Some more random and semi-interesting thoughts in my head

So I have to admit, these blogs are actually pretty fun to write. I like them because they’re informal and on whatever you feel like writing about. Im thinking I might continue them beyond English class….hmmmm… we’ll see.

This past week was pretty eventful. I had to go home unexpectedly Thursday for one of my best friend’s little brother’s funeral. It was really tough for him so I felt like I should be there for him and his family. I’m glad I went because he said it really meant a lot to him. It was definitely worth the drive.

After I got back, I took the last calc test and passed which also made me feel good even though I got really lucky. I’m thinking I’m probably going to have to study a lot for the calculus exam which is awesome…..

Also, I was thinking about those theories about alternate universes they always propose in science fiction stuff. They say that every decision or action could have an opposite or multiple outcomes, and that you by making a decision, just chose one of those. Therefore, there are many alternate realities or universes. Then I thought, well if they invent time traveling (somehow), how will they control the events that come from the moment you time travel back to? Do the alternate universes disappear? But then I thought if time is linear, then that means the moment you time traveled back to always happened, always is happening, and always will happen. I just ended up confusing myself. I’m a nerd but its chill haha

Lastly, This weekend was one of the last times that my friends and I all got to really relax and have fun without the burden of exams and tons of work. It was a lot of fun actually. We went to our friend’s apartment and chilled watched movies and stuff which was pretty cool. Then I got to go out with my other friend Saturday night and it was a really good time. I had a lot of fun and this whole weekend was just really care and worry free.

For the last time, peace,

Ian

another weekend

So this weekend was pretty sweet. Friday night my friends and I went out to our friend’s apartment to chill but we ended up going to a party instead haha. It was a 1920s party because it was the guy’s 20^th birthday and even though we weren’t properly dressed, it didn’t really matter because no one there was. After partying for a while my friend and I decided to fight just for fun. I’m not really sure of what our thinking was but it’s all good. Neither of us went all out on each other but we still were hitting each other hard enough. After a few minutes and after we each got a couple good punches in, I looked at my friend and I said to my friend, “this is really dumb. Let’s go back inside. I don’t care anymore haha.” And so we just went back into the party and chilled. My nose still hurts a little bit though. After that I went back to campus and just chilled with some other friends and watched the movie Transformers. It was awesome! On Saturday we all went to the scrimmage game at Lane stadium. It was really cool. I also thought it was funny how they were allowed to tackle any one on the team except for Tyrod Taylor because they dint want to injure him for next season. Then I kinda just goofed off for the rest of the day and my friends and I watched iron man. The next morning I woke up and realized how unproductive my weekend was and it was really stupid. So Sunday all I did was work to make myself feel better. I’ve done most of my engineering project with my group. It’s awesome how much I’ve done today. (yea I’m being sarcastic). So tonight I’ll probably be up late. Again. Woo.

crazzzzzzyyy man

Mornin everyone! I hope everyone’s cruising and had a good weekend. Mine was very interesting. It started out on Thursday night and I did a pre-race run to warm up my legs for the next day which was good. Then the next day I woke up at 630 bright and early to go run the “3.2 for 32” race. Because I normally run sub seven minute miles, I was put in group one which was really cool. On the Tech website you can see me and two of my friends on the grass at the start of the race out of almost the 6000 people that ran. I finished at 22:40 which was pretty good for me because I haven’t been training for it. Later that day, we went to the picnic on the drill field and got free food and cookies while we all played Apples to Apples. After that I took a nap, and woke up just in time for the candle light vigil. It was really emotional and a lot of people showed up. That night I noticed a lot of people ended up going out that night to party and I didn’t really care too much but it did bother me that they would be that disrespectful and insensitive to treat that day as a holiday. I feel like there was a greater purpose to that day and some people just didn’t get it. But if you did end up going out that night its chill with me, that was just a thought that was going through my head for whatever reason.

