Wait a Second – Where are My Pants?!

Oh, I meant plans. :P  Don’t be a perv, your day has soooo much more potential than that.

Anyway, I think I just realized something.  I was supposed to be a rich writer by now.  I never even really planned to go to college, but to be living as a hermit somewhere in Alaska in a modest cottage.

 

It seemed ideal when I was nine…

And now that I want to be some kind of teacher, how am I going to manage?  Is $30,000/year enough to live on?  Probably, yeah.  But what if it isn’t?  How will I continue to live in the manner to which I’ve become accustomed?  The truth of it is if I still want to be rich and/or famous, I’ll still need to write the next Great American Novel.  Or invent something.  Or go into a field that actually pays well.  How come people become corporate millionaires every day for selling us expensive stuff while educators shaping the future, frankly, aren’t become millionaires each day?  We’ll just have to start charging for teachers by the gallon, just like gas.  My body is (about!) 21 gallons.  Anybody want to ante up? 

Actually… that means I cost about as much as a fill-up for a truck.  Never mind; let’s not do that.  I didn’t want to teach inside a running internal combustion engine, anyway.

I guess the bottom line is that I want to do something fulfilling, and yet I also don’t want to starve, but that’s pretty much the choice I’d make if I didn’t immediately soar as a writer, anyway.  That’s a choice a lot of people have to make.  When faced with this, look to your heart, and do both!

 

Not literally.

 

Seriously.  I don’t want to have to fall back on something I’ll hate to do, do you?  Follow your dreams...

Speaking of dreams... sigh... here's a picture of me wondering where my pants are (pervs)

Luckily, I had the foresight to wear shorts for this picture XD

Addendum

So I just realized that that pic I posted could be taken in… different ways.  Because I’d kind of like to start a meme or something, here are a few ideas you can look to for inspiration:

 

Oh. Um, never mind, I guess.

But DO enjoy. And remember, don't annoy your drawings!

The Path that Forks About 9178395012349 Different Ways

The following is a reprise of my side of a conversation I pretended to have with a few dozen of my closest friends.

Hey. *shifty eyes* Are you alone? *cranes neck up and down hallway*  Okay...

You can't tell anybody else about this, understand? 

What do you mean "why is it in a blog post, then?"  That's totally not the point.  You can tell whomever you want.

The thing is *starts eating peanut butter sandwich* I like writing.  I really do. *takes another bite of sandwich* But I don’t see the point of majoring in it at college anymore.  *astounded gasps from all writers within earshot* (dude, you don’t understand how passionate we can be) *light cursing by writers* *one or two writers start to smoke cherry pipes * *etc*

This shouldn’t be a huge shock to the people who really know me, but I want to be a teacher, *knowing nods from about sixty people* or maybe I’ll work in children’s ministry at a really cool church, like CCV.  *shocked looks from several, facepalms from one or two, extremely pleased nods from just a few*

You can’t be afraid to follow the path you think is right, even if you have to get airlifted over a few hundred miles of jungle to get to a new path once in a while.  We meet some good pilots in life.

*Most just shrug*

I mean, I’ve been writing for almost 12 years now, writing PASSIONATELY.  I’m not just gonna stop, but I want to do something else with my life.  And my college.  I’ve heard too many people say a writing degree will get me a “great” position flipping burgers.  And now that I finally have some notion of what I want to do as a real job, well, I want to head toward that.

You gotta do what you love, and I think I love teaching more than writing.

<{([So, technically, the pretend conversation ends here; I don't usually insert web links into my daily conversation])}>

On that note, I highly recommend this article.  It's actually quite insightful. WARNING: it contains some bad words.  But it's worth it.  Unless you're very easily offended, though it's really hard to live life like that, especially in college.

See?  It'd get weird. The thing about linking, not being offended. That'd be... bad... to draw.

But seriously, try and figure out what you want to be when you grow up.  I've been at it for almost 20 years and I still might not have it right. My mom has been trying for over 50 years and she's still looking. I think most people are looking for what they want, wishing they knew what it was.

