WHOM?

As I grow older I realize that I am becoming more and more strange. Self-discovery. Not strange by other's standards, but strange by my own. I do not necessarily recognize this "Nate" I have become so "familiar" with over the past 19.5 years...With every late night I stay up thinking about what my life is like and what it has become, I realize:

I am not as simple as I thought.

Ever look in the mirror and wonder who's staring back? I do.....a lot.

Not wondering who physically is staring back as in, "A man with short, black hair, wearing a red t-shirt, etc."

But WHOM is staring back. What do other people think of the person you see? What do people like about them? What could people do without?  What do people say behind their back both good and bad, honest and dishonest? What are the person in the mirror's nervous ticks and mannerisms they preform when speaking in front of a large crowd or talking with an intimate friend? What are their favorite words to use and do they even sound intelligent when they speak in general?

Now let's get personal.

What is my look of surprise? What do I look like when something disgusts me and I'm trying to not show it but yet still showing it in a very palpable way? How do I look at my friends differently than my family? And why do I always write "friends" before "family" as an ordered pair every time? I love my family. What do I look like when I'm in love with somebody? What do I look like when I hate somebody? Do I truly have a "pokerface" or is it so easy for those closest to me to identify when I'm full of it that I needn't lie anymore because they already know what I am up to?

These are the things I wonder about.

Why do our voices sound different when we hear a recording of them as opposed to when we're actually using them? And why do we hate their sound so much? Better yet, which is our REAL voice: the sound we both hear and feel in our chest, lungs, and teeth or the voice others can measure only with their ears? Is the red, yellow, blue to me the same as red, yellow, blue to you or is it just an example or nature vs. nurture? And what if some eyes are so "colorblind" they only see in black and white but they see with such a heightened sense of luminous detail that they can still differentiate colors solely based on value alone, never mind hue, saturation, tint.

Why do some people only have 200 friends on Facebook and others have thousands? Does that correlate directly to real-life sociability or is it based on the time and effort you put in to social media? Why is it more lame to follow more accounts than be followed on Instagram, Twitter, etc.? What if everyone who has less followers than following are really just more interesting than us because they branch out into the unknown to find something...."strange".

Why do I find myself proofreading a status for Facebook, of all things to proofread, over and over again to make sure I won't "offend" anybody too, too much, but still get my point across while still sounding witty but without coming across as an egotistic asshole?

I try to notice things. See the details in that which others may not. And what is something observed exclusively for oneself but an idea people won't actually believe is yours. I guess I want to take credit for all the things I think of before others think of the same thing. Because if they think of the same thing as I have, they'll just use it on their friends like I do mine and their friends will use it further and further until it eventually makes it back to me and I say, "Hey! I thought of that!" like a disgruntled child whose friend has just STOLEN his one amazing idea in the world, only to hear a condescending, "Noooo.....I heard that awhile ago from someone you don't know." And they will Ancestry.com the idea back to who they heard it from and further and further down the line, the trail WILL lead back to me but before that can happen....

I will be labeled an immediate plagiarist.

Which I am not.

Mountain Dew Slushies

Why do I continuously do this?....I drink caffeine late at night with the intention of staying up a bit later than usual to either get a little work done or "catch up" on some television I've missed and the clock passes 2AM, 3AM, 4AM, and I'm still wide awake. Left alone with the inner workings of my brain, I am kept awake for much longer than I originally intended.

At a certain point a man wants to sleep and yet here I am....2:48AM and I could stay up all night if I wanted to. Writing, watching television, drawing, whatever the crap my mind thinks would be productive at this point. The average start time of my past 7 journal entries hovers around 1:45AM, the earliest being 12:30AM and the latest being 4:10AM.

My original plan for tonight was to have a little caffeine and catch up on the newest season of Mad Men then slowly wind down and fall asleep at a semi-reasonable time and wake up early-ish tomorrow and turn all the blank t-shirts I own into original "Nate Seaman works of art". Yeah....that's not gonna happen. I have watched 3 and a half hours total and still not a yawn or heavy eye to show for it which makes me wonder: How many other people stay up this late merely for the sake of staying up late? I wonder how many people on our cul-de-sac are awake right now and what they're thinking about.

