Well…

…it’s been awhile. I’m not sure why I thought it’d be a good idea to start this up again, but I guess I intend to. I think it’s the fact that I can’t think about doing this blog without seeing this computer, my old iBook that I devoted to Wardriving. I’ve been kinda far from it for a long time, and we’ll talk about it. It could be the fact that I’m lonely too… or something along those lines. So if you wanna hear my life story since last time… hit that more button.

So I guess I left off close to one year ago. Fun. Summer of 2008 was amazing. It was filled with anticipation of going to college, and the love of a wonderful girl. RIT was going to be great. As soon as housing info was released, I was talking to my then-future roomie. We had a great start and we planned all the essential stuff before leaving. Erin, my girlfriend, made it clear she wanted to spend as much time with me as possible  before I left, and I couldn’t agree more with her. My memory on how much I’ve talked about her here is sketchy, but she was a wonderful girl to me, and my first everything. To not go off about it, I would say I had found true love almost effortlessly, and I would’ve done anything to keep her. It was a beautiful summer to remember.

But all good things must end, and that summer had elapsed. I flew to Rochester with my family, we hooked up with some old family friends who showed us around Niagara Falls, and I bought all the stuff I couldn’t take with me on the plane. Orientation week hit like a cheesy summer camp, but wiped away with plenty of benefits: free food, trinkets, shirts, and hours demanded of us to be spent.  Then a funny thing happened. After the first week of classes, Erin couldn’t take it anymore and decided to break up. Long, and painfully. To this day, she hasn’t given me a legitimate reason why, but I have some things of my own to fault. The biggest was I left her with only one friend she could talk to, and so she started to turn to people that she shouldn’t have been talking to. Of course, this doesn’t help her in her defense of why she slept with a random guy that I knew from high school, when we were trying to get back together. Although, it is humorous to think about who it was that she virtually cheated on me with, because I still don’t see how that could have happened… Anyways. She started to hang out with a pretty unsavory group of substance-abusing sex fiends. Started some bad habits that to this day haunt her and make her wholly unattractive as a long-term companion.

So this all happened throughout the fall quarter, wherein things were new and shiny and difficult and challenging. My classes for the most part whipped me; my schedule was too demanding, so I fell asleep in later classes, and calculus’s prerequisites in particular needed to be reevaluated. Notwithstanding the mental, emotional, and spiritual beating I was taking with Erin, I got pretty abysmal grades for the first quarter.  But it was still interesting. By the end of first quarter, I had been decently acquainted with my floormates, and wished (rather foolishly as I would later find) to be more acquainted with this one girl who frequented our floor a lot. Let’s call her Samantha. Speaking of other girls, I was also trying to get involved online with another girl who was from my high school, but not really interested in me. This one is called Lauren. But more on these ladies after.

Coming back home on fall break was surreal. While sometimes it felt like I was alone flying with my parents (due to their lack of control), every trip after this would be me by myself. I absolutely love flying, and doing it alone was great for me. Anyways. In my absence, my parents decided it would be a great idea to move, move the farthest away that I’ve ever had to move (out of 6 times). They hadn’t moved yet, but I was able to see the place and fret about it. Moving from inland to literally 5 minutes from the beach would be nice for other people, but not for a person like me who isn’t much of a beach-goer. I would be 30 minutes away from all I had ever known, all the people that were my friends and all that was familiar. I’m still not quite happy about it. One of the first things I did when I got back home was to see Erin. I was thinking of stealing her back from her current druggie boyfriend, but when I got there I pretty much shit myself. Imagine a sweet redheaded 90’s grunge-clad teddy bear turned into an unfeeling black-haired gothic demon struggling to cope with her newfound addictions. Because that’s what I was used to and what I saw when I opened the door, respectively. We had talked, and by the end of it I was so upset with her the next day when I saw her I did the only thing a gentleman could do; and that was smear some dead skin cell particles from my hand across her face in one simple poetic motion. To be honest, I was perfectly justified, and the action was disgustingly understating of my feelings. I’d never really been angry at anybody since I was very little, up until that time. To finish this tangent up, I didn’t hear from her for awhile… until I started to notice a trend where she’d say she was sorry and ask for forgiveness, but that cycle only seemed to create bitterness for her, another reason in a montage of hundreds why I couldn’t be with her again.

