A LONG WAY BACK

I have a lot of ground to make up. I'd like to tell you all of the things I've done and seen, but with my planned website (which I'll pick apart for this here post) going down the drain, I thought I should put something up to keep all of you up to date. It's a bit of a cut and paste, but I think this will be easier to digest than if I threw everything at you at once. I'll try to break it down like so:

First, I'm in Australia. I hope all of you know that.

Secondly, all of you should know about my past troubles with roommates, so to try and fix that problem, I decided to go for a deluxe room where I get my own room and bathroom. What I got was a big house and two really cool roommates. Here you go:


My Roommates:

Name: Matt
Age: 19
Build: Short, Lanky, 4 eyes, hair pulled back in a pony tail
Home: Brisbane, Australia
Favorite Food: Anything Microwavable
Favorite Show: Futurama, Family Guy
Favorite Music: "60's and 70's era progressive rock and 90's grunge"
In his spare time he: is a student rep for the school and goes to clubs where him and his friends dance to Grease Lightning.
Quote: "Jerk is such an American word."
We get along just fine.

Name: Chirag
Age: 25
Build: Tall, twiggy, wide eyes
Home: Bombay, India
Favorite Food: Crisp Pepperoni
Favorite Show: Everything
Favorite Music: Trance and Classical
In his spare time he: plays ps2 and talks about life.
Quote: "See, here I could buy a bike... or a horse."
He's hilarious.

What else do you need to know...? The town is really amazing. It's just a small surfing village, where everyone is really environmentally and health conscious, and it's even made me change towards that a bit, too. The school is also way nicer than I could've ever imagined. All the teachers are really laid-back (most of them take their shoes off during class) and the facilities are top-notch. I'll get some pictures up later.

It's also been really good having our big house. At times it's almost like a hotel, and we've already had some English backpackers come and go. They stayed for two nights, and we went out for a nice dinner to show them the town and then we partied a little, which broke the cycle of staying closer to home at night, which was probably for the best. Some of the night life can be scary, though... with a club like Cheeky Monkeys around, you never know what might happen, or who might... oh nevermind.

But along the lines of the scary night life, (I have to tell this story) last night Matt and I went to a party with the two girls,a nd it was in this really high-class swanky warehouse apartment, and the whole place with littered with candles. I was talking to one of the girls, who I had a bit of a thing for, and we turn to go sit down on the couch and my back feels really hot, so I look back and I had caught my shirt on fire with one of the candles. Luckily, a quick swipe of my hand and I got it all out, but it left me with a nice big burn hole in the middle of my back for the rest of the night.

The backpackers were really sweet, though, and they invited me to spend Christmas in Brisbane with them, which now makes 3 places I have to be for Christmas, so I might have a rough day then.

Um... I suppose that's good for now. It's hard enough on my brain trying to rememberall the things that I've done. I'll try to keep things up to date about once a week, probably on the weekends, so check back later, and go ahead and leave a comment or questions if you want to hear more about anything. Hope all is well back in the States! Take care!

Flick

What to say? What to say? Nothing new really. My days have been filled with Lego Star Wars, frisbee golf and cleaning my room. I can't complain. Then, tonight the fam went out and saw The Departed. It was really amazing. Not since Fight Club have I been filled with 2 1/2 hours of fun characters, amazing action and a plot twisting script to die for at the movies. But everyone in it did a ridiculously good job, and... hm.... yeah, they all deserve Academy Awards. I just decided.

Like a Charm

As I put it so lightly to Sara: I popped my cherry. I finally gave in and bought an iPod. It needed to be done, and it's over with, so let's move on.

But getting everything set up on that almost made me forget that I was going to see a Broncos game on this cold, rainy night. Getting settled in with a little less than 3 minutes left before kickoff, I thought I might've been in over my head. I was already soaked, and cold, and the the fat man sitting next to me was wearing a moo-moo that was only funneling more rain down onto me.

Then the game started. Even though the first half of the game was probably the most boring thing anyone at home has ever seen, I was ecstatic. Whenever you get cold, you just yell and stand up and cheer and jeer and any of your worries disappear.

But the game really wasn't that bad, for a defensive struggle. With all the rain getting onto the field, there were fumbles and interceptions, and you knew that with any play, the entire game could change. And finally, the Broncos powered past the Ravens defense and put up a touchdown to ice the game, and warm up the fans.

When the clock ran out, everyone walked back into the night, still whooping and hollering, and some of them even fighting Ravens fans. It was an incredible atmosphere.

So if the rain couldn't even stop us from having a good time, what could put a damper on this night? When we get back to where we parked, we find an empty spot. We check the signs, and nowhere on the 3 different signs does it say that we couldn't park there. In fact, we seemed to have found the only time that we COULD park there. So was it towed? Was it stolen?

I called the information center that we were referred to on the signs, and while they couldn't tell us if the car was towed, they could tell us that we would have to walk about 4 miles to the middle of the boonies to check things out. We set out on foot. I don't mind the exercise, especially on a beautiful night as such, but I'd rather kinda take a cab, but we figured we'd already be paying out the ass to get the car back.

After our trek, and many, many wrong turns (we had to ask some guys at an ice cream factory!?!? where to go) we arrived at the gates of what appeared to be a maximum security prison, but in fact was the Waste Management Center. By this point, my dad is likely to burst. So he walks up the gate and when a guard opens it, mistaking it for an invitation to walk in, my dad tries to walk in. The guard gets offended by such a gesture and says "hey hey hey, don't get so pushy there!" Seriously, this jerkoff would be perfect as the asshole cops that you see in movies that blow everything out of proportion.

