Yeah I couldn't see straight but my thoughts were surprisingly clear

Two weeks ago: On the way home from work, I was actually pretty upset. Like kind of crying and wondering how, emotionally, I allowed myself to get to the position I currently find myself in. On the level of, oh, what a predicament.

I think I felt the widest range of emotions I've endured in quite a while. It went from sadness to fury to remorse to a zen-like calm and a steel resolve. Seriously, a lot to run through in roughly 15 minutes. What almost made me feel better was going to Applebee's by myself and having a couple of beers and some mini cheeseburgers. Eventually, I sauntered home around 1:15 a.m. and then set upon a little project I envisioned for myself. It was gratifying and maybe even therapeutic. I feel like I put a lot of thought into it and executed it about as well as someone named Jon-Michael could be expected to. My hope is that it does not go unappreciated...it certainly will not go unnoticed, unless by divine intervention.

It's quite funny and subsequently sad that there are no idols in my life any more. No one is my hero, there is no one I put up on a pedestal, etc. I mean, maybe those are things we do as children and it's a phase to grow out of. But even though children believe in foolish things, it's still better than the alternative. The other cool part of being a kid is when you screw up, people chalk it up to you being young and think it's cute.

When you're an adult, screw ups and misspoken words are no longer cute. You learn they hurt people and there's no such thing as a quick fix. You also learn that, in most cases, the people you hurt and the people who hurt you are the ones closest to you. It's understandable but the reality is overwhelming to accept at times.

Postscript: I wrote everything above this about two weeks ago as the first sentence alluded to. I'd like to say that I've become a little bit of a better person and have spent time with the people who mean the most to me in life. Not everything in life sucks but there are times where you have to sort through the rubbish to get to the good part.

Thoughts for tonight: I'm going to go shower, run to the post office, hang with my brother for about an hour, go to Ocala and have dinner with a special friend then hit karaoke at the Common Grounds in Gainesville tonight. Overall, I am pretty excited about the vast potential this evening holds. Oh, and I'm like a boss.

Who are you trying to fool?

So one of the more frustrating aspects of life, I am finding out, is attempting to set up a doctor's appointment.

I called three different places and I guess none of them have receptionists because I got each one's answering machine. I only left a message with one and I know doctors are usually busy, so I wasn't expecting to talk to him/her over the phone in the middle of the day.

I just couldn't fall asleep last night. I didn't end up nodding off until 5 or 5:30 in the morning and I didn't wake up until like 10 minutes to 2, which immediately put me in somewhat of a foul mood. I got my pre-work internet stuff done and then showered and headed to work.

Before I left my house, I found out that Harry Kalas passed away. For those of you who don't know Mr. Kalas, we was the voice of the Philadelphia Phillies and had just began his 38th season in the booth. If you've ever had the pleasure of listening to Kalas yell "Outta Here!" after a home run, you would understand why today is a sad day. That is a part of life that I will never get used to dealing with. It's not like I feel a family member passed away today, yet this guy was an institution in my life. I'll never be able to watch or listen to the Phillies without thinking about Kalas. He is all I know as a broadcaster for one of my favorite teams.

I guess I am happy that he got to see the Phillies win another World Series before he left.

On another note, I would like to regain my candidness soon. Without it, I feel toothless. However, I feel at the point in my life that I have a stupid mouth that says stupid things at the worst times. Finding a balance should be interesting and ultimately rewarding.

It is difficult to watch someone you care about live their life seemingly happily without you. Not to be selfish in that sense because I wish the people I care about happiness and even like to be a part of it when I can. Yet what if they are happier because you have taken a reduced roles in their life? Hmmmmm....

The future freaks me out

Lately, I have been thinking about my life outside of the next day, week or month. Being in the newspaper business, I know that this particular ride can only last so long.

So what is my next career or backup plan or whatever I decide to call the ensuing phase of my work schedule? I was reading the Parade insert out of the sunday paper and saw that speech therapists make decent money and it sounds like something I would be interested in doing. I would like to be in a line of work where I am making a positive impact every day on people. Either by helping them rebuild their lives or even achieve their dreams.

It's not that I just want to help people so I can feel good about myself. I just know I am lucky to be where I'm at, even though it's not that high on the food chain and would like to pay it back or forward. It all depends what angle one sees the object from, I suppose.

