Marathon Man

And so I have completed my first month of work in my second tenure of financial aid, and the year is about to end. And since the year is ending I could not help but to think about how I did not run a marathon this year. How sad. The marathon craze that my father started in me put me in a situation that had me running three Los Angeles MArathons in a row, and then one in Vegas. That was the past three years. And now nothing. I feel like a bum. Ah well, there are plenty opportunities up here for marathoning, and as much as I would like to run the LA one again, I think that I will have to use my day off for Seth's wedding, which I am really excited for.

My brother wants me to start triathloning, but I am afraid that I will die. Or I will get hurt. Or that I will just suck it up. I knew that the running piece of it would be fine, but biking? Swimming? When Will let me use his bike it was the first time I had ridden a bike in many years, and I was goofy to say the least. I am not sure that I can ride any amount of distance without falling to my death, but I guess that it will come back to me (because that's what the old saying says, right?) Plus, I might buy a bike and try to ride it to work a few days a week, which is only seven (7) miles, which is one less than if I actually drive to work. Maybe then I will be in good bike shape.

And then comes the swimming part. God I suck at swimming. I am terrible at it. It scares me to think about doing anything that involves open water longer than a smaller than olympic size pool. But since I live across the street from the beach...I guess I can practice.

But what about a full time job, graduate school, career development classes, as well as other things I do for fun, like volleyball and marathon training? I guess I have handled much more than that before (I think I just like making excuses and that's why I have not done a triathlon yet).

I am running out of excuses. I like sports, I need to stay active, and as my brother puts it: I "have the perfect body for doing a triathlon."

so I had better get out there and run, bike, and swim eh?

Am I Dope? Can I Cope? Stay Afloat? I Hope.

I finished my first week at the new job, and boy am I going to be earning my money. I did not realize that I was going to be the scholarship coordinator, a job that makes me responsible for getting around a million bucks to students next year. I have to know way more Excel than I do, and I have to be super organized, and I have to hit the ground running with it.

My predecessor had made the program really awesome, and those who have been around after her departure have kept it afloat, but nobody has really made it a priority and I am coming into this job behind already.

Fortunately, I have little other responsibility yet, because I am new and they don’t trust me with student files…yet. So I am making scholarship applications, and writing emails, and trying to get up to speed.

I also am in charge of Consumer Information. What’s that? That’s what I was thinking anyway when they told me I would be handling that for the office. Consumer Information as it were, is all the crap we are lawfully required to give to students about our programs and financial aid in general, like fliers and handbooks and whatnot….

Also, since I have a background in Journalism, I get to update the info on our webpage and other stuff that has writing in it…which means that I have to use my hard earned grammar, and I’m not afraid to use it! I even corrected some folks at my first meeting.

My office has lots of meetings. That first meeting that I corrected grammar at was an operations meeting, which I was nominated for before even working at the office, and also happens to be the place that our staff goes over how well our system works…and I am on the Operations Committee because I have so much experience there!

We also have general staff meetings, advisor meetings, and other random meetings here and there.

This first week was quite fun even with all of the mess. I went to five meetings, got to implement myself as the owner of scholarships, passed two tests, and thirty-six quizzes (five I had to repeat because I forgot to print out the certificates!). The quizzes were cool, boring, but cool. I got to rehash my financial aid knowledge, and I actually learned a bit too. I actually skipped most of the reading, because it was review (for the most part), and the tests allowed you to use the back button without penalty (which means all tests 100% for me! Woo Who!).

My two tests…as my boss called them were simple enough. First, I had to research the question: Can Federal Work-study be garnished? I had to use the online financial aid advisor (FAA) handbook and search through the volumes to find the answer…which I think my boss actually knew, but whatever. And the second test involved me writing an article for the Student Services newsletter, because someone decided to do a flier instead. My article, which stunk, was discarded after the original writer wrote an article and used cool graphics and whatnot, totally screwing me (and this test I think, also was unnecessary, but I think the boss wanted to test my skills.

