I am so tired.

And it's barely even midnight yet.

God I suck, I've only been awake 12 hours.

P.S. Answer your god damn phone. Fffffffffffuuuuuuuuuu.......

A quick recap..

Here's a quick run down of what I did the last couple of days, since I feel too lazy to expound upon anything else:

- Watched Pulp Fiction with Dan and Kellie last night. I love this movie so much. Samuel L. Jackson is the best. The conversation on giving women foot massages cracks me up every time.

- Tuned my ESP EX-350 to Drop B, which interestingly enough fixed my action problem on the high E string. /shrug. Playing Parkway Drive sounds better.

- Went to Guitar Center with JP since he's looking for a new, more shred-friendly guitar. They had a Schecter 7-string there that was pretty sweet. I really liked it. I don't really need a new guitar though but the next one I get will probably be 7 string to play around with, since I already have two nice 6 strings. I need to get better at guitar though before I buy any new ones.. lol.

- Went bowling and to Denny's with Dan, Kellie, Justin, Jeff and another one of Kellie's friends.

- Setup an account at Mint.com. Pretty bad ass for money management and budgeting. Check it out.

Lots of guitar recently, it seems. Probably a good thing.

Hypocrisy runs rampant.

Fuck people who want to play games. I really do not care for that nonsense anymore. It's especially bad when you say one thing and then go out and do the complete opposite. No thanks.

On a different subject, The Postal Service sounds absolutely amazing on these Seinnheiser headphones. This is probably the most enjoyable purchase I have made in a while. This isn't even my typical choice of music, although I've been listening to some folk/acoustic stuff recently for variety- Andy McKee, in particular. He is amazing. If you like guitar in any capacity I would recommend you give him a listen.

Saw this band last night at The Pit: www.myspace.com/cuttingcorners2008. Besides the guitarist, who is awesome, the female vocals are pretty good. They kind of remind me of The Agonist a bit.. with more cleaner vocals and more of a thrashier sound rather than metalcore.

Last night was also the first time I saw Seven Kingdoms with Sabrina on vocals. It was definitely the best performance I have seen them put on. I really hope something big comes along for their band, I think they deserve it with all the hard work they have all put in.

Got a lot of shows coming up soon...

All Shall Perish, Winds of Plague, Killswitch Engage, A Day to Remember. And my birthday is soon. The next month should be good.

Random thoughts.

So, we have a party at my house last night. It was my roommates idea; She wanted to throw a party because she was getting her cast off (a "cast-off party" themed party, we dressed as pirates har har) and it was pretty fun. One of the girls here was basically all over me for much of the evening, which was a bit of interesting situation. I don't know how much she had to drink (apparently at least one bottle of wine by herself). The reason this was interesting, though, was because the one time I met her previously all she did was talk about her boyfriend. Who is in the military and is going overseas for a year. They've been dating for two months, and their plan is basically that after he returns (his time gone, including training, will total something like 15-16 months) they are going to move in together.

I'm not sure what kind of absurd disconnect with reality you need to think this is a workable situation, but he's only been gone a matter of weeks and she was certainly not acting like she was taken last night. After she lost a bet with JP he basically tricked her into kissing me (which was awkward as hell), and she went outside and cried on the phone to this guy for about 30 minutes. Then she came back in, sat down on the couch immediately next to me and tried to cuddle up to me again while explaining that she had to call her boyfriend and apologize.

What the fuck?

Yeah, they're going places.

I saw her again tonight because she was at a Valentine Day's party that I went to with Lauren, Allison and their significant others, and she acted like nothing had happened last night. Which is good because that situation seems like an impending trainwreck which I want no part of. But she was talking all about her boyfriend to Allison and it was all I could do to not burst out laughing.

People act incredibly foolish and naive when it comes to relationships. Granted, there have been times I have made rash or poor decisions (okay lots of them), but this girl's situation just seems like a bad joke that everyone is in on but her.

Anyways, on a note I find truly disheartening, apparently Chris Storey is no longer in All Shall Perish. I know some people have said he is a dick (I really have no opinion as I have never met him) but I really love his playing and thought ASP's last album was an big step forwards from The Price of Existance. Hopefully his replacement is just as good, because I was really looking forward to seeing them in March. Blah.

Utah is awesome.

Utah is seriously gorgeous. Maybe it's just because I live in Florida but the mountains here are breathtaking, and even though the snowfall here is about half what it was last year, the snowboarding is great.

Speaking of that, I was also able to do a few intermediate difficulty runs today :) Considering this only my third time snowboarding and I hadn't gone since last time I was up here, I'm pleased. Hopefully the bruises I have on my butt already after one day don't inhibit my snowboarding for the rest of the trip though! Hahaha.

