Hey. Haven't seen you around in a while.

The short answer to where I've been is not here.
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That's not sufficient. This blog has always been meant for my open-ended rants of various lengths in which I try to wax poetic about my relatively plain life.
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The long answer is the following:
I'm starting the college application process.

Here's where I'm applying:

: Muhlenberg College
: Vassar College
: Connecticut College
: Middlebury College
: Amherst College
: Hampshire College
: University of New Hampshire

All are a little bit on the selective side/kinda far away, except for UNH.

I've once again wound up putting my face on public access television.

About three weeks ago now, I was asked by my former chemistry teacher/former Granite State Challenge coach to quickly assemble a team for another appearance on the show. I was ecstatic: having a second chance at this was literally a realized dream. Our first taping occurred only five days after we had assembled the team, which was without a doubt the least amount of preparation of any team this season. I'm legally obligated to keep the results a secret, but I can tell you that I felt a lot more confident this year, and I am infinitely more satisfied with the outcome.

I got my wisdom teeth pulled.

Outside of the terrible bedside manner, the operation went smoothly. Laughing gas is great. All I remember is repeating this phrase over and over again in my head while they drilled my teeth out:

"You're on a ship. Bring it on, doc. You're on a ship. Bring it on, doc."

There was one point while I was acclimating to the nitrous, where I felt my teeth getting really heavy. The heaviness spread to my head, and then later my entire body. My head was being pressed into the seat. I felt like screaming out for help. In fact, my mind was shrieking at me to call for help. Eventually, I managed the words "I'm feeling really... heavy." That's when they lessened it and I stopped feeling like I was going to be absorbed into my seat and never emerge.

Post-op has been awful. I've been lagging behind in school ever since, and my running ability has depreciated CONSIDERABLY. This is how it's gone:

- First 1.25 miles of race: Feels really good
- Mile 1.25-mile 2.5: Feels bad, man. I'm running in place and I can't get enough air to my head.
- Mile 2.5-finish: a random surge of energy takes over my entire system and I nearly sprint to the end.

My goal this year was to break 20 minutes, but that goal is unfortunately evaporating as quickly as my will to run.

Oh yeah, and music. I still make it, relatively.
Lately, as you can tell, I have been enormously busy and the album I had nearly finished has been put on the backburner. I hadn't written lyrics for about two months until today, when, after visiting Topsfield Fair, society frustrated me once again. I spent $30 doing almost nothing, and I felt so hollow by the end of it. Granted, being with Bobina made everything more or less the best, but the mindless, en masse consumerism I was witnessing all around me was actually sickening.

While the lyric department's been kind of stagnant, the music department's been flourishing. I've been working on developing more technicality in my playing, more notes, more complex melody, key change, tempo change, the whole nine. So there's been progress, just not the apparent type.
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So that's what I've been doing. Everything.

I'm going to New York City tomorrow with my family to bring Bobina back down to college, and then I'm gonna be checking out Vassar early in the morning the next day. Hopefully this long, long trip affirms my decision to apply/potentially go there.

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SONG OF THE DAY, Vader in Burgos by Mimas.




Mimas is one of those bands that really deserve widespread recognition. If you, by any small fraction of a chance, happen to live in Scandinavia or England, you can purchase their album either physically or on iTunes.

The album accidentally leaked onto the US iTunes store a few days ago, and I eagerly downloaded it without knowing that I wasn't supposed to. They've since taken the album off of the store (I tipped them off by posting to their facebook wall that I was downloading the album and was brimming with excitement and anticipation), but I still have my copy. I may be the only person in the United States to legally own this album at the moment, and I can say that this is a title that I hold proudly over my head.

This was a very long post.
Now it's over.
Guten nacht.

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