Tag: kind

Thirty-Three

Random Thoughts

Some time later this evening, shortly after eight I think, I will have officially survived thirty-three years of life.

Yay me.

I’m not the kind of guy who believes in omens, or the kind to prophetically announce that this will finally be the year that Fink beats the Stomach, but I do honestly believe that things have to change. I am officially a job burnout. One thing I have prided myself on over the years (well, at least after high school) is my work ethic. I go by the following rules:

  1. A job worth doing is worth doing well.
  2. A job that pays a decent wage is worth doing.
  3. If I accept the job for the offered wage, it must be a decent wage.

By those rules, if I take a job for the money they offer, I’m going to do the best job I can. Right now, though, I am just going through the motions, doing enough work to not get yelled at. I am Peter Gibbons. Even worse, I have noticed myself engineering situations with coworkers to properly lower their expectations so that I can do even less work.

Its a bad situation all around, and honestly its not because I care about the company I’m contracted at, it is because at the end of the day I am disappointed in myself. Add to that, I am officially thirty-three pounds overweight. Maybe I need to be putting a little more stock in these omens and signs and stuff.

My general down turn of attitude has also crept into other aspects of my life. I want a new job, but getting a new job takes effort and I’ve been avoiding it. I have at least a dozen unfinished projects around the house that could have easily been finished by now. I’m sure there is more, but I don’t have the energy to do a full self evaluation right now.

So, my goals for thirty-three:

  • Stop being a lazy shit and get my work ethic back.
  • Stop being a lazy shit and exercise to get my waistline back.
  • Stop being a lazy shit and find a new job that engages and excites me.
  • Stop being a lazy shit and finish some of these projects around the house.

I’m seeing a theme here… guess its time to stop being a lazy shit.

I hate thread

Random Thoughts

Specifically, I hate little balls of thread, the kind that come from my clothes and fall to the floor and lay there so patiently looking exactly like a dead bug, but that I know is not a dead bug, and when I reach down to pick it up makes me scream like a little girl because not only was is not a little ball of thread but it also was not a dead bug, and instead was a live bug which managed to skitter halfway up my arm before I managed to swat it to the ground and jump away doing the “Oogie Boogie” dance as the goosebumps form all up my arms and back.

I hate thread.

4 October 1999

Random Thoughts

First, let me say, no… she didn’t turn out to be some kind of psycho and kill me. I just missed a day.
Actually, she turned out to be quite nice… delightfully pleasant in fact. We saw a movie, Stir of Echoes, and I even put a short review of it up.
The movie is the real meat of this .plan. That and a conversation my new friend and I had.
Horror movies.
This year I’ve seen a bunch of them, The Haunting, The Sixth Sense, Stigmata, Stir of Echoes, and The Blair Witch Project. And I’m looking forward to End of Days, Lost Souls, The Bone Collector, and Sleepy Hollow.
Of the ones I’ve seen this year, only The Haunting left me unsatisfied. In my opinion it just didn’t have the weight that the others did. The story lacked, and it really never made you jump. Never really scared you.
The others, with the possible exception of Stigmata to a degree, all did make you jump and, more importantly, left you thinking. Now I’m not going to ruin any of those movies and tell their secrets, but I want to mention that almost without fail often the scariest parts of some of those movies were when they didn’t show you anything. No blood, no grizzly murder. I’ll admit there were a few things that were a little bloody or shocking, but the good ones knew how to build a story. How to keep you interested, on the edge of your seat while simultaneously making you squirm to the back your seat trying to hide. To make you want to slam your eyes shut, but you don’t because you don’t want to miss a single scene.
Someone obviously passed out the “How to write successful horror” handbook this year in Hollywood. And the year isn’t even over yet.
But we also talked about the movies of the past, Poltergeist and The Exorcist being the top two of course. Then the first Friday the 13th (which she had never seen any of, if you can believe that) and the second one too (the rest are funnier than they are scary). Then the first two Halloween movies, and even 4, 5, and 6 weren’t bad. And of course, the king of series bad guys, Freddy in the first Nightmare on Elm Street and the third. Each of those had a good story and in most of them the directors knew how to film a scene for suspense to tense you up before dropping the hammer.
The bad movies are too numerous to name… but we can start with Leprachaun, every movie of a series named above that wasn’t listed as a good one.
Even movies that I might consider ‘good’ movies, meaning that I enjoyed watching them, I wouldn’t really call good ‘horror’ movies. Maybe call them ‘splatter flicks’ or something, like the Hellraiser series, I like ’em, but they mostly shock, not scare.
Where am I going with this? I have no idea. Not a clue. But I like horror movies, so this year I’ve been a happy camper at the theater… it’s when I get home and try to go to sleep that I’m a little uneasy. But that’s what good horror movies do.

