edward fox’s reality

I like how I consistently screw myself over. I don’t really feel like explaining it, but I guess I sort of will….

Well, no I won’t. Lol. That just isn’t important to you, and you shouldn’t care, so gbye.

That’s enough for tonight.

Zack tried calling but apparently the call was routed to the wrong number (???)

LATER. #$%#$^$%!@^

We always seem to want time to move faster. Why? What an obnoxious question, but it’s a question I’d like to answer tonight.

As I slowly age, well, at the same speed as most people, everything around us ages with us, whether it is human, animal, or just a regular object.

Today, the Internet turned a young 35 years of age. For those of you who don’t know, the internet is not just the WWW/HTTP (Web) Protocol you are using to view this, but instead, the interconnection of two computers to each other to share data.

Just over a week ago today, I realized that I was approaching life wrong. My progress is somewhat steady. I am not sure about me losing more weight… I’ve been slacking off with exercise. I’ll try to tonight… We shall see. More updates later on, once the night actually _ends_.

I know, I know. I am behind in my rambles. Lately, though, I think everyone has enough to read from the previous blogs…

I’m going to ramble today, however, about what I’ve been doing wrong, not right.

I realize I just need to go with whatever’s going on (”Go with the flow”, etc.)…

I went to a play yesterday (Friday). Les Miserables, a highschool production. It was nice. I saw David there and whatnot… talked to him a little. On my way home with my friend Alyssa, I realized quite a few things, but that actually is private. Sometimes it’s best not to share.

I saw “X-Files” aka “Fight the Future” (1998–DTS/5.1/WS) twice today. Once early, and once around 8:30. It was good both times, better later on, though, since it was on the projector, etc. Occasionally, it makes you think about what really is going on in this world.

Oh, look at me. I’m wondering about what’s going on in the world, and don’t even know what’s going on in my own head. Hah, how beautiful.

That is all for tonight. I eagerly await someone coming to live with me…. T minus 2 months?

I had an interesting Horoscope for today…

Right now you can do now wrong. The stars shine on your home, tent, car or wherever you’re spending your quality time. When freedom calls, you’re the one who picks up the phone. You have ideas to carry out and friends who follow you to whatever new place you lead them. Make waves and move mountains as you delight in change for its own sake. Of course your underlying motive is to help others, but you can’t resist showing them some unheard-of options while you do it.

The hidden people reading this (I know a lot of people read this without telling me– I see access logs.) can now see what I look like *Updated today*: http://drnx.net/images/me2.jpg

I don’t want to try and spend as much time on this blog tonight… So, I’ll try and be a little more to the point. Lately, as you may know (after reading previous posts), I am attempting to be nicer to people. I believe I am accomplishing the task quite well. It depends, I guess. A few issues have arisen in the past two days, and I am willing to pour a large bucket of light on all of them. Alas, the blog, for today.

Rated TV-PG for Disturbing Reality. Adult Content. Adult Language.

Yesterday, I found out someone was using my screenname, and saying absurd and inappropriate remarks about one of my friends. This problem is most likely going to be dealt with and will be corrected by me, and I will make sure that it doesn’t spread. This is the kind of thing that I hate about life. People don’t know their boundaries. From what I understood, you are supposed to respect someone’s property, their trust, their individuality. Huh? What the hell?

That last part didn’t make sense. So, if you were wise to skip that paragraph, eProps to you, Yo. Anyway, I’ve been working quite hard in an attempt to be nice. These last two days, I’ve had someone to talk to… I’ve been talking to someone different each time, which would imply that I might be acting just a little bit more social. I don’t know really. In my orchestra class, it seems boring. The people there, well, are nerds. I am not, and will not be reduced, to common GT material. GT=AP=Nerd. I don’t know why I feel like this.

Time for a moment to share something from a conversation I had earlier on AIM.

intelligence boi (12:05:13 AM): At the Academy, I think that’s what we don’t think. If that confused you bad, it’s OK. lol. Ok. I’ll try to explain. I feel that a lot of people don’t want to have decent conversations anymore… Everyone’s bored, but they don’t want to reach out enough to make new friends. Heck, everyone has all this bling-bling stuff. Well, why not implement it?
intelligence boi (12:08:43 AM): And hence, that is where the conflict is. I have a bias against who I want to have as a friend, which is unfortunate.I will, however, show full respect to anyone who asks me questions or talks to me, whether online or off. If it becomes a worthy friendship, then there you go. Basically, I’m not going to push outside my bias for friends.

So, now you know a little more about me. Yay?

