Fear The Man

So my coworker is afraid of our boss. I’m not talking the usual fear of acting inappropriately. I’m talking about when he needs information our boss has, he will ask everyone else before he asks the boss man. Since this is getting tedious we’ll call the coworker Carl, and the boss Bryan. Now the problem isn’t new. Carl has always been slow to get projects done. And Bryan has never made Carl’s life any easier. I remember one time riding with Bryan and we saw Carl on the side of the road. Bryan, our boss, flicked him off. Carl doesn’t communicate well with anyone. He’s admittedly hard to talk to and be productive and he rarely takes any initiative or accepts blame.

I’ve heard from several sources that Bryan wants to fire Carl, and I am pretty sure Carl knows. That’s all fine and dandy, not my decision, but in the meantime it’s hard for me to work when I’m constantly hounded by Carl and he isn’t getting the work done that he should be because he’s unwilling to ask for help from the right source. Gawd.

F Nightmares!

It’s after 4AM and I’m wide awake. Why? Because my high school friend had climbed my balcony while the power was out and was trying to kill me. Lucky for me I had an exploding pine cone (not a hand grenade mind you). But I was trapped in the bathroom and scared out of my mind. I guess I should have just handed over the diagrams and been done with it.

Nighmares are great.

Lead Certified

So last night, Kyle and I both got lead climb and lead belay certified at RockQuest. Trent also got lead belay certified but opted to tackle the climbing at a later date. So now I can climb walls and die much more easily now is what it boils down to. I’m excited about lead climbing, but I also know I only have a little over a month’s worth of climbing left before I move to Lafayette, land of no donuts and no climbing.

I did get some Dunkin’ Donuts on Monday. They’re pretty stale now, but it doesn’t stop me from eating them. I can’t pack them away the way I once did though (thus the dough nuts are still here getting stale). AnneC also asked me for my new blog address last night so say “Hi AnneC!” because she’s probably reading this just like you are.

This weekend there’s a trip to Buffalo’s planned with Jacqui and Clint. I’m excited to see them and meet some more of their friends. I’ve also ordered the parts to make a fencing scoring box, so that’ll kill my day time hours for sure. And if I give up on that I can always work on the software version and/or finish prepping for the tournament I’m hosting the following weekend.

Cut the Crap

My friend, Heather, is moving home. She’s been living in Atlanta, GA attending grad school since August. Last week she tells me she’s packing up and moving back to Farmington on Tuesday. At first I was shocked. Heather is a sharp woman who kicks ass at all kinds of science that I can’t even begin to pronounce, let alone practice. It seems that despite the niceness of her situation on paper (top notch grad school for her field, warm climate of the south, new place and new adventures), it doesn’t make her happy. She’s not doing what she wants to do and it doesn’t make her feel like she’s getting any closer to her larger goals in life.

So she’s cutting out the crap in her life. For me that’s always been easy: cut the friends that don’t really treat you like friends, cut the activities that aren’t healthy, cut the tasks that drain me more than they’re worth. For Heather, I think, this has been a very trying point for her. So it is a big step for her to say that her situation isn’t what she wants and to make a change. I’m really proud of her for being able to do it. I wish I could say that if/when my life isn’t going the right direction that I’d be wiling to leave it all behind and try something else. Heather’s got guts, and it’s great to see her show them.

She’ll be fine I know, she’s got her undergrad under her belt, and tons of lab experience. She’s also pretty and has kick ass social skills. It will be exciting to see where this turn in her life leads her.

Married

I guess you could ague that it started back in September when I started rock climbing with Kyle. I met Sarah, a woman who works at RockQuest. Sure she was cute, but I never think about dating employees of places I frequent. I say that it started about a month ago when I was buying new climbing shoes. Chasity was going to assist me, but then Sarah was like “I’ll help him!” and half pushed Chasity aside. It opened my eyes a little.

Since then I made it a point to talk to Sarah more and what not. Last night I had set out to take it outside the climbing gym. My goal was to get her to come out to coffee with Kyle, Trent, Nikki and me. When she showed up half way through the night, she wasn’t working, I figured surely I could lure her away from RockQuest. It came out that she had plans to go to a local bar, but that I was welcome to come. So we all went.

The seats worked out such that I was able to sit next to her “Jackpot!”, I think to myself. We talk, everything is going well when all of a sudden she mentions her husband. I don’t know if I was able to contain the disappointment from showing in my face, but we kept talking until I finished my beer and I paid my tab and left.