Games We Play

I walked into the Pre-K classroom of my church the other day; it was the beginning of second service, when there are usually something like forty kids in the class, and there were only two in there.  It was really close to the beginning of the service, but I was still a little surprised.  I ignored the ferns hanging from the ceiling and the front end of a Jeep parked onstage (I had taught in that room the week before so it was nothing new to me) and sat down with the two kids.  They were playing this board game called Cross-Over or something.  It was some kind of math game, but these kids can’t even read yet.   

 

Extremely rough (hence the eye-patch and scars) likeness.

The one kid, Cole, who was probably three and looked a heck of a lot like my older cousin had at that age, asked my name and if I wanted to play with them; I said I’m Alex, and sure.  Cole showed me how to play; he catapulted this translucent blue die into the board so hard I thought it might explode, but it didn’t.  He looked around for a little and then pulled down a few numbers – 6, 7, and 8 – on my side of the board (it was a square board with ten movable number pegs on each side) and said it was my turn.  I threw the die at the board as hard as I could, but it still didn’t blow up.  I rolled a 5 and he started looking.  “Where is that one?” he asked as though he really knew the rules to a game like this.  Finally, he pulled down the 9 and 10 on the side where no one was sitting and said I’d gotten a 12.  Now that I think about it, he was probably just copying behaviors from his parents, but he sure had me convinced. We played a few more rounds – never apparently keeping score and ending the game when all four sets of ten pegs were pulled down – and I was convinced that we were doing something right.  The second kid – a girl named Ava whose brown hair was short but with bangs that neatly covered her eyes – seemed to agree with everything Cole had to say, but I’m not sure she was really paying attention.  She mostly wanted to pull number pegs down and say “you got 20!” she certainly seemed to like the game.

 There are 10 ninjas in this picture.

After the large group lesson someone else got ahold of the board, a somewhat older – something like 4 and a half – girl named Macy.  She plunked the board down on a grey plastic school table and said I should play.  Her version was a little… lacking, shall we say.  She still tossed the die at the board with intent to kill in her tiny hand – but then she only turned down one wooden peg, the 10, and then with each throw, she turned down one more, six, eight, seven, six, and so on.  For some reason, she always read the 9 as a 6, but never the 6 as a 9. 

So there you go – a three-year-old with a mind for creating his own complex board game and a four-and-a-half-year-old who thinks counting down from 10 is the same as keeping score.  On the same game board, they may just create some beautiful bridge of understanding.  Or kill each other with dice. 

In this pic, there is only one ninja. I think.

Thirteen Days of Summer

So, I have to go back to college in two weeks, putting an end to my nice, long summer.  Or, on the other hand, I get to go back to college in two weeks, finishing off my nice, long summer.  See how different those are?  Oh, you don’t care.  Maybe you will when you have to write an essay in a few weeks.

But it feels like I’m being pulled toward a black hole and I just crossed the event horizon yesterday, when I realized I only have one full Sunday left to hang out with little kids before I go.  I had planned on having two more, but then some fool decided to have us go back to school on a Sunday, with classes starting on Monday.  Why’d they have to go and cut up the most important day of the week?

 

It’s really sad. 

And now it feels like everything I do with the rest of my thirteen days of summer (could be the title of a great short film) will be overshadowed by going back to school.  The whole process looks something like this:

 

Poorly drawn? 

And I think this is something everyone going back to school or work or college or the icy rings of Jupiter feels, although they don’t see it as such a draining thing.  They look forward to it.  And it’s not as though I’m really dreading school: I, too, am excited about going back; but it’s always such a choice to make.  People who leave their lives behind for business or missionary work or extended steamy affairs in Brazil know what I’m talking about. 

I should just go home every Sunday.  Six hours in the car isn’t too much, right?

A Misplaced Path

So the other day a couple of guys and I (dang, that makes it sound like I'm not a guy, doesn't it? ) K, a couple of guys including me were going to bike all the way down to Valley Forge from up in Collegeville, something like 15 miles, and we was all excited, especially Tyler, which means that something was about to explode.

