Ramblin' Man

So it turns out it still snows in Western New York. The proverbial "they" says things like "when it rains, it pours" and "did you see Veronica, she looks like a whore," but in this case both of those things are true: if you replace rain with snow and pour with white outs and trucks in the ditch on the 390 and Veronica with your mother and whore with is such a nice lady.

I didn't die on that trip into work this morning, which I have decided is a good thing. Recently, besides being terrible at keeping a blogging schedule, I have been very consciously living my life.

No, I'm not going to spend abnoxiously long paragraphs explaining what I mean, but I will summarize it:

• - I'm thinking about my day to day existence rather than floating.
• - I'm working on getting healthier.
• - I read a couple things the other day, so that was good... even though The Governor is not proving to be very good at all.
• - Jenna and I got a food vacuum sealer for Christmas so I've been vacuuming the shit air out of things.
• - I'm spending time looking to the future and making positive moves to make that future way better than bad.

Not too bad, right? That concise explanation proves that I'm not an insufferable windbag. If you are reading this and at any point in your life you have thought I am actually an insufferable windbag, well that is mean and I don't know why you would do something like that to me. Jerk.

This man can legally shoot you if you
look at him funny. That's a real law!

So, this blog will mostly be rambling, like the title suggests, but it's also what I've been thinking about. I talked to my buddy Joe a little bit this afternoon. Joey and I have been friends since 5th or 6th grade I think. He's a cop back home and still one of the funniest guys I know. You wouldn't guess it when he has a gun or when you're standing next to him in general, but he is.

This got me thinking about relativity. There was a time, when I lived in Boston, that I thought it was the greatest place in the world and tried to get all of my friends to move out there to hang out with me. Eventually I talked my girlfriend into doing that and then she became my wife and she started doing the same thing.

Looking back at that time I'm not sure if I really wanted everyone to move out to Boston because it was Boston or if I just missed my friends. I am in a strange situation where I am still extremely close with my high school friends despite the fact that we rarely see each other and many of us are hundreds of miles away. We talk. We keep in contact. We pick up right where we left off each and every time we see each other, even if it has been years. We will still come to Rochester to help me move or build things or fix things if the situation comes up.

Approachable means the same
thing as smarmy, doesn't it?

Another spawning factor to this slew of thoughts was the save the date I received in the mail yesterday from one of my other high school friends who is marrying one of my friends from college. This got me thinking about how strangely words collide. My group of friends in Rochester is an incestuous conglomerate of people in love with each other who have no real reason to even know each other. If it weren't for a sandwich shop with great soup, the close proximity of some pretty large party schools, a long lived mecca of welcoming on Vassar Street and Phil's approachability (pictured to the right), who knows who I'd be hanging out with most of the time.

Probably just my wife and that would be disastrous. She would get sick of me so quickly we probably wouldn't even be married anymore and then I really wouldn't have anyone to hang out with besides maybe my dog, but Jenna would probably take the dog, so I'd really only have the bottle so I'd probably start drinking a lot and then I'd make all new friends, but not the right kind of friends, these friends would be all into some nefarious shit like bootin' black tar heroin or thinking Drew Barrymore is a good actress, or like thinking Drew Barrymore is attractive, or like thinking being adorable in ET correlates to being a relevant actress/person of interest well into your 30's (man I hate Drew Barrymore).

So with that tangent being complete I get back to my original point.

Drew Barrymore is the worst.

The way our worlds combine, collide, coincide, coca-cola classic, and constipate into each other is really interesting. Thinking about how chance, circumstance, coincidence, and randomness comes into play in our every day lives can really make a person start questioning life. Fate. Destiny. Or it can just help you realize how lucky you are to be where you are in life. Even if you're pretty miserable or in a shit situation, you could have just as easily looked left instead of right and been leveled by a city bus. Or you could be Adam Sandler or Justin Long, forever stuck to the black hole that is Drew Barrymore. The Wedding Singer was funny, that does not mean you were Drew. 50 First Dates was the start to the end of the Adam Sandler I used to know and love and I blame her. Justin, Jeepers Creepers should have been the greatest mistake of your life, not this, not her, not ever!

I'm not sure if there was a single line of value in this entire blog entry, but I am pretty pleased with that picture of Joe and the Veronica is a whore thing. Hope you enjoyed! Be safe out there.

