The Night I Met You

To practice fiction writing, I had the idea to take snippets from movies or TV shows and turn them into short stories. I already have dialogue and characters, all I have to do is make it read well. My first project is one of my all-time favorite scenes from LOST. This comes from the Season 3 episode "Greatest Hits." The clip is here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=5bGiJ-9DwWk

I was walking through the wreckage. Groups huddled here and there around makeshift campfires. Everyone’s adrenaline had finally worn off, and people just looked tired more than anything else. Scanning their faces, I saw no fear, no pain, not even apprehension, just fatigue. Some of these people probably knew each other. Husbands were probably reassuring their wives that rescue was on the way, holding them close, thanking God for their own survival. It would have been nice to have someone to curl up to like that, but I wasn’t jealous. Settling down with someone had never been my style. Anyway, I wasn’t the only loner; there were plenty of people sitting by themselves, staring into the fire, rubbing cuts and bruises absentmindedly. I was looking around to confirm that I wasn’t alone in being alone when I saw her.

She was beautiful. Blonde, about my height, probably three times as wide due to the almost perfect semicircle that arched from below her breasts to her waist. The pregnancy was important because it reassured me that my attraction to her wasn’t sexual. She was also alone, looking for a place to turn in for the night. I watched her select a patch of sand sheltered by part of the wall of the main cabin and suddenly realized that I was walking towards her. It didn’t hit me until that moment how much I wanted to talk to someone. I hesitated for a moment, pulled back the hood of my jacket, ran my hand through my hair, picked up an airplane blanket at my feet. I smiled and raised my hand in a half wave as I reached her.

“Hiya,” I said. I held out my opening line. “Do you want a blanket?”

She looked up at me and smiled. “Oh, thanks. I got one.” There it was, on her other side. Of course. Stupid.

I kept my arms extended, though. “Well, you’re warming for two. Take mine.”

She kept looking at me for a second, then down at her feet, a gesture of concession. “Thank you.” She reached out to take it. Our fingers brushed.

I sat down beside her and rubbed my hands together, to stall for time as much as to warm my fingers. Humor. Go with humor. “So, first plane crash?”

“What gave it away?”

“Ah, you can always spot the newbies.” She laughed, and because she laughed, I did, too. Whatever initial awkwardness or tension she might have felt had dissipated into the night. We were together, had survived a colossally rare event together, and we were able to laugh about it. It seemed to me that that was all that mattered. “We’re gonna be okay, you know.”

Her smile faded. “Are we?” An honest question.

“We’re alive,” I told her. “We’re on a beautiful island. We’ll sleep under the stars, and before you know it, the helicopters’ll come and take us home.”

“You really think they’ll find us?”

It was something that had to be on everyone’s mind, at least subconsciously. Of course I had no way of knowing if they were on their way, if they even knew where to look, but I’m sure no one believed that we wouldn’t be rescued immediately. Rescue was an expectation, not a hope. “Well, yeah, why wouldn’t they?”

I could tell by her expression that we shared the same optimism, that she had been looking for someone to confirm it. She made eye contact with me. “Thanks.”

“I’m Charlie.” I held out my hand.

“I’m Claire.” She shook it. My hands were calloused from decades of guitar playing. Hers were soft. “Nice to meet you, Charlie.”

We pulled our hands back but I kept looking at her. She had blue eyes. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said.

The Loner

Whenever I see people sitting by themselves, at lunch, in coffee shops, in the Quad, whatever, I don’t think twice about it. Sometimes they have a book – they’re studying, I shouldn’t bother them. Even if they don’t, if they’re just sitting there, it’s not really notable. Everyone needs some alone time now and then. When I’m by myself in public, though, I feel like people are watching me. “Why doesn’t he have friends?” they must be thinking. “What a freak.” They think I’m sad and lonely, even if I’m not.

