eh, i'm kinda in a semi-pissy mood. prolly just cuz i gotta do some homework tonight or something. other than that i don't really have any reason to be in a less than stellar mood.

here's a good odd news story for ya. pretty damn amazing somebody could do that, although in some weird way i sort of understand it.

for most of my time on campus today, it was semi-raining. for some reason in some ways i prefer going to classes on a day like that rather than a sunny nice day. i like my fellow students that either forgot an umbrella or just don't give enough of a fuck to bring one. there's just something noble about being pelted by the rain. not necessarily today, but there have been times in the past where i'm biking or walking to a class and just getting completely throttled by hard rain. no effort is made to speed up at all. i get to class and i'm completely drenched. everybody with their huge over-sized texas a&m umbrellas, what's the point? especially when you've already got a jacket on anyway and it's barely even drizzling. what exactly is the worst that's going to happen if you don't bring your stupid way-too-huge umbrella to class? you get a little wet? as if you're gonna get to class and all at once the entire class is gonna turn, point, and laugh at you? especially those supposed tough guys we've got on campus with a thick goatee and a hunting jacket on, they've got a huge umbrella like they're made of fucking sugar. i'd imagine those are mostly just the agricultural majors here on the 6 year plan anyway, huh?

that's another thing worth bitching about. what's with this new trend involving thinking it's apparently really cool to just fuck around for a few years, change majors 7 times, and graduate in 6 years, taking 12 hours every semester and using all 3 Q-drops? it's too often where maybe we do one of those first-day-of-class intro things and you hear some asshole laughingly say "yeah, heheh i'm actually class of '02, gonna graduate this may tho... well i dunno, maybe... not sure" and then we all laugh along. why is that even funny? i think instead of laughing the professor should immediately pass out blunt objects for everyone to heave at the idiot that just admitted he's a fuckin moron that doesn't belong here.

i overheard this guy in racquetball today say "yeah i'm gonna graduate in may probably but i'm applying for grad school, y'know i'm just not ready to move on..." what the fuck is this? i know i'm the guy that grew up too fast and has already worked real jobs for like half a decade, but am i the only one that sees something wrong with this? it's one thing to want to go to grad school for further education, then another thing to go cuz you can't find a job, but quite another to just go cuz you wanna keep going to college. such a fuckin drain on the system, man. that's what i think about every time somebody mentions being here for more than 4 years getting an undergrad. i wonder how much of your parents' and the state's money you're completely wasting just cuz you can't get your shit wired and at least graduate with a 2.0 or something. in the 2 years you pissed your career away by "chilling" in grad school i'll be sitting in my upscale apartment with a respectable bank account having a nice cold budweiser thinking how much i preferred by decision to yours.

i kinda rehash this all the time, but i made a point to alayna the other day asking her if she noticed a difference between how dominant cell phone usage is now compared to when we started at a&m in 2000. at this point it really is insane.

the high-tech pro-gadget side of me says great, we all have portable means of communication and this is yet another great evolution of a semi-necessary product, the telephone. but then the evil anti-social side of me screams in protest. the concept of everyone having their own portable telephone is great, but the way it's actually played out in our little fucked up mini-society on campus isn't exactly utopian. my biggest beef with cell usage all over the damn place 24/7 is best summed up with: hey, who the fuck are you talking to all the time? seriously, that's like the whole reason this entire phenomenon confuses the hell outta me. i just can't help but think, who cares about you this much? i know that sounds bad, but i just... don't think that's what the advent of portable telephony was intended for, y'know? that's why you pay $50/month for your coverage instead of a more limited $15ish. y'know they actually pay that in europe? no joke. this is why you have to get that insane 1000 daytime minutes blah blah blah instead of a more sensible 200 minutes. have you seen people right when they get out of a class? i swear, at least at this university, if a big lecture of 300 students lets out, about 100 of 'em are on their cell within 30 seconds.

do you know how pissed off i'd be if i were one of those people you called in that situation? hey, i love hearing from people, i wish i did more often, believe me. but do you really think i wanna stop what i'm doing for you to complain over a shitty cell connection how boring your lecture was and oh-my-god-this-chick-in-front-of-me-was-so-and-so? that's all people talk about! it's useless shit! sure, if you make a call to someone to come pick you up or something, that makes sense. that's what cell phones are good for. but it seems like 90% of the time people aren't doing that kind of thing at all. all they're doing is blabbing about their stupid unimportant shit. more and more, people don't meet anymore. you can't meet someone when they talk on their cell 12 of the 15 minutes you were next to them.

