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2008 June 16 — it's a date that I chose arbitrarily.

About… a while ago, I quit smoking. No, it wasn't some addiction to overcome or some weakness to struggle with. Pretty much, I just didn't have the time to light up. Then, before I knew it, I wasn't even smoking at all.

Around Christmas time, I realised that I hadn't smoked for some time, so I decided to celebrate a six-month-tobacco-free milestone… despite the fact that I really had no idea how long I had been without.

Anyway, I went through all of that to ironically state that I think that I want to start smoking again. I used to be a pipe smoker, but, now, I want to try a little something different. I'm thinking hookah. It's a South-Asian tobacco water pipe for those of you who are culturally illiterate.

Anyway, birthday is coming up. (obvious hint)

My father grew up in a family with three other brothers and two sisters. It was also a quite affluent family. My grandfather was a Ford executive of sorts, and, from the way that he talked about it, he was a good one. I remember sitting on the floor next to his couch, and I we would play poker while he would talk about how Ford moved him to the worst parts distribution plant in the nation and how he turned it into the best plant in the nation. In some ways, I envy the era in which he lived, but that's probably just the history minor in me longing to partake in the past, but I'm sure that my fondness for jazz has something to do with it too.

Being an affluent family, they were able to afford an eight-millimetre camera. Like any family that owns a video camera, the camera will be abused to record clips of the children engaged in the most strange behaviour… behaviour that will eventually come back to haunt the children later in life.

Years ago, my father took some of the eight-millimetre reels and made a VHS cassette featuring some scenes from his and his siblings' childhood. One of the charms of old eight-millimetre film is that it doesn't come with sound, so my father recorded some oldies off the radio and incorporated it into the video. The songs that he used still to this day remind me of this video: Paul Simon And Art Garfunkel, The Mamas And The Papas, Herman's Hermits and Smokey Robinson. He also had some of the most phenomenal artists of the era such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and (the most amazing) Van Morrison. However, it also included some of the worst music ever made by artists such as The Beach Boys and Frankie Valli And The Four Seasons.

Families grow. Pretty soon, we'll be adding another member to our family when my brother gets married this summer. For reasons that I don't pretend to understand, girlfriends always have a desire to see the old home movies of the boyfriends when they were young. It is for this reason that my family and any woman that I date are under strict instructions to never show the videos nor attempt to show them to anyone that I become on intimate terms with.

It's also the reason that the video came out the other evening. In the process of determining how we could convert the film from a VHS to a DVD, the idea came to us that it might work better to just start over digitally with a twenty-first century solution.

While it seems exciting to work on something like this, the truth is that I probably won't be to interested in making it all come together. Regardless, it's great to watch these old films for some reason… but I don't know what reason that is.

I hate bigotry. Hearing about it is one way to get me excited enough to… well… complain loudly.

Welcome to America. Yes, I bash the nation for the being… well… you see, America is silly. However, there is one thing that I love about America, and it's something that sets it apart from most other nations:¹ America doesn't belong to any group of people except for one: the people who live in America. There's no race that you need to be, no religion to follow and no language to speak to classify one as an American.

It absolutely irritates the crap out of me to hear people go off saying things contrary to that. When Keith Ellison was sworn into Congress, he caused a controversy because he chose to swear himself in on a copy of the Qur'an.² The controversy manifested itself even though there is some sort of clause in the constitution prohibiting any religious test for public officials.³ Then, in the recent election, there were multiple rumors flying around that Barak Obama is a closet Muslim. Even though the majority of the people were rightly informed and no matter how loudly certain people said such to the contrary,⁴ there were still some people unconvinced. During all of this, I'm here saying why: what difference would it make if Obama were a Muslim or not? Earlier, during the Republican primaries, some people were concerned about Mitt Romney being a Mormon and refusing to support him based on that. Here I was saying “I'd vote for a Muslim if he were solid on the issues.”⁵

