Don't read this one if you don't like it when people brag.

It's been a whole month and I've only missed 4 days! I'm feeling pretty good about myself, while some posts were more lackluster than others I have almost achieved my goal and I have no doubt that I will be in the habit of writing daily very soon. Then this will lead on to other productive daily habits and will finally lead to the annihilation of non-productive daily habits. Now all I have to do is stop giving up when I have a few sentences written and the TV is on, or maybe I can just kill my TV!

I found out today that I don't like people, (which is funny because I love humanity) when I'm surrounded by shitloads of people I become apprehensive, sweaty and cranky. I tried to go to a food fair tonight where several famous food trucks in LA come to a single area. It sounded like a fun idea at first, but then as we were nearing the hot spot I got a text message from my friend who was already there and told us every line was at least an hour long, and when we arrived we could barely move around there were so many people. The food smelled amazing but the entire experience was not even remotely worth it (or so I assume since I didn't actually eat any of it). Besides, eating is all about the entire experience and while I always enjoy seeing friends I have no desire to be close to people I don't know while eating. Maybe living in a large city has made me bitter and unfriendly.

What'chu got? ADD? Add it up don't equal you and me.

I think I've just created a new Disorder within myself, I call it CADD or Creative Attention Deficit Disorder:

There I am, sitting in front of the computer and staring at the blank white box thinking of something to write about. When all of a sudden BAM! in comes an idea, and I can kind of see the humor in this so I start writing, but oh wait! Now I have an even better idea so a quick ctrl + a, del and I'm really smoking now. After a quick flurry of clacking keystrokes I have a horrible thought, "What if my original idea was better?" But then out of left field comes my best idea yet, I'll write about my neurosis when I can't decide which idea is better. No no no! I can't write about that, that's not funny. I've got it, I'll write about the sounds I'm hearing out my window: birds, cars, children. Bircardren! The bircardren is a flying transport animal used on jungle planets in the Delta Quadrant of the Milky Way. Another think found in Milky Ways is caramel which Shaq pronounces caramel...

Perhaps it's just regular ADD.

A rolling snowball gathers no trees, until it gets really big

I've come to enjoy writing more because it's something I can change in the most minute manner, which is funny because I always enjoyed acting as something I would do, it would be done and that would be that. But I really like the amount of control I have, I can completely erase an entire paragraph if it isn't going the way I like, or I can add a single comma to ever so slightly accentuate a pause. I also like the fact that sometimes I have an idea which becomes a sentence and just starts rolling like a snowball picking up snow, and sometimes I have an idea which I think is interesting but it never really goes anywhere...

Going to San Diego this weekend, so I will most likely not be posting tomorrow, just a heads up.

It has been brought up to me that I use a lot of commas in my writing, like a lot of commas, like a whole crapload. I must say I concur. (to be finished later)

I have GOT to remember to write BEFORE I go out to the brewery.

I don't think this one deserves a title

Why can I not remember what was running through my head not 20 seconds ago? I had a great idea and now all that's in my head is Michael Scott being "Date Mike, nice to meet me." It's the god damn TV, it rots your brain.

Ugh, I'm sorry. The TV is on in my room and I can't concentrate.

Cooking is hard (That's what she said)

So cooking is hard. I always thought cooking was easy, but that's because I've always followed a recipe from a cook book with exact portions and direct instructions. But when you get a recipe from a friend and your "friend" says "boil 3 or 4 good sized peppers, depending on how much you're going to make" and gives you no proportions of water to keep in the pan, then cooking is hard.

Throw in the fact that we don't have a blender, but we do have an immersion blender, which I thought would work even better. Turns out the immersion blender we have was my roommates from when he was nine. Nine. What kind of a nine year old wants an immersion blender anyway? But I digress, so about halfway through blending it starts making a funny noise, and I'm looking and checking the blender to make sure nothing is falling off. Lo and behold my roommate comes in and says "Don't worry about that noise, it's fine."

I'm going to type that again because what he said was "Don't worry about that noise, it's fine."

