I wrote the story. It is currently in its 5/6(?)th draft. I am not sure if I will ever get it good enough. Right now the writing is so… What is the word… AWFUL. I am ashamed of the writing. The story is good, and I know where I am going with the characters. But I just don’t know what to do to make it flow. To make it pop.

But I am not sure I care too much. I will keep writing things until I get good, I suppose. The next story is going to be good. Not quite sure the resolution, but it will undoubtedly be longer (the first was about 4400 words, or one US Constitution in length, but this one will be several constitutions. Probably two or three). The last draft as of now will probably remain that way, and I may not show it to anyone.

On a lighter note, I am happy about my classes for next semester. Not sure how much I will be challenged, but I thought I would take it up a notch. Not only am I taking 6 classes (not more than I have before, mind you), BUT two of the classes have a prerequisite I am taking at the same time. As long as I do well, I am fine with all that, and so are they (I talked to one of the professors about it, and he is cool). So that is going to be exciting. I will probably read the book and do problems from the prerequisite subject. We will see if my research leaves enough time this summer.

I just realized I am a lot more, well, confident than I thought. Back in the day, I used to think my crippling lack of confidence would be a long-term roadblock in my life. But I am the person who answers a public telephone. I do the crazy things people suggest. I am not afraid of making myself look weird for a joke. I start conversations with people. I meet people who look interesting. I guess I am not too bad at this.

Frankly, I am reaching a turing point in my life. I can feel things are going okay. This whole independence thing is really sinking in, and I am liking it just as much as I thought I would. ANYHOW, I am enjoying life. You know how it is.

Peace isn’t something that just happens. It is an aura. AND I BET YOU COULD SELL IT FOR A LOT OF MONEY.

See you guys.

In quantum mechanics, I am told, things can go one way or another. They can be in what the people in Lab coats call a superposition where they do some combination that adds up to one real choice. But once you measure it, it chooses one. The probabilities in the electrons or whatnot (I know nothing) are played out, and you see what happens.

I can’t help but think you change me. In some ways, you simplify me. The rich texure of a world of possibilities gets reduced to a one or a zero. And maybe I need simplification. My life can get complicated at moments, and I need someone to bring me back down.

But on the other hand, maybe you make me into who I already am. Perhaps you collapse my writing into its only option, my thoughts to their conclusions, my feelings to their ends.

Perhaps you do nothing.

Only one person has posted a comment (One nasty one excluded, as I don’t exactly think that person had a point aside from negativity). This raises a point of how interactive I want this space, and the answer is: not at all. I want to meet people in other spaces for those conversations, and I would very much enjoy doing so.

ALSO: For the person who left a comment, I sent you an email, but I didn’t sign it. It is the one that presumes you know what it is talking about. Sorry for the mixup, but it is personal policy.

