Once Upon an Arrival in Spain Last Week (Mine)

So there I was, in an airport in Madrid, SPAIN, having just gotten off an airplane filled with people that all spoke different languages. I was excited, but also intimidated. My initial plans to immediately dive into the Spanish language failed when the extremely friendly grandmotherly monolingual lady from Aragon who was going to sit next to me on the plane and teach me all about Spanish and the culture and later introduce me to her large family that lives across Spain failed to exist.

(I blame the amiable french couple for not giving up their seats to go meet their previously forsaken American grandchildren who they ignore because they're still angry at the children's parents for abandoning them to go America. Either they were too stubborn to admit they were wrong for letting an old childish grudge get in the way of supporting their grandchildren in their time of need or they just couldn't read the dramatic and plot twist-filled letter they received from their grandson Peter in a Texan prison. [If it goes that way then I can blame them for being too proud to ask for help.] Typical.)

 (Maybe I'm projecting a little bit. [Or mayhaps I'm reading too much into their beverage orders.] Nevertheless, there was definitely some wistful regret mixed with bitter resentment in the way the man requested apple juice after his wife *explicitly* ordered tea for the both of them.) But either way, my matronly Spanish fairy godmother never appeared because of French people.

It wouldn't have been that bad but my contingency plan fell through too. I was going to master Spanish in my 7 hours on the plane by watching a few dubbed movies  (Alvin and the Chipmunks or something with Gerard Butler would have done quite nicely) but then American Airlines had to go and remove all the television screens from the back of the seats!  I was frustrated. (Now that I think about, what does "dubbed" really mean? Why is it such a silly word? Where does it come from? Does it like its current definition, or is the unusual use exhausting?)

Deprived of my preliminary Spanish mastery, I walked timidly through the airport, seeking out targets with which to bravely conquer and thus prove/create my linguistic mastery. My first target was customs.  The line was relatively short because it was a Tuesday, but I still had time before I stepped up to draft a short speech about how long I was planning to stay in Spain and what my purposes for visiting were; I'd even written up in my head a few brief explanations for my planned visits to other European countries and some strongly worded assurances about my scheduled departure from Europe in two and a half months' time.

Again I was tragically stripped of an opportunity to prove myself; I marched forward and handed my passport to the customs agent, brimming with expectant energy and prepared to stutter, when the seemingly hungover and visibly impatient Spaniard simply stamped my passport and handed it back, without so much as a second look at me. (Sometimes I think I'd get more attention in the airport if I were still on the no-fly list.)

I was then briefly sidetracked by an American from the same flight who was nervous about his baggage, but my focus returned to Spanish as I spied a money-changing booth. I muttered something unintelligible to the American and then turned to the booth while digging in my wallet for my money.  Here I wouldn't have quite the same opportunity to be verbose and loquacious and tediously talkative and long-winded and vocabulirific and obnoxious, but it would have to do. I sidled semi-casually up to the window, prepared to explain the cash I was changing and why and from where and for how much. I didn't know how long this kind of thing took either, so I considered small talk options and settled on a few paragraphs of questions about the money changing business and certain exchange rates. (best to stay professional at first; I could always improvise from there)

Trembling, with cash in hand, I carefully said to the lady on the other side of the counter: "Yo tengo...ciento...y cuarenta do..dolares..ay! dólares." (I have...a hundred...and forty.. do...dollurs..erm ohuh..dollars.)

She smiled and spit out a quick string of nonsense. I stood quietly as she changed the money. Then she handed me my euros and said "have a nice day" in perfect English.



My confidence was definitely shaken, but it was only a minor setback, and I determinedly continued on my way, set on making the day a successful Spanish adventure filled with efficient travel and enlightening conversations with natives who only later realize that I'm not from around these parts.


After spending an hour on the wrong bus and inadvertently learning my way around the entire Madrid airport, I stumbled and tripped my way on to the correct bus headed for the train station, nearly killed myself as I nobly decided to lift my 50-pound suitcase onto the second row up of luggage racks instead of the starkly empty bottom row, and then sat for 20 minutes vainly trying to eavesdrop and comprehend the conversation between two natives a few meters ahead of me before I realized they weren't speaking Spanish and that I was in the handicapped section. Confidence lightly battered, I retreated to the back of the bus and surrendered, turning on my ipod and listening to American house music.

Only a few stops later, however, my confidence was boosted when a Dutch couple assumed I was Spanish and slowly asked me how to pronounce a few words on a sign before I let them know I was American, and thus could speak a language that they could understand fairly well. (Of course I still talked to them in half Spanish, partly because I needed the practice, and partly because I didn't want to abandon the idea that I was one of those American-Spanish multi-cultural hybrid citizens you hear so much about. [the illusion that was in my head of course])

Then I got to the train station, Atocha, (Which I'd been tragically mispronouncing until this point) and was again shamed into submission.  I wandered for half and hour around the train station looking for a ticket booth and awkwardly walking into the wrong lines for surprisingly unoccupied areas mumbling half-formed questions about the station layout until a security guard or station staff member would spit out some directions that I would slow down and decipher as I turned around and walked on.

Once I realized that I'd fundamentally misunderstood both the station layout and the organizational structure of the entire train system in Spain, I figured out what seemed most correct and then sat down to wait in line for an hour and a half in what appeared to be a Spanish DMV for buying train tickets, which is both a fascinating notion and a horrifying reality.

Despite the best bureaucratic efforts of the train station employees, however, I eventually got a ticket and boarded the last train that would still get me to Sevilla in time for my rendezvous with the other students. As soon as the train started moving I commandeered the bathroom so I could change and put in contacts and wash myself in the tiny sink with an unintuitive motion sensor. (I'd been operating as an unwashed, half-blind, coffee-stained mess until that point in the day; this probably should've been mentioned at an earlier point in the story.)



