not falling down

I did it. Two finals and a scene analysis paper, today, on two hours of sleep. Smart? No. But when you’re Neo, you don’t have to be smart.

So I’ve only got one more final left in college, and it’s not until Monday, and even though noIdon’thavethecomicup I am still going to splurge. That’s right. Tonight, Nashville, Amanda and Jon and me and one more Angie show.

Yesterday was my very last class at Centre, which isn’t nearly as impressive spelled out. It was also the first of two Short Story reunion concerts planned for the end of the year, and we sounded damn fine, and it was the first and last time I cheated the system here at school.

Centre students are required to attend twelve cultural events per year, as designated arbitrarily by the administration, in order to better ram the humanities down our throats. Even more than that idea, which I mildly dislike because I don’t like ramming, I can’t stand the way in which credits are assigned–there are one or two people collecting these colored cards outside the door when you leave, and if they happen to cut out early, you’re screwed out of your credit. Granted, there are around forty a year, but when the count starts getting close at the end of spring, it can be a dangerous thing. Not getting twelve credits means a pointless one-hour F credit on your transcript.

Tuesday was the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra concert, the last convo of the year, which I had to attend because the aforementioned stupid system kept me from getting credit for two other ones to which I’d already gone. The only problem was that they suddenly moved up the start time of the concert to right in the middle of the Jon and Brendan / Jon / Short Story show.

Cheating at convos is a time-honored practice among Centre students. Most convos are boring and sucky and packed with old Danville townies, and people have other things to do most nights. You’d think that such widespread corruption would invite a reassessment of the system, and possibly a correction (like, say, a freaking ID scanner), but instead it just means that it’s impossible to get credit for a convo without a card, even with multiple witnesses.

Like I said above, I’d never done it until yesterday, when things just went beyond my control. So at 7 I left the show, went and got a card, and left through a side door. We played the rest of the show, and I returned to Newlin and idly surfed the interweb from the design studio until I heard the applause go off. Then I went downstairs, handed in my card and went on my merry way.

I’m a cheater. Except not really, because I earned the credit already. What law does that fall under? Conservation of convocations?

Rhymes aside, I finished Blind Loop. I can’t play it all consecutively right now, because I can’t play piano, but if I can get it put into a MIDI program I’ll try and post a playback here. Thanks to everybody who said you liked it!

Last night around 3:30, I was trying to compose the start of my music theory final project in a torpid stupor with too many things on my mind. Maria told me to write the way I was feeling, which is easier said for those of us with limited tonic ability, but I managed to get it out eventually. It was a lot simpler than I expected.

Brendan Adkins – Blind Loop
For best effect, listen to it on repeat. It doesn’t seem to go anywhere except back to the beginning, and it’s stuck, and I think it hurts. And, I’m sure, it’s very easy to get tired of listening to it.

Update 1748 hrs: Yes, that’s my piano, in what I’m almost positive is her interweb debut. Isn’t she lovely?

Spam:

	236865@delphi.com		Increased skin thickness and texture!	599000110

I know what I wanted to talk about! Jami got a blog! Jami is the dangerous one in the ITS department here at school, and she’s hard freaking core, and she has a mind like a knife. I need to add her to the Peeps I Read list on About the Creator, if I ever update that. I think I might end up waiting until I start the job at Trover this summer.

Eric is cool. He made me say that, or else he said he would send lightning down to kill me! Eric is Storm. (We saw X-Mans again. It’s still that good.)

And for the horrible, non-work-safe, very funny objet du jour, listen to Stephen sing a song.

So I actually did it: Running on three hours of sleep, I wrote the ten-page culminating statement on My Theatre in three and a half hours, then presented it earlier tonight. And it was pretty good. I’m exasperated with myself for doing this yet again, but at the same time, I’m now fully convinced that I’m capable of flight and the picking up of cars.

I know there’s more to talk about, but I’m really too tired to be capable of rational discourse right now (even the paragraph above was written down on an envelope at around 4:00). But hey! New Guster!

Can’t post this yet because our interweb is dead, but let it here be recorded that today I got a full-time summer internship. It pays eight bucks and it’s working with databases, and in no part of that can I see anything bad for my resume. Plus I’ll get used to the (possible) monotony and stress of having a real job, which will only make me more grateful to be back in school in the fall.

Also today, I got the CS department’s “outstanding senior” award. What?

Ultimate Frisbee is the new running. I get about the same workout, but it takes three times as long, and the whole affair is a lot dirtier. I also get to publicly embarrass myself, in that I (really, seriously) can’t throw or catch. On the plus side, I keep taking my falls on the same two places, so I bleed a lot!

