So, yeah.

Just letting everyone know I'm still alive. This week was some sort of Autumn holiday thing, so we had no school Wednesday on through the rest of the week. Which was nice. There is no such thing as Halloween here, though. I never would have thought I'd miss it so much. On the plus side, though, my host family and I went to this waterpark/spa place three times, with three different groups of other friend-type families. On the minus side, Psychonauts doesn't work on my lappy. Back on the plus side, though, it does work on my host family's desktop computer, so I get to play it there. Honestly, that's a lot of why I haven't been so much in communication with all y'alls this past week or so. Two Fridays ago, I went to this fantastic čajovna (that's teahouse) with some girls from school and some friends of theirs, and last Friday, I went again with one of Barbora's friends who I sort of inherited, and some of her friends. I had Japanese tea, which for some reason I always think I like, but then it turns out that I don't really. Tastes like fish. That doesn't stop me from drinking it, though. Anyways, they also had these spiffy voda fajčie things (literally, 'water smoking'). Basically, you inhale flavored smoke from a hookah (which is the thing the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland smokes. Don't know why I know that word.) They assured me that it was not bad for you, just sweet flavor. I sure hope so, 'cause I sure liked it. Three or so of us shared an apple-flavored one on my second trip, and it complimented my Japanese tea quite nicely, making it much more palatable. Yesterday, I went and spent all my money for the month, including the cash from a card in my package, my rotary allowance, and then some extra from my debit account to make up the difference, on a pair of warm boots for winter. About 3200 crowns. I have intentionally not done the math on how much real money that is, since I'm afraid of cringing so badly that I'll cause permanent damage to myself. It's supposed to snow Monday, and my host mom keeps on worryin' at me about whether I'm cold. For the ridiculous amount they cost, I intend to wear the silly boots until they are so worn out that they no longer qualify as viable footwear.

I have now exhausted everything I can think of to say. I'll probably be online next weekend for an undetermined length of time at an undetermined hour for when I have something more to say. I do, however, want to give a quick shout-out to my hype/hope buddies. Miss you all buckets, and don't forget to send me a copy of Narnia this year. Not a DVD, either, all of you have to come here, 'kay?

Dance-o-rama

Last week was frigging amazing. Forget every bit of whining about a lack of modern dance in this town. My two-monthish absense from my primary means of self-expression was certainly made up for, if only by sheer quantity. There was this four days of dance festival thing, with roughly six hours of workshops in the morning and afternoon, followed by some sort of performance in the evening. Every day, mind you. The workshops varied from "cool" to "amazing" to "oh my, I seem to dislocated my shoulder". Over the shoulder rolls, it turns out, are only one of the many ways you can roll around and injure yourself using your shoulders. I had no idea. As for the performances, they varied rather more in quality. Most of the teachers for the workshop were there to perform, and we often learned sections of their choreography. The best piece was by a group of dancers from Poland, who took the workshop with us, asking questions and recieving answers in English, since they didn't speak Slovak. My least favorite piece was very, very strange indeed. I have no idea what it was about, but there were a couple of girls wearing these knee-length sort of Quaker-looking dress things with hoods, and they ran around making sheep noises while some other guy wearing white tails without a shirt read some Slovak about the Tatras, pausing to strangle one of the quaker-sheep-girls, much to her amusement and prolongued bleating. The first night, there was a piece with many other strange things, including a girl eating a lemon, peel and all, while announcing "I do not need to eat chocolate to be happy", blowing up balloons while singing, tuning a guitar, a girl dancing around in her undies, only to put on pantyhose, a dress, and high heels, sit down, and eat a sausage that she pulled out of her purse. Quite surreal, but very entertaining. There was even a dance where the lady wore nothing at all. Not so much as a pair of shorts or a loincloth or anything. Bupkis. The lighting was low, so you could mostly just make out her sillouette, but you could see enough to know that you could see too much, if you catch my drift. So, yeah. I have many bruises, marley burns, gouges, scrapes, bumps, and scars, both mental and physical, to show for last week. All my arts school friends, the ones with whom I take ballet and folk dance, think I'm this amazing modern dancer, and I just let them keep thinking that.

By the way, this is my seventy-fifth post. Woo hoo. If I had one of those little party horn thingies that unroll when you blow them, I'd be blowing it now. Since I don't, I'll just have to sit here going "toot, toot".

