well... at least in the blog world here, everybody really seems to be in their own zone lately. alayna doesn't post too often anymore, lauren hasn't posted in a month, hoang posts every few weeks when he starts to feel guilty, and i don't seem to put any effort into my notoriously long posts anymore, not to mention countless other examples of tumbleweeds blowin by on other blogs i occasionally check.

i think that's prolly to be expected though. i'm not sure yet if everyone will suddenly come back and we'll see a surge of posts or if it's yet another trend that's slowly dying.

i can't speak for everyone else but for whatever reason since i graduated about 6 weeks ago even though i've had a lot going on i haven't particularly wanted to bitch and moan about much of it. luckily most of what has gone on has been pretty positive so i really don't have that much to even get on and just incessantly whine about. but like i said i think everybody's just really in their own zone and this just isn't the time of year to be posting everyday i'd imagine.

in those 6 weeks since graduation it really has been just a ridiculously busy time, and it's only now getting to the point where things are sorta settling in and there's not so many things i've gotta get done every minute of the day. moving to my new apartment here in dallas was obviously a way bigger deal than just moving between college and home like i had gotten so used to. i won't say it really took any more time than i thought it would, but it really was such an exhaustive process that took a lot of patience. i've still got minor chores still to do here and there to really get the place 100% lived-in, but for the most part it easily passes as my home.

living alone has been pretty good so far, haven't really missed my old house or being down at college station much. it's nice to not have a roommate, i'm sure you remember all my bitches about my last one, if not, check my archives. it's a completely different dynamic to just live on your own and do everything by your own rules. i haven't really been *too* lonely so far or anything, like i had told a lot of people in my senior year, i really have enough stuff queued up over the past few months/years to keep me entertained for quite some time, which i actually proved for a couple weeks in may without a tv, phone, internet, etc at times.

work is obviously mostly what my life entails these days. expectedly so i was pretty bored at first and everybody around me knew it, but now i'm settling more into the role they've given me which for the most part has kept me pretty busy, which i prefer over being bored and dreading coming to work everyday. i've worked a couple 9 and 10 hour days, so while those can kinda drain you they really do help as far as cutting down your hours the rest of the week. i've gotta hit 8am meetings monday through friday, so that's pretty much the motivating factor that helps me get there at 7:45 usually. so yeah it sucks i gotta wake up for those but it's not so bad once 4pm rolls around and you're free to go home if you want. 3 days a week i work out at the gym up there, which is obviously a puppy compared to the behemoth that is the texas a&m student recreation center, but eh it's got enough to allow you to make you good and sore.

it really is hard though when you leave for work at 7:30am and after working and then lifting weights, you find yourself getting home sometimes a good 12 hours later. i mean i expected it and everything and it's nothing to really bitch about, it's just unfortunate that yeah it doesn't exactly leave you that much time for other things you might wanna do. i've had to grow up obviously, i run my own ship here, nobody's gonna cook dinner for me or do my laundry. so i usually have to combine chores like those with a few things i like to do when i've got the time.

not sure whether i need an excuse or not, but that's pretty much my excuse for my relative disappearing acts on both this blog and on AIM. i had wondered in that last semester how much i'd use AIM after i graduated and joined the real world and now i kinda have a good feel for how much and when i like to use it. i leave it on a lot at work cuz alayna and i can make good use of it if we're not both swamped with work and i don't mind trading a few messages with anybody that needs a few minutes of my time online. at night though, at home, it's a bit harder to motivate myself to have AIM running even half as much as i did all throughout college. for one thing, my XP box has some sorta issue where it just cannot run AIM without disconnecting then reconnecting at least a couple times an hour. i have no idea what that is, i'm sorta the master at troubleshooting shit computer problems, but i don't have the motivation to really probe that one quite yet, so a lot of times i drop too many messages and get too many disconnects that i elect to just leave it off. combining with sorta this down season in everyone posting on their blogs, it's the same kinda vibe for instant messaging. i'm still pretty fresh outta school where it at times really was a way of life for a lot of us, but i have yet to find anybody up at work that gives me some silly AIM s/n to contact them away from work, heh. i won't bash it cuz it's really been the communication crutch i've leaned on for a good 4 years, but i'm not totally sure people out in the real world (post 22 years old) really rely on it all that much.

plus these days there really aren't that many people that i seem to chat with online anymore. everybody you know really starts to take on a certain vibe online after a while that's easily predictable. as far as a few of the people i talk to the most online, it's like alayna just gives me random tidbits at night that we both feel is a bit of a waste given that we'd rather just wait till 9pm and use free cell minutes instead, with lauren i've talked to her on & off throughout the day so we don't really even have that much left to say anyway, and mostly with hoang and rick it's either random links, tech-related geekspeak or troubleshooting questions. i don't really have a problem with any of those and i've grown pretty used to it, it's just after a while you start to feel like you're only getting online just so people see you're there, not really to purposely talk to anybody in particular.

hell, i see the value of instant messaging more than most people, but admittedly there are actually times where i'd really just rather trade a few emails. that would work fine in theory, but let's all just admit it -- it's easier to put off emailing somebody than to just respond right away to an IM that popped up on your desktop. i'm as bad as anybody else really, i get an email from a friend or something and often don't respond for days, if anything just to make sure i don't look too needy. but you've heard me bitch on here countless times at how flawed today's email system is and i haven't changed my opinion. just like ~6-9 months ago when i started to have problems emailing people and getting nothing in return, the same thing continues to happen, albeit less frequently mostly due to the fact that i'm too busy to spend all my time sending out random emails to people asking how they're doing. basically from now on though i'm taking everything like that with a grain of salt and just saying, hey if somebody doesn't get back to me within a reasonable amount of time, it's time to take them out of my list of contacts on the cell/pda/outlook, simple as that.

