The Final Blog...or Is It?

Even though our blogs postings are no longer going to be assigned after this tenth post, I think I am going to continue to try and post something at least once a week.  I don't plan to take too many more writing course, and I believe that writing something, anything, helps keep one current in their own vernacular and writing persona.  I'm not too big on a journal, I can't ever remember to do it, and I enjoy typing much more than writing.  With this being said, I think that it is important to state that I found these postings to be a joy, and quite helpful with my writing.  I also plan to have a few of my own friends join my blog and hopefully they create their own and start posting their own material.  Maybe I can save them from Facebook!  I also plan to create a new blog to discuss the goings on in the EPL, or the English Premiere League for those who don't watch soccer.  I will post another blog concerning music and both will be followers of this blog, so if anyone is interested, just follow.

60% of the Time It Works Everytime

I has come to my attention that 87% of people believe statistics that are 35% of the time wrong.  I honestly have no idea about the actual percentages on the case, but it's not hard to believe this without questioning it.  The reason I am speaking of this is because of a discussion I had with a friend yesterday.  He was telling me about what people hear whenever they hear a stat.  Most often, people believe them without any question to the validity of the statement.  I began asking myself why, and I came up with two answer, though there are probably millions.  The first thing I thought of was obviously laziness.  If one is given a stat that they don't already know, chances are that they don't care enough to do any actual research on the subject, so they are content with the knowledge bestowed upon them by their conversee.  I mean even if you knew it was wrong, if you didn't care about it, would you care to correct them?  The other explanation I found was the white coat thesis.  People tend to believe any and everything they hear from someone with a white coat, doctor, scientist, etc.  Why try to validate information that is coming from someone that you assume is much brighter than you?

Downhill Jam and Girlfriend Overboard

Christmas break is approaching fast.  I have three exams left to do in the next week and a half and then I am off school for almost a month straight.  This is extremely needed.  I go to school and work literally everyday, so this break from school is going to be awesome.  Work will also be ten times busier too because of the holiday season, which means more income for myself.  Over the break I plan to, if it snows, go sledding and quad-ing.  Where I'm from we play this game called Down Hill Jam.  We go to the biggest hill in town, start from the top, and the last man still on his sled wins.  Most often there is more than one person that makes it to the bottom, in which case we have a battle royale.  This consists of both players trying to remove the other's sled whilst keeping a hold of their own.  We have played this since we were 12 and it's still fun when you're 21.  We also used to play a game on the quads, Overboard, that I don't think will get played much this year.  Let's just say it involves trying to throw your girlfriend of the sled whilst someone pulls you on the quad.  It was fun when we were 12.  I think the repercussions will be a little bit more severe now that we're 21.  Over all though, I still can't wait to get out of school.

Thanksgiving Break!!

This Thanksgiving break was a little different than most I have had in the past.  In recent years, I have always made to sure to request off on the specific days that my families were planning on having our Thanksgiving celebrations.  My parents are divorced and one is remarried, so I usually have at least to celebrations to attend.  This year, however, I was not allowed to request off for those days and I ended up having to work the night before and on Thanksgiving Day.  During my shift on Thanksgiving I ended up having a range of emotions I really didn't expect from a day of work.  I witnessed the lazy parents who didn't want to cook or really celebrate at all and were just going through the motions.  I witnessed the traveling family whose celebration was not until Friday, and were so happy that they could find a restaurant open.  Finally however, I saw something that quite depressed me.  I witnessed the lonely old woman who had no one to celebrate with.  She ate alone on Thanksgiving.  This sent me into an extremely introspective spiral of thought, and this continued all the way to my mother's house where I was preparing to have dinner.  I ended up being almost an hour late, and I was about to submit that this was the worst holiday ever, when I opened the door to enter, I startled my uncle.  My uncle, a portly fellow, jumped out of his chair, and upon his return from the heavens he broke his chair and went crashing to the floor.  I was in tears from laughing.

Procrastination

There is something to be said about the type of urgency that procrastination creates.  It's chalk full of anxiety, uncomfortableness, and guilt.  We all know the possible implications that are procured from such laziness, but seeing as procrastination is a problem not concerning health, wealth, or other general attributes of well being, its lesson never seems to get learned.  For myself, even if I have a long term assignment that I could work on for ten minutes a week and get done with in time, the mere fact that I have a month, week, or day left is a constant laziness inducing factor.  This is at no fault to the instructors, of course, for most often these assignments are gimmes and I should receive full credit quite easily.  Even now, I have had a blog posting due every week and I waited until the day I am conferencing with my instructor to start posting things.  The only positive spin I can get from this whole experienced is that I have admitted that I have a problem, and in many cases that is the first step.  I do know that I need to light at fire under my you know what before I get a real big boy job.

A Quick Shout Out to Tom

I have a friend named Tom.  Tom and I have been friends for almost thirteen years.  I remember my first day at Columbia Middle School when I was the new kid in the third grade class.  I had no friends and no way to even begin making friends.  Everyone seemed to look at me differently here than at my last school. The only class I was looking forward to was P.E. I knew I could hang in any game and when you're eight, the kids who are good at sports are the "cool kids".  Unfortunately this new school did playground picks and since no one knew I could play, I was sure to be picked last, however I underestimated the kindness of one of my classmates. Tom ended up picking me first, and when I went to his side, he took me aside, shook my hand, and told me he would like to be my friend.  This story is just one example of Tom's behavior that shows his unmatched character.  This past Thanksgiving break Tom told me he was finishing his bachelor's degree at Mizzou and then joining the Marines.  When I asked him why he gave me another example that I thought should be written about.  "We send people overseas to risk there lives, and the majority of the time they are our poor or the people who had no choice to go in.  I really can't just get over that and go on enjoying the freedoms I do, especially if I know I was one of the people who sat back and let other people defend them."  

