Thankless Thursday

Thursdays are awful days to be thankful. Thursdays are not Fridays when the week is almost up and the weekend is right around the corner to look forward to. Thursdays are not Saturdays when I get to sleep in. Thursdays are not Sundays when a new week begins and there’s freshness in the air, inspiration everywhere, and new potential bleeding forth from every orifice of the world.

Thursdays are not Mondays when I get to return to the interesting topics discussed in my classes and see my friends after a lonely weekend. Thursdays are not Tuesdays when I get to go to my creative writing class and indulge myself in my deepest passions. Thursdays are not Wednesdays, the busiest day of the week, when I get to see all my friends in the SGA and then, in the evening, be thankful for surviving all the chaos that inevitably erupts every Wednesday.

But Thursdays are Thursdays.

Thursdays are just deep enough into the week to feel exhausted and overwhelmed, but not near enough the week’s end to look forward to relaxation or another week rising on the horizon. Thursdays are Thursdays–and Thursdays are awful days for thankfulness.

The Rooms of My Heart

Read the fine print! Don’t sweat the small stuff! Contradictions abound–and there’s no shortage of such when it comes to defining the perfect balance of details in writing, and whether or not those details matter. (After all, if we don’t sweat the small stuff, we won’t read the fine print, will we?)

This chapter that we’re working on is all about crafting exact scenes using concrete and sensory details. What does it matter? Why should I bother? If it isn’t obvious, then read on. You’ll be sure to be surprised.

Bring Out the Bling

There’s something ironic to everything, and I think one of ironies of my life is that everything I say I’m not, I become. For example, I’ve never considered myself one for jewelry, and yet I find I wear more now than I ever had before–period. The funny part is, when I forget to put on my watch, or when I lost my Equality Ring in the car one day, I felt a part of my identity had slipped away. It was like missing a breath and knowing your lungs aren’t as full as they should be–but that breath is already gone and you can never bring it back.

So, although I’m sure it’s an odd thing to say (especially coming from one such as myself, who frequently must refer to dictionaries to divine the meaning of slang), today I’m thankful for bling.

Cold White Snow

Last semester in my religion class I found it funny that every time (rather, I should say, almost every time), when a religious group felt they had deviated from the true intent of their Scriptures or their beliefs, they would start a new religion and from there build a new way of interpreting their faith.

It made me think of when the autumn comes and I remember how life used to be, how I was a playful yet shy little boy who defined my life in terms of how full my Pokedex was and whether or not I had caught the last episode of Digimon. I miss those days–not for their content, but for their simplicity. There were no such things as deadlines. There were small vocabularies. Complex numbers were still just imaginary.

So I did what I always did, in those moments before class began, or before it ended, or before my teacher next spoke: I wrote.

The End At Last

It’s finally happened. Yesterday while I was at work my boss of over three years (and teacher a long time before that) came up to me and asked, “Am I correct to assume you won’t be returning next year?”

I looked at him and said, “My hope is to be at State, so… yes.”

It was only after he had walked away and I was walking back to my kids that I clutched at my chest and shook my head, whispering to myself, I can’t believe it’s finally true. It’s all suddenly real now. It’s hard to believe that I’ve reached the end at last.

Photons Magnificent

This time nine years ago, the world was a different place. I was a different man. I was hardly a man at all; I was still a boy, draped in juvenile dreams, believed of a world that didn’t exist, or instead existed beneath the tide of the world we lived in. Mythologies were ripening inside me, thousands of stories stirring, yearning to get out.

It was somehow pristine, yet thoroughly in the dark.

I remember it clearly. Oh so very clearly.

Hold A and B to Start

Memories and bravery may get us far, but both are second when the world is a bottle of chaos and you’re stuck somewhere on the inside, shaken up and shaken apart. I tend to feel like this at the end of the semester. It’s all just a messy blur of moments and meaningful if miniscule messages of all the things I’ve learned. Dizzying, stomach-churning, exhaustive. That’s the life of a modern-day full-time college student with multiple jobs, a family, and oft-forgotten hobbies.

Alas, hobbies!

People like to ask what I do in my spare time. I grin a bit (I swear my eyes must sparkle with a mischievous light) and I ask them, “With what time?” Torn between studying, working, family, friends, and sleeping (as much as I’d love to go without it, physiology tells me I can’t), there is no time. Not until break at least. Or more specifically, not until the semester ends (those breaks in the middle? They’re for catching up, nor for resting, what did you think they were for?).

Free time. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with it, but when finally I’ve remembered how to use it, well, it’s the best thing all winter. Forget holly and mistletoe. Forget eight nights and everlasting light. It’s the free time that I’m thankful for today.

Once Upon a Time

There’s such a thing as irony, and when we lack it, we’re anemic (and that’s a thing called paronomasia, or punning, or wordplay). But no matter what we call it, what’s at the heart of my personal irony today is the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I have never seen it. But I have read parts of it, and I have read parts about it.

It began the second or third day of my Creative Writing class. We were covering screenplays and we were reading an example, and this was the movie my teacher decided to bring in. We read the opening of the script. We watched a couple clips on YouTube. We–rather, the people who had seen it–talked a bit about it. And then I ran to the library, checked the stock, and saw we didn’t have it. Ergo, I did not watch it.

Where’s the irony, you say? Here it comes, wait for it….

Something About Driving: Stuck in Traffic

Time passed. I had every intent to write “Something About Driving” and finish it, but instead I got carried away, In Amarantis Sedicia, and never came back to it. Like that piece of creative nonfiction I mentioned, I wrote it, but then left it. Except here the story got clogged even before I got that far, coagulated in my throat and stopped moving.

At least frogs can hop out, you know? Clots just sit there till they kill you when you least expect it.

Something About Driving: Ignition

I’m in the car. Somewhere between South Carolina and Alabama it strikes me that I am not alone. Yes, this whole time I have been surrounded by four friends and coworkers and teachers (each possessing a varied combination of the above) that I feel I know well, but apparently don’t know as well as I could imagine I do. Here they are, the youngest among them exactly twice my age, and they’re identifying in me the things I’ve failed to admit to myself for years.