Toot.

Details, details...

I have not had a huge amount of culture shock since I've been here, but there are things that, every time I see them, make me think about how they are different than at home. None of them really have much significance, but all of them together ensure that I feel that I'm in a foreign country now. And now, ladies and gentlemen, let's have a big hand for your favorite format and mine: the bullet points!

• Doorknobs. There are no round doorknobs anywhere in this country. They're all the kind that are shaped like the letter L, with the short end in the door and the long end parallel to the floor.
• Lightswitches. Rather than the neat white rectangles of my youth, these are all square.
• Chalkboards. There's nary a whiteboard to be found anywhere, but the chalkboards slice, dice, make julienne fries, and even sort your socks. The board is comprised of a rectangular piece with two folding wings, which open or close to allow the teacher to write on both sides of them, provinding a surface area three times that of the original rectangle. They slide up and down about six inches, too, the better to write at both the tippy top and way down at the bottom.
• Notebooks and other school supplies. Rather than aisled upon aisles of notebooks, binders, and the like, students here have only about three rather hideous styles of little staple-bound booklets of lined, plain, or quadrille paper, in addition to the three styles of more expensive spiral bound notebooks.
• Radiators. The big old-timey ones. There's one in every room. No central heating here!
• Very, very narrow streets. Coupled with the ridiculous speed at which these people drive, their utter disregard of seatbelts, and pedestrians' habit of jaywalking, it's a wonder I'm still alive.
• Yellow lights. They come on both sides of the red light. The cycle goes green, yellow, red, red and yellow, and back to green. Pretty good idea, actually.
• One last rant about socks, and then I promise I'll shut up about it. What the crap is wrong with not wearing socks? Seriously, these people are obsessed. And it's not just socks. If you're going to wear a skirt or even a pair of capris or something, you'd better be wearing nylons or tights (unless you're a guy. But if you're wearing shorts in the winter, apparantly that means you're on drugs). Otherwise you will be accosted by everyone you meet, even total strangers on the bus, with the thrice-accursed phrase: "Nie si zima?" ("Aren't you cold?")
• Shoes. There's some sort of rule about "inside" shoes and "outside" shoes, less strict than in Japan, but I still haven't figured this out. I think you're supposed to change shoes when you get to school, and we wear old, worn-out birkenstock knock-offs around the house. But some kids wear similar shoes around school (with socks, naturally), so I have no idea what that's about.
• Lunch. The school lunch system is complicated. The day before, one must register their choice of meal by stamping bot hhalves of a perforated ticket and depositing one of them in a little box. Then, the next day, you hand the lunchlady the remaining half, in exchange for which they provide you with a steaming plate of... food. The problem: 1. I can't read the menu, and therefore, my choice of meal is utterly random, and 2. I didn't get any more tickets for October. I'm working on that.
• Dubbing. Roughly half the TV shows one sees here are dubbed into Slovak from some other language- usually, but not always, English. I've seen episodes of Friends, CSI, Monk, NCIS, some random German show about a crime fighting dog, and any number of Spanish soap operas, in addition to the local programming- sitcoms, reality shows, soap operas, and the like, all in Slovak.
• It's funny to read the back of the shampoo bottle and see four languages, none of which are English. Often, you get Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and sometimes German.
• Public buildings, including my school, are all in such bad condition that, were they in America, they would long since have been condemned and torn down. Cracked linoleum, broken windows, graffiti all over the desks- there's even a mural of the Simpsons on the back wall of one classroom. That and the bars on many windows and doors gives the place a very strange vibe, like a converted prison or insane asylum or something
• The oldest building in Eugene is on campus and dates back to the 1870s. The oldest buildings in Slovakia date back to the 12th or 13th centuries. Note, for instance, this conversation that took place when the language camp kids went to see a castle:

"There was a fire here recently, and this ceiling was the only wooden thing to survive." "So all the other wood is a reproduction?"

"Oh yes. We replaced it shortly after the fire."

"When was this fire?"

"Oh, 1800."

• Every name has a special day, which the bearers of that name celebrate much like a birthday. The upshot of this is that there are only a couple hundred names for the entire population. I know two Martins, about four Barboras, four Ivetas, two Dominikas, and countless Sashas.
• The bathtubs here have a little seat built into them and a showerhead. Lots of families don't have a shower, so they shower in the tub. They never fill it up and take a bath, they just shower sitting down. Which is actually kind of nice, especially for leg-shaving.
• Everyone uses umbrellas in the rain. If you don't have one, then friendly strangers walking your way will often offfer to share, which is kind of nice.
• Gym class is wild. There are usually about three classes having PE at once, in the same little gym. Seventh graders duch under the volleyball net as they run laps, a crowd of 11th grade girls ignore their male counterparts' football game as it weaves through their volleyball game, and against the far wall, sixth graders do situps- the kind that were condemned as "bad for the back" years ago in America. It's beautiful and dynamic to watch, if loud.

The Moment Before Reason

For a moment, I thought I saw you yesterday. But it was just a particular shade in a stranger's hair, a tilt of the head or the angle of a smile on an unknown face. It seems you are refracted-my images of you, fractured, playing across a million foreign faces like glimmering rainbows cast by the prism of distance, intangible, insubstantial. I would not have thought I knew you well enough to see you where you are not, in the glint of a man's glasses on the bus or even the feet of a fellow dancer. The way a nose wrinkles in a smile, the shape of a slender finger, a neck's particular slope as it becomes shoulder- you are all around me, silent strangers reminding me of your absence. In the moment before reason, there is just time enough for an inhalation and the flash of your name across my mind like lightning across the sky and then you are gone, swallowed alive by harsh reality, and I realize, having had to say goodbye again, how very much I miss you. We are separated by thick walls of time and space, penetrated only by a feverish imagination starved of you. I did not think I missed you until my heart leapt at the sight of you, only to be cut down by reason, shouting its truel truths- that you aren't here, that you can't be here- and i realized just how much I wished you were.

I write this to you, my friends, so you will know, as I now do, that I miss you more than words can say, more than reason can explain or even describe. This is my love letter and my lament, for though neither of us is irrevocably removed from this fallen earth, the distance winding between us, literally oceans away, feels as impassable as the gap 'twixt life and death. We stand on the edges of the chasm and shout, scream until we have no breath, and ultimately, we turn away and live our lives apart. Living, simply being, causes our characters to change, grow, evolve, When I return, dear friend, who will you be? Will I recognize you in the flesh? Perhaps more frightening still- who will I be?

When such thoughts cloud my mind and precipitate into tears, your wise words, spoken in a quiet, tearful moment, decend about my shoulders like a warm arm-

"It's only for a year."


Note to readers: I wrote this in a very blue moment. Rereading it now, it seems extraordinarily overdramatic, but that's what makes it fun to write. It's not always this bad. Some of the occurances of the word "you" in this post are plural, some are not. You're smart. You can figure it out. But hey- it's got imagery, analogies, metaphores out the wazzoo, just a dash of alliteration, heck, even death. By gum, It's a bona fide piece of literature!

New comic! Fun times!

And for those die-hard fans out there, here's the very fancy, digitally remastered version of the first comic thingie!

I miss my Xbox

I wrote this in class and then put "Blog this" at the top of the page. So I guess I will.

I'm such a long way from home, yet the distance bothers me less than the simple fact that I'm not there, if that makes any sense. It doesn't feel as if I'm a couple thousand miles away, it only feels like I have paused my life there and time and space have conspired to change my surroundings. As if, in the middle of a game, I saved, quit, and played something else. The problem is that the game's still going on without me. But you sit in the same chair. You use the same controller and watch the same screen. Sure, the buttons have different effects and so must be used differently, but you still, at least, push buttons. I'm living a different life here, analougous to playing a new game, but I see it through the same set of eyes. The new world has the same sky, the same sun and clouds and rain. The pavement under my feet may be different, but I stand on the same two feet, in the same pare of cream leather converse that I got at Buffalo Exchange for $16.00.

I think I'm almost through the tutorial. It's taking for-freaking-ever.

Fruits of Idleness

See what happens when I don't have internet access in the wee hours of the night? For some reason, blogger won't let me make this nice and legibly big for all y'alls, so you'll just have to figure it out. Sorry.

*note* Emo's quote is some of a poem I wrote one day some months ago when I was feeling particularly down, so it's not to be taken as a reflection on my current state of mind. *ahem* Dad.

Miss you!

