Everyone is doing all of their looking back, looking forward stuff. It is now 2010, so I guess I'll do some of the same.
2009 has its good moments. That month-long road trip I took? Pretty sweet. Getting Chickens? Check. Discovering the community side to YouTube and gaining 100+ subscribers? That was cool. Keeping in touch? More or less. With Hands? Yea, I put in a lot of work with that.
2009, failures: 50 Book challenge. Granted, I only picked that up in say...August or September, but still. If I had finished Twilight and this other book, I would totally have made it. And...being a fatty. I gained some pudge which isn't pretty:
Alan Lastufka is taking serious measure with his own fitness, breaking out spreadsheets to keep himself accountable. I'm considering asking him for some...but I a) don't have a scale and b) haven't seen a huge correlation between how much I weigh and how chubby I look (I feel like you're going to call me a liar for this...but I'm being very serious).
I really need to start jogging more. It has been so frakking cold and last year when I tried to run at the indoor track at HVCC there was a huge issue with it. I guess I'll have to try harder this winter, and take better advantage of the warmer days. I should also get a head start on the 50 Book Challenge and maybe actually accomplish it this year. I would really like to start getting up earlier than I need to so I can exercise in the morning....maybe a little Rodney Yi abs yoga. More walking whilst hanging out. I actually got a little start on that tonight; I requested that my friend Erica take a walk with me.
Craig Benzine is making promises for 100,000 subscribers:
Which he totally deserves. He is endlessly hilarious, and if you have a YouTube account, you should subscribe to him. (Scratch that...even if you don't you should MAKE a YouTube account so that you CAN subscribe to him!) Yellow button.
I'll just be happy if I can do 1/100th of that by the end of the year. Not that that is a resolution.
And of course, I'm excited for VidCon, and graduating grad school, and taking a summer course at the Center for Cartoon Studies. I'm also really nervous about this last semester of grad school, so I'm not going to make any big resolutions...or plans or promises for this semester at all.
If this was canned, it would either be something outside of my creativity level, or maybe just not that funny. But I legitimately found this, last night, in just the way I describe. Win the for? This video will make more sense if you've watched the "clutterbank" video I embedded a few weeks ago.
So I took this extravagant road trip, and my only hope for my car was that it would return me to Troy, NY. It did that, certainly, but along the way....let's say somewhere up the Hollywood Hills I realized that my car was dying. Then, somewhere in Pennsylvania, I realized that my car was going to die soon. Since my car is technically my father's, I let him know this. He didn't sound particularly interested. I tried to convey the severity of it, but his interest still wasn't piqued. Since I can't afford it now, I asked if I could borrow their spare car between the time when my car finally kicks the bucket and when I've saved enough to buy a new one. This seemed fine to them, but somewhere my dad went on a rant about not buying me a car. This was confusing to me, because of course, I never asked him to buy me one.
So I'm not anywhere near ready to think about buying a car, I have only worked one half a day so far, and I need to pay my rent (and soon my Healthy NY) before I can think about such extravagances as...a means of transportation...you know, to work. (Though I could just work only in Troy and walk / ride my bike / the bus.) For some reason, my dad started looking for a car for me. I think he kind of enjoys doing this sort of thing. On Friday, the first day I actually worked this school year, I received a call from my mom. There was apparently some sort of parking-lot-car-sale which I've affectionately dubbed car-garage-sale. When I pulled up, my parents were standing near a 200(6?) Suzuki 4cl Station Wagon. Silver. I took it for a spin around the parking lot, everything seemed fine. As this was a car and a deal that apparently isn't oft found, it was decided to purchase it on the spot. I suppose I'll be making payments to my father. It was assumed that I would be trading my car in, and when our dealer guy, Russ Frost, wrote down $100 for my trade-in, I knew I no longer liked him. When my first Saturn broke in half, a guy name Guisseppe paid me $300 for it, and I think he had to tow it away. Three hundred, and I would have said OK. My car needs transmission work, but everything else seems find.
We discussed when to pick the car up, and I made it a big deal that it had to be after Monday. This shouldn't be a problem, considering that it was just Friday. The reason I needed my weekend undisturbed was that I had to finish my packet for grad school. It was due on Monday, and now that my advisor is in Canada, e-mailing is the only option. So, they never tell you a time Monday, so I figure, before it is Tuesday, earlier is best. After working all weekend on this, I wake up Monday to my alarm clock and my cell phone ringing. I should have been able to get my packet in by dinner time. On the phone was my mother, who had called to say that there was suddenly no option for picking up the car later in the week, it absolutely had to happen that evening. "Are you kidding? I was serious about not being able to do it today?" She promised it wouldn't take too long, and that they'd be down about 5:30 to pick me up.
At like, 4:45, there was a knock on my door. Seriously? Out of all the times I invite me dad to come hang out with me, and he isn't interested, the one time I need to be alone and working, he shows up 45 minutes early. My mom is apologetic. Apparently, she was aware of this, but he wanted to get going. We arrived at the dealership 10-15 minutes earlier than our appointment, and immediately located Russ. He was walking around with some papers to copy, and he said he would be with us in 5 minutes. 15 minutes later, my father went to glare at him. When we sat down, I signed a million papers with gritted teeth. At one point, Russ turned to me: "Are you excited??"
"Quite honestly," I told him "I have a 15 page paper due for grad school, like, right now. I really don't have the time to be doing this today. This is why I said NOT TODAY. So....no, I'm not excited. My mind is elsewhere."
When he went to put plates on my car, he said he had to wait because it was being detailed. I used to work for Hoffman's Carwash, my job title was Detail Technician. I did this for a year. For making us wait so long to bring the car out (like, another 10 minutes)...the car wasn't detailed. It wasn't thoroughly vacuumed, some of the cup holders weren't cleaned out. The part that got us most, however, was the brand new dent. My dad has x-ray dent eyes, and he and my mother had scanned every exterior inch of this car before even asking to test drive it. This dent was new.
So I apparently have to make an appointment with them to suction out this dent and re-detail it. They could just give me $100 and I'd live with the dent and detail it myself. But this isn't the most annoying part. By the time I'm finally able to go home and resume work on my packet, it is several hours later. And I didn't finish until 12:30....which is Tuesday...which means that had I been listened to, I would have been able to finish my packet, you know, around dinner time. ARGH#$*&#($&*#$!!!
And afterward, I watched RHPS because I was too wound-up to go to sleep. Such a good movie.
This is the first time in my life that my car has not existed on the blue-green continuum.
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