Once again, I find myself (yes, Debra, I find myself) in the position of not feeling comfortable saying what I want to say here. It's a tough situation: on the one hand, I feel like blogging is good for me and a useful exercise; on the other, I can write paragraphs and paragraphs in this little box labeled "Article Body" and it doesn't do much good if I can't bring myself to hit the gray button that says "Post."

I just don't know what to do with this.

Aaaaand I'm back. I said I'd keep posting, but that kind of got interrupted as my laptop has up until just now been in the shop for a display repair. Let's see if we can get this back on track, shall we?

Why is it that radio stations will censor the words "giving head" when Lou Reed sings "Walk on the Wild Side," neither of which are inherently inappropriate for all audiences in and of themselves, but not the word "faggot" in the Dire Strait's Money for Nothing?

Someone's got their priorities out of whack.

During my recent illness, I resorted to watching the YouTube/CNN Democratic Debates in an attempt to alleviate my boredom. The format, I thought, worked rather well. While I've heard complaints that the presidential race is being dragged down into entertainment instead of good old-fashioned civic duty, I figure that since civic duty doesn't seem to be working, entertainment is an alright place to start. Some of the candidates surprised me. Obama, whose progress I have eyed with general approval, let me down by playing politics too much. He changed questions around so that he cound answer the ones he wanted to answer and spent too much time saying "I'm the best one" instead of "here's how I would respond." His rhetoric regarding a change in politics rings hollow after such behavior. Meanwhile, Richardson pleased me by plainly answering a couple of questions and being fairly straightforward on the whole, and Kucinich, while excitable, proved himself firmly dedicated to making sure that the military mess we're in stops–whether he's elected or not. Unfortunately, both of those two appear to be lacking in "electability" (how I loathe that word), especially put up next to the competition. We'll see how the rest of the campaign trail finishes out, I guess.

JJ Abrams, the mind behind notoriously devious TV plotlines as Alias and Lost, is working on a monster movie. However, the film is not being marketed in a traditional way. With a subtle flair, the as-of-yet nameless film has a poster featuring a decapitated Statue of Liberty, a teaser trailer that does an excellent job of raising questions instead of answering them, and three online places for people to attempt to dig up clues: 1-18-10.com has a collection of photographs time-stamped from the point at which the monster attacks, some of which have notes handwritten on the back; Slusho is a made-up slushie-style drink that has seen appearance in Alias and apparently has something to do with the film as well, although I have a lot of trouble trying to dig anything useful out of the bizarre website; and it appears that the protagonists of the film have their own Myspace accounts. The few things that JJ Abrams has said about the movie only add to the suspense. The monster was inspired by Godzilla, but is not a sequel or remake of any other work. It is not a parasite not an oversized anime-style robot. There are just enough hints for me to drive myself mad wondering about the end result–which, at the end of the day, means that the ad campaign has worked extremely well.

I've been pretty nastily sick for a while, and although I'm more or less on the mend now, I got to thinking in my illness that I should get off of my ass and pick this up again.

The first order of business: Harry Potter (no spoilers ahead, don't worry). Wow, that was an incredible book to read. I really want to go back now and reread the earlier books to get a sense of perspective regarding Harry's development over the years. He came a long way from that wide-eyed, somewhat oblivious boy. JKR did a great job with the entire series, I think, and they're books that I'll be proud to have on my shelves for years to come.

Second: Most of you who read this read my dad's blog, so you likely already know that my parents have left to move back to Jersey for a year. The positive upshot to this for me is that I have the house to myself for the rest of the summer (give or take a week). Being here alone (plus having full reign over the stereo) is intensely relaxing.

Third: Next year at school I will be living in a suite that includes a private kitchen. Given the general quality of the food served in the cafeteria,* I have no good reason to keep avoiding my long-standing goal of learning how to cook. This being the case, I am now officially soliciting vegetarian recipes that I can use as stepping stones on my quest. Your participation is greatly appreciated.

