Stormy Weekend

     It's been a stormy weekend; not violent, just there, enough to remind you that you live in Oklahoma, and ponder curiously how much the weather plays a role in our daily lives (even if we aren't storm-crazy, like Stephen, Justin and Ashleigh from the BCM.) Speaking of which, Justin and Ashleigh just started a photography business, so that's cool.
     So I've stood outside in the light misty rain and watched a lot of enormous lightning, which has been followed by the sizzling type of thunder.

     Spent most of the weekend retyping old essays, I still like the one from Comp II about fairy tales. The 2002 Spider-Man is on for background noise at the moment. The Manchurian Candidate, a 1962 suspense movie starring Frank Sinatra, was the OETA Movie of the Week, and it was really good. Also interesting was the 2001 movie The Others, starring Nicole Kidman as a paranoid overprotective mother in post-WWII England. It was this week's movie in Gothic Film and Lit, and it was a terrific ghost story.

     At the start of Wednesday's psych class, knowing most of the class was freaked out by the test on Monday afternoon, Dr. Marrero sits down on a stool and looks at us gravely. "What do you guys know about buffalo?" he asks. (I thought, though I didn't say, "DON"T PET THEM!" SGYC reference. Still no word about a 2017 edition.) Silence in room. "Well, what do you know about cows?" More silence. "When there's a storm, cows will go crazy, running this way and that. They try to avoid a storm when it's on the way. But buffalo are smart. When buffalo see a storm coming, they run through the storm, because they know they'll get out of it quicker that way." (Here my eyes light up and I figure out the point of this rousing inspirational speech, delivered quietly in a pleasant monotone.) "When you see an obstacle, just push back against it as best you can and try to move forward through it. I don't know, you guys might not think this stuff is interesting, but I enjoy learning about animals. Specially buffalo. And horses!" So, BE LIKE RUMBLE.

     Dr. Marrero's speech reminded me of what Professor Semrow said once. I'm using one of my essays for her Intro to Lit course as a Capstone artifact.
     I need to write a short story and rewrite my main Capstone essay and reflective paper, but other than that I don't think there's much homework at the moment.

     With it being the start of another month on Saturday, the list of stuff on Netflix changes. In April, almost all of the Whedonverse will disappear, which I am not too thrilled about. (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is still safe, as part of the MCU.) I don't care about Angel, or at least haven't seen it, because I'm not a huge Buffy fan. (Though a Whedon-led show about a private investigator does sound good when you just hear that sentence.) And Buffy is really useful as resource material when you're an English major, due to the coming-of-age and Gothic aspects. And the impact on pop culture. Firefly is a bizarre mashup of Western and sci-fi, and it works brilliantly, particularly when it comes to snappy dialogue or character development. Dollhouse is fascinating because most episodes the main characters play several wildly-divergent roles at a time, so it's interesting to study from an acting perspective. (Also, most of the cast was either from Buffy or Firefly, or would be reused in Agents.)

A Difficult Week

     It's been exactly five years since the CVS Scotch Tape Incident. Feels like much longer. Sunday is the twelfth anniversary of the night Mimi died. That is always difficult. When I started this blog there was a post about it.
     She died when I was eleven, and so now she's been gone longer than I knew her. That is especially hard to understand.

     Just found this Bear Grylls article on grief in my Facebook newsfeed. Sure, I made fun of Man Vs. Wild, but it's that kind of show. Running Wild is interesting, and I enjoyed his memoir Mud, Sweat and Tears, at least what I heard of the audiobook version. He's a really interesting person. This was a good article, I thought. And it rereading it out loud gave me a chance for voiceover practice on doing his accent.
     In July 2013, Sunny died, and so I wrote about that. It was hard to deal with. Then in November 2013 Copper was hit by a car. That was bad, too. About a year after that Nano died late fall 2014, which has been hard to process, even though she was more than ready. Maybe that's why.  And Grandpa's cancer won three days before my birthday last May. I definitely haven't understood that yet.