i know i'm in the extreme minority here, but i just somehow see cell phones as such a turn-off now. i think when i remember back to how my college days were, i'm gonna remember "yeah that's when cell phones started to get really useful and high-tech... and then we shit all over it." the best analogy i can think of right now is in the movie seven where john doe is admitting that when a guy just spoke to him in public he was so incredibly banal that he just threw up all over the guy's shoes and couldn't stop laughing. there's no way you're not banal if you spend that much fuckin time on your phone. you're not nearly that important, dude.

i don't exactly have a much greater point for all my bitching, just that these are the kinds of things that bother me these days. there are *some* good things going on!

me and the goza actually got my older box working a little better with some HOT debian action, boy. after some time under mandrake and some experimentation with slackware, it looks like the debian distro works well on this setup. it still needs plenty of tweaking, but she's already ripping winamp tv and radio streams (can we still call 'em shoutcast?) and running bittorrent. plus i was shocked when she was able to churn out KDE so quick. so at least as of now i've got veritas and aequitas running side by side. [sidenote: yes, that's veritas and aequitas, as in latin for truth and justice. selected only cuz the twins from boondock saints each have one tattooed on their hands. just seemed like a badass concept to me. i figured it was better than luke and leia or some shit.] the plan is if maybe over the new few weeks i can write some good scripts or get some kind of automation going so that i can just leave veritas to do nothing but sit and rip streams and gather bittorrents all day so aequitas doesn't have to. i know you don't care, but it's been a long difficult project and it's exciting for me to get it running properly. just be happy i'm excited about something, asshead.

i think i'm trying to wear too many hats, man. it's kinda hard trying to be computer science student justin, boyfriend justin and entertainment justin all at the same time. more and more i'm starting to notice that has something to do with my weird sleeping habits sometimes. that's why i don't like to get much sleep. i can get along fine with just 5 hours, but even when i can get like 7 or 8 i realize a lot of times i don't cuz i think i have too many things to do. with tivo, bittorrents, newsgroups, p2p, etc, there's just too many places to get good shit. so i end up gathering alllll this shit that friends recommend i see/do or i'm interested in or whatever and i try to schedule everything out and it just hardly works at all. like right now i've got one anime series to watch that's 13 episodes, of which i've watched 1, another of 26 eps of which i've seen like 5, prolly a dozen eps of family guy still to watch, the entire series of the maxx from the mid 90's to watch completely, eps of ER to relive, etc etc etc. i think in my final semester here i put forth like 10x more effort just managing my own entertainment than i do actually working for my degree.

it's just hard for me to relax with that kinda lifestyle, y'know? at any given time if i'm not tied up with academics i'm just thinking about how i should be watching/playing/doing something. that gets all tied up with trying to be social and missing alayna and all that. i realize everybody's lives are like that, just that for me i think i really try to spread myself too thin. working out like 4-5 times a week with racquetball, being social and enjoying the things that i find entertaining, goddamn man that's almost enough justification for never sleeping more than 7 hours at a time, heh.

i guess i better get to doing some of that shit i mentioned, huh?

see you on the other side,
justin

oi! weekends always beat weekdays. that's the tip of the day. been mostly a lazy one.

first week of school was pretty much same-o same-o. it's nice to have less comp sci classes and instead some basic classes that people from other majors are in. plus i've got an ethics class with like 150 people in there, that makes me miss my earlier huge classes. for some reason i just love huge classes, it's so much harder to get completely bored in there. cuz no matter how boring it gets, you can always at least just watch people do whatever. plus you're lost in a sea of students, the prof doesn't really give a shit what you do. this semester i've got a pretty care-free outlook for all my classes, since i'm graduating in may. i just figure i'll relatively easily (based mostly on experience) be able to pull off something like 3.25, although the weird thing is i could score a 2.0 this semester and my job would be about 99% likely to still take me on. if i dwelled on that too much i'd really lose all motivation and prolly only go to half my classes, but i'm doing my best to just tell myself to tough it out and continue to do well in classes. my schedule this semester is pretty similar to the last, which wasn't really too bad. kind of a lot of coming and going back and forth to the apartment, but i'm pretty close to campus so it's no big deal.

this weekend was pretty typical of alayna and me. friday she ran some girly errands and came over, so we met up with the 18-year old terrors, lauren and laura, and hit up fazoli's. ultra-hip & chic lauren had never even been to a fazoli's before. i plan to next enlighten her with the holiest of chicken fingers at layne's. the goddamn plan was the come back to my place and let 4-player mario kart madness ensue, but like last time, it didn't happen. we ended up watching some tivo'd MXC eps, along with suggested saved by the bell episodes for nostalgia's sake. we ended up all blithering on like idiots (i've got some video captured to prove it if necessary) and there was no mario kartness to be had. it was sad.

