The New Year

Greetings everyone. As you may well be aware, it is now the year 2011. The year 2010 came to a dramatic close at 11:59 when we all stared at the clock watching the last few seconds of the pass by and we entered the new year. It usually at times like theses where we take time to reflect on what we’ve accomplished in the previous year and judge whether or not we did a job or if we are left wanting.I am normally not that sentimental. I spend maybe a little time to think back a few moments that stood out in my mind. Most of the time, the memories are all positive. It isn’t like I never had a bad day in the past year, it is just I have a hard time focusing on the bad. Why dwell on something negative?

The same goes with 2010. 2010 has probably been the greatest year of my life. I have done so much this year that it is hard to not view it as a success. I moved halfway across the country to pursue a career with The Walt Disney Company and finally moved out from under the care of parents and now live on my own. I have made a bunch of new friends and am looking forward to the rest of my life living in Southern California.

However, I do know that there are a few things about myself that I can improve on. That is my aim for the next year. Isn’t it everyone’s? We all make ‘resolutions’ about how we are going to one thing or another to improve ourselves and more often than not we hardly make it out of the month of January with our resolution intact. I won’t claim to do anything different, but I do aim to make small gains in the areas where I find myself lacking.

First of all, I don’t eat necessarily healthy at all. I don’t eat fast food as much as I used too and since moving to California, fried foods have been almost non-existent in my diet. However, I still drink probably far too much soda than what is healthy for you (which is none at all) and the food that I do eat also don’t constitute a balanced diet either. I am not going to claim that I will drastically change my diet, but if I can by the end of the year, improve the quality of the food I eat I will consider it an improvement. This would most likely benefit from actually cooking food instead microwaving meals and having more than peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. In short, I would like to be a better cook by the end of the year.

Secondly, which ties into the first resolution, I want to exercise more. I used to run all the time when I lived in Kentucky. I had a YMCA membership for a while and went to their gym regularly to exercise, then when I canceled my membership, I still tried to run about 3 miles a day (which was from my house to Wal*Mart and back). Since moving to California, I have done very little exercise if any at all. I am planning on getting a bicycle to commute to work. Since I live only about 3 miles from work, I figure it would be good exercise for me. Plus save me some money from having to drive my car constantly. Yay for being Green!

Thirdly, I’d like to get better at finishing the projects I start. As you may well know, I am not really good at updating at a regular intervals. I tried for three months to update every other day on this blog and that failed spectacularly and then I said I’d update more and that also didn’t happen. I also have a vlog on youtube. I wanted to be able to update that at a regular pace, while that hasn’t really failed yet (have at least for the past few months updated every single week), I have been neglecting it a bit. I also have a tumblr where I document my pal, Pascal, in different places.  I am also pursuing a creative project with my sister, both of us are notorious about abandoning projects. I hope by the end of the year to be consistently updating my internet projects and get better at making time for them.

So here’s to the next year! Let’s hope I can keep at it!

Video: Tangled

So the other night I went out to see the new movie from Disney called Tanlged.

Video: Harry Potter

Here’s the newest video up on my channel, Harry Potter. I talk about what I did for Thanksgiving and discuss the new Harry Potter movie.

I loved the movie despite its little quirks and I am eagerly awaiting the sequel coming this July.

End Hiatus

Howdy there! Long time no see. I could talk about why I haven’t blogged in a while, but that is so cliche. I don’t want to be the kind of person who only blogs about how they’ll try to blog more. It’s so tired and uninteresting.

So things are moving up for me. I’ve moved into a new place. I’m no longer living with my grandfather anymore. I moved out about a month ago and I am now living in Garden Grove. It is nice place and finally feel like an adult now. Although, I didn’t worry about money a lot until I had to worry about rent. But I love my new digs, the housemates can be a challenge with all the eccentricities, but it is a new experience for me and I look forward to the next year here at this place.

Here’s a look at my desk:

So, while I haven’t been blogging lately, I have been working on another project, making video blogs. This is something I’ve wanted to get into for a while, but I have never had the technology to do. Since this past Monday I have uploaded a new video everyday. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to keep the pace into next week, but we’ll see. I know that with every video I upload I will make a blog post here with it, to either elaborate on something I was discussing the video or to bring it to your attention.

Here’s the first video in the series:

The Channel is here www.youtube.com/DCN87Vlog Go ahead and Subscribe.

I’m also working trying to get another video project started, but I’ll have more word on that later.