Saturday night was the First Annual Drama Formal, and also the public debut of DJ Jazzy O’Badkins (that’s me). It was mostly cute little froshers, and they only stayed for maybe an hour of the allotted three, but at least they were there for tracks 6 – 18, what I consider the best part of the mix (on which I spent about six painstaking hours). You can see the HTML version if you want. Yes, I started it with Chumbawamba. I was being retro! I make no apologies! Nobody was there yet anyway!

My baby sister Caitlan, who wields the powers of all Adkinses combined, has decided to go to Georgetown, back in the little hamlet where we were all born. I still would have liked it if she’d picked Centre, but now I can say that our family has conquered all three important Kentuckian smallliberalartscolleges. O’Doyle rules!

A friend of mine has been questioning me with regard to the inner struggle in which I am pretty consistently engaged. I said I think it’s the way I’m trying to train myself into maturity. She asked why. This is my answer.

Katie’s passed out on our futon in the front room; I put out a trash can and a bottle of water even though I don’t think she’ll need them. Her friends say she’s been like this since around 6 pm. It’s pretty clear none of them made an effort to stop her.

I don’t mind that Kim and Danielle and Will left her here. I’d rather she be passed out in our apartment, which is at least a safe environment, than at fucking McNally’s house. I don’t mind taking on the responsibility of taking care of her tonight. It’s something for which I’ve made myself available, and something I’m willing to accept.

I will defend the letter of the law in that it allows adults to ingest drugs like alcohol if they want to abuse themselves. It’s a right. We have rights for a reason. I’ll defend that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t hate it.

People think alcohol makes them more interesting because it is essentially a self-centering device. All drugs are. And all drugs make you less interesting to everyone but yourself.

I will not deny that fucking yourself up is a valid choice to make with your life. I will not agree that it’s ever a good choice. There’s a difference. I want to scream this at people, but I’m incapable of that even if I thought it would do any good.

The things I actually hate in life are deliberate blindness and stupidity. They never accomplish anything worthwhile. They never make anyone happy in the long run. And living in Kentucky (or college, or America, or the world), I’ve seen so much of it that sometimes it makes me want to throw up.

I never want any part of that to be a part of me. My definition of maturity is not complete open- and empty-mindedness, but the unflinching refusal to be blind or stupid. It’s considering the needs of others before your own, and choosing to act in a way that takes into account the consequences of your actions.

I’m not there yet: thus the struggle. It’s me finding the parts of myself that won’t listen and trying to dig them out with whatever tools I have, and it’s my choice to never turn to chemicals to let me out of the job.

I feel like I lived two lives tonight: one where I went with excited people to see a really entertaining movie and stayed happy about it for an hour afterwards, and another where I sat in here being bitter and hating alcohol while a helpless, silly person sleeps on my roommate’s couch.

I keep believing that if I can find the anger and precision to hammer out every word of what I feel correctly, it’ll have to reach someone who’ll listen. That’s why I choose to articulate instead of screaming. Then again, of course, we all know that nothing ever changes.

T-minus three point five hours to X-MANS! And five point five hours to my birthday!

Today I went into the Wal-Mart and ordered new glasses; my old frames, which I think are around five or six years old now, finally snapped from the treatment they get in my backpack. The new ones are a lot slimmer and more… me-like, much like the ones I tried to order six years ago. They shipped the wrong ones that time, and I took them because I’m not big into hassles. If they ship the wrong ones this time, I will laugh bitterly, and probably kick something. Like the Cheat.

As promised, more on the Sumatran Ratmonkeys follows here: Sophomore year, the mighty Jon and the infamous Darren (Emperor of Peein’ On Things) decided to start an general-purpose intramural sports team. As fans of Dead Alive (aka Braindead, apparently), Peter Jackson’s gory-camp first movie, they named the team after its badly animated devil-critters.

Ever since, the Ratmonkeys have typified the Ragtag Band of Misfits from every sports movie ever, going up against the rich fraternity kids in black t-shirts and using their oddly matched combined strengths to try and pull off a Cinderella victory. As this is real life and not a sports movie, of course, we were consistently stomped flat by said rich kids, who were also frequently drunk and laughing at themselves.

It’s always been fun, though, and I’m going to miss the hopeful, hopeless camaraderie. It’s only because of them that I’ve played softball and basketball the past three years, and of course ended up with my Sumatran Area Ratmonkey Softballers t-shirt (pics, pre-aged for your enjoyment: 1 and 2; that’s me, Jon, Darren, left to right).

I don’t think we ever made the playoffs in either sport, any year. I still don’t know exactly what a “zone defense” is, and I will never, ever be able to catch. I’m going to a comic book movie tonight with six giggling friends and tape on my broken glasses.

It’s rough when you start out, but you know, it’s good to be a nerd.