Random list
1. Favorite noises to listen to while trying to fall asleep
- the clothes dryer
- soft rain & thunderstorms, bullfrogs and crickets through a screened window or door
2. Feelings on coffee
- I've gotten coffee-flavored ice cream for years, but it's only been the past few years that I've gotten anything with actual coffee in it (mochas and frappuccinos mainly). They still gotta have a lot of sugar and chocolate and caramel with whip cream on top. Can't actually drink straight coffee. But even when I was a kid, I loved the smell of it. My dad is an avid coffee drinker, and I still remember coming home from school (Dad works night shifts) and hearing the coffee maker going, and the aroma! Mmmmm
3. Weird phobias
- Moths. They're creepy as shit to me. INSECTS AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE HAIRY! WHAT'RE YOU D-STOP PETTING IT!!! NO, IT'S NOT PRETTY!!
- Bellybuttons. I know, everyone's got 'em. But they fucking creep me out, man. Outies always creep the fuck out of me, and innies can't be too deep or else I start imagining the shit that gets caught in there. bjebjnfkfk I can't think about this anymore. Moving on.
4. Thing I'm most proud of purchasing
- It doesn't work anymore, but I bought a PC right before college with my own money. No help from Mom & Dad, though I did have my best friend pick one out for me since he's more tech savvy. It lasted pretty much up until fall of 2009.
5. Shit I do that some people would find creepy
- Listening to scary soundtracks or ambient music at night
- I talk to myself. A lot. Often as two people having a conversation.
6. Gross habits I need to quit
- Picking out my earwax with tissues . . . . and then forgetting to throw them away.
- Wiping boogers on the carpet because I don't have access to tissues or the trash
- Eating with my mouth open; taking enormous bites which require me to chew my food for a few minutes before it's digestible.
7. Places I made up in my mind that I wished existed
- I often think about quiet areas I could explore for hours on end with no danger of anyone discovering me or bothering me. One of these places I think about a lot is an abandoned mall. It's not like, creepy and dirty abandoned. Just no one's there, but it's clean. It's at night too, and all the lights are dim to make the hallways an amber color. The floors are a thin brown carpet instead of tile (more like a hotel hallway, but the size of a mall with silent escalators). I don't have any particular stores in mind I would want in this hypothetical mall, just as long as there was a room only I could get to somewhere near the roof.
- Another night-only place, but this one has people inside. There's a muted but joyous ambient conversation drifting in the place, and it's the only store open on the street. It's an observatory, but also a bakery. The inner walls are mostly a dark blue color with framed illustrations from old children's books. At some point in the night, everyone is let upstairs into the observatory where they can see galaxies and other planets and such.
8. Volunteer work or jobs that didn't require a W-2
- I worked at a dairy farm for a week. Now looking back on it, I had a pretty easy job - bottling milk. But I hated it because the machines all smelled like vomit. Also, I didn't like to do manual labor. I was a lazy sumbitch.
- We had a guy at our church who ran branches of Christian communities within local colleges. He had a house in Chapel Hill that I guess could be described as a fraternity (but with less horrific initiations) for UNC. He spent the summer repairing the place, and honestly, I think he just hired me to be nice. I just got free lunch and $20 for 6-8 hours of work. I thought it was great. I do remember throwing up once in the yard because I was dehydrated and had been raking for a while.
- Another favor-job I did was working for a regular customer of the kennel. It was sometime around December, and I was to help this guy put up Christmas decorations at his house for a few weeks. It sounds ridiculous, and it was. I mean, he had a decently-sized house and a handful of acres of land. But you have to remember, this guy was constantly on drugs. He would start putting up Christmas decorations in September, start taking them down in February, and finish sometime around June/July. This was apparently all for his grandchildren who came down once a year. I scrambled up ladders, put up lights, lit debris on fire, and picked him up when he was too high to drive.
