Falling for the First Time

This document's importance lies entirely in what it distracts me from: I am not writing the final paper for the class I hate and I am not studying for my final examination in a phony math course. This is to alleviate the writer's block I am encountering and to relieve the stress I have built up over the course of the day.

Someone provided me with all of The Office (the US version), and I watched it yesterday and this morning. I love the show *not* primarily because it's funny, although I do appreciate Steve Carrel's comedy. The show is one of my favorites because Pam's character is far and beyond the best I have encountered in a television show, and tops that of a few good books, too. It's like she's really human; I don't know if it was intentional, but she's the only character in *any* show that I can almost empathize with.

The real problem, I guess, is that her character is realistic enough to remind me of people I know, love, and miss. For some reason, I've been slipping lately, and I've noticed because of pain and stress. So it's more complicated and boring than just this connection to television. Stress is a great buzzword, by the way. If it causes trauma, then you can get diagnosed with a "Get Out of Jail Free" card.

I used to have great control over my mind. I could be injured in some way (usually my fault) and not be bothered by the pain. I could make it disappear at will. I could get out of bed when I wanted to; I could get songs unstuck from my head when I wanted to. It was great. It's all gone now. I don't know where it went, but these past few weeks I've got all the symptoms of the slip: I got hit in the face with a frisbee, and it hurt for a good *fifteen minutes*, even after I told it to stop; watching The Office, through the vague and nonsensical path described above, caused an increase in stress throughout the day as I thought about it. This doesn't happen. The stress results in writer's block, which is really only a problem when I have to write an exam for a bullshit liberal arts class and study for a poorly taught mathematics course.

What I really want is a pill that will work for a few days to get rid of this; I can then deal with the problem slowly over the course of the summer, when time is less critical. At school, there's no real "free time", because you're responsible for doing your work by a certain deadline with no other constraints. This is great because of the freedom it offers, sure, but I really enjoy the feeling of working for a set amount of time, going home, and forgetting about my job. There's no real relaxation while there's work to be done. Well, I could have relaxed before, but no longer, as I cannot control my emotional state. I've had to resort to music for that purpose, which is something I haven't had to do for over a year. I guess I have some control. I've restrained myself from making rash decisions (socially), saying what I mean and not prevaricating about the bush. I may have lost a contact, but it doesn't bother me. The experience in control has made it natural enough in some areas, I guess, to choose my reactions so that I don't have to manually control my emotions whenever a sticky situation arises. In fact, I'm absolutely sure that I don't care that Lauren stopped speaking to me. It wouldn't have mattered even if the situation changed so that I was in the wrong; I don't feel compelled to chase her, even after all the fun.

Things have changed.

I've found the perfect band for the music mind control, though: the Barenaked Ladies. Even their slow songs make me happy. But, then again, consider some of the lyrics:

Anyone perfect must be lying; anything easy has its cost
Anyone plain can be lovely; anyone loved can be lost

Focus primarily on the fourth phrase in that stanza. I have been. I guess that's become the core of my philosophy, and I don't like where it's put me. The trick here is that as soon as I started to change it, I lost control over myself, and now I don't know what to do. I remember people from home, and I think about the people I know here, and how short of a time it's been, and how little I really know anyone, despite all of my social engineering. It seems like I'm connected to these people by small pieces of string, and the people from home used to be at the end of those huge cables made of steel they use to hold up suspension bridges. After all this time, though, it's worn away to a string, and I can barely hold onto it, and I feel like I'm losing people, and then we have incidents like this that really compile all of the fragmented angst, and there you have it: circular causation. Not quite, though.

"It doesn't change a thing." Having the gun in my hand doesn't change a thing; Brad Pitt is right; I can't regain control, and something tells me shooting my cheek out wouldn't help.