On the Topic of My Character

I'm not going to lie to you, I am a really interesting person.  I find myself to be an extremely interesting person with all kinds of different aspects and layers.  I'm sure everybody out there thinks the exact same thing about themselves as they are all "individuals" or whatever they claim to be but seriously I find myself to be much more interesting to analyze than most of people I've met.  It's largely due to the fact that I am always intrigued by people that I'm not completely sure if I like or not cause then I don't know whether or not to concentrate on their good or their bad traits (so I can compliment or criticize them) so I instead pay attention to both sides, so enough about you and more about me.

First of all, I am mostly incapable of hate.  There are people I don't enjoy being in the company of, as well as some that I have the tendency to disagree with on a large range of topics.  Yet, there are no people in the world that I have personally spoken with that I can say the word hate even begins to be applicable, and that even includes this random dude I met once who angered me and then popped back up in my life in what I momentarily thought to be an inopportune time, as friends of friends you don't connect with seem to be oddly likely to do.  Sometimes I wish I had a rival or someone I could hate that I keep running into, it seems like it would be a nice thing to have going on in the background.  Instead I give people the benefit of the doubt and like to think they are doing things I don't like for perfectly rational reasons.

GET IT!?!?!?!?!?

With the previous paragraph taken into account, it shouldn't be a surprise that I tend to get along with people on a personal level.  I was always an awkward kid who had problems maintaining friends during my early years in school as I have pointed out, having what I consider to be only one real friend in the first decade of my life.  This friend transferred schools after a year and I maintained contact with him for a little bit after that but we slowly fell apart, and haven't knowingly seen each other since.  I made my first current friend when I was 12, and proceeded to grow into a moderately sized group of friends.  During most of High School I had what I consider to be 4 good friends.  I currently believe that I hold at least 4 separate groups of friends that I still see and communicate with often (home friends, undergrad school friends, grad school friends, department friends, etc.)  If you had told me I would have this number of friends at my age a decade ago, I surely would have foamed at the mouth and spent days feverishly looking for a time machine to get here quicker, but first I'd have to visit this future.
It is also amazing that with the amount of friends I have been able to amass over the years that I have never been in a real adult relationship.  This probably would dampen the good mood of decade-ago me after being told how many friends I have.  It is an interesting thing to wonder, because I have so many people who care for me, but there is no proof that they really care about me.  It is a strange kind of loneliness that even though I am rarely lonely in the physical sense, I can't shake the feeling for my life at large.  I think some of my friends will argue that this has something to do with how picky I am with girls.  I understand that I often go for girls that are difficult to date, either being much more attractive than I, being of a personality that is not conducive to dating people like myself, or even finding myself being hung up on girls who are in long term relationships that everyone knows aren't going to end anytime soon.  My answer to that is that it isn't always about quantity, it is sometimes about quality, and I don't believe in doing things for the sake of it in general.  I intentionally put myself in positions to fail when it comes to my personal life, because some situations aren't worth risking to fail on, but the ones that are pay off that much more when you don't fail.  If I learned anything from growing up in my family it is that sometimes one stroke of luck is all you need.

I also think that my system of beliefs is interesting.  I study Applied Mathematics, and that is a type of science.  As you would expect to see from scientists, a lot of the people I spend time with in class and doing work, the prevailing attitude is to be counter-cultural and at odds with the concept of a God.  I diverge with my peers in these respects.  I have a great fondness for popular culture (paragraph 2 implicitly explains why,) it is one of the reasons that I am able to get along with a vast range of people.  I have a lot of interests in all facets of pop culture, and while I obviously give personal preference to some of them (sports), I am well-versed in almost anything you can talk about.  I am also a scientist, so I am also an intellectual to the point where even if you think you are above discussing things that can be seen on a screen and want to talk about concepts or ideas I am also able to hold a great conversation there as well.  As for the religious side, growing older is causing me to see the merits in the systems in place rather than trying to debase them as I would have tried to do in my younger days, and a lot of people I know are still trying to do.  I am still not sure what I believe in, but I certainly believe there is something, not for any rational reasoning but because it is comforting to me.  I think the world is more interesting when there is a greater power choosing to intervene when they feel it suitable, or things like "luck" follow you around and affect the way your life unfolds.  I could also say that these things should arise if you subscribe to the idea of multiple universes that diverge at every decision point or point that could change the world around you.

