pantsfarm

A bunch of the trees around here have leaves that have turned a vibrant red, or orange, or yellow. I hope to take a walk one of these days to get some photos before I leave this beautiful New England Autumn.

I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song.
I’m twenty-two now, but I won’t be for long.
Time hurries on.

Among the people I graduated with, I think I’m among the last to get on with it and enter adult life. Ok, that’s probably not true among all the people I graduated with, however it is certainly true among those that I know. Almost everybody has started their jobs, moved out from home and is getting on just fine.

Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl.
I held her close, but she faded in the night
Like a poem I meant to write.

I do think I am pretty ready to get out of here though. Spending the last few weeks out in the woods with only my parents for company has gotten pretty old. I miss other people, and it has started to get to me a little just how out of touch I’ve gotten with the world. I am really starting to look forward to returning to human interaction with people who aren’t my folks.

I threw a pebble in a brook
And watched the ripples run away
And they never made a sound.

It’s not like I’ve been without things to keep myself busy though. The longer I go without having solid plans the more I want them. And to that end, I’ve been spending a lot of time doing research on all sorts of things. However I haven’t really been spending my time that well, because a little while ago it was brought to my attention that even though I’m going through all this trouble to learn more about these things, I’ve got nothing to show for it, and while it’s great if I know more about these subjects, I have started to redirect my efforts so that not only am I still learning, but will also have something to show for it. Something, ideally, valued by potential employers even.

Hello, Hello, Hello, Good-bye,
Good-bye, Good-bye, Good-bye,
That’s all there is.

Really though, having been reduced to communicating almost exclusively through email and IM with people has really drastically reduced the number of people I keep in touch with. Even though it’s certainly very easy to send an IM or email, I find I care less and less about doing it. It’s like a super accelerated version of how I’ve fallen out of touch with people who I only kept in touch with via written letters. We’d start out strong, exchanging a few rounds and then after a while the enthusiasm would be gone. The letters would get shorter, or more generic, and we’d stop having new questions or interesting things to say. The time between replies would stretch longer and longer, and eventually somebody would just forget. Maybe a casual email or two would follow up. I guess now that’s replaced with a passing remark on a facebook wall. It’d be something easy, and quick, and lacking in substance. And then one day, a few months, maybe a year or two later, I’d think, “hey, I wonder how they’re doing?” Or maybe I wouldn’t.

And the leaves that are green turned to brown,
And they wither with the wind,
And they crumble in your hand.

I don’t know, I feel like I might be at some sort of turning point, but I am reluctant to say that because there’s so little on the horizon that I can regard as a definite sign of change. If nothing else, I suppose, it’ll be a change of scenery when I head to the West coast and that will probably cause me to reconsider everything in a new light. I hope this isn’t indicative of some grander cycle in my life, where every 4 years, I go through some massive crisis of indecision. It happened before high school, it happened before college and it’s happening now. And every time, curiously enough, I regressed into the same bad habits of too much videogame escapism and not enough getting my shit together. Would you believe that I almost re-installed Diablo II this week? Sad, I know.

But this is different. It always is.
quoted text from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Leaves That Are Green”