Once I arrived in Sevilla, I managed to successfully, albeit painfully, explain to a taxi driver where I needed to go and how much money I needed it to cost for me to still afford it.  I ended up a euro or two short, but the driver took pity on me (I think he could tell I'd had a rough day) and decided not to drop me off a mile before reaching my destination.

Pulling my huge suitcase, unwieldy backpack, and slightly fragile mandolin out of the taxi, I sluggishly dragged myself and my belongings into the hotel that I didn't have a room reserved in yet. It was three in the afternoon.

spainspainspainspainspainspainspain is where I be at.

I'm sleepy, but Spain is wonderful, thanks for asking. My body is currently stuck in some weird mental quasi-psychological backwards time warp, but not. Let me explain: it's currently midnight but my body thinks it's six but at the same time my body is exhausted and it doesn't know why and it gets angry and lashes out at loved ones (figurative loved ones) when it's hurt and confused so it's in this inevitably cantankerous downward spiral where it keeps getting pissed off at itself for how tired it is and refuses to listen to reason or read a clock. However, the rest of me is doing fairly well and has learned to ignore the body when it goes off one of its vaguely passive aggressive, semi-hallucinatory pathetic sleep rampages.

I'm in the wi-fi lounge (pronounced zona de wee-fee) of a hotel in Sevilla, and I should probably be sleeping, but that's a precondition for efficient and high-quality blogging, or so I have concluded from extensive laboratory test-blogging. (The entire last year and 9 months of blogging(or not-blogging, as the case may be) have been an experiment.[chew on that.] If that makes you feel emotionally manipulated or used or metaphorically filthy and in need of a shower, then just imagine how it makes *me* feel.{And then let me know because I don't quite know where I stand on the issue yet.}) (But don't even get me started on feeling in need of a shower; I have very strong convictions) (and odors)

The journey to get to this point (the wee-fee lounge), however, is more interesting and/or eventful. Any inherent connection between those two adjectives, however, is insubstantial. (I've done the tests; I've spent long hours blogging in the laboratory to create the evidence. [Take this however you want to. Think deeply about it, or don't.]) But this story *should* be at least one of those two disconnected things: interesting and eventful. (Keep in mind that we've already discussed how logically confusing and inadvertently instrumental but undemanding the *should* imperative can be.) (I don't know what I'm talking about.)

These last 48(?), 72(¿) hours?¿ have been quite ridiculous, marking this summer as a time for great adventure and new experience. s.

The new experiences and adventures haven't been confined to just Spain either; one of the first few began on my flight to New York. Seated beside my genially hasidic acquaintance (kind of like being acidic, but friendlier and more snappily dressed and generally not harmful in any way), I bit the bullet, said goodbye to my childhood, prepared to forge a new pathway of experience in my life, and requested tomato juice when the stewardess offered us beverages, eager to try something new.



*spit out bile and clear  out phlegm*



Despite this grievous misstep, I was able to recover and get back on the right path. (It took me years to remember how to spell flem, I mean phlgim, I mean snot. [I know years sounds like an exaggeration but I'm in a different time zone; so keep that in mind])


Then the rest of my travels went fairly well, at least until I arrived in Madrid after an overnight flight in which I sat next to an adorable old french couple who didn't know a single word of any language that I am familiar with. (except french; I was able to share a moment with them whenever they said fromage. Thanks to a childhood filled with Dexter's Laboratory, I managed to find a common ground in a shared experience with the phenomenon that is cheese. [also in laughing about airline food, which they ate zero of; they just picked up our packaged breakfast foods individually and then dropped them again, like they were gorillas slowly learning how to use sticks, or like aliens discovering plastic backscratchers: trying to decipher their intended function, and then laughing at what must appear to be a pitiful attempt at something greater, or a thoroughly valid, thoughtfully worked-out solution to an insignificant and impossibly inconsequential idle non-problem.

Now, because it is late and my body is beginning to furiously beg and plead with itself in hopes that it will cease the relentless and miserably pointless passive self-injury, I will go to sleep.  I will continue this blog later. I will post this portion now, so that I don't leave the beginning hopelessly anachronistic and temporally ambiguous. (Porque editing is a certain activity, up with which I shall not put.) (Also present tense is funner and I prefer not to choose between watering down my blogtastic drama or telling obvious (and therefore ineffective) untruths.) (funner is too a word.)

(Welcome back to my blog by the way. I'm in Spain at the moment but I left cookies.)

(What?)

(I pray to Jesus, Brahman, the Holy Spirit, Buddha(who is not a god), Shiva, KamaSutra, and the ever-loving L. Ron Hubbard that my room has been left unlocked.)

I apologize for the inconsistency of my capitalization.

Ohmygosh I’ve done so much reading recently. But I don’t really feel like talking ironically pretentiously and sillilly (meaning: in a manner quite silly) about old stuffy Russians and their stubborn ridiculous ways of looking at literature or a stuffy old American anthropologist and his stubborn ridiculous way of looking at “systems” of religion or Frankenstein.

(I didn’t expect you to laugh at that last sentence [I *don’t* expect you? Maybe huh Woah I just got a tense migraine (lol.)] I didn’t expect you to laugh at that last sentence about Frankenstein and Russians, but I just want you to admire the jarring, seemingly sudden way it ended because of the lack of parallel structure. You would have been more likely to laugh and feel good about the sentence (hehe) if the third item had been longer like the first two. (It being funny would also have helped) As it was you were (probably) all set to speed through the first part of the third item to get to the expected joke at the end of it, but it both ended early and wasn’t very funny. Yay for parallel structure!)

I’d like to apologize for that.