Am I the only one who likes he plays for a team that has a horseshoe as their logo?

Mix all of these amicable traits with the fact that I am in that perfect range where I am an attractive human being without being particularly threatening to anybody and that is a very great person.  All I need to do is improve my work ethic a little bit and start molding my body into a statuesque form and I may be a model human being.  And there might be my motivation toward the little self-improvement I have left to do.  Thanks everybody who sat around reading this piece of rhetoric masturbation, best wishes for all of you, especially now that you know you are inferior.

The People I Have Been

This is a piece I have meant to write for quite some time so I think I'll write it now for no better reason than because I want to write and this is the only piece I can think to write.  I understand at this point that by writing this that it may point out some potential social issues I may have, but for now I'm going to assume this is a normal way to act.  Throughout the years of my life I have found myself in many different situations that have caused me to have to tweak my personality to fit some supposed role I have determined for myself.  Every now and then I look back and think to myself about how I behaved in some roles, and wonder what the hell I was thinking.  So without further interruption, here are the roles I of today believe I tried to play in past years.

Role #1 Child (Birth-7th Grade)
This one is self-explanatory, until I turned 13 I didn't really have the mental abilities to understand cause and effects of culture so I existed as is.  During these times I didn't find myself with many long lasting friends, which probably suggests something about who I am naturally.

I really had no choice!

Role #2 Mr, Irrational Confidence Guy! (7th Grade- 10th Grade)
I became this person too early, it would probably be beneficial if I hadn't become Mr. Irrational Confidence Guy until this day and age.  By that I mean I was extremely ballsy in talking to girls, and had absolutely no reason to have been (hence the irrational confidence part), but now that I believe there is an outside chance that I have something to give a woman there is no confidence to be found.  During this time I told a popular girl she was a tall glass of water and I was thirsty (note I was far from popular, likely because of comments like that), bet that I could date a girl only to brag about it semi-publicly like a complete asshat and have that be the reason she didn't date me and even at one point I was very close to dating a popular girl from the grade below me despite my lack of popularity.  What made me feel I was a person who was able to do those things successfully is beyond me, but I simultaneously envy and hate that little prick.  This role mostly coincided with kid who wanted to be popular because I felt a little inferiority complex from having a popular older brother in the grade above me.  I have long since gotten over that inferiority complex and consider it a great lesson toward becoming the man I am today.

I thought I could be cool like Fonzie...

Role #3 Intentional Outsider/Nerd (11th Grade-High School Graduation)
Entering my Junior year of high school I found myself embracing my natural nerdiness/ unpopularity and decided that I should live with it.  I think this is partially because I started taking AP classes so I was separated from the less intelligent cool kids, and thrown into a setting with a lot more people who were more like me.  I found that in these situations I preferred the company of the less popular kids because I didn't seem to have to act as much.  This led me to a renaissance of playing video games (usually spent my weekends playing, including typical 11-3 shifts on Xbox Live with friends) and discovering new music (birthing my love for 90s music.)  During these years I found my number of friends grow exponentially as I found that there was another group of kids in my own grade (including Toninho!) who were a lot similar to my usual group that I hung out with at that time.  Along with that, there were still some residual effects from Mr. Irrational Confidence Guy as I was still much more aggressive in the dating world than I am now, even though that included barking up the tree of the bet girl previously mentioned for a whole year, honk if you are surprised that was a fruitless endeavor!