I am quite pleased now, though. Someone’s coming to live with me. Someone I really care about. Stay tuned, Kids…

Rated TV-PG for Reality. Adult Content.

School, an invetiable assignment, in which I must go through its semi-slow pace of ‘learning’… The first day wasn’t bad. I didn’t argue with anyone, so isn’t that a good thing for me?

These blogs are still part of my improvement series. Please read previous blogs if you have not done so already– www.drnx.net/indexlight.php … Thank you.

Now that people loved my last big blog posting so much, I supposed I should make another of similar calibar. Unfortunately, that was written early in the morning, and this is, earlier in the morning, so early that it became late at night… vice-versa.

Overall, I’m doing OK. I wish more people would talk to me, but it’s only Day One. There’s always the future… I was going to leave it at that, but to be truthful, I’m sick of the Academy. It seems no one wants to talk to each other there anymore. They just want to play on their laptops. I’m SICK OF IT. I’d prefer going to Mac, because that is where a lot of people I enjoyed talking with left to, and I’d just be in their Orchestra program. I’m really disoriented now, and I’m sure I’m stating all this for the wrong reasons. But it feels right now. It’s annoying. REALLY, annoying.

I had this little pointless questioning of David today. On AIM. So much has changed since Saturday. It’s a horribly, hugely challenging task. You know I basically lived and breathed on insults, attacks, and arguments. Now, to remove that and all insults from my daily conversation is painful, but it has to be done.

My mother decided to yell at me for the fourth straight day in a row. Something about … oh I don’t pay attention. She just tries to repeatedly belittle me, even though I don’t say anything rude to her. We were supposed to go shopping today, so I sort of delayed leaving a few minutes, and then she yelled at me, as if I didn’t want to go. I walked out, and said “Why are you being so disrespectful to me? Can’t you be calm for one day, please?!” This kind of stuff doesn’t help with me attempting to calm down at all, but it never gets me aggrevated. I’m finding that I am only getting marginally irritated with people I care about more, and that don’t disrespect me. Joy, another problem area.

I want to put some positive in here. I talked to Travis Hatridge. All the now-sophomores know him, but the were-juniors now-seniors probably knew him, too. Really nice guy. I talked to him online today, and yes, I was disrespectful to him a long time back, but fortunately wasn’t like that near the end. Long story short, I wanted him to read my blog, and invited him to a phone conversation with me. He said that’d be cool, but his mom has a work phone and can’t be used for any other purpose… even if I wanted to pay for it. I’m really not that mean, nor am I ever. I hate making other people pay for things. That’s never how I was… So, I guess I wasn’t totally cruel, right? Yeah, but I want him to get a phone line or cell soon; who knows? Maybe he helped in contributing to me being nicer, too. Whatever the case, I just thought I’d try to make a nice personal and friendly gesture by calling him, but e-mail will have to do for now.

I talked to Antonio again. It was odd. I think we have some sort of brotherly connection to each other. I was going to IM him after I had went off on him for some ignorant reason a few weeks ago, but it was on Mobile status… so he IMed me the next day. Haven’t gotten in an argument yet. Sounds good. Not arguing is pretty nice, actually.

Aaron is entertaining, and I haven’t really been talking to Zack lately. I’ve been focused on myself, and haven’t actually had conversations with a lot of people. When I say focused on myself, I mean to improve myself, not self-centeredness… Here’s a good example of something else I tried to improve.

I had a pathetic interrogation session with David today. I don’t know why I can’t accept the positive in things. Obviously, being a negative person for so long, I guess it was bound to happen… I am making improvements, but they happened late. I realized something. That’s what’s causing these changes– actually realizing I’m messing up. I didn’t nearly mess up as badly today, though… Near the end of the night, David needed some help with a paragraph for English (I assumed)… [Now listening to: Prodigy - Break & Enter, 192Kbps]… We talked easily. There were no gaps in our conversation. I didn’t have to force myself to think about what I should say next and if it would be right… Behind my negativity, my mind knew what was right. It wanted to be right, and I gave it a chance.

So here I am, more pleased with my life with each passing day. I need to just relax… not only to be nicer, but to take what comes, and be happy with that. I know that I can get so much further if I work with people at their own pace. I felt complete once David signed off–accomplished. I had done my good deed.

Accomplished is what I want, but I am not expecting that to always happen. Even if I try to change it, this isn’t always going to work out right on target. But I don’t see myself failing the same ways I did before. I have respect. That “R” word a lot of us had a few years ago. Some of us have lost it, maybe just a little, maybe because you hung out with me too much, but whatever it is, we need to bring back respect, privacy, and trust back to the mainstream part of our lives. We seem to be lacking the ability to freely express ourselves, yet we’re all trying to do it. Why? What are we missing? We express ourselves with clothing, hair styles, music, but… what about communication? Verbal Stuff. Talking. HUMAN INTERACTION. I believe laptops are foruming the possibility that we will not be able to hold decent conversations in the future, and that with the easy exploitation of media through new forms of technolog, this will cause us to, not only further breach privacy and trust, but to feel less trusting of others.

