Coming Clean
With six days to the move I find myself awake, after three hours of what would be best described as a full body shutdown. The stress, the frantic running around, the bureaucratic shuffle with UofL, it all caught up with me today, during my last day of work at the Office Depot in Paducah. I spent most of my day in a daze, wandering, thinking, feeling and shutting off conscious thought, to the point of stopping mid-sentence with customers a few times.
A week ago, I was thinking. It was a driving, frenzied sort of train of thought that left sleep totally out of the equation. So at 4 in the morning, I pour myself some coffee and sit down with the dogs, thinking about the future.
The conscious act of deciding what to do for the next 20 to 30 years is massive. To ponder that act is itself even more terrifying.
Computer Engineering and Computer Science. That’s what it says on my transcript. A field I couldn’t honestly tell you why I selected. Actually that’s a lie, I know exactly why: Money. Prestige, comfort, security. Materialism. While I consider myself something of an expert with these machines I have no aspiration to shepherd a farm of servers for the rest of my life. Nor do I, if I am honest with myself, want to be a database administrator. I picked Oracle because it was the richest database to master. Though some of you wouldn’t expect it of me, my favorite thing to do with these things is design things. Not even cool stuff like models, but flyers and advertisements and stuff. Graphic Design is even a little too binding a term because I’m not much of an artist, but the act (the art?) of laying out an ad I find to be a unique sort of challenge every time. Given a choice between this and web design, I would still do layouts. Why? Nothing against the actual act of designing web pages, it’s a guilty pleasure. I’ve repeatedly told others that if I can sketch a website on paper I can code it. No, the problem is the bane of all web designers. Interoperability, cross-platform support, all the buzzwords for making one website look the same on every browser. Would it go against convention to say that this shouldn’t be something I should have to worry about? Probably.
But even after all that, everything I just wrote takes a backseat to another passion. From an early age, I’ve had a love affair with the English language. The subtle intricacies always draw me in; if I were to indulge and cast myself into the crucible of this romance I would have no room to live for all the books I would own. I have never been a scientist of the language (should I say, a lexiconologist?) Instead, the sequence, the grammar, it’s always had an unmistakable flow. I don’t think I could diagram a sentence if I tried. But an English degree? What does that do for you? Many of my friends from high school are pursuing degrees in Journalism, and good for them. And despite the fact that my writings on here could pass for journalism depending on the point of view, the thought of sitting in a newsroom hammering away at an article with, say, an hour to spare before the deadline…that does not appeal to me. I don’t like writing under pressure, hell, half the time I feel like I don’t like writing at all.
It was during this reverie that my mind kept going back to high school, to English class with Mr. Quertermous. A great man, and a great teacher.
I wanted to be a teacher.
If it weren’t for him, I think my high school career would have gone completely off course. He gave advice and knowledge in equal amounts, his presence was a source of comfort. He listened, and reached out to children that many teachers would have, and some already had, given up on. If I could illuminate minds as he did mine, the materialism falls away and I am left with more abstract, but equally powerful things. Pride, contentment. Satisfaction. Altruism is unlike me, or is it? Maybe beneath the exterior of a cynic and confirmed skeptic is a man that only wants to better those around him.
Unfortunately, if I’m going to become a teacher, I’ve wasted a lot of time and a lot of money going down a path that many courses will not transfer from. But, as I’ve been told, there was a lot of experience down the path as well, and that counts for something.
I have nine days until the return to the University of Louisville, two months of class, and come August…the decision will have to be made.
So I’m driving back from Louisville and we pull off of West KY Parkway at about Dawson Springs to get gas. While we’re at the gas station I’m looking at the drink section and I notice a couple of new Mountain Dew drinks. I grab a MD Voltage which is apparently berry, ginseng, and some other questionable additions to the Mountain Dew equation. As the cashier is ringing me up, she frowns for a moment.
A sad truth in the fragrance world is that the public, by and large, has awful taste. Mainstream garbage like Acqua di Gio is regurgitated endlessly by the media, the marketing teams, and the public itself. A fellow Basenoter once commented on the fact that he was once locked in a meeting with 10 Indian men; 6 of the 10 were wearing AdG. Nothing against Indians either way, I do find the demographics to be very interesting on this stuff (maybe the subject of a future post). What I’m getting at, eventually, is while AdG will probably be selling well into my twilight years, you can not find Aramis Havana in any retail store. Not in North America anyway, if you want it you’ll have to do a bit of traveling, to South Africa or one of the other handful of countries that still receive it. Or, you can pay a premium on eBay or one of the fragrance retail websites, upwards of $80 an ounce on average, which is higher than many niche label fragrances.
So I’m in lockup this morning getting some tasks taken care of. I stumble across the item you see to your left. It is a real item, I am not clever enough to make stuff like this up. Enter the i.Beat emo, a device that I assume is an MP3 player for people I loathe. I was immediately reminded of a day about two years ago. 6/6/06, National Emo Kid Beatdown Day. I did punch a fellow teenager in his personal grill with my personal fist. And deep down I think we both enjoyed it. Now you can have that joy all the time, by punching the face of anyone that owns one of these things. Remember, that’s the i.Beat emo, available at your local Office Depot. Christ.