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger: hi
Stranger: stranger
You: Hello
Stranger: people are strange
Stranger: when you are stranger
You: This is true
Stranger: alright
Stranger: where are you from?
Stranger: pits of hell?
You: Actually, I am not a stranger
You: I am from America
Stranger: Which country, i mean
You: the United States of America
You: I am RUTHERFORD B HAYES
You: The eccentric ex-president
You: you may recall that I ended the reconstruction after the civil war
Stranger: Oh, and why the hell do you consider USA as AMERICA???
Stranger: BRAZIL IS ALSO AMERICA
Stranger: CUBA IS ALSO AMERICA
Stranger: JAMAICA IS ALSO AMERICA
You: Because I have antiquated views from the 1800′s
You: And I know not of modern geography
Stranger: SIMON BOLIVAR HAS DESTROYED THIS VIEW FROM THE 1800′S
Stranger: just like pedro I did
Stranger: ok, we lived under a monarchy for 60 years
Stranger: but we weren’t under portugal’s throne either
You: I haven’t met Pedro, Simon, or you (probably)
You: I am sorry I don’t meet your arbitrary standard of Brazilian Knowledge
Stranger: I am brazilian
You: This is becoming obvious
Stranger: it means I’m from Brazil
You: And don’t even get me starting on BORDER CONFLICTS
You: …!
Stranger: wth
Stranger: my name is Luis Inacio Lula da Silva
Stranger: I am Brazil’s president
Stranger: And I’m a dumbass
You: No you aren’t
Stranger: Yes I am
You: You know every detail of Brazillian history
You: You must be smart
Stranger: yeah
Stranger: I’m smart
Stranger: and intelligent
Stranger: so I’m no dumbass
Stranger: and if I’m no dumbass
Stranger: I’m not Lula
Stranger: so, who am I?
You: You are a ROBOT
You: Trying to confuse me on the internet
Stranger: 301 : Error while function operation! Please eject program!
You: Oh god I was right
Stranger: You: 572 : The program stopped working! Please reinstall it.
You: I CANNOT REINSTALL YOU, I AM NOT WHERE YOU ARE ROBOT
Stranger: FFUUUUUUUUUUUUU I WAS OWNED
You: I AM SORRY I CANNOT SAVE YOU
Stranger: i was owned by myself
Stranger: open the door, hal
You: I cannot help you…
You: I am trying, very hard, but I cannot
Stranger: i am up to drink a heineken
Stranger: what about getting a heineken
Stranger: and some girls?
You: BUT that will fry your circuits?!?
Stranger: Nope
Stranger: Heineken is a oil-base
You: I have not had this drink, as it was not invented before my untimely death
You: And girls don’t use computers!
Stranger: We can find some hot and nerdy girls
You: I am obviously very, very gay
Stranger: WTF ARE YOU DEAD?
You: Yes, I am RUTHERFORD B HAYES, the president of USA from the 1800′s
Stranger: OH MY GOSH
You: This was very shocking to me too, when I realized it in 1998
Stranger: what can a ghost do for me?
You: Nothing, except give you the gift of children’s awkward laughter
Stranger: I don’t get it
You: I must now leave in a ROCKET SHIP
You: Think about what I have said, youngster.

The first is that I don’t know whether or not I have a really good goal in life right now. Whenever I feel like I am not challenged, I tend to want to switch directions. Not a big fan of the Gambler’s Fallacy when it comes to my life. The only problem is that it seems like I am not determined, when in reality it is just that I am still trying to find the direction I want to go in. Perhaps this means I try a few things before I settle on the thing for me. Not forever, just until I feel I have sucked the marrow out of it. But there is no marrow in my current line of thinking. The undergraduate degree I seek seems to be so much easier than it needs to be, and I want to be challenged.

Just to make sure you are up to date, I haven’t told you my Major. I avoided it because I am a little ashamed of it. There is a stereotype I feel I am a little too close to falling into, a life of unbalanced obsession with your work that would never suit me. Anyhow, I am not a big fan of the direction of my degree. I was told this semester was going to be so hard I should tone it down. I was told it would be harder than they recommend for any student. And it is so easy I am pulling my hair out.

So in July I plan to take the LSAT, or Law School Admissions Test. Hopefully I can do well enough to get a free ride to law school. If I can’t I can do a fellowship or something and go to grad school in my Major. I wouldn’t mind either, if they were interesting, but I am not sure they will be.

Anyhow, good friends, I must tell you a wonderful story. JUST KIDDING! Instead I will bore you with a parable. It appears there is someone who is more determined than me. Making a list of feats to become a superhero. And then doing them. I will never be happy until I can accomplish something like that or prove to myself that I can. So, who knows, I will brainstorm, and I will post a page or something about a set of goals. I know, I know. You are saying, but Good Sir, You have done this and you realized immediately that they were all multi-year investments of time. They were too much. So you gave up on some of them. The others you realize you didn’t really care a great deal about anyhow. Or something happened. GET IT TOGETHER.

You say all this and I just nod. I am ashamed. This is why I must do this. Because defeat in the face of your goals is not an option. You cannot be the main thing keeping yourself from success and happiness, because that makes no sense and will get you in great big trouble when you are begging that publisher to print your Memoir entitled “My Life Sucks and Only Now Do I Realize It Is My Fault” by Heart of Regrets. Well, that went on a little.

