So the other day at work, I opted to prove to no one in particular that I can be a strong fellow. I loaded three tables (fixtures, if you must) onto carts and hauled them out onto the store floor for processing. These tables probably weigh a good couple hundred pounds, if not more, as they were a bitch to even get off the dock. After successfully unloading them, I felt triumphant that I pulled this off without hurting myself.
Woe be to the impractical.
Later that night, I went to bend down and felt the beginnings of what could've been severe muscle tearage in my lower back. I immediately stopped moving and only sort of fucked up my back. I managed to get some sleep, strangely waking up in near-perfect 30-minute increments. The next day my back was just sore, but after walking around for five hours my legs were close to falling off. Today, the pain has now traveled to my upper gluteus, meaning two things: this isn't a spinal injury (whew!), and it feels like someone kicked me in the ass with a bulldozer trowel.
This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, and it occurs at random moments. The last time it happened I was bending over and a sharp, stabbing pain hit my back so badly I had to crawl to a chair and hyperventilate. It was not fun. It also sucks because it never occurs when I'm actually straining myself, only when I'm just bending down. Fortunately, it doesn't happen often.
But enough about my boo-boo sissy fit. Not much else has gone on since my last post. It's stopped raining. I've moved on to playing Afro Samurai after unlocking enough achievements in Resident Evil 5 to shut me up. Afro is based on the anime series that Samuel L. Jackson has stuck his dick into, a combination of Samurai Champloo and Ninja Scroll that lacks any, if all, reasoning. I liked the anime, and after seeing the game's price drop $20 at Gamestop I squelched. Then I noticed that Target clearanced it out for the same price, so, hey, I bought some Afro Samurai. Thus far, it's proven to be Ninja Gaiden gameplay with Prince of Persia graphics, with hip-hop sounds laying out the entire game. This sounds likes a good thing, but after a few hours of gameplay it runs between simplicity (enemies are constantly respawning), to fucking insanely upsetting (nobody told me how to throw people, ever). It also loosely follows the same story as the anime, so there's few surprises here. But since I've yet to beat it, I can't in good conscience go on bitching.
"Blah blah Carter's reviewing shit again, blah-dee-blah."
And so I'm off to go watch some TV.
-C.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Aftershock.
So it's been a solid week since my escape. And thus far, it's still effective. I passed all my classes, paid off my bursar, and walked the walk. I have no idea if OSU have any tricks up their sleeve, as they're prone to occasionally screw with me. Let us all hope not, or wrath will ensue.
I don't feel different.
And so there have been a few things going on lately.
1. I beat 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand.
This game was a reluctant purchase, as I'd heard both good and bad about it. It's the equivalent of Gears of War with 50 Cent music playing throughout the entire thing. There's also a variety of five bad guys: terrorist in red shirt, terrorist in yellow shirt, terrorist in blue shirt, vehicle, and helicopter. The concept itself is frightfully stupid, but it's fun enough to warrant a playthrough. Fun fact: I netted 225 Achievement Points in 15 minutes. So yeah, it's okay. Just not worth having its own blog post.
2. The Wolverine movie was a letdown.
And yet nobody in their right mind should be that surprised. But the one thing that totally derailed the entire thing was how they treated Deadpool. I won't spoil much, but they pretty much didn't read any Deadpool comics. He's a character that's supposed to wise-ass around and shoot things with guns, and well... yup. Not quite so in film. On the bright side, they managed not to screw up Gambit. Everything else was lukewarm, as the writers cobbled together enough Wolverine backstory to make a movie out of it. I went into this expecting the third X-Men movie, quality-wise, and it was about on par with that. Meh.
3. The Star Trek movie looks interesting.
I only say this because I am not a Star Trek fan. I know little to nothing about it, and I hate spaceship stories (like Fantastic Four, to some degree). This is sometimes fun because my friends at the comic store are Trekkies and always seem to tell me stuff about it that I don't give a shit about. However, this movie looks amusing enough because it appears to have some serious action going on with it. I dunno. I may just wait until it's on DVD.
4. I'm so goddamned sick of rain.
If I were to put a number on it, I'd say it's rained about 46 days in the past week. What sucks is that, in typical Oklahoma fashion, the weather is constantly pulling 180's and for every 6 hours of rain, there's 12 hours of sunshine. So it's never one state. I wouldn't mind so much if I knew that the rain and dreariness wasn't messing up my Internet where I have problems downloading stuff. Also, hail sucks. Fuck you, weather.
Welp.
-C.
I don't feel different.
