2009 in retrospect

I feel like such a tool right now about posting this.  Remember the time before the advent of the digital camera where you couldn't reminisce over a moment immediately after the moment had passed?  Well, I'm reminiscing before the camera is even into "review" mode right now.  I feel like a tool because I hate people who do that, for the record.

Most of my judgment of how fantastic a year was is determined by the greatness of any previous years.  The problem with this, however, is that typically my "years" end up slicing themselves into "good" and "bad" halves, with the bad half typically starting in the right-now region of the calendar and the good half beginning around may and lasting until November or December.  Keep this in mind.

2009 was by far the most demanding year of my life.  January through May was spent almost completely away from social interaction, because I was juggling immense loads of schoolwork and music.  I've already told the story about my frustration with school that year, so I'll elaborate on the music aspect of these months.  I had to balance both Legends ensembles that I was in, and since both required me to practice a shit-ton, I spent a great deal of time after school doing so.  Winter Legends usually doesn't require that much practice, but for some reason that year we got music extremely late in the year that was quite difficult to play, so I became extremely frustrated with the whole scenario.  Somehow I ended up getting duped into another partial season of KJSO, which ended up being a huge time-sucker as well.  Summer Legends left me barely able stay afloat, so I had to practice a ton for that as well.

June through mid-August, of course, was spent entirely with Legends.  I still don't know whether or not my experience was what it was supposed to be.  I was told probably about 10,000 times over the course of the summer that it was the absolute best thing to do with your life, but I don't feel that that was true for me.  While I really like playing music (obviously), there were very few moments that could actually be described as "fun", and most of the people involved didn't have personalities anything like my own.  Don't get me wrong, I really like everyone involved - it's just that most people thought of themselves as total badasses for doing what they do while I didn't give half a shit about how cool we were, since... well, since I have never given half a shit about how cool I was.  When by the end of the summer I still didn't really "gel" with everybody else by being self-righteous, I felt like self-improvement had failed.  One example would be way back in March/February when I was on the verge of not doing drum corps.  The amount of work I was putting into the activity made it feel like becoming a stronger player was not enough reason to stay involved.  Then, one of my friends suggested other reasons to stay involved, including making new friends and maturing.  Cockiness, frankly, is not and never has  been my idea of maturity - this made it a bit hard to recognize any traces of self-improvement as I am still quite critical of myself. (Read the rest of this blog, for god's sake!)

By the way, don't misinterpret my complaints about this summer - it was chock-full of memorable moments and allowed me to improve quite a bit as a musician.  It was far from regrettable, but it's just that I still feel like I'm missing some crucial aspect of the drum corps experience that makes people fall in love with it as much as they do.  Since I am strongly considering another summer in Legends, I'll just stick with hoping that these doubts arise from me being a bitch and that next time will be way better. 

When I got back home until about four weeks later was possibly the happiest time of my entire life.  Seriously, I hung out with incredible people almost every day and never had a worry on my mind for more than three seconds (aside from some frustration with marching band, which is inevitable).  But since I have no complaints from this period of time, I can't really elaborate on this.  I just strive for my life to be like these few weeks - no stress, good company, enjoyable activities (these weeks included band camp, which is always a blast.)

After band camp though, I started getting sick of the section leader job... a lot.  Despite my instructors' reassurance that I was doing quite well in my position, by the end of the season I just wanted to shoot myself - just as we had settled into a groove, everything started changing haphazardly in the show and didn't even stop in the very last rehearsal for that season.  It doesn't really help that I am one of the most temperamental people on this earth, either - I left almost every rehearsal prepared to strangle something.  So despite our last few moments together as an ensemble being quite fun and relaxed, I left the season with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.  When Winter Legends came around again, I frankly just didn't want to play anymore.  The horrendous previous season and my tragically unfortunate hatred of leadership gave me a huge mental block of sorts, and I spent the past few auditions/rehearsals essentially sucking ass, because I was so afraid of being obligated to step in as section leader.  Luckily for me, there is a girl involved who plays just as well as me if not better, so my guess is they just shooed her in once I somewhat reluctantly admitted that I'd rather suck donkey balls than be section leader again (although my confession was more along the lines of, "No, I'd rather not be section leader.")

In summary, I suppose this year was a bit disappointing musically despite the fact that the sheer amount of time I spent playing enabled me to play much better, which may or may not be more important than my gripes about the ensembles I was in.  I'm not going to decide right now. 

