Bonus Features On A Blog? Innovative!

Every time I log into the Blogger dashboard, it tells me how many posts I have, but it also includes unpublished drafts in that number, so I know that I don't actually have that many posts available for viewing on my blog. Today, I decided to check and see how many unpublished drafts I actually have, and upon inspection, I concluded that the total is four. I was about to delete these drafts so the post count upon login would no longer be lying to me, but I started going through them to see what I had written. I then realized that it would be a terrible shame to throw away all that work just because each draft belonged to an overarching idea or theme that I ultimately decided against using for whatever reason, and thus, today's blog idea was born. The following is a collection of the material that I opted not to use, the "deleted scenes," if you will, and frankly, I don't even remember what I was talking about when I initially wrote most of it, so if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, that's why. This isn't going to be a terribly well thought-out blog, just a collection of some of the unwritten things that I was thinking during the Spring 2009 semester at Liberty. For my small contingency of readers, hopefully you'll enjoy it.

The first entry in my deleted scenes blog came from a draft entitled "If You Give A Grad Student A Cookie..." that I had written on April 21, 2009:

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day,

Profound. I can't imagine why I didn't follow this up with anything else at all. I believe I was about to go on a rant about how I hate hearing that breakfast "jump-starts your metabolism," because that phrase is so dang hackneyed, but I guess I didn't have the heart. Also, I believe this was written the day after one of my graduate work-induced meltdowns, during which the cookies I had procured from the Clubhouse on the previous night basically preserved my sanity, so I think that's the connection to the cookie mentioned in the title. This nice girl who worked at the grill had given the cookies to me... I wish I could remember her name... oh well. I'm sure she's doing just fine for herself these days.

The next entry comes from a draft titled "Reflections on an Easter Weekend." If you take note, this phrase is properly capitalized in accordance with the rules for such things, so this must have been written before I adopted the practice of disregarding English rules and capitalizing every word of my titles no matter what. I don't know when I started doing that, but it must have been before April 13, 2009:

You may have noticed that every Wednesday for the last three weeks, I've posted a new blog. Well, this week I'll probably be too busy on Wednesday night to get around to that (ah grad school, how I love thee), so I figured I'd put this up tonight to tide my regular readers over for the week. I don't have anything very insightful or even of real significance to say; if you haven't noticed, usually my inspiration comes from frustrating interactions with females, and most of the girls I hang out with on a regular basis have been out of town for Easter, so I haven't really seen them since Thursday. At any rate, even though I don't have any kind of grandiose overarching point, I do have an urge to just sit and throw down some of the stuff that's been swimming around in my head the past few days.

Let's start with the Easter holiday that has erroneously been dubbed "Easter Break" at Liberty University. First of all, it's not a "break." It's a day off. One freaking day off. We get Monday off (and, for the record, this was a tradition enacted in 2007; prior to that year we Liberty students got no days off for Easter), and people commonly wonder why we get the Monday after Easter off as opposed to Good Friday. The answer is simple: having Monday off, everyone who went home for Easter can stay through the entirety of Easter Sunday and then leave on Monday. This brings me to my second point, which is actually a question: why would you want to leave Liberty at Easter time? I understand that Easter is an important holiday for Christians and that people like to spend it with their families (I too enjoy Easter with my family, when I'm already home), but in all honesty, Easter weekend is traditionally one of the best weekends of the year at Liberty. It makes absolutely no sense to me to spend money to go home so you can miss out on the experience. Maybe the experience isn't the same for everyone, maybe it's just my particular group of friends and the way we celebrate that makes it so awesome. I don't know, I suppose this particular dead horse has already received a sound beating, so I will go no further, I guess I just feel sorry for everyone who misses out on the Easter festivities held by those of us carrying on the 22-3 Legacy.

