Summer Love

Since the beginning of summer it's been a long steady climb toward not sucking. Until recently.  But nothing can derail me from attending college so regardless of what obstacles arise, I am essentially unstoppable.

The Good:

• I found a far superior guide to self-improvement written by Anonymous.  Amazing that it didn't circulate its way around to me sooner.  Here's the link.
• I finally got some time spent with T-Rad after he was forced on more important adventures.  We saw the Last Airbender (terrible fucking movie, not even good to make fun of since every sentence in the movie is just exposition) and played RE4 and watched The Lost Skeleton and did a bunch of other shit like drive all the way to Parchment and back and eat at Denny's.
• Went to DCI Kalamazoo with a sweet girl, who shall be referred to as... something.  Nothing really merits a distinct nickname yet.  Anyway, it was an awesome time.  Easily the best drum corps event I've attended (other than World Championship Finals, of course) and she seemed to enjoy herself as well.
• Bought Kid A, and finally understand why people are so obsessed with Radiohead.  Absolutely fantastic album.
• Made lots of good on the list I made in "The Movies", and Grizzly Man and Almost Famous are probably now two of my favorite movies ever.  
• I can now officially say that I've done chatroulette with two other guys, in speedos.
• Went to some kids awesome lake house in Delton and fucked shit up.  Seriously, the kid has his own lake.  Freaking boss.  I went kayaking, did flips off of a floating dock, made waves, perfected the art of the body kayak, and, most importantly, played a download-only game for the PS3 called "Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars", which may be the best game ever made.  It's soccer.  With cars.
• Found a partner to attend the August 25th Coheed & Cambria/Porcupine Tree concert in Grand Rapids.  It's only fitting that it was this kid (known as No Problem) because he provided me tickets to see Obama at his own special graduation ceremony.  (I am so jealous, by the way.)

The Bad:

• Awkward dissolution of friendships continues as I don't see any friends for long periods of time.  I am also afraid of having a party at my own house despite the fact that I like my house and that everybody is urging me to.  
• Still haven't been invited to go/gone out to the beach with any friends.  I went out there once to pick up my dad after he rode the Kal-Haven trail  with my Colorado-dwelling uncle (if you couldn't figure it out intuitively, people who live in the mountains are insanely good at biking) and saw a bunch of friends who had gone together.  How much more awkward does it get?
• I realized people I trusted don't trust me enough to tell me anything I couldn't figure out by intuition.  This is intentionally vague.
• Experienced a gross invasion of privacy and breach of confidentiality on Formspring.  Also intentionally vague.
• I'm completely lethargic and never feel like bothering to do anything.  However, that's just a psychological thing.  Probably the result of me seeking refuge from the bad through apathy.  Not that I know anything about how that works.  

I honestly can't tell you a point in posting this.  I've been too lazy to bother with posting anything else, maybe?  Once the last two sections of "The Bad" blow over I'll post about them, assuming they don't get - wait for it... ugly.  Also, I was hoping to post some movie reviews after I see Inception, just because I anticipate that being good.

1/4"

I just finished book #3 in a year!  Jesus Christ, this looks even more pathetic despite the fact that it's actually becoming gradually less pathetic (and I am exaggerating because I exclude books for school and one that was short enough that I read it in one sitting)  Anyway, the book was House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

Be forewarned if you decide to read this book: it is an incredibly confusing novel.  The bulk of the book centers itself around a man named Will Navidson, who in the fictional universe of this novel, took the above Pulitzer-Prize winning photo of a Sudanese girl he named Delial who died soon after the photo was taken.  He and his claustrophobic wife, Karen, buy a house in some ambiguous location in Virginia that somehow ends up being slightly larger on the inside than it is on the outside.  Initially it is 1/4" larger, but this measurement increases slightly the more Navidson and his wheelchair-confined friend Billy Reston and his brother Tom try to find a way to measure the house and eliminate this "spatial rape".  Well, as happens with all quasi-horror plots, the house is actually really fucked up.  Not necessarily haunted, but weird as balls.  Rooms expand and contract in small increments unnoticed, doors appear in different places, and eventually, a completely dark, silent, featureless, and cold hallway appears behind one of the doors that appears to extend beyond the boundaries of the outer wall of his house.  Navidson has the spirit of an adventurer and is determined to see what is beyond that door, while his wife is much more concerned with her own safety and the safety of their two children, Chad and Daisy.  So they hire an initially reluctant but later intrigued group of professional climbers/explorers and such to document what the hell is going on in this weird house.  And basically (spoiler alert!), it's a big, scary labyrinth.

This is strictly the first layer of House of Leaves - this is an imaginary film called The Navidson Record, and we are reading an extremely intellectual, pretentious analysis/summary/documentary about the film that Navidson made and the slew of sub-films and essays that followed.  Because, you know, it's pretty weird, even for fictional characters.  The dude who wrote it is named Zampanò, and he's blind.  Which raises a whole lot of questions as to why he wrote about a film.  Or did he make up the film?  I don't know.  Anyway, after the guy dies, the third layer of the novel imposes itself on us - a lost soul by the name of Johnny Truant.  He had a rough childhood in foster care as his father died unexpectedly and his mother was institutionalized when he was young, and ends up as an apprentice at a tattoo parlor and in love with a stripper he names Thumper when the story begins.  Then he finds The Navidson Record and starts to lose his mind as he attempts to piece together the confusing jumble of notes left for him by Zampanò.  He sometimes interjects into the story with lengthy footnotes that explain some day-to-day experiences that reflect his failing grip on reality as he progresses through the many layers and labyrinthine structure of The Navidson Record.

So basically, this is not a book for people prone to migraines.  This is a damn confusing book.  The recurring theme of the labyrinth is often reflected by the format of the words on the pages themselves.  Often, the book delves into a series of footnotes upon footnotes, often occupying several pages of text - these contain innumerable references to sources that are occasionally fictional and that occasionally exist in reality.  Other times the main text is rearranged to reflect the events of the story - sometimes stretching, sometimes condensed into one corner, sometimes twisting and arcing and sometimes even written so that it can only be read in a mirror.  It's absurd and clever at the same time.  A personal highlight actually came in one of the appendices - Truant's mother writes him a series of letters from her mental institution that disturbingly details her descent into madness in a way that basically reflects the events of The Navidson Record.  Even through the spatial rape and abyssal blackness of the house and creeping monsters in the dark, this proved to be the most unsettling for me.  Oh well, I guess I'm just weird.  

If your house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, you just might be a redneck.