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Okay, among my friends, we were discussing what dates are significant to celebrate in the first year of a relationship. I could go on explaining more about the details, but it's 4:24 AM, and I'm eager to get a little bit of sleep. So, I will introduce you to the concept known as Wolfe's Law Of Significant Milestones In The First Year Of A Romantic Relationship.

1. Take the number of months that you have been dating (e.g.: 3).
2. Place it in a numerator of a fraction with twelve as the denominator (e.g.: 3/12).
3. Reduce the fraction (e.g.: 1/4).
4. Extract the nominator. If the nominator is one, the date is significant if the day of the month is equal to the day of the month of the original day that you began dating.

To make things short, celebrate your one-, two-, three-, four- and six-month anniversaries; ignore your five-, seven-, eight-, nine-, ten- and eleven-month anniversaries.

So, yeah, I would just prefer not to be alive at this moment. There was a reason why I hated photographs. When you find yourself the victim of a awkward looking photograph (which, to quote my often quoted phrase, isn't what it looks like), you just don't want to live anymore. End of story.

Unless Andrew could find it in his heart to delete it. Maybe?

Well, good news: I was on a nationally syndicated podcast this evening. Let's just hope that I didn't make too much of a fool of myself appearing on a conseverative, right-wing talkshow.

So, I've been in a financial crunch lately. Several unavoidable expenses just happened to accumulate around this critical time: books for German studies, taxi fare in Denver during a transit strike, other stuff that's none of your business (no offense). This past week, I watched my bank account fall from a healthy two hundred dollars to a meagar six. In addition, I wasn't even done purchasing items for the next month. There was one source of income that could have taken care of my problems: my federal tax refund.

I was entitled to a decent refund. Not being the procrastinator that I usually am, I hurridly took every shortcut possible to get my refund in. However, being the moron that I am, I neglected to affix my signature to it. That put getting my refund back about a month or two. It was scheduled to come about half way through the month of May when I wouldn't even be on the same continent. I needed that money to purchase a plane ticked from Chicago to Denver for the return trip.

As I went about my week, I got into my dorm room on a Thursday night after work. Normally, we would have weekly prayer meetings in Matt's room right next door, but most of us had been too busy lately to make it happen. I started talking about it, and one thing led to another, and, eventually, we were having a little “talky-poo” (to use a JBU term) where we discussed our high and low points for the week. Obviously, having a low bank account will do it for me. So, we talked to God about it. I think that He heard us.

The very next day, I woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup… well, not exactly. I cheked my bank account, and, behold, there was an additional amount of money that wasn't there the day before. My tax return was processed a month early.

I have no explaination… except for one.

The long ride back from New Orleans was just that — long. To pass the time, we talked… a lot. We told each other of the crazy stories of deeds of absurdity that we pulled off. We discussed politics; we discussed culture. We discussed college, and we discussed family. My family is unique; my family is biethnic. My sister hails from the country of Mexico as does her husband. I think nothing of having a sister of a different colour. It's so insignificant that I'm asking myself why I'm even bothering to write about it here.

My feelings towards race are ones of apathy. “Don't ask; don't care.” is my policy. So, when the subject of race comes up on the van ride, I naturally don't care and make that known. Then, one of my travelling companions stated to me that we're all racist deep down inside, and there's nothing that we can do about it. That shocked me! Nothing that we can do about it? I'm simply not a racist. I'm not a racist deep down, and I'm not a racist on the surface. I care about a person's skin colour as much as I care about her eye colour or hair colour. Despite the differences in colour, we all bleed red. I refuse to submit to this ideology that we're racist despite our best intentions. I wish that everyone could feel the same way… the sooner the better.

I'm finished with hard stuff. Rather then lament that the paper which I spent the last couple of weeks stressing out over was good for nothing but a good grade, I'll submit it to you for your enjoyment.

The Mutual Influence of Society and Hull-House

Enjoy!

I've decided that I hate money. When I go out on my own, I'm not going to want to keep a lot of money. That said, I need money, and I need it now. I think that I'm probably going to be needing to take extra shifts this week… except for that fact that I'm absolutely loaded with stuff that I need to do for classes.

Thank you, mom!

Amazon.com is so wonderful. Their selection is titanic. Their prices are affordable. Their service is friendly, and when they accidentally charge you seventy-nine dollars that you don't owe, they'll gladly refund it to you. If you haven't shopped there recently, I highly recommend it.

