Well, I'm home for Christmas, but even the lack of work can’t really bring a smile to my face. "Why is that?", you may ask, as I have loving family to come home to, no real drama, just a lot of love. Not too many people can say that about their homelife nowadays. But why am I depressed? A little bit of background information may be helpful in this instance. People that go to school with me and that know me somewhat well know that I graduated in 2001. By the time one reads this piece, it will be 2003. Simply, there are just none of my scant friends around to hang out with and just in general hedge against the omnipresent depression. Any friends that are on the same schedule as me, which in itself is an oddity, are hanging out with their families and being content with that. Tomorrow I'm going out with some old friends, friends who I know will never amount to anything, but that’s fine because both they and I know that.

What really shocks me are the friends that I only have very limited contact with from high school, as so much happens in what I perceive to be such a short time. It seems that every time that I come back into town someone that I knew is pregnant, pretty much a dead end of itself during the high school years. I honestly wish that it wasn't such a problem, and that the familial system around would be able to help raise and nurture both the child and the high school and younger-aged mother, instead of holding that ages-old belief that pregnancy before marriage is something to shun people over. Sometime the connection to the person is so great that I really want to go to them and tell them that I will help in any way. Obviously, this never happens, as I am busy with college pretty much all the time.

On the converse side of learning about my friends getting pregnant, I also hear the great news of pairs of my friends getting engaged and the like. All of these events really make my time at DePauw both seem inconsequential and extremely important. At the risk of sounding condescending, I feel that a pregnancy in the early years or an early marriage typically causes a rut in each member's life. The rut is something that any affected individual is able to overcome, and many people do overcome. The only sad part about that is that a number of people do not ever break out of that rut. And, the bizarre thing is, is that both popular music and popular Christianity have both noticed this trend, and have acted on trying to help the affected individuals, in various ways.

I try to always be a shoulder to cry on, someone that tries his damnedest to help anyone that wants his help. Some popular music, specifically what is considered r&b, tries to provide a moral slate for the impressionable youth that it panders to, usually to positive results. By addressing this issue of falling into a rut after a major life choice, typically either a teen pregnancy or some sort of youthful crime, r&b tries to show its' audience that these types of decisions can be detrimental to any sort of positive future. Two songs come to mind most rapidly when one tries to find songs that address these issues, those being Kelly Rowland's "Stole" and City High's "What Would You Do?" . Popular Christianity tries to do a more strong-armed approach to stem off the flow of these "immoral" acts with such organizations as the ones currently promoting abstinence.

I have started thinking more and more about the decisions I have made up to life at this point, and have really noticed a few ruts that I (by myself or with outside help) have been able to get out of. Start back in second grade, when I was thought to be retarded by a horribly incompetent teacher, a thought, had my parents allowed to be acted upon, would have placed me into special education classes. This action would have virtually atrophied any higher levels of thought in my head, and would have even added onto the type of behavior that the teacher had marked out as being indicative of someone with mental disabilities. This behavior, being rambunctious and generally boisterous, came at a time when vast numbers of teachers and doctors had forced parents into meeting the status quo for their children, turning them into Ritalin junkies and the like. I understand the need of some exercised control of children, but the consumerist-led 90's, with its easy-fix answers, really exaggerated the need for such aids.

My parents, instead of going along with individuals that society unfortunately typically gives minor forms of hero-worship to, decided to get a second opinion based on abilities that they had noticed in me even before I was in Kindergarten. Turns out, the teacher was dead wrong, and with some minor therapy and medication, I was moved into another school and into the advanced student programme, only later to be skipped along a grade.

Now, while the first rut was not directly influenced out of actions on my part but of those of a horribly incompetent teacher, the second rut was utterly and completely out of my actions. In the summertime before and during my Junior year at high school, I ran a zine called NeuFutur (still available! $1/copy), which provided me with something to expend excess energy on, as the internet didn't have quite the death grip that it has on me now. The first three issues were okay, no problems from anyone, but the forth, the forth was my downfall. My common sense just pretty much stopped functioning when I decided to do #4. On the last page, a fitting place for what effectively ended Amish Drive-By, there was a little fun game, based off of Chutes and Ladders. In each space, I had taken a popular rumor from school and used it either to propel or move back the player that landed on the space. I should have realized that something was wrong when tons of people were coming up to be to buy my magazine. No one really liked me during high school, and to have people constantly coming up to you to buy a magazine seemed weird.