Now I didn't realize he had had this thing since he was nine at this point in the story so I figured that most people know their own appliances and I would go ahead and follow his advice and ignore the terrible grinding noises coming from the twenty year old motor in my hand attached to a sharpened blade spinning at 7,000 RPMs immersed in boiling hot liquid. I assume you can see where I'm going with the story. So the blender breaks, the blade falls out into the pan, and I promptly stop the blade by taking my finger off the button (which is a genius way to start and stop something like that by the way, even for the 1980s).

So I know we don't have a blender, but I'm looking for one anyway in case I missed it somehow, and what do you know? Before my very eyes I see the most glorious site I have yet to behold in my life since, an unopened box containing one (1) small sized Cuisinart. YAY! Now all my problems are solved, I have to mix it in sections yes, but that's not a big deal. Until I try the first small portion. I learned a very valuable lesson today: Cuisinarts are not meant for liquid, only chopping solid food. If I had known how to cook I would know this, but as I stated in the beginning, cooking is hard.

Well Nick managed to get the blender working again (By "Jamming it back in there") and I was able to finish making my sauce, except for one small problem: I seem to have put WAY too much water in my sauce because it has no flavor and it is the consistency of well, water.

So even without all the terrible mechanical problems, cooking is hard.

Full Circle

I'm going to have to start writing ideas down again, I continue to have ideas upon ideas at various points in the day (usually when I'm relaxing of course) and then I sit down to write and BAM! "Nothing." You can imagine how frustrating that becomes. (On a side note I just realized that my link color is white and my active link color is gray, I was worried nobody would see the links because I thought they were all gray. I don't know why I was worried though, I think Thomas is the only one who reads (Hi Thomas!) and he's very good about noticing things like that.) Where was I? Oh yeah, writers block, I tend to write about that a lot, perhaps just "Writing what's on your mind" isn't always the best idea, because then I end up writing about not writing. Hey! I should start writing my ideas down throughout the day, then when I sit down to write I won't just be staring at a blank screen. ^_^

Tea for two and two teas for ME!

It's very easy to do something when it's new. But when it starts to loose its unfamiliar feel and becomes just another thing to do, it becomes very easy to stop doing it. I am referring of course to writing. I was so excited to start writing again and before I knew it, it was a chore instead of a pleasure; and I haven't even been re-writing, I've just been stream of consciousness word-vomiting. But I still think that this should be something I want to do, something to explore my mind and to whine and act like I'm better than anyone reading, because that's what blogs are all about right? So starting now I will no longer be putting in the immense effort I have been, I will now be simply writing, writing for fun, writing for pleasure, and writing for ME.

The grammar will still be correct though, because that would just bug me.

Life lessons are more inspiring when condensed into a consise limerick

Learning new things about yourself is an important part of life, and yesterday I learned a very important lesson.

Writing before beer/ never fear.
Beer before writing/ page unexciting.

Have fun, be young, drink...

Getting older is inevitable, yet America is so concerned with staying young. I am of course referring to the general America, not any one specific person or even a majority of people, but the overall feeling and most of all the advertising in America. It makes a very strange conundrum in my head, because I see people who are more successful than me and way younger than me, and I begin to feel like I've wasted my life. But then I see someone who is still in perfect mental and physical health and they graduated college before I was born. So in reality I've got nothing to worry about right? as long as I keep working on something every day I should be fine right? Oh god please tell me I haven't wasted the best years of my life!

No that's silly, they wouldn't have been the best years of my life unless I had wasted them.

On human nature.

After writing once a day for almost 3 solid weeks now I've come to learn that the creative process is one of the more interesting things about human nature. It's not something that can be rushed, except when there's a deadline. It's something that comes out of nowhere and something that must be forced, sometimes at the same time.

It's a bit like pooing.

A semi-nostalgic kind of rant.

