Habit-Forming

The Overly Long Intro

It’s been more than 15 weeks since I last wrote anything on this blog.  That’s way too long.  Luckily I have job applications to avoid so here i am.

Some of you may remember when I ran an experiment on my myspace blog to see if I could write one post a day for a month (an idea that I stole from W. Kamau Bell).  I lasted 15 days before I got bored.  I did learn some important things about myself from that little experiment.  Firstly, I realized that working under pressure really changes the blogging experience for me.  Rather than just casually posting a blog whenever i feel like it, I found myself stressing each day to make sure i had a blog done by 12:00.  It became less a hobby and more a responsibility.  As such, I took it a bit more seriously and I’d like to think that the quality of my content improved a little.  More importantly, I began to realized that I don’ really want for things to write about.  I constantly have ideas that could eaily become blogs but, for one reason or another, most of them never reach the internet.  Today, I shall try to correct that.  From this point forward, I will write no less than one blog per week.  I’ll let you all know when I come up with a suitable schedule.

 

The Update

There is sort of a good reason that I’ve been M.I.A. around these parts as of late: I got a job.  For the past couple weeks I’ve been spending most of my time standing behind the customer service counter at my local national electronics chain store.  It’s kinda sucked, quite honestly.  I don’t really mind the work itself and most of my coworkers are pretty cool, but business is always slow so I’m usually bored as hell.  Also, I’m broke as hell.  $7 an hour isn’t really any money at all.  Therefore I’m looking for a 2nd job, to supplement or replace the mediocre wages that I’m currently living on.  As a matter of fact, the main reason I’m writing this blog is to distract myself from the applications I should be filing out right now.

 

A Story

Inside the store I work at there is a little kiosk selling cell phones.  Working at this kiosk is a young lady whos name i don’t remember.  I first saw her sometime last week.  ”She’s kinda cute,” I said to myself, but she wasn’t cute enough for me to care for more than a minute.  One minute later, I stopped caring.  I’d pretty much forgotten about her by the time I strolled into work this morning.  I started off my day like I always do, getting right to work before I even have a chance to greet my coworkers (my job is hella boring but for some reason there’s always hella shit going on at the moment I step into the door).  When things got back to their normal glacial pace, I took a moment to behold my surroundings.  All was as usual, but when I looked to my right I saw an unusal sight: a really cute girl sitting at the cell phone kiosk.  I spent the next couple hours trying not to stare and almost succeeded at paying her no mind until she randdomly struck up a conversation with me.  At that moment, I suddenly realized two things: The girl I’d given no more than a minute’s thought a week before had changed her hairstyle and somehow made herself about 13 times cuter and I was smitten.  I spent the rest of my shift wondering if she liked me and being extremely self-conscious.  I wonder if I’ll still care about her when I go to work on monday. . . 

 

The End

If you stare at a lit flourescent lightbulb for a long enough time, you may begin to ponder the very nature of your eyesight.  Or maybe that’s jus me. . .

Mmmm. . .

I made some Grilled Cheese Pancakesand they were delicious.  It turns out that because the mix itself contains no sweeteners, pancakes can actually be prepaared any number of ways including, as we just learned, with cheese, Italian spices, and salsa.  Now that I’m full and happy, here’s some pictures for you to stare longingly at when you think of me.  =D

I’m 19 years old and Broke as f***!

So as of today I am officially an employee of Circuit City (I get my hours tomorrow).  That is the good news.  The bad news is that I haven’t gotten paid or anything so I’m still quite broke.  And between me and my brother (who is conveniently also my roommate) there is not that much food in the cupboard.  This blog doesn’t have much point really; I just felt like bitching because my stomach is empty.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make a grilled cheese pancake.

Therapy

So the last two blogs I wrote were pretty fucking emo, right?  Well it turns out that that type of thing is somewhat therapuetic.  Between all that venting/writing and the pint of Cherry Garcia I’m currently working my way through I dare say I feel a bit better.  Thanks Ben, Jerry, Tom and. . . ummm. . . is there no person who represents WordPress?

 

Anyway, What I was supposed to write about today was how utterly in love I am with a certain webcomic.  Questionable Content is possibly the greatest webcomic I have ever read.  That was not even hyperbole.  Let me put it this way, this webcomic is like the person you are so in love with that you ignore their obvious flaws.  QC makes jokes about music that I usually don’t get (the bands are too obscure), makes jokes about fine art that I don’t get (Picasso’s blue period?), and shits on bands that I love (what’s wrong with Bloc Party and The Killers?), but I still keep coming back.

