"Oh, nothing. My dad thought of it while he was shaving."

Off the bat, bonus points if you can tell me what movie that's from.

So, I consider myself to be a pretty able person. I have a lot of sortcomings, I know (one of them being reaching for the "h" on my keyboard), but as a whole, I'm good at stuff.

It seems, though, that no matter how good you are at something, you will inevitably screw up at it real good once in a while.

Take shaving, for instance. If you're a man and not Amish or a rabbi, odds are you'll be doing some shaving in your lifetime. Since I've started shaving, I'd say I've shaved somewhere in the ballpark of 70 times. By now you'd think I should be a pro at it, right?

Not right. Not right at all.

You see, shaving is a tricky thing... no, no, I probably fooled a single person into believing that right now.

But does me nicking myself on the jaw while I'm shaving make me stupid? It doesn't make a good case for me, no, but the fact is that even in something as mundane, routine, and simple as shaving, you are going to make a mistake now and then, even if you're being careful.

So if you screw up now and then, don't worry about it. In the big picture you're going to be just fine, even if you are a screw-up.

Funtime with Windows Vista...

HORRAY Bobby.  I got Windows Vista, and now I've got Windows Live Writer hooked up to my blog, which is hooked up to Facebook, which is hooked up to my friends, so now whenever I have feelings, I can write them quickly and easily.  Not painlessly, though.  They haven't gotten rid of the pain yet.

And the shadow proves the sunshine!

I will never ever fully understand how you can think that nothing will ever fix how just as you think you are in your darkest moment, God comes and takes everything that has happened up to that point in your life and weaves exactly what you need back into your life, and bring you back to a state of mind so much more hopeful, even optimistic, about how things are going to turn out.

I guess it really is true when they say that without the past, you have no future. Thank God for the past I have. Thank God Almighty.

You know what's funny?

I've found that when you try to sever ties with one person, but you want to do it cleanly, it can be excruciatingly difficult to do so without accidentally severing ties (uncleanly) with somebody whom you have no intention of severing ties with.  Maybe it's just my conviction that you should never leave somebody in a place of absolute despair that's gotten me into a huge pile of crap these past few days.  As a matter of fact, I know that that's what's put me through hell these past few days.

I'm so naive.  I believe that people can be helped, that I can help people.  What happens when it turns out that their plight was just an act?  What then?  I get ROYALLY SCREWED.  Maybe if I stuck to my pessimistic roots and didn't make any attempts at idealism, I wouldn't get hurt every time I turn around.

Christ, I hate this.  I need to write an angry letter.

The difference between despair and complete despair

Get ready, because this is 100% poetic. Okay: Think of a building for this one. If the building suddenly loses a support beam and will collapse unless something takes the place of that support beam, that's despair. Complete despair comes from when there's nothing missing from the building, but it's going to collapse anyway.

See, you can do something about despair. Complete despair, you just have to get the heck out of that building as soon as you can, because there's nothing you can do to fix it.

Let's test this widget out...

Hooray drafts!

Waiting for something or someone to take me out of this rut.

I can't describe the feeling that I get from being in my dorm room.  If I had to call it something, I'd say it's closest to boredom.  Maybe it's because I don't have anything to really do in here.  Maybe it's because I am tired.  Maybe it's because I'm just lethargic.  But that last one doesn't make too much sense, since rainy weather is my favorite weather.  I just don't know...

Anyway, there's a rehearsal in 45 minutes for this festival I have to go to on Saturday.  I know it's a little early to begin a five-minute walk to the place where that is, but I feel that it's worth leaving right now, if not to just get out of the room for a bit.

The most wonderful thing in the world.

Sleepless nights and restless days

You know, I don't think the philosophers and ponderers of the world truly appreciate the value of being tired.  My brother and myself would stay up late into the night and just talk about things like the universe and existence, can we prove that the universe exists, you know.  I think that philosophers would seriously benefit from pulling all-nighters in their reflections.