I tried to lay down for sleep around 3 but it was warm in my room even with the ceiling fan on at full blast. So I figured it I were going to be awake anyhow, I may as well turn the air on for a half hour and write. Then shut the air off, go to bed and fall asleep before it gets warm again. When I am warm, I sometimes get itchy and this is one of those night.

Regardless of my relationship status, I think I am going to try to go to Atlanta this summer. From what I hear, it is just a cool place and I really, really want to see the Georgia State Aquarium, which is arguably the largest one in the world, I thought I heard. Also, the zoo in Atlanta is supposed to be good along with the World of Coca-Cola, CNN tour and the nightlife is also good, says my sources, who only agreed to speak to me on conditions of anonymity.

My goal is to be back in a collegiate classroom by August. I could see myself being a teacher or a speech therapist. Or maybe just the rapist.

Right now, I definitely feel as if I'm getting a dose of my own medicine.

Learning self control has never been so easy

I'm trying not to be the gluttonous pig I've been in the past. Today for instance, I had waffles, a yogurt and a small glass of orange juice for lunch and then a ham sandwich, chips and a gatorade for dinner. Oh, and M&M's. I know that still sounds bad but I'm changing my habits a little bit at a time and I don't feel as weighted down as I usually would eating a lot of meat and drinking soda or beer.

Anyhow, trying to make changes or exhibiting self control is difficult in any facet of life when you've been living a certain way for a while. Sometimes a person will ask you to do something that is very hard but you know that it would be for the best, so you try even though your urges tell you to do the exact opposite.

For people like me, however, I try to control myself but actively search for loopholes, hopefully not pissing the person off in the process. Or asininely activating assimilation in alliteration. But you get my point.

My mom announced that she didn't feel like cooking this year, so we are going to Cody's for dinner before I have to go to work. Yes, I am working Easter Sunday. The other thing I don't understand is that Christmas is a paid holiday but Easter is not? Wow, I guess Landmark believes is Jesus' birth but are still skeptical about the whole resurrection part of the ordeal.

I am working through Tuesday and then (somehow) I have five days off in a row, including my sister's wedding this coming Saturday.

I would really like to go to a concert soon. As a matter of fact, Fall Out Boy is playing at UCF with special guest 50 Cent. The tickets are in the neighborhood of $25-30 and it is in the outskirts of what most people would consider Orlando. I'm going to call up my homeboy Ryan and see if he'd be down for going, especially since he lives about a mile from the arena.

For the record, I am done with work after an early deadline and am heading to my buddy Andy's house to go watch a boxing match. Peace.

A typical day

So let me take you (or really myself) through what my day off was like.

I awoke right around 2 p.m. Well, I woke up closer to 1 p.m. but had to convince myself today was worth leaving my bedroom for. I somehow decided it was and promptly got up and sat in my underwear to play video games on my couch.

After about 30 minutes of that, I came to the conclusion I was hungry and made myself an Egg McMuffin, an apple and some orange juice. Instead of bacon, I used sliced deli ham on the sandwich.

Eventually, my brother came over after getting home from school. He decided, after seeing me sitting around in boxers, that he wasn't feeling the scene and went to his house for a little bit. I went to grab my mail and received nothing of particular interest...except a notice that Bank of America saw fit to raise the interest rate on my credit card four percent and also make it a variable rate. I owe a little more than $100 on it and they gave me the option to decline the new rate as long as I didn't charge anything more to it. So I called the number, declined and proceeded to cut the card up.

After that, partially because I was disgusted and partially because I had been meaning to, I called Sears and cancelled that credit card as well. The only reason I got the Sears card was to buy my flat-screen tv with no interest for 18 months and I had already paid that off, so I saw no reason to keep it.

So then it was a little after 4 p.m. and I called a doctor I found through my health insurance network. I got her answering service and was told (rudely I thought) to call back tomorrow. I don't know, sometimes I feel people are short with me. I'm not sure if it is imagined or real.

I took a shower at about 4:15 even though I hadn't really done anything. For me with showers is the way people are about their morning coffee. I could shower the night before but I still wake up and don't consider my day started unless I let myself be beaten for 10 minutes with steaming hot water. After my shower, I was definitely in a better mood about the rest of the day. 

