Category: Personal

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Blog Day 2011 Personal

On Christmas.

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For some reason this topic did not excite me. Which is weird because Christmas is far and away my favorite holiday. The only real topic I could think to write about was the christmas of ’96 also know as the Nintendo 64 christmas. The thing was I totally spoiled Christmas early that year. For whatever reason even at the age of 8 I had the foresight to pre-order what I knew was going to be a huge console release. Around comes September 29, 1996 and I knew my mom was out at the store picking up my brand spanking new Nintendo 64 and Mario 64. The following months were hard on my mother because I bugged the bejeezes out of her asking if I could open it early. It was just sitting somewhere in the house, not being played. A war crime punishable by death in some parts of the world. As the months leading to Christmas wore on, my mother’s patience wore thin. Finally, sometime in November, she caved. It was momentous. I was trembling opening that up. Unluckily for me I did not contain the knowledge I do now and had no idea what the new fangled red, white, and yellow plugs were. I was used to screwing something in the back of the TV and turning it to channel 3. I spent a while playing around to no avail. I eventually had to go buy an RF adapter. When I finally had it all set up, I flipped the switch. Instantly, I was inundated with what could only be described as the future. It was so fun. Even though it was before Christmas it was the best Christmas present I can remember. The most anticipated at least.

This video was me in a nutshell.

 

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Blog Day 2011 Personal Philosophy

On Personal Utopia.

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Instead of impressing upon the world my version of a utopian society, I am going to write about how living my utopian life would be. There is very little you can do to effect society as a whole, but as Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I am slowly working towards accomplishing this in my life, but as this is a utopia, this may be just out of the realm of reality.

To start I have decided I want to live a life of “digital minimalism.” By this I mean to have very little in the physical world, but be as gluttonous as I want in the digital space. Data is cheap, and relatively energy efficient, where as physical objects take up a finite amount of space and energy. Ideally I would like to have all my videos, games, music, movies, books, photos, and memories in the digital space. I am doing a good job with the conversion thus far it is just incredibly tedious work.

The second part to this is be mobile. Living this lifestyle will make moving an incredibly easy task. Some clothes, a laptop, and maybe a projector. Boom, I’m moved. I would love to travel and being able to pick up and take my entire life with me makes any place on Earth, home.

The third and final reason to do this is to leave the smallest carbon footprint. I believe the digital age is going to allow us to use far less energy than any other time in post-industrial human history and do more with that energy. The less energy used the more that will be left for future generations. Whether we like it or not we have a responsibility to the people who come before us so they to can enjoy this planet as we have.

On top of this I would like to be physically active everyday and learn new things until my death. Those last two may be the hardest things of what I have written.

Categories
Blog Day 2011 Personal

On Friends.

Since I already wrote a blog pretty much gushing about how I love my friends I will discuss my era of friends.

I have up until now never maintained a consistent group of friends for one reason or another. This does not mean that I haven’t had some great times within these groups, it just means they never really lasted.

Early Childhood/Cousins Era

When you are a kid you really don’t have a lot of control over who is your friends. You usually just go with whoever lives down the street or is friends with your parents. In my case it was my family. I lived kind of out of town and went to a private school in town. This lead to my best friends being my cousins. As mentioned in a previous post these were some of my favorite times. As you get older though, you start to develop friends outside of family and this happened all around. Thus ending the Cousin Era.

Elementary & Middle School/St. Mary’s Era

I am actually compressing a lot of this era down. This was all the friends I made while at St. Mary Catholic Community School in Crown Point, IN. Early on these were limited to whoever I was in Cub Scouts with, but later developed into people I had actual interests in. Some of these people I remain in contact with to this day, but never to the extent that I did back then.

Early High School/Justin LeVine Era

That’s right. Justin LeVine gets his own era. Him and I were tight as a drum. Almost everyday after school my freshman year of high school I would go to his house until my mom would pick me up after she got off work. It was the best. We would play Halo and it was just a good release after school. We even held Halo LAN parties in half-days in his basement. We did grow apart when we both went away to college unfortunately, but at least we still have all those memories.

Late High School/Kevin Romanak and Friends Era

I was introduced to this group because I started dating my friend Amy Kozlowski. She was friends with all these new people and we hit it off. Although, I wasn’t usually the ones causing the mischief we got ourselves into quite a bit of it. These are usually the memories I remember from high school. From invading the Homecoming parade to pissing off the Mass Media teacher. They were all fun times.

Early College/Alex and Finny Era

This didn’t last very long, but when I first entered college I was rooming with my good friend, Nathan Finfrock. The best part is his girlfriend, April Finick, and my girlfriend, Alex Arges, were rooming together, too! It was the worst idea. Not only did tensions grow almost immediately, we both went through messy and painful break ups with those same girls. Needless to say, not my favorite era.

Late College/Crazy Monkey Era

This is probably my favorite era. Where I became friends with The Crazy Monkeys after starting to date Lauren Kohl. You can read more about it in my previous post.