saturday we actually had lunch at a decent time but for some reason i was just extremely lazy and couldn't motivate myself to do anything. alayna tried to get us a racquetball court from 2-4pm but they were all booked so that kinda ruined all the plans we had made. if i hadn't been so goddamn wiped out we woulda just gone to the rec anyway and lifted weights. instead i passed out for a while, so alayna went back home and ran her errands. ended up taking quite the powernap, which is why i'm still awake now ;). oddly enough, since we had had lunch at a decent time (in my college career on a saturday this has seriously happened only like 5% of the time) we could have dinner at a decent time, so i picked her up and we hit up texas roadhouse. it's sad when a "decent wait" is 45 fuckin minutes. the food was great as usual, just it always sucks having to wait so long, especially packed in with a bunch of other college kids. cuz of the rain and fear of huge crowds we talked ourselves out of bothering with the butterfly effect and instead played racquetball from 9-11. hours later, got that grocery shoppin out of the way at HEB at about 3am. that pretty much brings us up to speed, heh.

i've been sorta going back to wasting away on the net lately. it kinda ebbs and flows in monthly waves (kinda crazy that i've been online for now 8 years!) and right now i've just been spending a shitload of time just researching stuff and gaining useless knowledge. it's like i'll just set out to know more about a certain topic and bam, all of a sudden i'm completely tied up on a series of sites for a few hours. plus i upgraded to winamp5 the other day, and mentioning it to rick pushed him to do it as well, and then he checked out their new winamptv thing and told me to look into that. great, yet another way to entertain me.

i've been blowin a lot of time just researching what kind of setup i might want to try (or even afford) in the new apartment come may. you always wanna get off to a good start when you move somewhere brand new, so i just wanna make sure i don't buy anything i shouldn't have or waste a lot of money somehow.

i'm trying to research sort of the state of the union regarding HDTV. it's sorta hard to tell so far if 2004 is the year where it really starts to get more and more mainstream. 2007 is the year where the analog TV transmissions will most likely start to really come to an end, so it's difficult to understand whether if you're buying a new tv this year whether you should try to get an HDTV or an analog and just tell yourself when 2007 rolls around you'll either just use a conversion box or upgrade to an HDTV then. i haven't done enough research yet tho. my 20" sony wega will have to be shifted to my bedroom since that's just not really big enough to entertain a big living room. i come from a family that never really considered a big-screen tv or anything like that so it's not like i'm wanting a 60" LCD in my living room or something. most likely i'd be after about a 27" or 32", depending on how much those run for, especially in HD format.

every decision you make for those sorts of things will definitely impact your other home/tech decisions. if i got an HDTV, i'd obviously want some high-def programming, so ya gotta see what cable and satellite companies carry through HD. i hardly ever watch live tv anymore, so i'd hafta upgrade to a TiVo that could support HD, which doesn't exist yet but will be out this year. looks like the DirecTivo is really gonna be the next thing, so i could be looking at a satellite setup with integrated DVR over the summer, depending on the HD debacle.

even my dad suggested this, but in first outfitting a brand new home these days i'd really seriously consider everything you can that could be made wireless. so that's something i'll hafta look at, making sure any PC or device in the house that could support Wi-Fi made proper use out of it. a quick rant about wireless: y'know it's great that we can sever Cat5 ethernet connections and save some space, but what about the 3000 other wires i have running through my systems. sure i may lose that ethernet cable, but i still have so many damn wires connecting everything together, like all audio and visual sources.

most likely i'll finally be separating the computer from the rest of the system so i'll prolly hafta explorer a streaming media server for the living room to pipe the music through the main speakers. i constantly have little data-management and such projects going on but i think by far the biggest one i'll have is consolidating all my music within a few years. i'm really running out of room in my CD jukebox and it's becoming more and more useless to actually burn CD's. so at some point within prolly the next year i'm gonna end up having to move around a LOT of music to get everything the way i want it. whether it's a bunch of compressed mp3/ogg/etc to some sort of Hi-MD setup, somehow i'm gonna hafta wave goodbye to the concept of complete CD albums.

i think i gave ya enough useless news, right?

cheers,
justin

in my best impression of dane cook doing his impression of steve irwin, "well hello! hi! follow me on an adventure, c'mon, let's go!"

i've just been a sweet lazy fuck back in college station. can't say i'm too disappointed that classes start up tuesday cuz i can't live like this for too long, y'know?

i've tried to be productive since i got back to cs (almost a week now), but it's productive in my own way. that's the tricky part. that basically involved watching a few movies i had missed, cleaning off the hard drives, and playing GC games. i've been able to do all those except play GC, for some reason i just haven't made it much of a priority.

