Hooplah.Org

For years I would try to find the people I used to know by doing a google search of their names and crossing my fingers. Despite the almighty power of my love Google it was never able to find anyone I was looking for. I never stopped trying, still doing search after search, but over time I did it less and less because it was frustrating to always come up with nothing. I thought that as time went on it would only be a matter of time before people developed online identities and it didn’t make sense that I still wasn’t finding anyone after 4 years of looking.

As it turns out I was just living under a rather large rock, because people have been branching out in the internet. I was just looking in the wrong places and refusing to look in the obvious ones; like Myspace.

Ever since I discovered what everyone else in the world knew about but me, I have been sneaking an hour here and there to browse Myspace. I’ve found a good deal of my HS graduating class, as well as some people from college. It seems so weird – back when we all were in high school, I was probably the only one, or one of the very few, that kept a personal website… and it sort of boggles my mind that with the help from Myspace that there are now so many people that have openly accepted it as something perfectly normal to do. Ironic that one of the few things I once thought made me accomplished and unique from everyone else has now become mass produced and simplified for the masses. And considering that I don’t mind saying that while browsing Myspace I felt like I was sucked into a timewarp back to 1998. Browsing around I would think, “I had a page that looked just like that back when I was 15, but back then I also thought wearing neon orange pants with red shoes was awesome.” Are people colorblind? I guess history always will repeat itself, and this is the second and likely not the last time I’m left wondering if people really look their Myspace pages when they’re done customizing it and think to themselves, “that looks awesome!” I know people aren’t really there to comply to web standards and make their Myspace page look elegant, but when I browse around the only thing I notice is how it’s the cool thing to see how hideous they can make it look. After nearly 8 years of focusing on design and page elements it becomes a force of habit, I guess.

I’m being a little harsh about Myspace, but I have my reasons: after years of avoiding it the best I could, I finally sold out and have added myself to the ranks. I registered an account sometime back in 2004, in order to view other people’s photos, and I did it on the condition that that would be all that I used it for. I didn’t want any part of Myspace – I can make my own web page, thank you very much – and I kept that promise for as long as I wanted to, though even now I’m wondering why I apparently wanted to break it. I’m not there to network or make new friends. I’ll probably be just as distant as I usually am with everyone online, so I don’t even think it’ll strengthen my old friendships. I guess I only added myself because of how much I enjoyed looking at everyone else’s profiles. It was interesting to know where people were now, to see if they were happy, if they had kids, etc… and I figured maybe someone would be curious about me, or maybe someone wanted to find me like I had wanted to find others. Unlike me, most people would probably do a Myspace search, where I wouldn’t of been found before, than a google search. I didn’t want that to sound so egotistical… but I guess it is. Myspace seems to be all about being egotistical.

Even though I’ve only had any pictures and information posted on my Myspace for less than a week, I’ve already had a few people from HS send me messages and I’ve sent out a few of my own. We’d reply back and forth a few times, talking about major changes in our lives or just saying how we are. Usually it would go back and forth 1-3 times… then it seems to abruptly stop, with me being the last one that sent a message. Not sure what I’m saying that’s killing the conversations; it seems to happen after I say that I was sick for a few years. Not sure what about that is a mood killer, but guess I should try to dance around that from now on.

I found Jenn’s Myspace. The Jenn… the last person in the world who I thought would willingly put anything about herself on the internet. And though I never thought she’d do it, whenever I did my google searches, her name was always one I tried to find. I’ve said so much about what happened between her and I, so many things over such a small period of time, that it seems pointless to talk about all the memories that come to mind when I think of her. I’ve said things I regret, and though I doubt I’ll ever have the courage to ask, it makes it easier on me to assume that she feels the same. Sometimes people leave a particular impression on your life… over time it doesn’t matter anymore if it was good or bad; eventually it just becomes something that’s there and you live with each day. Whether she meant to or not, she changed my life tremendously… and looking at her Myspace, the proof that I had been looking for for years that she does still exists… it was like I was looking at a ghost. I looked at her pictures, read what she had written on her site… turns out she had spent a few years dealing with illness as well. When I read that, I had the urge to contact her… use that as a middle ground to see if we could both get some closure and some long overdue understanding between us. But I hesitated and I chose not to; even though it’s all 6 years past it didn’t feel like it was the right time to let her know that I still exist. I have kept all the archives from my college years on this site, and now they have their own category that would make it easy for her to find all the posts that once upset her so. I’m proud of this site and don’t want to hide anything anymore – this is me and my life and I won’t run away from my right to express it again. Who knows if maybe one day she’ll do a search for my name on Myspace and find this site, again… but it will have to be her decision and by her own will to do so. Somehow it doesn’t feel like it’s my place to take the first step in the space between her and I… who knows, in the end, maybe it’s something neither of us should do.