I’m going to tell you another little secret. Hiding things sucks. Have a secret? Where would you rather have someone else hear it from? You, in an accurate form, or some random person that overheard a friend of a friend of a classmate? For those who chose the latter, you are odd! Secrets are a great thing, when shared with the right people. I understand I screwed up in the past majorly, so I still have to remember that. I’m going to include a paragraph from something I wrote a bit earlier to someone:

It’s just… I mean, well, he says one thing, “You’re only 16 once”, and I only expect to be moved by that, and not by our Past? Of course not. I know, a lot of people say to get over it, but I think that if I don’t remember the past, or worse, purposely forget it, how can I improve the present, and my future? A lot of people also say the past shouldn’t shape you. I disagree–sometimes you need the past to be re-shaped, and without a history, what else do you have? You’re just as lost as a newborn baby out of its womb. I don’t know. I might be wrong again, but at least I’m making an attempt. Please do correct me!

I don’t want to forget it. It helps me become a better person. It makes me feel bad at times, but it’s that little boost of motivation I need sometimes. I’m not always strong, especially when I address my downfalls.

What does all of this mean? To be stronger, you must become weaker. You must admit to wrongdoing. I’m doing that…I’ve successfully lost 20 lbs. in the last month and a week or so, so that’s pleasing towards me. I still have a lot to accomplish. This isn’t an easy renovation and re-wiring of my mind and how I function. At times lately, it has been quite pleasant, but what can I expect? This, I guess. I’m slowly feeling better, realizing that I don’t think I have to try hard to be liked by people. I just need to not be rude to them.

Now, a short clipping from a song I am currently tuned into… [Now Playing: Me and My - Fly High (Radio Edit) // 3:50]

Fly High…
Fly High…

Keep Your Spirit High, and Let it Flow,
I’ll Take you Where You Want to Go.
Open Up and Let me Free Your Soul
Just Let Your Body Lose Control.

Run away with you…
No matter what you do…
Just remember…
Always… Fly.

Keep Your Spirit High, and Let it Flow,
I’ll Take you Where You Want to Go.
Open Up and Let me Free Your Soul
Just Let Your Body Lose Control.

It’s important to read the past few blogs before this one, so do that now. www.drnx.net/indexlight.php … k thanks.

So, tonight, I’ve relaxed sort of. I don’t need to be wound up in the past, though I certainly did enjoy it.

It was a good game. Me and Negativity made great partners. Unfortunately, negativity died today, along with … well, a large part of my conversation.

Today’s earlier blog got a good amount of what is an equivalent to Xanga’s eProps. A lot of people thought it served a good message, without a conclusion, as one reader pointed out.

That’s how life should be. The conclusion shouldn’t exist, until we die.

It might be good to read the post before this one, too.

This is one of those random blogs that I just can’t hold back on. If you don’t like mature material, don’t read what I’m about to say.

Rated TV-14 for Adult Language. Adult Content. Disturbing Reality. (Mature content edited out)

So, I sit here. I went to sleep around 4-something… middle of the hour about. Woke up at 8:30 AM.

What’s the point of hiding things? I can’t believe I’m about to ramble about this, but I will. Now, a topic switch.

Going back to the David thing… I’m going to describe his life in a nutshell (and certainly not him as a person). He’s extremely, overly popular, and always has something going on. When he chose to hang out with me instead over other people, I felt honored, and not only had I felt honored, but I decided to learn something, too. He didn’t mean to teach me it; it just happened. What happened? The beginning of what would make me feel like crying everywhere, but more so now than before.

It’s hard to describe how I’m feeling online… I do this so that I can look back at it, and see what problems I’ve had, faced, overcome, whatever.

While I was with David (Sorry for going off-topic slightly), I realized that he really is popular… his cellphone rang at least 6 times during the short time I was with him… He just seemed so, himself, and he’s always nice, and that’s what kills me. The fact that he’s so nice, and look how far he’s gotten.

I know some of you may hate subliminal, but that’s what this is all about. I’m not going to flat-out tell you what problems I’m having. I’m rambling like this so you can attempt to put some of the pieces of the puzzle together yourself.

