Snapshots from months past

It's hardly surprising that, following a commitment to chronicle with some frequency the events of my life, I would refrain from doing so. However, much has occurred and much has changed in the months that have passed between June 2012 and March 2013. This post and my last serve as bookends around breakups and the desire to replace what has been lost.

I have continued to do the things that I want to do. This seems to be one of my defining features (maybe the only one). I pursue my passions without regard to popular opinion or financial feasibility. It was that sort of thinking that landed me a year-long stay in Spain and may very well see my return to teaching abroad in the coming year. I intend to ship out to Costa Rica for a month or so this summer to get a TEFL certification and we will see where that takes me.

I have pursued a relationship with someone who I believe has inspired me to try new things and be more confident in myself. Whether consciously or not, she has made me more ambitious as a scholar and traveler. She has appreciated and shared my love for the pursuit of knowledge and enjoyment of history and art. We have explored new frontiers together in our lives, despite the relative brevity and infrequency of our encounters and the vast geographical distance between us. She believes herself to be a flickering flame in my life, one who reminds me of what I can be, yet who is not a permanent fixture. I think she underestimates the light that she provides me.

I have (in no particular order)...

Went to the beach with my family and developed a closer relationship with my sister. My sister and I have gotten along on a more mature and understanding level over the past year. I appreciate that. She also helped me bake my first cheesecake.

July 2012

Traveled for the first time to the nation's capital.

Allowed myself to indulge past the point of much control of my head on a couple occasions.

Pictures withheld to protect the author.

 Experienced a poetry conference in Newark (rectum of New York) with a poet near and dear to me.

Attended a poetry slam in Lexington.

Realized that teaching in a public high school would consume my soul.

Celebrated Los Medievales with Spaniards in Lexington.

Started and maintained a near-daily workout regiment with my sister's boyfriend. I have improved my diet and strength over the past couple months and plan to continue it for the foreseeable future.

Played countless pickup games of basketball with friends and strangers.

Had my first and several more beers with my father. Which I think led to some of my first deeper talks with my father. And some arguments over race and politics...

Continued to have strangers buy me drinks for no reason apparent to me.

Expanded and upgraded my wardrobe to consist mostly of classy attire. And then wept when my tie rack broke under the weight of my fanciness.

Attended a Super Bowl party hosted by my sister. Argued about the Illuminati and admired Beyonce's dance moves.

Improved my understanding of how Spanish grammar works.

Started learning French.


Those are some snapshots of the past several months. Hopefully I will have an equal or larger number of grand experiences in the months to come.

Moving on.

As I've finished my travels in Spain, I have stopped writing on my travel blog. But I don't feel like I really need to stop writing there, as there are still plenty of adventures to be had in my life apart from a year spent living in Spain. Keeping a blog has been a mostly enjoyable experience and it allows me to keep a chronicle of my doings and thoughts fairly regularly. All in all, I believe it can be rewarding, if only for myself. So I plan to keep a log of my general life happenings here as I go. I suppose it will range from the mundane to the moderately exciting, depending on whether or not I'm traveling or getting into trouble or what have you. 

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For my first post, I'd like to document a project I've been working on this week. I've been looking for ways to keep busy and take my mind off of current stresses, and what better way to do so than cleaning your room (and on the plus side, it pleases my current landlord - mom)? My room, while not terribly dirty or disorganized, was certainly not arranged in the most efficient manner. So last Saturday, I decided to spruce things up and make one of my most frequented areas a bit more user friendly and appealing.

I'll be the first to admit that I have entirely too many books. Getting them to fit in my room in the limited amount of space that I have has always been quite difficult. For the past year or so, most of them were actually stored in another part of my house, which is kind of a shame because I like having lots of books to look at. Even if I never need ten percent of them, they have a nice atmosphere to them. It's probably one of the reasons I'll never fully adopt e-books, though I do enjoy the convenience they provide. So one of my first goals was to make enough space to include my bookshelf of pretty books by getting rid of a small desk/table that a lot of my computer stuff was sitting on.

Secondly, I wanted to clean off the giant wooden computer desk that was once used as the communal desktop in our house. Over the years, it had collected all sorts of different sports paraphernalia and such, which doesn't really fit my room that well (read: at all). Getting rid of all of that cleaned up my desk enough that I could have stopped there and been satisfied. However, my mom has insisted for a while that I clean up all of the wires that connect to the myriad devices I've got hooked up around my room. That turned out to be quite the ordeal, but I managed to do well given the limitations of what I was working with. 

Finally, I wanted to set up my T.V. and video games in such a way that it could be out of the way and clean, hiding all of their wires as well. So I bought a swiveling T.V. mount and hid the wires in a strip that runs up the wall behind my bookshelf. The Wii is "hidden" among books on the top shelf, concealing all of its wires as well. 

Perhaps one of the most important investments I made in all of this was an Xbox 360 controller, which I use with my computer to play some games. It makes platformers much more natural-feeling. To top it all off, it glows blue like my computer. I don't know why the fact that they (mostly) match is that exciting to me, but it is. 

And here it is, finished:

I think the protruding smoke alarm functions fine, it just likes to pop out for no reason all-too-frequently

I really wish I had a before picture for comparison. Just imagine that it was less impressive and that this is a huge improvement and you'll get the picture, more or less.