Congratulations

I just wanted to take a second here to congratulate a couple of friends of mine. First off, Jim Safley. Some of you know him, and those that don't would like him, promise, but the point of this is to congratulate him and Christian on finally getting engaged. They haven't set a date yet, but they have decided to get married, so I just wanted to tell them congratulations and I can't wait to see the wedding...which should be damned interesting.
Secondly, and this one might interest some people, Sarah Davis is getting married too to her long-time boyfriend. I've kinda been waiting for this one, but I got the call earlier this week and the wedding is set for some time next year.
So, congratulations to you guys on getting engaged and I can't wait to get my invites. And I had better get invites.

The Heat Is On

Well, 6 hours after I was supposed to start working, they finally shut the store down. Why? The water heater wasn't doing its job. That's a bit of a problem in a restaurant. Can't wash the dishes and all. Normally I'd be a bit happier about a day off from work, but for one, they waited damn near the entire day to finally say that the store was going to be closed, and secondly, it's the holiday season and I could kinda use the money right now to buy Christmas presents. And to top it all off, we may not even open until Monday. That falls quite nicely into the category marked "Bad." The only upside is that I get to sit at home and watch some football and drink some beer. mmmm.....beer.

Everybody put your pencils down

Well, another semester has come and gone, and I must say, I really do think that this is the best semester that I've had since beginning the whole "college" thing. The reason is quite simple really. I care now. "But didn't you care before?" Of course I did, but I'm older now and have a direction in my life that I didn't have when I was 18 and straight out of high school, so I actually want to do well in my classes and want to get everything over with as quickly as I can so that I can move on to a career that doesn't involve asking how somebody's dinner was.
I am, for those of you that don't know, working on my degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. I plan to be a teacher after I get said degree and do the whole masters thing, but that's requiring me to go back and take a number of classes that I wouldn't have had to take had I stayed with my initial major of psychology. "Why did you change your major when you were about to become a junior?" (I love how I know exactly what everybody will ask) I changed my major because I realized that psychology wasn't something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but I could see myself teaching, and I always enjoyed the material we studied in high school english, even if my teachers were a bit lacking (I only really liked one of them in 4 years of high school).
But, to get back to the point, the semester is done, and now I have a whole month to work and relax and see my girlfriend and do some writing of my own, which I did a good bit of today, and actually post to here more than once every three weeks, though I don't know that I'll ever post as much as Brad, I just don't have that kind of free time (just kidding). I hope everybody has a good holiday season and for those of you out there that might actually read this and are in the middle of finals yourself...GOOD LUCK!

Another Holiday Season Upon Us

Wow, I just realized that it's been like 2 weeks since I last posted here. Sad really, given that I've actually had time to say something, and, more importantly, things to actually say. My birthday went off well, nice and relaxing with April, and the trip to NC for the movie premier with Katie was fun also. I like getting dressed up in a tuxedo, they look good on me.

Having just sat through two of my three classes I realized, looking at my syllabi, that the year is almost over, and another holiday season is upon us (see, you didn't think that I was going to work the title in here did ya?)

Thankfully I'm not working retail this year and hence will not have to put up with some of the more psychotic patrons of the shopping world. But I will still have to deal with them. I think the older I get the less I like this time of year. It's not that I'm a hum-bug mind you, I don't hate Christmas and Thanksgiving or anything like that. I think it's mostly that I've become jaded as to the ideas and the spirit behind it.

When you're young, Christmas is about getting presents, and giving them too, and about Santa and turkeys, and family, and snow, and other fun things. Now that I'm 24, Christmas and Thanksgiving are about working, customers, long hours, fighting the crowds to go and buy those Christmas presents for the people I actually care about, and trying to find the time I need to finish up this semester of school and do well, so that I don't have to repeat any more classes.

I really do think that this time of year is wasted on the old. I know the saying "Youth is wasted on the young." We all do, as some old fogey has said it to all of us at one point or another in our lives, but I really do think that, in our society at least, the holidays are wasted on the old. Children really are the only people that really appreciate this time of year any more. And good for them.

