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California

In a couple of hours I’ll be heading to California. This will be my first trip to CA. Maybe it is a bit silly but I’m going to put the song “Going to California” by Led Zeppelin on my mp3 player and I’m going to listen to it on the plane.

I’m looking forward to it a little bit. I’m looking forward to the plane ride because this will be my first time in first class. I hope I can take advantage of it. I think I’ll do alright considering the fact that I’m not flying for work and don’t need to go immediately to work when I land and also because the flight is 6 hours. I’m looking forward to the sunshine? I’m looking forward to seeing Hollywood and the Pacific ocean if I get the chance. I’m hoping that I see at least one celebrity.

The football aspect certainly is big part and I’ve had long enough to prepare so I’m not too nervous about the game. PSU is a fairly large underdog but we have the talent to win. I can’t imagine the celebrations we’ll have if we can pull off the upset. It would certainly be the greatest sporting moment of my life. And how about that Parade of Roses. I think that will be awesome to see.

I just have this really good feeling about this trip.

My Christmas

The most important part of my Christmas experience was the time spent with family and friends. That should be the obvious default answer but I can honestly say that is how it played out for me. I’m not going to lie and say the time was wonderful, because it certainly was not. However, I can’t imagine there was much that could be done to have it play out differently.

All of the typical joys of the holiday were there along with a few bonuses. We had a nice family dinner, had a good exchange of gifts, watched some movies, drank some drinks and ate lots of food. A few of the bonuses were all related to family trips. We visited the Yuengling Brewery, my aunt Helen’s bar (she is 90 years old) and a local beer distributor as a family.

The problem with this holiday is a very personal problem that I just don’t think anyone in my family quite understands. As I’ve gotten older I’ve lost a bit of patience but even worse I’ve become more affected by the actions of those that I truly care about. The best analogy I can come up with right now is that I am like a piece of highly conductive metal as opposed to something hardly conductive like wood. If I am exposed to a charge it causes a spark. The wood would not. There is virtually nothing I can do to not conduct that spark. When people engage in actions that are not “normal” I have zero ability to not let it affect me.

I guess this can be boiled down to an extreme case of middle-child syndrome. I don’t feel like I fit into the family like the rest though I strive to find a way to contribute.

I don’t know if it would do any good to verbalize the struggles I face with the individuals or simply writing in my blog is the passive aggressive, though gentle, method for dealing with it all. Here are examples with each family member.

Father – Continuing to smoke despite the fact that we’ve actively tried to get him to stop. I can only hope that he is as lucky as my aunt Helen who, as we learned, was exposed to the smoke from her bar for 72 years and hasn’t had any known ill effect from it. Every time I sense that he was out smoking it affects me. I’ll be blunt. I’m not sure how I’ll deal with it if he finds out he has lung cancer. It is more likely than not.

Mother – She is a champion at making soup. If only we could just eat soup. She tried to make fish on Christmas eve. Normally, not a problem. But for some reason we started eating half-cooked fish. I’m not mad about this. I just wish it never happened. I don’t like when my parents fail at things. I don’t like to see their imperfections. I could not sit there and wait for her or someone else to try and finish cooking the fish. I had to be in control and finish the job.

Mike – This one is short. A very talented person that is on the path of wasting his talents. He is a film major but the last film I saw was back from when he was in high school. Wait, no, I saw 1 from college. There is nothing wrong with not knowing exactly where your future will take you but there is a lot wrong with not trying to improve the odds that you have an active future. I could pull his grades into this as well, but I’ll let that go. I stand by the fact that grades don’t matter all that much if you are bettering your future. I just don’t want to see him 5 years from now doing absolutely nothing and there is nothing telling me right now that said future isn’t plausible.

Mark – He is the most arrogant person I’ve ever met. I love him dearly and share a lot of interests. I can look past the fact that he always has to be the center of attention and makes bold statements that don’t need to be made. However, I truly fear that his arrogance will get the worst of him someday and he’ll find himself in some terribly unfortunate situation. I honestly fear for that. On top of that he eats too many potato chips and doesn’t seem to care about the impact of that.