During a later period of the day, I was called down to the office, where I am yelled at for what seemed like hours by all the principals of the school (we have four.) From the time they had intercepted the magazine to when they had called me down to the office, they were busy at work, highlighting questionable and offensive passages in my magazine. I had a cavalier attitude from the start, and I'm sure it didn't really help my cause, especially when they brought in a individual in tears, to which I acted the same way. To top it off, my mother was called in, and I was handed a five day out of school suspension. This might have been my downfall, if I had let it. I could have become increasingly surly and disillusioned with school. Instead, I followed the popular mantra, I "straightened up and flew right", worked hard on raising up my grades, and even got elected Senior class president (most people voted for me for shits and giggles). Every thing was good until the last nine weeks of school during my senior year.

One of the conditions that I had agreed to to lessen the punishment that I got from my parents (if you are a fan of the Simpsons, this whole situation was like when Homer punished Bart, not letting him see the Itchy & Scratchy movie.) was that I stop making Amish Drive-By, so it was not an issue of offensive content or anything that provided me with my last rut-worthy offense. Through my last year, I had become a follower of the worst kind, being egged into progressively worse actions by a desire to please this one individual. Nothing in the way of trouble happened to us, even with the eggings, the car chases, any of that, until one night, where we hatched the absolutely brilliant idea that we were going to do a harmless (we made sure it was) senior prank. So, going to the one strip mall, we bought flour and some small, legal fireworks. On we went to the rube's house to survey the situation, during the day for whatever reason, and the driver decided to light up a smoke bomb, which we bought in a cylindrical shape. It sparked immensely and the driver whipped out a digital camera and took some pictures when it was going off, as we sped off. We came back to the rube's house when it was a little more dark, and I was all nerves, as this was about the worst thing I have ever done in my life. I was in charge of the flour, but I was all nerves by the time and dropped about half the bag in the car and on the parking lot directly. We got the bag back into some order, and drove past the rube's car, where we dumped whatever was left of the bag of flour in the trunk. We sped off, confident that we would be completely absolved of any wrongdoing. WRONG.

Early, incredibly early in the day, we were called down to office at different times, with me being the latter of the two discussions. Again, the principals were in the office yelling at us. The whole thing had blown out of proportion. What we had saw as some harmless fireworks fun in the middle of the day practically caused a heart attack, as where we had thought there was no people, was in fact some people sitting outside. The cylindrical smoke bomb was thought to be a bomb, and the shiny-ness of the digital camera was thought to be a gun. Holy fucking shit. The individuals that witnessed this were polite enough not to press charges, but even my attempts to weasel my way into less punishment with the principals fel on deaf ears. Even though the rube thought that the punishment was excessive, the principals gave me a 10-day out of school suspension, where I had to attend the alternative school.

For those readers who are not familiar with what exactly I mean with alternative school, I do not mean a school for the advanced and intellectual segment of the city. The alternative school of which I speak is where both students who have picked the option to still attend school, and also those constant wrong-doers, or those who have been placed into it by the police. This was not the nicest of places. For example, for those students who continually acted out, they had specific rooms that they would be LOCKED into. The kids had to take off their shoes, so that they would not strangle themselves with their own shoelaces! What the hell had I gotten into? I was stuck on the second floor, where the group I was in only used the restroom twice a day.

The rut was nearly the same as last time. I could have been disinterested in the high school, but by this time I knew I was getting out of the school in just a few weeks, so I grinned and bore it. I had my marvelous return at a awards ceremony, where I was given boat-loads of awards for various reasons, much to the chagrin of all the administrators present. I went back to the podium time after time with the biggest shit-eating grin on my face, my chest puffed up, and I reveled in the fact that I was back! Actually, I had such a cavalier attitude that night, and I had the best picture of me – ever – taken before the ceremony. This wasn't my last hurrah, as I had pleaded and continued to ask for my traditional right to speak at graduation. And I spoke, lordy did I speak! The applause that I received for my speech was my vindication, my big two-fingered salute to the school that caused me so much trouble.

I have had the luck and support of a very loving family to navigate through some life choices that could have forced me into a rut that would have tainted the entirety of my life. I don't think I've fallen into any ruts during my time at DePauw, and I continually try to look at my actions through different lenses to ensure that I haven't. I have many decisions on my plate for when school starts back up at DePauw – do I join a frat, do I continue going to college republican meetings, do I run for president of United DePauw? I think, whatever actions I take, as long as they are my own and as long as I have carefully weighed the options, that I will avoid falling into another rut.