2006

So I haven’t been here for a few days, let me fill you all in on why. First of all I found a job and this last week has been hell adjusting to it. I’m moving furniture and the last time I hit the weights was more than two years ago in high school, I’m not as strong as I used to be. My first day I was sore as hell, every muscle in my body was sore. Now it isn’t that bad, even though it has only been a week, my body is adjusting. The bad part about me not being used to it, is that this is supposed to be a full time job and I’ve only worked two 8 hour days so far.

I’ve gotten some inspiration for the site, I’m thinking of some changes here and there along with some sections that I’ve wanted to have, but never really had the drive for it. Lately I’ve been pretty inspired to do things that I never thought of doing, and to finish things that was once forgotten.

I got twenty-six comments on my last blog, I’ll return them all in the coming days, but for tonite I’m going to work on some stuff and get my Despair, Excentric and Xposure sites done.

Think about the people in your life, think about your best friend and the person who your going out with. What have they taught you? What do you think they will teach you in the future?

Now think about five years ago. Think about your best friend from back then, think about the person you were going out with. What did they teach you? Where did they go?

I’m about to tell you something that many people don’t know and some never really realize, people are only in your life for as long as you need them. I’m serious. Why is it that you never have as strong of friendships when your grown up as you did when you were growing up? Because you don’t need it.

The truth is that just because you want something to stay the same, circumstances beyond our control will change the situation, and at times it will make people not be as close to some as they once were, because we don’t need them to be.

In this ever changing world, we sometimes lose people far too fast to grasp, one day someone will be there and the next day they are gone.

Maybe you don’t lose contact completely, maybe what was once entire weekends full of fun turns into a phone call every now and then. Maybe a get together every few years or so, because the party’s involved feel a certain loyalty to the other, but perhaps one doesn’t really feel much beyond that.

Think about your best friend and your current relationship. Think about how life has a way of passing us by when you’re out working, or working out. Now go tell those two people thank you for being there.

It has always been a dream of mine to visit all fifty states, 49 of them I’ve wanted to drive through and stop at little towns along the way. What makes a state great isn’t how many Walmarts or Denny’s it has, but the little Mom and Pop stores that are around. When I get older I plan on owning an RV and just driving from state to state. I’d get one now, but it’s probably best if I have a place to live that doesn’t have an engine.

I’ve been to some states already, I’ve stopped in little towns and saw the interesting things that they’ve had, the most beautiful so far had to be West Virginia. I wish I had taken a picture of it, it was a mountain, a huge mountain that was cut in half that had the highway driving through it. It was probably the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen. Each state has something unique about it, each state there is something different and unique about. One day I will visit them all.

It was my plan this summer to go back to Ohio and go to Virginia, but circumstances arose and I had to reorganize my priorities, for the better. So IU may not be going on some life altering journey just yet, I do plan on going one day. For now I have posted a page that has every state I’ve been in in red.

https://lepslair/me/places.php

So to help my cause of saving money, I joined PayPerPost. It is a site where they will give you a topic to blog about, and then pay you a certain amount for that topic.

So I’m still trying to find a job, so far it isn’t going so well because the furniture store I applied at doesn’t know if they have money for me because the boss’s son is going to be working there. And I may just go and do construction in NY, but I haven’t heard anything from them either. Other than that nothing has really been up. Keep clicking on the ads, and tell your friends. If I could make some extra money from this site then it will expand I promise.

Ever notice that when you are completely lost in life, sometimes something will land in your lap and it will be exactly what you want? As many of my faithful readers know ever since I moved down to Delaware, I’ve been miserable. I’m not in a school that offers a degree I want, I absolutely hate the location, there really isn’t anything down here that I can stand.

The only reason I came down here was because of a promise I made to my mother, but since that promise has been fulfilled I was trying to figure out my next move. Right now I don’t know what my immediate next move is, but I do know that in January I will be going to CW Post in NY, my number one school. I haven’t figured out the steps up until that point, whether or not I’m going to school until then, how I’ll be paying, or anything of that nature, but I do know I’ve been accepted and I’m awaiting for the guy to call me back.

So yes after years in NJ and months in Delaware, now it is time for me to make my next move. I don’t know what my steps will be up until that point, but I get the feeling that from now on things will be getting pretty interesting.

Everything in life has to be learned. We learn how to love, how to communicate, how to hate. We learn that watching other people learn is easier than learning through our on first hand experience. We learn that when the time comes those people may not the best people to learn from. We learn that nothing in life is as easy as black and white and even grey areas are very seldom seen. It is the areas of many different colors that tend to pop up in our everyday lives. It is those areas that we most likely will mess up with.

