Rent?

Screw it. Let's just open up a restaurant in Santa Fe.

You know, Rent is an amazingly touching movie, even if the ending is a little dumb. In fact, maybe that's part of it. You are never quite satisfied with the end and are forced to live through the music in the middle again and again.

At the moment I'm listening to the song "Will I," and it has put me in a thoughtful mood. Sometimes while we're all busy having fun or worrying about petty concerns like de-virginization, we sort of forget that maybe our lives aren't all about filfilling silly whims.

I don't have much else to say beyond that. This isn't really a do-gooder post. I'm not going to provide any links to the good will or anything like that. I just find myself caught up in the lyrics:

Will I lose my dignity? Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?

I mean, I think we've all been in a place in life where we wonder this. Lord knows I have.

Yeah, I've got nothing. I don't know how to express what I want to say.

I remember my freshman year of college. The first semester sucked, but I somehow managed to get through it. The second was not so easy.

I distinctly remember times when I would feel so overwhelmed that all I could think to do was go hide in an empty room and stare at the wall. I had not learned to cope. There was even one very terrible day, as I was driving back up to school from a trip home, when I seriously considered wrecking my car, just so I wouldn't have to go back up to that terrible place.

That's what I think of when I hear this song. I remember the fear. I remember the terror. I remember thinking that I was being attacked from all sides, like standing naked in a hurricane.

In the book "A Princess Bride" they talk more vividly of the torture machine that momentarily kills the man in black. The story goe that the man in black had been trained how to escape the pain of torture by moving his conciousness into the dark, safe places in his body that were not feeling the pain.

However, the torture machine devised did not allow that. There was no safe place. Every part of his body was covered by the thing, including his eyes.

Anyway, then it got a little better. I didn't even notice the change; it was so gradual. I attribute some of this to an english professor of mine named Max Sutton, but that is a different story.

The semester ended. I went home and had a boring summer job. And when I came back, I discovered that college wasn't as terrible as I remembered. It was really very surprising how much I enjoyed the experience after that.

Will I lose my dignity? Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?

I'm a surprisingly happy guy. I've lived a peaceful, good life so far. It makes me wonder. If I've found myself asking these questions for a semester, how many other people ask them far longer?