Upon closer examination, I realized almost all of my posts start with some form of "I". "I" am an intensely self-centered person, it seems.

Andrew called me tonight, and we talked for about an hour. He's one of my best friends from home, and one of the only people in my life I can truly trust. He's like a big brother. While we reminisced about old times at home and in high school, we both realized that little things can cause huge changes. We thought back to two springs ago, at the end of my junior year. The end of junior year could best be described as volatile. It was all typical high school bullshit: love triangles, gossip, unkept secrets. It all seemed so important back then. Then we realized something: all of that WAS important. When I think about my life today in terms of the people I'm close with and the choices I make, when I think back to what has set my current path in motion, it all comes back to those couple of months. I replay the unrequited love I had for Paul, or the unrequited love Chris had for me, and I still feel the desparation and longing for simplicity. As turbulent and painful as those few months were, they hold some of my most cherished memories, and formed some of my deepest ties. People always say that all the things you cared about in high school won't matter in ten years or so, but I think that's bullshit. If you live right, everything you do will matter.

I really love the invention of the iPod. Everyone seems to be obsessed with them. If you ask them why they're so desperately in love with the little cluster of metal, microchips, and plastic, they will most likely rattle off a list of reasons: they're convenient, they take up less space than cds, they have good sound quality. I love my iPod for a very different reason: it makes it completely acceptable for me to ignore people. Seriously. When I have my iPod on it's my own little world, and I do not give a shit about anybody else. The rules of social structures no longer apply to me. I see the bitchy girl walking by, who is so fake that she will say hi to me then make a snide comment to her friend. iPodless, I would be compelled to engage in a forced exchange and pretend I give a shit how she's doing, or that she is still breathing for that matter. But I have my iPod today. Therefore, I can walk by her, passing within three feet, and say nothing, not even making eye contact. That's right, bitch. Walk on by.

I'm watching Made right now with my roommates. How come no one writes TV shows anymore? Seriously. All that's on is reality show after reality show. No wonder people say children are getting less creative. TV, what everyone says kills the imagination, isn't even being imaginative anymore. I will admit, I really love America's Next Top Model, though. But none of this is reality. I refuse to believe that that much drama is necessary in life. This post sucks.

I'm homesick again. I want to start making movies again. I miss Mr. Alan. I need his guidance right now.

I've gotten bored with college. I wrote this the other day about when I went to that old "haunted" building me and Joelle used to go to.

The old building stood before us, like a ghost, hollowed out and covered in the dust of what once was. I knew how the old place felt. We walked across the white canvas tarp, leaving a trail of muddy footprints, scrawled like suicide notes. I approached the window, looking up at the daunting, looming edifice towering over me.
“Shall we?” I hoisted myself up on to the ledge and swung my legs over, collecting dust and the glitter of cracked glass on my shirt. I landed with a crash on some skeletal piece of machinery. “Shit.” Joelle laughed and followed suit, as did Erik.
We were inside. This had been our goal for so long, ever since we had first developed our morbid obsession with the abandoned hospital. Now, the time we had come with no plan, no supplies, not even a light to guide us, we had achieved what had been impossible so many times before. The decay of the past three decades crackled under my feet as we passed through the shell of the old mental asylum. The once formidable walls were peeling and crumbling; gates once used to keep people inside now stood more use in keeping them out. The ceiling above us had given way long ago and now stars shined down on us like thousands of tiny eyes. Snow had begun to collect on the floor under the holes, and we shuffled through it.
The headlights from passing cars cast eerie shadows into the building, hitting the trees in front and transforming into figures roaming around. We stood still, in the simultaneous safety and danger of the darkness. If it were security, it would be better to remain in the blackness. If it wasn’t security . . . I shuddered to think what it could’ve been. I heard a shuffling noise from across the room, like the sound of a patient’s slippers would make against the tile. “Let’s get out of here”. We hurried back down the hallway, throwing ourselves through the same broken window through which we had entered. Joelle cut her hand on the glass as she pushed herself over the sill.
We ran away from the old building, to the safety of the orange lights, still haunted by something we couldn’t escape.