When we mess up, it is easy to blame other people. Blaming the people whom you’ve learned it from probably seems easiest, but the fact is that YOU have learned it, and YOU have to take responsibility for it. Learned behaviors are just that, learned, they may be second nature, but they can be changed when necessary.

The hardest part of these behaviors that are second nature, is seeing the fact of why they might be wrong. And once we see that they are wrong it is hard to say sorry for what they may have caused.

Many people are guilty of this, even me. Far too often do I blame my parents for implanting something in my head, as the right way of doing something, or a way that something is supposed to be. It is hard, but I have to look at it and sometimes realize that it shouldn’t be that way, or there is a better way of doing something.

Recently, through self awareness and meditation, I learned that you can suppress the learned behaviors, and truly do what is in your heart. I know I blogged about this a few months ago, about listening to your heart, but since then I have been really trying to implement it. I have to say, really listening to my heart and not letting my brain interfere much, has really allowed me to make some decisions that I otherwise don’t think I would have made. I mean granted you can’t cut your head out completely, because you can’t neglect your financial situation, or other priorities you might have, but listening to my heart more has made me a truly happier person. I’m no longer doing the things that I think I should be doing, but now I’m doing what I’m meant to do. I know I’m meant to do it because my heart tells me it’s right and it isn’t some learned behavior.

You always hear older people saying stuff about how much kids have changed since when they were kids. In reality though, kids haven’t changed. Kids have always been the same way. It’s everything else that changed. People in general have changed so much, and there’s realy no reason for it, at least none that I could see.

Growing up I didn’t want to go to school, ever, what kid does? It wasn’t even the fact of waking up early, because admit it, if you were a child of the 80’s you know damn straight that on Saturday mornings you were out of bed by 8AM to watch Saturday morning cartoons. Nowadays there is no point in getting up early on Saturdays, for kids or adults, and if you don’t want to get out of bed at 7AM then doctor’s will say there’s something wrong with you and most likely give you a pill that you don’t need.

Really now, kids haven’t changed. Boys who chase girls around the playground or tease them are known to like them. This goes back even before the 80’s, probably back to the earliest of men, but nowadays if a child does that it’s called sexual harrassment. \

People seem to forget what it was like growing up, I mean nowadays if you get into a physical fight with someone your suspended at the least, and profiled and closely monitored to ensure that you don’t bring a gun to school. Boys fight, even girls do too, and if you’re going to make a big deal out of it then yeah, maybe something will happen.

One could argue that these are the result of video games, or how the world is today, but really the world hasn’t changed. There’s always been wars, and growing up with the Nintendo Entertainment System, does anyone remember the gun that came with it, you would think that would cause kids want to shoot things, but no it didn’t. Instead they say that holding a controller that isn’t anything like a gun is teaching kids how to kill. Which I’ve said many times before is just bullshit. Now if parents really believe that, then they should better monitor which video games they buy kids, afterall if you won’t buy your children porn, then why buy them a video game filled with violence?

Where you could blame video games, or parents, I blame the news. In Canada, where they have more guns then we do in the USA, they don’t have nearly as much news reports as we do here in the US. Think about, there’s at least two hours of news on in the morning, more than four all day news channels about two hours on every channel in the evening, then after prime time, they have news again. I mean the news has all these stories of killings in wars and in our own neighborhoods, plus a lot of times kids are around when parents are watching. There’s more news on average that comes into the home than the number of hours playing video games or violent movies combined.

My question is how’d we let this happen? When did so much violence get into people’s heads that it changed the way they thought and felt, and even made them scared in their own neighborhoods?

So just weeks after spring break, I am on summer break. The testing wasn’t bad, I had a pretty good grasp on the material. My final average for accounting was 84, in any other college that would be a B, but here it’s a C, which sucks, but what are you gonna do? I’m just glad that I passed.

I’m actually outside on my front porch right now, on my laptop. While it’s annoyingly muggy and cloudy, it’s actually an alright day to be outside. I just wish I didn’t have this hot laptop on me.

I go back to tutoring in a few weeks, and until then I hope I get to do some of the much needed work that I’ve been putting off since the semester started.

One of my friends from high school, Susan Spahr passed away on Friday. While I was planning on getting up there for the wake tomorrow, and coming back late tomorrow night, I realize I can’t do this due to the fact that I have far too much work to do in Accounting. I have accounting on Thursday and I would get back far too late Wednesday to make it there by 8:30AM.

