It’s been quite a while since I’ve last updated this blog, in fact it’s been about a month since I last updated it. As always, the lapse in updates has more so to do with run­ning out of time as opposed to run­ning out of top­ics to write about. In the case of this par­tic­u­lar lapse, I par­layed (which is fancy speak for delayed) updat­ing this blog because I fig­ured it was time to take the blog in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion. First off, and most notice­ably is the theme change that this blog has. Owen Kue­merle and the rest of the Patrickmcn​.com tech­ni­cal team worked day and night for weeks in order to update this site’s theme. While I did enjoy the older theme that this blog had, it was far too black for me and it didn’t sup­port my epic 2000+ word posts very ade­quately. The theme would run out about half way through said posts, leav­ing the remain­der of the web­site in a per­pet­ual abyss of black­ness, which looked kind of lame. The newer theme, on the other hand, sports a far more con­tem­po­rary, and as the racists would say, “supe­rior” white based theme which looks a lot cleaner and more invit­ing in com­par­i­son to the pre­vi­ous one.

Iron­i­cally, I think these new aes­thet­ics reflect the direc­tion that I plan to take the blog in. In the past, my blog­ging was filled with rant­ing, one only had to look at the post count to see that I wrote more about the things that I hated as opposed to the things that I loved. In fact, the sum of the top­ics that I wrote about which involved hat­ing far out­num­bered the sum of that I wrote about involv­ing pos­i­tive top­ics, which I believe is a very pes­simistic out­look on things. While I did enjoy spew­ing my hatred for var­i­ous aspects of life, as I found it both enjoy­able and hilar­i­ous, such tan­gents were rooted in igno­rance and imma­tu­rity which is some­thing that I am pro­fusely try­ing to espouse from my out­look on life. Thus, I have made it my goal to write and blog about the pos­i­tive in life.

Now  I’ve made a few changes to my blog­ging prac­tices in order to accom­plish this. First and fore­most, I will be updat­ing this blog daily or almost daily because I feel it is the best way to go about reflect­ing on the pos­i­tive. It’s impos­si­ble to write about good things on a weekly basis because quite frankly the good in this world is fleet­ing. On one given day a tremen­dous amount of pos­i­tiv­ity could be felt, and on the next day com­plete neg­a­tiv­ity and evil could be expe­ri­enced. The prob­lem is that the neg­a­tive often over­shad­ows the good, so in order to truly reflect on all of the pos­i­tive, one must cap­ture it in a timely man­ner. I am also writ­ing daily because I feel that it will help sharpen my abil­i­ties as a writer. I’ve learned that writ­ing is like exer­cise and to really become a strong writer, one has to work at it every day. While my weekly epic blog posts did a good job of giv­ing me a work­out, the lack of con­sis­tency made it very hard for me to develop soundly as a writer. As some­one who is start­ing col­lege on Mon­day, I feel that fully embrac­ing my abil­i­ties as a writer (what­ever they may be) is some­thing that is very important.

So I’ve thrown around the word, pos­i­tive, good, and all of those flow­ery words, what exactly do I mean by all of this? Well to sum it up, I will mainly be writ­ing about my every­day life now. Since I am away at col­lege, writ­ing about my life on a daily basis will be a great way for me to keep my fam­ily mem­bers, friends, and who­ever else is inter­ested updated on my life. Of course, I will throw in the occa­sional rant here and there, and I am deter­mined to make every post enter­tain­ing to read, but I feel that it’s impor­tant to do so by embrac­ing pos­i­tive energy as opposed to neg­a­tive energy like I used to.

One thing that will prob­a­bly change is the length of my posts as well. While I love writ­ing 2000+ word epics, since I will be writ­ing on a more con­sis­tent basis, I will prob­a­bly be keep­ing my posts to a 500‑1000 word length. But don’t worry I’m sure I’ll man­age to find time to write some really long posts when I am par­tic­u­larly inspired. Right now, I am sit­ting in my new dorm at col­lege won­der­ing what the future awaits. The out­look is look­ing good, and I can’t wait to start writ­ing about it.

