third wind

I've got no idea just how this auxiliary subsection of my personality has managed to take over, and thrive for the past couple of hours.

I conquered the hellishly long word day with aplomb. And with only two hours of sleep to go on. So I feel like everything turned out okay, in that respect. When I got home from Apple I was resolved to eat, and immediately sleep.

But SNL turned out to be funny, so I stayed up and watched it with my parents. My dad went to bed, I had a cigarette, then went up to the computer, intent only on blogging about my conquest of today, and then sleeping my big gay ass off.

It didn't end there. I'd left Wikipedia up at some point earlier in the day. It sucked me straight in. I've felt like a zombie, hopelessly aquiring useless information just for the hell of it, slowly finding that I didn't need to fight off sleep. The urge started to fade by itself. And while I've been catching myself about to commit more and more typographical sins, I feel more readily conscious than I did a couple hours ago.

I don't feel like there can be any healthy explanation for that.

I do know I finished at least one REM cycle during my micro-nap this morning, which might have allowed me to survive the day at Signius with relatively few mistakes. And I know the Red Bull allowed me to survive Apple. But as for now, I refuse to believe that an episode of SNL can serve as metaphysical fuel. All I know is, this third wind feels disconcerting, to say the least.

I feel like my body and mind are at odds with each other. My mind knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I should be asleep. And I think my body knows that too. But for some reason, it's not listening. It's just doing its own thing. It's not the first time that's happened, of course- but this is one of the only instances in recent recollection where it's happening for no particular reason. Given the current circumstances, my concsciousness serves absolutely no purpose.

Random aside: Why the crap is it 42 degrees outside? Isn't May, like, Monday?? I don't know. I feel like I shouldn't be able to see my breath without the aid of a cigarette. That and, for some reason, it smells like autumn out here. That's kinda depressing.

I don't know why it's depressing. My first instinct is to type, "I feel like, in order to appreciate that smell, I need a tumultuous summer of accomplishment, folly, and emotion in general to look back on." Which I guess makes sense. What I don't get is, my summers usually aren't that much different from the rest of the year, except the weather makes me happier by default. Hell, if you compare my relatively idle summer of 2005 to the winter/spring of 2006... well, you've got sloth in one hand, and ambition in the other.

Although if I look at this past winter, despite financial woes and boy trouble, I remember it as having been a whole lot more fun than a lot of ones in the past. And I think I can trace that back to the night of the Apple X-mas party, when all of us piled in the van, went down to DC, and let loose for an evening. It brings back memories of when we all lived at the diner, and the hectic holiday shopping rush had us effectively working together constantly, and playing together constantly. Of course, the circumstances of one's life tend to change, and things have largely returned towards what I'd call the baseline. I don't know. I'd go looking through iPhoto, but I'd probably get a little misty. At least inwardly.

I think I'm going to try sleep now, because I can't think of anything else I feel competent enough to communicate.

(DB) out.

they say your middle name is trouble, but i know it's caroline

I think my body hates me, or something along those lines.

I woke up this morning feeling sick as a dog, and after stifling that with much medicine, avoiding soda, and trying to get to sleep early, I tossed and turned for hours until I woke up at 2. I haven't been able to get back to sleep since. Which is a pity, considering I told Signius I'd work a surprise shift tomorrow at noon.

Okay, it's only from noon to 3, which is practically only enough time for me to scratch my balls, yawn, and wonder what to do next. But still, once you get in that "day off!!" mindset, it's tough to reconcile with yourself if you give it up.

Tonight was the first night I really got to break in my cubicle, after spending the past two weeks floating around to train. (Once they decide they're fed up with Win98, I'll be totally happy in any cubicle.) But anyway, I like mine. Tonight, after waking up and realizing I wasn't getting back to sleep anytime soon, I went through iPhoto and printed out some 4x6's to keep me amused during the day. Surprisingly, the whole process took a lot more thought than I ever realized.

When you walk by someone's cubicle, and you look at the photos they've got up, you subconsciously try to extrapolate some kind of story from those photos. Personally, I don't care if I'm right or not, but it's fun to look for details and start fabricating entertaining lies. If I see a picture, I see a teenage son, a girlfriend that the mother's not too entirely happy about, but they're both smiling, so she feels bad for having her doubts. I see a family at the beach, and I think, wow, they look happy, but I totally remember all my family vacations and the squabbling about where to go for dinner. If I get as far as to wonder the potential dinner spots those people in the photo squabbled about, chances are I've looked too long.

Does anybody else do this? I'd like to feel like I'm not completely insane.

So, whilst looking through my photos, I feel like I was thinking about it entirely too much. I was thinking, what stories do I want people to make up from my photos? I figured the following- no pictures of just me and someone, because a) I'm not dating them, and b) Shelly would ask why we don't have any ones of just me and her. And I'd have to tell her that she forbade me to print any of the pictures of her that I particularly care for, because she feels like she doesn't look good in them. Furthermore, I was careful to avoid pictures of any of my friends with beer bottles in their hands. (That one made things especially tough.) Then I thought, is it too transparent to have tons of pictures of friends? There's a lot more to my photo collection than that. So I picked a few of my favorite landscapes. Then I wondered, is that transparent? If I walked past my cubicle and saw those pictures, what would I think?