But instead of that I will talk about something else.   Erm… (‘erm’ makes me think of Foxtrot. Think about it. It’s usually accompanied by Paige or Roger or ‘whatever the mom’s name is’ making the weird face where they’re concerned or torn or undecided about something and you can see their teeth and it looks like they’re eating their mouth in some kind of weird mutant monster manner.)

I had a dream about my teeth falling out a couple of nights ago. Popular superstitious opinion says that I’m either desperately trying to hold onto some deep dark secrets that are inevitably going to spill out like bloody teeth, or I’m just deathly afraid of dental surgery.

Have you ever thought about what Beyoncé would be like if she were a cat?  I’ve been meaning to shoot a parody of “If I Were a Boy” and call it “If I Were a Cat.” Ideally it’ll feature some Beyoncé look-alike in a fuzzy cat suit rubbing herself on furniture and talking about fish.

I went deep sea fishing once during my junior year of high school. What started out as a day of fun and fishing ended up as an eternity of nausea cold and vomit. (So I didn’t put any commas in here just to see what would happen, and it kinda looks fine to me which is interesting, but now this word processor program is suggesting I put a question mark at the end. Weird.) All our food got soaked, my hoodie was very much stained with vomit, and we ended up huddling together for warmth on a bench for hours as the cold waves crashed over the sides of the small fishing boat. Our first stop after returning to land was Walmart where we bought fresh boxers and vomit-free t-shirts.

Hm.

So I’ve been writing for a comedy magazine named BoUNCe this year. I go to these brain storm meetings they have, but it seems weird to me because they’re all just coming up with funny ideas and they assume people are going to take the initiative to write funny things with those ideas.  For some reason the concept of a trashy dirty collective idea bin that we all dip into before writing anything disgusts me, so I just listen to the ideas that they’re coming up with and spin off my own stuff, desperately trying to avoid copying what they come up with. So I go to their brain storm sessions to come up with my own separate ideas.

Here’s an article that I wrote that didn’t appear in an actual magazine!

Kyra Sedgwick Takes Break From Acting to Spend Time With Family, Eat Babies.

Kyra Sedgwick, star of television drama “The Closer”, announced Tuesday that she would be putting her acting career on hold in order to slow down, reexamine her priorities, and eat some babies.

“I’ve been working so much lately,” the actress said. “I just haven’t had any time for my family or any of my hobbies, like woodwork and hungry infanticide.”

Sedgwick, who played the insignificant female costar in The Game Plan with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, looks forward to spending more time with husband Kevin Bacon, running in the park with dog Minnie, and devouring small children.

“I really miss that fresh air, and you can’t really take it in when you’ve got all these commitments on your head,” Sedgwick explained. “And there’s no better feeling than snapping a dead infant’s soft neck open for some fresh marrow and knowing you don’t have to be anywhere in the morning.”

Sedgwick couldn’t say how long the hiatus would last, but she would definitely be back.

“I’m excited to come back to work, but I want to be a part of my children’s lives before their childhoods are over all. I’m just going to focus on Travis and Suzie,” Sedgwick said. “And dead babies.”

And now back to me. I hope you enjoyed that brief article-ish thing.

And here’s the application I sent in to a literary magazine last semester!

(blahs edited in once more)

 Well, my name is Michael Dickson.  I like writing, and I’m an indecisive sophomore from Raleigh.  So far I’m not telling you anything you haven’t picked up on from the first 1/4th of this page.  My apologies.

(shifting gears)   (*onomatopoeia*) 

I’m interested in “The Door” because I love writing, I love looking at writing, I love reading writing, and I love editing writing.  (I like gerunds too.)  I like analyzing stuff and overanalyzing stuff and talking to authors about stuff so I can argue with them about the stuff they wrote about.  

 Except I don’t think I’m actually very argumentative.  I’d say I’m pretty easygoing.  

I don’t know blah blah blah blah "work experience" blah blah blah blah "non-existent" blah blah blah "good work ethic?" blah blah blah.

I’m very organized – not in the sense that I obsessively sort my socks and make my roommate vacuum his mattress – but in that if I have something that needs to be done, I know exactly where it is and when I will do it and how.  (That might be the same thing as responsible – I’ll look it up.)  

As for specific writing experience, I’ve been editing my own writing for years – not to mention my friends’ blogs and my brothers’ creepy science fiction stories and my brothers’ friends’ college application essays.  I like writing (I feel like I’ve said that already) and I like making it sound good (More important than just *looking* good). 

blah blah blah blah "blog blog" blah blah blah "shameless plug" blah blah blah "link" blah blah blah "beg" blah.

Please excuse my liberal use of sentence fragments; I promise I am at least moderately conscious of and familiar with all standard grammar conventions and their uses.  

I hope this post has been at least moderately entertaining.

The Season of Lists! (I've been slacking a lot with the whole "proper punctuation" thing recently; sorry about that)

I have returned from my long Christmas break. I have come back to my compact, pleasant, and gnat-infested home after spending several weeks at my more expansive, comfortable, family-and-food-filled home. Thus begins the next season of academia, abstract education, and filling my mind with only semi-practical but simultaneously extremely interesting and thought-provoking nonsense. This marks the end of this rather short season of lights, family time, gift time, Jesus time, lots of food time, and lists. Time.

Now I’m going to delve more deeply into this last thought: the season of lists. Time.

This is because I have a very unpredictable attention span and I often venture off on long tangents in my thought processes without explaining or watching to make sure that my companion observers are close behind as I jump between trains of thought mid-journey on a whim, as if the Native American outlaw train-robber savages had me cornered, diving onto the roof of the train to Pasalacqua in a desperate attempt to escape peril. Ten-gallon Stetson hat in one hand and my six-shooter in the other, I try to provide some cover fire for them/you/the companions as I roll across the top of the neighboring train and deftly hang off the side in order to give the Indian criminal steam-engine burglar vermin less surface area to fire their blow-dart rifle knives at. I mourn the loss of any followers of mine who may’ve been blown gunned stabbed down by the Iroquois bandit railroad hijacker thief barbarians or their superfluously gratuitous nonsensical analogy about train robberies.

