|
|
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2004
| |
7:46 pm - Long time no 'c'
|
YES, well...yeah, I was told to update my journal more often than never, so I figgered it'd be a good idea to do so...seeing as how...y'know...I have nothing -better- to do. Right. So uh, a quick update on what's happened since. Here it is...REALLY quickly now: *takes a deep breath...* schoolcontinuedigotgradesnstuffandacoupleoftestsandthingsandfriendsandallthatcrapandsomewherealongthelineigotintroublewiththelawnoimjustkiddingididntreallyanywaybythewaytrytosaythisallinonebreathanywaygettingbacktothesubjectschoolendedigothomelookedforworkhaveyettofindanymysistergotmarriedeverythingscoolandimightbepossiblydoinganothermoviethissummerwithmybestfriendforkicksandjusttowastetimeandthatsprettymuchit. And now, I'm going to continue doing what I was doing...which was wasting LOADS and loads of--my goodness...my nephew just went speeding by with no clothes on. Hold on one sec...*screams at him to get dressed and then promptly returns to the computer...* Ah, anyway. I'm kind of the Chief Leiutenant General-in-Law of Kid Enforcement here and I have to occasionally rally the troops. Ehhermm...not much else to say. I'm going to go back to wasting time now, so until then, PISS OFF! ;)
current mood: HAM!!!
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
| Thursday, March 18th, 2004
| |
10:35 pm - Message to Ender
|
|
Hey, man, give me a call at my brother's house! I'll be home all day tomorrow. If for some reason I'm not, someone will be here to at least take a message. Leave a number when you call. Meanwhilst, my brother's number (in case you've forgotten) is 472-2634
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, March 16th, 2004
| |
12:06 am - Ahh....home.
|
Suffice it to say, that whole business about me -not- going home was ...well... planned. I was leading my best friend along that I -wasn't- going to come home for Spring Break (as a surprise) and I had to be consistent with it by not even mentioning it on here. So yeah, it was all faked, and I just got in yesterday morning. Good heavens it's good to be home! I've missed this place so much...My brother was fantastically nice and paid for my plane ticket home for the week, leaving next Sunday to go back. I'm staying up in my nephew's room, on his bottom bunk. He's such a neat kid. His name's Connor, he's 9 years old, and I think I'm the only one in the family that understands him. Well, not -understands- him...but I bond with him, I think, moreso than anyone else. I'm practically a kid myself--wait, strike that. I -am- and will always -be- a kid, so getting along with him is easy. He's so much like I was when I was his age, it's uncanny. I'll play video games with him, build blocks with him, draw, tell stories, or sometimes just listen to him describe to me the latest place where he's stuck in a video game. Playing with him just reminds me of how much I truly want kids of my own. I don't think I've ever felt more at home and happy than when I've been spending time with my nephew and niece. My niece here (her name's Greta, 7 years old) is also a neat kid. She's such a funny little girl...she always keeps me updated on the status of her teeth (how many she's lost, which ones are coming in), and likes to tell me stories of her latest adventures of being 7. She'll also occasionally do my hair, which is pretty funny. I'll be sitting and reading on my nephew's bed, and she'll walk in, take a look at me, and say, "Barrett, can I do your hair?", to which I -must- reply, "Sure. Go ahead." So she goes and gets her little brush and hair clips and a fistful of hair ties, and proceeds to go to work on my hair. She'll run the brush through my hair several times, occasionally dipping it in a cup of water to help tame my wiry locks, and then she'll put a clip in to hold it steady, telling me to count to thirty. Sometimes I'm asked to repeat my count several times, just to make sure. As soon as she's decided it's been long enough, she'll take the clip out, brush around my now protruding spike of hair, and then call it a masterpiece. I'll then, of course, get up (carefully) to go check out my new coif, telling her (after a theatrical gasp of appraisal) how absolutely wonderful it is while she giggles in delight at how silly I actually look. Heh...I'm so glad I'm here and not stuck by myself in my dorm, doing nothing. I feel -terrible- for my roommate, who just happens to be stuck in the dorms for Spring Break. That whole thing about the meal plans was unfortunately true, and he's barely going to scrape by in terms of food. It sucks...I wish he could join me out here (he's been wanting to see New York anyhow), but it's too expensive and his home IS Utah.