Part of it could be my neutral facial expression. I’ve noticed it when I look in the mirror in the morning. When I’m not smiling or laughing, I look pretty serious. Grim, even. My eyes are narrow and slit, my mouth a tight line. I’m looking at it now in the mirror over the couch. Nothing’s wrong; I’m in a pretty good mood, actually, truth be told. It’s gorgeous out, I’m done with homework (minus some preliminaries for an open-book Spanish quiz tomorrow), I just had an impromptu reminiscence session about last year’s B2 in the Quad with some friends, and there’s a new episode of Lost (!!!) on tonight. Doesn’t get much better than that. My face has no business looking like it does. Maybe if I widened my eyes and parted my lips a little. Then it wouldn’t look like someone just died while I’m just enjoying a cup of coffee. Call it a project to work on.

Still, there’s something about that guy sitting by himself in a room full of different groups of friends. People talking probably don’t give it a second thought, but that guy feels like he’s in the spotlight. The solo artist in a room full of cliques. I don’t like feeling that way, so I try to surround myself with friends wherever I go. It’s just dinner, my body needs sustenance. It’s science. For the longest time, though, I wouldn’t go anywhere in Austin by myself. I’d call three, four people without success before resigning myself to going to Wendy’s alone. It’s chicken nuggets at 1 a.m., not the social event of the season. I didn’t get that till last semester.

It’s not what I think or what other people think; it’s what I think other people are thinking as I plop down in a booth by myself. They must think that I look lonely, they must think I wish I had friends to enjoy my bagel and coffee with. Do I? Sure. I think everyone prefers company to solitude. Whenever I see someone glance over at me, I want to explain that I’m just looking for a quiet place to read, that I’m grabbing a snack before a meeting, that Danny and Sean and Tim are all in class right now. I don’t care, and they don’t care, but I think they care, and that makes all the difference. That’s why I feel as awkward as I do.

No worries. I’ll learn to deal with it.

The Middle

If there’s one song that pretty much everyone from my generation knows, it’s Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle.” It got a lot of radio play when it first came out, and I’ll still hear it every once in a while, but more than that, it’s one of those pick-me-p songs that I can’t help but be in a good mood after listening to it. I’ve heard that song more times than I care to count, but it never gets old. I was listening to it tonight, and I started thinking about how some really great moments of my life have had that song playing in the background. I’m not gonna launch into a greatest hits, listing off the best moments I’ve ever had in my entire life, but these are some definite moments where I sat back for a second, looked around, and consciously thought, “Huh…this is kind of cool.”

Summer 2002, I went to a summer camp in Colorado called Camp Cheley. I stayed in the Haiyaha unit, which was for guys ages 14-17. We all got to be pretty close because we knew not to step on each others’ toes – we were all living together in pretty close quarters for about a month, so making enemies wasn’t the best idea. In the last week, my cabin was assigned bathouse duty, just normal stuff, sweeping, rinsing out the showers, etc. Someone had a stereo, and he started playing DJ as we went to work. He picked out a couple of his personal favorites, stuff that a few people knew, but then “The Middle” came on. Everyone perked up – I can’t explain it. By that point, we were all in the typical summer camp “I love everyone!” mindset, so that didn’t hurt. We all started singing along (everyone knew the words, of course) and playing guitars on our brooms. In that moment, we were all united. Common task that no one really wanted to do, singing the same song, with a big circle of friends. Male bonding at its finest.

Summer 2005, again at a summer camp, this time YMCA Camp Grady Spruce in Possum Kingdom. It was the last Saturday of camp, the last batch of campers had left that morning, so it was just the counselors in the dining hall for lunch that afternoon. Same situation as with Cheley – we’d all been with each other all summer, making it a point to legitimately make friends and include everyone. I plugged my iPod into the giant stereo system and started blasting the first thing I found as loud as I could. As we ate, people would get up and select the next song. Sure enough, someone put on “The Middle.” We were done eating by that point, so we were just milling around, avoiding the last bits of work we had to do before we could go home. We were all really excited and energized already – the fucking kids were gone, our job was all but done, and we could finally just chill and all be together for the last time. There wasn’t too much of a reaction to the song beyond a general nod of approval and a couple grins, but nothing else was really needed. That lunch, in the last couple days of July, was the first time that we had been able to hang out as a group without anything to do since the first group of campers came in May. Can’t really describe the feeling that we all had, looking around at each other, satisfied knowing that our work was finally (!) done. All we had was sandwiches and chips, but that was one of the best lunches I’d had in a long time.