Motivational Resolve

No, I did not post last week.            Yes, I should have.              I'm sorry PJ and I'm very sorry Kyle.

A ton has happened in the meantime, quick recap:

My face and these actions are basically the
 perfect representation of the holiday Season

Two weeks off of work. I have no idea how tomorrow is going to go, but it's terrifying.
The entire two weeks spent with my favorite Swede.Oscar loves beef jerky, skittlies, Dinosaur, and Marshall Street.
Christmas: Three cities, four days, too many meals, drinks, presents.
Lancers game: Indoor soccer is awesome.
Amerks game: Talk to the guys at the door and you will get your Swedish friend on the ice between periods.
New Years: Opening up every bottle of champagne at midnight and then drinking straight from the bottle is not the most economical way to celebrate. It is effective though.

So much fun, so many great things and people, but I don't really want to talk about all that.

So I didn't start writing this thing as a new years resolution. I think resolutions are like diets, they don't work because they are our special little way of telling ourselves what not to do rather than encouraging ourselves in the things we do well. They're lifestyle constraints, not lifestyle adjustments.

Sadly, I'm not very good at working out. I'm an excellent eater. I am fantastic at watching tv and telling people about the things I've watched even though it's obvious they don't give a shit at all. I'm really good at hanging out with my friends, and my friends are really good at sharing meals and drinks and laughs. Little changes I dedicate myself to are going to be way easier to uphold than entirely uprooting my life.

So let's talk about a new year. 2011 was awesome. 2012 is giving every indication of being even better. For me it is things like this (nodding my head toward the computer, more specifically the keyboard). I've said it before, I'll say it again, I enjoy writing this swill. Sometimes I try to be funny, sometimes it even works. Sometimes I try to be sincere and that rarely comes off as anything but silly. It's writing this and changing small things that is going to make the difference for me.

I'm going to focus on the small accomplishments starting with this post right now:

Brian's Irish Curse: My beer is good! I should not be calling it my beer, because it's really our Beer, but Brian and I made an Irish Stout and it is actually delicious. It's encouraging as hell and I can't wait to do it again.

Getting Healthy: So a lot of my motivation comes from Jenna. When she is motivated and moving forward it is hard not to follow her. That's mostly because she is an unimaginable force to be reckoned with and is uncompromisingly dedicated when she says she is going to be.

I've worked out like 4 times and it f'n sucks. But I did it and I'll do it again today. Tony Horton is a sonofabitch. We're doing a biggest loser competition with two of our friends, just to help motivate ourselves and each other. Did you guys know salad is delicious? The hardest part for me, personally, is the fact that I used to be so much better at this stuff. I'm at almost the same weight I was when I was in the best shape of my life, but you could never tell. I'm gonna have to work twice as hard and long to just accept that I'm not that guy anymore and figure out what the new shape of Tom Chew looks like. I'm going to guess it will look a lot like Ryan Gosling.

Reading stuff: So, this one still hasn't been embraced. The Governor is still on the shelf and the Game of Thrones series will be behind it, but I don't know when. I do know a lot more about playing video games online thanks to Oscar and I got 11 kills in a Modern Warfare 2 online deathmatch, but no, I'm still on page 30 something.

Follow through: There is a lot I want to do in my life. A lot of traveling. A lot of personal and professional accomplishments I'd like to meet. I want to buy a house. We're going to start a family sooner or later. I want to do so much, but I need to realize that there is only so much time and I need to remind myself, like I tell my students all the damn time, you can do everything, but you can't do it all at the same time. We can only plan for so much. We can only save so much money and go on so many trips and there are only so many hours in the day, and that sucks, but it is what it is and we just embrace it. At least I'm trying to embrace it.

So if you're reading this, still, you probably know me and you're probably really bored. I will ask a favor though: help push me. I mean, you don't need to be like, "Hey Thomas, it's Tuesday, good luck with writing and working out, did you read anything today?" In fact, please don't do that, because it would be weird. But if you like the blog, let me know. If you're doing something fun, exciting, active, and want to get more people involved, let me know. If you want to do something new or different or fun and exciting and want help, let me know. If you don't think about any of this ever again, that is also fine.

If you want more fun stuff, that is much more light hearted, I'm going to add some stuff to the Nerdy Stuff for Nerds pages on the sidebar.