'Sides that, this morning I went to Edgemont, my old high school, for a bit, just to visit. It was a quick in-and-out thing, though. I was just getting tickets for the musical Saturday and I was in a bit of a rush. My friend and I are going in tomorrow for a REAL visit. Tonight, though, we attended the rehearsal towards the end. We wanted to see people, cause trouble, reminisce...it's amazing to go back to a place that caused such hell for all of us...and just see people right in the thick of the same problems we had, knowing that -we're- never going to have to deal with that stuff again. It's a comforting and yet odd sensation...I'm so amazed I spent six years of my life in the halls of that school...Six YEARS! And then when I think about it...it went by so quickly, and yet seemed an eternity at the time. I also realize how much the things I worried about, the crises, issues, moral dilemmas, were all so finite and, well, -pointless- in the long run! Matt, my best friend, had an interesting thought when we were talking about it all...he said he would like the ability to do high school all over again. What he meant was, he would like to be able to be in high school once more, only -this- time he would have the perspective of a college student and the laid-back personality it brought him. It's interesting that college does so much to help one gain perspective and realize that life can be wasted on such petty things if you let it get to you. Being relaxed about life helps you get through so much more than if you were easily perturbed and uptight, right down to every little thing that comes your way. It's just so -tiring-...worrying and torturing yourself over the littlest things. Life's too precious to be that way. You miss an awful lot of it if you are.
Yeah so, tomorrow I'm visiting the school for the latter half of the schoolday, and then we're going to the entire night's rehearsal later on. I hope this show is good...they're doing Oklahoma!, and I'm hearing nothing but bad things about it: it's a stupid musical, nobody pays attention, no work gets done, it's not coming together, even though it's HELL week, etc. Then again, as was pointed out to me, we all thought LAST year's musical was going to be horrific and it instead turned out to be one of our best ones yet. I guess I should have faith in the Edgemont Clutch factor, and hope that by opening night a -miracle- will happen. Well, it's getting late. I have to get to bed. Bye for now.
current mood:  happy
current music: The soft din of the the diswasher from three rooms away.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Saturday, March 13th, 2004
| |
12:49 am - A short list of current idiots
|
Okay...so it's Spring Break, and I don't get to go home. Fine with me, I'll be okay...I'll survive. I understand that some people don't even HAVE a home to go to, so I really shouldn't complain. Plus, it's just way too expensive. Plane tickets are a rip-off, and was only going to be there for a week. So I've basically accepted my fate. It's fine, I'm okay with it and all. Now, pretty much everyone -else- is leaving, and the whole school is shutting down for the coming week, the cafeteria included. The only thing that is remaining open to us lowly freshmen is the Convenience store, which has a decent amount of food in it and meals that I can actually put on my meal plan card. The meals themselves are barely classifiable as food but they work, they're better than -nothing-. So this is the picture, get this: the campus is closed, the cafeteria is shut down, and the -only- thing open to students (food-wise) is the C-store, for the entire Spring Break. And what do they do? What do these IDIOTS at the Office of Residential Living do? They FREEZE all meal plan usage! For the ENTIRE Spring Break! So here I am left with no usable meals, no cash to buy food, and a C-store which I now have to buy from with actual MONEY that I don't have. I look at it this way: I've paid nearly $1,450 to these morons for my meal plan, plan 19. I get 19 meals to use in the dorm's cafeteria per week, with the option to have 1 meal in any other Chartwells-supported eating area (Chartwells is the university's food service), the C-store included. These 19 meals reset their quantity every Monday. Now I often don't have time (or indeed the actual -stomach-) to eat 19 meals each week, so I'm often left with about 4-6 meals come Sunday. So I'm thinking, 'Hey, I'll go hit the C-store, spend a meal there to get a soda...and then maybe come later to the Heritage Center (our cafeteria) for a dessert and drinks'. So I have these 6 meals left, six meals that I've PAID for with my own friggin' money! And I'm -given- an incentive to spend them all because they RESET every Monday, so I might as well use them right? You'd THINK I'd be -ABLE- to, right? WRONG! See...there's a little thing called a 'daily limit' that some tusspot over at the ORL decided to tag onto plan 19. So, given the incentive to eat all 19 meals within a week and get my actual money's worth, I'm not actually ABLE to do it. It isn't possible. I'm actually LIMITED to using three meals per day. Why? Well, it's very simple: because the ORL doesn't want me to. Why? Well, er...because I might use as many as 5 meals in one day! What's that? Why's that so bad? Oh, well...I don't know...it just...doesn't seem healthy, you know? Kids eating 5 full meals in a day. They get fat enough as it IS when they're in college, so lets give them a healthy, 3 meal a day limit. Hey, MORONS, did you ever think that people don't always get an entire meal's worth of food when they spend a meal? Did you ever THINK that we might just want to pop over for a dessert and