A lot of curiosity arises amongst friends and family of my current status. “Why only one class this semester? Why do you stay up so late? Do you really have lots of free time?” So I’ve decided to take the time to explain myself here.
As one might infer, I dislike working at school like any other student. I haven’t done very well in the past either. But why? Well, lack of effort really. What drives effort is motivation, and I really lacked motivation to pursue anything. School is dull.
Being unenthusiastic about school I put off signing up for classes in fall 2008 (last year). I then scrambled to find enough classes so I could have enough units to be considered a “full time” student. I eventually did, but I ended up taking the majority of my classes in the afternoon and evening. Now I’m no stranger to the night, but I almost always fell asleep before 3AM. My last class of the day would end at 10PM now (the tue-thurs schedule at least), I would then go home and eat. Now you could interpret this multiple ways: either my food clock keeps me awake longer into the night, or I could have simply been trying to make up lost time on the computer. Either way I was staying up later as a result, and this became the norm.
The bright side is, not everyone works nights. I was confident going into summer that I could land a night job. I even slacked quite a bit in my spring classes thinking I could become independent of school entirely if I could land a good job during the summer. That’s not to say I didn’t know competition would be high during the summer – I tried applying to places while still in school. But rejection is hard to follow up on… for someone who could use a little motivation.
Needless to say I didn’t land a job during the summer and when fall finally rolled around I scrambled for school again. I like to think I learned something over the summer though — through the places I visited and the people I met.
School is easier than finding a job.
So here I am in school again after being able to catch one class by luck at the last minute. But my luck is running thin with my parents. I have to finish up school in two or three years and get out of here.
I was seriously contemplating neglecting my blog forever since much of my interest has now drifted from video games to music and DJing. Video games aren’t the real reason I started blogging though. Ever since I was a… well… kindergartner, I’ve always had problems writing things down on paper or being productive in general. When I reached 7th grade school took a turn for the serious and with it I received special help and training on how to overcome my “disability”. Calling it a “disability” is a bit extreme, I don’t want to be one of those idiots who claim they’re retarded in order to coast through life when they’re clearly not. It’s just how the school termed my weakness. Er, where was I? Oh right, my writing “disability”. I turned around in 7th grade and left the program even, only to fall back into it in my second half of 8th grade. … Somewhere along the lines of success I had lost my motivation to continue.
If I want to relate this to games again I could go on about how I found self motivation reporting game-news back to the Nsider community (now gone thanks to Nintendo) and eventually DS-X2.com. But lets not get off track here.
The point is I struggled with writing all my life and blogging helped me exercise and sharpen my writing skills. Though that’s an understatement. Think of my writing skills as a fat guy – yes a fat guy – now imagine what that fat guy would look like after sitting on the couch for 6 weeks doing nothing but eating and walking to the fridge occasionally. That’s what my writing skills look like right now. Even if it may not appear that way in this blog entry(riiight), the fact that I’ve done absolutely no English homework since I started school again makes my writing skills appear that way to the teacher, my parents, and even myself through de-motivation. Lack of blog updates really to blame? No… but they do get my brain working. More so than posting on forums or communicating with friends. Especially when the latter is accomplished via IMing.
This is why I need to continue blogging regardless of subject.
Though video games are always going to be a favorite of mine… just don’t expect every post to lean that way. I’m thinking about revamping the page as well. I notice people do subscribe to this blog… if any one’s reading this please let me know what you think I should do with this blog page. For the meantime, here’s an update on me:
My friend Mike submitted an interactive fiction game to “The 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition” and I helped beta test it so I feel some personal attachment to the game. I’m also in the credits, woo! Oh- the game specifically is called “Channel Surfing” (download here) and it’s a bit tedious to navigate for first-time IF players. I know it was for me! But he could only do so much programming in the three weeks he had left to develop it. Mike is -unlike me- a brilliant writer and the writing is really the “meat” of the game, so don’t feel bad to use hints in order to progress.
This poped up on inanity one day and at first we were all thinking “WTF”. But I approached it cautiously and it seems to be solidifying into a legit party for us all. To complete it I’ve bought a second turntable and I’m in the process of buying some new records they might want to hear. If all goes well the party should take place later this week. … With the new turntable I had to buy an LCD monitor in order to make space on my desk… good bye CRT… we’ll see if I can find a use for it though. I would hate to throw it away.
Bank account is feeling it this week with all these purchases. I need to start looking for a job again despite this shitty economy… uhg.
About six months ago I made a post called “maybe one day“. This post was about how my first and only(so far) attempt at love was an utter failure.
