The Product of Too Much Free Time

I think the bottom line to all of this pent up frustration, aggression, and all around dissatisfaction, is stemming from the looming graduation date on the calender and nothing to show for it. A diploma. A degree. But what is it going to do for me in the end?

I'm an English major, who wants to be a photographer, in a crumbling economy. Now, my math isn't so hot, but I don't like those odds. I basically just spent a bunch of money to live in a box for the rest of my life.

It also hit me that I'll probably have to waitress for another year. Maybe two. That thought literally makes my insides shrivel and crawl. I am on an endless pathway, no signs or lights to guide me, but an idea I had a while back that I thought may be fun to pursue.

I should have just picked something that random that was profitable. You know, like bio, or business. Econ, government. Coulda woulda shoulda.

I mean, I'm not happy with what I'm doing now. Would any of those other options be so terrible?

Gas is probably going to hit $4/gal. For people in rural parts of the country, like myself, this also makes me want to go lay down on those railroad tracks about three blocks from my house. Oof.

"If you don't use it, you lose it."

I feel dried up. My brain feels like a Mad Libs page that someone threw out with frustration, sitting at the bottom of the pail, unfinished and dirty. See? See what I mean? That was atrocious.

I remember there was a time where the words overwhelmed me. Where they were spilling out head at such a startling rate that it was always difficult to keep up with. And then essays came along. Writing stopped being fun.

I feel the same about photography sometimes. I don't feel as though I'm shooting for my own benefit; it's always for someone else. Mostly because my time is consumed with school and work and homework.

But what happens later on down the road? More work. Am I honestly going to have all of this personal time I imagine I am entitled to for the creativity to creep back into my veins?

Probably not.

I can see the difference. I can feel it, too. This is not the same passion I felt. It's all filled up with empty now.

And things elsewhere are going well, too, for the most part. Maybe the secret of good writing is misery. Wollstonecraft threw herself off a bridge into the Thames. Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun. Plath put her head in an oven.  I find that most of the writers that I find intolerably dull, such as Jane Austen, or Wordsworth, had relatively pleasant lives. Uneventful. I wonder if Faulkner had a boring life. I hate him, too.

I can't even bring myself to start on any of the THREE midterms I have due Thursday...

...but I did a few cartwheels today. Turns out, I haven't forgotten.
I think I'll do a few more tomorrow. Nothing is more therapeutic than a cartwheel.

And I don't want to do it.

Why bother?

What has my 3.5 GPA given me other than a discount on my car insurance?

...

Not a damn thing, is the correct answer.

I'm tired of my car nickel and diming me to death.
I'm tired of knowing the tourist season is slowing down and my income will deplete just as steadily.
I'm tired of my family getting bludgeoned with money troubles. I'm tired of the military forgetting to pay Dad and I'm tired of Mom's arrogant, asshole supervisors.
I'm tired of worrying about my own health.
I'm tired of worrying about Grandma's health and of worrying about everyone else's wellbeing as they sacrifice what little free time they have to babysit her.
I'm tired of feeling guilty for never being there...
I'm tired of never having a moment to breathe on my own. Sure, I make it a point to be online, like right now, but there's always at least 10 things that I haven't done looming around the corner, begging to be done. Laundry. Homework. Correspondence with half the people who contacted you that you haven't contacted back. WRITE PAPERS. Do reading. Take pictures for CLASS, and for MAGAZINE, but not for you. Don't bother reading for yourself, either, oh no, no time for that.
I'm tired of dealing with the gross incompetence of others in matters where I am helpless. My computer still won't work, after someone "fixed" it. AAA told me to go to Pep Boys to get my passenger window to at least come up and stay up. They refused to even do that without me ordering the part that I needed. Greg's step dad had it unstuck and proven them grossly wrong within another hour. He also told me the part that I would need for us to fix it for good; which was NOT essential to keep the window up and people out of my car. I. Hate. Liars.
I'm just tired of being tired. I need a vacation. I don't think I've really gotten one since the beginning of the summer. I probably won't get another one until Thanksgiving...

but I'm not holding my breath.

