What a stupid paragraph.

All of these thoughts about offices are set off by the fact that, rofl, I have a new job! With an office! And two monitors! Whoa. I feel like a real employee now, at a real job. How insane is that? A job that doesn’t revolve around me selling pointless video game shit to people who really shouldn’t be buying these things, whether too poor to afford it or so rich that they’re just trying to buy their way out of boredom, and instead working in the fundraising industry. It isn’t, like, Relay For Life fundraising, but those fundraisers you remember from your days in school. Still. I feel a lot better about doing that, because that means that I am, in some small way, contributing to something that is generally pretty useful. Or, more useful than Gamestop typically is. Plus, they’re rolling out new products that are not just designed to help them make more money but are legitimately better for everyone involved *and* are trying to change the industry to reduce the waste.

Maybe I’m just irrationally taken with the novelty of having a new job.

We’ll see.

But enough of the depressing, I went to MINECON! Which was amazing. Mostly. Jackie and I got to Vegas pretty early on Thursday morning and wandered around in a sort of daze for a couple of hours, until we could check into our room and take a nap. But before we did that we did manage to wander over to the M&Ms store and looked at all four floors of M&M insanity. Wat. I didn’t realize that M&Ms were such a huge brand. More than anything we were excited for the fill your bag with whatever the hell kind of M&Ms you want section, where we tried the surprisingly amazing white chocolate M&Ms. I want massive bags of those, RIGHT NOW. But I digress. We got our room and took a nap, then went and had a buffet meal. It was fine, but it was a buffet not anything amazing. (Also, we stayed in the Luxor lol.)

After that we wandered around the strip for a few hours, by which I mean we went the entire length of the strip to find this bakery Jackie wanted to go to so we could get macaroons. And my god were these macaroons delicious. Almost worth the insane amounts of exhaustion we ended up having, in large part because I slept about one hour the night before. Superb! But, man, those macaroons were delicious. Then it was time to go get our Minecon badges so we wouldn’t have to wait in line for them tomorrow. We did so, got free soda from Jones Soda, and then went back to our room. I think we may have watched TV? Or I ate food? I’m not sure, I just remember being exhausted and passing out.

Next day we got up around seven and went to the Mandalay Bay buffet. Again, it was a buffet. Woo. But we started seeing all sorts of people for Minecon, which was pretty damn exciting. Young, old, male and female, there were an incredible amount of people there of a huge variety of demographics. (That was a horrible sentence, by the way.) Jackie and I were excited to be wandering through the halls of Mandalay Bay, and we went up to the convention hall with excitement in our hearts. We turned the corner to the exhibition hall and… holy shit. There were thousands of people already in line, just to get *in* to the damn thing. And there was only one entrance that appeared to be in use, and no staff members around to guide people or check badges. Wat.

But get into line we did, and we didn’t have to wait too long to get into the hall proper. (40 minutes, I think.) The first thing I noticed was the twenty foot tall creeper, which was just to the left of the J!NX booth. Which had a line close to running out the door already. And that’s where the Minecon exclusive figure would be. Fuck. We decided not to waste our time there and went to look at other booths, X-Peria, Cole2′s World, lots of kick ass indie games, a pretty cool artist, they were all on hand. We poked around and got some photos taken, then decided to get in the line for J!NX. We met and talked to a couple of awesome people who want to work on some projects with me (more on that later) and we hung out in line for about an hour and a half.

Which is when they booted us all out of the convention hall.

It was obvious they needed more preparation, and it was doubly obvious they had no idea how to prepare this without having everyone leave, so it didn’t matter where your place was in line or how long you’d been there, you got the boot either way. Which didn’t sit well with people. But we all dutifully went to the Ballroom where the Minecraft keynote was being held. They showed some funny videos about the history of Minecraft, talked about how much they appreciated us, and then threw the lever launching Minecraft 1.0.0… and then walked off stage. No goodbye, no we’ll see you around, just walked off stage.

Uh. Kay.

Confusion settled in for a second, then people literally sprinted out of the hall to get back in line for booths. No security to ensure an orderly exit or anything like that. Seth held a spot for me up at the door, and they weren’t letting people in for 30 minutes *and* they had no queues setup or people to manage the line. Two thousand unmanaged people who want in lines for something. Gee, this will end well. The doors opened and people *surged* forward, and those of us in the front screamed verbal abuse at the idiot children and people who kept pushing. Some of us went so far as to stop moving until they stopped pushing. One father was screaming bloody murder because his kid was nearly trampled.

