Progress

I am upgrading. I am Advancing. Soon, I will be making progress in my life. Progress is apparently a good thing. Progress got us out of the primordial soup, onto land, on two legs, into a structured society, got Al Gore to invent the internet, and it will undoubtedly give rise to weapons and wars that will send us back to something akin to primordial soup again. But that is progress! Progress is what is yanking me out of what was once my comfortable little routine and into the wide world of a new routine that will consume me.

I would wake up early. Far too early. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I would be up at 5:30 for my morning run. I actually would enjoy this to an extent. I would run around on empty streets near my house and pretend that I was Haile Gebrslassie winning the Berlin Marathon. The other weekdays I would wake up at a no more reasonable 6:10. In either scenario, I probably should have woken up five to ten minutes earlier. I had to be at school at 7:00 in the morning because I was in the jazz band, for which I was always about a minute late. I would glance at the clock at 6:53. Oh shit, I thought today was going to be different. Dammit! I hopped in Spaceship Earth and achieved escape velocity before I could realize that I was forgetting something important, like my backpack.

I would zoom down the street to Colby's house. Horn honking and Pearl Jam blaring out the open windows, if I don't get to sleep, then dammit, the neighbors don't get to either! Shit man, we are late, better lay on the horn again. My phone rings. He's taking a dump, he'll be out in a sec.

We're on the road and it's 6:58.

"Sorry dude, my dump schedule is all out of whack. I don't know what's going on. It may have something to do with the fact that I'm not sleeping right."

"Whatever, I feel you, it's ok. We're going to make it." How do we make it? We do two things:

1. Activate the hyperdrive on Spaceship Earth
2. Crank up the Pearl Jam!

There is no parking when we get there, but I park in the secret spot, a loading zone that never actually gets used and no one cares about. We get in and it's all fine, we may have dodged a bullet this time, but tomorrow, I am getting up five minutes earlier so that this doesn't happen.

First period I would go to calc. Half the time I would pay attention, and half the time I would look at people whom I didn't know and try to figure out things about them, most of which were partially or entirely wrong. A lot of the people I didn't know where juniors. These were the juniors who were good at math, the overachieving juniors, the hyperjuniors. I am not very good at math. My brain is more wired for words and music. I wish I were good at math so I could build bridges that cure cancer and make spaceships. I am not smart enough to build spaceships; I am not reliable enough to fly spaceships, so I suppose I will have to settle for writing about spaceships. These were the things I thought about as I tried to figure out the rate at which imaginary cars traveled along imaginary roads where you had time to figure out when to slam on the brakes to avoid killing pedestrians, just like in real life.

It was also during first period that I started my grazing. I would usually start with a bagel, and between first period and lunch I would be continually munching on PB&J's, promax bars, oranges, and pita chips dipped in hummus. This was my lunch. I had the same thing every day and never got tired of it.

I know that this sounds a little pathetic, but brunch became the high point of my day. This was a ten minute break between second and third period. This is where I would eat the more delicious of my two sandwiches. I really don't think it's pathetic. Your daily routine isn't supposed to have any high points that really stand head and shoulders above the rest. I did my routine and I would get rewarded at 10 o'clock every day with a peanut butter and honey sandwich. That's not depressing, that's life.

Routine became my existence and I would lose myself in routine and love it. Weekends would actually become an annoyance because there wouldn't be that routine. I would always try to do something to spice up routine, but at a certain point, especially during the hot and heavy period of the cross country season, there was no room or reason for messing with the routine, and no wiser option than trying to stick to routine and get everything done every day.

The need for sleep was paramount. After practice I would give Colby a ride home in Spaceship Earth, sometimes we would talk about the heavy things, sometimes we would talk about meaningless yet oh-so meaningful things, and sometimes I would just clench the wheel and stare angrily at the asphalt in front of me. I would pull up to my driveway and sit in Spaceship Earth for a bit, getting some homework done, eat dinner, then pretend to do a little more homework either in my room which was not my room or in Spaceship Earth, maybe see if I could write a little, and then be asleep very early. As I was going to bed, I would think "It's ok, I don't need to wake up five minutes earlier. I can just do things a little more quickly in the morning." That was routine and I loved and despised it and for most of high school it never crossed my mind to even dare to disturb it.