To any of my family reading this, it certainly should not come as a shock. In my own mind I may have put more emphasis on various people being the root of my issue at various points in time but it really boils down to the overwhelming fact that every one of their actions has an impact on my own life whether I like it or not. When they make mistakes, poor choices or increase risks in their lives it adds a burden to my own life. The question arises of whether that is my problem or theirs. I believe it is a shared issue. I should probably find a way to focus on my own life more though they all have areas where they could help lessen the stress that a feel. I don’t believe the words I type accurately demonstrate the stress that I feel.

This might be more important to my parents than my brothers but I’d never let the personalities and actions of my family to come in the way of us being a family. No matter what anyone says or does they will still be my family and I’ll stand by them. I truly mean that.

Generally, I can handle my family just fine. However, I think I’ve been a bit worn down over the last period of time (I’m not sure how long that period is) and that just exacerbated the problem. My patience was exceptionally thin for the holidays. Well, my patience has been thin for a long time. I hope to reinforce it at some point in time.

As I started, it was good to spend time with my family irrespective of how I felt when I left. I love them dearly and only want the best for all of them even at my own expense.

Other Thoughts

1) I’ve been on this quest to make sure that all of the discs in my CD collection are ripped to at least 192 kbps mp3′s. It is taking longer than I expected. Anyway, I’ve discovered there are a few albums that include DVD’s of which I’ve never really watched. Guster is one example. I started watching it and it gave me this idea that will lead to point #2. I also noticed that in their Amsterdam music video they visited some of the same places I did. It makes me want to go back.

2) As soon as I am completely out of debt, I’m going to reevaluate what I’m doing with my life. I still think there is an outside chance I’m really supposed to be a musician. I can’t let the burden of debt get in the way of my music. Or perhaps, I should move to Hollywood and try to be an actor. Seriously, I think I want to be in movies.

3) I’m really good at cooking salmon. The seasoning is always the same and always perfect: olive oil, fresh cracked black pepper and medium grain sea salt right on top of the fish. Cook until you see the fat and it is done.

4) Indie films are neat because the soundtracks are usually filled with indie music.

5) I wonder if it is too late to learn how to play the piano.

6) I just had a sip of beer that reminded me of eating celery and that is a good thing.

7) Last week I was saying that I didn’t want to the Eagles to get into the playoffs because they played so poorly. However, after the way they played today I don’t want them to achieve anything less than a Super Bowl ring. They definitely have the talent.

8] One of my important life goals is to build a cabin. Well, I may not completely build it with my own hands, but I’ll own a stake in such a structure.

9) I’d like to own a bowling alley some day or at least belong to a bowling league.

10) I’ve been having a lot of vivid dreams as of late. The most recent ended strangely. I was on top of a skyscraper. To the north or east was another city. I believe it was a Canadian city. There were some containers sitting on a railing on this tower. I knocked them off with the exception of one. I was concerned about the other ones falling on cars and houses down below (but not about people strangely enough). I started carrying the container and it turned into a wooden canoe. I then carried it into the basement of my old Catholic school for storage.

An Experiment

I’d like to think that I’m a big fan of Belgium. However, there has been one important aspect of Belgium that I’ve found it hard to embrace: mussels. There were two occasions during my college years where I got sick eating seafood. I was never quite sure if it had been a particular bad piece of something or an allergic reaction to something.  Over the years I’ve slowly chipped away at the list of potential seafood items that could have gotten me sick: fish, shrimp, lobster, crab, crayfish, oysters and clams.

Tonight I took on the final test of eating mussels. They were of the pre-cooked and frozen in a box variety. All I had to do was microwave them for 5 minutes. The were in a sealed bag with garlic and butter.

It has almost been 2 hours now and I’ve had no signs of sickness. However, in previous cases it took 2-4 hours before I got sick. Only time will tell.

Update: It is now the next morning and I haven’t gotten sick yet.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!

Love

I was watching The Wizard of Oz tonight and there was a particular line in the movie that got me thinking. It was “A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others.”

It is an interesting quote. Essentially, it is saying that you have no direct control over love in your. If a person were to evaluate the love in your life you’d have no direct influence on that rating. You merely have the opportunity to do good in the world so that others will show love to you and by that action your quality of love could be measured.