Anyways, on a lighter note Saturday was a good day because it was the Big Event. I helped plant trees at Heritage Park which was cool because now twenty years from now it’s gonna look legit and I’m gonna be like “yea that was me”. Then on Saturday night my friends and I decided to go out to some “formal” party. I wore a shirt and tie and as always it was chaotic and hectic trying to get there and find the address. We finally got there at like 12 and it was stupid because no more than 10 minutes into the party the cops busted it. I was pissed to say the least. The party wasn’t even loud. They showed up at the doors and told everyone to leave. I just walked out because the cops were just marching everyone out telling them to go home but I thought it was really funny though because my friends panicked and went out the window and hopped the fence to get away from the police. Anyways, all in all, it was stupid. The night was a fluke. Hopefully next weekend will be better.

Peace I’m out

So this weekend was Relay for Life. It was really fun. Since December I’ve been on Team Crossfire, which was made by my friend Shannon. As a team, we raised over 10,000 dollars. Most of it was thanks to Shannon who rose I think around 5,000 of it, which is insanely crazy and awesome. They started setting up for the event at 7 in the morning and by 2 in the afternoon they had all the lights, stage, track, and tents set up and ready to go. Around 5 they kicked off the event with all the survivors and fighters taking the first lap which was really cool. All the teams had tons of tents set up around the track trying to raise money by selling food, bracelets, glow sticks and tons more. I think I got about 20 free hugs. At around 11 they had a ceremony for all the people that had lost their fights against cancer in the tech community. I didn’t think it would be very emotional but it really was. I am not ashamed to say that I did cry when I thought about people I’ve lost also. They did it in a way where you would light your candles, and they would announce people and as someone you were Relaying for fell into the category they announced, you would blow out your candle. It was mind-blowing how quickly over a thousand candles went out in a matter of minutes. After that our objective was to have at least one member on our team walking at all times. It didn’t work to well but that’s okay because our whole team stayed the whole time until 7 in the morning. At around 130 there was a dance crew competition. We didn’t win but its all good because the other crews were LEGIT. Then at 5 in the morning they had a cardio dance dude on the stage and we all did his work out. It was really difficult but after I was completely awake and not tired at all. The best part about relay though (other than the cause) was definitely Shannon getting her awards for all her hard work. Because of her we succeeded and we were the best team. So if you all know her, next time you see her congratulate her please she deserves it!

Aight peace till next week….

Oh and the sunrise the following morning was awesome. I saw it from the tallest point on campus (Lee Hall 7^th floor woot!!!)

3 short topics yo

Okay so we probably all know that West Virginia just lost to Duke. I wish this hadn’t happened. If they had won I would’ve won 140 dollars which would’ve been awesome. However, it is all kind of funny because I’ve never followed basketball ever and when I filled out the bracket for the pool, I had no idea what I was doing. One of my friends actually picked probably over half my bracket. This is why I thought it was funny because the most random bracket chosen by the least educated person almost won the whole pool. I feel like you could just flip a coin for most of the games and you have just a good of a chance of winning. It was still fun even though I lost 10 dollars haha.

On another note, I’m really good at procrastinating. Right now I’m really distracted writing this blog because of facebook and stumbleupon. I don’t know if any of you have heard of stumbleupon, but it’s really addicting. You go to the website, and it basically has a button called stumble and it loads a whole bunch of interesting or fascinating web pages. On rare occasion you’ll get one that doesn’t suit your interest such as top ten bed bath and beyond items. Most of the time you get cool stuff that’s just neat like art, or videos, or cool facts and blogs and pictures. It’s pretty sweet.

The last thing I’d like to talk about is driving. Reckless driving isn’t worth it, trust me. I know. You think you’re cool cruising around and all of a sudden you’re getting your car towed and thanking whoever you believe in that your friends are okay and nothing worse happened. The second worst part is the 5 seconds of sound that gets stuck in your head for days after it happens.

Aight peace till next week.

'Ello! Top o' de mornin' to ya!