We got back into the J!NX line which still wasn’t managed properly and *still* had two lines feeding into the main one. Ugh. So stand in it we did, for a good two hours me thinks. Just for some exclusive t-shirts. The human body knows no bounds of depravity, eh? Huh, what else did we do that day? Attend a panel, me thinks, about the creation process of a game. Aye! Aye. It was fine, but super awkward, and mostly dominated by egos. I wouldn’t have recommended it to anyone, unless they just needed to kill an hour. Then it was back to the hotel room for epic sleeps.

And it was epic.

-Snow

I’m a little wary about MineCon, since it’s the first year and all. We were looking at the schedule of events for it and there’s almost two hours devoted to a keynote address and the Minecraft launch, which seems like a hell of a lot of time to fill just to talk about how your game is finally getting a 1.xx version release. I imagine there will be a lot of talk about Minecraft being the best selling game in a long time (ever?) while still technically in alpha and beta modes. Some of the panels seem interesting, and we’ve already planned out what we want to see, but they’re mostly community driven panels which can be awesome or, like most of the internet, poorly researched meandering thoughts filled with semi-coherent ramblings about the topic at hand. It’s possible that all of my worries about MineCon will be for naught, and that it will be the coolest convention I have ever been to (if nothing else, I won’t have to worry about freaky otaku or comic nerds [as much]) but this being the first year and all, I have my doubts. If I come away with a Minecraft hoodie, I’d consider it a smashing success though.

I’m writing this entry from the front page of wordpress using the ‘quick post’ option, and I have to say that I’m not a fan. Sure, it has the basic functionality of “here’s a text box so go ahead and fill that in with your meandering and worthless thoughts, meat bag” which is typically enough for me and an entry. (If you haven’t noticed, my blog entries aren’t exactly highly stylized.) The thing that kills me about this functionality, though, is how small the text box itself is. The box scrolls with more content you add, obviously, but the visible portions of the text box are actually quite small. Despite having a cognitive knowledge that the box will scroll almost indefinitely as I write, I feel that I’m being overly verbose when I fill the box and haven’t made a new paragraph, and I doubt I’m alone. It might be wordpress’ way of trying to get people to post less, in order to save bandwidth, or it might solely be intended for the usage of really short blog entries.

Eh.

I took today off work as well, just so I would have time to work on an article for Real Otaku Gamer, and maybe spend some more time playing Saints Row: The Third. Which, despite all I would have ever guessed, is a really damn good game. Mostly because it never even attempts to take itself seriously, in a really great way.

100 posts. Yay.

-Snow

The big downside to this is that I won’t be able to write the usual sorts of insanity that I do in my hand written journals because, small as it may be, I actually have an audience to worry about. Sort of. Like, I really can’t get away with talking about my sex-life with Jackie and how the world revolves around the size of my enormous wang. Ha. See? Doesn’t that make you just feel all squicky inside? Yes. Yes it does. If it doesn’t make you feel weird, then you need to let me know. So that I can weird you the fuck-out. Believe me, this is going to become a personal goal of mine. If you aren’t weirded out we’re going to escalate this to poop. Lots and lots of poop. Gallons and miles of it! DO YOU DOUBT MY WRATH? I hope not, for everyone’s sake. (Especially yours. Yeah. You. You wacky freak.)

Anyway, how am I? Skyrim came out a couple of days ago, and that means that my life has been revolving (almost literally) around it. In fact, as I write this, Jackie is playing it and I find myself watching her and going “damn, I wish I had my computer with me so I could kill some zombies.” But, alas, I need to get a *lot* of writing done, so this is what I am doing, instead of spending my time slaying dragons. Drunk dragons. (I think the dragons in Skyrim spend most of their time with the Nords in the mead halls, talking about the glory days of the Old Empire, when the Chinese still wandered the lands of Skyrim and fish still tasted of Mercury. [The most delicious of all transition metals.]) {Good god, I just made a Sealab joke, didn’t I?} It’s kinda of sad how little I have to write about in my journals sometimes, much as I am happy with my life it seems like so little of note happens in it. I mean, wake up, go to Jackie’s, have food, go to work, visit Jackie, sleep, repeat until my eyes bleed from the tedium of it all. Tedium. But at the same time, I like the tedium. It sounds insane, I know, but the regularity of my life works is comforting. I absolutely love the unpredictable and the unexpected, even if it fucking sucks ten donkey cocks, but it’s nice to know that I’ll be able to come home from work and Jackie will be waiting for me, for example, or that I will be working an eight hour shift at work. (Granted, I wish I had more opening shifts at work, but, hey, Ray’s inability to work outside the morning hours makes for a consistent schedule. Of annoyingness.) Eh. There’s not really a coherent thought behind this, save that my life is happy and joyful but at the same time it is also tedious and every day feels like it runs into the last. First world problems, you know. Because not having the world actively trying to kill me makes for such a sad sad life.

