Life changes and minimum wage

It's 10 am on a Monday and I have no idea when I'm supposed to go into work. I have that sinking feeling that it was supposed to be at 9, which probably means that it was in actuality 9, but I don't think I'll get into too much trouble. For some reason after I went through the wake up process of snoozing my alarm about 4 times, I found myself in an extremely good mood. Everyday gets closer and closer to the big move, and packing my things makes that all the more real. Realizing that I am actually going to escape the protective bubble that Ruston puts over all who reside here, is a little nerve racking. For the first time in my 22 years of life I will live in a place that is out of my parents' zone of protection. This is exhilarating! After 18 years of living under their roof and then 4 years spent living an hour east of their roof, I am going 6 hours west under the roof that my buddy's dad owns but I will pridefully call my home. The risk of not having a job yet excites me as well as not knowing how everything will turn out. I have faith that I'll be fine, but you never know...and I think that "you never know" is what I'm truly chasing. For 22 years I have known I'll be fine. On all my trips and adventures there was always that "you'll be home soon" logic permeating through my subconcious, whether I wanted it too or not. But for once in my life I won't be home soon...so I've got a month to strategially pack my bandana, find a suitable stick that doesn't disagree too much with my left shoulder, figure out how to tie said bandana securely to said stick and hit the pavement. See ya Ruston, see ya bible belt, see ya friends, I won't be home soon...

Finding a job is hard

Due to my recent decision to leave the safety and comfort of Ruston and pursue a legitimate career in something other than inserting sale papers in the daily newspaper, which sucks pretty bad, I have had to start looking for this career. This is a frustrating and tedious process. I've been perusing various job sites and am finding some options but I'm just a little worried that these places get a barrage of potential and sometimes desperate people. So how exactly I make myself stand out over email...I have no clue. I just need to find someone who will pay me to write my opinions about stuff...good luck right?

A new age and new commitments

Summer has arrived and I have officially graduated...whoopee?
Recently I found myself with a college degree and no job or even any idea of where or how to get one. So I searched around the booming metropolis of Ruston and finally decided it would be in my best interest to get a paper route, strictly because my money was running out and I needed something. So here I am with an online class and a minimum wage job while my diploma laughs at me from the wall it hangs on.
After watching Confessions of a Shopaholic...yea I watched it because it was the movie of the day on the cruise my family took me on for my graduation...I decided I needed to get the heck out of Ruston and do something I actually enjoyed. So I've spent some time since I've gotten back searching for someone willing to hire me based on a winning attitude and sense of humor...and not necessarily experience. I've been meaning to start blogging for a while now since I think its the new thing of the future. That and twitter which I still have refused to get involved in. So that's all I've got for now but I'll come back with cruise stories later and other ramblings.
DAve

Gardenhoser

Baseball

There are many memories from my childhood that I value; the delicious smell that permeated from the kitchen when my mom made chex mix, the tree house in my back yard my dad built that set the scene for countless hours of pretend, my bright red bunk bed the filled my room, and too many others to list.
But one that is particularly meaningful to me now for whatever reason is the hours spend playing baseball with my buddy Eric. Why this memory is meaningful at this time I’m not exactly sure. It might be the changing leaves, the carefree nature that floats lazily around on the cool autumn breeze, or it might just be one of those things.
Eric was my best friend. His dad was in the air force and was conveniently stationed at Barksdale my third grade year. So his family moved in with his grandparents who lived two houses down from me. I can still remember driving home from school past his house and my mom telling me I should go make friends with Eric and his brother.
Unfortunately for me I was too shy to go play with them so it took a couple of weeks before fate brought us together. After that it would have taken a lot more to separate us. We spent every afternoon playing together, whether it was soccer, football, baseball, or DZ, a game we made up that is a story in its own.
So baseball…I don’t know how we got away with it. My neighborhood was far from spacious. Houses lined the sides of the street and driveways separated the front yards. Eric and I, his big brother Brian would occasionally accompany us, would get two gloves, a regular baseball, and my little aluminum bat and would go to the big pecan tree in my front yard. Then one would take batter and the other would run to the big oak tree in my neighbors yard.
This is where things got interesting. The selected batter would throw the ball up and attempt to hit the baseball to Saturn, completely disregarding any house windows or cars that lined the street. Usually the ball would fall fairly short of Saturn, and travel the 50 yards or so to the big oak tree where the chosen outfielder would be waiting.
Sometimes the ball would bounce off the tree, sometimes it would land with a loud thud on the roof of either my house or my neighbor’s, sometimes it would soar through the tree into the next neighbor’s yard, and sometimes it would just somehow avoid the bat and land on the ground.
We never once broke a window. Looking back I have trouble believing this. According to Murphy and his laws, two kids hitting a baseball around glass of any type should mean broken glass ten times out of ten. On the rare occasion that we would play while my neighbor’s car was parked in the front yard, we would sometimes send a screamer right into the side of the car, but would always miss the windows.
I can still remember some catches worthy of ESPN’s top ten, one in particular was a diving catch made by Eric right into a trash can full of leaves I had spent the morning raking up. Due to incredibleness of the catch, I didn’t mid picking up the leaves again after it fell over. Thinking back I should have written a letter to the trash can company complaining that their trash can couldn’t withstand a kid landing in it.
It might have just been us two, and it might have been dangerous, but it sure was fun. And the memories I have from it are priceless.

