I remember my first memory, which is getting up out of bed to play.

I remember, at first, having an unreasonable fear of ninjas.

I remember, at a very young age, getting upset upon the discovery that that Math was not my strongest suit.

I remember discovering how to hit record and play it back, and never stopping since.

I remember finally being conversational with the first girl I ever had a crush on, and getting in an argument with her before I moved to Pasadena.

I remember being very fond of Sonic the Hedgehog.

I remember my first day at a private school being foggy.

I remember trying to play sports at recess, and not really enjoying it.

I remember keeping sketchbooks.

I remember starting a band before I knew how to play.

I remember the day I got my first musical instrument, playing it way too loud, and having my foot tap an imaginary kick drum pedal ever since.

I remember the death glare of the first heinous bitch I have ever met in high school occurring in a Latin class.

I remember the awkward and difficult task it was to grow my hair long in high school.

I remember being able to play Hollywood’s Whiskey-A-Go-Go with my first high school band – just as much, I remember a member of that band climbing on top of an amplifier during a song — and falling off of it.

I remember prom being actually pretty darn fun.

I remember moving into college wearing a Weezer ringer tee.

I remember travel to the Philippines, Europe, and Scandinavia.

I remember starting a band in college with some friends and taking it on the road.

I remember road trips to Mexico and California’s Bay Area.

I remember some bad things about drugs.

I remember failing comprehensives due to simple omissions I should have paid attention to (like ending clauses with a preposition).

I remember getting dumped without closure, and crying the distance on the 134 from the 2 to the 210.

I remember the day of my interview at my current day job, a group of girls from the office walked past me as I smoked a cigarette – and all of them smiling.

I just remembered some things I forgot to list, and I wonder if I will remember this moment of unique clarity; one lined with cigarette smoke and the hiss of nearby surface streets.

I hope I do.

For I, ladies and gentlemen, am forgetful.

Two-pronged post, so for those of you who told me to post something (*ahem* ERIN) you’re getting a two-for-one deal today. ;)

New Living Situation

I already signed the lease to move in with Stuart, and it seems that the situation will ultimately be beneficial to me – namely, my work, because I freelance from the floor. I can’t freelance from my bed, I don’t have the patience to freelance from a desk, and if you’ve ever hung out with me at Fred and Warren’s place, you’ll notice that I sit on the ground not because of a lack of seating but because that’s where I can actually get stuff done.

Well, now I can work on the floor of Evan and Stuart‘s place because 1. I have installed wifi in that apartment and 2. I will soon be living in that apartment.

This is good because I am way behind in my freelance work. Just gotta crank out some invoices, finish up work on Miriam’s Jewelry Website, start on the Casa Sierra website (I’m the webmaster of my own apartment complex! I don’t even live there yet!), and evaluate whether or not I have enough time to work on freelancing for an elementary school, among other things. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, but it helps me remember an itinerary so I’m not going to delete that.

The Girl At The Wedding

After hanging out with Fred, Mahea, and Evan at Lucky Baldwyn’s some nights ago, Fred reminded me that I’d completely neglected to tell the story of the girl at the wedding.

It’s not really that much of a story, but I like to think about what happened since I do remember it in some detail.

It is the story of the anti-hookup.

I’ll explain:

At my cousin’s wedding in San Diego, I, like many other relatives, was dying to kill myself with another cigarette. Substances like alcohol are associative, I’ve often been told, so I’m assuming that the more I drank, the more I wanted to smoke.

I drank a lot at this wedding.

During one of the smoke breaks a girl stumbled out and joined the smoking section. She was, for lack of a better word, hot. Oh, I guess “stunning” is a better word. Regardless, she was extremely attractive, and I think that’s why the conversation of the smoking circle, once she had joined it, lasted longer than it really should have for a smoke break. All the other guys in the circle were being hoakey and friendly with her, but upon learning that her boyfriend was being possessively jealous that she came out to smoke without him, all the other guys backed off being pals with her and treated her like an acquaintance. I didn’t change my behaviors because I really didn’t care to impress anyone, I was just glad to have a little estrogen in the conversation to balance out what I believe was a military man in the circle.

