everything is fine

Good news always follows the terrible news. At this point, I really am not interested in anything else. I'll wake up tomorrow and it'll be the best day ever. And the day after that will be the best day ever. And it'll continue like that forever. And now, after all the gloom, things are looking up for our plucky hero.

I am exhausted. This weekend did not turn out the way I had hoped or expected, and I didn't even expect that much. The whole thing just seemed to be a long, drawn out ordeal that was over before I even realized it started. I would rather have been miserable in class than do the whole weekend over again. I have never really understood periods. Specifically, I have never quite understood how a girl can not realize it's her "time of the month" when "that time of the month" features blood coming out of her vagina. That just boggles my mind. But it's my time of the month. I can't help being moody sometimes. I try not to give in to mood swings, but everybody is entitled to a little emotional wonkiness every once in a while. These past couple of days, though, I feel like there's some kind of seething bitterness welling up inside of me. And I'm doing everything I can to hold it in, but it's leaking out at the seams. This unbelievable n...

My legs are just too tired to do anything properly anymore. Also, my shoulders. But it's the first weekend of the semester, and that's good news. All I want to do is hang out, play some music, hang out, and relax. I'm looking forward to the next couple of days. There is so much to do, though. Lots of drawing and reading. But I'm not worried. Nothing worries me anymore!

I knew exactly what I was getting into when I signed up for a class called Ballroom Dancing , but it didn't hit me until I was actually standing in the classroom. What it essentially boiled down to was that ballroom dancing combined two of my absolute least favorite things in a bi-weekly, hour-long session: dancing and social interaction. Every Tuesday and Thursday for an hour I have to not only meet and make small talk with complete strangers but also dance with them. And then I have to remember names and faces and details and all kinds of terrible things so that I don't constantly ask them what their names are. And I can't fake it, either. Girls don't respond well when you refer to them as "dude" or "man." I think the fact that it forces me to step so far out of my comfort zone is largely why I signed up for the course in the first place. It's good for me, or so I'm sure I will be told at some point. I also signed up for it because I'...

I definitely didn't plan for it to happen. I only wanted to get something to eat. I just happened to look outside at the right time. There was a bright flash, a pause, and the loudest roll of thunder I've heard in my time at UT. So I stepped out of line and went for a walk. I love to walk through the rain. It's cold. Brisk. Refreshing. And you're guaranteed to be alone. And so I walked through campus with my hands in my pockets and the rain falling on my head. I got to think about things, which is either something I don't do enough or something I do way too much. I can't find the middle ground there. But I think my problem is that I expect too much from people. People don't think like I do. And they don't do things that I do. And I forget that. I expect them to and when they don't I feel jaded until I remind myself of the facts. I guess I'm just selfish and moody. Something to work on. I needed the walk. And at the end of it, I t...

All things considered, it was a good trip. It was nice to reconnect with old friends and meet new people. And, though it might have been a complete clusterfuck, caving was fun. Caving is always fun. Being outside was the best part, though. A miniature vacation right before classes start? Quality time in pleasant parts of nature for free? Great food with no effort? It's a hell of a way to start off a new year. I've never eaten so much food before. I desperately need to brush up on my Spanish. While it was nice to get blood flowing to that part of my brain, it was a decidedly unsexy demonstration of my lingual ability. A crippling embarrassment. But these things happen, I suppose. It shouldn't be too hard to pick back up again. It hasn't been that long. It'll be like picking up clarinet again. Or riding a bike. I am very much not ready for classes to start up again. All I want to do is hang out, meet people, and buy a Batman poster. I think that sound...

Well, I'm all moved in. And I really went all out this year. My dorm room is decorated with things from my bedroom . It's, you know, something. Except that I have a picture frame with no picture in it. I just don't have any pictures worth framing right now. Maybe that will change? We'll see what happens. I'm starting my junior year in college. Shit. I don't think I'm ready for classes to start again. I mean, I barely got a summer. I was in class. No rest for the weary, I guess. And tomorrow I'm leaving on a geology school orientation-type trip. It's for the freshmen to meet each other and their advisers and some school-mates. It's going to be interesting. I'm good with kids. But these kids are my age, and I'm not good with people my age. So they're not really kids. I don't really even know all that much about geology. "Look guys, this is a rock. It's kind of rock-colored. Let's go climb on those ...

