Summer is winding down and I felt it appropriate to post again at its resolution seeing as I began with a post just after school got out.

I noticed Cody has been updating a bit more since leaving the States back to his rainy/cold premises overseas.   I have respect for his dedication to working out and staying healthy, especially with his commitment to running.   Personally, I’ve never been much of a runner.   I’m quick from here to there, as long as there is less than a mile.  Any more than that and I’m dead in the water.   While I do always run before I workout, it’s only to get my heart rate up and to actually make me sweat while I work out.   However, that run is always around the 1 mile mark and the pace is set to about a 8-minute mile.    Still, I plan to adopt a similar strategy of monitoring my measurements throughout the Fall semester and hopefully further.   LMU has a nice gym and the Fitness Center there has a machine that will measure your body fat, your muscle percentages for each part of your body, and other neat, little things.   The machine is available for use so that people can check their vitals about once a month and keep a printout with all the details.

Dedicating yourself to a task, whether that be a blog, entertaining an online community of gamers, or a single relationship; is never an easy undertaking by any means.  They do not often earn the appreciation or respect fitting the time and toil that goes into them, and sometimes leads others to downright disdain.   Still, the way I see it, the rewards are usually worth the amount of toil that go into the task.

I can’t help but think that expectations rule my life.   It’s not enough that I’m constantly questioning my own effort and expecting more of myself in everyday activities, but the carry-over effect to everyone else I encounter really takes a toll on my opinions of others sometimes.   I expect that others should feel an equally pervasive need to improve themselves whenever possible.   How often do we have to settle for less or look the other way before we realize that there is something that we could legitimately make better about our own lives?   I know it’s not easy; I struggle to improve things about my life all the time that simply do not get any better, but I never just give up outright.   I appreciate constructive criticism and I don’t mind giving it out either.   I get labeled as bossy or a jerk, but sometimes people have to hear it.   We don’t always realize what we’re doing wrong after all.   Unfortunately, I have to mention the worst part of expectations ruling my life.   Knowing that I can do better makes me constantly question my effort, leaving me slightly depressed and forcing me to look at what I have done and to try to be satisfied with that.   On the other hand, knowing others can do better makes me constantly question their own efforts, often to their complete and total aggravation.   And I’ll be the first to admit that while I am often the nice guy to those I do not know well, I am quite critical of those close to me.   At times I am simply annoyed, but most of the time I truly want my friends and family to improve their quality of life.

I mentioned to my parents last weekend that I feel really horrible when I am inclined to hope someone might experience a downfall so that they are forced into an epiphany of sorts to improve his or her life.   But that is often how life works and it is something that everyone experiences.   For most of us, it takes a lot to have to want to do something that is tedious and does not show immediate dividends.   In the end, there is nothing more satisfying than actually doing what you intend to.

I intend to go back to college tomorrow and improve upon my previous semester.   My grades may not be better, but I hope I will work generally harder, in all areas of my life.   This includes rebuilding a relationship with my friends I lost, building on a great relationship with my girlfriend and being everything and more she could ever expect, keeping up a good connection with family and friends that are not near me, staying health, and hopefully being active in school matters and even potentially starting a shirt sales business.   Video games and such are fun, but they do not really bring the kind of satisfaction I could receive from completing real life tasks.   I want to explain that by real life, I don’t mean that internet friends that you truly know or speak to often don’t count as part of your real life.   The things my brothers do, from talking online with less-than-complete strangers about things that interest them to playing games with such people, are actually quite real and invigorating.   My point is more in the following sense: the last few days playing Team-Fortress 2, I was truly bored without any friends on to play with or any real human connection besides the people spitting out jokes every few minutes.   I sat in an idle server a few nights ago for the first time and all of a sudden I don’t even have the motivation of getting items to craft into awesome hats because of the cap of items you can get in a given week set by Steam.   Yet, I still waste my time playing these games because they are more stimulating in the short-run than say, writing a blog or doing my homework in a timely manner that does not involve me staying up all night the day before it is due.

There were a lot of things I put off this summer that I should not have.   I tire from staring at to-do lists, whether concrete or in mind, for weeks at a time and not completing them.   I want to improve; don’t we all?