...But I was always much more Urkell

Role #4 The Kinda Crazy/ Weird Kid (Freshman Year of College)
I was actually called out on acting this role out once, a friend of mine said he hated me when he first met me because I made it out like I did all these crazy things and was a wild person, but never actually did anything.  It was completely true, but I was in a completely new environment and am kind of an introvert, so I needed to adopt this kind of personality to meet people.  And you know what, it was successful!  I met most of my friends in college one fateful day Freshman year when some kids in my hall that my roommate knew found a box and pranked our room by having someone hide in the box and jump out of it to scare me when I answered the door.  I don't remember how (possibly because nobody else wanted to do this prank to people they didn't know) I ended up being the guy in the box as we repeated this prank on other doors across the hall.  I ended up hanging out with these kids a lot over the next few weeks and this became some of the best friendships I've had in my life.  Say what you want, but this was a turning point in my life as this was a month into school and I was already considering getting a transfer due to the environment.  I never followed through with it and am very happy about that in retrospect.  This is the time when Mr. Irrational Confidence Guy completely died out as I was finally able to appreciate how stupid and contrived a lot of my attempts to woo women were, leaving your name and room number with "(insert name here) is cute" on the whiteboard on someone's door is only going to get erased, not responded to.

Chase in the Box!

Role #5 The Playful Older Guy? (Sophomore Year)
I really don't know what to call this guy, a lot of weird stuff happened over the course of that year, and I found it to be an emotional roller coaster.  Before the school year started I spent a lot of my time flirting with girls at the grocery store I worked at to slight success at best (I've written about this in multiple posts before so I'm not elaborating).  This year I spent a large amount of my social energy on trying to meet Freshman girls at school, I was older and that had an effect on girls at that age.  I can't remember how I spent my first semester of that year, but it was the first semester I had ever spent as an undergraduate TA for a class, and I had a student start making moves on me as the semester came to a close.  I thought that was going to be a great thing for me, but somehow before coming back to school for Spring she ran into her ex-boyfriend, and needed time to "think" apparently texting "what's up?" fortnightly, is pressuring so she decided to make me aware of this by never speaking to me again.  I don't get subtle messages born of idiocy very well so I asked her about it and she told me so.  It was dumb, and she transferred out of the school at the end of the semester due to said idiocy (yes, I'm bitter.)  Later a girl I knew and her boyfriend broke up and she talked to me to get over it.  I started to become fond of this girl because of this (guys are made to be attracted to emotional vulnerability I suppose) and followed through with this feeling.  I even got blessing from the ex-boyfriend whom she completely hated at this point (a former student of mine and a damn fine kid at that.)  She was apparently never that interested and nothing panned out save for a date.

I also watched the Prisoner!

Role #6 The Random Information Guy (Junior Year)
I had a weird housing designation for this year, I was living in a single a mile or so from the rest of my friends, and often found that leaving my room was burdensome.  Needless to say I spent a larger chunk of that year than usual by myself, and even created this blog during this time.  I'm sure my personality in my writing is different if you contrast then with now (2 years strong), and back then I was definitely more spontaneous and weird than I am now.  When I was around people I was typically getting dinner with my friends and one of their girlfriends and sometimes some of her friends.  For some reason since she was the only new person I was getting used to I found the part of my personality that she enjoyed was the part that came out the most (because I apparently can't deal with being disliked) and that part happened to be the part of me that comes off as a weird sexual deviant.  You mention one too many things you read on Urban Dictionary, and some people will actually think you do this stuff.  As time went on I'm fairly sure she got to know the more mundane me, but the weird kid kind of took precedence for over the course of that year.  Overall, the year was pretty uneventful save for the death of my car, which I still need to blog about at some point.

Foolproof way to make friends!

Role #7 The Laid Back Senior (Fall Semester Senior Year)
This semester was a great time of my life, I wasn't taking overly difficult courses, I was graduating at the end of the semester, I was over 21 for the first time in my life and I was living off campus with some awesome guys.  I didn't go out nearly as much this semester as I had in other years because I had no reason to, I could have all the fun I wanted to have in my house with my friends.  In this semester I played a lot of video games and drank a lot of beer.  There really isn't much else to say about this person, he had his fun and did what he wanted to do, except for the fact I didn't really try to date anybody at this time due to the short window of time.