There's only a few things that aren't vexing me to the point of a nervous breakdown at the moment.
One of which is a boy, who smells like heaven and tastes like love and knows how to paint toenails.
He still makes me smile.

I haven't done a cartwheel for a long time. I wonder if I still know how...

I'd like to.

Was it only in June I said things were sublime?

How was I to know how violently and quickly everything would go spinning beyond my control; how much life can change in only three months.

In three months...

 I lost a car. I had to fight my insurance company every step of the way to try to save it, and finally to squeeze more money out of what they ascertained to be the value of the vehicle once every attempt to keep it failed. I had to make sure this money was paid in full to the lein holder. I had to then cancel the warranty on the vehicle, only to discover a few days after the last bit of the money was due, that the dealership had gone out of business and the check was in limbo, issued and uncertain if it had been cashed. This means legal action against Nissan. Oh, the joys.

I thought retail was scary. I thought waiting would be scary, but profitable. I chose Hard Rock because it was busy and looked fun. It is fun. Right now, it's not busy. It's the off season. I'm only going to make $30 a night, on average.I can only work every other weekend. I'm not even on the schedule right now, because I have yet to complete training, and they hired me in August. Some corporate bullshit about needing my birth certificate or social security card to make sure I didn't fucking jump the border. I have to pay for my new car, for it's insurance, for my phone, for groceries, and for gas. And so, I avoid going out. I even avoid eating out if I can help it. Even those delicious $6 burritos and $4 cups of coffee I used to enjoy so much are now too expensive. I'm counting every penny I have to ensure that I can make my payments the following month. The only reason I'm going to make this month's is because my mother gave me three hundred dollars. I didn't ask her for it. I told her not to give it to me. But I don't want to think about what would happen if that money wasn't in my account right now...

My grandmother is dying of stomach cancer. Her doctor failed to notice her symptoms for God only knows how long. And this only adds to the myriad of stories I hear daily about incompetent doctors. Mostly from my mother, who works with them. She's watched people die on account of their mistakes. She basically had to babysit the ones she works with while they were taking care of Grandma: she had to look at Grandma's chart to see what was wrong with her and why they weren't doing anything about it. It almost got her fired, because instead of keeping the hospital's best interests at heart, she kept the patient's. Oh, the horror of putting the patient before policy!

My laptop refuses to connect to the internet through the wireless card at my house. Only at my house. Everywhere else, it's fine. At times, it also refuses to connect to Mozilla. Or Internet Explorer. It even freezes. I just bought it in July, and there's nothing I can do about it, because the warranty will only give me a brand new piece of shit computer identical to this one and with the same problems. Fuck you in the asshole, Bill Gates. Take Vista and shove it up there, too.

I've been contending with bad doctor visits for the past year now, with the possibility of problem with my health. I just got a call from the doctor two days ago confirming that there's a completely different problem that never came up with testing before, which is more serious, and the old problem was a fluke...

I'm lost. I feel hesitant to round the next bend, for fear of what lies just beyond my line of sight. I tread lightly and full of fear, and weary of moving forward so slowly. I just want to snap my fingers and have it all vanish, up in smoke, like it never happened. But oh, such is life in its tragic mystery. It can't always go right, I know that, but why does everything have to go wrong at once? I can't handle it. I'm a full time student in her senior year and now I feel as though school is just keeping me from handling the litany of other issues waiting for me every time I turn around. I feel as though school is holding me back rather than pushing me forward. I feel as though everything is pushing me back, forming a tightly packed line of defense holding me inches away from my goals, painfully close enough to see and breathe in, but just barely beyond my fingertips to the point of physical anguish. Everything I try to do to handle it makes it worse. I close my eyes and count to ten and the demons are are still there, facing me, waiting to block my next move all over again.

I am tired, so tired. I think I'm going to take a nap.
Oh wait that's right, I don't have time for a nap. I don't have time for anything. Except for avoiding all of the other things that I don't have time for.

