For those of you that don’t know my story, I go to Columbia University. After my Junior year, I took two years off from school for “personal” reasons, or at least that’s what I tell people. When I think back, I remember numerous times where I was on campus, walking around by myself, it would be a beautiful day, or a quiet morning, and I would think to myself “damn, you are one lucky son of a bitch. You go to one of the best schools in the world, and have everything going for you.”
When I had to take the two years away from school, my life felt crushed. I mean totally fucked up. Everything that I had planned seemed to fall apart, and for a solid year, I had a real hard time dealing with things. Granted, I sucked it up and gained some good experience working at a little law firm downtown.
So now, with graduation just a two weeks away, school ending in 12 days, I was thinking to myself “damn, you are one lucky son of a bitch”
It was kind of an epiphany, where I was sitting there and I realized that I have so much. I have this awesome apartment with lots of great stuff, but aside from the material things, in two weeks I’ll have a degree from an awesome school (well…their reputation anyway), I have a great girlfriend that wholeheartedly loves me, I have a family that is supportive of me, I’ve got a great job lined up with an amazing starting salary, and hell…things are just going right again.
It’s amazing really. Two years ago, it felt like my life was really in jeopardy of not heading in the direction that I planned, but at this point, I think that I’m better off now that I would have been if I didn’t take two years off.
There were times in the past that I was talking to Laura and trying to explain to her these times when I would walk around campus, and I remember my mother telling me that I didn’t appreciate what I had. My parents were actually really hard on me about the two years off. They were constantly telling me that I didn’t appreciate everything that they had given up for me and everything that they had sacrificed in order to get me through school. I wished, during those badgering sessions, that I could rewind time and let them hear my thoughts. So I figured that I would take the time and jot down how I was feeling, so that in the future, I could go back and refresh myself when I, inevitably, feel like my life isn’t as I thought it would be. Now I’ll know how good I have it.
Edit: The work ‘epiphany’ was incorrectly spelled when I first wrote the post, so I corrected it so as to increase people’s faith in humanity through my spelling skills.

This is one of the most beautiful days in quite awhile. The sky is blue, the birds…pigeons are chirping and it’s a perfect temperature. The NFL draft is on TV, and I get to sit on my computer, toiling away on my damn papers.
I’m not going to lie about this, I have a tendency to believe that I have ADD. I’ll walk away from my computer for the smallest distraction. So I came to that conclusion…I have ADD, then I realized that I’ve sat for three hours stints if not more, editing photographs and playing video games. It’s just a simple matter of the material I’m working with. Oh well.
So all last night and this morning I’ve been working on editing my paper. It’s amazing that even after going through the thing three times, there are still areas that need massive amounts of work. It doesn’t help that the thing is 40 pages, so that really slows down the number of drafts, but that’s okay.
Yesterday Laura left for Ireland for the week, so that sucks. She was my awesome editor. I don’t know what I would have done if it weren’t for her guidance and whip cracking. I guess I’d have written more blog entries

I got a call from one of the attorneys that I used to work for inviting me to work on this project this weekend. I was ready to tell him no way, not a chance…I have to work on my paper and then he told me that they were paying $45/hr. Well… I thought… I can’t very well leave him hanging in a lurch So I think that tomorrow I’m going to head over there for a few hours worth of work. I’m going to get to bed early tonight so that I can get in at least two solid hours of paper writing, then head over to DUMBO Brooklyn to the warehouse and work on that. Then later on in the evening I am going to be working at some convention for the Democratic committee. Not really something that’s worth my time, but I owe the guy that’s running it, so I should throw in a few hours. I’ll get paid…I think like $10/hr…not quite the $45, but still decent.
Well now that’s it’s 3:00, I’m going to get cracking on my paper again. I have about three pages worth of writing that I need to mesh back into a section that’s in the paper. It’s going to be amazing.