And then we come to tonight. This one’s a bit more subdued, a bit more random than the others. We were sitting in the Blobby (the Blanton lobby), just like every other night, doing homework but not really doing homework, just like every other night, making fun of each other, just like every other night, etc. Jackie put on “The Middle,” and again, there was that general consensus that you just can’t not like this song (think about it). I looked around at everyone sitting there, there were probably ten people in all, and I was struck with this feeling of contentment. Not happiness, which can be pretty fleeting when something else comes along to hit you in the face, but contentment. Not only did I know everyone’s name, which is rarer than I’d like to admit, but I’ve had extensive conversations with everyone that was sitting there. I was comfortable, I fit in, I belonged. Everyone in that circle, I felt like I could randomly call on a weekday afternoon to see if they wanted to grab lunch or coffee, just for the hell of it. I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in the past few weeks, long story there, so it was kind of nice to realize that I still have this group that I see, talk to, and laugh with pretty much every day. A more subdued kind of contentment than the other examples, yes, but contentment nonetheless. Every once in a while, it’s the little things that get to you.

My Economics Paper

As obvious as it sounds, economic principles are usually only used when studying the economy, past, present, and future. These principles were created for the specific purpose of describing how the economy works, both in theory and in practice, so it’s only natural that this should be their main application. However, with a wider scope, it’s possible to see that these economic goals, policies, and theories can relate to common events in everyday life. To view the average person’s daily routine through the lens of an economist might seem unusual, but a careful analysis results in a better understanding of the almost unconscious process of human interaction. In their book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner define economics as “…at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing” (16).

The arguable cornerstone of economics is the principle of supply and demand. When the supply of a product is low and the demand for it is high, a vendor can charge whatever price he wishes for the good in question. When the supply is high and the demand is low, he doesn’t quite have this freedom. The basic principle here is that a good is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it; this can potentially dictate a price substantially higher than the good’s retail value.

For example, I was once in a large lecture class that required its students to bring blue books for every exam. During the first exam of the semester, a student entered the room five minutes into the exam, sat next to me, and promptly realized that he had forgotten to buy a blue book. Running off to buy one would take at least ten minutes, time that he didn’t have to spare. The supply of spare blue books was extremely limited, and his demand for one was almost off the charts – the exam was worth thirty percent of the final grade. Smiling to myself, I realized that anyone who happened to have an extra blue book in his backpack could have named any price that this student would be obliged to pay.

Here, the concept of inflation comes into play. The basic gist of inflation is that the cost of a certain good fluctuates as a result of outside circumstances – it takes more or less money to acquire the same product. In the economy, the price of imported cars in dollars, for example, rises or falls based on the exchange rate of the currency between the two countries. Similarly, in real life, people often find that it suddenly requires more effort to obtain the same result. A young man trying to woo a girl finds that paying her a compliment and buying her a cup of coffee gets him a kiss on the cheek at the end of the night. One night, after the compliment and the coffee, she gives him a hug and leaves. The following night, he takes her to dinner at an expensive restaurant and takes her dancing afterward. Sure enough, at the end of the night, he gets his kiss. Based on the progression of the relationship, a kiss on the cheek costs more.

In the above example, the price of a blue book (normally just thirty-nine cents) has skyrocketed because of the unfortunate student’s immediate need for the good. Three hours before the exam, the student would be crazy to buy a blue book for any more than retail price. During crunch time, however, with forty-five minutes left in the exam and no blank blue book in sight, the value of the good begins to inflate exponentially. Again, the value of a good is whatever the person is willing to pay for it. Let’s say that the entrepreneurial merchant’s asking price for his extra blue book is twenty dollars. The (admittedly disgruntled) student wouldn’t be paying that amount of money for eight sheets of paper stapled together; he’d be paying for his only option for salvaging his grade in the class. An “A” instead of a “C” in a class is of inestimable value, but twenty dollars seems like a good start.