i rented underworld, X2 and bad boys II. basically all 3 of these i should have seen in the theater, but it's pretty impossible to see every movie you're slightly interested in in the theater. i guess if i wanted to put some IMDb numbers on 'em, i'd go underworld 7.5/10, X2 7.8/10 and bad boys II 7.5/10. underworld and bb2 were better than reviews suggested, and X2 adequately lived up to its hype.

i give underworld a lot of credit for stylistic elements along with a good overall theme and soundtrack, and it wasn't as much of a rip of the matrix like some people suggested. beckinsale was great along with a few of the other actors, but several of them were noticeably poor, which is really the biggest reason i'd say it wasn't better. the action was good and it was an overall good idea.

i basically picked up X2 cuz it was only $2 for a rental through hastings, but it was a good flick for a comic movie. i haven't seen all of 'em, but from what i've gathered so far most of the comic movies have sucked in my opinion, even spider-man and spawn. i saw the first x-men movie kind of in bits and pieces, but it wasn't entirely required to be caught up for the 2nd. overall the special effects were real strong and luckily the lines weren't too corny or anything. jackman's actually pretty believable as wolverine, that's kinda how i always imagined him when reading the comics. nightcrawler and his teleportation was really done well, although i thought storm and cyclops seemed kinda weak. plus as cool as magneto can be it's hard to get over the fact that it's played by such a flaming homo, doesn't matter whether it's gandalf or not. X3 is set for 2006 and i might get around to actually seeing that one in the theater ;)

i guess bad boys II was about what i expected given the trailers i had seen. smith and lawrence can sorta grate on your nerves after a while, but there were enough funny parts between the two to keep it interesting. any of the cheesy parts were pretty much understandably so. the stuntwork and action scenes seemed pretty flawless to me (assuming you don't examine their physics *too* much) for the most part. it's really a guy's movie, although there wasn't really an abundance of T&A, more like just lots of violence and cool cars. as others have said it was definitely too long, they prolly could have edited out a good half hour or so to keep it flowing a little quicker.

at latest count i've got about 50 albums to burn and about 40 to trash. i've slowed down a bit on bringing in a shitload of new albums to help push out some older shit. lately i've been burning more newsgroup quota on anime more than anything else. luckily i rounded up all 13 episodes of hellsing and all the episodes of gunslinger girls so far. i'm also looking into cowboy bebop and last exile.

at this point i've got ~107 dvd titles, just added american wedding, alive, ocean's 11, heat and 28 days later. combining those with the GC boxes, i'm really running out of room now. i've got almost 3 racks full and i'm tired of buying more. i think i'll prolly hold off and just wait to put everything in a bigger better rack when i move into the next apartment.

redballs (the new codename for the social-freak roommate) came back with an xbox and already set it up in the living room, saying i could use it whenever i want. that's cool and all, but it's too bad he went with an xbox instead of something else. would have been better if he'd come back with a PS2 and he could just go out and blow like $100 on 5 greatest hits games or something. plus if i bothered to get an xbox (my last pick of the 3 major video game consoles right now) i'd deck that fucker out with nothing but online multiplayer games, but in the living room he's not close to one of our broadband jacks. i'm actually sorta interested to see how often he actually gets out there and plays on it, given that he only watches tv out there maybe 4-5 hours a week and he's already holed up in his room just like last semester. i guess the idea is that hopefully he'll social up a bit if he's gonna be out in the main part of the apartment playing often at all.

i've only got this one semester left and it'll prolly be just like any other one. 16 hours, but less computer science this time around and less to lose based on my GPA and such. so the pressure isn't really on me too much. the engineering career fair and related festivities drop at the end of this month, but i'm almost positive i'll end up bailing on them, signing the offer i have already and just forgetting all about it.

they're a far cry from new year's resolutions, but here's some tentative goals for the next month/semester:

• the usual pledge to keep working out. this semester is the last for me to be able to use the rec center (which i won't be able to work out in anything that big after a&m) so i intend to be there 3-4 times each week, mixing up strength training with reserving one of the 14 racquetball courts.


• keep tivo'ing as much as i did before. added new season passes for airline, the john henson project and MXC. still keeping up with PTI everyday, and following friends till the end (quite ready for it), hoping scrubs gets a little better and seeing that ER doesn't get too corny. outside of sports, i've almost completely lost interest in live tv and sometimes it really helps when you can just record what you want and watch it when you've got the proper time.


• hit up more movies at the theater. no, it has nothing to do with getting sentimental and thinking i'll miss the somewhat run-down (1) local college station cinemark. at least from what i've seen there should be more movies to see at the theater this semester than last, which was by far the worst semester for movies since i started at a&m in 2000. last semester all we saw was kill bill and the matrix revolutions. this semester i'm (at least somewhat) interested in: man on fire, miracle, the butterfly effect, kill bill vol 2, mindhunters, the alamo, and taking lives. we'll prolly see along came polly tomorrow. if it was showing for real cheap and somebody was game, i'd actually bother to see torque. and as a sidenote, jersey girl looks like complete shit. i'm a huge kevin smith fan but i'd hafta try really hard to get excited about this one. affleck is 100% overcast lately, even if he and smith are tight mothafuckas.


