Out And About

I have been quite busy these past few weeks. Rehearsals for the play (which goes up next weekend) have mathematically taken over my life, and then when you combine that with everyday social twiddling, pondering the eternal creative verities, and (maybe) actual schoolwork, and you can see why the routine of a bewildered college freshman such as myself could get a little overwhelming. Also meals. You'd think that with 24 hours in a day and three meals which take I would say on average 35 minutes each if you go as packs of freshmen from your hall (as I often do, although there is no shame in grabbing a newspaper and eating lunch at like 1:30 by yourself once the lines have gone down), you would have a lot of time to do other shit. But no, that's really not the case. You get out of class at around 11 or 12. You get back to your room, you check the menus online, and you expound with your roommate for about 7 minutes on why the vegan beans are lame and the pita bread is awesome. Once you've succeeded in latching onto a cluster of other freshmen just as clueless and regrettably codependant as you are, you finally ship off. And you always end up leaving right at rush hour! It's a joke. So let's say you get back from lunch at like 1:15. You procrastinate til like 2:30, which for me consists usually of watching Colbert online and singing to music from "O Brother, Where Art Thou." Why? Because I ball. But what I'm saying is sooner or later (usually at around 5:30) you find yourself wandering out into the hall like a zombie trying not to sound too desperate/too much like you're talking to no one in particular when you casually but still at a relatively assertive decibel proclaim, in the words of many a lame de chez lame freshman that came before you, "Hey... anybody want to go to dinner?" And repeat. 

So school is overwhelming. That's nothing new. What do we look for, then, when life becomes too difficult? An academic break perhaps? A calendrical respite, if you will? Oh I will. Fall break '08 bitches! Featuring everyone fucking leaving and me staying on campus! There is practically no one here! I don't talk to anyone! Welcome to the good life...? But don't get me wrong - I'm not here to complain. I'm actually really enjoying these few days of relative solitude. I can chill, sleep, get some exercise, catch up on work, maybe even do some writing, who knows? That was my skeletal outline going into this purgatory. So far I have been (surprise surprise) overwhelmingly unproductive. But it's only Sunday. I have so much time...

Yesterday I had plans for an evening on the town. This would have been really nice, since I don't ever go off-campus. The vibe I get in terms of the town of Middlebury's reputation is that basically there are a few stores, a few places to get food, but overall it sucks and there's nothing to do and omg Boston is so far away I hate everything go to Burlington but Burlington is so far away man life will be so much better once I have a car here. So I've neglected to explore the town, simply because I thought it wasn't worth it. But I forgot to consider the fact that I, Matthew, have a tendency to find the mundane and the humdrum irrationally engaging. My standards for enjoyment in a public locale are so embarassingly low that I could arguably be happy in most if not all post-industrial revolution municipal settings. So here was my brilliant plan: (1) I fucking bike into town. (2) I sit and eat some pizza. (3) I go to some café/coffeehouse type place and sit on something cushy and rustic with my laptop, soak up the vibe, and try do some writing. Yes, some writing. Not blogging, not journal writing, not scribbling ideas and quotes into my little notebook. No, actual creative writing. I think about writing a lot. If I wrote for half as long as I thought about writing I'd... that would just never happen. I've concluded that I'm lazy. That's basically what it comes down to. I would love to have written (a-ha!), but it's really hard to write! And there are so many things that I enjoy not to the degree of which I enjoy having written, but still it's worth saving myself the struggle -- Let's listen to Andrew Lloyd Webber. Let's just bask in the reasons why Andrew Lloyd Webber is awesome. Hey, let's Wikipedia Andrew Lloyd Webber. Let's go play with a tiny flashlight. Man I haven't had a Snapple in forever. Let's delete text messages. Where the hell did I put my headphones? Card games are awesome. I used to be so good at spit. Shit, I have to do laundry. Should I join the Peace Corps after college? New Daily Show! New Office! Anybody want to go to dinner? -- that's usually how it goes. So I was going to actually bite the bullet and try and crank out SOMETHING. Anything. Anything would be better than laziness. And I'd feel accomplished! That's what I was going to do. That would have been awesome. Instead, here's what really happened. And beecause I'm me, I'm not surprised at all in retrospect.

I start biking down the hill from my dorm. My first thought, "Shit, I should have worn more clothing." I am such a terrible judge of temperature sometimes. I'll wear my "I-go-to-college-in-Vermont-and-I-recognize-I-look-like-a-tool-but-nevertheless-I-feel-obligated-to-own-a" North Face when it's like 70º out but no, when I bike into town at 6:30 at night when the sun is already mostly behind the mountains, I'll rock the long sleeve t-shirt underneath my father's cardigan. So it's cold. And I'm biking. I feel like a paperboy circa 1951. Obsessively changing gears, not really 100% comfortable with my ability to brake smoothly, getting really weird looks from people as I awkwardly waddle my bike single-file across the bridge behind some oblivious woman on a cell phone. 

