I meant to, but recently I've been up until too late, and sleeping in dangerously. Nearly missed class several times this week.
I like my classes this quarter, for the most part. I'm in Deductive Logic, Intro to Government, and "Life Skills for Higher Education." The first two are great, but how2c0ll3g3lawz looks and feels like high school. Mostly I'm frustrated in there. It's not difficult, and it's not a bad class. I'm just a pissy person who has difficulty complying with things I consider beneath myself. Then again, that's exactly the sort of skill I'm meant to learn if I want to succeed in college and work and life. It isn't like I especially want to do those things, but more on that later.
The first day of Logic - taught by the attractive, patient, friendly and urbane Toño Ramirez - included some sample work with propositional logic. He asked for something that's true. I offered him, "The sky is blue." He laughed, and told us that every quarter, the answer to that question is either "the sky is blue" or "the grass is green." It's never "hogs can have orgasms that last up to thirty minutes, even though that's completely true." I'm not sure whether I was upset or glad that I gave a regular answer.
During lunch I saw Pete Rabbit, my old karate instructor. I nearly took his class again this quarter, but decided that I wouldn't be dedicated enough to it, as much as I think I would have enjoyed it. I also prefer to keep my Monday and Wednesday nights open. We made eye contact and he gave me one of those quick raised eyebrow stares that sort of suggests, "Hey, we know each other," but can also be a cover for an internal, "You're familiar but I have no idea who you are." It doesn't really matter either way. I hadn't ever seen him in plain clothes before, but I liked it. That's a man I'd definitely get on my [hands and] knees for any day.
History is taught by Elena Dorabji, an older-but-not-old PhD who reeks of feminism and Paganism. She wears an amethyst on a gold chain and is a very realistic person who happens to be more old school in her teaching style. I think most of the class doesn't mesh with her. I don't know how I'll do in the class, but I certainly enjoy her lectures. On the first day she asked us what's something U.S. citizens value. The resounding answer was "our liberty." Evidently in her ~30+ years of teaching, that answer used to exist, and then it didn't, and it has had a recent resurgence. She's noted a lot of things that have been common character traits in students only in the last few years. I assign cause to technological advancements.
So my classes are nice and good. I'll enjoy the semester. I adore logic, and to an extent I wish I could submerge myself within it. I could do just that, but I suspect I won't. In any event, this will be my final quarter at De Anza, at least for a while. I was not accepted into CSUMB. I had the opportunity to appeal the decision, but I didn't get the decision notification in time, and then didn't act quickly, and then the appeal period was over. At this point my options are to go live in Maryland, or get a job and support myself for the time being here, until I can get into any school, or I flourish in some career that doesn't emphasize higher education. I'm going to try sticking around, and see what I can make happen. I figure that's part of why I'm not so enthused about the life skills class.
So anyway, I was up all night. At first it was because I was doing things in Lusternia, which I've been playing more and more of. I adore the story of my character, and it keeps getting more involved and solid and inspiring to me, so it continues to earn my attention. Another large factor is that Kyle has finally made a character and stuck with him. He has joined the same organization of which I'm a part, and while we don't interact in-character much, we compare notes while playing. Since he's the sort of person that becomes completely entranced with any project he starts on, he has advanced rapidly in the game. That has, I think, motivated me to try to do more work myself. As well, I have joined a divine order, and so want to play more because I want my character to be a very devoted supplicant, which isn't something you can say is true and then not back up.
Even though Lusternia's been keeping me up recently, it's not what led me to my all-nighter. On a whim, I decided to look up the obituary of Nancy Chu, who was one of the sweetest women I have ever met. She died within the past year at age 90, a pillar of the community who affected the lives of many.
I interrupt to note that I just got a call from Michael. He couldn't expect me to be up at 7:00 in the morning. I couldn't bring myself to answer. It could easily have been a pocket dial; I got a similar such phone call yesterday, and there was an attached voicemail. The voicemail was him bitching out one of his yes-men (whether consciously or no, he targets vulnerable people and offers them support, but then offers ridicule if they aren't operating by his standards, which are often what he sees as being for the best, but also involves a lot of "Michael is right.") It was illuminating; whenever I'm with him, he frustrates me to no end. Whenever I'm away from him, I miss the good parts. That might be part of the bread-and-butter definition of a bad relationship. It's something I'm working on.
I did just listen to the voicemail. It was him calling for me, and it was a message I never would have expected. When Michael and I first met, I was the vulnerable little thing, and he did a lot of good to work with me and fix me up. I didn't do much for him, though. I took, and took, and really did quite a bit of damage to him. It's part of why I have continued to feel like I have an obligation to him. I know that I can't be what he wants, and he very much wants me for his own. I've actually been amazed recently by how compliant he's been with everything that I am, willing to cut out big parts of what he wants from me just get me to spend time with him. It's touching. It makes me feel like an ass. This voicemail, though, was basically him saying that he was back to full-up, back to the person he was when we first met. He says he really wants to see me, to talk with me, to get to know me as the person I really am. It's all very sincere. He wants to see him for his birthday in a week. He would fly down to have lunch with me, he says. I suppose we'll see how this develops.
