Summer Break, Day Twenty Three

I'm home.

I'm both exhausted and recharged. Going to Houghton Lake always has a tendency to do that to me. I go up with the intention of coming home feeling recharged and ready to take on the world. This never happens. I come home and I'm more exhausted and in need of a vacation from my vacation.

The family vacation has always been a special time that many people cannot wrap their head around. When told that I'm going to spend a week with my family most people would expect that to be followed up by groans, sly remarks about my potential suicide, or the loss of my sanity. For most people my age that would seem to be the truth. The idea of spending time with family is (for many) a necessary evil that should be dealt with quickly. For me the family vacation is a highlight of my summer.

We go to our cottage at Houghton Lake with family friends who we only see one week out of the year because they live in Wisconsin, a whole Great Lake away.

One of the centric events (and now in its second year, a tradition) is the volleyball games we play. This year it spanned three days. One match of three games each day. Best of three games takes the match, best of three matches takes bragging rights for the next year. Last year my team got skunked. And were forced to deal with the ridiculous bragging of "What it be," the slogan Keith, the dad of our Wisconsin friends, had said in a vain attempt to be "hip." Well this year "what it be" has become "what it was." We smoked them in the first two matches, going completely undefeated.

We tubed nearly every day, and went water skiing once. The first time we took the boat out with the intent of water skiing we managed to get one person around, and then when we were getting ready to run my mom we were faced with the most bizarre mechanical failure I'd ever seen. The motor on the pontoon stopped kicking water, felt like it wouldn't engage, and then after a further inspection we found that it had lost its motor. How that happened is still a mystery to us. We were forced to swim the pontoon in to shore, which proved a grueling task that was averted after a few hundred yards of swimming by a nice couple in another pontoon who towed us back to the cottage.

This year we also managed to get the jet skis out and run them around the lake. I managed to secure a series of awesome blisters and scabs on my thumbs from the handle bars.

The past few years our family vacation has been marked by mild weather, storms, and a whole lot more inside. This year we were hit with 90s and sunny every day.
I unplugged for the whole week. Sent a couple texts and made a couple phone calls and then turned my phone off. My laptop came out once on the last Friday long enough to download some of the pictures, but for the most part stayed tucked away. The lack of technology has been a wonderful time. I wrote a bit in long hand (like seven pages of quick snippets of scenes). I started a new short story I'm thinking about for the Rosebud competition that involves soldiers in Baghdad and a conversation with an Ifrit. I'm not entirely sure what to do with it, but we'll see if it manages to amount to something more than a couple pages of amusing writing. I read a whole lot, finished the 7th Harry Potter (which wasn't entirely what I expected, but was a very good and very grand conclusion to a really good series), nearly finished the 4th Dark Tower: The Wizard and Glass (probably my favorite of the series yet), and played a whole lot of crossword puzzles.

I also played the best game of golf I'd ever played. My friends and I are talking about actually going out and playing golf around here, which has me excited.

When I got home earlier today I went and spent some time with my friend, Zach, and ended up playing some pick up Ultimate Frisbee with friends at a park around the corner from my friends house.

I got my hands on a stack of new music that you all should check out.

St. Vincent - "Marry Me"
Imogen Heap - "Speak For Yourself"
A Fine Frenzy - "One Cell In The Sea"

Now that this long entry is done, I'm off to go lift weights and read and sleep because tomorrow I need to go to my aunt's house and work.

Summer Break, Day Ten

I'm becoming terrible about remembering to update this. I open a new word document. Type a few lines. Wander off to use the restroom. Mix a beverage. Read a page of The Wizard and Glass. Come back. Close the document. Call all of my friends until I realize that they are all, in fact, at work, making a living, and I'm at home slacking. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. I have the attention span shorter than a gnat's life expectancy. So now I'm forcing myself to sit down and actually make a proper update.

I've not been running consistently. This week I promise that I'm actually going to get out and start doing that. Starting tomorrow morning. I promise.

I went to the new Die Hard with my Dad last night. That movie is something else, let me tell you. He takes out a chopper with a car. I mean wow. Ridiculous is a good word I think.

I've spent the last week earning a small living (or at least spending cash) from my aunt. Her mother-in-law is coming to stay with them for a holiday, and she is basically using it as an excuse to renovate the house. I, being the awesome (and only) nephew volunteered to do most of the grunt work. Stripping sanding and repainting cupboard doors, weeding gardens, painting the urine yellow entryway.

We got hit with storms this week. It was more of a tease than a balls to the wall monsoon that we occasionally get in Michigan. There was about a twenty minute blast that looked like something out of the movie, Twister. It cleared soon after and I was able to come home. When I got there I found half a tree from the neighbor's yard torn out and dumped in our lawn. So today I helped my dad hack it down to size and shred it.
I went to my friend's concert. His band, the Sidestreet Getaway, is pretty good. Rumor is they are going down to Nashville in August to record an EP. Good luck.

Ummm...

The new Harry Potter came out. As I am sure you're all aware. I got a cheap copy from Duke and I'm itching to sit down and read it before people ruin it for me. So I think I'll go do that.

Expect an excerpt from the novella I'm working on tomorrow.

I'm 21.

I had started an entry earlier about the anticipation of turning 21. About waiting for my friends to arrive to go to the pub and share a pint with me. About how life is constantly going. About a lot of things. Then James walked through the door and I closed the window and decided to go life more so than type this entry.

It's now 2AM. I've definitely enjoyed the beginning of my 21st. I'm still relatively sober. And I'm carrying on a conversation with a friend over AIM. We're talking about life, about my philosophy, and about the world in general. The side of me that is pleasantly passed buzzed is saying that I should elucidate on the subject. Ranting for pages and pages and swallowing up enormous amounts of your time. The sober side is saying that no one (who hasn't come to me asking) really gives a wet smack what a half-drunk 21-year-old thinks about life. I tend to lean towards the latter, and have decided that beyond this paragraph I will spare you (for now) the ranting of a philosophical drunk.