Yesterday Matt and I went to go see Shrek 3. Even though it certainly wasn’t a great movie – the plot turned from conflict to resolution way too quickly and awkwardly – I still enjoyed it because it involved actually leaving the apartment. I’ve been begging for us to go see a movie for weeks now, partly because we’ve been sitting on roughly $50 in free movie vouchers, but also because we finally have the time to do these things. I almost don’t know what to do with myself with all this time on my hands.

Before it was all about rushing home to be here at 5PM, logging in, clocking in 4 or 5 hours to our other “job” and be done just in time to go to bed… so that we could wake up at 4 or 5 AM and repeat the process all over again. Though I still feel a tremendous amount of guilt for doing it, quitting WoW feels like it was the best thing I’ve done in a while. It had it’s rewarding moments, but in the recent months they were scarce. Blizzard’s decision to change the game in a way that ruined what I had spent a year + helping create is what ultimately drove away this Beta 1 tester, this person who once wrote a 2 page long bug report describing how the footprints in the snow weren’t lining up correctly. This person who was on the Blizzard’s Friend list was driven away when the one MMO company I thought could be trusted slapped me in the face. And with each passing day I can’t believe how good of a decision it was to leave has turned out to be.

Considering the type of relationships I have, it’s ironic that quitting an MMO actually saved my relationship rather than ruined it.

Though we have quit WoW for the time being, we haven’t been completely MMO free – Matt had gotten into the beta for Lord of the Rings Online some time ago (August 06 I think?) and I got into the same beta in October 06. We played it off and on, nothing extreme, since we were still trying to juggle WoW at the same time – but when the game was released last April, we knew enough about LOTRO to be confident that it’d be worth at least a few weeks of fun to buy it in retail. It also came with the perk that if we bought the collector’s edition of the game it’d only be $9.99/month. That equates to almost 2 accounts for the price of one, and though money isn’t our problem, it’s still nice that no matter how much the monthly fees for MMOs are increased (and they will increase – I think they were only $11.99 when I first started MMOs in 2002) the $9.99 will never change. So far the game has been alright – just choosing between a DPS class or a healer has been the hardest part for me. Having been a healer for the past 2 years, I really wanted a change… but every time I hear the group say “damnit, we need a healer” I get a pang of guilt.

Proof that I am a nerd: I am extremely excited for housing in LOTRO, which is supposed to be released this fall. Having my own hobbit home in a mound of dirt? FTW I think.

It’s been a really slow process getting this site up and running again. I’ve opted to start fresh – all of the archives from before November 2005 will be cosmetically separate from all the posts after May 2007. Usually I would try to cover up or ignore the fact that I neglected doing writing for so long, but this time it feels good to own up to not being consistent. The post separation represents a change from my “childhood” years to now living life as an adult. I’m also going to try to keep a new format to posts (actually using categories, oh my!) and I was just too lazy to go back through 1K + posts and sort them all out.

This site will take a decent amount of time to finally come together, and I like that. Now that I’m finally allowing myself to casually enjoy my hobbies, free of any sort of stress or obligation, maybe they’ll actually make my life better rather than a living hell.

Despite my pace, I have spent a decent amount of time and money on this website so far: I adjusted my hosting plan ($2/month more), switched over to WordPress, bought $100 in clip art books from Barnes & Noble in preparation for making designs (something I never did or even knew existed before), and just this past Friday I went go Best Buy and got worked by a very “helpful” and knowledgeable sales associate in the Digital Camera section. I had been saying that I wanted a new digital camera for a while now, one with more photo options other than the Artificial Light Feature That Always Comes on and Cannot be Turned Off, so I spent most of last week researching the options. I ended up choosing the Canon S3 IS – not only because it is the best step up from the noob-friendly “point and click” digital cameras and a reasonable step down from the “OMG so high priced I need a loan” ones, but also because of the list that I had of cameras I was interested in the S3 was the only one that Best Buy had in the store. It was fate.

I’ve had some fun playing around with the camera, but so far what I’ve been able to accomplish is just seeing how many buttons pushed and settings on I can have at any one time and still be able to tell what it was I was taking a picture of when I review my work later. This camera also has some pretty good video and sound, so I’m sure there will be more than enough videos of our kitten up soon enough.