I say this because, despite my self-assurances that I wasn't excited or nervous last night, I didn't sleep at all, and having done that, I was slightly reluctant to wake up on time this morning.  Of course, I did, and I enjoyed the day quite fully.  Except for the beginning of it.  That was less fun than the rest.  I've noticed that when college students are unloading and moving in to their dorm, they move like kids at Disney World; practically dashing from place to place trying to see everything there is, and parents take their time, deliberately moving slower than their child so that they can draw out each moment and prolong the separation which they're dreading.  I'd find it sweet, if I weren't a college student.

Like an anaconda hiding in a light fixture, college is about to strike

Everything is falling into place.  I've got clothes for the next two weeks picked out. my new towels, blanket, and sheets are all folded and aiting to go into a box.  The Gamecube is sitting on my end table with a look of excitement on its face...  Wait, what?  Maybe not that last part.  Anyway, if I was extremely excited to start college at the BEGINNING of this summer, I'm having a heart attack right now.  Okay, not really, but it's like my stummy and my chest are trying to make a baby together.  That's what it feels like.

I'm gonna make a visit to my old high school in about an hour.  I should probably get ready for that.  It's gonna be some awesome stuff going on, lemme tell you.

College woahs

In less than forty hours, I will be waking up in my room at home for the last time.  I will step over the threshold of being an unpaid slacker who lives with his parents, and become an unpaid student who lives in the dorms.

 

HUZZAH!  If you've heard that song in A Goofy Movie, it's like that.  Yeah.

I've been getting prepped for the big move all this week.  My mom bought me some groceries for the room, we got some new towels, a blanket and a comforter, and some other stuff.  Yeah.

I am stoked about all of this.  I don't know what else to write.

The Tightwad's Guide to Making the Most Out of Your Computer.

Something I learned when I got my laptop is that a lot of the programs I had grown accustomed to using on my school's computers, as well as programs that my family owned, cost money.  As a high school student with no job, this posed a problem, so I scoured the internet to find the freest, best programs for my (currently three year-old) laptop.  Since I'm told that people like free things, I decided that I might make my findings public.  Note that some programs are still in their beta stages, and might be unstable, but as the adage goes, you get what you pay for.  Beta programs will be indicated as such, and with that, onto the guide.

• meebo: You might think it's a little odd for the first item on this list to be a website, but this website can successfully replace any IM programs you have on your computer.  Got AIM?  use Meebo. Yahoo?  Meebo.  MSN?  Meebo.  Google Talk?  Yes, Meebo.  It even saves your conversations, if you want it to.
• Google Pack: This is actually a number of other programs that have the Google seal of approval, including Google Desktop (with two-tap access to the Internet and any file on your hard drive), Google Earth (the most fun you'll have getting directions), Mozilla Firefox (a web browser with huge expandability), and Picasa (a photo organizer with a bunch of small editing tools).
• Internet Explorer 7 (beta): For the daring among us, Microsoft has made the future version of their web browser available right now.  Some of the benefits of upgrading to 7 include tabbed browsing (which has already been made available in every other browser) and a clean and simple RSS reader (if you don't know what RSS is, think of it as a dog that gets the paper for you, except on your computer).  You might say that these features are already in every other browser, but IE7 does them well enough that it's worth a look.
• Microsoft Office 2007 (beta): To start, it's free.  To elaborate, it gives you all the tools you need for papers, spreadsheets, and presentations.  To conclude, it's worth every penny.
• The GIMP: If you like pictures and are a college student, then you probably wish you had the money for Adobe Photoshop.  Fortunately, this open-source alternative has most of the same features of Photoshop.  The only thing about GIMP is that you need to also install something called the GTK+ Runtime Environment, which can be found here.

And so it begins... again...

Alright. For what I hope to be the last time, I'm making my own blog. This time, I'm hoping it will be cool enough to hold my interest. And if I'm lucky, it might even be cool enough to get read.