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Dear Blog,
I'm sorry for "neglecting" you for a while, even though I know you don't see it that way. You know what your purpose is, and you are patient with me, and I appreciate that to no end. You don't mind the time I've been spending with http://ourfeaturepresentation.blogpsot.com - you understand its place and yours. I entrust to you, "Dinosaur Eats Man," the most essential and unique bits of who I just might be. There is no other place for them.
Thank you for being the window between wherever it is inside me these thoughts are born and the rest of the world... that is, the portion that gets on the internet thereof.
You're going to help people, because you're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggone it, people like you!
Your author,
Joseph
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Dear Reader,
Thank you for taking the time to filter through my inwardly directed musings to find your place here. Sunday, September 28, 2008 reads my computer calendar. 12:57 PM to the minute. Personally, it is hard to believe that October is so nearly here. Midterm grades, project presentations, 5+ and 0 Alabama football games, a Halloween carnival, and more? Did I leave out the bears? Oh my.
My days are full of Boolean algebra and essential prime implicants. Of cheddar and potato chowder and Caesar salads. Of capacitance and resistivity. Neuer Wein und Zwiebelkuchen and adjective endings. Tests for linear independence and Gauss-Jordan elimination. Boardroom meetings and Second Life. What about my first life? Is that what all these things make up, really? Or do they just fill the gaps between every bit of my real life? I don't see how. I don't imagine there are gaps.
I imagine this is who I am on any given day... I am perfectly fine with that. I have my friends, my love, my thoughts, my imaginings, and my video games even, but I'm a student, growing, trying to get somewhere, and I am perfectly fine with reaffirming that fact every day. I am lucky, because nowadays, nowadours, nowadweeks, I seem to find myself perfectly fine with a lot of things.
And that's fine by me.
Apparently, I ought to co-op with a company in my probable career field sometime in my undergraduate course. Who knew? I don't think it makes much sense to stress too much about it now, not this semester. For one, I am in no position to worry about anything but grades. It makes more sense to think of co-oping right before a summer, but... do they have interview day in the spring? I don't believe so. I'm sorry to ask you so many rhetorical questions, reader. I will surely find all the answers soon enough.
More than apparently, there is next to nothing stopping me from studying abroad sometime in my undergraduate course. I'll admit, being this... well, lucky? Privileged? It nearly makes it feel like a responsibility. And what a lovely prospect... a semester or a summer in Germany. It is really hard to imagine, but I imagine when the time comes, I will be but a few well-placed steps from making it happen. What a world, and what a world could I come to know.
I hope you enjoyed this "update" on your reluctantly nimble author on hand. You can feel certain that I enjoyed it. It feels good.
Don't be a stranger. And don't miss "Our Feature Presentation." I would call it a lot more modular than "Dinosaur Eats Man," albeit perhaps less... in-depth? But no...oh heck, go read for yourself.
Cheers,
Joseph
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Dear Life,
Keep up with the unpredictability. I am enjoying it. Keep putting that soreness into my legs and arms the day after I visit the rec. center. It reminds me that you are there. Keep up with the unpredictability... but don't change the color of plain white light bulbs: that soft, orange glow. I need that. Keep up with the unpredictability, but don't change the way I puzzle myself every time I see myself in the mirror.
Be careful,
Joseph
For to whom some detail of this writing may have been previously divulged: forgive the chance in title, the change in topic.
For your analyses, I present to you my humble return to the blogosphere. Somehow, I half expected that word to pass the spell check, but I don't mind that it didn't.
For Wednesdays.
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It takes a lot to walk on a sidewalk. It takes more to retreat from its solidarity, its order, and its utility and return to the grasses, the dirt, the rocks. The paths beaten, only soon to become another sidewalk.
It always happens to me on Tuesday mornings. Tuesday and Thursday mornings, both. I am enjoying my walk across a fair portion of the campus towards Gordon-Palmer Hall. I am breathing in the air as it sits on top of the quad, nearly full in its stagnation and thickness with the growing heat. I am realizing what a spoiled treat it is to be headed to my first class of the day at 11:00 a.m. I am wondering how far we will venture today in MA 237 - Applied Matrix Theory (An Introduction to Linear Algebra, I ought to call it). I make a turn here, a cross there. I cross at the cross-walk in front of the natural history museum, taking up a tiny bit of that particular CrimsonRide bus's time once again. I turn left ahead and then... there it is.
The sidewalk.
A simple sidewalk, ample width, serves its purpose well. Traverse the space across the driveway between two buildings, make it from the quad to Hackberry Lane. Plain and simple. If only it were...
I loathe this sidewalk. I think it, in particular, out of every sidewalk that has ever been planned, lain, or walked upon, out of any that ever was, is, or ever will be, reflects all that is wrong with human kind.