     All of my stories for the last year or so seem to involve death of some sort, and it's the same way with classmates Brian and Lauren's stories, too. One of those jokes around the English Department. I kind of specialized in murder ballads in poetry classes, along the lines of Garth Brooks's "The Thunder Rolls" or Carrie Underwood's "Blown Away," "Choctaw County Affair" and "Two Black Cadillacs." Maybe it's an Oklahoma thing.
     Sure, most English majors employ the rule of thumb that when in doubt, you throw a murder into the plot, but even if we aren't trying to include it, characters still die. Brian's best stories from Fiction Writing were a Western revenge tale and one about a lonely, slowing-perishing baseball-loving widower. Lauren is a master of William Goldman-style suspense thrillers who loves Stephen King, and it shows - in a good way. Two weeks ago the couple's dog was put down in one of my flashfiction stories for Pop Market, and a novel I'm in the early stages of working on features a woman with terminal cancer as one of the main characters, while a minor character was a dog who was run over.
   
     Most of the weekend will be spent retyping old essays for the portfolio portion of Capstone, I think. Caleb gets back from Mexico Sunday night.

Anxiousness Isn't Fun

     There's a San Jose-Minnesota hockey game on quietly for background noise, but this just isn't a productive day. At all. I'm not sure why. The storyboard presentation this morning for Pop Market went fairly well, considering that I can't draw very well, and don't especially like speaking in public. (Acting is different - that's great.) It was for a short story that was due a couple weeks back.
     Tried to take a nap this afternoon, but that didn't work. Got four hours sleep Sunday night, and then overslept this morning (on six hours), waking up at 8:13 for an 8:30 class. Lots of aimless walking just to be doing something.

     The Thunder were destroyed by the Monstars Warriors last night, which didn't help yesterday, either. There was a fight, and lots of "accidental" bodychecking on our players. Which made Twitter more entertaining, at least, seeing Elizabeth and Daniel P. both going berserk. Yesterday was maybe worse than today. It's hard to tell, it's just been a very bad stretch of days.
     I think I bombed yesterday's psych test on theories of criminology. (Update: just found the grade - 82, which is frustrating because most of my wrong answers were just stupid mistakes.)

     The capstone project is due in like two weeks and it's not going very well at all. I was talking to Lauren in the hallway this morning, and we agreed that Capstone feels like that point in working on a novel where everything looks far too crappy to bother with finishing, but where you're too far into the project to give up completely. That's not a good place to find your writing in. But it's where all of mine seems to be, more or less, for the last roughly six months or so. And so your confidence is shattered all to pieces, which continues everything else schoolwise into a downward spiral. Writing is what English majors do. So if that's not working....uh, anxiety spikes up even more than usual.
     It seems like I've been flickering between "extremely stressed/exhausted/despondent but still capable of decent work" and "unable to function" all of college, really, but more so as time's gone by, and since coming to Eagleton Claremore this year. More especially this semester.

     Of Gothic Film and Lit stuff, I think the only things I'll probably ever come back to are Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Stephen King's Shining, because they're both written extremely well. (An occasional dose of King is helpful when studying how to put sentences and paragraphs together, and looking at how word choice give insight into characters, because while the man has a twisted imagination, yes, he knows his craft extremely well.) This week's book is Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which has that Shirley-Jackson-sense-of-indefinite-wrongness for sure. And there is a house fire that is described far too well - that was unpleasant. Panic attacks aren't fun.
     Been rereading L.M. Montgomery's The Story Girl to counteract school stress. I don't like it all that much, but almost any Montgomery is well-done and has noteworthy quotable passages. Also, The Golden Road is the sequel to The Story Girl, and I'm probably going to reread The Golden Road before graduation, because it's that kind of book. And it's one of my three favorite Mongomerys ever.

     Speaking of some of my favorite authors, the RSU Theater Program's play this semester is a fairly-accurate adaptation of Tom Sawyer. Even secondhand and distilled, Mark Twain humor still works very well. I have my doubts about how well it will actually be performed, though - it runs in about three weeks and there haven't been any rehearsals yet, and no one has any details on them, either. They were supposed to start yesterday, and at least a quarter of the original cast has dropped out.
     Mingo Valley is doing The Wizard of Oz this semester, which will be fantastic. Not sure if I'll be able to see it, but Paige plays the Wicked Witch, which sounds like a great role.

     No word of SGYC news, though GBC-Tulsa leaders are scouting possible locations for a new youth camp beginning in 2018. Don't know if I'd even be available to help this year at SGYC, because I don't know if I'll get a summer internship with the Creek Nation. But other than that I don't really have many options available work-wise. Been revising/editing fiction to maybe release on Kindle, and batting around a couple also-for-Kindle nonfiction projects, but that won't make a living, though it would be a place to start from.