Now, the obvious objection to this situation is that no good person would corner someone into this type of deal just to make a little bit of extra cash. While it wouldn’t surprise me if something akin to this situation has happened at least once, it’s certainly not the common response. I pose the following question: why? If economics is the study of incentives, and someone has both the means and the opportunity to make a quick buck, why wouldn’t he? It’s a bit dodgy, ethically speaking, but ethics aren’t usually a major factor in strictly businesslike transactions. There must be some other reason that this person with an extra blue book is more inclined to hand it over with a wink and a smile than to make the other person reach for his wallet.

To answer this question, I apply the principle of the balance of payments – regarding trade, a country wants to export as many goods as it can while simultaneously importing as few goods as possible. Just as a countries trade goods on a massive scale, people trade goods and services with those around them on a daily basis. A man offers a soda from his refrigerator to his neighbor. A student lets a classmate copy her notes. A girl moves her friend’s car out of a no-parking zone before the car gets towed. The societal norm seems to be that money doesn’t change hands during such personal interchanges; a person will do his friend a favor with the implication that the favor will be reciprocated later.

I would therefore like to propose the theory that in a group of close friends, especially in communal living environments like dormitories, doing favors for one another acts as the “currency” of the relationship. If someone does a small favor for me, I “owe” him one small favor. If I do a big favor for someone, he “owes” me either one big favor or several small favors. This system is obviously much more flexible than the dollar system, but on the whole, it seems to consistently match the daily interactions of acquaintances. As a side note, it is theoretically possible for one to live his life in a “closed” economy, that is, a completely self-sufficient person who doesn’t rely on anyone around him for anything, but this usually doesn’t last very long. Everyone requires someone else’s help at one point or another. We will therefore work with the model of an open market.

For example, say that John and Steve go out to lunch. John has forgotten his wallet, so Steve pays for the entire meal. Instead of reimbursing Steve with the exact dollar amount as soon as possible, John will probably just pick up the check the next time he and Steve eat together. Steve did a favor for John (“exporting” his good will), and later, he received one in return (“importing” John’s good will). The transaction is complete. Just as with national trade, it is better for one’s net exports to be positive than negative. A person who constantly does favors for his friends without asking for repayment for its own sake has a trade surplus, a useful stock that he can take advantage of should the need arise. A person who constantly asks his friends for goods and services without repaying them has a trade deficit; his friends will likely see him as a “moocher” and be less inclined to do favors for him in the future.

Booms and slumps can be explained by a person’s attitude over a given period of time. A student who aces two tests and receives an acceptance letter from the graduate school of his choice in the same day is likely to be in a pretty good mood – he’d probably be willing to grab his roommate’s laundry from the dryer before it gets stolen or buy a round of drinks on a Friday night. By amassing these favors while in his positive emotional state, he’s going through a boom. Conversely, a student who has three midterms and a research paper all due in a single week will probably turn to his friends more than once in order to make it through. Borrowing notes from someone here, his roommate bringing him dinner there – the deficit builds up pretty quickly. He’s going through a slight slump. Both of these are common, and in the long run, the booms and slumps of a hectic college student’s life tend to balance each other out.

Returning to the above example, then, a student won’t charge his classmate twenty dollars for a blue book because he wants to retain his ability to receive a favor in the future. A person’s current “trade status” is not necessarily private information. What favors he does, for whom, and how often are all pretty common information just through gossip and small talk among his friends. The person who sells his classmate a blue book for twenty dollars damages his reputation considerably in the process. News of this irregularity will spread, and his friends will stop asking him for favors for fear of what he will ask in return. Since his friends aren’t asking him for any favors, in turn, they feel less obligated to do favors for him. Isolation ensues. Though this man’s actions are perfectly logical in an economic sense, they demonstrate what kind of deals he has the habit of making, lowering the chance of future interactions.

The quote from Levitt and Dubner makes it a point to distinguish wants from needs. Three hours before the test, the student wanted a blue book. Five minutes into it, he needs one. While it is certainly unjust and irregular to charge twenty dollars for something he so desperately needs, it might not be quite as unjust to overcharge for a nonessential good. For example, in college towns, fast food restaurants close their dining areas at midnight but keep the drive-through lane open all night long. However, the restaurants don’t serve food to people who walk through the lane – since many college students don’t have cars, this is a bit of a setback. A student with a car is in the position to make a little bit of money for himself. He can park his car in the parking lot with a sign in the passenger’s window that says, “I will drive you through for five dollars.” At one or two o’clock on a Friday night, he’s likely to have several (quite possibly inebriated) takers. Again, the price that someone is willing to pay for a cheeseburger has inflated because of his mental state and the lack of other options.