I should hyphenate more. That sounds like hydrate. I will do one of those two things.

So with that botched segue behind us, I will now smoothly return to what is presumably the main topic of this weirdly and overly narrated blog post.

So we just ended what is essentially the season of lists. Christmas lists, Naughty lists; the list goes on and on ( I assume). If you have not yet guessed, this is simply a poorly conceived and even more poorly executed narrative device set up to allow me to make some lists. I will now do that.

Lists about my Christmas break!

List of cool nifty things I got for or around Christmas (That was some confusing preposition action right thur.)

• Pickpunch (IT LITERALLY PUNCHES GUITAR PICKS OUT OF WHATEVER I PUT IN IT. SURPRISINGLY ENOUGH, THERE HAVE YET TO BE ANY [SERIOUS] INJURIES)
• A scarf (yay! Also an awesome jacket but only “scarf” sounds exotic enough to make it on the list.) (Maybe I don’t use “exotic” the same way other people do…)
• Snuggie! (I don’t… I can’t… um… yeah.)
• Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee mugs.
• A zombie survival kit! (pressing concern)
• A lot of other things that I don’t have comments about but were nonetheless amazing gifts that I appreciated very much. I promise

List of things I forgot to do

• A lot of things, including sanding a guitar in preparation for painting, a project that I’ve been putting off for literally probably quite possibly three years.

List of things I said I wouldn’t do but did!

• Play video games/watch tv for more than an hour a day. (Ohhhhhhhh man I said I’d do that?)

List of movies I saw!

• The Adventures of Tintin (awesome and nostalgia! Adjectival suffix!)
• Source Code (yay inter-dimensional theory!)
• Cowboys and Aliens (YAY DANIEL CRAIG YAY HARRISON FORD YAY OLIVIA WILDE YAY YAY YAY)

List of movies I didn’t see

• Probs lots.

List of videogames I played

• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (I played an Italian assassin who kept speaking in Spanish and had English subtitles [I may’ve messed with the language settings a little])
• Civilization V (I created a grammar-themed civilization and proceeded to impose stern totalitarian and theocratic rule over the entire world. This is only a little bit of a big exaggeration.)

List of videogames I didn’t play

• Anything Lego-themed (except for 15 minutes of Lego Harry Potter at a friend’s house but that doesn’t count.)

List of snuggies I got!

• I may have covered this already.

List of nostalgic old tv show dvds that I gave to a sibling

• Sheep in the Big City!  A very ridiculous old show about a sheep named sheep. Sadly no real dvds exist so I had to buy a homemade Chinese dvd version. Is this illegal? If so, then it was 10 years ago that I bought it. Statute of Limitations! (That’s probably not how that works.) (Either way, whatever punishment I would receive for such a crime would be more than worth it for the laughter and tears I brought to a child’s face. [Actually he just chuckled and pointed out that they’re recorded really badly and inconveniently.])

List of Lego-themed video games I didn’t play

• Did I cover this?

List of Lego-themed video games (created by Traveler’s Tales) that exist

• Lego Harry Potter
• Lego Star Wars
• Lego Pirates of the Carribean
• Lego Indiana Jones
• Lego Batman

List of Lego-themed video games created that I wish existed

• Lego Lord of the Rings =(

Yay lists!

Wait, what’s this, you get one more surprise??? You get a bonus analogy-allegory! I’d call it an “analogegory,” but that sounds gross.

So we’re talking about the Nuremberg Trials in my philosophy class, and it looks like what was really going on in World War II was that America and Europe were trying to get their house under control. They had a new roof and had spent a long time trying to make it strong and stable. (At first the roof was really more of a thatch weave, but Germany kept climbing on top and mussing it up.) Then the roof was more tile-y or whatever roofs are.  So Europe and America thought the roof was fine, and they didn’t worry much either because Germany was in bed with a lot of broken bones and a really bad toothache and he had lost his wallet and his phone so he couldn’t call or get a ride to his friend Austria’s house. 

(Austria had helped mess up the thatch roof earlier but then England called his angry authoritarian Austrian mama and he had to go home.)

So England and France are out eating lemonade in their sunroom when they hear a noise above them. They look out the window and they see Germany running all over the roof! He’s cackling and hopping around and ripping up the tile-y roof pieces and throwing them off at people like Poland, but they don’t know how he got up there because his new room had been in the basement and they’d thought all his bones were broken anyway. Then they saw Italy and Japan climb up on the roof too. 

(They were mean neighborhood friends of Germany. Italy was at that weird age where he was cool when he hung out with England and France, but as soon as he was with Germany he was an awkward and anti-semitic hooligan.)

Germany was throwing tiles at all kinds of people and England and France didn’t know what to do. They waffled around for a while and eventually started throwing stuff at him from the window. Then Japan threw a rock at America who was just walking by, so America joined up with Europe and France and their group of friends who’d gathered to get Germany and *his* friends off the roof.  Well they went to all the windows and threw everything they could at Germany.  The roof was getting weaker and Germany was sore, so eventually he stopped throwing stuff, but he still refused to get off the roof.

They had no idea how to get him off, so America, England, France, and 21 other neutral or allied nations (including Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Australia, Haiti, Honduras, Panama, New Zealand, Venezuela, and India) sat down to think and come up with a way to get Germany off the roof.

(At some point in the struggle Italy had fallen off the roof and Japan had exploded, so Germany was the only one left to deal with.)

