i will bend the light pretending that it somehow lingered on

I wish I could update this a little more, but time and opportunity allude me. Nevertheless, here I am. Even more, I wish I had more profound things to talk about, but I don't. When I kept a LiveJournal (haha, who didn't?), I always had something to say and something to question, but I was living on a college campus where I was constantly trying to figure things out. It didn't matter if it concerned women or the number of electrons in an atom, I was trying to figure things out. Nowadays, I'm done questioning and trying to answer all of the questions, perhaps because I realize that I don't have to waste a lot of time doing so.

Heavier Things, the sophomore album by my favorite playa in the game John Mayer, made sense to me in 2003. At the time, I felt like I was leaving the high school mentality completely having a full year of college under my belt. John was singing about mature love, carving a piece into the world and having a place to fit into, aiming for inspirations bigger than we can possibly dream to achieve and not caring if we fail to do so as long as the attempt was made. I understood that completely. I was over my high school infatuation (hard to call her love considering I've had that "mature love," yahmean?), I was trying to make the most of being a Murray State scholar, and I wanted to be the world's greatest pediatric neurologist. The album struck a chord, so to speak. Yet, John was 25 when he made Heavier Things, and after listening to it as soon as I turned 25, it struck a completely different chord.

I had just returned from Ireland and had my awe-inspiring epiphany about life, blah blah blah. We've been through that. I also had my epiphany about friendships and what real friends meant to each other, blah blah blah. We've been through that too. So I popped in the album one day and it sank so deeply that I got a little emotional, you know? No crying, but I was moved nevertheless. From songs like "Clarity," where John has his own epiphany about the way life is going for him, to songs like "Split-Screen Sadness," where he pines for a distant lover he let go of, I related to every song and began to think about what I've been doing as a 25-year-old. It's only been a couple of weeks thus far, but it's more about where I am in the lot in life. I'm a college graduate who is not the world's greatest pediatric neurologist. I'm not learning much anymore either, even though I'm still in school. I haven't been asking questions anymore, which bothers me most of all. My quest to learn about all things that make the world go round simply went kaput and it seems if I learn anything, it's something I read on Cracked.com, which is a humorous website, but not really where the answers lie.

Most importantly, those days of learning helped me fashion together so many stories I'm thankful to have been able to tell. Most of my literary ideas come from me seeing things I'll never see again, not as long as I sit at a desk job working 3rd shift. This must come to an end, for it's beginning to drain me. I need to be up with the sun, where the light keeps my brain cells running a little bit better. It's more than UPS though; I can't blame it all on the job. It's gotta be about me and figuring out what questions I haven't answered. Some I never will--like why women are...the way they are--but sometimes, it wasn't about the answer itself but instead about what I learned along the journey of figuring it out. Hell, often, that was the best part! I'm not one of the folks in their mid-twenties that had even begun to think that it's time to settle down and get "the next phase" ready, where I get married and feel like starting a family is what I must do. If you do that so soon, aren't you really telling yourself that you've got enough questions answered?

All in all, I have just one thing I want to do--get back to that sophomore feeling where I felt like I had something to pursue. And I do. I have plenty trials, successes and errors to make with finding love, which I must admit is pretty important to me. I have to figure out why I was given the gift to formulate a story so well. I have to figure out why I'm able to do calculus problems in my head, like another form of mental math. I have to see why learning the piano so late in life is one of the easiest new things I've done in years. I have to see why logic doesn't explain everything and how it sometimes loses the battle against emotions. I've yet to carve out my spot in the world, and to quote my boy John, I'll go down in flames if a flame is what it takes to remember my name.