Of the many projects I have started and ended over the course of my life, this one has lasted the longest. This blog, through some vortex in my mind, saving it from my usual whirlwind of deletion and record-clearing whenever I start my life over again, has stayed true and steady. I can read back farther than five years ago, and so can you.

This is not the post where I end it all. But it may be the post where some of you stop reading.

I consider one post to be above all the greatest accomplishment of this blog. It’s the post with the most comments, the most views, and, ironically, the least relativity to my continuing life. It’s the one about a mental disorder I was diagnosed with called Cyclothymia.

When I wrote that post, I was in full-swing martyr mode, convinced that this disorder was dooming me to mediocrity, and happy with using it as an excuse. Happily, like many of my fad-obsessions and ideas, it soon fell by the wayside for other ones. I will start by telling that story.

The post was written on March 25th, 2010. During that time I was seeing a psychologist and psychiatrist once a week. I was flunking out of journalism school because I simply stopped attending classes or communicating with the deeply-concerned instructor. I had just been bed-ridden and feverishly sick for the longest period of time of my life, and had been doing literally nothing other than watching the 1980′s “Sherlock Holmes” series, in which the actor who plays Holmes is rapidly and visibly deteriorating in mental and physical health throughout the series due to medication for, and the effects of, bipolar disorder.

I was not in a very healthy, happy, self-confident, or mentally-stable state of mind. This instability gave me something to latch on to. I found stability in instability.

I did my own research, and talked to the mental health professionals, all of it telling me that a disorder called cyclothymia was the likeliest source of blame for the symptoms.

In the middle of all this, I wrote a blog post.

A few months later, I started culinary school.

There are many other posts I could write about why I enrolled in culinary school, and I’m not foolish enough to try to condense them here. But I can tell you that by the second or third day of classes, I had no room or energy for supporting my habit of indulgent self-pitty sessions. I realized that if I was going to make it through culinary school, already predisposed to flightiness and a confessed quitter, I would have to maximize my strong suits (a strong command of the english language, an obsessive personality, the ability to remember almost anything I heard or read the first time around)  and minimize my weak ones (namely a self-perpetuated lack of control of my own emotions).

It just wasn’t an option to continue whining.

I should stop right here, as I am sure that the possibly excited reader stumbling upon an update to the post that they had so enthusiastically related to before, and reading what they interpret to be someone basically saying that all he had said before was bull, saying that anyone who thinks they have this disorder is imagining it. This is not at all what I am saying. In fact I still believe that I am predisposed to drastic mood shifts. I still believe that I may very well, through a series of causes, “had” the disorder. But I don’t identify with having it now, and do not take any steps, other than leading my life to prevent it.

Three weeks into culinary school, I did what I have since learned is an idiotic and irresponsible thing. I stopped taking all of my medication (which was at this point, a very strong dose of antidepressants with an even stronger dose of lithium) cold turkey. 100%. One day on, one day off. The next day off. The next day off. I had simply come to an end with them, and wanted to be rid of them. I felt in my heart, and very deep down in my soul, that they were doing more harm than good. That they had served a purpose. And that my new medication, the incredible and intense focus one is forced to have when working with fire, hot metal, and sharp knives, was providing enough distraction and stabilization to render them unnecessary.

When I had started each of the medications, I had noticed HUGE behavioral changes. But when I stopped, I noticed no difference whatsoever. And with the medication went any notice of mood shifts.

But blogging time was no more. Coming home exhausted and with a pile of personally-asssigned research and homework, I just couldn’t sit down and write any sort of post updating the many who had started the dialogue with me regarding cyclothymia. And what was I supposed to write anyway? ‘I’m sorry you’re having this trouble, but I am inexplicably cured’? That was not something I wanted to write. And then, as two years passed without an update, it just got awkward.

But as I read some of the comments, urging me to keep posting, I feel that I owe it to readers to be honest about where the disorder really took me, and how I feel about it now.

I still feel that cyclothymia is an issue of concern, and valid enough to be considered a real disorder, but whether it is naivety through my own unique experience, or propaganda my head was filled with growing up in a household with a naturopathic doctor, I can’t shake the idea that cyclothymia is nothing more than an unhealthy state of mind brought out by an unhealthy state of body and spirit. When I truly began to explore my passion, exercising my full potential for each day, exhausting myself with knowledge acquisition and real, hard, primal, work, the issues melted away. When I began to exercise more, began riding my bicycle to and from school every day, standing up on my feet more, and focusing on something tangible and real, the issues that had plagued me were eliminated.

