I’m sitting in my backyard on our picnic table enjoying an excellent breeze, wondering if the clouds overhead are holding any raindrops for the thirsty earth.

I’m sorry for not writing anything at all in the past twelve or so days. I don’t really have any good excuse. I mean, I have been busy, but I’ve also had a tremendous amount of spare time in which I could have been writing.

I got tired of waiting for myself to have enough motivation to design my own WordPress theme so I went to Free WordPress Themes and chose this one. Marisa, I know you wanted flamingos, but none of them had flamingos, sorry…

So… what is new and exciting?

Joyce and I started taking Iaidō last Sunday, and we’ve got our second class coming up tomorrow morning. I’m pretty excited about it and I hope that it will help me in my goal to get into/stay in some form of not amorphous bloblike shape. I also plan on starting to go kayaking with my dad next week and hopefully get out with him a couple of times a week. Joyce and I are going to be taking swing dancing classes this summer, too, so that should be a lot of fun and even more of me not sitting on my ever fattening-ass. If I can find someone to do it with, I might also bike down to Jones Beach a couple (or more, if possible) times. And lastly, I plan on going out surfing with my friend and maybe learning how to balance myself up on a piece of wood in front of waves. (Although, with my foray into snowboarding in January, we’ll see how that goes…) So hooray for not being a couch potato!

Speaking of being a couch potato, all that I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks is playing Halo 3 and World of Warcraft. Yes, I did start playing WoW again, I apologize to all of you who are disappointed in me. Along those lines I started doing really well in Halo and kept ranking up and stuff. And then a couple of days ago I hit a wall. Really hard. And bounced off, and down like four ranks. I’m not exactly sure what happened but I’ve been incredibly sucktastic the past few days, and for whatever reason I’ve been playing more because of it. In other video game news, Diablo III was announced today. I never played the original Diablo games too much, but I always enjoyed them, so I’ll probably pick this up when it comes out. The other reason I’ll pick it up is because Blizzard Entertainment is the only video game company that I trust in completely and has my heart. Sighhh, oh Blizzard… Although I do have the theory that Blizzard will simultaneously release Starcraft II, Diablo III, and the World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King and take over the world in the resulting chaos. But we’ll see.

I think the main reason that I haven’t been writing lately is that all I’ve been thinking about is writing and why I haven’t been doing it. I keep telling myself to write, so in being true to myself I’ve been completely ignoring any ambitions or sparks of creativity and not writing anything. But… starting July 2nd I will be participating in THE CHALLENGE: AWESOME with eD! Thomas and his friend Brandon Mendelson. You can head on over to the website there to find out more about what to expect and how awesome it truly is.
And to make the month even more insane and out of my league I’ve decided to write a novel. Even though it is not November I will be following the rules of NaNoWriMo with the goal of having 50,000 words of novelesque fiction story by July 31st. We’ll see how that turns out. I have no obligation to tell anyone what the novel is about or show it to anyone, ever. But if it has any form of potential goodness I’ll see about editing it and making it available to the world. Also, for those of you who talk to me on a regular basis, keep pushing me to give you updates on how well I’m doing with the word counts and such and don’t let me slide if I decide that it’s too much and I give up.

The last big news is that I quit Best Buy. I had my last day on Wednesday (the 25th). I’ve been pretty unstressed out about life since then. I’m going to be working at Walbaums with a friend of mine in the deli starting on Monday, so we’ll see how that goes. I will be making substantially less money and be working less hours and I am completely broke. You might wonder why I would do something like this, and I wonder a bit too. But I really did hate being there. It seems less bad now that I’m gone, but I would get extremely depressed as soon as I walked through those sliding doors.

So yeah, that’s life. I’ll try to be on here more often letting you know what’s up, really I will.
I would also like to thank those loyal 4-8 people who were checking up every day to see if I had updated, I hope this made it worth it!

I was away this weekend with Joyce. We went to Pennsylvania to visit my family, wish my Grandmother a happy birthday, and just relax and have a good time.