9 Days Till I'm Old...er.

Well, the final countdown is on. In about 9 days I'll be 24 and old...er. I say older because as you all know, and for those of you that read this that don't, I'm an old man. Now I know, I know, 24 isn't that old. But really, that means I'm only a year from being 25, which is a quarter of a century old...it sounds longer when you phrase it like that. That coupled with the emergence of even more grey hair, much to April's amusement I might add, make me feel old sometimes. Of course, then I spend time with April and feel young again, so I suppose I'll have to keep her around for a bit longer.
Well, I think I've rambled on long enough, just thought I'd come here and blow some hot air. I'm good at that you know. Of course you know, and you all love me anyways. You love me! You really love me! ::takes his Oscar and goes home::

Poetry, Thy Name is Misery...but not as much now

So, I had my workshop for my poetry today. It didn't go that bad. Everybody liked my poetry, found it to be very funny, which is what I was shooting for. The only real interesting part was that so many people tried to read so much into some of my poetry. For example here's one of my poems:

The Lesser Known Lady from Saturn

There once was a lady from Saturn,
Whose body was shaped nothing like a penis
The boys never gave her a turn,
So she tracked down that lady from Venus
And beat her ass all the way to Uranus.

Now, I think that pretty much anybody that reads that is going to take it at face value. I was being silly, just trying to have fun. Now, my classmates read more into that then was intended. My professor saw some kind of Freudian reference, and the rest of my class was making references to the book Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. I've never read the book, and I don't know that you, my handful of faithful readers have either. Apparently I am the only person in my class that remembers the age old limerick that starts There once was a lady from Venus... As soon as I pointed that out, the light seemed to go off in everybodies head. Sorta sad really.

Anyways, the poetry is done for now, and I am on to bigger and, at least I hope, better things.

To Vote or Not to Vote...What a Question

Tomorrow is the election. Now, I'm not going to sit here and preach politics, or ask my faitful readers to do the same. What I am going to do is sit here and hope that each of you is going to vote. Now, some of us may think that neither choice is a particularly good one. We may very well be right, but if South Park taught us anything last week, it's that every election will always come down to a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich, and that's fine. What falls on us as citizens of this country is to decide which we dislike less.

I once had a history teacher that made something very clear to my class, and I think it's one of the most profound political statements I've heard in my nearly 24 years. She told us, and I don't believe that she said this originally, that you can't complain about the President if you don't vote for the President. That makes a lot of sense to me. If you don't make your voice heard, then you're essentially saying "I don't care" and as soon as you say that, then you can't complain when things don't go the way you want.

To wrap this rant up, I just hope that my friends, and anybody else that reads this that can vote tomorrow, does so tomorrow. I know I will be.

Poetry, They Name is Misery

How do I hate thee poetry, let me count the ways.
1) I hate the need people have to make you rhyme
2) I loathe the desire to express inner feelings in prose
3) I detest the idea of the epic
4) I'll admit I love a good limerick

It's not that I hate reading poetry, quite the opposite actually. I love a good poem, though a "good" poem is relative, and have a great deal of respect to those that can crank out a poem (I know that's not how it really works, but stay with me here). My only real issue with poetry is having to write it myself! I'm not a poet, never claimed to be, yet this week I've been put in a position where I've been forced and required to write poetry.

Normally I'd just suck it up and say "Hey, it's just a poem. What's the big deal?" But this time there was more to it. Not only did I have to write 3 pages of poetry - a challenge for me in and of itself - but I then had to print out copies for my entire Creative Writing class and let them read my less then soberly written poems, and then critique them next week. Ugh...I'll let you know how that goes.

