Edgy. Today is my last day of
the summer after high school. While it's only midnight here, and lately I've been dropping at about 3 AM, I feel very tired. Emotionally exhausted. It is such a difficult thing for me, to figure out what trinkets and icons I want to bring with me, especially since I have a notoriously difficult time decorating most things and paying any attention to aesthetics. Actually, that's not true. I am just very uneven about my attention to aesthetics. I feel that
my dorm room will sort of be my temple, and it needs to Fucking Rock or something in life will be missing.
So tomorrow I will move into Macalester College. I'm quite excited about it, all in all, but I have a lot of trouble letting go of things, and finally moving out of home is one of the greatest letting go's a person can experience (besides death, yeah) And I need to clean up the family computer, too, which is a fucking mess, much like most physical organizations in my life (though happily, not so much the mental end these days, Mmm Mmm good Paxil).
Mallrats: The pilgrimage. Today my very trusty friend Dave and I decided, as our last non-collegiate chance to hang out, we'd visit Eden Prairie Center, the filming location of 1995 Kevin Smith movie Mallrats. We were extremely disappointed to find that the entire mall has been gutted and is getting expanded about 80%. We searched in vain for any recognizable parts to the mall. Malls are such transient things, as are most things commercial in nature. However, this sucked a lot. The very railings, the floors, the ceilings, even the elevator that Brodie and Rene have sex in, all of it had been mutated into unrecognizeable forms. There was nowhere to get chocolate-covered pretzels, and from the exterior we couldn't figure out where Jay and Silent Bob had used his retractable cable to escape from Lafours. In short, don't go to Eden Prairie Center, because you can't cross the same river twice.
Geek I am. Of course, my beloved old Apple Macintosh 6100/60 kicked the bucket a few weeks ago when it acquired bad blocks, knocking my web server hongpong.com offline. Which means I should be trying to recover the news archives posted over the past 9 months, but it's just so difficult to try to do...
I am very happy that my family is springing for a new G4 for my dorm. Very very happy. I think I have earned it, working during the summer, and very hard during most of my high school career, and I hope I did not cross the line from kewl hardware to rich-fuck pretentiousness. I don't think I did, because I decided to get a Mitsubishi CRT display instead of a flat-screen, which was more than twice as expensive. With my parents already footing much of the bill at Mac, this'd be another straw for the camel.
In any case, the computer will not arrive at school for at least a week, probably more. HOW will Dan the Dork survive without his precious MP3 playing and all that stuff? I'm not sure, really. Conveniently, I am working somewhere in the school library, so I'll be nearby the computer labs and such. Ahhh... electron goodness... Of course, I think that it's really, really a good thing that a computer won't in my dorm, in some respects, because it will force me out of the room and keep me from being a recluse. The word from my friends already at college is that new freshmen are mostly quite friendly and excited... I'm counting on it.
Meta. Looking over this w/u, I feel it's quite tangential, unfocused, and parenthetical, which I believe reflects to some extent how my life has reached a junction point. It's not because I'm stoned right now, in case you're wondering. I have been known to do that before and the results tended to get nuked rapidly.
WEED! In fact, for the last few days here, I've sworn off getting THC-intoxicated until I get to school. I'm not sure why, exactly. My last experience buying pot was so truly unusual and unnerving that it's made me very edgy about drugs, I think. As I move onto college, I reflect on the people I know who've gotten pretty burned out. And I think about the people who don't smoke pot at all, or drink, but have no brains or ambition, which reminds me that drugs don't fuck you up if you're already a fuck-up. I think I have learned that you should not touch drugs until you've got your shit together. And additionally, don't smoke pot alone and When it's all about the weed, it's time to think. For the most part, I've held to these principles, and I think if I continue to do so, I will emerge from college a happy and healthy person who had a good amount of fun, without endangering myself in literally suicidal patterns of behavior.
P.S. The experience about buying weed was so bizarre I know I have to node about it, but I've had difficulty working up the reserve to do so. Also, I am now on E2 hiatus and I guess I will have to forgo most interaction with this fine community until I get the computer. However, as a human being, I think I will be better with friends and happiness than a little more XP.