On the plus side, this year is much easier than last year academically.  However, some of the events of last year left my social life a bit crippled - my life is like Gossip Girl sometimes, except nobody ever really gets mad at me because I, unlike seemingly everybody else in the world, don't try to piss anybody off.  The main problem is that people get stupid and seek drama despite the fact that they claim to hate drama.  It all affects me because I am almost incapable of having a centralized group of friends with the shitstorm between the friends I already have.

Another sorta-plus is that my love life is no longer stagnant.  To an extent.  I'm trying to set myself up for epic success in the 2010.

So relative to other years, this year was definitely better than 2008 (except for the summer - sorry, but drum corps ain't got nothin' on Philmont), in which spring was dominated by the worst period of depression I've ever suffered through, and the fall featured a lackluster marching band season and fears/regrets about my course selections for my junior year of high school that ended up being justified.  It was only slightly worse than 2007, where my spring was both stressed and depressed, but not nearly to the extent that the latest springs were, where my summer was quite laid back, and where I got my first taste of the life-changing marching band experience in the fall.  I'm most excited about the fact that this is the first year since I was probably 10 years old where things haven't been progressively worse than the previous years - which leaves me optimistic about 2010.

I am generally a huge pessimist, but for whatever reason, I think 2010 will be my year.  I'm a senior in high school, and I'm definitely going to college... somewhere.  Any college experience will be a miraculous improvement over high school for me, so I will probably spend the entirety of my fall elated.  This spring will allow me to slack off some in high school - I've already been accepted to many colleges, so I'm not worried about my current classwork so much anymore.  Right now, I've got no plans for the summer (I do have a full-time job potentially lined up that pays insanely well for someone my age), and I think it'll otherwise be quite stress-free.  As I mentioned before, I think I might find some success with romance this year too.  Although I'm not getting my hopes up. That's just foolish.

Christmas

This Christmas was not notable as far as celebrating goes - but there were many incredible memories that were made.  They should be saved.  So here goes.

Christmas Eve was the designated day of gift-giving amongst the members of my mother's side of the family - I received probably the best gift of the season that day from my grandmother: a Sony alarm clock.  The reasons why this gift is great include but are not limited to:

1. It has an iPod dock that charges your iPod and plays music from it
2. You can set your alarm easily!
3. It is synced to the atomic clock
4. You can wake up to music from your iPod
5. The speaker quality is incredible.
6. You can control the music it plays using a remote control.  And not just like next/previous

Once this portion of the family went back home, some of our cousins from my dad's side of the family arrived.  This is where things got interesting.  We ended up spending lots of time playing video games and watching youtube videos until the wee hours of the morning for two days in a row.  It was pretty fantastic.  Christmas morning wasn't terribly exciting, since we had already opened gifts the day before.  After we had all woken up, we made the trip over to my grandparent's home, which was quite uncomfortable.  My grandfather suffers from Alzheimer's and ended up talking to me about music for half an hour before announcing that he didn't even know who I was.  So the rest of my family told someone else to play the piano and distract him so I could escape.  It was pretty sad but comical at the same time - you have to be able to laugh at stuff like that. We played pool and then went to go see Avatar.  Again.   (There really isn't much else to see, and I didn't want to be lame and not do anything so I just went along with them.)

Afterward we annihilated a cube of mountain dew and stayed up quite late into the morning.  That was that.  There really isn't much to talk about that isn't me whining about my life, and I feel the need to post here, so please forgive the stupidity of this post.

The Friend Zone

If you read this and think it's about you, you're probably right.  Sorry, ladies.

When it comes to entering womenfolk's friend zones, I am incredibly talented. Why? I am charming, handsome, and smart enough to be reliable and desirable company for all the fantastic ladies on this green earth. Conversely, I am awkward, cute, and cynical enough to keep myself without any room for a relationship to flourish. Any guy who hasn't been living under a rock for the entirety of their lives understands that this situation is extremely hard to extract oneself from - luckily, I've never been in a situation where I've needed to. I am not the type who is constantly in need of some sort of romantic gratification, nor do I find women to be entirely terrible to keep in company (if you know me, which chances are you do if you are reading this, you'll know that 99% of my friends are women and that I am essentially of a feminist ideology, despite the fact that I have a penis and am not a homosexual).

The problem now, however, is that I have voluntarily entered a romantic situation that his quickly spiraled out of my control (see my last post), and can't determine for myself whether it is beneficial to become a permanent fixture in the friend zone, or to opt out of any sort of relation with the girl in question altogether. To explain my "crisis" more thoroughly, however, I'll need to give a little bit of back story with my pathetically inactive love life thus far.