So take from this post what you will. I still believe that the last one is a valid, hopefully lucid account of how someone can feel in the throws of mental instability, whatever the cause. I hope that people continue to draw strength from it. I will try to answer any questions that are thrown my way regarding this issue, though I have been out of that world for a couple of years now. Good luck to all, and thank you for opening up your hearts and minds to what I’ve had to say on this issue.

Related posts:

1. Superhuman update
2. An Update on Learning Dvorak
3. Why We Use Stock and Not Water…

I finally got it. Stock was there to make things taste more interesting.

The issue had been holding me back. You see, I have that kind of mind that siezes up when a question needs answering. If I see no answer to my question, I simply keep asking it. This might be okay if I thought out loud.

So when our “Culinary Foundations I” professor Chef Patricio continued to mention stock as an ingredient for soups and sauces, but did not give me the fundemental reasoning as to why, I am certain I missed material.

In fact, when I think back to Culinary Foundations I, our first segment of culinary school, I remember very little. I remember the first day, when Chef told me I needed to shave. I remember the second day, when I came back not only with a bare chin but a bare shiny head as well, a resolute plan to show the authority figure that I was quite serious about his class. But following those early days, when Chef went over our school-issued toolkits and showed us the simplest of knife cuts, I can remember little more than talk of stock.

Chef started with bones, veal bones. It was at this early stage that I lost the first grips of relateability. Who eats veal? Who eats veal in enough quantity so as to end up with four pounds of bones, as the recipe calls for? Hell, I didn’t even eat that much chicken!

Then I was further thrown into a place I did not want to be, a place including tomato paste. This was a product I had never heard of, but it sounded expensive.

It is hard to explain the difficulty I have putting myself back into the mental state from two years ago. Every ingredient seemed like a volitile chemical from science class. They were colorful masses of stuff that recipes told me would come together to make a dish. Like most Americans, and arguably, much of the world, I was horribly uneducated as to the “why” of ingredients.

But that’s why we go to cooking school.

I didn’t know how much I didn’t know. I had no idea that rules of flavor, things like the sweetness balancing salty, and acidity balancing fat, would become so second nature that I would forget how foreign the concept had begun.

So tomato paste went in with the bones. I know now that tomato paste is a cool addition to roasted veal bones for use in stock, it helping to draw gelatin out of the bones. More often than not, people that cook are making veal stock not to use as stock, but to reduce, boiling the mixture and forcing the water to evaporate into steam, while the solids that taste good, are left behind. This creates something the french call “demi-glace”. It’s got a little water, a lot of flavor, and a butt-load of gelatin. It looks and acts like jello. It is jello, really, only veal flavored.

But that was my problem. Cooking has so much going on, and so many different options and elements, there is no way to get a scope of what you must learn to know it all. And as soon as you learn an ingredient exists, you also learn that you don’t know how it tastes raw. You don’t know how it tastes boiled, or fried, or sauted. You don’t know how it tastes infused in an oil, or pickled with vinegar. You don’t know how it will taste in a salad, or salted, left for an hour, then washed. There is so little you know.

And even when you’ve tasted each ingredient in each possible configuration you still cannot really say that you know it. Not in every finger of either hand. Not in your ears, where things will whisper to you that they are ready, as long as you know to listen. Not in your nose, where a memory of the scent of diced onions when they are perfectly sauted in butter will immediately signal your brain to take them off the heat. And not really in your taste buds. That comes from eating the ingredient at every stage in the cooking process so many times that you begin to simply expect the changes. That comes from having to throw out your dish and start again because your grade and the respect of your Chef instructor depends on it.

No, I had no idea, at that early stage, that cooking school consisted of more than just copying down recipes and guarding them like a secret diary. At some point towards the end of that first class, however, when I had roasted bones and brushed tomato paste on them. At some point after I had filled a gigantic pot with water and dumped the bones in. At some point after the five-hundredth cup-full of scum, naturally occuring impurities that rise to the top of any stock and demand to be removed. At some point after all this, I took a spoonful of the dark, slimy, hot liquid. It tasted very much like soup, or a stew made for the low sodium diet. And it was at this moment that I finally began to comprehend that stock was in soups, and sauces, and braising liquid purely because it had more flavor than water.

And that was it. Six weeks of culinary training shortened into one single sentence and thought. The six weeks were worth it. For now I understood.

Stock just tastes better than water.

Related posts:

1. Why I Need a Loft Apartment…
2. Update on my mind…
3. Monday Links #2

Smells like winter around here in the city.

