Working Hard And Not Working

It's summer time! I hope everyone is enjoying their breezy shorts, the local urine filled pools and monstrous heat blasts that pour out when you open your car doors. As for me, it's summer school. Now before you jump to conclusions, I went because I chose to, not because I had to. I actually did very well this past semester, but one of my degree requirements is a foreign language, which in my case is French. I'm not terribly good at foreign languages, so I figured it was best to take it by itself. Upsides: I can focus solely on French, and it's only a six week class. Downsides: It's four days a week for 2 and a half hours a class at 10:30.

Je n'aime pas.

Behold my prowess! Je suis increable!

As I was saying, I'm doing well in college. Unlike high school, I'm enjoying myself and taking it seriously. My most recent semester I managed to pull in a 3.7 GPA, so you know... Yay me. I busted my exceptional rear to get that grade! I have been quite the busy B.

See what I did there?

Vomit-inducing pun: Check.

Happy though I may be, I'm admittedly broke. I haven't worked since I stopped fixing guitars, so I've long since depleted my funds. I don't need much, but something would be just lovely. Now, I'm sure many of you are wondering why I don't just get some menial job to hold me over. Well there are a few reasons! List time!

1) Because of a variety of reasons I'd rather not get into, my homework, papers and such take me roughly three times longer to do than the average person. I had 5 classes (12 credits) last semester, each with projects and papers varying from 3 to ten pages. For one 4 page paper, I will have to put in around eight hours of work before revisions. The average paper was around 6 pages long, and I had between 2 and 4 papers at a time. I was pressed for time almost every day. Next semester I'm taking 15 credits. You do the math.

2) I'm not very good at tolerating things I don't like. That sounds pretty "duh", but think about the things you tolerate for money's sake. Yep. It's a lot, I bet. I am void of that skill. I've had those kinds of jobs and I get... Well frankly, I get extremely irritable, quite often at times that I shouldn't. It really comes down to my inability to suffer fools. Want an example? When I was fixing guitars, I came in one day to find that my tools had been used, left out, one was broken and my office was a mess. I went up to the store manager and told him what happened and was met with a professional "What do you want me to do about it?" I will leave out the explicits, but I spent fifteen minutes yelling at my 50 year old boss, telling him why it was his responsibility to keep things in order. Did I dominate the argument? Hell yeah. Is it smart to yell at your boss when he already doesn't like you? No, not really. The point is that I need to be in charge of myself to do well and be efficient.

Done bitching?

Good.

I'm said all that to say this: I'm going to sell stories. Curious? I'll explain. I enjoy writing, so I have a little collection of stories which I would very much like to share with people. I recently found out that people can sell writings via Amazon.com for download on e-readers or online. Cool, right? I'll be doing that to help support myself and take care of some college payments. If you'd like to read some of my work, help me get known, or just help me take some of the weight off my parents, feel free to download! I'm going to sell them for 99 cents per collection and will let you know here and through my twitter when I put them up. I would love to hear from anyone who reads my stories! I'm open to all suggestions, critiques, requests, comments, hate mail, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Harpo, Goucho, Greg, Peter, Bobby...

Ah. Ah hah.

I hate your references.

Have You Sheen It? I Heard It Sucks.

I feel safe in assuming that everyone is fully aware of the antics of Charlie Sheen, and rightfully so. When he derailed, he derailed hard. But, much to the astonishment of everyone near him, his surreal madness didn't ruin his career and send him into a publicity hell-hole.

They squandered that on Paul Reubens.

I <3 you, Pee-Wee.

I don't care what you did in the privacy of a public place.

What actually occurred was quite the opposite. Sheen's popularity blossomed like a deep-fried blooming onion from Outback Steakhouse. The more unappealing it got, the more we couldn't wait to eat up his insanity. After all, who doesn't want to turn on the TV and see a coked out loon talking about dark magic on CNN? The world was getting boring and terrifying and I firmly believe we needed a crackpot to steal the spotlight. Every one has to admit that for a brief moment we laughed and said, "The world isn't all that bad."

Maybe he is a warlock...