A New President

Recently our nation elected a new president, as I'm sure everybody knows. Besides the fact that it's all over the news and the topic of many conversations, the reason I'm thinking about this is because I saw a man wearing a Barack Obama shirt. It has Barack's face on it and I'm pretty sure he was giving a thumbs up or something equally inspiring. It also had the words "change" and "hope" all over it. As an uninformed citizen I wanted to approach this man and as unaggressively as I could, ask him how the topic of his shirt plans to change our nation. Unfortunately I don't believe this person could tell me, and I also firmly believe that he would get angry at me. I am not a racist person, but I firmly believe that race had a big factor in who peole voted for, especially for the uninformed. This applies to white and black people. I know a lot of people around here are worried about what will happen in the future but I'm suprisingly not. But I tend not to worry about things. I don't know where all of that came from or why it came out, but I hope the best for our nation.

Oh No! It's the cops

There was something there that shouldn’t have been. Through the bordering-on-ridiculously loud chords and notes ripped apart by distortion, the clash of wood on thin metal cymbals and various other too-loud sounds produced by the drum set, and the gentle “puuvvhhfff” of the base something was cutting through that didn’t fit. It was a chore getting the band to quit playing, complete silence was avoided as much as possible for some inexplicable reason, but once the “music” stopped the oddity rang loud and clear.
It sounded a lot like an angry goose. “What is that?” I asked as I walked towards the window. Before I could finagle myself to the window between the amplifiers, cords, and cases to look outside and find the answer to my question, the cyclical flash of blue and red filled the curtains. “Guys it’s the freaking police.” I said disappointedly as my heart began to race. To understand my reaction, you must understand that I was probably the most timid kid that ever lived. I avoided trouble as much as possible by being as good and well mannered as I could. This has gotten better through out the years but I still hadn’t had an encounter like this with the strong arm of the law before.
Of course I was elected to go outside…I mean why wouldn’t I be elected, I was the only one not holding anything so it’s perfectly natural that I charge bravely into the unknown? As my heart tried unsuccessfully to leap out of my chest, I slowly opened the door and fearlessly(and by fearlessly I mean not fearlessly at all) stepped into the cool night air. I was immediately blinded by the 10 billion watt power of a Q-beam, and was forced to shield my eyes before they melted. As I tried to avoid the gigantic glowing green monster consuming my vision I desperately followed the voice of the officer and stumbled over to the car. Why was he still shining his freaking light in my eyes you’re probably wondering(I was wondering the same thing)?
“Come here boy.” He said, country just dripping off his tongue. “Yes sir.” I said politely, my strategy was this…be polite and he’ll go away with out shooting me. “I’ve been out here for 20 minutes honking my horn waiting for y’all to come out. I’ve had neighbors calling in for hours complaining about all the racket y’all are making, and if I have to come out here again I’m going to arrest all of y’all and take y’all down to the station. Understand?” First let’s address the problems with his story…
For starters we had just started the song literally a minute before we stopped so there is no way he was there for 20 minutes, second if he was there I think an exposed, angry-goose horn is louder and more annoying than music muted by thick wooden walls of the cabin we practiced in. And third, why didn’t he lug his lumbering mass out of his car and knock on the door? I mean…who just sits outside and honks for 20 minutes straight? Lastly…how was he going to arrest all 6 of us and take us to the station in one car? He’d have to make at least two trips, and like we would really just sit there waiting for him to come back.

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