fght ff yr dmns wrt sngs n yr slp

I need to change my major. My heart isn't really in "business administration." I'm not into paperwork, and thinking constantly about money and how it circulates and how to keep every last penny in order. The part of business that I always liked most is dealing with (ie screwing over) people, and I don't think I'm going to get enough of that side of it with a BA major or Supply Chain or even Marketing.

I'm driven by attention. I want to be liked, and I've spent the last few years of my life trying to separate "being likable" from "being untrue to yourself," which is a pretty big struggle. On one end, there's the bit that's "developing inter-personal skills," but you could also call that "being fake and manipulative" and I want to know the difference between improving who I am, and being something "better" than what I am.

Nonetheless, I'm attention-driven. I don't mind admitting that at all. It might make you think of some Cryspace attention whore who whines and complains and wears eyeshadow and totally wants you to comment his pictures and all of that bullshit or whatever just for attention, but I think that really earning, grabbing someone's attention so they can enjoy something entertaining or funny or weird or what-the-fuck-ever, so long as it distracts them from how boring life can be, is the greatest thing ever. We aim to please.

So I want to move to the college of communication. I'd like to be in broadcasting; I've been told repeatedly to go into radio. I'll probably go into Ad/PR though, since that seems to be a pretty broad range of skills, seems like the kind of thing you could apply anywhere, especially since the chief goal of any sort of media is, ultimately, advertising.

It's like, I don't know if I even want a "real job" though. On one hand, there's the very idealistic notion that "happiness is success." Living some idyllic life in a cozy little shack on the west coast, making enough to get by, having good times with my friends sounds AWESOME. But I feel like I should always be moving. I want to do something, so despite my cynicism towards doing work, I'd like to keep myself working on something new, advancing myself, building a real career. I don't mind working, so long as it's on something that means something to me. Problem is, few things do.

The hard part about figuring out what you want to do with your life is that you don't get to actually try your options until after school. Everyone says, "you have your whole life to change your mind," but when tuition is something to the tune of $15-20k a year and you need to support yourself through that time, it's not as easy as it sounds to go back to school.

I want to disappear. I want to vanish into thin air and leave this life behind and spend a year experiencing everything and living below my means and letting go of the human institutions that we all latch so tightly to, namely materialism and "The Meritocracy," the illusion that we all need to go to Good Colleges and have Good Jobs. I think I'd get something out of the experience. I don't know what.

So, I guess the short of it is, I'm changing my major. They say to follow your passions, but my passions are often involve sex, drugs, and rock & roll, not accounting or marketing or mathematics. There's a reason I like the things I like; I need to find out what it is, because I'm 100% sure there's a way I can build a good career out of it. I'll get back to you.

Re: Things I Feel Like Doing Right Now

I really like it when I can do things that are productive, while I'm procrastinating. Like, last night I had a fuckload of shit to do, so I cleaned the room. Cleaned and vacuumed my room. And the common room. And then rearranged the common room. Not that I necessarily LIKE cleaning, in fact, I don't really see a point to it (for the most part.) I don't see why my personal living space should be organized because it's my personal living space, and I know where everything is (it's on the floor or it's on my desk), so what difference does it make? I just cleaned so that I could procrastinate without feeling guilty about spending two hours on the fucking Cryspace.

So right now, instead of doing my massive amount of work, I'm writing about not doing my massive amount of work on the internet, which is futile in itself since I already know how much work I need to be doing, so it's not like I'm gaining any insight by writing this. And you don't gain anything from reading it since it's really just me bitching about insignificant problems. And the color red. Lots of red and lots of stars. But BEYOND the red and the stars, it's just me whining. And if you really wanted that, all you'd have to do is call me and ask me how I'm doing.

So, what I'm getting at is, my friend Ian was right when he told me that masturbation is a fantastic metaphor for my entire life, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Deja Entendu

Somewhere between Underoath and glassJAw is Secret Lives of the Freemasons. Right now I'm listening to their This Was Built to Make You Dance and I don't know where I stand on it. I guess the most striking thing about this CD is the fact that the singer thinks he's Daryl Palumbo of glassJAw (or Head Automatica, if that's your thing.) He sounds exactly like him. In every way. Second thing about this CD, I'm listening to it wondering "Man, these guys really sound like another band. Who the hell am I thinking of?" And that's when it pretty much hit me that they sound like every single band I listen to.