     On the plus side, saw Doctor Strange last week (FINALLY), so I'm current on MCU movies. It was weird, but worthy. There was almost no humor, and what there was was excessively deadpan or physical comedy. Trevor loved it, said it was the most hilarious MCU movie yet. (He's wrong. That's Guardians.) Seeing Benedict Cumberbatch use an American accent was very unsettling. Rachel McAdams plays the love interest, which was a good casting choice. There was a ton of Eastern spiritualism, of course, but there were also - maybe more so than any other MCU movie yet - lots of Christian messages, because the director is a very outspoken Christian. PluggedIn has lots to say on this matter in this post. So overall, it feels a lot like most of the books we've studied in classes - "some good, some bad, a little of both," to paraphrase Peter Quill. And lots of room for discernment. (That link talks a lot about Buffy, whose series finale was viewing for Gothic Film and Lit a couple weeks ago. It was a very good way to end the show, though I'm still not totally comfortable with it overall.) 
     The newest MCU Netflix show, Iron Fist, sounds like a horrible idea from Dad's description, and reviews don't particularly care for it at all. I'll probably skip it. Daredevil I liked aspects of, but barely managed to trudge through the first season due to the excessive violence and glacial pace. (One of the highlights in this very bleak and dark tale of a blind lawyer ninja - the villain makes and eats breakfast in one scene. It's almost as terrifying as Jurassic Park dinosaurs. Other highlights: Thought-provoking quotes on vision, and Fulton from The Mighty Ducks is the best friend.) Jessica Jones is a very interesting character, but I've only watched a couple episodes, and haven't seen Luke Cage, either.
     I think I'm going to watch Spider-Man now - it's inspiring and happy. And maybe The Princess Bride or While You Were Sleeping. Or Parks and Rec. Still TWO MORE WEEKS until the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. return, and I want to know what's going on inside the world of the Framework!!!!!

Being a Glad You Ate, Part Two

     In April 2012, while still trying to get a handle of how blogging worked, one of the posts was called "Being a Glad You Ate." I had tried on the graduation gown that Mom found off Craigslist from someone who graduated from ORU, if I remember right. The original tassel (from 1997) was yellow-gold, so if not ORU then probably Broken Arrow.  (The tassel I used was black and orange, because when you're homeschooled, you can choose whatever school colors you want - and those are good Morris Eagle colors. Also, technically we live within Preston school limits, and they're the colors of the Pirates, too. And of the Dewar Dragons, whose softball and occasional basketball I covered for a couple seasons.)
     Anyway, the experience reminded me of a passage from one of my favorite books of children's literature, Bill Wallace's Upchuck and the Rotten Willy. It's narrated by a cat named Chuck, and things are rough: His best friend Tom moves away, not long after their other best friend, Louie, got smushed on the highway. And there's a huge dog the size of a house that moves in next door, and then his Katie leaves for somewhere called "College." It's one of my favorite books in all the world.

     Here's an excerpt -
     "My Katie had left before. I had come to live with her when I was just a kitten. Almost every day she had left for a place called school. She told me she was a Senior and that "seniors are really cool." I didn't know what a senior was, but being one made my Katie happy - so I was happy, too.
     Going to school had been okay. When my Katie had come home, she played with me. She dragged an old sock round and round on her bed while I chased it. She hugged me and petted me and rubbed behind my ears. At night I slept on her pillow next to her. Then, after a few months, my Katie told me she was a "Glad You Ate." Now, I had no idea what a Glad You Ate was. My Katie told me she was happy to be one - only us cats don't just listen with our ears. We watch and feel and smell. My Katie made mouth noises that said she was happy, only the feel she gave off was happy and sad and worried, all rolled together. She smelled confused and uncertain - like maybe being a senior had been more fun than being a glad you ate - only she didn't know for sure."
     I quoted more paragraphs in the earlier post.

     This soon-to-be Glad You Ate went to a career fair this morning, which wasn't very helpful. They just aren't designed for English majors. But I got some free pens, and talked to the people from Cox Media Group (K95, Mix 96, KRMG), Griffin Communications (KOTV Tulsa/KWTV OKC) and the general manager of the Tulsa Athletics minor-league soccer team, and handed out a couple resumes. Also took grad-school promotional material from NSU, Pitt State, and Arkansas, because it makes the people feel useful if their fliers disappear by the end of the day. (I've helped Dad do these before when he worked for the co-op.) I think I still have the grad-school promo material from Missouri State and a couple other places from last year's career fair.

