Brian's World

Attitudes

A few days ago I was viewing the world in a very negative light.  The lack of knowledge regarding anything-my-future was casting a pretty large shadow over everything I was doing.  I was coding very slowly, sleeping too late (10am!), and my back was hurting.

I actually think my back was hurting from spending a few hours in a crawl space moving my mom’s old boxes around, but that’s a different problem.  I commanded my back to stop hurting and so far it seems to have stopped ailing me.

What I realized, was that I wasn’t taking my own advice very well.  I remembered the advice I used to give people who were feeling depressed, homesick, or downtrodden for whatever reason:  Is someone gunning for you today?  If the answer is no, then you don’t have anything to worry about; life could be a lot worse.  If someone is in fact gunning for you, then you can complain all you want until the problem is resolved.  I ran the “how many people are gunning for you with a high probability of success” query and, as expected, I shouldn’t be complaining about anything.  Things could be a lot worse.

I guess I was then feeling nostalgic, because I then proceeded to remember lots of other units of advice I would issue or those that were issued to me by far humbler men.  Based on the fact that it isn’t raining, I have a roof over my head, food readily available, wash facilities that work, the means to complete my current mission, AND the fact that no one is gunning for me: I must be living some form of the high life.

That’s not to say my life is perfect and I wouldn’t change a thing, but on a very basic level things are going pretty well I guess.  Sure, socially I might not be on par with the course, but I also don’t have anyone in the foreground who is actively serving as my enemy.

I’ve been trying to identify the correct way to describe how my spring break has gone and its tough.  Usually I would say “mild” or “mediocre” as a way of saying “well, nothing exciting happened… but my house didn’t burn down” but I feel I should increase my descriptors to something a little less vague where people actually have the ability to respond.  If you’re wondering, I’ve used words like mild and mediocre because they’ve very effective at stopping a conversation.  If someone says they had a great break, you ask them what they did or say “that’s good”.  If someone says they had a bad break, you ask what went wrong.  When I say my break was mild, people tend to just look at me like I have 8 eyes or say “mild?” to which I respond “yea, like the salsa.”  So far, only one person has managed to extend this conversation beyond salsa and back to the subject at hand, but they are a well trained conversationalist.

But like I was saying… there isn’t much exciting news to report.  This break is playing out very similar to the last one, my dad sends me a stack of places I should apply for internships… out of which there might be 1 that uses the words “HTML” or “internet” in their field of work.  This year there are 0 that say Ruby on Rails :-(.  Mom continues to harass me regarding my weight, believing that once again my stomach has shrunk and that is why I did not eat 2 donuts for breakfast or only a can of soup for lunch.  I have actually gained 1.5 pounds, which I will attribute to a lack of motivation when it comes to exercising sir.

Well, I should head off to bed.  Katie is out partying with some friends,  later today I might party it up with Concerto 2… that is where it is at these days.

Good night moon.