Then on one fine day in either March or April, I can't quite be sure, I stopped caring about the routine and how much sleep I got and when I was going to eat my sandwich. For a few months I got a glimpse at the way I could have lived and experienced life if I hadn't been a slave to the routine, only its partner in crime. It became routine-lite. I didn't sleep quite as much because I didn't bust my ass to get in bed early every night. My afternoon dump turned from an absolute truth to a fuzzy concept that could happen at any time from 8 AM to 3 PM. I talked to people I wouldn't normally talk to. I even ate my more delicious sandwich at lunch sometimes. I compartmentalized, I was only a runner for three hours a day and then the rest of the time I was just a dude with some slightly boring tendencies.

That was progress. I grew up because I could live without regularity. I made progress because I was willing to lose sleep and discover the greater humanity around me. I swallowed dry ice to see what would happen (you feel cold, then you burp a lot, then you fart a lot, in case you were wondering). I ate basically nothing but tacos and fruit snacks for a week, with the occasional banana thrown in to pretend I was being healthy. I let go and didn't care about routine or progress and I made progress and achieved what I had hoped for after all those years of being wrapped up in routine.

Now I will be making yet more progress. I will be leaving, going to a new city and starting a whole new routine. I don't know what it will consist of yet, but I do know that if I want to enjoy myself and not regret the time I spend there, I will have to let it be something that I want to break out of. And if I become complacent let the good Lord smite me down, because in doing so I will have failed.

For purposes of anonymity, the city in which I am going to college will be referred to as "St. Collegeberg." My hometown and the area around it will be referred to as "New Gibraltar." I don't want to say "home," because I'm really not sure what I will consider home to be in a few months. Right now New Gibraltar is home, but not because I live here or because my biological family lives here. It is home because people I am not related to have made it home for me.

I wonder if I will make progress, if I will grow up, or if will stay as I am, not a kid and not an adult. Maybe I failed because I measure myself against the most interesting people. Maybe I want to have all kinds of adventures and thoughts and feelings and sensations that would actually make me crazy. Since I have stepped into the real world, I think I have approached my limit for emotional density. That was another benefit of the routine: it created a bulwark against most emotions. For long periods of time, the most intense emotion I would feel was frustration at either not falling asleep quickly enough or not hitting my splits in a workout. I didn’t let anything happen because I knew that I couldn’t handle anything. That was why I stuck to the routine. Routine is the best medication you’ll ever regret.

But what I did wasn’t that dull or boring, because I did have great times that I will always remember, and whenever I did break routine, usually on weekends, it was always quality. That routine is just what happens when you are on a very competitive team and at the same time want to do very well academically. It took up 90% of my time and allowed me to survive.

I guess I’ve learned that routine is important but it’s not the most important, and that sleep is necessary but not always at the expense of other things that are necessary to be human.

Last night I was at a Chinese restaurant with a group of friends, and it was probably the last time in a while that we would all be together. I was really not ok with the situation. Things have come together so well in the past few months and for the first time I’m home. At the end of the meal we all went around the table and read our fortunes. I went last. Mine said “You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily.”

I will miss the fog the way it rolls over the hills. Sometimes I want to wrap myself in it and become a fog spirit that just dances around here forever. But then there would be no progress, and we need progress sometimes. I may become attached to this place where I had my routine and was comfortable, where I forgot that I was a person and then became one again. I will miss the roads that I drove down in Spaceship Earth, and I will miss the people that have all somehow come together to help me out of my bubble, even if they didn’t realize they did. But my fortune is right. You gotta hate your routine. You gotta want to break out of it. And in my case, I may have to keep making and breaking routines for a long time. And I don’t mind. Because breaking this routine, making progress, was the most damn enjoyable thing I’ve ever done, and I look forward to breaking routines and making progress for years to come.

At least until my stomach hemorrhages from all of the MSG I consumed last night.