Life as a college graduate

Fifty-eight hours ago, in the sweat-drenching heat of our main gym (why?  why?), I finally nabbed my Bachelor of Arts degree.  It looks depressingly like my high school diploma.

I spoke at baccalaureate and received lots of positive feedback.  Praise is always awkward.

I numbly loaded the last of my life into my van today and left Pirate House behind.  I decided I want to start college over.  Dad asked if that meant I wanted to do it differently.  No, I just want to do it again.

I learned a lot: Hardee's starts serving breakfast at 3am.  You should not use the word "hick" with any volume in public in a small town.  The quality of my work varies inversely to the time I spend on it.  "Irregardless" is a dictionary word (but my Mac, like me, refuses to recognize it).  It takes 2.5 liters of water to make one liter of Coca-Cola.  Straight bourbon is not straight bourbon unless it has been aged for at least two years.  And the greatest modern philosopher is a fictional talking gorilla.

I read once that "I" is the most commonly used word in the English language.  Maybe just spoken language?  I write a lot of research papers that do not use "I."  That was the same book that told me the world's fastest animal is the African swallow.  I remember feeling very defensive about my own favorite animal, the Cheetah.

/nonseq

In 29.5 hours I will be leaving for Mexico.  If I had regular readers to write to they would be familiar with my feelings about a fishing village called Sayulita.  Since I estimate that zero people who read my blog then still read it now, I'll just say Sayulita is a way awesome place.

After that I'm going to Berkeley.  I have an internship with Pace e Bene, which is way cool.  I'll be working on their Nonviolent Stories project, interviewing, transcribing, writing, and producing film.  Way, way cool.  I also may be doing some work with Free Range Studios, which is certainly equally cool.  You may know them as the people who produced the Story of Stuff.

By the way, if you haven't yet seen the Story of Stuff, you should watch it.  Here's a link to it.  So yeah, those guys.  And me, working with them.  Way cool.

By now everyone knows that birds learn to fly by getting shoved out of the nest, right?  Well, I've just been shoved out of a nest, and I'm currently in freefall.  I don't know what I want to do.  I'm starting at Bethany in the fall, but I don't know if I'll stay there.  UC's Master of Liberal Studies (MLS) degree looks pretty cool.  So does law enforcement, which isn't really related to my educational path, but it's what I've wanted to do since I was about six.  Can you be a peace activist and a cop at the same time?

I wish.

Well, I have to unpack a house's worth of stuff and shove it all in an attic tomorrow, so I'd best be getting to bed.

Peace

Nick

I told you texting was repugnant

New York Times article today about the negative effects of the texting society.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/health/26teen.html?em

Epic fail

My career as an author was short-lived.  Despite 70-some people going to the web page where my book was for sale, I sold zero copies.

Okay, I sold one copy, if you count the one my girlfriend bought.

I guess I'm not making my living that way.

Take that... you.

From NYTimes:

"The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married."

Ha.

I'd like to buy a kidney, please.

I tend to assume the state is right until I form an opinion otherwise.  Which means that up until now, I'd always figured that making it illegal to sell organs was the right call.  Fair's fair, right?

Maybe.  But let's be utilitarians.  Rich people buying their way off the waiting list isn't fair, but it shortens the list.  Plenty of people who aren't willing to donate kidneys (or chunks of liver) for free would do it for the right price.  I know i would.  So yes, people with money have an advantage, but it does help everyone else on the list.  Isn't that capitalism at its best?

Nick Kauffman, L.L.C.

At the age of 17, I wrote the following at the beginning of a blog entry:

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Rivernico News, a division of Nicolas Entertainment, a subsidiary of Nickslife, which is owned by Miller Kauffman Parentals Inc., who are in turn owned by the United States Government (along with the United Kingdom, Israel, and your soul).

I would like to note that I am now a 51% owner of Nickslife, though Miller Kauffman Parentals still have a large share.  And despite a level of teenage hotheadedness that even most people familiar with my current hotheadedness wouldn't believe I possessed, I'm still proud that I was making snide political remarks five years ago.  You know, before it was cool.

I remember very much enjoying that whole company/subsidiary splicing of my life.  Beyond its comedic value, it gave me a sense of order.  I could divide my life into segments, each one tailored to some specific purpose.  Today, I find myself seeking some clarity like that for my writing.

There is a lot I want to write.  I have two worlds of fantasy-fiction waiting for me to put them into novel form for my first few million dollars.  I write poetry (though it doesn't really sell).  I write moral and theological commentaries.  I want to write my life stories.  And sometimes I just want to write what I'm feeling.

How do I parse all that?  All these authors I read have specialties.  They write about one thing.  I don't want to restrict myself that way... though I suppose I could actually write all this stuff I want to write and see what succeeds.

Then there are the readers.  Not the ones I don't know; I'm fine with them.  But I can't have my Grandma reading memoirs of my college days.  I can't have my professors reading my fantasy fiction (after all, that genre is loaded with the myth of redemptive violence).  And the things I want to write don't always mesh or agree with each other, so even if I wrote under a pen name, would I need more than one?

Sometimes I think about starting a new blog so I can just write and write and write and not worry about my audience.  Who cares if some random person from Bangladesh stumbles across my blog and reads all my innermost thoughts?  I'll never meet them.

But then, I want to claim what I write.  In anonymity, nobody matters.  Maybe people with interesting things to say, sure, but my only selling point is that people know me personally.

I want to assure everyone that my real writing looks nothing like my blogging.  When I blog, I write until I'm tired of writing.  When I write, I actually take the time to form some sort of conclusion.

My first "book"

I am not a romantic, but also I am. I am sometimes good at thinking up last-second unique gift ideas for people. Sometimes. And I suppose by "thinking up" I mean "getting hit with," because any real thought on the matter will usually result in the sort of crippling failure that leads me to beg my girlfriend not to give me anything for Christmas, lest I feel guilty for my lack of comparable effort.

Well, this Valentine's Day was one of those finer moments for me. I had most of the vignettes I've written so far bound into a book, dedicated it to Natasha, and gave her a copy. Until now, only two copies (one for me and one for her) existed, but after reviewing it a few times I decided it's not a total embarrassment, so I've made it available to the public through Lulu.com. You can see the listing, along with a couple of the poems, here.

I can't really push anyone to buy it, which is why I will never be a good salesperson, but if you click the link and say "that's kind of cool, Nick," I will be very grateful. Of course if you choose to buy it, I'll be more grateful, but almost all the poems are available for free on this blog if you look for them.

Regarding the current infestation in Pirate House

Last night I was doing homework (playing video games) and generally minding my own business when the door opened and several loud voices entered my home.  Under the guise of recycling a glass jar I exited my room to investigate.

Apparently Micah had gone to the college's air band concert and met some guys that know a guy that know a guy that he knows, so he invited them all to come back to our house.

As of today, they are still here.  Micah left to go study.  I don't know where Steve went.  So here I sit, with some random guys hanging out on my front porch and storing their beer in my refrigerator.

Well, the joke's on them.  Because every hour they stay here, I'm stashing two of their beers elsewhere.