I blame the pie.

Well, not much else has really been going on. In a couple of days Jackie and I are going to Las Vegas for MineCon! This is exciting, because I love Minecraft AND I have four days off from work. That’s the most time off from work I’ll have for the next however the fuck long, because I work retail hell and vacations are another day in which the masses are encouraged to come out and buy more shit that they don’t really need. Ugh. This is going to rapidly devolve into a rant about how America is full of people who have no fiscal responsibility, how they just can’t resist buying lame shit that they don’t really need, but want anyway because it’s “such a good deal.” Like, I want a Steel Battalion controller and a computer to go with it, but my god, do you really need to buy so much of this shit? Christ. Okay, I have to end this now. Stop before it becomes a full blown rant.

Well.

Have a good day guys, I hope your world ends up well.

(And that you have someone of your favorite gender lick your genitals.)

-Snow

To say I am not excited for this game is a wee bit of an understatement.

My excitement not withstanding, MW3 wouldn’t really be on my radar at all, save as another man-shoot FPS, except that, oh yeah, Activision kinda wasn’t lying about that whole “most anticipated game” thing. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but if the sales are anything to go by Activision isn’t really stretching it too far. Granted, the game isn’t out yet but if one looks at our number of pre-orders for Batman, Gears of War 3, Uncharted, and Battlefield those combined numbers exceed what we have for Modern Warfare 3 by only 100 or so units. These titles will be dwarfed in comparison to Modern Warfare 3, and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves. And, again, I don’t really care about Modern Warfare 3, because I’m more or less over the modern manshoots.

I *do* care how it affects my job, though. See, today is the midnight launch. We expect well over 400 people (some estimates as high as 700) and it’s a ‘all hands on deck’ sort of night. We did this last year for Black Ops, and it was a fine shift and a fine night, all said and done, but there’s a couple of things which are going to make this midnight launch suck a lot more than the last one: I live 40-50 minutes away from my job, and we aren’t going to close until 1am. Yeah. If I have to stay and close I won’t be getting home before two in the morning, easily. Huzzahs. At least I have Tuesday off. Compound that with the fact that my shift starts at 1pm, and I am just so wonderfully agog at how long I’m going to be at work, close to 13 hours, and then how long I get to spend driving back home. Oh, I’m all a-giddy with anticipation.

So help me god corporate had better have gotten my pay-rate fixed.

-Snow

Those who know me well know that I don’t, and haven’t, spent much time pondering the absence of my biological mother in my life. Not because it isn’t an interesting thought experiment, it certainly is, but because it’s so very futile. But this thought, this thought really gives me pause. Here I am, twenty-five years old, and I have traveled to many parts of the world, lived, loved, wined, dined, fucked, and been fucked-over, and I think I’m doing well with my life. Then I stop and think about all I know of my mother (and father) in this point in their lives: they were living in Saudi Arabia, and soon would have children on the way. They were financially independent, more or less, with myriad friends and connections from all parts of the world. They had problems, of course, and issues that I may have very well crumbled under. But their lives were huge and robust, at least to my eyes.

And soon, I’ll have outlived the robustness of my mother’s life.

I think this is the first time I’ve felt so deeply about my mother, that I’ve really been faced with the reality of who and what my mother was. And why her death was so horribly tragic, and how it has tainted and changed my family ever since. As a youth my mother’s age, much less my dad’s, seemed like this mythical and far off place, that would welcome me into its ranks after I had suffered for aeons. And here I am. Realizing that if I *were* to keel over tomorrow, my family would be beyond crushed. I’m in the peak of my life, with so much more to go, to do, to love and hate, and losing it now would be so horribly sad.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t thought of my mother before, but it’s been hard to make anything real of her. My entire life I’ve gained most of what I know about my mother from my dad and brother, with my grandmother filling in details here and there. I’m still not convinced that my memories of her aren’t my brain taking pictures I’ve seen and filling in details as appropriate. For fuck’s sake, I remember seeing a cloud in Mario more accurately than I do my mother. Maybe my youth addled brain was just taking her for granted, maybe not, but it is hard to ponder on what you’ve never had, what makes no sense to you.