I can remember a story that my sister once told me. She was at her workplace⁶ talking to her husband on the telephone in Spanish. Then, a coworker told her that she needed to speak English. I absolutely went ballistic after hearing that. I wanted to go down there and speak French to her… pardonable French, that is.⁷ It's probably a good thing that my sister never gave me a name because I do know how to speak pardonable French. Never mind the fact that it's rude to even listen in to a conversation on the phone between two other people, in this country, there is this thing that's guaranteed to all people called freedom of speech.³ America belongs to Spanish speakers too, and, if they want to be catered in their own language, they have that right to demand to be catered in their own language and the restaurants, banks and bookstores have that option to cater to them. Indeed, if it proves useful, it's not a bad idea.

I could go on: I haven't even touched on national origin and gender. I think that I've said enough though. The point is this: America doesn't belong to any group. America belongs to those who live in America. America isn't a Christian nation no matter how much we want it to be. English speakers do not own America. We've made progress on not associating America with any particular race, but we still have… well… idiots chanting and shouting as part of KKK or neo-Nazi groups and being… well… idiots. For the most part, most people in this country don't share those feelings: they're more progressive in their attitudes.⁸ The problem is that those who aren't are loud…

…but I'm loud too.

1. Well, many nations are headed down this road as well. I'd say that it's a good thing.
2. In reality, he was sworn in en masse in the chamber with the rest of the congressmen. The use of Bibles and other sacred texts usually occurs during an unofficial photo-op later.
3. I believe that I read that somewhere once.
4. They even had McCain saying it!
5. Obama isn't a Muslim, and he wasn't solid on the issues.
6. Which doubles as my high-school alma mater.
7. That is, the type of French that you say “Pardon my French” before speaking.
8. And I do not apologise for using that word.

Lately, I've just made some realisations… and I'm talking about the bad type of realisations. In a nutshell, I think that I've failed in life.

I'm not really a good friend to my friends. Sure, I have a couple or so friends who would go to bat for me, but, overall, you won't find the majority of my friends telling me that I'm incredible or something like that… at least, you won't find them saying that publicly. The reality is that I understand. I kind of am a jerk in quite a few ways. It makes sense to me, and I'm not fine with it.

I just wish that I could redo life. Never mind trying to fix things after the fact.¹ Starting out by not ruining friendships would have been a better solution had I implemented it earlier. That would have been such a great idea if only I had thought about it… twenty years ago or so.

Bottom line: I wish that I meant the same to all the people that I think very highly of.

Just writing that seems like a selfish thing to say in itself.

1. Which never really worked anyway.

I am so incredibly happy! I am just so glad that the state of Colorado is now finally without a bigoted, intolerant, warmongering senator…

…for now!

Okay, when I think back to the jobs that I've had in my past, there's aren't that many that I look upon with great delight. Sure, with my wicked sweet computer skills, I've worked at some wonderful places and some places that I don't care for at all. However, when I think of what my absolute favourite job was, I have to say that it didn't involve computers at all.

For a little over a year, I worked as an employee at a local noodle restaurant. Saying that I worked as an employee is about as specific as I can be without being too verbose. I really did a little bit of everything while I was there: washed dishes, waited on people, took orders, worked as a sauté cook… Since we were the slowest store in the chain, we really had a lot of time to learn how to do everything instead of simply specialising in a particular area. That meant that I learned how to cook.

As much as I did love food service, the pay sucked. Yeah, it was a nice job while I was in high school. Of course, there probably were some better paying jobs out there in food service that I could have had if I had looked for them.

Here I am now looking for a job that's just going to get me through the next five months until I go to graduate school. A job in food service seems to be something low commitment enough to abandon when the time comes to head to Nodak. The sad part is that it's making peanuts compared to what I could have be making if I would stick to an IT job.

Essentially, I've already come to a conclusion. Everyone always says to get a job that you love instead of a job that pays well. Well, that's good advice to live by, but I feel like I need a little bit of encouragement in this regard.

Encouragement? Anyone?