Episode 22: Guitar Zero (or: Throat of Fire)

This week has been exciting! I have gone to every class for the first time since the first week of classes, I have gotten all my homework done at least a day in advance, I have studied for all my tests and exams, and am making some serious headway on these bad grades that I am likely to still end up with by the end of the semester no matter how much dedication I seem to remember having had...

My throat is killing me, my head feels like stupid, my stomach moves about like it is doing the tango with my intestines, and I'm on Ibuprofen at nearly all hours of the day. But you know what? I feel great, overall. This is primarily because I'm awesome and am in love with this week. And also because I'm too cool to be too sick. Oh yeah.

This coming weekend I'm heading home for the first time since I've been back; I'm leaving Thursday after Acct and not looking back. Until I remember that I left my razor or something here and turn around to get it (because apparently, and this is in no way an exaggeration, it is far too important for me to look awesome and clean-shaven at home, when I never bother even looking in a mirror at school).

Otherwise, the only real thing going on with me right now is I'm trying to enter this Guitar Hero II tournament at the end of the month; I recently started playing in little bits, again, and I've noticed that I've gotten much better at it. So we'll see how that goes.

All in all, so long as I keep dedicated and remain awesome (like my everlasting New Years resolution demands) I should maintain my chipper outlook on life here at Drake University.

PS: Frank Miller's 300 hits theatres in a few weekends. Eff Why Eye, it is going to be awesome.

Episode 21: Starting My Jr Year (or: A Half a Year of "Whoops!")

Starting this weekend - and fueled by conversations with some of Drake's "key" faculty members - I am now proud to say that I am going to be officially starting my Junior year of college here at Drake University. This is where you would normally cue the applause, folks.

First semester I wrote a script right when I got back on campus. This was bad, yet awesome. I had a lot of fun doing it and spent a lot of good, creative time with my older brother. But, at the same time, it was a poor choice because I really didn't focus on school for two-and-a-half weeks, right at the start, and I never really got invested in school... a video game franchise (the RPG "Xenosaga"), working at Toys R Us, and frequent dating seemed more important to me than school. And it showed, as I narrowly pulled out two passing grades that should have been failing grades.

So, this semester, I've pretty much spent the start trying to date some more and playing Guitar Hero 2, so I really haven't been invested in all my classes. Granted, 3 out of the 5 are in tip-top shape, so long as I don't drop the ball anywhere, but these other two...

So, since I know about the problems now as opposed to finding out that I'm failing two classes a week-and-a-half before the finals for those classes, (I'm not failing anything, now, mind you), I am really going to start taking school seriously again.

I've goofed off long enough; no more dating, no more Guitar Hero, no more random trips to random places at random times, no more shirking responsibilities, and maybe some more on campus activities to ground me firmly at Drake for the remainder of the semester.

I love it here too damn much to fail out, ever. And never because I was too busy being lazy instead of doing my work. Skyler Bartels never fails out of anything. And I am never, ever wrong in that prediction.

Episode 20: Skyler: Live! (or: Skyler: Depressed!)

Well, I survived the long, half-boring road trip to Florida with my brother; I left from the Writer's Night to Omaha, NE and stayed overnight there, then I got up and came back here because - believe it or not - I forgot to turn in homework. So, having done that, my brother and I took off for the southern part of the country.

We saw lots of road, I slept a lot, and I read a great book called The Rules of Attraction. It is way better than the movie.

We got to Florida late-ish on Saturday night then I got up and was on airplanes all morning on Sunday, then I drove two hours to get here, did a lot of homework, and had some really great sleep. It was fairly awesome.

Now I'm trying to get through this book called The Dark Tower... I'm only on the first one, but I can already tell I'm either gonna love or hate it.

Otherwise, in an attempt to be as vague as possible, I have been disappointed far too many times by a [vagueness here] to even care enough to try and [vagueness here], and really, I just [vagueness here] with [too crude to post] and half a [too gross] green apple dipped in [too horrible] with all the [*bleep!*] and Mr. Aaron Jaco.

This has left me rather depressed-ish.

I'll get over it, but I'm tired of doing all the work when it comes to [vagueness here], so I'm just done doing all the work.

The
End

PS: I promise something lighthearted next time. Maybe.

Episode 19: Califlorida (or: Alli-date-or)

Two quick posts combined = This post. Ok, let's go.