And so there have been a few things going on lately.
1. I beat 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand.
This game was a reluctant purchase, as I'd heard both good and bad about it. It's the equivalent of Gears of War with 50 Cent music playing throughout the entire thing. There's also a variety of five bad guys: terrorist in red shirt, terrorist in yellow shirt, terrorist in blue shirt, vehicle, and helicopter. The concept itself is frightfully stupid, but it's fun enough to warrant a playthrough. Fun fact: I netted 225 Achievement Points in 15 minutes. So yeah, it's okay. Just not worth having its own blog post.
2. The Wolverine movie was a letdown.
And yet nobody in their right mind should be that surprised. But the one thing that totally derailed the entire thing was how they treated Deadpool. I won't spoil much, but they pretty much didn't read any Deadpool comics. He's a character that's supposed to wise-ass around and shoot things with guns, and well... yup. Not quite so in film. On the bright side, they managed not to screw up Gambit. Everything else was lukewarm, as the writers cobbled together enough Wolverine backstory to make a movie out of it. I went into this expecting the third X-Men movie, quality-wise, and it was about on par with that. Meh.
3. The Star Trek movie looks interesting.
I only say this because I am not a Star Trek fan. I know little to nothing about it, and I hate spaceship stories (like Fantastic Four, to some degree). This is sometimes fun because my friends at the comic store are Trekkies and always seem to tell me stuff about it that I don't give a shit about. However, this movie looks amusing enough because it appears to have some serious action going on with it. I dunno. I may just wait until it's on DVD.
4. I'm so goddamned sick of rain.
If I were to put a number on it, I'd say it's rained about 46 days in the past week. What sucks is that, in typical Oklahoma fashion, the weather is constantly pulling 180's and for every 6 hours of rain, there's 12 hours of sunshine. So it's never one state. I wouldn't mind so much if I knew that the rain and dreariness wasn't messing up my Internet where I have problems downloading stuff. Also, hail sucks. Fuck you, weather.
Welp.
-C.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Happy Ending.
As I start this post, I'm reminded of an off-beat sketch from Robot Chicken where a guy is finishing up at an Asian massage parlor and the female masseuse offers him a "happy ending." He politely declines, and the insistence that he gets one becomes so chaotic he flees from the manic woman. The chase continues into the streets, as cries of "HAPPY ENDING?!" are belted out. The guy eventually falls down a flight of stairs, seemingly breaking his legs and trapping him in a corner. The woman reaches her prey, only to reveal the happy ending - "You get one free egg roll. Happy ending." And then the man sighs with relief, broken and battered.
This is the metaphor for my college career.
It's hard to imagine that it all started six years ago. The reasons it took an extra couple of years to get this far was A.) I changed my major within the first year, B.) I didn't have any genuine guidance throughout college (save one good advisor that lasted a year), and C.) I grew into a procrastinating, lazy shit. I'm not to say it's impossible to get a degree in less than four year's time, and good job for those that do, but I didn't really care to bust that much ass over it. After all, it's only college, right?
What's sad is that I remember little of the first three years, or as I like to call it, TCC. Unlike about every other smarty pants I knew in high school, I didn't have dreams of leaving home and moving into a university, or dreams of campus life and frats and parties and underage delinquency, or paying thousands of dollars for basic education courses. I was quite comfy to settle for community college. I set down that path and watched as the other smart kids went to OSU, OU, NSU, and so forth. Some managed to be dedicated enough to their cause to graduate, while others drifted back out because they didn't realize that in order to stay in school, they actually had to go to class after the parties.
TCC mystified me, as up until then I rarely ventured into Tulsa on my own. To make matters less appealing, the two campuses I had to attend were located in less than savory parts of town. One sat snug amid the one-way hedge mazes of Downtown, while the other settled in the northiest part of North Tulsa, or OklaWatts. I was eighteen, skinny, quiet, dorky, sober, and lost.
Within a couple weeks I managed to trap my truck between vehicles in the parking lot, start a trend of getting begged for money by transients AND attract a homosexual. These were not the bumpkin schools I knew.
At first, my goal in life was to become a zoologist, but seeing as how I have the mathmatical skills of a stop sign, I realized that was out of the picture. So I went with what I knew - art. Hey, I already knew how to draw, so how easy could this be? As it turned out, TCC only liked to teach people who didn't know how to draw, and boredom quickly set in. Twice a week I was forced to draw random inanimate objects set in odd ways - a draped blanket, a kettle, some kind of horn, a vase - or had to look out the window and draw the intricately gothic Boston Avenue Church. The monotony was so severe I began creatively twisting these pieces into false realities. Underpants gnomes dug along the objects with pickaxes, or witches would fly their brooms in circles around the church as lightning clasped in the sky. My teacher grew irritated with these fabrications, and questioned if that's really what I saw. I'd say yes, and by the end of my first year I realized my innate talent had no home at TCC. I spent most of my time playing Street Fighter III in the arcade and playing billiards by myself to improve my left-handed skills, which to this day are all but improved.
