Darn it, so much for my commitment to post everyday. I guess that’s a little unrealistic. Well, here was today’s scene.

I hung out with Bennet and Pierre, as Bennet had an indoor meet today, and ran his mile PR! Go Ben! Otherwise today was a day to catch up on cleaning up the apartment, and doing homework that I hadn’t gotten done during the week. sometimes it seems no matter how hard i try to get ahead there is always that one extra reading assignment that i can’t quite finish in time….

well such is life. and life is good. fun is forcasted for tonight, though in what form it will arrive, I do not know.

Ahhh… yes, here it is. my room as you would see it, just upon opening the door. people’s bedrooms are special places, and mine is no exception to that i guess. it’s where all my ideas are born, my music is played, my dreams are realized. it’s a happy place. and yes my bed sheets are really multi-colored. i am always wondering how my surrondings reflect who i am. i think my bedroom reveals alot about my personality: it’s minimal, yet bright, a bit messy, sparse, and small without making you feel claustrophobic. i guess there is a parallel somewhere in there with how i choose to be.
don’t forget your feng shui, a happy room can make a world of difference on a rainy day!

Wow, I just noticed that it’s been almost a ten day absence since my last post. I will attribute this to the rush of the new semester, but really I shouldn’t let silly things like school get in the way of writing. If I don’t take time out to write, that means that I haven’t taken time out to truly live what is going on in my day. I’ll just be floating by on screensaver. So I guess a quick recap is in order for you and for me since I have apparently been out to lunch:

-School is wonderfully time consuming, more so than last semester. The upside to this is that i actually feel like i am going to school. my day on campus starts at 7:30 and ends around 3 every day except terrible tuesday, in which case, school ends at 6.
whew, that’s a long day, but long does not mean bad. it just means long.
otherwise, life is just dandy, i can’t really complain, except for the rather abrubt weather changes and my always wandering mind. So my main task has been to just stay focused on the present.

not much has changed at school, except for the constant stream of “national championship” news that seems to be on the front page of the paper most everyday. it’s kind of nice, really. i’ve never been a part of any team or organization that really won big, so i’m glad the footbal team is so inclusive about their hard-earned glory. it makes me feel like i accomplished something, even though “i” really didn’t do much of anything.

after reading dave’s post yesterday, i couldn’t help thinking of all the things i do everyday to avoid slipping into the “routine” of daily life. as dave mentioned, it’s a real struggle. usually i try and create something about that day, whether that be a journal, a little song, a sketch, poem, just something to make me focus on making that day matter to me.

in coming posts, i am going to try to incorporate those little everyday imaginings into my blog, as a nice addition, and as a way to hold myself accountable for doing them.

so expect that real soon.
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i think it’s strange how certain things can affect my mood.

on saturday night i remembered that i had to return a movie due on sunday, so at 1:00 am or so i hit the road. now, macon isn’t exactly the most picturesque town ever, and the city lights obliterate the stars anyways, and i wasn’t going anywhere special, but the night was very dark and peaceful and lonely. almost no one on the road. driving down a little ways, i started to feel the same way that i feel when i leave desiree’s house late at night, on lone black-wet back-country roads with numbers instead of names. take a right turn, and suddenly my mind is transported back to midland, texas, on old featureless highways, surrounded by nothing but desert grasses in all directions; now on top of the foothills of the rocky mountains at Buffalo Trails Camp, with the celestial dome covered in cool blue stars, a great milky stream of them just pouring perfectly down the center of the sky… there is something undeniably alone and lovely and wonderful about driving at this time of night. i almost wanted to keep going and drive down the interstate a ways.

so i wound up back at my dorm, feeling slightly disoriented because of all these resurfaced emotional responses. i want to write, and i flip on the compy and start writing a post but it feels weird. i end up just squeezing out an e-mail to jon talking about everything and saying nothing.