The difference between the two situations is the distinction between necessity and desire. Charging twenty dollars so that someone can pass an exam might as well be stealing, since the student has no other options besides paying the asking price. With the fast food example, though, the buyer makes the conscious choice to pay the five-dollar “transportation fee.” He doesn’t “need” a cheeseburger like the student needs the blue book, so there can be little comparison between the two.

Examining real life situations from an economic perspective provides an interesting view on human nature, both psychologically and sociologically. The study of the average person’s incentives, needs, and the lengths to which he will go to obtain these needs is a very practical use of time. A rational, unbiased, fresh perspective on the unconscious happenings of everyday life can be quite educational and can significantly increase the quality of one’s social life.

Nicknames

I’m taking a break (i.e. procrastinating) from my philosophy paper, but I’m still in a writing mood, so I thought I’d ramble on here for a while. For no reason at all, the topic of nicknames came to mind. Someone’s real name doesn’t matter that much beyond it being the main method of identification (if my name’s Matt or Will or John, it doesn’t change who I am at all), but a nickname can define someone as a certain personality type or even prod them to act in certain ways. I think that a nickname’s a very important part of someone’s identity – if it catches on, it sticks with you for quite a while. Most people know that you can’t give yourself a nickname. Someone has to come up with one, and it has to fit the person to be common enough for everyday use. I’ve had my fair share of nicknames, some good, some bad.

FRODO – this came about during my first few years at Cistercian. I was one of the shorter kids in the class, and I had what I like to consider an affably eccentric personality. This was before the years of tests, papers, and teenage hormones killed my spirit. A big staple of Cistercian is that sixth grade English consists pretty much solely of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. When it came to Tolkien, everyone at Cistercian knew their shit, whether they wanted to or not. A guy in the class above me (either Nick Christensen or Mason Reeves, can’t remember) nicknamed me Frodo because of my height, and for whatever reason, it stuck. Everyone at CPS, even the high schoolers who normally wouldn’t bother to look in my direction, knew me as Frodo. Between classes, at football games, whatever, I’d hear someone shout “Hey, Frodo!” and turn to see someone sprinting from the other side of the hallway to say hey. It was a term of endearment more than anything else. I eventually grew out of it as our class stopped being the low men on the totem pole, but I wonder how many CPS graduates from the classes of ’99, ’00, ’01 occasionally think, “Whatever happened to that Frodo kid?”

JONESY – not too much of a story here. My high school nickname. My last name’s Jones, so it’s only fitting. I just want to say, though, that during junior and senior year, I’d guess that a good portion of people I hung out with on a daily basis didn’t know my first name.

SHEETS – ah, yes, the fucking infamous Sheets story. It’s ubiquitous in Austin and it’s apparently even spread back to Dallas and all over the country with various high school friends of mine who’ve gone on to college. I’m not gonna tell the whole story for privacy reasons, as there may or may not have been certain illegal activities involved, but suffice it to say that this one stuck in a big way. During my freshman year of college, pretty much everyone in the Quad knew me only as Sheets, due in no small part to Mr. David Zummo and Mr. Saul Elbein. The nickname isn’t as common this year as it was last year, but it’s something that I’m pretty sure I’ll never live down completely. I compare being Sheets to being Michael Bolton from Office Space – everyone has a joke to make, and not one of them is original (or funny).

KIDDO – this one’s used exclusively by the Broccoli Project, the Plan II theater group that I’m in. My friend Brandan calls someone “kiddo” when she can’t remember his real name, so that’s how it started, but even when she finally learned it, she kept calling me Kiddo because she said it fit. Fair enough. A nickname’s a great way to know you belong to a group, and that’s what happened with Broccoli. When I meet people at auditions or shows, I don’t even bother introducing myself as Matt. I just hold out my hand and go, “Hey, I’m Kiddo, nice to meet you,” and everyone around me who knows me nods in approval. They’d correct me immediately if I said anything else. This one’s still going strong, and I don’t see it dying out in the foreseeable future, at least with this crowd.