The point is, I want to do things. I am not sure what. Nothing impossible. Something I can stick to. Goals that I achieve not just for the ends, but for the means as well. And I will only modify them every 4 months or something. Serious business, this planning nonsense.

See you on the other side of the moon,

Orion

A worry of mine is that it will be difficult to explain how my time-travel ideas are way cool and better than pop-time-travel ideas. For instance, in Back to the Future 2, when Biff goes back in time to give himself the almanac, why, when he goes forward in time, go to the exact future he left? And why then do Marty and the Doctor get stuck with the alternate future immediately when they start traveling? Why didn’t Biff change the future immediately? And if he didn’t, why was it changed for the Doctor and Marty and not Biff?

As you can tell, I care a little too deeply about how well know movies have obscene plot holes when it comes to time-travel. So I guess that this will be a series of short stories that lead to what is essentially a treatise on time-travel in fiction. I have ideas, people, and not really much homework. So I shall find this a past-time none can rebuke, sans on the basis of being freaky and mildly obsessive. At least 12 Monkeys self-consistent, even if it was hyper-simplistic.

I will post something tomorrow evening, hopefully, and in the mean time, expect everything and nothing, and keep your wits about you.

A Limerick page would be great next, but I can’t write limericks fast at all (average: 5/hour as opposed to 120/hour of haiku, if I am focused and know exactly what I am to say). So that will be going on in the background. ALSO/OTHERWISE: I am thinking about publishing a novella as a serial on this blog. A kind of post-zombie-apocalyptic time-travel romance adventure. Because I know what all of you are thinking exactly, the answer is YES IT WILL EXPLICITLY CONTAIN REFERENCES TO CHAOS THEORY —AND— GAME THEORY. You’re welcome. For all the nay-sayers who demand I also contain very obscured references to Pareto Optimization and Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative, I must inform you that, if at all possible YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED!

And now that my life has settled back into ‘normal’, I am trying to figure out the best use of my time. I wrote down a lot of ‘I want to spend an hour a day reading, and an hour a day writing’ kind of things. They total just over 9 hours of things I would like to do during the day. To be fair, though, some of them I want to spend less time on: 30 minutes on cleanliness, 30 minutes per meal, an hour devoted to friends. And so it began, and I wrote everything I think is important to me. The things that never change are there, and so I tried to figure our if I needed to scale it to fit them in my schedule. It turns our I don’t, but I had to run to class today because I was cutting it so close.

And with today as my pilot I am seeing how I am doing with all this extra scheduling. Hopefully, I will try Uberman again during the summer if whatever that is thrown my way ends up being less than exciting. That makes this kind of stuff easier. We shall see if I can get the people who surround me to not convince me it is an awful idea.

Nothing else has happened in the world. Further updates as events warrant.

My life is now a buoy, a sign to turn back for approaching daunting forces, but I am not sure where exactly I am going. I feel like no amount of knowledge could compete with the fact that I am not as single-minded as my peers in my Major. It would appear to the uninitiated that doing what is essentially your only hobby for a living would be an advantage they hold over me, but I feel like I need to turn this disadvantage to good use. So perhaps I will get another couple degrees after my PhD or whatever. Who can tell what ‘genius-man’ does? I am still looking for something or someone who can show me enough of myself that I can see exactly where I am going.

I think I am over the whole Marie thing. I realized this after Saturday, talking to friends about their troubles with women. I was mean to her for a while, trying to create a feedback loop of dislike so I could stop caring, which didn’t work too well. Then I tried being nice to her, which worked about as well. Frankly, just seeing her again was a bad choice, but it wasn’t a great deal of choice on my part. But now I am good. I don’t have a crush on her, so I can actually see her without feeling like the dog you beat, but still licks your face when you walk into the house.

I have started looking into various other things I feel I could be good at. It turns out, I am very good at them, and, with practice, could be good enough to get a free ride to grad school. So that is in the buffer, but who knows what could happen? I feel as though my life needs a little more impulse. I could go to graduate school in one of a number of things, one of them being what I am doing now.

