The porcelain bowl-shaped collection dish of my thoughts

The last few days have been pretty complicated with figuring out an optimal schedule.  Handling my nerd groups, reducing my obligations for carpooling, and most importantly opening up the ability to see other friends again.  Here’s what I’m at now:

4pm-2am, Friday thru Sunday off

Saturday and Sunday are routinely open now, which will certainly help.  I’m pretty excited.  =D

And since I know yall are curious, I had landed my previous schedule to help with carpooling a car-less friend to work.  So in addition to the open-invitation to switch back whenever, going to second shift was anything but a fleeting thought (*cough* Steven *cough*).

Now invite me to places, people.

My grandma (yes, my family calls her Nana) isn’t doing so well, an inevitability for most grandmas.  Kidney issues have lead to various medication complications and the resulting side effects.  That’s not to say any malpractice is present, but I’m learning that people with a number of medication-worthy issues run into conflicting ‘solutions’.  Basically she’s faced with either frequent dialysis treatments or opting out of any further treatment.

My conversation with my aunt is similar to what I’m posting here.   Mind you, I wasn’t THIS upfront about such feelings, but the point was still conveyed.

A few years ago, an aunt (different from the aforementioned aunt) passed away.  Her husband, my Uncle Sal, was understandably distraught from her passing.  His health failed during the next year or so until he too passed away.  While I attended his funeral, I couldn’t help but feel relief knowing that he’s with her now.  His crossing over means they’ll never have to be separated again, wherever they’re at now.  So, in some sense, the whole thing seems oddly romantic to me.  A ‘together forever’ type of thing.

For Nana, I feel the same way.  She absolutely does not want dialysis, she’s been persnickety about her medication up till this point too.  Her husband, my grandpa, died  10 years ago.  It feels wrong to withhold her wishes to follow in his footsteps and rejoin him.

My booming fanbase for my blog has reached gut-wrenching new records.  Within a matter of months, my unique visitors will achieve a 2-digit count (before excluding Google and Yahoo search bots).  To give back to my loyal followers, I’ve considered expanding my operations.

Games – Blogging about them can ‘brain poop’ that stuff out of my head, freeing up space for more interesting opinions.  I don’t want to post comprehensive short-novels, just share some of the finer points (or annoyances) of the games I’m into.

Dreams – I have a lot of them.  I’m pretty sure they’re random, but they still manage to fall into a set few categories.  Blogging about them would keep record of such events before they’re lost in the dark cat pee-smelling closet of my shoddy memory.  The usual dream categories for me are:

Special powers – Usually flight, sometimes telekinesis.  I occasionally have dreams where I realize I can do something really awesome, then spend lots of time practicing, or showing it off, or trying to understand why I never noticed such abnormalities before.

Epic failure – Personality flaw, clairvoyance, or a negative interpretation of random images ?  These dreams present a challenge of some sort that inevitably results in a grim outcome.  I’ve been mauled by shadowy K-9 hounds from my parents’ basement, chomped by possessed dolls, and murdered in hostage & robbery situations.

Girls – Names omitted, obviously.  Satisfyingly successful dates, rescuing old crushes, romantic entanglements of random female acquaintances.  The morning always brings disappointment or dramatic WTFs.

Morbid – Lately, the most popular category for me.  But also the prime reason I’m hesitant to share.  Why don’t I skip this one?  Because it’d offer the most consistent resource of interesting updates… just at the expense of wary looks at the office.  Pretty sick stuff though, enough to make me queasy when I wake up.  Or is the queasiness what causes the morbid dreams?  Hmm.

Comments, suggestions, criticisms welcome.  Providing I agree with them.

My family used to be big in Civil War Reenacting.  Around the time I was in elementary thru middle school, we’d go to multiple yearly events.  Jackson, Linden, Chickamauga, and Gettysburg were places we went for camping, war games, and reenacting old battles fought between the North and South.  Spectators were everywhere, friends from school came to reenact, and the campfire food was outstanding.

With all the things that went on at those events, I actually cared about the historical parts the least.  These are some of the staples of those memories:

The chicks – Contrary to the muscle-bound ladies man that you see nowadays, back then I was a total wallflower.  It wasn’t until the later years, in reenacting of all places, that I started to take strides with the opposite sex.  And man was it awesome.  A lot of firsts at those events (no, not that first), laid the groundwork for more ‘skirmishes’ later on.

