Sometimes I Wish

I currently have the most terrible case of writer's block. I, myself, will contribute it to a lack of Red Bull in my system, others may say that I'm just being too critical about what I'm writing, and Maryanne will probably say that I just haven't found the right thing to write about yet. I;m pretty sure it's a combination of all three.

I have started typing in this little box about fourteen times in the past few hours, just trying to force something brilliant to come from these fingertips. Nothing. Well, not nothing. Stuff has come out. I've just proceeded to repeatedly delete whatever it was. It wasn't good enough.

I started by just sitting here with the window open, no ideas, hoping an idea would fall like a lead balloon out of the sky into my head. Didn't happen.

I tried free-writing; the whole stream of consciousness thing. It worked for a little bit, but then it just didn't feel right. I was forcing myself to think, and then I was over-thinking it.

I realize that I think about the world alot. Nothing ever specific; just everything all at once. I think about thinking and the fact that I think so much. I often wonder (hope) that other people think about stuff as much as I do because that would make me feel a little less crazy.

I realize that I have a problem asking for help from people. Some call it being stubborn or being proud; I personally think I'm dumb for it. I'm not sure why I do it, but whenever I know I need help the most, I tend to retract myself and pull all the work onto myself. It's like I'm trying to constantly prove myself even when I don't need to.

I realize that the most important things in a friendship are ears and shoulders. Nothing in the whole world is more valuable than a friend who is willing to give you a hug and listen to you talk when you're feeling down. Those are the two things I always know I am always willing to do for my friends.

I realize that my personality is that of a therapist. I don't know how it happened. I don't know when it happened. But somewhere along the life of Steven Nowicki, I made an unconscious decision to be the shoulder and ear for not only those close to me, but to anyone and everyone I met. I think I just have a knack for being able to make people feel like someone's listening to them.

I realize that although I like helping people and that I like being the therapist, I'd like a turn on the couch.

I realize, again, that I think about stuff too much.

And just like that, I wrote a blog.

Breakfast

Many different people from many different places, following many different beliefs have many different ways of describing life in general. Some have positive views, some have negative views, some have existential, unbiased views. Here's mine:

Life is like scrambled eggs. Once cracked and scrambled, there's pretty much no way to get that egg back together with everything inside. What has happened in your life will always be there; it can't “unhappen”.

But here's the thing about scrambled eggs: people hardly ever just eat scrambled eggs alone. Some do simple things like add a little salt and pepper. Some make omelets with onions, peppers, ham, and cheese. Some go all out and make full sandwiches with bacon, sausage, and maybe some ketchup.

So you can't get back the egg you started with. So what. Take the scrambled egg you have and add a little flavor to it. Make your life taste how you want it to taste.

Triggered

It smelled like Florida. It definitely wasn’t Florida; it was Binghamton. But I knew that smell, and that smell was the smell of the Sunshine State. That smell of humidity surrounding you; of thick and heavy air; of the impending storm.

Day 3 of Family Disney Adventure 2006. On today’s agenda: early morning Magic Hours at the Animal Kingdom then Downtown Disney for the shops and shows. It was the first time I can remember ever noticing the unique feel of the air around me. The sun was shining all morning long and all the animals seemed just as jubilant. A few clouds began to show themselves as it started to get blistering hot and we took the moments of shade as blessings.

The smell hit me when we left the LEGO store after my hour long perusal of my favorite toys. It was like some giant Mickey Mouse decided to dim the house lights for a show. The fluffy Toy Story clouds were gone and all that remained was a blanket of gray sky in every direction.

I’m not sure if there’s an actual meteorological term what happened next, but the first expression that came to my mind that day was “flash-pour”. About a quarter of a mile down the boardwalk, I began to see people running for cover, presumably to get cover from the rain about to fall, but I was wrong; the rain was already coming down.

Slowly but surely, with each passing moment, I watch as a wall of falling water rages toward me. I faintly remember my mom yelling at me to get back in the store, but the adrenaline already had me. I feel the tingle start in my mid-back, shooting straight to my knees, locking my legs in place. It works its way up my spine, tickling every last vertebrae on the way to my brain. It hits my neck and arms simultaneously; hundreds of hairs standing at full attention.

The roar of the oncoming waterfall becomes deafening, the wind blowing my hair and open shirt behind me. A few seconds pass; an eternity.

The tingling finds its way to the top of my back; brain stem; whole head. A single drop of water from the careening wall of water lands on my sunburned nose. The adrenaline explodes. My body is numb. I close my eyes and smile as I have never smiled before. The blanket of rain washes over me for what feels like a lifetime. And just as quickly as it came, it’s gone.

