Status Update...

Things...did not find "some screwed up way of working themselves out". July 13th came and went without a call from any potential employer, the class I'd hoped on taking started without me, and as a consequence I will almost certainly be an extra semester or two in college. The week has kind of trudged along without any sense of direction, and in the absence of accomplishing my goal - something I expended a majority of my time and energy on - I can't help but feel that the thunder has been stolen from my summer. There's one month left, I'm stuck in Martin with fewer than $30 to my name, and as a result of having spent so much time in Memphis over the past few years (as well as a few bad romantic decisions), my circle of friends here is limited. My mind's at work though, running at a frantic pace, trying to salvage this summer - to make use of some of it's wreckage. Some part of me though, is fixated on all this could have been. Before I left Memphis, I'd started getting closer to several people who at some point had written me off, or me them, and the possibility of establishing relationships in those circumstances is always exciting to me. I'm really doing my best to shove that to the back of my brain. Goodbye to all that, right? Most of my thoughts are fixated on the next few weeks - making something of them, that is, and doing my damnedest to get this school thing straightened out. Still, my circumstances (and i know they could be much worse), feel at times like a backpack filled with bricks, one I can't take off until at least one aspect of the situation resolves itself positively - this says a lot, because over the past few years I've become the sort of person who can come out on the back end of some disappointment relatively unscathed, focusing on the good times I've managed to accumulate. I just don't know that I'm used to things unraveling on this sort of scale, especially in the face of a future that would appear to be a messy blur. More hard work is needed. Once again, and I say so very tired of it, I need to grind it all out and ultimately hope luck winds up back on my side in the coming year. I'm more realistic now than I ever have been, and that's a positive I suppose. Anything I do will probably be accompanied with a fall-back plan or two. To worry about things playing out in May or December of the coming year might seem ridiculous, but I think most senior years are defined by a stressed-out nervous excitement. Anyway, I've been wanting to go camping, or find some excuse to spend a lengthy period of time out in a woods unfamiliar to me, and I might direct my attention to making that happen...ah...if only I had more than $30 right now. I attempted this last summer, with a group of about twenty people, and as it happened, none of them knew anything about what they were doing. My brother, Jeff (a friend of ours), and I wound up setting up tents for other people in pitch blackness after having begged the group to get started while we still had light at our disposal - swimming was top priority, though. The majority of these people also spent an entire day sitting around the site talking about video games instead of being out on the lake/enjoying what they had surrounding them. I would replicate the experience only to get as drunk as I did and piss people off as hilariously. There are a lot of good days left, I believe. I just have to figure them out. The music this time should be no surprise to anyone.

Go Outside (Or Get Contemplative) 

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BRV4O9M8

Description: 22 tracks that mix the outdoors-y with the introspective. I'm actually cheating here because this is a mix I made for a friend (Jen) over a year ago and never got to her (before I knew about megaupload). It's a pretty good soundtrack to that mess I just wrote, by the way. Next time I really will do that garage rock thing I've been promising.

Recommended For: Jen and/or Hiking.