Collapse.

Isn’t it funny, that it seems like when life isn’t quite going the way I want it (or not the way I want it at all, for that matter), I seem to write on here a lot more often. Anyway, I felt the need to put this up even though it’s not mine. I’ve been listening to this song pretty much all day, so you could say it’s how I feel right now (if not exactly, at least vaguely).
Collapse The Light Into Earth by Porcupine Tree     (By the way, check this band out. Amazing.)

I won’t shiver in the cold
I won’t let the shadows take their toll
I won’t cover my head in the dark
And I won’t forget you when we part

Collapse the Light Into Earth

I won’t heal given time
I won’t try to change your mind
I won’t feel better in the cold light of day
But I wouldn’t stop you if you wanted to stay

Collapse the Light Into Earth

Home is a Place You Can Still Get to By Train

Why do people get homesick? Most of the time when they are in the place they were raised, people are bored and want to get out. Then, when they finally make it out, they sometimes miss it terribly. Why?
Is it the missing of common people? You know people in your hometown. They hug you when they see you again. They want to catch up and see how you are doing.
What about the comfort of a home? The house you grew up in will always feel more like a “home” to you than any apartment or house of your own… at least for a while. The feel of your old room is something that can’t really be described. You just feel so relaxed in that place, like it is where you were meant to be.
Could it be familiar places? In my home town, I know every street like the back of my hand. I bet I could drive where I need to while asleep. I can go back to the old restaurants, hang outs, and places we got in trouble and bring back all those memories immediately.
So maybe that’s it… the memories? We’re getting closer now. Christmas morning as a child. Walking to and from school for the first time. Your first kiss. Getting driving instructions in the empty church parking lot. The first time you felt your heart break. Camping out in the backyard. Visiting friends and family. Getting up early for camping trips, sports, and any other number of exciting events. Driving home after senior prom, watching the sun rise while the stars disappear, and looking back. The way you felt when you left for the first time. The way you feel every time you come back.

Right now I really want that last feeling. If not for only just a little bit.

Pray That You Are Not Put To the Test.

Even the strongest body can be torn by violence.

Death can stop the richest heart.

The sharpest mind can carnage still ruin.

War torments even the faithful soul.

Maybe I Just Won’t Sleep Tonight.

It’s one a.m. and I have an 8 a.m. recitation then a test later. And I couldn’t care less.

All I’ve been thinking about all night is how pointless college feels right now. It’s definitely not working out for me. I have no clue where I’m headed with my life, and classes certainly are not helping in that regard. I sit in my classes and feel like I should be doing something better. I’m doing decently, not as good as I could be, admittedly, but easily passing, but at the same time I don’t know what good it’s doing me. Sure, I’m “learning.” I’m learning chemistry, environmental terms and issues, and weather forecasting terms. So? It just feels worthless without an overall plan that it is working towards. And I definitely don’t have that plan.

Taking a year off always sounded so cliche to me, but now it’s making more and more sense. The problem is, I’d need to have a plan if I’m going to do that. I can’t just screw everything up. Talk about wasting money. Then again… I have a well-paying job, I could just make that full-time. I have a home to live in that I’m already paying rent for. And I could maybe go climb some mountains, go backpacking again. That would be amazing. At the same time, as I type all of this, I’m shaking my head at it. What would that prove? Ok, so I climbed some mountains, probably payed off some of my loans from this year, and worked a lot more. So what? I’m just supposed to go back to school after that and everything will be different? I don’t see how that will happen.

Somebody help me.

People I can’t Stand

Ok. I know I didn’t finish that other post as promised, but life hit me like the 203 bus and I couldn’t ever really get to it.

I am going to rant now. You received fair warning. I apologize for my possible language ahead of time.

People I can’t Stand:

• Professors.
  Well, not all of them I guess, but most. The ones who set you up to fail from the start. The ones who find pleasure in giving you no tests all year, only pop quizzes worth test grades. Pop quizzes, you can’t study for those kind. The ones who grade simple assignments as if you, the students, should know enough about the topic as they, the teachers, do. Your job is to teach, not to find out who can catch the strange wordage of your ridiculous trick question and get lucky enough to answer it in the only way that you will give credit for. I learn nothing from your classes when you are just trying to trick me constantly. We get it, you’re smarter than us… Now teach that to us!
• Landlords who you never see even though the house you moved into was a mess when you got there and has had appliance and plumbing issues that have popped up ever since.
  You’re a dick, Rusty.
• People who rub in their intellect.
  I honestly don’t want to hear you talking to your friend about how all your classes are “just honestly way too easy,” and that’s why you’re failing them. Shut up. If you really were so smart you would not have to prove it by using big words you found in the thesaurus last night in casual conversation or by making everyone around you feel stupid. If you’re that smart, prove it by sitting in the back of class, saying nothing and still passing. Don’t tell everyone about it because we honestly don’t care.
• Sean Penn.
  Seriously. What an idiot.
• High Schoolers who think they’re the shit.
  “Oh my god, what happened today was the most important thing that’s ever going to happen in my entire life and I need to tell you all about it right now as loudly as I can. Also, I can’t believe how much cooler I am than everyone else around me even though we all look and act the same in all.”
• College assholes who think they’re the shit.
  “My dad bought me a car and a flat screen tv, so I’m thinking we need to rage tonight bro. We can spike our hair and wear 4 layers of clothes that are way too big for us and maybe that will increase our chances to get some poon.” Get a job.
• Assholes who admit it and embrace it
  Take a 12-step program or something.
• That girl that I see like every time in Chemistry no matter where either of us sit.
  Sorry, you just annoy the piss out of me with everything you do.
• People who can’t respect most kinds of music.
  Just because you’re obsessed with (pop/metal/country/rock/rap/insert music style here) doesn’t mean there aren’t other genres out there that are worth listening to. Music is one of the greatest gifts mankind has. We can express things through music that are impossible without. Respect someone who does that, no matter the method they use.
• PeOpLe WhO tYpE lIkE tHiS.
  I’m either going to kill you or have an epileptic seizure and then kill you.
• People with public service jobs who hate it and take that anger out on the customer.
  All I did was ordered a burger/got on the bus/looked over your merchandise, man. I didn’t need you to go apeshit on me at all.
• Crazy liberals.
  Newsflash: Most citizens of America lean toward the middle. No one enjoys hearing about how much better you are than the alternative. We don’t need to constantly hear from you about how guns are bad, abortion is good, Global Warming is completely human-caused, the war in Iraq is the worst in history, Republicans eat babies, and Barack is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
  On notice: Michael Moore, Ward Churchill, Ted Kennedy, Al Franken, Al Sharpton, Al Gore, The Clintons
• Crazy conservatives.
  Newsflash: Most citizens of America lean toward the middle. No one enjoys hearing about how much better you are than the alternative. We don’t need to constantly see pictures of aborted fetuses or hear from you about how 9-11 changed everything, the environment isn’t changing at all, guns solve everything, and John McCain is a “maverick” (didn’t you hate him not too long ago?).
  On Notice: Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Dick Cheney, Dubya, Karl Rove, Sean Hannity
• The guys who came up with and/or continue to practice “planned obsolesence.”
  Look it up. You’ll agree with me.
• Carlos Mencia.
  Who convinced this guy that he’s funny at all? You couldn’t pay me enough money to listen to his act.
• People who can’t find happiness in any aspect of life at all.
  We get it, life sucks. Here’s the thing though, it sucks for all of us! I know people who have some of the worst stories you’ve ever heard and they still manage to smile, laugh, and not wear black make-up and clothes every day. You can too.

There are a lot more than that, but at this point I’ve blanked my mind. Yeah, I realize this is pretty hypocritical in a lot of ways, but the thing is I don’t complain all the time about these people or act on my disdain for them. I simply need to write down my issues with them once in a while. This is that once.

The People’s Republic of Boulder

There’s no sense mentioning this is my first blog in a long time. That much is painfully obvious. I should mention, however, a few reasons why: I moved to Boulder. Ok, so that was just one reason, but it pretty much encompasses every other smaller reason why I’ve been a mute as far as wordpress is concerned for a month. I moved the day after my last post, my roommates and I came up a bit early to acclimate ourselves to Boulder and our new home. The house is pretty nice, though the first few days it didn’t appear like it was going to be that way. Between the caked on grease, dirty dishes in the cabinets, and the coke straw in the kitchen, we started out on this path a little wary to say the least. Paint, Lysol and elbow grease can settle even the most skeptical mind, and after applying the three, we finally settled in. The first order of business was to get to know Boulder a little better (for me anyway). This proved easier than I thought it would and I quickly started looking for jobs. Even that ended up being much less difficult than I expected; I started my new job at McGuckin Hardware a week after I moved to the city. I started to feel very comfortable with the groove I was settling into. And that’s when school started and threw everything off.

Ok, speaking of school, I have a 9 am in the morning and taking the bus there means I have to get up even earlier than I should, so part 2 of this will have to come tomorrow night.

It’s a John Mayer kind of night.

I am totally content right now laying in my bed listening to John Mayer’s music while searching other blogs. I can’t sleep or I don’t want to sleep, even though I will be awake early for church. I’m not anxious about moving on Monday, even though my room is strewn with unpacked paraphernalia. And I’m not even upset at myself for the usual things, even though I haven’t done anything to remedy any of them.

So that’s all I have for tonight.

Harvest at the Pierson Farm

Tomorrow my family is celebrating joint occasions, my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary and my grandpa’s 80th birthday. Grandma and Grandpa (Mike and Marilyn) Pierson are my only remaining grandparents as my father’s parent’s (Irene and Bernard Westhoff) have both passed on. I love both sides of my family so much and we’ve been blessed with many cousins and aunts and uncles.

These family occasions always make me reminisce about the past and tonight I caught myself thinking about growing up visiting the Pierson farm near Wiley, CO. About this time of year all the cousins would flock to the little farm that Grandpa and Grandma made their home so many years ago. August was harvest time for Grandpa’s sweet corn, and we all gladly helped where we could. We had quite an operation going, too. Grandpa and a couple uncles and hired hands would patrol the field, picking ears by hand off the tall stalks and sending them back to the house in 5 gallon buckets. There, Jeff and Ryan and some of the other older cousins would chop off both sides of the cobs and once again toss them in buckets. Next, the cobs went to Daniel, Megan, the Peecher girls and my older sister (the “middle” cousins) for shucking and removing the silks (sometimes I got to help with this too, and that meant only one thing, I was growing up!). This is where Grandma finally got her hands on the corn as she boiled every single one for just the right amount of time. As I was so young most of the time at the farm, my duties came last. I helped take the freshly boiled corn and cut the kernels off the cob for freezing (we couldn’t eat all of it in one night, no matter how hard we tried). Sometimes, when you got lucky, the kernels would strip off the cob in giant slices, still connected at the bases. That was the pinnacle, that was what I worked for. Seeing that knife slice perfectly down the side of the cob like butter as the kernels peeled away like a strip of sod was the same as seeing a beautiful car cut through the summer air to my young eyes. Of course, not a single strip of kernels ever made it into the plastic freezer bags. No, I devoured those sweet slices as soon as they hit the cutting pan. They were too perfect for plastic baggies and freezing, they deserved to be eaten immediately.

I’ll write more tomorrow night about my grandparents, for tonight, I just wanted to record my memories of those wonderful times on the farm… God Bless.

Dazed and Wanted

So I overthink things all the time. Actually, pretty much constantly. And most of the time movies will cause me to do just that. That said, I watched two movies today: Dazed and Confused and Wanted. Now, these two movies couldn’t be farther from similar. One is about how high school kids spent the summer of 1976, while the other is a shoot-’em-up flick that I thought was closer to Office Space on a bad acid trip than anything else. Yet after both movies I thought about the same thing, which can really be summed up by the last line in Wanted, when the main character turns to the camera after sniping out his last enemy and says, “What the fuck have you done lately?”

Dazed and Confused may not have asked that question so blatantly or in quite the same terms, but ultimately I did. What have I done with my life lately? I’ve worked. And when I wasn’t working I did nothing really. Not the kind of “nothing” they did in the movie, either. In the movie they had a blast, they lived life. I can’t exactly say that I’ve followed that path. In fact, the opposite is probably true: I’ve worried about life too much while not living it at all.

It’s almost like this blog is a small picture of what I’m talking about too. How many times have I said on here that I want to do what Wesley did in Wanted? To “take back control of my life?” The sad thing is that for every time I actually wrote it down, there were at least ten times more that I thought it and didn’t commit it to words. I’m constantly saying that I need to reform my path because it just isn’t working for me, but I guess I don’t really know how to do that. No matter where I go to, no matter what I decide to do with my life, no matter who I associate with, I’m still the same old guy who feels lonely in a crowded room and can’t manage to get his self-esteem up to average.

I don’t even know how to finish this post, how the hell am I supposed to know how to set up the rest of my life? I need some inspiration of sorts, and it needs to be something that can travel. I need to have it with me at all times, or else I’ll fall back to… this. And I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I don’t deserve pity. But at the same time, if someone thinks they can help, that’s a different story.

Time for me to go, I have to go back to work tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. And the next.

Lonesome.

Is it so wrong to be lonely? To feel a little self-pity? Sometimes a person almost can’t help it. Life turns to crap and we don’t feel like anything can fix it. Can that be healthy? Who knows I guess. A lot of people hold the opinion that it isn’t, though. That we need to always be happy and carefree and living in the now. But I just don’t operate that way. I look back into the past constantly and worry about the future the rest of the time. That is, whenever “now” isn’t working for me. Which sure seems to happen more often than not anymore. I’ve started to realize more and more that no matter how many friends I have, I don’t have a best friend. I don’t have someone that would stick up for me no matter what. Take my side in a serious situation. Pull me back from the brink should I ever reach it. And I’ve never had that person. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up around a lot of kids my age. Maybe it’s because I was picked on. Maybe it’s because I took to being a smart ass because of the bullying. I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure. And I certainly don’t have a girlfriend that can fit in that category. Which would be ideal. It just seems like no matter what I try, everything falls through. No matter how I act, it doesn’t work out. So once again, I don’t know why I wrote this for sure. just needed to vent again. I had a bad, lonely day, and I needed to get that out there.