The Weekend that Was

This weekend was pretty fun, but it reminded me what I'll be missing this summer when I leave. It's funny how a single week can change your entire year. I guess its true when they say that you never know where life will take you, though you find out why it takes you there along the way.

Friday: My friend and I made plans to go to a party. When I got to his place, neither of us were dressed. We decided instead to just hang out, crack open a bottle of wine and play video games. There was an enjoyable throwback moment where I sat back and watched him as he struggled with tech support for an MMO. It felt like we really had gone nowhere since High School.

Saturday: Went to Magic Prerelease. Even though I went 1-3, I had a lot of fun and felt better that the ones where I do well, but I am stressed out by the games. Hung out with another friend afterwards and played for a bit. He and his wife (it feels so fucking weird writing that) opened their wedding presents. Over Skype. Welcome to 2013. We also got dinner off of Potbelly's 'Secret' Menu. After, went to my grandparents and helped them avoid having to repaint an entire room.

Sunday: Went to Prerelease for redemption..Got some cards for my EDH deck. Saw my friend go 4-0 and take first, while his brother and I went 1-3. Accused of cheating in our after-prerelease guild off. Kids were just jealous I won. Went to White Marsh to pick up a friend, and passed by the Starbucks that makes me embarassed of the things high school me did. Hung out for a while and talked about a wide variety of topics, including life, work, movies, television, and music (Reminder: I need to check out The Voice). Got two books that are quite related to my interests as gifts.

Three weeks remain before I leave the state.

Funny Story of the Day:
This is a bit of an old story, but I'll record it because in hindsight it was pretty funny.
Two guys are sitting in a group that is mostly female.
Guy 1: It is rough being a single guy in this crowd. Not many lookers.
Guy 2: To be honest, I don't know many of the people here.
Guy 1: Well, you know her. *motions* She cleans up pretty well at least.
Guy 2: Huh. I thought she always looks good.
Guy 1: That is an interesting perspective.

Lyric of the Day: The XX: Fiction

Fiction, when we're not together
Mistaken for a vision, something of my own creation
Come real love, why do I refuse you?
Cause if my fear's right, I risk to lose you
And if I just might wake up alone
Bring on the night

This reminds me of a quote from 500 days of Summer that I keep on my Facebook wall.

We are the things we hold on to

I've been packing for the past couple of weeks. And by packing I mean going through my things and remembering the past. I am a sucker for nostalgia. Things I found:

- My sixth grade journal (where I reveal my desire for a stable job and a Gameboy)
- My middle school yearbook (with a thank you note from a best friend who is barely an acquaintance now)
- A reminder that my rival was still smarter than me in that yearbook
- YMA Mix CD one !!!
- My nunchucks from demo team
- A game I made for learning about vitamins
- Binders full of Pokemon
- A friend from HS's award that was left in my car on graduation day
- A syllabus from a class I never took, but attended anyway
- A report titled 'LAID'
- A purchase request (and a pledge of assistance in fowl interruption)
- A poem I started on a scrap of paper while waiting in a car on my friend's campus

Here is the last one. It was an interesting start, but i kind of want to leave it unfinished.

Identity

Man is not what he is.
He is not this collection of emotions.
He is what others see.
A reflection in the mind's eye.

I am not the thoughts in my brain,
these feelings in my heart,
or this blood in my veins.

I am a memory in the collective conscious.

I enjoy being an emo kid. And its not just for the bangs, though I do love them.

Lyric of the Day: Dev - Take Her From You

You say you know her
Well I know her too
You say you kno-ow-ow-ow-ow her
But you don’t know her like I do

You say you love her
Once upon a time I loved her too
You say you lo-o-o-o-ove her
But you don’t love her like I do

You’ve got to give me that girl
Or I, will take her from you

Where the main character ignores everything he has learned so far

I realized a little bit ago that I should probably stop planning out my life so far in advance. Who knows what city I will end up in, what job I'll have, or when I'll find Ms. Right? My love for structure and control have tended to leave me at the corner of confused and apathetic.

With that in mind, I'm going to make a decision that I think I will have control over. I want to have a pet. I don't know what type of pet. While I would like to have a baby panda that I grow into an adult and make into my personal bodyguard, I do realize the impracticality of that idea. I'll probably end up with a small, manageable dog.

I can dream, right? The important part of being a dreamer is admitting that you have a problem. I'll update you if I ever figure out how to fix that. For right now, all I've got is that you have to acknowledge the infeasibility of your more ideal ideas. That was actually unintentional alliteration.

Weekend Recap: Lab work on 2 hrs of sleep. Playing BSG with noobs. Dinner where I actually had to answer the "what do you do?" question. Drinking games to a great movie (Easy A) for a friend's bday. Starting a bachelor party at 2 am. Endless Mimosas. Saw a ball game. The earliest, messiest end to a night that I've ever had. Overanalyzed the pacing of the Hunger Games movie.

Lana Del Ray: Summertime Sadness
"Kiss me hard before you go
Summertime sadness
I just wanted you to know
That, baby, you're the best

I got my red dress on tonight
Dancing in the dark in the pale moonlight
Done my hair up real big beauty queen style
High heels off, I'm feeling alive

Oh, my God, I feel it in the air
Telephone wires above are sizzling like a snare
Honey, I'm on fire, I feel it everywhere
Nothing scares me anymore"

They are who we thought they were, continued

On this blog, I'm still going to be as ranty as ever, so fear not. In fact, the first thing I must do is finish something from my last blog that I started here . To summarize, gender roles seem to be a shitty construct that is outdated.

