Keep Moving Forth

My bathroom is clean. I think this may be the earliest I've ever gotten that done on New Years Eve. In fact, it's been clean for about an hour now, and I'm just waiting for the floor to dry so I can move all the stuff back in and get the rest of my room tidied up and in order.

I suppose it doesn't make a difference whether or not my bathroom is particularly clean, since I have no one to impress. Only the usual people are gonna be at the party tonight, and even then, due to the shifting sands of social dynamics, some of those who have been party regulars dating back to the Greatest Party of All Time on New Years Even in 2010 won't be here. But that's okay. I like to have a clean bathroom to start the year, even if I only clean it once or twice for the entire rest of the year thereafter.

I also like to start the year with clean bedsheets. Since this was our first year spending Christmas away from our childhood home (due to circumstances beyond our control, mind you), I changed my sheets for Christmas Eve and had no plans to change them again before New Years. HOWEVER! Meg came in clutch with a brand new Rick and Morty bedset for Christmas, and Natalie gave me a Mr. Poopybutthole body pillow, so as soon as the bathroom is done, I've got my sights set on outfitting my bed with those items, so the clean sheet streak will remain unbroken.

Up till now, I've always intensely considered everything I put up on this blog; I've pored and pondered over it for great lengths of time before deeming it thorough or complex enough to be worthy to be posted permanently on the internet. That is not the case on this day. As I mentioned a year ago, I have yet to go a full calendar year since 2009 without making at least on entry here, and that's another streak I intend to never break. So here we are.

I guess it's about time to go check on the bathroom again. My goal is to come back here more often in 2019, but... that's been my goal for most of the intervening years (thanks for that term, Razorfist) as well, so... we'll see. But at least I've gotten over that mental hurdle of needing to have something arduously prepared before plopping myself down at the keyboard.

For now, I'll close out 2018 by saying that, by and large, the year sucked. It was not the worst year of my life, at least not personally speaking, but it was almost certainly second place, all things considered.

But there were a few bright, shining spots. I got into Rick and Morty. And I discovered Doom. That game has changed my life. I may get into exactly how more later on; I may not. But one thing I am not gonna do is stop moving and let myself get taken down.

Never Give Up

I have posted at least once every year since I started this blog in 2009, and 2017 will not be the first year I miss an entry.

Blocked

This will not be the first year I neglect to publish a single post on this blog.

I've put up at least one post every year since I started it back in 2009. And I think 2011 was the only year when I wrote only a single post.

So at the very least, I've kept that streak going. Plus, this has been a day. I needed to go somewhere and write something. I have a lot of somethings to say. My 2016 recap is swiftly approaching, and my 2015 recap is long overdue. I don't know if I'll even get to the latter before the end of 2016.

Also I'm tired. I'm not putting a whole lot of effort into this. I'm just going. This used to be a place for thought-provoking insight to spur discussion (or at least that's what I wanted it to be). Not anymore. It's little more than a diary. I didn't even follow through with my plan for it to be a place where I shared stories, probably because I have to be approaching a reasonably intense degree of sadness to even make my way over here.

That's exactly the kind of thing I never would have said outright before. But lack of regular posts (and removal of links from my social media accounts) guarantees pretty much zero readership. I still don't want to get too specific, but I'm here because what I really want to do right now is Late Night Twitter Confessional... but I know people are looking at Twitter right now. And we can't have them seeing my updates in real time. If they stumble upon them later, that's fine. But not now.

I don't have the necessary degree of stoicism to take it to my journal, and I don't have the energy (mental or physical) to pull out my Super Secret Notebook Where I Write My Feelings. It's not a diary, because I pretty much only write my feelings on one very specific, very pathetic topic. I haven't done it in a while (maybe more than a year), but if I were going to... today would be the day.

Oh and for future reference, the title is a reference to the Christmas episode of Black Mirror, just because I'm genuinely concerned I might come back here someday, read this post, forget what I was going on about, and wonder why I titled it like I did. This should be enough to spur my memory, should it fail. You think it never will, but it does, as I've learned from reading a good number of incredibly vague Facebook statuses from years gone by.

Anyway, like I said, now I've got my one post in for the year, and I think I may be able to get to Late Night Twitter Confessional now.

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.

2014 And Other Years: A Retrospective That Turned Out To Be Longer Than I Expected

There are less than 24 hours left in 2014, and I can't say that I'm sad to see it go. Typically when the end of the year is imminent, I sit and reflect on everything that happened throughout its course. Usually this process is touched with some bit of melancholy just due to the nature of my personality (my unwillingness to move forward and my general hatred of change), but really the only loss I have to mourn over the passing of this year is the fact that I watched 365 separate dates go by that will never come again. That's it.

I don't think I could be more excited about 2015. I don't know if I could be less excited either, unless I was saying goodbye to a truly fantastic and life changing year (see: 2011), but again when it comes to a new year, all we're really looking at is another cycle of days and nights with distinctive numbers attached to separate them from all the others. It's only as special as we make it.