And winter smells like the city.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I expected it to smell like the city all the time. The city smells like possibilities. The city smells like interesting people. The city smells like new places. The city smells like things to buy. The city smells like tobacco and motorcycles.

And the city did smell like the city for a little while. For a few days, maybe. But then the city smelled like, well, nothing. It smelled like a place where people lived. Where people took their dogs out. Where laundry was done. Where food was cooked and served. But it didn’t smell like the city.

So sometimes it seemed like, though I had moved to a place that had seemed magical and perfect every time I had visited, it had all been a show. It had been something that lived inside my mind. That maybe the city was like one of those kinds of smells like we smell in the airport as kids when we are on a trip with our parents. How every hot dog and pretzel on a sidewalk stand smell so good your first day walking around New York. Maybe it had been a smell that never truly existed.

But tonight, as I stepped outside from the Mission Creek Cafe and looked up at the stars, and back down to the wonderful friends I’ve made this November, it smelled very much like the city.

Related posts:

1. I feel low.
2. I need some new dreams!
3. Unexpected clotheslines

I want to be in control of my debt.

But its not really the debt I care about.

I live more in the moment than anyone I know. And though I use it as an excuse for rash choices more than anything, I feel this is a good thing.

The problem is that I live in a beautiful city, and today is an incredible crisp day. I want to go on a picnic, and I don’t really have picnic foods in my house.

So lets say I go to the specialty market down the street on my way to the park. Everything is pretty expensive there, but you could get some crackers and cheese for less than $10. That seems like a pretty affordable picnic, an even better value if Chanterelle comes along, since I wouldn’t finish the whole thing myself.

But I live in the moment. I like to make the moments special. My mother used to say: “If I’m going to eat chocolate, I want good chocolate.” And that’s how I feel about everything.

So if I’m gonna have a picnic, I want to have a great picnic. What’s more: I have the means. I have some cash in my pocket, and that cash would buy me not only some cheese and crackers, but some salami and kombucha too. I love kombucha, there is little more luxurious to me. And so I would go on this well-equipped best-it-can-be picnic, and I would enjoy the hell out of it. I would love every minute, and regret not a moment of it.

But my mind tells me that living every moment in this way is the reason I am in debt.

So I started thinking, what would it take for someone like me, who doesn’t consider financial consequences by default, to resist. What would I need to do to make choices that would lead to good experiences, but also having money left over at the end of the month for more good experiences?

Could it be persistance? Could that be the way to control myself? Constant monitoring the effects on this one single goal? Would that be a substitute for following a budget and planning? Constant reservation?

I mean, that’s how exercise works, and good customer service. A big picture supported by a bunch of little every-day goals. Good cooking is about attention to detail on every step of the process to make a single excellent dish.

Live in the moment, but consider every choice, hoarding for the future rather than living for the day? Hmph. I think I’ll take the debt.

Related posts:

1. No Money Month – Day 1: An Inventory of our Kitchen
2. A Journey Within a Journey
3. “Living Life to the Fullest” doesn’t work

…is that when you get them, you usually want to think about what you’re going to say when you call back. So you think, and the day ends, and night comes, and…well…you don’t want to interrupt their evening. So the next day comes.

But then you don’t get to it the next day, and at the end of the day you realize this, and realize that it’s been quite a while since they called. You feel bad about it and put it out of your mind.

Then the next day you realize it’s been too long since they left their message, and you feel uncomfortable about talking to them now. And the days go on.

That’s the thing about phone calls. And the thing about emails. And (have you figured out the theme of this post yet?) the thing about blogging.

In fact, funny story: I haven’t posted anything on Facebook for about a month simply because I feel so incredibly guilty about messages sent A MONTH ago, and I don’t want the people to think I read their messages yet. I don’t want them to feel hurt.

Wow! That’s chronic anxiety alright.

So, why am I posting this? Well, I’m mostly riding the wave of inspiration, taking the incredibly rare opportunity in which I feel like saying something, and doing something with it before it goes away and the guilt returns. I’ve been waiting on posting anything until I had a nugget of goodness to write.

But nothing has come, so I decided to write about that.

Related posts:

1. T-Mobile unlocked my phone!
2. Becoming a superhuman, month by month.
3. Real

Audio and PDF versions of this post will be coming soon. Sorry, it’s the end of the school semester, and things are a little hectic. Enjoy!

The week passed quickly for David. Large amounts of caffeine had an effect like speeding up an audio track of his life, without the squeaky voices.

