The Unemployment Chronicles: Part 1 of Hopefully 1

My last blog post was just over a month ago now, back when my time after graduation was no different from a typical college student's winter break.  During that time I didn't really have much to complain about, my friends were around, I was giving myself an intentional reprieve from doing anything constructive, and as far as I was concerned I was succeeding in what I wanted to do.  We found ourselves having some good times, a lot of video games were played, a few football games and there was even a trip to the city to have some drinks with a friend who has moved away!  There are minimal complaints about my pretend vacation, but the thing about vacations is that unless it involves the Titanic, they don't last forever.  And thus a great portion of my friends moved back to their schools and I was left basically home alone to start my new life as a grown-up.

I'm sorry, once you became the 2nd highest grossing movie ever.  You lost the right for any joke to be "too soon."

 Being a grown-up is almost exactly like being a 12 year old again in my situation.  You have no money, you can't go out and hang out with your friends all the time (I don't have a car), you spend most of your days watching TV and playing video games and the only thing you are really looking forward to is baseball season.  I quickly realized that this was going to get old quickly and started shipping my resume around to places that seemed they would be interesting in hiring someone with an extraordinary academic record leading up to receiving their B.S. in Mathematics, which is a smaller subset of companies than you would be led to believe.  For the record, receiving the physical copy of my diploma has probably been one of the most underwhelming moments of my life, my first thought was to make a paper airplane from it, but it eventually found its place in a frame on my wall like everyone else's.  All frustrated hostility aside, my resume started to make its rounds at places all over the country.  In the half-month or so I have received calls, e-mails or some form of interest from places in Massachusetts, Florida and North Carolina, one of which was an on site interview in which at the time it seemed like there was a genuine interest in myself.  So, there is reason to believe I have a nice and desirable education, but I have not quite found an opportunity to take the next step.

Mine never even got to wear a hat!

Meanwhile, to kill time all day I have found myself getting enthralled in such productive endeavors as Batman: Arkham City, FIFA 12, Netflix and playing with my dogs in addition to searching for new and exciting ways to keep in touch with my friends.  Now please excuse me for a minute while I attempt to think of something interesting and new to say about any one of these things.

Despite such a great motivating speech from Special Agent Dale Cooper from the show Twin Peaks, I still am searching for something interesting...

Almost onto something here...

That's it!  I can talk about my new found love for B-movies.  I am pretty sure everyone on earth who sees that clip from John Carpenter's They Live will agree that it is completely awesome, and I would also recommend anybody to watch From Dusk Till Dawn as I found that to be one of the most entertaining movies I have ever seen, and Toninho strongly agrees with my tastes in both movies.  But now lets move on back to slightly more important matters in my life.

I spent last week back at my school apartment (by way of train for all you smart asses who were remembering my admission to not having a car) because Wednesday was the school's career fair.  I think the career fair went well but to tell you the truth it was really nothing worth discussing at this point.  The rest of the week was nice though, after weeks of barely seeing anybody outside of my family it was a very good thing to be around people my age again and maintain my social skills.  Over the course of the week I spent a lot of downtime with my housemates playing video games and watching TV, being a normal college student again (without the classwork of course).  My visit also happened to correspond to my graduating class's "100 Days Party" so not only was I able to find the opportunity to see a lot of the friends I spent a lot of time with over the course of college, I was also able to run into many people I probably would not have seen otherwise.  The party itself was pretty good, but not spectacular.  People drank, people danced, my friend claimed to have found the perfect girl for me but couldn't introduce us because we "both have ADD" and couldn't find the both of us simultaneously, I woke up hung over with half of the house a complete mess.  Typical Friday night.

Pretty much

So now I am back at home after this week trying to kick this job search thing into second gear.  I'll try to write more often about things happening in my life so I don't keep bringing these ridiculously long periodic catch ups, and also because another hobby wouldn't hurt.  I'll see you then, but I guess I also need to give the prerequisite Happy Valentines Day to the blogosphere given the time.

I could have not conjured a more silly image.

Oh yeah, and if you would like to hire me, comment below and we can talk. (Don't pretend shameless self-promotion can't ever work)

Decision Points

Firstly, I would like to point out this is my first ever post written using my fancy new phone so don't be surprised to find some limited vocabulary, incorrect words and grammatical laziness as my fingers tend to be less accurate than I believe.  Now that I have put that matter aside I would like to congratulate myself on finishing my bachelors of science (retrospective on the college experience to come along eventually) which I was able to finish slightly ahead of expectations.  But as I have been known to blog about before, I am a little hesitant about growing up and still don't know what it is I want to be doing for the rest of my life.  But I suppose this is a decision point everybody has to go through.  Yet I have never found myself to be particularly adept at making correct decisions for myself although you could argue that I turned out alright anyways (thanks to all those who would care to argue that). 

