I took off from work yesterday to help my parents move. I noticed that I was awfully lethargic, but I still got through that plus both classes. Turns out I was sick and had to take today off too. Regardless, I have to go to work tomorrow not only because I've missed so many days, but also because I won't have a bed during the day tomorrow because they're moving it over to the new house.

So yes, tomorrow is a pretty big day. I leave the Westampton house, go to work, and come back to the Florence house. There will be moving people in during the day to move the big stuff like the beds, entertainment systems, our 90's-tastic 32 inch television that's nearly as deep as it is wide. Meanwhile, my 46 inch Sony Bravia is up and running in the basement. There's still so much little crap around though. For instance, in my room I emptied the bookshelves and the video games, but everything that's attached to the walls is still there. Our kitchen in particular doesn't shout "We're moving". I can't wait to try out the XBox 360 on the new television tomorrow.

Now that she's single again, Sam was a lot more playful last night. During the (surprisingly bad) YALSA guest speaker, we were passing notes about fears, what we expect out of life, etc. She's still borderline stalking an ex boyfriend who she still has "a thing" for, but realizes she would never ever get back together with. She was hinting liking somebody else, which I absolutely refuse to believe is me because last time I did I got hurt. Otherwise, it was weirdly like having the Sam of old before loads of crazy shit happened back. Also, Jill more or less admitted she's a slash fangirl, so on two counts tonight...

My thunder was stolen shortly after posting this by Kristie going "You're just finding out now?"

Also I recently found this quote online which I appreciate. It combines the "Screw you world" tone of Rorschach's "They'll look up at us and shout 'Save us!'" without that fear of being as bad as the bad guys:

"Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world - "No, you move.""

—Captain America

People online are claiming that Cap is quoting Mark Twain, but I couldn't find any evidence. I asked Will, but he showed skepticism as well.

This week we had an all-man D&D game, which is only about half as homoerotic as it sounds. Zakk ran a one-shot where Will, Sean, Dean, and myself were the players. Will was our arcanist, and I spent about ten minutes preparing and it showed. Dean and Sean were practically the same guy except that Sean was a PHB Paladin and Dean was a Book of Nine Swords Crusader so Sean was more like a mini-Dean than a different character. Zakk did a decent job, but Will and I both realized his weakness as a DM; if something isn't key to him, it will not be used. That side character you want to catch up with? Gone. That optional NPC they provide? Dies before the battle even begins. I think I'm losing the touch when it comes to roleplaying anyway.

I'm learning that one of my professors is definitely one of the most interesting people I've met in a while. We've been corresponding over Facebook after that completely uneventful class. To use an "anime I don't actually watch" example, she seems like she could be the Might Guy to Liz's Rock Lee. However, I can see some of Kelly's qualities there too now. I think it's funny that she's an enormous Buffy fan as well, which has allowed me to take advantage of and pretty much indulge in the Angel kick I've been on. For instance, the last friends-only post I made on the other blog and the comments that followed used subject heading were lines from Angelus's passion monologue complete with closing on:

Without passion, we'd be truly dead.

I came to some conclusions about what happened earlier this week. I'm the kind of person who's usually pretty good at burying negative feelings, but the combination of being confronted with this (allegedly) universal sentiment of love and being loved romantically at a young age, the lengths to which these people would go to please that special person, and having to listen to all this with Scrappy (a.) within arms length of me (b.) involved with someone else and (c.) being weirdly "clingy" that day just caused some of the old wounds to reopen. Fortunately, this doesn't mean I'm about to go barking up that tree again.

I hate to say it, but right now, between the class blog and this blog I feel like I'm starting to have a bit of a Clark Kent/Superman identity crisis, and I don't know which is which.