Hi there–

This is a post from PatrickMcn.com’s tech­ni­cal team. Although the web­site is more or less func­tional, we will con­tinue to make small improve­ments through­out the next sev­eral hours which you may or may not notice. We plan to roll out some new fea­tures to PatrickMcn​.com as well which include:

• Brand new com­ment­ing system
• Lightbox-style image viewing
• Sum­ma­riza­tion of posts
• Pub­Sub­Hub­bub RSS pub­lish­ing (basi­cally, instant RSS updates)
• New mobile site
• and much more!

On behalf of the PatrickMcn​.com staff, we would like to thank you for your sup­port through this tran­si­tion period.

Cheers–

Owen Kue­merle, PatrickMcn​.com tech­ni­cal team

As many of you know, my next goal as an ath­lete is to become a triath­lete. For me,  triathlon has a lot to offer and I also think that it is some­thing that I am capa­ble of excelling at. Swim­ming is some­thing that I am very expe­ri­enced in  which means that train­ing for the swim­ming por­tion of a triathlon is lit­er­ally a no brainer. Cycling is some­thing that I absolutely love to do, and I am also fairly strong at it despite being rel­a­tive novice after start­ing it only a year ago. In com­par­i­son to cycling and swim­ming, which are by far the two most chal­leng­ing endurance sports in my opin­ion, run­ning is very sim­ple and some­thing that I assumed I could catch on to after train­ing up for it a lit­tle bit.

Yes­ter­day, I decided to test my run­ning abil­i­ties when I entered the local 4^th of July 5K run at my neigh­bor­hood. Now to be hon­est, run­ning and I have a love hate rela­tion­ship. After my junior year of swim­ming, I started to run in order to improve my abil­i­ties as a triath­lete. How­ever, because I was in such good car­dio­vas­cu­lar con­di­tion from swim­ming, run­ning seemed super easy to me. My first day run­ning I ran a mile. My sec­ond day I ran two miles, my third day three miles. Then I rested for a day. Then the next day I ran about 6 miles. Unbenkownst to me, the body is not designed to put on so much dis­tance in such a short time, and thus after only a week of run­ning, my knees were basi­cally ruined and it took me a solid month to recover from the injury.

While I did get injured run­ning, I also hap­pened to enjoy every sec­ond of it. There was some­thing so fun and enjoy­able about the sim­plic­ity of it all. I just had to put on shoes, maybe some iPod head­phones, and I was good to go. I didn’t need to mess with putting on a swim suit, inflat­ing tires and tun­ing up the bike. Plus, there was also some­thing very reward­ing in know­ing that I didn’t have to rely on any­thing but my own two feet to get me from point A to point B. This year, I decided to take up run­ning again. Hav­ing learned my les­son from my Junior year, I started off with a ton of short dis­tance runs in order to build a solid base mileage and to get my body used to run­ning. I also lifted weights, and had plenty of rest in between runs in order to pre­vent injury.

How­ever, as the day of my 5K dawned closer I began to get ner­vous about my train­ing. See, most of my train­ing had been run­ning short 1.5 mile bursts, and while this was good, it cer­tainly wouldn’t have pre­pared me for run­ning a 5K which was about 3+ miles in dis­tance.  In order to at least get my car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem used to work­ing in the sit­u­a­tions of a 5K, I began to put in some nice “dis­tance” runs in this past week. On Mon­day and Tues­day, I ran around my neigh­bor­hood one and a half times, mak­ing about a 2 mile run. Then on Thurs­day, I went to the worst place in the world, Irvine Cal­i­for­nia, to run at one of their local parks in order to get my legs used to some dif­fer­ent ter­rain. Since I didn’t know the area very well, I didn’t exactly know what the dis­tance was how­ever I made sure to run for about a half an hour which is much longer than I expected a 5K to last. Finally, on Fri­day I ran up and down a street that was two miles long nearby my house in order to get the last bit of dis­tance into my legs, and to hope­fully get them more than ready for a 5K, as that ses­sion was about a 4 mile distance.