After months of deliberation, America tentatively made a suggestion: “What if…” he began, “what if we went out on the roof too? Then we could take him back inside!”

A lot of other countries got pissed. What the crap was America talking about? If we went out on the roof then we’d be no better than Germany.

But America was all like “No way, we’re going on the roof for totally different reasons; the way we’re doing it, it’s not even really going on the roof.”

The other nations all said, “wat?”

“Yeah man,” America said, “Germany is already on the roof, so any going onto the roof we do to get them isn't actually going out onto the roof anymore, we’re just going out onto the roof to bring Germany back in.”

The other nations were still confused, but they went with it anyway. They went out onto the roof, grabbed Germany, pulled him back in, and then created a new roof. They called it the United Nations.

If You Ever See Me In A Coffeeshop Obnoxiously Tapping Out Rhythms On My Computer, It's Because Otherwise I'd Be Shaking Uncontrollably From The Egregious Caffeine Intake. Now You Know.

So here I am, sitting in a Starbucks in North Raleigh. (This is about as clear and specific as saying “I’m in a building that sells waffles somewhere in Johnston County.” Probably less so actually.) It is near the end of Christmas Break, which means that the parents are back at work, the little brother is back at school, and I only see most of the other brothers when they come by for a free meal. The rest of the extended family has returned to their home streets and states, and the cousin has left for Belize. You know how it goes.

I’ve realized that while at home, I am incapable of doing anything besides watching entire seasons of 30 Rock, wasting hours playing my little brother’s computer games, and checking the fridge every 15 minutes, assuming that I’m going to find something interesting wedged in there that was not there before. Thus I am at Starbucks. And now that this huge mug of liquid caffeine is causing me to literally buzz a little bit, I will write.

(The drug culture in this country is fascinating. You can buy machines for filtering your drugs at every big store or mart worth its beans, some people carefully grind their own personal blend of drugs every morning, and there are cafes in literally every shopping center where people can sit on smarmy couches and think smarmy thoughts while a smarmy liberal arts major in an embarrassing apron prepares their drugs for them, complete with hazelnut syrup and room for cream.) 

[I’ve begun to use parenthesis as an indicator that a particular thought is an offshoot from the central topic and an acknowledgment that I am comfortable and conscious of this fact. The brackets {or whatever they’re called} are indicative of a further tangent away from the original offshoot.]

At a certain point, however, I decide that the subject of discussion has become skewed enough that it is no longer clear or worthwhile to categorize things in reference to what the supposedly “central” topic is or was. (Think of it this way:  Your train is going to New York. From somewhere. If it stops off in Philadelphia, that could be considered an offshoot. The stop makes it take longer to get to New York, but it could still be considered a point on the way to New York.  Then the train goes to Massachusetts. This delays your arrival in New York even more. (Particularly because you just briefly passed through New York, and despite your shouts at the conductor, the train didn’t stop or change course. You think he might’ve been on the toilet.) This stopover in Massachusetts delays your arrival in New York, but it is still nothing more than a brief tangent, an offshoot from your original course. Maybe not a very efficient one, but you can still see the main route you’ve been pursuing. But then the train leaves Massachusetts and before you know it you’re in Ontario and there’s a lot of mounties asking for your passport and an obscure train analogy messing with your head and you’re not even sure where you were headed originally or who you were visiting; You’re left in a Canadian jail (imagine your average Holiday Inn but with better room service) with nothing to your name but righteous indignation and a vague disconcerting feeling that you’re supposed to be somewhere else. 

At that point parentheses are no longer useful, sensical or effective.

(This says “sensical” is not a word but I’m going to keep saying it is until it shuts up, not because I know it is a word but because I know it should be.)

I am ashamed to admit that I had to find and study a map of the United States for that train analogy. Hooray Geography!

Never again will I try to blog without a huge mug of coffee by my side.

I saw The Adventures of Tintin last week! Another reason I like being at home, besides the delicious home-cooked meals and the coffee that is magically already in the coffeemaker every morning as soon as I wake up (Where does that come from???) is the ability to go out to eat and watch movies with family, AND NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!

I enjoyed Tintin immensely.  I don’t know if it’s an orthodox, expected part of remembered childhood for people of my generation, but I definitely hold some kind of nostalgia for it. The father Dickson has a huge collection of Tintin comics and I attempted to read every comic I found lying around the house as a kid, be they on the kitchen table, in the basket in the bathroom, or in the cardboard box discreetly tucked under my dad’s bed. (The box is where I found especially good ones like Catwoman and Bone. [*pause* for comprehension and analysis {Bone: an independently organized series of graphical novels about three bald white cartoon brothers: Phoney Bone, Fone Bone, and Smiley Bone.} Do as you wish with this information.])

So yeah, Tintin brings back a lot of memories. On a related note I kind of like the CGI animation used more and more in movies now. It makes everything look as similar to real life as possible without making it as boring as real life. (So the people look real but they don’t actually have to follow any natural laws of gravity, physics or thermodynamics.)

Before the movie I saw a preview for The Lorax, which made me squeal and squirm in excitement for the rest of the previews and at least the first 8 minutes of the movie. (much to the chagrin of my neighbors, but it serves them right for invading my arm space. [I SAID “CHAGRIN” I DID IT THEY SAID IT'D NEVER HAPPEN BUT I DID IT! THAT CRAZY WORD SOUNDS LIKE THE NAME OF AN ALOOF AND MYSTERIOUS FRENCH ADMIRAL RESPONSIBLE FOR A LOT OF COVERT ATTACKS ON BRITISH PORTS, NOT THAT THERE WAS REALLY SUCH AN ADMIRAL WITH A NAME SIMILAR TO "CHAGRIN" BUT THE NAME "CHAGRIN" MAKES IT SEEM AS IF THERE WOULD BE SUCH A STORY BEHIND IT]… *ahem*) Despite my tendency to get extraordinarily excited about ordinary things, however, I would like to emphasize how amazing and awesome and incredible and cool and fantastic it is that there is a legitimate feature film being produced based on Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. It will be released on March 2^nd. Thus I will celebrate my impending transition out of teenager-hood (March 5^th=20^th birthday) with a resounding return to my childhood.

