In the Grand Tradition

Five-point Update

1) Still working for IMMC - I love the job and I love the people. I don't necessarily love the hours, but I will do what I do until I can do it no more.

2) Being poor sucks: Right now I'm on a tight-as-Hell budget on account of me having to pay two-months worth of rent in one pay period, on top of a car loan... and utilities. I'm not making a killing - just enough to get by and live how I wanna live. Is that so wrong? Well, apparently I think so, because if I emptied my TV fund, I'd be fine in an instant. But I want that TV...

3) With LOST over, my mind wanders to other things... I've actually started reading again, and while I've found this to be extremely rewarding, I find fault with it because I know that, in the fall, when AMC debuts "The Walking Dead", I'll be right back where I started; in front of a television.

4) I don't write anymore, personally. This is something I'm aiming to rectify as we speak.

5) Music - still - is the soul. Never before have I had faith in any concept as strongly as I have in this one. ...and the fact that there is no such thing as choice. Which, of course, there isn't.

Just Googled myself. Here's an update in five sentences:

1) I didn't move to L.A. because, in the end, it turned out that true love was not made of horrible parenting, lame-ass excuses, and abysmal failures.

2) I am, once again, living in Des Moines, working at Iowa Methodist, and - as always - I am made of awesome.

3) I have slowly started to "eat" music, and by this I mean I collect it, I listen to it all, and I don't care what it is, all in the hopes that I will gain a better understanding of music's doorway into the human soul.

4) I still obsess over the television show LOST, although not nearly as much in this final season as in years past.

5) If I could do any one thing right now, at this point in time, it would be to get on a bus and just go somewhere and not have to worry about things like money, family, love, humanity, or the lack of cake I'll likely only ever continue to encounter as I get older and older with each passing minute.

New Blog Post! New Blog Post!

This summer I am in Iowa City, living with my older brother Pete. Pete is a Dr., so he can afford to take care of me. Also, he is a nice guy, so I think I can stomach to hang out with him a bit, I suppose.

I'm still being educated, currently, working on getting some stuff done so I can enter the technical writing field at the start of next year. Its an area I'm really interested in and think I would do well in, also. So, I've got that going for me. In the meantime, I'm working at a place called TMone this summer (those of you in Iowa with Facebook have probably seen the ads all over the place, I'd wager), saving up money to pay off a car, buy tickets to go to L.A. (more in a second), and buy food and gas and stuff and stuff.

In regards to L.A., my girlfriend, Aliona, moved back there at the tail end of May and, since the two of us are like "we're super duper cool and stuff" and we love each other, we're just gonna work through the distance thing. Because the other option is stupid and neither of us are interested in that, nope, not one bit. So I have to work and work and work and save and save and save until I can visit on occasion and eventually - as is the plan - move out there (I hope) near Feb. 2009. Which will make me 23-and-a-half years old, by the way. I'm an old man.

I'll be 23 on July 5th. That's scary. I always thought getting older would mean getting cooler. But I guess all it really means is that I can't ride down the stairs on a pillow anymore without getting hurt and all bruised up :(

More... as it happens, including:
-Evaluations of all of Pete's friends
-How I like my job (I'm going to try to get promoted in a couple of weeks, too!)
-What is in store for my immediate future
-A Dark Knight review (since that movie is going to be so awesome it makes little babies explode upon being birthed)

Have a good'n!

Leapin' for Leap Year

Well, today was the 29th of Feb., an almost magical day where... nothing different happens.

I spent it like I spend most Fridays: bored at work, spinning around in an office chair, taking calls at fixing problems at ye olde Drake Computer Help Desk (which we're supposed to start called Drake Support Center, but I don't see why. We're supposed to do this to avoid possible confusion with people thinking we're a help anything desk, but if you toss the word "computer" in there, I don't think people will be confused. Support Center sounds like a place you call if you think your friend is going to take their own life or something). Andy and I (Andy being my awesome co-worker, the one that does most of the work) fixed many things, talked about a bunch of stuff, and then I left.

Then I took care of some business on phone lines, as I always do. Whenever people organize, they call me to be middle man. I don't understand why.

Then I took my super-duper awesome girlfriend, Aliona out to get foodstuffs and stuffs and it was great. I mean, we went to TGI Friday's which isn't really the "top of the pops" so to speak (although who would ever describe a place as the "top of the pops" as it is clearly an event that takes place on July 4th...), but it was good and I feel well fed.

Tomorrow starts another month, another 31 days of homework, and another eight posts I get to make for you crazy kids to read! So strap in and hold on tight because...

...well, I don't know why.

ANOTHER POST

My Writers and Critics event went OK, I thought. My story ended up being more complex than I'd hoped it would be and, as a result, ended up being kinda like a rough draft instead of a finished story, but that's OK for the most part, I think, because now I have something I can work on a bit more in depth in the future.

Tim Bascom, the guy that people actually came to see, read from his book and it was also very good. His story is about his life growing up in Ethiopia, so I wrote about my travel experiences as a way to kinda work with his text, rather than against it. Which is what I would have done if I'd read anything else I've put together in the past six months.

Otherwise, everything else is going OK. I'm finally getting back on track with some stuff I've been letting slide and that's good, since we aren't at midterms yet, this means I can kinda pick up some slack (I hope!). Otherwise, not much else has been going on.

In other news, though, I have done this thing on Facebook which I think is awesome. Basically I've created a group that has only one purpose: To make fake albums.

The Facebook group's URL is as follows:
http://drake.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10182729001
All you have to do is follow the directions and stuff and you can make your own fake albums! Join up and make some junk! No one cares how quality your picture ends up being, either. We all just like to look at them!

Cheers!

I Forgot:

-Help Deskin' @ 8AM
I apparently decided, in the past, that it was a good idea to volunteer to work a full day from 8AM-4:30PM. I found this out, again, way too late to really take care of it in a smart manner. So now I'm sitting here, exhausted out of my mind, and wishing I could go back in time and punch myself in the stomach for signing up for this, then making that version do the work of convincing a different self from even further in the past to not sign up for work and to stop using so many italics in the future. Obviously, based on the nearly obnoxious levels of italics found, this didn't happen.
But I'm getting out of work at 3:30, an hour early. Because I'm tired. As Hell.

-Writin' for a Readin'
I have been working on the thing I'm going to read for the Writer's and Critics event I'm guest reading at, but only in my head. I have nothing on paper, yet.
The worst part is, I'm limited to ten minutes of read time, and the thing I'm working on in my head is LONG AND HUGE and, well... this will only cause problems.

-Eatin'
Since I've gotten better - after my battle with bronchitis - I've found that my appetite has ever-so-slowly started to reemerge. But, because I'm already used to eating rarely and very little, I find myself starving all the time and never around foodstuffs.
Learning to remedy this is taking more time than it should.

-Blackboard
I just found out that most of the important stuff - like the assignments - for my Witchcraft class are posted on Blackboard and not on the class syllabus or announced in class. This is after a week of having figured I'd just missed the information every class and showing up unprepared in every possible fashion for two classes in a row.
Now that I know, I'm going to actually start doing readings for that class. Its amazing how knowing what the readings are can help you do the readings.