I then put some clothes in the laundry and went through all the papers on my table, threw away expired coupons, looked over love letters, organized and kept important stuff. My brother came back over again at some point and we made the decision to go to the park to play basketball. 

Anyhow, I was shooting the ball really well today. I'm not a bad shot normally but I was probably nailing 2 out of every 3 shots I took, including from 3-point land. The only problem was after about 45 minutes or an hour, I couldn't really play any more. I think I took so many shots that my neck was stiff from continuously looking up to shoot. Either way, we played one game and my team won, so I guess that perked me up a little.

Following that, I took my brother home and we threw the football around a little bit. Unfortunately, the annoying little kids that live next to my mom came over and broke up our football throwing after about 30 seconds. They first wanted to join in and then after that were trying to convince us we should throw around a hacky-sack instead of the football. Usually, I'm pretty easygoing when it comes to children but maybe it was being a little depressed and tired...I just couldn't do it. I booked after about 10 minutes and went home. The best part was getting in a few passes with Kenneth though. Perhaps it was from the basketball playing but I felt as light as a feather gliding down the street and running under some of the bombs my brother uncorked.

I was quickly brought back to reality, however, when I misstepped on one route and my left knee nearly buckled. I didn't get hurt but it is clicking now when I sit with my legs folded. If I weighed about 30 lbs. less and exercised more regularly, I doubt events like this would occur.

That was the beginning and end of the active part of my day. I came home and cooked a cheese calzone for dinner, finished off a gatorade and had some granola bars. I played video games, thought about how I am responsible for my own life sucking and then deciding to let people know that my life is really as boring as they suspected.

Oh yeah, I also watched In Bruges with Colin Farrell, Ralph Fiennes and Brendan Gleeson. It's about two hitmen who are told to hide out in Bruges, Belgium after one of them accidently kills a small child during a job. I really am not a fan of Farrell at all but he was extremely likable in this movie. He plays an Irishman, which he actually is. I won't give the movie away but it was entertaining and has sort of a surprise ending. It's one of the few movies on Netflix I've gotten lately that I have thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe I should watch more foreign films. The movie was shot on location in Belgium and had a decidedly European feel.

Attention: awkward transition upcoming.

My biggest fault as a person in a list of many is that I am not a creator, I am a destroyer. It's not enough that everything is good at points in my life. If I can't make it better, I seem to only want to make it worse. If you've gotten this far, you deserve a round of applause. Yet you're probably also wondering why I am this way? Well, I don't know myself but I intend to get to the bottom of it.

I had a perfectly beautiful, loving, smart, insert another 100 superlatives here, girlfriend that would have run through a brick wall for me. So I repaid over three years of us working to maintain our relationship by unceremoniously dumping her even though I knew I still loved her and most likely could spend the next millenium scouring the Earth for someone better and failing miserably.

So I am stuck in the unenviable position of having irreversably hurt the one person who knew me and cared about me more than anyone in the world and no amount of pleading, begging, appealing is going to get me out of this one.

In a way, I am glad from the perspective that she certainly deserves to have a more stable presence in her life. I don't want to keep dragging her back into a relationship and letting her down yet again. 

On the other hand, I know if she were to ever marry someone else or have children with someone other than me (as sick as it sounds), a part of me would die, crumble, disinegrate, cease to exist. I feel like a monster to think that but that doesn't bother me as much as the realization of two paragraphs ago.

I've already noticed it in subtle ways. I don't have anyone to talk to online when I wake up most days. I don't have anyone who regularly e-mails me or calls me just to see how my day is going. I realize how I've never had a person that I've been so close to or even if I never dated said person, how good of a friend someone could actually be.

I have immediate relatives that didn't treat me as well as Alison did and I honestly don't know why, at this stage of my life, I can't see the repercussions of my actions before I commit them, It makes me ill and, like I said, this is make-or-break time for me. The love of a great woman is pretty fucking rare and I can ill afford to fall into a pattern of stupidity. I don't want to have these issues with me the rest of my life. I would like to be a stable person a woman can rely on consistently. I haven't always been a shitty boyfriend.