Classes ended last Thursday, the 6th.  Grades came out today:

I actually did better than I had expected. The 3.8 GPA makes it my best semester yet, but it should get tougher now that I will take mostly business classes in Junior and Senior years. I never know what fun the professors will have tweaking grades depending on how much, or how little, they liked me. Somehow I got a B- in Statistics last semester, which I found extremely hard to believe. I went into the final exam with a B+ and felt like I did perfect on the final exam. Of course, I thought I did perfect on the other 2 tests we had throughout the semester and little mistakes set me back then. Still, I emailed my professor to ask if could see my final later and he never responded. I just have a feeling the guy didn’t like me much, which is ironic because I ran into him at Trader Joe’s last week. Anyway, what’s done is done.

That’s the thing about small colleges & universities like mine: the professors are able to account for a “personal” factor, whether that be daily attendance, participation in discussion, or how you interact with your peers. This is the single greatest question a high school student or whoever else planning on attending college must confront: a BIG school or a small one. Big school’s have classes with hundreds of people in them filling auditoriums. These types of schools usually have classes where the first day and the final exam have the classes filled with 200 people in the seats and all the other classes have about 50 tops, and professors are normally fine with this. People cut deals with others about taking notes or taking turns attending classes. Small universities, on the other hand, usually have required attendance and some sort of participation grade.

Why am I still talking about school even though classes are out and summer has begun for me? Actually, I am taking another course starting Monday. It’s actually pretty interesting… We’ll be on a train for a week during Memorial day weekend. That’s right, a whole week spent on a train. Most summer courses go on for 6 weeks for a total class time of about 36-40 hours. Fortunately this class kind of cheats that system by having 2 weeks of classes twice a week for 3 hours at a time and then counts a large chunk of the time on the train as class time. Best of all, we’re not just sitting on a train the whole time, but stopping by several places along the way in the Southwest States (AZ, NM, NV). This is the first class of its kind in the United States so it should have some press surrounding it. Overall, I am thankful to be able to have such an experience. I owe a lot to the Education Fund and to my family. Hopefully I can pay both back when I have the opportunity.

I went through my old posts and deleted a certain person out of them. I don’t know why, but I think that was the main reason I kept away from this blog… I had always blindly put up with so much of Kristel’s crap that it becomes sickening when reviewing it now. I guess that’s what happens when you have your first girlfriend a lot of the time. Don’t get me wrong, I had some good times with my ex, but I feel like it was the idea of having a girl friend that was more important to me.

Back to this whole blogging thing, I always make false commitments of posting more and then never doing it, so I’m just going to say when I have things I want to say, I’ll write them here.

So, to  start, I’ll go with my roommate.  His name is Tyler Payne, although he hates his first name, so he goes by T-Payne.  The name is appropriate considering he loves hip-hop.  T Payne is a real nice guy, but pretty crazy at times.  To give you some insight, he loves jackass and seems to enjoy hurting himself for the enjoyment of others.  My room, while small, is no different than what I was used to with my brother.

The other people in my dorm are all really tight and welcoming. One room seems to be occupied quite often with people playing xbox360, watching movies or just hanging out.  The sounds of portal, L4D, Batman, music, and laughter have caused me to stop by there often to see what’s going on.  It’s funny that my knowledge of gaming astounds some of them at times when they are playing some of these games.  I dominated in Super Smash Bro.s (on N64) and sucked on the xbox  games (as I usually do with that crappy two stick controller).  So far in there, I have played N64 games, xbox games, watched 2 movies, listened to music, and just talked to others.  We also celebrated a birthday in this room which brought me into the tradition of carrying the birthday person (in this case, a nice girl named Bree) to the fountain a little bit away and tossing them in at midnight.

Another room houses two musicians who are also very welcoming, and have some really kick-ass instruments.  I enjoyed fooling around with the electronic drum kit and listening to Henry play his guitar.  I won’t go into great detail about everyone I talked to and everything I did, but in general, I found that Whelan was full of people that are very nice and easy to get along with.  Whelan itself is four stories, with all guys on the first two floors, all girls on the third, and a study/hangout room on the top floor.

