Bad Thoughts

So I was scouring YouTube this morning, watching dogs do tricks and news blooper reels and the Unforgivable series, and I came across this video provided by a group known as the "Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice". I watched it, and it instantly won my sentiment.

The Scholars are an organization of professors, electrical engineers, aeronautical engineers, firemen, families of 9/11 victims, demolition experts, and thousands of others who've dedicated their time to finding and providing the world with a concrete explanation for exactly why things happened the way they did on 9/11.

Anyway, I sat for about 90 minutes and watched every video they'd posted and noticed that the group had gone from questioning the vague, myth-like account the government provided to uncovering evidence suggesting that the government masterminded the attacks.

In several videos, there's compelling footage supporting statements that the Trade Center was downed by a chemically-aided controlled demolition. Advocates provided actual debris from Ground Zero coated with substance known as thermate, which can heat to temperatures of over 4000 degrees Fahrenheit. Compelling stuff. They also provide testimony from administrative aides claiming that VP Cheney refused to order the plane that crashed into the Pentagon to be shot down. Finally, they've compiled hoards of first-hand accounts from reporters and NYC firefighters that compared the collapse of the towers to a demolition.

Sitting back and considering the possibility that our government, acting in accordance with an illicit financial and political agenda, possibly planned an attack that killed 3000 of its own citizens is numbing. But the more I think about it and our nation's history of back-door dealings, the capability is there. This is a nation founded on the genocide of over 15 million Native Americans, where Japanese citizens and immigrants were brazenly incarcerated simply because of their nationality, where government health officials used sharecroppers as guinea pigs for syphilis experiments , where the public deaths of JFK and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X still lack hard evidence, where the government provides guns to Nicaraguan rebels and profits from their drug trafficking, and where the government funnels cocaine into inner cities.

All of these things have one thing in common: the lack of any substantial explanation by the government. That's the only reason conspiracy theorists exist, because they're bold enough to challenge the commonly accepted stories that are all to often incoherent and nonsensical.

I don't really know if I believe the government executed 9/11. What I do know is that until they provide a cogent reason for why two 110-story steel towers melted, collapsed, and disintegrated (and where on earth the remains of those jets are), I can't believe that they didn't do it.

Time Flies

When you get to camp, the first week is always the longest, most drawn-out, awkward, seemingly endless seven days you'll ever spend in your life. You get there and it takes hours to unpack - clothes, shoes, toiletries, little idiosyncratic relics that you bring to try and give your room some semblance of the one you left at home - and then another handful of hours to get settled. You have to get used to the people there; not only their physical presence but the thought of them, the thought of them showering in your shower, using your toilet, brushing their teeth in your sink. Moving into a dorm is natural selection on steroids, a pressure cooker of adaptation. Those who adjust will enjoy their five weeks immensely, those who can't find a comfort zone will be relegated to many a night alone reading in their room while their roommate produces improvisational music videos in the lobby.

But you get through it. The next three weeks will be euphoric. You'll laugh endlessly at recurring jokes. You'll make ceremonial trips to the local Chinese restaurant. You'll order the same thing every time. You'll eat with the same people. You'll stretch the rules. You'll jaywalk whenever possible. Curfew will come. You'll disregard it. You'll stay with someone in their room until even the instructors call it a night. You'll tiptoe back upstairs to your floor. You'll meet your friends. Now their more like family. You'll tiptoe back downstairs to raid the fridge. You'll tiptoe back upstairs and feast on your chilled prizes. You'll speak in code. You'll refer to campers and staff using short acronyms. You'll go to the beach. Way past operating hours, you'll take 7,000 pictures in the sand. You'll write on 35 Facebook walls a day. Some of the recipients will be in the room with you. You'll sing along to the same three songs every night. You'll tell yourself you'll do those interviews tomorrow. You'll climb up to the top bunk. You'll collapse onto the bed. Your roommate coughs and laughs as the dust lands on him. You'll talk about your late-night exploits. You'll laugh. You'll anticipate tomorrow. You'll say goodnight.

During the last week, time stretches out again. This will be the second-longest week of your life. You'll spend every moment possible with the people you've gotten closest to; those who you don't know very well get the rest of your time, visits and conversations you'll regret not having earlier and more often. You'll eat out together and, after the meal, just sit there talking, not wanting to leave because that would mean one more thing has ended and you, and time, have to move on to the next thing. You'll spend all your time on your floor in the common room; you'll brush your teeth there, wait for the shower there, read your pre-lecture material there. You'll stay up till 2 a.m. and talk with anyone who'll listen; about any and all things, sometimes about nothing at all. You'll spend the night in someone else's room, because even sleeping next to someone is spending time with them. You'll cherish every second of every day, as appreciative as a patient with a terminal illness. You'll watch the sunrise on that final day, with the people closest to you, and even if you can't actually see the sun, you were there and you stayed up for it. You check your cellphone every two minutes and watch helplessly as time inches forward and, in a juvenile bout of disbelief and denial, you'll close your eyes as hard as you can to try and stop it.

