Just close your eyes, and pretend that everything's fine

Just close your eyes, and pretend that everything's fine

Just close your eyes, I'll tell you when 

Best. F^%$ing. Line. in this Mastodon song "All the Heavy Lifting" that I absolutely love to listen to when I need an extra push during my runs around town. I joke that with all the pizza and beer I've consumed this summer I'm not even running to get in better shape, I'm running to stay in the same shape!! 

Anyway, what's up guys? It's Wednesday morning. I had the last two days off which I spent doing the usual, but did have a nice evening last night for my cousin Graham's going away party so I'll start out by telling you about that. 

This might look like any other picture of cousins taken over the years (Minus Rachel who's in Mexico for a mission) but there's more behind the fact that it's being taken. 

I feel like things have changed for the better  in our family because of the effort I've made to keep in touch with my grandmother regardless of the painful situation that occurred primarily between my Dad and Ty a few years ago that basically took my Dad out of the picture entirely. I know my Grandma didn't intend for it to go as far as it did. I just think it more or less has comes down to my Grandma not wanting to deal with life alone after my Grandpa died and when Ty was willing to come in and take over the finances she was all for it. 

For about a year after that last cherry harvest where Ty wanted to fire me for messing up our already inefficient ticket system, I had no contact with anyone on that side of the family. I remember passive-aggressively making a point to my aunt how much I didn't like them by posting a status a following Thanksgiving when my Mom's side was visiting that it was "The best Thanksgiving ever." My aunt Teri and I got in an argument over Facebook shortly after and I deleted and blocked everyone on that side of the family for about a year. 

It wasn't until about Winter of my second quarter at Central when I started dealing with some major anxiety that I started trying to patch things up with my family. I started calling my Grandma when I was trying to come down from major panic attacks and her talk of mundane, day to day life would kind of put me at ease. She loves to talk so that kind of helped rebuild our relationship after not talking for two years. Since then my relationship with the rest of my family has been pretty good. We just entirely
avoid talking about the kind of sad and obvious stalemate that has occurred between my Dad and his family and just hope there can be some kind of resolution someday. 

Graham's going away party was actually a send-off for bootcamp with the Navy. He's going to Illinois to get his ass kicked, basically. But we're all really proud of him and he seems more than ready. It's pretty incredible, Graham lost 90 lbs in the last year by keeping a food diary and exercising in order to suit his recruiters needs. Only someone who really wants something could do that because losing significant amounts of weight is so hard, especially when you've had kind of the same build your entire life. So yeah I have no doubt he'll do great. 

The party was at my aunt Teri's house and she was cooking a lot of Dominoes (here I am eating pizza again!! I swear to God this summer I've been on the pizza diet...!). Teri, Traci, Grandma, Tiffany, Avery and I were all standing around the table chatting. One thing that came up a couple of times that stood out to me was the sudden death of a young Benton City woman that suffocated sleeping on a memory foam mattress. My Grandma went to the funeral because the family of the woman that passed is LDS and she is actually the older sister of a guy I graduated with. Very sad. 

....I can't help wonder if they'll file a lawsuit against temperpedic. 

I think the biggest highlight of the evening was that my uncle John and I actually related on something-- and this is a family member I've honestly never talked more than small talk bullshit to in my life! He asked me if I was returning to Central in the Fall and I told him that I'd decided to stay back and work full time for a quarter instead. 

When I told him I'd be "returning to business school in the Winter..." he asked me "So are they going to raise or lower the prime rate soon?" He was trying to see if I knew my shit and I wanted to seize the opportunity. I paused for a second... my mind was like 'God, think, Prime rate, interest, Carbaugh's class..." and I responded "The interest rate the federal reserve charges to borrow money? I'm not quite sure what they're doing now." 8-) Ha ha ha, Hell yea. I could have just bullshit and said they were going to lower it to increase spending if I wanted to sound like a real hotshot but I honestly don't know the REAL answer to that question. 

I told him that someday I want to go into forecasting stocks and portfolio building and he said he wanted to be an analyst himself if he hadn't become an engineer. He's bought and sold stocks before so I could probably learn a lot talking to him about his experience with it. 

I'm just dying to start playing around with buying and selling stocks on E-trade but before that happens obviously I've gotta MAKE some money. As of right now I'm flat ass broke and have been for a couple days. I've got a paycheck waiting for me at Caesar's but it's not worth the drive to Pasco to get it when I can just pick it up today when I go to work. 

With my little 3 and 4 hour shifts my paycheck is going to be puny as all Hell. I'm probably just going to keep out $40 in cash, try and stretch that as long as possible and put the rest of it away. I really need to start applying for other jobs. Things have just been coming up so I haven't had a chance yet but I think seeing my first paycheck will *really* motivate me. 

peace. 

Well I've had an unexpectedly good weekend already.

As I'd mentioned the other day, I met this guy named Ben in the surc when I was eating my lunch on Wednesday. I had originally thought that he had sent his friend over to talk to me but it turns out his Vietnamese-American friend was the one that wanted to talk to me in the first place. I was surprised to hear that because I noticed Ben had been seriously staring me the second I walked in... Anyway the end result was the same, we ended up talking later that night (the night I was frantically looking for Marshall) and we ended up making plans to hang out on Friday.

He came over here and honestly my apartment was a little less than a wreck. The weather was beautiful and I was too busy practicing my guitar to really care. I wanted to make sure to have a good warmup before Ben came over. He plays guitar too and was a music major for awhile so I didn't know what to expect. He's not bad, he was sort of out of practice but I can tell he can play. He sings really well too.

Just the fact that I can "talk guitar" with him is amazing. He also listened to a ton of metal in highschool so we have that in common too. Like while I was making dinner we were listening to Mastodon and Iron Maiden and all kinds of good sh&t. I made chicken Parmesan, which takes forever and wasn't as good as the first time I made it when Michael was here that one night. This time I forgot to mix the breadcrumbs with the Parmesan/garlic salt which made it a little bland. I put too much milk in the eggs so the breading didn't stick right. By the time it was done we had both downed one and a half of those big cans (me on an empty stomach, so I'm sure I was acting pretty goofy at this point..) so he was too full to even eat.

I still ate. Lol I'm one of these people that can usually eat. My eating habits have been rather weird lately because of my late night studying habits and the fact that I wake up around lunch time 3-4 days a week. Late night eating and drinking beer won't do my figure any favors so I've been working out a lot more to counterbalance it.

I was just watching the first 20 minutes of this pretty nauseating documentary about modelling on Netflix called "Chasing Beauty." It's funny how so few, few people fit into what modelling agencies look for. And how depressing  it would be to have a career solely reliant on your looks. They say in the modelling business "you're old when you're 25." The first 20 minutes of the documentary was pretty much just successful, attractive models talking about how much of being beautiful gives you an edge in life and how fun it is to be on the runway. I was like alllrighty then, how long until we get to profile one of the thousands upon thousands of delusional souls that get rejected in this cutthroat industry?

I'm sure it gets there. I'll give it another shot tomorrow if I get bored.....

Because I have to admit, some of guys in the documentary that are pretty incredible looking...

Whhhew.  

peace.