On Sat­ur­day I took a rest day and boy did I need it. My legs were sore, my knees were at the point of get­ting injured if I pushed them too hard, and most painfully, I began to develop foot blis­ters from all of the run­ning. To be hon­est it was some­thing that I had never expe­ri­enced before. While swim­ming and cycling are indeed intense, they work the body in dif­fer­ent ways. Swim­ming tends to be a sport that yields a ton of lac­tic acid, mak­ing it hard to swim at a high inten­sity for more than three days straight. Cycling is the kind of sport that also pro­duces a lot of lac­tic acid, but it’s dif­fi­culty comes in man­ag­ing that lac­tic acid in the next suc­ces­sive day on the bike. To me, cycling is all about find­ing a rhythm and the more tired the body is, the harder it is to find that rhythm. But run­ning is much dif­fer­ent. Run­ning is tir­ing and it causes a lot of sweat, but it also tends to beat up the body. Not only is it tough on the knees, and painful when things like foot blis­ters develop, but after a cou­ple of days of train­ing, the pain in the leg feels very dif­fer­ent from the sore­ness in other sports. The mus­cles just feel tat­tered and almost unwill­ing to fire. Whereas in swim­ming and cycling, the mus­cles still fire per­fectly fine, they just start to burn very quickly if they already have lac­tic acid in them from the day before.

With that being said, I was rather con­cerned for my 5K on Sun­day. I could tell that my legs weren’t fully recov­ered yet, but there really wasn’t much that I could do as far as recov­ery was con­cerned. As far as I could tell, my knees weren’t bro­ken like they were last year and if that meant any­thing, it was that I had trained prop­erly for the event. I woke up on Sun­day morn­ing oddly excited for the race. Unlike swim meets, which I have com­peted in lit­er­ally hun­dreds of times, this was my first time doing a run­ning event. Thus, I had the odd eupho­ria of com­pet­ing in igno­rant bliss. I didn’t really know what to expect from the race, I had no pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence to com­pare my per­for­mance to, and that meant that I could sim­ply enjoy the expe­ri­ence of com­pet­ing with­out the desen­si­ti­za­tion that I have expe­ri­enced after com­pet­ing in hun­dreds of swim meets.

I was one of the first entrants to arrive at the start­ing point. I checked in and was given a bib with a num­ber on it. Being the run­ning noob that I am, I put the bib on my back which is a major no-no in the sport because the timers can’t see your num­ber when you come in. I began to warm up, just to get the legs fresh, the oxy­gen flow­ing, and the body ready to com­pete. As I came back, more entrants had shown up and I am going to guess that every­one was laugh­ing at me because the race offi­cial told us that any­one who didn’t have their bib in the front was an idiot. Of course, I was the only per­son who DIDN’T have their bib on front, which meant that I was the idiot. After prop­erly re-aligning my bib so that it was on front, I looked around at the con­tes­tants and noticed a kid wear­ing an Orange Lutheran jacket and attire.

Now, I know that I am out of high school but I still hate Orange Lutheran and to be hon­est, that kid was my num­ber one tar­get. Not only did he go to OLU, but I was also pos­i­tive that he was in cross coun­try, which meant that he could com­pete and would be a fairly com­pe­tent oppo­nent. The race began and like most run­ning races, it started off fairly quickly. For a good thirty sec­onds, peo­ple had a siz­able lead on me, and if this was a swim race, I would have been screwed. How­ever, once the pack hit the main course peo­ple found their rhythm and every­one began to sep­a­rate. When I found my rhythm, it was at an awk­ward lone wolf tempo. Three fast run­ners who were, the OLU kid, the OLU kid’s brother, and some­body who I didn’t know, made up the leader pack and were about 15 sec­onds in front of me. While every­body else made a pack and were about 15 sec­onds behind me.  The good news was that I was essen­tially locked in at a 4^th place, which was some­thing that I was really happy about con­sid­er­ing that it was my first 5K run. But then things got even better.