The pictures I chose tell the following story: this kid travels a good bit. He's got a lot of friends. They all look so happy. I wonder if they're all still happy? I wonder how long ago that was taken, do they all still talk? Would they all still appear in another picture looking just about the same? He's also got quite an eye for scenery. I bet he thinks he's some hot-shit photographer. I wonder if he even took those. Seriously, who prints on non-glossy 4x6's? I don't see any girls he's hugging, he must be one of those gays...

And I'm okay with that story. Because, ultimately, my life is interesting, for better or worse, and I'm fine with people noticing that.

Saturday is the work day from hell. 8-4 at Signius, 6-close at Apple. I've never worked that long a day before. I'm both excited and terrified, thinking about how it will turn out. Sure, I've partied that long, but that's a much more free-form activity than general purpose customer service. Will I get off work and go out, desperately needing to unwind? Or will I go home, crash, and wake up sometime Sunday afternoon? I guess only time will tell.

Speaking of time, I've got entirely too much of it. No matter how hard I try, I haven't been able to get myself to sleep. I don't even know what my body's telling me to do. One voice says "sleep!" Another voice says "Seek more cold medicine!" Then the "That would be dangerous" voice quickly puts that one to rest. If the chorus of "You're hungry!" and "You're nauseous!" and "Drink more water!" and "FIND SOME CAFFEINE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!" doesn't stop, well, at least one voice will win- I'll eventually tire myself out, thinking about what I'm really thinking.

By the way, the "You have to work today, bastard, because you're responsible and said yes when they said they needed you, and you're not in bed yet, muhahaha!" voice is really bugging the hell out of me.

That paper Jaime was writing, remember that? I proofread it the other night, and sent her a couple notes she later hailed as brilliant. Then she informed me that I have way too much potential to ignore college, but not in a condescending way, rather in an encouraging one. I then spewed out a little insight that's rare for me to spew out anytime before midnight:

10:49:57 PM danny c.: here's the official story on me and college: i'm working now, just so i can get my life in order before i attempt to take college seriously again
10:50:21 PM jaime b.: yes...
10:51:44 PM danny c.: here's the unofficial version: i've already screwed it up twice. i hate being there, and i hate essex, but i don't have a choice. it's there or nowhere, with my high school GPA. the last two semesters i went, all it took was a couple nice large emergencies, which in my head i blew out of proportion and was able to rationalize as an excuse for losing all interest. so in all reality, i'm waiting because i need to be more mature and self-motivated if i'm ever going to make this work, because i couldn't take screwing up again

I went on to talk about how my home situation and ailing car seem like they're significant emergencies waiting to happen. For clarification, my home situation isn't, like, bad. It's more along the lines of, I'm getting older, and my parents are getting older. Our relationship is just fine. But we're on opposite sleep schedules, and my dad's got a worsening case of real, clinical insomnia, so when I'm here, I have to be practically silent. I can rarely ever have company, because the parents don't like the idea of surrending their house to a bunch of kids. Which is fine. Hell, it's their house, and I'm at the age where I really need to stake my claim on my own living space and get on with it. But, it's just really inconvenient to have to live like I'm a guest, rather than a resident.

Jaime said it's good that I wasn't being a bitch about it. I told her, all the years of thinking that way landed me nowhere.

In other news, I feel like life without MySpace is a lot more rewarding than life with it. I've been forced to stop using it as a crutch for my bored and uninspired mind, and thus, been forced to give my noodle a little exercise. (Please refrain from any masturbatory references, because I'd like to take the high road for once.)

(LOL, just kidding.)

But seriously, I like it. I feel slightly more alive, and slightly less like I don't exist.

Would it be unprofessional to ask if I could bring in my own keyboard and mouse, to make the working experience more pleasant? I doubt they'd let me, but would it hurt to ask?

Meh. I think pretty soon I'm going to find something to eat, and try sleeping again. And maybe some more cold medicine. The voices are starting to organize, and rally against the "stay awake and keep blogging" voice. So on that note, goodnight. Or good morning.

(DB) out.

ambitions of being a walking double negative, plus uncensored word-painting

I was struck with a really interesting thought process earlier.

Today, my accomplishments could best be measured (okay, I definitely almost split another infinitive, and I definitely caught it, again.) ...anyway, measured in terms of what I did not do, rather than what I did do.

Today, I didn't watch all three episodes of ST:TNG. I only watched two. In fact, I didn't even watch the 2am one. I didn't insist on my boycott of Denny's on account of their abolition of the smoking section. I didn't need that much help handling business at Job Deux. And most importantly, I didn't back down from my assertion that I was going to empty out my MySpace profile and never look back. So maybe I posted a bulletin explaining my departure. I think that's allowed.

I didn't surrender to porn surfing after I got home from hanging out. I instead listened to some music, and then picked up my guitar and gave it a bit of exercise. And now, I am blogging. And I haven't picked the same playlist to which I've been listening nonstop these past couple of days; I picked an album I've never listened to before.