I went home over the weekend and it was kind of a disappointment. It was great to see my friends, but the two I wanted to see most weren't there. It's weird and it made me think a lot. I don't really know where home is anymore. It used to be in Walpole, MA, a town only notable for its maximum security prison. It was a boring town, and I spent a lot of time bitching about it. Now when I go back to Walpole, it seems like a shell of what it used to be. Without the people I grew up with, it feels empty and hollow.
When I first got to UMass, it didn't feel at all like home. I hated it at first. All I wanted to do was go home. Now when I do go back to Walpole I want to be back here. It feels almost like I don't have a home anymore.
If I was alotted a moment to think back to my roots as an emo kid, I would say this: there is one thing that connects me to who I used to be, and that is music. Right now I'm listening to Blink182 and Billy Talent, and all I can think of is the stupid shit from two years ago that I hated at the time but miss so much right now. My whole high school career was spent wishing I was in college. Now that I'm in college, I realize how easy high school is, and what an awesome time I had.
I'm never going to have friends by circumstance again.
I'm never going to have to stay friends with someone just because I always have been.
I'm never going to come home from school and shoot the shit with my parents or have them nag me about my school work.
No more proms. No more film festivals. No more skipping study halls.
I loved it all more than I'll ever be able to admit.

I had a wonderful Chinese food dinner for faculty chats last night. It was with the chair of the theater department, I forget his name. His name is inconsequential to this story. In any case, we were sitting around, enjoying mediocre Chinese food from Panda East (I suspect it was not in fact real panda, but rather imitation panda, i.e. chicken with water chesnuts.). We were conversating and I felt kind of like I was eating dinner at a friend's house, trying to make polite conversation, trying to be entertaining without being offensive (something which is becoming more and more difficult each day). At some point, Mr. Theater Chair (T.C. I will call him. There was a cop in my town that everyone called T.C. and he seemed like a pretty good guy.) asked us how we liked UMass. The collective response was that everyone LOVES it here. Except for me, apparently, who sat at the end of the table trying to shovel rice into my mouth with chopstick. (Earlier I had threatened my roommate that if she did not opt for the chopsticks, I would go through her stuff when she wasn't in the room, so I couldn't be a hypocrite.) T.C. asked us why we loved it so, and again I mumbled "I don't". Everyone else started to say the people, the party scene, the excitement of not knowing whether or not you'll be stabbed when you go out on weekends. In any case, I started thinking. Then I stopped because it hurt. But then I started back up again, and I realized it isn't as bad here as I once thought. I also realized I was being a pansy for not saying what I really thought. But whatevs. I might not be able to do film here, but I can deal. As long as I don't take a screwdriver to the temple, I'll be okay.

I’m the kind of person that reads far too much into things. Not into what people do or say, necessarily, but more the involuntary afflictions of the world around me. Today I was walking back from class at Thompson, trying to call Joelle to tell her that Brian might be coming to visit me tonight. My phone wouldn’t work. I tried calling her three times, and each time it gave the same response: network busy. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t meant to be on the phone at that time, that something would happen for which I needed to be alert, and that something would happen that was going to change my life. At this point I started listening to the people walking ahead of me. There were two girls with their backs to me, enthralled in what a young man was saying to him. He was reasonably attractive; nothing that would take my breath away. He wore jeans and a jean jacket that didn’t match. At first I thought he was obnoxious for talking so loudly, but then I saw something in him that reminded him of myself when I spoke about something I was passionate about. Then I started listening.
“The only way to get an A in that class is to read the book and come up with an original thought about politics, which is impossible. You can’t come up with an original thought, everyone has had them already?”
I realized he was right. The girls he was talking to batted their eyelashes and asked him to help them study. I wanted to say something to him, a greeting of some sort that would welcome this boy into my destiny. But how do you say, “Hello, I think you’re meant to change my life”, without coming across as completely and entirely insane. You can’t. so I decided to facebook him.
Facebook is an outlet for all personal encounters you’re too scared to have in person. It also allows for awkward meetings with people you’ve friended but never met.
But why am I relying on someone else to change my life? As I walked through the echoey tunnel between southwest and the outside world, it dawned on me that perhaps this boy was not what was meant to change my life. Perhaps I was simply meant to have these thoughts and then go back to my room, shut the door, and write this before it all left my mind and mixed with the blaring rap music that echoed from the third floor. The truth is, at this point I am utterly relying on someone else to change my life, and in that, change me.