The unkown kid was really push­ing the pace in the leader pack, so much so that the OLU kid and his brother had exhausted too much energy early in the race try­ing to match his tempo. I, on the other hand, main­tained my pace because I wasn’t sure how well my legs would hold up over the dis­tance. About halfway through the race, the OLU kid’s brother dropped from the pack and began to walk, essen­tially solid­i­fy­ing me in at third place. Then for the remain­der of the race, I slowly gained dis­tance on the OLU kid, more so from his grad­ual dete­ri­o­ra­tion as opposed to my own increase in tempo. This put me in a very good posi­tion because I knew that the OLU kid was hurt­ing, while I still had a lot left in me, which meant that I could over­take him towards the end of the race. Or so I thought.

As we reached the fin­ish line, I began my sprint and gained a lot of dis­tance on the OLU kid, eas­ily over­tak­ing him. How­ever, the fin­ish line that I thought I saw, wasn’t the fin­ish line. See, our course was a loop around the neigh­bor­hood a cou­ple of times. On the last lap, instead of just end­ing the loop, we were sup­posed to turn into the park to reach the fin­ish line, which was about 200 yards within the inte­rior of the cir­cuit. What con­fused me though, was the fact that peo­ple started smil­ing at me and say­ing good job, as opposed to point­ing me to the fin­ish line. So I began to walk after hav­ing believed I had fin­ished, only to be imme­di­ately screamed at to keep run­ning. I tried to turn around to go towards the park, but my legs began to cramp up, caus­ing the turn to slow down tremen­dously. Then the OLU guy, who bet­ter man­aged his sprint as he knew where the fin­ish line was, was right behind me and was able to beat me out because my body just wouldn’t respond after hav­ing to start and stop like that.

Thus, I fin­ished my first 5K ever in third place with a time of 21 or so min­utes. I could’ve fin­ished sec­ond if I took the time to learn the course bet­ter, but I didn’t beat myself up over it. What really got me though was the fact that I lost to the OLU guy even though I totally ran a bet­ter race (from a phys­i­cal stand­point at least), and only lost to him because of a bout of con­fu­sion. With that being said, the guy was still very polite and while I hate los­ing to the Luther­ans, I will def­i­nitely give him a pass.

After the race, my body was absolutely toast. I felt like I was going to throw up for a few hours after­wards, but the feel­ing wasn’t from push­ing myself too hard, it was more so from the fact that my abs had been con­tract­ing really quickly for about 20 min­utes straight and thus I felt the mus­cle con­trac­tions that one nor­mally expe­ri­ences when throw­ing up. Stand­ing up, walk­ing, and sit­ting down all felt painful, and for the first time I felt a lac­tic acid burn in my legs, as opposed to a mus­cles being torn feel­ing. As I write this, I still don’t think the legs have fully recov­ered, and I’m prob­a­bly going to take a few days off of run­ning, but they cer­tainly aren’t as bad as they were yesterday.