Jarmok

So this weekend is Jarmok, a nation-wide festival sort of thing, complete with booths and people running around in native costume doing traditional things and selling traditional, hand crafted wares. The most bizarre element of the whole thing is that, according to tradition, the boys give girls smart whacks to the bum with traditional wooden spoons. Not even kidding you. (Michael Eckerdt, this is your chance.) There's also a bunch of the obligatory festival-type portable rides of questionable safety and/or legality. So that's what I did this weekend.

This was my first week at school. I'm taking a bunch of classes, presented here in handy-dandy list format:

• French. This seems like a good idea, but they are all way better than me, and half the time, I don't even know what language the teacher is speaking.
• PE. I suck at Volajbol. And at basketbol. And futbol. Oh well. At least I don't have to talk much.
• Chemistry. This class is probably the one where I understand the most, as far as Slovak goes. I mean, it's not hard to tell that "etán" means "ethane". Unfortunately, I don't remember much of the content.
• Remedial Slovak. Private lessons. Yay!
• Math. Same deal as Chemistry.
• A bunch of other classes. It's horrible, I know, but I don't understand them at all, so I sit quietly and draw pictures. The other day, and I know my readers will be either appalled or proud of me, I wrote out every bit of diologue from the first ten minutes of Serenity. I checked later, and I only made 27 mistakes. Not bad, I think. Try it some time. We'll compare scores.

So, that's about all for now. I've been quite busy. I've been learning to ride šelda, sasha's horse, and I start dance classes on Thursday. Dance will be three days a week, ballet once, (I think) modern once, and folk dance once. I'm excited!

I miss you all incredibly much.

First day

So today was my first day at school. After being shuffled from office to office, following my host father around, I went to my first class, which seemed to be sort of a homeroom sort of thing, where the teacher announced their schedule, pausing to tell me that mine would be different and that I'd get it tomorrow. After class, some girls nervously approached me and asked in broken English if I wanted to go into town with them. I said yes, not knowing if they meant after school, sometime next week, or skipping the rest of the day and going now. In any event, I then followed the teacher to an office, where I met the headmistress/principal/director of the school, who welcomed me graciously (via the best efforts at interpretation my teacher's limited English could furnish), and shuffled me off to yet another teacher, this one with a more functional knowledge of English. She informed me that she is basically in charge of exchange students, and that I would be taking various subjects with various other classes while my class took English, which makes sense. When she finished, the girls who had approached me earlier came in, and I followed them, much to my bewilderment, out of the school and a couple of miles away, through the mall, through the old city center, to a sort of outdoor bar kind of place, where we drank kofola (one girl smoked) and played fooseball, at which I continue to suck. Seeing as it was about nine or ten in the morning, and we were gone for more than a good hour, I was understandably confused and freaked out. However, my fears were allayed when we met up with my host mom at a cafe in the mall on the way back, after several phone calls. Turns out that we weren't delinquent hoodlums sneaking out of school to smoke and drink (only kofola, but still). The best I can tell is that today was just an orientation sort of day and that's all there was to it. Oh well.

Oh, and I had my first rotary meeting today. I was asked to introduce my self (in Slovak, of course), which I did. "Your Slovak is perfect," said one high-up looking sort of guy. Then I sat, legs crossed at the ankles and back straight as could be, for about an hour, pretending to understand. I perfected the art of looking from one face to another, following the conversation without understanding a word. Well, I understood words. About halfway through, I started a drinking game with my mineral water- every time I understood a word, I'd take a sip. I made it through the whole bottle, even. Yay for me! Afterward, I met my counselor's girlfriend, who plays the violin and teaches English to little kiddies. She offered to take me to concerts and the like, and asked me if I would come to her class every so often so they could hear a native speaker.

I don't have a snappy way to sum up this blog, so I'll just have to let it die here. Sorry, folks.

Language camp debriefing

Just got back from language camp. Overall, I would say that it was a good, productive, and fun experience. However, it seems that every roommate-type person I have ever had, both here and at SEP, has to have some sort of life crisis while staying in the same tiny room as me. Oh well.

One of the first things they told us about at the orientation meeting was "inbound syndrome". Exchange students huddle together in their panic and don't experience anything. The essence of what they said was "don't make friends with the people with whom you will be spending every moment of your waking, and even sleeping, hours for the next two weeks". We failed.

