In other news, my sprocket necklace is magnetized from contact with pony feet. Life is good.
It's currently 1:38 a.m. on a Wednesday. Do you know how nice it is for me to not have to worry about Latin being due in the morning or about whether people here want to sleep? With all due respect, it's very nice not to have the suitemates breathing down my neck for a couple of days.
In high school, as some of you know, I was pretty much cut off from the world every night and on weekends, as I didn't have a computer, much less the Internet, and I was hardly ever allowed to go out. Considering how much effort it took to be able to actually go somewhere for even a brief time, I stopped trying to go places after awhile. (Save me the pity—you'll see that it was useful.) I'd spend a whole lot of time in the basement wasting time—I didn't have a computer, so I'd procrastinate by doing productive things like reading books, copying down quotes like a penitent scribe, and writing down my thoughts in my notebooks.
I avoided my family and didn't really bother to talk on the phone but for late at night, as most of my conversations were monitored during the day. Hence for long periods of time I'd be alone in the basement with my thoughts, books, and the homework I was putting off. I'd check out stacks of books and CDs from the library and embark upon vast projects reading the books and copying the relevant quotes into notebooks, all while listening to the new CDs and/or the radio, eventually copying the CD to tape if it was good enough...
I'd stay at the library whenever I could until 5 minutes to closing doing things online and searching the catalog for things to read or listen to, stay in the school library learning the mysterious ways of Pfingsten, or in the basement with my physics teacher doing a whole lot of nothing, or just stay at school until after 10 p.m. finishing a stacked set of three activities in a row. When I got home, though, after avoiding it for so long, I'd set myself to writing and reading. That, not the Internet, was my escape.
I procrastinated just as badly as I do now, only instead of staring at the screen until my eyes got blurry, I'd stay up 'til 1 a.m. reading Orson Scott Card, Ayn Rand, or Richard Bach, then type out my paper on a typewriter, chicken-pecking at the keys, as my hands weren't strong enough to actually touch type on the out-of-adjustment typewriters we had around. I learned the intricacies of typewriter ribbons and Wite-Out.
Surely I'm romanticizing the whole thing, but compared to the way I am now, I was erudite! I actually had ideals...and sure, those have been dashed on the rocks of college largely due to my own foibles, but still—what a wonderful thing to have ideals! And to be alone with my thoughts—glorious! I became so accustomed to having my space over the long years at home, and all this continual invasion of my existence, the relentless wash of people here, is driving me nuts. There's always someone in the suite—last year I relished being alone for those few weekends when my roommate wasn't here. This year, even if one suitemate is gone (most often the engineer), the other two are still here.
Now, obviously, I chose these guys to live with, and it's working out well. But space...glorious space...and the freedom to play Evanescence's Origin over and over again and fall asleep listening to Ayumi Hamasaki at 2 a.m. with no shirt on and the thermostat at a toasty 75 degrees, then wake myself up the next morning after my shower by singing along to loud rock music, keeping cool without a shirt. (Screw those of you who don't relish the image—that happens to be my long-cherished routine.) My inability to do these things is nowhere near as oppressive as the rampant drunkenness and falseness I lived with last year was (how does one get so blessed as I was, to inhabit a floor with about 50 people who're absolutely intolerable?), but nonetheless, it takes its toll.
I have to do something about the turn my intellectual life's taken for the worse. Sure, I'm being productive in new ways, taking care of various forums and learning the intricacies of the online realm (a benefit of being cached by Google, for instance, is that if you screw up your page, you've got a window of time in which the search engine will still have the old version for you to copy it from), but I've gotta think about where I'm headed with all this. I'm learning things, to be sure, but I've gotta get some guidance on this rocket headed sunward.