On to classes, to leave off from the last post, I did not get into English, despite spending 5 hours last week attending classes under two different teachers just in case I got in.  So now schedule is as follows:

Mondays

Public Speaking 8-8:50

Math Analysis for Business II 10-10:50

Macroeconomics 1-1:50

Microeconomics 3-4:15

Tuesdays

Art History of the Western World II (Medieval times – Present) 3-4:15

Wednesday

Public Speaking 8-8:50

Math Analysis for Business II 10-10:50

Macroeconomics 1-1:50

Microeconomics 3-4:15

Thursday

Art History of the Western World II (Medieval times – Present) 3-4:15

Friday

Public Speaking 8-8:50

Math Analysis for Business II 10-10:50

Macroeconomics 1-1:50

So far, the food has been good.  There is a wide variety, including Mexican, sushi, fresh-made salads (and wraps), American food (turkey burgers, fries, chicken strips, & grilled chicken sandwiches), Quizno’s, Jamba Juice, omelets,  other breakfast foods,  and Chinese foods (orange chicken, chow mein, etc).  There is also a diner on campus named Iggy’s that serves breakfast all day and is highlighted by the great french toast, shakes, and fries.  I went there with my friend Juan (who lives 2 doors down) where we got to know each other.  Both of us are trying to watch our diets (ironic that we went to the greasy diner to eat and talk) and decided we’d go to the gym with each other.  So Monday through Thursday, we went to the gym and played basketball with others and then did crunches and a run afterwards.  Juan is a real hard worker, enrolled in the difficult engineer program and working to make a living for himself and his family.  We have a lot of mutual values and he’s interesting to talk to.

My classes themselves seem like they are going to be easy enough to me.  Public Speaking seems to be easy; after all, I took Toastmasters for 3 years in Middle School and don’t normally have a problem with speaking in front of people.  Of course, this is a relief that I have an easy class at 8 am.  Math is math, nothing to do about that.  I’m sort of up in the air about the whole homework-doesn’t-count-for-or-against-you in that class simply because that means I can skip it but then that also means I can’t get points for it and the exams are worth a ton, so I have to do well on them.  I guess that’s the general theme of college anyway.  Homework obviously helps with the weekly quizzes anyway, so might as well do it.  I enjoy my economics classes more than the others not only because it’s really what my major is about (and I’m actually interested in it) but also because the teachers are awesome.  In fact, if you can imagine Tony Stark (pre-becoming Iron Man) without the genius but with all the attitude and wittiness, you’d have my microeconomics teacher.  Art History by far is the worst class.  It is not only a lot of work, but also the classroom has had broken A/C  and the teacher speaks a million words per seconds.  Luckily, however, we are allowed to type on our laptops in class on the provided powerpoints.

I decided to accompany T Payne to a club Friday night. The club itself was a hotel called Custom that has 18+ Nights every Monday.  The party was actually pretty dull with no dancing and just some meeting some people.  I told T Payne that I was kind of bored so he said he felt about the same and decided to go out with a bang and jumped into the pool to get kicked out.  Fun times at LMU.

I woke up around 5:30 this morning in order to get ready for Spring Orientation today at LMU.  My mom was unable to wake up until about 6:15 and by that time I had showered and packed all of my stuff into the car.  I took my clothes, bedding, lamp, trashcan, some framed pictures, toiletries, and most of my supplies.  That leaves my computer, laptop, chargers, car, more pictures, and other random things to come with when I move in to stay on Sunday afternoon.

My mom was too tired to drive, but I made good timing, arriving around 7:35 at the gate entrance.  The first place I went after parking and leaving my mom in the car was to get my Student ID card.  It’s nicknamed the ‘Onecard’ for good reason;  I use it as my ID,  for meal purchases, getting in the gate to park, getting into my residence hall, getting into my room, and for plenty of other stuff.  I went back to the parking lot to meet my mom and we reparked closer to the orientation check-in.  After checking in and gaining some sweet swag, my mom and I once again reparked, this time next to my dorm.  There, I left my mom to unpack my stuff and “work her magic” while I had to take my placement exam for math at 9.  It’s weird that they would give me credit for my class at SCC, but since they aren’t like official partners or whatever, they still made me take an exam to make sure I was qualified for MATH112: Math Analysis Business II, which is basically just the continuation of what I took at SCC.  In the end, it didn’t make much of a difference because they called about an hour after my exam and told me I made it into MATH112. 

