A story.
To tell the story of my life is to tell a very short story, indeed. My life is a plethora of repetition. I can tell you one story, any story, and I have told you all. Choosing the story to tell is a story in itself; I could tell you about how I saw that dull little five cent coin squished into the hardened tar of the street that runs along the edge of my uni campus. I could tell you about how my brother asked our mum to send him nail polish. I could tell you one of many things - they are all the same. You see, I cannot even bring myself to separate my ideas with paragraphs… it just takes so much effort. I hardly ever think with paragraphs or even words for that matter ~and it is hard enough to find all the punctuation I need just to help you sneak a peek into my world. So, which story do you want to read? Like I said, they are all the same. They are mine, mine alone, and no one will tell you my story the same way, even if one uses my words and traps them in my punctuation. My thoughts aren’t behind their story, and therefore my stories are always mine, no matter how many times I tell them. I’ll give them to you, even - and they are still mine, because what I give to you becomes yours, and you will have your own impact on whatever I give you. But you know that. I just like to say things that make me feel philosophical. Ish. Philosophicalish. Not too philosophical. Someone else could beat me in my philosophicality rather easily, so what I am we shall henceforth refer to as “philosophicalish”. Unless I change my mind, that is. I may go out for full philosophicalness, but not now. Now I will tell a story, all stories, and the story. How do you like my little divider? That one. I could have used but those two parallel lines had such a clean look until I added the other three. Well, I’ll start a new page, and then we can relish together in it’s cleanness. Cleanliness. I am pretty sure they are both words, and they may both work. I like “cleanliness” more. It just sounds less hampered by the need to think through two n’s in a row. I changed my font. This is the font I use when I write out my Math equations on the computer. On Microsoft Word vista, or whatever this is, the font is MS Reference Serif. I wonder what a serif is. A serif is that line at the top and bottom of the letters that makes them easy to read. I’ll show you the difference. By the way, don’t take my word on any of this stuff. I guess at meanings from context; I don’t use dictionaries anymore. Once, when I looked up a word in the dictionary, the dictionary failed to mention that the word wasn’t really in use anymore. This was back when I used to read dictionaries as recreational reading. So anyhow when I use to tell stories using my ‘special’ word and my audience would responded with unexpected fascination, I started to sense that I had been caught in the sinly sinful act. I was used to making up good stories so that I could consistently have an attentive audience; therefore, I also prided myself on keeping the moral integrity of my stories intact; therefore, my stories of lies necessitated more lies to make lies look like truths. Isn’t it funny that, in a way, a whole lot of lies seem more like the truth than “a little white lie”? That’s because a little whit lie stands on its own; a series of lies creates an entire system within which other lies can live as long as they follow the rules set forth by the strings of lies that surround and protect them. And, yes, I do think about this too much. So, when I thought I was caught telling a lie, I went on to describe in great detail how Brendan (that’s my hunting brother) could use his pile of sticks to make natural animal noises. The unsuspecting animal was in for quite a surprise when the cute little bunny who had been playing behind the bushes ended up being six feet tall, and toting a very loud stick Story of my life: bunnies end up being pre-pubescent teens with loaded guns in hand. You can see how the coin-in-the-tar story would tell you about the same thing. Mostly You know, it is so hard, as in painful, to watch this story change. You see, if I had told you any of my stories a moment ago, I would have been telling you all the others at the same time. But now that I have told that story, the other stories have changed - they have changed enough that I cannot honestly say that they are the same stories that I could have chosen from before I told that story. This is the art of story-telling at its beorst. I don’t know if I meant best or worst, so neither should you Do you know how annoying it is when someone else knows how you think better than you do? Like, I have this friend, Jessie, and she kicks my ass when it comes to knowing me. She can kick my ass in other ways, too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I can assure you that if I keep on writing, that issue will come up more than I am happy to admit. Anyway, if I try to tell Jessie something about me, she either a) already knew about