I saw the third Pirates on Friday and it was good.

I went to my cottage this last weekend, and it was also good. I had a few beers on tap (figured I'd jump the gun a little bit). I should've done writing, but couldn't bring myself to work. Instead I ran and got some sun and I read.

I'm deep into the third book of Stephen King's Dark Tower cycle. It is very good. As everyone was, I was a little weary through The Gunslinger, and was very apprehensive after the beginning of The Drawing of the Three. The Wastelands is shaping up to be quite a howler. I get far too much time to enjoy my own books now. I have an two hours of commute-time on a train four days a week. I should be able to just hammer through the Dark Tower series over the next month. And probably read Herodotus's Histories through June. That will carry me all the way up to the release of the 7th Harry Potter, which yes I am excited for.

I sent Mort my first chapter of the Center (working title). He liked it. Offered a few good suggestions. I'll keep them in mind, but I am not allowing myself time to go back and edit. Not yet at least. I want to get the first 10 chapters done before I start cycling back. And with that I am off to bed.

I ended up dropping one of my two classes after sitting through an hour of it. I thought it was just a general communications class, but it turned out to be a civil rights communication class. I know I sound like a racist jerk, but I'm fed up of hearing about civil rights. I'm tired of being belittled for being a white middle class male. I'm a firm believer that diversity is the biggest detriment to equality. And now I'm stepping down off my soapbox before rotten fruit gets tossed my way.

So as a result of dropping that class I had a four hour period with which to waste time. I was (for once) able to go out and actually enjoy a bit of this summer weather that Chicago boasts. I walked down to Buckingham Fountain and smoked my pipe with some fresh 50th Anniversary Blend from Campbell's Smoke Shop. I went down to the lake front and watched the sailboats for a while, and then, finishing my pipe, I walked back to the South Campus building. It's funny to me how many people stop to point at you for smoking a pipe. I know that it is becoming a rare sight, especially in today's youth (my generation), but I just think it tastes better, looks classier, and smells amazing.

I now have only one class this semester, Prose Forms. It's with my Fiction 2 Teacher, Lila Jokanovich (I think i brutalized her name (sorry)). I wasn't a big fan of her at the start of last semester, but she really grew on me. It was more of me growing and learning not to be such a self righteous jerk, and realize that, yes, in fact, she can teach me things. The class is off to a good start, but the work load is going to be nothing short of exhausting. That coupled with a tutoring session twice a week.

Lila, my teacher, really enjoyed what I sent her of the center, and is pouring over it, trying to figure out what part to submit to try and get it into Hair Trigger. HT is the fiction dept's anthology published every year of student work selected by the teachers, and then edited by a specific class. I feel like this time I really have a few things to run with. The Center that I gave to Lila I feel really strongly about. And surprisingly my essay from CRW Novelists (a class I took in the spring) also has been submitted. Shawn Shiflett usually doesn't submit stuff from CRW classes, and said that my essay was one of the first things he has submitted in a while. Enough tooting my own horn.

Tomorrow is comic day! I hope it isn't another quiet week. From what my friend Mike was saying tonight at Bar Louie's is that he thinks it is going to be. The only title coming out that is worth noting is The Spirit #6.

Almost finished with the 2nd of the Dark Tower Cycle. Expect a review for The Gunslinger in a few days.

So I was away in Canada all this last weekend. I didn't have internet or phone or TV or any real technology except for the short battery life of my iPod. We were there for the Dorchester International Brotherhood Camporee. This is (like the name implies) a big international Boy Scout (or Scouts Canada) shindig that we go to anually. It is always on Mother's Day.

We left to go there on Thursday. I finished classes on Tuesday, and got all of my other stuff done on Wednesday, and then drove home Wednesday night. We got in late on Wednesday (well, Thursday morning in all technicality) and then Thursday we drove to Canada. Because it was just Matt my Mom and I, we were able to stop at the Labatt Brewery in London, Ontario, where we got to drink a couple of mediocre beers and get a free tshirt and a tour all for about $5.00 Canadian. I also ordered my first legal pint (thank God for the 19 drinking age).

The rest of the weekend was spent staffing DIBC. As was usual for Venture Crew 97, we worked the Botswan's chair (pronounced Boh-suhn) which stretches across the river. This is always highly amusing because we aim to dunk the campers in the river. They don't seem to mind this, considering how warm it usually is, and how cool the water is. As usual we got really muddy from the kids kicking the water and ground into this brown soup.

I finished my first book of the summer, The Gunslinger by Stephen King. It was a spectacular read, and I am intrigued to see where he is going to take it over the next six volumes of the magnum opus, The Dark Tower. I knew a lot about it, and it made much of the highly abstract story a lot more bearable, but even then there were moments which had me scratching my head in a metaphysical contemplation.

I'm back in Haslett for the next week until school starts. Then I'm going to be travelling like a maniac from here to Chicago and back and forth over and over again. I have a feeling that come the end of June, when the majority of my travelling is complete, I'm going to want to shoot myself or blow up a train or something. (For the Dept of Homeland Security that's not true, and is just a means of expressing the exhaustion of travel that I am going to be faced with). Well now, it's off to bed. I've got some stuff I'll be talking about and posting over the next few days concerning writing and projects and the like. G'night!

PS: Sorry about the bland lack of links or pictures. For some reason the Mac internet doesn't like to give me all the options that I get when I use the Microsoft Internet browser, and me being HTML retarded I have no idea how to remedy that. I downloaded a program called firefox, and I think the next few posts may be a little more snazzied up.