Basically, I define myself by the fact that I am in love with the concept of love - something that I am actually somewhat ashamed of. I'm pretty sure it came about as a result of seeing too many Disney films as a child - how many teenagers do you think Walt Disney has fucked up? Anyway, when I meet a girl who I'm attracted to, I'm extremely hesitant to look any further into a relationship with this person. The reason? Experience has told me that I need to be cautious. When I determine that a relationship may be likely with a given person, I devote myself fully toward the goal of wooing them - and since I am not by any means a seductive individual, I tend to have the effect of turning them off and coming off as a total creeper. This seems completely foolish and stupid, and I often ask myself why I am so willing to throw myself at one goal where the probability of success really has nothing to do with how hard I work for it. But again experience has taught me that my relentless pursuit of the objects of affection is one of the few completely unchangeable facets of my personality - in the same vein as my seemingly permanent low self-esteem and my constant desire for the approval of others.

My freshman year of high school was when I was mostly provided this experience. After a few months affirming my status as the creepy nerd in the class, I somehow ended up completely infatuated with - you guessed it - the girl who sat fucking right in front of me. The most stereotypical attraction in the world, and I fell victim to it. My mind still has trouble processing the stupidity of my 14-year-old self, for an obvious reason: I reluctantly admit that I still have feelings with this girl. My constant one-sided flirtation with this girl led her to hate my guts - something I am still paying for to this day. I'll obviously never be able to satiate this desire - I would never let a person who ever acted that idiotically toward me back into consideration for a romantic relationship.  The point is that I got stupid.

Thus, I've been extremely hesitant about who I take interest in. It took an extremely long time for me even to be able to find myself genuinely attracted to other women, and I was so scared of having yet another unrequited love that, aside from one girlfriend, I've never felt the same sort of strong romantic attachments again - even in situations where they should have formed. That is, until now.

Recently, a young woman walked into my life at one of the most unexpected of social events, and after a long period of time without contact, I've reconnected with her. The important thing is that about a month ago I decided that I may have actually started to become legitimately interested in her - not just in the I'm-a-horny-teenager way. The pieces suddenly fit together in my head: I've got nothing to lose by pursuing a relationship with her; plus she's absolutely gorgeous, incredibly intelligent, and super classy. Maybe I could even use my budding attraction with her to distract me from my obsession over the previous girl. The next day, as I my self-confidence grew immensely with this newly-found hope and excitement, she got a boyfriend.

Shit.

So here I am now, back at square one, and I am left with a decision to make. On one hand, I've got the option of essentially scrapping all the progress I've made with her, and not having to worry about my feelings with her, which would eventually fade with time. On the other, I've got the option of entrapping myself within the friend zone, and getting closer to her in a way that will probably not end well for me.

Option #1 would result in an overwhelming sense of guilt, since I do actually care about her feelings, and I'm sure she values my current relationship with her, no matter how weird it is for me - ending it would hurt her feelings. Also, I might not be able to end my feelings toward her so quickly, since she is an incredible lass. Knowing me, I would also probably experience regret toward choosing not to advance our relationship any further, since few other women in this world are as magnificent as her.

Option #2 would allow me to grow closer to her, but the friend zone is an option about which I've become very cautious in high school. I predict that becoming closer to her will not happen without my sexual attraction to her fading, or even remaining as strong as it currently is. Even after she might break up with her boyfriend, she'll be unable to requite my affections, seeing as how at that point I'd be more of a friend than a suitor.

So which is the lesser of two evils? Torturing myself for the sole sake of being around a woman I care about? Or is it better to break off some of the bonds I've formed, which may potentially harm the girl and make me feel, for lack of better words, like a total douche? Fuck you, friend zone.

@@@@@

Update! I got overexcited by the dim prospects of a potential relationship with a girl who doesn't know or like me all that much and have pretty much reverted back to my usual pathetic obsession with girl A.  So I guess whether or not I'm actually friend-zoned doesn't really matter that much.   It's healthy to be distracted from your own helplessness for a month every three years or so, anyway.

The Joy Of Being Helpless

Tonight, my friend told me a story. Thursday night, he claimed to have gone to bed and been unable to sleep as a result of some unnamed guilt hanging over his head. When he finally fell asleep, at some point that night, he woke up completely paralyzed. He couldn't even open his eyes to determine what was happening around him (which was absolutely nothing).

This phenomenon is known as sleep paralysis, which I haven't experienced. I don't really care about what happened to him though. He kept bringing up two things that at first seem to contradict each other:

1. He felt completely powerless - like anything could happen and he wouldn't be able to do a thing to fix it.
2. He was completely relaxed and thinking coherent, intelligent thoughts.