She ran out of cigarettes and to my dismay, so had I, and we decided to run and get more smokes while most of the other guys returned to the wedding party. It was at this moment that we knew she was drunker than we originally thought, as she wobbled on her heels and had a tendency to repeat anecdotes. That’s all good and fine, we did get our cigarettes and returned to the party.

Men, a word of advice; when a girl rambles on and on about nothing, just listen. When you return the volley of conversation with questions that actually are pertinent to the subject, they know you are listening (and hopefully you are), and lo and behold, you have acquired the level of acquaintance, and not ‘some guy’.

Honestly, guys, it’s not that hard. Just listen. I know that some of you already do this, and more power to you; but for you others who can’t deal with yapping, come on, it’s not like it’s a stretch for the average attention span.

Anyway, she thought we were fun to hang out with, good smoking buddies, and asked which table we were sitting in case she wanted to have company on the next cigarette break.

Cool, well, that was fun.

I brushed it off until she actually did come over to my table and sit next to me. She tells me that as soon as she sits back down at the table, she and her boyfriend get into an intense fight over her something as petty as taking a smoke break even though she let him know what she was doing and told him to come with her to keep her company. He has already left the wedding by this time out of spite, even though he was her ride over to the wedding reception. I believe her exact words were “I feel like I’m on lockdown.” Then she tells me about how her relationship is not going well, hasn’t been going well for a long time, and that the dude has some serious jealousy issues. She says the only person she really knows in California is her boyfriend (who brought her to the wedding – friend of the best man) and her boyfriend’s kid, and literally hangs out with nobody else. She’s not even allowed to go to study groups for classes because he’s that possessive.

So I Dr. Phil her as much as I can, telling her that it sounds like they both have resentment issues and that the fights over nothing are probably rooted in some other more important problem at the foundation of the relationship, and that if they want it to work out, that they both need to work to find out what is the issue, and to uproot it before it gets any worse than it is already. I’m putting my money down on the idea that he has abandonment issues since he’s a single dad, but this has yet to be proven in any concrete manner.

She says she tries and she tries and she – and on the third ‘tries’ she starts to cry, so I offer my dinner napkin (cloth – used only once), and as she’s drying her tears she keeps saying how she has no idea what to do about the situation, she has no friends outside of this guy because all of her friends are back in Canada, and she is swearing like a sailor and starting to grab drinks off of other people’s tables.

It is at this point that I make her promise to not do anything stupid. I tell her to pinky swear with me that she will not cheat on her boyfriend, regardless of how much of a bastard he is turning out to be the more I learn about him; I tell her to consult me before she wants another drink so that she doesn’t annihilate herself out of escapist revenge; I tell her I’m going to be feeding her as many cigarettes as she needs so that she doesn’t drink too much or get involved with some guy who just wants to hook up at a wedding; I let her rant and rave and cry on my jacket and snot on my sleeve; I put my arm around her when she sulked; I let her hang on my arm when she was stumbling.

I was a good guy in this situation.

Her: “I hate guys. They just want to have sex.”
Me: “Sometimes, that seems to be the motivation.”
Her: “Are you trying to get me in bed?”
Me: “Nah, dude, I’m looking out for a smoking buddy. Also, I came to San Diego with my parents. That would just be awk-”
Her: “You just called me ‘dude’.”
Me: “Am I not allowed to call a friend ‘dude’?”
Her: “I haven’t made a friend out of a guy in the US yet. You’re the first.”
Me: “You don’t hang around nice guys.”
Her: “I am tonight.”
Me: “Why, thank you.”
Her: “How can I make sure you’re not just trying to sleep with me?”
Me: “Honey, you’re hot, but you’re too freaking crazy for me to even enjoy the sex.” (This is true. I can’t detach sex from feelings no matter how much I try. In this way, I am probably pretty effeminate.)
Her: “You’re funn
y.”
Me: “Still think guys are just out for sex?”
Her: “Yeah.”
Me: “Oh? So why are you still hanging out with me?”
Her: “You’re not a ‘guy.’ You’re something else.”

Hm. She may be right.

So, basically, instead of sex with no strings attached, it was strings with no sex attached. Also, I made a new friend whom I’ve promised to call every time I’m in San Diego, especially since I was her first friend since she had moved to California four years ago.

