back to basics

so i haven't blogged in quite awhile. roughly 4 months. and i've actually gotten people asking me to blog up again. even employees at subway are asking me to blog and let the world know of my amazing and breath-taking insights into humanity and the experiences we call life. and so i will. i've always been a man for the people, and the masses have spoken. they want reger.

update on the personal life that are spawning these thoughts and experiences of my current situation:
not doing the school thing this semester. not big into that. i've been wondering what i want to do with my life (in the long term. i'm quite comfortable in the short term, but more on that later) and i've decided that WPI is probably not the best choice for me now. 4 years ago, it was a great place for me to accomplish the goals i had at that time. but i've changed a lot in the last 4 years. more than most people here realize (they would if they sat and thought about it) because they have been growing and changing along with me. but i think people from home would almost not recognize me in the ways i have changed. (mainly the extra 40lbs since college started. 40, yes i know that's a lot, but it's a slow process to reverse. stop snickering) and i'm focusing more on the idea of me being a high school math teacher. i don't think i could handle doing research in the private sector or trying to do the whole publish thing at a university. i want to teach. just teach. and i think high school is that possiblity. so right now that's where the future is looking to go. math degree with a teacher certification.

so if i'm not going to school, you may be asking how do i fill up my days? i am honing my culinary skills. oh yeah, i'm a cook. where at? is probably your next question (it would be mine if this were a real conversation and not just me rambling semi-coherently). i'm cooking at TKE. oh yeah, i'm the cook at a fraternity. what could be better for a young man of 22? and there's not much i tell you. i'm paying my rent and house bills through this, i'm getting a bit o' spending money, and i'm providing a service back towards TKE. and i get to sleep til almost 10AM every day. so i'm just rocking and rolling the rest of the semester as executive chef in residence of tau kappa epsilon.

but being the cook and occasionally drinking a beer in the evening hours to enjoy the fine taste of malted hops can't take up all the time in the week? what else do you do? that's where the woman comes in. it will be 6 months in a couple days that we have been together, and i'm just going to throw it out there that being in a relationship with carla has been fantastic. she is beautiful, graceful and very intelligent. i love her.

speaking of relationships, this is something that i have realized recently in my thoughts on relationships and how i've seen people interact in the last few days. i think the most maturing and the largest changes comes during the 18-24 age range. at 22, i'm getting towards the age where i'll finally be over about 85% of my maturation process. it can't be 100% done because life goes on and the maturation process continues til the worms start eating our rotting corpse. (like that visual image? you do don't you? you're sick). but i'm getting to the point where i think (this being the operative phrase i think, cuz this is just my opinion). but at 22, i've done a large amount of maturation in the past 4 years. but i am now beginning to make friends. good, close personal friends that are of the 18 and 19 age. and they are close enough to my own age to enjoy the same things i did as a little kid and they remember the same tv shows and doing the same stupid shit that everyone in my generation has. but, they have not yet had a lot of the same experiences as i have, and have not learned as much about personal relationships and human interaction. i sometimes forget this when the 18 year olds i know do stupid things or have reactions to situations and events. i was just getting frustrated at them for how they responded to events. but then i realized that no matter what i say to them or how much i tell them how you'll look at this in the long term, they probably won't listen. and i don't think it's because they don't respect my opinion or that my opinion is worthless (this is a totally different subject), i think that it is because they need to experience it for themselves. that's the only way to really grow. you can learn a lot from listening to other people that have had similiar experiences, or you can read about it in books, or you can observe it happening with other people in your social circle. but i think that it doesn't matter if you hear or read the experience. you need to go through the situation yourself. you need to have those memories yourself. only then can you really draw on other's advice or the words of books. it sucks that you have to go through the rough stuff in life to understand its place in the grand scheme, but it is also freaking awesome because you can so appreciate the highs of life so much more as you experience more of it. like this tid bit of advice: there is no secret to life. you just live it and try to make yourself and your loved ones happy without hurting other people. that's it pretty simple, right? it took me 21 years to figure that out. and i don't even know if it is correct. or even close to correct. but it's pretty good.

moveon.org i am against the current aggression towards iraq and the nonaggression towards north korea. iraq is a threat to the iraqi people not to america or the rest of the world unless you're talking about oil supplies. north korea has actively started up a nuclear weapons program, and yet we are not calling for "regime change" on that peninsula, are we? i could go off on this subject for pages and for hours, which may come at another time. i'm going with this short condensed version: exhaust all diplomatic, international law routes, then use military force as a last resort. and if we are going to police rogue states and nations headed by tyrants, then we have a lot of countries where we need to perform these "regime changes" even ones without economic or military advantage. there are mor e pressing concerns here in america that we need to focus on before we start flipping out on other nations about how they act towards their own citizens and the international community. this last paragraph has many logic holes in it, but i'm not in a politics rant mood right now. i'll present my thesis on the state of current world affairs at a later point in time.

ok, kids, futurama is about to start on cartoon network, so i'm out