Just something I was thinking about while I was sitting outside. Even if it’s completely pointless, it’s fun to write stuff like this for posterity. Twenty years from now, I’ll be flipping around on my computer (or whatever the equivalent is by then), find this, and think, “Holy shit, I completely forgot about the whole Frodo thing.” Good times, good times.

There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.

A couple of years ago, on a Saturday afternoon, I was watching an episode of Lost that I had Tivo’ed from the week before. I think it was the one where Michael killed Ana Lucia and Libby, because I remember that I was really into it – it was just getting good. I had been interrupted three or four times already, by my mom asking me to take my laundry upstairs or my dad showing me a newspaper article, stuff like that, so I was a bit perturbed already. It was in the last five minutes when my sister yelled “Hey, Matt! Come look at this!” I was so enraged that I couldn’t get forty-five minutes to myself that I finally just shut it off and said out loud, “Screw it, I’ll just watch it later, I guess. WHAT?” She meekly handed me a packet we had just gotten in the mail from Plan II, and we all know what a big packet instead of a dinky white envelope means. My only response was, “…oh.”

Whatever I do, I’ve noticed that I have the tendency to try to make it an experience instead of just another action, especially when it comes to media. I prefer watching movies in a dark room on my laptop with my headphones in – I can shut out the outside world, so the only thing that my senses can possibly perceive is the movie itself. I get into it more, I engage myself more fully when there are no distractions to pull me away. I think my roommate thinks that I’m antisocial because when I’m in the room, I usually have my headphones in playing music full blast instead of having a conversation for the sake of having a conversation. I do that a lot when I listen to music. I’ll lie in bed with my iPod, shut my eyes, crank it up, and just enjoy. I can’t keep one earbud in as background music while I’m having a conversation or whatever, because I usually end up getting caught up in a guitar solo and tuning out the person I’m talking to. Not a great conversational skill.

For the last couple years, I’ve tried to live by a maxim that I came up with – “Do what you’re doing.” If you’re talking with someone, then talk with him and pay attention, don’t wonder what’s for dinner. If you’re reading a book, don’t stop every couple of paragraphs to get a drink of water or look around. If you’re writing, don’t check Facebook every five minutes. It loses its flow, it doesn’t mean as much when you don’t just get into it and enjoy it for all it’s worth. I came up with this idea during the summer after my junior year of high school when our class went to Europe for three weeks. We went to Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, and everywhere worth going to in Italy, among other places – not to be cliché, but it was the kind of trip you only get the chance to do once. All around me, though, all I heard was bitching about the food not being good enough, the rules were too strict, the bus was too cramped, etc, etc. I just wanted to tell everyone to chill the fuck out. Maybe listening to a song you’ve heard a million times isn’t an experience, but touring the Sistine Chapel sure as hell is. Pay attention, look at the murals and stuff, and stop complaining that you think someone stole one of your T-shirts. You’re here, you chose to be here, you can’t change it, so you’re only hurting yourself by not fully engaging in your surroundings.

I’ve found that the opposite of this is also true – if you don’t want to be somewhere, then don’t be there. Obviously, everyone is forced to deal with certain unpleasantness that pops up occasionally, but it’s easy enough to disengage mentally, if not physically. If I’m in a really boring class, for example, I’ll usually just halfheartedly scribble down whatever the professor is saying while I’m off in my own little world. Not paying attention makes the time go faster. This is obviously easier when the situation has a definite endpoint – a fifty-minute class period, for example, or the guy that lives across the hall that you absolutely hate deciding to sit across from you at dinner. Even if it seems like it’ll never end, it will, and you know when it will. Almost anything’s bearable for a predefined period of time.