• rent a lot of older "essential" anime and get caught up. right now i'm in more of a mood for anime so it's a good time to go back and rent a bunch of somewhat classic anime. blockbuster's absolute shit for that, but hastings typically has a pretty good selection.


• anything i can't tivo, watch it on the computer. i need to watch the entire hellsing series, as well as various episodes of other things that i can't record or forget about. when i'm not tivo'ing, i'll be watching shit on my sweet flat panel here.


• hit up the bars and such. college station isn't exactly known for really great places to hang out on the weekends, but i at least need to hit up a few of the more well-known places before i move out of here, mainly just to say that i had. i'm not exactly dying to go anywhere around here and drink (honestly i kinda prefer doing that at my own place) but somehow i'll hafta work on being more up for the idea of getting the hell out of the house on the weekends and such.


• keep gettin my money's worth out of the little GC. we figured out mario kart with 4 people can be pretty goddamn fun, so we've got the party games thing covered pretty easy there. i'm not sure if i'll buy several more games this semester. i'm still trying to maybe hook up eternal darkness and sega soccer slam used over ebay.


• and the only serious type issue on this bullshit list is to really kinda give up on the whole idea of going out with more people around cs. it just caused a bit too much heartbreak last semester (which of course you know if you ever read this back then) and i've run out of reasons why i actually need a huge array of friends here. i've got a handful of people that i hang out with here and i'm prolly just gonna hafta accept that that's enough.

cheers,
justin

topical
man i can't get off this crazy sleeping schedule shit. i have such a hard time getting tired these days. i have a complete inability to force myself to actually try to go sleep, goddamn.

kinda trying to get over a cold and all, but it hadn't been too bad.

been biding some time just researching apartments for the summer and shit. it's kinda pointless unless you go check out some places in person, but eh i'm too lazy. just been pricing things and seeing what's available mostly. there's a lot of choices in several cities, just mostly wanna make sure i get something close enough to work, since that'll be such a big focus in life at least for the next few years.

heh oddly enough i care more about decking out my apartment rather than actually finding "the right place." i've got all these things i want and a crazyass setup i wanna do, but who knows if i'll actually be able to afford any of it. i guess i'd sorta like my place to be like the badass bachelor pad (not that i'm actually a bachelor) that everybody tells their friends about. y'know, video games, hi-fi shit, all good entertainment stuff. multiple computers doing their own thing while i'm gone.

i want a real guy's place. i want guys to come over there after work just to down beers and bitch about women. so i guess it's not a bachelor pad in that sense, where you'd take chicks back to and woo or whatever.

deep
the debate of the day was played out with rick. the question is "at this stage, does everyone have an agenda?" meaning does everybody (mostly college students and 20-somethings) make all their social decisions based on what they want, or does anybody actually do anything for someone else?

that's why it's so hard to hook up something casual with somebody of the opposite sex. everybody assumes everybody else (except them) has some kind of "evil" agenda. i'm not sure if i can really say we don't all have a piece of that. i can admit at times all my decisions are made in some sense to bring me some kind of pleasure.

everybody else is almost surely the same way at this stage. i dunno about how everybody most people know are, but for me i see everyone as having this evil sorta agenda. it's so rare that anybody ever goes out of their way to show they really give a shit about what i'm up to. i mean sure i can think of a short list of people that do no doubt, but not as many as there should be. it's not a pity party for justin here, just that the more i think about it the more i don't know many people that are willing to bring me pleasure if they don't think they'll get something even more beneficial out of it.

people use ya, man. if an incoming college freshman asked me for one piece of advice, i think i'd tell him to cherish the people he finds that really bother to actually get him. most people i've met at a&m, yeah they're cool for a little bit, but they're nothing more than temporary friends. acquaintances that need you to help them with academics or to accomplish some task that helps themself, not you. those are the people i meet every time i have a class, a work period, etc. now and then, you can hang onto one and you can become real friends, but most of the time, they're not interested in how you feel. only in how you can help them achieve some purpose. i'm so goddamn sick of that.

like anybody else i can't help but wonder how people think of me. it's odd how some people come across like they think i'm too passionate and serious about things yet others admit to me how cold they think i am, lacking enough emotion. as things progress i think i can get away with saying often times people don't deserve what i give them. in the past i thought like i owed people more, but not anymore. sometimes i try to put faith in society in general and just think they're innocently overlooking the passion i show to some people. at times i have poured and poured to people and too often i feel like i don't get the same in return.