Good evening ladies and gentlemen!... or rather good morning…. Anyways it’s about three in the morning and I can’t sleep again. But you know what they say, life is short. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Or what’s worth living if you spend it sleeping? I don’t have any raps or anything like last week, sorry. But yea it’s pretty chill right now. Being up this late is actually mostly my fault because I just finished watching The Hurt Locker again. It’s a really good movie in case you haven’t seen it. There’s really not much action in it but the surprising thing is that I was on the edge of my seat the whole time during the movie. Just the way it’s filmed or somehow you get into the character’s head really well makes you feel like you’re actually there in Iraq. I also thought the opening quote was really interesting. It went something like war is addictive or something. Actually I’ll just look it up. It’s by Chris Hedges. He writes “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” It’s really intense. You never would really think that you could become addicted to the adrenaline rush of war, but it’s kind of funny because the rush after watching the movie made you want more. There’s this one seen where this American sniper dude has a standoff with an insurgent sniper dude and I think the scene only last about 5 minutes but it feels like an eternity. It’s really cool but freaks you out at the same time. I recommend watching the film.

P.S. On a side note, I think everyone should thank God for D2 on Sunday afternoons. All the food there is amazing, especially breakfast in the afternoon. Ask for extra bacon. Mmmmmmmm bacon…..

yomygoddd!!!!!! puppiezzz AKA random

Aight you guys here’s my blog for this week. It’s been a while. I am tired and sleepy but I can’t go to bed yet because of engineering. It’s dumb but everyone says it’ll pay off in the end so it better. I thought of writing about something interesting but nothing’s coming to mind so I will write in real time with rhymes… maybe a rap? Here it goes.

I’m chilling in the lounge with my friends josh and alex,

They aint too busy so they be watching Netflix,

My other homie holly just walked in saying she’s sleepy,

But I don’t know why because she just had a coffee

So now were all getting distracted, telling funny stories

Like the time alex killed a rabbit,

Or falling off cliffs, that story was Holly’s

Hah okay enough of that. This is actually really difficult to rhyme so I think I might stop now. Anyways I guess I’ll talk about my spring break. It was pretty cool because I got to see all my friends and whatnot. I also visited some of my friends in Maryland which was also fun.

Yesterday my friends and I went to the cascades waterfall. For anyone who wants to go and hasn’t been there before, here is some advice. Do not trust Google Maps or your GPS. It will take you to the wrong place. Google will take you to the middle of freaking nowhere and your GPS will take you to somewhere in Christiansburg. Trust me we followed both. Finally we just asked an upperclassman and they said follow 460 west until you see the signs. It worked. So finally after getting lost for three and a half hours, we made it. The hike was really worth it especially because I went swimming in the pool of water beneath the falls which was really cold (there was still ice and snow on the waterfall).

Aight I’m tired so peace till next week

mas tiempo por favor

Aight so this weekend was pretty fun. I thought I got all my work done so Alex and some of my other friends went out Friday night. Alex knew this kid from his high school who was throwing a party at his apartment. He had it planned for a while so it was pretty legit. When we got there, there was a Dj playin a sick mix of popular songs with dubstep and trip hop beats behind it and there were black lights and the whole nine yards. You guys get the idea. It was a sick party. We got there a little early, chilled and then after a while it really started to pick up. Eventually throughout the night our group sort of got broken up and I think we didn’t really see much of each other at all. Finally at about 1:45 or so I found my friends and we left. Some of my friends were worse off than others but it was all good in da hood. There were five of us and we all made it home safely for the most part. I lost one of my friends but that was his fault. He got on the bus with us and when we got off at the tech bus stop he wasn’t there anymore. Oh well. It’s a good learning experience for him haha. Afterwards, we just ended up chilling in the lounge in Lee and talking until like 4 in the morning which was a lot of fun too. The next day I went to the game. Everything was good except the end result. Maryland’s stupid. Oh and here is some flarf I don’t really know what else to say. I searched the words “What up man.” It doesn’t make sense.

What up man

Listen to The Cool Kids

in a very rudimentary way

a balance of faith and behavior,

a swaggerific, speaker-busting, self-produced English term or phrase

a global call to action using music and sports to engage

which is answered by repeating the same phrase

So I woke up this morinin and uploaded a video of me doing this

The Urban Dictionary Thumbnails it so

Listen to Street_Waves Yo.