Welcome back Perry

Whew! After about 5 days of no computer, this hombre is finally back in the saddle. I had to restore my computer not once, but TWICE, but now everything seems to be working fine, and with any luck I won't have to do it again any time soon. Not only did I have to go through the process of re-loading everything onto my computer, but I realized, too late I might add, that there were quite a few documents that I had recently typed that were only on my laptop. While I have hard copies of all of them, a couple of those papers are well into the 10 page range, and the thought of retyping them isn't one that I really like. Of course I'm going to, because I have to. But I digress. As the title says, I'm back online and decided that since I hadn't posted here in quite a while, and knowing that my faithful readers...all 3 of you, were going to miss your fairly regular doses of my wild ramblings, I thought it was in yours and mine best interests to put something up here. So, without further ado...

I am the very model of the modern major general, I've information animal, vegetable, or mineral, I know the kings of England....

What, you wanted something deep and insightful? Who do you think you're talking to? At least while I'm this sober. Give me a few drinks and a couple of hours and we'll see about something deep and insightful on here, but for right now you're going to have to settle for a bit of singing. Now...where was I?

The Joys of Restoring

If those of you out there in blog land are anything like myself, then your computers house a good part of your life. For myself, being a creative writing major, I have to write a ton of papers, all of which are stored on my nice, 20 GB HD. Now, I'll admit, I made the mistake of not backing up my laptop any time recently, mostly because, until recently, my laptop was the back-up for my desktop. However, with me deciding that I hardly ever play games anymore, I realized that it was time to move to something smaller, lighter, and more up to date. And here we come to my problem. The other day, I shut my laptop down, same as I always do. Later that day when I started it up, my laptop decided to go and fuck up on me. It decided that it was magically going to have a corrupt file that would prevent it from starting back up. So, what did I do?

I RESTORED MY GODDAMN COMPUTER!!

"But George, you've got another computer, what's the big deal?"
The big deal is that since I had made the move towards using just my laptop, I was no longer typing my papers on my desktop, which means when I restored my laptop, I lost those papers. There is a good and bad to that. The good is that I have hard copies of everything that I didn't have on my desktop. The bad is, if I want them back on my laptop, I'm going to have to retype them. Not a big deal since I type about 100 wpm, but still a royal pain in my ass. To top it all off, I can't seem to find all of my discs. The one that I'm missing that can't really be replaced, is my Office 2002 disc. I've got a disc that gives me Word, which is all I'm really using right now, but it would be nice to have all of the programs that I had before. Mind you, I'm pretty sure that I know where the disc is, the problem is that happens to be at my ex-girlfriends house, and we're not really on speaking terms.
So, here we are, a number of hours later, I've got my computer back to pretty much where I want it, minus my music files, but I'll get those back later, and I still have the urge to through this damn thing against the wall. Too bad my service plan doesn't cover that.

A less than happy rant about research

Alright. I am an English major. On top of that, I am taking a concentration in creative writing. Still with me? Good. Now, I can understand the need to have good research skills, one never knows when one will need to find information about a topic from reputable sources in any line of work. That being said, I am having an issue understanding why in my Advanced Composition class, my professor is finding it necessary to teach us how to research. It would be nice to think that at this point in our lives, having taken enough English classes and having had to write more than one research paper on more than one occassion, that she would assume that we knew how to do basic research. I know that some people are better at it than others, but still, it's hard to believe that by the age of 20, there are people out there that don't know how to research a topic.
The real reason for this rant is that I've been spending the last two days working on this assignment that is supposed to help teach us how to research more effectively. Now, the actual research part of this hasn't been that hard for me. I know how to plug keywords into a database search engine and then use those results to find even more sources. What's been bothering me is that we're having to write these stupid little rhetorical precises' based on one of the scholarly journals that we found in the process of doing this research. What is a rhetorical precis? you migh ask. Instead of trying to explain it in my words, I'll give you the exact instructions that my professor gave us:

A rhetorical précis is a strategy for understanding the content of an article and its point of view. Educator Margaret K. Woodworth first advocated this strategy in 1988. It forces you to read with greater attention and to write with control and conviction. It helps you convey to other people ideas that you have read about. The summaries you will write using the rhetorical précis will also answer the basic who, what, where, when, how, why, and to whom about a piece of writing.
The rhetorical précis is a highly structured four-sentence paragraph that records the essential rhetorical elements of a unit of writing. It includes the name of the writer, the content, the major assertion, the mode of development or support, the stated or apparent purpose, and the relationship established between the writer and the audience. Each of the four sentences requires specific information.
Sentence 1Name of author and title of work [publishing information, date, and page numbers in parentheses]; a rhetorically accurate verb (such as asserts, argues, suggests, contends, believes, reports, indicates, insists); and a "that" clause containing the major assertion (thesis statement) of the work.
Sentence 2A brief but accurate explanation of how the author develops or supports the thesis, usually in the same order as was developed in the essay.
Sentence 3A statement of the author’s apparent purpose, followed by an "in order to" phrase.
Sentence 4A description of the intended audience.

I think you see my point. This is on top of the other reading and writing assignments that she's already given us and that I have for my other classes. I really do think that in college, all professors believe that their's is the only class that their students are taking. Somebody really should educate them to the contrary. ::begins typing a memo to teachers world-wide::

A Free Lesson in Tipping pt2: Damn Teenagers

Alright...here's an expansion on my last post. For all you teenagers out there that might be going to homecoming here in the next few weeks, please remember to take enough money with you to TIP YOUR WAITER!! Why would I be saying this you ask? Simple. I spent the last 7 hours waiting on group after group of 14-18 year olds all dressed up and cheap as hell that thought it was ok to leave me and my fellow servers 5% tips. I know that not all of you have a lot of money, but I'm sure that if you ask mom and dad, they'll slip you a little something extra to tip your server. That's all I'm asking. You may now continue about your days. Thank you.

A Free Lesson in Tipping

Alright ladies and gentlemen, here is a free lesson in tipping from me to you. First off, 15% is a MINIMUM!!! What that means is: if your server is adequate, then he/she deserves 15%. If they do a good job, then they deserve 20%. If they are amazing, then I leave that up to your discretion, but it should be a good tip. Now, I realize that some of you are really bad at math, but you can go to the Hallmark store, spend like $2, and get a little card that will spell out 15% tip for you all the way up to around $150. There is no reason that a waiter/waitress should ever get a $7 tip on a $80 check. There's NO excuse for that. Also, a myth I'm going to dispell for all of you out there in internet-land is that waiters make minimum wage. I don't know about other states, but here in VA, we only make $2.13 an hour plus tips. That is far below minimum wage. If we don't get any tips, we don't make any money. So, in conclusion of this rant, tip your waiter. We don't serve you for our health.

Second verse same as the first

And I've managed to post more than once. I RULE! I've been trying to think about something interesting to put up here, something mind-blowing and life altering, but I'm coming up a bit blank on it. Oh well. I'm sure something will hit me at like 4 am, but by then I'll be too lazy to put it on here. I'm sorry world, you'll just have to do without. My first story was workshopped today, that's a fun experience. There's nothing more frustrating then being told to turn in a piece of work, then show up and listen to people talk about, dissect, and analyze it, with you being able to say nothing until the very end...with like FIVE MINUTES LEFT!! ::takes a breather:: I'm better now. Really. How do you explain to a group of people that there are so many contradictions because you decided to cut down the story at the last minute because you thought they might try to lynch you if you turned in a 26 page story. ::takes another breather:: I need a drink.

Well...here it goes

As the title says, here it goes. I've finally gotten around to setting up one of these blog things. Everybody's doing it, and the peer-pressure finally got to me. What can I say. I'm hoping that I'll actually be able to post to this thing more than once every six months, since that's about how long I actually get to post one of my stories. Who knows, maybe I'll throw some of what I have to write for my creative writing class up here. Well...yeah....umm...this is awkward. Hmmm.....::walks off, scratching his head::