it's the self. everybody's so goddamn interested in themselves. i don't know what it is. this country? the information age? the change in social patterns caused by the internet and cell phones? prolly a combination of all of 'em. i need hope that beyond college, people aren't like this. that people can just shut the hell up long enough to hear what you've got to say. everybody's just forgotten how to listen. the truth is they prolly won't ever learn how to do it again.

are you afraid of me because i tell you this much? what is there to be afraid of? afraid to know more about someone else than yourself? afraid i'll get the wrong idea when you show you care? afraid i have the above-mentioned agenda?

confidence. you fear my confidence. you're afraid i just might be right. you hate having to apologize because someone figured you out. someone knows your secrets.

i wanted to say my resolution for the new year was to be more accepting of people. but i'm not going to do that. what's been done to deserve it? nothing. i could wait and wait forever and see if you missed me enough to call or email me, but we both know that won't happen. years and years will pass and you will know you can wait long enough for me to come to you, and if not, oh well fuck it forget about it. all you can show in that mindset is that i mean nothing to you.

and if i mean nothing to you you won't remember this post, will you?

--j

man, winter vacation is just some sweet waste of in-between time.

being almost 22 now, i guess i've learned that i'm unable to function properly when i don't have anything proper to wake up for the next morning, i.e. school or work. like last night, i just wasn't tired so i stayed up long enough so that i ended up just not bothering to sleep at all (after i had slept till almost 4pm the previous day). so i took a 4-hour nap this afternoon and now i don't know what to do with myself. with all the goofy sleeping i'd rather be doing it back in college station without the rest of the family living normally, heheh. only scary thing is when i go back there it's gonna get SCARY worse cuz nobody else will be around so i'll have no reason to really go to bed at any point.

it's a really stupid thing to care about, but i'm pretty much convinced i am so content-overloaded. i kid you not man, i still have albums on my hard drive from 2000 yet to decide whether to burn. now that 2004's rolled around it's pretty much time stuff like that is completely phased out -- it's either thrown on a cd or trashed. i'm the worst when it comes to trying to collect something. i'll find a few episodes of some show or whatever and all of a sudden i'm on a mission to have every one of them. i'm not really sure why i do that, it's almost like i wanna just say i have a collection of something rather than actually use it. take my friends and seinfeld episode collections, for example. i'm pretty proud of having 2 of my favorite shows collected, but rarely do i ever actually watch any of what i've got. sorta makes me wonder why i bother to buy tv series on dvd.

i dunno, i'm kinda just eager to get back just to be in college station without academics to do for a while. 99% of the time i'm having a pretty good time when i'm there so it sorta makes me wonder how it'd be without having to be busting my ass all the time. all i'm gonna do until school starts is play music and movies at a ridiculous volume and sleep like 10-12 hours without an alarm clock, heheh.

this is just the time of the year where if you're 22 or younger you're free to be a lazy bitch.

i thought this was gonna be a deep and thought-provoking post. turns out i just sat and bitched about nothing.

i dunno,
justin

happy 2004. first post of the new year.

sheeeeat, it's been a while... my last post was just before finals started so i guess i'll sum that up. finals ended up being about the usual difficulty, which means some were easy and some were just impossible. somehow tho i ended up pulling off 5 A's and a B for a 3.8 this semester, heh. so basically i say that explains enough and i won't go into all the details. ;)

the colorado 2nd house christmas vacation project year 3 definitely felt like the busiest one we've had since our first xmas there in 2001. i'll try to sorta sum it all up. the first couple days were the most lax, and we mostly just sorta sat around the house for a couple days not doing anything, which was fine with me. it'd didn't take long for lauren and i to set up the gamecube, especially since we brought a bigger tv for our upstairs area. i started off trying to move a bit further in metroid prime, not being able to get anywhere, i moved onto crash nitro kart adventure mode, got about 80% done there now tho. but as soon as lauren put in mario kart it was obvious that was gonna be the game that stayed in for the rest of thet trip. we basically raced our sweet asses off, finishing all the goals in the game pretty quickly, so that we got to the point that we were just choosing random characters and racing all the tracks. usually by the end of the day we were sick of playing so we moved onto satellite surfing between VH1, MTV and fuse. apparently i had to completely catch up on some pop/mv culture that i hadn't absorbed this semester in my semi-boycott of mtv. vh1 had several of those borderline-annoying categorical countdowns going on, so somehow i ended up glued to "the 100 most shocking moments in rock & roll" and "the top 40 celebrity feuds of all time" and shit.

