Long Time, No News!

Well hey there, folks! It's been a long time since I checked in here, and so I think it's time to give a real-basic style catch-up. You may or may not see this area updated more often from now on, depending on how things go. So, where're we at half-way into the year?

The new place! Back in December I changed where I was living, and boy was that a good move. With my noticeable lack of online presence, almost any of you could guess I had reprioritized. No longer sitting in my room for hours on end, I found opportunity to change things up significantly. The new place is good: no kids, no cats, comfortable room, low rent, low stress all the time. While this isn't my final resting point by any means, it's more than nice enough a place to stay for now.

The job! Job continues to go well, with less worries, and review coming up. Hopefully, I've done well enough in my fulltime position to get a significant pay raise, though this has been oft-promised and almost never followed through on. I continue to consider shopping around for a new place to be, but really, I do have a lot of friends here at the Bar, and really help things run around here. It's nice to feel useful and needed, something this job regularly affords me. It's nice and laid back, with work right up my interest-alley. Smooth.

The friends! Really been branching out socially of late. Trips to the gym and concerts introduce me to more and more folks, and fun times ensue. The only real regret on this front is still not finding any particularly special someone to spend time with. Aside from the occasional lewd concert dance, not much really comes of that. But hey, good to be out there and getting any response! And why am I getting response...?

Holy crap, he's improving himself! Down under 300lbs for the first time since high school and with shiny-good teeth in my face, I feel absolutely awesome. It's interesting: I never really considered while I lived there that my home life was anything other than normal. How deluded could I possibly be? Looking back on my old eating habits, I'm frankly pretty shocked compared to where I'm at now. Living and learning -- stuff other people have had a pretty good handle on their entire life are things I still have to hammer out. I can't even begin to blame my parents really, though. It was mostly a function of laziness and lack of attention on my part. When your role-models include a large number of fictional characters (Donald Duck doesn't change his clothes -- he doesn't even wear pants), something is bound to get missed in translation. More about that in the future, but right now, things are good. I'm going to continue my weight loss, as I really want to see how far I can take it. The next goal is to hit 280, and hopefully I'll nail that within the next 10 weeks. Then, 260. See where I am then, and in time to go show off for the family over Christmas. Very cool.

To be honest, I feel kind of bad having nobody online really know what I'm up to and doing, and feel like I've grown apart from the online community. But to be frank, a lot of my early social interaction and friends living out on my own came online, and you folks (even though I don't oft have a chance to talk to you) are all pretty cool, and been awesome to me in your own ways. Even folks I'm only met a couple times.

So thanks for reading about how I've been doing, and caring at all. Let me know how you're doing, so I can repay the favor, or something!

And ofcourse, if you're ever out in Vegas, let me know.

-Martin

Dreamtime

I'm pretty tired today, on account of the world having too much to do in one day. Meantime, I've started a regular workout, and pretty radically changed my diet. The exercise is particularly hard to cope with... I could barely lift my arms yesterday. But at the same time, I realize that this is exactly what I've been missing in my life. Recently, I've been so successful at making life changes, this is the opportunity to keep up with the momentum.

I weighed 311 lbs. We'll see what's going to happen there.

The reason I'm really typing this is that I've started dreaming again since I moved. I don't think I ever truly stopped, but I did not remember my dreams for so long, this is a real change in experience. And I had this nasty, nasty bit of dream.

I was in some rural place, near a river. It didn't seem very far from civilization, but there was a cabin, and it had all of my stuff in it. The strangest thing was there was a foreign presence there, and while I couldn't always see it, I knew it was there. And when it appeared, I would attack with with my things. Unfortunately, whenever I swung, it was like I completely lost my strength, and nothing much came of it. I have trouble remembering the nature of the presence, but it seemed feminine in some way... Hard to describe. I woke up hours early, and could not sleep for the life of me.

Anycase, vented that, and feel better. Happy trails, folks!

MOVIN!

I'm gonna do it. I'm moving.

Got a buddy with a room and it's a fine place to be: as it was, I was spending 9/10ths of my weekends there anyway. Now, I'm just making it official, and getting it so I have access to all my stuff. I'll probably be throwing a lot of stuff out this time, but I am still actually fairly packed up from the last time I hopped places. Need some organizational furniture, and I'm going to be picking it up prior to arrival.

