Weather Proof

So since I’m infatuated with wide brimmed hats, and because I was alread looking through Target’s website, I’ve come across a discory.

There are no Target’s in Vermont.

Sorry, Vermont, better luck next time.

So here I am once again, trapped within a parameter of time that allows me to go nowhere and get nothing worthwhile done. Of course I’ve decided to spend it in the library because I would otherwise spend it on a computer in my room if my room mate wasn’t sleeping.

Primarily I’m thinking about my OL interview right now. I was the first in my group of friends to interview for a job we all really want. Theoretically and Ideally we would all land a spot among the 29-or-so Orientation Leaders for the Summer of 2010, but there’s always the hazard that one of us gets the lame tag and the others get it instead. That is simply horrifying.

Everyone’s interviews seem to have gone pretty well. Each time I heard back about one I get a warm feeling for their success and then a more subtle pang of concern for my own. I’m fully aware that I did a stellar job when it was my time to be interviewed, but I’m also aware that I had a dissadvantage because of how early in the process it was.

Now I’m not attributing anything to this ‘disadvantage,’ if that’s what it is. I’m just saying that I went in first and was able to advise my friends fully thereafter. I wouldn’t have it any other way because I want them to get the job just as bad as I want it, but a fraction of me wishes someone had told me what the panel would be like, or given me suggestions.

I feel stupid complaining about this. That I’m even complaining about all this is a good thing because it’s a reaction to the utter success of all my other friends applying for the same job. I wouldn’t be so vexed if they weren’t doing so well, and for that I’m grateful. I don’t blame a single one of them, but mostly myself for not applying early enough and getting a later time slot.

Whatever. I’m being too harsh. I got the whole ordeal done with weeks before anyone else allowing me to relax, too look on the seething nervous masses with pity, and then to help them to my full extent. I wouldn’t change that at all.

My, and everyone’s, largest problem when it comes to writing is getting started. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve started a project and then left it to rot after only a few pages. It’s generally because I think about stories in their peaks and in their dramatic moments which never seem to be their beginnings. As a result I always sort of force a start and then promise myself I’ll go back to it once I’ve got a firm pace up on the rest of whatever I’m writing. However, these temporary starts prove to be too boring to keep going with and the disconnect between the future plot and the initial details just yawns out before me and I get distracted.

I think I’ve fixed it, though. Stephen King called ‘Plot’ a literary device that ruins otherwise great stories. He compared it to digging out fossils with a jack-hammer. Well, Stephen, that’s subjective. I have a plot in mind and I agree that it’s becoming a hassle to work about it but that’s something I’m wiling to deal with. Things don’t have to be so definitive in rhetoric. I’ve realized this and decided I’ll just write what I want and work in my plot in a more natural method.

Tonight I wrote about 9 pages all together which is a lot more in book terms, but 9 word document pages. And I’m actually happy with them. It’s not some sort of starter document to get me running and its not going to crust over later, eventually falling off in order for something else to grow back.

I guess I’m just really happy with what I’ve done, and I’m really content about this start.

I’ve got Calculus in about half an hour. I’m sitting in the library now because I have yet another awkward chunk of time dolled out to me by NU. This one is a little more managable—55 minutes—than the usual spotty assortments of 12 minutes, 36 minutes, and 39 minutes that I get between classes. I usually just end up walking slow but evidently Mother Nature is going through a rough divorce with Practicality and as a result Boston is suffering the brutal end of her self-pity-party.

Calculus. I have always respected people who understand Math, who can manipulate numbers and letters to come out in certain ways and who have taken phenomina and converted it into a digital system—a system comprized of made up numbers and figures representing universal consistencies (because that’s all mathematics actually is).

I see the absolute use in all of Math. I see how interesting it is and how influential it has been on the fields of science but at the same time I hate it. I hate how I can’t think about it plausibly and I hate how useless it is yet how much time is spent drilling open students’ skulls and lining their minds with it. It’s useful stuff, to a degree, but even when I was in an AP Statistics course—possibly the most useful of maths other than the basics—I still was grasping for a reason to master any of the techniques.

The fact, for me, is that if ever I use math in a professional career, it will be specific and tailored to what I’m doing. I wish I had a life where maybe I was better at thinking about numbers and could be more flexible about their use but instead of that I’ve got this limited brain. Whatever, that’s fine, I’m used to it.

The othe frustrating thing is that I’ve only encounted a handfull of good math teachers, none of which have been in College thus far. M.V., my first semester teacher, was an amazing women and one of the nicest teachers I’ve met. A.I., this semester’s teacher, is a misanthropic meany-face who has boustrously targetted me for no particular reason and bashed me since…and consistently so to the point where it’s not just me who has noticed.