My thoughts on the matter are that if I were to wake up in the middle of the night completely unable to move a muscle in my body, I'd probably start panicking and tearing myself apart from the inside. That may have to do with my nature more than anything else, so I'll accept that his reaction to his situation was rational.

I normally wouldn't be the sort of douchebag philosopher to read into why someone would react that way to any given situation in which he/she has no control without some sort of prompting. However, I realized that I've actually been many of these situations, and I actually have reacted in the same way as my friend.

One situation would be my recent climactic struggle with IB English. Last year marked one of the first truly meaningful, epic failures of my lifetime, when I completely bombed the Oral Examination, as I've posted about before in "Because I'm Still In High School..." I've had meaningful failures on a small scale, and I've had epic failures with situations that are fairly trivial in hindsight, but this is, to date, the only failure that has negatively impacted my life on a tremendous scale. Just a few weeks ago, I went through the second ring of IB English HL's circus, which completely overshadows any other examination besides the test at the end of the year - the Commentary. Compared to the first Oral Exam, this one is a nightmare. Or at least it should be. Roughly four times as important on the grade-weighting scale as the first, it involves a 20-minute period for writing a 12-minute analysis of an unknown passage or poem from works we've studied. Naturally, everyone involved in the studying process was terrified of failure and studied their asses off for a good grade.

I never did. While the examination process itself was uncomfortable, it was no more so than anticipated when I learned about the assignment at the beginning of this school year in September. Why the night before was about as close to serenity as possible in my life escapes me. I don't know whether it was because I had simply become apathetic to the futile idea of passing, I was too preoccupied by other things to put forth effort, or whether I just lost interest in trying to be competitive in a class full of people who are actually generally less intelligent than myself (yes, I realized that is a totally cocky statement, but true).

I did manage to come to the conclusion, after finishing my exam with a dreadful grade and a wide grin, that it was much better to not worry about the benefits of success and the consequences of failure. But I don't think this is a good stance to take, in general. I can't just forfeit in all situations that require me to put forth lots of effort!

All this is beside the point. What really interests me is the very facet of human nature where hopelessness becomes a form of escapism - and is universal. Some people could describe it as "going with the flow," but I associate that with simply choosing not to exercise the pimp-hand and letting someone else take charge. There are probably a billion other people who've noticed this before me, but I felt the need to post it as a moment of self-discovery.

Inevitable Post

If you've managed to take anything away from any previous posts I may have made, it is that I am a tremendous nerd. With each day I grow closer to becoming that stereotypical nerd - shunning any sense of uniqueness for the sake of entertaining myself. I have no problem with this, so tell your brain to shut up before you post about how "CONFORMITY ISN'T COOL!" because I'm short, dweeby, weak, into sci-fi, video games, good at math and science, and study way too much.
That being said, my reasons for making the late-night trek to see the midnight premiere of James Cameron's new movie, "Avatar", are understandable. It's my impression that many people were actually turned off by the trailer and shortened premise of the movie before it came out - it appeared to be a fairly standard sci-fi action flick, but the fact that it mostly starred giant blue people over humans seemed to be a bit off-putting. For nerds like me, though, who are familiar with Cameron's work (that doesn't include Titanic), the background is a total turn-on. When I went to see it, I hadn't done as much research on it as one would expect - at that point in time, I didn't know that Avatar was the most expensive movie ever made at that point, or that the technology behind the movie was as unique as it was.

So when I first laid eyes upon the Earth-like jungle-covered moon of Pandora, I was absolutely blown away. I really can't describe this movie visually in words. Perhaps the most accurate description would be that while most of the movie is entirely computer generated, it is all completely real. The blue-skinned Na'vi which inhabit the land are so detailed that you can easily tell them apart with the same level of ease with which you could distinguish any number of film actors. Every single organism on the planet is so detailed that you frequently have to remind yourself that the movie is indeed animated, and is not actually filmed footage of the strange creatures on some actual distant planet. It is completely unlike anything I've ever seen - and that's what makes the film worth viewing more than anything.

That being said, there have been frequent complaints about the simplicity and unoriginality of the script. I'm not going to deny that both are quite dull, but the visuals make up for this flaw. By far. And they aren't really that bad - just not quite as believable or inspired as the environment where the film takes place. Nobody goes to this movie to see a romance between giant blue warriors blossom, anyway.

In short, if you don't see this movie, I will fucking find you and kill you.