The classes were extraordinarily long, but chock-full of good information. If you look at my notebook, however, you can see a steady trend downward, from the organized, labeled, and color-coded pages upon pages of notes of the first couple of days, to the couple of jotted down phrases and fantastic pieces of artwork drawn toward the end.

The activities were sort of a mixed bag. The highlights were:

• The "walk" that turned into a five mile hike- the second half running back frantically toward the school where we were staying through pelting rain and steadily nearing lightning and thunder.
• The castles. We visited two- the first was a generic, though fantastic, tourist trap. The second required a half-hour hike and was merely ruins, but was the better of the two. It was awesome to imagine it back in the day.
• The waterpark. Really, it was more of a spa-type place. We walked in and were greeted by gently steaming pools full of murky brown, mineral-filled water, which is supposedly extremely good for the skin. It must have been, because my sunburn went away after only a couple of days.
• One day, they brought about five horses to the school. A gaggle of young kids lead us around in circles, talking to eachother about how they didn't know how to say "the horse's name is Dusty". Somewhere along the way, one of them decided that I was competent enough to keep my seat myself. Which I could. Steering remains a problem, though.

I'll think of more eventually.

I had my first bout of homesickness while I was there. Coupled with being surrounded by people 24/7, I wandered off to a deserted corner of the school one night and sobbed for a good half hour. Tanner, I took the scarf you bought me and wrapped it around my shoulders and imagined that it was one of your famous violent, yet cuddly, hugs. It helped a little, but I miss you so much. Geez, I'm crying all over again. I miss you all so very much. Mom, thanks for the cards. They helped a lot. I don't know how I'll make it through a whole year. I have been listening to the Superchic[k] song "I belong to you" a lot. It pretty much sums me up at the moment.

One more language camp-related thought: lunch and dinner were virtually always some variation on pork and rice with all the rolls you could eat and/or sneak to your room and eat later with nutella. Good times.

I miss you.

So far...

Wow, it took me about thirty seconds of staring at the blinking cursor to remember how to speak English. I just have a few minutes before we leave to go to the disco (!), so here come my experiences so far in easy-to-swallow morsels. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you... the bullet points!

• My first day, Barbora (my host sister) and Ivena (her friend) took me shopping at Europa shopping center (pronounced "eh-oo-ro-pah"). We stopped for blended drinks, non-alchoholic, of course, and headed down to the city center, which was awesome and old and stuff. We met up with Peter, who will be my host brother in my third host family. He spent a year in Nebraska, so he speaks flawless English. We all walked down to the holocaust museum, stayed there about two minutes, then went and got ice cream. I had grapefruit flavor, which was fantastic.
• The next day, Brano (my host father) took me to all the places to get my visa and stuff, which was sort of a hassle, but okay. We ran into another rotary kid, Haley, and her host mom at the police station. Haley does not speak a word of slovak. Literally. She didn't even seem to be trying to make herself understood. I myself have eschewed every part of my English grammar and most of my vocabulary in an attempt to communicate, and it seems to be working pretty well. Anyway, that night, we went to a kid's birthday party, which was at Donovaly. There was a folk band that played all these slovak folk tunes, which was really spiffy. There was a baby boy that belonged to one of the women at the party (which, for some reason, had no other children present). A middle-aged woman introduced him to me as her "son in law", but somehow I thought she was mistaken.
• Today, Ivetka (my host mother), Barbora and I went to the mall to find some luggage for Barbora's trip to America. This afternoon, Barbora, Ivena, several random men, and I piled into a car to go to a football game. Not soccer, mind, football. I am so in Europe. Our team won, and I discovered one of my new favorite drinks: Kofola. They explained it as "Slovak Cola", but it has this licoricey sort of bite to it. Fantastic. After the game, we rode back in the bus with the team, who all flirted with me, despite the prodigious language barrier. Barbora translated what she could, but it was still hilarious. We went to what I think was a sort of post-game barbecue, except with goulash instead of hot dogs. Then we went home and watched Top Gun in Czech. Which made me laugh.

Also worthy of note:

• Almost everyone smokes almost everywhere.
• Driving is dangerous.
• Seat belts are optional.

Safe and sound!

Just letting everyone know that I have arrived safely. My host family seems fantastic, and the flights went smoothly. It is funny that the longer the wait, the fewer words it takes to tell how long it is. Such is the case concerning my six hour layover in Detroit and my seven hour layover in Prague. Much sitting, sleeping, and eating took place.

