Emerging from the Shadows

After having heard pleas from two of my devoted readers, I was finally motivated to post something. Well, that, and my plans for this afternoon fell through. So, I guess that means it’s time for a…

BLOG UPDATE!!1!11!

So, you may be wondering what took me so long to get back to the blog. For starters, I was working for the past 3 weeks, and the area I moved to for the month defied all my expectations by keeping me busy with programming. I’ll leave out the technical details except to say it was in a programming language (Perl) with which, beforehand, I had little-to-no experience. What that meant was, I had to spend the first week in the new area learning the language so I could be of some use to them. The next two weeks, I created scripts like a mad monkey, minus the poo-flinging. On top of that, I did my normal amount of socializing, leaving myself with little time to do anything else except play the occasional video game.

Now, this summer, I quit work earlier than normal to give myself about a month to cool down and get ready for the school year. I started off my break right on Monday with a family trip to the Baltimore Aquarium. Before college, our family made the Inner Harbor an almost annual excursion, but when we went on Monday, I couldn’t remember the last time we had been there. I was pretty psyched about the trip, but as it turns out, my memories of the place were filtered through some rather rose-tinted lenses.

It seemed to me that the aquarium used to be this cavernous place where one could get lost wandering the halls for a whole day, but we meandered casually through all of it (including a new Australia exhibit) in about three hours. Now, I’m not the type of person who reads the descriptions that are attached to every display, but neither did my family and I rush through the halls. I suppose a lot of my recollections stemmed from how much smaller I used to be, but still, it was a bit of a letdown. Also, making our way through the summer crowds grew somewhat tiresome, although it was surreal to see elementary school-age summer campers experiencing everything in the way that I imagine I did when I was that age. However, as my parents reminded me, we never went to just the aquarium when we were younger; we’d also go the Science Center or the stores around the Inner Harbor. So perhaps it’s just another case of my terrible memory interfering with my current experiences. *shrugs* Anyway, I still enjoyed the aquarium; the exhibits were as engaging as ever, as were the animals. I could have sworn there used to be penguins there, but they do have puffins, which are pretty close to penguins on the Awesome Scale™.

Afterwards, we perused the nearby Barnes and Noble store for about an hour. While there was nothing extraordinary about the store itself, I mention it because during our time in there, I achieved a state of inner peace that I haven’t had for some months now. Don’t ask me how I did that because I couldn’t really tell you, other than I think I came to terms with my present situation in life and found myself OK with it. The mental high I had from that lasted for a few days; I think it’s more or less used up now. If I can maintain that feeling of peace in the back of my consciousness and if I can call on it as needed, that would be fantastic. I’ll let you know if I figure out how to do that.

From Monday until Thursday, I mostly played Guitar Hero and God of War on my recently purchased PS2 (as mentioned in the last post). For Guitar Hero, I’ve played through every song on Medium mode and achieved a rank of 4 or 5 stars on all of them except Bark at the Moon (3 stars), which I’ll likely be giving another go after this post. As for God of War, I played through that game at Lehigh last fall but decided to run through it again, this time on Hard difficulty. Ironically, I’m spending more time on games that I’ve already played through than the stack of games I’ve barely touched since I got them. I’ll have to fix that.

Then, on Thursday, I returned to the outside world by going over to Chris V’s house to use his pool and have some stimulating conversation. Last night, after helping Chris with his new computer, we went to Wahab’s house for an evening of Halo 2 and Real Genius. And that brings us to the present.

As you may have noticed, I’ve updated my Facebook entry with my planned activities for the rest of the summer. Here’s what I intend to do next week in those areas (not including any social activities that may come up):

• Finish the September issue of PC Gamer
  
• Finish last week’s issue of The Economist (which I bought at Baltimore’s Barnes and Noble)
  
• Finish The Left Hand of God
  
• Exercise (see below)
  
• Start/finish Prey
  
• Make a list (and start on it) of what needs to be done to get ready for the school year
  
• Go to DC next weekend (more details on that later if it happens)

I’m getting better when it comes to consistently exercising: I did some sort of physical activity 4 days out of the past week. Of course, my parents put me to shame today, with my mom having gone on two walks and my dad having taken an hour-long bike ride while I only joined my mom for one of those walks. But my body’s already infinitely more prepared to go back to Lehigh than it was at this time last year, so I’d say that counts as progress.

Now that everyone’s up-to-date on what’s up with me, I’d like to do another political post, probably something about the Middle East, but that’ll be sometime next week. Talk to you then!