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12/8/2004 – Robert
The illness has probably been defeated, but here I sit, wide awake in the middle of the night. I have slept for the majority of the past couple of days. I am inspired to write because of the words of one of my oldest and dearest friends. You bastard, I could be playing halo 2. The words reminded me of old times, old hopes, the innocence of being young. Ladies and gentlemen, this was way back in the jr. high / high school days. The days when I was a republican (my parents were), and I could still not yet drive. Those were some bittersweet times, wrapped in depression and fond memories of friends I may never see again. The story starts out sometime after I had just moved to Ogden, Utah… perhaps about a year afterward. Me, a goofy half-asian kid with flat feet, befriended a asthmatic white-boy in gym class. God, we hated our instructor of that class; I hope that small man has paid for making our lives miserable. If only you could have known back then how much better your life would become than those who tormented you, it would have made a small comfort… maybe. I’ve found out a few of those tormentors are either dead, or their lives are in the gutter now, and all I can say is “eh”. Somewhere around here my long crush with Jenni began. You know, those good old days where you’re a dumb kid and think you’re madly in love with a girl that has so little in common with you. If only I could have poked my head out of the clouds… I could have gotten a decent amount of tail then. That’s the horrible thing about getting older, right? You now have a good idea of how you should have acted in those days. Hindsight is only 20/20, and it will always remain that way. Nothing ever amounted between Jenni and I. We went to a few of those Jr. High dances together, young adults afraid to get near the opposite sex, hearts pounding, hormones surging, until you finally get the courage to go up to that girl and ask her if she’d like to dance. It always takes entirely too long for those crushes to die, and in the end you wonder whatever happened to them, hoping their doing well. I gave up my first They Might Be Giants concert for you, I hope you’re happy! For some reason, we all thought love was eternal in those days. Time begins to pass and you begin to go through those growing pains: Stupid falling outs with friends over girls, the standard teenage depression that you go through if you’re one of the picked-on intellectuals, seeing friends go on the downward spiral and not being able to do anything about it, realizing adults are just as flawed as we were, etc. I could go on and on. I still can’t fathom why we had the falling out over the girl. We both thought she was smart, pretty, and quiet. It turns out we were wrong on one account… we thought the fact that she was quiet meant she was one of the smart ones. We lost our friendship over an airhead. Thank goodness we’ve gotten over that. How can I forget the way we all used to be: we were the flannel-wearing, grunge-loving geeks (theatre, science, chess, debate, choir, etc.), who were outcasts from the mainstream, but we ended up forming our own little subculture. Given the way we were back then, and how miserable we all felt, I’m surprised more of us didn’t end it end all, an unfinished chapter to a miserable existence. I’m pretty sure we all realized the world that was being handed to us was shit, and it hasn’t changed since then. Thank you, adults, for fucking us over. These were the days a handful of us were getting into computers: the days of bbs’s, getting your shareware in 1.44mb packages, trying to run doom on your old 386/486, playing red dragon and tradewars, and trying to leech porn at speeds as slow as 2400 baud when your parents weren’t looking. The world wasn’t this wonderfully connected, lonely place it is today. The home computer was in a stage of infancy then, sort of like we all were. I didn’t think a lot of us realized that we’d end up getting these crappy, underappreciated jobs in the IT world just a short number of years later. Did we have dreams then? I dreamt that I’d follow in my dad’s footsteps, become an engineer of some sort, own a big house, a big car, have a nice wife, 2.5 kids, and a moderately-sized dog. Okay, truthfully, I’ve always favored cats, but there you go. Those dreams perished when my goals started shifting after I fled the nest. How many of us figured we’d be where we are today, some of us waiters, some of us IT geeks just waiting gleefully for the last of our jobs to be shipped to India? Slash and burn, and the dreams die. Do the dreams ever remain intact? I’ve seen death occur in loved-one’s families. I’ve seen friends dive into drugs never to surface the same person they once were. I’ve seen people escape this state, only to be dragged back. I’ve seen some resort to crime, never to really learn their lessons. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s some hope; I’ve seen some come back from the brink. My companion and I have suffered and learned a lot throughout the years we’ve known each other. We’ve seen our share of girls, drama, friends moving away, some coming back, people getting knocked up, and some friends turning out alright. It’s weird; I thought I would have had things figured out by now… that’s not the way life usually works, is it? |