Growing up

I think you get to a point in your life where you realize you are your own responsibility, where everything is on you.  For me, and probably for most of you, that's when I went to college.  I'm back for Christmas break and everything is different.  Some of the furniture is moved.  They got rid of the futon and instead there's a chair and an ottoman in my study.  I liked my futon.  But that's beside the point.  I get back to my home and it's still my home, but I think my home is now less the place where I am and more the people I'm with.  I love my family so much and I don't think I realized it until I went away for a while.  And I realize that my family is more than just my biological family.  It's the guys I explored my city with in middle school.  It's the girl who gave me the blanket I sleep with every night.  It's my friend in Ghana, teaching underprivileged children how to write and do math.  It's the girl in New York, who I talk to every day even though we have nothing too interesting to say.

Anyway, I realize that I'm being taken care of more and more by myself and my friends.  And it's super weird.  Not that I'm not being supported 100% by my parents, but that I don't need 100% of their support anymore.  And I watch movies with people falling in love and I realize that that might be me, in maybe 10 years.  Maybe 10 years from now I'll be married.  That's insane.  Because I'm just a kid.  But I'm not just a kid, and I think this part of my life is the part where I become okay with that.  I walked by the park by my house the other day, and I was amazed at how much fun kids have.  I think I've forgotten how to have fun.  I remember thinking as a kid that adults don't know how to have fun, and I think I'm forgetting.  My definition of a good time has been turned into two categories of things:

1.  Creating relationships with people.  Whether talking to a girl in class, or meeting people at parties, or hanging with my friends, you know what I'm talking about.  Meeting the people.  It's the better part of my fun.

2. The worst part of my fun, and I think what separates "the boys from the men" in the worst possible way, is the endless competition.  We no longer have games, we have competition.  I don't play Halo and marvel at the colors and intricacies and feel of the game, of assuming the role of a super-soldier, I play it to kick my room-mate's ass.  And you probably do too.  It's the same for many other things, when you're a kid, you want to run fast, when you're an adult, you want to run faster then everyone else.  And it sucks.  It's what makes us successful, as adults, it makes us create better products then everyone else, so people will buy our products, instead of everyone else's, so we can make money, at the expense of everyone else.

I don't know, being an adult sucks in some ways, but it rocks in others.  I can't wait until I'm older, until I've gone through law school.  Married a really smart brunette who loves my stories and poems.  And she plays piano, and likes when I sing along, even though I suck.  I can't wait for my 2.5 kids and I'm allergic to dogs so maybe we'll get a bunch of fish or an iguana or something.  And we'll live in my hometown, or in the suburbs of Chicago or Boston.  I doubt I'll go west coast, that's a bit of a stretch.  I really like snow.  And the west coast is no place for a lawyer, unless I wanted to be an entertainment or corporate lawyer.  I'll still go to my family's timeshares in Hawaii and Spain.  I'd teach my kid to ride his bike and pay somebody out the ass to teach him or her to play piano or guitar or any instrument they wanted.  Hopefully I'll make good money, and be able to give them every advantage they deserve.  I hope I can live up to my expectations, as you can see they're normal, but extremely big.

I don't know if anyone reads this.  If you got all the way through, feel free to just say hey.

Cheers, and happy holidays!

My Life Is Complete

I just completed my The Beatles discography.  No more fear of me dying and coming back as a ghost.

Movie List

Ya'll can duke it out with me at your convenience.  Let me know if I forgot some things because I know I did.

Best War Scene:  Saving Private Ryan

Runner Up: Letters From Iwo Jima

Film I Most Relate To: Adventureland

Runner Up: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Movie that made me pee myself a little bit (not really, you idiots) for a good reason: Airplane

Runner Up: Anchorman

Movie that made me pee myself a little bit for a bad reason: Aliens

Runner Up: The Shining

Movie that was so bad that I would have faked peeing myself in front of Kate Beckinsale just to not have to sit through it: Epic Movie

Runner Up: Dragon Wars

Best Movie From When I Was Young: Toy Story

Runner Up: The Lion King

Best Foreign/Check Me Out, I'm Artsy: Pan's Labyrinth

Runner Up: Let The Right One In

Best Guiltry Pleasure: LOTR

Runner Up: Star Wars and Harry Potter tie

Movie I Shouldn't Have Liked As Much As I Did: Ghosts Of Girlfriend's Past (cause Jennifer Garner's a fox and you know it)

Runner Up: Disturbia

Greatest Mindfuck: The Matrix

Runner Up: Inception

Greatest "ooooh, i just got owned": The Usual Suspects

Runner Up: Fight Club

Greatest Franchise: Bond

Runner Up: Star Wars

Greatest Race/Chase Scene:  The Italian Job

Runner Up: The Fast and the Furious

Best Martial Arts Scene: Bruce Lee vs Chuck Norris (I KNOW, RIGHT??? IT'S SO DANK) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPiMpdm3wnQ

Runner Up: Jackie Chan in The Drunken Masterhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6o9p8yXjr0&feature=search