First, this weekend my older, med-school brother is going to Orlando, FL for his next medical rotation. But, since he's going to be there about a month, he's driving instead of flying and renting a car. I volunteered to accompany him. So, now, Thursday night (after Drake's Writers Night, which I'm going to, no matter what, and so should you!) I'm driving to Omaha, NE and then going straight from there to Florida on Friday morning.

Then, Sunday afternoon, I'm flying back from Orlando to Omaha and then! driving back to Des Moines to go to sleep for the first time all weekend.

Rest assured, I will not be drawing pictures and/or posting drawn pictures of the trip.

Second, I came up with an idea for an extreme dating reality show for Fox; 12 men try to court 1 woman out on the bayou. The challenge? You have to do your best to keep the woman pleased with you, even if that means lying to her face and altering your own personality. The reason for this life-altering?

If you don't get selected to make it to next week, they feed you to one of the alligators.

This happens until only one man is left. The show would be called:

Alli-date-or.

THE
END

Episode 18: Existential Quandary (or: GoldenEye is Cool and has Tanks)

I had what is known throughout history as an "identity crisis," only mine was of monumental proportions. But, I can not start this story here. Come along, gentle reader, and take a trip back in time with me... back, to a different time; a time of happiness, a time of laughter, a time... of joy...

It was yesterday afternoon and my friend Aaron and I had decided that we would head over to Blues on Grand to see Frank Bang (awesome blues guitarist) instead of doing the other things we had eached planned to do individually (Aaron: Nothing/Skyler: More Nothing). Rest assured, jokes were made, good times were had, and the concert was a blast (seriously, the guitarist, Frank Bang... fantastical. He did a really good live cover of Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks," although since it was a concert, I suppose you already knew it would be a live cover. Wow, I must come off assuming everyone is stupid...). We came back, at some quick food, made some more jokes and ran into some people here or there, and then we went to bed.

I had made plans for Saturday night, but decided to try to change them to see this show, so instead of an all-night World of Warcraft run (yes, I play. Leave a comment and call me a nerd. Try to be creative, though. I've pretty much heard it all by this point...), I was going to get up early to have me some Horde adventures.

My clock went off at 7AM and I shot right up. And this, dear friend, is when my... bizarre occurence... eh, occured (Talk about redundancy... I'm a great English major, huh?).

Sitting up, I was so out of it from such a heavy night cram-packed with blues, that I could only think about one overly grand concept: One's identity. Only, it was more... like a question, as in... "Am I really Skyler Bartels, and what are the ramifications of being me?"

I really don't remember much, as I was so dazed upon waking up, aside from having my barely-active mind blown at the thought of being Skyler Bartels. Not in an awe-stricken sense... well, yes. In an awe-stricken sense. But rather than "YEAH! I'M AWESOME!" it was more or a seriously-toned "How does one have an identity?!"

The only thing I really remember doing about these vauge thoughts was getting out of bed, saying aloud to myself "Who am I?!" and shutting my alarm clock off. Then going back to bed.

I don't really remember much else, aside from that. Later I played about 5-6 hours of World of Warcraft, ate some dinner, did some homework, and watched GoldenEye on DVD. So, I will leave you with two questions:

1) How does one deal with the topic of who he is based on self-inspection and discovery? Can a man ever truely understand his identity and his self?

2) How did James Bond, who was in a tank behind a fast-moving train, manage to be in front of the train in said tank, dozens of miles down the rails, if the train was moving its standard speed and the tank was going at a snail's crawl?!

Episode 17: New Black Socks (or: LOST!)

I feel great today, and - for once - I know exactly why. But rather than just describe why to you in boring words, I figure I can probably use these newly discovered pieces of art done by the late, great Leonardo da Vinci. So, without further ado:

The "Now" is Awesome
The Skyler Bartels Story
With illustrations by:
Leonardo da Vinci

1) Black Socks
I love black socks so much, that if I told you, you wouldn't believe it. So, instead of telling you, I'll illustrate for you how much I love them. Or, to be more accurate, this picture drawn and painted by the marvel of a man known as da Vinci will illustrate it for you:

I find black socks give the illusion of added warmth for some reason and, obviously, da Vinci agrees. Over the past few years, my collection of black socks has diminished, either to the socks getting holes, washers and dryers eating them (potentially for the socks' souls or courage, although studies on this have been inconclusive thus far...), etc. But, this past weekend I replenished by supply with newer, tighter socks that really give me that extra "WARM" feeling.