Everything felt rushed and nothing seemed to get done. Todos lingered on his list as he rushed from class to class. He spent his lunch time finishing the next class’s homework. He ate quickly so he couldn’t taste the food.

Today was another Monday. David had spent his entire weekend creating a digital inventory of his coin collection on his computer. He hadn’t thought of homework beyond the occasional glance towards his shoulder bag.

David was in study hall. He was drawing a floor-plan. He wanted to rearrange his room so that it had a more professional, more productive feel. David could be a little obsessive sometimes about reorganizing his room. Every few weeks, he would come home exhausted at the end of a long day at school, take a look around his room, and spent the entire night reconfiguring every speaker and bookshelf in the room.

He could be doing his homework for the next day, but David just didn’t feel like wasting his time. He needed that pump of adrenaline that came right before the work was due, otherwise he just couldn’t focus on something so utterly unnimportant. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to get some work done, but it was as if the focus was broken on his eyes.

“Alright, you’re free to go,” the polka-dot-wearing teacher yelled from her desk. She wasn’t in a good mood today, and David wondered why. Had she not meant to wear the polka-dots today? Did a gumball machine throw up on her?

David broke into a cough to hide his laughter. It felt good to laugh! He looked around for someone to share the joke with. It was more of an excercise than anything else. Why did he even try? Maybe he would go crazy soon and start making up friends to talk to him. Maybe he would start to have mysterious blackouts, and the newspapers would start printing stories about a mysterious thief who breaks into the school gym and steals girl’s panties from the dressing rooms.

David stood up, slung his bag over his shoulder, and breathed a sigh of relief. He had speech next. If he had to have a class at the end of the day, speech was a good choice. He reasoned that experience in drama, as well as his pent-up desire to communicate would offer him a perfect toolset for breezing through the class.

The dozen or so students waiting for speech class looked as if they were all about to lose their virginity. Their tense faces told David they were already regretting their choice to break out of their shells and sign up for the class. No doubt their parents had encouraged them with statements like “You only have to take it once! Just get it over with while you’re still in high-school.”

David stepped over the threshold of the classroom and found a seat near the front. He didn’t like to sit in the front row for any class. He felt it made him seem too eager. He felt uncomfortable without the back of a head to look at.

The girl in front of him had curly brown hair. She was wearing sunglasses and could have been sleeping she was so still.

An overweight kid dressed in a baggy shirt that read “Yo Fadda” kept shifting uncomfortably in his seat as he searched for comfort in the plastic-mold school desk.

David hated those school desks. He could handle their bias toward right-handed humans, even though he was a leftie. It was their plastic-mold-connectedness that made him feel so much like he was in a car-seat. When he sat in one, he felt as if the roller-coaster operator had just clamped the uncomfortable bar over his lap, and then the ride just sat their. For fourty-five minutes.

David looked up from his notebook to see the shiny-headed Mr. Ronald in the doorway. The teacher had a look on his face David couldn’t quite place. Smugness was the closest adjective he could think of.

A fake denim shirt was draped across the wiry form of Mr. Ronald today. It was too big for him, and the collar hid any view of whatever neck had been there to begin with. The overlong sleeves of the shirt were not rolled up. Instead, they were buttoned tightly around Mr. Ronald’s wrists so that the sleeves billowed out.

“Hello class!” Mr Ronald said as he bounced through the doorway, “Welcome to speech!”

“He-lo-mis-ter-ron-ald,” the entire class sounded in unison. Everyone knew this routine from elementary school, and the “Hello Mister” chant had become more of a mockery than a sign of respect.

“Please, call me Saint! Now, raise your hand if you have ever given a –” but the rest of his words were lost on David. His mind had siezed up at “call me Saint.” Was he kidding? Feeling confident, David raised his hand.

“David, good to see you again! Did you have a question?”

“Uh, yeah, what did you say you wanted us to call you?”

“Oh, call me Saint. I don’t like Mr. Ronald, too formal.”

David hadn’t heard wrong.

“Is that a nick-name or something?”

For the first time, his new teacher’s smile faded a little.

“Saint is my first name. Saint Ronald.”

David stopped all movement in his face. He had learned this useful skill in drama class, and it had served him well through the years of highschool classes. He could entirely paralyze his face. If he twitched so much as a single muscle however, his entire face would give way to whatever emotion he was hiding.

Had this man’s parents actually named him Saint Ronald?

“As I was saying, who in here has ever given a speech?” Mr. Ronald contined.

