applied to the program with only a very dim idea of what would be expected of me, and now that I know more about what will be involved, I am no longer enthusiastic about the chances that I would like AmeriCorps very much. From what I understand, it is really designed for motivated, outgoing morning-people. Since I am none of these things, it didn't seem like a very good fit, and honestly I am a little pissed off at myself for not figuring that out earlier; if I'd had half a brain it'd have been clear to me from pretty early on that I probably wasn't going to flourish in Sacramento, and if I'd been quicker with my thought processes I could have taken all the time I spent listening to that “California” song by Phantom Planet over and over again and instead used said time for making alternate plans. But I was caught up in some sort of la vie boheme wanderlust fantasy that did not belong to me, and for a long time I pushed any doubts I might have had from my mind and told myself that it'd be good for me regardless of what happened. But my priorities are much more easily quantifiable when I'm staring down the barrel of ten months spent in a rigidly controlled environment that I do not particularly care to be in, or something.
“So what are you going to do instead?” you are probably wondering, and my response to you is, please think of a different question to ask me when you hear about the decision to skip out on AmeriCorps. Seriously, I've been asked that so many times over the last two weeks that now I have scoliosis or something from shrugging my shoulders in response so much. So no, I don't have any kind of well-formed “Plan B,” but the only thing lamer than spending all summer being pissed off that my life has no direction would be to go all the way to California and spend ten months in AmeriCorps just because I couldn't think of anything better to do. I've spent the summer so far kind of sort of thinking about maybe filling out some job applications at some point in the future, undertaking some unfocussed writing projects, that sort of thing. I did take the GRE though, which is definite, easily-quantifiable forward progress of the sort that is very unusual for someone like me who always has to make every step a long, painful, drawn out process of angst-ridden journal entries and self-doubt and song lyrics. Eventually I want to go to grad school, but I won't be sure about what's going on at front for at least another semester or two.
So in the meantime, while I let all that other stuff fester, I've been trying to at least keep myself sort of occupied. And while I'm not improving myself at the rate that would perhaps be considered ideal, I have learned a lot this summer in my own way.
For example, one thing I've learned during the summer's travails thus far is, when you are rocking out in a mixed-gender mosh pit, any time the person you shove is a girl, you have about a 90% chance of accidentally pushing her by her breasts. The immediacy-based logic of the pit trumps social conditioning; in a mosh pit, you see a person and your first thought is not “Hey, there is a person, maybe I should say hello!” but instead “Hey, there is a person, I should push her into that guy standing over there and then grab hold of one of the ceiling rafters and swing around like a monkey,” and then like a minute later your brain catches up with the backlog of stimuli it has been trying to work through, and you think to yourself, “Shit, I just put both my hands on that girl's boobs and pushed her really hard. Jesus, I'm such a dick!” But this realization is always always retrospective, because you can't stop to think about these things while the music is playing. You're basically enclosed in a human meat grinder with a bunch of sweaty people who are jumping around and going crazy and spilling beer everywhere and just generally being chaotic and punk rawk. Things move pretty fast in that kind of an environment. And the chest area is really the default, ideal location to aim for during a surprise shoving attack---go for the shoulders and you run the risk of missing and hitting air or slipping and smacking the person in the face, but go for the stomach and you just don't get the same kind of leverage as if you go higher up on the body. Plus, if you stop to strategically place your hands on a less prominent and harder-to-access area of the other person's body, you're going to screw up the internal anarchic rhythm of the hive-consciousness that all good mosh pits end up being, and the girl in question will be like “Psh, you're taking too long to shove me, and while you're standing there being all limp-wristed and indecisive I've been stepping on your toes and spilling my drink all over the front of your shirt. Dork.” Except she won't really say all that, she'll just communicate it to you with a glance. At which point, you'll get expelled from the pit for being a dead weight, which is no good either.
So here I am. Just trying to stay sane. Look me up if you're ever around.
“Prison,” he said. “Jail. Whatever you want to call it.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I didn't really do anything that bad,” he said, after a short pause. Then he asked me about the other people in our middle school graduating class. I told him that I hadn't talked to most of them in a very long time, but that I was sometimes informed of their activities passively through Facebook. He'd never heard of Facebook, which would seem to suggest that he really had just spent a significant amount of time locked up in some kind of deep dark place.
He paid for his prescription with a short stack of cash, and the top bill was worth $100. Presumably this would mean that he doesn't have health insurance, which is really a shame.