2) "Children of Men"
Over the past weekend my family and I saw about 900 billion movies, and one of them was this fantastic movie called "Children of Men." But rather than even mention the story to you, I'll let this painting found in da Vinci's notebook do all the talking:

This painting was called "Self Portrait After Having Clive Owen BLOW MY MIND in 'Children of Men'" and I think his expression and approval is really all that is necessary; If it's good enough for da Vinci, it should be good enough for me and you.

3) New LOST this Wednesday!
The art, history, and television world was most astounded by this picture, however. It's of da Vinci's vitruvian man, or at least a different version of said work:

It appears to be an older version, to be sure, and not the one we're most used to seeing, but bares a striking resemblance to the virtuvian man we all recognize. If you look closely at the man's face, though, you'll see a couple of differences.

A) The face is clearly of Jack Shephard, from ABC's hit drama, "LOST" (Wed, 9/10pm), and
B) da Vinci seems to love said character.

So, there you have it. As we get farther and farther into the week, I'm sure I'll start to feel like I no longer care for anything, but as it stands now, school, life, friends, and fun all seem to be clicking. Which is awesome.

But, all in all, I'm just really excited that these new pieces of Leonardo da Vinci art worked so well with this post. Really excited and... really confused...

Episode 16: TD Features Featuring: Skyler! (or: Paper Conundrum)

So I managed today to finally get my hands on this past Thursday's printing of the Drake University-made school newspaper, the Times Delphic which just so happens to feature an article written by me (that's a looooooooong sentence. Wow).

The article I wrote is about the new Ultimate Frisbee team and their exploits so far in becoming both a functioning group and an official Drake recognized organization. I thought I did a fine job doing the interview and writing up the article.

Writing articles for school papers is nothing new to me, as I wrote each month for my high school paper, but those were editorials where I, basically, said whatever the heck I felt like saying (within school parameters and rules and guidelines which, apparently, I still have issues dealing with today...). These are journalistic reports on events and activities around the school, here. Slightly different.

Back in high school, though, I was supposed to get my articles OK'd by the administration (since all I seemed to do was write on controversial topics that ended up coming down pretty hard on the entire student body), but after the first one was censored so heavily, I just lied and said that they had read them and OK'd them, then they ran that month.

While this was lying and cheating, I figured it was fine since later the administration would approach me and tell me how much they loved the article and how it was the only thing in the paper they read. They had apparently forgotten about their duties completely, it had seemed.

So, in the end, the only thing that happened to my article was the teacher of my journalism class fixing grammar and spelling mistakes and making sure everything was accurate as far as information. Then it was printed, more or less, exactly how I wrote it.

The Times Delphic article I wrote, though, is slightly different. While for the most part it is the article I wrote, there are some differences here and there... A few rewordings, some parts left out, a title that I didn't give it, some things added or moved about... So, in the end, while the majority of the article is what I produced, the final product is just a touch different.

And I'm not complaining in the least, to be sure. Its not like they removed some part I had put in there about how the Ultimate Frisbee team were some racist or sexist jerks or anything like that (which they aren't! I'm just saying, for example!!!! NO ONE SHOOT ME! I HAVE SO MUCH TO LIVE FOR!), and I'm not really journalistic writing material, as I'm a fiction writer and like to make stuff up, primarily. So tuning my article into something they can print is perfectly OK by me.

But its just interesting to see my name attached to something that wasn't created by just my hand. Its a falsification, any way you look at it. A small one? Sure, but a falsification nonetheless. And, like I said, it doesn't upset me at all, because they are editors and stuff, but... It just makes me fear for the future of all my writing and what an editor will be for me if I ever become a novelist or something. Will any work I try to publish or produce for the masses ever be mine alone? Will someone else always have a hand in making my creations ready for the world?

In talking to my mother about this fact, I came to the realization that so very few people ever have 100% say in what their creations are in the final product. Even though my parents were the ones that created me, at 21 years of age, I'm a man that has been shaped by much more than just his parents. The entire world around me and all its people are to blame for my reaction to everything and how I've responded in my growth.

So, again, while not upset about how the article turned out, it has made me wonder about the creation of all things and how we can only create with our intent, but it is the input of the many that helps us present.