"I'm not pushy, I just want my car back..." my dad starts up with the cop, clearly getting pushy.

"Can we get going here, we're ready to close up" the guard's supervisor says.

So the guard raises his voice and yells back to his supervisor, but he's clearly yelling it to everyone within 100 yards of us, "I would, but this guy here is getting pushy with me."
Somehow this feels like sketch comedy.

My dad finally lets the dillhole to let him in, and then, the gate being open, I mistake that for an invitation too, so the guy gets all pissy with me because I tried to follow my dad in to get our car. So I sit out in the cold and rain, waiting for all this bullshit to get over with. After a good 20 minutes, my dad finally comes roaring out of the lot, and we get back out on the road.

Apparently, it was $100 to pay the tow company, and it was a $120 fine to the cops, which he'd have to appeal later, which we would clearly win, yet would have to go back down to Denver to do.

So while my dad was in there paying them the $100 CASH!!! to get our car back he asks, "Does this bullshit happen a lot? Does the city make a lot off of this?"
And they leave us with this gem, "Oh yeah, this could basically pay their salaries."

That's our wonderful government at work, everybody. Towing cars illegally, and then charging people up the ass to get them back, relying on the fact that everyone is too lazy or busy to challenge the ticket.

Well do ya, punk?

I'm sorry. I dropped the ball. I had the perfect rambo moment today, and I didn't even get pictures. But I can help you visualize it:

For months, if not years now, my uncle (a cop) and I have always been masterminding a plan to get out and go shooting with all of his sweet ass rifles. As everyone's pointed out, I've been acting like I only have 2 more weeks to live, so with me leaving, it seemed like the perfect excuse to finally get some lead out.

My uncle picked me up bright and early at 10 o'clock and we set up towards the Pawnee Grasslands. For those of you who don't know where that is, it's a national reserve out east of A Unique Little Town (or Ault for anyone outside of Ault), which is out east of Severence, the quiet town best known for their Rocky Mountain Oysters. Now if you're getting farther out into the country than a town where they're known for their amazing ability to choke down bull balls, you know it's out there.

We make it there and we lay everything out. There's an AK-47, two AR-15s, two police-issue 9mm, and a Dirty Harry style Smith and Wesson .357. It was a step up from the pellet guns of my youth. He runs me through the safety issues with each one, how to work them, then tosses one in my hands and gets me going. It really is amazing holding and firing something that could kill a man. I got a woody. Not really, but it was still fun to work through all of them.

A couple of targets and pop cans later, we loaded some armor piercing bullets into the .357 and let a large metal sheet have it. Those things ripped through there like nothing. Then we tried the normal hollow points, and even with the amazing recoil on the handgun, the rounds bounced off one by one (which probably wasn't really safe, us being 10 yards away and all). Just to let you know that armor won't do shit against some of the stuff they have now-a-days all you robbers-to-be.

We head back to where we set up shop, already satisfied with the day when my uncle says, "You want to Rambo it and get out of here?" Of course I'd been waiting for him to ask that all day. We both grabbed a rifle with two magazines, then each loaded 9mm with 2 mags and strapped them all up. We had everything ready to go, except my ear plugs. I'd worn them the entire day up until that point, and I was having too much fun to stop and go back. We started out from about 100 yards out and started pumping the rounds into the target as we walked up on it. When one clip was empty, we loaded the next. All I heard was ringing. We kept moving forward. When the rifle ammo was gone, we switched to the handguns. My eardrums were literally bouncing in my head. When one clip emptied, we loaded another. We emptied every shell we had, and stopped there, in front of the target that we had thoroughly ripped to shit.

"You want to get some lunch?" my uncle asks.
"Huh?"
150 rounds had just gone off by my head.

So that's pretty much how it was for the rest of the day, but it was absolutely worth it. I still can't hear much of anything in my right ear, but I go to a lot of concerts; I know it can recover.

Could be fun!?!?

Being an avid South Park watcher, tabloid follower and music listener, I've come across a lot of information about Scientology. Of course, South Park takes a total mockery of the entire religion, but when I read that Beck was a scientologist, I decided, with a little free time, to check out "the information" a little more.

I found their main website at www.scientology.org, and while I couldn't find anything on aliens like South Park might suggest, I did find some interesting things. The home page of the website outlines the religion clearly, in that the religion springs from 3 "truths":

Man is an immortal, spiritual being. His experience extends well beyond a single lifetime. His capabilities are unlimited, even if not presently realized — and those capabilities can be realized. He is able to not only solve his own problems, accomplish his goals and gain lasting happiness, but also achieve new, higher states of awareness and ability.

In Scientology no one is asked to accept anything as belief or on faith. That which is true for you is what you have observed to be true. An individual discovers for himself that Scientology works by personally applying its principles and observing or experiencing results.

Through Scientology, people all over the world are achieving the long-sought goal of true spiritual release and freedom.

While I can't attest to the third "truth" the first one summarizes the main problems that I have with some other religions *Christianity, I'm looking your way* by way of giving power back to the indiviual, instead of having to put all your faith in a higher power. The second "truth" is also kind of nice, because it just lays out that "life isn't going to be the same for everyone".

The second thing that I found interesting was "the Clear". It sounds to be a lot like Buddhist's Enlightenment: a state that can be achieved through realization of yourself, which gradually lets you deal with life more rationally. Through it, though, you also have to recognize that the body is nothing, and that the soul of an individual is all that matters in the big picture of life.

With the time I had, I didn't get to delve too deeply into the website, since there was a lot of information, but what I found was, strangely, intriguing.