Things I've learned this summer:

You can total cars going 15 mph in your driveway. But accidents happen to everyone, so just let it go. After all, no one else is going to let you forget it...hahaha...oh, the pain and agony.

Working 3 jobs isn't any fun unless you have a few days off to enjoy yourself. Especially when your next day off rolls around and you can't remember when the day off before that one was...

Working 3 jobs where two of them don't pay shit is a nice wake up call. It'd be nice to find a real job, but for now it looks like maybe more shitty jobs until graduation. Probably after that, too. Suffice to say, you learn to count pennies.

Cherish the moments you have with the people you love. It can all come tumbling out from beneath you when you least expect it. After all, as me and my co-workers know, "only the good die young."

Photography is EXPENSIVE.

As are cars...:)...and computers...and phones...oh, hello there, Burnout, I've been expecting you!!!!
Okay okay, a little dramatic, but adding school to the equation should make things interesting.

Mice are dirty little creatures. But damn, they are smart little bastards, too.

It's been interesting, to say the least. Heartbreaking and joyful at the same time. A lot like Christmas; with a new laptop, phone, and car (thanks to the majority of the poor Altima being paid off by insurance), and CAMERAAAAAAAA. Once that memory card comes in, ho boy, that baby will be glued to my face ;).

One closing thought, courtesy of Little Miss Sunshine: Do what you love, and fuck the rest.

The six year old in me is still awe-stricken whenever I drive down the quiet back roads of my hometown, after sundown, and see the trees illuminated with hundreds of tiny twinkling fireflies. Every time is the first time; I slow down and dim my lights and roll down the windows, listen to the sounds of the night, feel the cool, honeysuckle breeze waft in. It's just all so amazing to me, a sensory overload, that I literally have to slow down to take it all in, to compute everything, to appreciate its simplistic beauty.

The 21 year old me is rejoicing at her newfound freedom that comes with finally having a car again. It's a 99 Altima, and it's mine. Mine. The payments are in my name, the insurance is in my name, it's mine. And with the windows down, and the honeysuckle permeating the vehicle, I remember to glance at the trees and wait for the twinkling lights to appear.

The car has a CD player, so this morning, before work, I remembered to grab my old CD book, untouched since the days of iPod. Another stark reminder of these days: mixed CDs. On the way home from work, I popped one in. Skipped through the tracks. And landed on "Alive" by POD.

And then I was 16 again, in Spanish class, with my arms around the tall, lanky kid who smelled indescribably good, but somewhere close to clean laundry. He was wearing a POD shirt T-shirt layered over a long sleeved, darker one. He wasn't even that crazy about the band; I think he stole the shirt from his brother. It didn't matter. For whatever reason,  I thought he looked incredible. His stunningly blue eyes seemed to always see all of the things I thought I kept hidden. I could have sworn my heartbeat was filling the room. I was consumed with a fiery mix of passion and agony, for though my fingertips were pressed against the small of his back, they were two layers away from the skin and forbidden to go any further. We were always forbidden to go any further, and so we gazed and gazed, and I would go home and listen to POD, and think of him, simply because of that one T-shirt.

The surrealness of the moment seized me so badly that I saw everything slow down in front of me, though my actual speed remained constant, if not accelerated from going down a small hill. And the smell of honeysuckles made me think of his beloved, tattered notebook, where he wrote stories, so many stories, one of which ending with: "And I could still smell the honeysuckle..."

I smiled. I softly sang along, and despite the abhorrence of being cheesy, I honestly felt so completely and totally alive. My senses were heightened; if I knew anything about tripping, I'd say that was probably close to it.

I sang along. And I thought of him. And how all of the pieces of my life are slowly coming together. I've never been happier.

Another school year, come and gone.

I think Kelso put it best when she said this afternoon, "This has been one CRAZY year."

