Back To School — Thinking Comes Later

Sorry, but it's not like that at all. Not even a little. I'm sad too.

Oh, and I was so happy that I finished fall term on December 3rd, and here I am paying the piper. While all my private school friends get to lounge around for another week, in a few hours I’ll be boarding a bus back to Eugene so I can start winter term. Literally hundreds of people have asked me if I’m excited, and I guess I am, but I’m also scared for some of the same reasons I was scared before I went down to school at the end of the summer: 1) Oh snap, what if I have boatloads of homework now? and 2) Oh snap, what if I’m not as smart as I enjoy pretending I am?

All of my friends are excited to go back to school because they, with their newfound college independence, are chafing under their parents’ rules and regulations (which I’m lead to believe are “lame”). Now, as with most adolescent problems, this doesn’t really bother me, because my parents are so easygoing that my home life isn’t too different from my college life. In college I spend most of my time playing video games and surfing smutty websites, and I do pretty much the same thing at home, only I’ve got a private bathroom and shower and no homework to distract me. I mean, who wants to walk away from that? Even if I were the type to stay out all night with my friends getting totally crunk, my parents probably wouldn’t be all that angry about it so long as I did so responsibly. About the only thing I could do to really piss my parents off would be to start attending Bible study or vote for Mitt Romney.

But I have to go back, and I’m not saying that I’m not excited at all, because there’s a lot of fun stuff about college. I’ll meet a whole new crop of girls who don’t want to go out with me and get a chance to load up on chicken Caesar salads again, plus I’ll finally be able to find out whether it was a bad idea for me to leave a half eaten container of hummus in my fridge for the entire break. It’s also a lot easier for me to make funny blog entries when I’m at school. In college, interesting things happen to me on a daily basis (that is, if you find band gossip interesting), and it’s easy for me to whip up some wordy crap with run on sentences about whatever strikes my fancy. At home with my parents, though, I seldom leave the house because I don’t have any friends in the neighborhood, and so the only stuff I have to write about are my parents, and if I’m going to post on my blog about my parents then I might as well grow my hair down to my shoulders, dye it black, wear eyeliner, gain 50 pounds, drop out of school, write freeverse poetry, play World of Warcraft, go to anime conventions, shop at Hot Topic, see The Corpse Bride, change my name to Skyler or Josh or Seth, complain about how nobody understands me, and start dating a high school sophomore with a history of cutting.

Never will I feel more materialistic than when I go from home back down to school. Right now I’m taking my duffel bag, which is so stuffed full of clean clothes that I can barely close it, my marching band uniform, a backpack full of books, DVDs, and Christmas gifts I received, and both my trumpets. The fact that I’m doing this on a bus makes it that much harder, because taking the bus is really only one cut above walking on your hands when it comes to efficient or comfortable travel. Riding the bus to Portland after the bowl game, I made the mistake of trying to use the bathroom while we were in traffic, which would make for a pretty entertaining and challenging arcade game, but in real life it’s more like trying to fill a glass of champagne without spilling it while jumping on a trampoline.

Ah well. School, like life, goes on. I don’t suppose I could exist much longer like this anyway, living it up with no responsibilities and all my wants and needs catered to. Proust (or, more directly, Steve Carell at the end of Little Miss Sunshine, because any 19 year old who claims to read Proust is probably lying) says that only in stressful, trying times can a person see his true nature. He’s probably right, but I think most of us would be willing to give our true nature a miss if it meant we could sleep in ‘till 11:00 and spend all day playing Team Fortress 2.

Truman has made a possibly foolhardy decision, and will now be updating twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays. Watch and see if he’s creative enough to be funny two out of seven days!