Well it seems after all this time just now has my post finally reached the girl I was talking about. Not much to say besides that after six months the post is somewhat obsolete. It does a decent job of explaining why I did what I did at the time, but not really the aftermath. I spent a lot of time thinking about the whole ordeal. Probably more than what’s healthy. The result is I’ve learned to just worry about what I need to worry about. School, homework, future job, and of course my various hobbies. As usual the first two could use a bit of work.
Edit: I forgot to add: Myspace people, start using firefox! Internet explorer screws up some of the formatting on the header image of this blog… Firefox is also safer. Just click the Firefox2 button over on the right side of the page to get started.
Anyways, this weeks regular post (as regular readers know, I update this weekly) is a bit late. Look for it soon. In the meantime here’s this…
Thanksgiving, Christmas, and sometimes random weekends, I was traveling to the bay area somewhat mysteriously. Well now I think it’s about time to fill you all in.
Back in November or so my Grandmother was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Apparently she had been treated for thyroid cancer with radiation in the 1930s(!) and it finally came back after all these years. My family tried to visit her and get together as much as possible after we found out. About a week before my birthday in February or so(I’m not very good with dates here) she died in her home overnight. A couple of days later I received a birthday card wishing me happy birthday with a check for $100. She was still sending me birthday cards from beyond! Actually it was sent the day before she died and it took a couple of days to travel in the mail. Still amazing that through all that pain she was able to make out a card and a check. The amount is worth noting because she would always throw large amounts of money at my sister and I. Even if we insisted she should keep it, as she needed it more than we did, she would still force us to accept it. I was hesitant to accept this check as well but my dad said she would probably want me to accept it. I thought about it: If it was one of the last things she did then she must’ve really wanted me to have this money – more so than usual. Looking back I’m surprised the bank would let me cash a dead person’s check. Something seems weird about that.
I’m convinced what really Killed her though was her “health care”. Her “health care” was “kaiser permanente” which over the last couple of years has gained a reputation for being one of the worst in the nation. As my uncle calls it: “assisted suicide”. It shows too, she had been complaining to my father and her doctor about problems swallowing and breathing for months. The doctor would tell her it was just allergies or some other bullcrap. It finally took a visit to the hospital to get a correct diagnosis, but by then it was way too late. I don’t think my parents are the suing type, but we really would have a case against them.
Now she requested some weird religious funeral thing since that side of the family is in to that sort of thing so we had to wait until just last Monday to start the three day/part funeral. I had to miss the third day as I needed to get back to school, the two days that I did catch though were quite interesting. Many of her friends and barely-related family (to me) attended that I didn’t even have a clue existed. I even met some of my dads’ friends who I seem to get along with quite well. They told me some very entertaining stories about my dad (more on that another day hehe) and how they all felt very welcome in my grandmother’s house back in the day. I really mean back in the day, we are talking the early 60s here.
Overall the funeral was a pleasant farewell, as my dad says: “It’s the end of an era”.
I’ll miss her… and making that two hour trek to her home, getting the typical grandma/relative hug, eating lunch, and enjoying the beautiful weather with the foster city lagoon nearby. I guess what I mean to say is that she had this aura of family and culture to her that I’ll miss very much. Perhaps it’s a bit of the north beach culture…
I really want “The orange box”. Hell I need the orange box(LAN next next fri in the works). It’s bad enough I’m falling behind the times(no next gen system!), but when I miss a release of three great games, for the price of one, on a platform I own(PC), it’s just sad. Sad it will be, since I’ll have to pass it up. Yes that’s right, I have to save up my money(read: very limited) for that blasted holiday. Sure I could spend it now all on myself and give nothing. However, capitalism class economics class(which I have been very busy with this week) has taught me to look at my opportunity cost. The way X-mass works is you give… and then receive. So the loss of spending all my money on myself and not others? Potential gifts baby! Gifts that would most likely exceed the amount of money that I have now – a value not worth even posting(though I’ve never actually withdrew money from my bank before… I might want to practice that one day lol). There you have it, NPC has a plan to get with the times! Woo hoo! I just won’t have the orange box until December or so…
Remember last august? Inane-talks birthday? Yea I lied, it’s actually tomorrow, here in November. I have a strange habit of mixing up the two months, and I’m aware how absurd that sounds but I’m just clumsy like that.
We’ve even got an Inane 2.0 thing going on since we moved from PHP to SMF. Funny thing is the new template was originally somewhat lighter but members said it was too bright for viewing at night (of all things) so we changed it. We’re looking to expand our membership everyday so feel free to join!