Well, I erased her number from my call history after we found her lost phone, so I guess calling her is out of the question. I guess it’s for the better, since she seems to have an insanely jealous boyfriend with ass-kicking capabilities.

Jessica, if you’re out there somewhere, I hope you’re doing alright.

Because you owe me an entire pack of cigarettes, you little mooch.

via lydia13

Oh.

As it’s mentioned a lot in this blog, 50% of blogs get abandonned. But what has not been researched about this phenomenon is the content of these abandoned blogs, and whether or not the character of or behind said blogs have an influence on whether they survive or not.

To be frank, I can’t see anyone wanting to do that kind of research when you’re just looking for numbers and statistics, but I have a hypothesis that has yet to hold any water: Blogs used as journals are kept longer, but without readership; inversely, specifically intended blogs spark some readership, but without longevity. Any one of many psychological and sociological reasons could be cited for this happening, but this claim has more to do with the qualitative content rather than quantitative content of the blogosphere.

What also fascinates me is the arc of activity that a blog gets; whether a blog is, in any way, marketed to certain demographics or is just the crux of a miniature community; what is the cutoff point of fascination for a person to cease blogging? The lack of comments? Lack of trackable readership? Lack of the desire to keep it updated? This certainly hasn’t stopped me, as I really don’t care to fish for attention and need to ramble somewhere since people really don’t care to listen to me put together these thoughts in real life. But people, namely bloggers, are as diverse as the world (wide web), and have probably as diverse intentions as they do content. So, what I’d like to know about are what are these other intentions and their nuances, even if for just the personal detailing of life in the information age (oh, in which case they are like me.).

Case in point: Stuart has admirably kept up a personal blog since 2002, and a good one at that; both Evans, Bacon and Stiles have relatively new blogs with a specific intentions with equally interesting content, but have posts that are few and far between because of their respective foci (this is the plural of ‘focus,’ by the way). Obviously, Stuart’s blog has outlasted the other two because of its four year head-start, but I wonder how long the Evans’ blogs will hold up. I know for a fact that their respective interests are not going to be waning anytime soon, but that’s not the issue here: Are their blogs going to survive?

Note: I was worried about Erin’s blog surviving, but it seems that as I named her link in my blogroll “Will this blog survive?” that I’ve prodded her into doing so.

Note #2: I think I might just keep track of friends’ blogs just to see how my hypothesis pans out. So here is your warning that you are all now guinea pigs, FYI.

If any of you are like me, which you most likely are not in this respect (believe me, I know who is reading this; or I should say the lack thereof), you continue to journal but lack the ability to customize it from the ground up. This is why I’ve abandoned blogs on Xanga, LiveJournal, DeviantArt, etc. etc. — the lack of customization. And so I wonder why I hadn’t stumbled sooner onto Blogger.com in the first place, because as you can see, I’ve already made myself at home quite easily.

Considering my position in the grand scheme of the internet as an employee at an internet company, I should probably have answers to these questions about blogs. So I’ll get back to you on my findings since I have access to a great number of research tools. With these findings I will post answers, and if not for my own personal edification, then for the sake of at least being able to propound some useful information to an audience no matter how infinitesimal.

So, I have been able to spend ample time with this new 360 device I have recently purchased, and I have no inkling of buyer’s remorse whatsoever. In my recent sickness, it was the 360 that has shepherded me through the darkness (and NyQuil my flashlight).

In these recent days, I was reminded of how video games used to take care of me when I was sick. I become extremely irritable when I’m ill, and it’s always been that way even though I try not to show it (gotten better at it over the years). Video games used to be the only thing that would keep me from snapping at people. It was entertainment, but it was less cerebral than reading a book, less mindless than watching TV, less effort than playing guitar or practicing drums. Yes, I’ve tried to play drums while sick and that lasted all but 15 minutes (and I had to throw up immediately afterwards).

Back to gaming, I’d first like to point out that this is not to say that I am going to take on the voice of a 360 fanboy, even though I am considering being close. No, this is actually kind of a retort, to an extent, the “Pretty on the Outside” post by my dear friend and fellow gamer, Evan.