I miss the 90s.... things were simpler then

Setting: police station

Detail: A taxidermied panther

Person: A boy who uses 1990s looking computer program

He woke up in a police station, scared, nervous, and confused. But that wasn’t important now. The only thing that mattered was how he ended up in the cell and how he was going to convince the police that he wasn’t a criminal. The boy was a complete loser. He used Windows 95, didn’t keep up with the times, and didn’t improve his technological systems. However, he didn’t care at all. Instead, he dubbed himself the Captain Awesome, and at night he sported a superhero costume and prowled the streets looking for criminals who were conveniently smaller and dumber than him to take down. This was uncommon, but oh well. However, one night everything turned completely upside down. He was chasing a common local criminal after he heard of a house robbery of Sir Charles, the richest man in the city. The stolen artifact was a priceless taxidermied panther. He chased the robber through dark, sketchy alleys of the city. Then the robber tried to make a break for it. He climbed up a fire escape on an old abandoned warehouse. Captain Awesome lost sight of the robber as the he swung over the edge of the top of the building on the roof. As Captain Awesome lifted himself over the edge of the roof, fear struck him cold. Before he had even a second to react, the panther was thrown at him full speed, knocking him off the edge of the building with the dead animal. He lay there motionless with the taxidermied panther by his side. He woke up in a police station, scared, nervous, and confused. The robber was gone and the men in the offices were discussing his fate. “What a Loser.” “He aint gonna last one night in the house. He’s screwed.” “Idiot. He freakin stole a panther. What the hell’s he gonna do with it anyway.” He sat there motionless and powerless of his destiny. He was no longer Captain Awesome. He didn’t care about his identity anymore or what happened; he just wanted his 95 computer. Stupid Panther. If only Commander Keen were here to save him…

rewind the video of my life i wanna redo that dammit!

Okay, so a quick follow up – I finished the chili challenge and got my super hardcore t-shirt with a roaring bear and fire breathing gorillas! It’s brutal, and yes, I feel more manly than I did at the beginning of the week despite the fact that I almost cried on the fifth day. Even though it was really spicy it was still good chili. But now on to this week’s blog. I found a YouTube video of my childhood dream job. But before you watch it, you have to know a little bit about me and what this means to me. Ever since I was about five years old or so, I wanted to be a fighter jet pilot. It sounds childish but I don’t care. It would be amazing to be one and it still is my dream job. The worst part about it though is I am physically UNABLE to be one as a career. It’s the worst feeling in the world to know that the phrase “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up” doesn’t apply to me. The reason being, I am slightly deaf in my left ear. Its bulls*** especially when I wasn’t born with bad hearing. It was my fault. Freshman and sophomore year of high school I was on track to applying to the Air Force academy and joining the ROTC program so I could achieve my dream. However, I was also in a band in high school for those years. I played guitar and the way we set up for gigs and shows, I had my amp and the drummer to my back left about 6 or 7 feet away ( we played a lot of house parties so it was a little cramped). After 2 years, the traveling bus for sight and hearing tests came to our school, and the tests showed that my hearing was significantly lower in my left ear than my right ear. I didn’t even notice it. It feels fine. It just sucked that I couldn’t fly. But anyways back to the video. I like the footage a lot especially the last scene where he is all by himself for miles flying alone (except for the camera). I know some people will find it a little boring or maybe repetitive, but to me it’s awe inspiring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWPlrE9rNV8