What sometimes made me feel worse, isn’t only the fact that I treat everyone like crap. I think the main problem was… well, jsut that–thinking. I’m actually thinking about what I’m doing now, and I’m not liking it. It’s driving me insane. I just want to be a mess wherever I go, and, I hope the feeling fades away, but I’m not sure. Geez, I abuse commas. The thing that really hurts me worse, is my past. Normally, I don’t mention it, and it’s way too old to be on this blog, so I’ll talk about it shortly. I’m not proud of it, and I will not repeat it, under any circumstance.

2 School years ago, I was in a class with David Wilkins. I thought he’d be a nice guy to talk to, but the problem was, I thought he was stuck-up like every other good-looking person in our school. That was an error on my part… (as I type this I’m figuring out other things, so if it doesn’t make sense, just try the best you can!) As I went through the year, I didn’t exactly respect him… I don’t respect a lot of people, and that’s wrong–just wrong. That’s also going to change.

Disrespect takes up a lot of time. Yelling, screaming, arguing, lying, all things that have become excessive, not only with me, but in this world, and people like David do their part to counter-balance it all. Even after all the shit I did wrong to him, he still decided to go with me somewhere. Granted, it took awhile to get in his schedule, but we finally found time…

(Sorry to everyone else in advance, but…) While I was with him, it was the most worthwhile time I spent on this Earth.

If you are thinking odd things now, stop. That’s wrong and dirty, you little pervert.

What I’m talking about, is something that should’ve been told to me a long time ago. I’ve heard the phrase, “You only live once”, and when it’s said by someone I don’t care about, it doesn’t have weight. But, when David specifically mentioned (as I said in the previous blog) “You are only 16 once”, that’s when I realized what I had been doing wrong.

I acted as if I didn’t want to be a teenager. I separated myself, thinking I was better than everyone else. Who the fuck would want to talk to someone like that?! It doesn’t make any sense to me, not anymore. Like I said, now that I realized this, I can’t go back at all to what I used to be. I don’t know what all the factors were, but I know that the key factor was David. It seems odd, you know? I see someone only a few hours, and I last saw him over a year and 3 months ago, but inadvertently, he told me what I needed to hear. He seems perfect. So damn perfect. Damn in a, perfectly good way, of course.

So what does this mean? I don’t know. I’m not going to act the same around people. I’m so serious. I don’t know what was wrong with me. I never thought you could be nice, and be happy. It just, didn’t make sense to me. Once I call David to let him know about all this and more, he might just be a little annoyed with me calling so many times (Ha) and might be a little, well, thankful.

All too often I take for granted what I have. Or, I take advantage of people, poke fun of them, and for what? To make myself feel better? To end friendships before I can start them? What does that do? That serves no purpose. I realize, some of you may be disappointed with the fact that I am not going to be making fun of everyone else but you… and occasionally, you, too. I understand that, for a short bit, I’m going to be pretty boring. Hey, having to re-boot your whole level of conversation and communication style isn’t that easy. I can get a faster processor, but it’s gonna cost me. (Hey! That didn’t make sense to me, either–we’re in the same boat.)

Anyway, I don’t know then, why I feel so awful today. Is it because David’s so popular, and I’m just a little loser-kid, at least for now, and really don’t have that many friends? Or am I more confused by the fact that, I don’t know if I’m going to still be his friend, because we so rarely see each other? That’s what makes me feel worst of all. Yes, that’s it. How can I tell? Well, it makes me cry, kids. It scares me. I don’t want to stop talking to someone, that made such positive changes in my life, in just a few short hours, maybe minutes. Whatever the hell the timespan, I just feel totally different. And that’s just it. Feeling different hurts, bad. Changing how you’ve been, and realizing how you’ve been for more than 4 years in the past was just wrong, and that I (yes, me) could have had way more friends. Suddenly, I couldn’t really give a shit about school anymore. It’s just this huge time-waster. If you read my previous blog, with the “attached” essay, you’ll realize what I mean. For the record, I don’t really consider myself a nerd.

By the way, I read over the paragraph above ^, and I got to “I don’t know if I’m going to still be his friend, because we so rarely see each other” and cried again as I read it, so that must have something to do with it.

A lot of you think I have no feelings, no emotions.

What I’m trying to get at is, I didn’t think! I did not process anything I had done, my emotions, my thoughts, nothing! My mind was empty, and that is what I had become. An empty-headed, empty-counscience person. I don’t want to be like that. I want to be… better. A lot better.

If David’s still my friend, that will happen.