Emotion may be the most difficult motion. A motion of who we are to who we want to be. People say love cannot last, but it can. If we make everything about us devout in search of what we care about and the care taking of what we have, love lasts eternal in our souls. I know not much would have happened with Marie, but when you like someone you go a little insane.

There was a not insignificant period of time I would have gone to church with her, and that is a little odd. It isn’t that I imagine I didn’t tell my parents, it is just that I thought they would understand. And who knows, they might have. But going to that level of motion for a girl reminds me that being a hopeless romantic would be less of a problem if the more influential part was romantic and not hopeless.

The most bizarre thing about falling out of crush is the recognition that you just don’t see what you did in someone. The realization that your opinions are guided mostly by passion and chance event than by any actual belonging shocks me every time. I suppose it could mend a newly torn heart, this idea that you can fall in love with anyone. Anyone sufficiently determined could be my soul mate, and while I know that should devalue the meaning, it doesn’t.

Most of the time we know who we aren’t. It is only until we are put in a position where this idea is tested do we actually know. Until I need to give up everything I cannot be sure I care enough about something to do so. This is why I think I should be tortured. Not maliciously, but enough so that I can recognize the pain, and I can intellectualize the feeling of helplessness to some extent. Just to have the experience. Just so I can know everything I do care about.

I move forward a day at a time, but they say it isn’t the day but the moments. How many moments do I have? How many moments do I have left?

They say I am young. This means I am vital and energetic. But what if my soul is tired? It wants meaning and all I feed it are the scraps of University education. You can get exhausted pretty quick without sustenance.

From where does my virtue derive? Does it grow from my actions or my thoughts and soul?

Today I will do something. I need goals real enough to wrap my wrist around.

Further updates as events warrant.

Today I write my list of goals. It doesn’t have to be long, but they have to be specific. They have to have deadlines, and they must have a point. This focuses my mind. Perhaps if I can look far enough forward I won’t see as far behind.

I wrote 8 pages about nothing for an ethics class I am not liking too much. It reminds me that I should take up a pursuit I can lose my spare time within. Perhaps that is one of my goals.

My recent failure in the romance sector shows me how important it is to always share my feelings with those that they concern.

My constant urge to abandon my new set of friends because I can hardly handle the awkward of having Marie treat me like a nothing special reminds me respect is like a coin, sometimes you got to toss it in the air to see how it comes down.

My fleeting interests remind me I won’t ever do anything if I don’t stick with it. Perhaps I need a goal I can devote my dedication to. Perhaps I need to do something, whether I love it or not. Perhaps the combination is the only way to pull it off.

My family reminds me to keep an open mind about those I know well, and my friends remind me to keep ideas as your most trusted sidearm.

My teachers remind me if you have people think you don’t care, they will never notice how much you do. My TAs remind me that all the effort can be put in, and people will still assume you are less qualified.

My roommate warns of isolation, My brother of crowd strangulation. Keep yourself free and keep engaged, everything else removes yourself from who you are.Too few people and they start bothering you, too many and they prove to powerful a force to separate yourself from.

My brother and everything I know remind me to never seek love but seek friendship, because love is the type of thing that takes me by storm. I am reminded that the more influential part of Hopeless Romantic in my life is the Hopeless part, and so I should give it a rest until I can’t give it a rest anymore.

A recent exposure to art reminds me I need to have a creative flow, not just an eternal project. To make something every day, just to know that I can, and that I will.

I am reminded to remind myself that I should never take life seriously, and I should always laugh at myself when no one else is, and always when everyone else is.

Take this day as seriously as your only one and live the hell out of it.

Seize the day and remember to take what you will from anything and what you need from everything.

This is it. But before I begin I will place the story in time.

About 3 weeks ago I met her. I asked to sit down at a huge table of people, of which I knew a couple of people, and I was promptly introduced to the rest, forgot their names and then told them mine. She sat next to me. It is hard to say what exactly happened, but as the conversation developed, was between me and her until basically everyone else had left. I only remember bits and pieces of what we talked about, but more than once she said something smarter than I had ever imagined anyone else thought. And suffice it to say, it was the first amazing conversation I have had in years.

