Hi Again

This is a blog post. Specifically: this is a blog post that I have written after a long time without having written a blog post.

What happens when you write something like this after not writing things like this is that you end up with something really messy and awkward. Like a baby taking its first steps, except this baby already learned how to walk. So maybe it's more like a baby taking its first steps, walking for a while, deciding to take a break from walking, and then walking again. God, baby. Why you been slacking so long?

I should also probably mention that I'm not going to edit or proofread this post.

I usually do do that. I go back and look at words or sentences that don't quite work the way that I want them to. And then I fix them or put different words in their place. Nobody usually notices this, but they definitely do notice when I don't.

Actually, I have no idea. It's maybe been about three years since someone actually said that to me. So maybe people just think it instead.

I tried to write a post earlier. In fact, I have it saved as a draft. It is a sad, apologetic post masquerading as a triumphant, inspirational one. I haven't even looked at it since I tried to write it about a month ago. Sometimes you just know that certain things aren't worth revisiting or fixing.

And sometimes you know when to stop talking.

Here's something I wrote during my absence. Actually, I didn't really write it; I said it out loud and my phone dictated it. I wasn't sure what to do with it, but now I think I'll put it here. This is what it said:

When I was a baby, I would shit my pants. It's not something that I'm proud of. And it's not something that I do now. But it was something that I had to do – something I had to do so that I wouldn't shit my pants when I was older. So I used to shit my pants. And that was a necessary thing.

Anyway, hi again.

The Giant Walgreens Moment

Was at the giant Walgreens in downtown Chicago a week or two ago. The one with multiple stories, a sushi bar, and literal conveyer belts of wine bottles.

Went to the pharmacy. There was a big fancy camera and a light. One of the ones with an umbrella-looking thing over it, like they'd have on school picture day. The pharmacist told me that they were doing a photo shoot for their website. We made small talk.

Waited for my prescription in the lounge area. Watched the professional models pose holding prescription bags, pretending to use the self-serve touch screens, pretending to walk while they awkwardly stood, one leg a little too far from the other. Then they all came to the lounge area, too.

Had a moment where I realized that I was the only non-Walgreens-pharmacy-model sitting in that lounge. That's when I felt very out of place. Like I had accidentally wandered into an alternate universe or a catalog.

They didn't have my prescription in stock.

The Mimes and Writing

Went to the mime show yesterday night. I've written a lot about the Baker's Dozen Mime Troupe (here's every post I've ever written with the word "mime" in it), but if you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll leave it at this: I was a mime in high school. Thanks to over forty years of history and a number of students who tended toward subversiveness, The Baker's Dozen managed to become an institution at our football-obsessed suburban high school.

Okay. So explaining the thing tends to raise more questions than answers. Before I dig myself any further in this hole, I'll just say this: the mime show was a lot of fun.

One of the neat things about The Baker's Dozen is the group – all high school students – write the show on their own. There's the potential there for disaster (and every now and then there are consequences, from skits that are a little too edgy for high school to ones that just flat-out suck), but thanks to a voting process by the troupe, the shows always turn out well.

And the stuff they write. Man.

One skit was about a t-rex who had trouble fitting into society. Another followed a twisted version of The Brady Bunch, who took to incest and eating their pet dog. My favorite was about a guy who was never detached from his mother's umbilical cord.

You could tell the crowd was loving it. There were all sorts of whoops, cheers, hollers, guffaws, and other verbs that would be more fitting at a West Virginian hootenanny. But what really got my attention was that the mimes – that they were loving it too.

The Baker's Dozen is part of the reason I decided to focus my academic career on writing and storytelling. I loved writing skits for that group. There's something indescribably satisfying about seeing a room of a couple hundred people just roar at something that popped in your head while you were taking a poop.

I'm in the last few legs of my degree. I've encountered more than a few folks – teachers and students alike – who seem to go out of their way to suck the fun out of this silly thing called storytelling. They have a valid point – that writing can't always be buckets of fun – but they take that axiom to its extreme. These are people that seem to take pleasure in squashing fun and exciting ideas. The furrow their brows at bizarre but imaginative concepts, are too preoccupied with the business side of things, try to make your stories fit into self-concocted "rules" of writing.

I've had a hard time with writing the past month or two. Hence the lack of posts. For a while, I wasn't entirely sure of why that was. And then I went to the mime show and saw all that joy.