School has been kind of surreal lately, I think it has something to do with me being a Senior. Well… except what happened on Thursday. I was walking to my first class thinking about you-know-who, when all of a sudden she walked around a corner right in front of me! Freaky! We both kind of frightened each other and gave this “gasp!” look to each other. I don’t know what to make of it, I must admit I haven’t stopped thinking about her. Though I’m adopting the “Good things come to those who wait” philosophy for now. I figure the balls in her court now, it’s her decision to like me or not, I’ve done my part. “Though doesn’t she already have a boyfriend?” you might ask. I know her friends fairly well and I’m thinking about doing some investigative work by asking a few questions. Plain curiosity is forcing me too anyway. I have a feeling it’s someone not from my area because I never see her with anyone but friends.
Oh and I posted a story I wrote in English on my main blog. I think it may be too geeky for many people to understand.
Warning: This specific entry is extremely long, somewhat repetitive, had almost no proofreading, and goes into extreme detail.
It’s been over a year since I’ve been blogging, as I’ve mentioned before in previous posts. But something I’ve never done with that time blogging – almost avoided really – was to blog about my personal life. Well Today you’re going to hear it… a long story about how I fell in love… and was rejected.
-Yea I know, cheeee~sy! right? Well it’s your choice to read this, I just do this to get it off my chest. If there’s a story to be told, tell it, I say.
It began with one of my now favorite classes, broadcasting. Junior year and it was the second time I had the class since the beginning of school. We were to be assigned into groups this day and I was a bit nervous. Sure enough no one really cared about me – I had no friends in this class – and so I ended up with two losers. Ok, I could(and should) probably call myself a loser, but these guys were above and beyond. Then my broadcasting teacher realized the groups were uneven so he asked around if anyone else wanted to join our group to make it even. Sure enough this girl from the back of the room joined. I was relived because any girl would probably have a better work ethic than these guys I was with. I took this class very seriously, especially since I had no electives the previous year and I was looking for an outlet at school – broadcasting was perfect. Why didn’t I have electives as a sophomore? Long story, lets just say all throughout high school I’ve never been an “above and beyond” type of student. My first project I was really strict, I wanted all the camera work perfect – even if the overall production was lame. The two guys were really hard to guide, but once I broke everything down they listened. Or so I thought. As I slowly figured out, they only listened to me because the girl listened to me, and she listened to me because she probably just wanted to finish the projects. That’s my point of view at least.
She was the main drive of our group and we made a film every quarter. But rewinding to around the time of our second project – a montage. I finished my montage really early, and I thought it turned out pretty good. It was based on my favorite subject of…(you guessed it) video games. I finished it with some confidence under my belt and I exported it to game-videos.
As you can tell, I was playing every extend at the time
Finishing that project early gave me tons of time to just sit around and do nothing. This was great for a end-of-the day class. However the girl in my class began to talk to me, well, more than usual – it’s not like we didn’t talk at all.
I got to know her, what she liked, what she didn’t like, and her personality in general. Or at least that’s what it seemed to be. Till this day I’m not even really sure. Either way that was the time period I began to like her… especially when I went to night school during the fall/winter. Looking into the sunset during break knowing I’ve reached a knew academic low I swore to never reach again. I was in denial up until this point and when I walked home in the dark I tried to think of ways to tell her one day. Thing is she knew I was a computer freak by then and I knew if I was going to tell her I should not use the computer. However I told no one and never confessed to her at all. I was too much of a coward. However I did hint to one friend I liked someone, but never said who. I increasingly liked her as the year went on and then one day… school… ended.
I don’t know what she did over the summer but I went to summer school. I passed night school but I fell behind in my current English class that year. I fought the summer school system and managed to get two English classes that summer and made up all remaining English class credits. I worked my ass off, and night school taught me how. Or re-invented my ways at least. On top of this I was biking about seven miles round trip in temperatures of +100F everyday. My main drive became her… to go back to school and work with her again. I then was planning to tell her in class one day… that I loved her.
I passed my summer school classes and went on to vacation with various friends. All of which I would’ve loved to replace with her. -Haha, don’t get me wrong, I love to travel with my friends. But there’s something about visiting a far away place that makes you wish you could experience it with someone you love. Regardless of how well the trip goes.
The day came. I went to school. I looked around. Nothing.
She was nowhere to be seen. Not in any of my classes, not around campus, nothing. For a day or two I thought maybe she had moved away. Until a week afterwards, I saw her for the first time. At that time I finally told my friend her full name and I excessively discussed with him possible ways to get back into her life…. somehow. My first plan was to figure out her patterns around campus and sneak in a friendly “hi!/hello!” whenever I saw her. I figured if we were acquaintances before she would have no problem saying hello to me. But unfortunately I quickly remembered her reluctance to talk to me outside of class. This wasn’t exactly new, and it wasn’t really a big deal either. I figured she probably is just nervous… or something – and for the record she did actually say “hello” back most of the time. Honestly I don’t think she saw me the other times… and was probably talking to her friends while walking.