First, I’m disappointed in myself for letting myself get so hopeful that I could be let down. And it wasn’t even a rejection, just a dead end of sorts. The second thing that really eats at me is that when she told me her husband was a micro biologist, it all came back to me, I knew she had a husband, she had told me that months ago and I just wasn’t paying attention. Yeah. Dumb brain.

So now I’m doing my best to forgive myself for forgetting information that would have been important later on. It’s not easy.

Married

I guess you could ague that it started back in September when I started rock climbing with Kyle. I met Sarah, a woman who works at RockQuest. Sure she was cute, but I never think about dating employees of places I frequent. I say that it started about a month ago when I was buying new climbing shoes. Chasity was going to assist me, but then Sarah was like “I’ll help him!” and half pushed Chasity aside. It opened my eyes a little.

Since then I made it a point to talk to Sarah more and what not. Last night I had set out to take it outside the climbing gym. My goal was to get her to come out to coffee with Kyle, Trent, Nikki and me. When she showed up half way through the night, she wasn’t working, I figured surely I could lure her away from RockQuest. It came out that she had plans to go to a local bar, but that I was welcome to come. So we all went.

The seats worked out such that I was able to sit next to her “Jackpot!”, I think to myself. We talk, everything is going well when all of a sudden she mentions her husband. I don’t know if I was able to contain the disappointment from showing in my face, but we kept talking until I finished my beer and I paid my tab and left.

First, I’m disappointed in myself for letting myself get so hopeful that I could be let down. And it wasn’t even a rejection, just a dead end of sorts. The second thing that really eats at me is that when she told me her husband was a micro biologist, it all came back to me, I knew she had a husband, she had told me that months ago and I just wasn’t paying attention. Yeah. Dumb brain.

So now I’m doing my best to forgive myself for forgetting information that would have been important later on. It’s not easy.

Sweet November

I just finished watching Sweet November with Keanu Reeves. it’s a movie about a man who is too busy with his career to notice that he isn’t having any fun. When along comes a woman who is set to shed some light onto his life. She is crazy and nuts, and she knows how to get him to say yes. It’s a great movie, and you really must see it if you haven’t.

But what I want to write about is what I took away from it. Simply put: There are a million reasons why you shouldn’t love someone, but tomorrow you could get hit by a bus, and so those reasons don’t matter; love all your life long.

For me, I side step the commitment, I’m graduating high school soon, I’m going home for the summer, I’m moving away in three months. Or maybe I make up something about her, she probably has a boy friend, she might be crazy, she might find out exactly who I am. And while they’re all true or possible, it shouldn’t hold me back from enjoying my life and sharing it with others the way I always say I do.

Tomorrow will be the most interesting day I will have had in a very long time.

I Love/Hate My Car

Today I took my car in for an early oil change since the only time I seem to get by the shop is on weekends and I don’t see myself having one free for the next few months. And since I dump 100+ miles a day on my car, it’s now or never. Anyway I decided to also get my transmission & brake fluids flushed in addition to getting my radiator hoses changed out. The damage was roughly $250 when it was all done. The good part is that my car runs noticeably better and I feel safer knowing I won’t break down because of a busted hose. So my car is treating me well, it’s just sometimes that preventative maintenance gets to me.

Since they were doing so much work to my car I decided to walk back to my apartment. It was 30 minutes by foot each way. It felt good to just go out and walk. I wish there were more sidewalks, but that’s the way it goes. So I got my exercise today I guess, though it wasn’t near as fun as RockQuest.

The Greater Good

The other day I was mulling over the idea that if we do negative things with good intentions we can still be considered good. Where as if we do positive things things with negative intentions, then we’re still considered evil. I started to wander down the path that our intentions dictate how we are perceived, and then my mind took a side-step.

I wondered what would be ideal. The first thing to come to mind was that if we all acted for “the greater good” then everything would always work out. To act on the behalf of the majority seems like a solid plan. But then if everyone acts on behalf of the majority, then the needs and wants of the minority are never addressed. So should we then act on behalf of the minority all of the time? Certainly that doesn’t make sense either.

So if there is no suitable hard and fast rule to optimize happiness, then how does one determine when he should consider the majority, and when he should consider the minority? I suppose the answer is the same as cause of the question: Emotion. We differ on what we want because of our emotions. If we all acted the same and thought of what was logical and for the greater good, then there would be no issue. However, we are all unique [fortunately], and our emotions set us apart. So clearly our emotions are what must be used to drive our decisions.

What’s scary is that it means the “stereo-typical emotionally driven woman” had it right all along, and that my approach of logic is ill advised.

New feed thingys

I’m not much into podcasts since, well I don’t rock an iPod (yet). But there’s now links on the side where you can get a computer voice reading my RSS feed to you as a podcast. Enjoy I guess.