9. Worst injury incurred
- A year ago, I got a mean cut on my head. This happened in my house, in the bathroom. I was bending down to grab something from the cabinet under the sink, and stood up. When I did that, the top of my head caught the edge of our glass medicine cabinet. I immediately went down, tears welling in my eyes. I thought I just got a nasty bruise or a bump until Nikki asked to see it, and we both saw blood. She was more freaked out than I was. She drove to the nearest hospital while I held a couple of paper towels to the wound. It was stapled within an hour, and later that month, the staples were removed by Nicole herself.
10. Stupidest thing I almost did
- Join the Army ROTC. The biggest feeling I had right after the 9/11 attacks, right after I got over the shock of the whole event, was anger. I wanted revenge like so many other Americans. I had gotten to the point that I had a recruiter come to our house and talk to me. Ironically, it was asthma that saved me. I suppose the recruiter deemed my lungs were too unfit to allow me entry into service, so that was the end of that. Keep in mind that this was only a month or two after the attacks, so I have a feeling the Army was already getting a surplus of volunteers. If I volunteered now, I wonder if they would take me?
11. Angriest I'd ever gotten
- Surprisingly, I can point to this happening just a little less than two months ago. February 1, 2012: the day I quit working at Bonefish Grill. I never got into details as to why I quit here (mostly because of the ass amounts of drama and bullshit wafting through the restaurant). I had been unhappy working there for years, but I tolerated it mostly because I felt like I should be grateful to have a job at all. But towards the beginning of last year, the managing partner had been unceremoniously dumped and replaced. I already got an anxious vibe from the new managing partner because he would badmouth his employees left and right. He didn't do his job well, either, but I just attributed this to being new. After a year, he never got better. Rumors started to float around that he did cocaine and was sleeping with one of the servers. I never had any proof of this, but he was arrested for a DUI once and he did come into work obviously drunk on more than one occasion. Surprisingly, this was not what ticked me off about him.
What set me off was when he went after Nikki, accusing her of being bad at her job and slacking off. Nikki is one of the most loyal and hardest workers they had there, so it pissed me off to no end when he had several meetings with her where he accused her of bullshit. I was close to quitting, but again, the fear that I had nowhere else to go stopped me. It was when the managers had a sitdown meeting with me and accused me of similar things that I lost it. I began to yell, and was practically hysterical when they seemed genuinely confused by my anger. I quit that day, and I am so glad that I did. I'm currently working at another restaurant, but it's much more casual, and for the moment, I really like my job.
12. Where I stand on religion
- I come from a religious background. My parents had taken me to the same Christian church from the time I was born up until I moved to South Carolina. I took Christianity very seriously up until I started dating Nikki. I don't feel comfortable saying that I've completely abandoned my religion. I don't go to church, I don't pray, and I don't think I intend to. I think it will never leave me fully. I have come to believe, at least so far, is that there is a possibility of a supreme being or supreme beings; an overbearing supernatural force that is undetectable by us. There is no god in the Christian sense, I believe. But I think there's always something greater that exists that eludes our understanding. So I suppose it depends on your definition of "God" as to whether or not it exists. Whether or not it is sentient, controls the daily happenings in our life, or even cares is up in the air.
But at the same time, I am weary of those antagonistic towards religious people. From where I was raised, I did not know bigots. No one who went to my church I would describe as ignorant, stupid, or even a zealot. They were people; parents, children, brothers and sisters. They had concerns just like everyone else did. The main difference is that there was an intangible sense of community that could not be had by those who did not attend church. It may make us seem like a cult, but I don't believe we were. We had classrooms were we would have questions and debates about the Bible. That's why we went to church. For some it was solace, but I think it was also to understand. And if you're attempting to understand and ask questions, I can't qualify that as a cult. I feel like a cult would accept unquestioningly.
We had potlucks, played football, held baking sales, and performed community service. So when I hear atheists describing Christians as either bigots or glossy-eyed sheep, it doesn't fit the picture I grew up around. These people genuinely cared about other people. We also tried to grasp understanding of a book with a multitude of authors written many centuries ago over a few millennia who's teachings we took as a guideline to how to live your life.
There are many things found within the Bible I disagree with, but it never seemed alien to me. I still find Christianity intensely interesting. But I find it fascinating more from a secular point of view.