I almost hit a college student with my car today.
I didn't, though, so don't worry (I knew you were worried).
Apparently, trying to get directions out of the (very) tiny screen of a Palm Pilot and driving are two things that the male brain should not attempt to do concurrently.
So, I'm in Boulder, Colorado. It's a beautiful day (sunny, about 65) and I'm driving past CU, so you'd think that I'd watch out for college students (especially college students in crosswalks), but noooo, I don't. So I almost hit this college girl, a relatively attractive female (if you're in to that kind of thing), and in that half a second between scouring my palm pilot, looking up, noticing the girl, and hitting my brakes I get a sickening feeling in my stomach... but not because I almost plowed her over.
My lack of moral standing notwithstanding, at that very moment, for whatever reason, I felt ill because I knew I would give almost anything to be a college student again.
I'm not sure why I thought that, really. When I was in school I couldn't wait to get out, move on with my life, not take any more finals, actually DO something, etc. But now that I'm out, it seems that I kind of want back in.
I suppose it could be the fact that this thing that naïve people tend to call the "real world" is really just a pretty big drag. It's just so much of a letdown. In college we're trained to be thinkers and dreamers, and we're told (or maybe it's just what I heard) that once we get that diploma we'll be free to mold the world as we see fit. But now I see, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the "real world" simply exists to feed itself. The vast majority of it isn't challenging, it isn't forward-thinking, it isn't revolutionary, and it panders to the lowest common denominator in a lame attempt to placate the masses with some deranged form of what we imagined real life to be.
I could be angry with the college I went to for the obvious setup for disillusionment they fashioned me with, but I'm really not. Somewhere (some days I have to dig pretty deep to find it) there seems to be this idealistic hope in me that refuses to die. Now, I realize that I'm only in my twenties and I've got a lot of years left for the world to try to kill it, but I do rather enjoy dreaming and hoping for a world that is just a bit more beautiful than the one I live in.
And that's why I love college students. They don't really know any better than to dream lofty, pie-in-the-sky dreams, and in my current "enlightened" state I think that bliss sometimes really might be ignorance.
//
I'm not sure what happened to me.
You should know, before I begin, that I'm one of those people that saves every email they've ever written or received. So, as you can well imagine, approximately half of my 40GB hard drive is taken up with email (just kidding, but it's really no laughing matter how far back these things go).
I was looking through my Sent Items folder and realized that I had doubles of every email I sent between the dates of March of 1999 through October of 2000 (or thereabouts). Being the technological guru that I am, I realized that was a rather large amount of emails taking a lot of space that didn't need taking.
But that's not really what happened to me.
So I'm scrolling down using the clever little wheel on my mouse (those Microsoft geniuses!), selecting every other email so I can rid my sanity of these duplicate space-takers. As I scroll, I am reading some of the email subjects... and they're funny! I never knew I was funny!
There are emails with obscure Austin Powers' references like, "No, Mini-Me, we don't gnaw on our kitty," nonsensical crap like "Wadaladabingbang," and even frightening apocalyptic things like "IT'S THE Y2K BUG - WE'RE ALL SCREWED!!!!!" I've even got one with this subject: "Mini-RE: It's a flu shot, I don't want you getting sick..." -- can you even stand the wit?? Mini-RE:... man, I just crack myself up. (Keep in mind these are just subject lines; can you even imagine the infinite depths of humor that could be contained in the email body!?)
But that's not what happened either.
As my wheel continues it's journey upwards toward the more recently written emails, I am getting the impression that I am, sadly, getting less and less funny. I am just not as jovial... I might be getting actually, kinda, boring.
What happened to me? (There's the question.)
I'll tell you what happened: I "grew up." I started conversing with quote-unquote "adults" and thus, had to obviously rid myself of the extraneous wit. Professionals have no time for such nonsense, you know.
The only problem is that I think I liked myself better before -- that person who wasn't afraid of smiling, of being a little goofy.
In a fantastic movie called Finding Neverland, Johnny Depp's character, J.M. Barrie, has a conversation with a boy named Peter that has adult syndrome — he's grown up too quickly and acts older than he actually is. Barrie creates an imaginary world where Peter's dog Rufus becomes a bear in the circus, and Peter says "This is absurd. It's just a dog."
Barrie replies, "Just a dog? Rufus dreams of being a bear, and you want to shatter those dreams by saying he's just a dog? What a horrible candle-snuffing word. That's like saying, 'He can't climb that mountain, he's just a man,' or 'That's not a diamond, it's just a rock.' Just."
It's just a bit of silliness, really.
Well, I should hope so.
A little more silliness sounds pretty good right about now.
//
So, I just finished writing (literally, just now) a new song called Soul, and, oh, am I all about moody songs right now.
You know the kind: the beautiful and terrible poems set to music that elicit visions of nostalgia and fear, of joy and hatred. (If you need artists, reference Damien Rice, Patty Griffin, or pretty much any artist on the Garden State soundtrack.) I'm not sure if my songs live up to this, but it is certainly something to aspire to.
I've noticed that humans have a gross tendency to scrutinize each other to the point of weakness. Where the line of fair expectation and ugly realism meet is where life seems to get really blurry. It's a mess, really. We all carry the paradoxical weight of expecting idyllic behavior from everyone we encounter while gladly giving ourselves free passes to behave however we see fit.
I don't claim to understand this instability, but I am certainly repulsed by it, especially in myself.
To me, everybody who inhabits this strange planet has roughly the same amount of "broken," and to expect something less or more than that is simply foolishness. Remembering that isn't easy, though.
Somewhat conversely, I think everybody also has the same amount of "soul" -- the passionate essence which comprises the "who" of "who we are." Most of us spend more time burying, hiding, suppressing, repressing, or ignoring that soul than we do trying to release it, but it's in there.
I know it.
//