A few of the students raised tentative hands, tryning to communicate with their curvature that they were to be noticed, but not called on.

“Hi Jamie, I remember your brother from last year. What kinds of speeches have you given before?” Mr. Ronald directed his question towards a perky bonde girl with thin, dramatic glasses, on the right side of the room.

“Oh, like, when I was in seventh grade we did, like, these presentations for our, like, science class.” As she spoke, her tightly-arranged ponytail bobbed back and forth. She looked like the love child of a Barbie and a bobble-head.

How did people like her survive in this school? David wondered to himself as he examined Mr. Ronald’s face. To his surprise, Mr. Ronald was beaming at her as if she had offered to shine his head for free.

“Great! And did you feel as if you did a good job in your presentation Jamie?”

“Oh, like, well, ya. I mean, it was, like, really hard to talk in front of, like, that many people.”

David’s head exploded and bits of his brain splattered the walls of the classroom. No, not really, but that’s how he felt. He wanted out. Out of this school. Out of this classroom. Out of this plastic seatbelt seat. But he didn’t show it on his face. He didn’t want to expose his hatred for the system, or the system would fight back. He knew this from experience.

The year before, he had nearly lost all momentum. In a school as intense as his, that would have meant all of his “work” from the beginning part of the year would have been meaningless. He would have had to repeat the grade.

He had pulled through with the help of a therapist named Mrs. Perch. She was patient, and almost as jaded about school as he was. When he had told her he wanted out, she hadn’t fought him.

“Then go,” sho had said, “school just isn’t the right thing for some people.”

He had said he wanted to stay through at least the rest of the year, because his parents had paid for it. She had given him some coping techniques. One of the ones he liked was just to look at the semester in chunks. She told him not to look at it as a whole year, just look at making it through the next month, the next week, even the next minute.

David tried to use this method now. He focused on listening to Mr. Ronald’s next sentence, and then the next. He focused on staying calm and focused for the next five minutes. THe focus didn’t come, but at least the chunks of brain stayed in his skull.

Related posts:

1. Please Be Mind: Chapter 1
2. Please Be Mind – Chapter 2
3. My first novel “Please Be Mind” will be published here starting Wednesday

Click here to listen to me reading this chapter.

Click here to read the PDF version of this chapter.

Where on earth was 1965?

In the hot doldrums of summer, David had made many attempts to replace the activities he would have usually done with friends. He had started a job selling singing telegrams door to door. He had zeroed in the first week, but he became industrious in the second, and started giving samples. By the third he had given one-hundred forty-seven and a half renditions of “Fly Me to the Moon.”

David had even tried taking a dance class at the local ballet studio. He wasn’t too bad at the movement part, it was the girl’s outfits that made it so hard for him to focus. On the third day of class the teacher jammed the stop key in the CD player and looked directly at David.

“Well David,” she had said, “You’ve got the hips and chest movements down now. How about taking a look at some of the other body parts. David hadn’t returned to class.

His final try was collecting, and it was working out well. He had a coin collection, complete with two collections of state quarters, one organized by state and one by date. He had a movie-stub collection, he had his books, organized by author of course, and DVDs by director.

The infamous end-of-year performance wasn’t the only reason he had no friends. His previous “best friend” Justin Kinney had moved far away, and now they only talked every few months. The conversations mostly consist of rapid “stock” updates, the kind you tell a million times to everyone when they ask you how it’s going followed by excuses to get off the phone.

At first, David had been hurt by Justin’s sudden detachment. After the second friend moved, and the third, David began to understand that they hadn’t been real friendships at all. They had been more like relationships of convenience. As soon as it was more convenient to be friends with people from their new town, they were.

David wished he had known that before pouring his heart and soul into them. He had made sure to do as many favors for his friends as he possibly could. He made a massive central calendar in his room, wrote all of his friend’s birthdays on it, and made a special habit of checking it each night before brushing his teeth to see which of his friends needed presents and cards.

David put his last penny into its place in line with the others on his carpet floor. He counted each one, double checking the dates, and used a small washcloth to wipe off as much dirt as he could. That summer, he had painstakingly sifted through every ounce of change he could find and picked out one for each year. He didn’t even try for the coins below the 50’s, they were too rare and hard to find.

As he counted each coin, David checked them off on a small piece of paper. He had most of the quarters since the 50’s, and some of the nickels, but his real pride was his penny collection.