     Today's bookstore sale find was a photo essay book called A Letter to My Cat, which, though the letters themselves are a little gushy and awkward, wasn't bad for three dollars, because the pictures are amazing. The concept was terrific, which was why I bought it - there are so many nooks of nonfiction possibilities out there, if you just followed your nose and chased them...still working on that. Have to get through this semester first. And while at the bookstore I got my college cap and gown, since they had finally been stocked. They were arranged by height, so I found the right size on the second try. This tassel is red, since that's the main color of Hillcats.

     Before today's Psychology of the Criminal Mind class today, I noticed a girl wearing a Youth Tour T-shirt, so I asked if she'd been part of the trip. She went to D.C. the year after I did, and so we talked for a bit about common sights and "Did y'all go here to this cool place?" Their group went to the Pentagon - on the wrong day. So that sounded like an interesting memory. I told about how our bus broke down, leaving us stranded on the side of the highway in the rain. (We spent most of the waiting time playing Ninja.) We both felt sorry for all the kids who don't get to have Spike Mama as their tour guide.

     The other day I finished a book on philosophy (which I then realized wasn't a category on Tim Challies's reading challenge) called The Virtues of Captain America. It wasn't bad, though all the academic jargon was hard to follow at points.
     Also reread S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders the other day, because I wanted to see if there were Gothic elements in it (there were a few, but not enough that it could be labeled Gothic). Also, the mid-60's are one of those chronological canyons that histories don't cover in much detail, so that is part of what makes it so interesting, especially since it's set in Tulsa. And Pony's narration is something else. You can tell that a girl wrote it, but still, she was in high school! You can also clearly tell that the publishers edited out most of the swear words, which I can understand in that it would be better for sales, but given the setting, that feels necessary to leave intact for authenticity purposes.

     Edited a classmate's terribly-written adventure story for Pop Market; but hopefully it will help make the tale stronger. I might have been a little biased when it came to the genre, though - last night I was rereading mine and Ashland's Two For the Treasure, trying to find ways to unobtrusively throw in backstory details without disrupting the flow of the action. For my Pop Market story this week, it was a hybrid between Bill Wallace, Matt Christopher and Philip Gulley. Not expecting good feedback from the guy assigned to edit it, so I emailed it to the writing friends I know are good editors, hoping to get some information on what worked and what didn't.

     Rags is a good cat. She'll be glad that spring break is next week, even if I do have a massive amount of homework to do.

Good Music Videos and Songs of the Day

     It's been a while since I talked about Songs of the Day. Today, I woke up with the Keith Urban song "For You" from the Act of Valor soundtrack playing. Here's the link. This is a great music video, particularly those close-up shots of the fretboard. And the background explosions. This was played all the time on TCN (The Country Network) during my senior year of high school.
     Right after waking up, the next song to play incessantly was Jamey Johnson's "In Color." That's a good music video, too. (Also first seen on TCN.)
     And then for some reason Big Mama's song "Appreciate the Lady" from The Fox and the Hound was another Song of the Day. It's weird, the songs that get stuck in your head.

    I really like the way this acoustic version of The Band Perry's "Independence" was filmed. And I love the way it sounds.
     Another all-the-time-shown-on-TCN video (and a fantastic story song) is Brett Eldredge's "Raymond." This was the first video we ever saw on that channel, actually. I thought of it while walking through Arlington National Cemetery on Youth Tour.
     Another TCN story song is "The Call" from Matt Kennon. And the Eli Young Band songs "Even If It Breaks Your Heart" (which is a great one to play) and "Crazy Girl" were played over and over, too. "Crazy Girl" was a case where the video is actually better than the song itself, but the lyrics grew on me through sheer repetition.

     I talked some about music in "Guitars" and "Story Songs," I guess. The picture in "Guitars" was of Sam's acoustic/electric Steve. He and Abby Lee worked pretty well together, though she and I learned during a jam session at the Grahams' Fourth of July picnic that practicing outside in the middle of summer will burn your fingers off.