Best Stylized Fight Scene: Kill Bill: Uma Thurman vs the crazy 88 -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3aFv8IQb4s&feature=search

Runner Up: 300 Spartans vs The Persians -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4_8x4lY2Uk&feature=search

Coolest Training Scene: Rocky Training Montage -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pmSvWHgaao&feature=related

Runner Up: Miracle: Again -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9AajQn7b18&feature=search

Biggest Dissappointment: Pearl Harbor

Runner Up: 9 (cause the trailer was so sick and the movie was only mediocre) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnoJecu9e7c&feature=search

Most Essential Movies (that I've seen, sorry there's no citizen kane or casablanca)

(I actually saw Citizen Kane since I wrote this originally.  We can throw that between The Godfather and Schindler's List)

1. The Godfather - Duh

2. Schindler's List - Possibly the most moving tale on the list

3. Saving Private Ryan - Realistic to the point of horrifying...  I got shellshocked just by watching it

4. Fantasia - Animation masterpiece

5. 28 Days Later - Scary while maintaining good storytelling is hard to find in contemporary horror, but this exceeds that by a mile

6. The Matrix - When a movie made me question my own existance, I realized it had to go on the list

7. Jaws - The reason I fear deep water

8. 12 Angry Men - Compelling, riveting courtroom classic

9. Snow White - First hit of Walt Disney's that redefined the genre

10. Pan's Labyrinth - Nightmarish and horrifying yet incredibly wonderful...  Like the bad trip version of Alice in Wonderland

Honestly

Once you realize that the only person that you have to fulfill is yourself, life makes a lot more sense.  Don't live for others, do what you do because you want to.  Go to school because you want to be a more intelligent human being, not because your parents want to.  Turn in your homework because you want to learn the material, not because you want your teachers to shut up.  Help other people because it makes you happy, not because you have to do community service for some class or to get into college.  You'll wake up one day and realize that you love making people happy and smile.  It's the best thing in the world.  Especially her.  I told New York girl that I was into her and she wouldn't have me.  I didn't tell her I love her, but I didn't want to come on too strong.  I realize that the distance would get in the way.  I don't know. I know nothings going to happen between me and her, but where I lost a potential girl friend, i think I gained my best friend.  I'm not going to be any less nice or any less there for her.  I know that it would be easier for me to get girls if I was more of a douche, but it's not worth sacrificing part of myself along the way.  It's better to do what is right than what is easy.  Plus, I'd rather a girl fall in love with the nice guy in me, the real me, than some douche bag front i put on.  I know New York cares about me, a lot.  We've stayed up late in the night and put off things for each other more than once, just to hear about each others days.  She's still coming to hang out with me this Christmas, and I'm still going to see her in her show, she's an actress if  I didn't tell you, this spring.  I look forward to knowing her the rest of my life.

Wikileaks

http://wikileaks.org/

What this site is: It is a compendium of over 400,000 classified and otherwise not-released-to-the-public documents detailing the lesser known side of the Iraq war.  Also understand that obviously every document here is not earth-shattering and going to twist your conceptions of our nation, but there are a few diamonds in there that really make you reevaluate how you feel.  You have to do a bit of digging.

Why it's important:  It is documentation of the deaths of some 104000 civilians in Iraq.  Even more, now, I believe.

Why it's not criminal:  This does not divulge secrets that would effect the condition of the war currently, at least not directly.  Like it doesn't reveal our secret plans or whatever else.  However, it does show us gunning down Iraqi civilians trying to retrieve the wounded after we mistakenly massacred 8 civilian reporters (this attack ended up mortally wounding two children as well who were with the Iraqi rescuers, who we refused to treat at our camp).  It also reveals interesting things like who the hell really has the bomb, and what is still just media bullshit.  The only way this could effect the war is in the same way footage effected Vietnam - we realized that war really does suck and we ran the hell out of there.

Why you may not have heard of this yet:  The government has blacklisted this site.  No media is supposed to really talk about this, like ever.  Think about this.  400,000 documents?  Greatest intelligence leak literally ever?  That's definitely bigger than "two women were trampled on black friday".  And you never heard about it, except for maybe a whisper online or on CNN.  It's been banned in many countries, because it reveals documents that were exchanged between our embassy and there's, and from what I've seen, some are fairly incriminating.  China recently attacked the site with their tech, overloading it in excess of 10 Gigabytes per second (that's a shitload) in an effort to shut it down, because it revealed less than happy things about their government's dealings as well.

I'm not screwing with you, this is legitimate.  People have gone to jail, and people are on the run for creating this site.  You can peruse it, however, without fear, as this is freedom of speech and information.

I know a lot of you don't really involve yourself in politics, or you have some huge boner for America, but please realize that this is not some "opinion" or me pushing some political agenda on you.  These are straight up facts, straight from the mouth of your government.  These are facts for you to interpret as you desire.  Take a bit of time out of your day to take a look at it, this is incredibly important.  I find it to be imperative to know what is going on around me.

Prepare to shit bricks

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Think about it :)

Catholic (noun) - One who is addicted to cats.