What’s Normal Anyway?

I spent the first half of my day at work unpacking and setting up 22 new desktops for one of the computers labs we have at school. I spent the first hour or so unplugging the old computers and cleaning up the surfaces they were on. It then took me a few hours to simply unpack everything and plug them all in. I then had to join them all into our domain, set them up properly in Active Directory, and finally make sure SCCM worked correctly on all of them. It did. This was the first time I’ve ever done this, and it was easy, after it was all said and done, but it took me a long time. Well… the new superintendent thought I did it really fast. All about perceptions, I guess.

I started to watch Wayward Pines on Hulu, and I was hooked immediately. It’s about this secret service agent, played by Matt Dillon (!), who’s investigating the disappearance of two agents. He tracks them to Wayward Pines, but he’s involved in a car crash, and he wakes up in a hospital, and that’s where things start getting weird. It’s an amazing mystery show, and it’s so much fun getting caught up in the mystery and how all the answers they give us only make us ask more questions. It reminds me a bit of Lost and Twin Peaks, which is awesome.

One of my favorite songs on Miguel’s new album is “what’s normal anyway” simply because it describes exactly my feelings from the past few weeks. I don’t belong here; hell, I don’t know if I’ve ever found a place I truly belong in. College was the closest thing, but I was such a different person back then, so shy and quiet, that I didn’t live it up as much as I wished I did. Now, I’m in Montana, not sure what I’m doing anymore. I like my job, and I like the money it gives me, and it sure beats McDonald’s, but this is not a place for me to set down roots in. This is more of a town you pass through than settle down in. It’s even on a damn highway, so even its early settlers thought so.

I know I should stop bitching about that. I’m slowly trying to figure out what to do. Grad school is always there, but I don’t feel as confident as I used to that I will get in to any school. I still need to go through the process of applying, and I don’t even know how well I’m going to do with that. No, part of me wants to stuff my car with all my stuff, rent a U-Haul to shove the rest of it in, and drive somewhere new. Chicago and Seattle are close and New York City seems so tempting. These are just feelings, though, and I know how fleeting they are. I know that about myself, which is great. Not many people know themselves. I guess not everyone’s normal.