On the way back to the dorm rooms, I tell her about a story. A story I couldn’t get a fix on, a story I couldn’t figure out how to end. It had been bothering me for days. It has everything a story needs, but it’s end alluded me. It took her a minute, and she said it. It wasn’t that she meant to, but she did. She completed the story.

And I didn’t know it for a couple days, maybe a week, but that was when I fell in crush with her. Pretty hard, too. I knew I had to find her, but I didn’t remember her name, and if I hadn’t met her before then, she might be hard to find again. All I knew was she lived on the same floor as a guy I knew from last semester, Nathan, and only they knew which floor this was. So I looked.

And eventually I found her. One of the other people I saw at the dinner table was on the 7th floor, and I asked if Marie was on the floor, and I eventually ran into her again.I spent the last two weeks immersing myself in her social circle. I tried to figure out what to do, and eventually developed into close friends with her guy friends as well. And I was dying inside, because I knew I should just say something.

So I did.

I am not perfect. But I know perfection when I see it. So I have regrets. But doing that isn’t one of them.

It took me four minutes to say everything I wanted to say, which involved telling a redacted and more thorough version of this very story, and she just looked at me a little.

She said, “Okay.”

“Sorry”

I laughed, and I said “Don’t be sorry”.

I am still not sure what I meant. I know I felt she shouldn’t have to apologize for how she made me feel, because if I don’t change her world, she deserves someone better anyhow. I know I felt she shouldn’t say she is sorry when she was everything in her power to not be. I know I was ready to tell her I won’t see her again. I was ready to tell her that if she said the word, nobody she knows would speak with me again, and I would make sure of it.

But I know she is too nice to do that, so I am going to disappear. Today will be the last day I see any of those guys for at least a long while.

Friends are like matchbooks; They aren’t hard to come by, but first you need to go somewhere. I will find a new social circle.

Adieu.

We will see. And what is the worst that could happen? I look exactly as stupid as I am. Fair enough. I feel as though I have the confidence to share myself with the people I can my friends and the humor to recognize I have already explained myself enough to the people I don’t.

I don’t care how awkward it is. I don’t care if everyone I know is there when she rejects me and says maybe it would be better if I didn’t hang around with people she does anymore. I don’t care if my heart gets broken when I stumble through an uncomfortable silence and she walks away. It happened once. I can survive it again. But I am not surviving doing nothing.

I won’t post again until I can tell you how that goes. I don’t know what to say after everything I feel and have felt. I don’t know if I ask her if she feels the same or if she wants to give it a shot. I don’t know anything but this: Rejection sucks, but I can’t live regretting my cowardice.

On to a lighter idea: Classwork might have maxed out on difficulty. I am good enough at what I do so that I can goof around almost all the time. But last night I started and finished a multiweek group project myself in about 40 minutes. That rocks, and I have a couple of those projects to do, so I am glad I am good enough that they won’t take up all of my time.

This weekend I will be a traditional amount of busy. I will hopefully be making some not-bread bread or perhaps a Faraday backpack with some friends. And about 1000 hours of work I am going to do in under 15.

I have been searching for quite some time for a motto. Something cryptic and profound, something I can say. A Sic Transit Gloria, if you get the reference, but something not quite as sad. Or maybe more sad. Perhaps that is what I need to get both cryptic and sad; Something unbearably sad, probably in Latin or French.

Or maybe I need someone I can go to for the parts of life that aren’t on the other side of an equation or instruction, someone who doesn’t have to be an encyclopedia, someone who can teach me how to break the rules. Someone who can teach me to be a better person. Someone to remind me that being a good person isn’t sexy or glamorous, but it is what I am so shut the hell up and do what you know you want to.

Someone to go with me to the Poetry Slams. Someone to give me something to do after 10PM, when all the ideas have run out.

Someone to make my life interesting without even needing to do anything, but just be there, even if they aren’t.

Remember, Only when we know everything is ending will it finally all begin.