Conor - Hard Work or Boy, Achieving My Hopes and Dreams Is Turning Out To Be More Of A Hassle Than I Thought It Was Going To Be!

That's me up there. I'm taking a class in looking disheveled, yet simultaneously sophisticated. And drinking what appears to be fatal amounts of coffee.

Heads up everyone REAL TALK.

As you all know, I've been dabbing in the sport of Ultimate Frisbee as of late. One would assume by the amount of time I've spent talking about it that I would be good at it, but alas. This is not necessarily the case. The past 2 weeks there have been tryouts for the A-Team, the elite squad we send to tournaments and what have you to represent us, and last night I was informed that I didn't make the cut. This bothered me for a while, and hey, I mean it still bums me out a little bit, but that's not what this post is about.

I failed to achieve a goal I had been aiming for, and I think that might be the best thing that could've happened to me.

Upon first hearing that I didn't make the cut, I looked at the list of who did make it, found the members who I believed myself to be better than, and cursed their names, aiming all my frustration and disappointment at their unworthy souls. I was at a party so I then drank more than I'm used to drinking, decided that my failure would make wonderful inspiration for song, and left the party to go to a practice room and play piano. Immediately after leaving the house I made several wrong turns and ended up far away from where I intended to go. By the time I made it back to campus I was tired and no longer wanted to play music, so I went to bed instead.

A quick note to Laurie and Dennis O'Brien: Mom and Dad, work with me here. You're not my audience and I try to ignore that you read this, but the rest of this post should redeem myself, so stop planning how to awkwardly advise me not to do that again the next time I call you.

Anyway so I was pretty bummed out for the first half of today and just moped around for several hours. Eventually my train of thought led me to a couple of topics.

How many times have I actually, 100% applied myself? The answer is extremely, extremely rarely. By the time I'm giving my all to a project, it's often too late to realize it's full potential. For instance, I would routinely devote the 20 hours before an improv show to quickly throwing everything together with the rest of the troupe and trying my best to make sure things went all right, and they pretty much always did, but what if I had started planning weeks in advance? What if those fliers I always naively believed I could make happen actually did happen? What if I had remembered to get a cash box so we could make change when the audience showed up? Band Practice gigs were usually preceded by 4 or 5 hours of intense practicing. What if I had made time to do that 2 or 3 days before? I can make excuses for all these things, say I was busy, and I was busy, but the fact is I didn't really give it my all.

I don't super regret the way I did things. Thanks to the people I worked with and pure dumb lucky, everything always worked itself out, but I have to realize that this won't always be the case.

I didn't make the A Team and that's making me attempt, at least, to change my ways. I have something to prove right now. So I'm working. I went to conditioning and only 4 other people showed up, but we ran anyway. I wasn't running because I like running. Running is stupid dumb. People who run track and shit are insane, and I will never feel 100% comfortable around them, because no reasonable person will ever enjoy doing that. I was running because if I run I'll get faster. If I'm faster I'll be able to cut harder and get to where I need to be on the frisbee field. If I can do that, if I can get open more often, I'll be a better handler. If I'm a better handler I'll play more ultimate and better ultimate. I love ultimate, so that's what I want. So I'll keep running. Maybe if I had made the A Team I'd have rested today, but I didn't, so I didn't. I went out there and ran. I'm going to have to work, but I guess that's not the worst thing that could happen to a guy.

This doesn't only apply to ultimate. A couple of weeks ago Mada was telling me about some of the local bands she's seen in Champaign, she put a certain emphasis on saying they were "actually good." When I joking/not joking protested that Band Practice was good, she said "you guys were basically the best band in Springfield, isn't that kind of sad?" or something along those lines. That was pretty lame. I would like to think that we make good music, not just "good for us" music, if you know what I mean, but it's not like we were pushed very far as a group. I'm not saying there was no competition or anything, but there was no real drive to become constantly better. Our goal was to make good music, and I think we did, but we should have tried harder, gone farther.

I've spent several hours at piano today, and a couple more listening and talking about my favorite music with friends. I played several of the pieces I've already written in different ways. I took away sections that I had settled for in the past, and tried to find new ways to do what I want to do. I watched a Wilco documentary last year, and one of the band members said something that I've always found really cool. He said that when they come up with a new song, the first thing they do is tear it apart, and get rid of all the details. They leave only the skeleton standing, and then decorate as many ways as they can. I write a song, go "oh that's cool!" and leave it as is. It's time to cut that bullshit out.

College is meant to teach me how to get where I want to be, right? I think I've taken the first step today. I know I won't always be as inspired as I am right now, but this isn't something I'll forget terribly quickly. I'm happy right now. I think this is going to pay off. Life's hard to do right, so I'm trying to balls up as soon as possible and continue barreling on towards my ultimate goal of being the very best. The best there ever was.

But first, Mario Kart.