     Keith Urban's "Days Go By" was one of the first songs that I really got down once I'd learned how to play from Dale. Also, Keith's hair is awesome in this video. "Kiss a Girl"s video drove me nuts, with the cartoon background behind the band and everything, but it was another of those first songs I mastered to the point where Mom and siblings would be like, "Wait - that wasn't the CD?" And I liked the production elements showcased in the "Put You In a Song" video. (TCN played a lot of Keith Urban videos...) Besides, it's a good tune. They also played Craig Morgan's "That What I Love About Sunday" a lot. I love the song, and the lighting and editing - particularly the fade transitions - of this video are amazing. (And I thought the brown-haired girl in this video was pretty.)

     Keith and Brad Paisley's "Start a Band" is one of my favorite collaborations of all time, and the video is awesome, too. It was on CMT all the time while living in Tahlequah for most of 2009. Other great songs/videos that were playing then were Brad's "Welcome to the Future" (which I parodied after YT), Josh Turner's "Would You Go With Me?" and Justin Moore's "Small Town USA" (which was Trevor's All-Time Favorite Country Song for forever). Brad's "Water" was a tune that the Okmulgee homeschool group loved, though I was horrified by the opening shot of the blue guitar floating in the pool.

     TCN played Brad's videos for "Old Alabama," "Southern Comfort Zone" and "Beat This Summer" a lot, too. I first heard "Old Alabama" on the radio, and from the first listen to the intro guitar riff I knew it was a Brad/Alabama team-up. They use very distinctive effects pedals. Plus it's cool that Jeff Gordon is in the video.
     "Southern Comfort Zone" and "Beat This Summer" both came out during my freshman year of college, and "Beat This Summer" is another one of the rare "video story is better than the lyrics" examples. "Southern Comfort Zone" was one of the OFTEN played tunes, on the radio and on Abby Lee. (So was "Independence." They both fit the situation well.) Taylor Swift's "Ours" was one of the first songs I learned to fingerpick, and Taylor's soldier boyfriend is played by Matt Saracen from Friday Night Lights. And FNL's Lyla Garrity is the girl in Jason Aldean's "Tattoos On This Town." Those were also TCN videos and are both great songs to play. The Owl City/Carly Rae Jepsen duet "Good Time" also was playing everywhere freshman year, and as a video it's fine. Not the level of "Fireflies" or "Deer in the Headlights" or "Vanilla Twlight" or "When Can I See You Again?", but still pretty good. And Carly Rae stole another summer in 2015 with "I Really Like You," first because the song is so catchy, but then because the music video is almost entirely TOM HANKS LIP-SYNCING THE WHOLE THING, which is too hysterical. And if Carly Rae Jepsen comes up, so does "Call Me Maybe," of course. And as Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz pointed out, it's physiologically impossible not to like the song. But that instantly brings to mind (for Thunder fans) this parody made in preparation for the 2012 NBA Finals with the Heat. (What a fantastic season that was.)

     This turned out longer to be a longer post than I expected.

Friday Night Thoughts

     Week after next will be spring break (which I doubt will be much of a break). But still, that's a pause from classes for a bit, which is kind of nice. The Thunder are losing to the Suns in Phoenix right now on the almost-silent TV, and Pandora is running in another window. I got a short story finished that's due next week, and a good chunk of another assignment mapped out. It's been a pretty usual Friday night - sort of productive, a little lonely, but with some effort at following a routine to give things some structure - that's why I'm typing this blog post, and why the game is on.

     Overall, this week was pretty average; last week was rough. Uploaded some overdue stuff to the writing projects blog, which I'd been meaning to do for a while. I need to work on the book-review blog, too.

     Texted Dylan and Jon earlier today, it was good to hear from them. They're both doing all right. Jon had some good advice, which is helpful. Ashland and I are counting down until Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 releases in early May.  Her classes are going "fairly easily" this semester, she said last week, so that's good. No news about SGYC 2017 yet - if I can, I think I'd like to help out again.

     Trevor had surgery on his shunt Monday morning, and that went well. Caleb got Dad's old phone, so Courtney and I taught him how to use Spotify. That was fun.

     The MCU is currently at 14 movies (and an ever-widening array of TV shows) since 2008. That's amazing. I think it was right at the end of 2011 that we got into sucked into it. Anyway, Iron Man 3 released at the start of finals week my freshman year, which was a really great motivator.

