zachariah

It's been cold lately, which is great. Biking in Arkansas in August works so much better when it's cold.

I graduated college, completed the math minor, got a 2.8 GPA. I keep thinking "It's over, son." No more classes, no more jigsaw schedule, no hanging out on campus, no more being a student. No more second or third chances. No more study plans, no more "When this is done, I can start the next phase." This is the next phase. I finished. I've gotta use it now.




I hate the unfamiliar.

On May 31 a man walked into my store, went into the back area, rummaged through my backpack, and stole Nay's DS lite and all of her games. He was in the store for a minute and a half. It was a crime of opportunity by the pettiest kind of human, and caused various kinds of harm to both Renay and myself. Several events conspired to cause this theft, the absence of any of which would have been suitable prevention.




Tomorrow we're probably going to see the movie "Up" by Pixar.

Clicking through to things PZ Meyers links can be problematic, as sometimes his minions have already swamped the server. Tsk.

I didn't understand before today just how trade-ins work, and I'm sure there are thousands of details of which I'm still unaware, but I at least have a basic idea. I really don't like buying cars; I've never had a good experience doing it, and because one doesn't buy a car until one is in a bad enough situation to require a new car, it's really a whole lot of not-fun to be had.

The cats are pretty much staying out of each others' ways. Maybe when they get around to fighting it won't be the apocalypse we're expecting?

I went and saw Star Trek!

( It sucked. )
Overall, I'll give it an A-. (Bones was excellent)

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Love is something you do, not something you find. Or as the song goes, "If you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with."

I re-read Preacher, filling in the gaps of what I'd missed eight years ago. For a book about killing God, the ending is sort of anticlimactic.

I suppose this is officially the end of me trying to post every day. Honestly my life doesn't include enough interesting things to fill a paragraph a day, and one-sentence posts are so 2001. I'll keep posting and whatnot when things happen, but as I said...not that often. :)

If I don't post before work, I have to edit the date to keep up this daily thing. Gotta start remembering to post earlier.

First day of classes was nice.

IN a casual sense, I'm pro military. My brother is in the army, and he's getting paid to see the world, meet interesting people (and blow them up? hm. Actually referring to his battle buddies), he gets school benefits, etc. For a guy who was pretty directionless, that's a good offer, and I'm glad he took it. I also understand national defense is important, and I'm not so much of a hippie that I think the military is like, pointless, dude.

But.

In an abstract way, I really think organized military, starting at terrorist cells and all the way to national armies should be completely and permanently disarmed. No guns, bullets, grenades, bombs, jets, tanks, microwave pain guns, nothing. I'd like a return to the days of when nations have ideological differences, they're settled with mind-bending violence, with sharp sticks and rocks. If a Palestinian thinks an Israeli soldier has no right to live, he should be forced to feel the man die, not just lob a grenade and move on. If one country wants to invade another, they have to hoof it the hundreds of miles and then try to take over with sheer numbers. The invaded country can still call on their allies, of course, which can arrive quickly via planes and boats and trucks, but fighting has to be done on foot. In person. Painfully.

War should not be so easy to do that an industry is made of it.

I'm okay with citizens having guns, both for self defense in their own homes and for personal fun. Contrary to what parents tell their children for years, guns are toys for adults. When I shoot them, I don't do it to become a better aim or to become more comfortable with the idea of using one to defend against an attacker. I use it for the little spike of adrenaline and endorphins, for the loud pop and seeing something develop a hole problem. I'm not dangerous with it, I am a responsible adult, but I'm not shooting it for any reason than childlike enjoyment.

I'm aware there is no system that can disarm entire armies, nor is there a way to prevent soldiers from taking their personal guns from home to the battlefront. Like I said, this is an abstract wish of mine.

The second scheduled installation attempt, the second failure. Once again my parents do not yet have broadband because of poorly trained technicians. It grinds my gears because I sent them everything they need to get hooked up, so unless there's some special protocol a DOCSIS modem connected to Satellite uses that a DOCSIS modem connected to cable doesn't, the technicians are just running in circles. Blegh. IS there such a proprietary protocol?

I'm drinking too much coffee these days.

What you see is three kinds of cheese, some lunchmeat that is almost certainly bad, a random bottle of water, eggs, butter, and Kahlua that I've been slowly sipping from for what, three months? It's not so much that we live from paycheck to paycheck, which we of course do. I've been doing this for enough years I'm getting a better understanding of how we're living from windfall to windfall, even though the windfalls come in the form of once-yearly tax returns and twice-yearly excess aid from Stafford loans, i.e. payback's gonna be a mofo. I've been hearing more lately from people at work and school about putting applications in and getting my resume out, and here I am still angsting about not having anything to put on a resume. Reading this does two things - makes me happy because I've got numbers 1 through 6 in the bag, and makes me sad because I've completely screwed up on number seven.

When I came to Jonesboro, I had to have a job right away and school was not a priority. Getting the gas station job was quick and easy and provided the kind of guaranteed employment that was important at the time. And those two words, "guaranteed employment", have provided a sort of false security blanket for me ever since. No matter how poorly I did in the classes I took, no matter when I dropepd out of AState for a semester, no matter how much debt I was taking on, I had guaranteed employment and felt little need to get an internship or look for perhaps less guaranteed work in a more relevent area. Tech support at our local Circuit City, for example, would have been more relevent than what I'm doing now. A classmate with a paid internship at a local software company mentioned to me last semester that they were taking applications and he could put in a word for me, and I did nothing with it! Nothing! Half of it is fear of the unknown, of putting myself into a position where everything might implode and I'll lose this "security", and half of it is self-doubt. My worst grades in school have been in the math classes I thought I was taking for fun and the CS classes I was taking to learn the craft. Doesn't that mean something? I know I'm smart enough, but I've lost my stoicism; the emotions drive my actions more than reason does.

Reason states that if I have nothing to put on a resume, then build something and get it out to the public; make more friends and express interest in their employers; stop with the useless stuff and do the real stuff. Emotionally, it's like looking at a wall. I don't feel like I'm up to the task, even if intellectually I am.

Wow, okay, I didn't actually mean to jump from empty fridge to "My life is dooooom!" I suppose it is time for that annual rant. Well, no matter what, this is my last semester of school, so things will change. There's some degree of predictability and yearly repitition when one is a student, and I won't have that after May ends. *Insert Japanese trope about "doing my best!!" here.* :D