Fortuantely, I drew inspiration from an unlikely source: English class. My teacher, Ms. Benford, was a no-nonsense black woman in her late fifties who had a knack for making an otherwise boring subject useful. It was the first time I had taken an English class somewhat seriously, and her appraisal of my writing caused me to reconsider my profession. I knew being an English major wouldn't get me far with what I wanted, so I checked in to the school of Journalism & Broadcast. Hey, maybe I could write articles and editorials.
By the end of my second year at TCC, I realized that I wasn't going to be a news reporter. This was despite the fact that News Writing became one of my favorite classes. It was taught by Tulsa World reporter Jason Collington, whose method was to give us articles to read for the following week and discuss them. When I admitted that I couldn't read through the entire thing, he'd deliver his lesson - that was the point, that it was a crappy article and nobody could sit and read the whole thing anyway. Midway through the semester the class boiled down to just me and one other guy, but Jason continued teaching the class with a more leisurely pace. I DID learn something from him: awful work shouldn't be appreciated.
Fortunately, the journalism program starts off slow, giving a basic rundown of the four parts - news writing, broadcast, advertising, and public relations. I had already lost my desire to write news, I didn't want to be Ron Burgundy, and at the time I felt that PR was just figuratively giving stuff handjobs. Advertising, it seemed, afforded me the best option, as I could use my artistic talent AND my newfound desire to write creative stuff in that field. So it was decided... I was going to be an advertisement major.
Little else can be remembered about my journalism days at TCC, save a few names. My final semester gave me little option but to attend the infamous Southeast Campus, all the way across Tulsa and so close to Broken Arrow that I could smell the snobby kids. I dreaded traveling down the highway to get to it, but once I got there I was floored. It was immaculate compared to the other campuses, hanging over a man-made lake that was viewable through a well-adorned arcade, complete with Capcom vs. SNK 2, Soul Calibur, and more pool tables. Also, it was only a mile from 71st Street, which is essentially shopping central. This was also the place where I created my first comic series since high school. A huge air had been lifted over my head and I felt freedom. My travel phobia disappeared, and I was sad that I could only spend a few months there before I was awarded an Associate's Degree, or as my family calls it, not a Bachelor's. I unceremoniously walked away from TCC, happy.
With the beckoning of all those around me, I reluctantly chose to continue my "education" at OSU-Tulsa. This particular breed of OSU worked just fine with me, as it offered all the upper-level ad classes I needed to get a Bachelor's. It also meant I didn't have to go to Stillwater... yet. But it didn't take long for me to feel the backhand of OSU's system. I had to jump numerous hoops to get in, and it didn't help that my first advisor was anything but one. It also didn't help that my introduction into OSU's journalism program was met with utter failure - I couldn't pass Media Law to save my ass. What was interesting was that the ad classes were connected together with the same group of students. By my second year there, I had joined the ranks of the 2008 ad students, making good friends. Which worked since practically all my high school friends had fallen off the face of the earth, until stuff like Myspace and Facebook showed up. I was now part of a group, but that only lasted until last year, when almost all of them graduated. I was left behind, and had to settle for hanging with the public relations students. Fortunately, they turned out to be a swell bunch. As did the marketing group, as advertising and marketing were clumped together on occasion.
This spring, I repeated history by traveling to a far, distant land to finish up my degree. Unlike Southeast Campus, which was surrounded by fun, I went to Stillwater, which is surrounded by a different fun. A fun I was too damn old for, like wearing OSU T-shirts and joining every conceivable group imaginable. It was as if high school had mutated into a self-sufficient city. Now, I'm 24, and I felt like a cranky old man trudging along the campus - "Why is everything so far? Quit writing on the sidewalks! Stop setting up booths, you'll ruin the grass! Why do I have to pay two bucks for a Dr. Pepper? This sucks." Even the arcade sucked. At least the PR class I took there was enjoyable. As were the bus rides, which let me sleep and catch up on my podcasts. But unlike Southeast, I won't miss Stillwater.