If anyone wants to see where I am at, this is where we've been going:

http://www.thecanyons.com/

Tomorrow I hope to do a few different blue runs (green circle = easy, blue square = intermediate, black diamond = advanced, double black diamond = you're going to die).

We're staying at a hotel in Salt Lake City, because Sundance Film Festival is this week and Park City is booked, but that's where I am snowboarding.

Now time for dinner, well, as soon as my dad stops watching the damn football games!

All I want is contacts.

So in December of 2007, I got an eye exam.

It had been a while, and I had new vision insurance so I figured hey, this won't be too bad, and I had thought my prescription might have changed. So I go schedule an appointment at VisionWorks at the Avenues Mall. It ended up costing me $60 with insurance, but I got 12 months worth of contacts for free, so that was cool with me.

Fast forward a year. I am going snowboarding with my dad this weekend and I am on my last pair of contacts. If case they get knocked out or I have any issues, I'd like to have a new set ready. And I need to get new ones anyways since I've been wearing these ones about 3-4 weeks anyways (yes I know I should change them sooner.) So I call a local vision place that takes my new vision insurance (VSP), and they tell me that to fill any orders they need my prescription. Well, I don't have my prescription written down anywhere now, I just have a box of my contacts.

So I call up VisionWorks and ask if I can get contacts through them. No, they say, they cannot sell me lens since my prescription expired. Sigh. It expired last month, December 2008. So I ask if I can get a copy of my prescription from them again so I can go to a new optometrist and order lens there. They tell me no, and say they cannot release MY prescription to me (what the fuck?), because it's expired, but they could release it directly to my new optometrist. I say fine and hang up.

So I call back this other local place and talk to them again. They can get my original prescription from VisionWorks, but they won't fill an order for contacts until I take another vision exam.

FANTASTIC.

So now I get to pay another $60 so they can tell me that my fucking prescription is still the same, and give me the exact same contacts again. My prescription in 2007 was the same as it was in 2005, so I doubt in the last 12 months it has changed either.

The health care industry can lick my balls.

From Years Past

I like to clean my room out periodically.

Not only because for whatever reason I'm the only guy I know who likes having a clean room, but because I always find a lot of old nostalgic stuff. I am kind of a packrat, owing to the fact that I have an enormous closet and a lot of storage space. In my closet right now, besides the basic stuff like clothing and my suitcases, I have a whole bunch of weird shit. Lauren's bike, (hahah), 2 PC cases, several video cards, a few motherboards, processors, a pair of hard drives, a CD-burner, another functional Dell PC (for a total of 4 PCs in my room) a guitar amp, a set of Subaru WRX 2006 stock rims (only 1 of which is in good condition), every video game console I have owned dating back to my original SNES from 1992, etc. I think you get the idea.

Well today I decided I needed to file my health insurance information. I have had a filing box since I was in highschool that my mother gave me. Whenever I have gotten any document of importance since about 11th grade, it has ended up in here. As you can imagine, it being 7 years old now, it had accumulated a TON of junk. Here's a list of some of the stuff I found in there:

- All of my high school report cards since I had the box
- My original SAT and AP test scores
- A bunch of Boca High newsletters
- Every lease / housing contract I have ever signed
- My first ATM card
- A Christmas Card from Lindsay + Rob, of which the front art was me + Rob dressed in santa hats and male bikini briefs. They actually mailed that one to my house. Thankfully my parents don't open my mail, I wouldn't wanted to have to explain that one.
- At least $120 dollars worth of various book store gift cards. My relatives in years past insisted that I get Barnes and Noble or Borders gift cards, even though I never bought books. Seriously I found a gift card from 2001 in there, what the hell? I feel stupid now because there are actually books I want to buy. I think one of them is still active, though.
- Every postcard my mom has ever mailed me (I intentionally keep these. Yes I'm sure that sounds ridiculous. I imagine I will appreciate them someday.)
- All the Spinnakers from college that I had published articles in
- A Valentine's day card from Shelley from 2 years ago
- The schedule Shelley made for me for my last semester of college

I did end up throwing a ton of stuff out, basically all the crap from highschool, and most of the stuff from college, although I did keep all the cards. But it was definitely weird going back through all of that stuff and thinking how far my life has come in the last 7 years.

On an entirely unrelated note, the cost of the rest of the parts for my PC has fallen into the realm of the reasonable. I'm this | | close to pulling the trigger on the rest of my i7 920 build. Mmmm... should I do it? Quadcore, 6GB of RAM.. yeah, I'm a huge nerd.