Stuff.

1. I’m really sad about Paul Walker. What a pleasant guy in a bunch of entertaining movies. He was not my favorite actor by any means, but it seems like he was well loved by people who knew him outside of work.

2. The pastor at the church we’ve been going to is not a creative type. And that’s completely fine with me. He’s a jock, he gets along with jocks, and he makes jokes about art sometimes. I’ve spent too much of my life wishing I was someone like him. Today he made a joke about how he wasn’t going to ask if there were any artists because the non-artists would want to claim that they were artists, and the real artists would get pretentious and say that if they called themselves artists, they wouldn’t be artists anymore. Roarous laughter. This kinda hurt and was also not very funny, but I’ve learned that the bar for what’s funny is lowered significantly at most churches and that most people are not creative types. So they will, by default, relate more to his sentiment than to mine, which is that art tells us in the most direct and relatable way so much about the values and beliefs of every culture, past and present. Belittling what you don’t understand is juvenile and transparent.

3. I might be projecting a little though – someone I admire called me pretentious recently in jest. A few times actually. That also hurt, probably worse. I don’t know how to say it, but there are times you know someone’s not kidding. And he’s an artist. Maybe I am pretentious.

4. I’ve had a personal trainer for about 6 weeks now. I’m understanding now how far away I am from fit. Even 6 weeks in, even on a good day, I’m still just learning the baby steps. You really have to do so much more than you think to get from couch to fit. It does get addicting, though. But don’t expect a geek to chic transformation anytime soon – I don’t think I’ve gotten to the point of noticing really anything yet, except that it’s getting easier, and sometimes I feel better.

5. I wish I was rich and could quit and move back home and have everything exactly how I imagine it would be in my head. Don’t you? But wait, Heather and Norah love it here. And Maryn kind of does in a two almost three year old way. Shit, you mean my decisions are affecting other people?

6. One time when I was 17 or 18, in the middle of a heated argument over the phone with my dad, he asked me if I was gay. I didn’t answer. He told me that we all have bad things about us. I really hate him most days.

7. “Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.” Salinger, Teddy

8. J.D. Salinger created a trust around certain unpublished works so that they would be released over a five year period between 2015 and 2020. The idea was for a posthumous release, and the motive is speculative. He hated how his work became iconic, as if it didn’t all come from his hands, the hands of a man who works and is wrong sometimes. That’s why this is confusing to me – posthumous releases make that situation ten times worse I would think. People will read so much more value into his words knowing how final they are. Some of the works to be released (or maybe just one) will be more information surrounding the Caulfields of Catcher in the Rye, probably his most famous work. I don’t know if that means it’s a sequel or a backstory, or if it’s a long or short story, but I’m very excited. I don’t want this to sound like a negative impression of Salinger releasing new work – I’m tremendously thankful it’s happening.

9. The sun is so far away. And the seasons change, and the days get shorter or longer in a very precise, predictable, cyclical way – a constancy necessary to support life I guess, or we couldn’t live here. The planets in our solar system are spinning around the sun at different but consistent speeds and orbits, kind of like an atom’s electrons around its nucleus which inhabit different orbits at different speeds, but the consistency of how many electrons and the speed and path at which they travel determine what element they represent. And all of these structures that look very similar, even spiral galaxies that look like water draining from the tub, are held together by what’s called the Higgs Field, which theoretically is here to stay. Otherwise everything would disappear like *that* (pretend that I can snap my fingers and that I just did), because it gives matter mass. I guess in that sense, there’s new evidence that there really is a fabric, and we really do exist on it together, a bunch of spinning particles collected together on a spinning planet, revolving around a violent, turbulent sun in a spiral galaxy in an expanding universe through in immovable fabric that creates mass. I guess what I mean is this: I wish the days weren’t so goddamn short in the winter. The shorter days make me feel further away.

10. “Some of them are starting to sink now. In a few minutes, the only place they’ll still be floating will be inside my mind. That’s quite interesting, because if you look at it a certain way, that’s where they started floating in the first place.” -Salinger, Teddy (regarding orange peels dumped into the ocean)