I must say Clark, a comment like yours telling me how much you enjoy my posts is a potent motivation for writing. It would be nice if I were to write these of my own volition but it's not a perfect world I guess. Since I'm already directly addressing you, I think it's funny Guy got you to reactive your account. I sort of feel like you relented to his request for the sake of Spencer's enjoyment. On the subject of World of Warcraft (shameful, I know) I've actually started playing this last month, but on my own terms since I "quit" a while ago. It's nice to be able to play while simultaneously feeling productive in other areas of your life and being able to limit game play to something that isn't just completely ridiculous. I've been able to do what I find the most fun in the game while avoiding what I consider the least fun. And the dosage of either is small enough so the game doesn't quickly lose its novelty.

For Halloween this year I'll be wearing an amazing costume of a sombrero with a colorful poncho and white bandana. I even have some cowboy boots to go with it. In preparation for this costume, I have been growing a mustache coupled with a soul patch to give my costume an authentic flare. I really need to get a little makeup for the day of Halloween though, so I can make my facial hair darker, gotta make it pop!

Since I've started school, I've met this guy who happened to be talking about Mariah Carey at the beginning of my government class. Warning bells were certainly going off, and I just had to make fun of it because I'm not personally a Mariah Carey fan and I think she's just so goofy and campy. But since then I've befriended him further (his name is Roy) we would talk in class about this, that, and the other. We'd always talk about something like gay rights or general topics that happened to come up. Sort of annoying though, the gayer the topic, the more hushed of a tone. How obnoxious. Reminds me of this stupid movie Broken Hearts Club where one of the characters accuses others of "internalizing homophobia." That movie was really cheesy bad, but at least Zach Braff was good, as I recall, adding a little bit of legitimacy to it. So recently Roy and I have been interacting more outside of class. This week he invited me to eat lunch with him and his friend on Tuesday, and since I lack roommates I figure it'd be a good thing to start getting some friends outside of class. Lunch was alright, I wasn't totally thrilled by it since my goal was to bleed information out of him so I could get to know him better, but we ended up watching videos on his laptop half the time.

The next day I invited him over to my apartment after class so I could attempt to get to know him better and make out with him because I totally knew I could. I had been kind of flirty with him online and I knew he was coming over to my house with salacious goals in mind. Pretty much I used him as a guinea pig so I could (finally) have a legitimate homosexual experience. We talked for about an hour before we dove into it for about twenty-five minutes and it was fun but ultimately (gasp) underwhelming. I'm honestly just not all that attracted to him. We happen to be the same age but beyond that we don't have a ton in common. At a glance we don't have similar backgrounds, we aren't on the same level intellectually, and I literally haven't been with anyone for about two and a half years. Having not been with anyone for so long, as I found, seems like it sends you back to block one in terms of what you're comfortable doing during an episode of physical contact. I didn't even manage to get fully aroused, which I can't tell if it's just because I'm not gay enough or if my lack of attraction has a strong enough effect on my libido. I'll probably still hang out with him and make out for the sake of experimentation and just to see if he'll reveal something about himself that will make me like him more. If not, I'll probably just have to put my foot down before I feel like he's being strung along excessively. Come to think of it, I liked his body since he has a thick trunk and he's nice to hold, but his face just isn't terribly appealing.

Another thing on the romantic front was that there was an episode with this girl in my speech class. Granted, it wouldn't exactly be classified as a romantic experience. In my class there's a girl who has been exchanging glances with me for a while now. But I didn't act upon those suggestive glances until recently, when I saw her outside of class where she worked, a restaurant Karen and I went to for our weekly hang out. I said hello to her and asked about class and was generally perky and friendly. As we walked out I decided to be brave and scratch my phone number on a napkin and tell her I'd like to get to know her better. At that point she revealed she had a boyfriend; I was just completely surprised. She suggested that we could pursue a platonic relationship instead, so I agreed without give it much thought. Upon further reflection, no, I'd rather not pursue a platonic relationship. Fuck Plato. When I got back in the car with Karen I told her of my plight and we returned to our regularly scheduled conversation. Ten minutes later I completed a sentence unrelated to the girl from my speech class and immediately said "Karen, she has a boyfriend." My surprise that day was palpable. A week later when I met up with Karen again I used Karen as my sounding wall for what once was surprise, but now has evolved into thinly veiled bitterness. At least it isn't very severe considering the lack of emotional capital I've had to invest.