But the sheer human loss… that I understand. I can relate to just how god awful it would be for someone so young, so vital, so integral to so many lives to suddenly disappear. I think about losing my dad, who has had a good life but is till far too young to go, and I think of my step-mom dying and it makes me a little shuddery inside, she’s too young too. Then I think about my brother dying and my heart nearly stops. My brain refuses to even consider something so horribly *unfair* as my brother drying at 26. No. How the hell did you people deal with my mom’s death? In some ways I’m glad it happened when I was so young. If it had happened now…

Well.

Yeah.

-Snow

If you’re still here, then I am assuming you’re aroused by the mere thought of self-indulgence and I would suggest to you that you take off your pants and sit back for a wonderful time relaxing with Kylock and his magical typing fingers.

So. Today there was a post on Facebook about life-choices and job-choices, and how we should really just keep our nose to the grinder and save money so that we *can* retire, and then pursue our dreams once we do so. And there is some merit to this line of thinking, I can’t deny it. Being frugal, not spending on wasteful consumer products, saving money, striving to make your work enjoyable, these things I can’t deny are good ideas. But the thought that we should postpone our dreams for that point in the future is one I can’t agree with. It smacks too much of a defeatist, passive attitude toward life, that if one does the nine to five for long enough their dreams will come true and all will be well and they will die with a happy and fulfilled life. And that very well could happen, but when I give that idea serious credence an idea seeps into my brain, always asking the ‘what ifs’. What if I die at 30? What if I lose all my money to medical bills? What if I have an unplanned pregnancy? All of these things would dramatically alter my life plans, so why *shouldn’t* I put some time into my hopes and dreams now? Planning for the future is good, but living for today is also good.

The middle road. The thought of it always pops up in any life thinking or planning I do. The middle road is always the best road, in my experience. I can work at a job that isn’t incredibly fulfilling but pays the bills if I take the time outside of work to write a story, or read a book, or go watch the sunrise in a field cuddled with horses on a cool spring morning. At the same time I can strive for my dreams, focus on them and work tirelessly for them, if I know I have a social and financial safety net behind me. And you know what? I do. I have both of these things going on. I have beautiful and amazing friends who I know I can count on, I have family that will support me financially and emotionally, and who push me to my dreams. At the same time I have, and am applying for, jobs that aren’t dream by any stretch of the imagination, but provide money, and security, and some form of skill usage that I enjoy doing and using. I’m not striking it rich, or living my dreams forever, but by living on the middle road I am happy and more or less secure. Why ask for more?

Related to the middle road, last night was the Tea Party Debate for the Republican Presidential candidates. I didn’t watch all of the debate, but I did watch enough of it to make me rage and yell and blather on about logical inconsistencies. There was something that I came across though that pushed me beyond the usual rage and into a land of actual fear for our nation. Opposing political values are fine, are good, a lot of the world’s progress can be tracked to conflict and resolution. What scares me about this debate are the two clips in particular, and the mindset they represent.

It would be easy to make the usual ‘the Republicans are the pro-life party’ arguments for the first clip about our mystery uninsured man, but there’s something more insidious there. Stop and watch the clip and you’ll realize that, basically, what Wolf Blitzer has asked Ron Paul is “Would you allow a human being to die, simply because he thought that nothing horrible would happen to him.” To which he, and the audience said, “Yes.” You may call not taking precautions silly, you might be opposed to the idea of free universal healthcare, but to actually cheer for, and be pleased by, someone proposing that we should let unprepared people die because, well, hey, the government isn’t here to nanny people you should consider enrolling in Evil Overlord school. Because you’re showing some awesome signs of being evil. Put another way, would we be cheering a policy that says we should let a person die because he got hit by a car that blindsided him? The person didn’t take proper precautions (adequately looking for traffic) so shouldn’t we just let the victim die, and let the person who hit him off? It isn’t *our* fault he wasn’t prepared.

