18. (Stride.)

If there is one thing that truly do well, it's walking.

Yes, you read that correctly: walking.

Now, I'll admit first off that I'm ridiculously clumsy and stumble often. My legs are too short for my torso, really, so I tend to unconsciously mis-step. Or maybe that's just me making bullshit excuses and wearing my pants low on my hips, which makes my torso look longer than it is be extending the length of what is perceived to be my stomach by a good handful of inches.

Or something.

But it isn't my actual ability to walk properly that I'm writing about here, it's my ability to walk confidently. I don't just walk, I stride, hunched just slightly forward, a slight bounce in my shoulders, each step thrown forward without a second thought or fear as to where it's going to hit the ground (this could, admittedly, be why I stumble often).

It's a challenge I'm issuing now. Walk with confidence. Walk like you've got a pair, as I've instructed the drumline at least twice when walking from place to place in a group.

'Cause once you start walking with confidence, nothing can stop you. And once nothing can stop you, you can let that confidence spread to other aspects of your life.

17. (Lessons.)

As we go through years, and age, and become adults (to an extent, at least), there are lessons we learn.

Don't drink orange juice after brushing your teeth. Even though heroes say bad words, it's not okay for you to use them. Salt tastes good by itself, but it can hurt your tongue if you have too much of it. Don't spit into the wind. Girls have cooties. You can't turn left onto Main if you're coming from the south side of the street. The speedometer isn't always right. Everyone's afraid of cops. Liquor tastes bad only at first. Papercuts hurt. Stand on your own two feet. And while Love is blind, she's also a total bitch--and fickle, to boot.

The words 'never' and 'forever' don't mean a lot.

A broken heart mends with time--or with affection.

Absence makes the heart grow stronger.

She's beautiful, caring, understanding, and I've got a lot in common with her. Problem is, I'm doing something to myself that I promised myself I would do again (again).

And honestly? She's worth the fear.

I'm a coward. I've been hurt time and time again and time and time again I've set myself up for it. Some days I can't help but feel like I'm doing it again.

But I don't care. I love her, and if I can bring her some kind of happiness before we fall, then that's good enough for me.

I'm not a fatalist, though. I have hope--for the first time in months--that things will work out for the better this time. This time. What makes it different from the other times?

Not much. I'd be doing a disservice to the people I care about, though they've hurt me in their various ways, if I were to say that she's somehow better than them, more worthy in some manner. That is not, of course, to say that she's not amazing. I can't help but feel, right now, that I'm surrounded by absolutely outstanding people. I'm just lucky in that.

And she's fantastic. Fantastic! I want so bad to say how she's the most amazing person ever and that I'm infinitely happy now that I've found her.

But that... that would be a lie. Am I happy? Yes. She she amazing? Yes. Don't let my inability to shower you with large-scale compliments make you feel like I think badly of you in any way, sweetheart. Far from it. I think the world of you.

Yeah, I think the world of her! I love her! I said it, you read it, fucking deal with it. I don't care what anyone thinks about it, I don't care what anyone has to say, and I don't care about all the silly little inane questions that are sure to come up one day. I just don't care. I love her that much.

I love you, sweetheart. Please don't ever let my general craziness drive that fact from your mind.

16. (Like Las Vegas' water supply.)

Today's tirade is about metaphors.

The metaphor above (specifically, like: "There's a toilet that won't stop flushing out, like, all of Las Vegas' water supply.") was actually used not more than a few minutes ago. Okay. If you're going to make a metaphor, that's fine. Really. Just be sure that it makes sense.

For one thing, what the hell does Las Vegas have to do with the library, the library located in Oklahoma, several states away from Nevada? Secondly, does Las Vegas even have a notable water supply? I mean, it's in the middle of the desert. Sure, they've got a supply, but it couldn't be that large, compared to, say, some of the places I'll use in a minute.

So, what would be a better metaphor for use with a constantly-flushing toilet? There are several options available to you.

There's the snobby Euro-traveler metaphor: "It's flushing out enough water to fill the canals in Venice."

Or the politically incorrect, attention-grabbing metaphor: "It's flushing out enough water to drain Thailand after that tsunami flooded it."

Or the perverted, (also) attention-grabbing metaphor: "It's flushing out water like a loose girl gushing after a great lay."

Or you could just dead-pan and say: "It's flushing out a lot of water."

My point is this: metaphoring isn't hard. At all. An idiot can do it. So why do people insist on using these utterly ridiculous examples? Because people are stupid, of course.

15. (And the rain came down.)

There's a flood in the library.

Yeah. Read that again, take it in. There's a flood in the library.

Utter madness. Somewhere between the main floor and the floor below a pipeline broke and now the water is flowing up into the room to my right and down into pretty much everything below me, including the men's restroom (which is downright comical right now) and acquisitions.