after that, all sunday i felt so artsy-fartsy, which contributed to my laziness factor. i didn’t get any homework done until late sunday night. i went over to my palestinian friend’s dorm and did Diff Eq homework and ate some of his munchies that his visiting parents brought over “Straight from the West Bank, Yo” (that is, the west bank of the jordan river). We had some pita bread and wild honey and homemade jelly and hand pressed olive oil and spices. and then i went bak to my room and brought out my mixer and my one mic and my acoustic guitar and set it up and played with it a whole lot, recording more than an hour’s worth of audio (in perfect quality, nonetheless). listening to the recording now, i was in a very weird mood, at random points saying crazy things into the microphone, like “Just be glad it’s not you, monkey boy…”, or singing slide guitar blues with the same phrase over and over again, and trying to be a bass guitar with my mouth.

so today i wake up and its a terribly bitterly awfully cold monday and all thunderstorm-rainy and parts of the weekend seem like a wild fantabulous dream. shortly after diff eq, i meet up with desiree for lunch, and my disposition changes once again. i feel totally goofy right now.

all these mood changes may seem somewhat erratic to the casual observer, but to me, they are perfectly natural and welcome disruptions of the daily routine. i was stuck in third gear for a couple months. Its about time life got a little more interesting.

well i talked to my department head, dr. collins.

as far as he is concerned, i have enough english credits to withdraw from EGR 108. and that’s exactly what i wanted to hear. wow. He said, “Yep, son, if you keep up these grades that you’ve been making, you’ll see a lot of doors open up for you down the way…” And voila. suddenly, i am holding a Course Withdrawl form in my disbelieving hands. i quickly fill out everything i can and then sign it. all i need now to finish it off is the Professor’s signature.

but wait.
____
sitting in perfect dark, the walls, cold steel, they’re closing in on me now. slowly. i can feel the air pressure increase, my chest cavity is tightening. each breath must be calculated and steady in order to survive. but i know that, eventually, i’ll adjust to the intense conditions. in fact, something inside of me is telling me that perhaps this is a test of strength, of mental fortitude. conditioning, forging myself into a more capable person. nodding my head down, i glance at the floor. incredibly, right before my eyes, a round button with “EJECT” written on it lights up! my fingers approach it, cast in a red glow from the button’s illuminated face. a moment goes by, i contemplate the blue sky and fresh sunny air that lies millimeters away. why do i hesitate, stop short? i love the thoughts of freedom. joy is made of freedom. but… should i eject now, use the safeguard before any damage has been done, or should i perservere until i cannot stand the pressure, and come away with self knowledge and strength?
____
there is no such thing as “recovery” when one speaks of GPA. damage done is never repaired. as far as school goes, Defense means success. i’d rather not stick my neck out and act tough this time. I’m getting out of this mess, before i forget to breathe.

so there’s this class called EGR 108, Professional Practices.

For practical purposes, let’s call it English for Engineers. No no, it should be called Remedial English and Study Skills. And it’s retarded. At the total risk of making myself sound arrogant and spiteful, I do not need to take this class.

The only reason why i was forced to enroll in the class dosen’t have anything to do with my English skills or my grades or my SAT scores. It has to do with hours and AP credits. I came in to Mercer with 2 full English credits, or 6 hours worth of credit. Little did i know, the beginners’ freshman english class is a 4 hour class. Therefore, using four of my six hours to get out of baby-english, i have 2 hours left of perfectly good AP credit, which won’t get me out of a 3-hour EGR 108 class, no matter how hard i plead.

Stupid hours! Who decided… Where in the world…. How can one possibly… ACK!

Desiree got out of the class just today, but only because she asked her Department Head if she could make up the hours at another college during the summer. That’s my only hope. i cringe at the image of myself, a grovelling smudge in front of the Electrical Engineering department head, begging to change the stupid rules just because they are stupid. and i don’t even know if i can take a class during the summer, i don’t know where i’ll be come summer ‘04.

now that i have an answering machine hooked up to my phone, i can meticulously keep track of all the people who try to contact either me or my roomie.

sometimes i’m playing guitar and cannot hear the telephone, the machine picks up and i have the opportunity to call back whomever i missed. sometimes joey and i are asleep and we do not want to wake up to get the phone, so the machine takes the call for us. And sometimes, inmates at a local jail randomly dial this number and leave mysterious pleading messages.

That’s right, last night i got a call from such a person. I was not in at the time, and so when the machine picked up, this message was recorded.