It really has. But in some of the best ways imaginable. I never thought that I'd enjoy myself as much as I did this year. I cut loose: I went out on Tuesday nights, I had dance parties in front of my laptop that lasted all of five seconds, I made some amazing friends, I played wiffle ball at 1 a.m. during exam week, I've played Mom to the boys that I know and love who can't cook to save their souls, I've ambushed a frat with my roommate in cow suit. I've made some bad decisions, but I've made some good ones, too. I've learned a lot, academically and otherwise.

They say that's what this whole college thing is all about, anyway. Learnin' things. If I must...

I've also come to the conclusion that, despite all of my yammering about "knowing" what I want to do with myself, I really don't. And it's more or less okay. I mean, I know I want to take pictures. I don't know for who, for what, or for what purpose, but I do know that at this point it seems to be the most interesting. I wouldn't mind writing, but I'm not sure my style is completely en vogue right now. I wouldn't mind doing a lot of things, actually, which is precisely the problem: I have so many pet interests, a broad range of things of which I yearn to know more about. But there's always a peak, a threshold, and once I reach it, it's like flipping a switch: "Yeah, I'm done with that now. Moving on..."

So, I guess we'll see. Senior year is next. And then the world awaits...

God, I'm scared. But I'm SO excited. And I'm really going to miss the Ladies of L-town. Well, one of them, who is sadly not accompanying the remainder of us in Chapter 2 of the Chronicles of L-town: The Party Moves to Knox. She's been like an older sister to me, full of sage-like advice and love and patience, for which I shall always be greatful. I couldn't have asked for a better roommate (aside from the other two, of course ^_^), and I'm most appreciative of all of the insight she has given me. We have both made an impression upon the other, and will carry it with us. And yeah, she's only going to Bethesda, and is basically our 4 1/2 roommate, unofficially speaking, ha. Filling in the shoes of Nicole is Liam. Granted, he won't be living in MY room, but he's got a LOT of expectations to live up to, that's for damn sure. Though, you gotta admire a guy who willingly places himself in a house with three women. He's certainly going to learn a lot about tampons, nail polish, and chocolate, and how essential each and every one of those items are to our very existence.

It's been great, guys. It really has. Congrats to those of you who are graduating, and good luck to you.

[if anyone still reads this, that is, he he]

I know I'm definitely one of the world's most infamous creative spellers, but I keep that within the confines of my class notebooks. I try to use spell check as often as need be, or even (gasp) LOOK UP THE WORDS I DON'T KNOW!!

Now that that's out of the way, let's have a GRAMMAR lesson, yes?
WHOSE is implying ownership, WHO'S is WHO IS.
It's ALL RIGHT. Two words. Not "ALRIGHT."
I went TO your house and had TOO much to drink even though I only had TWO shots. NOTICE THAT THOSE ARE THREE DIFFERENT WORDS!!!!
Look over THERE, THEY'RE going to walk THEIR dogs. ONCE AGAIN, THREE DIFFERENT WORDS WITH THREE DIFFERENT MEANINGS!!!

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I just felt that it was relevant to mention this, because, well, we're kind of supposed to be EDUCATED by now. It's also especially useful to think about if you're about to go off on a rant about how you're so much better than someone else, but all the while soundin' like y'all done came straight outta Appalachia or Compton, HOLLAZ! Represent Cecil-tucky, y'all! Or worse, when u type lik a SiXtH gRaDeR on CRAKKKK!

In the end, the rhetoric speaks for itself. What do you want it to say about you?

Also worth mentioning before I move on with my life: my 18 year old brother is in his fourth year of high school, and cannot solve to find the missing angle of a triangle.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to go shoot myself in the face.

Soon to come: A full-length rant about the housing crisis @ UMD! For now, have fun with these fun-tastic links:
http://media.www.diamondbackonline.com/media/storage/paper873/news/2007/04/05/News/More-Than.600.Students.Rejected.From.Housing-2824729.shtml
http://www.wbaltv.com/news/11603179/detail.html
http://news.wjla.com/news/stories/0407/411968.html