The Spartans soldiers had war; The Vikings plundered villages; The Romans conquered the known world; Modern man has contact sports, hunting, cars, technology, and outdoor BB-Q grilles. These are things that have separated men from MEN! As for me, I am eating chili…. in the chili cook off at d2! This week I will be proving to the world that I am great and I AM MAN! RAAWWWRRR! Two weeks ago I signed up for the chili cook off and so far it’s been awesome. On Monday, the chili was very mild, tasty, and hearty. I asked the lady that worked there if I could have a second bowl but she said no and that they needed enough for everyone else. The second day threw me off my game, way off my game. It was less spicy than the first day and almost sweet. The chef wasn’t around to answer my questions about this flaw in the contest, but it was okay because the chili was still seriously good. Come Wednesday, the recipe got kicked up a notch. While serving my bowl, I could see the peppers and peppercorn in the chili and the lack of tomatoes which I heard are supposed to help with the spices. It was still delicious none the less but it defiantly took longer to finish and I had an extra glass of water. On Thursday, the chili definitely started to reach my limits of how spicy I like my food. On top of the spices, the chili was actually physically scalding hot. I had to wait a while before I could even take a bite of it. I got halfway through the bowl of chili before I started sweating and got the sniffles. Like my dad always said, “If you’re sick, drink some tobasco sauce; that’ll clear your sinuses.” After finishing my bowl, I thought about the last day’s bowl of chili. Tomorrow’s gonna be very interesting to say the least. However, I will not give up! No matter what! Especially when there’s this really badass t-shirt at stake with a roaring bear and fire breathing gorillas! What’s more manly then a bear?

Insomnia… if you can call it that?

I will start with a quote from one of my favorite movies Fight Club. “When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep... and you're never really awake.” I think I might have insomnia, but I’m not sure because I don’t know enough about it. Sometimes I’ll try to go to sleep at a decent time and I cannot get to sleep no matter how hard I try or how tired I am. It’s really strange though because it only happens while I’m at Virginia Tech. I’m not sure if it’s the beds or the rooms or the whole “college” attitude but it’s very difficult for me to catch Z’s. However, while I’m at home I can sleep for 12 hours straight with no problem. But at school I can barely get 5 hours of sleep at a time without waking up. Sometimes though, it helps me out a lot because I will be restless in the early hours in the morning and I will decide to go study or do homework instead of wasting time. There are no distractions that late at night which is great. It feels sort of weird knowing that your most productive hours during the day besides being in class are between one and three in the morning. Even facebook is a useless distraction at that hour because there is nobody online to talk too. During the day I feel fine most of the time and I’m rarely ever tired (excluding the few minutes after I wake up and before I get in the shower. I think everyone feels like a zombie that early in the morning). However, I am slightly worried about the possibility of health repercussions of not sleeping well, but I’m the type of person that lives in the present so I’ll worry about that later. Also, one of the coolest parts of sleeping lightly is I can remember my dreams a lot better. For instance, last night I went to China, saw The Who in concert and they played a Michael Jackson song and somewhere in that mess there was some sort of physicist or magician doing tricks with magnetic fields and stuff. It was really weird, but awesome.

Some of the Randomness in the back of my head

This week I have two thoughts that have recently been rattling around in the back of my head. First, as a musician, I am normally tuned in to recent news in the music community to find upcoming shows, local or mainstream, find new artists and album releases. However, over break I did fall back on the current happenings and didn’t have the time to focus on this. Once back at school I read some very disheartening news. One of the world’s most innovative drummers, James Sullivan, you may know him as the Rev from Avenged Sevenfold, died a few weeks ago in his home from natural causes at the young age of 28. Although you may not listen to alternative metal (their last two albums) or core metal (their first two albums), I am asking fellow readers to appreciate the amount of skill he possessed, the precision in his style, and his ability to inspire fans and musicians alike. It was truly amazing what he had accomplished in his short life. Since I am an amateur drummer, he was and still is one of my influences and ranks second in my mind as the greatest drummer who ever lived next to Keith Moon.

The second thing that’s been on my mind, is the weather in Blacksburg. I don’t like it. It’s cold and raining all the time. It’s inconsistent and dumb. Maybe I should move to Florida or California. As for now, I am seriously hoping the weather will be better in the spring so we will no longer have to use the term Bleaksburg. However, I do like the snow. That part is kind of nice. It mostly worries me though because the weather limits my driving capability. I make an effort to take good care of my car so not only do I have to make the walk all the way to the cage to cover my car during any inclement weather, it also means I can’t drive anywhere thanks to rear wheel drive. Although I am complaining, I wouldn’t trade my car for anything. It’s pretty much the greatest car ever, hands down.