Oh, Karen. Karen and I have a fabulous time together. At the restaurant last Friday, ignoring my episode of quasi-rejection, we had great fun. I can't remember what it was specifically, but something just made our meal seem like it was very fun and very funny. It was as if she were in a commercial for the restaurant we were in, attempting to convince the cameras that she was having an excellent time in their establishment. I even encouraged this behavior by sarcastically imploring her to stop laughing and smiling. Living in College Station has been really great for our relationship. I think it's because we don't see each other as often as we did during summer, increasing the novelty of our interactions. On top of that we usually have a specific goal in mind when we spend time together, whether it's getting something to eat, buying groceries, watching movies, or participating in some sort of church activity. This weekend we spent time together Friday. We went to Target in an effort to get me a pair of casual shoes and make Karen's rounds through the store to look at merchandise that she won't purchase. We walked around getting caught up with the more juvenile aspects of our personality while pointlessly going down isles and making fun of things we saw. After that we made a stop at her house so she could get something to eat and to entertain each other. She probably ate something around four o'clock, which was the second thing she had eaten that day. She woke up really late that morning and had only eaten a granola bar. Karen even went for a run before she picked me up that day. Seems vaguely reminiscent of anorexic behavior, yeah? Such is the life of an American female: body dysmorphia by default. I made fun of her for eating ramen noodles as her fast breaker, saying that it was about as good at eating cardboard. I suggested that she must have been like "man, those noodles sure did put something in my stomach!" Fortunately we did actually get a proper meal since we went to Pei Wei for some possibly overpriced Asian food. After that we went on to Walmart for an hour to get some groceries for ourselves. And, like I said, being around Karen is just a joy. I'm self aware enough to admit that I'm so vain that I like to hear myself talk, so it's nice to have a sounding wall, but Karen is obviously more than a sounding wall. She's intelligent and a genuinely fun person to talk to and be around.

This Thursday I was on a cloud because I did well on my easy speech midterm and found that I received a 100 on my speech the week before. Immediately after that I went to my art history class to give a speech which I got more than a hundred on, getting 42 out of a possible 40 points. I was feeling great until Friday morning when I took a test in US History because my performance was less than amazing. Maybe I shouldn't take a history class that seems like it's specifically designed for students that are actually history majors. Ultimately the goal was to challenge myself, which I am. Maybe I'll do better than my low expectations because of the righteous amount of extra credit my teacher offers.

I love pickles, so I got this really big jar of pickles and... they're gross. I'm having some pretty bad buyer's remorse right now, and hoping that when I return to my refrigerator and attempt to eat one again they won't be awful. Here's hoping.

Whoa there I'm back! My last post took an hour to write but who cares I'll write some more. While my previous post does cover the last four years it doesn't quite bring us to the present day, so I will attempt to get us there.

One fun little detail I failed to mention in my last post that happened before school that I thought I'd cover is my falling out with the Mormon church and ultimate severing. I'm sure people who know me are already sick of hearing me rail about this crap but I'm masturbatory enough to continue talking about it for the sake of getting it down in print. Because of my experience with Brigham Young University Idaho and the compulsory church attendance and heavy Mormon overtones at school, I left Idaho feeling disaffected by the church. Once I began to live in New York I attended church with Clay for about a month before I decided that it wasn't for me. Since my attendance wasn't compulsory no one really cared that I stopped going, except for maybe Clay who would offer me to come with him on a weekly basis before I told him to stop asking. On that note I'd like to commend Clay for being a good sport by honoring my request and not giving me a hard time about it. So from there I no longer went to church, even when I began to live in Texas again. Having gone through major bouts of depression along with a long creeping cognitive dissonance, I was beginning to feel that a lack of belief was becoming increasingly justified.

