Adventureland

The Best

Best Compilation evar:

1: Simon and Garfunkel - America
2: The Replacements: - Hold My Life
3: REM - Daysleeper
4: Snakes Say Hisss! - We Are Hot
5: The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize?? REMIX
6: Devendra Banhart - Bad Girl
7: Less Than Jake - The Brightest Bulb Has Burned Out
8: Animal Collective - Winter's Love
9: Bon Iver - Skinny Love
10: The Bouncing Souls - The Guest
11: Boards Of Canada - Kid For Today
12: Air - Playground Love
13: Matt Pond PA - It Is Safe
14: Neutral Milk Hotel - Two-headed Boy Part 1
15: Regina Spektor - Us

Alma Mater

On this brutal Sunday afternoon, I'm missing my nurturing mother. My alma mater.

This is partly due to my hangover. It's funny that a hangover reminds me of LSU. Most of my mornings there were spent in that state, with an iced coffee sweating bullets on my desk while a red-faced, militant German professor bellowed his reasons for hating the department. The coffee took the bulk of his anger while I wondered idly what happened the night before.

After my six years there, it's strange to miss the place, because I never thought I'd have to miss it. Those six years felt like eternity--a pleasant eternity, in which I was a college student and would always be a college student. LSU spit me out in May, and all of a sudden, it was over. I got so comfortable in that desk with my iced coffee. Now I've got to figure out what exactly I learned there.

What am I qualified for? Did I learn anything of value, or was I just hungover all the time? These are questions I'd rather not answer right now, because all I want to do is be forced to wake up at 9:00AM and trudge my dehydrated ass to class, where I can drink iced coffee and wonder what I did last night. Sometimes I wonder why they gave me a degree at all.

Oh, LSU, I'd say you had me at hello, but you never properly introduced yourself. You just kind of cracked the door open a little and I ran inside, and didn't come out for six years. You failed to explain exactly how much $22,000 is, or that my years with you would cost so much. And that's not including all those bar tabs. You didn't tell me that most of my friends would move away after graduation and force me to re-evaluate myself and my ambitions, and what I always said I'd do once I was free from you. I said I'd leave too, over and over and over again.

My head hurts.

A Nostalgic Essay on Time

From the roof, we could see where we met--in a tiny, colorless classroom fifty yards down and across. It was a math theory class, taught by an old woman who resembled a turtle. I'd thought he was cute. When we introduced ourselves, neither of us could have guessed the stream of events that would span six years after that, or how many of our friends and family would be affected by that moment. No one could have told me that at three in the morning, six years after, that he and I would be sitting on the roof of the old fieldhouse trying to make sense of the fact that if we'd never met, my sister wouldn't have a two-year-old son, and we might have found completely different ways to become adults.

A full moon hung in the sky. The Mississippi Bridge glowed hazy, riddled with late-night travelers and early commuters. Years ago, I had moved to this city from the other direction, and so had he. Sometime soon, I thought, we'll both be leaving this city by way of that bridge. He'll go one way, and I'll go the other, and that might be the end. The network we've built over what feels like most of our lives, even though it's been only six years, will fall to pieces without us. Or maybe so much has happened that it will continue to thrive without us. I don't know which hurts more.

My life has a history of extraordinarily long chapters, and sometimes I leave the book open for too long. That's what happens, you know, when you stick around for too long, testing how much dust and cat hair it can hold before you're forced to turn the page. Pretty soon, your beautiful chapter looks more like your parents' attic, or your grandma's knick-knack shelf--it never changes, and you eventually forget it's there, until a rusty nail gives out and you have a pile of broken ceramic dwarves on your floor.

Or maybe it'll be one of those projects that you think is brilliant at first--the ones that wake you up in the middle of a dream--but you can't finish it, because you don't know enough yet. But when that day comes, you pick up the unfinished chapter, blow off the dust and realize you know how it ends. When you start to write, it doesn't even look like your own handwriting anymore. Then you remember that the person who started it couldn't be the one to finish it. And you smile, because you kind of always knew that.

An old drinking buddy once told me that life can only be lived forward, but can only be understood in reverse. I began to drink more because I thought he'd discovered a way to get drunk enough to time-travel, and that sounded way fun. The fucker always had a drink in his hand, but not because drinking made his life reel backwards. He merely understood what he was saying.

And he never bothered to explain what it meant. I suppose one can't describe the fourth dimension unless you're sitting on the roof of a period in your life, looking down and across at every building you've ever drafted, as every person you've ever affected enters and leaves at different times, and continue to do so long after you stop looking.

And to our left was a wide, wide river, with only one bridge across, and the light glowed hazy. The commuters buzzed by, continuing on to the event horizon. It might have been Port Allen on the other side, but we couldn't tell from there. He threw a handful of rocks off the side of the fieldhouse; they hit the steel awning four stories below us, and each made its own pitch upon impact. Shortly after that, we climbed the stairs back to the ground. I suppose it's there that we belong.

Barrel-chested and solid-souled, I have decided to "do this".

I'm going to be teaching English as a second language by this time next year.

It's more than enough time for me to save up for either the plane ticket, or the certification that pays for the plane ticket. I'm leaving. If I don't, I hold you--mostly my family and friends--responsible for reminding me what I haven't done. Of course I hold myself responsible, but as you learn in 5 years of peer-editing, one person cannot always see what they're doing wrong.

So: Drew, Annie, Jen, Ant, Ross, Tommy, Josh, Amanda, Mandi; my most esteemed friends and family, I'm counting on you to hold me to this. Rain or shine, unless one of my parents meets an untimely death, one of you needs to tell me to follow my dreams. If I haven't spoken of it by June of next year, remind me. I may have forgotten to follow my dreams, and that is inexcusable.

The doors will open, if I am the one turning the knob. I need out of Louisiana.