Then it's over.

Life As A Cherub

I just got home, after living at Northwestern University with 87 of my best friends for five weeks. It's painfully quiet at home. Nobody runs down the hallway, nobody blasts The Fugees at 1 a.m., nobody punches the wall after somebody else catches a flush on the river. My dog barks occasionally though.

As sappy and melodramatic as it sounds, I can genuinely say that I've never had such an earth-shatteringly profound experience in my 17 years of life. I walked into a situation where I was one of seven black people in a population of roughly 90. I walked into a situation in which I was a neophyte regarding the curriculum. I walked into a situation in which I, as a male, was outnumbered 3-1 by the opposite sex (something I managed to get through, of course). I walked into a situation in which I knew absolutely nobody. No one, not even loosely.

Living with people, complete strangers actually, is the definition of a leap of faith. You are trapped. With your roommate, you are trapped. People must recognize this at first and thus put forth a concerted effort to be pleasant and somewhat congenial. It's wildly interesting; it makes me wonder if my counselors weren't actually journalists at all. Maybe they were sociologists, and they studied us and our interactions (or lack thereof).

It doesn't take guys long to make acquaintances. There's the common ground we all share some expertise in - sports. On the first day, I argued baseball and the NBA Draft with people whose names I could barely remember for at least three hours. Sports really opened the door for me to develop 10-12 friendships. If there isn't anything interesting to talk about, talk about sports.

Now the ladies were a whole different animal. The first day a few valiant dames climbed the steps to the fourth floor and introduced themselves, but besides that the girls spent the first week as exotic birds or butterflies spend their lives at the zoo. "Look at her!" "Oooh, I wonder what they call that one!" "Don't say that to her, she'll bite." "I dare you to touch it!" "I've never seen one from there before."

An ice-breaker here and an arduous assignment there eliminated any reluctance remaining after the first couple days. At a group activity in which we'd rush to fill in the spaces in a human circle in order to avoid sharing personal details, I had to reveal my adolescent infidelity to about 100 students and instructors I didn't know 12 hours beforehand. For the next week, I was "the kid who cheated" and I was forced to tell my adulterous tale over and over and over.

Once you find your comfort zone in a land of former strangers, there is an incredible shift in your social consciousness. Wait, that's sounds way too Freudian. Never mind.

Okay, once you get comfortable around these people, you forget what home was like. The dorm becomes your home, in every sense of the word. You call it home, you do the things you did at your house. You forget about your friends and family. Who needs them? You have 87 new ones, and you are with them every hour of every day. The people you are really fond of become your new family. They are the people you eat with in the cafeteria every day. The people you tell things that, in all honesty, you probably wouldn't even tell your "family" back at "home". The people you loan money to. The people you sit next to during every lecture, in the exact same seat.

Ah, summer camp romance. It's puppy love, Balco-style. Everything moves at light speed. Especially when there are three girls for every guy. Competition is a beautiful thing, nature's gift to the desired. As a guy, you felt like the good pieces of fruit at the grocery store. All these people combed through the bruised, degenerated produce at breakneck speed to get to me and the rest of the guys. Once someone finds you, it's painfully difficult not to abuse them as they bask in their pride and show off "what they found". You can do no wrong, the girl becomes the aggressor and she has her way with you, her prize. Of course there were exceptions; guys shadowing their "cherub hookup" across every square foot of Evanston, not wanting to waste one second of those precious 38 days by being alone.

But back to my POV, the unusual one sprouting from an estrogen-heavy environment.

Being found isn't even half the fun. It's being protected that's the interesting part. Sometimes, girls would do things for you just to keep your attention, to keep you interested in her and not in her roommate, or the girl down the hall, or the girl in your group, or the girl who sat next to you in class last night. It was a beautiful thing.

No matter how many times you and the person who found you try to deny it, attachment happens. Why do you think you sit next to her in class, at the cafeteria, spend more time in her room than yours? You've fallen for her. Your four week relationship will be at the same stage a normal four month relationship is. You spend 14 hours a day together and, if you are me, have gotten closer emotionally and intellectually than you'd ever intended. The leap of faith will pay off.