Now that my caffeinated buzz is beginning to fade, I will provide you with some extracurricular reading material.

Near the beginning of this last fall semester, I applied for a position as a staff writer at Bounce magazine, which is the satire magazine at UNC-Chapel Hill. Here’s part of the application I filled out: (I’ve edited my answers to the first two questions in order to remove the boring informative material; everything besides the "blah"s were in the actual application I turned in.)

Describe your ideal position at BoUNCe. What kind of work would you enjoy doing?

My ideal position at BoUNCe would include reading, writing, editing and free meals at Noodles and Company.  Ideally.  Parties with fresh fruit would also be ideal.  Blah blah blah blah “ideal job” blah blah blah blah “interests” blah blah blah blah “ideological compatibility.” Blah.

What relevant experience, if any, do you have with magazine publication or your position of interest?

I have no real relevant experience with actual magazine publication, but blah blah blah “I have a billion majors” blah blah. I’ve been editing my own work for years, and in recent years I’ve been the go-to-guy to proofread and edit my friends’ blog posts, my brothers’ wonky Lord of the Rings fan-fiction, and my brothers’ friends’ college essays.  I read the Onion religiously, and blah blah blah blah “journalism” blah blah blah “blogblogblog” blah blah blah; “socio-political expertise” blah blah. 

You wake up in a bathtub full of ice and your kidney is missing. What do you do next?

I jump out of the tub and take off any wet clothes I might still be wearing.  Then I start limping, squinting, clutching my side, and mumbling loudly about dinosaurs.  I need to reach maximum crazy before I run out of the bathroom and subsequently through whatever humble household I happen to be entrenched in.

Aside/Explanation: Think about it – if a mildly crazy-looking injured guy in his boxers starts wandering through your house and/or neighborhood and/or local elementary school playground, then you’re going to beat the peat(synonym for crud) out of him.  But if you see a half-dead, naked, soaking wet teenager yelling about a brachiosaurus trying to make yogurt out of his head while a diplodocus looks on, then you are much more likely to just sit in your easy chair, hunker down behind your newspaper, and tremble.

Approaching maximum insanity, I swing open the door and begin to run through an oddly clean living room.  It looks and smells like my grandma’s house. I get a momentary glance at a middle-aged man playing chess who stares at me and freezes, and then I sprint-limp-shuffle out of the room.  I then run through a kitchen pretending I’m being chased by iguanodons.  The three college-aged guys cooking breakfast look very much caught off guard, and one of them spits out some curses as I dive-tumble-crawl my way to the back door. 

Once in the backyard, I take a moment to get my bearings.  Then I abandon the limp and begin to run faster.  I compensate for the loss of the limp by yelling louder and adding nautical terms and random exotic fruits into my frenzied exclamations.  After a few minutes of running I realize I have no idea where I am.  It’s going to be a long road home. 

The most ironically relaxing stress-full period of the school year. (Posted slightly late)

Stress-full implies that something is filled to the brim with tangible stress, which is slightly different than stressful.  Mostly because it has a hyphen and an extra 'l.'

So here I am, very much in the middle of crunch time, the time of the year infamous for its long communal nights in the library and nerve-wracking early mornings in solemn and eerily quiet lecture halls, and I am doing nothing but blogging. I'm also listening to indie music on Youtube and eating Munchies snack mix, which was created by what is obviously both the laziest and smartest snack company ever. (Hey guys, we've totally been going about this the wrong way! Instead of trying to come up with an original new inventive and delicious snack food, let's just take every other popular type of chip and pretzel and throw them together!  Then we'll bag it up, sprinkle a little extra gritty cheese powder on, and ship it out!)

 Exam time, the peripherally liminal period between the last day of class and the first day of vacation, is an inherently paradoxical time. It is filled with double standards, marked by an abnormal shift in societal norms and regularly accepted behavior, and received simultaneously with ecstatic celebration and both conventional and existential dread.

(I'm still uncertain about what I mean by "peripherally liminal," or "conventional dread," but I like it.)

Let's take me for example. My sleep patterns are sporadic and unpredictable. Since exams have started, however, I have not gone a night without a fully restful 8 hours of sleep.  I've spent time and money going out to eat at least 4 times rather than eating in the cheap and conveniently close dining hall.

Exams have definitely included some work for me: Last Thursday I spent the entire day reading old British authors like Jonathan Swift and George Herbert. (These writers represent opposite poles of the complicated and colorful "British authors with cool names" spectrum.) (John Donne is somewhere in the middle, just below Shakespeare.) (I have mentioned John Donne in at least two separate blog posts. According to ancient tradition, I am now officially an English major forrealz. HUZZAH!) (The word sound at the end of "Herbert" is quite possibly the silliest sound in the English language. "Bert" "(mispronunciation)Sherbet" both sound very silly. What's curious is that it isn't the same if you change the "B"; "Kurt" does not sound silly at all. Maybe the feeling of silliness this evokes is entirely because of Bert and Sesame Street? [It has more of a cultural influence than we thought!]  What is for sure though, is that if I ever own a gerbil his name will be Herbert the Gerbert. And that's real talk.)

On Friday I spent several hours simply typing in my notes about Ancient Israelite society and the way their conception of god effectively enforced redistribution of wealth as a mandatory feature of society and land ownership, in addition to the other aspects of social justice that played a prominent part in their civilization. (As much time as I spent copying notes, I probably spent at least twice as much time frenziedly scribbling societal insights, historical connections and philosophical or nonsensical musings into the margins.)

