It's Christmastime

It's Christmas Eve in Truckee, California. My family decided to exchange gifts tonight; it's an unfamiliar but welcome departure from our usual crack-o'-dawn tradition. Instead, we're all planning to ride snowmobiles around Lake Tahoe tomorrow at 9 a.m. I can't think of a more unique and enjoyable way to spend Christmas Day.

I passed all of my fall semester classes. Actually, I excelled in my fall semester classes and completely surpassed my own expectations. All the time I spent flustered for the past weeks and months—worrying whether I would be allowed to graduate in May—seems to have been a complete waste of time. Perhaps not a waste but, you know, I could have been proactively positive rather than a negative Nancy the entire time. Straddling the edge, tripping over my responsibilities and worrying whether my next clumsy step will see me into another one of life's ditches... well, it's a recurring theme in my life.

My dad warned me a long time ago that he, too, spent too much of his youth worrying about things and not enough time actually doing the things that needed to be done. It must run in the family.

One of my winter projects is finished: All of the music, movies and pictures on my hard drive are now organized into nice, neat little folders. Shuffling old images reminded me how long I've been going at this whole college thing. Half a decade now. The amount of weirdness, badness and disappointment I'd blocked from my collective memory of freshman and sophomore year is startling and staggering. What else don't I remember? Would I be a better person now if I had remembered?

Would I be worrying so much about things I can control?
Would I worry more about the things I can't control?

What a decade.

I was 12 when Y2K happened. I stayed up late and watched one of Dick Clark's last New Years Eve broadcasts with my dad. I remember trading a weird, disappointed glance with him when the power didn't go out and planes didn't fall out of the sky at midnight. Barely two years later he died of esophageal cancer and his eighteen month battle with the disease is still very vivid and real in my mind. And nearly three years after that I received my acceptance letter from Rice. My good friend Phillip was there next to me when my mom came running at us from the mailbox, holding the letter and wearing the most proud smile a parent can ever hope to wear. Phillip's getting married this summer.

And what of the second half of the decade? I made do, I suppose. I had a lot of fun—both superficial fun and real, earnest, ear-to-ear smile fun—and had some great, priceless life experiences with great, priceless friends. I also did some stupid, selfish stuff that I'll never be able to undo or atone for completely. I did some bad things to people who either were my close friends or, miraculously, remain friends with me to this day. Five years of pushing the extremes for purposes that, in retrospect, boil down to selfishness, stupidity or entitlement.

But it wasn't all bad. I remember O-Week at Rice, meeting Andrew and Augusta and Louie. And even before O-Week, getting to know Sam and Allee and Leslie and all the clever nerds who were so earnestly excited to experience college. Sharing Southern sensibilities with people like Julie and Sarah who seemed like old, familiar friends the instant I met them. Austin City Limits Music Fest, both in 2006 and 2008. Road tripping across Texas to Port Aransas and Matamoros, Mexico, for spring break during my sophomore year. And to Shiner and Fredricksburg for spring break last year. Meeting a girl named Cristina who shared all my weird interests and made me feel comfortable and confident and happy while pushing me to be the better man. And those parties that saw me outside Baker College 'till 5 a.m. talking with Stef or Britt or Johan about life, love, movies, music &stuff.

Not bad for five years. Not at all. And, deep down, I know that the person ending this decade is the same person that started it: The one who is surprised when planes don't fall out of the sky.

I'm the last person awake here in the little vacation cottage my mom won for a week in a contest several months ago. Goodnight, blog.

Lamenting the Doucheblog

A little over a week ago, I received two separate messages from Julie and Nat asking why the old Doucheblog was suddenly churning out e-mail alerts for two-year-old blog posts. I personally blame Feedburner: The RSS aggregation service I'd been using. It was purchased by Google a while back, jury-rigged into Google's AdSense program for maximum ad whoring across the Internet, then left to die like Johnny 5 in Short Circuit 2. And just like that brave, battered, sentient robot, Feedburner has been sputtering and acting peculiarly and bleeding battery acid ever since. Those random e-mails were just flecks of battery fluid amidst Feedburner's digital death throes.