All in all though, I really enjoyed the expe­ri­ence and I learned a ton. First off, run­ning is really easy once one has the con­di­tion­ing for it. Unlike swim­ming, where I always felt I had to con­sciously push myself to swim fast, because the races only last for a few min­utes. Run­ning is def­i­nitely an endurance test, and keep­ing up a strong tempo and pac­ing one­self is def­i­nitely the most effec­tive way to win because most other com­peti­tors will wither away for you. What I thought really helped me was my car­dio­vas­cu­lar fit­ness. Because of my swim­ming and cycling back­grounds, my car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem can work in a lot of dif­fer­ent ways. It has some really nice anearo­bic capac­ity from swim­ming, but also great aer­o­bic endurance from cycling, which means that I can both pro­duce a lot of power or keep a steady pace if I have to. I used a train­ing method called HIIT, or high inten­sity inter­val train­ing, which was essen­tially dis­tance runs but with short sprint inter­vals in between to pro­duce power. This helped keep my heart rate high, and really allowed me to find a com­fort­able cruis­ing pace. To be hon­est, I felt like I had the best car­dio­vas­cu­lar fit­ness out of any­one. I wasn’t even breath­ing hard after the race, and the main rea­son why the other com­peti­tors had an advan­tage over me is because they had more dis­tance in their legs, which is some­thing that I can def­i­nitely live with.

Of course, run­ning also has a lot of strat­egy  that isn’t found in swim­ming. Since the races are so long, things like choos­ing when to increase tempo are really impor­tant because they dic­tate how the oppo­nent runs their race. For instance, I stayed right behind the OLU guy for the major­ity of the race because I knew that I could run his pace com­fort­ably. He on the other hand, had to keep his pace very strong in order to pre­vent being passed by me, and I’m sure that really took a toll on him through­out the race. On the other hand, if I had passed him I would have had the risk of push­ing my own pace too fast in order to pre­vent being sur­passed by him, which in turn could have tired me out too early in the race. It’s fun, fas­ci­nat­ing, and dif­fer­ent, and I hap­pen to like it.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to declare myself a bona fide run­ner, I cer­tainly will con­tinue to par­tic­i­pate in dif­fer­ent events here and there, and hope­fully I will con­tinue to enjoy them just as much as this one.

Proof that I ran my 5K (and that foot blis­ters do exist)

When peo­ple die, I’m usu­ally the last per­son to say “Rest In Peace” or any sort of death related con­do­lence. In fact, I usu­ally do the exact oppo­site of this and try my best to find humor or light in the sit­u­a­tion.  For instance when Steve Irwin died I imme­di­ately made a crack about his sun­tan lotion being taken off of the mar­ket for it not pro­tect­ing against harm­ful rays, which was uni­ver­sally deemed to be “too soon” by my peers. Of course, one only needs to look at my Michael Jack­son post to see how I han­dle the deaths of peo­ple who I par­tic­u­larly dis­dain.  After going through a recent string of celebrity deaths, as well as a death that occurred at my own school, in the recent months I’ve quickly come to learn that a lot of peo­ple don’t like my way of approach­ing death. To them my light-hearted almost humor­ous approach to death seems harsh or dis­re­spect­ful and while I can cer­tainly see this being the case, I have my own rea­sons for it, rea­sons which would quite lit­er­ally take me thou­sands of words to fully explain.

With that being said, I’ve recently learned of a death that I sim­ply can’t take light-heartedly and that is because the influ­ence and sheer impact that this man has had on my life has been great. The man who I am talk­ing about is none other than Jun Seba, A.K.A Nujabes. For those of you who don’t know (which should be most of you) Nujabes is a Japan­ese DJ/Producer who has made some of the great­est hip-hop beats that I’ve ever heard. Now I know when most peo­ple think of hip-hop they think of Kanye West, Lil’ Wayne, and what­ever crap that is made by today’s main­stream music scene. While such hip-hop is pop­u­lar, it really isn’t music. It’s a bunch of really crappy beats, with lame lyrics, and a ton of auto­tune to make every­thing sound fake.

How­ever, Nujabes’ approach to hip-hop was dif­fer­ent. Instead of try­ing to make the beat sound loud, aggres­sive, or exces­sive like today’s main­stream artists, he made his beats sim­ply sound beau­ti­ful. He did this by using  jazzy themes, which were played with beau­ti­ful instru­ments like the piano, vio­lin, and gui­tar, and then he com­bined them with the drum beats that hip hop is known for. The results where sim­ply out­stand­ing, as he cre­ated a sound that could be con­sid­ered sophis­ti­cated and elo­quent jazz, yet at the same time pure hip-hop. To add a cherry on top, these beats where often set to some of the most mean­ing­ful and pow­er­ful lyrics that I have ever heard.  Lyrics that have a mes­sage and are uplift­ing, some­thing that isn’t found in today’s main­stream hip-hop.

I was first exposed to Nujabes some­time around eighth grade when I first heard Samu­rai Champloo’s theme song. Like all of Shinichiro Watanabe’s ani­mes (such as Cow­boy Bebop), Samu­rai Cham­ploo had an open­ing song that was sim­ply badass, it was called “Bat­tle Cry”. After hear­ing it, I became obsessed with Samu­rai Cham­ploo. Partly because it was a good animé and it had a great story, but mostly because it meant that I could hear “Bat­tle Cry” when­ever I watched the show. I entered high school and I let go of my animé roots. It wasn’t so much that I dis­liked animé, but it was more so because I out­grew it, and aside from Cow­boy Bebop, and Samu­rai Cham­ploo, I found every­thing else to be too kiddy for my tastes. Plus, there’s absolutely noth­ing cool about animé so shed­ding that social encum­brance was help­ful in help­ing me mature as an indi­vid­ual.

A few years later, I was search­ing ran­dom youtube videos and I decided to see if youtube had any Samu­rai Cham­ploo episodes avail­able for me to watch. Of course, because youtube is copy­right happy in the “we’ll fuck you over anally” kind of way, they didn’t have any full episodes, but they did have the open­ing sequence fea­tur­ing “Bat­tle Cry” which I decided to watch. Upon watch­ing that video I saw in the com­ments that the artist who made the song was none other than Nujabes, and using the handy “related videos” fea­ture I found more of his work. Need­less to say, that was a very big day for me because I was exposed to a whole style of music that I had never heard before. It was called “under­ground hip-hop”

After lis­ten­ing to a whole bunch of Nujabes for a few months, I decided to instant mes­sage my good friend Brian Nguyen to show him one of Nujabes’ songs. To my sur­prise, Brian had known about Nujabes for years and was more famil­iar with the “under­ground hip-hop” scene than I was. Brian promptly intro­duced me to some more artist, and since then I’ve dis­cov­ered such greats as Kero One, Pat D, Nicola Conte, Tsutchie, Jaz­zanova, Koop, and a whole lot more.

To put it suc­cinctly, this music has sim­ply changed my per­spec­tive on life and I don’t mean this in the fake “music is my life” kind of way. What I mean is that this music has added an uplift­ing, emo­tional, and sim­ply beau­ti­ful com­po­nent to my life that I think I was sourly miss­ing before I expe­ri­enced it. It has influ­enced the way I play piano, how I make movies, and even how I enjoy exer­cis­ing and rid­ing my bike. Of course, there’s noth­ing bet­ter than going out on a beau­ti­ful night and lis­ten­ing to some Nujabes tunes while cruis­ing. For all that, I sim­ply have to say thank you Nujabes for mak­ing such beau­ti­ful and great music.

I learned of Nujabes death last night when my friend An texted me. Today, I com­mem­o­rated his death in the best way that I could think of (out­side of writ­ing a corny blog post that few peo­ple are going to read any­ways) and that is by going on a long 40 mile bike ride and lis­ten­ing to noth­ing but his music. To be hon­est, it was a beau­ti­ful ride that I don’t think I will ever forget.

I thank you all for show­ing up to me,

I appre­ci­ate this unique opportunity,

I’m going to rock so hard you’ll never stop sup­port­ing me,

I’ll show you how music brings more mean­ing to life.