I want to make a good point. That doesn’t mean that, if David isn’t still my friend, at least, as good as we have been; no–scratch that, better, much stronger friends than we were before. I am just sort of lost right now… I’ll find my way. With Help?…

———Edit: 8/22 @ 12:08PM———-
I just got off the phone with David… Interesting. He summed my above typing with this:

“It was weird that it wasn’t weird.”… How great is that?! We’re still friends, and for a good reason… we actually like talking to each other.

Before we get into the blog, if you are looking for details of anything else today, you aren’t going to find the person(s), or events, mentioned anywhere, ever. I apologize for the strict Confidentiality Agreements in place.

OK, so it’s not mid-day. It’s 4:20PM. I just got done driving around with David, after he got lost. He picked me up around 12, and I made him get out of his truck (ooh, fascinating, a truck!) to come in and see my room… then after about 5 minutes of me staring at the computer, he was hungry, so we drove to Braum’s… OK, he drove, I rode, and he ordered something, and we ate it at the school in front of my house. We then went over to Wal-Mart, to buy a pack of gum. Yeah, it’s a lot of gas, but hey, we might’ve saved a few cents!

So, after that, on our way back, there was this… really, dark-colored pair of relatives, a mom and son it seemed, that were arguing with thick accents, something about leaving someone somewhere, or, something.

The scent of David is still in my room. Cologne has that effect. He left around 3:00 or so, Now, it’s time to do a reflection of what I thought of him. When I was at Wal-Mart, I was walking with David, and I have a big mouth, and I noticed that he’s, for a lack of better words, uberly cool. Like Daniel, he’s incredibly nice, except, David’s extra-nice. He’s so nice that he’s never said anything rude to me in the entire time I’ve known him, which really does say something in and of itself. However, when I was walking with him @ WM, I sort of felt odd because I wasn’t talking. I have a big mouth, so… connect the dots. However, I rested assured once he told me he was comfortable with me, which was nice to know.

I’m going to devulge a little… secret of myself.

Ugly people don’t like me. Noooo it’s true! Ugly people can’t, STAND, me. If you look bad, you might as well kick me down and never talk to me again; it just won’t work out.

That’s probably why my relationships had been so horrible in the past. I went out with ugly people, because I thought I couldn’t do better. This is drifting away from previous parts of the blog, but it isn’t drifting away from what I really think. What do I really think? I think that, my negativity really has dug me into my own hole. I need to at least attempt to be positive, and I’ve done so lately. I need to cut back on the whining, too, and yes, I must change. One of the words I like least, is change, but it seems necessary now…

Why shoot for the low stuff? Classes, ethnicities, groups of people, cliques, are all artificial divides, people. Don’t Divide– Unite! Less nerdy, basically… hang out with as many different people that you can. If you hang out with someone that’s like you, you probably aren’t having as much fun as you could be having, if you met someone with a different style, say, of music, clothing, etc., or different opinions. People are out there in plentiful amounts. You just have to find them.

Sticking to what you know just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Also, if you are the low stuff… Shoot higher. Who knows? Of course, you won’t be as low on the social food chain after awhile will you?…

—————8/22/2004 @ 3:05am——————-

Rated TV-PG for Adult Language (”F”-Word). Reader Discretion is Advised.

Hey, check the jargon out. Ite? It’s the preview, of the future, ite!? Don’t call me a poser. Don’t call me an impersonator. Don’t tell me I’m changing to satisfy anyone else, even if I am. That is what I want to do, and that is what will happen.

I have plans for this December, and someone specific is part of it.

I just got back…. about 45-60 minutes ago, and Rehan came in to look at my monitor, which supposedly looks bigger than his… Then he had to go, due to some emergency girl issue. Don’t Ask!

We saw Manchurian Candidate, after I begged the ticket giver that, even if I didn’t have my ID, Rehan would be responsible for me. Woo. So, we made it in… there was certainly a lot of originality in the movie, but some parts were sort of stereotypical. The ending was much smoother than the beginning part of the movie. The middle was almost fluffage, if you will. Just wasn’t that cool.

Today is one of my most awkward days. Some people know why, some can guess… Few will really know how I feel right now, and have been for most of this day.

When I was with David, he said something that really stuck out: “You’re only 16 once.” Well, I was 16, and I’m 17 now, but for him being 16, the phrase made sense. But why not apply it to my life? Listen. I’m fuckin’ lame, all right? You can’t put that without profanity. Seriously. So what do I need to do? Change my attitude, and I swear, if I hang out with David more, or people like him (I prefer David… o_O), I will definitely become a lot nicer, and more…. publically displayable.

