Does anyone ever just sit back and look at the world as if they had never lived in it before? If they do, hopefully they don’t do it too often, because sooner or later they’ll want to buck the system, and we wouldn’t want that.

Think about your environment for a minute. Your immediate environment. What’s in front of you? Why is it where it is, doing what it’s doing? How does it work? (No, really – how does it work?) Depending on who you are, you might find its history fascinating, or boring beyond compare, but you can’t deny that it’s a really complicated thing.

Now think about what you’re sitting on. What’s it made of? What’s it really made of, once you get past its texture? How was it put together? Does it disturb you to know that you’re sitting on nothing but an array of molecules that’s actually mostly “empty space?” Really, people, a chair is complicated!

Once you get past your immediate surroundings, think about how you interact with people. You’ve got friends, family, in-laws, enemies, acquaintances, bosses, co-workers, strangers. You treat them all differently. You identify yourself as part of any number of groups, whether those groups be Sports Racers or Hell’s Angels.

Then there’s the government. Of all the confusing things in life, The System is the easiest to understand and the ugliest to think about. You know what goes on, and you know how it works, but it sucks. So skip the government, and just know that The Man is Keepin’ You Down.

So here’s the world. It’s a huge, interconnected series of systems that have gazillions of interdependencies, almost as many as you’d find in the Linux pick-your-distro package repositories. They form a huge ball of tangled string full of kinks and old gum and sharp objects, and here you are in the center of it. The sheer improbability of your current state is unimaginable. There are so many factors that make you who you are, and to change any one of them could have completely changed you.

So here you are, reading my nonsensensical ramblings. What are the chances?

(1)

Yesterday was the last day of The Show with Ze Frank. I’m sure most of his viewers who have been around for any significant length of time will say the same thing as me, but it still wants to come out of my fingers, so here it is: Awesome show, Ze. Goodbye for now. You showed me what a guy can do with a cheap camera, iMovie, GarageBand, and a little creativity.

(2)

It’s late and I have school tomorrow, but I’m in such a wonderful mood right now that I don’t want to go to sleep for fear of losing it tomorrow morning. It’s a rare thing for me to be able to sit back and realize how wonderful it is just to live, and how curious the world is, but somehow I’ve been able to do that this past week.

(mid-thought: wordpress.com dashboard goes down for maintenance in 10 minutes, so I’ll be cutting it short. continuation tomorrow, probably.)

I’m heavily involved in Science Olympiad, and it used to be one of my biggest stress factors. There was always another competition, another deadline I had to meet. I’ve built robots and bottle rockets and studied rocks and minerals for hours. I’ve dealt with team infighting and inflated egos. It used to be that the payoff didn’t come until the awards ceremony at the end of a competition, and everything prior to that was blood, sweat, and tears. This year, on the other hand, I’ve realized something very important: things like this aren’t as much about work ethic as they are about learning and tinkering. (and winning.) When I was a sophomore and an Olympiad noob, I started my robot months early with my antisocial partner and we kicked everyone’s ass with a piece of crap we’d painstakingly cobbled together from Lego Mindstorms, wood, cardboard, and elastic, with power tool help from my dad. The next year, we started a lot later, did all the power-tooling ourselves, and got overconfident. That year, I didn’t get a single gold medal in Olympiad. (By contrast, I had managed around 4 the previous year.) Then again, I was a busy, tired junior on the path to AP test mastery. This year, though, we both started late and did well. The first reason for this is that my old partner graduated, and my new one is less prone to argue with me. The second reason is that we knew what we were going to do from step 1 to step Done, and it was all very straightforward. Also, our working atmosphere was laid back and conversational. It helped that I didn’t care about winning anymore, since I’d already gotten into college and any potential medals wouldn’t get to go on my college resumé, but I had finally realized that it just isn’t worth it to bust my butt over something unnecessary and kill my happiness.

Deadline’s almost here, and this Venus Hum album is almost over, so I’d better wrap up for today.

I’ve spent the week living like my peers, but I’m playing a very different head game. I’m actively looking for the world’s curiosities and idiosyncrasies, and thinking about them, and how they affect me, Stephen R. Johnson the Eccentric. I’m also not worrying about the future anymore, because no matter what happens, I’ll always have a way to live and be happy.