The ghosts – Staying at places like the Cashtown Inn in Gettysburg (used as a hospital for wounded Civil War soldiers) garnered some pretty memorable, albeit sleep depriving moments.  My family and I don’t need much provoking to tell of our experiences.

The family tension – As mentioned previously, I didn’t care much for the reenacting part.  Going on war games with my group, assisting in events for the spectators, and contributing to the (nearly useless) obligatory nightly guard duty of the camp wasn’t for me.  I’d try to skirt on such obligations wherever possible.  Among other unnecessary catalysts, this often sparked arguments between my parents and I.  Especially my dad.  Being less interested than him in Reenacting or Church typically resulted in moodiness and guilt trips.  I don’t miss it.

Oh, and I’m much less likely to be startled now thanks to random nightly cannon fire in the distance.

Disclaimer:  This post spoils the first 50 or 60 pages of  House of Leaves.  But considering it’s length, it’s not a staggering blow to your fulfillment of the story.

Nearly finished with House of Leaves, but even still I’m impressed by it’s awesome premise.  More-so because the author created it by simply breaking a rule we’ve all taken for granted.  Space, not the Outer kind, the Anywhere kind.  It’s existence is a constant.  Never created or destroyed, just different.  Like matter.  Or is space a form of matter?  I don’t think so, but that topic is far too thought-provoking for a blog like mine.  Anyways, the author dictates that space can exist in places where the quantity of it exceeds more than whats possible.

A family buys a house of Ash Tree Lane somewhere down south.  They’re gone on a trip for the weekend.  When they return, they discover a door in their master bedroom.  The door reveals an empty ‘thru closet’ to the adjacent kids’ bedroom.  Their pictures, shot when they first moved in, as well as the original house blueprints, prove that the closet is indeed new.  Careful measuring reveals an even stranger fact; the addition of the closet extends the house’s interior dimensions further than the exterior.  In other words, the house is bigger on the inside than the outside.

Weeks pass while the husband remeasures and re-remeasures the dimensions, using new tools & techniques.  The wife decides to make the best of the situation by decorating and purchasing a bookshelf to add to the new room.  The bookshelf’s width perfectly occupies the span between the master bedroom to the kid’s room.  As the husband conducts a self-shot video documentary about the new room, wind blows the closet door shut.  In the moment that it takes the wife to open the door, she shrieks as she discovers that the bookshelf no longer fully occupies that distance between the two bedrooms; an extra foot-long gap is suddenly present.

Buy the book.  It was a mere $20 at Schuler’s when I picked it up.  An easy expense for such an epic introduction.  I’d like to paraphrase another passage, but I’d feel like I was taking away more of the fulfillment.  For those of you that read it, you’ll know which I’m referring to when a primary character says “I am not who I used to be”.  An awesome line for the situation that triggers it.

By reading this blog post, you obligate yourself to either sharing your opinion of the story when it’s finished, or writing a 500-page essay on why you’re a cheap prick.

Several months back, Joey checked out.  He had been a childhood friend but we hadn’t maintained any sort of relationship after hitting middle school.  I learned that he hadn’t done so well after a bad break-up with a bad girlfriend, then made the rash decision after having a couple drinks at home.

Many details omitted for relevancy, but I’ll say that the whole ordeal was pretty heartbreaking for everybody that knew him.

Though I’ve grieved for his and his family’s pain, the song above best reflects my feelings on the overall topic.  The background music is distracting, just focus on the words.

To recap:

-I’m on a family plan, my parents pay for the service that my brothers and I use.  In exchange, we send my mom payments every month.

-I use an Evoke QA4.  I like to think of it as a ‘poor man’s smart phone’.  It has GPS, a clunky email app, and a very sluggish browser.

-I’ve had the QA4 replaced once before, due to random hard lock-ups.

-The replacement has been only slightly better.  Randomly reboots (especially when I text too fast), the alarm clock function is unreliable, and the entire phone still behaves very sluggishly.

—

I went in to try and score a phone upgrade at a reduced/free price.  Long story short, I was told the following options:

1) Have the QA4 replaced with a QA4 for free, based on it still being under warranty.