As much fancy-schmancy that can be fit in a JPEG

The easiest decision point that comes to mind is when I chose what school I was going to attend my college classes at.  This was a little different from the normal decision most high school students have because I had to make the decision twice.  Finding the first time relatively easy because of financial reasons, I was at one point enrolled at the flagstaff campus for the local state university (I don't know why I still try to maintain anonymity on this blog since I'm sure anybody who cares enough to read it already knows exactly who I am.)  If that was the end of the story I don't think I would have been too disappointed, but it wasn't the end of the story as the one school I was wait-listed at responded back to me with what I considered to be an attractive package.  After a week of deliberation in which I was steadfast on not giving in to the new offer, I talked with my physics teacher who more or less told me I would be stupid to pass on such a good school.  For some reason hearing that was enough so I technically dropped out of the first college but immediately enrolled in the second, which I can technically consider to be my alma mater now. 

I've always wondered how they work.

Over the years since this decision I haven't been able to help but think of how my life would have differed had I not changed my mind at that juncture.  One thing to understand is that my original choice is known well enough as a party school and I would have been attending with one of my best friends while the school I did go to has better academics at the price of being known as an overall unhappy student body.  This does not mean that I was unhappy at school, but I definitely understood why the school had been able to ascertain such infamy.  Would I have gotten as good of an education and been happier if I stuck with my original decision, or would I have given into the party culture and not succeed as I had?  Would I have had more relationship success if I had gone to a school that was not 70% male (which may be gracious with the ratio), or is that just an undeniable part of who I am?  Would a change of scenery have helped me mature more and possibly know what I should do right now? 

What happened to my elbows?

There are thousands of these questions that I could ask myself, but there is no way I could possibly answer any of them.  The answers wouldn't even hold any meaning even if they existed, because I made that decision in my life and I really can't argue with how it turned out.  I met many interesting people and created some great memories with them at school and I suppose I am in a position to succeed in life, so even if I may have made the wrong decision at my last decision point it was a good decision in general.  So I would like to end this post hoping that I can be lucky enough to have my upcoming decision point turn out as well as this last one did, even if I scrutinize it anyways.  I'll be sure to keep my dedicated fan base alerted to what that is and how it turns out.  Enjoy yourselves.

Kinda what its like.  Plus I realized I had never posted a picture of Rover.

Baseball, We Need to Talk... It's Not You, It's Me.

I wanted baseball to be innocent again.  I needed baseball to be innocent again.  I hoped that baseball was innocent again.  And eventually, I believed that baseball was innocent again.  But this week went and showed me that I had been naive and gullible once again.  I felt a small pang of the loss of innocence coming from Pujols leaving the World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals, a franchise he played his entire career with (including minors), to pursue greener (get it?) pastures in Los Angeles with the Angels.  But that wasn't too much pain for me, because I had already come to the conclusion before that players are not fans, their job is to play baseball and make the most money while they are at it, they are human beings and as we all know, everybody has their selling price.  Pujols happened to find an offer that he felt was best for himself and his future, and human nature would not allow him to give up his personal happiness for the happiness of others.  While I don't want to condemn Pujols for being a human, cases like this show us how precious players like Craig Biggio, Chipper Jones and Joe Mauer are playing their entire careers with a single team, and even going as far to giving their career franchises a hometown discount.  That's not what a player would do, its what a fan would do.

Human nature at it's purest.

