Home is where the Heartland is

Hey dear friends,



Thank you for making my blog a wild success. According to the fan mail, I now have a following of 5 devoted readers. I may need to offer some advertising space on my blog to some major corporations to capitalize on my audience. This is America after all... Don't worry, I promise I won't succumb to the allure of fame and sell out...too much. To those of you not reading: it's alright, I forgive you. You'll never know I was angry with you (or that I benevolently forgave you), but I just had to make sure my conscience was clear.

This posting is a house salad of emotions, drizzled in two different kinds of metaphorical dressing (For the sake of the image, we’ll say Thousand Island and French. I have no idea what the metaphor is, however, so if you come up with something, become an English major and write a thesis about it. I look forward to your many paragraphs about Stormian food imagery in contemporary internet literature.).

As usual, the humor is mostly in between the parenthesis; although, it will occasionally attempted to slip itself into the “actual content” of the paragraphs. If you don’t laugh, that’s ok. That’s why the “funny parts” are caged between punctuation marks. For your protection. In the event you make remarks like “that’s not funny at all. Paul, you’re really dropping the ball this time around.” You won’t have to worry about angering the text, and becoming the victim of a word crime.

A hard day’s night
Since returning from my beautiful weekend home at St. John’s, I’ve had a very hard time being out here in Baltimore. Over the last 5 months, (yeah, I've been involved in TfA for 5 months now!!) I haven’t found much time for reflection. Now that I'm in baltimore, most days are spent scrambling to be ready for the next day. When I’m not at school, I’m thinking about what needs to happen at school. When I’m not thinking about school, I’m at school.

Since leaving St. John’s, the time I’ve looked forward to most is the time I spend asleep. Dreams are the one place I don’t feel frustrated. Sleep is the one place I feel some sense of peace. That admission, that reality, is neither healthy nor uplifting. On the flight back to Washington (I saved myself $100 by flying out of DC!…Only to spend that $100 on parking and gas. Irony?) I spent a lot of time thinking about how different my life is now. I found myself looking at a really terrible conclusion: I haven’t felt genuinely happy about my choice to move to Baltimore. Some of you remember my deep belly-laugh; the one that people could identify me by from several hundred miles away (ok, ok, so I was just loud enough to be heard on the fourth floor from the second floor.). I haven’t been able to laugh like that out here. I forgot what it felt like to laugh like that. Until I came back home, and found myself in the company of John Howard, JEtten/mom, J-Bo, Elise, Kelsy, Chanti, Natalia, and a dozen other wonderful old friends.

So what am I supposed to make of that? Well, at first it really brought me down. REALLY brought me down. Monday and Tuesday were the hardest days I’ve had out here. I told my school I needed some time off to just think about where I am and what I’m doing (Mike, Reuby, J-Bo, Elise, you all know what I mean by ‘told’). My principal, the incredible woman that she is, told me to take the rest of the week to reflect on my reasons for being here. She went to my class and told them that Mr. Storm had submitted his letter of resignation to the school. Did I do that? Not yet. Just to clarify, my school has issues. While I’ve been there:
One student was gunned down in his neighborhood
One student’s arm was broken by a group of kids who wanted his cell phone
One student was jumped before school and beaten very badly
One student was stabbed in the chest in a stairwell
Several fights have broken out
AND a random weapons search turned up about 40 knives, a few bricks, and various
blunt objects
So yeah, stressful environment. Combine that with the lack of order and effort in the classroom and you’ve got one tough place to go everyday. I’m not sure how likely it is that I complete my second year of TfA. There is too much about home that I see myself losing if I stay here. There is too much about myself that will evaporate if I stay under the heat and pressure of this place.

Something on the lighter side
Me. Since coming out to Baltimore, I’ve dropped a few of the lbs. that aren’t so nice to carry around. The love handles are smaller (sorry ladies, there’s less of me to go around), the belly doesn’t hang quite like it used to. So go ahead and start fantasizing about a lean, cut, athletic Paul Storm…it’s not as ridiculously unrealistic of a dream as it used to be. Still a little far-fetched, but sort of plausible.

That's all I have for now. I miss you, beautiful people.