I'm not even really sure how to proceed. It's not like 2014 was an utterly terrible year that I'd like to scrub from my memory. I guess it's just that there were very few highlights. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one thing that truly stands out as great, and that was Summer Jam. That was far and away the best day of the entire year, and I'm extremely grateful to be able to be a part of it. As a matter of fact, that was probably one of the highlights of my entire life, as I got to check off quite a few bucket list items that day. If some kind of cosmic wizard told me that I had to live one day of my life for the rest of eternity and that day would never end, but I could choose whichever day I wanted, that would be a top contender.

So there's one shining beacon amidst a whole year of meh. And again, it's not like there were a great number of tragedies that befell me this year either. My dad was diagnosed with cancer, so that's been a bit of a trial, but he seems to be beating it, so that's also something to be thankful for. It's just that when I look back, that diagnosis (and its ensuing consequences) and Summer Jam are the only two things that seemed to have any real impact on my memory of the year. Otherwise it was just a tranquil lake of mediocrity that occasionally lapped on the shores of disappointment. 

I suppose the most interesting thing to do would be compare 2014 to each of the rest of the last five years of my life, since those are the years since I entered the "real world."

2009 was a cataclysmic year in my personal timeline. The first half of the year was fantastic, and contained what may have been my favorite semester of my college career. It introduced me to Magic, which may seem trivial, but that game actually helped shape my life over the course of the next year and a half or so, so it's nothing to scoff at. Over the summer I was forced by financial limitations to drop out of grad school. On one hand that was fine, because I hated grad school, but on the other hand, it was terrifying for a number of reasons. For one thing, I had to commit myself to the "real world." For another thing, it meant my days of hanging out on campus with my friends were over, and to me that was the most distressing aspect, particularly because it came so abruptly. It seems silly, but it hit me hard, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't have any friends at home, and I didn't have any job prospects lined up. So I did what I could to make some money and took a job as a janitor. By the time the year was over, I was on okay footing, plodding along through life, even if doing so with no real purpose. So while 2009 was sort of a roller coaster, for that very reason it was pretty spectacular, and the ups and downs gave me something to remember it by.

2010 began with little fanfare. I did my thing as a janitor for a couple months, and that was that. Then my brother decided to introduce Magic to his group of friends, who up until that point I considered to be insufferable dorks. I had no real desire to ever hang out with them... but if they were gonna play Magic, that was a different story. I desperately needed someone to play with. They played, I had a good time, one thing led to another and I realized they weren't actually as insufferable as I thought on first impression, and suddenly I had friends again. Moreover, I'll always remember that summer as the only time I've ever really reached that zen state of mind where I was completely content with my life and social circles; or in other words, the only time I've ever been single and totally fine with it. I didn't need a girlfriend and I didn't want a girlfriend. I had a good group of friends with which to play Magic till the wee hours of the morning every night after work, and that was all I could ask for.

I wanna keep this as abridged as possible, but that all changed when I met a girl, I was kinda into her, we hung out for a bit, I realized I wasn't as into her as I initially thought, and I broke it off. I wanted to end that year with as little to do with her as possible, but that wasn't really in the cards considering she was part of a new group of friends that formed on RPI's campus. I still don't know exactly how all that went down, but at the end of 2010, which was again an overall solid if somewhat unremarkable year, the stage was set for an unprecedented turn of events.

2011. Man. This year deserves so much attention I'd probably have to split it up into multiple blog posts. I can easily say it was the defining year of my life, but because there were so many intricate details and complex series of events, I'll keep it to bullet points.

-I moved out of home

-I got a girlfriend for the first time in my life

-I got a second job, quit my job as a janitor, and got another nighttime job as part of a planned transition to a more responsible adult life

-I got my dream job

It was a freaking whirlwind. Everything happened so fast and so unexpectedly that even now it's hard to believe some of it really happened. As I mentioned before, 2011 was one of those years I was actually sad to see go. I don't think it's a stretch to say it was the best year of my life.

2012, by contrast, was actually one of the worst years in recent memory. It started off great, like an extension of 2011. January 2012 is another one of those times in my life that I can look at and say "you know, I was really content then." And of course that's always when the rug is pulled right out from under you. At the end of January, we moved out of Troy, and not long after that my girlfriend and I broke up. It wasn't a bad breakup; honestly it wasn't much of a breakup at all. We still lived together and did all the typical couple-y things, so it was like dating without the stress or responsibility of the title, and honestly that was pretty great. But then she met a new guy, and that's when things got messy. To make a long story short, she ran off with him, and that was when the classic bad breakup stuff happened. I don't want to get into it too much right now, but I will say there is no one on the planet I have more disdain and less respect for than the guy she left with. Anyway, I spent the last couple months of the year dealing with the fallout from that, and it was rough, as breakups are.