Anycase! I'll be in there by January. So hurrah!

Wah!

Alright. It's a proven part of blogging. This is where every disaffected person comes to whine. Well, far be it from me to defy convention.

I think rules about child negligence and punishment should be repealed. I don't REALLY think this, but it's fun to say and eye-grabbing (there's almost nothing worse than child abuse - somebody quote me here). The worst thing about kids is the same thing that's awful about cats. It's the little things they do that make them seem smart of cute that pay the way to them still being kitties. However, at some point, they do something completely dumb and you go "yeah... they're just cats."

The kid is growing into the point of her life where she wants to play emotional reaction, and if I didn't have this firmly in mind, she'd be a lot worse off. I'm not in a position to punish the child, so her litany of sins can be passed without much in the way of retribution.

Let this be a declaration of statement. No more shall I just suffer. I believe her world will be a better place in the future if I apply some balanced justice to her life at this juncture. I'm not gonna pretend I'm smart or brilliant here, but I also recognize that if I do nothing, it only makes me a doormat for worse to happen.

So hurrah for me, folks!

Oh! And aside from this, life is dances and rainbows. More about that soon.

Movie Review: Stranger Than Fiction

You know I go to the movies. I don't have to explain this. You know I...

RANT AT THE SCREEN

Today's movie is "Stranger Than Fiction", the amazing story of a story which affects a man's life. Very literally. The very act of the book being written is affecting him directly, and unfortunately, will probably kill him.

Farell? In a SERIOUS role? What the hell? Erm... fairly serious, anyway. Will plays bumbling with a cleaner, less sarcastic face than Ben Stiller ever has. He's absolutely awesome as Walter Crick, the star of his own tragedy. Our author's quiet, sickly narration helps establish the movie in the place where it wants to be: a movie that SOUNDS just like a book. The tropes of literature are hung all over this place, and the movie mimics a book as much as it can throughout, which helps the 'plausability' of the stories immensely. Also awesome is Dustin Hoffman, Walter's advisor on his perdicament.

In the end, the movie is artful, like some literature can be, and a wonderful examination of how we treat fictional characters (and especially the duties of the author to tell the story). Funny, mesmerizing in place, and it really stuck with me, and held me at rapt attention through to the very end. Perhaps, this is a testament to the power of narration. At no point was I particularly lost. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's now Farell's standard fare. This is grand.

I give it five out of five malfunctioning watches.

Well... I misread that one. Nevermind. I'm still employed, and may well be for a good long time. Good advice and a level head got me through this one.

My boss thought I was going to or wanted to quit. I assured him today that wasn't the case. So we're all good now!

That's freakin' awesome.

ARGH!

I need to catch you folks up on the last week. It's been "a treat". And those of you familiar with sarcasm could probably smell it on that one.

Last week, I got my first major write up at work, and a significant chewing out. I've been late a lot recently, and I really did deserve to get written up. No problems there, actually. Unfortunately, my boss also decided to do a little resetting as far as my user rights and priviledges were concerned, essentially hog-tying me into doing one job at a time, under his strict supervision. Essentially, I'm being micromanaged.

I can work like this. It's not effective for the company, but I can work like this. The problem is, 9/10ths of what I do is now more time consuming, and I don't have the proper access rights to do a lot of it. Many things have become flat-out impossible. For the position of my boss, I can understand: He's limiting the negative impact I could have on the network if I got upset. He's scared in a way, I suppose.

Honestly, I'd never do anything to hurt this place. I had too many good times here. It's been an awesome job. But I don't know how long I can stay here, being stopped from doing a job effectively. It's as terrible a punishment as you could devise: being forced to do what you once did with ease ineffectively.

I hate this, and it's getting exaserbated all the time. Today. TODAY! My boss is on vacation, and didn't tell me. I have to get permission to do almost anything directly from him. And, apparantly, over the weekend, we had e-mail issues, and now we've got a major problem I can't investigate except in the most basic ways.

I couldn't get restricted at a worse time. And everyone is looking to me to provide help, and I can't. It's stupid. And I'm sure, eventually, I'm going to lose my job over it.

Sorry, SBN. It was a good run.

...Anybody need a good web designer/tech support...?