Today's the last day of the semester, and I'm all too ready for it. I really disliked one of my courses this semester. I think it's because it's the first time in a long time I didn't get the material at all. Also, the course's content seemed to exist in a vacuum; whenever I tried to research this content in any source outside of the course materials, I could never find anything. Luckily I managed to struggle through the paper this weekend. Now all I have to do is present for both classes tonight before I can return to the world of normal people that acknowledges little things like the upcoming holidays. I find it funny that after a semester of coming to class in work clothes, today is the day I'm back to wearing the Marvel hoodie because I'm doing a book talk for boys. I feel like I should keep a small axe in the hood.

The first presentation went fairly well, despite the fact that I messed up going into it. I have a presentation tool that is more or less is a mouse in remote form. I like it because it frees me up to not have to stand behind the computer, but I left it in my bag and didn't bring it up. Second, I opened my presentation as a slideshow in Gmail. Unlike PowerPoint's slideshow feature, the hyperlinks aren't active so I had to do everything in a linear fashion. Still, I got a handful of positive comments. Naturally, all the compliments were about everything I did on the technology side and nothing to do with the content.

The second one actually went really well. New relationship for Sam. Must be a Tuesday. Made a dynamic entry by jumping out of my chair to start and everything generally went well from there. People definitely reacted positively.

This is going to sounds dumb, but I really miss Who Wants to be a Superhero. I feel like not having it this year was actually a factor as to why this summer has been somewhat lacking. I'm pretty much over my other summer television obsession, America's Got Talent. Instead, I amuse myself with observations I find at work like this:

“I credit our amazing team for not only working hard to sell ETS products, but for building relationships with our customers to ensure that those products are a good match for their educational needs,” says Internal Sales Manager Frank Miller.

He should know. He is the G@# D$%^ Batman.

I had a 4.0 semester! *confetti* Of course I only had one class. Perhaps someone should defend my case. But who!? To celebrate, I declare a link post. Anti-Shurtugal has explained to me the explicitly how and why to hate the Inheritance Trilogy. However, Arya is very pretty. Also, for my roleplaying crowd, I'm sure you've noticed that the Magic Item Compendium is a pain in the butt to search, but this index may be of some use. Too bad it's only organized by names.

There's a shelf of free books at work, and somebody handed me something off it today. It's about a vampire, who solves crimes (yes, he does) with his friends (with the gang) It appears to take place during Season 2, as there's Gunn but no Fred. This means Wesley is nowhere close to a leather jacket.

Research Methods is done done done. We're doing a class review in lieu of the exam. I don't know whether to be more or less scared. Knowing that we're doing it as a class made me study less intensely than I had expected, but that might mean everyone else did the same thing. I'm selecting specific areas to focus on. The good thing is that the papers count for more now, and I just got A's on the last two.

Okay, now I am done with the semester. Something didn't submit correctly and I had to rush home from work and submit it again... two days late. Hopefully this isn't a problem.

I strangely pity this little window that I'm typing into. Over the course of two days, I've tried making an entry for keybladerating, a post, a second attempt at the keybladerating thing, and now this. Scott is in DC for training this week so work has been really slow of late so I'm watching old Yugioh episodes.

I'm not doing anything too major for my birthday this week, but Will and I are going to do something for real in early June. And there will be a pretzel tray, and all the pretzels will be mine. All mine!

All this Rutgers crap is done. Done done done. No more Finals, no more post-Final extras. Time to move on to the next thing.

My next thing to do is figure out what I'm doing for my birthday. Going to the movies seem to be the most obvious route, as I have yet to see Iron Man and KUNG FU PANDA comes out this Friday. I'd love to somehow find a time and a place to order trays of food, particularly Philly Pretzels or Chicken Nuggets, instead of the usual restaurant thing but that's looking like it might be tricky to pull off. I'm thinking something easy and small-ish this weekend and then something with a little more substance in the summer.

Okay, the worst is over for a little while. Today I had a presentations for work from 9-11 am, Interface Design, and Principles of Searching. One of my post-Finals is as good as done, but one still has a little ways to go.