2013, however, brought with it a ray of hope. I met a girl very early on in the year (actually at the tail end of 2012, but we didn't start talking until 2013), and I knew she would be the one to help me get over my ex once and for all. I had never met a girl like her before, she was pretty much everything I was looking for. I even went so far as to say I was going to marry her, which is something I've never said before or since. Spoiler alert: I didn't. Surprise surprise, I was wrong about a girl. In any case, there wasn't any real emotional baggage attached to that one since it didn't get far enough off the ground to warrant that, so it was just another set of stories for Dr. Love to mine a little bit of wisdom from. The other big thing about 2013 was that it was the year I finally bought a car. I also got my own health insurance (which I was supposed to have as soon as I started work full time in 2011 but I had never filled out the right paperwork), but having a car was so huge. I could finally go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted without having to bother someone for a ride or to borrow their car. On top of that, 2013 was the year I was introduced to League of Legends, and that's been another defining aspect of my life ever since. Overall, 2013 was a pretty solid year.

And that brings us up to speed. To recap, 2009 and 2012 were years that were both great and terrible (though 2012 more terrible than great), 2013 was more-or-less positive, and 2010 was pretty middle-of-the-road. I guess the year that has the most in common out of all of those with 2014 was 2010. So in that sense, if I'm setting myself up for 2011: The Sequel... then I guess I'm okay with that.

In any event, peace be with you, 2014. You gave me virtually nothing worth missing, and I suppose that's for the best. I miss enough things from my lifetime as is.

I Am Still Here

I think I'm the only one left, and that's okay. I really should do this more often, though. I've only written three other posts the entire year, and the year will be over in less than a month.

I have so many things on my mind; so many things to say, but now is not the time for any of them in particular. The best time to say them is when they're formulated clearly and cohesively. Of course, it so happens that whenever that time comes, I'm at work and will be for the next 7 hours or so. And by the time I leave, all motivation to sit down and wax philosophical on the ole blog machine has departed, replaced by a desire to just plop myself down at my computer and get in a few hours of League with my internet friends before we all go back to reality for the night.

I guess that could be what I'm doing wrong in the first place. Maybe instead of waiting for a particular jolt of inspiration, I need to just sit down and go with the flow of whatever it is that springs to mind. Yes yes, I know this blog is a veritable sinkhole of metaphysical "maybes," and I realize that I've addressed this very topic on more than one occasion before. But there's certainly some merit to it. I have these grandiose concepts that I can never bring myself to commit to internet space because I'm concerned I don't have the correct lead-up or the proper closing paragraph. I'm afraid that whatever I write will, in the end, have no impact on the reader because it wasn't packaged properly.

Ah, but that's it, isn't it? There ARE no readers anymore!

It's just me. Sitting here plunking away purely for my own benefit. But I am still here. And as long as I am, I might as well make it worth my own time and at least put down the fragments of thoughts and the concepts that I have when they do strike, so that they don't become forgotten and go totally to waste.

Heck, I've just written more than I imagined I could write about really nothing at all. I wrote three paragraphs on not writing. Although there's more to my lack of posting than just a simple inability to properly organize my thoughts. Part of it has to do with the fact that, for me, these blog posts are a form of catharsis. Typically I review and assess my own issues by way of strange pieces of symbolism that I hope can be translated into something meaningful and relevant to whoever might stumble across this blog (which, again, at this point is most likely no one). The hangup I have is my fear that, once I address a particular issue, if simply posting about it on the blog wasn't enough to beget substantial relief, then I won't know how to deal with it henceforth. So rather than face that potential problem head on, I just kind of put it off. It's the kind of thing where, say, you like a girl and want to ask her out, but you're afraid she'll say no, so rather than risk failure, you just avoid her entirely. That way the possibility of her saying yes can always exist in your mind.

That's honestly a terrible way to go about your life, but I usually let it get the better of me, due in large part to my underlying existential dread of not having a goal to accomplish or anything to look forward to. So for example, if I have an idea for a blog post, I have two options: I can post it and end up with something concrete to look back on which may not have perfectly captured my abstract thoughts on the subject; OR I can just keep putting it off and keep the possibility of that perfect post alive forever.

So that's where we're at right now. So much to say, but the mostly self-imposed inability to actually say it. Although I must admit, it does feel good to have the fingers navigating the landscape of the laptop keyboard at this pace again. I should probably get back on the bloggery train. It might help me sort some things out. Goodness knows there are quite a few things I need to sort out.

But for now I just stopped by to update my tagline and my picture. The old ones were outdated. And because I know Future Bill, when he reads this, will want to know what they were (his memory not being what it used to be), the tagline said "Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt" and the picture was the icon for Fiddlesticks' fear. They made sense at the time, which was back in May. Oh and I guess last time I posted I also noted what the previous tagline and picture were. Neat. I'm such a good historian.