But once I got over this and maintained a large proportion of my baseball innocence, last night dropped a megaton bomb on everything I wanted to believe, and the irony of No Doubt's song Ex-Girlfriend playing on my shuffle right now is the perfect analogy of what being a modern baseball fan is.  Being a baseball fan is the same as being a single person in the dating world, you try to keep your hopes high that the worst parts are behind you and that only happiness awaits you, but you can never be completely sure.  Let me explain.   I was a child during the steroid era, an eight year old watching what seemed to be one of the greatest baseball seasons in history as Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire battled for home run dominance over Roger Maris, I remember that summer very well and my naivety believing that the players of my time are truly some of the greatest ever.  I was 14 years old when Barry Bonds broke the home run record once again, once again sitting on the couch praying that I could witness history repeating itself, even though the allegations of PED use were starting to seep to the surface of baseball, and I was well aware of the potential artificiality of what I was seeing.  But there is also one moment of my life that I will remember forever, on my 17th birthday, I sat on my couch watching the San Francisco Giants play, I argued with myself after all my family had gone to bed about how I was going to respond when Barry Bonds broke yet another home run record, his PED use was just about as well documented as it ever would be, yet he hit his 755th home run off of Clay Hensley (who was formerly suspended for PED use in the minors) which made me feel maybe there was a level playing field.  That night I got a birthday present I will never forget, as Barry Bonds hit 756 and my reaction was to run and jump around my living room at 1 A.M.  I woke my parents, I told my father what had just happened, and in the moment it was one of the best things I'd ever seen in baseball (which included the entire 2004 postseason from the perspective of a Red Sox fan).  

Its still a powerful image to me.

When the luster of those moments wore away, I realized that what I had experienced was not completely genuine and I just didn't have enough trust to continue this relationship at the level I was currently at.  This was my first time being alone and without a sport to share my time and life with.  The end of my high school years, I had problems trusting baseball again and while I was able to still like it as a friend, I couldn't find it in my heart to commit myself again, but I was able to dabble around and try all sorts of different things out.  Following soccer for the Euro 2008 tournament was a real good diversion, but it was a hoax, not meant to be real.  I had experienced the equivalent of the first bad breakup through baseball, all the symptoms were there.  But eventually I moved off to college, I was away from home, I was alone, and baseball was there to comfort me. 

I don't want to know which one I was.

I jumped in head first, learning all the new names that I missed the last two years, and remembering all of the good times I had had with baseball in the past.  I couldn't hide it, being a baseball fan is an integral part of who I am.  I was a little hesitant to commit to any specific players again, and was able to get through the PED suspension of Manny Ramirez relatively unhurt.  As the years went on and no notable players were even suspected of PED use anymore, I learned to trust baseball once again, and more importantly the feats of individual players once again.  I was ready to dig as deep into baseball as I ever had before, learning entire team's rosters, tracking standings and league leaders by the day, subscribing to MLB.tvPED use would be regarded for the Hall of Fame as my senior thesis.  Yes, in my mind the Steroid Era was officially over.  

No image could possibly better represent innocence in baseball.

Before this season, I had never been a particularly big fan of Ryan Braun, my best memory of his existence being my disapproval of his being elected 2007 NL Rookie of the Year over Troy Tulowitzki (I really disagreed with the 2007 awards voting).  But I had looked at his statistics over his years and marveled at his consistency, and was starting to be convinced that he was the real deal.  The season went on and Braun continued to show extreme talent and I began to be very impressed with him.  Then came the playoffs, which was the first time I had been able to consistently see Braun play.  He didn't disappoint, in the two series I was able to see him play, he showed me that he had more talent than I had ever imagined, hitting homers that soared distances I would not believe by seeing him, and getting on base at an inhuman rate.  I was completely drawn onto the Ryan Braun bandwagon, I was thinking about buying a t-shirt online, I was researching the periodicity of great Jewish baseball players and I was arguing that he deserved to win NL MVP despite the fact that Matt Kemp's stats were better (but only slightly).  Braun went on to win that MVP award, and I was proud, even though I still had to argue he was deserving a few more times.  Being a baseball fan was great for me, I was identifying talent correctly, I was enjoying the subtle shifts in gameplay since my childhood and the sport was clean.  In other words, I could trust baseball.

I don't understand...

Then, yesterday happened.  It was a textbook time for a breakup to happen, I finally shed my shell protecting me and my feelings to avoid them from being hurt again, I was vulnerable.  Here is how yesterday happened, in play-by-play form.  I received a text message from a friend telling me not to look at anything about baseball on the Internet for a while, so I naturally looked immediately.  Seeing the headline caused me to fall to the ground, stunned.  I didn't know how to respond, so I told all the important people who I felt needed to know so they could soothe me and help me get over it.  I called my brother and told him the news, which was followed by no less than 30 seconds of disbelieving silence, which was then followed by a series of one word sentences.  The next few people who I talked to who had found out on their own brought it up and tried to console me.  The night ended with myself trying to drink it off with some close friends, and myself trying to avoid any analogies to what I had just experienced.  The worst part is that I still don't know how to respond, I'm holding on to hope that it was a false positive, and he will win his appeal and all will be normal again.  I want to defend Braun, I want it to work out and I want this to be a slight speed bump on the road of life.  But in reality, I know I have to acknowledge that it happened and move on with my life.  The part that bothers me the most is how I am having this strong of a reaction to the misfortune of someone I only know of because they are talented at a game.  I guess that is what being a true fan is about, and I wouldn't sell it for all the money the New York Yankees, Miami Marlins or Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are willing to throw at me.  I'll be fine, but I just have to get used to slight distrust of every player in the league again.