Departure

The Plan:

August 14th, I will get on an airplane in Portland in the wee hours of the morning, then fly to Detroit, sit around the airport for a good long while, then fly to Amsterdam. From there, it's off to Prague, where I have another really pretty long layover before flying to Sliac, which is just outside Banska Bystrica.

If I don't post again before I leave, know that I will try to pass on whatever tidbits I may have for you, be they mere impressions of my surroundings, the deep philosophical insights and witty saying that we at the aublog strive to provide for all y'alls, or the whining and ranting that we inevitably fall into anyway. However, depending on the availability of internet access, these posts may be infrequent and/or inconsistent.

Pray for me, please!

Goodbye

This goes out to my 12 years at YG. As you listen, keep in mind that a) this is a very, very rough cut and b) I couldn't hear myself when I was recording the harmony. Listen mercifully.

Wisdom

This morning I was anesthetized while some folks poked around in my mouth and pulled out two teeth I didn't know I had.

The good news is that now, twelve hours later, I can finally feel my face and even move the left hand side of my upper lip. Plus I get ice cream.

The bad news is that, while I can move my previously incapacitated facial muscles, the feeling that has returned is not at all a pleasant one. Not only can I now feel my tongue, but I can feel the waves of nauseating pain emanating from the gaping holes in my gums where, I'm told, a couple of teeth were lurking, biding their time, waiting to erupt and wreak havok, causing incalculable pain and damage to my mouth on their way to take over the world in the name of all things toothy. Well, we sure showed them.

My face hurts. Whether that has anything to do with my preference for words both rather larger and more plentiful than I generally would thrust upon my innocent readers is up for debate.

So here I sit, typing with one hand while the other holds a bag of frozen peas, specially purchased for the purpose, to my cheek.

Augh.

(PS. The title of this post, while somewhat nonspecific, was specifically chosen to not break the now six-post long streak of one word titles. It is my solemn vow that, until now, this was entirely unintentional. Thank you.)

Linkfest!

Just a pointless quickie note to buy me a few more days before people start asking about my next post.

I am so tempted to blow all my graduation money on this dress, but won't. I have next summer's end-of-the-year trip to save up for. Travel around Europe vs. really cool but expensive dress... the travel wins out. Oh well.

In other news, I like all the music on this site. I put almost all of it on my fauxPod and listen to it alls the time. I still don't approve of the name, though. I bookmarked it as "Spiffy Music" instead.

As long as I'm linking to stuff, I might as well refer any and all of you who may not have read it to xkcd. I went back and read all the archives and felt really smart and laughed really hard when I actually got some of them.

In other news, cramps suck. I wanted to curl up and die all morning. If you are male, count your blessings, or at least add that to the preexisting list.

Lackadaisicality

I have not blogged in a very long time. Mostly, life as a graduate is not that different so far. I'm teaching ballet, trying to learn some Slovak, babysitting fairly regularly, being roped back into DTO (they're paying me this time!) and taking whatever dance classes I can fanagle into my schedule (Including some ballroom stuff! With a real boy! If you read this, thanks for being such a good sport, Ryan.) In addition to all this stuff, since I don't have a "real job", I've basically been put in charge of all the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, tapestries, and draperies for the household, under the threat of being charged rent. However, despite all of these demands on my time, I can often stay in my pajamas until nigh on 6:00 and delay showering for several days at a time, besides wasting my "sleeping" hours on my lappy. It's hard to get motivated when I know I'll only be around for another month and a half.

Anyway, the thing I've laughed hardest at in all this time can be found here. If you haven't played Monkey Island, you probably won't laugh at all, and if you actually speak German, you might not laugh as much as I did. Oh well. If nothing else, this will provide you with some insight into my strange mind.

In actual news, I'll be getting my wisdom teeth out soon. We'll see how that goes. If I later learn that any photographs of me with a puffed up face-full of cotton exist, I will personally make sure that they are destroyed by any means necessary. I'm just that vain and/or insecure. But we already knew that.

Lonely.

Tonight marks the second time in my life that I have felt lonely. The feeling that there is nobody here, and that this span of time could be better spent in the company of others, is somewhat overwhelming. As with the first time I was lonely, I am at a place in my life where there are actually people with whom I could be having fun, which is not a state to which I am accustomed.