We are inconsiderate. We are self-centered. We are meek. We are pushy. We are selfish. We are vengeful. We are oblivious. We are pretentious. We are kind. We are distraught. We are walking, hurrying, wasting time, all of these things at once! They all happen there, there of all places, each slab upon concrete slab.
I have not made an effort to seek out this knowledge, yet I make a reasonable assumption. There is a large biology lecture that concludes in the Biology building on Hackberry Lane at 10:50 a.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are also a number of math classes, with varying capacities, that end at the same time inside Gordon-Palmer Hall.
That's where they all come from.
Three, four, sometimes somehow five abreast, barreling towards me like a freight train at a leisurely pace with a meager gait. On the sidewalk. Moving in a totally unpredictable zig-zag, worthy of scholarly research and analysis on the criterion of completely naturally showcasing chaos theory. On the sidewalk. Brazen behind their wide, wide, extra-wide rimmed sunglasses that render no face to share a smile with. Behind their backwards baseball caps, backwards visors, upside-down backwards visors that must have the properties of race horse blinders. On the sidewalk.
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You would think that my mind would have the capacity not to toil with such anti-confrontation. Can't you easily walk on the dirt, Joseph? Can't you easily weave your way in and out, back and forth since you're walking a mile a minute anyway? If it offends you so deeply towards the bone, why don't you just take the sidewalk by the concrete and walk on it? This is just foolish and self-centered. You might easily be asking all of these questions, thinking these thoughts. You might not. I only suggest them because I've considered them myself, you know? I didn't pull them out of thin air, and I certainly don't know what you are thinking. If I did, oh if I did...
The fact of the matter is, it's not about the sidewalk. I'm not even so sure it's about the people, but we'll get to that later. It's about me. It's the fact that no matter how many times I walk the gauntlet, and stare down a trio of friends from yards out, I will always move. Do I think I should? Me knee-jerk reaction is to say, "No, of course I shouldn't move. The sidewalk is just as much mine as it is theirs, and we all learned in kindergarten that you stay to the right of things. Go through the right door, go up the right side of the stairs, drive on the right side of the road. You should stand your ground." But the fact of the matter is, I hold a certain very contradictory fact in very high regard: you never do something unless you want to. Plain and simple. No one - read, no one - makes you do anything you do. You make the decisions. You eat the food, you type the letters, you take the steps, you smile or frown, just you. So if I stop and get out of someone's way, it wasn't the whim of some celestial demoralizer. It's me. I decided it was best.
Why?
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I might have found the way to give us our answer, albeit in a very grandiose, self-righteous-sounding way. We all know good and well that if I'm already worrying about it, I'll make plenty of explanation to the contrary thereafter, so I continue. It reads:
The way I see it, compassion is a double-edged sword. Righteous and edifying, yet a curse, two in one.
Am I saying that I am a saint because I don't extend the reality to you that sidewalks are two and three people-wide for a reason other than you walking in tan-tandem with your friends? No, I am not. Am I saying that I bear a heavy burden on my shoulders for taking the steps to leave your walk back from class undisturbed? Again, most certainly not.
What I am saying is this: I can't recall ever having pointed out to someone that they are "in my way" when coming upon them on the sidewalk. No matter having to make my way out into the street, pausing for a moment, or taking a different step altogether. I doubt I ever will. I don't consider this a virtue, I don't think my unknown peers around me should thank me for this courtesy, either. Rather, I wish anyone who takes the time to notice it at all, or its ends, even, will recognize it for what I do - a window, facing one of my deepest natures.
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I am going to take care of you. I am going to worry about you. I am going to sacrifice comfort, ease, and prudence for you. (And most of you know how much I love to be on time.) Even if be it only ever in the most subtle ways, I am going to do something for you, and I always will. And I will expect nothing in return.
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Here comes the worry. "How could you spend pages explaining how wonderful you are and not expect us to find you self-centered, self-righteous, self-over-zealous?" Oh, but your folly is there. The fact that I posed this question myself, and straight-away, nonetheless, shows just how I did expect this. I do expect it... I think. Yet I feel like even if that response strikes you, you'll keep reading, you'll see me again, you'll meet me, you'll have an extra eye on me, and then you'll know that if I had any intent to bring accolade upon myself, to make my portrait in your minds gleam, I would not be the same person doing all of these things.
Why do I bring it up, then? Because I worry that none... scratch that - that too few of you see any return from this nature, from this essential, though perhaps tiny, part of who I am.
What can I do to make me worth your while? To open another window on me for those of you who don't run into me on the sidewalk on a daily basis? What can satiate this deep worry in me?
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I can blog.