*I do not wish to cast any aspersions on the kitchen staff at my college. They are wonderful, hardworking, talented chefs and I fully understand that the meals that leave me dissatisfied are the best that they can do when faced with severely limited supplies, time, staff, and budget.

I'm going to try to hold myself to a one-post-a-day minimum, so if I miss a day, you have my express permission and encouragement to heckle me about it.

I'm back in Evanston.

I've got a job lined up to start in a couple weeks (the commmute is worse than before, but the pay and hours are better).

I've got so much time, yet I feel like I lack the energy to actually do anything with it (even with projects I should be working on right in front of my face).

Blah.

I've started cleaning house for the move back to Evanston. It's bittersweet, seeing things of varying sentimental value divvied into piles of storage, shipping, and donations.

One of these years, I'm going to go for a full year without having to pack all my crap and move it.

Really.

The thunder rumbled like a feral beast asserting its dominance. Softly, a whispered response came from the clouds, growing louder as the rains swept across the mountainside. The time of cleansing had come.

I'm back again... We'll see how long it lasts this time.

I couldn't find a specific news link about the Julie Amero case neutral enough for me to feel comfortable posting, but do look around and see what's going on.

I feel disgusted at such a flagrant display of skewed "moral" priorities taking the place of law and justice. I admit that I only know as much about the case as I have been able to glean from various news sources, but what I've seen leads me to perceive the situation as a blatant example of bad judgment. If we give Amero the benefit of the doubt, then she may well have to spend 40 years (essentially the rest of her life) in prison on account of pop-up windows in Internet Explorer. If we assume that she is guilty and showed these sites to her class on purpose, then she may well have to spend 40 years in prison (a sentence four times as long as the state minimum for a rape conviction) for inappropriately showing 13-year-olds pictures of naked people, a sight which the majority of them have most likely seen anyway.

The case of Julie Amero brings up again for me a major problem with the country in which I live. Americans as a whole see sex and nudity to be far more shameful and wrong than violence. The logic of that perception escapes me completely. The rallying cry "We must protect the children" rings false to me when protection involves censoring naked bodies instead of mutilated bodies. The concern, as I understand it, is to keep children from emulating what they see. Why, then, is a naked body worse to see than crowds of people getting bludgeoned and shot and eviscerated? If I were to raise a child, I would infinitely prefer that my child strip down and get naked than start whaling on or kill someone else.

It's late and I'm out of steam. Maybe I'll follow up on this in the morning.

Is this what it really means to be an adult?

The Christmas season has been wonderful, but quite exhausting. I've been running around for the past week and a half going to various family events and church and out of town and back into town and only just now do I have a chance to sit back and breathe, having just driven Laura back up to St. Olaf. There's actually snow up here, and a bite to the air that provides a calming reminder that winter does, in fact, exist and should occur during this general period of time.

For Christmas, Laura gave me this collection of poetry by Jill Scott, which I'd asked for to help with the tutorial I'm trying to set up for next fall (an analysis of 20th century song lyrics as poetry). I have since fallen in love with Scott's words, and the book along with some holiday stress prompted me to start writing poetry again–– for which I am very, very grateful. Not only am I happy to be writing again, but the material I'm producing feels much more satisfactory than earlier work.

Drove down to Laura's this morning on empty streets listening to excerpts from the Relient K Christmas album. Life is good, it finally feels like Christmas.

Much love and happy holidays to you all.

So I'm home. I'm not really sure what to say... this place and the place I just came from seem like two entirely different realities. I cringe at the reference, but it's kind of like the film Passion of the Mind when Demi Moore can't figure out which dream or reality is, well, real. If that reference makes no sense to you, don't worry; it's a terrible movie that you shouldn't bother seeing. But the point is, I'm still trying to define my own reality and where my life will go.

Cryptic, eh? I don't get it either.

All my assignments for the term are finished. I need to turn them in, attend another day and a half of classes, and finish one exam this weekend, and then that's it. I can do this.

