Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Breathing is Nice

Dear Blog,

Breathing is nice. It's one of the few things I can count on just now too. My phone died. My laptop died. My headlights died. Someone who had been a best friend kicked me out and we aren't speaking anymore. The only administration I have to depend on right now (other than Obama) is giving me eight separate middle fingers at once. Central State requires a variety of courses to graduate. I need four more math, two more education, and student teaching. Only two of the maths are being offered at feasible times. They are being offered in the same time slot. That time slot conflicts with the only offering of one of the education courses. These are the easy problems to deal with.

The other two courses are only being offered while I student teach, so the dean of Education (who is acting as my adviser until they hire a new chair and a math ed adviser) directed me to institutions which have an agreement with Central for instant and free transfer. One is Wright State, they offer the classes at the exact same times. One is Sinclair, it's a community college and doesn't offer the classes. The last is University of Dayton, they're actually not offering one of the classes until fall 2010. However, I have made progress with their department chair who is an expert in my field of interest with regards to one of the four math classes.

The two classes which conflict lead me to the head of the math department, Mr. Marcus. Rather than fix the problem, he identified several others and said he'd get back to me. Namely, the pre-requisites which I had been filling, are not necessary, the professor for one of the classes is teaching it wrong and needs to be consulted on content covered, and the engineering department, which is bigger, needs it moved to another semester anyway (differential equations).

My phone will either not transmit my voice or not send any data either way. My laptop won't accept AC power. My headlights won't turn on, which could be related to the toggle stick, which broke off a while back but still worked if you jiggled it right.

I did mad. I did desperate. Now all I can do is laugh.

breathing is nice,
-Ian Hogan.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Winter Breeze

Dear blog,

Reviewing my last entry, it is both too long ago and missing probably the biggest, or at least most far reaching, life changes that happened in the window of time covered. A) I lost forty pounds. I'm continuing to lose weight, though much more slowly and with lots of little back slides along the way. I can bench 225 and do a chin-up. I can feel my ribs. It's all very new to me. B) I want to have children. Fun little story there.

Family reunion on the fourth of July weekend 2008 (how could I have forgotten to mention this in the last entry, I do not know). My second cousin Sahara, she was seven then, and the cutest kid you can imagine. She wanted to see a bird's nest in a pine tree about six feet and some inches off the ground. I was conscripted as the one with the necessary strength to elevate her. I could have held her at arm's length for minutes at a time, she was so small.

“Say thank you,” reminded the mother.

“Thank you,” said Saraha.

“Shit, I want kids,” said my broken brain.

And if I was impressed with three weeks last summer, I'm about to hit three months with my current girlfriend. I could ramble all day on the subject, but I think I'll keep it to “we met at church as kids, we held hands on the second date and kissed on the third.” The rest, is history. Also worth mentioning that our families have friendship ties all over the place, so no meeting the parents situations have occurred.

School with a long distance relationship is new. School with any relationship is new, actually. I'm getting by alright, but weekends are my only real spurts of proper happiness. Even then, I've never been happy weekend after weekend for months at a time before. It's like my ribs.

I've kept up on my chain-mail weaving. I just finished a vest for my friend Lionell. People think we're strange. Hallie is next on the list, and then Vivian, and then someone else. Everyone wants armoured. I don't think I've ever given away something that I spent forty hours on before, that's new. But I was planning on it, so no surprises.

My car has outdone its ghettoeness. Before it was merely a piece of junk and an eyesore. The bumper was held on by duct-tape, the gas gauge read whatever you moved the arrow to, bits of plastic left and right were falling off and poking me in the legs. Now the radio is blown out by a jump situation and I have to disconnect the battery with a ten millimeter every time I turn the car off or else it slowly drains the battery.

I was commiserating with another Sephia owner and he related that almost all the same problems exist in his. The opposite window fell out of the track, the radio is blown out, most of the same bits of plastic are falling off/poking him in the leg and his bumper is held on by tape, but again on the opposite side.

“But it handles great in snow!”

Auf weidersehen,

-I