After graduation these people who you’ve known for years, all go on to bigger and better things. An unreturned phone call here and there, and you don’t really think much about it, until something like this happens. She had a baby about a month ago, and I didn’t even know she was pregnant. I think the last time I spoke to her, is when I was in Brookdale and she was telling me all about how she joined the Campus Crusade for Christ. Some unread blogs left me in the dark about her pregnancy until Sunday night, when I had heard that she had passed away.

These last few days I’ve been away from the computer, as some of you could tell in my not responding on IM, but just checking email when the time came. This is the third time in the last 13 months someone has died that I cared about. I think it’s a wakeup call. I don’t want to be going through life wondering what if or whatnot, I want to live. Last May I did the most irrational thing and picked up for a week and went to Ohio to meet a girl. Was it the safest thing to do? No. Will I ever forget driving through West Virginia through the mountains? Never. I implore you to go out and do one thing that scares you, one thing that is unlike you, one thing that you’ve never done before. Carpe Diem.

In the Allegory of the cave, Plato said that men that were chained up and spent their whole lives looking at shadows being cast on the wall would accept this and not challenge it at all, for it was all they knew. One day one of the men was taken out into the real world, into the sunlight. He was allowed to run free for a while, but was then brought back into the cave, chained up as he was before. Did the man like being chained up? Of course not, he wanted to be free. He told the others of his adventures, but they didn’t want to hear such tales. Eventually with all his ramblings, the others would kill him.

Now look at the world that we live in. We are not so different than those in the cave. Anyone who comes along who is different is ostracized for what they believe in. In the 1950’s if you believed in a different form of government then the US, then you were the enemy and could go to jail. Everyone believed that Communism was pure evil, but if you look at the theory of it, that all men are and would share equally, then it actually isn’t that bad of a theory, improbable, but in theory it works.

With religion, it is the same way. Christians, in the old days were brought up to believe that everyone who wasn’t Christian were evil. Through their own experiences, social gatherings in which not everyone was the same, people were able to step out of the cave and see the light. Just because you aren’t the same doesn’t mean you aren’t good people.

Now look at your own lives. Is there an instance where you are in a cave? In high school there are so many different caves, jocks beating on goths, populars beating on punks, all because they don’t step out of the cave and look at the real world. In the US some people hate people with different colored skin, because of the way they speak, or because of the country they come from. These people are in a cave all their own. If you don’t step out of your own caves, then your children will be in caves, and this world will never get any better, or safer.

Earlier this month, Mitchell Stuekerjuergen with the gamer alias “Kuja105” committed suicide. My thoughts and condolences go out to his friends, family, and gaming buddies. Unfortunitely that isn’t the saddest part of this story.

Jack Thompson who has been speaking publicly lately against video games, who have bought stock in Grand Theft Auto’s parent company to attend stockholder’s meetings, and whose just plain ignorant, released a statement regaurding Mitchell’s death. In this statement he said that Mitchell chose to fill up the void in his heart meant for the lord, with “combat video games”. He stated that playing video games is a “masterbatory senseless self stimulation” and that all the gamers out need to get off their computers and consoles, and if we did then Kuja105’s death could have been avoided.

What Mr. Thompson failed to recognize is the fact that when Kuja105 stated on a message board that he was considering suicide, the moderator’s of those forums spent countless hours getting his contact information and staying on the phone with him, trying to talk him out of it. Mr. Thompson also fails to realize that depression is a disease, and just because you play video games does not

It took your entire life to come to this moment. Maybe had you made a different decision three years ago you wouldn’t be here looking at this site. Maybe got a different job, or moved to a different house. Maybe even if you had a hamburger one day instead of a cheeseburger. Or maybe you are destined to look at this. Maybe no matter which choices you made, you would inevitably end here. There is only one inevitable thing, death. Nothing else is inevitable. Some people say birth is inevitable, but what about those babies who die before even seeing the light of day? Death is inevitable, so maybe it doesn’t matter what choices you made, maybe there are other things that are inevitable.

Maybe some of us are predestined for certain things, like disease, or heartache, or fame. These things eventually all even out though, making us equal in the end, but not the same.

Now what if there was a way to change your destiny. What if someone came up to you and said that they knew what you were destined for and they could help you change it. They don’t tell you what is in your future, but they tell you that you can change your destiny, would you do it? Would you be so unsure about yourself that you’d change your destiny without having trust in yourself? Afterall your destiny is really only what you make it right?