I just feel awkward. I like thinking positively… but I am just not sure. What if I’m too positive? Then I screw myself over while I learn how someone screwed me over… Back and fourth I walked, 45 minutes, throwing a baseball back and fourth along 7 3-foot pieces of sidewalk. Back and fourth, side-to-side. I was so emotionally confused, and I still am. I really need to talk to two people in particular, one I can’t mention, and the other one, Zack. It is just driving me insane… I don’t want to end things. A relationship was formed today, and to end that so soon… I just want more. Not sex or anything, but just more communication… but, the classes of people, the groups of people… is that a barrier for me? Must it be? Can it not be?

Or should everyone just wait until December?…

—————8/22/2004 @ 4:20am——————-
An Essay: Why Nerds Are Unpopular:
Yes, I did read this entirely. I did not write it.

“When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down’s Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called “retards.”

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn’t make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don’t smart kids make themselves popular? If they’re so smart, why don’t they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn’t matter much. Kids didn’t admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn’t want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn’t want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn’t have taken it.

Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don’t think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn’t drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that “no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.” I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don’t mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don’t consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids’ opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things “right” is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.

Nerds don’t realize this. They don’t realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don’t realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who “can draw” like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that’s why they’re good at it. Likewise, popular isn’t just something you are or you aren’t, but something you make yourself.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They’re like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.

So far I’ve been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it’s only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn’t socially adept enough. But “enough” depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don’t have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they’ll tend to become nerds. And that’s why smart people’s lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.

Before that, kids’ lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school, but this isn’t their whole life, as it later becomes.

Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn’t get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don’t normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I’ve read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it’s part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It’s much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn’t a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.

If it’s any consolation to the nerds, it’s nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don’t actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Because they’re at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don’t persecute nerds; they don’t need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of popularity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear. The least popular group is quite small. (I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who want to pick on nerds than there are nerds.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.

It’s no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.

For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separate the smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I’ve talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.

In our school it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen for me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.

It didn’t have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time was that she was surprised. You mean she doesn’t know the kind of things they say to one another? You mean this isn’t normal?

It’s important to realize that, no, the adults don’t know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don’t like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don’t see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens’ main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I’ve read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn’t want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.

Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it’s populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don’t think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it’s populated by adults, but that it’s very large, and the things you do have real effects. That’s what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it’s no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that’s where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

The other thing that’s different about the real world is that it’s much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.

As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn’t have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I’m not sure which was worse.

Because I didn’t fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn’t realize that the reason we nerds didn’t fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn’t know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He’d seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he’d know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it’s good for smart kids to be thrown together with “normal” kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don’t fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a “pep rally” at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I’d tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn’t really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.

Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it’s damaging even to the winners.

Adults can’t avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don’t they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There’s nothing wrong with the system; it’s just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn’t help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

I’m suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it’s physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I’ve read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren’t crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they’re made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn’t even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were…. Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren’t left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they’ll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years’ training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

What happened? We’re up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don’t start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they’d be a net loss. But they’re also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you’re describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don’t really take it seriously– not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo’s Les Miserables. I don’t think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff’s Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn’t have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff’s Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

There are certainly great public school teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn’t fix the system.

In almost any group of people you’ll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it’s generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that’s exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one’s rank depends mostly on one’s ability to increase one’s rank. It’s like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another’s opponents.

When there is some real external test of skill, it isn’t painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn’t resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.

Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It’s kill or be killed.

This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn’t realize at the time, and in fact didn’t realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.

The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they’re supposed to be learning.

Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before I could bring myself to read anything we’d been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like “character” and “integrity” because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.

The word I most misunderstood was “tact.” As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as “tacit” and “taciturn,” and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it’s derived from the same root as “tactile,” and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don’t think I learned this until college.

Nerds aren’t the only losers in the popularity rat race. Nerds are unpopular because they’re distracted. There are other kids who deliberately opt out because they’re so disgusted with the whole process.

Teenage kids, even rebels, don’t like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called “freaks.”

Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.

They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.

I’m not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems– trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn’t start smoking pot because they’d heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.

The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won’t see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn’t. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.

Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.

Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won’t be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in nerds’ lives is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.

Merely understanding the situation they’re in should make it less painful. Nerds aren’t losers. They’re just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It’s hard to find successful adults now who don’t claim to have been nerds in high school.

It’s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It’s all-encompassing, like life, but it isn’t the real thing. It’s only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you’re still in it.

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don’t have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I’ve said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one– that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both.”

My impression on this is just, Wow. Except, I don’t want to waste time with grades anymore. Just wait. (: It will happen. Changes are being made within the next (literally) 48 hours. Enjoy them.

I know you’ve never seen this symbol, or at least, not in months. Rated TV-G, for all audiences. Learn something new!

