Today, as you may be aware, I went back to school. Honestly, as I predicted, it wasn't all that bad. A whole week of it might be, but one day wasn't all that bad. I was pleasantly surprised to find I didn't have to go to my longest class of the day, which was pretty awesome considering it meant I could go home.
Of course, as the first day usually does, I'm having some pretty unhappy stress related things going on in my head and body, not the least of which is a headache. The beginning of school tends to be like stress to an immune system: it lowers my defenses against really depressing thoughts. The news came on and of course it was about the economy having issues still, taxes going up (which, under a governor you voted for, makes you feel pretty shitty), and Facebook being worth dozens of billions of dollars and potentially knowing what I do at night. This is also amid my parents wanting to refinance the mortgage so we have money to like...live.
So in my head began a little subconcious art student short film. I narrated a trip to the gas station and Wal Mart with my parents (not out loud, of course) with my observations about the world today. I remarked on how cold it was, especially humanity. I wondered why I'd want to raise kids in a world as stressful as this one, and I wondered why I'd want to go another ten years myself. I sheepishly bought myself a new 3DS game, lamenting the money I paid for it, certain I'd run out paying for gas, which, unfortunately, I needed. That was a trip I took alone, ranting at myself to basically cool the fuck down. A highlight of this was my speech about "power is just an illusion"...about having the right of way driving down the street.
Having spent $64 I returned home for the night. My Dad was already surprised enough I hadn't broken into my game yet, but for some reason, I didn't want to. It was one of the things I internally monologued about in Wal Mart...the fact that I play video games so much to escape the shitty reality I lived in. Maybe I wanted to actually live in the moment or something, because when I returned home from the gas station, still grimacing, I took my shoes off and closed the door to my bedroom.
My mother had brought home a great length of laminate from the school she works at. Before we'd eaten dinner, she'd begun to cut out all of these little things she needed to cut out. So after deciding I didn't want to play Zelda, whether the reason be a headache I didn't want exacerbated by the 3D or a philosophical bend to offset buyer's remorse or staying in reality or whatever, I went and sat down at the dining room table and started to cut some of the things out. I was kind of surprised that nobody in the house shit a brick, honestly.
It wasn't long before my mom joined me, since it was her task anyway. She started telling me about an awfully depressing book she read out loud to some students today. It was about this boy who lived on a potato farm with his grandfather, which was apparently good times, of course, until his grandfather had a stroke and was bedridden forever. So the boy harvests everything along with his dog, since their plow horse died. Then we find out his grandfather didn't pay taxes, and without $500, they lose the farm. So there's this dog race, and the prize for winning is, conveniently, $500 dollars. Of course, there's this Indian fellow that wins every single year, so everyone is telling the boy to not waste his last dollars entering the race. He still does, naturally, and gets off to a good start, maintaining his position for a good whole length of the race. Then, within something like 100ft of the finish line, the dog fucking has a heart attack and dies. So the Indian fellow stops, draws a line behind the kid, and tells the other racers not to cross it or they're in for a hurtin'. He then instructs the boy to pick up his dog and cross the finish line. The boy wins, he gets paid, the Indian gives him a puppy, and nothing is ever mentioned about the psychologicla problems the boy had later due to the memory of carrying his dog's corpse to a finish line.
Oddly enough, discussing that and cutting out these random math games my mom had laminated ended up curing me of my depression, at least for a little while afterward. It's more or less back now, but it's odd how that little thing ended up being the highlight of my day. It was like some stupid oscarbait movie...no action whatsoever going on, and a depressed main character that gets better due to something simple he's doing. I went from walking through Wal Mart thinking about how awful it was that I was spending money I could use for something ten times as productive in the context of a world that's going entirely downhill, to being somewhat happy after cutting out some squares and putting them in bags. I'd make a movie out of it, honestly, except I can't remember too much of my monologuing/narration, other than imagining Wal Mart as a ghost town in a TRULY downtrodden economy, and a little girl and an older man standing in front of the little machines by the exit picking something out. "Sometimes it's the little things," I said to myself.
It's not a Lauren-sized story that's going to change the course of my life, but today was something I would like to remember as time goes on. It's not a big story, but a little one, just for fun, that's at least interesting. It's not a four-star billion dollar major novel event. In the scheme of things, it's just a little art school film that also happens to be a story that's entirely true and ultimately unexciting. Sometimes that's just right.
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