July 16th, 2015 - The Nights We Don't Remember

   Hey everybody! How're y'all doing? Last night, I turned in at 3 am for the third time in a row.
   Last night, however, was different from the previous late nights, because it was an amazing time hanging out with some friends from The Collective, after some fun filming. I'm sure that the title of the post might make you assume that the night wasn't at all memorable, but that's opposite of the truth. In reality, I'll probably remember it for a month or two, and then whenever I watch the movie we made or if I read back over these posts, but eventually and inevitably, I will probably forget what happened last night, and that's what actually important.
     Instead of having a specific memory for hanging out with my friends, I'll have a general sense of happiness and kinship for them. It's like trading the beauty of a wood carving for the heat of a flame. Weird comparison, but it works. I think.
    In the many years to come, the memories of my high school epoch (yeah, I said epoch) will slowly fade, and some even now are fading, like I don't remember the specifics of each marching band rehearsal, but when I think of them, I recall cold nights, warm friends, and kickin' tunes. In that sense, I've traded away the specifics for the longer lasting feeling of happiness. The question, however, is will this be a good trade? Unfortunately, I won't know until high school feels like ages in the past, but I've definitely got a good feeling about this. Not like that hasn't been said before shit gets real. Fingers crossed guys, fingers crossed.

See y'all later!
DFTBA

July 15th, 2015 - A Week From 18

p    Hey everybody! How have you guys been? Really? I'm so happy/sad to hear that! How am I? Alright, except I'm going to turn 18 in seven days!
   Now, it's not like I don't want to be 18 or anything (Cigarettes! Porn! Rifles and Shotguns in MD! Voting! The Draft! Being Charged as an Adult!), but I'm not entirely sure that I'm ready to not be 17 anymore. For one thing, I haven't used my age to acquire access to a rated R movie yet, which in hindsight is a little sad, because I've been 17 for almost an entire year, and I just realized I haven't gone to basically any movies this year. Including Mad Max, Jurassic World, and yes, that other movies you're thinking of but I didn't write down. I did go see Avengers, though.
    Segueing into something else... Today I bought my first book for college, which was a really weird feeling. Granted, this wasn't some engineering text book or calc 3 related pamphlet (pamphlet, really? Wow JD. Just wow.), but instead this was a classic novel, Bram Stoker's Dracula. As I started to read it, I realized that I was technically beginning my college education. Which is awesome, even though I technically began it in sophomore year with AP Calc because I got college credit for that course... Ignoring my own counterexample, I'm super stoked (ha, Stoker joke) for this, because it's like I've begun to fully move on towards the next phase of my life, and in two days I'll find out my roommate. My whole world is picking back up again, and I love it! Unlike the last time this happened, however, I'm feeling more inclined to write and blog and stick with this thing, although I've probably now doomed myself into never blogging on this thing again until the end of summer... Crap... Anyway, it's currently almost four in the morning for me, and I think that I'm going to try to get some small measure of sleep before the rest of today happens.
 See y'all later!
 DFTBA

July 12th, 2015 - Pancake Diner pt. 1

Hey everybody! This is a short story that I've been working on. It's not entirely edited yet, so I'll be posting them as they are written and processed.       

 Pancake Diner, by JD Galuardi

   The blinking fluorescent lights hummed in the 24-hour diner as the waitress put our pancakes on our table. She stood with her arms crossed, hip shifted, and weathered face contorted into a scrutinizing gaze. It was somewhere around three in the morning, so I didn’t blame her for staring at four teenagers ordering pancakes in the predawn hours. I would probably scrutinize us, too, given how my friends and I must have looked. Mark probably looked the worst out of us four. His thick and curly hair was all disheveled, his shirt covered in dirt and motor oil, and a line or two of blood running down the front of it. His face didn’t look too good, either. I’m not saying that he’s ugly or anything, but his face was pretty marred by the grapefruit-sized black eye he was sporting. He was sitting next to me, and he had begun to pick at his food.

          The waitress, Marge (I gathered this from the name tag attached to the pink and white uniform she wore), looked expectantly at Mark. He looked back up at her, and after several seconds she broke the silence.

          “Anything else?” Marge drawled in the most apathetic, non-committal voice I have ever heard from someone who wasn’t nineteen years old.

          “No, thanks. We’re good,” Mark replied in a tone a little too cheerful for a guy who, only a couple of hours ago, had been socked in the face by a Schwarzenegger-sized hype man. Marge made some sound close to a grunt, and walked away from us.

          “Dude, are you okay?” I asked Mark, eyeing the black and blue fist print stretched across his face.

          “Are you kidding? Mark’s a man now!” Cheered Dan, drawing the eye of Marge back to our table. Dan was a scrapper, wiry and compact. He still wore the shirt from the school carnival, despite it being at least two sizes too big for him. “I mean, how else can you explain him taking that kind of hit and not getting knocked out? He’s a man now!”

          “If being a man means getting pummeled, then why didn’t you fight George the Hype Man?”

          “Because, Nate, I’ve got asthma. If I fought him, I’d have probably had an asthma attack. I would’ve died if he went after me!”

          “I’m not sure if a reflexive punch counts as ‘going after’ someone, Dan,” chimed in Amber, who was giving the apparent majority of her attention to the food in front of her, dancing her fork around the edge of the plate. “And you didn’t seem too concerned with your asthma when you hit George in the first place.”