Which we did. We stayed with my sister, who I hadn’t seen in a few months, and who is much, much less insane and much more laid-back than the rest of my extended family who lives in the area. We played a couple games of Scrabble, which my sister won, as always (well almost, I think I’ve beaten her twice. ever.). We also went strawberry picking which I felt was much more like work than anything else, but Joyce and Jules (my sister) both seemed  to enjoy themselves so it wasn’t too terrible, I guess.

Saturday was my mom’s mom’s birthday, so we went there to have dinner. Her new catch phrase is “I’m 85, I can do whatever I want.” I kept responding with “Yes you can Grandma, yes you can.” That was a fairly enjoyable evening. My family wasn’t as crazy as they normally are, and they didn’t scare Joyce (or at least, she won’t admit it).

On Sunday Joyce and I went to Longwood Gardens which was beautiful, as always. It’s a pretty fantastical place, so I recommend that everyone go there. It’s pretty cheap to get in, and if you have student IDs (or say you’re students, they didn’t even check us) then you get in for half off. It’s full of flowers and trees and grass and cacti and all sorts of fauna. It’s beautiful. I might post some pictures if I ever get around to stealing them from Joyce.

Then Sunday night we came home. I come home to find my father and mother on the porch talking to some people from down the street that I’ve never met before. Apparently, on Friday night, a drunk kid hopped the fence behind our house and my dad went out to tell him to get off of our property. This kid then tackled my father in the middle of the street and proceeded to start hitting him, as like twenty other kids were gathered around. My dad didn’t hit him back, because… I’m not really sure why, but he didn’t. Now my dad is in pretty good shape, I know that he could toss me if he wanted to, so this kid wasn’t really hurting him this much. My dad actually said he was laughing when the kid started hitting him in the abdomen because he couldn’t even feel it.

Then one of the kids who lives across the street from us and his friends pulled this guy off of my dad. They then proceded to form a wall between my father and him and tell the kid to leave. They wouldn’t tell me dad who he was or let him see him. So I’m kind of upset that I wasn’t there Friday night to go out and kick this kid in the face a few times because my dad wasn’t willing to.

Then I wake up this morning and my mom tells me that our diagonal neighbor across the street said that there were kids at the bottom of our driveway last night drinking and yelling “Come out Mother Fucker!” I wish I had heard that, because I would’ve called the cops. Then gone out with a baseball bat and incited them to come at me.

Oh well.

So I go away for the weekend and Levittown turns into Hempstead… What is the world coming to?

Joyce and I went to see Kung Fu Panda last night.

I was thoroughly impressed.

It was a very fun movie, and even mixed in some neat self-affirmation and Eastern philosohies.

My absolute favorite part though is that in the first two minutes of the movie the word “bodacity” was used. How can things get much better than that?

But in all seriousness, if you like Kung Fu, pandas, CGI, or good movies, go see this. It’s good for the whole family. And from my experience last night, it only made the kids in the theatre squeak with joy and/or fear about four or five times. And those were over pretty quickly.

So go check it out.

Last weekend I was in Philadelphia for the Wizard World comic convention. It was my first convention ever and it was pretty awesome. I loved it. I was able to completely nerd out the whole weekend.

I don’t really know that much about comics (although I plan on getting there, I have a stack of six graphic novels to get through, I’ll get back to you on those), but I am a pretty giant Star Wars nerd, so it was pretty awesome seeing stormtroopers up close and personal.

I went to a couple of the panels with eD!, he liveblogged them over there. I was sitting there trying really hard to listen, but not understanding anything and not getting it at all when the whole audience burst out laughing about something someone said about some obscure character I’ve never heard of. Oh well!

Then there is the Klingon Hunting. Klingon Hunting is the act of hunting down those at comic conventions dressed up as characters from anything (not just Klingons), and it is incredibly fun! We also then came up with a subsect of that called Klingon Hugging, which involved me hugging Klingons. I was able to have a group hug with four stormtroopers, I hugged Darth Vader, Boba Fett, Iron Man, a Transformer, a guy from Gears of War, and possibly some others. Once I obtain all of the pictures and videos from the other people who were with me I will most certainly post them.

We had such an awesome time there that we might be heading to Wizard World in Chicago at the end of this month, but we all have to check our wallets and see what’s going on in that aspect of our lives first.

It’s four AM and I haven’t yet gone to sleep.

Not that I’ve really been trying, but I’m pretty positive that any attempts would have been unsuccessful.

