I...The Interviewer..

So I'm new as an interviewer. I'm not really sure what it's going to end up like as far as the length, how involved my interviewee is, how into the subject she is, or how open and honest she will be. Then again, I am interviewing my mom, so, I'm sure that we will probably work together to make the interview sound good. The original person I wanted to interview apparently has one free hour over a period of 5 full days. this one hour is when I have a class. Ain't that a bitch.

I do, however, know what i want from the interview. I'm doing my interview on personal accounts of the influence of music and counterculture in the 1960s. I've had to change it around a bit, because, though my mom was influenced heavily by the counterculture movement, it occurred for her much more greatly during the late 1970s and early 1980s. So she is much more subject to the influence of the first movement in the 60s, rather to the actual movement itself. So, I'm basically hoping to get some juicy stuff. I want to know all about following the Grateful Dead in college. I want to know what the college experience was like living with a bunch granola heads in Colorado. I want to know what it was like with her conservative midwestern family from Iowa representing the exact opposite morals that she did during her years in Colorado. I want to know how her political views have been shaped to this day; what she thinks of protest movements, occupy wall street and such. I wanna know how she looks back on it all, now living a life that is probably an opposite world compared to her life in college and the four or five years that followed.
I think that if my Mom is willing to talk as much as I know she can, I think this could be a hell of an interview..

Look who's a college athlete

It's pretty crazy to think of how sports in my life have gone to this point. For about eight years ago. i dedicated myself to basketball and pretty much nothing else. This went until about my junior year of high school when I planned on playing basketball and college. I gotta say, thank god I'm not doing that. That would be miserable.

So around my junior year, I pretty much decided that I was bored with basketball, and that I just didn't have much interest in it anymore. keep in mind, at the time, I still maintained a spot as a captain on the varsity team (Yes, this is to silence anybody who immediately thinks that I got tired of basketball because I was the white kid who sucked). I wasn't anyone to fuck with on the court. I definitely held my own. I sometimes even began to have fun during the games. But, and I don't mean to sound like a jackass, at the end of the day, I was just so over going to practice with a bunch of kids who had very ambitious goals in basketball, while I became the one that, even though I earned playing time and put up my fair share of numbers on the court, just didn't give a shit our season and where my illustrious basketball career took me.

My senior year it got even worse. I'm pretty sure that I'm the only player in the history of my high school to hold a spot as a captain and not be a captain senior year. Yes, I'm proud of it. At this point, I had already taken up theater because of how jealous I was of the fun that my theater friends looked like they were having when they did it. At this point, even my mom gave me her blessing to skip practices and at this point I just wanted everything to be over.

Again, thank god that's all over, and now I'm in college. But, surprise! I'm a college athlete. Turns out tall kids make good rowers. So I'm doing that now and it's wonderful. After all, I get to go on the lake for the sunset every evening and row a boat. I can't complain about that too much. The strange part about it, is that I started doing it as a method of staying shape during college, to cancel out all of the beer and cheesy poofs. Now, I can't wait for racing season because I wanna win. Feels strange. But whatever, I'm glad I'm doing it. I'm in a renaissance of my athletic career. And I'm sure as hell glad that I'm not playing basketball. All of the guys on the basketball team look like douche bags.

October already...

Jesus Christ it's October already. I feel like I just got to college yesterday and I've been here for, I wanna say, about 7 weeks now. Pretty crazy. it's going by about as fast as could imagine, if not a lot faster. It tells me several things. I feel like the time has gone so quickly because of all the fun I've been having, which is good. Is it really great if so much of the fun, though, is fun that i can't remember in the morning?

It's tough to decide, at this point, if I'm having a great time, or if I'm wasting my time. My classes are all going at least decently, which I'm happy about (Kind of). I've made friends and rowing is fun. Debauchery with the rowing team every weekend, doesn't get any better (I guess). How would I be doing in my school work if I didn't try to live the life of what the stereotypical party-apt college student every weekend, and even during most weekdays? What clubs would I be joining? What people would I be meeting? how much more in touch would I be keeping with my family. I wish they all had facebooks, being a good son and letting them know constantly that I love them would be so much easier if they were under my "family" list on my facebook. How selfish of them, they need to know better. 

As I look back on seven weeks of school, I can only wonder how much quicker the remaining weeks will go by. And, really, it's sort of a good thing. Breaks come fast. Summer comes fast. So when you're not taking part in your normal, everyday debauchery at school, you can do it at home with all your old buddies. But what also comes quickly is graduation. Fuck, I have to be an adult soon. They even tell us that sophomore year is the time to start looking into grad schools. And now all of a sudden I feel like if I'm waiting tables at the pizza joint during my summers and not some fancy internship relating to what I wanna do with my life, I'll fall behind. So the fun and the stress come quickly.

I guess I should give it a rest for a little while and stop feeling sorry for myself. I'm haven't had midterms for first semester of my freshman year yet...

Is it really a table?

So, you I used to have a pretty good grip on what exactly physical objects were. When I see a pencil, it's a pencil. When I see a desk, it's a desk. And, as goes the great saying, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a fucking duck....Well that might not exactly be very famous. A friend of mine said it once and he was pretty drunk. Could have been a great man, so if it was, I credit him. Hell, I think my drunk friend is a great man anyway.

Anyways, so, a table is a table right?
WRONG.
The truth of it actually is, that we have absolutely no right to call just any table that we see, a table. What petty attributes do we give such objects? A flat circle, oval, square, or rectangle surface? Four legs? Solid material? For all we know, this could all be bullshit. Because the real truth is that we know nothing about what a table actually is. Somewhere out there, there is a great, all-seeing table that is the true definition of a table. It is the absolute truth of what a table actually is. The tables that we know, love, cherish, and possibly take for granted, may be nothing like tables at all.

