Freedom Bird

Posted on February 12, 2015 by qrparker

This year I found myself envying birds, for obvious reasons.

Although technology has allowed the human to fly farther and faster than any dumb bird, they still remain my symbol of stupid freedom.

Birds are seen as free because their wings allow them to escape from the present the moment their tiny bird heart craves it.

Unlike the bird I made up, I spent most of last year unable to escape my environment.

Somehow, midway through the summer, I did escape, and I escaped to Canada.

Escaping to Canada is a sort of joke in America, something you threaten to do when taxes are raised or a non-white man is elected president. No one really means it, but, as idiots are prone to do, I took satirical language at face value and moved to The Great, White North.

I started school at a new college, moved into a closet, and got a job at a local sandwich shoppe with all the other immigrants.

I learned more about international relations in six months at that sandwich shoppe than I did in eighteen years of government-funded education.

I genuinely feel workmanly-affection for a solid 90% of my coworkers, and truly care and admire several of them, but minimum wage work is rarely rewarding, and I spent most of my days wishing I was anywhere but the present.

It was sobering to realize that escaping did nothing to increase my sense of freedom. Realizing my mental state could deteriorate regardless of my environment, I lost the last of my hope, and descended into a very dark place.

This state, whose name I feel comfortable saying only now that I have exited it, is depression.

It is a mental state I think is impossible to fully understand when you’re outside of it. Even now, having only spent a week out of this brainspace, I can recall it only in muted memory.

I spent a year trying to exit this state naturally. I read a dozen books promoting meditation, zen, diet, and exercise as cures. All these things had some temporary effect, but as the days melted into one another it soon became very clear that this was something I could not escape through effort alone.

I don’t know why it was so hard for me to accept that.

I swallowed my pride in the form of a pill.

~fin

My Roommate, The Ghost

Posted on June 5, 2014 by qrparker

My roommate and I don’t have a good relationship.

That’s not to say we have a bad relationship.

We’ve lived together for almost a year, yet somehow we don’t have a relationship at all.

Every time my roommate sees me, he runs away.

It’s my ideal living situation.

After several months of vigorous non-discussion, I began to suspect my roommate might not be very fond of me. Then, to protect my ego, I began to suspect he was a ghost.

At first it was a joke, but like most jokes, the longer it percolated in my mind, the less funny it became. If my roommate was genuinely a ghost, then his refusal to speak to me or look me in the eyes or acknowledge the fact that I lived ten feet away from him had less to do with my social skills and more to do with his ephemeral statues.

Last week, my roommate left. He didn’t say goodbye, but he did leave a bunch of paperwork he was supposed to do.

While filling out his notice of vacancy form and sliding his keys into an envelope, I realized there was actually no substantial evidence that he existed at all. I never even got his phone number. Was it possible that my roommate was just a figment I invented to make my apartment less lonely?

I thought about existence for a long time. For most of us, a couple hundred years after we die, it’ll be like we never existed at all.

For a few days, I was melancholy. Then I realized I was still only paying half the rent. So, if my roommate didn’t exist, that means I’m kind of a genius.

Have a nice summer everyone.

~Fin

Gone Goose

Posted on March 27, 2014 by qrparker

You can’t walk in the grass by my apartment complex, because if you do, you will step in goose poop. Goose poop, like most bird poop, is not as unpleasant to step in as say, mammal poop, because birds eat mostly grass. You don’t really notice it, and it doesn’t stick to your shoes, but if you look down, you feel like a disgusting human being.

Due to no choice of my own, I am now relatively familiar with the behavior of geese. Here are three behaviors I have observed:
#1 Geese are braver alone than in a group.

#2 Geese and squirrels are surprisingly cool with each other.

#3 Geese possess the ability to hiss AND THEY HAVE TEETH.

The particular goose I happened to step on spends a lot of time on the sidewalk. Maybe he just wants attention, because he should know by now that sitting on sidewalks highly increases the probability of getting smooshed by humans.

How do I know it’s the same goose?
Because all the other geese have flown back to Canada.
At first I thought it was because he couldn’t fly, and his friends had to leave him behind.

Apparently, this goose just likes to hang around my sidewalk, making my life that much more difficult.

And thus mankind and goose grew a little bit closer.

~Fin.

Why I Didn’t Post Last Week

Posted on March 13, 2014 by qrparker

I keep getting in trouble with my English teachers for being too mean. This has been going on for a while.

There’s something very uncollegy about the check-plus, check, check-minus system. Like they’re afraid to tell us if something is good or bad.

Like we’re children.

In my early-level courses, I was grateful for the sugarcoating. Writing is a vulnerable act, and early on encouragement is probably more important than honesty.

After a while, I began to distrust this plastic layer of niceness.

Now it’s reached the point where I completely distrust anything positive about my work.

The problem with English majors is that they’re goddman sensitive. Everyone’s got some common problem with a simple solution, but instead of trying to solve the problem they expect the universe to change around them.

I wrote all this last week. If it reads as a condemnation of people feeling bad for themselves then good – I fooled you. I also fooled myself. That’s what I was really trying to do.

But you can’t run away forever, and it looks like things have finally caught up to me.

Oftentimes when I make fun of things, it’s because I’m trying to expel something I see in myself. That’s what I was trying to do with the first half of this post, but I just couldn’t finish it.

I’ve been posting every Thursday for a while now, but I missed last week because I was staring at my computer, wondering what was standing in my way.

I like to think of myself as the type of person who is in control of their emotions, but that’s only because I know I’m not. My outside behavior is a product of carefully maintained self-manipulation.

I don’t think this is unusual, and everyone does it to some degree, but for me it’s a constant process. When I see people acting in complete disregard of their own insignificance it enrages me.

I’m going to try to be more empathetic.

~Fin

Writing Cult

Posted on February 6, 2014 by qrparker

Yesterday, I met with my writing cult. Me and my writer friends My writer friends and I started it last semester. It was spearheaded by the oldest member of our group because – like all great cult leaders – he had a beard

When you first let people read your writing, it’s kind of terrifying. You watch every little movement in the face of the person, hoping they grasp a glimmer of your brilliance.

It’s kind of funny, because when you’re the one doing the reading, you want nothing else but to make sure the person feels comfortable so they don’t hate you afterward.

My writing cult is filled with nothing but nice people, but for some reason, I can never shake the feeling that secretly they’re all planning to get rid of me. I have no reason to believe this. There is no evidence. In fact, we let so many people into the group that now we have to push two tables together and it’s kind of hard to hear everyone.

It’s probably a natural for humans to fear rejection from a social group. No matter how independent anyone thinks they are, humans are social animals, and we don’t last very long on our own.

I think it’s nice to be a part of a group, especially if the group is connected by some broad ideal. The ideal could be becoming better writers or promoting firearm legality or cleansing impurities from the German race – working as team feels good.

I guess you never really know what goes on in other peoples’ minds.

~Fin

How to Lament Advertisements

Posted on January 30, 2014 by qrparker

I lament advertisements.

Trust me, I understand why they exist. I understand the need for people to sell their product, and I understand the best way to garner positive feedback for something is to subconsciously relate it to something people already like. I get that, and I lament it.

Notice something?

That’s right! I bought the energy drink! Thinking I was immune to advertisements is what made me so vulnerable to them.

The conscious mind is what gets all the attention – it looks all glamorous because it’s what makes us better than ants or rockpiles, but we can learn a lot more from focusing on the subconscious mind — the things we do when we don’t have a real reason to do them.

When you start to try and pinpoint the reasons behind your action, you’ll find you often can’t come up with anything satisfactory. Instinct is a warm-bellied master, but he feeds you gruel. The void chills the heart, but the meals are sweet.

I’ve noticed WordPress has started to post ads on the bottom of my posts. This isn’t my doing. If you want to remove the ads you have to pay WordPress 30 dollars a year. I’m not going to do this. I failed Financial Mathematics, but I know making negative money on something is a bad thing.

I don’t like ads, especially when I don’t get any off the top. Please bear with me.

~Fin

Why I’m Afraid of Haircuts

Posted on January 23, 2014 by qrparker

My hair grows very fast. I know this because, in my family’s lean and early years, my constant haircuts were a source of contention.

As the member of our little family that contributed least to our financial security, I felt it my responsibility to keep the monetary burden of haircuts as minimal as possible.

I kept my haircuts down to one or two a year. As a result, this cycle of growth and removal became unintentionally ritualized – a trend that continued long past the age when it is appropriate for parents to pay for personal grooming.

I did not realize to what extent this cycle had on me until several days ago when I decided to cut my hair before the new semester and found I was deathly afraid.

There’s a barbershop I pass every time I walk to the grocery store. It’s just some guy’s house with a sign and phone number outside.

This house used to just tell me I was one block away from packaged food. Now every time I passed it, the house was like a guilt-machine reminding me of my crippling personality flaws.

I bought more and more groceries to force myself to keep passing the house, until finally I had mustered up enough courage to schedule an appointment.

Three sunsets later, I returned to the house/barbershop.

The Barber washed my hair and then cut it.

I had 25 dollars in my wallet. He charged 20 dollars, so I gave him a 5 dollar tip. He said if I ever needed a quick trim it was free.

When I looked in the mirror, I was amazed by how symmetrical the haircut was. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that haircut was actually asymmetrical, but in a manner inverse to the way my face is asymmetrical, making the face as a whole therefore symmetrical.

Most haircuts I’ve had try to be perfectly even, but the human face isn’t perfectly even.

I guess if you decide to cut hair in your basement, you probably know what you’re doing.

Here’s to new beginnings.

~Fin

Why I Made This Blog

Posted on December 17, 2013 by qrparker

I have a confession: a confession about this blog, about the nature of this blog, which I will tell you via this blog.

Believe it or not, when I started this blog, it was not a vanity project. It certainly seems that way – I mean, I have drawn a lot of pictures of myself.

The internet has created an amazing canvas for vanity, which I think is a good thing. The fact that anyone can have a voice is incredible. It took less than five minutes to create this website. The barrier of entry is so low it’s practically invisible.

The human spirit wants above all else, I think, to be free. There’s something in the air we all feed. We bleed our minds and our hopes and our dreams into the nothingness and hopes it spits back something interesting.

If I had a thousand lives to live I’m sure I could sort out this whole damn mess, but it seems my great misfortune to only have the one.

This blog was started for a college class: Writing in Online Environments.

I took this class as an alternative to a plethora of other dull-sounding classes, most of which involved the word ‘rhetoric’ or ‘discourse.’

That’s not to say this blog was the product of some well-structured syllabus. I broke just about every rule set in front of me. This page was supposed to be an academic analysis for the thesis of my blog (I actually think it is, by the way.)

The class is over, but I think I’m going to continue the blog.

So now it’s all on front street. This blog isn’t a vanity-project designed to maintain an ego. It’s a education-project that almost immediately descended into a vanity-project designed to maintain an ego.

But then again, isn’t all of academia?