Finding Orion's Belt

No.

No, I’m not on drugs.

And no, I’m not drinking.

I’m addicted to tech. And I haven’t been there in over a month and its actually really bothering me. 

Tech, isn’t just tech.

It’s a self-esteem booster, a stress reliever, a social forum, a skill developer, and a creative outlet. All in one.

My life, is surprisingly way more boring than expected.

I wake up. Depending on whose house I’m at, I eat a rushed breakfast, or skip it, hop in the car, or catch the bus. I converse with friends, then head off to my first period class. I survive through the day. I sit through class after class: psych, and precalc, english, world history, apes, and photo, and a currently undecided class (its irrelevant to the story so I won’t go into details). I eat lunch with my friends, but its not entirely normal, persay. We talk, and make jokes, but I rarely get a chance to hang out with them outside of school. My best friend isn’t talking to me, my girlfriend is 2000 miles away, I don’t hang out with the techies much, expect AT tech or before shows. I hang out with the friends I had before my life manifested, and its just not quite the same. I’m not back in yet. 

After school, depending on what day it is, I ride the bus, either to the Metro or to the library to do homework. I’ve traveled the redline down through DC so many times I could practically name you all the stations along the way. More or less in order. I bring my camera with me, on the off chance I’ll see a really good shot, but usually the trains windows are so dirty that I can’t shoot a nice picture that doesn’t have a brownish sludge looking tint. I get home, and I sit. I sit, drink tea or have a snack, and check facebook. I check my email, I check the 3 different webcomics I read. I check tumblr. Eventually I get around to doing my homework. My ipod is dead, so I stream pandora. If I’m lucky, I don’t have to skip every other song cause its something I hear too much or something I don’t feel like listening to. I go on edline, and go through my list of homework, either until I’m finished, or until dinner. Dinner is usually short, and conversation is fairly light. I go back to doing homework, or if I’m done, I go on facebook, or hulu, or read, and find something to do till around bedtime. I take a shower, and sit in bed, texting my girlfriend till I fall asleep.

It’s a rut. There might be some variation, like touring NYU last weekend, or Michelle being back, but on most days, its the same thing over and over again. Time has actually started to just blur together. I can be sitting and working on homework, and suddenly it’ll be dark out and like 6 at night.

Tech was the difference in my life, once Michelle went to college. No matter what show we were doing, or what was going on in my life, tech was always somewhere I could go to relax. It was always something different, whether it was those doors, painting the set, or actually working the show. I had a break from work, and I had something to do show weekends. And I had a support network, there for me every day after school.

Sure. I might put too much time in tech. And prioritize it a bit much. But the motivation and esteem that I get from it can spread into the rest of my life. It might hurt my grades a bit, but my life suffers without it. Part of my personality is that I like having tangible results. Photography, I mess with the settings, take the picture, and have a photograph, a physical representation of feelings, emotion, and the scene, what I saw at that time on that day. Reading, biking, surfing, sudoku. All of it, I do, its done, its accomplished and I know for myself that I did it. Even my relationship with Michelle. Helping her, talking to her, making her smile, I know I made her happy and made a difference to the girl I love. Tech is one of these things. I work, for at least 3 hours a day, and create. And at the end of that day I have something in front of me, that I built with my friends, and I know that I made my contribution. The show, whatever show it is, is that much closer to becoming a reality because of what we all did. I need that. That feeling. But my parents only see the downside to it, missing how what I do for those shows is reciprocated in my ability to keep going. And so, I’m going through tech withdrawl.

In other news, I toured NYU’s photography department on monday! My aunt(or some vague relation to my mother) works as a special programs manager at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, so she was able to set up a tour of the photo department. 

They have a couple digital labs, with the last generation of Mac towers and large format printers, and then 2 labs with contrast filter printing heads, and they provide all the chemicals and supplies and things, with some cameras and lights and such. They also have a minilab for color prints, with rooms for individual color printing heads. 

Their classrooms are small, all three of them, and each photo class has 12-15 students each. In addition to classrooms, they have 2 studios, one of which is just a classroom which doubles as a studio.

All in all its a fairly small department. But having such a small area of focus gives me an opportunity to make a bunch of close friends, and unlike in Foo’s room, getting the teacher’s attention should be easy.

When I got back to Maryland, we had one day of school before snow shut us out for 3 days, giving us a bit of an extended vacation. So I’ve been bored out of my mind for the past couple days, but got some okay pictures during the 2nd or 3rd wave.

Hopefully there’ll be more to do next week.

Till later, peace out cub scout.

“I need another story, something to get off my chest; my life gets kind of boring, need something that I can confess.”- OneRepublic

That is, if I had any friends in New York.