Seriously, when he gets excited, stuff just happens.  It's like standing at the dessert bar at your favorite all-you-can-eat buffet when they're about to bring out a new 5-layer chocolate ice cream cake gushing raspberry sauce with, like, a gallon of hot fudge on top that's so big you could pretty much eat your way inside of it and take a food nap before finishing off the outside. It's like that.. except there's a HUGE guy behind you. Or maybe a HUGE girl; it depends on the day you go. And that HUGE person wants that cake because they have really severe hypoglycemia so they actually NEED it or they might pass out because their blood sugar dips too low. Only the hypoglycemia is already affecting them so they're coated with sweat and their arms are trembling and their whole body is like jelly and their mouth is watering and they NEEDS it like its their PRECIOUS. And its really something like 5 really, really, big guys (and girls) trying to get to the cake as fast as they can and elbowing each other out of the way and spilling hot fudge everywhere. And then they just get so hungry that they eat you and take a food nap while you're inside their stomach and they finish off the cake later.

That's something like what happens when Tyler is really excited. If you don't believe me here's some video evidence:

That was something we did with water balloons last summer, and we really haven't changed too much.  Did you see the explosion?  And the PAIN?  He talked about how much his "fluctuating pants" hurt every time... and he went on to do this SIX MORE TIMES. After he was done, we went inside and he augmented the newly sized insides of his bathing suit with a SERRATED KITCHEN KNIFE. While he was WEARING THEM. He thinks he's SO HARDCORE. I enjoy CAPITAL LETTERS, but i guess that's enough for now.

ANYWAY, back to the story at hand.



UPDATE: This is not actually the story of the misplaced sidewalk. Sorry if you were fooled. I know there was an overwhelming number of sidewalks in this post. Remember?

F!r$t P0$t!1one (or, This is Why I Don't Speak Leet)

So I’m sitting here and I’m like, “mannn… I don’t feel like writing anymore, even with all of these ideas to get down.” It sorta feels pointless, y’know?  Because something like 10% of writers can actually live on their income from writing; the other 90% (possibly more that are too ashamed to admit it or work under-the-table murder cases in the dead of night) work side jobs to keep themselves afloat.  The original reason I wanted to start writing was to avoid getting a real job; that was when I was 8.  I was a pessimistic child.  Okay, that sounds bad; the original-original reason was because I had 97566473427 ideas in my head and I thought they were really cool.  I thought they could be a TV series like Pokémon, probably because 76.8592% of my ideas at that time were direct rip-offs of the Pokémon TV series.

Later, I found God (though I’m still not quite sure why He was hiding) and I decided I could change the world through writing subtly encoded with subliminal messages to make the readers want to do good. (have you spied the message yet? this one just says “drink milk;” you gotta start slow with this stuff) Now I just don’t know anymore.  I used to have the attention span to write novels, now I just don’t want to.  Maybe college has turned me into a lazy good-for-nothing.  Hmm… okay, so college has definitely turned me into a lazy good-for-nothing, but I think the real problem here is with you, the consumer. 

No offense, but how much of my merchandise have you bought in the past two hours?  That’s what I thought. And you might say, “but Alex, you don’t have anything on sale yet.” And you’d be right about that, but what about in the future?  Why haven’t you instructed your future offspring to build a time machine to bring back to your future self, which you would then use to bring your present self into the future and buy my merchandise, which you would then bring back to the past to show all of your friends who would think it was totally cool (and shiny, everything currently on sale in the future will be shiny) and start a wave of future-traveling post-buying pre-revenue-boosting shopping sprees?

Then again, I guess it’s not all your fault.  The 29^th amendment of 2014 pretty much shut down travel, anyway.  Oh.  I guess you’re not supposed to know about that, either.  Oh, well; just the fact that the future government allows me to print that online probably means that the course of history that allowed the 29^th amendment to be passed has been somehow changed.  Good job, John S. from Oklahoma, and don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.

I’m sorry to have to have been so blunt, there, but it’s really for your own god.  And good.  Yes, I’m sure it made your household god very happy.  Anyway, to make up for it, here’s a heretical picture of what my first real post will be about.  It’s a sidewalk that some genius decided to put right through the middle of a local river!