I can't remember how exactly this sentiment of mine reached Clark's ears, but he gave me money so I could purchase a copy of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion and Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation. These books really turned my life around, changing my perspective on life and the universe while inspiring the kind of happiness, renewal and fervor one might associate with a religious epiphany. Oh the irony. So to reestablish my identity in relation to my philosophy and outlook, I decided that I wanted to sever with Mormonism on an official basis. Before I sent a letter to their offices in Utah I sat my parents down and informed them of my decision. I did this against Clark's advice that I leave the church after I had started school. Looking back I'm glad I did it then, since it wasn't likely that I would have been able to keep my mouth shut about it anyway, allowing me to go through a phase of being really abrasive about the whole thing before I left for college. I know that I was being really obnoxious, but given that fact I still feel like it was a necessary part of the process of severance and rebuilding my identity around a new way of seeing the world. Plus it saved my roommates (well, the people I lived with for a month) from bearing the brunt of my constant railing. I'd say that restructuring my identity with my family as an audience is more useful to them than to strangers in comparison. Plus what can you expect? Someone claims they've found something new that is life changing and great, of course that person is going to go on about it incessantly.

Now that I've fully established myself as a nonbeliever I've started taking more of an interest in philosophy. I watched an excellent philosophy course called Death by a contemporary philosopher named Shelly Kagan that is offered online by Yale University. The class itself wasn't completely focused on the subject of death, instead it began by delving into the nature of life while addressing the question of the existence of a soul, the nature of identity, some history of philosophy and some other topics. I'll probably get a book by Shelly Kagan at some point in the future, but I'm not dying for more knowledge of philosophy just yet. Plus I'm pretty busy with school, which leads me to the beginning of my Fall semester.

I am currently attending Blinn College in College Station, Texas (well actually Bryan, Texas but whatever) beginning in the fall semester of 2009. I'm currently taking some super cool general education classes which may not seem immediately relevant to my major but serve me by acting as a proving ground to see how good of a student I am. I'm currently in a US government class and a US history class, the latter requiring a lot of reading. The idea is that if I can work hard and be a good student I'll be able to do well in classes that I do not have a natural inclination for. My other classes are a little more up my alley. I'm also taking a speech class, art history, and a digital art class. I was kind of surprised with my speech ability but it turns out that I have a pretty good speaking voice along with the extra confidence from being a little older than my peers. Since I'm in a digital art class I got my hands on a computer drawing tablet which doubles as a Christmas present for the upcoming holiday season. I'm doing pretty well in the class but it doesn't involve the help of my drawing tablet as much as I hoped, so I use it for my own personal enjoyment and work at home. The class is more about design and hasn't yet required much drawing. We're currently working with text designs for our projects which is turning me off to notion of a graphic design career and making illustration look more appealing. Dicking around with page layouts and text doesn't seem as fun as digital painting. Lastly my art history class is pretty interesting, requires quite a bit of reading but I've been enjoying it, and my teacher seems to have a pretty high opinion of me.

Now let me tell you about my living arrangements. I live right next to school which is pretty obviously very convenient for me. I don't have a car for myself so my world is mostly limited to being home or being at school. It's not too bad though since my sister lives in town and can taxi me around when I absolutely need her to. So when I began living in my apartment I had three roommates: Charles, Travis, and James. They were all pretty agreeable guys and it's too bad they left, but at the same time I am able to keep the place much cleaner with the same amount of effort I exerted previously. James and Travis left to go live at home again because they were low on funds while Charles decided to move to another room within our complex to live with a friend. A room opened up in his friend's apartment because their crack head former roommate attacked his fellow roommates with a sword, breaking the pinky of one and leaving two superficial cuts on the chest of another. That same night the crack head roommate was arrested so it isn't likely that the outside world will see him for another twenty years or something.

So, now that I'm alone and we've arrived to the present, considering my loneliness I will probably be writing in this here blog thing more often. That and doing what I've been doing, which is hanging out with Karen and her fellow ward members from church. I hear church is a pretty good way to meet people after college. The irony never ceases.

For those who care:

I'll be in Houston tomorrow on Friday. Oral sex by appointment only. I'll be leaving Monday, so if you want to come over and force me to make a batch of popcorn, this is your chance. Also, if you're up for a rousing game of Super Smash Brothers (for Nintendo 64), bring a couple of controllers.