The taste of irony
The further I move from the allready distant shores of my high school life, the more I find the little oddities it drove me to just blatantly disgusting.
I must admit, my life is extremely bland as of late. You'd think that going to UCSB, on the edge of the beach, with some of the wildest parties on the west coast, would have me claiming that I live in a world of nonstop action, but I wont lie.
Yes it's beautiful down here. So beautiful that I wont even begin to describe it because it's incomprehensible to anyone who hasnt spent more than a month exploring the various byways, walking down the beaches, and just lazing around in a room on the ninth story of a tower facing the beach. However, beauty is just a passive thing: most of the time you dont notice after you've lived in it long enough. For example, the first week I was back in Yorba Linda, I was awestruck by the beauty of the setting sun over the mountains; as opposed to the all-to-often-seen beach sunset. I digress, beauty doesnt make life exciting, just better.
As for my party life, it's most definitely not on-par to the average student here. Yes this place is a party school, almost too much so. The sirens of police and ambulances every night passing by under my window get somewhat annoying after awhile, as do the jackoffs who find it necessary to rev their muscle car engines out in a drag down my street at 4:00 in the morning. When I do go to parties, it's usually with a couple of girls I met on my floor, although since coming back from Winter Break I havnt seen them. Never really got around to knocking on their door last weekend to talk; oh well.
All of this quiet existence is nice. I could/have settled in like this. I find it almost annoying those few times I do have to go home and break my idyllic routine. The point I'd really like to get to is that I chuckle when I walk through the dining commons, doing my usual "check people out/psychoanalysis of their actions". I still see some of the stuff that I remember from high school; stuff that I really wish I could understand the reasoning behind. I see couples where the girl is talking and the guy is staring adamantly into her eyes, as if she's the most interesting thing in the world. I see groups of friends breaking out laughing at something that one in their ranks said that, truthfully, couldnt be considered funny in any context.
Such selfless devotion to social interactions defined my high school career, and in many ways I desired it too, but I cant help but wonder now if those interactions were entirely meaningless. I came away with a couple of good friends, but for the most part those were friends I had in the first place. I went through three years of teenage stress about who my next date would be only to decide in the first couple of month's of college that it didnt really even matter. I used to think one should seek love, now I'm more of a believer in the "it will come when it's destined to". So many failed relationships, all with the same problem: the girl said "I feel like you and I are really different, James", of course followed by the reassuring lie, "But that's a good thing!".
Truly interesting is that the driving force behind much of the changes in my life revolve around my addiction to a certain video game. Some days, like today, I ponder over it and think of it as a blessing; an escape from one of the worlds endless circles of meaningless work. Others, I wonder if I should be living the same way I did in high school, because while I might have the oppurtunity now, I'll soon never have the oppurtunity again.
I must admit, my life is extremely bland as of late. You'd think that going to UCSB, on the edge of the beach, with some of the wildest parties on the west coast, would have me claiming that I live in a world of nonstop action, but I wont lie.
Yes it's beautiful down here. So beautiful that I wont even begin to describe it because it's incomprehensible to anyone who hasnt spent more than a month exploring the various byways, walking down the beaches, and just lazing around in a room on the ninth story of a tower facing the beach. However, beauty is just a passive thing: most of the time you dont notice after you've lived in it long enough. For example, the first week I was back in Yorba Linda, I was awestruck by the beauty of the setting sun over the mountains; as opposed to the all-to-often-seen beach sunset. I digress, beauty doesnt make life exciting, just better.
As for my party life, it's most definitely not on-par to the average student here. Yes this place is a party school, almost too much so. The sirens of police and ambulances every night passing by under my window get somewhat annoying after awhile, as do the jackoffs who find it necessary to rev their muscle car engines out in a drag down my street at 4:00 in the morning. When I do go to parties, it's usually with a couple of girls I met on my floor, although since coming back from Winter Break I havnt seen them. Never really got around to knocking on their door last weekend to talk; oh well.
All of this quiet existence is nice. I could/have settled in like this. I find it almost annoying those few times I do have to go home and break my idyllic routine. The point I'd really like to get to is that I chuckle when I walk through the dining commons, doing my usual "check people out/psychoanalysis of their actions". I still see some of the stuff that I remember from high school; stuff that I really wish I could understand the reasoning behind. I see couples where the girl is talking and the guy is staring adamantly into her eyes, as if she's the most interesting thing in the world. I see groups of friends breaking out laughing at something that one in their ranks said that, truthfully, couldnt be considered funny in any context.
Such selfless devotion to social interactions defined my high school career, and in many ways I desired it too, but I cant help but wonder now if those interactions were entirely meaningless. I came away with a couple of good friends, but for the most part those were friends I had in the first place. I went through three years of teenage stress about who my next date would be only to decide in the first couple of month's of college that it didnt really even matter. I used to think one should seek love, now I'm more of a believer in the "it will come when it's destined to". So many failed relationships, all with the same problem: the girl said "I feel like you and I are really different, James", of course followed by the reassuring lie, "But that's a good thing!".
Truly interesting is that the driving force behind much of the changes in my life revolve around my addiction to a certain video game. Some days, like today, I ponder over it and think of it as a blessing; an escape from one of the worlds endless circles of meaningless work. Others, I wonder if I should be living the same way I did in high school, because while I might have the oppurtunity now, I'll soon never have the oppurtunity again.