Best School Ever

I was sitting here reading my textbook for my Applied Climatology class tonight and was getting bored, so I decided to get on Facebook. I posted a very nerdy post about how I was wasting time and my mom started to comment on it. Next thing I knew my Physical Meteorology professor was in there giving me a hard time as well. I got all sorts of flak for not studying on the second day of school and how I could be doing much more productive things than facebooking.

This whole experience reminded me of why I chose Cal U in the first place. I truly have a family here. The Professors are all very close with their students and have not problem with giving us a hard time both in class and out of class. The friends that I have made here are some of the closest friends that I have ever had, and perhaps because of that I have higher expectations of them.

I still have some fundamental problems with many of my friends, my roommate from last year for example does not always live they way he preaches. My best friend and I are not nearly as close as we once were, perhaps for the best. I am an asshole to pretty much everyone at some point or another, and I miss many of the graduates of our program, even though I only knew some of them for a year. With that said we are all still great friends that have no problem putting aside our differences and helping each other out. That is what makes our program the best program not only in all of Cal U but in the whole country.

I have a family here, with parents, and brothers and sisters and the crazy uncles and cousins. I belong here at Cal right now, and I truly hope that there is never a day that I lose touch with anyone that I have met here.

First Days

Today was the first day of classes here at Cal U, and I happened to notice a few things. I never realized how easy it is to pick freshmen out of a crowd. They either look very lost or like super douchebags (more so than normal douche college kids). I hope I didnt fit into either of those categories, but I am pretty sure I still look lost most days.

I also noticed how even though everything has changed between people over summer, we are all so insecure that we tend to ignore all the problems and act like good friends. I try not to be fake, but sometimes its both easier and better for everyone of I pretend like we are still friends.

I also noticed that classes dont seem so hard or stressful yet. I have this feeling like I might be able to do all of this classwork and not even break a sweat. I know in reality however that I will very soon be one of the most stressed people in the world.

Lastly I was reminded of how impatient I am. I want everything now. Not to say I dont think about the future, I just dont apply details to the future. I seem to forget that today is only 24 hours of my life, tomorrow will come and things can happen then too. No need to live life all in one day.

The First Days of School

I'm back at school. There really are only freshmen here right now and it is pretty boring. I've basiclly ended up laying in bed just vegging the past day or so. Its given me plenty of time to think (and as we all know that never ends well for me).

Today, after cleaning up the weather lab I started pondering the idea of belonging. Where do I fit in? Right now I don't fit in Sterling, Em was my last real tie there other than my family and now not only is she no longer there, she is no longer a tie to anywhere for me. And I don't feel like I belong here at Cal right now, none of my friends are here, and in all reality I'm not sure I have friends here after the past summer. I have done a great job at inadvertently burning bridges in my social life. That leaves no where for me to belong.

I have thought quite a bit about relationships too, and not just boyfriend/girlfriend stuff. I have given a fair amount of thought to the word itself, what does it actually mean? A relationship is any mutual contact and interaction between two people. I have a relationship with my parents, my brother, and all my friends. However we as a society tend to give the word a differnt meaning. To most of us a relationship is the same as infatuation/love. But when does friendship turn into love? How do we know when its "safe" to take that leap of faith and put ourselves out there?

I don't take rejection well, not because I care what other think of me (I am who I am and no one will tell me otherwise), but because I have always been rejected by other people. I've never been the popular kid. I ate lunch alone in highschool, and ended up spending the majority of my evenings at home. I wasn't smart in highschool and really only have friends in my major here in college. Emily was all I ever had.

Everyone here at Cal told me at one point or another that we should break up. And now that its happened I feel very out of place here. I know that I should create more relationships, but I just don't know how. I generally don't like people and the ones I do like usually don't like me. I see people walking around with groups of friends laughing and talking and I look at myself, back to eating lunch alone.

Its All Been a Lie

As I lay here getting ready for bed I finally understand the whole summer, no the entire last 6 or so months. I understand now why I have done what I did and where everything went wrong. I make it a rule in my life not to lie to anyone, it always just makes things worse. Turns out I have been lying all along, to myself.