Crazy. I passed them though, so I guess I should be happy. I am so good that I get eleven days off (paid) in my first month, and when I get back from those days off I get a 3% raise! Good work me! It totally has nothing to do with the school being closed for the holidays, or the fact that our union negotiated a raise for us…nothing at all.

Ooh, we might get to work four ten hour days instead of the regular five eight hour days…that would be cool. More videogame time. If I don’t suck up this scholarship crap…that would mean something not as cool, you guessed it, more overtime.

The Madden Curse

Yeah yeah yeah, the Madden is baloney and whatnot, and I am a skeptic myself, but you have to check this out. Oh yeah, I am borrowing heavily from the Wikipedia article for the first part of this essay, so sue me.

Disclaimer: If you don’t want to read the boring football crap at the beginning, then skip through the years into the meat of the blog….

The story of the Madden Curse goes: He who is on the cover of the Madden Football video game will have either a crap season or an injury during the season the game comes out (which usually begins in the previous year, such as Madden 2008 coming out in 2007).

The Victims:
Garrison Hearst 1999. In 98 (The year the game came out), he had an awesome season, but he breaks his ankle in the playoffs, killing my Niners’ hopes for the next eight years and beyond! He never was the same after that.

Barry Sanders and Dorsey Levens 2000. Sanders: The all-time best break yo neck running back of all time (in my humble opinion). Retires. Just like that. He was so close to Walter Payton’s (Who happens to be my third favorite running back after Sanders and Bo Jackson, respectively) record! Levens had a crap season that year, for him, but he was only on the cover in other places I guess….

Eddie George 2001. Became stagnant the year after he was on the cover…but hey, at least the curse affected him…or he just got old…because 27 is way old for a football player, right? Oh yeah, and I might try out some arena ball next year…when I turn 27, so hopefully they allow walkers on the field.

Daunte Culpepper 2002. He started out crap, and to crap it all off he got injured after throwing 14 TDs and 13 INTs.

Marshall Faulk 2003. He had an ankle injury that year, he did well enough though, but he never got back into the awesome grove he had been in previously through his career, and he never broke 1,000 rushing yards again.

Michael Vick 2004. Four years ago on the cover, this year indicted for dog fighting. Coincidence? I think not…well anyways…. The year it came out, guess what? Broken leg, crap season.

Ray Lewis 2005. Zero interceptions that year, a rare occurrence for the beefy linebacker, especially since the previous year he had a career high pickoffs, and they also missed out on the postseason, after winning their division the year before….

Donovan McNabb 2006. Had a sports hernia that ended in a surgery, and he missed out on a good portion of the season. All this and after a really awesome year.

Shaun Alexander 2007. What a good guy to have this happen to. He really is just a good guy. The curse caused him a broken foot, and a broken record to be claimed by another good guy, LaDanian Tomlinson, in just the very next year! I think LT denied being on the cover for this exact reason, he wants to salvage his career…but he should pick his game up a bit for me, since he is on my fantasy team!

Vince Young 2008. I can’t even talk about his season. I feel sorry for whoever drafted him for their teams this year! And no, it wasn’t me.


The Real Madden Curse.
The real curse of that damn game is that it is so addicting. I spend way too much time on it. Hell, I’m thinking about getting on right now, but if I do, not only will I endanger some poor sap’s life, I will not finish this blog. And do you know what the crappy thing is? I have an old version! 2006!

Really though, I started thinking about this curse business yesterday, or two days ago by now, when I found out that Sean Taylor was the football player that had been killed the other day. I had seen on the news that a pro football player had been shot and killed in their colossal home, but I did not catch the player’s name.