So today is the one year anniver­sary of the cre­ation of this site.  As I’ve men­tioned in my past posts, this site started off as a deal between Alex Guichet and I. I promised that I would start blog­ging, if Alex would train him­self to the point in which he could climb fences. One year later, I’m hold­ing my end of the bar­gain, but I have yet to see Alex climb a chain link fence. I like to think of this as a tes­ta­ment to my golden rule which sim­ply states “Always Deliver”.

Look­ing back, I started this site with a whole lot of neg­a­tiv­ity. My first offi­cial blog post was incred­i­bly pes­simistic, and my first few rants were sim­ply vul­gar. While I do find my highly neg­a­tive, satir­i­cal rants to be hilar­i­ous, I’m slightly dis­ap­pointed by the fact that I don’t wield the same kind of fire power any­more. It must be all the opti­mistic writ­ing for the school news­pa­per soft­en­ing me up. Regard­less, I think it’s pro­found look­ing back at my old posts, and sim­ply see­ing how my ideals and val­ues have evolved through­out this year. On one hand, some of my val­ues are still firmly in place, some I have sim­ply for­got­ten, while oth­ers have down­right changed.  Of course, this is noth­ing mind blow­ing, it’s what hap­pens in life as peo­ple mature, but it’s still kind of cool being able to track the pro­gres­sion of my maturity.

So how am I dif­fer­ent today than from who I was one year ago when I wrote my first posts for this blog? Well for one thing I’m not pissed off as hell at Alex’s neigh­bor for “dis­ap­pear­ing” after home­com­ing. I feel more com­fort­able with my life and my sur­round­ings, and I think I’m doing a much bet­ter job at bal­anc­ing out my life. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned how to do over this past year, it’s how to think crit­i­cally. Now I don’t mean that bull­shit term that is used to describe some­one that is smart. I mean actu­ally think­ing crit­i­cally, as in, con­stantly reflect­ing on my lifestyle, actions, and habits, in order to find my flaws and to hope­fully con­trol them. By doing this, I think I’ve grown to enjoy life in a much greater capac­ity. I feel free from most of the soci­etal lim­i­ta­tions that peo­ple meld to, and as a whole, I’m liv­ing life based on my own dreams and desires.

Of course, I still feel as if I haven’t accom­plished much in this past year. I wish I made more movies than I ended up mak­ing. I should be a way faster swim­mer in com­par­i­son to what I am now. Finally, I also wish that I was bet­ter at piano. How­ever, not being able to accom­plish these things has taught me an impor­tant les­son, and that is that the words “wish” and “should” need to be elim­i­nated from my vocab­u­lary.  I’ve learned that peo­ple will remem­ber and judge me based on what I accom­plished, not on what I wanted to accom­plish, and thus I need to be more engaged in the process of accom­plish­ing things. I sup­pose this all stems from dis­ci­pline, and that this dis­ci­pline will become more refined over time, but it’s still a lifest­lye that needs to be adapted.

Peo­ple often com­plain about how bad this past year was, with the eco­nomic reces­sion, the wars in the mid­dle east, swine flu, and the elect­ing of a black man as a pres­i­dent. But I per­son­ally think that this year was much bet­ter than peo­ple give it credit for. After all, it was in this year that the king of pop (who is sub­se­quently the king of child preda­tors), died only to have peo­ple super­fi­cially love him  post posthu­mously. That sin­gle occur­rence alone made this past year worth­while. To top it off, the world’s rich­est black man Tiger Woods, revealed him­self to be one of the world’s great­est “play­ers”. Not only did Woods sleep with at least a dozen or so girls, but he did so know­ing that he had a super model wife at a home, and a bil­lion dol­lars still in his pocket. It appears as if Tiger Wood’s only rival is Bill Clin­ton, who per­formed an equally impres­sive feat when he trav­eled to North Korea to hit on res­cue, the two Amer­i­can reporters that those com­mie bas­tards cap­tured. With all of this media drama, I sim­ply can’t fathom how peo­ple can com­plain about this past year. Isn’t mak­ing some­one famous and than ruth­lessly bring­ing about their even­tual demise the whole point of hav­ing celebrities?