But yeah, I’m currently on a bus heading up to the Big Apple, with my awesome friend James! Right after exams ended, we hopped on a bus heading north. We’re supposed to be spending the whole weekend there, staying with my cousins at their apartment over by Central Park, and my parental unit won’t be arriving till Sunday. We’re gonna bum around the city for a few days, shutter clicking as we go, then on Monday I’ve got a tour set up at NYU!

Its going to be awesome.

Anyways, part of the reason I wanted to post (though I know so many people enjoy reading about my life :P) is my english exam. I’m aware this makes very little sense. English exams generally aren’t very interesting. However, this year I had a great opportunity to read some good essays and write a solid piece on a really great topic, the definition of success. Now due to legal issues and whatever I couldn’t keep my writing, or any of the sources we used, but if anyone wants to do a search for them (I highly recommend this, they’re fantastic) its Closing My Eyes, a personal narrative by Susan Clark, a student at UNC, and Anna Quindlen’s Commencement Speech at Mount Holyoke University. I obviously couldn’t memorize an entire essay, but I have the intro, and a couple really great quotes from my sources above. 

What is success? Much time has gone into searching for the answer to this question, about as much time that has been spent trying to achieve it. Many people believe that success is defined by money, or power, or fame- a wealth of abstract possessions the people believe will lead to a happy life. But success is not an achievement, rather, it is a state of mind. It is a sense or feeling a person has at the end of the day that they are truly happy where they are.

“Do we define ourselves by where we are going, at the expense of who we are?”- Clark

“If life is a series of little tasks and goals, then it is easy to hop off from one to the next, relieved and unquestioning.”- Clark

What most people will fail to do is ask the question Clark says is easy to ignore, “What’s the point of doing this?”. Often times we find that the answer isn’t what Quindlen says it should be, “Because its who I am and who I intend to be.” The main and most important point Quindlen makes in her speech can be summed up by this: “…if your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but doesn’t feel good in your heart, then it is not truly success.” And so I say to the members of my underrepresented age group, those of us who are old enough to understand the value of being a kid and still young enough to do it, perhaps as a whole, we should agree to stop defining our lives by the standards, requirements, and expectations of others, stop striving for perfection and success, and merely do what makes us happy.

Because as the song So Long, Astoria tells us, “Life is only as good as the memories we make, and I’m taking back what belongs to me.”- The Ataris

No, I’m not a cat person, but they keep popping up whenever Michelle and I hang out. Which we had tons of time to do over winter break.

Well, not tons, but a fairly decent amount. After my birthday and Christmas, we hung out while she was in town, after I worked on some makeup school work. Then, on New Year’s Eve, we went skiing with Katie and David Foster! I was kinda the only one who didn’t really know what I was doing, but it was all good cause I picked it up quick and only had one bad spill. I was going a little too fast coming down a blue, and failed to stop before tumbling over the side. Luckily I didn’t roll too far, and only minorly injured my leg. Seeing as I wasn’t too far from the bottom, and the binding on one of my skis was twisted, I walked down and hung around this little cafe they had. And what do you know, a cat shows up.

Again.

Other occasions involving cats:

- Michelle works at an animal hospital, where there are multiple cats.

- We were hanging out at a playground near my mom’s, and on our way back we see a cat, who proceeds to follow us all the way back to my moms. Apparently the cat came back every day for at least a week, when I wasn’t around.

- Michelle has 3 cats.

Obviously the great cat in the sky (popstrip.com reference) is sending us a sign. A very soft and furry one at that. The cat at the base of the mountain is apparently the stray that bums around there, one the ski patrol calls Smoky. It was pretty cool, it wasn’t shy at all, and its fur wasn’t matted or dirty, as you would imagine a wild cat to be. It was really cute too…

Anyways, later that night I joined Michelle and her friends for New Years celebrations, and we went ice skating new years day.

It was tons of fun. :]

The tuesday after that, Michelle and family left for vacation in Costa Rica.

and I went back to school.

Anyways, I miss her a ton, but she’ll be back soon.

Now that I think about it, I’m not gonna get to see her very much in the next few months. She goes back to Colorado sometime this week, and shes not coming back for spring break. And better yet, she’s staying with family in Iowa for a while, before I even get out of school…

Now the obvious solution would be to go out and visit her over spring break or whatever right?

Wrong.

My parents won’t let me. Even if I’m using my money. And I have a place to stay. And its not taking any time away from school.

Can you say trapped?

Oh well. I can try my mom again, but for now it seems like my only option is to make the best of the time we have.

“For this dance we dance we move with each other, there ain’t no other step than one foot, right in front of the other. (We’re marchin’ on, we’re marchin’ on)”- Marchin’ On, OneRepublic