I’m not sure why I have such a strong connection with this particler collection of words and pictures.  Maybe it’s the fact that I identify with nearly all of the characters, with their various emotional issues, imperfections and all around human-ness (i don’t care much for the word “humanity”).  Maybe it’s the art, which was really good to begin with but has steadily gotten better and better as the strip has progressed.  Maybe it’s the balance between serious issues (suicide) and outright absurdity (gay robot sex).  Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good story.  But whatever it is, this comic has captured my attention in a way that few other things ever do.

The point of all this?  You should read this webcomic, for it is awesome.  I’ll even link it again so you don’t have to scroll up:

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1223

 

 

 

P.S. Sorry for the glut of posts; I guess I was a little backed up.

Pity Party! Everyone’s Invited!

So one thing I’ve always tried to avoid in my bloggings is devolving to the point where I become one of those people who just pukes his life onto the screen for the world to see.  I always thought that people who did that were

a) not very creative

b) pathetically begging for attention

Well luckily for me I currently have no ability to do anything remotely creative or productive but I have a pretty compulsive need to write something regardless.  So here it is:  some random shit that happens to compose the make-up of my life at the moment:

Money: I have no job, $1 in my wallet, -$79 in my bank account and rent due on the 15th.  Time to go beg my parents for money.  Oh joy.

Music: First I broke my external hard drive and couldn’t recover anything from it.  Then my ipod broke and I had to delete all the songs on it in order to reset it.  All told, I lost about 17,000 songs.  I don’t have any money to buy music (which sucks because the record store is like 5 minutes away) and this computer is has too little bandwith, memory, and speed to download (read: pirate) music in any great amounts.  Also, my dad hasn’t sent my guitar yet, I blew out the speakers in my (only) headphones, and this computer is also too slow to run FL Studio.

Social Life: I basically know 5 or 6 people in this entire city, most of which are my brother’s friends, and I don’t have any money to go out so I’m pretty much stuck in the house all day every day. 

Miscelanious: All the spiders that call my bedroom home are jumping spiders.  It is hot as balls. I ran out of chapstick.  I’m effectively addicted to Questionable Content.  I’m almost out of ice cream.  I’m starting to feel really silly sitting here thinking of reasons to feel sorry for myself.  I guess that means I should stop.

 

Stay tuned for my next blog where I will be writing about something other than self-pity.

A Different Approach

Isn’t always great how tragedy can sometimes strike at a moment of great triumph? After staying up until four a.m. reading July’s issue of GQ Magazine, I turned the experience into something positive by writing an amazing blog about the profound effect that the magazine had on my life. I had it cued up and ready to post as soon as people got sick of reading overextended metaphors involving video games. I was all ready to post it and dazzle the world when, without warning, my external hard drive crashed. Okay, that was a lie. In reality, I tripped over a wire and knocked my hard drive onto the floor where it immediately broke, destroying over 18,000 mp3 files and a priceless collection of porn I didn’t pay for (also my resume and all of my writing that I ever bothered to type up). Oh yeah, and that spectacular blog (which would’ve changed your life).

Although it’s tempting (and arguably even possible) I’m not about to retype that amazing, spectacular, life-changing blog. I will, however, give you an abridged version (less awesome, but shorter):

It turns out that I do like nice (read: expensive) things. Who knew? Also, women in men’s underwear are hot.

Take a moment to catch your breath if the unbridled awesomeness of that (really abridged) blog just took it away.

Okay, now on to today’s blog (I make it sound as if I blog every day).

I’ve got another confession to make: I am a master of bullshit. That’s a bit of a contradiction, really. The fact is I’ve been bullshitting my way through life for as long as I can remember and it’s kept me from mastering anything. Does that make more sense? I pretty much got through school on intelligence and luck. I’ve had almost no technical training or extensive practice on drums and have really been getting by on natural rhythm since the 8^th grade. The only type of writing that I’ve had any real success in is poetry and that’s only because I can write poems in one shot without any sort of planning or forethought. The common thread here is that everything I’ve ever accomplished has involved almost no planning or effort on my part. If life had been less kind to me I’d probably be homeless and starving right now.