While being a child had its advantages and disadvantages there are certain things which ultimately lost their magic: Magic: the gathering is one, pretending to be spiderman in the backyard while completely sober is another, but swearing is the specific one I'm going to write about today.
As a child swearing was something you only did in secret with your friends, adults didn't like swearing because it was bad and adults were never bad unless they were needle sharing, drug dealing prostitutes who played with fire and swore, and those types usually ended up in jail. No swearing was just for kids to use, when only other kids could hear, and even then you never actually said "F--- You" unless you were prepared to never be friends with that person again. It was the absolute, end all be all, penultimate insult you could use to tell someone off. Now that I'm an adult of course it has become almost a term of endearment. But being an adult also has certain advantages and disadvantages, I no longer believe in magic (the real kind, not the gathering), but I do have the freedom to spend my life however I want to. Or at least I thought I did, turns out all the training my parents did ended up working and now I'm a responsible adult who eats his veggies and doesn't hang out in the alley ways. Well you know what? I'm going to go share a needle with a prostitute tonight, and then I'm going to start a fire, just to assert my independence and prove I wasn't brainwashed by the public. AND I'm going to say "Fuck You!" to someone I never want to see again.

and then I'm going to believe in magic while webslinging between the trees.

TV? No thanks, I'm straight.

There are only a few things in life that I don't enjoy and I don't need to do but yet I still do them, this to me is the definition of an addiction. Watching TV is one of those things (reading the entire Twilight series was another, but that's still to painful to talk about). When I'm watching TV, and I'm referring to the daytime, whatever's on, I'm just watching because there's nothing else to do TV; not the prime time, action and comedy filled, amazingly produced Television that gets released to DVD because it's a genuine joy to watch. TV to me is something I can't be around or I'll join in, I'm not a social watcher who only does it occasionally. I can sit on a couch and do nothing but watch TV for an entire day, when that happens I usually forget to eat, and when that day is over I realize I didn't enjoy myself for even a moment. When I do anything else all day, I have something to show for it: a sense of pride, a newfound talent, a couple levels and a few achievements gained. But TV? oh no! TV is the Devil, with a capital D to demonstrate the true sense of Evil.

And yet, though I know how terrible and draining the entire experience is for me, I still can't stop myself from watching when it's on. When you tell people you're a recovering alcoholic they respect the disease and won't drink around you, when you tell people you're addicted to TV they laugh and say "Me too."

Perhaps there's a bigger problem going on here...

Sunday

So I've always thought of Sundays as a "Do Nothing" day. Since I was a kid and would spend the morning reading the color comics in the paper and not watching Saturday morning cartoons. The point is I'm keeping that tradition alive to this day by not doing anything all day :)

So there should be a game, guess the quote:
"Pazuzu you ungrateful gargoyle"

Procras-eh, I'll finish later

The funny thing about procrastination is-
Sometimes it actually takes more energy to put something off than to actually just do it.
Once you start procrastinating it becomes exponentially more difficult to get back on track.
With each decision to not work the work gets that much further away.

It's like rocket fuel (stay with me on this I'm going somewhere).
Say there's a rocket that's going to leave the atmosphere that weighs 3,000 pounds.
Now you're going to need 3,000 pounds of fuel to break the atmosphere, but now your rocket weighs 6,000 pounds, so you're going to need 6,000 pounds of more fuel, but now your rocket weighs 12,000 pounds and so on and so forth.

So you wait to work, but now you've lost all your momentum so it's harder to get back to work now, and because you've waited you've lost more momentum and waited longer, so you lose even more momentum and so on and so forth.

Often times I do things on the computer with only one hand, because my other hand is usually under my chin holding my head up (or in my pants, but don't tell anyone). So my new genius idea is to type with a mouse, you have a couple quick keys "R S T L N E" that are actually on the mouse that you press with your thumb. Then there is a virtual keyboard that has the rest of the keys. Yeah, yeah, this might be my best idea yet. Or perhaps this is just the best few beers I've had all week. Only time will tell.

Funny things in life

I've noticed a funny thing that happens in human psychology, or at least it happens to me, and not just in Human Psychology, also in Physics, and English, and any class really. Not just in classes either, just all around in my life. Whenever I get excited or sometimes obsessed about a new and fun thing I tend to only do that one thing for a long period of time. But then the funny thing happens, you know the one I mentioned in the first sentence? Eventually the blinders come off and the other aspects of my life come into view. Suddenly I have this new thing that I want to hold onto but there's all these other things I have in my life that I can't let go of either, so it becomes a big game of catch up while I'm trying to cram every possible crumb of experience into my life. Then of course something falls behind, and I get upset. Like that general from that movie who's all "We can't leave anyone behind!" You know what movie I'm talking about, "Generic War Movie" I'm sure it made lots of money in the box office. So my body becomes like an army and I can't leave any part behind (this analogy doesn't make any sense to me any more because it sounds like parts of my body are falling off), and then I just get completely run down with everything I've been trying to do and I stop doing the first fun thing that started this whole mess and my life goes back to normal. So is the cycle, so shall it ever be.