Winter quarter went better. Classes were significantly better, and my schedule had a much better handle. I’ve noticed that this blog post so far has mostly been ranting about girls, and that’s not really going to change. Girls, you must know, are not in abundance at my school. However, there was a blessing of fate in my calculus class (ironically the one class I had to take over again). There was a surprisingly even ratio of boys to girls. Not to mention a handful of decent-looking ones. One of them happened to be our friend Samantha, who I was still trying (in error) to get closer to. We would go after class to eat lunch together, and it became a habit. Our friendship grew, and as it grew, I couldn’t help but feel turned off by her personality and sympathetic towards her dilemma: half the school wanted to get into her pants. Eventually I gave up on her, but she ended up wasting her time at RIT and started some worse habits than Erin did. Anyways. There was another girl in that calc class that caught my eye, beautiful in appearance and possessing an equally tempered intellect. We’ll call her Abby. I’m not sure what I can say for posterity’s sake because of my current situation with her; but there’s no reason not to mention the positive things when I don’t know how things stand now. We first met in a workshop group where she appeared to be interested in me, despite having a boyfriend at the time who she would break up with shortly. We later would spend a bit of one-on-one time “working” on a project and meeting at random places. So far all of our contact has been awkward, but I have my suspicions as to why. At the time, she was still off-limits out of respect for her, so I didn’t really pursue.

Goodness me, I need to stop talking about girls. Winter. Winter wasn’t as bad as everyone said it was going to be. I found that pretty hilarious, and while I do owe some thanks due to Rochester’s weather for no classes during the quarter, it was a little bitter 4 days out of week that I had to traverse the Quarter Mile in the morning. In the fall, a few floormates of mine acknowledged each other’s prowess in their musical instruments, and we had planned to get a band together. We would have started much earlier in the year, but we had to wait after the winter break for our drummer to bring his drumset down. Our collaboration is called the Sol Men, a play on the fact that we lived in Sol Heumann Hall on an all male floor. So far it is a 4 piece band, two guitars, a bass, and drums. Our style I guess is dictated by me and the other guitarist: he favors blues and I favor progressive. We both like each other’s stuff, or else nothing would work. A vocalist is something we have not found yet, so we’ve remained a jam band for now. We make up certain things and cover other things. Needless to say it’s a great creative outlet and I’m sad that it took so long to get one going. The guys I play with are great, it’s too bad that we weren’t able to arrange an apartment together or something like that for next year. Hopefully we can continue to play and evolve next year.

There was also another thing, another girl (d’oh!). That one named Lauren. Some background: before I was set up with my quasi-exgirlfriend Erin, I was pining for this one girl who probably regarded me as a fly at the time. I was on the verge of being a retard and asking her out right before I was committed to Erin, and I’m glad that things happened the way they did (sorta?). Fast forward a year and a half in to the future: Erin had broken up with me and Lauren started to be online much more in college, contrasting how it was high school. She comforted me, and I became attracted to her again. When I told her my feelings, she expressed that she also had (some [a tiny bit {almost negligible}]) some interest in me. We wouldn’t start anything without seeing each other, and that wouldn’t happen until winter break. Female status of winter break: Erin was still being a retard, I felt so bad for Samantha I had given up on her, Abby had just broken up with her boyfriend and needed space. So I thought, okay, I was already lined up with Lauren anyway. After a week of frustrating myself, I asked her out to the movies, which was pretty awesome. We stuck around at this park afterwards, and had a nice time. I went to her New Years party, hung out with people I normally wouldn’t have hung out with, didn’t get drunk, and had an awkward time trying to get to sleep that would probably make a funnier story if I was drunk. We hung out another separate time before I had to leave back for Rochester. I myself thought a little more of what happened than she did, because she doesn’t seem to care that it happened. Which is kinda why at the current moment of time I’m like “aw lame” when it comes to her. But I digress. Nice girl but she doesn’t want anything to do with me obviously.

This is winter quarter part 2(?). Things were cool, cold actually, but not otherwise too noteworthy. After winter quarter was spring break, and my parents took me on a cruise. It was actually better than I had imagined, seeing as the previous one was sorta dull (dull, yet it was a better cruise than this one… puzzling). We went to Port Canaveral (Kennedy Space Center lulz), Nassau, and… I’m not really good at remembering itineraries. But the best part was after the fact. We sailed out of New York City, and it was the first time I’d ever been there. We only spent a day there, but it was quite amazing, more surreal than I would have imagined just walking around a city. That was the time that Erin started to latch onto me again, and I honestly didn’t mind, because I had already expressed the fact that even if we were together over summer, it would end when I left for RIT in the fall (whew). But NYC is very cool, I will have to go back many times.

