Philosophy ala Nick Hornby

In all this ample time I’ve had lately, I’ve been reading through anything I can get my hands on.  I even went to the library to get a library card so that I could really delve into books that I’ve never read before, but the whole scene was too overwhelming.  I came home and started to go through the back-rows of the book case in the house, brimming with books I’ve read a dozen times each.  Wedged between all those well-worn book bindings were a few books that I had never read.  Nick Hornby’s SLAM was one of them.  I had tried to read it after I first got it, but it didn’t call to me.  Perhaps I counted myself as too busy, perhaps too high on my life’s horse to lower myself to reading a book written from the perspective of a 15-year old kid who loves his skateboard.  I wasn’t sure why I didn’t get into it the first time.  Now, after having read the whole book, I can see that perhaps the reason I didn’t get all the way through it the first time was simply because I wasn’t ready.  I couldn’t realate yet. 

Here’s what Nick Hornby, (er, Sam?) has to say about staying out of trouble:

“What’s incredible to me is that you can keep out of trouble pretty much every minute of your life apart from maybe five seconds, and that five seconds can get you into the worst trouble of all, just about.  It’s amazing, when you think about it.  I don’t smoke weed, don’t cuss out teachers, I don’t get into fights, I try to do my homework.  But I took a risk, for a few seconds, and that turns out to be worse than any of the rest put together.   I once read an interview with a skater, I forget who, and he said that the thing he couldn’t ever believe about sport was how much concentration it took.  You could be doing the best skating of your life, and the moment you started to realize that you were doing the best skating of your life, you were eating concrete.  Skating well for nine minutes and fifty-five seconds wasn’t good enough, because five seconds was plenty of time to make a complete jerk of yourself.  Yeah, well, life’s like that too. It doesn’t seem right to me, but there you go.  And how bad is it, what I did?  Not so bad, right?  It’s a mistake, that’s all.  You hear about boys who refuse to wear condoms, and you hear about girls who think it’s cool to have a baby at fifteen. . . . Well, those aren’t mistakes.  That’s just stupidity.  I don’t want to spend the whole time moaning about life being unfair, but how comes their punishment is the same as mine?  That can’t be right, can it?  It seems to me that if you never wear a condom, then you should get triplets, or quintuplets.  But it doesn’t work like that, does it?” — Nick Hornby, Slam, Chapter 3

That’s me.  I’m Sam, and I paid attention, CLOSE ATTENTION, every goddamn second of every minute of my life except for one.  For almost two years, every single move that I made was towards a solitary, obtainable goal.  But I stopped paying attention for 1 minute.  For one fucking minute, I stood in my house and said, “Look at how awesome I’m doing.  I am, in a manner of speaking, doing the best skating of my life.”  And while I was there, gloating over the progress made, the goals obtained, the greatness that I had at last achieved, I got slammed.  And when you get slammed, when you quit paying attention, all those other minutes–the minutes where you were working your ass off, doing everything right–those minutes don’t count for anything anymore.  The punishment for not paying attention for one minute, if it’s the wrong minute, can be just as bad as the dues for not paying attention for ALL the minutes.  And like Sam, I’m sitting around, scratching my head, wondering, “that can’t be right, can it?”

*note: I’m not pregnant.  Sam’s trouble had to do with babies and condoms, my trouble doesn’t. But the same principles still apply.

Fucking Sad

I am incredibly sad.  As my niece walks in through the front door to find me laying, face down on the couch, I force myself to admit this truth.  I am incredibly sad.

I was laying face down on the couch in my Sunday best.  I tried to go through the motions today, but I had to leave in the middle of the church service.  I saw someone who had been in my class with me before I fumbled my life’s dream.  That someone didn’t see me back, thank God.  As soon as I saw her there, standing in blissful ignorance, having no idea what kind of heart wrenching pain her presence was causing me, I started to cry.  I thought I was going to be able to get my shit together while the lights were still low.  That’s when the pastor called for a meet-and-greet and I had to split.  Regardless of the fact that church was designed to be a community where people go to share their lives, I left. I left so I could shoulder this alone.  I had planned to find the nearest tobacco hut and bottle of wine so I could drink and smoke this misery away.

My mother-in-law caught me on my way out the door, rode home with me, and that’s how I wound up on the couch instead.

Still, I didn’t admit to myself that I was SAD.  Not the kind of sad that people reference on commercials, or the kind of sad that can’t be cured by watching a terrible movie.  Not the kind of sad that might maybe, sort of, sometimes, a little bit eek over into the side of sad that is defined by a 10-letter D-word.

No.  Leaving church, not being able to make it through a day without crying, having to force yourself to see friends and family, and even then, wishing that you weren’t–those things weren’t enough for me to admit to myself that I am sad. Sad like a quality, instead of a feeling.  Ser instead of Estar, if you catch my drift.

It was the niece, running through the front door, shrieking my name at the top of her hyper-excited 2-and-a-half year old lungs, who finally alerted me to the fact that have crossed over from the kind of sad that takes a minute to the kind of sad that requires a fucking effort to overcome.  Unfortunately, I don’t know that GI Joe’s rule about knowing being half of the battle applies in this situation.  I have no idea how to start getting un-sad.

Today, I guess, I started by peeling myself off the couch.  I guess I’ll go with the flow from there.

-S

Does anyone still read this?

If you do, and you have posting privileges, share some love and post something.

What Does It All Mean?

Double tall 2 pump vanilla latte 1″ of soy easy whip-oh! extra hot

i work at a coffee shop. the false sense of authority that is found in these places surprises me.  i’m amazed with middle aged women being tickled that they order “their” drinks correctly. as if ordering this expresso drink differs any from the expresso drink she ordered yesterday. Shit, at least I have a job.