I just seem to take more enjoyment out of life when I, as I said, do what it is that I’m doing. I take more away from it when I’m able to completely immerse myself in a movie or a TV show or a song or a conversation. It just seems like a waste of time, otherwise. Yeah, I spent three hours of my life reading this book, but I didn’t understand any of it because I wasn’t paying attention. I can either spend more time rereading it, or I can just call it a loss and move on. Neither of those options is really appealing. Hence, if you see me sprawled out in the Quad with my nose buried in book, don’t come up to me and ask me how I’m doing because you haven’t seen me for three hours. Unless your name is Tim. I always have time for you, sweetcheeks:)

Life barrels on like a runaway train.

I went back home for my high school’s homecoming this weekend. It was an interesting experience. Three guys from our class showed up, and one of them still lives in Dallas, anyway. I didn’t talk to either of them longer than the obligatory handshake and pleasantries. It’s not that we don’t like each other, it just seems like we didn’t really have anything to say. Only a couple guys from the class of ’07, also, and nobody from ’05. Alums that I knew were few and far between. I ended up hanging out with Br. Stephen and Br. Philip the entire time. It was fun, but it made for some interesting musing once I got home.

It wasn’t that I felt out of place, exactly; after all the time I spent there, I don’t think I could ever feel like a stranger at Cistercian. I felt like an outsider. I left and went to college, I’ve been doing my own shit for the last year and a half, but things back there kept on the same way they always have. Guys that were in seventh, eighth, ninth grade while I was there are the top dogs now, and teachers treat them just like they treated us senior year – as friends more than students. It’ll eventually cycle out to where I don’t know any students at the school at all, by which point all but the most dedicated teachers will have left, too. I didn’t feel anything like this when I went to homecoming last year, but I think it’s because it was too fresh – I’d really only been gone for about a month and a half, so Cistercian still felt like home just as much as it always had. Last year, chilling in the stands and cheering for the team, I felt like I’d never really left. Not the same this year, though.

During sophomore year, it seems like I’ve been gone long enough to feel distant from everyone there, but I haven’t been gone long enough quite yet to feel nostalgic about my time there. I made a pass around campus, hit up the senior classrooms and the lunchroom and the pub, but it didn’t bring back that many memories that I don’t call up on a daily basis. That’s it – I felt distant, detached, somehow. I was watching the same shit that always happened, chatting with teachers, hitting on girls, buying popcorn, stuff that I did a million times, except it wasn’t mine anymore. I felt like there wasn’t much of a point in being there. I mean, yeah, it was good seeing everyone, but it only made me think about how much I’ve changed since I graduated and came to college. I’m a completely different person than I was in August 2006, there’s no doubt about that. It just didn’t feel like I’d had enough distance since senior year to appreciate it purely for nostalgic value. I was trying to fall back into my old role of actually being a Cistercian student, which didn’t work at all. I can’t do that anymore, and I learned that.

Before the game, I went to Ball’s Burgers to get a plate of nachos. Good shit, I can’t finish a full plate. On my way out, I ran into two kids wearing Cistercian t-shirts. I struck up a conversation, turns out they’re eighth graders this year. I told them I was a sophomore in college, pointed to my Texas sweatshirt, and their jaws dropped. I was a god, I was a friggin’ college student, and here I was, talking about E-Lab and Art tests. They were hanging on to my every word, something that hasn’t happened to me in a very long time, if ever. Somehow, thinking back on it, it only made me more depressed, though. In a few years, these kids are gonna be seniors, and after that, they’ll be the college students who happen to run into middle schoolers and shoot the shit for a few minutes. By that time, I’ll probably have left my Cistercian days far behind me. I might come back for the occasional Christmas or lunch with an old friend, but besides that, I’ll be living my own life.

It’s just weird, I guess, knowing that I had my time and finished it, and now I’m off doing my own thing, but things continue on at Cistercian like they always have and always will. I don’t have a place there anymore, there’s nothing left for me to do. I’m welcome to come visit occasionally, I’m sure, but that’s pretty much it. I’m finally at the point where, as a whole, our class of ’06 doesn’t rely on Cistercian anymore. We’re not “the class” anymore – we’re 44 independent people who may happen to drop in from time to time and remember the bond we used to share a million years ago. There’s finally enough distance between now and my time at Cistercian to realize that. I don’t belong there anymore, and to be honest, that scares the shit out of me.