it, b) points out and proves that I am waaaaaay wrong, or c) reminds me that it is just better sometimes to stop talking Example: I try to explain that I am really not that smart (because I am really *not that smart*). She denies my claim. I am, like, “Dude, seriously, I am not kidding. People just think I am smart because …” Wait… why do people think I am particularly intelligent? I really don’t know. My best guess is because I take unusually high-level math classes and I like to insert meaningless numbers into any (and, probably, every) conversation I am even remotely a part of. I don’t often take clear stances on issues because most people are bastards who are happy to use one of my past stances against me as though changing one’s mind implies an absolute inability to ever have resolute beliefs, standards, or logical reasons to subscribe to a particular set of beliefs, so I doubt that my indecisive opinions make me stand out in people’s minds. I certainly don’t have the lexis to use words like “lexis” often, and I have an absolute inability to pronounce most words in my native tongue as though it were my native tongue. Eight out of ten people I met my first day of uni thought I was from Northern Europe. I don’t even know how to fake a Northern European accent (as though there were a single one). What, do I act Irish? Or are we talking Scotland? I don’t know what they meant. We are getting off the point. I guess I can’t blame you; you aren’t really doing a whole lot to distract me. OK, so I like math, I don’t debate well, and I can’t speak my own language. What a masterful piece of intellectualism. Anyhow, Jessie can always put together some argument to beat mine, and I walk away satisfied that she won, but then I can’t remember what argument she used. I feel like one of those poor early earthlings in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books; one of them kept going to this one dude who was a part of a group that was being all autocratic at them and the poor little guy tried to vie for his people, but the big guy gave him some spiel that sounded good until the little guy had to recite it to his people so that they would feel as good as he did accepting the evil rule, but then he couldn’t remember the argument, so he looked like a fool and was still disgruntled (which may as well be “gruntled” because they both sound just as bad at the other) You know, I don’t really think that story clarified anything. Sometimes, I need Jessie here to remind me that it is just best to stop talking. Jessie, where are you That was an unfair question to yell out into the abyss of paper. I left Jessie, not vice versa. I mean, I didn’t leave her in the married couple sense. but in the geographical sense of: I left home. Jessie lives at home. Therefore, I left Jessie. To go to uni. By the way, hi, I am a uni student. I love uni. We’ll get to that later So, where was I? I am afraid that I have left to many stories hanging. I tend to do that. I get so excited about tangents, that I go off on them, never to return to finish drawing the circle that is the full story. How do you like my analogy? I am a big fan of a lot of things I do. That is why I do them. By the way, that is not an obvious statement. A lot of people do a lot of things they don’t like, and Lord Knows Why. I do, too, but not very often. When I do, it is something that I am actually very happy to do at the time; it is only later that I am not so thrilled by my performance; or I am not even happy at the time that I am doing it, and I am doing it in hope of a longer and more fulfilling future-happiness; I have decided, by the way, not to use paragraphs for a while; is it distracting? My computer is yelling at me with sharply serrated green lines. Well, I don’t think my computer cares! (haha, I avoided the evil paragraph again!) In fact, even Word does not care that I write forever and ever and never apart; it is the little expurgator that works for Word, the one that goes by the name of “Spelling and Grammar Check” and nobody likes a censor accept for big companies that have to worry about lawsuits, and even they don’t like censors; rather, they begrudgingly accept their pathetic necessity for economics’ sake and move on, every once in a while spilling coffee all over their brown padded office seats so that when they sit down they end up with a pee-like coffee stain on their crotch. We are all better. A good game of Lying Bastard will fix anything. That, too, comes later. For now, I feel like ending this chapter. Four pages in Word is, like, an eight-page paper in college. Everything is double-spaced. Papers, cars --- but all of this is another story. These stories keep on changing because I keep on bringing them up and telling other stories and, well, it just makes this one story I want to tell harder to get to. I am working on it. That is the kind of story-teller I am. I have to work on it. So for now, I’ll summarize what has been said: I am about to tell you a story.