I’ll have a real blog post sometime this weekend.

 

Skyway Flyer

So I have discovered this new band recently. It is called Skyway Flyer. It is pretty much the most amazing thing ever. It only has one member and his name is Jason Munday.

Now, I’ve heard of Jason’s stuff before. He was a part of this Wizard Rock band called Ministry Of  Magic, which was an electronica type of band. Now you probably don’t know what Wizard Rock music is, but it is a genre of music that is about Harry Potter. Most wizard rock bands are named after characters in the Harry Potter books (i.e. Harry and the Potters) and writes songs from perspective of that character. Not all follow this formula, but most do. Ministry of Magic, because of it’s utilitarian name was able to explore more options in their song writing. Jason’s music has always fun to listen to.

Skyway Flyer is also in the same vein as his MoM stuff. He has several different types of songs on his album and each one is a joy to listening to. My favorites are “Ready for Anything”, which is about Luke Skywalker and his piloting skills and “California Dorks”, a parody of Katy Perry’s California Gurlz. I personally find the parody to be better than the original song, but that’s just one dork’s opinion.

God, I love good music. Check him out and become a fan!

Reflections Part I

So, I didn’t post at all last week except for that one day. My internet had been experiencing some issues and it was just more hassle than it was worth to try and update when the connection had a high chance of timing out and causing a lot of undue stress. So I took the easy way out and decided to not update. I know, you should be disappointed in me, and to be honest, I’m disappointed in myself. Anyway, back to business.

Last week I was going through a lot of emotional stuff. I don’t care to get very detailed about it, just know that things went down that I wasn’t particular happy about and that apparently my feelings of friendship with this one person were not entirely mutual. They moved and decided not to say anything to me about it or even allow me to see them off on their endeavor. I’ve spent the past week or so thinking about it, whether what I perceived to be a slight on my person was actually a slight or just that this person didn’t feel we were good enough friends to make time to say goodbye and all that jazz before they left. I still don’t have a good enough answer for that question. The more I think about it, the more it makes me angry.

That is what sparked last weeks question. Why do we develop insecurities and why do we let past sufferings give us a bad outlook on the future? This whole incident has drudged up a lot of emotional garbage that I usually like to keep buried beneath the facade of my easy going devil may care attitude. I have issues with separation and letting myself get too attached to the people in my life. I make friends quickly and I immediately invest my emotions and my time into them. I guess that makes me a good friend, I don’t have to know you very long to willingly to help you out and stuff like. The downside is when the feelings aren’t necessarily mutual I tend to get burned.

I’ve opened myself up and therefore I’ve exposed myself to the consequences of that action. It hurts so much that I can’t bear it sometimes. The pain brings with it a lot unwanted memories. Like the passing of my maternal grandmother. I think a lot of the way I interact with people now is due in part with my grandmother. There were a lot of things I wanted to do with her and things that I said I would do for her that I never got the chance to do before she passed. The whole situation makes me value every moment I have with people I care about. You never know when the last time you’ll see someone will be and you want to make sure it’s not going to be a moment that you’ll regret for the rest of your life.

I also over-think my relationships with people a lot, to point where I become obsessive. I have had too many relationships where people stop talking to me or ignoring my calls and texts that it gets me paranoid. I think that I’ve done something wrong and they no longer want to be my friend. It causes me to get very upset and uneasy.

Why do we develop insecurities? I think we develop them as a defensive mechanism. We were hurt once because we exposed ourselves and we don’t ever want to feel that pain again. We feel that we got hurt the first time because we didn’t pain attention, we didn’t see it coming and now we look for it around every corner. I see desertion around every corner when I feel that people aren’t paying attention to me. I feel like I’m going to be abandoned again and left to feel inadequate and lonely. I can’t stand that feeling. Yet I open myself up every single time and allow this to happen every single time. I don’t understand it, you’d think I’d learn not to trust people with my emotions so quickly.

I wish I didn’t have this great propensity to feel pain. It makes me get so depressed sometimes.

I will be back Wednesday with a happier post.

Of all things

So you may have noticed that I didn’t make a post on Friday. I was busy and I really didn’t have much to report on, so no post.

I still don’t have much to discuss but I thought I might pose a question that you guys are free to answer. It is something that has been weighing on my mind a lot recently. Why do people develop insecurities? Why do we let our past sufferings to give us bad outlook on future?

Think about it and I will post my reflections these questions on Wednesday.