once we actually motivated ourselves to get off the damn couch we rode the 4 wheelers (although at that point there was a faulty spark plug in one so we only actually took *a* 4 wheeler) around the property, went skiing, and played foosball in the basement. the skiing was on the 23rd, and apparently nobody wants to ski 2 days before christmas so it was pretty badass having the slopes with so few people there. we stayed pretty safe tho and mostly stuck to greens, only 1 blue to relearn after the year hiatus. lauren and i went into town a little bit for some errands and shit, but mostly we just sorta hung around the house. i did finally decide to read lullaby, i bought the damn thing in like september. lemme insert a little plug/review for it here:

lullaby
by chuck palahniuk

he's written like 5 of these books, and i'd sort 'em like this:

5) choke
4) survivor
3) invisible monsters
2) lullaby
1) fight club

my rewiew is basically: they're all fookin great, really. in other words, you should save up yourself a good $13 or so and go buy at least one to get a taste. and if ya do that, ya might as well go for fight club, even if you've seen the movie. all of chucky p's books are great tho, but admittedly if you're a really conservative semi-religious "everything offends me" type, don't bother. he's really apocalyptic and whatnot, with the swift ability to knock you on your ass using only words and the like, haha. you can read them in like 2 days pretty easily, so i suggest you pick up one of chucky p's masterpieces and give yourself a nice break from harry, ron and hermione.

alright... wtf was i talking about again?

yeah, so then we had a pretty low key christmas. not that it was a bad christmas or anything like that, just a "low key" christmas. heh, honestly, at this point i really don't even know what the hell the holiday's even about. it's pretty apparent we're not actually celebrating jesus' birthday, so what exactly are we celebrating? in our family, i think it functions more as a "here i bought you some shit, did you buy me some shit?" type occasion, which apparently works out pretty good, ha. i racked up the usual array of clothing and gift cards, as well as a handy HP digital photo printer which compliments my digicam pretty nicely. i guess i just say it was low key cuz for some reason since we had to finish all our xmas shopping before the trip and things like that it just felt like xmas was already over already or something. i think from like the ages of like maybe 15 onward each year you sorta realize a little something more about how you really feel about the "holiday season." it's one thing when the whole santa claus gig exits your family, then another when you get into a stage where your parents understandably don't know what the hell to get you anymore, so you just get an envelope with a check and some clothes. now i'm just sorta moving onto another stage where i look forward more to celebrating xmas (in my eyes, purely seen as an excuse to exchange gifts and sing songs forbidden from the months of january to november) with my girlfriend/wife and eventually kids moreso that my immediate family. i guess after you've had 22 christmas's you start to wonder if there isn't something else you'd rather do instead of what you've grown so accustomed to. i better start another paragraph here to explain a bit more:

see, before '01 the tradition always involved christmas eve spent at my grandparents' house, then christmas morning with the immediate family. but since we built the 2nd house in westcliffe it's pretty much standard that we spend the xmas week or so there instead of in dallas where the grandparents are. part of the thrill of that wasn't "ooh i get more gifts and shit from people," but moreso that we actually got to see, y'know, other members of our family. my dad's brother and his family of 4 also live in dallas so we'd always see them, then another brother and his wife from soCal would come every other year. so especially when all 3 brothers + family were together, and even occasionally the 4th brother and others, it made for like 12-20 people and a pretty rousing good time. but nowadays my immediately family celebrates the holiday off on our own in secluded colorado. don't get me wrong, it's extremely cozy and wintery, but it just doesn't have the same feel simply because we don't even bother to see anybody else. i'm not a family guy really at all and i've never been very close to any extended family but to me to some extent that just seems all wrong. so i guess when it's just the 4 of us opening gifts and maybe having 3-5 minute calls with a few relatives on the phone wishing them well it just feels a little uninspired and not as worth celebrating.

although no one really said anything, this last christmas was actually the end of a certain era. that was the last christmas where i'm still in college, thus it was the last one in which i was actually still sharing a roof with my parents. by this time next year, i'll be in my own apartment living on my own working and living for myself. while obviously i'm still included in whatever the family does, in some ways it means i'm a completely different role player in the family regrading those kinds of events. it'll be up to me whether i want to go to colorado for 10 days or not. i mean who knows what can happen, maybe alayna and i celebrate xmas ourselves, maybe i'm staying in san antonio for a few days, maybe we're doing our own thing in dallas with friends, maybe we took a trip somewhere, there's no telling. so i'd imagine if i think this christmas felt different, i can't imagine how i'll feel for christmas '04.

moving on on the recap...

on the 26th zach flew in from dallas and alayna from SA an hour later. so most of that day involved just getting them to the house and getting everybody set up and reacquainted and whatnot, since my parents hadn't seen alayna since the summer. alayna and i exchanged our gifts, where i ended up with a shirt and a trendy denim jacket.

