This Life I've Lived

On Tuesday, September 2, 2008, I officially became a responsible adult. Responsible is the key word in that sentence because before that day, I wasn’t 21. The way I see it is at 18, one becomes an “adult” but can still plead youth as an excuse to doing irresponsible things. But 21…holy cow!
It seems like so long ago, a lifetime one might say, that I was pulled into this world. On Wednesday, September 2, 1987, I officially became David Allen Awalt I have stayed that way for 21 years now. Due to the fact that my parents lived and worked in Shreveport, that’s where I grew up and lived until I went to college an hour east at Louisiana Tech in the small city of Ruston. College for me, as I’m sure it is for most people, was and still is a major turning point.
The decision to attend Louisiana Tech was an easy one to make. Most of my friends from high school were going there and the application wasn’t long or too difficult. Being from a relatively humble background, an affordable school that was willing to pay the majority of costs was a necessity. Another force pulling me to Tech was the fact that the remaining members of the rock band I was in were also going. So Tech was the easy choice, and I firmly believe the right one.
So sometime around my 18th birthday, Tech is on the quarter system so it usually starts around early September, I anxiously carried my backpack toting self around campus and officially began my college career as a mechanical engineering major. This major decision was made out of ignorance. To my naïve mind engineering was a job based solely on designing cool things. Imagine my rude awakening when my classes included calculus, statics, and strength of materials. None of seemed to fit the mold of exciting designs and fun group projects.
It took me a year and a quarter before I decided that I just couldn’t force myself any farther into it, and after a long and fairly complex process, I chose to follow once again what came easy to me, writing. I happily began my journalistic training my junior year of college. Soon I realized how wonderful it was to have a major that I actually enjoyed going to the classes of.
My introduction to journalism came in the form of a weekly article written by Dave Barry that my mother showed me in high school. I quickly became an avid reader and bought a few of his books. Completely intrigued by his wit and how easily his sarcasm read, I quickly decided I wanted to be a humor columnist. I was fully unaware of what that looked like or how I would get there, but just as every child naively aspires to be a fireman or astronaut, I just knew I wanted to be a humor columnist.
During my second quarter of being a journalism major I took a literary journalism class and decided that’s what I wanted to do. We studied Hunter S. Thompson and Truman Capote among many others. While I still dream of writing a book or even a story that takes that type of interviewing and writing, Ted Conover’s book, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, opened my eyes to the commitment this will require.
Herein lies a problem though. My entire life I have been what some people may call…a little lazy. How I got this way I’m not sure. Neither of my parents are happy if they aren’t busy. I, on the other hand, am perfectly content just lazing around all day. I say all of this to convey my outlook on school. Throughout my entire scholastic career I have just sort of winged it. This especially holds true for classes I have no interest in, i.e. French, geography, and any other class I consider poorly taught. Throughout high school and even college, all this meant were decent grades, A’s and B’s, and a frustrated mother.
Not only can I reasonably diagnose myself with laziness, I can also claim procrastination as one of my many faults. There’s nothing harder than making myself do something early and on the best of days I can think of a myriad of reasons to do something else instead of what needs to be done. Even with writing this autobiography. It should be fairly easy because it’s about my life and I’m the only one who’s lived it so who could tell anyone about my own life better than me? But it’s taken me weeks to write it. And by confessing that one might expect something of literary masterpiece standards, but alas, “working” on it for weeks doesn’t exactly mean I’ve worked on it for weeks. Just that I started it a while ago and sporadically worked on it since then.
But all this has a point and that point is I am changing my ways, at least in my journalism pursuit. One of my favorite parts about newspaper journalism is the fact that I can’t procrastinate. If I wait too long to write the article after my interviews are done, my notes don’t make as much sense, and I can’t wait until the last minute or I’ll be screwed. But like I said, that’s just one of my favorite parts. A couple of the others are just talking to people about something I don’t know a lot about and being able to learn from them. Just recently I found out my university has a bowling team. I found this out because I had to write an article about them. And I learned a lot about collegiate bowling in the 30 minutes it took me interview the coach and two bowlers.
Another fascinating part of newspaper journalism is the opportunity to put my writings in front of a large audience. Every writer wants their writings published and read, and the bigger the audience the better. The thought of having people appreciate my work and hopefully enjoy it gives me one of those coveted warm, fuzzy feelings.
But aside from those feelings, and my fascination with newspaper journalism, I have one more bit of autobiographical information to share. During my junior year of high school, my buddy and I started a band. I guess we were trying to be a screamo band at the time, but that is irrelevant because we were horrible. I know this because we recorded a few songs, which I still have, and listening to them makes me cringe. But we thought we were good and played a few events throughout the rest of our high school careers. Unfortunately we could never find a drummer that would stick around or was good enough. We all went to Tech with aspirations to take the music scene by storm because everybody knows drummers are a dime a dozen in college.
Turns out they aren’t, so our bass player picked up the drums and we got a new bass player. I played the guitar and screamed and my buddy played the guitar and sang. We were a little better than horrible but still not good. Soon we got restless and decided we wanted a real drummer. So we picked up another guy and moved to purely vocals and our drummer moved to guitar. So the five of us hit it hard as Rhythm Abstract, a melodic, hardcore band. We practiced a lot in this creepy, old cabin and thought we were hot stuff. Soon we added another vocalist who was supposed to sing but never did. This turned out to be a terrible decision but that is perfectly ok.
During the peak of our existence, we toured the south for 2 weeks and played cornerstone festival in Bushnell, IL. We played in south Louisiana, Texas, Okalahoma, Missouri, and Tennessee. It was a life changing summer. Minus the fact that I hated everyone in the band after those two weeks, we’re still great friends to this day, I look back fondly to those times. It was an adventure, pure and simple. Since then I’ve loved music and have considered partnering my journalistic ambitions with that somehow. But that’s another story.
I’m not sure how to conclude this. I guess my hopes for the future wouldn’t be a bad place. Well after I graduate I hope to go to graduate school at the University of Texas, Austin. I would like to move there and start my career there. I know I don’t want to live in Louisiana at the moment. I’m a little afraid of the future, but who isn’t. But I am willing to take some risks, because what would life be like without risks?
I hope this wasn’t boring and miserable and I hope more than just what I said was telling about me. But this, in that proverbial nutshell, is the

