Trivial Matters

As of writing this, I’m about 90 minutes from next year. Actually, it’s 90 minutes and an extra second since they have to adjust the atomic clock to account for orbital wobble.

I’ve been thinking hard about the goals that I want to set for next year, and I’m not sure I want to set a goal for December when a lot can happen in the 11 months between now and then. So, instead, I’m going to limit my goals to just the first three months. Come March, I’ll check back, see how they came out, and adjust fire as neccessary. That being said (typed… whatever), here we go…

January

• Score above 240 on my PT test at the next drill. I’ve done this before, back in May, and then slacked off for six months so that when I had to take it again, I put up my worst score ever: 183. (For those unfamiliar with the Army PT test, there are three events at 100 points each. You have to score at least 60 in each event to pass. So while 183 can be a passing score, it wasn’t in my case.)
• Start on a draft of the Acuff response paper I said I’d write during my History of the Middle East class. Basically, we read a paper about the “Cultural Revolution” in Iran and how that was the only applicable model to use to describe a revolution. However, the author failed to apply that reasoning to any other revolution in history, and I proposed that his model relied too much on previous models to stand alone. I also tried to incorporate a “divine catalyst” for revolution, which I want to work into a fifth revolutionary model.
• Finish the HP Graphing Calculator series that I started for Bright Hub back in November. They’re retooling the site right now, and I want to get back into it as soon as they are up and running with the new system.

February

• Average at least 20 unique visits per day on Trivial Matters. I think that once I start my training/fundraising the numbers will go up. The blog averaged just under 10 UVs per day for December, so I don’t think doubling that in two months is all that unreasonable. I also know that I’ll have to step up my writing if I want to keep readers comming back.
• Have a new apartment to move into. I’ve had to push it due to financial reasons, but I should be able to get a new place by February.
• Get back into a regular pub quiz routine. Mostly Confused hasn’t made a strong showing in several months now, and I don’t know how busy they all will be in January. I made sure to request Tuesday nights off from my new job on campus so I can make the Bridgeport game, and I just have to get the rest to join me.

March

• Be ready for the Portland Half-Marathon. And by “ready” I mean actually running 10+ miles in the weeks leading up to the race the first weekend of April. I have everything I need except someone to run with on a regular basis, and that is my biggest motivating factor because I always run slow when I run alone. My hope is that there are enough TNT teammates in the local area to do a few regular runs each week.
• Finish all of my classes with an A. Surprisingly, I’ve managed to get a 4.0 in the last two terms which has drastically improved my pre-military GPA that got carried over. If I can do it for the rest of the year, I might be able to raise the GPA enough to get an additional $1000 scholarship for Pacific U.
• Be back into a regular meditation routine. Part of this relies on my having a new place when I can set up an appropriate space to meditate, but it’s mostly a discipline issue. Ironically, meditation helps me gain discipline in a catch-22 sort of way.

So those are my goals for the next 90 days. I suppose you could call some of them “resolutions” with a little bit of rewording, but I always think of resolutions as being to vague to be of any use. “I resolve to be a better writer.” “I resolve to get in shape.” Um… yeah… sure.

Feel free to share your own goals/resolutions here. Perhaps you’ve set similar goals and want to help me keep a check on mine, then by all means. Part of what will make this better blog is to get feedback and create a sense of community that I can write for.

And now there is 60 minutes (and 1 second) remaining on the West Coast. See you on the other side.

Wow. 2008 is a few days from completion. I look back on the year, and I find myself in a much different position that I expected. Is it a better position? Maybe. I’m not getting shot at, so that’s saying something. Though, sometimes a man just needs to be shot at to get his life in order.

I spent the better part of the year learning how to be a Soldier (and trying to forget how to be an Airman). I spent the later part of the year trying to be a civilian again, and more importantly, a student. I acomplished something that took me 13 years to finish, and found myself still years away from my goals.

I’ve formd bonds of friendship with a number of people over the last year. People whose support I’m not sure I would have been able to go without. I ended a relationship that I had hoped would last much longer.

Finally, I made mistakes, and corrected past errors. And I’m sure that I will continue to make new mistakes while I try to fix the old ones. Unfortunately, that’s just a part of life.

Now, it is time to plan for 2009. I’ve decided to set at least one goal for each month. The goals will vary in nature (personal, economic, spiritual, etc.) and will be atainable. Maybe a year from now I will be in a better position.

Earlier this year, my BlackBerry crapped out on me. Sprint refused to fix it because they could not duplicate the problem here in Portland. But every time I went away for the Army (to California, Washington, or New Jersey), my service would start acting funny. I’d get no connection despite having multiple coverage bars.

Frustrated at not having a phone, I bought a TracFone on one of the bases, canceled my Sprint service, and didn’t look back. After a while, though, I got to missing the extra BlackBerry features (email mostly) and decided to go with Cricket because I didn’t want to be tied to a contract in the event that I have to leave the country.