I turn my head just enough to see the rains going away, hoping it will come back. Ever so gently, my heartbeat calms, the endorphins wane, and I am left standing, soaked, with a smile. I laugh a little as I watch my mom, who apparently did not find shelter fast enough, come walking over to me carrying her bag. She says,

“Umbrella?”

And the only thing I can say back is:

“Ever notice that smell in the air?”

That was Florida three years ago. This is Binghamton and I know that smell. I know that although, for the moment, the pretty and puffy clouds rule the midday sky, at some point later today, I’ll be smiling again.

The Mask Speaks

I like math. I like numbers and numerical phenomena in general. I like puzzles. Word puzzles, math puzzles, logic puzzles. I like figuring things out, whether it’s a puzzle or not. I like knowing things, understanding things. I like being able to grasp difficult concepts.

I like feeling connected. I like feeling like I’m not alone in this world. That there are other people out there. But at the same time that I like being connected, I like feeling like I’m different. Unique in some way that sets me apart from the everyday crowd. Something that makes me…me.

I like doing things that scare me. I like doing new things, trying new things. I like the adrenaline rush that comes with an uncertainty of thrilling events to come. I like the deep, dark part of the lake where you can’t see the bottom. I like the curve in the path that goes off into an unseen distance. I like the sounds that you can only hear in a silent room. I like wind coming in the window of the car on a sunny day just as much as the wind going through my hair on a roller coaster. I like getting goose bumps.

I like the click of keys on an ancient keyboard. I like the feeling of writing with a really smooth pen. I like sound of colored pencils on a piece of colored construction paper. I like patterns. Shapes, letters, numbers, pictures. I like the sunset, anywhere. I like the sunrise more.

I like hiking. I like nature in general. I love the smell of a freshly cut lawn and the forest after it’s just rained. I hate mosquitoes. Bam. I like the feeling of being completely submersed in water for an extended period of time. I like taking paths I’ve never taken before.

I like that you’ve read this.

Connection

Striving to be closer to other people who exist in this world. Wanting to be completely understood by someone else. Needing a sense of security and comfort in the knowledge that there are others who feel what we feel.

When you find someone else, whether it’s a friend, a lover, or a neighbor, who thinks like you think, feels the way you feel, and can see what you see, never let them go. These people become inherently important in you life, and should be valued and cared for as such. These kinds of people will always be there for you whenever you need them, because they will know of your need.

You will often seem to share a singular consciousness with these friends, lovers, and neighbors. You will finish each others thoughts, or even preemptively start their thoughts for them. You will not have awkward silences, because their will be nothing awkward about the bond you share.

I have been lucky enough, in my short 19 years, to find a few people like this. I have come to know and love and connect with these people as I never thought I could. I have shared stories, smiles, hugs, laughs, tears, silences, beds, fights, walks, swims, runs, clothes, injuries, cookies, meals, car rides, roller blades, jokes, text messages, old movies, vacations, pictures, dances, phone calls, drinks, memories, and all-around adventures with people I am honored to call my friends.

I love all of you and am grateful for every last moment I get to spend with you.

=]

Touristas...Don't Go Home.

Tourism

Your first thought when I say the word “tourist” is probably not a good one. We all picture tourists being these annoying foreigners walking around with outdated maps, huge clunky cameras, and bags, apparently filled with all their worldly possessions, on their backs; working in lower Manhattan, I’ve come to know the image of a tourist quite well. But what I now propose is a complete change in connotation for these travelers.

Just think about what "tourism" actually is. It' the act of a single person, or group of people (usually a family), leaving their native society, culture, or region, to travel to a completely different society, culture, or region with one sole purpose; to collect information and learn. To learn.

The single reason that tourists even exist is that people inherently want to learn about things that they weren't taught while growing up. The reason so many people flock to Manhattan is because of how much history there is here. A great deal of you reading this (if anybody is reading this at all) have all gone through history class in high school and learned a significant about Manhattan's history and wouldn't consider yourselves "tourists" if you went to the city.

But imagine a family from a small European country who have never even seen a building over three stories tall; Imagine the family from Asia who have never seen more than a few cars in their entire lifetime; Imagine the African family who live in a village with less than one thousand people. Just imagine their reaction to seeing New York City.

So the next time you see that couple walking down the street, getting lost in the hustle and bustle of a city we've come to call home, please, I beg you, stop and ask if they could use some help. They're just trying to learn.

Senseless

-We know that someone is blind because we can see what they cannot. We know that someone is deaf because we can hear what they cannot. The majority of the world’s population has all five of their senses; we can see, hear, taste, feel, and smell. But I now have a question for you: what if there was a sixth sense?

-Now I don’t mean some extraordinary ability to see and/or speak to the deceased; I mean that what if there was some other sense that let us experience a new part of our world? If everyone in the world were blind, how would we know we weren’t seeing something? If everyone was deaf, how would we know that there were sounds we weren’t hearing? What other world could we be missing?

