Moar Because...

I wrote about returning and I can't do that. It's officially my first real week back from college, which is scary, off-putting and exciting. After working until 11 p.m. (long into the night at least in Chicago time), last night, I finally stopped hitting snooze on my cell phone at 8:30 a.m. to finish up the grade checking I was doing. I didn't like it, but it got me up. More to the point, it introduced, politely, the idea that I can't just do what I want anymore and plan my work or studying around it, like I used to at Allegheny. I miss the people, not the institution. After four years of being in Meadville, there are little rituals that feel strange not to be continuing.

It's those little things that make the big difference. Not wearing my keys around my neck, not bringing a card whenever I leave the house, not going to a centralized place for lunch, not putting on a backpack to leave the house (I've been doing that for 12+ years), not walking the 45 seconds to the post office, not chilling in GFC for two or three hours after class are all the things that are interesting, different experiences, that I never would have had if I didn't push myself a lot.

I'm in danger of not pushing myself now. It's very easy for me to sit back and just sit at the computer, refreshing my email every so often and keeping current on whatever subject I'm looking at from afar (economic meltdown, suicide terrorism, future plans of the Wu-Tang Clan). Every fifteen minutes I spend looking at things to stay current is another fifteen minutes I could spend looking at grad schools or filling out job applications or finding driving schools in Chicago.

Scott Kurtz (of PvP) recently announced he was trying to change his habits now that he was working from home so that he actually got work done, getting up earlier to get that "quiet home in the dark" time, better to get up at 5 a.m. and get to it. Getting to it, then.

On the right side of this tab, there are four tabs that all have something to do with driving schools in Chicago. On the left, six others. Two of them CDs. One of them a well-reviewed, but not much purchased PS2 game, one Twitter, one Blogger and another one for Windy's one or two shot campaign. I originally wrote time to choose, but I don't think it's quite that simple. I have to focus and remember, I'm not planning my work around my free time anymore. I'm planning my free time around my work.

Sometimes, the work will be fun. I need to call up my friend anyway and talk to her for a while about how much money she's going to want designing my webpage and what I want out of it, including twitter integration and whatever else I feel like ought to be done with it. If I am going to set something up seriously to be a writer/blogger (for which a personal webpage is needed) about music/videogames/politics/whatever, than that means maybe buying a PS3 makes sense from an economic standpoint. I need to cover these things, right?

Most of the other time, it's not going to be fun. It's going to be depressing, bleak and tedious. But it's a down payment on getting to a place where I can keep growing and have fun while I earn money. But before I can get to the point where it's fun, or I enjoy what I do, I need a plan. That plan involves a lot of honest thinking and questioning what I want to do with my life in the future. I never seriously entertained the idea that I was going to be alive through college when I was in junior or high school.

Now that the future I never expected has come to pass, it means my habits are changing and now...to figure out what, exactly, I want. Once that figures out, the details can be chewed on.

And, because it's me, probably here. More than that, it's tough to stay positive when you don't do that much or few exciting things happen, or as I learned this semester, if I don't go out. And by go out I don't mean party so much as just leave the house and do something. Run or walk or just get out of whatever comfortable space I'm in.

Therefore, while I'm not committed to somewhere, I'm committing myself to these ideas: Get out of that comfort zone. Just keep moving. Keep doing different things, not just to keep busy, but to keep pushing myself. Keep growing.

So then, what do I do with the two boxes of videogames in my home? I'm hopefully not going to do what I did last year, which was park in front of my TV after searching for jobs for a couple months and playing Persona 3 until three in the morning, going to bed and doing it all over again.

A schedule that I can keep. It just needs to be coherent. Even if it goes something along the lines of:

Immediate Future: 9-2.
Future Future: 2-5
Chilling Out That Happens Before Dinner: 5-7
Videogames: 8-10
Daily Show Then Bed: 10-10:45

It's not anything...detailed, but it's something that will give substance to my day, around which I can plan whatever my next big move is on the chessboard of my lifetime. There are two questions left, then, can I get to a point where I see the board, and once there, how do I analyze the information?

I don't have the answer currently, but I think I'm on the right track now and whatever happens along the way, well, you'll see it here, first, as close to firsthand as these instruments on the end of my arms will allow me.

At least I'm honest, right?

We're back.

I'd lie and say we've been busy, but you all know better by know. Truth is, we've been working, some of us in summer camps, some of us manual labor, some of us on other pursuits.

I'm fairly sure the point of this blog was to pay for our liquor (beer, specifically), so typing this out after I've been drinking seems only appropriate. I've been listening to the Gaslight Anthem for the better part of the summer, mostly to the yet to be released the '59 Sound disc, and it's pretty fantastic, even if the same ground is covered each song on it. It sounds like Bruce Springsteen in 2008, if he was just starting out. On every song some variation of "driving", "Saturday night", "dancing" "the radio" and another that's not coming to me now. The themes, somehow, don't get tired. Maybe that's because of the liquor.  Neither, for that matter, do the song structures, which, for all but one song, is verse/chorus/verse/chorus/chorus/chorus (and if they're feeling adventurous, they'll throw a bridge in there).