A Selfish Day

Does anyone else ever have those days that seem to take up not only the amount of time it has been allotted, but also the next two days allowance of time? You know, the days that seem to go on and on and so much seems to happen that not only can you not remember what you ate for breakfast* (which in reality, isn’t that abnormal) but you can’t really remember that you ate breakfast, or lunch for that matter. In fact, when experiencing one of these days, many common traditions such as breakfast and dinner are just theories and legends that seem to have become mysterious occurrences that can almost be considered alien. Of course you did eat breakfast and lunch and they were probably moderately to decently enjoyable.
But how does this day, who I guess is a bully in the world of days that takes the other day’s proverbial lunch money* (lunch money = time, kind of a stretch but acceptable nonetheless), find a way to sneak all of this extra time in and make us believe that our minds are only playing tricks on us because it isn’t possible that one day took the time of three, “I mean the clock ticked just as fast as it did yesterday right?” Well I have a theory behind this supernatural occurrence and its going to be a little out there, but be patient and open-minded and hopefully I can go in enough circles to sound intelligent to make you believe I have a well-supported idea.
So here it goes, a jump into the proverbial rabbit hole* (the word proverbial is probably one of my favorite words so I’ll reasonably use it a lot). So when reflecting on the day, I realized that yes, there was definitely more time in that day than most days normally possess. And how this can happen can best be related to watching a movie in fast forward. The spectator of this movie knows that the movie is moving faster than normal but the characters in the movie have no idea. As far as they’re concerned, time is moving the same speed as normal and nothing is out of the ordinary. It would be like watching all three Lord of the Rings movies in fast forward, which would probably be smarter than watching them at normal speed. This way you have shoved what should have taken about 9 hours into the span of about 3, while the characters of these movies have lived 9 hours, you have only lived three.
…TBC

French class and lions

So I officially don't like the way my French class is taught. I don't agree with an academic class focusing on French slang and testing on it. But I don't make the decisions, I'm just forced to follow them. And along with trying to pass this class, and applying for grad school, and finishing my internship application, and being a habitual procrastinator, the sermon series at the church I attend has been challenging me to chase this metaphorical lion. What this to me personally is too telling to write on this so we'll just leave it at the metaphorical level. But let's be honest, that level is much more exciting.