These were his favorites, but they also drove him a little crazy. He had every single penny from the year 1950 to 2009 except for the elusive 1965. David had used this dilemma as one of his stock conversation pieces when he was talking to a distracted Justin on the phone one day:

“I swear man, its a conspiracy. I can’t find a 1965 penny anywhere.”

“Uh huh, ya that sucks man.”

“No, seriously! It’s bugging me so much! Where did they all go? Is there a 1965 penny collector who’s keeping them all stockpiled? Did the government have some sort of 1965 penny recall?”

“You may be over-thinking this a little.”

“Wait, hold on, one…nine…six…five…together that makes twenty one! Aha!”

“Um…my mom is calling me for dinner. I have to go.”

Come to think of it, that was the last time David had heard from Justin. David was ponding this when he heard his mother’s voice through his thin walls.

“David! We have to go! We’re both going to be late if we don’t walk out the door within thirty seconds!”

David didn’t have time to pack. He would reorganize it later that night. Maybe he could arrange them by condition? He grabbed his shoulder-bag and collided with his waiting mother in the hallway. Not even his linebacker tackle could alter her irritated stance, arms folded tightly like she was trying to keep something hidden in her belly-button.

“I made you some tea. Its in the holder.” She said flatly as he ran out ahead of her to put his bag in the car.

Caffeine always lifted David’s spirits. He had even gone so far as to try convincing the headmaster to keep thermoses of hot water next to the vending machines so the students could keep themselves caffeinated the entire day.

“That’s what energy drinks are for” the headmaster had told him.

But how could someone even attempt to stay awake and interested what was being blabbed at them by someone in a blue checkered shirt?

His mother talked into her cell-phone the entire drive to school. She was a lawyer which means she worked for herself. She could control the amount of hours she worked. The problem was, she didn’t exercise any of this control. Apparently David was important enough to drop off and pick up from school, but not important enough to talk to while doing it.

Some mornings the phone did not ring, and some of the times they would talk.

Well, she would talk.

David would be amazed at her self-centeredness. She would talk about her work, the last inconsiderate thing his father had done, what she had “on her plate” for that day. Sometimes David would mention something about how stressful a big was and his mother would chuckle to herself knowingly as if to say “If you only knew what real work was.”

David was almost happy to arrive when they rolled up to the school drop-off point. It meant more tomatoes, more dull subjects, and more cafeteria food, but at least school had people. At least school gave him contact to someone, if only just a furtive glance from a new kid that didn’t yet know what a social time-bomb David was.

As David walked down the steps and went again to his locker, he wondered when it would all end, or begin. Would things be this way forever? They couldn’t. David had once been a confident, social person. He wouldn’t go so far as to think he had been popular, but certainly not anonymous. Actually, anonymous would be better than this right now. David wished he was one of those lost-looking new kids or freshman who had not yet truly begun writing their record in social school history.

David found no tomato in his locker today.

Related posts:

1. Please Be Mind – Chapter 3
2. Please Be Mind: Chapter 1
3. Please Be Mind: Introduction

This is the first chapter of my young adult novel Please Be Mind. For more information about the book, click here.

This chapter comes after the Introduction, make sure to read it before starting this chapter.

Click here to listen to me reading this chapter.

Click here to read the PDF version of this chapter.

David gripped the plastic thermos tight in his right hand as he stared at the school building at the bottom of the hill.

Not another year! I thought this was over… he thought to himself. He had thought the very same thing the last time he was in this parking lot. Things had been more hopeful then. The end of year high had been fresh in his blood and everyone was trying as hard as they could to pretend it was the end forever. The end of high-school, the end of school in general, the end of the bureaucratic pressures and injustices.

His school wasn’t just any school, his was a private school. In his school, the teachers cared too much, the parents spoke up too little, and the end result was an over-caffeinated jittery group of insecure teenagers with embarrassingly low self esteem.

“Got everything?” his mother asked, staring at him impatiently as he shouldered his messenger bag. She had been annoyingly stressed out that morning, acting as if David had been the one who scheduled his “back to school” day on  her most stressful day of the week.

Aren’t Mondays stressful for everybody? David thought to himself as he watched his Mother queue up with the other parents trying to get out of the poorly planned parking lot.

As he made his way to his new locker – the novelty of lockers had died off somewhere around sophomore year – a few people waved at him and a few more laughed. They hadn’t forgotten. Last year, the school drama club, of which he was an active participant, asked him to sing a song accompanied by “The Jockstraps,” a band made up of four pimply freshman, for the end-of-year talent show. He had, as usual, agreed. Anyone could get him to do anything if they asked his ego first.