BEFORE YOU READ ANYTHING ELSE,
Daniel Thomas– Photoshopp’d. www.drnx.net/ps_fun ! (This WILL be .htaccess’d once I let everyone I personally know see it. You will need to be in my Admin category [Any user can request to receive a user/pass, and it will work with any part of the site. Just IM me or email me.] to access it. Thanks.

Moving along…

It’s not often I get to write about a perfect day, but I will describe it for you.

I got up early, anticipating Daniel would be on earlier than he was, but that was fine. I was so knocked out. I went to sleep around 6. Got up at 10:30. Then laid down, got up again at 11:30. Daniel called around 12:xx… before :30, I know. And to think, I almost cancelled my events for today… because I was so out of it. When Daniel called, that changed everything.

He said to get online eventually… so I did. He showed up around 1:xx (sorry, I can’t keep time?) He came in for a while. He is surprisingly skinny. That’s just freaking awesome. If I was that skinny… well, I’d not only be happier, and look better, but I would be nicer, too. Fat people can’t put up with things the same way skinny people can, but what’s odd is, even though I talked to many people today, I didn’t say one rude thing to any of them. Proud of me? YOU SHOULD BE. After he came in to examine my room, which had some similarities to his (as I later found out), we got in his new car and drove over to OfficeMax, a new one, where he currently works. He had seen the backup battery on my computer, and had been thinking about getting one for his own computer, so we went and bought one for about $24, after he used a $30 Gift Card he had. We went on our way to his house, where we found our way to his room. I helped him connect it, and ta-da! His APC power backup with $75K Equipment Protection Warranty, was installed. I looked and poked around in his room. It’s neat, organized. I like it. This doesn’t get freaky, nor was it ever, ite?!

He (Daniel) has incredibly good taste. I was surprised by the fact that he listens to Opera and Classical music, along with anything electronica or rock, like drum and bass. He used to spin it a few years back, so that was a nice tidbit to learn. Since he did mix live on decks with dnb, that’s what we halfway-listened to, on our way to and from his house. Among other kinds of music, of course… let’s just say, Daniel is a really, really nice guy, and someone that anyone would be pleased to be around. My review for him gives him a 10/10 score. He’s just awesome. One more compliment before you lamers throw up: If I could be anyone, anyone in the whole world, I would be him. I admire him. He’s so damned nice, and… more. Just, he has an attitude, which is awesome. But, he also is respectful, so it makes him seem quite close to perfect. I don’t give compliments easily. So there. We drove him, and I arrived at about 4:15 PM. Woo-hoo.

That, was perfect.

Then, to skip the dreadful details, Tim finally found me and my house, and we attempted to find our way to the Irving Mall… we also had to pick up Brandi. Long story short, we just didn’t have enough time to get to any movie that was decent, so we cancelled and walked around instead, after also attempting to go to the CinePlex. Or whatever the discount theater is.

We drove back to the mall, and walked around around around, and, oh yes, around. I wanted to get a hat, ok, cap, SHINY VISOR WHATEVER, and the people I was with agreed that I am too fat to get one for now, so I’ll wait. If I go down to… ok, 140 is my goal. 28 lbs. less. Is it that hard? I’ve done 14. I’ve accomplished 1/3 of it? Wow!

Anyway, then I returned home around 10:05 pm or so, fulfilled, and full, with multiple Starbuck’s Double Chocolate Chips drinks consumed in the largest size.

What’s the plans for tomorrow?

~12pm: Touring the city with David (Tentative-75% Confirmed)
~6-8pm?: Rehan + Movie Time at Mall (Tentative Time, Confirmed Event)

Sunday: Freedom, relaxation. Nothing.

Monday: ~5:30pm: Mall till 8:30 with Elisa.

Before you read the rating, this is a really excellent blog; I’m actually expressive. Read it–you will like.

Yes I know… you hate it. Rated TV-MA for Adult Content, Adult Language, Sexual Content, Sexual References, REALITY. This does not mean that content is not suitable for individuals who are mature but younger. Reader Discretion is still, as usually, advised.

Despite its hiccups, tonight went really well… Just remember my quote. False Hope Leads to True Tragedy, and you should be O.K. Let me sum up what’s happened today.

I awoke at 12:30, and proceeded to watch “The Shield” (TV-MA- V,L,S) Episodes 5-8 on DVD. (I don’t need to state the season, or at least shouldn’t have to say Season Two, because it’s the only season out on DVD now.) On a rainy day, which I prayed for and got, you shouldn’t expect me to be out running around. The only reason I was out today, other than to feed the chickens and close the coop, was to get the DVD from the mail that I watched today, and promptly stuck it back in today. Gotta love Rentals by Mail. Once that online grocery delivery store thing picks up again, I’m sure I won’t have to leave my house at all, if I become “rich” selling everything I own off EBAY!