If the shoe fits

Liesl: i hate this internet
it’s OBVIOUSLY run by a communist
I should have seen this coming

Zack: communism?

Liesl: horrible internet
If LIESL had seen communism coming, things would have gone a lot differently. trust me.

Zack: yeah, horrible internet is a bit more difficult to discern than communism
what with all the “COMRADE” and red clothing that accompanies communism

Hallelujah

“I despise pious language because I believe in the realities it hides.”

-Flannery O’Connor-

Anyone?

Attention-starved.

Twiddling thumbs.

Sigh.

College 2.0

It’s past midnight, and I’m looking over my seemingly insurmountable to-do list for tomorrow. College 2.0 is nothing like it was the first time around.

I can’t help but wondering what my academic breaking point is. Boasting an academic record that, at times, resembled something akin to a nerdy equivalent of a World’s Strongest Man contest track record, I feel ashamed to admit how oppressive this measly load of 7 hours feels. Two tests in two days, both of which my professors have said, “this is the easiest test you’ll face all semester.” It doesn’t feel easy this time. Not when I have a husband, a dog, a full-time job, 5 loads of laundry pending and every single dish I own sitting on the kitchen counter with the week’s food morphing itself into a solid impenetrable substance. Is this how I’m going to spend half of my year? Juggling two classes, neither of which I am interested in nor gifted in, wishing that I was doing something else? Anything else? Ironing? Doing dishes? Carrying the washing machine up and down the staircase? Anything?

“Are you excited about starting school?” A friend asked me that question today while we were sitting at lunch together–a lunch that was ill-advised in reference to my schedule, but highly recommended on the part of my sanity. I thought, “STARTING SCHOOL??? What the hell am I doing right now if I haven’t even started yet?!” She wasn’t talking about this preliminary stage I’m in, this trial run, this qualifying round. She was talking about nursing school, which is the dream, the goal of this tedious balancing act that I’m currently attempting. After I came to my senses, I told her that yes. I am excited about school. I’m excited about the idea of only having one thing to do.

Foolish, right? What about me truly believes that I am only going to have one thing to do once I start the Accelerated Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing degree program that I am working towards? The stupid part. Even when I start nursing school–the program for which they purposefully don’t admit students who have children because they (and I quote), “don’t want to be responsible for the level of neglect that the program demands”–I will still have a husband, a family, friends, a house, a dog, a cat, and dishes, all of which will still demand my attention. And I will want to give them that attention. I’ll have even less to give, though. I’d imagine that learning how to care for people in that capacity is a bit more complicated than studying for a Microbiology test and a Chemistry test in two successive days.

And so it’s nights like these. Nights when I am up after midnight, nights when I’ve made poor time management decisions all day long, nights when the total of ‘hours left in the weekend’ are noticeably smaller than ‘hours needed to accomplish what I need to accomplish’. These are the nights that leave me thinking that I’m not ready, not able, and maybe not willing to make the sacrifices that I need to make in order to achieve my goals. I’ll feel better in the morning, and maybe better still on Monday, after I have reviewed for my exams and perhaps have memorized all the Elements and Ions and Compounds that I have to memorize. Perhaps after I can differentiate between the Genus and the species and after I’ve memorized Whittaker’s 5 kingdom system I’ll come back to you and proudly declare that I once again have confidence in myself and my scientific abilities. But for now, I’m going to crawl into bed and recite to myself the 8 parts of speech and murmur under my breath in what Spanish I can remember, remembering that I must have felt this way in College 1.0, I must have, and then I’ll remind myself of how I survived.

-sarahthe

Visualization

 

Visualization of Recent Words Used at The Brewhouse. Greater Prominance Given to Words Used More Frequently. - Zack via Wordle.net -

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008

“You can only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power-he’s free again.”

Year’s Anniversary…so I thought I would dig this out again.

I’ve turned the page, albeit with reluctance. The pages preceding were laden with lost loves, new corrections, beautiful cities, crumpled addresses, and forgotten cynicism.

But these things were familiar. I loved them.
We learned to rely on one another -
I, on their desperate endowment of hope and they on my inability to cease to thirst for more.
The false certainty that exists in the past eats away at me.
The idea that the very thing that promised me nothing could now be proferred as an elixir for the bitter and unforgiving newness of the present is laughable.

The World is before me, behind me, around me, hell, under me and, yet, I have no concept of anything certain.

Carpe Diem.

What the dickens could that mean these days.
Did the fellow who first uttered these words, do the people who live by and subscribe to such a philosophy know that today merely becomes yesterday’s certainities?
Should we then, instead, live for tomorrow, whereby tomorrow can become the means of forgetting or, rather, the only beautiful way to love today?

Oh Love, that wilt not let me go.
And so on.

For me – yesterday was sitting on the curbs in Prague whilst discussing the Fall of Communism,
watching the sun rise over Castle Bridge,
and drinking in the idea – mind you, only the idea, as to truly be present was of a time that I may not claim as my own – of living, fighting and dying for freedom.
Yesterday was the nights of tears, affection and release.
Yesterday was the most pointless quest in the world – only to steal just a bit more precious time.
Yesterday was that last Moment and Look.

You said it.
I said it.
And then, oh god, we walked away.

Is today to always belong to yesterday?
And tomorrow as well?
Are they all yours?
Or will it fade into tomorrow, be left on the streets of Prague,
the empty words that you hold the inflections to,

or will your part of the hill
- the bit that sees the sunrise -
always hold what my side
- the bit that sees the twilight -
will always lack?

 

–L