Inversely, I just spent all of Monday and Tuesday watching cheesy 90s movies and running through seasons of How I Met Your Mother and Arrested Development. I even went home on Sunday.

More than ever before in the semester, I see people with enormous amounts of spare time doing entirely unproductive and pointless things. Then I see a parade of soulless and downcast students who've spent upwards of 36 hours memorizing chemical equations with only short breaks for bagels and coffee. Only during exams do you see hundreds of people filling the pit for a midnight rave, moshing and crowd-surfing all over the place, only to see the huge mass of people immediately retreat into the library afterward to return to the grind.

Speaking of which, I was at that humongous midnight rave and it was marvelous. For a while us hundreds of students were just awkwardly standing around the pit, unsure of how things were going to go.  Then suddenly music blared out of a speaker and the pit was filled to the brim with people.  After accidentally hitting people in the face far more than was necessary, I decided to put my arm down and get on a friend's back.  Sitting on his shoulders, I danced like it was the end of the world and hi-fived anyone who put their hands remotely close.  I'm pretty sure I saw people I knew (and probably hi-fived them) but things were moving so fast that I couldn't really get a good look.

There was also a guy climbing up the tree in the middle of the pit; we didn't think he was gonna last very long.

I had so much spare time that I went to P.F.Changs on Tuesday. It was delicious and I drank so much lemonade that the waiter started calling me Captain Thirsty. I had fried rice and a friend of mine had pancakes. They had Hoisin sauce and pork and rice in the pancakes, but the fact remains that he was eating pancakes in a Chinese restaurant. Weird.

I visited the inspiring mountains of North Carolina and I found happiness. I lost my toothpaste and several pairs of socks.

So some amount of time more than a month ago and less than a lot more than a month ago, I went on a beautiful and amazing life adventure into a state park in western North Carolina where I saw many beautiful things and ate beautiful food and made (mostly) beautiful fires and climbed on beautiful structures of nature and had a beautiful and joyous time exploring the beautiful world with my beautiful friends.

Accompanying friends: Laura, Alex, Katherine, Sarah, Sheena, in descending order by height. I think.

So we planned a camping trip to Stone Mountain State Park. We had a pretty even mix of camping experience. For some of us, the closest we had ever been to sleeping outside in a tent less than a foot off the cold wet ground was making a fort out of pillows in the living room as a kid and then spreading a quilt on the carpet inside it, peeing on it, and slipping and falling and spending about 35 minutes unconscious before a sibling got curious about the smell of urine and blood coming from behind the couch. (presumably unintentionally (peeing I mean (well the passing out part too))) I realize that isn’t very close to sleeping in a tent outside in the cold.

(At some point in the future I will attempt to make a humongous string of adverbs that actually makes sense in context. (like presumably unintentionally, but more so.) You won’t know what hit you–it will come that unexpectedly quickly frighteningly absurd(ly), albeitly magically sensically.) (Failure.)

Some of us had years of experience camping with our families every summer or every weekend for six months until our father decided to quit bear-hunting.

(Mother wanted us to spend as much time with him as possible; she figured his days were numbered. He bearly escaped that hobby unharmed! Hahahahaha. Ha.)

And then the rest of us had a weird middle ground amount of camping experience. We had briefly participated in cub scouts as a child, which meant that we had gone camping two or three times with our entire family and two cars full of conveniences.  We learned how to pee outdoors and make s’mores. The rest of the time we would pretend to sell fruit roll-ups through a zipper window in the tent.  We may or may not have ended up sleeping in the car and/or on top of a cushy parent. (We’re not sure how we got the fruit roll-ups through the tent screen.) (Impressive, really)

(We’ve decided that we’ve been using personal pronouns in a very odd and uncomfortable way.) WHY ON EARTH IS THERE AN APOSTROPHE IN S’MORE? I suppose it’s for “some more,” but I want it to be something funnier than that. “send more”? “Sam Smore”? “Scouts have eaten all of our marshmallows, graham crackers and crappy chocolate; we need to recruit someone to send for some more”? I believe those are equally feasible options.

A fourth group of us (or potentially a subgroup or identical group to one of the previous groups named) also had camping experience at camp. This meant that we had spent lots of time escorting small children into the woods so that they could pee. We were also experts at telling kids what kind of sticks to gather for a fire. Not to mention we were pros at watching fires being built. (This skill was not as useful as hoped.)

So some of us had a fair amount of camping experience. The only problem, however, was that none of us had ever gone camping without a parent, veteran camp counselor, or creepy scoutmaster to help make fires and make sure food is made and prevent bear attacks.  So it was a fairly interesting experience. 

We had a fantastic road trip experience driving there in the early afternoon, and only a reasonable amount of trouble setting up the tent and such. It mostly involved angrily hammering in stakes, sticking in the tent pieces, then pulling out the tent pieces, pulling out the stakes, moving the tent, hammering in the stakes, sticking in the tent extendable pieces the other way this time, figuring out it's backwards, trying it the way it was before, realizing that’s wrong too, taking them out, pulling out the stakes, moving the tent again and repeating the entire process over. More than a few good stakes were lost that day. Also the tent instructions and some shoes may have disappeared in the process.

We had tentatively planned on going hiking that afternoon, but that did not work out as planned. The fire was started haphazardly with little long-range planning and then we needed to make supper.  The rest of the evening was spent pouring time and energy and effort into food and fire. The level of morale required for regular twig hunts and thus proper fire upkeep had crashed by dusk, and so our fire’s fortunes disappeared along with the setting sun.