I attribute this realization to two people. The first is Plato. What a guy. Plain and simple, he was the one who said this. He discussed absolute truth, this absolute truth being that the things we may think to be facts (lol, oxymoron there) may not be anything like we perceive them to be at all. This is because somewhere out there, there is an ultimate being of that object or idea, that puts all impostors, such as these so-called tables, to shame.
The second person I credit my realization to would be my western civ professor. She explained this to me and acted just crazy enough while doing to convince me to give it some consideration.
I didn't give it too much thought. It's a fucking table for christ sakes.

Fear.

Fear is an interesting things to ponder. I have fear about many things. It comes in shifts and waves depending on where I am in my life. When I was young, my greatest fears came from wanting to make sure I caught my favorite cartoons. I would also get the occasional worry about, when my parents went out to dinner and I was left with the babysitter, whether they would ever come home again. After all, where should they have the right to go that I can not go with them? Well, this was the five-year-old me.

As I grew a little older, my fears began to morph to how I would be perceived in school. This did not come arise as much in high as it did in middle school, as I went to high school in a very liberal environment. I was in my awkward stage, and I slaved over keeping up with whatever was cool. The only thing I never surrendered was my music taste. I always listened to whatever I wanted to listen to. However, I could still not let any of my classmates new that I liked to listen to The Clash instead of Chris Brown. Funny how the guy who beats his spouses makes music more suitable for the younger than the Grateful Dead do.

Anyways, in high school, the biggest fears were keeping my social life stable, maintaining a stable relationship if I was in one at the moment, and, finally, getting in to college. Those seem like pretty reasonable things to worry about to me. After all, those are what's most important right?

When I think about it, it seems pretty awful. Faderman's interview told of a group of people on the run from soldiers who wanted nothing more than kill them and to do every possible awful thing that they could think of before that. There are people in third-world countrties whio fight every day for survival, and there main worries usually center around just getting the adequate amount of food for that day. Why do I have the right be afraid of my parents not coming home, how my "friends" at school feel about me, or, god forbid, getting a low grade?

I don't think it's a good excuse for it, but the reason I'm afraid of these things is because I'm selfish. I want to do well. I want to get good grades in college, and end up having a good set-up for after I graduate. I want things. I want a nice house and a nice girlfriend (well, maybe...), and the people from Faderman's interview wanted just to live. So where the hell do I get off? But that's the truth. It's because of the way I was raised; I was raised with opportunities. If I don't make something of myself, what point will there be to any of the things I was provided with when I was younger? I'm afraid more than anything of wasting what has been given to me since I was little. It's selfish, but it's right.

I'm Terrified Of Women

Well, fucking cheers to Brian Doyle. Now I'll never get married.
...That was a bit aggressive for the start of a post. I'm sorry.
I'll start over..

So I read a really great and creative essay the other day in my essay class. Don't let the intro to the post throw you off. It was inspired by Brian Doyle's "Irreconcilable Dissonance". It terrified me and made me never want to reach my late twenties, but the essay was awesome and I loved reading it. It's a story about love that involves no love. Doyle pointed out to me that it is what makes our marriages great that breaks them up. What makes our marriages great is the stupid shit that we have to put up with and handle each and every day. People commit to each other for the rest of their lives because they're ready to take that on, right?
Turns out the reasons that wives divorce their husbands is because they pick their noses and because they make pissing jokes on the fire hydrants on the sidewalk. And the reasons husbands divorce their wives is because they're "tired". It's all kind of a scary thought. It seems like the same stuff that makes the marriage work is what destroys it.
I guess "destroys" is a strong word. It depends on how seriously you take marriage. Anyways, it was a really good essay. Funny too. I recommend it, but only if you're single.

What Others think Of My Conscious..

Hi, all. So I'd like to talk about some of the feedback I got on an essay that might have been one of the most enjoyable writes I have ever done. I loved writing an essay on my stream of consciousness because, as I have said before, I love to be impersonal, and on this assignment, I was able to do just that. I love talking about what other kids are doing out on the quad, Cornell's suicide rate, and thongs....lots of thongs. I wrote it with almost the same mind set that I write most of these blogs, and that can't be too terrible can it?

Anyways, I was really happy to hear my feedback because my peers that read it seemed, for the most part, to enjoy it and find something significant out of it. I did discover that I may have the potential to confuse a few people with my opening line: "Charlie told his mom that he would buy the pencil himself". I am coming to the realization that not every person happened to have an english teacher in high school who was obsessed with Virginia Woolf, therefore transitioning that obsession over to me. So when I write that line, I wrongly assumed that everyone would just get that that line alludes to the opening line of Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway". Oh well, I don't have regrets, I will continue to allude to allude to my favorite writer and just hope that enough people get the reference, though I suppose it was a little smug of me.

Besides that, both of my classmates seem to have a good reaction to the paper, admiring my openness towards contradiction, opening up the floor for the inner debate in my mind about social norms and why people do what they do. People seem to like the thong story. I'm glad they reacted well to that. Anyone who reads this that is still in high school (I don't know why a high school student would read this, but whatever), don't worry, you will definite have many thong-related adventures when you get to college. It's a good time.

One of the big things that I can tell that I need to work on is how people will receive my tone. When I mentioned in my paper that it would be absurd for me to actually sit down to eat lunch by myself, some people may actually think that I personally and terrified to just sit down and eat lunch by myself, when what I would really like to do is say to the reader that this is a point being made about the general overview of the masses, especially in high school and college settings. To their credit, this is not the easiest thing to conclude in my paper, because I'm pretty aggressive with my fears to eat lunch by myself and walk around outside without anything important to do. Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out. Now, to edit...