I met my mom in my room right around when she had finished with all my stuff.  The room looks and feels nice, although of course I wish it was bigger.  We didn’t really feel up to staying for all the orientation, so we just went around to a few places.  We went to the bookstore to buy some shirts, got my parking permit for the Cadillac, paid the hefty check (from the Lloyd Children’s Fund) for all expenses, and  then left to have lunch.  My mom gave me a mini-tour of the area to show me some nice restaurants and some cheaper “hole-in-the-wall’s” where I would probably go to more often.  After lunch, we decided to head home early rather than return to LMU.  On the way home, we picked up the Caddy from the shop, which is driving great now with new brakes, a tune-up, and a reallignment.  Once I got home, I hopped online to finish registering.

The following is the link for my schedule of classes so far for Spring 09:

lmu-spring-2009

Right now, one of those classes will be leaving that schedule. I’m hoping that I can get into the English class on Tuesdays and Thursdays (even though I’m not much of an English fan) because it’s a required course that I will have to take eventually anyway.  Plus, that would mean I would be able to drop my Public Speaking class at 8 am.  That would be sweet, but I like the schedule either way really because if I don’t have the English class, I won’t start until 3 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and will only have the one class. 

I’m getting excited to start, but I know I’ll miss some, if not many things.

So, in case I didn’t make in evident enough by now, I got accepted to attend Loyola Marymount University for the spring semester of 2009. I guess I’ll start by saying what led up to finding out I got accepted. I sent in my application and the necessary materials in early October. I went to the Open House hosted at LMU on November 2nd and it made a great impression right away. I knew that this was the place that I wanted to be for college. I asked a lot of questions to counselors and students about the school and how things worked regarding students joining in the spring. In early November I received a postcard saying that they had received all necessary materials and were to begin the decision process. But when mid-November had come with still no word on acceptance, I began to worry (more than before anyway). I talked to a few counselors both online (thru AIM even!) and on the phone, but they just told me that it was still in the decision process. By then, lots of things went through my mind about my future and I made wishes, prayers, and pleas that I would get accepted to this college.

Throughout work I was able to text Mike and talk about our impending reconcilation (he flew in that night). He was actually at my house playing D&D with the guys before I even made it home. After a short, but fun run through a dungeon in which I dominated the casserole competition, Mike and eventually Cody left. It was around this time that I realized no one had gotten the mail on Saturday. I figured I might as well, after all, I had been doing so for the past 2 weeks looking for a letter from LMU. So at 2 AM, I walked outside and in the dark found a rather large letter from LMU. I immediately ran inside and ripped open the letter to read my acceptance letter and began to celebrate.

So everyone has been asking me what I want Christmas and honestly I don’t really know… I am already getting what I really wanted, and at some level, desperately needed: an acceptance to LMU and a new phone. I also went to Eagle yesterday to talk to my uncle about funds for college and somehow ended up with a brand new laptop! Figures that my grandpa would offer one to me. So now I guess now it’s down to clothes. Otherwise I have no idea. More blogs to come on a more consistent basis. Let’s just say my life has brightened up a little lately

I’ve kind of given up on the whole blogging thing as you may have noticed. I don’t really want to share my troubles with everyone and I don’t feel like I’m interesting or intelligent enough to sustain an actual good post that would be worth time reading and/or commenting.

In other words, I don’t think I’ll be posting anything real anytime soon.

Past couple of days, not much goin down. Mychael and I have basically been going to the pool shortly after we wake, stay there for a couple hours, have lunch, then watch tv or play cards, pokemon, read, or do whatever else sounds fun. Dinner was this nice seafood restaurant two nights ago and room service again tonight. We’ve run into some trouble with the hotel; like thrice now they’ve told us we’ve run out of credit on our room even though Mrs. Jauregui keeps going to get it settled. They’re a bit incompetent at times, but hey, overall, I defintiely can’t complain. I burnt a pack of M&Ms trying to make my dad’s “famous” candy bar because of a combination of retarded Mexican microwaves and my own stupidation. I know, it’s not word (proves my stupidity, right?). Anyway, tomorrow we go back into town, when cruise ships aren’t stopped in for the day, so things are supposedly cheaper. I plan on buying all the souvenirs for people tomorrow, so last chance to let me know. Anyway, we head home in a few days. For all of you seeing Batman in the next few days, I envy you. Although, they are showing it at the Mexican theatre here in English with Spanish subtitles, but I think Myke and I can wait. We’ll see!