If I need to post this picture in a Steroids column again, its over...

My Current State of Affairs

Hello all!  It has been a while since I have last written about almost anything, so I guess now is as good a time as ever to just write about what is going on in my life.  The calendar just turned over to November, and it's becoming that very special time in the college student's life where they start to not care as much about their classes as they probably should.  I can only speculate as to the reasons why I feel like this, one of the reasons is probably the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday (which I have already weighed in my opinions on before), but it can also be due to the fact that most students have been at school for around 10 weeks already this semester, and that is a fair amount of time to be burnt out.  In my case this year, it may be due to the dangerous ailment known as senioritis.

I still love Hand Turkeys!

My senioritis is lying itself on especially thick because this is my last semester of college, in a little more than a month I will be a college graduate, and just like every other grown-up out there.  It is actually a little scary in general, I enjoy being a child and I don't feel like a lot of the things I do on a daily basis work very well with the working adult schedule.  But instead of just regurgitating what has been said before, I will just link to my buddy Toninho's article where he basically covers all that needs to be said.  More importantly than my whiny little tangent there is that I have yet to know what I am going to do once I become a so-called adult.  I have never really had a lot of ambitions growing up, and I've rarely had an answer when people asked me what
I wanted to be when I grew up.  In general, I made math my college major because I felt that I wasn't old enough to decide what I wanted to do with my life, and since I was talented at math I would just do that and it is an open enough subject that I would probably be able to jump into anything with it.  Well, four years later I nearly have my math degree, and I was mistaken when I thought that companies would be excited to find someone with a math background, they mostly think that I know how to program.  Having said that I have found myself stumbling upon what seems to be a very exciting path in life, at the career fair at school I happened to talk to a consulting firm that was very interested in hiring math majors and other problem solvers!  It was very exciting and I even had an interview with them last week!  Hopefully I will hear back from them soon and it will be a positive response, but if not I think I'll manage to come out okay.

Aww shit!  I could have just learned math from this picture!

While waiting to hear back about the job I've found that I have come across two new addictions (well, one is just a renewed addiction.)  The first is that I have found myself watching a lot of Spongebob Squarepants again, I love cartoons and some cartoons just transcend age and continue to be funny and entertaining no matter how old you are, among the ranks of these cartoons are Spongebob, Doug (obviously on those two), Hey Arnold, and Rocko's Modern Life, while the middle two are still good because they spread positive messages in fairly well-told stories to children, the latter two are the finest examples I have ever seen of a show for all ages.  Both shows are capable of hiding little pieces of adult humor seamlessly into their episodes and you wouldn't even know the difference as a child.  Take for example, the episode "Karate Choppers" from the first season of Spongebob.  When I watched it a month or two ago I remembered it as being exactly what it seems to be at face value, a story about Spongebob and Sandy doing karate with each other.  But now that I am more mature, I watched the episode and was surprised to find that the entire episode is a slightly veiled euphemism for sex, I won't go into how it is, you can watch the episode yourself.  But for now you can help yourself to seeing how much subtlety Rocko's Modern Life lacked.

As for my other new addiction, it comes to me directly from Toninho.  For a long while he has been urging me to play Batman: Arkham Asylum, and I have never found the time or a copy to play with, but recently I was able to borrow it from another friend of mine, and it is almost life changing.  Up until this point as far as comic book characters go, I have primarily been a Spider-man fan, and have had a moderate respect for the Batman, particularly from his movies (especially the one from the 60s!).  But I have found that not only is Batman: Arkham Asylum (and it's sequel Batman: Arkham City) a great game, but it also does a great job of giving in-depth descriptions of nearly all of Batman's most powerful villains.  I think that is my favorite part of the game, finding all of the information on the villains of Gotham City and being able to learn about the true story of the Batman.  Playing through the game, I have found that although the Joker is the most popular villain and probably is the most interesting, my favorite one is the Scarecrow.  It is likely that my taste for him comes from the parts he is featured in in Arkham
 