They've found it, now, as I'm writing this. Off in the room to my right--and now it's stopped. I could hear it, when I wasn't typing, when there was no one around. Water flowing unhindered... not a sound you expect to hear in a place full of books, really.

Thankfully, it's away from the collection, as far as I'm aware. We're going to have to deal with the after-effects, I'm sure, even though Circulation has nothing to do with this end of the building other than the desk I'm sitting at now, which is mostly just a security post to keep people from sneaking out the back door with books and such.

Complete madness. As it today didn't need to get any stranger.

14. (And herein lies the truth.)

You wanna know how much of a geek I am?

I love the smell of books. Old books, new books, dirty books, moldy books, books, books, books. I work in a library. I love just walking around and smelling the musty, slightly-rotten smell that many of the books give off.

It's glorious.

I want to buy a bunch of old books from the used books joint on Main just to leave them sitting in my room, stinking the place up. The book smell has character! If scent is the strongest scent tied to emotion, then I must really like books. Or something. I dunno. I'm rambling now, if you hadn't noticed.

In all seriousness, though, I'd much rather have an old book than a new book. It just feels better to hold an older, more fragile book in your hands. Hardbacks especially--they feel solid, they feel alive.

You hold an old book in your hands and you just know that sometime, somewhere, someone was reading that same book and likely taking a similar experience out of it. It's a sense of anonymous camaraderie. Untouching brotherhood. A connection with a person you never have nor never will come into contact with.

Character! Books have a character that nothing else will ever be able to grasp. I rue the day that books become obsolete and everyone turns to the internet or to television completely. We're not yet there, but we're close.

As for me, I'll never give up on books. Ever.

The book I'm reading now, The Pendragon by Catherine Christian, smells slightly of mold and, since a certain mishap with my friend Alan, Southern Comfort. It's got more character than most people I know.

13. (Fresh start.)

Sometimes things just happen fast.

You can't exactly always make things work out the way you want, but sometimes you can attempt to get them to work out something similar. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We do what we can to be happy, and make the people we love happy. And sometimes, that means doing things you wouldn't normally imagine yourself doing.

This is not to say that I am unhappy with the decisions made in the last 24 hours. No, no, no, I'm happy. Pleased. Oddly content. Which...

Which is scary as a motherfucker. Every other time I've ever been happy or content, I've fallen, and I've fallen hard. Here's to hoping it doesn't happen this time. Here's to hoping something better comes out of it.

But something things just hit you fast and hard and you can't control them. So you roll with the punches. This one's just a punch on a fresh bruise. A punch in a scar. A punch in a wound.

But I'm rolling with it. Rolling like a rolling stone. I'm doing my best not to be scared and paranoid, which is natural. I miss being an optimist, I miss having true hope, I miss feeling like things are going to work out.

I think they will. But there's still that nagging sense of pessimism I can't just get past.

Maybe I'll roll with that, too. Hopefully.

12. (Left a brush; brought something better back.)

Today, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to talk about people.

I just finished up a week-long excursion to the southern-ish tip of Florida, in order to watch the Orange Bowl (a horrifying defeat, which I will not discuss further here). Throughout this week, I spent pretty much all my time with members of the same 35 people (the drumline, that is, which I won't directly discuss further here).

It's nice when you meet someone you already know. The end of this week-long trip was spent spending 32 hours on a bus driving back to the Holy Land of Our Fathers that is Oklahoma. A good portion of this trip was spent talking to a group of people (who I shall refer to as The Rookies--that is, first-year members of the line--I'm a third-year myself), among them a certain young woman whom I had danced with on New Year's while riding the bus to Miami (in another 32 hour journey).

I won't use her name. In fact, I pretty much won't ever use anyone's names when I write in here.

Anyways, this girl has been around for about 5 months or so, since the beginning of the marching season. So, as such, I've spoken to her once or twice; but since she's in the pit (off the field) and I'm in the battery (on the field) there's been little more than that.

Well, on the way home from the beautiful hell that was Miami, we got to spend quite some time hanging out on the bus. Suffice to say, I really, really regret not making an effort to get to know her better, because today's bus-ride was officially the end of the 2004 marching season, and more-than-likely I won't get to see her much before the end of the summer.

This doesn't just go for the girl. It goes for several other members of The Rookies as well, as I got to sit near a bunch of them on the bus and to be honest I wish I had been closer to the lot of them throughout the season.

Oh well, it'll be better when the next season starts, most likely.

So I said I was going to talk about family...

These people, the members of the line, young and old, past and present, are, in so, so, so, so many ways, my family. Not the same as my family-family, but they're not just friends. They're like my brothers and sisters in so many ways.

Family doesn't need blood. Family doesn't even need closeness. There are people on the line of whom I could count the words spoken between us on my hands. And yet, those people are just as much family as the people who were Rookies when I was.

I really just don't know how to explain it, to be honest. And I just felt like getting that offa my chest.

I'm back from Miami, by the way.