So, I was supposed to go to a movie with my Rehan Arshed person today, and such did not happen. I called to cancel, then I was given permission at the last minute (ok, in the last 3 minutes before the latest time I was supposed to call him dawned), but alas, it was too late. Rehan has too many things to do. Why? Heh. We might reschedule for Saturday. Just like the next day in life, it’s tentative. Today (it is Friday already…) I am going to go somewhere with my DANIEL. YES, this is an IMPORTANT announcement! DANIEL THOMAS. We’re finally going to go somewhere, and… do things? That occurs at ~1PM till ~3PM. Then after that, it’s off to the movies with Tim and Brandi. Event was planned with Tim, and he invited her. I would normally call 3 a crowd, but I don’t want to be rude, anymore.

So, I haven’t mentioned this in the record. A day or so ago, a plan was decided between me and someone named Riiileyyy. Riley lives in Canada, and next April, will come visit me for as long as possible… so, that’s something to put in the LONG-TERM Planner. I am definitely looking forward to that time… No more details yet, kids.

So, that’s really the only thinking I’ve been doing. About Riley. First talked 3 years or so ago, and stopped for about 2… now we’re talking again and we really like each other (again?)… Our memory is sorta shot about the past, but, it feels nice to care about someone else… If that person’s life is great, that actually takes away the fun… Yes, this is almost uJournal-worthy (not awful, but not too great either)… but it’s also true. It’s time to do a little bit of… confessing.

I hate the Internet. Oops, that wasn’t what you were expecting… no? I’m getting there. See, I’ve noticed that teenagers, anyone who is horny really, (that just upped this to TV-PG, boo-hoo.) will try to excite themselves in more ways than one. Porn is the main idea, however, sending self-pics has become a popular trend. What better way to express your love than through a beautiful, home-made, compressed MPEG-4 Video of you masturbating (CRAP! That’s TV-14) to excite your online date?! Shit Folks! (Dammit! Now it’s TV-MA.)

So what does that have to do with me?… I just didn’t want to be part of the Internet’s evil side. I promised that I didn’t want to see any graphic/adult images of Riley because I actually care… I don’t want to take anything away from that. I think sex and nudity just ruins the idea of caring about someone, and that is where most teenagers have it wrong. They think that in order to show you care, you need to not only communicate with them (most of us can’t spell or say that word anymore, much less any other words to our partner) but have sex with them, and that is untrue! The tried and true element of a relationship is communication, and I really do hate to say that, even when I want some, too.

FORTUNATELY (yes, not un.), it’s what is best for you. It’s what’s best for your future. And another thing. Don’t have a kid when you’re 21. Geez folks. You want to end your freedom that early? 25, hopefully not but bearable. When you are 30, that’s more like it. You simply don’t have the funds for it, either.

When Riley comes to visit me, (at the age of will-be 16 and I will-be 18), everyone knows what to expect. It’s going to be a lot of affection. One thing I won’t want a lot of, though, is sex. To me, once that comes up, you ruin the idea of having a good, stimulating conversation, and that’s something Riley definitely is.

I’m not saying that I want to date solely online, because, well, I think that’s just odd. However, since it is based on communication, and MSN is an excellent form of that as well as the phone… shouldn’t it be OK? Shouldn’t we survive?

We talked about still being able to date people offline if we were to date online. I thought about that while thinking about Riley… I actually cried. Fascinating. My feelings are that strong. You know folks, I’m really not someone to just fall into a hole. This isn’t some spontaneous new person that I just met, but rather, it’s been a relationship that started more than 3 years ago. I cared about Riley then, and now I’m realizing that I can actually respond to those feelings now. It just seems so awesome, to have someone care about me, and I really don’t want to be sexually attracted… No, not yet. Communication is key, key, key. I want us to last an extremely long time. I’m not closing myself off from other opportunities…

I just want to secure one really caring, nice, respectful, and most importantly, honest, one. I can’t end a blog like this dudes and dude-etts, that isn’t going to happen. So, here.

I had to get up at 3:40AM this morning… because one of my roosters was having a panic attack. The cover of the cage apparently caved in; thankfully, no animals were injured, etc., and it caused me to exercise for 30 minutes. I feel a little better. I’m down to 168. Can you believe it? I haven’t been that low in over 2 years. It feels quite nice… I’ve gotten taller, and this isn’t easy. No, it isn’t.