In a way, the '59 Sound sounded oddly familiar to me on the first listen, because the first comparison was JRPGs. Much of the same themes are recycled in JRPGs, and I don't tire of those either. The one I'm still playing (Persona 3), has the same themes of teenagers making up for the sins of the earlier generation, a corporate coverup which has disastrous effects on the populus, a main character with an epic destiny and high school girls in short skirts as the rest of the genre.

There are rough patches in both pieces. Equipping a character in Persona 3 with a weapon means you have to walk up to them, and go into their inventory, scroll down, and then exchange the weapon, which is a pain, considering that the standard in JRPGs is that all characters can have items swapped out from your menu. Miles Davis and the Cool, off of the '59 Sound has it's own issues, a fairly pointless minor part in the song that (almost) kills the flow of what could be the perfect song to play during the iconic scene in Say Anything, with a hook of "so I laid a kiss on a stone/tossed it upside your window, upside the roof", but the song survives due to its strength everywhere else. 

Speaking of everywhere else, when Persona 3 gets into a groove, it's pretty much undeniable. Spoilers follow.

One of my favorite scenes in the game is one after a brutal death, a particularly close friend (Akihiko) of the deceased says his goodbyes to his friend after the ceremony and the rest of the school left the auditorium. Somehow, the character, has a conversation on his own with the deceased, just to say goodbye, but introduces it like this: "I had the usual for lunch...Ramen tastes a lot better when you're cutting class."

Spoilers end

The power in those sentences is in what isn't said. It's not that the ramen, likely, was made any better, but that the deceased character kept telling him to cut class with him, and he probably never did.

The same power in what isn't said can be found in the song High Lonesome, where the singer (Brian Fallon) murmurs to a girl "It's a pretty good song, babe, you know the rest" before hesitating and finishing the line: "baby, you know the rest." Again, the power is in what isn't said. Lord knows what meaning that song has for the two of them, and Mr. Fallon only hints at it.

Hell, Persona 3 doesn't feel like a JRPG when I play it, and yet I've already sunk roughly three four days into that game. I can't count the number of times I've played the '59 Sound straight through. Maybe 40 60something? Lord only knows. Even if the themes are recycled and familiar, I still enjoy the time I spend with both discs, and will spend more before the summer is out. 

In which I rip off of Penny-Arcade horribly.

I do not know what it is about lyrics and I. Perhaps I should not be singing along with a Mr. Nathan Gray when he sings "this world is a cesspool and love has surely died/you've got to bleed a little every day/and let the memories fade/fuck hope, signed me". If you are a boysetsfire devotee (No, seriously, that was his old band, and that band was spectacular.) then you won't recognize the lyrics as any of the bsf lyrics, but instead from his new project, which sounds like the Jam, XTC, Talking Heads, the Cars (but far more importantly) seminal emo bands, Samiam and Jawbreaker.

This new band is called the Casting Out, the song, is called Quxiote's Last Ride. To be sure, that title is a step away from titles like (Compassion) As Skull Fragments on the Wall, Release the Hounds, Suckerpunch Training, Dying On Principle and Falling Out Theme. Suffice to say boysetsfire, like any other band worthy of such a vivid name, played with dangerous, potent and troubling imagery.

How else could I define the shiver down the back of my spine when I first heard him scream "Where's your anger? Where's your fucking rage?" Now it's songs about girls. I'm fine with this. There will always be bands that play with potent and troubling imagery, and there will always be artists that choose that pallate over something more pedestrian, and I suspect I will continue to gravitate towards the former. That's really the only way I can explain that I picked up Persona 3 yesterday.

Persona 3, is, yes, the game where your character brandishes an object that looks suspciously like a pistol at the general direction of their skull to release helpful spirits. Needless to say, the game sounds interesting, at the very least. 5 or 6 reviews devoured later, I figured I could find worse uses for my $50. I may not be able to pick up the Modern Life Is War pre-order with the tshirt, but I figure the story and game will be worth it. To be specific, after reading the reviews, I figured the use of the potent and troubling imagery would be done intelligently and in a way that would fascinate me.

To be honest: I also heard it was a limited run, like all Atlus game, and the pre-orders came with a hardbound art book and soundtrack disc. I am a sucker for limited edition things, and I cannot deny those incentives were incredibly tempting.

In an time where my English professors kneel at the altar of Kerouac, where I am told from all sides that my childhood and adolescnce is incomplete until I walk in the footsteps of people I despise spending their money on other kinds of escapism than the ones I indulge in, a game where one of the core elements is a suicide excites me greatly. You want potent imagery? There it is. It's been overused by a lot of writers, but choosing death is one hell of a mindfuck.

To bring this back to Persona 3. Your character does not actually commit suicide. Skull fragments are not strewn across the floor, and once the battle is over, your character continues moving around the dungeon until morning. Apparently, during the day, the game plays as a dating sim.

But we'll talk more about this when I actually play the game. Until then, the Wii calls.