Anyways, having suddenly been reminded of our Frankenstein's monster-of-a-blog, we quickly agreed that it had long outlived the self-gratifying purpose for which it was created. For the benefit of anyone not familiar with the widely popular Doucheblog, it was arguably the most eloquent effort by a group of drunks similarly-minded Rice University students to discuss being drunk their curricular and extracurricular activities. And we were popular and cool, dammit.

It was also the online home base of Albert Patrick College '06-'07, where I encouraged my suitemates to start posting about our annex's dumb shenanigans. That was the only way we could become popular across both campus and the Internet, or so I thought. Basically, the Doucheblog was a place where my sophomore year friends and suitemates could recount our college douchebaggery with pride.

More recently, the Doucheblog existed only as a liability, rooting itself deeper into its members' respective digital footprints as we, the new young professionals, began to battle against our Google Search Results in the pursuit of finding employment. While Confused Nation may not be the best reflection of my own business acumen, it's certainly a bit smarter than the deadpan idiocy I was espousing three years ago on the Doucheblog.

So I deleted it. Doucheblog is no more—though I saved the a backup of the site if anyone wants a copy for posterity. The process was easy enough, both technically (clicking the big "delete" link) and emotionally.

I suppose I expected a greater surge of nostalgia while stepping through the deletion process, waiting to be flooded with memories of carefree Friday nights and life as it was during my sophomore year at Rice. Instead I am oscillating between triumph and something like guilt. The triumph of clearing the slate for myself and my close friends is marred by the guilt of erasing one of the web's last known tributes to Albert Patrick College. See, they tore down APC this past summer, hauling away the counterculture suite tradition along with the chunks of rubble.

In the end, though, taking down the Doucheblog was a step in the right direction: If not for our careers and futures, then certainly as a step away from lauding immaturity.

Thanks for the trip I took

(Reporting from Atlanta. Can't blog from Houston anymore. I've decided that's the problem. My house is a void of pure evil that saps both the heat and the will to write out of my body.)

You know, I'm always surprised when I don't see more Rice students begrudgingly shuffling around the Atlanta airport the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It's a major hub, ya know. In my four or so years of making these trips to-and-from Panama City Beach and Houston, I think I've run into roughly five people I recognize and only one I knew well enough to sit down and talk to. The girl I sat next to from Panama City to Atlanta is in the same gate area as me right now right now, heading back to Houston, too. But her sweatshirt says she's an Aggie so, you know, whatever.

I had a good time in Panama City Beach this time around. Ran into Bob at Borders on Black Friday, had a few drinks with Roy at Fridays. Things seem to have calmed down a bit. There's not a lot of shuffling in the dark looking for personality or individuality. People are settling into their lives, completely outside of and separated from their youth. I'm not sure I exude the same sense of maturity. I am, after all, still a Kid.

I'll admit it: That's something I'm always scared of when I go home. It's the reason I don't go out of my way to see people while I'm in town. I don't always feel like I've lived up to being the Great White Hope that my family friends packed their dreams into before shipping me off to Rice. I'm not graduated and making that six-figure salary that defines "success" among the simple people who saw so much promise in the drive and work ethic of yesteryear.

(Interjection! There's definitely someone wearing a "Rice Athletics" shirt in the terminal now, but hell if I know who they are. And hell if they'd recognize me. Though I am famous.)

And yet, somehow, I once again feel a restored sense that everything is going to be alright. It only takes a few kind words from the people who know you best to reassure you that you haven't gotten any stupider, that you still are the Great White Hope and that you still boast the qualities that saw you out of Florida in the first place. I watched Up and welled up at the emotional parts and it felt good to know that there's still a mushy kid with true feelings hiding inside my sarcastic, selfish, insecure Houston persona. Somewhere.

I have lots to be thankful for.

Lamenting in two dimensions