Travelling to New Orleans by car, I was half-bored and half-pensive as I kept the dial tuned to the closest classic-rock station. A lot of that time was invested in personal thought about my life. As my friend Ryan once said, “God invented Kansas¹ for us to look at our lives as we drive through it. Why? Because there is simply nothing better to look at.” Well, Mississippi is not Kansas; Mississippi is actually quite beautiful. However, beautiful landscapes start to look the same after about an hour of driving. As I got to thinking about my life and my past, I couldn't help thinking about something that I did somewhere in my past, and I couldn't help saying to myself That was dumb. It's these dumb moments that have made me a better person… not because there is something magical in and of itself concerning doing something bad, but because I know that I'll never make the same mistake twice… I hope.

Anyway, I tried to compile a list of the top-ten worst mistakes of my life. The problem is that I had trouble coming up with ten mistakes that were critical moments in my life (at least ten mistakes that I would be comfortable publicly sharing). So, I only thought of five mistakes. Here they are:

Fifth: Majoring in Computer Science — My father works with computers. There has never been a moment in my life where there was not a computer in our home. I can remember the first time that I ever used a computer. It was this weird Sesame Street game where you would hit F7 when the right word was at the right place on the Ferris wheel. I have learned the insides and outsides of these machines for as long as I could remember. I can remember really ticking off my fifth-grade teacher² because I brought to the read-in a flippin' huge book about web development rather than some sort of book “about life”. It seems that I was made to be a computer man… wrong! I find my major to be completely dull. I remember talking to a professor of mine at lunch about my classes and major. He was wondering if I had taken all of my core classes to get the pain over early. I had to honestly tell him that those core classes (which cover topics such as philosophy, history, theology, literature) were my favourite part of my university experience. If I had it my way, I would rather just go to college to study philosophy full time. My advise: get rich, screw your scholarships and study whatever topic you want.

Fourth: Hitting a parked car — Okay, hitting the parked car was not the mistake in and of itself. It was the fact that we (we meaning I) decided to perfect the art of drive-by vandalism via toilet paper. Needless to say, obviously one of the most awkward moments of my life had to have been going to the door to tell these nice people that I had hit there car and having the lady who answered the door not wearing any pants. My advise: know when to quit… and don't ever turn your headlights off at night… even when you're trying to sneak up on someone.

Third: Not learning how to play the piano when the opportunity presented itself — Note: as I was writing this (I've written this over a matter of a week, the grandmother who I talk about passed away. So, for me right now, this mistake is really on my mind. Grandmothers are known for being the largest candy suppliers to minors in North America. My grandmother was the largest salad supplier to us grandchildren. Don't get me wrong: I love my grandmother. Another great attribute of my grandmother is her musical aptitude. She regularly gave piano lessons to students. Now, being the person interested in music that I am, it really sucks that I didn't jump on the opportunity to learn how to play when I had the opportunity to get a head start. It also would have been a great way to get to get closer to my grandmother while she was still alive. My advise: learn piano! You can't go wrong by learning piano. If you don't know anyone who can teach piano, learn something from someone.

Second: Not learning how to speak Spanish when the opportunity presented itself — Same story as with piano. Having a sister from Mexico has been a favourable asset in my life; not because she's from Mexico, but because she's just awesome. My parents were also great for adopting her in the first place. They did a great job with trying to make her feel welcome. However, I'm not sure that welcoming my sister was in my list of things to do at the time. In my defence, I was eight years old. My methods for integrating my sister were more practical. Where my idea was to just put my sister in the spare room in the basement, my parents moved all the children down so that she wouldn't feel alienated. Another concept that my parents wanted to implement in the family was that we all learn Spanish. It made little sense to me why four people should learn Spanish rather than one person learn English. I didn't do it. The concept of my learning a foreign language sounded stupid in my mind. My high school didn't agree. Two years of a foreign language was required to graduate. So, I put it off until sophomore year. The summer before sophomore year, something happened: I learned about this crazy language called Esperanto³. When I found out how easy it was to learn, I took an online course so that I could learn it. Then, one thing lead to another. To make things short, Esperanto got me interested in the whole study of linguistics. However, despite my best interests to learn Spanish (and French) in high-school, I still to this day have got mastered the language. My advise: learn a language, and start with Esperanto. Also, if you're serious about learning Spanish, room with a crazy, Chilean kid.

First: Dating the wrong woman — I would go into detail here, but there are a number of reasons why I can't. Essentially, this is the worst mistake that I ever made because of what kind of person she became as a result and what kind of person I became as a result. My advise: if a girl (or guy for you girls) takes an interest in you and you don't like her like that, don't pursue things. No matter how desperate you are, if she doesn't do it for you, don't force it. If you don't like her, you won't respect her, and that's important in a relationship.

1. My friends from Kansas would murder me if they knew that I would be referring to their state in such a way. I think that it's important to note that when Ryan said this, he was referring to western Kansas.
2. Don't honestly care that I ticked her off in this instance. It's not like she had a right to be.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto