Hair Guy Back To School Special

Maybe you did this, but I was playing Bioshock.

September has begun, and with it have begun all the typical back-to-school rituals. Marts of both the Wal and K variety are airing slick ads for the latest ludicrous school fashions, teachers are refilling their hip flasks, and flute players across the country are already creating and spreading the rumors and gossip that will inevitably lead to the standard quota of brooding, pouting, crying, and tantrums that define a typical season in a high school marching band. The time for fun is over, and Mother Nature agrees – in the coming weeks, my part of the country will turn from a sunny, pleasant Garden of Eden to a grim and stormy nightmare not unlike the end of Jurassic Park (without the dinosaurs. Hopefully.)

All throughout school, I was always just as stoked as everyone else for classes to end for the summer. I’d eagerly anticipate summer vacation until I could stand it no longer, and when school finally did let out I was always overcome with nearly incomprehensible joy at the prospect of not having to use the thought centers of my brain for a full three months. Every June, I’d leave school saying to myself, “This is gonna be the best summer ever!”, and nearly every fall I’d come back a broken boy, wondering how the time had passed so quickly. My problem wasn’t that summer came to an end – linear progression of time is a feisty bitch, and I’ve always accepted this – but that I had done nothing particularly memorable during my summer. Of course, it’s tough to really seize the day when most of your interests and hobbies take place indoors in front of a television or computer, but I’ve always been driven to strive for greatness because twice in the past I’d actually achieved summers that were, for lack of a better word, perfect:

1) I will always have joyful memories of the summer between 5th and 6th grade, because that was the summer in which Perfect Dark, arguably one of the best games ever made for the Nintendo 64, came out. That’s it. That’s pretty much the only reason. I spent the entire summer playing a video game, as usual, but that summer it was one of the greatest video games I’ve ever wasted a summer on.

2) Between my junior and senior year of high school, I didn’t have a job. I instead elected to wile away my days playing Resident Evil 4, arguably one of the best games ever made for the Playstation 2, and my evenings spending time with a particularly attractive young lady, arguably one of the best games ever made for a 17 year old with wandering hands.

Sure, there have been other great video games, and sure, there have been a paltry few other women, but never at the same time, and certainly never during the summer. This is why, every June, I wonder if the summer I’m about to embark on will be anywhere near as fulfilling and entertaining as these last two, and almost every September I ruefully admit that, no, it wasn’t.

Living in Portland now, with all of my old high school friends 50 miles away and most of my Portland-area college friends living across the Multnomah Triangle in Beaverton, I hadn’t expected this summer to be one of the landmark few that I would remember forever. That was why I took two jobs and also why I was so dead set on getting an Xbox 360 – the jobs would keep me occupied and financially secure, and the Xbox would keep in line with my summer tradition of wasting my summer. So far, my prediction has been correct; there have been no excellent video games and women, nor has my life taken a turn for the Dawson’s Creek with late night bonfire parties and road trips.

This doesn’t bother me as much as it would were I still enrolled at that disease ridden Black Hole of Calcutta otherwise known as Sprague High School. During my public school days, the school year wasn’t all that different from the summer, save for the fact that the weather sucked and every day I had to get up early and waste seven hours of my day with 1600 other people, most of whom I wasn’t too jazzed about seeing. College, as I have always said, is so very different because unlike high school, it doesn’t blow. The thought of going back to high school always was a downer because it wasn’t particularly fun or educational – college, on the other hand, has tons of fun and a bit of education too.

For the first time in my life, I’m almost more excited to go to school than I was to get out of school. Summer, while pleasant, has been pretty boring. I’ve done more or less the same thing every day, and I’m here to tell you that while playing video games all day and then working a few hours every evening may seem like paradise, it does start to wear thin after awhile. I bet that island Tom Hanks was on in Cast Away looked like paradise at first, but if you go for too long without changing up your routine, pretty soon you wind up talking to a volleyball and yelling at the moon. Fortunately, thanks to my rather sedentary lifestyle, there isn’t a lot of sports equipment around here for me to form a friendship with – however, I feel like the moon is trying to start some shit.

Going back to UO means a change of surroundings, both physically (the toilet in my new apartment is much closer to my bed than I’m comfortable with, but oh well) and socially (I’ve been in Portland so long I’ve almost forgotten what marijuana smells like). I’m glad that’s happening, because those are entertaining surroundings to return to after a few months in my current surroundings. This is not to impugn the state of the surroundings here, Mom and Dad – they are excellent surroundings, some of the best I’ve ever been surrounded by, but any surroundings, no matter how nice, get old after awhile. I guarantee you, come the end of Fall Term I’ll be sick and tired of my Eugene surroundings and dying to get back to my Portland surroundings. There’s no such thing as a surroundings for all seasons: Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and at the moment I’m fond of the thought of being at the heart of a much younger social scene, getting back to the independence one enjoys when he lives on his own, and taking part in the four months of crass debauchery and dick jokes otherwise known as the Oregon Marching Band trumpet section.

As I start packing for my trip back down to Eugene, I can’t help but think that this is gonna be the best school year ever! If my friends, classes, and the band don’t make that statement true, well, Resident Evil 5 comes out in March. There’s no way I can lose.

Truman Capps will probably start hating his surroundings the second he gets his first homework assignment.