I’m feeling very… something, right now.

Kind of jittery and lost and drifting and confused and worried and wondering and contemplative and all sorts of crazy, but a tiny bit at peace, too.

I finally just went through my night time pre-sleeping ritual and my mouth tastes like toothpaste residue. I love that feeling and that taste.

I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.

More importantly, I don’t even know what I’m doing with the next two weeks of my life.

I plan on putting in my two weeks notice within the next week or so. (I would’ve done it today if I didn’t need that extra week’s pay check…) I have no idea where I’m going from there. I’ll figure it out, I’m sure, I always do, more or less…

Then I have two more years of college and I’ll have a degree and be out on the street begging for scraps. I don’t know how to find a job, or what kind of job to look for, or if I even want a job. I just don’t know.

I don’t even know what I want to do.

Everyone has their dreams and their desired jobs and all that jazz.

Me… I just want to be rich and possibly famous, but mostly just rich. I have no plans on how to get there though. I’d write a novel, but I’m lazy, don’t have any good ideas, and I’m lazy.

When did I become so lazy? When did I become this drifting, procrastinative, empty, lazy, apathetic blob? I used to care, and I used to do it really well. I used to dream, too. I used to have plans. That all culminated in my senior year of high school where instead of applying to all of the school’s that could have gotten me where I wanted to go, or given me the opportunity to do anything, I applied to three schools. Two local and one that I didn’t plan on going to anyway. If I could go back and change that I would. I would be recently home from college right now, seasonally employed somewhere, thousands of dollars in debt and happy with the decisions I had made.

Oh well. The past is the past is the past is the past. It’s so hard to remember that sometimes. We, as humans, pride ourselves on our memory, on our history, on our ability to learn from our mistakes and from others. And then we proceed to repeat them again and again and again and again. I know I do the same stupid things again and again and again, rinse and repeat, minus the rinsing… (”Yeah, I’m going to start saving money now…” “Oh, well, four hundred dollars in Philly over three days, three hundred dollars of video games I don’t need, a few hundred dollars of books and t-shirts won’t be a problem…” “And oh wait, there’s that phone bill, and car insurance, and Brazillian kid you pay thirty bucks a month for.” Go me.)

I just want a sense of purpose and direction and meaning and kick in the ass telling me where to go and what I should do and why I should do it. I want to love with a conviction and reasoning and logic behind it. While all of this “money can’t buy me love,” and “love is all I need” stuff is great, and I too want love with passion and meaning and hot, hot, hot sex. But I also want love with “I know where I’m going with my life so I can stop  being angsty and whiny and grab a hold of myself and just do something.”

I want to do something. I want an adventure. I want to fly to Australia and go on a Walkabout (speaking of which, after watching Lost, I Googled walkabouts and couldn’t really find any, if anyone has any links or information on any, that would be great!). The only problems with such things are mainly money and secondarily “responsiblities.” You have to work to have money to do the things you want, but then you never have time to do the things you want because you’re always at work.

I hope the self-help book(s) I ordered off of Amazon are able to help me actually help myself and make billions of dollars working only fifteen minutes a month. Or not, whatever. I just want. to. do. something. Anything. I don’t care what. If it’s cheap that would be nice. But honestly, whatever. I want to go gather experiences sew them together and fly them as a kite. A really big, bright, obnoxious kite that I can wave in everybody elses’ faces. They can then laugh at me because I have not the slightest clue how to launch a kite…

And I want to know, I want to know everything. I want to know who, what, where, when, how, and why. But I hate to ask questions. There’s me being a jackass again, but not the good kind. I make myself angry for being so stupid and contradictory all of the time. I then get angrier at myself for getting angry at myself. I then make up and become apathetic and unhappily content again. The three of me get along just great. </sarcasm>

I think that’s all for the angsty bitching and moaning and groaning tonight. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go make something of it. Or, the much more likely scenario, I’ll turn off my alarm clock when it goes off, sleep until one, play video games until four thirty, eat, and go to work about ten minutes late.

Look at me, I’m living the American Dream…

Something else that I should do tomorrow that everyone should keep bothering me about is to write about Philadelphia and load up other pictures and any good videos that I might have.