Role #8 The Manchild (January 2012-Now)
This was a trying time for me, I was unemployed, graduated and had no idea what I was doing going forward.  I also had no car, and had no friends nearby that weren't consistently busy.  I spent nearly all my time bouncing between my Xbox and computer.  It was probably one of the worst times of my life for the first month or two, but eventually I got used to it and managed to pass the time (Mass Effect, Arkham City and Fifa helped) and after a short time, a few failed job searches, I got my Grad School acceptances in and decided I was going to continue to be a manchild for a few more months and then go back to school.  During these months I reinvigorated my love for Spongebob, watched a lot of cult and B-movies and then went back to my house at my old school for a month before the graduation ceremony.  This phase is directly responsible for my recent shift in movie and music tastes, gaining a taste for "so bad it's good" films and indie rock.

If you Insist!

Role #9 To Be Determined Dude (Now)
I'm in a new setting and, as I always have, I am going to have to assume a new role.  Usually these roles come organically and I don't need to consciously decide what person I'm going to be next, so lets give it time and see what I will think of current me next year.  This probably sheds a decent amount of light to people what it is like to be me, I still don't know if this is normal, but it's my normal and I'm just trying to be myself.

Who Am I!?

Sorry to everybody who reads this title and thinks that I am going to write about the Jackie Chan classic by the same name.  To make it up to those people I will give you this video (Editor's note, the video is gone!)

Oh my that is quite the awesome fight scene!  Almost as good as the fight in They Live!  But I digress, the point of this post is not Jackie Chan or fight scenes, or anything even remotely close to that.  The point of this post stems from my curiosity the other day when I looked at the stat pages for this blog.  I saw that I have views from all over the world and a decent amount of views on the whole, which is cool even though I think a vast majority of the views are people looking at pictures then leaving the page.  I don't think that I have many readers outside of Toninho (link to his blog, Sycophantic Laughter, is always present on this page) and by that I mean I misplaced an m and meant I don't think I have any readers outside Toninho.  But that day I looked at the search results that have brought people to my blog, and I see this list.

It is more than obvious from the top 7 results of those 8 that those views are people searching unrelated things and stumbling upon pictures I have featured on my blog before.  But the last one gets me a little excited, if I can say myself.  To you, Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. Curiosity-Pants, if you are searching that on Google, you have read my blog enough to know that I try to hide who I really am to not have any personal backlash, although if you know me personally, it would be a little obvious.  So my question to you is, why did you think Google would give you this information?  I also want to know why you would think that knowing my real name would make any difference from knowing my pseudonym?  Lastly I just feel a little sad that you would ask Google who I am, when there is a comment box at the bottom of each of my posts  that I would love to see filled with your questions!  So if whoever you are that searched that, and you see this, make use of the comment box and I'll try to write about anything you want to know.  I do ask that you allow me to keep this curtain of anonymity, if it wouldn't be too much to ask.

Fill that thing up!

I'll try to give you some help by consolidating some of the information I have thrown about on this blog before.  I recently graduated college and am going to graduate school for an applied math masters.  My real name is not Chase Robertson, and people have been redirected here by searching "Chase Robertson Houston" and I would like to apologize to Chase Robertson from Houston if my blog using his name as my fake name is a problem, I would see what I could do to change the name of the blog and use a nickname instead.  I am mostly a kid at heart and still have a fondness for Spongebob Squarepants, Doug and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  I enjoy cult movies, I like video games (that aren't online first person shooters) and apparently Jackie Chan.  I am a huge baseball fan (particularly the Red Sox and Braves, and since the middle of last year I've added the Nationals to that list.)  I guess that is a lot of the personal information I have given over the time, feel free to dig through the archives to find what I forgot I wrote.  Anybody who reads this, I urge you to make use of the comment box, especially since I haven't had a whole lot of ideas to write about lately, and I would love to have enough questions to do some sort of mailbag.  Since my reader(s) has (have) been so kind to me, I will grant you a single picture of myself.

Who doesn't want to know more about this guy!