If they look out their window and see my room lit and think the same thing I do. I tried to see if anyone is awake on Facebook but I've left chat off for so long now that I honestly don't even remember how to initiate a conversation or even contact my fellow night owls.

I remember hearing a comedian, Mike Birbiglia, talk about how he suffered from years of sleep apnea, irregular dreams, sleep walking, and a general lack of rest and I can't bare the thought of it. While I was at school was probably the least amount of sleep I've ever had. Not to mention all the nights I went to bed with such high blood pressure I'm surprised I woke up the next morning (shout-out to my ex-roommate's crazy bitch girlfriend what what!).

Luckily my girlfriend is not crazy though. She refers to people who stay up really late as "cool people" and insists that every time she stays up past 11PM, she is classified as a "cool person" too....yeah. I guess she's pretty cool \m/

-N8

Email to Housing and Residence Life at UNCC

Recently, since the cold weather has started to come through, my roommate Alec and I's room has started to become EXTREMELY FREAKING COLD because something is wrong with the heating in our room and neither of us is a fire-bender so we are officially SOL. So, naturally, I emailed HRL department about la problema (that's Spanish for "the problem") but they didn't really make many changes the first time I emailed so I emailed again......with more words......a lot more words. Unfortunately, I forgot to put any words in the "Subject" section of the email so this could very well go unread so I wanted to share it with the world because I think it's great and sometimes having a brain that stops working logically at 8pm works to your advantage. So here it is.......seriously.

"Dear HRL,

My roommate (Alec Newell the Great) and I (Nathan Bruce Seaman the First) live in Sanford Hall Rm. - - -. Before Thanksgiving Break whenst turkey would be consumed, we received a notice to contact you fellows about anything that was wrong with our rooms (cable, heating/cooling, rodent infestations, the usual). After reading said notice, I contacted you posthaste about the absence of heat that had/has been permeating through our vents when it is cold outside and everybody else's heat is working. We used to keep our door open with a fan facing inwards hoping that the warm air from the hall would trickle in like the chocolate river that swallowed Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, but, much to our chagrin, it made virtually no difference and the fan, as you may have guessed, made things even colder. As a result our room was/is always cold (after Thanksgiving Break) and we walked/walk around in pants, socks, shoes, and hoodies all the time and we both have to wear sweatshirts, sweatpants, our matching footy-pajamas, blankets, and socks to bed to keep the ever-advancing cold at bay. 

A few days after I electrically mailed (emailed) HRL, a kind-souled technician, whose name escapes me, came out and inspected the vent. He "fixed a belt" in the mysterious room where all pipes and gauges live to where air started coming out again and I thought, "Shazam!! Huzzah!! Our room shall FINALLY be warm again!!". But unbeknownst to my roommate and I....progress stopped there. After that, the local climate of Charlotte, North Carolina, USA started warming again as is customary for this "crazy Carolinian weather". I figured the heat wouldn't come on until it got cold again because before leaving, that is what the unnamed jack-of-all-trades told us (something about the computer that recognizes temperature outside). 

But now it's cold again and our room: still cold. Like.....REALLY cold. When I went to turn on my computer to send this very email it was freezing and wouldn't turn on until I warmed it up by shining a lamp on it and urging it, "DON'T MOVE TOWARDS THE LIGHT!!!" At this moment in time, it is unclear to me if we need a separate module of heating equipment such as a space heater or something of that sort to warm our room. But what IS clear to me is that it is still really cold and it seems like most everyone else's rooms around our periphery are normal, happy temperatures. 

Thank you for your attention to my EXTREMELY-long, quasi-novelic, electronic mail (email). I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it (at approximately 2:45am in the morning). We (Alec and I) hope a solution can be reached quickly before we both go into a cryogenic freeze like Han Solo in "The Empire Strikes Back", because although we (Alec and I) both have Princess Leias in our lives. I doubt either of them have the knowledge necessary to unfreeze someone suspended in a cryogenic state. :D 

THE END 

Written and Produced by: Nathan Bruce Seaman the First" 

After getting a response from HRL this is what they responded with......

"Nathan Seaman,

You and your story are awesome! I did enjoy reading it. If you don’t mind, I printed off a copy of it as the best maintenance request ever written. Thank you for giving us all in the Facilities Office a smile :)

P.S. Your request was referred to one of our mechanics."

Sounds like it was a success....

-N8