Huh

Got dumped. hah! Wouldn’t even phrase it that way except the whole thing felt so bizarrely relationship-like for the whole 36 hours of it. Not to mention that me taking her out at some point was a prerequisite for the event. Fortunately being overwhelmed with work and a sweet new video game kept me from building it up in my mind. Still, the optimism of the previous post still stands. It was a unusual and positive experience, and hopefully will remind me in less eventful times that good things will just happen for no apparent reason, as long as I keep my head up.

Now: plenty of time for guitar hero. PLENTY

Just an update

My grades were due today. I don’t have them done yet. I am incapable of working for more than an hour at a time, or letting myself turn in something shoddy, so this has turned into a 15+ hour adventure.

My all-in move on this relationship thing seems a little bizarre and uncharacteristic… but maybe only because I haven’t talked to her since sunday morning. Grading all last night… hopefully she will respond to my text soon.

Guitar Hero III… can’t stop thinking about it. Stayed at school to remove the temptation. Looked up high scores on my work laptop.

Guitar Hero 3

Despite everything else I have going right now, I was still compelled to plop down in front of my TV for 3 hours with Guitar Hero. Played through expert, I got through 40 songs, with 37 5-star ratings. I need to work on “One” by Metallica a bit before I beat that and get the encore song to finish out career more. This game is absolutely insane. Most people won’t notice, but they slightly eased up the timing requirements to hit notes and it just completely opens up the ability to play insane licks that would have been incredibly difficult in the last two versions. The feeling of hitting 50 note sequences of 32nd notes is really unbeatable. I’m in love with this game again. I’m also in love with frisbee again, and in love with girls again. It’s a good day to be alive.

It makes you feel silly for worrying about it all the time,

when you meet someone, and everything just falls into place instantly.  All this talk and theory about pick-up, sealing the deal, whatever else, it didn’t matter, this was it from hour zero.  I met her Friday, we just locked in and talked for two hours, oblivious to all else.  She had a notebook with her that she had brought from work; we were using it to exchange email details among a group; I wrote “I’m pretty into you, call me 267xxxxxxx.”  She was impressed.   We parted Friday night with intentions to meet up Saturday. 

It almost didn’t happen… no one in my group was interested in going to the halloween parties she had invited me to; fortunately my group of friends dissolved at 10 and I was left with nothing to do but go to this party by myself.  So there I am, waiting for her to text me the address at a street corner in Dupont, feeling pretty stupid for thinking this might work.  Hours later, lying in bed, discussing how we both cleaned our rooms that morning, the feeling went the other way. 

This whole scenario destroys the mythos I’ve built up around meeting girls in this city.  It couldn’t have been easier, more natural.  The hours that are normally spent demonstrating how impressive you are were just completely unnecessary; she was so interested in me from the first hour that I actually had a chance to think about her.  

Of course, when this whole thing is over; I will spend my time thinking of how to recreate it; or recreate the beginning of it.  Stupidity.  This is just one of those things that happens, and whatever I might have done to start it is incedental; mostly everything just fell into place. 

 Time to go play coach

hijinx

Adventures continue as a weekend with no expectation for hijinx (sexual) turns into a weekend with expectations.  I will stay tuned.  I hope you do as well.

XBOX 360 LIVE BLOG YES

I just bought an xbox 360 in anticipation of the release of Guitar Hero 3 on Sunday.  ANTICIPATION!!

Here is a list of things I had to do this weekend that did not involve xbox:  Happy hour w/ friends to celebrate friend’s new job, watch world series games with roommate, play ultimate on saturday, take high school team to ultimate tournament on sunday, grade 31 problem sets and 31 tests before monday (~10 hour job), go out saturday night and check out the brand spankin new book 11 update on lord of the rings online.  Oh yes, this is the weekend to go out and buy a new game system. 

 I will be posting my thoughts.

 As a user of electronic thingies since 1991, setup passed muster substantially.  Plugged things in easily, determined that controller was just ready to rock (it was), turned on xbox, followed on screen instructions, busted out some geometry wars.  This game definitely lives up the the hype.  Took about 30-40 minutes to beat trial version, score 156,000 or so.  I don’t know if this is good or bad, but it was definitely fun.

I’m not at all thrilled with the xbox live interface.  scrolling through menus seems unweildy compared to a cursor interface, but I will give it a chance.  Kept switching panels when I was trying to select things. 

MY GAMER TAG WAS FUCKING TAKEN.  MY FUCKING GAMER TAG WAS TAKEN BY SOME LITTLE BITCH.

