This Suit Burns Better

So I officially can't go out in the sun anymore. I was outside for about three hours, half of the time in the shade, and I am burnt quite robustly. Thankfully its only my arms and my face and I shall be able to sleep fairly soundly so long as I don't roll onto my face, which sometimes happens, though I mostly wake up when the pillows begin to suffocate me. Mostly.

It has been a little while since I've posted on this blog. Though not for lack of trying. Okay, thats a lie, but I've thought about it. And thinking is trying, right? No? Probably not. I am still jobless and fairly hopeless in my life. Not hopeless in the "what does it all mean!?" sense, rather the "crams at least eight hours of television into the day,between podcasts, comic books, and video games" sense of the word. I think about all these people out there, all these people that get up everyday and go out and do something and spend a lot of time focused on a goal and I wonder if there is something wrong with me. I ask myself, why can't I be that industrious? Then I realize I just don't have anything better to do with my time. Fry from Futurama (alliteration!) was at the orpenarium asking the head of the place about Leela, and Fry asks if there is anything more the man can tell him about Leela, to which the man responds "nothing that wouldn't be a waste of your time" to which Fry responds "That's impossible, because my time is worthless!" I have become a Fry, who was happy to get a vacation, saying he hadn't had time off since he was "twenty through twenty-three". I like to think I enjoy all the time I have, and I do, but there is something about living in a basement level apartment, with no job, with nothing reason to bother to wake up before the noon bells toll, alone brooding in silence for hours on end that does tend to make me a little bit off. It isn't as noticable to myself, perhaps it is to others, but most of the time I feel just the same as I did the day before and the day before that. Everyonce in a while, though, I'll find myself in a situation that I should know how to handle and its as though I've forgotten. I recall a few odd sensations when I started going back to UNR. Talking to people in my classes I just cocked my head and stared, not knowing why they where speaking to me. Something about how my day was going, perhaps, I wasn't sure. I managed to make some level of small talk but walked away in a daze, as though such an occurance was a complete annomoly. Shortly after I realized it was just a normal way of going through life. A benal conversation about something reletively meaningless, still, it left me with a sense of myself as something outside. A stranger.

More than that, though, I've been living in downtown reno for a while now and so going to UNR was altogether a bizarre experience. I live a mile, maybe a mile and a half, from the campus. But they are two different worlds. Sometimes I see some of those UNR type people come into this world, usually on weekend nights, usually drunk, and I ignore them. But to see them, in the day light, walking around and chatting on cell phones and with friends, I noticed how far gone from them I really am. I never felt completely integrated at that school but, still, I was one of them then. Just another student. Maybe not as outgoing as some, but they were a group and I was in that group on some level. But being there just a couple nights a week, seeing them from the vantage point of just a year and a half, I notice how completely different I am from most of them. They seem so well adjusted to their surroudings, so at ease with the whole scene of that college student lifestyle. Meanwhile, I walk hunched with a hat pulled down nearly over my eyes smoking a cigarrette without taking it out of my mouth, a messanger bag strapped over my shoulder and an apparent aura as no one seems to walk within a few feet of me. I realized then, though, that I still have the part to play on that campus. That although I walk most of my days in a world that is littered with drunks and homeless, of the old and forgotten, of the young and mentally insane, that I come to that campus now not as a simple student. But I am a stereotype. In my messanger bag I carry notebooks scribbled with stories, poems, and non-sequiters. I am the proverbial outsider. The ones that exist on the fringes of the others happy worlds, reminding them that this campus is a diverse campus, a campus where philosphers and artist come to try to make sense of the world in there own way. My importance to the group is to remind them that though they may be pursuing a safe major, that they may be having the typical college experience, that they are still surrounded by a world outside the campus, one that exists only to remind them that at least someone is doing it, and thank god they don't have to be that lonely morose mother fucker over there. Perhaps I have not said what I meant to say correctly. I do not want to make it seem as though I am looking at myself through titnted glass, to make myself look like some sort of marter. I do not see myself that way. I am just how I am, at one point in my life had I been given the choice I would have choosen this life. In other ways it has been somewhat thrust upon me. Christians might say that the good lord saw fit to curse me with personality quirks that make it almost impossible for me to connect to new people in order for me to find a higher calling, one that would leave me little time for too many people in my life. Another view of this may be that I choose to keep people at a distance because I don't like to be acknowledged. What I say before about appearing as some sort of characture of the stereotypical moody artist (pronounced "are-teest") isn't self grandulizing, rather it is a mere observation of myself from an outside perspective. Again, I didn't mean to represent myself as something I'm not, or may not be, just as a composit of what I suspect some have viewed me as. To attempt to look through anothers eyes at your own actions has helped me in recent years to understand things about myself. If something has happened that seems so big to me that I can't get a grip on it, that is what I do. Just trying to see myself from someone elses point of view. Someone with their own problems and worries. When I view it through that lens I see that what I do doesn't matter all that much. I am a background character in their lives and although I may have done things I regret, things I wish I could go back in time to fix, when I look at it through the eyes of someone else I see that it really doesn't matter to almost anyone but me. Somehow that makes it all better.

When it comes down to it, I suppose the reason I feel so off at UNR is because I feel like I've somehow given up. Had to go back and try again because I failed. I know I didn't fail, but by not being able to achieve anything new for myself afterwards I feel as though I've not been able to grow since leaving. And I hate having to go back. Wherever I am I try not to make too much of an impression on anyone. To stay relatively annoynomus so as I can move on without regret. Going back to do anything over again feels like a waste. Even if it helps me to get better, I want to try something new. Even with my writing I hate to revise. I know its neccessary, I know it needs to be done, but once I've written a story and felt comfortable enough with it to call it a first draft I feel I'm more or less done with it. Maybe I do need to slow down and retrace my steps from time to time, maybe I do need to become more emotionally invested in what I am doing at any given time, but I never have before. It would be a new thing for me, and perhaps something I could carry on with me. It is something I should try, but perhaps I am just not ready for it. I always want to experience life through a different sort of life. I always want to move on but I am a creature of extreme habit and find it hard to really move forward. Still, I try new things, I see how they work, and then I know. If nothing else it helps me to understand life through other people's eyes, and maybe thats really the only way anyone can understand life.