I’d love to say that I’ve made a complete turnaround and changed my life completely but that would be a lie. I am moving in the right direction though. There are a few areas where I’m actually trying to, well, try. I’m learning guitar, an instrument that I have absolutely no natural talent for. I’m seriously looking for a job so that I can pay my rent next month. But most recently, I did something that I’ve probably never done since 10^th grade English class: I brainstormed. Now to your average Joe, that may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but to me it’s damn near revolutionary. Nearly everything I’ve ever written has been done in one shot, with no outlining beforehand and no editing afterward. For the formats that I’m most comfortable in (poetry, songwriting, blogging) that’s always been sufficient. Even the two short stories I wrote were written straight through from beginning to end.

But lately, that method of writing just hasn’t been sufficient. My ideas are getting a bit bigger. Not huge, mind you, but just big enough that I actually have to think about things like plot structure and character development. I can’t really bullshit these ideas.

A while back, I came up with an idea for a short story and had written the first couple of pages of it before I was stopped short by the realization that I had no idea where the story was going. For several weeks the story just floated around my head without any real purpose or direction as I tried to figure out what was actually supposed to happen in this story. I was drawing blanks constantly until today, when I finally realized (or more accurately, admitted) what I had to do.

I got a blank index card and wrote “Possible Conflicts” at the top. I then spent the next few hours writing down every potential conflict that could be important to this story, even the ones that were horrible (i.e.: most of them). To my surprise, I actually enjoyed this process. It felt good to just write down ideas without feeling like each one had to be perfect. Ironically enough, by getting rid of this unreasonable pressure I enabled myself to actually conceive of some pretty good ideas.

Realizing that everything I thought I knew about the creative process was utterly wrong should have been a painful process, but it wasn’t. Instead, it felt like a gust of fresh air in a stuffy room. It was as if I was learning how to breathe all over again. It humbled me. I realized that I don’t have the need, or even the capacity, to conceive of ideas that could immediately get up and walk away. In other words, I came to realize that I’m not a gazelle, but a human being. What a relief.

P.S. Index cards have changed my life. That might or might not be the topic of my next blog (It’s more exciting than it sounds, really!)

To everyone who wanted to know why I moved to florida.

Do you ever wish that you could go back and un-make some of those choices that have made you who you are today? Do you wish that you could scrap who you’ve become and completely remake yourself for the better? The good news is, you can. The bad news: only in video games. Very few video games, actually. One such game is City of Heroes, a comic book themed MMO* that I was addicted to about a year ago. In that game, there were certain points at which you could re-choose all of your superpowers, essentially remaking all of your past decisions using the knowledge you’d gained since then. Aside from the idea of actually being a superhero (because, really, what’s cooler than that?) this was my favorite feature of the game, redemption embodied as a gameplay mechanic. The only ting that could possibly;y be cooler than that would be if such a thing could happen in real life. What if I could just pack up all my shit and move to a city I’ve never never been to where I know almost no one and almost no one knows me? What if I could start over, create myself as if the old me never existed? What if I could be new?

I’d jump at the chance.

*Massively multiplayer online game

A shaky start at best

warning: I suck at html, so if my code looks like actual code instead of the hyperlinks and stuff that it’s supposed top be, don’t be surprised.

Well this is my first “real” blog, my previous blogging being in the form of myspace and occasionally facebook notes.  Ironically enough, I don’t have very much to say.  Here, read this while i think of something to say.

. . .

So I was reading some guy’s list of the top ten worst geek films or some bs like that, when I noticed that he had the Johnny Depp/Tim Burton Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on the list. Now I thought that that movie was pretty horrendous but as I read through the comments on the list I saw several people saying that the more recent film was a much truer adaptation of Roald Dahl’s vision than the 1971 Gene Wilder film. As I looked back on my own memories of the book, I realized that I didn’t remember it at all. But it’s pretty irrelevant whether or not the newer movie was a better adaptation because as soon as I began to think about it I realized two things:

a) The only reason I hated the movie was because the Oompa Loompa songs were not as cool and because Johnny Depp seemed to be channeling a bit too much Michael Jackson into the role.

b) If someone remade the Thriller video starring the (1971) Oompa Loompas it would be the greatest thing ever.

. . .

Well that’s all I got. If I still feel uninspired the next time I decide to blog I’ll just write one of those horribly generic “Introduce Myself” blogs. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

edit: the html worked! yay!