(3)

Updated me bio:

I like to build. That means I write computer games and make robots, musical instruments, and actual music. I play all the standard rock instruments, plus piano, cello, and homemade Blue Man Group-like PVC thingy. I’m about to go to college, and I’m no different from most high school seniors around this time of year – excited and scared.

Speaking as a classical musician trained to painstakingly play every note exactly as written, and as a writer of such music, I despise restrictions. So naturally, an open-ended prompt should excite me, and initially it did – an open plane upon which I could place most choice sentences. A veritable Amsterdam of essay prompts.
Then the indecision set in, the doubt which chiseled away my confidence. What do these people really want? Should I slop out some supremely eloquent BS, or should I give them a simple answer to the optional question? Or perhaps I should stop thinking on those terms. Perhaps I should, instead, attempt to show them Myself. (If, by any chance, you people really are looking for that simple answer to that question, then here it is: I learned some of my best skills in Science Olympiad as unofficial head of the “nerd squad.” The most important of those skills was how to deal with failure. Miserable failure.) And what better way to show them Myself than to give them a Grand Metaphor? (Or is it simile? If you don’t like to pick favorites, you can call it a Grand Comparison Device Scheme Mechanism.)
The metaphor/simile/comparison device scheme mechanism I present to you is this: Experiences are like food, food being observable, consumable, tactile, often soft, often hard, sometimes difficult to come by, sometimes bitter and sharp, sometimes sweet and smooth. Oh, and life’s stages are like restaurants. Here’s how it works: you start life by being fed a simple breakfast of cereal. Most people get Cheerios, some get Frosted Flakes, a few lucky ones get Cocoa Crispies or Corn Pops. This obviously represents alphabet blocks and Lincoln Logs, though the latter may be out of fashion by now. (Some people get fed German sausage for breakfast, i.e. Mozart and $50/day preschool. Frankly, those kids piss me off. When I was a kid, I listened to John Cougar Mellencamp with my dad and I liked it, dammit! R-O-C-K in the USA!) After a while, we move on to brunch at Frisch’s, where there’s a bit more variety, such as scrambled eggs and pancakes, plus that great chocolate milk they have there. This, to me, says Elementary School, where we keep getting those fundamentals and discover The Sleepover. (The sleepovers get better later when we learn how to talk about girls.)
Next comes Elevensies, a meal invented by the venerable J.R.R. Tolkien. People like me call this Middle School or Junior High. This particular meal is taken at the Rainforest Cafe, where half the time you don’t know what the hell is going on, and the other half, your food is on fire. It’s when we learn about ourselves (odd though I may be) and about other people (don’t even get me started). The flaming food represents the grand dramas which are played out in the hallways and on The Blacktop. It was while I was eating a Chocolate Volcano (which, by the way, was on fire) that I first realized that I had found something that I actually liked to do – I liked to Create. So I did; I made Lego robots (Thanks Mom, that set was expensive!), K’Nex structures, musical compositions, and computer programs (mostly games).
Next up is lunch at TGI Fridays. The selection of courses (please note my clever pun) is extensive, and everyone, having abnormally large stomachs, usually orders a little bit of everything. Mostly steak, actually. (However, I have noticed that a lot of people at Wyoming HS tend to go for sushi.) But unlike most people, I had already discovered a dish I really liked. I liked to create via technology, and I will represent that here as shrimp. (I will also represent classical music via the cello as turkey.) It has been hard for me to continue to eat shrimp during high school while everyone else chatters about the quality of the steak. Shrimp eaters can often be looked down upon by steak eaters because of their specialized tastes. (The sushi, salmon, and crab eaters are far more sympathetic.) It’s also hard to initially learn the art of shrimp consumption; beginners often eat the whole thing, tail and all, not knowing that it would taste much better if they stuck to the soft, juicy bits. Eventually I got the hang of it, and I have recently become a go-to guy for shimp-eating advice. (If you grip it just right with your teeth, you can pop the tail out of the exoskeleton and get a bit more meat. It’s a difficult art to master.)
What comes after lunch? Better to ask someone who knows. Anything I could say would be sheer speculation. But I hear that the Afternoon Snack is absolutely delightful, with even more options than lunch, and is a great place to meet girls, who, as I discovered in middle school, are not “gross,” but really quite fascinating, and impossible to decipher. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to meet one willing to let me further develop my research and we can start stocking up on German sausage.