Three performances, one CGI web page, a quiz, a presentation, and a paper to do this weekend. After Sunday things should be bearable again.

The wireless connection in my dorm is spotty at best, so I wanted to plug in my own router to boost the signal. However, the school network needs to configure all the routers on the network so that the DHCP settings all play nice. I brought my router down to the admin, who promptly told me that the built-in firmware wouldn't allow the necessary settings. He then offered to hack it so that we could configure it however we wanted.

h4x0r3d. The happy way.

I am sooooooo euphoric right now.

My a cappella group, The Desperate Measures *pause for groan here*, had their debut concert tonight to a wildly enthusiastic full house. I am extremely proud of everyone and thrilled that it all went so well.

Yay me!!!

Once again, I amaze myself with my ability to get tons of stuff done except for the thing i need to get done.

I have a final paper due this coming Monday for Elements of Style. I have a very rough draft of that paper that needs quite a bit of revision. I have tons to do over the weekend, and not much free time to work.

So, instead of revising my paper during my five-hour work shift, I compiled the set list and starting tones for my a cappella group's debut concert tomorrow night, finalized plans for New Year's Eve with Laura, sent in a status report to my boss, and started toying with programming in CGI.

The final still needs work. Now I just need something ELSE I can procrastinate on so I can get the final done while I'm avoiding the other thing.

What should a young student do when facing his grammar final?

Have an identity crisis, of course.

I am thankful for a wonderful, stress-free day.

I am thankful for the opportunity to spend that day with people who have become my family.

I am thankful for casual evenings and long, late chats with the aforementioned family.

I am only slightly bitter that there's STILL no snow on the ground.

I have my voice back. I'm quite pleased about that particular turn of events, as I have precisely one week left to get my a cappella group in fit shape for our debut concert next Thursday. Not being able to speak for a couple of days left me to explore other various means of communication, some of which worked better than others, such as writing my words by hand (trying to explain what i needed to the guy at Radio Shack without knowing the proper terms such as 12-gauge wire and banana plugs made that one tricky), miming (always a bad idea, although good practice for charades, I suppose), and even making my computer speak for me (which worked surprisingly well, and there were many good opportunities for playful banter a la Hal).

School is officially on break for Thanksgiving, and both of my roommates have gone home for the holiday. I went out for dinner with some friends that are still around, but the evening has primarily consisted of my being alone in the room. I've worked on my grammar final that's due far too soon, let the music of the Indigo Girls soothe me and the witty banter of the Gilmore Girls make me smile (in context, that title is far less scandalous than it sounds, isn't it?). This kind of relaxed downtime is a badly needed breather for me, and I think I'm going to enjoy it, even if the room does feel kind of empty.

This weekend, full of assignments and Queer Homecoming, the best party of the year, I have lost my voice. It mas made me very self-aware about voice as a means of communication and as a way of life. More to follow.

So... I'm back. Not really sure why, but here I am. It'll be interesting to see how many people notice at first.

To get the update stuff out of the way, school proceeds apace. It's looking more and more like I'm going to be able to pull some strings and pull off the tutorial I want to set up, albeit with different faculty sponsoring me. The tutorial in question addresses the place of song lyrics in the context of poetry, and how (or if) they can be placed in that category. Right now, this tutorial seems to be the springboard for whatever my Plan ends up being, so the fact that it might work is a happy thing.

I'm still changing in a number of ways that are hard to define. I look pretty much the same, and as far as I can tell my mannerisms are still at least similar to what they've been (although I've been infected with the Southern Vermont slang term "sketch," which indicates something out of place, suspicious, creepy, or otherwise, well, sketchy). I don't know how different I appear and seem from the outside; I feel different, though, and it will be interesting to see how that affects other aspects of my life.

So, anyway, it looks like I'm back. Updates will follow; I don't know how frequently, but I will write up here from time to time.

I don't know what to say here anymore. I feel bad about neglecting the site, but also lack motivation to write here most of the time.