          “Well, I had to. If I didn’t, we were gonna lose the crowd, so I got the hype man.”

          “We still lost, though!” I replied. Dan just looked back at me as if I had simply agreed with him. That was kind of just the way that Dan worked, really. He didn’t hear things that went against him, and trying to get him to agree with you could be chalked up to a miracle. That’s something I learned quickly, so I didn’t press the issue. Instead, I shook my head and looked over at Mark.

          “I still can’t believe you can freestyle,” I commented, making a necessary topic change. Besides, it was still on my mind. Before today, Mark was a little quiet, but obviously an intelligent guy. He always had his homework done, and he was a big poetry buff, often filling his conversations with quotes from poets and philosophers. After the rap battle, I wasn’t all too sure what to think of Mark. For one thing, I’m pretty sure that I had never heard him curse before tonight, and I definitely had never seen him drink before tonight.

          “When were you going to tell us that you were so hood?” Dan chirped in.

          “I don’t think ‘hood’ is the right word for that statement,” added in Amber.

“Well, I’d personally use certifiable badass, but I think you get that title tonight, Amber.”

She looked back down at her pancakes. “Yeah, where did that come from?” Mark asked. We all leaned in, looking at Amber as if we expected her to actually accept that kind of direct prodding for personal information. It isn’t like she would never talk about herself or anything, she just never seemed to do it directly. She’d always slip bits of her background into casual conversation, leaving it up to the rest of us to piece together who exactly the red-haired, green-eyed girl we all hung out with really was. So, when we had confronted her so directly, we were all thrown for a loop when she blushed and barely murmured, “I used to take Judo classes in middle school.” As if realizing she had just explicitly given away her own exposition, Amber quickly went back to focusing on her pancakes. The rest of us just sat in silence as the significance of her words settled in.

See y'all next time!

DFTBA

July 7th, 2015 - The Gap

     Hey everybody! I made it back from Philmont alright (like a week ago but shhhh), and I had an awesome time and I can't wait until I go back! I'll probably talk about it more at some other time, but instead there's something else that I want to discuss.
     Having graduated high school more than a month ago, I find myself in this awkward interstitial time. While, yes, I am technically a college student now because I have my ID (and that's what makes it official), I'm in this weird place, and it almost feels like solitary confinement, even though I know that it really actually isn't, yes I've read studies on it and how horrible it is, but I digress. Most of my close friends that are also my yearmates aren't people that I typically text or communicate with through social media, but since our schedules and responsibilities have it so that we can't hang out every day all day. Mostly because we'd probably run out of things to do very quickly. This absence of social communication could -obviously- be easily solved by me communicating with my friends that aren't my year mates. Except for the GAP.... and no, not the clothing retailer. This Gap that I speak of is something that I've just come up with and will now explain.
     Normally, I could talk to my friends who were in younger grades of school because we were all in high school together, and so there was no barrier. Additionally, a majority of my friends that are still in high school are either in the marching band or the drama department, so one of the big things that we would normally talk about and the large focus of their life currently is an activity that I am no longer involved with, thus creating an awkward conversational Gap. Take, for example, my friend in marching band. She's really into band, and her new leadership position in the band has definitely made it an incredibly huge aspect of her life and her focus. Typically, we would hang out in band rehearsals, and all conversation and interaction would essentially revolve around marching band activities or related events. Now that I've graduated, we no longer hang out in those venues, and thus we no longer really talk. Never mind the fact that the year to year changes in the activity have already created a sort of alienating effect on the whole subject. So, I'll be bored or lonely, and I'll want to talk to someone, but I can't seem to talk to my band friend, because of this Gap. There's no current social event occurring to allow for non-planned interaction. To add to this, enough time has elapsed that at this point an attempt to establish a hang out or meet up would be something akin to "Oh my gosh I haven't seen you in forever, we need to get together!" which puts an unnecessarily awkward agenda into play. And besides all of this, what I am currently experiencing and the life events that I am going through are different enough that there really isn't a way for an empathetic interaction (i.e. we can't discuss how hard the music is for band, or how excited we are for the season, or things about next year in high school).
     This also works for those friends that I have who are a year ahead of me, and have returned from their first year of life outside of college. Take for example a friend of mine. He and I were in several classes together, had many shared experiences, and were all in all fairly good friends. However, he went to college last year, and now we barely talk, and its not as if I don't want to converse with him, but there's this distinct distance that has been created, that until we meet again face to face organically, can't really be resolved.
    Of course, I'm sure that you're saying to yourself (if you stuck with this post for this long, props by the way), "JD, what are you talking about? Just send them a message! Arrange a hangout! Geez!" You make a good point, that that might solve it, but there's something about a forced conversation that is imperative to remember: no one enjoys it. A forced conversation would more than likely increase the proverbial distance, and make future interaction even more difficult. Which would suck.
     Well, that's what I've been thinking about for the past day or so. Thanks for sticking through with me while I'm Stuck in Summer. Get it? Stuck in Summer, like the title for the blog? Ha. Sometimes I make myself... really question my sense of humor. I'll catch y'all and on the flip side (but seriously, the flip side of what?)
DFTBA
-JD G.