And then, my god, the sheer and absolute intentional desire to not learn anything about the world that the citizens of this country show day in and day out is sickening. Looking at the second clip, whatever you feel about Ron Paul aside, Mr. Paul actually attempts to explain why the Muslim world, in particular those who attacked us, felt justified in their actions and give a human face to something America has very much dehumanized. He attempted to show that, while horrible, wrong, and terrible, there was a logical motivation behind the 9/11 attacks and, more importantly, that *not all of the people in Islamic countries are terrorists.* And he was booed. In fact, it seems like Wofl Blitzer cut him off to save him from the wrath of the audience. Which isn’t too surprising, that the American public as a whole, wants to remain in general ignorance, but what was worse than the audience reaction was the other candidates. They all look like they’re watching someone kill himself, like they would love to swoop in and say something along the lines of “All the Muslims are terrorists and we’ll get them.” and we all know that the audience would love that particular candidate forever.

Again, the middle road. The American public needs to move toward the middle, the politicians need to move toward the middle the financial institutes need to move to the middle. We all need to. But we can’t, or we won’t, because the American dream now revolves around polemic and misinformation. Taking a difficult and principled stance, very typical of the middle road, is almost impossible to make heard and understood in a climate like the one we’re currently in. People don’t listen to something that acknowledges the vagaries of human life, and tries to take them into account; they want a stance that is easy to swallow and understand.

We should be ashamed that we’re allowing this to happen.

The upside to all of this time off is that I can focus on my writing for once in my life. I have a job offer lined up, I have a place to live, I have food, friends, and family. I’m not worried about maintaining my life, I *know* some job will come along to keep me afloat, even if I have to take two part-time jobs.

So that’s all that’s really happening in my life, realizing that I am far too young to give up on my dreams and being okay with the fact that I may have to work jobs I am not eternally happy with. But that’s okay, because if I am working toward my goals then what does it matter? It’s simply another stepping stone on my way to doing what I want to do.

And challenges help me focus anyway. If I know that I have to work *and* finish a draft of a story, then I won’t spend time on something superfluous like a round of Magic online.

Speaking of, I started using the Pomodoro technique recently. In a nut shell you choose a task to do, let’s say edit a paper, and work on it for 25 minutes straight. Set a timer. When your 25 minutes are up you *immediately* stop, and doing something completely unrelated and relaxing for five minutes. Use the bathroom, drink some water, watch five minutes of the Daily Show. Doesn’t matter. Then you make a check mark on a piece of paper next to the name of the task you’re doing, and go at it for another 25 minutes. This helps a lot because it segments your work into thirty minute chunks, so you’re not thinking about how many *hours* it is until your next break, but how many *minutes*. I know it’s kept me productive, and that’s all I can ask for. And for people who say that five minutes isn’t much of a break, imagine this over an eight hour shift; that’s forty minutes of break time. While there are an incredible number of bosses out there who would be appalled that I suggest you not work for forty minutes of your day, I would suggest you do this anyway. Speaking from experience I know it has kept me more focused and happy to be working on something, and avoids burn out with much higher success. It’s been shown time and time again that people are more productive with short, frequent breaks.

Embrace it.

If nothing else, it will get you through your mind numbing job with more happiness. And that *has* to be worth it, right?

Hm.

Ah.

Yes.

I was emptying out my Google reader and I came upon something interesting on the Skepchick feed: an article that mentioned Magic: The Gathering World Champion, Jon Finkel. For obvious reasons this elicited a full read of the article, and it has been a long time since I have actually been quite so angry at the internet. (An exercise in futility, I am well aware.) The Skepchick article was about another article, an article in which a Gizmodo editor discussed her experience on the online dating site OkCupid and, in particular, her date with one Mr. Jon Finkel. Since I am both lazy and refuse to give Gizmodo more hits I will not be linking the article here, but I am sure you’re handy enough to find it with a quick Google search. Do so. I’ll wait.

Back yet?

So. You can see why this may have set off my “FUCK YOU INTERNET!” alarm. For those of you that didn’t go read it, I’ll give a brief overview: Gizmodo editor drunkenly signs up for OkCupid. Creepy men hit on her on OkCupid. She considers deleting account, but nice man asks her for a date. She accepts. Man is Jon Finkel. Jon mentions, in reply to Editor bringing up her own brother’s gaming, that he plays Magic. Date proceeds, they are both left feeling a little disenchanted. She goes home and googles Jon Finkel and discovers who he is: a Magic pro-tour champion, poker world champion, and hedge fund manager. They go on a second date, and she asks him about his magic and he gets three ‘strikes’: he still plays Magic, he met his friends through Magic, and he is going to a tournament soon. Date over, she’s done with him.