I’m not going to rant and rave about how good things look, because we all know that an argument for a better looking game does not denote a better game. In the same manner, a painter who can blend colors very well does not make him/her a better artist. It makes him/her a better blender. This leads me to my case in point, the seminal 360 game of last year, Gears of War, which I had the pleasure of promoting in the past couple of months or so. This game has single handedly revived my interest in gaming, and not because it’s a good looking game, but because it is a novel game.

Now, a lot of people would judge it like another shooter, and ooh, ahh, gunfire, blood, chainsaw bayonet, etc. etc. And to be honest, my cursory evaluation of it was also in the same tone. I thought it was going to be the same as any other shooter that follows in line of Halo, Half-Life, Doom III, etc., new graphics, better ambiance, better physics, incremental improvements in the world of gaming.

Well, I was wrong. And I’m happy to say so.

The reason I’ve been so hooked on this is because it actually makes you think twice about the shooter genre. Even a lot of my marketing contacts had missed this aspect; yes, you are supposed to shoot the bad guy, but you aren’t supposed to rush head-long into battle. You have to take cover. You play the hero, you die a n00b.

Small improvement, maybe, but let’s think about this for a second. Every shooter up until this point has made use of obstacles as cover, but has not emphasized the idea of actually hiding behind cover as a means of survival instead of letting it be just a good idea. If you’ve ever been paintballing, you know that cover is almost the end-all-be-all of the firefight.

Also, the fact that your teammates, with so-so AI (I guess as good as it’s gonna get these days), are always at your side dispels the whole “one-man against 50-million antagonists because he’s a badass” motif. As a soldier, you stradle the line between “I’m a badass” and “Fuck me! We’re getting shot at!” and the fact that cover and taking care of, and paying endless attention to, your teammates communicates this idea very well.

Now, this doesn’t debunk Evan’s claim that more novel improvements need to be made to games to step up games’ quality–and this is where I stop being a fanboy–because Lost Planet, as gorgeous of a game as it is, is pretty much your standard adventure shooter. Yeah, it’s nice. Great, even. But it’s no Gears. Gears proved to me that the 360 isn’t just about textures, because when you’re knee deep in the fight, textures are the last thing you are paying attention to. You aren’t even thinking “How do I get to the next point in the game? I gotta kill that guy to go further? Ok, let’s do it.” You are thinking “What’s around me? How can I exploit that? Where is the rest of my team? Who is shooting at me, and from where? If they can see me, does that mean I can see them? Did we clear the area? Is it safe to come out now?” Notice that the train of thought moves from a future-tense mindset to that of the present, which is what I think shooters aim for (no pun intended) but fail to hold once the gamer gets a grasp on the game and how to advance to the next thing. And even with my moderate experience with shooters, I can still say that I’ve never had these present-tense thoughts while playing a gun-game until Gears. Not with Half-Life, not with Doom(s), not with Wolfenstein, not even with CounterStrike.

Moreover? I’ve beaten Gears of War. And I still like to play it over and over. and over. And I believe the replay factor makes it not just a good-looking game, but a good game.

Felt like posting a music video. I’ve been obsessed with this group lately, because I believe this is what it sounds like to live life like a robot.

I Am Robot and Proud provided by irukababy.

That’s right. I give up. I can’t take it any longer.

I’ve fallen in love with the Xbox 360 here in the office and now want, nay, need one for myself. I’ve been staying late at the office just to play the 360. So yes, I am going to buckle down, take the hit, and purchase one. And why not? There is a good handful of games here in the office so that I won’t have to worry about buying any titles for a while. Also, my brother owns a PS2, a GameCube, and a Wii, so I figure it’s only fair that I should contribute to the mess.

So before I go to see a movie tonight with some friends, I’m going to pick one up for myself.

And thinking about it, one of the reasons my brother and I became close back in the day was over video games, and since I’ve been so busy with other kinds of distractions for, oh, the past 10 years, I should get on the horse again. It could be good for brotherhood. And in video games, it’s a different kind of camaraderie. Especially when somebody comes home with not just a game, but a console.

Damn, I just realized that I haven’t bought a console in such a long time. The last console I purchased, or, I should say, to which I’ve chipped in some money, was a PlayStation. The first one.

Great. Just what I need. Another hobby. Ah, well.