I think I must remind him of a childhood tyrant because that’s the sort of thing he projects onto me, so far as I can tell. Or someone who broke his heart. Either way he acts like he has divine revenge on his side.

This took seven minutes. I’ve still got twenty minutes to slaughter.

Chemistry Recitation was uncharacterically short today and it made me wish I had thought about skipping it whilst lounging in bed. In actuallity, I did think about skipping it because I always think about skipping life while I’m lounging in bed.

Come to think of it, the term ‘lounging in bed’ summons up a very realistic and potent fantasy of mine. A fantasy that has some consistent themes with most of my other day dreams.

My day dreams generally have to do with me in the future, and me living a life of spoils and exclusivity that can be attributed to my essential role in some secret agency. I have money, not a ton of it, but most of all I have professional freedom and an independent life. In this particular scenario I’m lying in a maelstrom of gold sheets in a large ornate circular bed with paneling on one edge depicting some Greek God scene. And I’m waking up at an hour that’s unknown because the whole room is lit artificially with indirect and soft lighting.

So I just sort of move around for a while, rolling over and deciding if I feel like waking up for the moment, and no alarms go off and no obligations threaten to give me a hernia if I happen to sleep into them by only a few minutes.

«END SCENE»

I want to write a rap song simply because I want the music video to be a bunch of maids fluttering about a medieval queen, and suddenly she looks at the camera and goes…

“I’m just a byzantine BITCH…”

And then the song will take off from there, having to do with beheading and gossamer fabrics and other medieval queen things which I enjoy.

Besides all that:

I’m currently well. I’m sort of sleepier than usual which is dismaying because this week I have not had to get up for Clinical Neuroscience, an 8 am class, on Monday, Wednesday, and soon Thursday.  I should be more upright than slouched but I find it’s reversed. Maybe my endocrine system senses vacation only mere days away and is thus easing me back into a non-coasting-on-adrenaline mode. That’d be nice, I suppose.

Today I had some interesting experience at the gym. I was working out on one of the machines, one for pectoral muscles I think, when some guy sort of started hanging near me like he wanted something. I’d seen him before; he’s gorgeous and placatingly indifferent tot he stares he gets from me and the other people at the gym. From the creepies.

Anyhow, after I do a set he comes up to me and says “Mind if I work in with you?” in a manly manly tone.

Keep in mind I have close to no familiarity with gym jargon. So, naturally I said yes. I figured that this all just meant he wanted to use the machine while I wasn’t, and we would switch. Super efficient jock style. Great!

So I let him sit down and stuff and he changed the resistance on the weights and then it was my turn again (I did jazz dancer stretches while I waited. They were alluring, I hope) and he asked me what resistance I had it at. I said 10, however much that is.

So I do my thing, and then repeat to him what he said to me about resetting the weights for him. He goes, “I had it on 28…” and I just sort of stated laughing and then scrammbled to change it back for him.

The saddest parts of this encounter were the parts where I watched him change the weights from my light ones to his super heavy ones.

Some of his friends came over and sort of watched me stand around and then talked to him. He said, “I’m all set, dude,” and walked off with my heart.

Is where the devil resides. Seriously, I’ve consistently been berated by their supreme incredulity when I visit. How is that possible?

And when they DO send me a new phone, they send it without a battery….which is why I needed a new phone in general.

Oh yeah, and to the man managing the Postal Store in Speare Common…I hope you trip into a pit of defective and vindictive bear traps. I’m RATHER aware that my mother’s name was on my fedexed new phone (sans battery), and I’m also acutely aware that we don’t have a single name in common. Thanks for acting like you just cracked the most fervently enigmatic Nancy Drew mystery when you announced to the entire store that:

“Yeah, YEAH, these names aren’t similar at all. They don’t even match up a little bit! Yeah not even at all!”

Thanks, sir, I know. I’ve known for the greater portion of my life. I have fun family naming games, I get it. Oh and thanks for the lecture about how it should have been addressed to me and not my mother. I’ll make sure to make the physical trip to the Verizon shipping Co. next time so that I can personally scrawl, in big loopy magenta cursive, my own name. Yeah, sorry, I guess I just got lazy this time around.

In conclusion, I would be A-Okay if that man contracted some Amazon Flesh Decay Bacteria, and if maybe he thought the first place to get help was the ever humble Verizon Store because they’ve been just so helpful in the past. Then he explodes in a splatter of pus and rot.

Oh that’s nasty. But divine vengeance. They don’t really know how the world treats my adversaries, I suppose.