Spring quarter omgwtfbbq. They say that it’s spring but it’s pretty much like winter part 2 until May. Which I didn’t mind, I kinda liked forgetting what it was like to sweat. Spring quarter went by without too many hitches, interestingly enough. My grades weren’t great, but then again I didn’t really try. At first I was excited, because Abby was going to be in another one of my classes again, but then I realized it didn’t really matter because I was a lame ass, and I was having mixed feelings about Erin and the upcoming summer. In my defense, there were not too many opportunities to present myself. My best friend Meghan transferred over, and despite the reason she did transfer (which was me), I still let her do the crazy things she does. In fact, I’m pretty sure that my grades suffered from too much hanging out with her, and then not doing my work because I needed to escape from her and play video games. Speaking of video games, I started to play a lot of them over this year. I was never too much of a computer game player, but I started getting a few because I had extra money lying around. I think the first thing I did was get CrossOver Games, because it was free during a promotion and I could use Steam without having to dual boot. I hooked myself up with the Half-Life 1 Anthology, played that entirely, and then bought the Orange Box, and played all of that. I’ve seen the beauty of Valve’s creation and I enjoy it so. Also of note: I’ve played Multiwinia (which is amazing and has tons of replay value [too bad few people play it online]), World of Goo (a nice innovative game), and Plants Vs. Zombies (just awesome).

At this point it’s taken me a few days to write this and my thinking is so segmented that I’m going to stab something. Spring quarter was okay, but it had so much more potential. There were some ups (some at which I’m not at liberty to divulge [Protip: Meghan is retarded]), and some downs. I didn’t really spend as much time with my friends on floor as I would have liked to, but for some reason I felt pretty antisocial. Most of my socializing would be with Meghan, me talking about Abby, her talking about her quasi-boyfriend, me trying to avoid her sexual advances… Anyways. I guess it’s worthy to note that the last few days at RIT were fun, and yet I was still very reflective. Good times man, good times.

At this point, we’re pretty close to present day. My family friends that took us to Niagara came to pick up my stuff to keep over the summer. I had 9 boxes, they had a Subaru sedan. Despite the fact that I would never usually make that joke, I felt like playing Tetris and wanted to call over a Packaging Science major. But I flew uneventfully back home, back to my new pad in Laguna Beach. It was in a lot better shape than when I was here for winter break. I was damn excited to get my car back again, but then my mom was retarded and didn’t put insurance on it until after the weekend, so I was all sadface. It’s nice to be back with all my possessions, as materialistic as that sounds. I have two rooms basically now, a bedroom with nothing in it, and then an office with a desk for my computers, my amp setup in a corner, my two keyboards on a dual rack, guitars hanging from the walls, and a new addition that makes it so much more complete: a leather recliner. It’s my own little sanctuary, but I think that’s negatively affecting me, because I have gone outside very little since I’ve been here. I’ve had a family party, hung out with my friend Justin, saw Erin once or twice, and… not much else. It’s tricky you know. There must be something wrong with me, because even though they all may have been friends at some point, all my friends hate each other. I can’t hang out with more than any given person or else hellfire will ensue.

And now yes, you thought you had avoided it, girl time. I first saw Erin again since fall break, under some pretty horrible circumstances in which we didn’t even really have direct communication. She had told me all this yadda-yadda about spending time with me over the summer, lo and behold, this is the only thing that she’s actually made contact with me about to see her with. I had to ask her to give me back something of mine to see her the second time. True, I had given her a reason for her to be angry at me, but there’s no reason in spreading a bunch of jive for 3 months, then pretending like I don’t exist when I actually come back. Besides, what I did to made her angry was benevolent in comparison to her misdeeds (even less, I didn’t get angry at her when she did what she did). So in a word, I’m upset with her. In other (somewhat happier?) news, in light of Erin’s being rude, I finally grew a pair and started talking to Abby online. I had only really talked to her in length once, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. And even then, it was Facebook Chat of all things. I’m still not sure if I should talk to her on AIM, since she’s never on Facebook Chat… I can’t tell whether or not sure thinks I’m a nuisance, so I have to be careful for now. The only thing that is certain is that I’m trying too hard. I’ve noticed for years that I would fail things that I thought too much about, and do relatively well in things that I put no effort into. I only made this hypothesis recently, and although I have it backed by a lifetime of experiences, I’m still going about it cautiously. I know I’m blowing it with Abby, there’s 7 months of too much effort put into that.

Anyways, I’m almost out of stuff to say. Right now, I am looking for a job, even though I already sorta have one. I picked up a job at RIT developing an online tool for making reports… but to be honest I’m not sure what I’m doing. Uncertain in that I’m unfamiliar with the technology being used, and uncertain in what I should be doing in the first place. I think the biggest problem is that I have a conscience, combined with being too shy makes me a ghost in this project. Needless to say, I still need to find a job. There are plenty around, it’s just taken me two weeks to get serious about it, and now I’ve sorta doomed myself into putting too much effort into it… but eventually I’ll have one, eventually…

I guess that means I might have to get a haircut. Rats.