Another big thing that has happened in my life was that my second oldest brother (I have two older brothers) just recently bought a house with his girlfriend and they moved in and bought a puppy!  I am very happy for him, but it does do something to point out a lot how much I am different from my brothers.  They have both stayed around the area where we grew up, for school, for work, and now for living, but as I was getting to earlier, I have no idea where in the world I am going to be in a couple months, it is really weird.  They have also both been in long term relationships (one is married) and then you look at me, its not that I am unbearable to look at (on the other hand, maybe it is) but I haven't had a whole lot of luck with women in recent days.  It is probably been for lack of trying, it has been some time since I have really shown an interest in anybody in particular, and I don't know if its my problem or that of everyone else, so I'm gonna go ahead and blame it on everybody else.  All I have to do is continue to be the great catch that I am and someone will come fishing for it.  Well, I figure that is about enough to talk about for today, hopefully I will be able to blog again more often and maybe even come up with some more good ideas.  So I'll catch you all later.

Get off my property you damn kids!

Return of Project Yancey: Doug En Vogue

To the surprise of myself and likely many other people, the students of the Bluffington School actually do care about fashion (which is obviously reflected in their everyday dress.)  This is shown off by Doug walking by Bee Bee, Connie and Chalky looking at a teen fashion magazine during what is presumably their recess period.  After Bee Bee does her typical insult at Doug for being regular, Doug lets us in on his secret wish of wanting to be more like Dylan Farnum from the hot new teen drama, Teen Heart Street.  The next scene finds all of Doug's wishes coming true as he is watching Teen Heart Street, and sees the heartthrob, Dylan Farnum himself, wearing the same exact green vest and shorts that Doug always wears, and it's all while Judy does some mindless counter-societal blabber that Doug obviously pays no mind to.  As we lose ourselves in Doug's imagination, some fashion show is talking about how cool Doug is and how he is a total trendsetter.  With this perception of his new-found coolness in mind, Doug goes to school planning to not say anything about it, but everybody else is wearing the same clothes and point out how he is wearing the "Dylan Farnum look", obviously forgetting that Doug wears the same thing every day.

Dylan Farnum, such a hunk

 He decides to confide in Patti about his plight, but for lack of a better term, she simply doesn't give a fuck.  As Doug's frustration works it's way toward critical mass, even Skeeter is wearing the Dylan Farnum look.  Since Doug is more than a little insecure, he invites all his friends over to see how his closet is full of the same clothes, but it backfires and everyone thinks he is just a crazy Dylan Farnum fanatic.  We are now interrupted by another awesome daydream, where we see the same scene from Teen Heart Street featured earlier, except with Doug saying all the lines, and Connie and Patti get creeped out how Doug thinks he is Dylan Farnum, and that is because he is a marionette being controlled by Dylan Farnum himself.  Now critical mass has been found so Doug goes shopping for some new clothes, and the guy at the store tries to hook him up with the hippie look, a rapper's outfit and even a disco suit, but Doug hates all of them.  Now things get really interesting, another clerk (looks Jamaican but has a deep Indian accent) comes over and tries to figure out what the deal is then short stubby Jewish-sounding guy comes to help out as well and Doug does his patented "scream and run away" move.  Having decided to fuse elements of all three styles from the store Doug comes out wearing one of the most amazing ragtag sets of clothing I've ever seen (don't worry it will be pictured below) and keeps kicking a soccer ball against a picture of Mr. Farnum on the wall.    Now we find out three more things about Judy, first that she reads crazy magazines where people dress like Doug is now, second that she actually has some understanding about how copying moves things forward, and lastly that she has some soccer skills.  As she runs away to plan what seems to be a performance piece where people get naked and grunt at each other (too young to know what porn is I guess.)  Doug soul searches and realizes he doesn't care if he is trendy or not he just wants to be himself, which is just in time for him to not be trendy anymore because the new style is Skeeter's typical clothes.

I just found my Halloween costume!