Hangovers and Hand Grenades

Last night I heard those dreaded words that no young adult male wants to hear from one of his best friends.  "Dude you owe me one!"  One can be sure that whatever favor needs to be fulfilled will be somewhat unfavorable to the friend in debt.  In this case, my friend was hanging out, for the first time, with a girl he met in class and had been flirting with for months.  Since girls are rarely comfortable being alone with a guy prior to ever hanging out, of course, she decided to bring a couple of friends.  My friend promised me that at least one of them was a looker.  "OK. I'll help you out dude."  My job was easy enough.  All I had to do was be entertaining to his girl's friends, for the longer they want to stay, the longer his girl will stay, and at the same talk look for an opportunity to separate the group from the couple.  Of course if one of her friends is cute then I'll get her number, but as stated before, this was a favor i was doing and therefore a personal agenda would have to be extracurricular. Upon entering his apartment, I found myself with a challenge.  Neither one of her friends were attractive, automatically making my job harder, and they both had a look on their faces like this was the last place they wanted to be.  Noticing this, I start drinking and trying my best to draw their attention away from the couple.  Things weren't going so well at first.  I had accomplished making one of them laugh, but the other girl was being a huge bitch(and I rarely refer to women in this way).  I couldn't quite figure out why.  I had been polite, nice, charming, what was her problem?  This caused me to start drinking heavily; I have to make it fun somehow.  After about two hours of drinking, I received the signal from my friend, and it was time split up.  By this time, however, I was already piss drunk and in no state to pseudo-woo two girls I hardly know.  "Alright bitches, it's time to leave these love birds alone."  I hadn't quite realized what I said until everyone starting laughing, even the bitchy girl, and the two got up a followed me out of the room.  I kept going with the asshole routine, and low a behold, I ended up keeping them entertained for another two hours, giving my friend ample time.  By the end of the night I had killed my twelve pack and the next morning felt the repercussions of doing so.  "Sorry about the hand grenades dude, thanks for takin' that one."  "Technically that was two bro, now you owe me one!"

Gambling

I was eighteen years old at the time and had never been to a casino before.  I had never even planned to go to a casino for another three years or so, but when my friends, who attended Missouri State University, told me that you only had to be eighteen to gamble on a reservation, I was in.  The drive to the casino took about an hour, so we started loading up the car at eleven, figuring that if we got there early, we could put in an eight hour session and still be back to do some partying before the night ends.  This plan seemed all well and good except that we never stated what would happen if we started to win, and that is just what happened. Right about the time we said we were going to leave, I found myself going all-in two hands in a row, getting at least two callers each hand, and ending up with 700 dollars sitting in front of me. This was a 600 dollar increase from my starting buy in. At this point I should have known my luck was about to run out, but of course why not push the envelope.  A few hands down the road I find myself looking down at pocket kings, the second best starting hand, and I raise before the flop comes.  The action folds around to the player sitting to my right.  He re-raises, and I re-raise right back.  He then puts me in for all of my chips, and I call instantly.  He flips over pocket aces, and I watch in dismay as it holds up long the board, and I watch my 600 dollar profit fall away in one hand.  I leave the table and tell my friends it's time to go.  They can tell that I'm livid, so I don't get much argument.  On the way out I told them how I had just lost almost all of the my money and was down to 20 dollars, and as we pass one of the last groups of slot machines, I put my 20 in thinking, I might as well, and to my surprise I won 400 on my first spin.  I cashed out this time though, and now it was just time to party.

David B. Mueller

David B. Mueller is not a hard man notice.  More or less, he takes it upon himself to make sure of that.  One day while playing street soccer at the Columbia Park, I heard shouting coming from the road behind me.  As I turned to inspect the noise, I was surprised to see a middle aged caucasian male, dressed in khaki shorts, a Hawaiian style shirt, with sun glasses, and an old AM FM radio strapped to a bike, staring upward at the American flag shouting his pledge of allegiance, not to the flag, as he put it, but instead to America.  Though, this was no ordinary pledge, one might say, and certainly not one taught to children entering preschool.  No, this was his pledge of allegiance to the Libertarian, Socialistic, Democratic Party of America, a political movement of his own.  I couldn't begin to describe the utter sense of confusion I experienced that day, but then again I'm not all that sure I want too, for you might one day meet David B. Mueller and you deserve to make your own judgments.  Here's a little taste though. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFTWGu3-S6M&feature=related

The Blog

It was said that the blog started as just an idea. One thought provoking idea that served to accomplish the goal of its creator. What is the goal one might ask? Well the result of the intentions of the creator can be most easily witnessed in the events subsequent to the original posting of the idea. After the first "post" there came a "response", and then a "response" to the response" and so on and so forth. At some point others started responding not only to the ideas posted by the creator, but also to the responders. Eventually the number of responders and well as the number of responses from each one began to sky rocket, and as the number of ideas posted rose, so did the number of responses either supporting or refuting them. This in turn caused The Blog to grow into a seperate entity altogether. This entity is one that can and will continue to grow and can never be harmed no matter how malicious or insane an idea might seem to be, it can and will only serve as fuel for the feeding of the blog which leads us to that age old saying, "NOTHING CAN HURT THE BLOG”.