This weekend I mourned the death and celebrated the life of my friend Allen, who died of cancer last week. He was only 16 years old.

I'm thrilled to see my old friends, but I also miss my new ones.

I'm living in a guest room in my parent's house. That's how I think of it now: my parent's house. Not my home.

I'm working retail again this summer. If I work retail again next year the increasing possibility of that career path continuing any further will cause my small intestine to leap up through my neck and throttle my brain out of mercy.

Life and I seem to be progressing at different speeds.

I lit a candle for you today at the Mary shrine at my church. Don't know if that has any significance for you, but I hope at least that the gesture means something. I realize, too late now, that I missed my chance to get to know you half as well as I could have. I do know that your presence was a distinct one in our new home, and that there will always be an empty chair in the dining hall reminding me of the fact that you ought to be sitting there. But then again, you really are still around, aren't you? I've seen you around since that night, in people's faces as they've smiled or in the morning sun rising up over campus. I do miss the crazy skirts and those rainbow-striped stockings, though.

So here's to you, Ryan, wherever you may be. I look forward to meeting you again, however and whenever that happens, and until then, know that I'm thinking about you, and I'm grateful to have known you in this life and in this world, even as little as I have.

Be at peace.

P.S. I learned to play "The Rainbow Connection" on the guitar the other day. Thought you'd approve.

Sleep is good. I ought to try it again sometime. Sure do miss it. Been a while.

So last night I managed to get five other people together in one cramped, soundproofed room to sing collegiate-style a cappela with me.

It was good.

Good in that heavy-voice-emphasis, massively-understated, dear-Lord-that-was-phenomenal sort of way, I mean.

So we're going to meet four, maybe five more times this semester and get a feel for the style, and then next year I'm going to turn up the pressure, get in some crazy music and hold two rehearsals a week (more than any other choral group on campus at the moment). I have high hopes, but more than anything I'm thrilled that it's going so well already. Hooray for music!

Yeah, I've been bad about keeping this up. Thanks for bearing with me (those who have). Today's topic is transition. Change. The process of impermanence pushing its way to the fore. Speaking personally, I don't handle transitions very well. With some few selective exceptions, I get very introverted, moody, sullen, confused, and generally not pleasant to be around. I operate best with a solid platform base, and when either I leave the base or the base becomes unstable, I shut down partially. Since I'm an extrovert and almost always draw energy from other people around me, in whatever number, shutting down only exacerbates the situation ("What does 'exacerbate' mean?"). Over the course of many years and many, many transitions (five moves, leaving home, coming to grips with my beliefs, finding out just who I am exactly, etc.) the problem of dealing with them is one that I have yet to find an answer for. Sure, eventually the awkwardness goes away and I return to my normal everyday self but there is precious time that I can feel slipping through my fingers and into a pile of mopey oobleck. Of course, there is the possibility that I shouldn't even try, that this is the sort of thing that I should allow to run its course and not try and control. Like the time I figured that since I always felt bad when I cried, I should just stop crying. That lasted for about two-plus months until I watched the tour of RENT. Popped the cork out of that bottle of emotion, and I'd had plenty stored up. But back on the subject at hand, I'm still left wondering what I should do, if anything. Something to ponder while I pack and travel, I suppose.

So today is my 19th birthday. It's been good so far. The last couple of days have been incredibly stressful and lacking in things like sleep, and today just happens to be my day off. So, I slept in, and woke up to find a fresh layer of snow on the ground. I took a nice long hot shower, and am now killing time listening to an album I just got from Simon (Danse Macabre by The Faint). At loud volume.

Life is good.

It's been a long year, and a LOT has changed. But for the most part, I'm pleased with the changes, and I'm happy where I am. College has been a major, major shift. But I'm really settled in, and I'm comfortable here. There are lots of people I miss from back in Evanston, but I am far from bereft of friends here, too, and I look forward to seeing and catching up with many of my hometown friends in just a couple of weeks when I get back on spring break. But for now, I must continue with my day of luxury.