Asleep And Awake, Alliteration!

The human body is an incredible thing that can adapt to most anything. I am referring of course to the amazingly low amount of sleep I have been getting as of late. For the last week and a half (wait, that's the same time I started this blog up again...) I have been going to bed later and later because I'm just so busy, and the strangest thing has happened: nothing. I haven't been passing out at work and being asked to go home (damn) my productivity hasn't plummeted, if anything it's been getting higher (but that's not because of the lack of sleep, in fact the lack of sleep is because I'm being productive as well as slacking off as much as I usually do, somethings gotta give). And all this leads up to one conclusion: I could have been staying up all night playing video games my entire life and I wouldn't have had all the ill effects I always heard about, I'm typing specifically to you, Mom. So I'm not going to go crazy, I'm not going to be sick every day and I'm not going to go blind (or is that something else?), so there!

(title goes here)

Social obligations are funny things, not necessarily funny enough to make a joke out of though. I used to ditch my social obligations to play video games, and it would make me feel bad. Now I'm ditching my video games for social obligations, and I feel bad. I have to ditch my friends to hang out with my friends and vice versa.

I've also noticed that writing is a very anti-social, personal thing. I'm sure writing COULD be done with other people in a group, but that would take all the fun out of it. Writing is about closing the door to the rest of the world (sometimes literally) and exploring the deep depths of your soul, sometimes with no lights save the glow of the computer monitor. You know, like ya do in junior high and high school? with your dark clothes and eye makeup? writing just to feel something besides emptyness? was that just me?

I lost!

After almost a complete week I lost my chain. :(
But here's the deal: there was a weak link and usually I would feel sorry for myself, but not today! Oh no! Today I am starting again, and if I break this chain then I'll just start again again and if the next chain breaks then I'll just start again again again and if-yadda yadda yadda.
A large problem in my life has been that I give up too easily, if I see a small imperfection in a project I give up completely and therefore it never gets done. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not how most people operate, I also think this is not how anyone excels.

So starting now I will no longer let my failures get me down! I will use them to motivate me into a master! I will dust myself off, move my command center to a different location, and rebuild! I will no longer be bad at Starcraft!

Ah spring, when a young man's mind turns to thoughts of cookies.

As anyone who has perused the annual Girl Scout cookie catalog will know, each box of cookies is priced identically. To the casual observer this seems like a fine deal because a box of cookies is a box of cookies right? Absolutely not. According to the Girl Scouts themselves the most popular cookie is the Thin Mint, to no surprise from anyone. But if you remove sales from the equation and actually talk to people I believe you will find that Samoas are the preferred Girl Scout confection, taste wise. So why then, are Samoas not the highest selling? Well I think it's a simple case of economics. Samoas have at best 15 cookies in their package, Thin Mints have about 32. Your option here is a small amount of excellence or a crap-load of pretty good, and being as we are in America the masses have spoken and quantity trumps quality any day.

I personally prefer Trefoils, you get almost 40 per box.

No time no time no time

Crap! I only have 6 minutes to write a blog before I completely miss a day! I'm late because I went to go see a taping of the Wanda Sykes show.

I must say that while I always thought of myself as a Wanda Sykes anti-fan I really enjoyed myself, she was quite charming and entertaining. Plus Nick Cannon was on there, he's totally on my man crush list, and there was THE Passenger 57, Wesley Snipes himself.

Shite! I'm out of time, maybe I can edit it and it will still show up as being posted today?

YES!! I can post it and then go back and add more things and I still have my complete chain, even though I kinda cheated. But we don't really have the same approach to ending or starting days that we used to. I don't think the day can officially start anew at midnight if most people are staying up past 1:00am, that way you're going to bed and waking up on the same day. That's not sleep, that's a glorified nap.