And that’s all well and good. As it stands, the Gizmodo editor is just overly judgmental about a nerdy hobby. Cest la vie. What really drives me insane is how this article was presented, as if Jon Finkel was a creepy internet predator/loser who was so socially inept that he couldn’t function outside of the world of Magic the Gathering. (Also, let it be noted that choosing an interesting date activity that your date didn’t enjoy doesn’t make you creepy, it makes you a human who has interests outside your own.) The Editor actually goes so far as to say Jon “lured” her into a date, and intentionally lied to OkCupid by not putting that he was a Magic pro-tour player on there. She implies that he is stalkerish because he had gone on dates with people the Editor knew which, more than likely, seems like a coincidence and more importantly *how the hell was he to know she knew these people*? And it goes on like this. An article that, so the Editor claims, tries to show that people judge people all the time. Which is true. But a more important point would be that we judge people, then realize we are judging them, and give them a chance to show us how interesting they are.

I could live with all of that, I really could, but what put it over the edge for me was that the Editor had the audacity to include Jon’s name and Wikidpedia page. Accusing someone of luring people into dates, being a creepy loser, being borderline stalkerish, and then naming his name on the internet is as unprofessional as one can possibly get. Exposing your own private life is fine, exposing others’, without their consent, is not.

Gizmodo made a ton of money off all the internet rage though, and that’s the important part.

Right?

I got back from New Zealand on the 7th of August, and Jacqueline picked me up from the airport. It was a bit nerve wracking, after travelling for close to 30 hours to meet up with someone I hadn’t seen in years. Was I going to just fall on my face, or cry, or vomit, or eat my shoes? That last one seems like an especially bad idea, I really shouldn’t eat my shoes. (Again.) To everyone’s surprise, I was not a huge flaming idiot and did not embarrass myself in front of her! Which is, of course, to say that I did embarrass myself *after* she turned her back, but let’s not get into that, shall we? ‘Kay. We went back to Melanie’s place from there, and then we all went out for delicious Japanese food. Yay Japanese food! Then sleep.

During the following week we went and did cool things, saw the Dallas Aquarium, went back to Arkansas and got my car and some stuff for my apartment, ate at some neat places, hung out a lot, made giant bubbles, played Catherine. You know, the usual. But in DALLAS! (Well, Arlington really.) Once this week rolled around I put my nose to the grinder and started seriously looking for jobs and apartments, the apartment front is going way better than the job front. I found a place fairly close to everything that is about 460 a month for a studio (large!) apartment, on the first floor, with easy pool access, a gym, lots of trees, and covered parking. On the whole, it’s a pretty nice place and I think I’d be happy living there. Plus I could finally setup my epic multi-box nerd room! BWHAHAHAHA?!

I had a job interview today with the VCS at the VA, in which I would basically be an assistant manager for the VA canteens. It seems like a standard enough job, and the hours are pretty good (630a to 330p M-F), and the pay would be about where I was hoping to end up at a minimum. Plus! Government benefits. Oh yeah. The only thing that really scares me about the job is that I would have to commit to a “go here when we tell you to” schedule, which basically means that I would have to up and leave whenever the VA wanted me to move to a different position in a new place. And unless it was really awesome, or a place where I knew people, I’d probably just quit. I’m not opposed to moving to new places, obviously, but I’ve always wanted to do it on my own terms *not* when someone else demands that I show up. That irks me to no end. Surprising no one, of course.

Initial impressions of Dallas are pretty favorable, actually, aside from a couple of things which are just *beyond* irksome. The sprawl. My god the sprawl. The Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex is around seven million people, and takes up 9,300 some odd square miles. By comparison, the Seoul metro area has upwards of twenty-two million people (almost four times the size of Dallas/Fort Worth) but is around 3,000 square miles, three times less area than Dallas/Fort Worth. That’s absurd. It means that public transit is almost non-existent, and that driving is the only way to get somewhere reliably, but you have to take the massive almost perpetually under-construction highways of doom. Ugh. The second problem with the Dallas area is the damn *heat*. My god, they’re going on 40 some odd days with 100+ degree weather. That’s just utterly insane. Summer! GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL, DAMN YOU!

Not much else to comment on at the moment. Life is life is life is life.

