New semester, new beginnings. (Yeah, right)

Well, after endless lies and evasions on my part, (all of which I knew were dishonest at the time) I find myself back at Indiana for at least this semester, now the hard part comes when I have to put forth the effort to stay here. And it's not as if I can't do it. I think. I've proven to myself that when push comes to shove, I can do what I have to, get to class and do the work and go to bed early and not be stupid and all the other things mom and dad have said for years, I just don't like doing it. Not for any concrete reason, I just don't like to. However, now that my back's up against the wall, I suppose I have no choice. To quote Woody Harrleson, it's time to nut up, or shut up.

So as a part of my Culture of College class, I have to set up this blog, and I'm not sure why, or how it relates to the class at all, but I think it's a good idea for me at the very least. Just a place where I can put things, not venting per se, but organizing the jumble that has been in my head for years doesn't seem like an awful idea. So let's get down to the good stuff, shall we?

I'm in college, somewhere that I always knew I'd get to, even if the actual journey here was harrowing and a long drawn-out ordeal that seemed to never end. First there was me totally giving up on high school after Katelyn and I broke up, which turned my senior year into a laughable excuse for an education. Which was a pity, because I really love all my friends from Dice, and the teachers were fantastic (some more so than others, obviously). English was especially great, and I think it says something about how much I liked that class that I remember it so well even after all that's happened since then. I still look through my yearbook sporadically, even though it seems everyone from there has moved on, sadly. And intellectually, I know they haven't, and I'm sure I'm giving off the very same impression, what with my introverted-ness and lack of friends and not talking to anyone and the like, but I still can't get over the fact that it feels like it.

So after barely scraping by my senior year, it turned out that I hadn't actually scraped by, and had to go to summer school in order to actually graduate. This meant that I couldn't really have a job, or really do much of anything I wanted to that summer. So I didn't actually get my diploma at graduation, I left very quickly with my twin brother holding his diploma, and rapidly told everyone that I hadn't gotten it out of the baskets or buckets or whatever plastic containers that they were in. In fact, the first time I actually laid eyes on my diploma was after 5 months in Israel, when I came back home for the month of February 09.

After what can only be described as a transcendent experience in Israel (more on that later, much more and much later) I landed back home and had the greatest summer of my life. I got to spend the most time with the people who mattered most to me, and to be fair, I was still coming down from the high that my ten months away had been. After a very solemn goodbye to home, I set off to Indiana, and started my life as a college student. Which in retrospect didn't turn out all that great. I'll go into further detail on last semester later (later, always later) but for now, I'm sure you numberless anonymous internet readers can gather that it was pretty bad. But with that under my belt, and a winter vacation that could not have come soon enough, I'm ready to start, to make an actual, definitive start to my life. I guess the best way to put it would be:

It's time to nut up, or shut up.