Later that day, I was playing my customary Madden game when I decided to get a defensive back that could jump well. Lo and behold, Sean Taylor pops up as the DB with the best hops. I found some players (including Darrent Williams, but we’ll get to that in a second) to trade for him. Then, while waiting for Amanda and talking to Jimmy, he said, “What’s up with that football player who got shot in the leg and died?” And I was like, “What? Got shot in the leg? And died?” And he was like, “Yeah. Sean Taylor.” I made him repeat the name a few times, and I am still in shock.

So I looked up the details about this murder, and I saw that yes, he had indeed died from a gunshot wound to the leg that tore some artery that led to massive blood loss. The article also mentioned another player who had died this year to gun violence; Darrent Williams.

Now I know Darrent Williams’ name because I love fast defensive backs, and he happened to fit that profile. I had him on my team, but he was little known in my older version of the game, hell, he didn’t even have a real picture of him by that point. But the strange thing is that he died on New Year’s Day this year, and Amanda and I thought that it was crazy. And I now realize that I am cursing people, or sentencing them, rather, to death.

Scary shit.

And I know that Darrent Williams was kind of a punk, and that Sean Taylor was a punk too at one point, but it seems that he had been on the right path. You know, being a good father, a team player, and a better human being. Both guys had talent, but Taylor was going to be a legend. How sad.

So what do I do? Stop playing the game? Shell out more money for a non-cursed version? Or do I draft Tom Brady and Randy Moss and hope for the best (and their worst!)? All joking aside though, I hope others I have traded for will be okay, like Chris Henry, because he is the kind of guy that my curse could affect, because he is not the kind of person that steers clear of trouble.

P.S. Anyone else think I should try and get Brady and Moss and see what happens?

Failure is Fun!

Failure.
That word in and of itself makes me feel sad.
And in two days or so, I will be considered one myself…again.
I pretty much failed to complete the NanoWriMo….
I had the good intentions to do so, but really, I had no idea what I was getting into.
I suppose I could blame starting on my Master’s degree, but really, I don’t think the program is that hard, and it’s online, so really, how tough could it be?
Oh well, I guess I should have started planning my story before hand, like everyone else.
I made the mistake of waiting, because I thought I was supposed to…but next year though, I know better!
I think I could have done it even with starting to make an outline the first day of November, but then I lost passion for my first idea, and then my second, and by the time I though of my third idea, I only had a week left.
And I still could have done it!
But then I got lazy.
What I think I got from this experience though, is a new idea for a book as well as two old ones revived!
I don’t really see myself as a failure, just someone who procrastinates and will eventually, hopefully, will one day write a book.
I hope everyone else taking part is making good progress, and good luck!
Fun stuff!

P.S. I might have my first short story done for that last idea soon, so let me know if you want a copy! (First draft of course!)

A Cool New Job.

Yay! Yes, I really did get a new job.

No one really cares though.

More interestingly is the fact that we are moving in to the cottage across from the beach. It’s only $550 a month! But it’s $550 with a catch: we have to stay there almost the whole month from 9 at night to 7 in the morning. So for five hundred fifty dollars, we get to be innkeepers at a bed and breakfast. But at least we have the beach. Good location.
I know this is more interesting because the cottage development was the life of the cheese with your wine party we attended at Will and Janet’s. It was fun! I made the mistake of assuming people were talking about my new real job when they mentioned the new job I had, but in reality, they were talking about the new job we had, the one in the cottage for the bed and breakfast. I guess it’s cool.
My new job will be at Cabrillo College as a financial aid technician. This new endeavor could not have come at a better time, because we were struggling a bit here with my two crap part time jobs, and one decent job is going to help us do the things we want to do in this, our only life.
The coolest though, is my fat cubicle. It’s so big, and I get to spruce it up.
Feel free to ask me any questions about my new job. And yes I am referring to the other one, the cool one near the beach.