drink? Or a quick sandwich? Did you actually THINK that we were going to GORGE ourselves with 5 all-you-can-eat meals' worth of food, JUST because we had 5 meals left over??? COME ON! Where's the logic? I can understand (vaguely) WHY they might want to set a limit on meal usage, so that people couldn't just come and spend 5 or 6 in a day, putting a strain on the cafeteria's supply, but just how much can one person eat in a day? More importantly, how much can one person actually WANT to eat in a day? Here's an example: person A and person B have the same daily intake of food. Person A and person B -both- ate 15 pounds of food by 8:00 p.m. this past Tuesday. Only, person -A- spent only one meal doing it, whereas person -B- spent three, splitting up his eating into several smaller 'quickie' meals because he didn't have time for one big leisurely meal. Person B, unlike person A, has a tight schedule that only allots very small periods of time to eat. Now, person A and person B are -both- still hungry. Let's say they both still want to eat about 5 more pounds of food (yes I know, these numbers aren't realistic, but it's just for the example). Even with the 'daily limit', person A would be able to do it, because he decided to be a glutton earlier that day. That, and he has a light schedule so he can afford to have had a nice long personal -banquet- of a meal. Person B would be, shall we say, 'screwed', because he only had several little gaps in his day to fit in mealtimes and none of them were sufficient enough to make up for a decent meal, so he ended up spending three meals to get (maybe) two -actual- decent meals' worth of food in his system. Now person A and person B are in line at the cafeteria, neither knowing about 'daily limits'. Person A swipes his card and gets accepted, because he only spent one meal so far. Person B, when he swipes -his- card, gets rejected with a taunting electronic alarm and an UNfriendly message that says, '***OVER DAILY LIMIT***'. Person B, who has paid the same amount of money to the school as person A, and would even be considered a much more worthwhile student to the U (what, with his tight schedule and all), has to then shell out $8 extra to go eat a meal that he SHOULD have been able to spend, because he still had 14 left in the week for Pete's sake!! Now, WHERE is the JUSTICE in that!?? Where is the LOGIC? If I PAY you for something, I should get my money's worth no matter WHAT. And even if you TELL me that I have to get my money's worth on my own, you should ALLOW me to be able to do it, -REGARDLESS- of how! I want my 19 meals a week, and I'd rather spend a fortnight in HELL than see money of mine wasted because of such a needless and downright PETTY rule that was clearly not very well-thought out! The Office of Residential Living are IDIOTS, and SO are the morons who invented the 'daily limit'. Not only that, but whoever the twit was that decided to freeze the meal plan for Spring Break should tied up and hung out to be consumed by locusts. Yeah, so where's my $1450 going? What did I PAY for? For you guys to screw me over? So I can either shell out MORE cash (because I didn't have the cash to go home in the FIRST place), or STARVE? Gee, guys! Those are -great- options! Gee whillikers, I can't -wait- to lose 10 pounds and be malnourished by Sunday! SCREW you, ORL. Next time, you should probably think PAST your friggin' rear-end and make a sensible and FAIR meal plan for the rest of us poor college students that don't have money spilling out every available orifice! ARGH! *sigh*...I need a vacation. Oh wait, I'm -on- one. Hmm...I need a vacation FROM this vacation. Most of all, though, I need a cudgel, a nice big -iron- one, that I can use to crack the thick skulls of Numbnuts McGee and all the other drooling tards that run the ORL. Hmm...*looks at the time*...I also need to go to bed now. I'll be seein' ya.
current mood: completely livid
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, March 12th, 2004
| |
12:58 am - Introduction?
|
For the veritable collective MOB that wants to know more about me--yes, that's you two *points*--my name is Barrett. I'm 18 (19 this coming April) and an ex-theatre major at University of Utah. Yes, yes, I know...Utah. America's...well, America's something-that-isn't-particularly-fantastic. It's pretty here, but I don't think I'm going to last much longer. Somethin' about the people that just -irks- me. Now I know you're all wondering: 'Utah? Ooh, I wonder if he's Mormon' Well, to answer that question, YES, I am. But a different breed of Mormon. East coast. It's a -whole- different faction that joins the -rest- of the world in reality...whereas in Utah, people have this (sometimes pathetic) death-grip on UNreality. They're closed-minded, single-minded, and can often be VERY holier-than-thou towards those who aren't Latter Day Saints. My roommate here, whom I've gotten along with very well, has yet to meet a Utah Mormon that he can stand for longer than five minutes. And yet, he told me that all the out-of-state Mormons he has met have been excellent people, really fun to hang out with, and generally cool. Y'know...'cause it's hard to be cool when you have your HEAD lodged up your butt and you don't want to hear outside thoughts or opinions. It's so unfortunate that Utah, our (Church's) centralized (so-to-speak) location, houses some of the -worst- examples of Latter Day Saints I've ever seen. I say the heads of our church should just move on up to New York! THAT would be interesting...it would add to the already ecletic mix of cultures and beliefs that exists there, and I think it would strengthen those who are of the belief that there IS, in fact, a real world out there where everyone ISN'T Mormon and doesn't have their head up their butt. But I'm a dreamer, and often my dreams aren't exactly reality themselves...and so it is with this: it -ain't- gonna happen. Criminey. I think it's a crime, personally, that more people get turned off from the Church because of what happens in UTAH than anywhere else in the world...even in the 'heathen' east coast. Part of me wants to stay here and keep spreading my ideas to the rest of the bedraggled Mormon masses...but another part of me wants to scream for mercy and run away, back home, to where I -know- I'd be comfortable. Meh...