So a lot of people were and are under the impression that I am going to do the AmeriCorps thing next year, and the reason they think this probably has something to do with the fact that that is what I spent like the last two months of school telling them whenever they asked what my plans were. But things have changed since then, and after a great deal of thought, several late-night bitching sessions over IM, and some long talks with my parents, I've decided that AmeriCorps is not for me and that I'm going to need to find something else to do with myself for the next year or two while I see about getting into grad school. I applied to the program with only a very dim idea of what would be expected of me, and now that I know more about what will be involved, I am no longer enthusiastic about the chances that I would like AmeriCorps very much. From what I understand, it is really designed for motivated, outgoing morning-people. Since I am none of these things, it didn't seem like a very good fit, and honestly I am a little pissed off at myself for not figuring that out earlier; if I'd had half a brain it'd have been clear to me from pretty early on that I probably wasn't going to flourish in Sacramento, and if I'd been quicker with my thought processes I could have taken all the time I spent listening to that “California” song by Phantom Planet over and over again and instead used said time for making alternate plans. But I was caught up in some sort of la vie boheme wanderlust fantasy that did not belong to me, and for a long time I pushed any doubts I might have had from my mind and told myself that it'd be good for me regardless of what happened. But my priorities are much more easily quantifiable when I'm staring down the barrel of ten months spent in a rigidly controlled environment that I do not particularly care to be in, or something.
“So what are you going to do instead?” you are probably wondering, and my response to you is, please think of a different question to ask me when you hear about the decision to skip out on AmeriCorps. Seriously, I've been asked that so many times over the last two weeks that now I have scoliosis or something from shrugging my shoulders in response so much. So no, I don't have any kind of well-formed “Plan B,” but the only thing lamer than spending all summer being pissed off that my life has no direction would be to go all the way to California and spend ten months in AmeriCorps just because I couldn't think of anything better to do. I've spent the summer so far kind of sort of thinking about maybe filling out some job applications at some point in the future, undertaking some unfocussed writing projects, that sort of thing. I did take the GRE though, which is definite, easily-quantifiable forward progress of the sort that is very unusual for someone like me who always has to make every step a long, painful, drawn out process of angst-ridden journal entries and self-doubt and song lyrics. Eventually I want to go to grad school, but I won't be sure about what's going on at front for at least another semester or two.
So in the meantime, while I let all that other stuff fester, I've been trying to at least keep myself sort of occupied. And while I'm not improving myself at the rate that would perhaps be considered ideal, I have learned a lot this summer in my own way.
For example, one thing I've learned during the summer's travails thus far is, when you are rocking out in a mixed-gender mosh pit, any time the person you shove is a girl, you have about a 90% chance of accidentally pushing her by her breasts. The immediacy-based logic of the pit trumps social conditioning; in a mosh pit, you see a person and your first thought is not “Hey, there is a person, maybe I should say hello!” but instead “Hey, there is a person, I should push her into that guy standing over there and then grab hold of one of the ceiling rafters and swing around like a monkey,” and then like a minute later your brain catches up with the backlog of stimuli it has been trying to work through, and you think to yourself, “Shit, I just put both my hands on that girl's boobs and pushed her really hard. Jesus, I'm such a dick!” But this realization is always always retrospective, because you can't stop to think about these things while the music is playing. You're basically enclosed in a human meat grinder with a bunch of sweaty people who are jumping around and going crazy and spilling beer everywhere and just generally being chaotic and punk rawk. Things move pretty fast in that kind of an environment. And the chest area is really the default, ideal location to aim for during a surprise shoving attack---go for the shoulders and you run the risk of missing and hitting air or slipping and smacking the person in the face, but go for the stomach and you just don't get the same kind of leverage as if you go higher up on the body. Plus, if you stop to strategically place your hands on a less prominent and harder-to-access area of the other person's body, you're going to screw up the internal anarchic rhythm of the hive-consciousness that all good mosh pits end up being, and the girl in question will be like “Psh, you're taking too long to shove me, and while you're standing there being all limp-wristed and indecisive I've been stepping on your toes and spilling my drink all over the front of your shirt. Dork.” Except she won't really say all that, she'll just communicate it to you with a glance. At which point, you'll get expelled from the pit for being a dead weight, which is no good either.
So here I am. Just trying to stay sane. Look me up if you're ever around.