The famous Seth Parker told me to write a part from my paper as a screenplay, so here it is.




EXT. POOL AREA - NIGHT

A tired-looking, middle-aged woman sits on the edge of a pool, dangling her feet in the water. This is DIANA. Moonlight reflects off the water, illuminated by lights at various points throughout the yard. A teenage girl comes and sits beside her. This is JENN.

DIANA
(absently)
The fireflies are out tonight.

JENN
(glancing around)
They're pretty.

Diana takes a drag of her cigarette and the smoke swirls overhead.

DIANA
(staring straight ahead)
When we were little we used to try to catch them in Mason jars.
You know what Mason jars are, right?

Jenn nods.

DIANA
We would catch them in these jars and cut air holes in the top,
so we could keep them. But they always ended up dying. Even
when we cut them airholes . . . the fireflies still died . . .

Diana takes another drag from her cigarette, staring out at the water sadly. Jenn watches the smoke circle in the air and sighs.

I just finished my first official college paper. Yes, it's due tomorrow. Yes, I'm a procrastinator. I think I've always been this way. I'm liking college more and more as the days go by. I went home last weekend, and it definitely wasn't what I thought it would be like. First of all, I had to take a bus to Boston. That should've been a 2 hour trip, tops, but it took 4 hours. I had to change busses in Springfield, and then wait for 15 minutes at the Worcester terminal. It was a mess. When I finally got to Boston, I had to wait to be picked up at the bus station. It got weirder when I got into my home town. I felt like a kid who faked sick. The town seemed empty, like I was supposed to be somewhere else, and everyone knew it. When I was little and I stayed home sick, my mother used to always take me out to lunch to cheer me up, unless I was deliriously ill or something. Whenever we saw people we knew I would get embarassed because they knew I should've been in school. I ended up going to a concert with some old friends, one who commutes, one who goes to community college, one who works, and another who goes to Tulane, but was relocated and now commutes to BU. It was weird, but I wanted to be back at UMass while I was there. It was a good concert, though. So I guess going home has cured most of my homsickness. Who'd have thought?

Mr. Seth Parker has just graciously let us out of College Writing early, so I figured the least I could do was to actually write one of these things. Since nothing interesting has happened yet today, I'll write about something that's been floating around my brain for the past couple of days.
Everyone upholds icons from the past with nostalgia. For example The Brady Bunch. Whenever someone criticizes modern entertainment, this show seems to come up. True, the show was successful at being both wholesome and popular, but it's hardly something to which to base the entire decline of culture against. I mean, behind the scenes Greg and Marcia were banging each other all the time. Nostalgia is bullshit. Now we see Peter Brady eating whipped cream off the winner of America's Next Top Model on VH1 and I can't help but wonder if this is symbolic. Are our icons of the past conforming to the oversexed and commercialized media of today? Or have they always been oversexed and commercialized, and now just have an appropriate forum in which to be themselves? I have no answer for these questions, but I will state again, nostalgia is bullshit. Earlier this week, I found myself missing high school and reminiscing about last year. This is bullshit. I hated most of high school. I spent at least half of it wishing I was in college. But somehow I have become able to convince myself that it was the greatest years of my life. Dear God, I hope this is not the case. If so, my life will be an utter sham. The truth is, you always need something to miss, you always need someone to be away from, you always need something to be nostalgic about. I remember being in the car with my friend and his father a couple months ago, and we were talking about memories that we both had from the past. After we had gone through sharing our recollections of middle school, his father turned around. "Nostalgia," he said, "it's just not what it used to be."