Enough about that for now. I deleted my facebook and my space. They were spectacular timewasters and I also realized that the people I most wanted to keep in touch with must have felt the same way because they rarely contributed. I thought for a few days if I started sending messages and updating more often, then it would be more fun. Conversely, it wasn't. My Space in particular, all I got on there any more was spam.

My sister's wedding is coming up soon and I'm happy for her and want to be there to support her. It's just so unbelievable though. I can't believe someone I know is getting married. I'm 27 and realized this is a natural step in life. But my mom or dad were never married to each other or anyone else during my lifetime. I've only been to three weddings, two of which were for people I actually knew. The third I went as the date of an ex-girlfriend and actually had a great time. Weddings can be pretty fun I guess. 

I like what my sister is doing in the sense of having only like 50 people invited. If I could get away with it, I would try to have less. 

Recently, I've been listening to Flobots a lot. They're an alternative hip-hop band from Denver that is pretty politically charged and differently musically than a lot of bands I've heard. I mean, there's some violin and trumpet mixed in there and my brother is convinced there is also french horn. I'm dubious about his proclamation because he's 16 and I'm not sure he's heard a french horn. About this, like many other things, I could be entirely wrong.

If you've actually read this far, I'd suggest listening to a song by them called Handlebars. It's not new music or anything, I think it came out in late 2007 or 2008. I just recently heard it, so it's new to me.

So that is what is going on in my life. I want to thank myself and blogger.com for allowing me to vent. Good luck and good night.

Blogging in obscurity

I write more for myself than any other person yet I often wonder about how people feel about my thoughts or even the process?



Things are just moving along right now. It's almost like a metamorphisis of sorts in the sense that my life hasn't changed yet but events are already in motion that will most definitely alter the outcome soon enough.



Letting people know what is truly on my mind is something I am quite terrible about. I feel like the only time I can be truly blunt is when I am frustrated or no longer fear the repercussions of my words. Neither of those instances come up often enough.



I am working this weekend. My plans to go to Orlando fell through most unfortunately, however, I definitely don't blame Ryan, who is working his ass off in order to graduate in May.



The one feature I love about this blog is it has an auto-save and also you can go back later and finish it without having to first publish it. My regular musings aren't all that great, so you can imagine how they read when only half-baked.

My biggest concern right now is prioritizing what is truly important in my life and working on fixing it. I have a severe problem in the sense that I still love a girl who I basically broke up with due to my own laziness. In the current state I'm in, I don't deserve anyone. Even if I rectified the situation and gave everything some time, it still could be just one too many times I jumped off the deep end...and ultimately, for what?

As a human being, one of my biggest faults is overreacting to things erractically. Like using a nuke to kill an ant.

Keep on keepin' on!

Here are some housekeeping items, so naturally they will be put in as numbered notes:

1. I feel like I am ready to move on to the next set of challenges in my life. Exactly what those entail, I do not know at the moment. But it kind of dawned on me today while I was covering boys weightlifting.

Outwardly, my job is a piece of cake at times, others it can be kind of hellacious. I am thankful to have a job in the current climate (which I believe is set at about 87 below celsius), but sometimes I ask myself what am I doing? I've already come to the conclusion that I will not be a writer for the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years of my life, yet I suppose I haven't been extremely proactive.

I think (besides the hours) my job gives me too much flexibility and enough fun to keep me from pursuing something more worthwhile or fulfilling. Honestly, I can say I love Citrus County and am entirely grateful to Gerry Mulligan and Andy Marks for even giving me a chance to work here full-time in a permanent capacity. I know nothing is permanent but I worked here in a temporary full-time capacity for about 3 months about 18 months before I got hired for good in September 2005.

2. This weekend, I (hopefully) get to hang out with my friend Ryan in Orlando. I now say hopefully because he had an unexpected snafu in a year-end project he needs to complete in order to graduate and live a happy life. I am trying to remain selfless but it would be a bit of a disappointment because I'm looking forward to hanging with Ryan.

3. Although I've tried to tell people I think I would like to be single for the time being, it hasn't stopped them with thinking of people to set me up with. The best one I have to say is from my cousin Andrew. A friend of his has a friend (great) who he described as 29 years old, single, hot and fun. The only problem is her name, which is the same as a friend of my ex-girlfriend's daughter. I swear life is hilarious. Just when you think you've heard or seen it all, you quickly get put back in your place.