Changed the name here. I decided that I’m probably gonna tell some people about this place. Cleaned up older posts accordingly.

I don’t know what I think of the new name. It feels okay – certainly better than the dreck that was there before. I may be an alleged writer but I am horribly bad at coming up with clever names and headlines and titles and whatnot. That’s an artform all on its own.

So. Bought a house! Yes. Very exciting. Sometimes I think about all the work that needs to be done and all the money that needs to be spent and I panic a little bit. I know it is irrational. Anyone can own a house, including lots of people way stupider than I am. And they all get by. I, too, will get by. Even if there’s stuff I don’t know how to do yet. Like fix a door, replace a dryer vent, switch the polarity of a plugin, or live with someone.

I have something to write that I don’t want to bother with. So I’m here instead. Just spent a half hour reading a friend’s blog from start to finish (technically, from finish to start since I was working backwards) and now I am inspired to… do not as good a job as she does.

I like not putting titles on my entries here. I’ve decided that.

I booked tomorrow off from work. Ten minutes later, I got invited to a meeting. I decided I’d still take the morning off, but now I think I’m just going to go in at my usual not-quite-on-time time. May as well.

I think maybe my girlfriend won’t like living with me all that much. All of this “I have tomorrow off wait no I don’t,” “I got us concert tickets oh wait I can’t go oh wait now I can,” “Work will be slow today oh wait here’s a last-minute bombshell from a salesperson who dropped the ball and now I have to work until 2:00 a.m.” nonsense is probably a lot easier to take when you’re one city away.

Not sure how much of that is a flaw with my job and how much of it is a flaw with me.

I do have quite the range of flaws. I’m very impatient. Easily frustrated. I am not good at hiding my emotions, which is bad when you’re prone to brief fits of ill-temperment that you know are stupid and pointless and will not last. I don’t have a lot of opinions of my own; I’m not that creative and I am easily swayed by a good argument (or, more often, a not-so-good one).

And I get to manage myself at work, but mostly that involves me taking on anything brought to me, because I feel guilty about the time I waste when there’s nothing to do. My workload is all peaks and valleys, and it’s unpredictable. Sometimes this leads to a lot of waiting, so when someone asks me to put together a huge rush job on a moment’s notice because they forgot something or got lazy or assume that my job is effortless or pointless, well, I feel like I have to. I think I could count on one hand the number of projects I’ve turned down in six years. None are coming to mind at all right now but there has to have been something.

How the hell did I get started on this? Oh well, it was on my mind, I guess.

I don’t watch sports except for MMA but sometimes I get very interested in big sports stories. I read this one message board, and while it has more than its share of morons, there are some people who are posting some really insightful stuff about LeBron James, or that pitcher who was robbed of his perfect game, or those two players at Wimbledon whose game went on forever. I think I really like the concept of sports. Maybe I’m becoming a man. It’ll be nice to finally get some bass in my voice.

You know what I like? Getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Sure, it is kind of a pain, and you stumble around in the dark and then blind yourself with the light and you inevitably stub your toe. But. When you come back, the spot you were laying on has cooled off, as has your pillow. And you lay down, and you’re still all dozey sleepy, and you don’t have to pee anymore and that feels delightful, and your bed and your pillow is cool, and that’s all just great.

I also love getting stones in my shoes because it feels so good after you take them out.

When I was a kid, I used to keep my pillows in the freezer so they’d be nice and cold when I went to bed. They wouldn’t stay cold for as long as you’d think. One time I poured a little water on a pillow before putting it in the freezer in hopes it would freeze solid and stay cold longer. At 33, the many flaws in this plan are readily apparent. At 14, they were not.

A nice thing about not having an audience is that I don’t feel bad when I don’t update for a week.

Post-by-email works well, though it ignored my paragraph break and I had to put one in manually. I may play around with that sometime soon.

Posting the slideshow by email also worked quite well, though it’s a bit hard to see what the pictures are supposed to be. I don’t think there’s a way to click and enlarge the pictures. I’ll have to mess with that as well.

In other news, I got preapproved for a mortgage this week. Bring on the lifetime of crippling debt!

And now I have to go not eat.

Found during a lunchtime walk to and from the health food store on a quest for raspberry chocolate:

I kinda like this Tumblr idea. It all seems so simple and customizable. Maybe in a few months, if there’s anything here worth sharing, I’ll change the name and link it up to my Facebook and Twitter. At least, that was my thought while walking to work this morning. One day in, and I’m already ready to give up on my pretend anonymity.

Blog #2 was under a nickname and I enjoyed its pretend anonymity for several years. Eventually, though, three things happened:

1)- The blogging site I was on was going downhill and many of my friends were leaving it.

2)- I had a falling out with some other friends, and we all went our separate ways, both in real life and in blog life.

3)- I started to notice real-life people bringing up topics that I’d blogged about – only, I’d never told them about my blog. To this day, I’m not sure if they found my blog and just never specifically said so, or if it was just a couple coincidences.

Oh, netbook keyboard, you’ll be the death of me.

Anyway, I moved from Blog #2 to Blog #4. Blog #1 was on my own personal website. This was back in the day before there was such a word as blogging, which is starting to seem like a pretty great time to be alive. I have typed the word “blog” way too many times tonight and it is starting to feel pretty obnoxious. Anyway, back then, I had to create and upload each individual journal page, which was just too much of a hassle. Blog #1 died after two entries. I eventually ported them over to Blog #2.

Blog #3 was on the same site as Blog #4, but I never really posted there – I just filled out surveys and quizzes and things of that nature. It was under the same fake name as Blog #2.

Blog #4 was under my real name, because I decided that if I couldn’t really be anonymous on the internet, I might as well go all the way. It’s now several years later and I still have that blog, and I might continue to post there, but I really like the potential here. Plus, it’s always inspiring to scrap everything and start anew. You get that brief period of hope before everything eventually sinks back into the same ol’ rut.

I signed up for Blog #5 in hopes that it would have more features than Blog #4, but I never got around to doing anything with it. It never got so much as one post.

And this is Blog #6. And I might have to implement a ban on the word “blog” now that I’m done my backstory.

I feel like I owe you a good story after all that, but I can’t think of one at the moment. So instead I’ll sleep.

I’ve always wondered what would happen, blog-wise, if I started anew somewhere without using my real name or telling friends to visit. Would anyone bother reading it?

It’s kind of like a best-selling author releasing a book under a fake name… well, except for that part about having any previous success.

Ever since going online over 15 years ago, I’ve been a very open person on the internet. I’m starting to wish I’d kept more things to myself. I don’t think there’s anything really terrible out there, but there’s definitely some stuff that doesn’t represent who I am now.

Clearly, the answer is to start another blog.

I don’t live a very exciting life. I work in an office, I live in an apartment, I have a girlfriend, and everything is mostly okay. It doesn’t give me much to talk about.

But here’s a story. This evening, I was helping my girlfriend load some stuff into her car. As we’re loading up, some dude comes walking down the alley. I look over at him. Early 20s, maybe. Wearing a football jersey – the same one I was wearing at the time.

“Hey, where’d you get that?” he says.

“Get what?” I ask.

“That stupid look on your face. HAW HAW HAW – just kidding, man, I love you.”

And he walks off.

This kind of thing happens more often than you might think. Earlier in the day, we were greeted by a homeless man and his talking dog puppet show.