Speaking of Easter festivities, this year was no exception to the general rule of awesomeness. For starters, Ryan came up from Florida, and I haven't seen Ryan since early December, so it's been over four months. Andrew Clark has been back from Ohio for the last two weeks, so he was here to join in the fun. Danny Latin, Aaron Crawford, and I are all still students at Liberty, so the only people missing from the Golden Age of 22-3 were Jamie and Sean, both of whom are fully entrenched in the working world now.

As you can see, even then I acknowledged the tribulations of dealing with women as the lifeblood of my blogging career, and I recall being very annoyed that they all bailed on us for Easter, but I think just the sheer enormity of the task of describing what happened that weekend deterred me from finishing; either that or something Ian and Milton were doing in the room distracted me and I never got back to it.

The next excerpt truly is a bit off the cutting room floor, as it's part of an early version of the post I ended up writing about the differences between the worldviews of the Watchmen characters Rorschach and The Comedian. While I ultimately took a different approach to the post as a whole than the one I had chosen upon starting it, this small bit, written on March 29, 09, is still applicable:

On the ride back from lunch today, after considering the number of cars the average American family has (which, in my estimation, is roughly one per person and, in my mind, is also absolutely ridiculous), I noted an exchange from Watchmen, wherein Nite Owl wonders aloud what happened to the American Dream, and The Comedian responds, in the face of a chaotic New York cityscape, "It came true. You're looking at it." Following this seemingly random (but actually calculated) excerpt, one of the females in the car asked who spoke that particular line, and after I told her, the other female (who had seen the movie) said "Ooh, he was AWFUL! I didn't like him!" I briefly described The Comedian's worldview, and after hearing my description, the first girl said "That's a sad way to look at life. It sounds a lot like the way Bill looks at it."

My original introduction for this post felt clunky and much too direct for my liking, which is why I decided to postpone the idea until I had something better to go on, and I'm glad I did.

Speaking of directness though, I must have been following the same line of thinking that I espoused in this draft, the last of the deleted scenes:

A brief note on subtlety: if you want to get a message across, don't use it. I've found that people often don't want to think too much (which, I believe, is why some people don't like masterpieces like Watchmen or the Matrix Trilogy). As a result, they may hear exactly what it is you're saying, but won't understand precisely what you mean. I'm a big fan of ambiguity and double entendres used in such a manner that your words may mean more than just what they say. Unfortunately, sometimes the only way to make people understand what you're getting at is to bash them over the skull with it.

Interestingly, that short paragraph serves as a surprisingly appropriate appetizer for the main course du jour. Since I just stated that subtlety is generally lost on the masses, I'm gonna throw this out there for everyone to read, plain and simple: what I initially meant in that first paragraph was that sometimes I make statements, comments, remarks, references, etc., and the real meaning goes unnoticed by most people. Then I realized that I've got a perfect case of dual meaning going on here,

And I guess I just stopped mid-thought right there, but the draft continues for one more line after that, probably because I wanted to throw down a thought that I didn't want to forget (I do this often while I'm composing blogs):

Speaking of oblivious people, I've got another subject to address:

My guess is that I was gonna go off on the general lack of perception that girls seem to show, although that generality was more than likely inspired by a singular source. Unfortunately, I no longer remember the specifics, nor do I remember exactly why I titled it "Hey Kid, You'll Never Live This Down." What I do know is that the title is taken from a line in the Fall Out Boy song "A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More Touch Me." I think the significance of the title was meant to be discovered upon examination of the song; I do know the line that follows that particular one had special significance, and that the reason I chose this line for the title was multifaceted, a common habit of mine. But like I said, I can't remember exactly what I meant when I wrote it. I think I mentioned dual meanings at the end of the second paragraph for that precise reason. Apparently, I also wrote this draft on March 29, although it was probably some time after midnight the night before I wrote the other draft.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, my unpublished material from Spring 09, foisted upon the world of the internet for all to see and probably for two or three to read. But that's okay, at the very least a few people will (hopefully) get something out of this, and my dashboard will henceforth reflect an accurate post count.