Reasons I am stressed and stuffing myself with fried cheese

It has been several months since the last time I ate fried cheese - cheeseballs or mozzarella sticks. Tonight I'm eating them both. And drinking pop. Not to make myself sound like a beacon of healthy eating or anything, I just usually eat better than this. But I'm stressed! So in the hopes of alleviating some of it, I've decided to list the reasons.

• My KDX dues aren't paid yet.
  
• I paid my Visa bill a day late again.
• I now have somewhere around $9 in my bank account. That doesn't include my savings which I refuse to touch. That's for moving in with Billy.
• My toe is still fucked up. Every time I go somewhere I try it without the splint on it, and after walking for about two minutes, I realize that it was a dumb idea and that just because it SEEMS better doesn't mean that it IS better. So I guess I'll just be gimping around for a while longer.
  
• I'm not scared of my class, but I am intimidated by it. I have a preliminary lit review to turn in tomorrow, and I don't have all of my articles. My articles are boring. I don't like sociology for data, I like it for THEORY. I want to theorize. I want to think in the realm of ideas. I want to take Durkheim and Marx and have them duke it out in a mental cage match. Don't be fooled - college is more like high school than imaginable. There are just as many hoops to jump through for that diploma - you're just paying more for it and the hoops are more cleverly disguised.
• I haven't been working on my resume and job search as much as I've wanted to due to work/homework, which I've been doing pretty diligently.
  

Now to imbibe on pathetic nostalgia. I didn't quite realize just how blissful things were, when I was around 16, listening to the Rent broadway soundtrack on cassette tape in my car and Bill Chase, typing everything out on ICQ in the basement until 11 every night, going to band contests wearing the ugly ass pants they made us wear, drawing out "California Über Alles" and Dead Kennedys logos on the back of my geometry notebook (I sure as hell wasn't paying attention to that crap. The only thing I really remember from geometry was learning how to say "Can I go to the bathroom?" in Spanish, because we didn't have enough classrooms, so we had my class in the Spanish room).

I swam all the time, partially because I was a lifeguard. I didn't actually used to hate summer. I used to actually get tans and wear little swimsuits. Make no mistake, I wasn't Suzy Highschool. I was still a cynical, depressive nut job, just like today (who says that has to be a bad thing?) Sarcasm was, and still is, my primary weapon in a verbal duel. But I had one hell of a lot more tenacity back then. I definitely credit college with draining that from me.

We were all so optimistic when we started college, my friends and I. It was getting us out of that place, opening up all these opportunities, we were going to study and it was just gonna be righteous - we were free to pursue what we wanted to pursue. But that's not true. You are free to pursue what you want within someone else's framework. I don't mean to say I've had a horrible time and learned nothing in college - it's certainly been valuable in many social and educational avenues. But this is my theoretical mind coming in. They say education teaches you to question. I didn't need college to tell me that, I already knew. Little by little, bachelors to masters to doctorate, you get more freedom to pursue what you want, but it is ALWAYS within someone else's framework. Your ideas become a part of their institution. Your ideas and plans must be submitted for approval. If they are not approved and you can't amend them, or don't want to, consider yourself fucked. You have used college to build a plexiglass box around part of the world to observe and study, but as Trent Reznor says in "Right Where it Belongs", "Are you sure what side of the glass you are on?" They're studying you. They pull your strings. You are the one paying them to do it.

Elementary school, middle school, high school, college, jobs...it's all worksheet after worksheet. If you were constantly wondering, as I was, why your middle school teachers were always drowning you with worksheets, it's because they were trying to teach you the skill that actually IS valuable in our society - the ability to complete worksheets. And the reason they drowned you in them was to desensitize you to how dull and numbing the process would be. They disciplined you with bad grades and the like when you did poorly or did not complete them because their job, administering the worksheets, went unfulfilled. Also, as the administrators, they saw in those kids non-compliance. Sure, some of it was laziness, but some of it was the lack of challenge - kids who knew better than to jump through the hoops like trained animals. And then there were kids like me, who did the worksheets in about two minutes, and then get bugged by other people to copy them. College is just a much more complex set of worksheets, and sometimes, they even let you write the worksheets yourself. But then they grade them and tell you why they're not very effective worksheets.

Sometimes, although I know that I would never actually want things to work out this way, ever ever ever EVER, I wonder what it would be like to still be living in my hometown and just working, doing whatever. Or I wonder what it would have been like to just graduate from high school and work, and maybe be able to actually afford shit every once in a while. I don't know. It's a question I can't even think about, not because I won't let myself, but because it is incomprehensible to me.

But there is a tenacious part of me, which still comes out every once in a while, who dances like an idiot, and yells crazy things, and gives lots of hugs, and looks ridiculous on purpose (believe it or not, I used to get dressed almost every day. I didn't go to class in my pajamas all the time like I do now).

I have a lot to be happy about. I have great friends who I wouldn't trade for anything, I have a loving and caring and wonderful boyfriend, my relationship with my mom is better than it's probably ever been, I'm in good health pretty much, and life is generally good. But I used to be much more of a fireball, or a "pistol" as Rube from Dead Like Me would say. I was me with an exponent. I was much more inspired by my discontent. Now my discontent just makes me tired and I sleep a lot. She is a version of me that just needs to be dusted off. I need her back.

I still am a pistol. I just need to wake up.

And now I am going to go back to my room, lay in my bed, and listen to Jello Biafra rant about Tipper Gore and the PMRC. But that's a story for another day.

Labels: college, high school, nostalgia, summer