Click to increase the size…it’s damn big too…
My life as I know it is on the brink of massive changes. I can’t fucking wait. I’ve got four more classes, two today and two more on Monday. I’m pretty damn excited. My 9:00 class was canceled for the last two days, so I’ve gotten the luxury of sleeping in today and not getting up to Columbia till 11:00.
Yesterday I went on an interview at Standard & Poor’s for their Capital IQ software. The called the position a Customer Relations Analyst, which is fancy talk for “Tech Support”. I had a nice interview, the people were young and nice, and I’m sure that it would be a nice place to work, but there are a few reasons that I don’t think I’d take the job if it were offered to me. 1) There is no hierarchy…no titles…that’s a little strange to me. I know why they do it, but I think it’s a little more confusing than it’s worth. 2) They won’t pay me enough. I’ve got a solid financial offer from another consulting firm, and I just don’t think they’ll match it. 3) For the first 6 months I’d be working on learning financial markets (that’s a good thing) and learning the software (it’s pretty much a data management tool) and answering people’s questions on the phone. I’m not too keen on answering phones for a living. 4) I feel like having a job where the software is the focus (this was Laura’s comment) and not the consultant is really going to limit where I can go afterwards, because I’ll be learning to think in terms of the software and less about general business. We’ll see. I’ve yet to get an offer (I’m supposed to hear by the end of the week), so it’ll be interesting at least to see if I’ll snag the offer.
Anyway, I’ve gotta head up to Columbia to finish off 50% of the classes that I have left. Excellent.

Around 7:00 today Laura and I decided to go for a short little walk around the area. We constantly walk around towards the Bedford area (Hipsterville) and towards Greenpoint, but it’s rare that we venture into the other areas surrounding our house. So today we ventured down Metropolitan Ave away from civilization and towards Ghettoness. It’s amazing down there. You would swear that you are in Post-soviet Russia or something. Just garbage everywhere, buildings falling apart, but if you walk just a litte further, you come across the real Brooklyn. Where all the artists have retreated to. It’s kind of cool to see where huge industrial buildings that are obviously housing people with all the lights on and plants in the windows. It was rather neat. Makes me want to live in a loft, then I realized that I want to live near a subway and therefore can’t afford to live in a nice loft. Ahhh… dreams.

So for the remainder of the night, I’m going to be cooking steaks (finally got Propane) and then trying to slap together a rough draft of this damn religion paper that I neglected to start or even look into till today. That’s okay because tomorrow I can hand in a draft for a preliminary grade and see if I want to re-write it, so that’s great because well….I can put together a shitty paper and still have lots of suggestions and know where I stand. Sweet.
I also recieved good news about my planet earth paper which is due on Tuesday, so it pretty much just made the paper 100x easier to write, even though it was already going to be a cake walk. Life is good , but will be better in two weeks.
Okay…just found out a bit of disturbing news. So Laura was able to get her blog on Google because she’s the primary account holder or whatever for the domain, so I get shafted, but anyway…. we were looking at the keywords that people used to search for her blog. And on three different occasions, someone found Laura’s blog while trying to search for “how to sexually arouse your cat”…fucked up world.

This afternoon Laura and I went out to Chelsea Market (snazzy upscale Wholefoods-ish kind of group of stores) to get some cooking stuff. Laura has been on a cooking kick recently (I can’t even tell you how many “30 Minute Meals” are on my DVR) so we ended up getting a new fry-pan and lots of food. So at one point we decided that we should stop and get some lunch. So we sat down to eat lunch outside this little seafood market thing. After finishing eating, I stupidly left my umbrella (nice big golf umbrella…well, not nice, but it was big) and we started to walk away. We literally got maybe 30 yards away and realized that we didn’t have the umbrella, so we walked back to get it. Of course….it was gone, and of course it was pouring rain out, so that made for a nice time walking to the train with bags of food in the rain. It wasn’t all that much of a good time, I have to tell you.

So we also stopped at a little grocery store across the way in order to get ground turkey (which looks like nasty ground up brains) for breakfast stuff tomorrow. So we got in line to pay for the $1.27 worth of ground turkey, which was amazingly like a pound and a half (what a deal!) anyway. So from behind us, up walks this obese man. And I’m talking like a solid 6-7 months away from being a shut in. God help him if he ever realizes that he can get his groceries delivered. At first, I didn’t want to judge him, I mean he could have a thyroid problem or whatever, so I didn’t really think about it, then he started to put his food up on the counter. Up came two large bags of Cheetos, 2 bags of ’spicy’ pork rinds, a BOX of glazed doughnuts (I believe it was a 20 pack), numerous sugary drinks and whatnot. It became very obvious as to why this man resembled the Stay-Puff Marshmallow man. Ugh. Oh well, at least I’m a solid few years away from that state.

Is that just fucked up or what?

Last night, as a celebration for my handing in the 3rd draft of my huge ass paper, and the realization that I’m going to be locked in my apartment for the next two weeks studying, Laura and I decided that it would be nice to go out and socialize.
So we met some of my old friends from back in the day out at a rather lame upper east side bar. You know the type, terrible music, lots of neon signs and people getting way too involved with the baseball games on TV. The night ended up being filled with lots of cheap beer and cigarettes, so as you can imagine, this morning isn’t exactly a good time.
I think the worst part about it is that when I got home, instead of crawling into bed, I decided to stay up and play some video games… yeah, didn’t end up getting to bed till around 5:30. So getting up at 10:00 this morning is going to hurt later on. At least I know that I’ll be curbing myself tonight and just hanging out so that I’ll have a productive day tomorrow.

