I have said that fall is my favorite season, and goddamn! do I mean it this year. I am so glad that summer is loosing its hold on this shitty state finally. Time to start rediscovering those long-sleeve shirts and maybe grab the jacket and get it all dust-free and ready to go.
I really love fall.
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Even though I've got school, clinicals and work, I am in a flurry of home-repair projects. I have windows to replace, exterior paint to finish up, a patio to finish, and a bathroom to finish remodeling. It seems that I always get halfway into a project and then something comes up, but now I've got to get these things finished.
See, the wife and I are gearing up to sell our cute little house and get the hell out of this horrible state. We would like to move to WA, to a rural area outside Seattle. Anything to get away from the small minds, preconceived notions, and general shittiness of this place. God, I hate Oklahoma.
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So in this vein, I give you a Fleet Foxes song that is one of my anthems right now. And though I know that I have ridiculously romanticized the whole thing, this song gives me hope in the form of visions of mountains and forests and water and tolerance and cool wet air and all of the things that I crave that this place isn't.
(Edit) Okay, something isn't working right. I wanted to embed something from YouTube, but it wouldn't work. Suck.
So do a YouTube search for the Fleet Foxes song "Mykonos." Good fucking tune, bad fucking time trying to share it.
Ahhh....summer. A time to spend with friends, grilling in the back yard and drinking a few beers. A time to go to the beach and relax to the sound of waves and wind. A time to partake of lazy late-night drives with good music pouring out the open windows and air soup pouring in.
Not so this year, friends. This summer has been the worst time I have ever had in my life, methinks.
Shall we make a little list of the ways this summer has sucked monkey balls? Lets...
Summer 2009 Suckage
I started clinicals in a hospital this summer, along with working every weekend and taking an evening summer class in Organic/Biochemistry. That meant zero days off for two months. Zero. And four days a week I was gone for 18 hours. No time spent with kids, wife or cat.
Long story leading up to this, but suffice it to say that my ex-wife is the worst person ever. I have full custody of my two kids with her, but she had summer visitation (every other week during the summer.) During this time, she would leave them with her husband while she lived with her boyfriend. So in order for him to work, her husband had a live-in nanny (some homeless guy they met in a bowling alley.) I pitched fits over this situation for a year, to no avail. Being a dad in Oklahoma doesn't exactly bestow one with phenomenal cosmic powers. So my ex-wife comes to visit one night, and she finds this bastard in bed with my 11-year-old daughter. Much screaming and fighting ensues, and they let the fucker go. That's right, they let him go. I get a 1am call to the hospital and POW!....it's a case of "Here ya go, I screwed up now you fix it." Ex-wife bails, I get a lawyer, and now we're in the midst of yet another monumental court battle. Add clinicals and school and work to equation, you get one stressed-out me. But I have seen to it that my daughter is getting all possible help. She is seeing a counsellor, going to group therapy, etc... Everything that I can possibly do, I'm doing.
My next-door neighbor died. She was a wonderful older lady and the best neighbor ever. She brought little bags over to the kids on every single holiday, kept her lawn mowed, and was just the nicest lady. I used to do little odd jobs around her house to help her out and we had the coolest unspoken agreement in that whichever one got to it first would set out both trash cans to the curb on trash day. God, I miss her.
I just found out that one of my favorite uncles died yesterday. He gave me my first beer and was the first person to talk to me about sex without being patronizing about it. I'll miss him too.
That's all that I can do for now. Sometimes life is good and sometimes it is like it is now. Things do come in groups, you know.
I smoke cigarettes, up to a pack a day but usually a little less. At today's prices, I pay $5.69 per pack. We'll come back to this in a few, k?
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Every time I light a cigarette I have this little vision in my head: I see myself as a sweaty shirtless junkie sitting on the toilet in an empty slum-style apartment, tying a rubber band around my arm with the other end clenched in my teeth, anticipating the needle lying on the edge of the dirty stopped-up sink. That is how I think of smoking.
Some people think of it as sexy, a badass James Dean kind of thing. To some, a guy (or girl) with a cigarette hanging from their lips is a turn-on, a sign of how cool and daring a person is. If I could, I would tell these people that there is no romance in smoking. I would offer them the vision of this cool person, this sexy badass person, wheezing and coughing every time they walk up a flight of stairs or lifts a heavy object or *gasp* makes love. How sexy is that? Imagine it if you will, this object of your affection, wheezing and panting during your most intimate of moments. Turned on yet?
Oh, and back to the money. Let's say that I spend $5.69 per day on smoking. That adds up to $39.83 a week, $170.70 per month, and 2076.85 per year. That is a pretty decent vacation that I'm putting into my lungs, ruining my health and making myself smell like shit.
Having said all this, I still haven't managed to quit. I want to really badly, but it is so hard. I can't explain just how hard it is...and maybe that's a bit of a cop-out on my part. It is a hard thing to admit to yourself.
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With school, work and family, things are kinda tumultuous this spring. I feel torn many different ways and this song illustrates the way I feel to a point. I listen to this and think that I just need to chill out and slow down. Look around me and smile in contentment, that kind of thing. Thanks to the chick in Canada for turning me on to this album.
Yes folks, I'm going to start watching American Idol.
For the record, I have been against AI since its inception. Sure, the auditions are funny and watchable, but the rest of the crappy thing bears a suspicious resemblance to the stuff that comes out of the bad end of a horse. And I was happy in this belief until the wife turned me onto this last night on YouTube:
Holy shit, right? It's almost as if Jeff Buckley has been reincarnated. I really dig this Adam Lambert. If he doesn't win American Idol outright, America will need to be shot in the collective face. Or raped in the face if you can dig some "Hamlet 2" humor.
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And I"m not listening to the same music as the video I posted. A new band called Rogue Wave that I recently found on Pandora. Check 'em out, yeah? Nifty stuff.
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And check us out, Oklahoma getting a blizzard in late March. How messed up is that?