A word now on biking with a shitty bike. Now the bike I was using this evening was much better than my bike, the bike I owned before it got stolen because I was sick of using a ridiculous Kryptonite lock on a bike that probably cost $14 on ebay. So of course one weekend it got stolen. For the break I was lucky enough to bum a bike. I like this new bike a lot better. But it's still a mountain bike and thus fairly onerous to operate. The ramifications of riding on such a bike -- 

1) You look like a fool. I'm not really able to pull off the whole pedaling while standing phenomenon. I see these people gliding up hills and I think to myself "Wow, that  looks like an efficient use of energy and utility. That person is totally maximizing their and their bicycle's geometrical potential. Way to be awesome." But I always end up sitting the whole time, and I feel really incompetent pressing my chest into the handlebars trying to muscle my way up the hill in low gear. 

2) You work obscenely hard to get where you're going, and yet you don't really go anywhere. You'd be so much better off with a road bike. We're taught in life that if you work hard and put effort into what you do then you can accomplish anything. Why isn't that the case on a tiny mountain bike? I call it the paradox of fucked.

3) This point is more about inexperienced bikeriding in general. I don't know about you, but it takes me so impossibly long to lock my bicycle. Especially now, the bike I'm borrowing has one of those coil locks with the rubix cube system of alligning the numbers like freaking Hercules. And you pretty much have to be Hercules to not get absolutely victimized by this lock. Every time, it's a struggle. To get it through the spokes, around the metal thing in the ground, inserted properly (don't even-) and finally locked. The worst thing (and this has happened to me several times) is when you're literally squatting down in front of the bike rack trying to tame the beast and you look over and hey, it's someone I passed three minutes ago on my bike. They were just taking their sweet old time walking while I was cranking out endorphins like I was Lance Armstrong. Oh the shame.

So I get to the pizza place. I had been by there earlier that afternoon when I was aimlessly wandering the town, half-attempting to find this street I looked up which the internet claimed had a barber shop I had developed an interest in. I didn't find it. But I did see this nice sicilian pizza place that looked promising. I looked it up online when I got home. What I got from the reviews I saw was that it's great pizza, but the service takes forever. I said ok, that's cool, I don't mind waiting for good pizza. I get to the parking lot, see some tough ass dude with a goatee grilling me from outside Middlebury Discount Beverage, and I have a "Fuck, I look like such a college student" moment. I mean I'm wearing a backwards baseball cap and a backpack for goodness' sake. I won't even get into how worthless and uncool I felt pacing, scanning the parking lot looking for a place to lock my bike. I eventually get into the pizza place and order. I realize that there are no seats. It's just for taking out. Actually, there is one seat. A tiny bench. A bench that probably didn't go higher than my shin (Shin is a weird body part. I would have been more comfortable using my knee, but it was really much shorter than that. An ornamental bench. I didn't sit down. Imagine if I had?). So I immediately realize why the service in this place is so abysmally bad -- it's run by a bunch of white kids from Vermont. In the words of my Statistics teacher of old, "Hello!!" They're like chatting it up back there! Making pizza! The specials were written in really lame colored chalk. It was really a joke. You ever go into a pizza place, like a real pizza place in the city or like a deli or something and you feel like you don't want to even interrupt the assembly line that's going on behind the counter and you don't want to inconvenience the employees by even ordering? A bustling pizza place is a thing of beauty. But these were college-age kids. I ordered two slices and some garlic knots. Shout out to Westchester. Two things struck me as bizarre -- first, the garlic knots. Garlic knots, as I understand it, are made from leftover scraps of pizza dough that they just crumple up, splash on some butter and some garlic shit, and toss in the oven. But these garlic knots weren't even knots - they were like cubes. They were in a bowl. The chick behind the counter asked me how many I wanted. How many?? I said one order of garlic knots what do you mean how many? I want six motherfucker because that's what an order is. You mean you sell by the individual knot? She's scooping them out one by one with a piece of waxed paper like it's a goddamn Dunkin Donuts. These were obviously premeditated garlic knots. They actually set out dough specifically for garlic knots. What, you mean you guys fucking measure shit out? Do you use recipes? Be a man, eyeball your shit! Man, that bothered me. This also bothered me -- I was planning to only order pizza and take my chances eating the pizza the café later, hoping if I bought a drink at the café and hid myself in a corner, I could have my pizza and they wouldn't hate me. So I wasn't ordering a drink at the pizza place. The girl at the cashier says to me when I'm ordering, "You can have a drink too, if you'd like." Hold the phone. I am almost 19 years old. I have been in probably over 100 pizza places in my life, and every fucking one has had drinks. So I'm pretty familiar with the ballpark of mealtime accessories at my disposal. I can see the fucking drink machine right there. You look like you babysit my little sister and you're telling me I can have a drink if I'd like?? Do not bring that weak shit around me. I'm taking my pizza. Peace.

In the end, the café was closed. I ended up biking all the way back up and having a really ghetto meal at my desk, with paper towels from the bathroom, sipping water from a nalgene. Ah, freshmanhood. I also ended up dumping half of the garlic cubes on my buddy across the hall. Dumping unwanted yet perfectly edible food on someone is kind of a testy maneuver. I made sure to tell him that they were soggy, not warm, extremely dense and he totally didn't have to take them if he didn't want them. I then felt kind of lame when he looked at me kind of quizzically and said "Dude I don't care, I'll take them all. The more food the merrier."

Hm. That's a really nice outlook actually.