To me, the idea of gender as anything outside of being based on primary and secondary sex characteristics seems pretty dumb. I know this is hypocritical of someone who has said "Girls love llamas" and refers to a video game character as a she because they wear a purple costume, but I've been working on trying to avoid those things. It is really ironic, because I find myself mad when other people do the same things that I do.

With this premise, I find a bunch of stuff that we do, makes no sense in this context. Why do we have bathrooms for different genders? Why is this current event an issue at all? And this thing too Why do we report gender at so many different places? Why can't people just make immature anatomy jokes without it being sexist? Why is it that Gawker has a blog for women, but none that say they are targeted at men?

In conclusion, a lot of shit doesn't make sense to me because I think their premise is stupid. I also look forward to the day when I feel fine getting bright purple rain boots, without feeling like I am judged by men and women alike.

I ran out of steam, but I'm sure when I'm mad I'll keep going. Now, I'm just hungry.

Edit: http://acko.net/blog/storms-and-teacups/ is similar to what I was trying to say. Except for the part about being a gay guy.

Hemingway + Bucket Lists

I tend to have a lot of love for Hemingway, especially for The Sun Also Rises. Maybe its that I sympathize with the lost generation, or that I appreciate the bluntness of his writing. His characters seem like real people, in that they are all flawed. Maybe I just like The Sun Also Rises because it captures the idea that you can't run away from your problems or solve them by drinking. Or that I enjoy his antiquated romantic notions of love. Or his directive to go out and enjoy life before you get too old.

"Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?" - Cohn in The Sun Also Rises

The real point of this post was to talk about getting stuff done while you have time. I'm going to steal some stuff from an article I saw in the Sun (http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/dining/bal-100-foodies-pg1202,0,5822554.photogallery), but here are 20 things I want to do this year.

Foodie:
- Have a jumbo lump crab cake from Faidley's on a Saltine. (Got calamari from The Daily Catch instead)
- Corned beef on rye at Attman's. (Crab Omlette at Little Havana instead)
- Have dinner at Brewer's Art again
- Try some of the special flavors from Taharka Bros. (formerly Sylvan Beach) ice cream and Pitango Gelato.
- Smith Island Cake (Sugarbakers)

Expanding my horizons:
- Go into the city (Six hours of madness)
- Go out somewhere into the country/mountains
- Go to a big city driving distance away
- Go out of the state
- Go out of the country

Movies/Reading:
- Watch all the old Batman movies
- Finish the Hunger Games
- Watch the Best Pictures from the past 5 years
- Read Atlas Shrugged
- Read all of Abbott's reports

Doing stuff I should have done:
- See live music
- Get back down to 230
- Go to speed dating
- Finish "Perspective"
- Get on LinkedIn

Classic Overthinking

Sometimes I find it funny that to some I'm labeled as impulsive. I have always been the type of person who would think too much before they make a decision that they care about. I think its related to how I listen to songs by focusing on the lyrics. I enjoy having lots of information and feeling like I'm thinking critically. I could see my habit of making fast decisions for things coming out of the fact that if I thought about every choice as much as I wanted to I would never get anything done.

To some extent, I'm glad that I evolved that habit. In group projects, people generally respond well to having a shot caller. Also, in the whole, the consequences of the bad decisions I have made have been minimal (at least they seem so now). Its amusing that how long I spend thinking making a decision also kind of correlates now with how much something matters to me.

That explains why I took two days to decide that I wanted to buy RPG maker and the sale period ran out, right?

Ah well, there is always next Steam sale.

Lyric of the Day: Drake - Marvin's Room
I think I’m addicted to naked pictures
And sittin talkin’ ’bout bitches that we almost had.
I don’t think I’m concious of making monsters
Outta the women that I sponsor til it all goes bad

But shit it’s all good

Tokens of the Past

One thing I do is I collect things that remind me of parts of my life that I'm afraid of forgetting. I've been packing up the stuff that I have in storage and I've come across many things that I kept. The two things I have in storage are boxes of memories and the books for my future library.

Things I found last trip:
- SWAT badge from karate when I was in middle school
- A picture from our High School robotics trip, where I have past-shoulder-length hair
- The lanyard from my first Otakon
- The box that came with the ring I got for my 16th birthday
- The swag bag from the year I took my little brother with me to Otakon
- The Playbill from when I was in Macbeth in HS
- The folder from my freshman college orientation (with the school map)
- A receipt from my first trip to Balducci's
- My ticket to Iron Man (the first one)
- The invitation for the wedding of the first of my friends to get married

I also remembered that younger me enjoyed leaving Magic: The Gathering cards as bookmarks in books that I had completed or at passages that I particularly liked. There were two that I noticed I had marked on my last trip.

From Hemingway's Fiesta (aka The Sun Also Rises):
“You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
Oddly appropriate as it relates to some of my recent posts. Plus the story itself relates to the title of this blog.

From Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Totally used this on my essay for AP English in 11th grade. Still remains a universal truth.

Lyric of the Day: Miike Snow - Animal

I change shapes just to hide in this place
But I'm still I'm still an animal
Nobody knows it but me when I slip, yeah I slip
I'm still an animal