More on Life

Did you know? Once the red light to cross 13th Street turns green, I always make it exactly nine steps along the crosswalk before it starts blinking red again. Unless, of course, I'm behind someone, or get a late start. But if I'm unimpeded, it's always precisely nine steps.

I've been backsliding recently. I haven't gone running in a few days. I spent hours yesterday doing nothing but staring into the computer. Huh. Had trouble finding other things to do. What's there to do on a Sunday when a lotta your friends are out of town, and the rest are studying for various things? Sure, I could have done something constructive, but I haven't been exactly in a constructive mood for the last few days. I've been flickering randomly between rampant fervor and an unaccountable haze that prevents me from doing anything much.

Valiant attempts have been made, however. On Saturday, I annoyed both my roommates until they both finally got off their computers and accompanied me outside, to get some lunch and play pool at the Reitz Union. After that, I called one of my friends to give Henry (and myself and my roommate) a ride to Publix, seeing as he needed to buy antibiotics for his terrible throat virus. We got to the pharmacy literally minutes before the gate came down and it closed, and I'm not entirely sure if it would have been open on Sundays. Even if it was, it'd have been darn inconvenient. So, lucky us.

...This should probably come later, but who is Schroedinger? I mean, not the classical Schroedinger, the one who commented. I'm a bit puzzled as to this person's identity. I mean, I know this much about the person:

1. I see him/her on Wednesdays. This probably narrows it down to someone I see on Game Night, as I don't have any other Wednesday-specific events. But this doesn't narrow it down at all, seeing as about thirty people go there.
2. It's someone who knows me well enough to know that I have a blog, and where to find it. Again, normally this would narrow it down more, but a few of my Gainesville friends know about the blog, and any one of them could have told anyone else in the group.
3. It's someone who cares enough about me that they would give a tinker's damn if my personality changed significantly. Here, I am absolutely at a loss. Barring a few people who have already denied being this commenter, I can't really think of anyone at Game Night who I would put above the level of "friend," and only six or seven above "acquaintance I see once a week." Generally, I'd think a person would have to be slightly more familiar than this to worry about me drastically changing the way I act. (Besides, I was under the opinion that a lot of people found my exuberance and frivolousness slightly irritating.)

So I'm completely lost. If'n you want to reveal yourself, mystery commenter, good on yer. If not...I wish you would, this is seriously starting to pick at my brain.

But as to addressing his/her comments, don't fear of any terrible change in the way I act. I'm not going to throw my computer out the window, burn my Magic cards, and forswear all involvement in the silly nerdly activities I regularly partake in. I just plan to change the way I look at life, and reduce greatly my reliance on said activities for being the only things I do.

More to the point, I can't imagine that this change could be taken as anything but good. I plan to do more exciting things and be more social. ...Oh no. Let's hit the general alarm. I plan to *gasp* go out and talk to people more often. This is not a change to be wary about, sir/madam. I'm not going to abandon my old friends, I'm just going to go out and make a lotta more new ones.

And as for generally being happy, I can't really deny that, but I would submit to your attention the sharp distinction between being "happy" and being "content." I am almost always content. But truly happy? Not so often. True happiness is not easy to attain, it's true, but it's much more difficult to do so when I'm more or less lobotomizing myself for hours every day by giving up the greater part of my personality, expenditures, and mental processes in favor of blandly browsing the Internet. Seeking adventure is a better bet than waiting for adventure to come to me.

On that note, when I come home next Friday night, I'm not going to sit around and play video games Friday night. I'm gathering all my 18+ friends to me, and we're gonna go out and go downtown, and go to a nightclub. Not because nightclubs have anything especially fun or amazing about them (some may, I don't really know), but because it's different, it's weird (for us), and we haven't done it before.

There's a card in Magic called Sensation Gorger. It's a goblin. Gameplay-wise, it triggers the whole "discard your hand and draw a bunch of cards" mechanic that red is all about in the game. Being as a player's hand can be thought to represent their current state of mind, this can be seen as abandoning all current plans to hurry up and try a new plan. Its flavor text is simply "More, more, more!"

I don't gorge myself on sensations, of course. Not to the degree of goblins, who are known to wound themselves near-fatally to experience a new and interesting kind of pain. But the concept of abandoning (or lessening) my previous locked-in thought processes and trying something new and different is an appealing one to me, at the moment.

Huh. Yesterday, besides just spending a lot of time on the computer, I went and played pool. I originally went to practice by myself, but I called some friends who came and showed up. I made an impossible bank + trick ricochet shot, which was dimissed by the others by being just luck-based. (It was. But shut up.) Steven, however, topped everything everyone did when he hit a ball with such force that it:

- Smacked into the bank and flew into the air
- Bounced off another ball
- And still rolled into the pocket.

Even though it was one of Kevin's balls that just got sunk (we were playing Cut-throat), he felt the need to applaud that shot. So did I. It was really something to see.

And...that's the point, isn't it? I may not have done much yesterday, but I at least have that memory to distinguish that day above the others in my mind. If I had spent all day indoors, I wouldn't have any specific memories to treasure, or anything at all to write about. This is one of the reasons I stopped updating my blog previously, because nothing friggin' happened to me. I did the same thing all day - go to class, study, play on the computer, go to bed really late. I didn't go out except for Wednesdays or the rare event when I met someone on campus, which didn't happen often since I was always racing back home to play on the computer.

But now...now, I may be backsliding and only making small successes and struggling against my entire entrenched mind-set, maybe futilely, I don't know...but I'm trying. I'm trying, I'm changing some, I'm making successes, small though they are, and I'm having interesting experiences that I can then turn around and write down.

My last few blog posts in the spring, I had to squeeze my brain to think of something even remotely writable. Now that I'm doing things...things are happening. The distinction is simple, but it might be more important than anything else I've ever done.