As Always, I Have No Idea What To Title This. Good Luck Trying To Reference This.

So I've neglected to make a post on New Years like I planned, and am instead making it on the last day of my break, which my mother deemed the day to work on some college stuff. Even though I'd like to enjoy the last bit of my unstructured freedom (the lack of structure, I'll admit, has had an effect on my sleep schedule), I'm stuck looking up college stuff with a distinct un-passion. Instead, I'll just write about all this other stuff. Why not? It's not like college was that important anyways.

One thing some people have noticed by now is that I'm not Captain Dirk Yaple on G+ anymore. Ever since sophomore year, I've always clung to it as a title, like some other obsessive pirate we all know and love. Now, however, it feels kinda tedious having to introduce myself like that everywhere, instead of just keeping it as a theatre nickname/reputation that'll always precede me. It feels as if it's something more I'm adding to myself, and on New Years, even though I didn't write this blog post, I did change my G+ name back to it's original Dirk Yaple (keep in mind the picture will remain unchanged until I can shoot a high-def version of it). The "Captain" was just an add-on to who I was, when in reality, I needed to be proud of just who I was, and that's my new years resolution, I guess: to be proud of who I am. Sorry Jack.

Not him, we named the monkey Jack

Continuing with the whole "philosophical self-reflection" motif, I finally read Paper Towns. My mother may or may not have gotten annoyed with me over college stuff and taken away my electronics, leaving me with no entertainment but the stack of books I'd amassed over the week from Christmas. I had a Star Wars book, recently written as a prelude to The Force Awakens (brilliant movie, by the way; I'll fangirl about it some other time, because if I do now, someone's gonna say I spoiled shit for them), but Paper Towns seemed to call out to me, as if it was telling me that it was the book that needed to be read next in my life; I hate books like that, because those books tend to require frequent breaks to self-psychoanalyze like no tomorrow.

The one thing that stood out to me during Q's adventure with Margo in the night was her anti-college speech, where she mentions how our lives have devolved to the point where all we live for is in the future, and nobody really lives to appreciate the moments we have to do awesome things. I really loved Margo's character on a personal level, because she always seemed to be one to seize the moment and have adventures, a person I've wanted to be, but my anxiety, personified by Q, always held me back. I think even though I'm a really chill person and don't have much of a desire for revenge, romance (well, I have a girlfriend now, so I'm kinda out of the game of love), or real estate, there still was a passion inside me that wanted to be unleashed but was capped by the anxiety of not wanting to be disliked by anyone. I'm the kind of person always cracking jokes, like Leo Valdez in Percy Jackson, because I never really had a good set of friends, and people will keep you around if you're funny. People always laughed at my humor, but nobody ever appreciated me for it. Props to my new friend group I found this year, the right kind of friend group, and it sucks because I won't be able to chill with them after this year, because after 3 years of high school, I finally actually have real friends.

Back to college, I still don't have any kind of inborn passion for it, because for every story about how college made someone's life great, there are 5 stories that say they did just fine without even high school or that college screwed them over in life. No matter how many assemblies school calls where they tell us all about how college is awesome, it always seems like it's more of a detriment than a benefit to do it right after high school, when my personality is barely established and my finances far from capable (which is why I say gap year all the way). Re-watching Tim Minchin's graduation speech helped me relax this morning and let stress subside. The idea that it's all luck and that I shouldn't rush helps the anxious feeling of "you're a failure" that you seem to get whenever you tell someone you're not really interested in college. It's amazing how much it's advertised that your success in society is dependent upon whether or not you go to college, even if you can't afford college. At the very least, it'd help if schools were subsidized by the government, meaning admissions prices (and even the cost to apply) would drop and broke teenagers (like myself) could actually go to college without fear or worry.

A half-decent politician for once and he probably won't even make it into the primary. If the democrats won't take him, then he'll probably run as an independent, stealing enough votes from the democratic party so that they can't get the majority and making it so that Ben Carson wins the presidential election. A creationist brain surgeon is exactly who we need running America.

Thank god I can vote this year, but I'll start making a sign just in case.

I wish you all good luck for your spring semesters, if you are in school. If not, I still wish you luck. 2016 will be great for all of us, I just feel it.