On a lighter note, I feel blessed to have devel­oped such great friend­ships this past year. My friends have truly become like fam­ily to me, and I owe a great deal of my liveli­hood to them. When­ever I want to make a movie, they’re the first ones to vol­un­teer, and they always give their best efforts in the process. When hang­ing out, they’re pleas­ant, fun, and enjoy­able to be with. In gen­eral, there’s vir­tu­ally no drama, back­stab­bing, or other bull­shit that comes between us, and that’s what I think the mark of true friend­ship is. Obvi­ously, I could go on and on about all of the won­der­ful expe­ri­ences that I’ve had with my friends this past year, but I would just like to high­light a sin­gle friend of mine and that is Melissa Costa.

Like most of my friend­ships, I don’t really know how my friend­ship with Melissa started. I knew her in my fresh­man sci­ence class, but we didn’t actu­ally get to know each other until that dark period in my life when I was involved with a quincenera. Since then, Melissa and I have forged a very strong and reward­ing friend­ship. Whereas most of the woman in my life are com­pletely crazy, Melissa comes with just a tad bit less crazi­ness mak­ing her my last bea­con of hope for females. Of course, Melissa is still pretty crazy, and not in the good way. She thought it would be cute to change up her hair so that it looked bad, she Oreo cook­ied my car for no real rea­son, and then she per­formed the worst of offenses by steal­ing my rice krispies one day. Obvi­ously, I was a lit­tle peeved off at Melissa for giv­ing in to her infe­rior fem­i­nine ways, but she has now found her place and is  repent­ing for these past trans­gres­sions by mak­ing me pies.  What sets Melissa apart from most peo­ple is the fact that she’s a gen­uine friend. Most peo­ple have super­fi­cial friend­ships which work great when things are going well in life, but they often col­lapse when a lit­tle com­mit­ment or ded­i­ca­tion is required. My expe­ri­ence has been the com­plete oppo­site with Melissa. I can eas­ily come off as a picky, arro­gant jerk and thus I often give Melissa  a ton of crap. If you couldn’t tell by all of her “pranks”, she gives me a ton of crap too. Yet, despite the fact that we reveal our flaws to each other, we are still able to laugh and enjoy being friends with one another, which is what I value most in a person.

So what lies for me in the future? Well there’s a lot of things that I am look­ing for­ward to in this com­ing year. First and fore­most, I’m still try­ing to enjoy my last five or so months of high school. I still have a lot to accom­plish with swim­ming, jour­nal­ism, aca­d­e­mic decathlon, and just gen­eral school­work, and it’s a shame that my time in high school is com­ing to an end.  After high school comes col­lege, in which I hope to major in Film. I have already been accepted to Cal State North­ridge, and San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity, both schools with some solid film pro­grams, and hope­fully I’ll get accepted into more great film schools come March. I’ve decided that I never want to live a life that is dic­tated by a 9–5 job for some cor­po­ra­tion. Instead, a life that is com­pa­ra­ble to that of a free lancer sounds more appeal­ing to me.  For­tu­nately, the film indus­try offers this kind of  lifestyle, and even if I don’t get into film and end up tak­ing over my dad’s com­pany, I will still be able to live this kind of lifestyle. My major goal in life as of now, is to sim­ply live it by doing things that make me a bet­ter per­son. I want to take com­plete respon­si­bil­ity for my actions so that way I will never have any­one else to blame if I find myself in tough times. What I really want, is to live life inde­pen­dently from the soci­etal bur­dens and sheep-like men­tal­ity which I feel dimin­ish the eter­nal fire of the human spirit.  Of course, want­ing and achiev­ing are two com­pletely dif­fer­ent things, and I will have a lot in store for me this upcom­ing year. But with this blog, we’ll at least be able to see how it all pans out.