I’m not sure I completely agree with that statement, but I do appreciate that importance of doing good because that is the only way that others will show love to you.

Avalanche Warning Cookies

We had a cookie competition at work today. There were 4 categories (best tasting, best presentation, most holiday themed and best overall) for the judging and I believe 12 different recipes were presented. My “cookies” won 3 out of 4 categories but they wanted to have other people get prizes so they only awarded me “best overall”

The reason I put the word cookie in quotes is because some people might say the product does not qualify as a cookie because I personally didn’t bake anything. It was composed of ground-up sandwich cookies (generic brand Oreos) blended like dough with cream cheese and dipped into a mixture of Hershey’s melted milk and semi-sweet chocolate. They were then dusted with powdered sugar and presented as a snow capped mountain.

There are two things that I find to be amusing about this. The first is that I don’t really like cookies all that much. The second is that I went out with this girl the other week and she gave me the recipe though I’ll probably never talk to her to let her know her recipe was a winner.

I do suppose that I did make the recipe my own so I don’t need to credit anyone but my own ingenuity. I suspect that my creative presentation had a very large influence on my success. People took time to look at it and then they figured that they might as well try one and they were decent enough and so rich that they didn’t really remember what the rest of the cookies tasted like.

Catcher

There are very few books of which I’ve taken the time to read twice. I’m thinking about reading Catcher In The Rye a second time. For whatever reason, I was reading the wiki page on the book. It stated that “it becomes evident that he is talking from a mental facility where he is being psychoanalyzed” which was a realization I never came to. I’d like to have that context and read it again. Even if it doesn’t change the story for me, it might be nice to read that book again.

My Opinions

• Coffee is best with one pack of sugar and that is all
• The nicest candle scent is sage
• Sugar-free Red Bull is better than the normal version
• Having an excessive number of friends is a sign of weakness
• All Cadillac Escalades should be dissesmbled immediately
• While normal session beer is fine, beer with more alcohol in it is generally better
• Chinese food and pizza are equally good late-night snacks
• The Play Station 3 is better than the Xbox 360
• The only reason rum should exist is to make mojitos
• Bacon is not really as great as people act like it is
• Sunday is the best and worst day of the week
• Wawa is better than Sheetz
• The one and true clam chowder is New England

Thewishlistbuilder.com

If you’ve been putting off the creation of a Christmas wishlist to share with family and friends, now is the time to get it together. There are only 2 weeks until Christmas for goodness sake! Go to http://www.thewishlistbuilder.com and put together that list. It is super easy. If it doesn’t work for some reason or you think it sucks, you are probably stupid and you probably suck. But let me know about it anyway.

I put together a list of material good that I’d like for Christmas but I honestly don’t really care for anything in particular. If I got a pair of socks from my parents, a CD from my younger brother and a sweater from my older brother and his wife, that would be good enough for me. If I would get any presents from my family beyond something along those lines, that would just happen to be a bonus year for me.

I’m going to take this moment to share what I really would wish for if wishes came true.

• friends that lived near me so we could drink beer on Tuesday nights and play video games instead of me spending quality time with my laptop every night making pointless spreadsheets and power point decks

• The ability to be more articulate in my speech – about 75% of the time when I explain something I have to explain it twice because I’m not the least bit articulate

• the ability to play basketball really well so that when I play on Monday night I’ll score more than an average of 0.7 points per game and everyone will be excited to pass the ball to me

• a smaller car

• a non-eternally messy room

• a non-eternally existent pile of dirty clothes

• shirts that appear dry-cleaned every time I take them out of the closet

• a ceiling in the basement that doesn’t drip water at random period of time for absolutely no apparent reason

• sunlight in the winter

• the replacement of various genes handed to me by my parents

• energy efficient incandescent light bulbs

• someone to occasionally do my laundry for me, help manage my money and take walks with me even though I hate walking places

• leaves on the trees 2 weeks after they fall off the trees

• a fountain that served low-calorie Gatorade

• a case of Westvleteren 12 served to me by monks any time I desire a bottle

• to be cask in a major motion picture

• to be in amazing shape simply by sleeping 7 hours every night