Party Politics

I once was at a party with friends at a close friend’s house and as is the common practice, for some ungodly reason or another, the topic of conversation turns toward that touchy arena called politics. The debate was over gun control and one of the partygoers, the super conservative guy with the beard and the wallet from the 1980s, said that he would not care if someone brought a nuclear weapon on an airplane because the right to bear arms is a freedom that we have to defend. His take on owning and holding a gun is that if you’re in line at a movie and you are taking too long to order that having your weapon in plain view on your belt would be an excellent deterrent against the next guy in line to open his fat face in protest. This might be true. Then again, what if the other guy had a gun and he thought that he was a quicker draw than you? That’s what I would think. I probably would open my fat face because I would have my .45, not a huge .50 Desert Eagle, because that is just for people who are overcompensating, but large enough to take someone down with one shot, as long as he (or she, because ladies get violent too) is not hopped up on some illicit substance. I can picture it now, high noon at the Cinema 12, the sweat beading on his brow because I rose to his challenge and wanted my pop corn a little bit faster, and the sweat glistening on me because I am after the hero here, right? And then the shoot out. Someone dies, probably an innocent, because hey, we love our guns, but we have not had to shoot at anyone in real life before and we are not battle hardened yet. As the crazy thought of having a shootout in public in the old western fashion dissipated I realized that I was thinking that perhaps the state of our society now could be enough to limit me bitching at someone to hurry up and order their god-damned popcorn in the twenty-five cent more mega tub before I had to ask them a second time. Maybe civility would be enough to stop me from flapping my lips at someone who is just a tad indecisive for my liking. This is not to say that I hate guns, because I actually quite like them. I know how to use them, be safe with them, and even had the experience to kill stuff with them. And when I say kill I mean it. One time, and really it was only once, Jimbob my step dad took me duck hunting somewhere around Bishop, and he let me use a shotgun and go out on my own with my little brother Jim-Jim, who recently turned eighteen, and boy do I feel old. On this venture, Jimbob was on one side of the lake while my brother and I patrolled the other. If either party happened to scare up some ducks, we had two angles covered. Jim-Jim and I did scare up a couple, and the to that bolted into the sky flew right in front of me and so I raised the rifle, pulled the trigger, and guess what I hit: both birds! My brother and I were shocked. Two birds with one shot. We quickly walked over to collect our prize and another duck flew up far off. I missed with both shots. But hey, at least we had those two. Jimbob made me clean them when we got home, and so I did, and that’s what my family at that night. I think I had to work or something so I missed out, but I really did not want to taste their flesh on my tongue anyways. I felt weird about killing them. I don’t know why, but I did. And I do not even have issues with people hunting, as long as they are doing it the right way, and that whole canned hunting business, because that is just wrong. I really can’t figure out how our vice president, who is a supposed crack shot could accidentally shoot his friend when the animals are not even coming from a surprise location. They are let out in front of them, and dumped on the ground so that they are not even oriented before they fly. I even wonder if he eats his spoils. My family ate mine, and I would have it no other way. When I used to fish, I would clean and cook and eat my catch. If I were to ever hunt something again, unlikely, I would make sure to use as much of the animal as possible, because that makes sense to me. After giving up the hunt, I began toying with the idea of using boar spears to hunt wild pig. When I first mentioned doing this, it was to spite all of those gun lovers that I know, all of them who I love, but I guess I was just bitter. But is there really any manlier way of hunting something without having to us only your bare hands? A man and his melee weapon or pole arm against Mother Nature. Awesome. Maybe the right to bear arms is more about having the right to bear anything considered an arm. Perhaps our forefathers did not want us to have personal weapons of mass destruction; maybe what they really meant was swords. And yes I know that the interpretation could be considered all arms, but it could also mean that if the court deems it constitutional that boar spears are arms and therefore by allowing us to bear them they are protecting our right to bear arms. And then we would have to kill things with our pole arms, and I would go for wild boars, because A) they are dangerous, and B) it is so manly to kill a wild boar only a spear. And boy do I love bacon.