Continuing, after I looked at Nancy's obituary, I looked up Derek Pence's. Derek was a friend of mine in early high school. We were both percussionists in band class while I was in ninth grade, and he in tenth. We spent a lot of time goofing off, playing DS games with each other, and generally misbehaving gleefully. I remember we once crushed a pen between two chime mallets, leaving twin lines on the hammers and coating each of our hands with a fine layer of ink. I was excused to go to the bathroom. Derek was not.
Derek was always a good friend to me. I invited him to my thirteenth birthday. We went to an arcade, where he mostly played DDR. He was absolutely boss at DDR. Also at that birthday was my high school best friend, Stephanie. It wasn't much later that, with some assistance from me, he became her first boyfriend. There was talk about it with both parties for a while, and then one afternoon I was standing with her at her locker when he walked up. I, with no subtlety to note, grandly gestured between the two of them and smiled urgingly. He sort of looked at her out of the corner of his eye and asked her in a sideways sort of way, "Want to go out?"
I think it was the following year that Derek moved to West Virginia. I didn't see him again after that, although we did occasionally talk online - conversations that dwindled until we had no contact at all. I was in twelfth grade when a longtime friend-or-burden of Stephanie's, Michelle, told me that Derek had died. He was a passenger in a car that flipped three times, and he was ejected. It was, as Stephanie noted, "a very Derek way to go."
It was following that that I really began thinking about life and death, and past, present and future in a critical way. They were immature considerations, but the foundations of a lot of who I am today, I think. Life, death, and time are major contributing factors in how I view the world. I don't know whether I can attribute it all to Derek, but his death certainly spawned some thoughts along those lines.
After reading his obituary, I searched for more artifacts of him online. I found a video of him playing DDR that was split into three parts. After watching all three, I saw that the poster (possibly somebody I knew once, although I didn't investigate) had a memorial video, so I watch it. In so doing, I realized that Derek bears a striking resemblance to Lawrence, who, for those of you students remedial in Merrll's life, was the first boy I ever loved. I don't think I was ever particularly attracted to Derek when I knew him, but I think I would have been today.
To prove to myself and others the similarities between the two, I looked through the albums Lawrence has scattered about his social networks of choice. On his MySpace, there is an album of FurCon 2009, which was quite the weekend for me. I had only heard of furridom through Lawrence, and only in the preceding semester, when I first met him. I didn't like him at first, at all. I specifically remember our first encounter on placement testing day in the weeks before the start of my first college classes. He, I and one other student were in the lobby at Cogswell after taking a math assessment, and he just seemed too sure of himself for what he had going on. Later he heard me playing piano, and told me he'd use my music in his video games when he started making them. As time progressed, though, I found I was very comfortable with him. There is a whole journal conveniently timed to document my budding romantic feelings for him, "The Villosi Chronicles," so I won't bother to tell its whole story here. The point is that I fell mad for him in the start of the second quarter, and I followed him to FurCon a few weeks later. We didn't spend all of our time there together, so I don't know whether I was with him or not when he took one particular photo that I saw this morning in his album. It was of Michael, who I wouldn't meet until he found me sitting in a windowsill in that very hotel during the following year's convention. The world is full of missed connections about which we'll never know.
So that was my morning. Today, then, lies ahead. I only have Logic and Life Skills today, each a fifty minute segment, separated by an hour. After that, I have amorphous plans with Andy, who is recently back in the Bay Area. I don't know what to expect from that, but I feel confidently less obsessed with him than I was in years past. I remain very attracted to him, though, and continue to think of him as an important personality in the world, with a lot of learning to do and insight to spread because of it. He's the sort of person I would like to be able to be friends with, as I never could when I was so limitingly enamored. I'm comfortable saying I still love him, although it's not something he wants to hear. My mission with him is to offer support when and if I can, and more: to give him little considerations to ponder as I come across them. I think he appreciates it. He's said as much.
So that's my today so far. I still have to figure out whether Dell is actually going to send me my certified Mark of Materialism, manifesting in the shape of a convertible laptop/tablet I've had my eye on and been saving for for several months. After hanging out with Andy, there are regular games, which are hosted by the love of my young life, Kyle, and which involve (how many can we fit in?) yet another boy who has a solid grasp on my heart, young Logan: Michael's current pet who I've met in my two most recent trips to Seattle. It is a world full of events to experience, if nothing else.
Fun fact: Derek was a great person.
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