My Interface Design professor was a complete douche on Wednesday. The presentations today went reasonably well, but he wanted us on a whim to vote on which were the two best. Had he just said one, we could've simply counted the winners on the cards and been done with it. So now that we have the two-person complex system, he also decides that the first person you write down gets two votes since they're clearly your first choice (not mentioned until after the cards are turned in) and the second person gets one vote. Seeing as this has already become too complex for mental math, he starts writing the votes on the board. Basically it comes down to two people, a skilled programmer and the closest thing to a real life Mary Sue I personally know. The Sue won, but everyone else's votes were up on the board, and I was one of two people with zero. I didn't really have any expectations of being THE best, but it was just a pointless slap in the face and it really pissed me off. I'm not mad at my classmates. For starters, I went second out of nine which anyone who watches American Idol knows is bad for voting. Similarly, the winner went last and thus had "finale power" so if there was a band behind us, they'd have been playing their hearts out for her over everyone else.

Principles of Searching went much more favorably. The person who went last made balloon animals for everyone including a balloon fishing rod/fish for Stew [photo] and I got an orange balloon sword. However, the handle is now deflated but not much else because of the way it's twisted together so now it looks like an orange balloon wang.

This post exists largely to put off studying for Principles of Searching. As such it might be the longest one I've ever written.

I'm on an Angel kick again. I'm going to blame it on events that happened a few weeks ago causing me to listen to Once More with Feeling again leading me back to the series by way of Spike. Either that or the fact the Angel soundtrack Live Fast, Die Never has the song Touched by VAST which seems to be a recurring thing. I gave my craptacular Myspace a shadowy urban feel, and my theme song is the Sanctuary Extended Remix of the Angel theme. I just need a good background. My Facebook status is even based off Joss Whedon and Alex Denisof's made-up lyrics to the Angel theme song. I'm just proud I haven't made a new Wes icon. I've never understood that one. You'd think I'd like Spike, the snarky 'other' vampire with a soul who likes kicking things in the face, over the emotionally messed up nerd who fandomsecrets reminded me is a creepy stalker--or they would if I ever posted something there which I most certainly have not.

I think my biggest flaw as an "Internet person" is my complete inability to write "about me" profiles. My LJ profile is horribly outdated and my Myspace and Facebook "about me" sections are blank. I've been told that's my biggest drawback on those online dating sites because I don't really present myself as a unique or even interesting individual. My other weakness is using actual pictures of myself.

So I noticed something strange the other day. The three women that I probably would have dated if not for the intervention of other boys are now all in relationships with guys named Kevin. After a little bit of Googling, I discovered that while it's a popular name, Kevin ranks twenty-third on the list of most popular first names as per the 1990 U.S. Census, and is possessed by 0.671 percent of the population. I'm trying to figure out what the odds of three unrelated people all being named Kevin are. Know how to do that math people? Also, "Kevin" is apparently an Irish name that means "Gentle Birth". Bitch please, my name comes from a wandering badass eighteen-foot-tall giant who they tried and failed to execute multiple times.

I got the chance to play Super Smash Brothers Brawl at Will's house for hours on end until I got massive headaches. ( I think Kim gave us brain damage with whatever she sprayed, so my snark-o-meter may be off. )

Later that same day, Will and I made some progress on our characters for Super-Fight-A-Thon, but Cricket let us in on an interesting tidbit of information. Apparently, this whole thing is more or less the equivalent of the shooting contest from Robin Hood. That is, it's largely an excuse for Dean to try to find a way to best Will and I in tactical combat. I feel like this is an enormous Blackleaf joke waiting to happen. I mean, if this is all for Dean to show us how awesome he is, why are we going through all this rigmarole!? I mean, he can't keep his mouth shut with regards to details, so why all this crap over the big picture? Why not just say, "Hey let's make dudes and fight"? Will, Sean¹, and I have done it before, and it came off as a good time and not some creepy vendetta. Why must we waste Mrs. Lewis and Tersha and Jimosh's afternoon? So he has backup? All he proves then is that eight Dungeons and Dragons characters can beat up two of the same level. And what the hell was up with Cricket pointing out that Will and I stand out because we're the only white hats? Nothing adds up anymore. While it's strangely flattering that he either respects our intelligence or simply views us as a threat to his alpha dog status, it's days like these that raise a sense of paranoia in me that everyone else is there because they love each other so huggy-muggy much and I'm just the hired mercenary goon who gets to stick around if only for his character optimization skills until he gets replaced by a guy named Kevin. How pathetic does that make my post-college existence? Then again, this is Cricket and foresight; if the fight were any closer to May my Cricket-to-English translator would suggest that it's really just a guise to throw a surprise birthday party for Will and we'll be met with cake.