What they hadn’t told him was that the song the band had chosen was “Mama Said Knock You Out” by LL Cool J. The awkward and embarrassing apex of the performance came when a well-aimed tomato hit David squarely in his groin. The band’s overamped drums had stayed consistently off-rhythm for most of the performance, but when tomatoes started flying the music began to sound like something out of “Morse Code, the Musical”.

David finally managed to get his locker unlocked. As he swung the door open, a gigantic red tomato fell out with a plop onto the hard cement. By some heavenly freak of nature, the tomato stayed intact as it hit the ground and rolled under a vending machine. David sighed.

At lunch, he exchanged nods with a few acquaintances and sat on his own near the cafeteria window. He liked to soak in some of the sunlight after spending three hours in the vampire-enabled classrooms of his morning classes. David had, at one point, had friends. He used to sit at a bustling table of gawky teenagers just like himself. His group had been one of the only co-ed lunch-tables around, and the guys around the cafeteria had always laughed at him for not being “manly” enough to hang exclusively with the guys.

“Why did the good lord give me testicles if I am not going to use them?” he had said loudly to Loic Turnbull once during lunch. Loic was a hardcore Catholic who sat strategically between the gay table and the stoner table so he could more efficiently inform them of their damned destinies. David didn’t have a problem with religion, even the ones that encouraged unprotected sex. He did have a problem with the judgements produced by Loic’s very blonde, very thick head.

David tried to remember the comeback, if any, that Loic had come up with after he had heard this sinful remark. Something about judgement day? Being a target for the impending zombie attack maybe? David couldn’t hear very well in crowded areas. For some reason, when everyone was talking at once, everyone else could hear each other, but he couldn’t hear anyone. For a while he had tried lip-reading, but this turned out to be harder than deaf people made it seem, so he began to learn to read faces and hand movements.

Perhaps in a different setting, this would have been more of a challenge. But teenagers really only say a variation of about six different phrases all day, so his task was reduced to figuring out whether someone was talking about being bored, being hungry, being “pissed”, or sex. It wasn’t such a bad system really, and the efficiency of cutting out the curses made the process even easier.

All of these skills were useless now. Though there were plenty of people he could try to observe, there was no one sitting across from him. He had his own table today. Many of the students who would usually be forced to sit near him were still on “extended family vacations”. His school was attended by rich kids, and rich kids got special treatment. That’s just how it worked. Those with the biggest family “endowments” got the most days off for summer break.

The teachers hated it, but the administration forced them to be the late-comer’s personal tutors upon their return. Why the teachers put up with it, he had no idea.

It couldn’t be the food. David thought, as he pushed his uneaten bits of “tuna casserole” away. He liked tuna casserole, but not this stuff. He had gotten excited when he was it listed as the first meal of the year on the school’s website, but the reality of school lunches had come rushing back to him with the first bite.

The friends who would have shared his disgust had all moved away, flunked out, changed schools, or weren’t willing to commit social suicide so early in the year. Who would chose to sit with the “Mama Said Sing Really Badly” guy? David wished he had thought of that nickname for himself. It had been lovingly crafted and slung at him like a rock as he was walking into his first class that morning.

Sitting alone at a lunch table was way too cliche pariah for David to stand, so he got up, dumped his tuna cardboard, and walked out into the sunlight of the cafeterias courtyard.

“Hey David!”

David couldn’t believe his ears, and didn’t, the first time he heard his name called. He ignored the social grim reaper coming back to haunt him and continued walking.

“Oi! David!” the voice came again from behind him.

David had been described as being “in his head”, but he had never heard voices before. He turned around and saw that it was a teacher who had called his name. David couldn’t place him. He searched his mind trying to remember what class he was from. He had certainly seen him around last year.

The teacher was almost completely bald with tiny bits of hair sticking out of his head at the sides. He wore a checkered blue and white shirt which hung like a curtain on the his wire-thin frame. David had always called these “teacher shirts” because it seemed like all the teachers shopped at the same special teacher stores. As the teacher walked towards him, David had a vision of a department store with flashy yellow signs adorning it saying things like “TEACHERS SALE TODAY! Buy 2 ugly checkered shirts and get the third free!”

David nodded as the man approached.

“Hi, I’m Mr. Ronald, I teach the elective speech class for seniors. I saw you on the roster for this year. Glad you signed up! I’ve seen some of the performances you’ve done with the drama department. It will be very interesting to have such a performer in my speech class.” He said this all with a knowing grin, as if David was a lab rat and he was a scientist gleefully watching the effects of his experiment. When the teacher said “performances” his grin momentarily became a leer before twitching back into place.