The rest of the night involved lots of eating and struggling to keep the fire moderately warm.   Then around 8 we started getting tired and it felt like bed time, but then we realized it was 8.

Preparing for jump from chronological story-telling to purely anecdotal: I feel like I need an onomatopoeia here.  LAUNCH!   Err…  Blast off?   Swoosh?

That night we went for a long walk around the many campsites. There were sooooooo many stars.  At one point a squirrel made a noise in the woods and we froze for ten minutes waiting for a bear to jump out at us.  Then while we were walking farther away from the camp site we heard a solitary owl hoot. We immediately flipped out and abandoned our current direction.  We were a little bit jumpy.

We were a little worried about the temperature and for good reason. It got mind-numbingly cold late at night. As well as feet-numbingly, hands-numbingly, head-numbingly and just general rest-of-me-numbingly cold.  We filled the tent with all of our sleeping pads, sleeping bags, and full-blown humongous air mattresses.  Then we covered ourselves with extravagant amounts of blankets and jackets and other sleeping bags.  I was in a sleeping bag with another sleeping bag and two blankets and a jacket on top of me.  As my head was outside of the sleeping bag I had another blanket just for my face. I usually sleep with my hands around my pillow but this was impossible because although it wouldn’t feel cold when I took them out of the sleeping bag, I lost the ability to feel or properly move them after 30 seconds or so. I had to keep as much of my body in the sleeping bag as possible.  I just had to get tired enough and somehow will myself into a semi-comfortable position so that I could fall asleep. It was like I was wrapped in a giant cocoon but for some reason my magical caterpillar instinct hadn't yet put me into hibernation or whatever caterpillars do while their bodies are changing. Great question.

We became master fire-makers by the time the 2 days were over.  Now we are like cavemen but less hairy and with more variety in our diets.

We brought our guitars but all they did was let us stress over where to put them and the chances of people stealing them and the chances of it being too cold for them or too humid for them or too warm for them or too dry for them.  We were like mothers who brought our infants rock-climbing with us. As a totally hypothetical uninformed idea it seemed like a great idea, but rock-climbing tends to leave little time for babies. The time you do end up devoting to the babies is solely spent on worrying about the weather, their diapers, and whether or not they have enough cushion left to survive the next fall.

Also all of the time we imagined would be spent guitarring was instead spent poking a fire, collecting sticks, cooking food for hours on end (which makes it amazingly beautiful delicious at the end of all that effort (mostly because you’re starving)), hikinghikinghiking, and various other campy things.

We also went on a twig hunt the second night that turned into a Troll-Hunter-esque adventure.  It was dark and grainy like an old video camera and there was an old shed and it was dark and there were huge sticks we found to burn and it was dark and creepy. Thus: Troll Hunter.

My linear story-telling abilities will now degenerate further.

BEAUTIFUL PICTURES!!!!

YAY! firefirefirefirefirefirefirefirefire. This is our camp site. Was. Our campsite.

THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN. We had picked up walking sticks by this point. I think others were using theirs to make hiking easier. Mine was mostly for pointing menacingly and looking cool and wizardish.

YAY COOL LIGHTING!  For a Stone Mountain, there sure were a lot of just plain rock faces all over the mountain. Oh wait.

Everything was crazy topsy turvy. Also this is awesome.

treestreestreestreestreestreestreestrees  colorcolorcolorcolorcolorcolorcolor. Also I discovered that sometimes I'm not seeing all of the amazing colors in beautiful trees in the distance because of my colorblindness. It's comforting to know that no matter how beautiful or cool things may look from a distance, I'm probably not getting the whole picture and I never will. Wait no what?

This is me pretending to struggle with some trees. ('Nuff said (the Norwegian pig))  (Try not to be confused)

ACK. It's like a wonderful sunny pathway to a new world. Is this Narnia? I remember having a discussion about what crazy fictional world we'd want to live in if given the choice. I'd choose this one because this doesn't seem like real life and it reminds me of Lord of the Rings. (I know that whole exchange didn't completely make sense. Don't think too hard.)

WATERFALLWATERFALLWATERFALLWATERFALLWATERFALLWATERFALL

Here it is.

And again.

Here's me being excited about nature.

SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN AT SUNSET asdfjklf;lkd;lksjcfjaewoicpjewiphfkdsjhfkdshfkshf;lkadsj;lkjdsfjdslfjldsaf  Now let me explain. If you'll pay close attention, you'll realize that not all keyboard garble is created equal. Quality mashed keyboard gibberish will begin with the classic home row or a close variation "asdfghjkl;jk." Once you start paying attention you'll note that beginning gibberish with a sound other than "asdfj," seems slightly off. "yoiuvpoiubv" "swuyiuyviucyvhjk "mvmdoivoidsjv" What does this gibberish mean to you? Well to me they mean absolutely nothing. They are gibberish. "asdfjk" however, has effectively become a sound, a word, a quasi-fixture of internet speech. Beginning a line of gibberish, it attaches the feelings of shock and awe to an otherwise senseless line of nonsense. After the beginning "asdfjkl;jlk" your options become more flexible, although when I look at the middle of a line like "asdlkfjlkdjfoijboibjomoivvbvewyb,"  sections including very strongly repeated intense consonants like m or b or v or q or y or w are kind of distracting and take me away from looking at the gibberish as a whole, which was of course predicated solely on the surprise and speechlessness expressed by "asdfjkl;." Thank you for your time. I hope that was interesting and informative.

This tree looked like it was made of old trolls mashed together. It was really gross but at the same time really quirky and endearing in a fractured mythologically anatomical sort of way. Having quieted the endearingly nauseous feelings evoked by this tree, we proceeded to sit on it.

Hey everybody I found this hole! And I climbed through it and there was cool water and rocks on the other side and then everyone climbed through it! Yay!

Yay artsiness!