Yesterday, Ryan, Bobby, and I (whom you may remember from a previous episode) went to Detroit lake, where we hiked about five miles and met a group of exhausted elderly-ish people at the top of a mountain, then meandered down to the lake itself, where we swam- that is to say, the boys changed into swim trunks in a nearby port-a-potty, then we all stood around, knee deep in the murky water, watching Bobby shiver. Later, we rented a paddle boat, and peddled our way hither and yon around the lake. That is to say, Ryan and I peddled while Bobby sat in the back and tried (unsuccessfully) to catch something with his newly-purchased fishing pole. We ate some pasta salad left over from my graduation party, and some leftover sandwiches from Ryan's graduation party. Two of the three of us ended up with pretty wicked sunburns. Around 4:00, we discovered that there really isn't that much to do in Detroit, and started for home. I nodded off for about 45 minutes on the way home, thanks to the sunburn, which always makes me sleepy. We all came back to my house, where we all hopped into the pool and ate some barbecued chicken and veggies. (Aside: we recently purchased a new barbecue. Now, our food choices largely revolve around what we can cook thereupon. Never before had it occured to me that pizza could be barbecued. In Ryan's words: "the same thing happens when you get a deep-fryer. Suddenly you want to deep fry everything." End aside.) Dad then invited them to play a shoot-em-up-type-man-game on the 360. I sort of spoiled the fun, however, by chainsawing them all to death with the Lancer. They exacted their revenge, however, by subjecting me to a racing-type game, where I made an utter fool of myself by running into walls and driving better in reverse than I would have otherwise. All in all, June 14 was among the most fun days I've had in a very long time.

So today I'm lonely. The moral of the story: people need people- in much the same way that smokers need their cigarettes. The first time you try it, it makes you cough and gag, but when you get used to it, you can't not have it. Or so I've been told. At the moment, I'm going through friend withdrawals, which is really all that loneliness is.

Graduation

Graduation was Saturday. Theoretically, I am now an adult. The world feels no different, it's just that every day now feels like a Saturday for now. I 'knew' that I would cry at some point, but the forecast eye-showers never materialized. I came close when I said goodbye to Patrick-sensei, Japanese teacher of six years, but I ended up just sort of welling up. The all night party was fantastic. Though I didn't walk out of there with any mini-fridges or toaster ovens, I had a fabulous time playing craps, on the verge of breaking out into "Luck Be a Lady Tonight" from Guys and Dolls the whole time. Around 3:30, they gathered us all up to pass out whatever prizes we may have won. Unfathomably enough, someone (probably The Man. It's always The Man.) decided that, rather than any reasonable order, they would call the names totally randomly. Twice. On the positive side, I left at 4:30, $50 richer than I was when I arrived.

Humility

I'm all the time thinking I'm so much cooler than everyone around me, and I have to let them no it by being the smartest, strongest, and funniest thing since Calvin Coolidge, put together. Recently, however, I've become aware that I am fundamentally insecure, and I'm all freaked out about making sure nobody knows about the ugliness I see inside. That's where the pride comes from. I try and hide my many faults, end up overcompensating, and come off as prideful and arrogant, which I recognize and add to my list of things wrong with me as a person.

While my self-image may be somewhat skewed by my history as a really mean kid, which I deplore about myself, there is a lot of truth to be found in my insecurity. Theologically, it's all about the depravity of man. I am, as a human being, naturally inclined to evil. I am flawed. I am a hopeless case of selfishness. And, in a way, it's good that I recognize that about myself. Amazing grace saved a wretch like me, not a basically good person like me. Paul was all vibin' on that.

The epiphany I had the other day was that I am insecure, but not humble. I still have to learn that it's okay that i'm scumm and that I don't need to hide behind my own puffed-up coolty.

(The word SCUMM in the last paragraph, by the bye, is a very, very oblique reference to the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, with which most of my game collection was made. Adventure games forever!)

So, yes. I looked up and saw that it was a blue moon, and since I write a deep post about once in every one of those, I figured it was time to plumb the slimy depths of my tattered soul and dreg up something for all y'alls enjoyment.

Incidentally, senioritis is running rampant at the moment. Only three days of compulsory schooling left... ever!