all in all, i'd prolly say (although not entirely hands down) life is better than it was senior year. i miss a lot of the ability to be a kid back then, but a lot of other things have improved in the meantime. alayna and i have coped really well with being separated 300 miles apart and things are as good as they've ever been, just had some minor bickerings on the phone that get cleared up pretty quickly. plus we've had some setbacks with getting her up here as smoothly as we wanted, but she'll most likely still get up here in the fall, although we don't know yet if she'll live with me or not. i came back into the same general group up at work, and the transition back to the working world couldn't have been much easier. i've got a huge unfair new college hire advantage in that i know about 10x more people than the average newbie would and i've really fit in much easier than they would since i've been working there since '01. it's nice to be seen as an equal (at least by fellow software engineers) instead of the collegeboy co-op that i had been before.

it'll take some time before i get a really good feeling about friends and stuff up here though. i've still got contacts from both high school and college that still work pretty well but for the most part i assume i'll meet the bulk of my friends through work. so far it's been pretty good as far as other young people i can connect with up there, mostly with guys i knew as co-ops. at least so far i'm not really all that interested with hanging out with a bunch of thirty and forty somethings from work. nothing against them, it's just that lack of common mindset and maturity that i'm not really interested in. but like i said i've been around the company for a while and i'm constantly running into a lot of cool twenty somethings. my buddy from last year, kathryn, she's still in the same group and we're still pretty tight friends. she's kinda on that outer threshold where we get along pretty well but if she were any more mature or settled we prolly wouldn't have anything in common to joke around about or anything. i can't really determine that on age, but she's almost 26 (3 and a half years older than me) and she's dating a guy that's 30, so for some reason at times i question how well we can actually hang out together successfully and stuff. it's funny though that occasionally she has to play the role of standard co-worker to me like when we're trying to solve some software-something-or-other together and we have to be all serious and shit. it's like i can barely take her seriously, heheh. she's just one of those people that i consider her much more my friend than my co-worker, which can at times make things a bit awkward in the office. i think that just shows you that you've reached a point where you're better at having a deep conversation over a coffee than actually working together.

as far as this weekend, alayna got a surprise hook-up standby ticket here which somehow we lucked out and her flights in and out worked perfectly. we had a great weekend though, used some coupons and certificates and shit to eat out and stuff on the cheap. we checked out the terminal saturday cuz we both thought that looked interested. we were... sorta right, it was... kinda interesting. i walked away from it thinking my parents would have liked it, heh. i dunno, it had funny parts and for the most part it didn't *entirely* drag on, but eh, nothing was really groundbreaking in it. i mostly thought it was a cool plot/scenario that wasn't really done the right way. kinda one of those films where if some trendy up and comer had directed it in some new-age risky way it would have been more interesting than the way spielberg did it. and like the whole thing with zeta jones... wtf for? she didn't really add anything to the movie and nothing in her role was really realistic at all, at least from what i know about pretty flight attendants. hanks did a fine job and all with the foreigner routine, but nothing in the movie was just really all that moving i guess. after walking out alayna gave it a 6/10 and i said 6.5/10. IMDb says 7.2, but i think that's a little bit of skew from people generally loving hanks' movies maybe. saturday night we ended up having lauren and zach over for a while to eat, play gamecube and make use of the foosball table some. it was pretty fun for the most part, the 4 player mario kart battles felt just like old. today was mostly just a mellow day for the two of us where we stayed in all day and even fell asleep on the couch together in the afternoon, a bit of a rarity.

we did watch the triplets of belleville today though. we both thought it was weird, but kinda fresh and new and at only 80 minutes not really a waste of time or anything. it was just cool old-style 2D animation, and the fact that it was 95% silent with only bits of french (no subtitles) in there was kinda cool. some of the animation was very well done, i was kinda more interested in the visual than the somewhow weird wandering slow plot. i'd recommend you check it out if only to just appreciate some oft-forgotten 2D goodness.

not really sure why but i've got some high hopes for this week. alayna will be back on friday (a planned flight this time, in for the 4th) and we know we've got kathryn's housewarming party to hit friday night. plus we'll do something for the 4th, just not sure what yet. this week i've gotta get caught up on the last ~10 days of big brother 4 australia, been missing out due to being maxed out on newsgroup quota and the aussie that was torrenting it decided not to bother anymore. i see that the harry potter and van helsing telecine DVD-R torrents are out there, so i might check those out.

so i guess until next time... ;)

--justin

unfortunately, it looks like i lost access to the TAMU server that i was using to host images. just took it a little time to take effect after i graduated. not exactly sure what i'll do about that yet, i'll hafta try to host 'em somewhere else, but that might not happen for a while. might be able to serve 'em off one of my own boxes, but we'll see.

so in summary, sorry the "My Photos" link on the right is now dead.

-the damaja

sheeeeit, sorry for the huge lack of posts, but i think it's pretty excusable given that i made the big move and was actually without any internet access for several weeks, heh. i'll try to make some time in the next few days to make a decent post, but i don't really have time now. i'll get back as soon as i can.

--justin