-The fun part of these questions is how incredibly far you can go with them. Just try to imagine what this “other world” could possibly consist of. The first things that usually come to mind are extreme visual images or loud and amazing noises, but those are still within the limits of our world; they’re still just sights and sounds. The difficulty comes in trying to imagine senses beyond our own.

-Imagine a sixth sense of “being”. I am, you are, he/she is. A sense of actual existence in this world. More than just simply interacting with your surroundings, but becoming part of them. A sense where you could take an outside look at yourself and just see yourself as a part of a bigger picture.



-What could that bigger picture look like?

Rant-tastic

So, I'm Steve. I started this blog because I felt that it would be much healthier for me to vent my anger on the internet and not my walls.

Most of my posts will just be random thoughts that have gotten my interest (the first post was done sitting at my desk at work while two of my coworkers were playing Z100 on their computers.)

So visit often to find my thoughts on the popular and mundane, scientific and religious, boring and entertaining, pointless and world-changing topics that you will eventually come across in your own lives.

=]

Z100

The Trail of a Song Heard on Z100

• 6-8 months before hearing it on the radio, you will have found this song either on your own or by the suggestion of a close friend with good taste in music.
  
• The actual song was released about a month before that.
  
• About a week before hearing the song on the radio, the song has faded from the top of your “recently added” list on itunes.
  
• Upon hearing the song on Z100 at work, in the car, or somewhere else in public, you proceed to do one of two things; you either:
  
• 1. Immediately exclaim that you’ve been listening to this song for “SOOOOOOO long” and have tried to get everyone else around to listen to this band for a couple months (they obviously refused because of their crappy tastes in music. If they had good taste in music, Z100 would NOT be playing.)
  
  OR
  
  2. Purposely sing every word to the song as if it’s just another song on the radio and wait for someone to eventually ask how your are cool enough to know this seemingly brand new song.
  
• For the next 4-5 months, the song will be played around 12 times a day, every day. This amounts to AT LEAST 1,440 plays. Odds are, if you’re still hanging out with those friends, you will hear about half of those plays. After the first 6, you will grow to hate the song, fearing the other impending 1,434 plays. You may hate this time during your life, but it will be tremendously valuable later on in this explanation, and in your life.
  
• Once the song has reached the end of its radio life, you may have even deleted the song from your itunes entirely. Another couple of weeks after the 1,440th play, the radio will play it for about a week, thinking it’s a “throwback” to earlier in the year (no.).
  
• The last time you will hear the song on Z100 is at the end of the year, when they do their countdown of “The Top Songs of 20XX”. After that, Z100 kicks it to the curb.
  
• About a year later, the song, depending on the genre, will resurface on 95.5, 102.7, or some other station that isn’t a slave to the hands of the Billboard Top 5. The song will never play more than once in a week, but will always play at least once a month.
  
• At this point, even your friends loyal to the ten different songs being played on Z100 will hate this song. Any time it comes up on itunes shuffle, it will be immediately skipped, as per the request of the groaning audience.
  
• The next few years go by, and almost all memory of the song has faded; but then comes that one party.
  
• One of your friends will decide to let you make the playlist for his/her next party. Scrolling through your itunes, you put a mix of the standard, current pop hits and lesser known bands that you know just sound good. Then you get to an artist you haven’t listened to in a while, and you stumble upon a song. A certain song that you all of sudden fall back in love with. You forget all knowledge of ever hating it and realize that it is and always has been an amazing song.
  
• About halfway through the night, when everyone is decently buzzed, the song comes on. You immediately recognize the intro, having been the one who put the song on the mix, but the rest of the crowd collectively stares at speakers as if there was a billboard with the song’s name.
  
• Slowly, but surely, one by one, you actually see light bulbs flicker on above people’s heads. There’s a collective round of “NO WAY”s, “OH MY GOD”s, and “YESSSSSSS”s, reassuring you that everyone has just shit themselves.
  
• And remember when you had to listen to that song 720 times on Z100? Secretly, they were preparing you and all your friends for this moment. Everyone and their mother now knows all the words, and the next 3 minutes and 22 seconds will turn into a hysterical lyric screaming match to see who can drunkenly sing the loudest. It will be the highlight of the night and you will be praised.
  
• It may seem like Z100 was butchering the song way back when, but they were just subliminally implanting the lyrics in your brain.
  
• Ten years after this party, some singer will stumble upon this “oldie” and decide to make a remix of it. The song will once again find its way to Z100, but this time it’s actually been butchered.
  
• This new song will then go through the same cycle again; forever to be played and replayed, known and forgotten, hated and loved, until the original sounds are lost to the musical black hole that is Z100.