The one caveat was that I needed to be able to take the TracFone number with me. I didn’t want to have to go through the trouble of having a new number, especially when there are still people who try to use the BlackBerry number to get ahold of me (and then wonder why I don’t answer). TracFone told me that I could port the number with no issues. They gave me the info I needed and I went to Cricket last weekend to buy a new phone.

I picked the Samsung Messager, which is a very nice phone. It’s not a BlackBerry or iPhone, but it does what I need. The problem was that they don’t do the number porting in the stores. Instead, I was given an 800-number to call, which I did. Too bad they aren’t open on the weekends, so I had to wait until Monday to call again.

After spending 30 minutes on hold, I was connected. I gave the guy all of the info and he said to call back in four hours to check on the status. It was more like four days before I got someone to answer again. This was last Friday night. The new person told me that the change never happened because Verizon didn’t have that account. I explain why Verizon doesn’t have the account (it’s not a Verizon phone). To which she replied that TracFone was closed (they’re on the East Coast apparantly) and that I’d have to wait until Monday to have the new request processed.

It’s now Monday. To my knowledge, the number is still not ported. I tried calling earlier this morning, and nobody answered. I went back to the Cricket store and had them call. The manager was on hold for 45 minutes when I finally gave up waiting. I told them that if it wasn’t done by tomorrow, I was returning the phone. I’m thinking I’ll use the money to buy a netbook instead.

I moved many times in the first eight years of my life. Mom worked for a company that kept getting relocated or bought, and we bounced around southern California, Texas, and finally High Bridge, New Jersey.

It was the first day of sixth grade and I found myself in homeroom. (Looking back, homeroom seemed like such a waste of a period. I can’t even remember what we did for the hour or so.) The morning announcements started with the Principal introducing himself and finished with what would become the daily tradition of asking a trivia question. The question on that first day was: What is the official state animal of New Jersey?

“Horse,” came a shy, lispy response from the other side of the classroom from me. (I didn’t know at the time that “horse” would become the word that kick-started my body into puberty at the tender age of 12.) It was spoken by Jennifer Jordan. Jenny, as I would come to call her, was wearing a brand new set of braces and hadn’t quite gotten the hang of talking again. There was some snickering from the other students at how she said that magical word, but I was too shy myself to come to her rescue and quell the laughter.

I think it might have been the fact that she was the only person in the class (and the whole school as it turned out) who knew the answer, or the combination of braces and glasses (which I’m still a sucker for), but whatever it was, I was in love.

It took more than a year for me to work up the courage to ask Jenny out. When we first moved to High Bridge, there was a bar at the end of the street I lived on with an apartment on top for the owners. When they moved, the new owners turned the bar into a pizza/Italian restaurant. One half was the pizza joint and the other half was the fancy Italian restaurant. They had a daughter that was the same age as my sister, so we got to know the family and I wound up working in the restaurant as an unpaid assistant.

When I did ask Jenny out, it was there that I took her for our date. Not having a father at that point, I had to rely on television to tell me about how to conduct a date. Step 1) Get flowers. So, I went to the florist on Main Street and bougth the biggest bouquet with red roses I could afford.

Step 2) Pick her up. Being thirteen, I didn’t have a car and had to get my mom to drive me over there to pick her up. It was a small enough town that I could have walked over there on my own, but I was resolute in following the proper steps. It was instantly apparent her parents were very uneasy with the idea of Jenny going out on a date. (I think the roses threw them off.) My mom had to reassure them that I was a nice guy and everything would be monitored. And so we got in the car and drove back over to the restaurant.

We had the whole place to ourselves, and even though we were sitting on the Italian restaurant side, we ordered a pizza. The owner brought it out to our table, gushing at the young lovebirds. And as we sat there eating and trying to carry an adult conversation, it slowly dawned on me that Jenny had only said yes to be polite. She wasn’t interested in me the same way I was in her. Rather than make her sit there and suffer, I asked if she wanted to go home and she said yes. My mom had been in the other half of the restaurant, occasionally poking her head in to check on us, and I got her to bring the car around.

I dropped Jenny back off at her house, and we never spoke of the date again. In fact, we barely spoke at all after that. I moved to Oregon a year later and we never kept in touch, even though I kept her name, address, and phone number in my notebooks well into high school.

It was several years before I ever got to Step 3 on a date.

Been a while, hasn’t it? I was doing the first part of my Active Duty weeks, and I thought that if I tried to post, it would just be a very long rant about military incompetence and why I still can’t deploy… needless to say, it was an interesting week.

The weather has been screwy too. They tell us it’s going to snow, and it hails. They tell us it’s going to be freezing rain, and it snows. Today was actually nice. Not too cold, not too windy, the snow came down gently. I walked down to the theater to see Seven Pounds.

The movie was very predictable. Anyone expecting some twist ending, and ends up being surprised at what happens, hasn’t seen enough movies in their life.

And now I have dinner to eat, so I’ll stop rambling. Don’t worry, there’s more to come…