Houses

Tomorrow, Chris and I are going to close on a house. This time tomorrow night, I will legally be a homeowner.

That's so weird to me.

Part of that probably has to do with the fact that all I did was write a check for the down payment. Chris dealt with the realtor and took care of all the paperwork and meetings and red tape and whatnot on his own. He's always been the more responsible one anyway. Heck, I haven't even seen the inside of the house yet. I'm looking forward to finally getting to see it tomorrow right before we officially close.

I kinda hate that term, "close." It sounds so needlessly official. But I guess it's more efficient than "signing a few papers last minute to conclusively transfer ownership after the deal has already been worked out well in advance."

This will mark the fifth house I've lived in in as many years. This time five years ago I was still living at my parents' house. Not long after that, I took up residence at Highland Ave for a few months, and immediately following that I transferred to the Farm for just about twice as long as Highland Ave, and then we made the move down here to our current establishment, where we've been for almost four years. That fact is staggering to me. We've lived here for the better part of four years. And in less than a month and a half, we'll be moving one more time. One last time.

I normally stress over the titles of these posts. I try to make them clever or punny or to include some kind of reference to some work of fiction or piece of pop culture, but I didn't try on this one. I just labeled it with one word that sums up the backbone of the content of the post. Of course, as it always goes, I had way more to say when I first opened up this tab to start blogging; as well I should, I've only posted once this year and that was over five months ago. It's been an interesting five months, to say the least.

But here we are again, having written out the factual skeleton for the post but lacking the meat of the content I set out to lay down. Maybe part of the problem is that I already expressed some of my thoughts last night via the good ole 5 AM Twitter Confessional, and I fear posting them here would be redundant. I guess I kind of intended to expound upon those thoughts in long-form here, but it doesn't seem to be playing out that way.

And welcome to life, ladies and gentlemen. Intentions and plans? What good are they?

I guess I really only blog when something is bothering me. That's the lesson to take away from this exercise. Because when nothing is bothering you, why blog? Just go live your life. Enjoy it, because there's nothing holding you back. But a blog... that's a place of existential discourse. Or at least that's how it is round these parts.

Maybe the actual signing of the papers tomorrow and the official ownership will have some sort of effect on me. Maybe I can come back tomorrow for "Houses: Part 2" with a bit more clarity, and manage to muster the ability to say what I wanted to say. I guess we'll see.

This Is A Story All About How... Actually This Will Probably Be Many Stories Moving Forward

Here we are, staring at the blank space of a new blog post; the first new blog post of the year, as a matter of fact. It's 2015 now and it seems like Blogger's interface has been updated yet again. The font is bigger and more doofy than I would like (at least in this draft mode here, I'm sure it'll look the same as always once it's posted), but isn't that just how it goes? Things change, whether you like it or not, and you have to just deal with it. So here I am, plugging away with these big, doofy characters.

This is kind of a difficult time of year for me. I guess, now that I think about it, it has been pretty much since I started this blog. Heck, the main reason I started this blog in the first place was so I could vent my frustrations about girls. That hasn't changed, because I really don't get frustrated about a whole lot else other than League, but I get over that pretty quickly. It's just a game, and on top of that, I'm bad at it. I may improve incrementally over time (I'm certainly better at it than I was two years ago), but I'll never truly be good at it, and I'm okay with that. Bad beats happen, they happen frequently, and sometimes they make really mad. But it never takes me longer than a few hours to put it out of my mind.

Girls though. That's another story. A lot of other stories actually, and I think that's what I'm getting at here. When I began this blog, yes, the purpose was to vent. But I also hoped that, in so doing, I could pass along some wisdom somehow. But I think I limited myself because of that. Back in the day, I always tried to include some lesson or nugget of wisdom that I thought might be helpful to anyone reading. Of course, as my readership dwindled, I focused less and less on that and delved more into a kind of self-reflective externalized internal monologue... like thinking out loud on the internet, I guess. I stopped trying to find a lesson or a meaning behind everything, but more often than not my posts would revolve heavily around stories.

I'm a naturally really nostalgic fellow. I look fondly at the past and often wish I could relive it, or parts of it. I love sitting down and telling stories of my past exploits, and I love keeping track of dates and notable moments in my life. It occurred to me not too long ago that, rather than keeping all that information stuffed inside my head until someone happened to ask me a question about something that happened years ago, maybe I should just be my own personal historian. That way I get to tell my stories without bothering anyone in particular, and keeping a written record of things can help jog my memory if the details ever get hazy.

I realize that when I reference my frustrations with girls, it seems like I have several bones to pick with the general female populace, and that's kind of how it started off initially (or at least that's what I wanted it to seem like). But when I say "girls" what I really mean is "a select few particular girls that I've encountered in my lifetime." There are really only 3 truly noteworthy players in the overarching story (thus far) and a few other minor characters here and there. I just don't want it to seem like I have something against women in general, or that I go about carousing with whichever girls I encounter. I just use the term "girls" so I don't have to reference any of the main characters by name.

So if you are reading this (and I still feel it's necessary in almost every post to address the fact that people rarely read this blog anymore), what I'm saying is that I'm probably going to be making sort of a stylistic transition, although that's really a more grandiose term than is warranted. I do have a few ideologically based posts still swimming around my brain (one in particular that I've had cooking for almost a year but never got around to is an analogy I formulated based on missing a key Malphite ult, which does sort of tie together all the things in the world that frustrate me), but from here on out, it'll probably mostly just be assorted memoirs about whatever part of my own history is haunting me at the time. And maybe there will be some kind of moral in every story, I usually like to come up with those. But I think most of all I just like to tell stories.