Wednesdays are easily my longest day this semester (season? What do you call them now?). I get up between 6 and 6:30 and go to work like I usually do, except I leave a little after 12. My dad and I usually grab lunch on Route 1 before driving to New Brunswick. My first class, Interface Design, goes from three to 3-6, and the second, Principles of Searching, runs from 6-9.

Today was particularly stressful because we had to buy books, which was no big deal. Unfortunately, while we were in the Rutgers bookstore, my dad realized that he left his credit card back at Market Fair and had to go back to get it. He was miserable the rest of the day.

It's only week two, but laughing at stupid stuff with Samantha seems to be what keeps Wednesday from really sucking because neither class is really reaching me. I'm still in that out-of-school daze. This week, she showed me The Eight-Foot Lego Man in Holland!

I smell a musical post coming.

I don't know if this is common knowledge, but I recently discovered Scribd. It's basically a Youtube for PDFs, but I imagine once it hits the bigtime, it'll be recognized as a file sharing nightmare, bought by someone big, and completely neutered.

School starts up again this week. I was enjoying just working and not having classwork afterwards. I can't even figure out where my first class is. Rutgers can make TCNJ look like the model of intuitiveness some days. Now, we were told that one of last semester's courses was the hardest and the worst and blah blah blah, but I have a feeling that's just professor talk. You'd think at the graduate level they could start being straight with us.

Random thought of the day: there are a bunch of D&D books called Heroes of... followed by a genre. They only made Heroes of Horror and Heroes of Battle. With the coming of fourth edition, this series most likely will not continue preventing me from seeing such hits as Heroes of Romantic Comedy and most importantly Heroes of Musical! I mean, it worked for Evil Dead, and Spider-Man, and Batman, and pretty much Mel Brooks's entire line of work.

Right now my life as actually been surprisingly eventful. After God knows how long, I finally got accepted into Drexel's Digital Media program. However, there's been a change of plans *record scratch*. I've already been accepted to Rutgers Information Science Masters program and took my first classes there last night. This semester I'm taking Human Information Behavior and Multimedia Production -- They let me skip the first computer course! For now, I'm going to defer Drexel until January and hopefully to the fall. If I really applied myself, I could have two Masters and a Bachelors by the end of this decade.

So I'm a few days into Spring Break and a week without an update. Wow, not sure how that happened. Anyway, here's a peek into my life.

I'm still looking at grad schools. Right now, Drexel is my favorite. Apparently, most digital media graduate degrees require a specialization in one particular field. From the examples I've been given, education sounds the most appealing to me. However, the man I spoke with made the use of digital media in medicine to transfer and inform sound good too. I still need to talk to the people at Rutgers when I get a chance. When I listened to the guy talk about IT in education it sounded really appealing but it seems like the progress I've made in media would be going to waste. Despite my dad's good intentions, I don't think library science is right for me.

I finally started listening to the Huna podcasts. The first was funny because it told me to concentrate on the concept of a blue feather, and it will come into my life. Then again, it is the logo for Photoshop. I'm making excellent progress on my digital multimedia midterm. My theme is a tiny me in a big world. I've done Photoshops of myself sliding into a bowl, me stirring a pot of pasta sauce, and diving into a bag of Hershey Kisses. I'm definitely making progress with shadows and levels.

I've been playing instances more and more in Warcraft. They're good for items and XP, and working with a group is fun. But it also denies me the ability to just put everything down and vanish when I want to.