An incredible reaction to a drunk-driving lecture the other day. We all gather in the gym and listen to this guy talking about how his son and two of his friends died in a car crash because they were drinking, how it disrupted their lives for years after and how many family members were barely stuggling to stay functioning.

Basically no reaction. People are giggling, hitting each other, etc.

"My daughter, before the accident, was a 3.0 GPA student. A month after the incident, her GPA was 0.9."

Gasps, disbelief, shock.

Fuck that.

I miss Santa Cruz. I want to feel involved like that again. I want to feel stimulated by everything around me, instead of barely crawling through chemistry homework because I'm too listless to give a shit anymore. Back to that land of giants, where every person was like a painting you kept walking back across the museum to see again because it was just that intriguing.

As I grow older the mist parts. The gap is shrinking between now and then. I know why people did what they did; I'm starting to move and talk like them. The mystery is gone.

I feel like something important is missing. I feel passionately about next to nothing. I am excited by next to nothing. I am becoming nothing, consumed by myself.

What would be good would be to get on a plane, alone, and stay for a month in a city I've never been to before. Need to experience.

To anyone considering taking it, Video Production is the easiest class I have taken since web design. Once again, I have sat staring at this computer for an hour, with another forty minutes to go. To my right, Matt Kelly also stares at his computer, an iMac that behaves like it was dropped as a baby. Likewise, to my left, twenty other people stare vacantly at Shockwave games, the hands, the shambles of their empty lives. At the front of the room, the teacher has inflated himself to "ward off predator" stance as he confronts something shiny.

Matt and I have found ways to entertain ourselves. If we didn't, we'd spiral into a comatose twilight state.

Matt and Matt's top five methods of distraction:

1. Inordinately beat each other. If the teacher interferes, beat him too.

2. Harass the teacher to let us do news stories such as "Is our school prepared for attack by dinosaur?" and "SRHS video teacher android from the past, demands human sacrifice." When teacher rejects, argue. When teacher continues to refuse, hold magnets up to his head and rub.

3. Hide in the news room and play with the SRHS time machine, a metal box of unknown purpose or origin which we have determined is our key to a wacky romp through the circuits of time. If teacher hassles us about deadlines, reassure him that we can simply go back through time if we have more work to do.

4. Claim we are going out to gather footage for our stories and instead exploit the power of having a camera to hold free reign over the campus. Pull friends out of class, have Mortal Kombat-esque melee battles and hit stuff with big sticks.

5. Staying in our seats and staying on task, completing the items in our packets in the order listed and not screwing around on the internet. Writing story proposals, interview questions and scripts, capturing SOT and B-roll, logging with Final Cut, editing the SOT and B-roll together into a linear, coherent story and submitting the quicktime-formatted stories through the local server.

When do we stop distracting ourselves? When do the curtains draw? It doesn't end after school, does it? We have to start now, don't we?

What doesn't matter is that I will likely get a C in math.

What does matter is that when I start adding up variables, the answer is hidden, maybe not even there.

And yet, why is it that I will continue to do my math homework? I should set it on fire.

Absurd.

Nothing like waking up covered in bruises from a No Dough Show.