<3

-Snow

March

Holy shit! I’m in New Zealand! I think that’s about the most accurate assessment of March. I spent the first week of my time here recovering from both the flight and the hike we took, and general illness, so I didn’t get up to much of anything until the second half of the month. There was also some initial… tension… with people in New Zealand, but that worked itself out once everyone calmed the fuck down and realized I wasn’t quite as insane as they thought I was. The second half of March I spent more or less with Michelle, learning Wellington and getting acclimated. I also, briefly, dated a girl here. That, uh, didn’t end well. Suffice to say she had issues with pretty much everything, mental, emotional, physical, she was a big ball of unstable. At least I managed to get out of that fairly quickly. Huzzahs! Everything was generally fine on the home front, but there were beginnings of… tension with the people I lived with.

Verdict: A good month, if a bit on the slow side. Was happy with what I did and the people I met, even if things didn’t quite pan out.

April

April started out well enough, doing more of the same, cooking, hanging out with Michelle, enjoying the beach, generally being a bum. Then… Joy’s family showed up. That was trying. Very. Very. Trying. I got booted out of the room I was sleeping in, first of all, and then her family stayed for nigh on three weeks. It was next to impossible to get any quiet time in the house, and that is something that I pretty much must have in whatever place I am going to be living in. It’s just not optional, I need a space where people won’t come in and pester me. That was impossible with her family in the house. (Not to mention the racism, oh gods above the racism.) In light of these… circumstances… Michelle and I got together and planned a trip to the South Island to get away. Get awayawayaway! We met up with a friend down there, and putzed around wine country, did some hikes, and went out into the sounds and looked at beautiful things. Huzzahs are in order for that! Though I did get pretty irrationally irked on the trip, and feel bad about that, all in all I would say that we all managed to enjoy ourselves. (Plus we got a lot of good wine, and we hung out in a supremely beautiful beach house and there was a full moon! Glee!)

I think this trip was actually in June, but the events that caused it were in April, so suck it. Eventually, Joy’s family left and I got to move back into the room I had been vacated from and all was well.

Verdict: A very up and down month. At times it was awesome, especially going to Weta, and at times it just pissed me right the hell off. The trip to the South Island made up for a lot of that, though. Still, I should have been more productive with job finding or skill training.

June

June. Oh June. Around a week after Joy’s family departed, Peter and Vera showed up to work on Joy’s bathroom. Peter and Vera are quite nice people, and I have no problem with them. I decided that, since I was back on the couch, I may as well go visit Auckland for a week to give them time to finish the bathroom and me a chance to hang out and explore New Zealand’s biggest city. And it was good, overall, but Auckland was a bit disappointing. Michelle came up a few days after me, and we explored the city and did some stuff. Rode roller coasters, did an aquarium, poked around town, the usual shenanigans. The last night we were there we got drunk with a group of random people at the hostel, which was quite fun. While I don’t want to go back to Auckland, I had a good time there. (Michelle may disagree, though we both agree about the aquarium sucking.)

We get back from the trip, and the bathroom isn’t done. Lolwhut. And this is how the entire month of June went, the bathroom just not being done. At one point I was taking showers in a public stall, and got thrown out for a few days too, and they only managed to get the shower in toward the end of June. Augh. It was a trying time, and I had a lot of moments of just wanting to cut ties and gtfo the whole country.

Verdict: With a few exceptions, a poor month. It just got more and more irksome, and I was getting sick of New Zealand. I don’t blame Michelle for getting sick of me this month.

July

Started much the same way June ended. Michelle’s parents showed up about half way through the month, and I started studying a lot more. We all hung out, and then Michelle took a trip with her parents along the North Island and invited me along. I was more than happy to gtfo, and we had a great week out. Saw lots of neat geothermal stuff, relaxed in some spas, and generally had a great time. (With the exception of Napier, fuck Napier.) When we got back the bathroom still wasn’t done (in fact, to this day it’s not done) but I didn’t care because I moved out! Woo!

Verdict: The second half of this month rocked, and I was happy for it. The first half drug, but meh. Whatever. I got a lot more reading and studying done, and made some good Magic friends, so all in all I can say I was actually pretty happy with the month.

The past four months saw a lot of ups and downs, and a lot of trying times, but I’m superbly happy with my time in this country overall. It also lead me to get back in touch with Jacqueline, and prompt me to move to Dallas, like I’d been considering for years.

All in all, I did well, but can always do better.