And thus, here I is. I even pulled off the impossible and passed Media Law (thanks in part to the law lady teacher, who was easy on both curriculum and looks... giggle).
For the past few months, I've been consistently asked if I'm excited to be done. Excited being the only word they use. But to be honest, I don't feel excited. I feel exhausted, relieved, and ready for a goddamned nap. I feel like a marathon runner who got talked into it by his buddies, someone who knows how to run but isn't in the exact shape for it. And after running thirty miles in one day, they reach the finish line. Everyone's there, cheering and congratulating him, and he can't do or say anything because he's too tired. Then someone out of the crowd comes up and acknowledges him. "Happy ending?" they ask.
The guy smiles, and lazily lifts his arm and flashes everyone a thumbs-up. "Yeah, dude." Then he gets drove home to rest.
I cannot say I won't miss this. I have been in some kind of school system since I was five, so the change will be pretty deep in a few months when I'll realize I'm never going to have to do this shit ever, ever again. What's amazing to me is the amount of stuff I got out of it all - a love and talent for writing, semi-social skills (I'm still a homebody at heart), a love for driving around and doing whatever, some vague concept of the Japanese language (which I took my first year at TCC), enjoyment of playing pool, being able to drive in the ghetto and not get scared, good friends, and well, probably more that will set in over time.
But I am soooooo glad it's over.
-C.
This is the metaphor for my college career.
It's hard to imagine that it all started six years ago. The reasons it took an extra couple of years to get this far was A.) I changed my major within the first year, B.) I didn't have any genuine guidance throughout college (save one good advisor that lasted a year), and C.) I grew into a procrastinating, lazy shit. I'm not to say it's impossible to get a degree in less than four year's time, and good job for those that do, but I didn't really care to bust that much ass over it. After all, it's only college, right?
What's sad is that I remember little of the first three years, or as I like to call it, TCC. Unlike about every other smarty pants I knew in high school, I didn't have dreams of leaving home and moving into a university, or dreams of campus life and frats and parties and underage delinquency, or paying thousands of dollars for basic education courses. I was quite comfy to settle for community college. I set down that path and watched as the other smart kids went to OSU, OU, NSU, and so forth. Some managed to be dedicated enough to their cause to graduate, while others drifted back out because they didn't realize that in order to stay in school, they actually had to go to class after the parties.
TCC mystified me, as up until then I rarely ventured into Tulsa on my own. To make matters less appealing, the two campuses I had to attend were located in less than savory parts of town. One sat snug amid the one-way hedge mazes of Downtown, while the other settled in the northiest part of North Tulsa, or OklaWatts. I was eighteen, skinny, quiet, dorky, sober, and lost.
Within a couple weeks I managed to trap my truck between vehicles in the parking lot, start a trend of getting begged for money by transients AND attract a homosexual. These were not the bumpkin schools I knew.
At first, my goal in life was to become a zoologist, but seeing as how I have the mathmatical skills of a stop sign, I realized that was out of the picture. So I went with what I knew - art. Hey, I already knew how to draw, so how easy could this be? As it turned out, TCC only liked to teach people who didn't know how to draw, and boredom quickly set in. Twice a week I was forced to draw random inanimate objects set in odd ways - a draped blanket, a kettle, some kind of horn, a vase - or had to look out the window and draw the intricately gothic Boston Avenue Church. The monotony was so severe I began creatively twisting these pieces into false realities. Underpants gnomes dug along the objects with pickaxes, or witches would fly their brooms in circles around the church as lightning clasped in the sky. My teacher grew irritated with these fabrications, and questioned if that's really what I saw. I'd say yes, and by the end of my first year I realized my innate talent had no home at TCC. I spent most of my time playing Street Fighter III in the arcade and playing billiards by myself to improve my left-handed skills, which to this day are all but improved.
Fortuantely, I drew inspiration from an unlikely source: English class. My teacher, Ms. Benford, was a no-nonsense black woman in her late fifties who had a knack for making an otherwise boring subject useful. It was the first time I had taken an English class somewhat seriously, and her appraisal of my writing caused me to reconsider my profession. I knew being an English major wouldn't get me far with what I wanted, so I checked in to the school of Journalism & Broadcast. Hey, maybe I could write articles and editorials.
By the end of my second year at TCC, I realized that I wasn't going to be a news reporter. This was despite the fact that News Writing became one of my favorite classes. It was taught by Tulsa World reporter Jason Collington, whose method was to give us articles to read for the following week and discuss them. When I admitted that I couldn't read through the entire thing, he'd deliver his lesson - that was the point, that it was a crappy article and nobody could sit and read the whole thing anyway. Midway through the semester the class boiled down to just me and one other guy, but Jason continued teaching the class with a more leisurely pace. I DID learn something from him: awful work shouldn't be appreciated.
