The BIG Games: Imagine five hundred freshmen all cheering for thier own team, all on a soccer field, covered with paint for thier team. I was team purple, and we were doing really well.

1st game: A cheer off. We had to make the most noise that we possibly could, screaming our lungs out and cheering for our team, with chanting, people yelling, running and jumping all over the place. There were almost 100 people per team, so you can imagine the amounts of noise we could generate.

I don’t think any airplane I’ve ever been in has ever been that loud.

2nd game: To start simple, everyone was required to remove thier shoes and mix them up in the middle. Then on the cry of go, put them back on and return back to thier place in the circle.

I didn’t even bring shoes. I got to watch everyone running chaotically towards the center, screaming and looking for thier own shoes, then looked around and saw the same scene replicated five separate times.

3rd game: We all lined up, close to each other. The first person had to push a watermelon through the legs of everyone else behind him, then was followed by everyone else in quick order. When everyone had followed him through the legs, he smashed the watermelon on a tarp and we had to eat it as fast as possible.

I had watermelon up to my elbows, up my nose, and all over me. I must have stuffed half of the thing in my mouth in under thirty seconds.

4th game: Relay Race. Each team formed six groups, and two girls from each group were required to eat a twinkie and consume a coke while being dragged around a cone on said tarp. Then one boy had to eat an entire can of Spam, spin around ten times on a baseball bat, and use shaving cream to write our team name on the ground.

I have never seen so much pure purple chaos in my life.

5th game: We had to make a replica of a barbershop, with people forming practically everything in the shop, from pictures, to chairs, to walls. Shaving cream was used to give people incredible hairsyles, and I was a massuese, one of the extra services our barbershop offered, along with shoe-shiners and a quartet of singers.

I had to fake a french accent and describe our hair design, essentially an entire can of shaving cream stacked on someone’s head, saying stuff like “This style is truly a masterpiece of design, showing the juxtaposition of the elegant woman and the classy man.”

Totally a blast.

6th, and unfortunately final game: Make a replica of a monument with toilet paper.  We built the great wall of china, using people as support, and had differing levels, like the terraces in the actual monument.

We had one more game planned, but unfortuately, a tree caught on fire and summoned the fire department. I don’t know exactly what happened, but at least it didn’t turn completely into a living torch. It was dangerously close to a powerline, so that might have had something to do with it.

It’s like climbing to the top of a building to get up there, but still pretty cool.

All the people who helped us with getting our rooms set up, and the registration, were all super-friendly, and contrary to what others are saying, and what rumor would have you believe, the food at the caf is really not bad at all.

Hey, as long as the rest of college is as entertaining and interesting as this orientation, then it looks like it’ll be a nice year cruising.

The whole park that we drove through was full of these, along with a beautiful lake that was surrounded by forest, while having a box canyon on the other, with small rocks perched on top, like someone had sprinkled rocks on top.

This one sentence I read before I started the series. This sentence made no sense to me until I had finished it.

Are you willing to change yourself, to lose what makes you yourself, and change into another, in order to live?
Or will you hang onto that which makes you yourself, and die?

Back to the main thing: Lightning is also cool. Not quite as cool as fire, at least in my mind, but still really cool. A giant bolt of electricity hitting anything is pretty cool. Especially when said object explodes. Or does something equally violent and awesome.  If you can’t tell by now, I’m sitting in the middle of a giant storm in my house, listening and watching the huge blinding flashes of light blank everything out for a split second, , followed by the enormous crash of thunder, which is pretty cool too. Just not important enough to discuss now.

We were driving back from my job when we noticed the massive storm clouds on the horizon, and started watching the lightning play underneath. We couldn’t see the ground for the trees, but it was still amazing watching the lightning smash downwards from the heavens… (And back upwards, incidentally as well, considering that lightning is a flow of electrons both down and up, one right after the other. I can’t remember which comes first.)

You’re never actually seeing lightning anyway. Only the afterimage imprinted on your retinas by the blinding glare of… plasma, I suppose.

Coolness.

Whatever it is, I feel more or less like an alien.

I love GIMP, mostly because it let’s me fool around with fun filters and other stuff like that, which lets me have fun with manipulating almost everything I want to in a picture.

It’s like, ultimate power and control over all of reality.

In other words, awesome.

So why is it that I cannot seem to simply slip into this state of excellent nirvana?

Seriously, I’ve tried everything. It’s not that I can’t get to sleep… it’s that every now and then, I seem unable to sleep, no matter what I try. Every few days, I don’t feel tired in the slightest, and stay up really late without really intending to. Then, when I try to sleep the next day, I’ll feel incredibly tired, but no matter how long I stare at the ceiling, I just can’t sleep.

Help?!?

For instance, last night. I was attending a rather large event, one where we are all locked in a room, and are ordered to not sleep. It helps that there are rather large screens and projectors, as well as loud music, but as time progresses, more and more people start falling asleep, until you and just a few of your friends are the only ones up, due to the fun that you are having in laughing at each other’s stupid mistakes and other random things that they have done because you are so tired.

Try figuring out the differences between apples and oranges when you are incredibly tired. It makes for some very entertaining laughter, especially if you all know each other very well.

So, after a long time, I was the only one still up at around six am. The sun was starting to shine in, and despite the fact that I was lying down, listening to music, on a pillow… I still couldn’t sleep. My eyes had drifted shut, yet I can still remember each and every moment as they passed, despite my tiredness.

Soon after that, I began to feel wide awake, while at the same time knowing that if I stopped moving, I would fall asleep within moments.

I made it from 5:30 am Wednesday morning until 8:00 am Thursday morning. I know that I could have kept on going, but there was nothing to do but wait to go home from my event, so I decided to sleep.

Maybe being inspired is such a critically important part of our lives that when we are expired by something, we must face everything that comes with it, all the plans and stuff that needs to be done so that what we were inspired to do gets done. We need our inspirations to be completed, much the same way that we need water to drink and food to eat.

When we can’t complete an inspiration, in the sense of something being done, a part of us dies.