Like The Plague

About two weeks ago, the front page of every newspaper and the feature story of every news broadcast in the city of Chicago centered around a surprise 17 years in the making. Cicadas, nature's fine wine aged to perfection, were about to make their grand entrance.

There were cicada recipes, cicada t-shirts, cicada forest reserve viewing tours, cicada information sessions at Lincoln Park Zoo and the Field Museum. Pictures captured jubilant youngsters smiling from ear to ear as they held one of the little red-eyed critters in their palms. All was well and, being 17 years old myself, I was admittedly as excited as the rest of the city's adolescent population to see the cicadas for the first time. But that was two weeks ago.

I've spent the majority of the ensuing days sweeping up dead bodies, decaying exoskeletons, wings, antennae, and legs, scraping "cicada juice" off of my sneakers, and washing sea gulls' (who apparently are happier than a kid in a candy store to see the cicadas arrive) crap off of my car. I feel deceived, hoodwinked, bamboozled, flim-flammed. This isn't a visit, as the Tribune so often liked to call it as they monitored the days left on their "Cicada Countdown". It's an infestation.

Unlike most of the city, my neighborhood, Morgan Park, features a gallery of parks and spacious, green lots. It was a suburb until the '50s. It also is the cicada capital of Chicago. I've read reports that in the Dan Ryan Woods, a forest preserve about two miles north of my house, there've been estimates of over 5 million cicadas per acre.

They don't bite or sting, they aren't aggressive, and they live a miserable life above ground - which consists of 6 weeks spent mating, laying eggs, getting stepped on, and getting eaten by everything from dogs to sea gulls. But they spend every waking hour of their time here singing mating calls in unison. It's a mind-numbing harmony akin to a million rattlesnakes shaking their tails and that noise being amplified by a sound system at Lollapolooza, a sound system that doesn't go off. It's irritation in surround-sound.

I guess the rant stops here, my mom just found another cicada in the kitchen.

Disaster at The Friendly Confines

I go to school on the North Side of Chicago. I'm a rabid White Sox fan. This weekend was a travesty, a disaster with ramifications lasting until the Cubbies come down South during the summer's second round of interleague baseball.

Derrek Lee set me and millions of other fans of the Good Guys up for 6 weeks of disappointment, anticipation, angst, and irritation. Coworker a Cubs fan? It's going to be a long day at the office. Lovable Losers in the family? Stratch them off the list of guests to your next barbecue. Personally, I'm going to excommunicate any and all schoolmates from my life if they are Cubs fans. It's not personal or anything, it's just a way to cope with the pain. You know?

The Crosstown Classic, as the media has dubbed it, (as cliche as it sounds) is more than just baseball. Especially after my beloved White Sox won the World Series in 2005, the Cubs-Sox games are about regional pride, bragging rights, everything but baseball. In the inevitable arguments that North Siders and South Siders have, it's too easy to just say "2005" to a Cubs fan. That takes the fun out of it. This series is the catalyst for a year's worth of debate. Winning both of these series gives you hollow-point bullets for ammo - there's nothing a Cubs fan can say to counter.

Now the pressure is on the South Siders. Though they salvaged the series and avoided a catastrophic sweep, this weekend at Wrigley Field was indescribably painful. Boone Logan better lay low for a few days.

Unimaginable

A couple of days ago, about 10 minutes from my own home on the south side of Chicago, 4 students were shot on a CTA bus. One, Blair Holt of Percy L. Julian High School, died.

I heard about the incident later on that night and I can honestly say that the news hurt me, regardless of the fact that I had never met any of the victims. But, for some reason, I felt some sort of emotional connection to this kids. Maybe it was because they were young, black high school students like myself. Or that I knew several kids who attended Julian High School. Could've been the shooting's close proximity to my neighborhood.I don't know. All I do know is that all I've thought about over the past week is this senseless, disgusting act.

The Chicago Tribune featured the only fatality's, Blair Holt, devastated parents as the top story the next day. His mom was a fire chief, and his father a cop. Holt was an only child and an honor student, consciously avoiding the ills plaguiing his society. He was outgoing and popular and, at 17, in the prime of his adolescence.

In what kind of time do we live when students can't even let down their guard on the bus? After a long day at school attempting to learn, Holt couldn't even catch a break on the ride home. I know he's going to be labeled a hero in the coming weeks, with crowded funeral services and a gang of t-shirts bearing his likeness, but I don't think he's a hero. Celebration has no place in a situation like this. Blair was a victim, a tragic one, and more questions and change need to raised than anything.