Inspiration

I'm writing this from a computer lab during one of my classes. I managed to forget my memory stick at home today and therefore I can't work on my autocad assignment. I was wondering how to kill an hour so I decided to catch up on some journals. I just read a whole whack of posts from a bunch of people and I feel inspired. Everyone, especially those of you in China right now, have inspired me to pick up my own training. I've been slacking a bit lately and been using my new environment as an excuse to do less.

No more sitting around wasting time. I should be pursuing my passions with more vigor. I have to break out of my routine of sitting around at my computer. I could easily be using that time to do things like drawing, practicing, exercising, expanding my San Shou knowledge, writing, going out to do things and spending time with friends. I have been sitting around all day feeling unmotivated with the day wrote off simply because I forgot my backpack at home today. Now I feel amazing, thanks for the inspiration guys.

That's the Rules

Question: Why do we have laws and rules? Answer: To help maintain order and to increase our quality of life. When problems arise, someone comes up with an idea on how to help manage or prevent the problems. So each rule or law has a reason for existing, at some point in time there was a specific reason for each rule coming to pass. That’s my take on it anyway; I think it’s fairly straightforward and logical; by the way I am a huge supporter of common sense.

Here’s where I start to rant. If we get so carried away with enforcing a rule or law and eventually lose sight of the reason for its existence we’re just blindly follow policy. In many cases the automatic unthinking obedience to a rule or law can actually contradict the purpose of the rule. For example, and this is not the reason for choosing this topic but it’s the most recent example I can think of, at school there is a fairly new mentorship program in place for the electrical techs.

The program pairs up each first year student with a second year student so that the second year student can help the new guy. The second year is there as a resource for the first year student, he answers questions, shows him around, shares first year experiences, gives advice and maybe even helps the first year student with homework. Sounds great right? I agree. It’s a good way to get the new guys on track and it’s nice to have someone with experience that you can talk to if you want, or to get help from when you need it. The problem lies in the “when you need it”, you see, this program is mandatory and they set up mandatory meetings between mentors and mentees every month after class. The pairings are pretty much random so its luck of the draw (my guy can hardly speak English, minus 5 points in usefulness for not being able to carry on a simple conversation). They even make us sign a contract.

So when one finds himself with no questions to ask or help needed, with homework to do and exams to study for, one suddenly finds himself assembling a puzzle (while not allowed to speak) with his mentor. Other lame bonding exercises have and may include drawing caricatures of each other, building bridges out of newspaper, making lists of common interests and going for simple scavenger hunts. These activities take about an hour unless you want to factor in the rush hour delays, buses missed, and carpools held back, that go hand in hand with staying late. With a midterm the next day and a project due the one after that, precious time ticks away, spent uselessly instead of the way you’d like to.

In this situation blindly following the rule that was created to help me is now doing the exact opposite by hindering me. I have someone looking at crowd of people, which I happen to be standing in, and throwing out a suggestion to the mass of us, ignoring us as individuals. That’s just fine, so long as I retain the right to choose whether or not to use that advice. No one likes being forced to do something they know isn’t in their best interest and don’t like being called stupid.

*This has gotten pretty big and there’s still a lot I want to talk about so I will continue this later*

Post-Turkey bloging

Ahhh no midterms this week or assignments due... it should be a laid back week for a change. The only thing I’ll have to annoy me this week is radians, I HATE radians. No more time consuming manual drawing to do either, we just started AutoCAD, which I already have experience with. I even got a legal copy of AutoCAD 2010 on my home PC; they let students download special temporary copies for free now. The new version moved everything around though so I can’t find anything anymore.

That’s all that’s new and exciting with school; school tends to sound a bit dull unless you’re there you self and often dull even if you are. I feel like I haven’t been doing much these days and it’s kind of bumming me out. I’ve been sitting on my butt too much. I think this is partly because one of my best friends moved to Ireland for 4+ years and because of my new place/roommates. Living at my old place I was often out and about doing things with my current roommates. Now that we all live together I think it kind of makes it harder to do things, probably just because our attitude, we need to try and be a bit more motivated to do things.

Now that I have school and the lightness of my wallet to worry about I can’t seem to go off and do things as easily. Plus a few of the people I’d like to see more are also really busy and our schedules clash. I think I’m just coming out of low spot now though and I see clear peaks ahead. I am getting restless in class from inactivity during the days, I think I may have even gained a little bit of weight. I went to the school gym for the first time today and worked out for an hour. It felt great, I got back to the running I’ve been neglecting and did all my pushups/situps for the day along with some other exercises. I am completely physically exhausted, I went pretty hard and it’s been awhile. I will definitely feel it tomorrow or the next day. It feels great sitting here sore and tired though, I’m almost sleepy from exercise, I love it.

I’m going to make it part of my regular routine to go to the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Tuesday I’m done at noon so I can go there after and still make it home early and on Thursdays I have a two hour spare I can make use of. So I’ll be at kung fu Monday, Wednesday, Friday and the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I don’t have an elliptical machine at home anymore so I’ve got a lot of kilometres to cover when I’m there. I’m not sure if I mentioned this yet or not but I have signed on for the next UBBT. So I have another year fun, hard work and excellence ahead of me.

I wish I could will myself to sleep

This journal entry coming at ya live and late, straight from my sleep deprived bedroom. I am currently sweaty, mentally and physically exhausted and yet a bit wired all the same. I have a couple of midterms this week so I’ve been studying my but off and exercising during my breaks. I brought out the old weights for the first time in the new place and did some routines on top of the usual stuff. Did a few calve exercises to work on the “insufficient calves” problem. I just finished doing my last rep of pushups/situps, kempo, squats, calve raises etc... Now I’m sitting at my computer, cooling and calming down before I go to bed, wondering what to do in the meanwhile.

I wrote a letter to someone and here I’m still sweaty so I thought it’s a good a time as any to journal. That is if you ignore the fact that I’m AGAIN going to bed way too late and can hardly form a coherent sentence. Plus I don’t really have a point; I guess I’m kinda just rambling out loud. Man I have to get into a routine of going to bed earlier. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t a night person. It isn’t very convenient being tired all day and getting a ton of energy from 7-11pm.

Uhhhh, right, say something interesting already, oh, here’s a thought I was thinking. I was debating whether to write a couple journal entries about two topics I have strong opinions on. Trouble is they’re the controversial type and would guaranteedely offend people. Speaking my honest opinion would certainly have people looking at me differently afterwards. Therefore I don’t think I will write them. Ha, I found the trouble about posting publicly to people you actually know and care about. You have to deal with them later, who cares what you say to strangers. The negative potential far outweighs the positive of writing them so I think I won’t.

I know what some people will say,

“Hey you can’t let that stop you! You should write them anyways, just try to be conscious of other people’s opinions and try not to overdo it. I’m sure people will be able to take it in stride and it may stir up discussion.”

When considering this response I feel this comparison is apt. No matter how much you try to prepare a group for a REALLY dirty/sexist/racist joke, no matter how light the situation is, even with extreme care given to explaining that the joke does not reflect your opinion whatsoever and that you were not one who came up with it, even with encouragement by your care free audience to just go ahead and tell it, everyone wants to hear it, your joke will probably be met with silence while everyone looks at you like youre a jackass. It’s kinda like the old, “I promise not to get mad”, bit when you have no idea what’s coming, it’s a hollow promise. Hint: of the two topics, one has something to do with religion and the other with the military. That’s all I’m saying, no further comment.

Oh no, this 10 minute babble turned into a 45 minute tangent. think Im a little delirious. Tomorrows gonna be rough. If youll excuse me the giant purple snorklewacker in my closet is telling me i should probably do something about the 7 foot talking banana in the bathroom so i thnk i wll be gng nowzzzzz....

I want to do Everything

I want to be everyone and do everything. I want to be a race car driver, a motorcyclist, a mountain climber, a martial arts master, a scuba diver and a sailor. I want to be a property owner, archer, world traveler, linguist, business man and a craftsman. I want to be a fighter, an artist, a writer, a humanitarian and a professional. The list could go on endlessly but you get the point, I really just want to do things.

Is it possible to do all of these things? My answer is yes. I don’t think it’s possible to do all these at the same time or professionally but that’s not the point. When I say I want to be a race car driver I don’t mean I want to join NASCAR, simply bringing my car out to the track or an occasion auto cross would suffice. Drawing on occasion, maybe taking a few art classes and trying to incorporate the creation of art into my life would be enough to call myself an artist.

I already am, or I’m at least on the path to a few of the things I just mentioned. My dad used to own a catamaran and was a member of a sailing club. He used to race for fun and win consistently. I grew up being around a sail boat. He eventually traded in the catamaran for a fishing boat and then eventually got rid of that boat, now he has a canoe. As time went on his interests changed and old hobbies made way for new ones. So even if he only sailed for 10 years, and he hasn’t sailed in a long time, he is still a sailor.

Going through a phase of doing something and eventually dropping it is not necessarily a bad thing. Over time our priorities change. It’s important to recognize these changes and to not be afraid of branching out to pursue them. Really I guess my point is that I want to experience as much as I can and get the most out of my life. Keeping all these goals in mind and staying active will help me achieve them. I look forward to crossing things off my list and adding new ones.

Blue Screen of DEATH!

Ahhhhhh! I haven’t blogged in too long! Two and a half weeks ago I moved out of my old place and into a house with some friends and started school at NAIT again. In the process of this move, one of my friends accidentally unplugged my computer while it was running and it immediately exploded. Not literally of course, but the motherboard, power supply and processor were destroyed, virtually everything important. My computer was running on an old socket system so I couldn’t replace the parts without making the rest of my junk useless so I decided to just build another one from scratch.

So in my first week of school, with a new resolution to try and live thrifty, I ended up dropping $800 on a new computer. Aw well, I’d have had to do it sometime or another and I’ve been looking for an excuse to upgrade, I just couldn’t justify it while the old one still worked. Losing my computer also resulted in me losing all my journal entries, which I shouldn’t have had stored on my main hard drive (Duh), including a good one I had almost finished. Due to a series of software issues and other frustrating, tedious computer issues, I didn’t get my computer set up until last weekend. So I haven’t been blogging because I was waiting until I had things set up the way I wanted. It took me much longer than I anticipated.

Things are just spiffy now though! So I’m back and ready to bang out a whack of glorious journal entries to make up for the drought. I thought I’d throw out this little, “Allo, sorry bout the hitch, right, now where were we?” before I undertake the frustrating task of trying to re-write the entry I lost. I might end up copy/pasting my blog entries back into word, I was feeling awfully swell about having 50 pages in the journal and now it seems rather lonely with just this.