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What? What's this? A post?

Behold.

The title is how long since I've last posted, in case you didn't get that.

Kind of like in Donnie Darko but without the 80s music and the rabbit.

I'm not making any sort of commitment with this... I might start blogging again, I might not. We'll just see what happens. I don't know myself.

So. Obviously. It's my senior year, and it has been for some time. The musical was Kiss Me Kate. We did one show... weather problems. My senior project is over. So is my senior paper. Neither is worth discussing here.

I'm in a band now. Sort of. With music. Kind of. I sing a song, badly... most of it is instrumental, because we can't exactly be bothered to sing most of the time. And there's no myspace, or upcoming gigs or anything... Also because we can't be bothered. Hence "sort of" in a band.

It's called "The Something." It was an inside joke. Now it's just getting old. I can't decide how I feel about it.

It's been an eventful year, month, twenty-one days, four hours and twenty-seven minutes. There's the school stuff that's happened.... My grandmother died.... band stuff.... found good new music (The Mars Volta, Dresden Dolls (not new as much as rediscovered, I've mentioned them here before I think), Muse, The Shins (I was pretty late on that bandwagon, I admit), Regina Spektor... etc).... Drama Club President (woo-hoo.).... Cousin moved in.... Cousin moved out.... Went to Scotland.... Made the decision to take AP Economics (a life altering experience, naturally).... basically a load of stuff that I can't really be bothered to recount in detail. I can hear your cries of despair, and I'm sorry.

As you can see, I've still got the really bad sarcasm thing.

Anyway, on to the present.

I'm on spring break, which was, of course, badly needed. The musical was fun, kinda, though (as I said) we only did one show. It snowed. I was the Assistant Director. Stress, stress, stress. I hosted the cast party.

I'm going to Indiana University in the fall... Majoring in Theatre and Drama / Computer Science. Supposedly.

Hmm. I probably won't get back into this habit.

Oh well. It was worth a shot.


........


I thought I was done. Then I got to thinking, you know, I haven't actually said anything worth saying, or anything that you couldn't have gotten by asking any one of my relatives or acquaintances. So I'll take another stab.

I've been reading the Dresden Dolls Diary blog (linked).
Blogging is not about sharing things that you're obligated to share and stopping. It's about sharing your deeper thoughts and emotions, so that someone might actually get to know you better, or at the very least you feel lighter yourself.

That's what I always forget. I get into the habit (cough) of just writing out what I feel like I should tell people (people? Bah. No-one reads this, especially not after 1+ years of complete stagnation).

So more about that band stuff.

Yeah, I write music now. I might have written a little bit before, in This Blog version 1.0... Mostly lyrics, probably, if I remember correctly. Bad lyrics. Lyrics about love and loss when I was too young to know the meaning of either. Rearrangement of the tried and true, Oh Baby this and Depths Of Despair that. Now I write actual music.

Wait, time out. I don't write actual music. I write simple four-chord progressions on the piano with bullshit improvised melodies in the right hand, occasionally stuttering out a word or two about life in general or my experiences with relationships. But the point is, I write music now, rather than cut and paste music.

I'm getting the urge to do another self-deprecatory time-out, but I won't. It's okay. Nobody reads this.

.....

Anyway.

I write music. My bandmates (James and Eric) write music as well. We meet up, sit around, drink tea (nothing funny!) (except for Eric, he's Mormon. He drinks root beer), and write music. Occasionally we remember some of it, because sometimes it doesn't suck. Some people tell us we're good (those who actually hear us, we don't really do shows... some people just hear a few songs we've recorded). The state of the band is, however, uncertain. I am a Senior, James is a Junior, Eric is a Sophomore. Once college gets into the mix... Well, that all remains to be seen.

The point is (again), I write music. Well, that again is a lie. Most of the time I don't write it down. I usually just make new stuff up every time. But I play music that has at some point or another come forth out of my own creativity.

And sometimes Chopin.



I bought The Mars Volta CD (Bedlam in Goliath) with the money I made from watching James' pets over the weekend. It is awesome. I listened to it, and nothing else sounded like music for a day.



I've been reading "insightful" books lately. On The Road (Kerouac), Oracle Night (Paul Auster)... those are the two really worth mentioning, though The Plague (Camus) is also a good one. I gave up on the fantasy novels for the most part. All of these are highly recommended.



I was reading back through my old blog posts, just to see whether there was actually anything going on in my fifteen-year-old head. In the last actually meaningful post, I mentioned the need for superiority--How I (think that I) flaunt my "intellectual"-ness sometimes, or feel compelled to, anyway, so I can feel like I've got one up on everyone else. Wow, it sounds so shitty when I type it out like that. Anyway, the point is, I was caught off guard. Normally when I read through old posts (or journal entries, depending on the age), I find Myself-In-The-Past grappling with all sorts of issues that I-Now had no trouble with, and barely even remember. The superiority thing is not like that, though. Apparently, it's an ongoing thing. As I said then, it is human nature to want to be better than everyone else. But I don't really want to write it off as human nature so quickly. Human nature or not, I do want to try to fix the things about myself that really bother me.