Although it is difficult to decipher, the short bit of audio at the beginning goes as follows:

(in south georgia drawl) “Please accept this call, i need you to do me a favor, please…”

all i can say is, “Poor fella”.
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Well for being monday today was a productive day.

I always find that these “last week of vacation” weeks are less like vacation and more like work because I am busily trying to get everything ready for work, or school in this case. I always find it strange how much preparing goes into things. sometimes preperation is the most time-consuming/difficult part of the entire operation.

I think of tests for example. you spend hours preparing for an exam that may take only 30 minutes. if you are ill-prepared your marks are low. If you are well-prepared then your marks are high. how you score is just a reflection of how well you prepared or “learned” the material.

So, i think a good deal of life is about preparing for things.

I know there is some old saying about the “end being the journey” or something like that.

which makes me think, lots of things are preparing to prepare to prepare, ect..

for example, you prepare to be a good athelete by training correctly, and you prepare to train correctly by learning techniques correctly and you prepare to learn by being well rested, and you prepare to be rested by going to sleeping for 8 hours, ect…

It’s like this never-ending cycle of ‘getting ready’. but what are we all getting ready for? aren’t we supposed to present and ready, living in the moment so to speak? is all this preparation simply a diversion to just actually ‘being’?

although i have no answer prepared, i would tend to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

each individual act throughout life is interconnected and so it creates a chain, or for the sake of analogy, a necklace.

each act can be done well or right, and when this happens the act in and of itself is not a preperation but a single ‘pearl’ of a job well done.

to carry the analogy further, when all these individual pearls are connected they become a beautiful necklace of a life well lived (which is the thing we’ve been preparing for all along).

So the saying, ‘Tommorrow will take care of itself” is true.

my prescence or non-prescence in each action, my ‘being in the moment’ so to speak, effects my ability to create/understand the rightness of that action and therefore effects my quality of life, albeit in an indirect sort of way.

so paradoxically we are ‘being’ as we prepare and we are preparing for our true being. at the same time.

in other words, by doing things right now, i am in a sense, assuring myself of a right or happy future, assuming i am present enough to understand the rightness or happiness of that future. after all happiness can be many different things to many different people.

what a wondeful motivation to live life well and fully.

which is why i am glad today was a day well-lived.

On sundays, i always listen to Miles Davis in the morning. I don’t know why, there is just something about those aching blues and smoky jazz lines that i really enjoy on sunday.

now i have a whole nother week of freedom before school starts. what am i going to do?

i think…….relax.

life at mercer is getting more like the college life that i used to think about as a grade-school student. I have these great friends, i have all kinds of freedom and responsibility, and i am taking fairly challenging courses.

but that’s not all. desiree moved to a different dorm. she was fed up with the one she was at. and now she’s literally just across the courtyard from me. as in, if we opened our windows we could talk to each other. And her new dorm suits her just fine… she has no qualms about Mercer any more. Des mentioned to me, as we were moving the remaining few armloads of things into her new dorm “You know, i think Plunkett [my old dorm] was the reason i wanted to leave Mercer so much.”

and i think that’s wonderful.

ok, as for my classes. i experienced one of the wonderful joys that an engineer at a small school can experienceseveral of my friends and fellow engineers are taking the exact same classes that i am! it is so nice. We are a friendly bunch. Even though i know almost all of my classmates, i still h-a-t-e icebreakers on the first day. i don’t know why. organized introductions just make me mad.

my classes are: Differential Equations, Physics, Engineering Design, Professional Practices, and Music Technology. 17 hours total.

classes this spring are going to be lots of WORK!! demanding teachers. man. but i’m going to skip the details of all classes for now except for one, Music Technology.
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hmmmm,

i woke up this morning clicked on my recording gear to do a few saturday morning experiments, and i noticed something different about the sound my computer was producing.

instead of the beautiful crystal clear cd quality sound i am used to hearing i noticed a rather loud new unwanted addition to my recording.

“hisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss”

after going through every cable in my house, changing every wire in an attempt to isolate the problem, i have determined that the cause is in fact the very root of my audio input.

my imic.

apparently between last night and now, the cable has gone bad.

so that means no more home recording.

and i still have another week before school starts. all those hours of sound experiments i had to look forward to are now gone.

i am very sad.

dave, any ideas?