KITTAH!!

This was my Valentines wrapping paper, made, by Jess!

I just added the text overlay. All the grunt work is her. Not bad for not knowing a lick about photochop other than what I taught her in passing. Not bad at all.

Fuck, it makes me laugh.

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I'm going to be Thirty.

All week I've been trying to come up with a nice way of saying that. But in reality, there it is. Tomorrow is my birthday. February 3rd. I will be thirty years-old.

On the outside I appear to be handling it pretty well. I don't know, maybe I'm not fooling anyone. Over and over in my head, I keep repeating it, like a psychopath. Thirty, thirty, thirty...

I need to stop thinking about it. It's just a number. In it lies no weight. This is what I tell myself anyways. This is what I say to keep smiling about it.

I've never wanted to be canonically adult but there is a part of me that wants to hurry up with it all. Though still, part of me is grasping to hold on to some youth-like traits and immaturity.

It feels like I'm on a bit of a cusp. To old to be young, too young to be old.

I don't know. This woe-is-me post is pissing me off a bit. It's not like I'm quitting video games or anything that drastic. I'm having a birthday, I'm not CRAZY!

The one thing I have planned to do today -- on my birthday eve -- is to call the bank and get the pay-off amount on my car loan and be done with it. That will be 1 down, 4 to go. (A year early I might add.) My debt should all start falling in line after today. Car down, medical loan next, then credit card #1, and credit card #2. Rounding them out is Student Loan. The first step is going to be done this afternoon and it feels really good.

My plan for today is to not look at all the things I haven't accomplished by thirty, but all the things I have accomplished. And the things I will have accomplished by the time I'm 31. I didn't get to Japan last year, but I am planning to go this year. The goal is to come up with a trip, plan it, buy tickets, and go. I need that under my belt.

Tomorrow I'm having a great party. It's a video game party. The kind of which we used to have. It will be a good time even if not everyone can make it. My main objective is that we all have a good time. There are going to be 2 more 30th birthdays this year in my group of friends, Scott and Jon. I hope that we celebrate each of them to the max that they deserve.

Parting words of wisdom from a soon to be thirty year-old?

Be excellent to each other.

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A Comet Appears

We can blow on our thumbs and posture,
but the lonely is such delicate things,
the wind from a wasp could blow them,
into the sea,
with stones on their feet,
lost to the light and the loving we need.

Still to come,
the worst part and you know it,
there is a numbness,
in your heart and it's growing.

_ The Shins

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Better than indifference.

It was hard not to give up. And I think some part of me wanted you to give up. Then I could go back to feeling like I’ve always felt: not good enough.

Not good enough. In life. As a son to my father. As a friend to my friends. As a lover to my lover.

It’s where I’m comfortable. It’s where I’ve accepted myself.

But you didn’t give up, even after the claims I made, stipulations, and accusations I put on our relationship. The things we said. Even after I tried my hardest to push you away, you stayed. You fought and didn’t quit. You stayed.

We are more than the stupid stuff we buy, the TVs, the meals, the toys and games. More than the places we go, the things we do. The good times we share, the quips we trade back and forth, the pillow talk. We are more than the sum of our parts.

We’re not perfect. But neither is anyone. And sometimes we fight just because feeling pain is better than indifference. Because sometimes our lives get boring, and being in this skin for some 90+ years can get old. But that is the strength of what we have. We are never too far gone that we can’t be hugged, or kissed. Held and loved. When one pushes, the other pulls closer.

Clawing, slobbering and cold, biting and growling in our darkest hour, there we are, standing in the blinding light of an open doorway. Not two silhouettes, but one.

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I've been reading these.

"Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives - trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone."


"A word to the wise now to the garbage collectors of the world, to the curio seekers, to the antique buffs, to everyone who would try to coax out a miracle from unlikely places. Check that bottle you're taking back for a two-cent deposit. The genie you save might be your own. Case in point, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Castle, fresh from the briefest of trips into the Twilight Zone."


"One time in a million, a coin will land on its edge, but all it takes to knock it over is a vagrant breeze, a vibration or a slight blow. Hector B. Poole, a human coin, on edge for a brief time in the Twilight Zone."

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Anime is capitalized.

"how much do you know about Anime?" A message stated, waiting inside my inbox.

Sent yesterday, it sat there overnight -- cramped up against the other bloated bits of spam and wine reviewer nonsense I receive at my work address. I have to ask myself: how much can one really know about anime? Was he in essence asking me if I was "cool... man?" Hey man, are you -- you know -- cooool?

"Enough," I reply. "Why do you ask?"

The addresser is a guy down in the mailroom. He shuffles around the FedEx shipments to various people in the office. He's got kids and a brand new non-ipod MP3 player. I like him, he's one of the people here I get along with. When he's in my office we usually discuss things of videogame nature sprinkled with music and a dash of technology. He's interested in the 360, in Ghost Recon. Black, Halo, Rainbow Six. Shooters are his deal, a topic on which I can expound. He knows, with me, to keep the sports talk to a minimum. I guess I just radiate an anti-sports cologne.

"you ever heard of Mezzo Forte?" He replies.

"No, is it any good?"

"hell yeah but there's supposed to be an uncut version of it but I cannot find it"

Doing a google search and popping up with a Wikipedia page it's no wonder the guy can't find it. It's Hentai. That's japanese cartoon porno for the uninitiated. Not really a work topic by any stretch, but I think it's great he felt he could come to me. Even if I had to be felt out first.

You cool man?

He's looking for the Japanese version though, the one you can't get over here. Since I know what he wants me to do without really asking me, I check the torrent sites -- well, the ones I can check at work anyways. A cursory search brings up nothing so I go over to AnimeKrazy. Sure enough, there it is, in all it's uncut glory, for $19.85.

"cool, I knew I came to the right person"

And out it comes, the reason for the seemingly random inquiry. I am, in this office, the man you go to when you need something done right. The man who knows how to get you things.

I love when something comes at me sideways and breaks up the day.

- Holdin' Caulfield

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Child's Play Update:

This just made my day!

Via Penny Arcade

"Wednesday's Child's Play Charity Auction and Dinner was (I believe it is fair to say) ridiculously successful - photographs of the ridiculous success in progress may be discovered here. Powerful winds took out power to the office, making Kiko's update of the official bar difficult - we'll do it as soon as we're able to. But the new total, as of yesterday, now sits at $760,000. That's Earth Dollars, not shells or bottle caps. Yes, that's just this year. My hope is that we will top eight hundred thousand, because the rhetorical payload is simply too potent: Child's Play will have, officially, raised "millions" of dollars. Specifically, you know... two million. I was going to downplay that figure, but then I remembered that it was two million dollars.

(CW)TB out."

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