Anyways, I soon realized that no conversations were going to spark. Mainly because we’re both too busy changing classes. I got impatient and figured I should probably just tell her how I feel… but then my cowardness kicked in(I made that word up) and I came up with another lame plan. Well, I had some peer pressure with this one since I now had my friend to talk to. I came up with this plan to burn a note confessing on a CD full of music. You see last year I planned to burn her this one song but never got around to it. So I would give her this CD and essentially disguise my little love note. Brilliant, right? I gave it to her. Then I realized an error on the last line of the note. I put the following:
“if you don’t talk to/message me(note: back) I’ll just assume you want to be left alone.”
Problem with that is I didn’t know if she wanted to be left alone, or simply hadn’t read the letter.
As my friend told me, if I was truly determined I should probably just assume she hadn’t read it. After a few days, I assumed so. She probably didn’t like the music after all and probably still has the CD lying around somewhere. Or being a mac owner that she is, looked at the CD with itunes, which doesn’t display other files besides music(my note was in HTML). Then one weekend my friend tells me he heard one of my good friends talk about her, and how he would like to go out with her, ect. ect. In fact, he had her befriended on MySpace and he linked me to her page – which was set to private. At first it was like someone just poked me in the eyes and kicked me in the balls. Then a couple days later I made my own call and talked to him about it. He seemed pretty casual about it and noted I must like her more than he does. I couldn’t argue with that. In the process however I had bookmarked her page, and then made the decision to join MySpace. MySpace is a hideous place filled with creeps and shitty web-pages. I sent a friend invite to her and waited. It took her about a week to approve it, and in that time I was just thinking about how I would apologize for breaking my promise at the end of my note. After all if she wasn’t approving it she must’ve read the letter, and hated me, right? Well like I said she eventually approved it and not a moment too soon – I was ready to tell her everything the next day. Then began the tedious process of messaging her. I wanted to keep it casual, get acquainted again, and then tell her one day. This was my only possible way of communication with her. I hated it but it seemed to be going well… until I told her one day in conversation that our Broadcasting 1 group from last year was “nothing without you”. It’s true though! Like I said before, it really wasn’t. I could however sense that she knew what I was up to. Never-the-less she didn’t say anything. If she had told me “omg are you hinting at something?! go away freak!” I would’ve been perfectly content. Strait-up rejection is fine. She choose to toy with me and I had no other choice as a person in love but to keep going. To an extent it worked… for a bit.
I really dropped the ball when I replied to one of her bulletins about a homecoming party. “Homecoming” is -for anyone that doesn’t know- when we have the first home football game at our school. I said I had nothing else better to do than come over and join her… (I was feeling ambitious I guess) unless they were going to the football game later on as well. Which then she replied with “we’re going to the football game”. Now I realized my stupid mistake by now, combined with my(stupid) ambition, and the fact I live 4 blocks away from the stadium… I went. Alone. I walked down there, paid four bucks, and looked around. Nothing… Well ok, I found one friend at least. I didn’t find the girl though. Over the course of a few days I sent a few messages to her, they were read(you can check the status), but no replies. No friend de-listing or blocking either so I carried on… very carefully.
And so came college night. This was actually just yesterday. Once again for those that don’t know, “college night” is when a bunch of colleges(forty?) come to our campus and set up a booth. Well this was a huge event for me because I was filming it for broadcasting(morning announcements) and cable access(which no one watches). While I was filming one of the orientations(?) in the theater, I noticed her out of the corner of my eye. She was right there, smiling, hiding, almost spying on me really. I’m not 100% sure but I’m very positive it was her. She left after a few moments but I think she knew I was there the whole time – I posted about it before hand. Maybe she wasn’t avoiding me completely after all? Maybe she was, as some say, “playing hard to get”. I didn’t see her the rest of the day.
When I got home I commented on her MySpace page – not about college night – but about a comment she left somewhere else on MySpace. Apparently this was MySpace blasphemy and she talked more on this other page where she revealed she thought of me as some sort of stalker(It’s complicated to explain unless you know what I’m talking about). That was it. I snapped. I had to tell her why I was there. “The truth” – is what I titled that message. I told her I loved her, and have since broadcasting. I’m not a stalker, just a stupid kid in love. No reply and I went to bed.
The next day after school I got an email telling me I received a new message from her. It said the following:
“Subject: I don’t
feel the same way, and to be completely honest, 1. you make me feel slightly uncomfortable 2. i have a boyfriend 3. i’ve decided it’s better to not be myspace friends
sorry.”
That’s that. I can’t blame her really. One thing that strikes me odd though is that her MySpace status was always “single”…
Well regardless I’m going to delete my MySpace account and call it a day. I’ve finally been rejected, and I now have a pivot to turn away with.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have some homework to do.
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