Fortunately, the journalism program starts off slow, giving a basic rundown of the four parts - news writing, broadcast, advertising, and public relations. I had already lost my desire to write news, I didn't want to be Ron Burgundy, and at the time I felt that PR was just figuratively giving stuff handjobs. Advertising, it seemed, afforded me the best option, as I could use my artistic talent AND my newfound desire to write creative stuff in that field. So it was decided... I was going to be an advertisement major.
Little else can be remembered about my journalism days at TCC, save a few names. My final semester gave me little option but to attend the infamous Southeast Campus, all the way across Tulsa and so close to Broken Arrow that I could smell the snobby kids. I dreaded traveling down the highway to get to it, but once I got there I was floored. It was immaculate compared to the other campuses, hanging over a man-made lake that was viewable through a well-adorned arcade, complete with Capcom vs. SNK 2, Soul Calibur, and more pool tables. Also, it was only a mile from 71st Street, which is essentially shopping central. This was also the place where I created my first comic series since high school. A huge air had been lifted over my head and I felt freedom. My travel phobia disappeared, and I was sad that I could only spend a few months there before I was awarded an Associate's Degree, or as my family calls it, not a Bachelor's. I unceremoniously walked away from TCC, happy.
With the beckoning of all those around me, I reluctantly chose to continue my "education" at OSU-Tulsa. This particular breed of OSU worked just fine with me, as it offered all the upper-level ad classes I needed to get a Bachelor's. It also meant I didn't have to go to Stillwater... yet. But it didn't take long for me to feel the backhand of OSU's system. I had to jump numerous hoops to get in, and it didn't help that my first advisor was anything but one. It also didn't help that my introduction into OSU's journalism program was met with utter failure - I couldn't pass Media Law to save my ass. What was interesting was that the ad classes were connected together with the same group of students. By my second year there, I had joined the ranks of the 2008 ad students, making good friends. Which worked since practically all my high school friends had fallen off the face of the earth, until stuff like Myspace and Facebook showed up. I was now part of a group, but that only lasted until last year, when almost all of them graduated. I was left behind, and had to settle for hanging with the public relations students. Fortunately, they turned out to be a swell bunch. As did the marketing group, as advertising and marketing were clumped together on occasion.
This spring, I repeated history by traveling to a far, distant land to finish up my degree. Unlike Southeast Campus, which was surrounded by fun, I went to Stillwater, which is surrounded by a different fun. A fun I was too damn old for, like wearing OSU T-shirts and joining every conceivable group imaginable. It was as if high school had mutated into a self-sufficient city. Now, I'm 24, and I felt like a cranky old man trudging along the campus - "Why is everything so far? Quit writing on the sidewalks! Stop setting up booths, you'll ruin the grass! Why do I have to pay two bucks for a Dr. Pepper? This sucks." Even the arcade sucked. At least the PR class I took there was enjoyable. As were the bus rides, which let me sleep and catch up on my podcasts. But unlike Southeast, I won't miss Stillwater.
And thus, here I is. I even pulled off the impossible and passed Media Law (thanks in part to the law lady teacher, who was easy on both curriculum and looks... giggle).
For the past few months, I've been consistently asked if I'm excited to be done. Excited being the only word they use. But to be honest, I don't feel excited. I feel exhausted, relieved, and ready for a goddamned nap. I feel like a marathon runner who got talked into it by his buddies, someone who knows how to run but isn't in the exact shape for it. And after running thirty miles in one day, they reach the finish line. Everyone's there, cheering and congratulating him, and he can't do or say anything because he's too tired. Then someone out of the crowd comes up and acknowledges him. "Happy ending?" they ask.
The guy smiles, and lazily lifts his arm and flashes everyone a thumbs-up. "Yeah, dude." Then he gets drove home to rest.
I cannot say I won't miss this. I have been in some kind of school system since I was five, so the change will be pretty deep in a few months when I'll realize I'm never going to have to do this shit ever, ever again. What's amazing to me is the amount of stuff I got out of it all - a love and talent for writing, semi-social skills (I'm still a homebody at heart), a love for driving around and doing whatever, some vague concept of the Japanese language (which I took my first year at TCC), enjoyment of playing pool, being able to drive in the ghetto and not get scared, good friends, and well, probably more that will set in over time.
But I am soooooo glad it's over.
-C.
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