Houston was an incredible disappointment. My driving was off, I wasn't feeling great, we sort of got lost, I was tired, and after we finally got to the place, it sucked. It was a giant kid's center. It was not at all what I imagined and it was awful. There wasn't any cool Star Wars stuff. An hour later we turned around and went home. An entire day and a lot of money wasted. Something always goes critically wrong with my plans. PLUCKY HERO suffers 15 damage to LIFE ENTHUSIASM. PLUCKY HERO has acquired LVL. 23 PESSIMISM. Live and learn, I guess. Today's lesson is to never go to Houston under any circumstances. And that acting on nerdy impulse leads to disappointment. And that Ashley has better directional intuition than me. Life is terrible.

I've been on kind of a music playing binge these last couple of days. Playing all the songs I can remember on all the instruments that I can for as long as I can. I had a couple conversations with a couple of people about music and life and other things and they both really hit home. Like a punch in the gut. Or a split reed on a lip. Or something that sticks with you for a while. Not the best feeling. Life's going by pretty quickly now, and I'm still spinning in circles trying to do everything I want. Scattered. Too interested in everything. I've got to sit down and figure out what I actually can do with the time I've got left because time is not a luxury I really have. Which is also not the best feeling. There are just too many things out there I want to be into. It's not fair that I can't do all of them, I think. I'm afraid that if I let music become a side thing for me that I'm going to end up dropping it almost entirely. Actually, it...

She's right.

My name is Gabe and I am a compulsive liar. I tell lies before I even finish registering what was said to me and before I start to think of a legitimate response. It's not something that I mean to do, it's just something that happens outside of my conscious control. I don't mean badly, it's just that words tend to fall out of my mouth in ways that sound reasonable and believable but are complete falsehoods. I am totally innocent here and cannot be held responsible for the things I say when I'm not telling the truth. Everything after this statement is true. I am going to stop lying all the time! Might be impossible! PLUCKY HERO has acquired LVL. 1 HONESTY!

After a certain point you can't just call it stage fright. Use it or lose it, they say. And I am in the middle of losing it. And it is a bad feeling. That's what I get for looking and thinking for so long and not actually doing. Not playing. Like I should be. What kind of musician doesn't play his instruments? Maybe that's what threw me off. Preoccupied. Bothered. Mental conflict between the things I love. Something has to change. I've got to justify keeping those horns around. Or I've got to get rid of them.

So Comics Fight is over. What. An. Experience. It's. Been.

"Do you know about the flood?" I pushed the newspaper into my bag and looked at him. "I'm sorry, what?" He stepped closer. "I asked if you knew about the flood." I looked around. "What flood?" " The flood." He said. He pointed to a shell in the limestone wall in front of us. "See this shell? This shell got here during a flood. All these shells in all these walls got into the rocks during a big flood. A flood that covered up a lot of land." Images and information flooded my mind like a slideshow on fast forward. Shells, rock, limestone, water, sea, millions of years. Deposition, sediment, cementation, calcification. "Really?" I said. "There are sea shells on top of Mt. Everest." He said. "Wow." I said. And so we talked. We talked about religion. He told me about how he'd had a religious/spiritual awakening twelve years ago where, after an entire life of religious bel...

She was smaller than I was used to, but in a way it was better. She was shorter, tighter. Not what I was used to. But she moved the way I wanted her to when I wanted her to. Moved with me. And after all the bouncing and rocking, I stepped back and looked her over. There was still work to do--problems to work out. I wiped the sweat from my brow and I knew that I had made a good decision. It was just one of those things that you knew was a good idea. You don't always feel so comfortable so quickly. Something to be thankful for, I guess. I locked her up on the post and walked inside. It was a good first test ride on the bike. I have a new dancing partner. A friend asked me to draw a comic for a shirt. And this is that comic. I'm kind of tired.