Come to think of it, today's been really unusual, and I can't think of a good reason for that. At all.

I suppose I should do a little catching up, to cover the time between my last entry. God, I don't even remember what my last entry was about. Okay.. turns out it was a screen capture from a MySpace bulletin I posted. Wow.

Well, in short: I cut my hair. I was interviewed and hired at Signius Communications, where I answer phones for a variety of different people. Shelly had no small role in getting me considered for the position, for which I'm quite grateful. I've been training these past couple weeks, and honestly, I think everything's going to be fine.

I went on the camping trip, which was absolutely fantastic. The pictures are up and they are also fantastic. It was a fitting vacation, and it was most definitely the kind I'd been sorely needing.

Speaking of the camping trip, I have to go out to my car, and dig up my sketchbook. I did some writing out on a pier, the night we ended up leaving, and while it's raw material and I made no efforts to refine it whatsoever, at the time it satisfied my need for self-expression. And so, without further ado:


I am the full moon.
I am the lone headlights, a mile away, on a bridge.
I am this glass lake, a bay on one side, and a raging river on the other.
I am the barely perceptible breeze.
I am the call of all these unfamiliar birds, and the owl punctuating them.
The shadow on this page falls in a peculiar fashion.
These occasional moments of solitude remind me just how alone I am not.
The only sounds I can hear are the ones that speak to me.
The ones that reassure me there's more to life than seeking potentially lucrative uphill battles.
Wherever the storm, all the rain will eventually return to the sea.
I am far better at painting with words, or with light, than with a brush.


And it's amazing, how an hour can turn a glass lake into a maelstrom. A bunch of us were playing cards in our screened-in room, well after quiet time because, shit. It was our last night there. We didn't care about noise, plus everyone else had RVs that likely insulated sound. Anyway, we were playing cards, and two storms blew in simultaneously; one down the Potomac, and one down the bay. There was no rain, only lots of lightning.

Jason, Francis, and myself all decided to walk out onto the causeway so we could watch the storm roll over the bay. Keep in mind, where we were, the bay was about 30 miles wide, so we still had an unobstructed view of the one storm from our relatively safe intended vantage point. On the walk over there, the wind started to pick up like we couldn't believe. After getting slightly lost in the woods, we finally got out to the causeway.

The lightning was like the grand finale at any Fourth of July fireworks show you've ever been to, except it didn't end. You could read by it. Every half-second, another massive lightning bolt shot down to the water, illuminating the massive wall of fog forming on the horizon. It was unlike anything I've ever experienced.

Only moments after we arrived, that glass lake was spitting waves about six or seven feet beyond its usual shoreline, starting to lightly flood the roadway on which we stood. And only moments after that, a van full of our compadres rolled up, and informed us the wind was destroying our campsite. We returned, and found all the pop tents nearly collapsed, and the screened-in room reduced to a heap of metal and mesh. (My complicated-ass tent was the only one that survived the 60mph winds with no problem.) After determining the tents to be uninhabitable, and getting a weather report from someone back home stating the storm was supposed to get worse, we haphazardly broke camp and left, at 2:20AM.

The peaceful, idyllic trip ended in a clusterfuck of wind, lightning, and chaos. And that was about as beautiful as the rest of the trip, in its own strange way.

I think with that, I'm going to bed. Chances are, most people reading this have already heard this story anyway, but I don't think I've written it out before. I feel like I've accomplished something. Bonsoir,

(DB) out.

good boy, bad blogger.

So, after nearly a month of negligence, I somehow feel compelled to return to blogging.

I think I was prompted to return by a paper Jaime's doing, asking about MySpace, and other social networking / instant communication phenomena and how they've been popping up in society as of late.

We did a phone interview last night, where she asked me a number of questions about MySpace, how important it is to my life, what it enhances, what it detracts from, et cetera.

She asked me to make a list of things, positive and negative, that MySpace has contributed to my life. Then she asked which list was more difficult to make.

Funny enough that the positive list was more difficult.

Then I read an article on Wired about committing "MySpacecide." And for the past hour or so, I've found myself increasingly entertained with the prospect of erasing my page and stating that I only want to be contacted via AIM, email, or phone.

I feel like it could be an important step in my personal growth. No idea what direction that step would take me, but I feel like it would theoretically be important nonetheless.

Oh god, why did I just notice that I was about to split an infinitive, and correct the mistake?

Would emptying my MySpace and allowing it to rot change me, or change how I interact with people? Maybe time will tell.

In other news, I haven't been blogging because I've been busy starting the new job, doing the camping trip, and otherwise sorting my life out.

Note to self: pay credit card bill for month before you forget.

Believe it or not, I haven't been spending as much time on MySpace. Maybe because I'm growing bored with it, maybe because I'm starting to realize that of all the strangers that've come my way, only a few have been worth keeping around.

If the whole purpose of MySpace is finding new friends, and I've only found a few, then who the hell are all those other people in my "social network?"

I think I've answered my own question.

I think I just might take the plunge.

Of course, this is speculative. I actually have to sit down and do it.

And I might have to do it in the presence of friends.