And then I thought: oh shit. I let the fun-squashers get inside my head.


I'll say it again, because it's important: writing is not always fun. But if it's never fun – or even mostly-not fun – then something is wrong. If that's the case, then maybe you're listening to the wrong people.

I realize that that's not the only explanation – but it's one that seems to really resonate with me at this particular moment.

This is not all about money, brilliance, or pleasing other people. There is a time and place for those things, I think, but they're fleeting.

In the meantime, keep things fun for yourself. Don't make this harder than it needs to be.

Running Down The Hallway

I don't usually post emails that I've written on this thing, but I feel like this would be a good way to get out of the block I've been in lately. And plus, there's a story behind this.

Tutoring at 826 CHI caused a really awesome memory of kindergarten to resurface. I thought that my kindergarten teacher would appreciate it. The problem, though, was that she didn't teach at my elementary school any longer. On top of that, her name – Mrs. Johnson – made her kind of difficult to find. After exchanging some (really lovely) emails with my former principal and a couple of teachers from back in the day, I finally got ahold of her. This is the email I sent.

Hi Mrs. Johnson, 

This is Thomas Matysik. I was one of your kindergarten students from '95 to '96. One of your old progress reports that I found going through old papers described me as a student who was a good reader/writer with a sense of humor and a tendency to be a little too sensitive for his own good. Not much has changed.  

Anyway, I tutor K-12 students at this place in Chicago called 826CHI. That's where this old memory of kindergarten I had resurfaced. It got me smiling, so I figured that I'd share it with you. (Thank Mrs. Kellogg for providing me with your email address.) 

So: it was the last day of kindergarten. The class had just finished watching the sixth grade talent show, and I'd decided that I had to do something for it once sixth grade rolled around – in fact, I started trying to figure out what I would do at that very moment. (I ultimately ended up singing a song about toast while drumming on a toaster, which cemented my reputation upon graduation as "the kid who sang a song about toast." It actually went pretty darn well.) 

But before I could get too much of an idea of what I wanted to do, something happened. 
Since we were the youngest – and shortest – we would always sit in the very front row, which meant that we were the first to leave at the end of assemblies. So the hallway was quiet, empty. And then you said something like this: 

"Tell you what. For the whole school year, we've been walking in a line, having to do body basics, having to be quiet. So let's run down the hallway! No line! But just one thing: you have to be totally quiet. No noise at all. Can you do that?"
And we all got really excited about this. 

"Ready? GO!!!" 

And we just took off running down the hallway. We were waving our hands, our mouths wide open in big smiles. Our faces made us look like we were all screaming on a roller coaster – except, of course, that we were totally silent.  

Long story short: it was totally awesome. Then, to top it all off, we all had Popsicles. 

I remember other things about kindergarten – all the songs we learned came to mind. One was a jazzy song about Goldilocks and the Three Bears, which I don't remember the lyrics to, aside from the fact that it ended with scat singing. And Baby Beluga, which Brittany Johnson (whom I'm still friends with!) and I tried to remember the words to not that long ago. 
But the running down the hallway thing – I think that was my all-time favorite elementary school memory. And I just wanted to thank you for that.  

Hope all is going well. Thanks again!

Ten Years

As of this very time today, this blog is ten years old.

That's a big deal to me. It means that I'm getting to a point where I'll have maintained this blog for the majority of my life. That's weird on a number of levels.

I've probably mentioned this before, but in case you didn't know: I started this blog when I was in sixth grade. I came across this site service called Blogger (before it was bought out by Google) and thought it sounded neat. My original intention was to write a fictionalized blog – short stories based on things that'd happened to me – but that fell through. And so this started instead.

The first post linked to this Flash animation about getting drunk and going to Heaven. Back in the day, it seemed brilliant, subversive, and technically impressive. Nowadays, it seems primitive and amateurish, albeit not without its charm. (Sort of like those early posts.) It's still cute, but in the era of hours and hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, it's lost just a bit of its luster.

My original intention for celebrating ten years of blogging was to go through the archives of this blog and write a post about each year. I decided against that, mostly because of time constraints and school. But maybe one day that'll happen. And maybe one day I'll come across this post about going through old posts. And I'll go: "Oh. That's weird."

Anyway. Thanks for reading. Here's to another ten years.