Long distence relationships are difficult under the best circumstances, and nearly impossible under the worst. Em and I made ours last almost two years, sort of. I guess you could say the last 6 to 9 months of it were rocky and we had very much fallen apart before that. Id like to say that we had the best circumstaces, but we didn't. There was a lot of doubt there on my part that I never saw until now.

The problems really started when I got to know Ericka better. She was exactly everything that I thought I wanted in someone,no more or less. That's not to say I didn't love Em, because Em was my whole world when I met Ericka. However I found myself attracted to Ericka nontheless. It made me constintly question my relationship with Em. And then Em felt it too, there was someting wrong, I don't know if she knew what but I think she had a pretty good guess.

At this point I was back at school, and Em started to grow apart from me, she questioned what we had, and even broke up with me for about a week. But we worked everything out and stuck it out. I knew that I could never be with Ericka, she had a boyfriend and I had Em. I still wanted to be with her though. I told myself she was just a friend, nothing more. Then her relationship crumbled.

This isn't the place to go into details, but I ended up spending a lot of time supporting her, and it pulled me further from Em, though I didn't see it. I started complaining about the little things more and I generally felt more distant. This is when it all changed.

I felt lonely. I had Em, sort of, and I had Ericka to a degree. But I didn't have either compleatly, and so I was in this awkward limbo of loneliness. Then I decided at some point to go for it, make the leap and choose just one. Em broke up with me a few days later.

I thought maybe things would work out with Ericka, they wouldn't. We have gone all summer awkwardly trying to decide what we are to eachother. In the end we always end up fighting over it, and now I see why.

I am lonely. I made a mistake and it has taken almost a year for me to realize it. I have been lonely ever since I first doubted my relationship with Em. I fight with Ericka because I know she is the only thing between me and complate loneliness. I am mad not at her, but at myself for breaking the only rule I have ever compleatly followed in my life, no lying, ever.

So it is as I lie here, alone in the dark, writing a post the no one will read that I have finally been able to admit that I was wrong. I am alone and I do not like it. I am alone and it is all my fault. I am alone and I am sorry to both of you for pulling you into all of this.

The Explosions of Life

No this post is not about life being created or destroyed; it is about moments of time. John Green said it best in his book Looking for Alaska, we do not recall our lives as hours or chapters, we recall it based upon the before and after's of important events. For me it happens to be arguments in the short term and relationships for the long term.

I am now living in the after of my last great relationship, it was a two year long moment of happiness. But all moments must come to and end, and I caused this one to blow up in my face. I made some decisions that came back and caused the greatest thing to ever happen to me to come crashing down around me. That was about three months ago. The dust, I believe, has finally settled from that. However it has caused much more turmoil in my short-term life than I could have imagined.

The past summer I have had some pretty intense disagreements with my Best friend, many of which turned out to be misunderstandings, but some, such as the one that has been occurring over the past week were sincere and pointed to a much deeper problem in our friendship. However, as with most things in life, I cannot simply go to my friend and tell them what is wrong, they haven’t given me that option. They have instead chosen to stop talking to me for now. So I will embrace that and instead focus on other aspects of my life until the dust from this explosion too settles, as I think it is beginning to do now.

I worked today, and as a lifeguard I get a lot of time to think and ponder. Today I was able to clear away much of the smoke and dust clouding my vision of our friendship. This morning I was ready to throw the whole thing out the window, say screw you and move on with life. However that would do nothing for either of us. Instead I have decided to wait. To try out this new patience thing I have been working on and see what happens after you have had a chance to sort your life out some more.

In the process of our spat, i have said things, some of them publicly and many more of them privately into my own thoughts, that I am not proud of and that have, or would have, hurt you. For that I am deeply sorry. I have told you that, and I’d like to show you.

With all of that said, I anticipate that we will continue to fight, and I will always make things worse while I try to make things better. That is a lesson that I don’t think I will ever fully learn. However at the end of the day id like to be able to tell myself two things: that I have done everything to the best of my ability, and that someone somewhere out there cares about me. Tonight I can tell myself at least one of those things.

