The Brainwasher Tour in The Stuff That's Not Interesting But Is The Most Interesting Stuff I'll Write

If you have read me for any significant amount of time, you know what this title means. Whenever I go on a trip somewhere, I have to name it. It’s like a statement of purpose; a way of defining what exactly I want to happen during the time that I’m away from whatever place is being called home. There has been The Atlantic Crossing Tour, The Never Surrender Tour, The Disco Army Tour, and many more.

I actually have been thinking about what I wanted to call this trip since I first got the tickets in the middle of October. I hate when people say “this is a really defining point in my life” because the truth is every moment of your life is like that, it’s only when you realize those moments that they are truly upon you. The end of one season really just begins another one and the choices we make define where those things are going to hinge.

My huge project that I spent months and months doing plus 15 days writing netted me 95% on the assignment. I got 95% on the final. I got 90-something percent on everything else… but somehow ended up with an 84% in the class.... uhhh okay? I got pretty much Bs and Cs in the rest of my classes which I’m fine with because I knew that that project was too difficult to keep up with.

The way I tend to take classes is to take two classes that need my attention and two classes that I don’t care about at all. I spend the quarter working my ass off and getting either a A or B that I worked REALLY hard for while just doing bare minimum stuff to get a B or C in the other two classes. That’s how I’ve survived college and maintained a decent GPA… which they try to confuse you into thinking means the rest of your life, but it really doesn’t.

Part of the reason I’m going home is because I’ve been in this college mode for too long. I feel like this whole experience in Southern California has been a break from reality. This whole place doesn’t seem real to me. I need to reset my brain and get deprogrammed quickly.

I graduate in about three months and after that I’m supposed to have this master plan of what to do with my life. In reality, I’m so out of it that I can’t even make sense of what I want to do. I have spent five years being focused on this one thing that I can’t even remember why I started it in the first place. I need to get out of my head for a bit and get back in touch with everything because the clock is ticking and unfortunately, my tunnel vision on school means that I haven’t cultivated alternative options like I usually do in these situations. My house in Sacramento is gone. I have nowhere to go once this is over. It’s now or never.

So that’s why I’ve called it The Brainwasher Tour. I usually get names of tours from songs somewhere, and I actually got this from two different songs, and because I see there are two different aspects to it, one is dark and the other is hopeful. With any luck, when I return to my hometown in Northern California I’ll find hope and leave the darkness down in sunny SoCal.

Something about this song is so threatening. I actually had forgotten about this song until I stumbled on the second song and then I went back and re-listened to this. That’s when I stumbled upon the duality of brainwashing.

The New Radicals album upon which this song can be found is “Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too” and I thought that that is a perfect metaphor for how I feel about college right now. I think we can look at brainwashing as two different concepts. Maybe our brains need to be cleansed and purged of all the shit people try to shove into them so that we can reset and find the hope we once had.