That is all.  It’s time to go drink for a bit; I may stay in tonight to try out BioShock.

An Open Letter to Chevy Trucks

Dear Chevrolet,

 As an American, I have always considered it my patriotic and Christian duty to be a proud consumer of your fine trucks,  off-road vehicles, and oversized luxury vehicles of ambiguous purpose.  This is, indeed, as John Mellencamp once said, our country.   However, something I witnessed in a recent Chevrolet commercial has deeply offended me and made me question the values on which Chevy built this country.  At first I thought my eyes were deceiving me, but upon a second viewing, there was no denying it.  You see, in the second to last vignette in the commercial where engineers design a series of chevy trucks through the years, there is not a single black person in view.  Yes you heard me; for approximately four seconds, Chevy portrays a segregated elitist cabal of white engineers designing a vehicle so unamerican it might even have been German.   Does this sequence reflect a dark time in Chevy history where African Americans were not careful placed in every group of four employees?  Or is the truth even worse?  Perhaps even now, certain components of my Chevy truck were designed without considering their cultural bias. 

Through Chevrolet’s commercials, I have learned of the cooperation between blacks and whites that has been carefully arranged into every scene of American history, whether it be an inner city stickball game from the turn of the century, or the beginning of a high school football game in the midwest.   This is the way America was built, and unless this problem is addressed, our culture faces dark times indeed:  image, for a second, walking into a starbucks or jamba juice and there not being a single black customer.  When that day comes, ask yourself.  Is Chevy to blame?

Demonstrates a true lack of moral fiber

I sat at my table at 4:45 this morning, procrastinating by thoroughly reading the box for the new mouse traps we bought, after about a week of watching glue traps ineffectually and suspiciously slide around the kitchen.  “Never have to see or touch the pest!”, the box advertised, boasting a hands-off system where the quarry of your prey is indicated only by the sliding of an arrow from “set” to “trapped”.  “Simply dispose of the trap when triggered,” glossing over the issue of humaneness.  Truly a product for the modern American, I thought.  Who wants to be troubled by the idea of a living creature; worse yet, a cute living creature, struggling helplessly as it suffers the fate of the Gherardescas?

 As irony would dictate, at this moment I was alerted to sqeaking and shuffling noises coming from the next room.  Our once ineffectual glue traps had acheived a feat of synchronized conquest, and here I had two fuzzy little prisoners on my hands.  I considered, neither lengthily nor briefly, how to dispose of them.  Simply chuck the glue traps, prisoner and all, down the garbage chute?  Inhumane… and yet the other options were, though it speaks poorly to my character, less appealing.  In retrospect, a quick death would probably be the correct option.  Catching a pest then rereleasing him into the city to afflict my neighbors seemed counterproductive, but as for killing the thing?

 I would say that “I couldn’t do it” but in the face of my obvious physical capabilities to the contrary, the statement holds me to a unacceptably low standard of free will.  Rather, I wouldn’t do it, and I chose not to do it, and settled for the regrettable choice of bagging the critters up and tossing them, traps and all.  They were pretty cute little buggers too…

Dreamcrasher

Saturday I hung out with a couple old college friends who are doing consulting, which seems to be a high stress, low quality of life job that pays well enough now, and most importantly, sets you up to be a millionaire before you realize what’s happened to you.

Still, at this early stage in our post-college lives, my job compares extremely favorably to those of my friends.  I make a similar amount of money (similar: we dress comparably and can all afford to go out to a reasonable bar), get to act like I’m still in school, and work substantially less than half the days of the year.  Per hour, in fact, I’m probably making more that those guys are.

My problem is there’s nothing actually wrong with my job.  I have the exact same job title as intelligent, satisfied middle aged folk who own houses and are raising families based on the exact (well, we’ll get into that later) work I’m doing now.  I could do nothing and nothing bad would happen to me; there would be no wakeup call.  The ticking clock has always been a part of my life, and without it I feel absolutely lost.

This entry was originally about a dream I had last night, but I ruined the entire narrative structure… the dream pertained to my specific lesson plan for today, and the fact that I was oversleeping while I  panicked about being late to work in my dream.  Then, the whole thing was supposed to tie into my persistent anxiety/lack of anxiety about my future.  Unfortunately, I spilled the beans early.  Sorry

Now where’s my “certified attractive” pin?

Another teacher told me that he overheard students discussing which teachers they thought were physically attractive and my name came up in the “fairly attractive” category.  Boo yah!