I'm about to tell you something either you didn't know or have known for a long time. Sheen, mecca of lunacy that he is, is playing up his crazy for the camera. He was genuinely nuts for maybe two weeks. Now, hes just playing a character that people expect to see him play. Sheen is the Pied Piper and we are the flocking forest creatures. Like him or not, you want to know what bizarre statement he made on Entertainment Tonight. Don't think I'm patronizing anyone for being curious, though. I love hearing how he is similar to an F-18 as much as the next guy, just be aware that he is acting. 

Real whackos actually dress like jets...

 And run around humming March of the Valkyries.

The American people are constantly aware of Sheen. They know what he does and who he does it to. So it was no surprise when Sheen began touring as some kind of one man travelling circus confessional. The tickets sold out within minutes and they weren't cheap, but the chance to see him do... What ever the sweet hell he was going to do seemed priceless.

It was like going to see Siegfried and Roy.

Except they were hammered.

So was the tiger.

I, too, thought seeing him would be awesome, but, alas, it was not meant to be. I gave up trying to get tickets some time ago and totally forgot it was even happening until recently. Someone mentioned that the first show was an ENORMOUS bomb. Disappointed though I was, I was really more curious as to why it was so bad. I was told that it wasn't funny, Sheen promised a 90 minute show and left after 45, and he was supposed to hang out at some bar for a Q&A, but showed up for ten minutes and left without answering any questions. People were apparently outraged and demanded their money back. A perfectly logical response.

Except its not.

I'll explain, so put your listening ears on.

Charlie Sheen is famous for being crazy, but he is only in the position he's in because he is a narcissistic jerk who breaks contracts and costs people a lot of money. Anyone picking up what I'm laying down? People paid a lot of money under the condition that they would see 90 minutes of Charlie Sheen being crazy on stage. Charlie Sheen notoriously does not care about contractual agreements. He was done sooner than he was supposed to be (a la Two and a Half Men) and people were just so very livid. Then when he didn't actually A any Q's, the world may as well have stopped spinning. I get that people were upset they got jipped, but... Well... Duh? You paid to see a self-centered asshole who costs people money, but got furious when he was a self-centered asshole who cost you money. He wasn't a sheep in wolf's clothing. He was a wolf that was wearing a shirt that said, "Wolf" with a big damn arrow pointing to his toothy grin. I'm not saying its right, but the fact that people were surprised says that maybe Sheen isn't the crazy one. At the end of the day, Sheen is bigger now than he ever was as an actor. He does what he wants all day long and comes home to his mansion filled with pretty blonde girls. He got millions of people to fall in love with him for being a cocky jerk. Deplorable or not, that guy has his life lock, stock and barrel.

Well maybe more like cut, roll and snort.

But you get the idea.

Perhaps A Valiant Return Is In Order

Hello, my compatriots! Yes, I know it has been quite a long time since I posted anything at all, but understand that beneath my calm exterior, I am a frantic disorganized loon. That being said, I feel a recap of the past few months is in order. School and various other hurdles have really done a number on my ability  to do anything other than sleep and eat.

If I recall correctly, that's all you ever did.

So! Starting off! School. Oh sweet bane of of my existence, school. In the beginning, I was admittedly a mess. I was not sleeping at all because my English class was so early, sleeping actually lost out to staying awake all night. I was in a continuous cycle of drowsy nausea, which is (and get this) an enormous bitch. I would shamble in to class, heft my dead weight into a chair and then have to dissect the finer points of story structure. I like English. I like analyzing stories. I hate 7 AM. I hate it with the same passion Charlie Sheen has for winning... And porn stars... And tigers... And warlocks... And F-18s...

Honestly, am I the only person who wants to vacation in his head?

Philosophy is a slightly different story. I have it later in the day, so the class isn't drowned in grogginess and the compulsion to vomit and pass out. Instead, people don't seem to like me. Like at all. I'm not sure what I did to them, but they make it a point to not sit near me and ignore everything I say. It is the strangest thing I've come across in a long time. They look at me like I have a second head attached to my shoulder. And it does nothing but quote the Brady Bunch in an endless loop.

EPIC!