It seems kind of strange that I would choose this episode, but stick with me because I have some interesting things to say about both the world of teen dramas and the world of fashion, so enjoy the ride.  The first topic I'll touch are the hilarity of teen dramas.  The trendy and cool kids would watch all kinds of these shows when I was in my younger days, but i was neither trendy nor cool, so I never was able to get myself inundated in the worlds of such shows as Dawson's Creek, Seventh Heaven or The OC.  I found myself preferring to stick to cartoon and typical sitcoms that would be conveniently timed when I got home from school.  This does not mean that I never watched and enjoyed a teen drama, because that is completely false.  I am a lifetime fan of the show Boy Meets World, but rather than having watched it when it was a new show, I got into it when it was syndicated years later.  It would be easy to say that being able to connect to the geeky little brother Corey Matthews was the reason why I was able to get into the show (mainly because I am, in fact, a geeky little brother).  It would also be easy to say that I like the show because Mr. Feeny is the Atticus Finch of television.  Yet, neither of these were the reason I found myself so interested in the show, the truth is that I watched nearly every episode of the show because I am in love with Topanga Lawrence.  She is a geek's dream girl, she is very smart, can hold a conversation, is very attractive yet approachable and to tell you the truth the weird name thing kinda turns me on.  We would just have to do something about the whole saving herself for marriage thing.

Oh Topanga, you tease...

The next topic to touch on is fashion, which shouldn't be too long of a discussion as I am still daydreaming about Topanga.  My typical day-to-day dress isn't very flashy, I would usually be found wearing a tee shirt with the partially zipped or unzipped hoodie, jeans and my trusty Adidas sneakers.  I've recently found myself taking a little divergence between given days, for some cases I have been starting to attempt to look nicer and wearing collared shirts more than typical (I'm still not "cool" enough to pop the collar), but have also found myself delving into looking at and even buying some more geeky tee shirts.  My favorite geek shirt was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt I was able to get for $10 at www.teefury.com, which has become one of the sites that I make sure to check once a day.  Other than that I really haven't noticed any particular fads in fashion as of lately, everything seems to just stay the same all the time without any drastic changes.  It isn't like what you are wearing sets you apart as much as people make it seem like, the real world isn't like The Warriors where you obviously know who knows who just by a quick look at their garb (for the record I would choose to be in the Baseball Furies if I had to choose, sorry Warriors, you are the best but leather vests aren't my style.)  So, that is that, I am going to go back to fantasizing about Topanga Lawrence now.  Until next time.

The Furies in all their face paint and glory.  Watch this movie.

Alternative Universes

A week or two ago I was watching The One with Jet Li, on the whole it was a pretty crappy movie with a few kinda cool fight scenes, exactly what I was expecting to see.  The best part of the movie though was that the premise revolved around the existence of alternate universes, which is a topic that always seems to find itself running through my head often, usually in humorous ways.  An alternate universe can take on all sorts of different personalities or traits, for example one of my friends is always very proud of his creation of the "Sombrero Universe" in which everything is exactly the same, except everyone is wearing a sombrero.  So I will continue to talk about some of my thoughts on alternate universes.

Only in the Sombrero Universe!

My first creation of an alternate universe myself was to imagine what all the people I know would be like in this alternate universe where everyone's personality is the complete opposite of what it is like in real life.  The perfect example of this came when I was talking with a friend about a professor, we were discussing her getting help from him at his office hours, and how in general he was just a fantastically nice guy.  I started asking her how she would respond if instead of being his own nice self, when she went to his office hours he all of a sudden became a total sleazebag who makes awkward sexual advances toward all the girls struggling in his class for improved grades.  This is when his alternate universe alter-ego was created, he still would become a professor, but he would be a horny bastard who has a reputation for a lenient policy on extra-credit.  It is left to assume in this alternate reality he gets all the dirty student-teacher sex he could ever want, but enough about that, lets see who else exists in this alternate reality.  Jennifer Aniston is still America's tough-luck sweetheart, but its only because she is a massive whore, and Angelina Jolie is a complete sweetheart who just happened to find her true love in Brad Pitt when he was with slutty Jen Aniston (oh what a twisted web we weave).  But by far my favorite character in this alternate reality is alternate reality me, who actually writes quality material (other than bullshit about sexually deviant alternate universes), and gets loyal readers.

For your extra credit assignment you must play with my dingaling.