And why am I typing this out? Honestly, part of me thinks it's to prove to people that I have these thoughts, and that I am in fact "better." But if it was about people reading it, and thinking "Oh, that Patrick, he's so deep," I wouldn't be posting it on my Blogspot-Which-Has-Been-Vacant-For-A-Year to be imported into a Facebook-Which-I-Haven't-Been-On-In-Months Note-Which-No-One-Will-Bother-To-Read-Anyway. I would be writing it out in my 89 cent Psych notebook, flashing the four packed-solid pages of incoherent scribblings and saying something to the effect of "I got pissed today and needed to vent" or "Look, I had so many ideas that my head was just about to explode" or "Aren't I insightful?"

...

I do that too.

...

I stayed up until 1:20 last night playing Guitar Hero for about 4 solid hours. My fingers kind of hurt after a while, but not enough to stop. It was less an addiction to the game, and more just not going to bed. Sometimes I get the urge to do mildly self-destructive things like that, and stay up just so I will be tired in the morning... which doesn't work on break, for future reference. But essentially, I was sitting there, totally fucking up the songs but apathetic, thinking about stuff. My grandparents (from Scotland) dropped in last night, and we were updated on the status of my infamous cousin. Anyone reading this will doubtless have heard the story, as I tend to overtell it in my solid-world, day-to-day experience. Essentially, things have taken a turn for the worse again... about as they were some months ago. She's no longer "doing better." I don't need to elaborate any further in this forum. But she was a huge part of my thoughts during my Guitar Hero marathon. I also thought about my self, like I explained in the last few paragraphs.

...

I finished the Career on Easy mode, which was boring. I got halfway through on Medium before I finally decided to pack it in. I also played When We Were Young on Hard, but that hardly counts... Just a bunch of repeated notes interspersed with random hard bits that mercifully don't last long enough to do any actual damage to your score.

...

I think I want some tea. Bigelow Earl Grey. Buy it. It's amazing.

...

I know... I'll tag people. That'll get them to read this, on Facebook anyway. Hahaha.

...

Back to the personal struggles. The superiority thing... I've honestly got no idea. I'll let it stew for a minute.

As you know, I write music. Oh, tea.

...

(water was boiling)
Until recently, I had been trying to write music. This was unsuccessful.

** aside--apart from flinging around the intellectualness, I also tend to do it with vocabulary. Where exactly is the line there? What counts as a good word, and what counts as annoying? **

I was trying very hard. I was taking lessons, which, now that I've quit, I think were part of the problem. I was sticking too hard to the theory, and the theory (which was minimal, actually) was bogging down the creativity. So, I quit lessons. Problem solved, except not really. Then, I was bogged down by Chopin. I was looking too hard at classical, or at massively complicated popular/modern, and thinking "I can't write that. How can I ever write that?", and trying anyway, and failing miserably, and then beating myself up over it, and being just generally very disagreeable. And, to my GREAT frustration, the best songs I had were the ridiculously simple ones. Grrrr.

So, along comes dresdendollsdiary. I've tried to find the post again, but alas, it is nowhere. Essentially, it was Amanda Palmer saying "it's not about what music is, but what music does. If the goal is best accomplished simply, let it be simple." The words were nothing like this, but the point was somewhere in that general area. And suddenly, I'm improvising like there's no tomorrow. I sit down at a piano, play for three minutes, and it's good, or good enough for being made up on the spot, and I don't write it down, I forget it. And it's no big loss, because I'll come up with a hundred more that week. They're simple, they're worthless, and I feel uncomfortable writing them down because if I write it down, suddenly it's a song, and it's a stupid, simple song at that, with a rolling-chord C A G F progression and Oh My God, how did I even write that?!

But if I just play it, and forget it, I don't have to live with the simplicity, or live with the fact that people can play it after watching my hands for twenty seconds, or live with the feelings of worthlessness and impotence when I just keep writing the same song in different keys. Because I'm just expressing myself, I'm just getting emotions out to get them out and I'm not grasping at straws, trying to hold on to them so that I can bring them out at parties. Life as a musician is so much easier this way.

Yet another reason why I'm "sort of" in a band. I can't bother to remember the songs.

...

This post is longer than normal. And I know why, and it's stupid. It's longer because Dresden Dolls Diary posts are long and I like them, so I can pull off long posts too.

Jeez, I'm pathetic.