Within 60 seconds of posting that last entry, Gone Wired‘s internet connection (or my AirPort card) decided to get shitty. There were rumors of signs, unions, and strikes. I’m just hoping that the Teamsters don’t beat me up for going to Theio’s, where the scab packets are working.

Anyway, not long after that, calls me. This is luck, as my phone has been actually receiving about one out of every five calls that are made to it. Needless to say, I am excited about my on-the-way new phone for manifold reasons.

So, she says to me, she says, “Go down to the river.” And, of course, she’s right. I love rivers. I love creeks. I can dig on lakes. Oceans are just crazy-talk. I say to her, I says, “But, I’ve got this half-full cup of coffee left. I don’t wanna waste it.” I practically hear her rolling her eyes over state lines (which may be a federal crime), and she says to me, she says, “So, do something fun, something that you want to do, and finish your coffee. Half of this is you feeling guilty for doing things that you like.” I make feeble protests, but am lovingly shot down.

We say our “I love you”s and hang up. I head on over to Homestar Runner and catch up on some StrongBad Emails. Oh, the chuckle-fest that ensued. Let me tell you. (Or not.) When my coffee is finished, I release all guilt-strings and head out the door. Of course, my bus is just going past, but this doesn’t bum me out in the least.

I chill at the bust stop for a bit, and watch a man and a woman expertly break down a few days’ worth of groceries from their paper bags and into a duffle bag. They’ve done this before, and I admire their skill.

The bus comes, as it’s wont to do, and WHAM! While I’m wondering what mixture of hallucinogens and mood-alterers two teenage girls are on, I figure out that this is all LARP’s fault! Uh, well, more accurately, I wrote something true when I was writing about a LARP character. Accidental truth, thy name be Matthew “Math” Smith. Or Samuel McNally. Depending on the plot point.

Anyway, while writing up a short-short version of Math’s awakening, (Mage: the Ascension, by White Wolf. Revised/3rd Edition.) I had flat-out stated that college is just another cage that we build around ourselves. Like high school, like the 9-to-5, college is just another system to immerse ourselves in so that we don’t have to live for another few years. It’s a cage that we trap ourselves in.

With my personal history at MSU, this is not an inaccurate statement. My time in this cage, though, is nearing its end. I am taking the summer off, and my last two semesters at MSU will be part-time, due to the timing of the classes I require to graduate. But wait! Oh, dear reader, it gets better! This is a pattern in my life. This has happened before!

Voyager.net/CoreComm. Comcast. Eubulus. When the system is too broken for me to leech any good from it, or to fix it from the inside, I am filled with the feeling of wasting my time. The phrase that repeats over and over in my mind is: “I’m not interested.” Performance reviews, sales meetings, you know the drill. But, this time around, I haven’t been hearing that phrase over and over in my head.

Why, back just before Spring Break started, did I stop doing the school work that I had set out to do?

I had an impulse, after chilling by the river for a bit, to head down the River Walk in a direction that I hadn’t gone before. A block or so got me to the River Walk Theatre and the Impression 5 museum. Impression 5 has one of those setups where they represent the distance between planets in a mini-version, with a plaque for each planet, and a big brass sphere for the sun. WHAM!

The writing of the character bits voiced leftover bitterness from that blasted Astronomy lab class that I detested. When I was taking that class, “I’m not interested” ran through my head every time I pulled out some of that homework or attended a “lab session.” I stored that away when the class ended, but I never dealt with it. I never addressed it. And then I gave it form in a LARP character.

Welcome to my retardation. And then my brilliance. Thank you, .

So, here I am again. I’m at the Gone Wired Cafe, attempting to focus.

I have three teenage girls in front of me, and sometimes I can hear their giggling and gossiping over IPM in my headphones.

On a similar note, there’s some dude that insists on using his speakerphone option with his annoying Nextel chirp-I-must-stab-you-chirp radio nonsense. He’s sitting to my right.

I feel overwhelmed. I feel frustrated with myself. I have obligations, to myself, to my professors, and to my fellow classmates (group projects and all). And here I sit, quietly but completely dropping the ball.

This funk is no longer under the short-term heading. Now I need to find a solution. Every attempt I make at pushing through is met with some sort of internal, diametrically opposed force that pulls me back into a state of…

… doing nothing.