(funny word, 'Meh'...it's so expressive in its UNexpressive nature)...I guess I'll just stick it out until the end of this semester and see where my body roams afterwards. *looks at the mass of words above* Whoa, I went on there, didn't I? Well...about me: visually, I'm tall...6' 5" to be exact, and up until recently, very very large to behold. We'll get to that in a second. Well, -I'll- get to that in a second, I don't care what -he- does...I have blond hair that's recently turned brown. I'll get to -that- later as well. Shut up, I know, I go off on tangents. Eat me. I have grey eyes. Well, actually, they're sometimes grey, sometimes blue-green, green, ice-blue...it really depends on my mood, the temperature outside, what I'm wearing, the day of the week, leap year, diet, mother's father's genes...the list goes on. Basically, I've been told they're a different color every other day by some observant nitwit, and in reality I've no friggin' CLUE why they change...I'll leave it to the latter half of my life for solving, right alongside the issues I have with my tremendous widows peak. Seriously, I have the world's most awe-inspiring widow's peak. I hide it as best I can, or as best as one can when they have a veritable -stalagmite- of a follicle growth creeping down their forehead, poised and ready to frighten children or any too-curious observers. But try as I might, I put Braham Stoker to shame, or any one of his fictitious (or ARE they?) characters. Enough about that, I'm getting twitchy just thinking about it...Also, and I don't know if this is a commonly observed detail about someone or not, I have really big, hairy feet. They're size 15 in shoe-stores, size 13-and-a-half/double-wide in ski shops, size 14 in L.L.Bean catalogues, and really really big everywhere else. Funny how your feet can fluctuate like that. Makes you wonder why we have shoe sizes in the first place if they're going to all just contradict each other. And the hairy part...Lemme tell ya, taking socks off is a delicate process because of this. I have a fairly good patch of hair on every one of my toes. LONG hair. It likes to nestle nicely in between the stitches of some of my socks while I wear them, and then hold on for dear life while I try to pry them off. If you've ever accidentally plucked a nose hair or had someone tear one from your scalp, you'll know what I'm talking about when I say that it HURTS! The hair doesn't end there, either. It trails up to a nicely ill-trimmed 'carpet' on my legs. It keeps me warm in winter, and has been known to attract many women (woo-woo!). Of course...they're probably not attracted at all and just want someone to show -their- leg hair issues as well, and that's just icky. S'far as my largeness goes, getting back to that whole thing, I -used- to be one beefy, fat-packed sack of cement...around 290 or so pounds. But it turns out this past year that I wanted to go and lose a hundred pounds. So I did. I basically...er...well, I basically went on a fast? No...not a fast...I basically gave up meat and fat for a solid few months. Not -entirely-, of course, because one needs fat to live. But I only ate bare minimum, and exercised a whole friggin' lot. Yeah, so now, 100 pounds lighter, I'm still me surprisingly enough. Eh well...enough about that. As you can tell by now, I'm odd. And odd people lead to odd hobbies. My hobbies aren't particularly odd, but they're just weirdly mixed. For instance, I like reading and writing, but I -hate- 'rithmetic. I like art and music, but I also like sports, basketball and racquetball in particular. At the same time, I hate watching them. The -only- time I'll ever be able to stand watching a spectator sports event is either when A) it's live, and B) it's basketball or baseball, or C) there's nothing better on. Other than that, watching it on the tube is about as appealing to me as reorganizing my underwear drawer. From here on out, it's pretty normal. I like playing guitar and singing. I'm also a huge fan of good comedy, mostly British. Other than that, I pretty much hang about and try to enjoy life. That sounds cheesy...shoot...well, I just try to make the most of things. I'm at college right now, and up until a week ago, was all set to major in theatre. But it was a lost cause that was fueled by a lot of misplaced feelings, and was gradually being replaced with the feeling that it was a wrong choice of careers. So I went with what I -should- have been doing this whole time and double-majoring in creative writing and illustration. I figure it's better to have a normal, happy life away from the limelight and have some sense of security, rather than having a tumultuous and impossible career to predict. My, the time be late...I've been writing this stupid thing in the background for hours now! It's time for bed. You've heard enough from me for today.
current mood: relaxed
current music: My roommate's snoring and the occasional wind gust.
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
|
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
sieredith's journal