Friend Zone

This weekend I spent a night with my bestfriend. I drove out to her house on Saturday evening and we rode bikes with some of her friends and then watched a movie until we fell asleep. I spent today going to church with her family and just spending time with some of her family. Seems pretty boring, no? And on the surface it was boring, but it also managed to be both the best weekend all summer and an emotional rollercoaster.

To understand this you need to understand her, her dad's wrapped around her evil stepmoms finger and won't stand up for her, and she was reletively recently dumped by her worthless boyfriend. Enter me.

Now I have been friend zoned pretty badly with her in the past year. And even over the summer that has changed very little. But the past week or two a dialog has opened between us unlike we have had before. Its been much more open. Friday night she told me that she didn't have any feelings, good or bad, for anyone except me. We both took this as she must have feelings for me. Well after this weekend I think that might be an incorrect assumption, though I'm not sure yet.

She told me this afternoon that she isn't sure she feels anything for anyone. This crushed me. But she never told me whether I'm anyone or someone. So I hold onto hope (after all what else is there??). But before she can be with me or anyone else, she needs to work things out with her dad and stepmom and I can't help her, which kills me. Until she can mend that gaping hole in her life, I will always be a foot note in her book of living.

This is a good place to mention that I hate friend zone. It sucks for everyone. Not only can I not have you, but I need to watch all these other douchebag guys get to be with you. And I am there with you through it all. And what you don't know is when I'm done being there for you and go to bed at night, I cry. I cry for everything I will never know. I cry because you deserve so much better and yet can't see that its right in front of you. I cry because I can't be with anyone else, because I love you. Friend zone sucks.

Friends of friends/Exceptions

I have been thinking lately about two things. The first is a social question, do need to be friends, or even like, the friends of those we love? I mean ideally we would, but is it nessicerry? I don't think so. In fact I think its good to have some seperate friends, it gives you a chance to get away from them (lest we fall victim to the classic "too much of a good thing is a bad thing"). But I do think we need to be able to accept their friends, even if we don't like them. We should be able to see that these people are impotant in their lives and so they should have a certain level of respect in ours.

The other thing I have been thinking about is exceptions to our standards and habits. Specificlly my habit of being very ver impatient. I am the kind of person to ask forgivness rather than permission because I want it done now. And if I must wait for someone to decide on something I am likly to leave. But teir are some people that are exceptions to this. Particularly two in my life right now, and it baffles me how I, of all people, can have such a double standard in my own life and not think anything wrong with it. Perhaps it just means I should learn to be more patient.

The Most Exciting Week of Nothing

This week has seemed abnormally long to me; and granted, a week for me is half a week for you as I split mine by interning for three days and working for four. I just finished the interning part, and while I love what I'm doing and its one of the best experiences of my life sometimes I just cant stand it. This wasn't one of those weeks.

To understand my week you need to first understand what I do. I'm a meteorology student during the year, so you might assume I intern at a news station, or that I forecast for NOAA. You'd be wrong. I'm an engineer for NOAA. I am helping test thermometers and rain gauges and anemometers. I love it more than almost anything, its my dream job. The problem is I am also helping with the help desk for the field and even worse helping with IT support.

It is very difficult to get anything done when you spend all day looking for a server (it was in a completely different building). But I still enjoy it.  This week however seemed longer than the rest for one simple reason, I am waiting for it to be done.

See this weekend I am going with my mom and brother up to see my family near Pittsburgh.  But I see them all the time,  so I am taking the van and driving towards Erie to see my best friend in the world.  Shes awesome, though much like me she is sarcastic and an asshole sometimes, so you probably wouldn't like her.  Though unlike me she looks awesome in a dress ;)

I still have two and a half days to get through until I can see her, and that's killing me. A week has never felt so long and boring in my life. It feels as if, even though I like what I do, the week is just in the way and needs to move. I plan on taking my camera with me to see her, and maybe we will do a vlog together. But the thought of two more days of working is almost painful, though the pool is more fun then my Internship.

Besides the frustrations of working selling my soul to the government and all of its inefficiencies (there is a reason we are so far in debt...)  I don't really have any complaints for the week.  It hasn't been overwhelming great,  but not bad either so I guess I should count myself as lucky,  for now... =)