It's not necessarily a bad thing that they sound like a lot of other bands. I mean, they're other bands that I like, so it's like, shit, more is more, I like this. On the other hand, it's pretty tired and uninspired, and I feel like the CD has a decent amount of filler. And as an aside, the "Dance!" gimmick is gay as hell.

Final verdict, this CD sounds good. I like listening to it. On the other hand, it's nothing to really phone home about in terms of innovation; Secret Lives! sound like every other band ever. So, I guess the bottom line is, the album is straight mediocre, but I still listen to it. Geddit?

edit: obligatory myspace link.

Snow Day!

Snow day today, no classes! Last night there was plenty going on around here already. The night included, of course, the obligatory weed and Guitar Hero marathon. "muh boi" Greg and I decided that we had to enjoy the snow, however, and so we fashioned sleds out of cardboard boxes with garbage bags stapled to them. They worked pretty well, until we realized that just the cardboard boxes work better.

I honestly hate snow. I spent senior year throwing beach parties, and I spent the rest of my life actively hating snow. I had to shovel that shit, I had to scrape that shit off my car, I had to freeze my ass off any time I wanted to leave my house. I also had some private time with snow that one time it caused my car to gracefully glide into a tree, totaling my favorite car ever and forcing me into that awkward situation wherein I had to call my parents and go "Uh, hey, listen. Remember the car?" I blame the snow for that. I blame the snow for everything. As such, I enjoy living somewhere that ice falls from the fucking sky about as much as I enjoy my roommate talking/screaming - in Hindi - while he sleeps.

Regardless, State College is completely fucking unprepared for this. Because Erie gets the meteorological equivalent of (cold) diarrhea sprayed all over it every single day of the year, the plow crews there are ready for anything; I heard they had the Erie snowplow fleet push Anna Nicole's lifeless body to the morgue. Here, on the other hand, the snow is as deep on the roads as it is in the grass. Classes are canceled today. And, because I'm totally fucked up from living in Erie all my life, I don't see the point to it. I haven't had a snow day since before high school. A foot of snow is nothing.

A comprehensive list of Things I Feel Like Doing Right Now:

·

Weed and Guitar Hero

I would like to own a bathing suit. Like, a full three-piece suit, that I can swim in. Fucking classy as hell. Playing beach volleyball and shit. I think that'd be sweet.

On the kindness of strangers...

Yesterday I was talking to one of the Housing ladies that cleans up after us on a daily basis and I mentioned my trip to Pittsburgh this weekend. She said, "Visiting home?" "No, I ... I really don't know why I went." "Oh, so for a girl then."

On the way to Pittsburgh this weekend, my friend's car slid across the highway and into a ditch, backwards, jamming the exhaust pipe into the dirt in the ditch. We sat in the car for a bit, and a tow truck pulls up, we talked to the driver, he said he can't pull us out until a cop shows up for an incident report or some sort of bullshit, so we told him to go away. Another one showed up. Like, seriously, tow trucks drive up and down bad roads trying to extort people into paying them absurd amounts of money just to be pulled 20 feet. It's disgusting. Eventually, we got the car to start for a few seconds, so we pulled it forward enough to look at the tailpipe. Sure enough, it was clogged with dirt and keeping the car from starting.

We figure, we should get the damn thing unclogged so we can at least have heat in the car while we wait for a AAA tow truck. At this point, it was about negative a million degrees outside and I wanted to kill someone for it. I stared at the clog in the tailpipe waiting for something to happen (nothing happened) and got back in the car. Eventually, someone pulled over and offered to help. I explained the situation and we ransacked his car looking for something to unclog the tailpipe with. We're poking it with the ass end of a snow brush when another guy pulls over and offers to help. We tell him what's up and he pulls out a knife to unclog it. He made decent progress on the clog, enough that we could get the car started and the force of the exhaust would unclog itself. Unfortunately, the car's still stuck in the ditch when a third person pulls over and tells us he has a towline in his car.

And as I'm watching three people on their hands and knees in the fucking freezing snow, working together to hitch this towline to the car, I realize that sometimes... I really, really hate living in Pennsylvania.

Oh, and I also realized that not all people are assholes. We tend to think that none of the people we know are "the average person." We also think that all strangers are the average person. The reason I like talking to strangers is that I like breaking down that barrier, getting to know people, and, admittedly, I get off on making people like me when they have no real reason to. But the point is, there's people out there worth meeting (few and far between) and I like when I have the opportunity to find them.

And then there's this.