8 March 1999

Random Thoughts

Let me start with this. Stanley Kubrick is dead. He’ll be missed. I’m going to have a screening of 2001: A Space Oddessy and A Clockwork Orange tonight. If you know where I live, feel free to drop by.
Next on the list, wisdom teeth. I had mine pulled on Friday. Egads! It hurts like nothing else. And I can’t eat. But I do have some wicked pain killers. So at least I got something out of it.
So I’m sitting at home all weekend, just watching TV, some DVDs and chatting on the PC in IRC. And my ex-girlfriend and I talk quite a bit. It’s odd I guess, but she and I seem to talk just as much as we used to. I think I like that. But then there is this other girl I’ve been kind of seeing (who might just give me hell if she reads this here) who didn’t say two words to me all weekend. It seems its always like that. I’ve been running an odd sort of experiment and I’m sad to say the result were what I expected. You see, I noticed that I was starting all our conversations. So I decided that I would wait for her to say the first words. We’ve barely spoken in over a week now.
All of this reminds me of a movie I saw, and not really the whole movie, but just one line, one idea. Which is better: to be with someone for the wrong reasons, or alone for the right ones? In my relationships, I’ve always tried to be right, to end things when I became aware I was sticking around for the wrong reasons. This girl, she just got out of one of those “love of my life” kind of relationships. And I totally understand that, I had one myself once. And I get this feeling that maybe I’m the “I just don’t want to be alone” guy. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. Maybe I’m reading too much into nothing. Maybe… maybe I’m not.
I was alone for 4 and 1/2 years because I needed to be, and because I didn’t want to be wrong. I don’t recommend the experience to anyone. 4 and 1/2 years without someone in your life, it’s hell, it’s even worse when you try starting over again. But my unique perspective gives me pause, and makes me wonder… did she wait long enough? did she wait at all? does she need to? Some people don’t. Some people can hop right back in the saddle like they never fell off. But… I just don’t read the situation that way.
Perhaps it’s something I should take up with her instead of typing it out here to no one in particular, and I will. I just don’t know when… when is a good time for something like this?
—–
Today’s Movie: Somekind of Wonderful. It’s the movie that the idea above came from. Good movie. Go see it.

9 July 1998

Random Thoughts

Some time just shortly before noon, Clan DoS died.
DoS, the Disciples of Syrinx (not satanic, its from a Rush song), was the gaming clan that I was in for the last… jeez… almost 2 years. Over the past 6-8 months however, we fell on some hardships as RealLife(tm) set upon many of us.. myself included at times. I like to think I did a nice write up on the closing of our doors, check it out, http://www.clandos.com . Now, so very unlike me, I’m going to quote myself:
“Well… even though I’m one of the guys who helped make the decision to disband the clan, it’s kind of like when they have to shoot Old Yeller… he’s your best friend, he’d give his life for you and you’d do the same, but it just needs doing… Ending the clan hurts… but so does anything worth having… memories more valuable than gold, my friends, that’s what life is all about…”
I actually said that. I look back on that and think, where the hell was I when this got said. It’s like it’s not even me. Same with the write up on the clan page. But then something happened about 30 minutes after I said that and signed off IRC and was working on my webpage.
I still love computer games and comic books… I like cartoons… but somehow… in the last couple of weeks… really the last couple of days… I’ve grown up. Not so much that I forget what it’s like to be a child… but somehow, I saw all this coming… my new job, the clan disbanding, and other things… and I’ve come to understand the world a little bit in places I didn’t before. Things I did yesterday that seemed so cool and fun, today seem irresponsible, like a waste of a few of the precious moments we are given here on this Earth, like time I could have better spent somewhere else, on something else.
I’ve always held that I never regret anything that I have done in my life. And I still don’t. Because I cannot regret the things that made me who I am today because I like who I am, and I would not be the same if I had not made those mistakes that I made. But for the first time I see that maybe, just maybe, I can keep myself from wasting time… from wasting life… on things that in the end give me nothing in return, no sadness, no joy, no “memories more valuable that gold”…
Today is just a sad, sad day all around…
…Tomorrow will be better, if not by nature then I will make it so.
—–
Theater Review: [none]
—–
Today’s Song: Oven by Seven Mary Three. Just kind of fits my mood today.
—–
Today’s Movie: Crossing The Bridge. This is one of those films you’ll never see if you aren’t the kind of person who takes chances on videos you have never heard of. It’s written and directed by Mike Binder, who also did Indian Summer (another good one). It’s just a good movie about three close friends. Makes me feel good when I watch it.