Tuesday, July 26, 2011

1000 Words A Day, Attitude and...shit, I don't know man. Just read it.

I'm starting a thing. I'm going to (attempt to) write a 1000 words a day. It can be anything. Short story, part of a novel, a blog post, whatever the hell I feel like, it doesn't matter, but I am going to write 1000 words. We will see how it goes. Or I guess I will see, considering I have no readers.

Why'd I pick a thousand? I dunno. It's not too hard, nor too easy. It's a chunk of words, a short story, a chapter of a short story, a section of a chapter of a novel, a sizable blog post, yadda yadda yadda. It's a thousand. If you think it's easy, try it. Do it for longer than a week, and I will personally give you a dollar. See? All you have to do is write 7000 words and you will have made more money than I have with my writing. Haha, self-negativity baby, always cheers me up.

Of course that doesn't make sense. At all. It is nonsensical. Or perhaps hypocritical. Noncritical? Hyposensical? I don't know. What I do know is self-negativity is bad. I'm not even sure if self-negativity is a real term for being negative about yourself, but you know what, I may have google at my fingertips but I don't give a damn. I'm keeping the term here, regardless of it's usage, definition, or latin-origin.

As I was saying, or typing...I guess I am saying these sentences to myself as I type them...Anyways, as I was saying/typing before I went off on a tangent, self-negativity is bad. I've got to say, I've realized Attitude is Everything. Okay, maybe Attitude isn't quite exactly EVERYTHING, but it's close. How you choose to feel or react to a situation will define how you feel.....I'm not really saying it correctly. Let's give an example. Say you just found out that you ripped your favorite shirt. Now that could possibly ruin your entire day, week, month or even your yeeeeaaaaarrrrr. Or you could be pissed about it for about five minutes, not let it affect you longer, and move on.

Now some might argue, hey, I'm not a robot, I can't just choose how to feel about something. But this is silly. We decide how long we're going to be angry about something. We choose whether to say "Oh fuck goddamnit thats my favorite shirt in the whole word what will I wear oh god this day is terrible blah blah blah" or "Well shit, that sucks, I liked that shirt. Oh well, I've got other shirts, the day really isn't terrible, things could be worse..." Now this obviously doesn't work in all situations. There are genuine things that cause emotions for an amount of time, and nobody can stop them. But I just seem to see lots of people that get upset over little shit, and they obsess over it and let it ruin their mood for so long, it just seems ridiculous. Don't make a mountain out of a molehill is a silly over-used statement and yet it's still fucking true.

I guess I think I'm a pretty laid-back guy. I try not to be negative, I try to assume the best of people, and I try not to let little things make me sad or angry or whatever for too long. You know what's the easiest way to do this? Realize there are people very worse off than you are. And don't just say yeah I know that what am I supposed to feel sorry cuz I got lucky and born here and whatever, I mean truly understand there are people without the shit that you have, or that things could be very worse, and when you do think about this, you realize little shit just doesn't matter. At all. So you ripped your shirt, or got snubbed by somebody or whatever, who cares? So you're pissed about something. You still got your fuckin life, don't ya? You still got health, food and water, friends and family that love you and support you, so don't obsess over little things. Don't let small shit ruin more than five minutes of your life. It's not like we got forever on this earth (damn man, 2012 is getting close!) so why spend time pissed off?

Anyways, that's why I say Attitude is Everything. If you can deal with a situation, realize it's not that big a deal, and move on, then you can spend more time being happy.

"Don't worry, be happy"


By the way, I wrote 1168 words today. Booya bitches.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Stuff Happened

Stuff has happened. I graduated. Two hours of standing and sitting only to walk across a stage in five seconds. I didn't even get my diploma, I got my diploma cover. Woohoo. My parents weren't even in the same room, they were in another room watching it on a screen. This is because UVM decided it would be great to have a first-come first-serve  arrangement rather than using tickets, so some kid could've had twenty family members and friends in the room meanwhile my parents had to watch me graduate on a screen, simply because they had arrived later than other people. Great job UVM. Another rousing successful graduation. The speaker was great too.  A professor of proverbs, who basically just quoted proverbs for twenty minutes. Yeah, we'd never heard 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush', thanks.

So yeah, I'm all gradumatated, learned, intellectual, and educated. Good for me. Now I work for my dad doing manual labor/carpentry/construction. Really puttin' that english degree to use.

My plans to become a licensed teacher in Mass have hit a road block. I passed the tests, and I sent them my transcript and my licensure application is 'Ready for Review'. If it's ready for review, then someone goddamn review it already. It wouldn't take very long. 'Oh here's a transcript, he has a bachelor's degree, oh here's his tests, he passed' and BAM I would have my license.

I'm looking at jobs other than teaching as well. 'Document Specialist' and 'Document Controller' and similar positions for large companies. These jobs are about specializing and controlling documents, something I think an english degree has gotten me ready for. I've editted, proofread, written, and organized documents of all shapes and sizes. So far, I have yet to hear back about any of these positions.


On another note, another thing that has occurred, is that my computer is broken, it will not turn on at all. This is bad. I do not like it.

But it does give me more time to do stuff, like write in this blog. So there's that, I guess.

I'm also on Google+ now, which is interesting. I like it's ideas. The fact that you can control who sees what and organize friends and others into different groups is intuitive. It's lightyears ahead of facebook and I do not doubt that many many people will switch over once it's released and people know about it.

In other news, I'm reading George RR Sanderson's Song of Ice and Fire series and it is quite amazing. He takes fantasy and makes it feel real. It is entirely unpredictable, which seems hard to do in fantasy, to avoid the pitfalls of cliche and tropes in fantasy, but Sanderson does it well. It's a very gritty medieval setting and I am enthralled by it.  Good stuff.

In other other news, maybe the US is going to default on our debt. That doesn't sound good. That sounds like something we wouldn't want to happen. All I know is I'm getting sick of the fucking bickering and general aggressive attitude between the two parties. All they seem to do is fight each other and nothing gets done. I think we need some more fucking moderate politicians in office.

But what do I know? I'm a 22 year old English degree graduate trying to make my way through the world. Stuff's happening, and I'm just trying to figure shit out.

"Be in my joint in two hours, we're forming a fuckin government!"
-Al Swearengen, Deadwood.