So Comics Fight is underway, which is super exciting. It's a lot of work and coordination, but it's worth it. Although, I'm not entirely sure why we made a Facebook event group for it the day before it started. If we wanted to make sure we had an audience, we should've made it sooner. But, I am not complaining all that much. The whole thing is pretty cool, and it's good practice for the Whodunnit? Murder Mystery Dinner that we're hoping to put our characters through in the fall. Also, doing a big fight between comics (a la Civil War!) means we get to do tie-in comics. Just like real comic artists! I've been thinking these last couple of days and I'm afraid that I'm going to waste my life running around in circles trying to do everything and never really doing anything. Jack-of-all-trades, master of none . Somebody has to ask the hard questions. But, in important news, this is my 200th blog post. That's 200 posts full of absolutely nothi...

Rock climbing was a blast. I had almost forgotten how much fun it was. It's so much different when you're actually out there and not just climbing up a wall in a gym. When you've got the sun beating down on you as you reach your hand up blindly to grab at a ledge that isn't there. When you slip and fall out into the air knowing that the knot in the rope you tied is the only thing keeping you from falling on the rocks under you. It's a thrill. Not knowing if you'll make it up that last ledge. I need to get into it more. Some of my friends want to meet her. "We have to meet her, you know." "Why?" I say. "Because that's just how things go. You know that. We have to approve." "But it's been however long it's been. Can't you just assume that it's not bad?" "No," they say. "We have to meet her." And after thinking very carefully about all of it, I don't have any proble...

I met up with a couple of old friends tonight. And a new friend. A few friends. The one thing that has always bothered me was the handshake. I know what a handshake is. I'd like to think that I give out pretty reasonable handshakes. But everybody seems to have a different idea of what a handshake is. You grab hands and shake them. This is what you do for people that you have just recently met or are only acquainted with or if you are feeling like being a little formal with your buddies. I understand that when it's good buddies you do the bro-shake and grab thumbs and optionally go in for the shoulder pat. This is, however, reserved exclusively for good buddies. Not for people that you don't know very well. You cannot be somebody's bro if you have only just met them. The rules of etiquette here are very simple. So I cannot for the life of me understand why people go for the bro-shake when you clearly are not good buddies. It makes the entire thing awkward be...

It's kind of funny. The less sleep I get, the more comfortable I feel, the more honest I get. I tell people all kinds of things that I wouldn't normally. But then again, I'm not sure I can say what is normal because I am rarely well rested. I'm not sure where my mind is taking me. Somewhere, I guess. I'm just glad everything got worked out. Honestly, I was worried there for a while. Communication problems can really do amazing things. It was like playing a twisted game of telephone. Everybody had a different message to share and everybody thought everybody was somebody else. If that makes sense. Guessing at someone's thoughts is always disastrous. And people are so inconsistent. People surprise you like that. You think you have someone pegged and then all of a sudden you roll over and they are somebody totally different. Opposite. I think we're not so unalike. "It's not going to magically solve everything, and I think that's exact...

School is creeping up very quickly and I am very much less than ready for it even though technically I am already in school and have been for the entire summer. I am, however, ready for Comics Fight . Which we are trying to plan out. It's going to be badass.

And things are looking up for our plucky hero. Also, I'm so unbelievably exhausted.

Good things are temperamental and never last. Bad things, too. All things, actually. That's a belief I hold as true. Is that depressing? I guess. It's definitely not cheery. It's not really depressing either. It just... is. Good things take work that not everybody is capable of doing or keeping up. And even if you do manage to keep the whole thing going, it tends to slip through your fingers when you aren't looking. Like sand. I guess good things are like sand. A lot of it everywhere, but you can't ever really hold on to it. Maybe the sun boiled my brain a little bit. People just don't understand each other. Oh well. Deal with good things on a day-to-day basis, I guess.