the 4 of us went to the royal gorge in canon city on the 27th and took plenty of pictures and video (still working on/deciding if i can try to post some of these pics somewhere or something) which was pretty cool since we were able to get some actual fast food and get away from the parents for a bit. just a sidenote: that was the first fast food place (arby's) i've ever seen that had a fireplace in it. we made it back in time to go to a favorite restaurant [in the middle of goddamn nowhere] and listen to some live music while eating what alayna claims to be the best chicken she's had anywhere.

on the 28th we had my dad's youngest brother and family over at the house for a few hours since they were driving through colorado. that was cool, but pretty much ate up all the daylight hours. at night the 4 "kids" went to one of the few places to hang out in westcliffe, the cliff lanes bowling alley. nobody actually felt like bowling so we just played foosball and pool instead, then had some late snack bar dinner.

the 29th was sort of the humbling roller-coaster day of the trip. the 4 of us went skiing at monarch, which was a good idea, and for the most part ended up maintaining that. only things that thwarted that were the huge post-christmas crowd and alayna's little freakout session in the middle of the slopes. lauren and zach stuck together at first, retraining zach on bunny slopes (he hadn't been skiing in 2 years) and hitting some greens while i coached alayna down the bunny slope. apparently i had sorta overestimated how quick alayna would pick it up again and it turned out we kinda had a lot of "rebuilding" to do. it's funny cuz alayna's a really adventurous type chick, not really scared of anything, but you get her on a sloped mountain with snow on it and she's not exactly herself. so after i retaught her some basics i convinced her she was ready for some greens. to avoid the 10 degree chill and huge crowds on the beginner lift, we went to the top and tried to go down the green "rookie" run. the idea was the 4 of us were gonna all go down it together, which was intended to be cake for me and lauren and somewhat of a task for zach. unfortunately things didn't really go that way. the fear of the mountain, not her lack of skills, completely froze alayna up and i had to do everything i could to keep from losing my temper and helping her as best i could. the poor thing had to cry it out a little bit first, then she seemed to gather some courage and she did much better after that. it's hard to tell whether it's sad or cute, but it's funny cuz alayna's not nearly as bad a skier as she thinks she is, but she's twice as afraid of the mountain as everybody else is, so she just has trouble willing her mind to do what her body wants her to. we ended up splitting up (i obviously thought she could benefit more from her own practice time on whatever run she wanted) so i hit several blues. i think i've been skiing 4 times now and i'd consider myself a decent intermediate skier. i've gotten to the point where the blues are more fun than the greens, just that any of you that have skiied a lot know the well-groomed almost-mogul blues are much different than the soft gentle greens, heh. hopefully i'll be back there soon, maybe to try out snowboarding.

somewhat unexpectedly, the nights of the 28th and 29th ended up involving a lot of 3-player (my sister had given me a GC controller) battle mode shine thief action in mario kart. we just sorta stumbled onto it, but it'd ended up being damn fun. we wouldn't go as far as saying battle mode is shit in the new mario kart, but we were definitely more into racing than battling with just 2 of us playing. but with 3 (and soon 4, since i just bought a wavebird controller the other day too) people it's fuckin great playing shine thief with several people battling to keep the shine. hopefully i can host several mario kart battle mode parties this semester, make it a drinking game or something.

pretty much all of the 30th was blown with the 12 hour drive back to dallas. once we got back everybody was pretty damn exhausted.

as part of her xmas present, i gave alayna tickets to the dec 31st stars game, so on the new years eve we headed downtown. we rode the dart rail down to the west end and ate at hoffbrau, then hit up the AAC. we ended up with a 1-1 tie (my rant about the stars this season is a whole other post) but she had a lot of fun, since she's trying her best to become a hockey/stars fan, so that sealed it for me. we caught the train back to plano and drove back to my house to celebrate the new year with some drinks.

on new years day we didn't do much, just did some shopping and met my parents at EZ's for dinner. yesterday i sorta continued touring alayna around dallas by taking her first to the galleria then over to northpark. we had a fun time just walking around, shopping, gettin starbucks and giggling at shit like we were better than everybody else, heh. hard to believe if i'm not mistaken it was almost 4 years to the day since i had last even been to the northpark mall. afterwards we blew a gift certificate at maggiano's little italy, which is attached to northpark. yeah, oddly enough, don't always assume a restaurant connected to a mall is really casual. turns out the inside of that place is pretty fuckin fancy and we were hella overdressed. we ended up mostly laughing it off and having a decent dinner anyways.

so today alayna flew back to SA and basically most of my winter "vacation" is done. i'm gonna be in dallas for the rest of this week, get some dental/eye appointments and errands done with before i head back to CS prolly early next week. until then it'll be a pretty slow week here at home, but hey, i've earned it.

hell of a long recap there, boy.

cheers,
justin