2) Pay for a brand new phone of higher quality, receiving a rebate for part of the cost, and extending my individual plan to 2 years.

3) Pay for a refurbished phone of higher quality, no rebate, but not contract extension.

I opted for a refurbished Droid.  Despite lots of references to the dissatisfaction I’ve had with the QA4, I couldn’t tug on their heart strings to get any slack on the price.  While Tiesha helped me, her manager wandered by and made comments about how it “sounds smarter just to get the brand new phone + contract extension”, to which I replied “True, but based on my shoddy experience with my last two phones, I don’t want to obligate myself [to you] longer with this next one” she wandered off without another word.

$307 (with tax) for a refurbished Droid.  Tiesha was very nice.  I had to wait almost 45 minutes for a rep, but was estimated an hour when I first arrived.

Bewildered from being shafted by Verizon, I unwittingly entered my apartment armed with only some take-out Chicken LoMein.  Within in few moments, it was clear that my premises had been violated.  I could hear the telltale signs of movement within a few feet of me.  Surprisingly, even with my dinner in hand I still felt inept to deal with the intruder.

Manning up to the situation, I calmly exchanged my food in hand for a large binder cookbook.  I took a few quiet steps toward the source of the movement, readying to strike.  I paused to muster up my courage, scraping together my obligation to defend the sanctity of my home.  Knowing what I was about to get into, part of me (most of me?) felt unwilling to proceed.  It was like being compelled to dive off a cliff, but pausing for a precious moment, hoping some divine force would grace me the opportunity to bow out of this inevitable dance.

I raised the book in front of me, it became both my sword and my shield, I closed the remaining space between me and my adversary.  Now entering the dining room, advancing unto the blinded window overlooking my balcony, my body flooded with adrenaline as I lurched forward.  A bellowed roar filled the room, the source of it forever lost between me and thy enemy, I engaged him with my weapon.

scuffling

raspy gasps for air

a grunt (whimper?) from exchanged blows

My familiar heart rate returned, sweat beaded down my brow, I faltered from my exerted strength.  I surveyed what just happened, not from my eyes but from the scene.  Relieved not for my victory, but for the knowledge of strife’s end.  I reached forward, spreading the blinds on my window, I could see the remains of this proud (if not foolish) warrior.  His black-and-yellow striped corpse lay against my window.

“This calls for a celebration” I murmured, then returned to my kitchen to retrieve my spoils of war.

My lease at Lakeview Apartments in Haslett is expired.  It dried up two months ago, but they’ve been nice enough to let me stick around while I sort out future plans.  Normally, it wouldn’t take me this long to find a new apartment complex, but I’ve got a few different events around the corner that are both inconveniently timed and would surely mean a loss in money if I acted too hastily.

I’m going to be moving in with my aunt in Plainwell for a month or two.  She’s awesome and it’ll save me a crapton of money in bills.  During that time, I can carefully plan out where I should be taking up a more permanent(ish) living location.

By reading this blog post, you’ve obligated yourself to help me move.  I need bodies to help load up the truck, unfortunately the ones I’ve had prepared have gone bad.  Now my closet stinks.

My thoughts on it.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell if I’m right.

- You couldn’t go back in time for a pre-planned purpose that involves altering the past.  Upon completing the task, you’d undo the whole point to traveling back in the first place, rendering your former self without said goal.

- In the remake of The Time Machine, the main character travels to the past multiple times to try saving his lover from her fated doom.  But in each attempt, he prevents the previous cause of her death but indirectly contributing to her new one.  I forget if the movie actually spelled this out, but I really found that aspect of the story interesting. If she was never killed then he’d have no reason to invent the time machine to save her.  But it made me wonder how things would pan out if he traveled back to leave the time machine’s blueprints for his past self, with convincingly urgent instructions to build it asap.  THEN saved her.  Or would that introduce a new paradox?

- Realistically, if we could ever pull off traveling to the past, it’d have to be in an incorporeal form.  We’d be a ghostly observer of the events with absolutely no means of affecting things.

- The end result of such a discovery would surely spell doom.  The past holds answers about all religions, creation, etc etc.  Even without meddling in crucial past events, simply bestowing “what really happened” upon the masses today would probably lead to chaos.

All in all, this isn’t a product I recommend you invest in.  Just avoid it altogether.  Probably give you cancer anyways.