The puzzle pieces were filling in for David. He thought back to the halfhearted glance he had given the available elective options for the coming year. None of the options had been very appealing, but speech class seemed to be the least of the evils.

“Right!” David said as more puzzle pieces fell into place, “I always wondered what you taught.”

This was partially true, but only a very small part. David had remembered seeing an awkward looking bald guy standing in the wings last year when the seniors were giving their required speeches. He hadn’t really thought of him at any other point. Electives didn’t start until the second week of school. David didn’t want to think about any more classes than he had to just yet.

“It’s gonna to be a fun year!” Mr. Ronald was saying. “We’re videotaping the speeches this year, and we’re putting them online.”

Um…yay? David thought to himself as he imagined inviting more school-related paraphernalia onto his already overloaded hard-drive. He didn’t mind being videotaped, though. In fact, he kind of liked it. He had been interviewedon a show at the local public access television station when he was eleven. It had gotten him lots of fame amongst his classmates at the time, when one particularly television-privileged kid happened across the interview during one of its four showings.

“Well, it sounds like fun.” David said, flexing his genuine-sounding-fakeness muscle, “We meet for class in the drama building, right?”.

“That’s right David. I’ll see you next week. I am looking forward to a superior year!”

“A superior year? Interesting word choice.” David thought as he walked toward his next class.

Related posts:

1. Please Be Mind – Chapter 3
2. Please Be Mind – Chapter 2
3. Please Be Mind: Introduction

This is the first chapter of my young adult novel Please Be Mind. For more information about the book, click here.

This is the beginning of the book.

Click here to listen to me reading this chapter.

Click here to read the PDF version of this chapter.

Do you have a best friend?

Do you have any friends?

For a year and a half, I had no friends at all. No one looked at me in the hallways, and no one sat with me at lunch. For a guy of my particular genre, a lack of friends is almost as common a wallet chain. Our mission is to be rebels, to be different. To rouse a stir across the schoolyard, and astonish with our individuality.

But what if no one cares that you’re not like them? What if they look right past your black hair and nail-polish, like you’re just a stagehand in a life-sized play?

The halls of high-schools are ruthless not because we students are any more manipulative and sadistic than the adults we become, but because we are so utterly vulnerable. As students, we are still forming our beliefs about the world and its inhabitants. We are thrown into a snake-pit of other students, all grasping for attention and definition, just like us. The result is more dramatic than a soap opera.

Where are our role models? What access do we have to examples of positive adult relationships? Television? Nope. Movies? Hell no. The mall on weekends? Doubt it.

Blaming younger people for increased violence and reduced respect for authority is a foolish displacement. The responsibility lies in the adults. With each new generation, additional layers of emotional dysfunctions and tendencies are passed down. The result is now.

In a few moments you will read what is more or less the life story of my best friend. His story is one of adaptation, of accepting what is and moving forward.

I would not be so bold as to urge you to be like him, but rather to emulate his spirit. To use his lessons, his patterns of thought, and to let his strength inspire your own way of living.

Though I probably should have, I did not write this book. My good friend David Shane did. I am merely the announcer, the warm-up band, now…

…Enjoy the main act.

Related posts:

1. My first novel “Please Be Mind” will be published here starting Wednesday
2. Please Be Mind: Chapter 1
3. Please Be Mind – Chapter 2

Hey guys,

This isn’t the post you’ve been hoping for. It’s not the first chapter (or the introduction) of my novel. This is actually a podcast episode (the file I’ll link to, not what you’re reading) about staying centered and being present.

Click the link to listen to it:

(MP3 – 20.6mb – 42:54) Christian David Holmes Podcast #1: Staying Centered and Being Present

Click here to subscribe to my podcast in iTunes

The episode is just under 45 minutes long, which is alot, I admit. I had tons to say on this subject.

If you are curious, and think you might like listening to me ramble for 45 minutes while pacing around my room, have a listen. You can put it on your iPod or listen to it on your computer.

If you like this one, I’ll do more. I’d like to start recording one every week or so, but I want to see if anyone likes them (or will listen to them) first. So please please please post a comment or send me a quick email with your comment (ideas for improvement, general feedback, whatever).

I hope you enjoy it!

The introduction to Please Be Mind is coming tomorrow

Related posts:

1. I’m having trouble makin a decision…can you help?
2. PODCAST: Leaving my home
3. My first novel “Please Be Mind” will be published here starting Wednesday