Today is going to be a nice relaxing rainy day. Sometimes when it’s just gross out, it just feels good knowing that you really don’t have to do anything and you won’t feel bad for “wasting a beautiful day” so that’s kind of nice, and to top it off, before I went out last night, I was able to procure a propane tank for the grill, so not only can I hang out and do nothing all day, but I can grill up some steaks later. Awesome.

Click for bigger version

I decided to take the day off, and no it wasn’t the good kind, like going to the beach or going and sitting in the park all day. I took the day off to get some work done on my paper. I got up around 9:15 and started to work around 10:00. I’m not going to lie, it’s actually going well, well…except for this shot break that I’m taking to blog. I got myself some more great library books from Columbia yesterday, so I’ve been using those. Let me tell you, they are gold.
The problem with writing papers at home is that I sit here and am looking into my backyard. It’s right there… like 3 feet away from me and my god it’s beautiful. Last summer Laura and I put down grass seed and really did a decent job on the lawn. We watered it all the time and we has extremly successful growth, but then something happened… well, it was really the bastards from the ebay store that I ordered our lawn mower from… the mower didn’t come for ages (2 weeks) and our grass grew to mamoth proportions. Needless to say, we ended up cutting it down with a steak knife…I know ghetto, but what are you going to do?
Anyway, we now have lush green grass, a rusty push mower (the old school type without a motor), a grill without propane (Still didn’t get any) and a bunch of plastic chairs. I can’t wait for summer

Damn, I can’t believe it’s already 12:40. This day is just flying by. Figures that when I am actually working and need the time it’s not there, but when I’m sitting in class listening to a terribel professor talk about interpreting the Bible in 1000 different ways it just is terriblely slow. Oh well, that’s life I suppose.

Today I was sitting in my terrible religion class and jotting down some of the upcoming events that I have going on, mainly the due dates of my final papers and things like that. I quickly realized that I have quite a bit of work to do this weekend. On the up side, after this weekend is over, the only paper that I’ll really have left to work on is my Pullman paper (35 page terribleness) and some in class essays. So that kind of puts a smile on my face. But on the bad side, I’m going to be working on papers pretty much from Thursday (I took the day off from work) till Sunday night.
Turns out that I am able to hand in another draft of my Pullman paper to get some more feedback from my professor. This sounds like it’s a great idea, but it must be handed into her by Friday at the latest, so I’ve got to really settle my ass down and get working on that. Ogh… one more full week of classes, and then it’s a study week, then finals week.

Of course I don’t have all that many finals, but what I do have is crammed into the smallest space of time. On the evening of Tuesday, May 9th, at 7:00pm, I have my first final which is a long in-class essay in my Leadership class. The following morning, at 9:00, I have my Planet Earth final, which is again, fairly simple, just a matter of looking over the book. My final exam is directly after the Planet Earth and is my Terrorism and Counter Terrorism final. That one isn’t going to be easy, and it’s going to require a ton of reading and a ton of prep work. I just hate when everything falls into a short period of time. But believe you me, the night of Wednesday, May 10th is going to be wonderful.
I already have it planned out, Foreign Guinness that’s been sitting on my shelf since last May is going to be drunk, relaxation will commence.
I’ve decided that I don’t like working, so the most obvious thing that I could do when I finish school is to stop working, but alas, the great Money Gods won’t allow me to do that, so I’m going to be stuck working. I’ve decided that a solid 20 hour a week schedule will allow me to get plenty of reading done, working out and such, while still making just enough as to cover my rent. I can suck up the extra $200-$300 that I’ll loose out on that month for the sheer pleasure of being able to sit back and do nothing. mmmmmm I can’t wait.

One of the most urgent upcoming events is Laura’s departure to Ireland. Laura is my editor for all my papers and she’s very helpful. As much as I don’t like it at times, she’s the one that really keeps me from handing in total crap. So I kind of rely on her to crack the whip on me and get my ass to produce some quasi-palatable papers. She’s going to be leaving for Ireland the week before my paper is due. She’ll get back the day before! It’s actually not a bad thing because it’s going to really force me to get a move on on the paper before she leaves so that I have some help with it.
Either way, my life in the next two weeks is going to suck. Lots of work, but lots of reward at the end, so I’ll make it through.

I was googling myself and found some more of my pictures online. So I decided to share.