Got up around 8ish. We left for the ATV place around 8:20 and got there around 8:45. I thought we were going to get bussed to some far off place like with the ziplining. I thought wrong. We got on the 4-wheelers right there in the middle of the town and drove off to the side of the road out into the jungle. It was the four of us along with a family of three and the tour guide leading the way. Everyone had their own quad and we all had fun driving through bumpy, sandy, muddy roads. We drove for a good hour and a half through craptacular Mexican trails in the beautiful jungle and sprayed water and mud all over the place as we drove in. After a while, we ventured into more steep, curvy, mountainous roads until we reached an opening where there was a restaurant and tequila tasting. We found that our tour guide not only was nice, but also very funny. I guess that’s a common theme among the people we’ve met out here.

On our way up to the restaurant, our guide asked if we’d like this little berry-looking thing off of the “candy tree,” as he put it. I told him I’d eat one if he had one first. Of course, he just smiled and shook his head. He told us it was a very, very spicy pepper; nothing any tourist eats. The three others laughed and looked at me; “right up your alley.” I said I’d eat the tiny thing (it was literally the size of a small berry). I tossed it in my mouth and chewed for a few healthy seconds and swallowed. While chewing, it didn’t seem too bad, but by the time I had swallowed, the burning hot pain set in. I started blinking quickly, breathing in for air, and hiccupped a few times in no time at all. I first learned about the Scoville scale when I read Little Brother. It’s basically used to figure out how spicy a pepper is. Here’s a quote from the book:

“Pure capsaicin is about fifteen million Scovilles. Tabasco is about twenty-five hundred. Pepper spray is a healthy three million. [...] Some of the real hardcore can get up to a half million or so, about twenty times hotter than Tabasco. That’s pretty freaking hot.”

My response to my pepper is very similar to the narrator’s in a similar situation:

“You know that feeling you get when you take a big bite of horseradish or wasabi or whatever, and it feels like your sinuses are closing at the same time as your windpipe, filling your head with trapped, nuclear-hot air that tries to batter its way out through your watering eyes and nostrils? That feeling like steam is about to pour out your ears like a cartoon character? This was a lot worse. This was like putting your hand on a hot stove, only it’s not your hand, it’s the entire inside of your head, and your esophagus all the way down to your stomach.”

I suppose mine wasn’t quite as bad a response, but I think I’m either more used to spicy food or mine wasn’t quite as spicy as his. Either way, it was by far the spiciest thing I have ever eaten. Too bad I can’t remember the name of it. It took me almost ten minutes until I was completely back to normal again; I couldn’t even feel my tongue for a while. After a 7-up to cool me off, I had an order of beef tacos, which were tremendous. After lunch, we left again onto some more straight, long roads and really got to hauling. Apparently we hit 65 mph at one point; way fun. Really made me miss motorcycling up at the cabin. I’ll have to schedule some more meetings with my grandpa… We got back to the place we started around 1 in the afternoon.

Back at the hotel around 1:30, Mychael and I went to the pool to cool off and get the dirt off of us. After that, it was back to just chilling in the hotel and watching tv. We ordered room service for dinner again and I had a cheeseburger. As usual, the food was great. Haha seems to be getting a little redundant. Not sure what will be going on for the rest of the week, but hopefully we’ll go into town at least once more and find things to do on the other days. I still need ideas on what to buy people, so let leave me a comment if you’re reading. Good night.

Well, the past couple of days have been a lot slower and more “relaxing” I suppose you would put it. Mychael got quite a bit of sunburn (because he decided to ignore requests to put on sunblock) and spend the day indoors all of yesterday. I was bored being stuck inside all day, so I went a couple of times to the Mayan Palace and the Grand Mayan pools. Today was about the same, except Mychael went out with me to the pool for a while. We slept well: 11 hours of sleep. Not too shabby at all. I don’t really have much to say. Tomorrow we have our ATV 4-wheeler ride to look forward to. I expect to get plenty dirty and outrace Mychael all over the jungle. I need ideas for souvenirs for people, so if you’re reading, let me know what you want. All I have so far is a butterfly knife for Austin (Mr. Spah). Peace for now.