Plan Z

There are a lot of words swirling around in my head right now. They flutter around like kites taking off from the ground, twitching and flipping over in defiance. They refuse to let me pin them down into real sentences, much less the vague ideas that they've become.

It started with The New Yorker. I was reading it in class today and people just kind of stared, some venturing to fling the word "Intellectual" at its cover as if that were a bad thing to be, but that's not really where it started. That was just a random side note. It started with an article about diamond thieves that are internationally known as the Pink Panthers, then another article about a restaurant in Turkey that makes old-style food so authentic that it brings people to tears. There was a story about a photographer who takes pictures of the landscape while flying around in his red, engine propelled paraglider, and a thin column about the effect of one painting on a person's whole life. And these are interesting stories in themselves simply because they are stories that seem more like a novel than a piece of nonfiction. That's the best part of them: these are all real stories.

Based on ingenuity, sincerity, good tips, and some luck, these journalists tunneled into worlds unseen by anyone not originally part of them. They travel the world and, if something like a tiny Turkish restaurant interests them, they schedule an interview with the owner and suddenly find themselves accompanying him to market day at five in the morning. The Pink Panther article was all the more intriguing-- imagine meeting up with gangsters renowned throughout the Balkans for lunch and scribbling down your notes in the bathroom instead of right in front of them to avoid arousing their suspicion of you.

Imagine paragliding through the air for twenty two seconds.

I think the reason all these words can't cement themselves into sentences is because they're too fantastic, too quixotic to be real. But they collectively translate into this: How did they get there? How did these people a) end up at The New Yorker and b) end up reporting from wherever they are?

And then there's c)How do I get there? Not The New Yorker, specifically, and definitely not chasing Serbian gangsters, but there, in...at...what?

That's the blurry part. How do you yank the words out of the sky by their kitestrings and pin them on the wall?

Catching up on the daily news

People like to read news that's relevant to them, which is why we read local newspapers. People also like to read stuff that's relevant to the whole world, which is why we read big papers like the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe. I like to read about things relevant to people I know, which is why I read blogs. At first, they don't seem like your typical news blog. And they're not. Instead of telling me about the world, the five blogs I like to read tell me about the people I see every Monday through Friday-- they give me the news on those five people and, unless they make some kind of observation on another person, those five people alone. I'm inside their heads for a paragraph or more, if I'm lucky.

So after being gone for a week and having no time to read my dailies, I decided to catch up yesterday and, surprisingly, they all have a similar message: I'm messed up. You're messed up. The whole teenage population is a big, messed up world.

Sometimes I can see the point. Sometimes I know that we're all messed up-- I definitely am-- and decide that I'm better off sitting in my room all day than even reading a book. But other times I wonder, what are we going to do about it? There's no point in posting drama after drama if we don't DO something to pull ourselves out of the hole we find ourselves in. I've thought about it, and I almost always come up with a different response: We don't want to do anything after all, we'd rather play the rebel or the wounded artist. We just aren't smart enough to figure it out yet. We'd rather keep dreaming. We're lost. We dont' know how to climb out. On and on and on and on and

What I'm trying to figure out, basically, is what we're supposed to do. Acknowledgement is usually the first step to recovery, though what we're recovering from and what we're trying to recover in ourselves depends on the person. Are we trying to recover or discover? Maybe that's it. Maybe we have all these plans that either didn't turn out or haven't gotten a chance to be tested out yet. Either way, we know things are messed up. There's the school side of us, which is usually ok and always fake, and then there's the real side. That's why the school side is fake-- because at school, who's really going to be their true, unfettered self? I'm not. At school I'm practically perfect, blending in with the other "smart kids" and getting good grades and being nice to teachers, just like them. There's nothing wrong with that kid other than a bad grade here ant there.

Then there's the real side, the one that steps out of the school costume at the end of the day and sits here at a laptop upstairs, wondering what we're going to do. That's if we decide to do anything at all, really. Will we decide to reach over our walls and talk to someone else, or will we just let our fingers talk to a computer instead? Are we ever going to sit down and figure out why we're messed up so that we can find the solution? Because I don't know about you, but right now my personal solution is three thousand miles and two years away. We need to do something now to get out of the hole. And I've asked this a million times already, but how will we do that?

I don't like the whole "Generation Messed-Up" thing we've got here. I don't like this blog post much either, but whatever. It doesn't make sense, because I'm in same situation as everyone else, believe it or not. It doesn't make sense, but I write nonsense in the hope that someone will make sense of it for me.