Duality

Over the years, I’ve come to understand the fact that in a sleep deprived situation, I tend to become a bit more emotional than I normally am. In other words, when I’m tired, I seem to contemplate my life and what is wrong with it. So, running on little sleep and exhausted from a long day, I am going to attempt to write something. It will most likely include a lot of admissions that most people wouldn’t want to make public. It may be profound, it may be crap, but you’ve been warned.

So…yeah. There’s been a lot of things going through my head lately and I’m going to get some of them out right now. Tonight I went back home to the Bay Area to spend the Fourth with my folks. And while I love going back home, the hour drive each way can get boring. So I start to think. And me thinking is never a good idea. Occasionally I make the trip with a passenger and tonight was such an occasion. Emily is one of my closest friends and I tend to feel that I can tell her pretty much anything. She’s a good listener. So tonight’s car ride got to a point where a mixture of sleepiness and boredom caused my brain to get all mushy.

I started thinking about this site. And when I think about this site, a lot of things come to mind. Firstly, and I state this first because it is the reason why so many other things are wrong, I don’t know you. I’m not trying to be mean or sassy or anything. It’s just a fact. I don’t know you. Ok, I don’t know most of you. Aside from Jon I know like two and a half people. Everyone else, I know nothing about you. For most of you, I don’t even know your real name. And I do understand that we’ve got a bit of a limited audience, but there’s still like 5 people that are unknown to me, and that’s a majority. So, to try and rectify this situation, I’d like to start from the beginning.

Hi! My name is Alexander, but everyone calls me Alexis. I’m 22 and am a senior, studying Dramatic Arts at UC Davis. My dream job is to do voice-over work and become a voice actor. I work at a gas station/repair shop and work on cars. I’m not really interested in cars, but it pays the bills. In my spare time I like to play video games. In fact, I play them quite often, probably more than I should. I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I’m knowledgeable about enough things to get me by. I would consider myself to be a bit of a geek and I think that’s ok in today’s world. I love cartoons almost as much as video games, and have an enormous amount of knowledge about them. Especially when it comes to the voices behind the cartoons. I can usually pick out a voice and say “That’s so and so, and you might recognize them from this other show.” And while I usually get blank stares in return, I still feel good about knowing. I also like to watch anime and listen to music. I prefer classical music and techno music. I’m from El Cerrito, a city near Berkeley and Richmond. I’ve got a younger sister who I love very much and try to talk to as much as possible, and my parents are celebrating their 32nd anniversary this week.

So, who are you?

Yeah, yeah. No one’s going to respond. No one ever does. I post and post and post and I’m lucky if anyone reads these things let alone comments on them. Of course, I’ll probably get sympathy comments now, but whatever. I’d like to make it clear that I am a very insecure person. I like to have encouragement and acknowledgment. When I post something here I like to know if people read it, liked it, hated it, whatever. Even a comment saying “read it. nice post” or something as equally mundane would mean so much to me. I don’t want to say that blogging here isn’t fun, because it is. However, if no one reads what is written, then there’s no point in doing it.

And this somehow leads me (not) to my next point. Four years ago, I was living in the dorms. A few months into the school year I realized that I wasn’t going out and meeting people. In fact I still don’t go out and meet people. Most of my friends today are people that I’ve known since high school. But anyway, I realized that I’m never going to actually go out to meet people, so why not let them get to know me in a way that spares me the fear of talking to strangers. I started writing down my thoughts and tacking them on to my door so that passersby could read them. I called it “Alexis’ Thought of the Day” (TOTD). And that’s exactly what it was. Every day I would write about what I had been doing, or what I was thinking about, or even what I had for lunch. Eventually an old friend of mine offered to host a website for me and I began to post my thoughts online as well as on my door. However, time went by, the school year ended, everyone moved out of the dorms, and I had a difficult decision to make. Do I continue my TOTD online or end it on the last day of school. I chose the latter.

Four years later, I start thinking about what it would be like to reopen my TOTD. To allow the world to reenter the haunted house that is my mind. That is when Quad approached me about doing this dual blog. I, all excited about the opportunity to make an ass of myself again, jumped at the opportunity. Fast forward a bit and the site is now up and running. Having the opportunity to speak about whatever I wanted to was a bit daunting at first. Ah, who am I kidding. It’s still scary as hell, and that’s half the reason I’m in this predicament. For inspiration, I went back and looked through all my old Thoughts. As I read, slowly but surely I came to a very simple, yet extremely true conclusion. Me writing about myself was boring. Not only that, it was damn uninteresting. I was reading about things that excited me four years ago and could not think of a single person who would have found that interesting to read. And that brings me to now.

The other day Quad and I were discussing my posts and he said “I want to encourage you to post about yourself.” I, of course responded by trying to explain that if I were just to talk about myself, I’d either scare or bore people to death. I felt that it was much more interesting to post about things that interested me. But thinking about it now, I’m not sure if any of this works. Writing about myself has bored people in the past. Writing about things that interest me is boring people now. What’s left? Nothing.

So what now? Am I leaving or something? No way. I’ll probably continue to do this for as long as were around. Am I going to be changing? Who knows. I guess I’ll wait and see what the reaction to this is. I guess I just needed an opportunity to get some of these things off my chest. But either way, you wanted me to post about myself? We’ll here ya go. This is probably more about me than any of you ever wanted to know.