     Capstone is extremely depressing. Which is slightly better than feeling depressed, anxious AND extremely pissed off, which was how I felt after every Seminar class let out last semester. We've been talking a lot about philosophy for some inexplicable reason, and most English majors don't understand philosophy, so our eyes glaze over while three people out of fifteen say anything. And so far the overarching topic during the immediate coursework has been Death. So if religion can't be used (and it can't, because this is a classroom), how else can you talk about or argue your way around its inevitability? Everything becomes a foolish waste of time.
     The highlight of yesterday was finishing a crossword puzzle in one sitting, which doesn't happen often. But it sounds pathetic that that was the highlight. I'm frustrated by my Pop Market stuff this week, considering that it was one my teaching weeks and the topic was sports. I could have whipped out a really good sports scene in no time, so why did I go with nonfiction, straightforwardly reconstructing myself at five watching Monday Night Football? And the discussion Tuesday morning didn't go too well, either - except for Brian (who was also teaching this week) everybody is pretty apathetic towards them. So their sports-set inclass assignments were full of really obvious errors; that drove me crazy. (I'm really persnickety when it comes to writing well, especially when it's about sports.) Still, there was at least some praiseworthy scrap from almost everyone's piece.
     There are a couple novels that I'll probably come back to from Gothic Film and Lit, but I've pretty much hated every single movie.
     Psych is going fine, and it's interesting, but you can only contemplate serial killers for so long before wanting to just wail at the evilness of their actions, and of sin in general.

     I really miss relatives at night. Grandpa, Mimi, Nano... I'd call Robbie to see how she's doing, but I lost her number when my old phone died. Mom was asking if I was going to order graduation announcements, but I don't think I will. Are college grad announcements a thing people do? And if they are, where would I send them? Almost all the extended family who would be proud is gone, and it would be weird to send them to non-relatives.
     Also missing the NSU BCM and having a place where I fit; where you knew where friends were hanging out and where you knew you were doing something useful, however small. The SWAT antics on the road and during practices, and the wonderful intensity of basketball/volleyball practices. Playing worship music with Daniel P., James Hoover, Ja Li Si and Annie. The Friday Lunch Bunch get-togethers. Praying collectively with other believers. If I could have stayed in Tahlequah I'm pretty sure Grace Baptist would be my home church by now. (I miss the Galdamezes, too.)

     Steven and Jamie are having another murder mystery tomorrow night, which should be amazing for those attending. I wish we could have done more of those during my generation's time in the youth group. GBC is a great church still when it comes to teaching and all, it's just....not so great when you're a single college student in a church full of older people and young families. And the downside of attending the same church for 14 years is that you remember so much. Too many ghosts in the hallway.

     Tried to shoot some baskets this afternoon, to take advantage of the nice weather, but that didn't go very well. Missed about 85% of my shots, a mix of not practiced in forever, it being a really windy day, and the clear-Plexiglass backboard. Those are always really hard to play on, because there aren't any spatial clues about where the backboard is - it just looks like it's hovering in space, which is really unsettling.
    Last night I played Abby Lee for about an hour, mostly playing along with my 90's Spotify playlist. (NSYNC does not work on an acoustic guitar, FYI. Jars of Clay, however, sounds excellent that way.) It didn't go great, but at least it was playing. Usually here lately there's a desperate run through my hymnal/worship-music-songbook about once a week, because it's hard to know what words to pray a lot of the time.
     Missing Rags, too. And Sport. Creek and Firefly and Klipsey and Shadow, Rocky and Swifty. Sunny, and Copper.  There are a lot of animals.

     A classmate named Cody was presenting a reading of his capstone screenplay Tuesday night, so I read a minor role as the minions of the school bully. Hopefully he'll get a good grade on the project.

     Kurt Busch won the Daytona 500 last Sunday, which was good. The college basketball conference tournaments are starting, which has a flickering excitement to it.

     Been flipping through old posts this week. I started this blog one February afternoon as a high school senior, and in December 2014 I wrote a long post about honesty in social media. When it comes to writing, I'm not sure how much truth and honesty are intertwined, though I kind of think they are separate things. It's a muddy area. But mostly I think I've kind of glossed over what this college experience has been like, mainly because of the monotony - at some point there aren't any more ways of saying "I went to class, I did homework, I wish this were over and I had a clear idea of what happens next." I don't know how much I'll post here once the summer comes, but I'll probably keep writing in some way or another.