If I had to guess why, I would say it is because the only thing people know about me is that I really like some weird guy named Django and I have a man-crush on Carl Sagan. The Django thing was part of a class interview, but the Sagan thing was partly due to a lack of control on my part. It was one of the first classes and to demonstrate a point, we watched a clip of Carl Sagan. When she said we would be doing this, I squealed, "Gah! I love Carl Sagan!" like a fourteen year old girl. Regardless of their uncomfortable stares, I ended up being the student with the fifth highest grade out of thirty. They shut their yammer-traps.

Note: When people already think you're weird, confirming it with a loving outburst about a scientist in the middle of philosophy class is a bad idea.

Not everything recently has been funny, at least in the way I can make my bad situations enjoyable. My grandmother died on Super Bowl Sunday. After two years in and out of the hospital, several surgeries, endless infection and more close calls than anyone would want to have, she passed away. I was sad, sure, but more than anything else, I was happy it was over. The funeral was somber and the burial was rough, but we all managed to stick it out. We sat Shiva for the three following days and everyone everybody ever knew showed up. I was exhausted by the end, but it was nice to see so many people come out for Mongo. She was a real firecracker.

Good-bye.

I'll pull away from the sad stuff now. Once I returned to school, I had about a weeks worth of work to make up, followed by mid-terms. Needless to say, I was yelling for a solid eight days. At anything, really. My parents, my car, my homework, walls, metaphysics (Yelling at philosophy assignments got weird). I was able to finish, but I hit a... snag with my English mid-term.

Let's hear the excuse, ding-bat.

I am allowed to take any exams in a testing center with extended time. This gives me not only more time to complete my essays, but it gives me a week in which to do them. Through bad timing and general laziness, I waited until the very last day to do the mid-term, which was an essay on the Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken." Let me establish one thing first. I am not a Robert Frost fan. At all. So doing an entire essay on his poem made me rather displeased.

Displeased = "F@#K!"

Well I got to the testing center, grabbed my instruction sheet, sat down and, with sigh, realized I had no damn idea what I was doing. I sat at the desk for well over an hour without a single word written. "Diggity-damn," I thought to myself. This was clearly a bad thing to have happen, but there was one more factor that made my time in the testing center significantly worse. In the testing center, a proctor is required to be in the testing room to make sure nobody is cheating. This has never bothered me before. This time, however, the proctor watched me the entire time I was there. I was across the room, and this woman stared at me for over an hour straight. Every single time I looked up, there she was. And to make things worse, several times throughout my exam she got up, circled my desk, sat back down and continued to stare.

FOR AN HOUR! DO YOU KNOW JUST HOW LONG THAT IS?

If you want to understand what it felt like, do the following:

1) Get a friend.

2) Set a timer for an hour, turn on the Sopranos, or use anything else that marks an entire hour.

3) Do something that takes concentration and effort. Clean the house, write a story, have a phone conversation, anything you need to focus to do.

4) Have whoever is with you STARE DIRECTLY INTO YOUR EYES FOR THE ENTIRE HOUR.

5) Try your hardest to ignore the person and do whatever your activity of choice is without interruption.

Try. I dare you.

I didn't write my essay. Instead, I wrote a letter to my teacher explaining what happened and how I didn't have "the fainest clue as to what I was doing" and how "the proctor has been watching me since I got here like she saw my face on the CIA most wanted list and was frankly very uncomfortable." I left fully prepared for a zero. We just recently got our grades back and I'll say I really didn't want to know mine. As it turned out, my teacher thought my essay was hysterical. She was so impressed by the sheer balls it took to do what I did that she was willing to let me retake it with no penalty. Knowing I could only get away with that once, I managed to pump something out to bring my grade up. I think I did better this time around.

Let it be known.

Sometimes, telling the rules to screw off works out great.

So, here we are. We are pretty much up to date. School has evened out and I'm going to apply for a tutoring job at the academic help center. Here's hoping I get it. I've been writing some short stories and have been thinking about posting them here so you guys have something from me every now and then. They aren't funny, though. So far, people that have read them have liked them, so it's up to you guys. Let me know if you would be interested in reading them.

I won't be offended if you don't.

That much.

Please... Please read them.

Oh God... READ THEM.