Unless you’re reading Wideman, This is likely the Longest Sentence you’ll Read all Day,

and it begins with the start of my day when I lined the whitening strips on my gums and teeth, hoping that after two weeks of use, I’ll have the gleaming pearls in my mouth that I likely had as child (at least for a couple of weeks!), and maybe, just maybe I’ll be done with those off-white or eggshell or light taupe or whatever other off-shade of white my teeth have been my whole life, and I mean it, my whole life, my teeth have, as long as I can remember, have been a weird shade yellower than white and whiter than yellow, and not quite either, but never bad enough to be gross, while also never good enough to be considered nice, which has bothered my on many occasions, but not enough to do something about…until now, two-and-a-half weeks before my wedding, when I will finally give my whole heart and soul (officially) to my Amanda, and I think it would be cool to have nice teeth for all of the photos, and maybe, just maybe, they will be similar in shade to her wedding dress, her really nice dress, the dress that she is not quite sure about even when I tell her that it is awesome and beautiful and the fact that I helped her pick it out really keeps me attached to it, and yet she still has doubts; she wonders if it is too fancy for a garden wedding, and of course I tell it is perfect, but since several of her bride’s maids have exchanged perfectly fine dresses for other dresses (without even getting any money back for the original dresses in these oh so tight of times), but who can blame them for wanting something else, I mean really, if I were trying to make a loved one’s wedding special and perfect for her, I would want to present myself at my best, so that when others look back on the day, they could say: “Wow! Those bride’s maids have really great dresses!” and then of course, when I think back to my decision to wear a burgundy shirt and allow my groom’s men to wear black ones (which was always my dream to wear a black shirt in my wedding) I thought that maybe it would be cool to spruce up my friends, but since they are all better looking kids than me maybe I should have made them wear the ol’ standard and ugly white shirts that most people wear for their friends’ big day…or maybe, I could let them wear black, and hope that they make the overall strength of the wedding party above average in the looks department and when people look back at photos of the big day they will see the awesome suits that my boys are wearing in those pictures and say: “Now that’s a good looking group of guys!” and then we will all laugh about it and remember the day that things changed for all of us, but not a bad kind of change, but a good one, the kind that makes you think that our lives have really come along from the olden days in the trailer park, and while we laugh we’ll remember the good times that kept us together and the bad ones when we were apart, or the bad ones that drove us apart, but no matter what we’ll still be friends and we’ll know that there is always a place in our hearts for each other no matter how distant we are, and I’ll think of the times we laughed and how I laughed tonight about something dumb like when Amanda’s eyelashes were lightly scraping my neck (a spot that I am paranoid about, so much so that when I sleep on my back I oftentimes have to clutch my throat with my hand so that assassins will not creep in in the middle of the night and slit a fins line through my jugular and into my Adam’s Apple and on through into the other jugular causing warm blood to flow onto the pillow and stain the sheets and she’ll probably think it’s drool because I have been known to drool and I just hope that she is not there when it happens and that people live on without me because that is what would be best for them and best for my soul, if I had one), and when those eyelashes brushed the sensitive skin of that oh so vital of places, I had to laugh because: A) it was a serious moment, and I tend to laugh at the worst times; B) because I was (like I am now) delirious from deprivation of sleep, and since I hardly laugh, my real laugh anyways, not the fake one I usually use, nor the funny Eddie Murphy laugh I have conditioned myself to do, but the real one, the one you probably do not know, unless you really know me well, which is unlikely, or if you are Gabe (with a silent B) because I think I laughed at him today after calling his hair big and not really knowing why, and then he wanted to box, but I told him he had to remove his helmet first to which he said he hated me, and I laughed because of one of my rare moments of wit and it was early and I had no coffee and the delirium had set in hours before that but I was finally succumbing to the effects of it, and as I sit here now, delirious and hardly laughing at this really long and highly terrible attempt writing a sentence, a smirk tugs up on my lips, my eyes close, and my breathing falls in to the deep… rhythm…of sleep.