What's with today today?

Today was one of those days where I would sit around for an hour or so, come up with a great idea to write about and as soon as I tried to cultivate the idea in my mind there would be something that needed my immediate attention and the idea was lost in the ether. Ideas are funny things, they can seem amazing and incredible the moment you have them but write them down and come back later and all of a sudden you have absolutely no idea why you thought that was even remotely funny. That's an extreme case of course, most of the time the idea is just slightly less funny. But there are rare occasions where a small nugget slips out from the folds of my brain and finds itself on a small slip of paper that gets lost on my desk. When I ultimately come upon the idea once more I have forgotten how I ever came to such a witty and entertaining musing about the world around me, and sometimes even literally Laugh Out Loud (never rolling on the floor of course). Today was not one of those days though.

So I just got a Beta Key for Starcraft II. Which means 1 of 2 things, either I will: A)Fall in love with the game almost immediately based on my previous nostalgia for a game I still play from time to time mixed with the upgraded graphics that I have been waiting for a decade to see properly, or B)play 1 or 2 games online, realize that cheat codes aren't enabled and remember that I was never very good at RTS games and I always show me the money'D my way through pretty much every level past the first two of each race.
I think cheat codes in games are a terrible idea, every time I found a cheat code for a game that I loved that game suddenly became the epitome of fun. My pupils would dilate with the added adrenaline of becoming a demi-god in the world I had been enveloped into. Yet as quickly and intensely as I had loved the cheat code, I became embittered. Like an addict who stumbles into a large stash of their choice drug I had used up all the fun at once instead of allowing the fun to build and becoming proud of my accomplishments. I had no will power when it came to cheat codes, no matter how many times I started a new game and promised myself this time would be different I would always go back to my dealer and ask for another hit. "Just once or twice when I'm in trouble" I would convince myself, and eventually I would finish the last campaign again with a single Dragoon after a quick "power overwhelming" was typed on the keyboard and go to bed as the victor on my screen, but the defeated in my heart.

What to do when you don't have an idea

You just write? Right? Right!

But the problem with owning a computer and living in this age of ADD is that anytime there is a slight break in concentration I immediately have 30 or 40 other things to occupy my attention. This is when war must be declared on the minimize button. Why are computers powerful enough to run 4 or 5 programs at once? Do I really need to play a game of solitaire whilst balancing my checkbook, updating my resume and watching the best the internet has to offer. Well no I don't NEED to per se, but it's always good to know I have the option yes?

I, for some reason, was never able to focus on many things at once the way most of my friends were. I constantly saw my buddies in high school reading while listening to music, I never could. I would have friends watch TV while carrying on a conversation with me, and I apologize to all of you because I didn't catch a single word of what you said while the TV was on. I tried, god knows I tried, I would play music while writing papers which turned out to be terrible. I never quite got a hold of it.

At this point I feel like the story arc should arise into a crescendo where today I am able to read, listen to music and have a coherent conversation with my girlfriend about the current economic trends of the US and where we think they'll be in 10 years. But in reality I can't even finish a blog post without

Time to start a new chain

So I started to realize that lately I've been doing all the things I've wanted to do but haven't for one reason or another. More often than not that reason is because it would look bad in the eyes of society. But now, that doesn't matter, and you know why? Because I have a live in girlfriend! Now that I have a live in girlfriend I don't have to pretend to be interested in manly things like sports so that I can talk to the other single guys at a party. I can just talk to my girlfriend about things that I want to talk about, like how slutty that girl over there looks. Now that I have a live in girlfriend I don't have to worry about things like working out, I can just take a nap as soon as I get home. Now that I have a live in girlfriend I don't have to worry about how people will look at me when I tell them I've started playing World of Warcraft. Because I still have someone to sleep with me every night even though I play (LF1M 4 [2 girl raid] pst if interested). Now that I have a live in girlfriend I don't have to worry if I smell good, or if my fingernails are trimmed, or if I have clean underwear on (I just stopped wearing any, less laundry). Yessiree having a live in girlfriend has turned my life around, I've even started collecting comic books (although that will mean less room for her shoes).