I also had a dream about a lost Chappelle's Show sketch.  The idea of the sketch was about how our cultures came to be the way that they were, and how weird the world would be if things were only slightly different.  The most prominent difference in my dream was the change that would occur in a Chinese Food Restaurant, nothing would be aesthetically different except instead of serving the same delicious MSG-packed Chinese food we are used to, all Chinese restaurants are instead, burger joints.  It truly was entertaining to watch all the Asian people standing in front of grills and flipping burgers and putting limitless amounts of ketchup and mustard on everything while yelling in their native language.  The only problem with this dream was that I am unsure if they also served french fries, and would have loved to hear them ask if I would like fries with that.

My thoughts exactly.

Thinking up different alternate universes can be tons of fun, and also finding what people would be like in the opposite world alternate reality.  The possibilities are endless, we could have an alternate reality where everyone is a surfer dude, so all the anti-society people would rebel by saying they prefer to ride small waves over the giant swells, and apparently there will be no such thing as a vegetable as all of the good farmland is a lot further from the ocean than any surfer would ever want to be.  There could also be the awkward silence universe, where everybody is expecting everyone else to speak next, so every time you converse with someone it is just a long awkward silence while you wait for the other person to think of something to say while they wait for you to think of something to say, and the length of these awkward pauses contain some kind of meaning in themselves so things can get done.  There are infinite possibilities of alternate universes, so if you have any good ideas comment with some good ones, and if I like your ideas I may expand upon them in a future post.  I'll leave you now with this interpretation of an alternate universe, courtesy of Mail Order Comedy, who now make the show Workaholics on Comedy Central.

Return of the Prodigal Son! (Again)

Hello all of my faithful readers (read: Toninho), I have taken a short hiatus from blogging for about a month, and there is so much I have learned!  Actually, not really, I have just stopped blogging because I had better things to be doing with my life than sitting in front of a computer discussing the better things I could be doing with my life instead.  So let us get busy describing and going into gruesome detail about the month that was.  This video will give you a good idea.


A few days after the last time I posted anything to this site I took the GRE (Graduate Record Exams), the test was more or less a repeat of the SAT and was just as easy.  After breezing through the entire test and likely doing just as good as I knew I should have, I was able to officially enter the life of a true adult.  And this new life as an adult meant beers, beers, beers, golf and beers.  It was a deliciously fun time for the next week or so, as I was not only trying as hard as I could to enjoy my life, but I was also preparing to move back in for my last year at college!  Instead of the packing that it is usually expected to be, my preparing was saying goodbye to all of my great friends back home and trying to follow through with as many fake plans as possible.  But time truly flies when you were having fun and the next thing I knew I was back in my parent's car getting a ride back to school (my car died so I couldn't drive it).

We there yet?  My Teddy has to pee!

This year is much more special than any other year of college though, because this year I am living off campus with some friends of mine and do not have a meal plan, so in short, I am responsible for not letting myself die.  To do this I have had to learn how to cook, and how to eat smaller portions because I don't have the money to feed my fat ass (I am actually quite thin).  This is going surprisingly well as I have yet to go hungry for a day since moving in!  But it also has the unintended consequence of limiting my blogging time (frowny face) because for some strange reason, survival takes precedence over sharing my life with millions of strangers via their computer screens.  Hopefully, I will become so adept at not dying that I will be able to return to form and put a few sets of ideas out, and I also have office hours for a Calculus on Tuesday's and since I don't expect many visitors I will try to get some writing done during that block.  Living on my own has been a blast, I have continued my trend of drinking a moderate amount every night that remains from the week after the GRE, which sucks because it is costing me a lot of money, and I am not exactly made out of 20 dollar bills.

Currently in my fridge.

I have also found myself becoming obsessed with video games that were made over a decade ago.  The recent three games I have been playing since moving back into school are Banjo-Tooie (remake on the Xbox 360), Jet Grind Radio (DREAMCAST!) and the original Metal Gear Solid.  I think video games are much like music and art, the new stuff is good, but there are many times when you need to look into the past and experience what came before to get a true appreciation for how things were meant to be (especially for video games since the technology of games directly influences what they are able to do.)  I am planning on following this paragraph with a few images you need to see, the first will probably be some picture from Jet Grind Radio, and the latter will be a video display of the psychic powers of Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid.

On the next episode of Gangland we look into the GGs of Tokyo-to 

So, I am sorry there really wasn't much of a logical train of thoughts going into this post, it was really me just typing random things as they came to my mind so I could get back into the habit of blogging again, and to say things.  There are more things that I need to say that I hopefully will be able to get off my chest within the next few weeks.  But until then, enjoy my ideas and thoughts and appreciate the fact that this post was just me trying to waste an hour.