Speaking of her, this is probably the best time to introduce her: Meet Nala, Matt and I’s 8 month old Snowshoe Siamese. She was my Christmas 2006 present and she owns me.

This is something I wrote on April 23rd. It’s what sparked my interest in journaling again, because for the first time in years I looked to writing (granted, as a last resort) as a way to deal with my feelings about what happened on April 16th at Virginia Tech. For a solid week I could barley function outside of refreshing CNN and getting lost in my own thoughts – I was at a loss of what to do because no matter how much I talked and read about it it would still haunt me all day long. Writing was the only thing that finally freed my mind and allowed me to have some closure, if there ever really can be.

——

My mind has been whirling for the past couple of weeks and it feels as though the force of is only getting stronger each day. It started with my poor performance at work, it continued with the troubles between Matt and I, and its now at it’s peak over what happened at Virginia Tech.

As a testament to how I seem to have grown past doing this, my initial urge (that I struggle with even to write this sentence) is to keep my thoughts and feelings of what happened at Virginia Tech to myself. I did not go to school there – I went to Radford University, some 15-20 miles down the road. During my 1 year spent at RU, I visited VT a handful of times, usually staring out at it from the backseat of Dave’s car when he was picking up or dropping off Nadia. Two or three times I actually walked on the grounds and spent some time in Nadia’s dorm room. I remember disliking Virginia Tech – the idea of a school that big intimidated me, I didn’t like the look of the pseudo New England buildings, and I believe I did feel jealous of those who attend school there or maybe that was just shame of attending Radford University. I only knew two people who went to school at VT – Vince being one of them. I remember the moment he told me he had been accepted to Virginia Tech – I believe it was 1999, he had just picked me up from my house and while we were driving in the dark he broke the silence with saying he had been accepted. There was also Nadia, who I met through my friend Dave since they were dating at the time (2001-2002). I spent a lot of time with her at the beginning of the year, since she had a little trouble getting used to VT and meeting people. I enjoyed her company – one of my clearest memories I still have of her was watching that year’s Miss USA contest in my dorm’s common room. Of the those two people I knew who went to Virginia Tech, I no longer have contact with either of them. Parts of me wish I could talk to Nadia and Vince right now, but at the same time, I know I’d have nothing to say – I’d be asking them to repeat the same thing they’ve probably repeated thousands of times by now, and I doubt what I had to say would be of any interest to them.

I don’t know where my views fit in on what happened 4/16 other than being yet another voice in the resounding sympathy and shock that everyone, even those who have never even heard of Virginia Tech before Monday, are expressing. I’m one in the crowd of millions, and the only claim I have to justify how I feel is that 5 years ago I was within a couple of yards of the buildings that the shootings occurred in. Parts of me are angry at myself for my self importance – other than a handful of visits, VT never meant that much to me. How can I act as though it does all of a sudden? I know that what I’m going through right now is not even remotely close or relevant to what those who spent justifiable time at VT must be feeling, and the fact that I’m going through anything at all makes me feel as though I’m stealing grief that doesn’t belong to me.

My memories of Radford University are a sensitive subject for me – I usually avoid thinking about it if I can, because it just makes me sad – and even though I spent little to no time actually involved with VT, it is still a place I associate with my college years. It was apart of the area, apart of the experience – just like the Blue Ridge Mountains were. Even before 4/16 I could never think of RU without also remembering something about VT. Back when I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be returning for the 2002-2003 school year, I had planned to go to Virginia Tech after I finished 2 years at Radford. If I had gone down that route, I likely would of still been in the Blacksburg area, maybe even still attending VT, when the shootings took place.

I know what it feels like to have lived in the exact same town and experience the exact same sort of disruption that so many people experienced on 4/16. Roanoke VA is the site of my 9/11, as I was attending Radford University when the twin towers were hit. I still to this day clearly remember walking across the grounds of RU and hearing CNN echo across the grass through all of the dorm room’s open windows and doors witnessing everyone around me trying to find a way to deal with the same tragedy in an atmosphere where it should never be. I guess that’s the best way to put how I feel about VT – I’m relieving my 9/11 all over again.

I was standing in Qdoba, my favorite place to eat here in AZ, when I looked up at the TV and noticed a news bulletin that had the words “Virginia Tech” and “shooting.” There was a feeling of surprise, but not much else – the same lack-luster response I had when I first saw smoke billowing out of the first tower of the World Trade Center, before the second one was hit. I made a few comments of shock to Sheila, my coworker who had come with me to Qdobas, and we went back to the office without another word about it. With the recent shootings at the CNN office building in Atlanta, I assumed it was something “minor” – a typical foolish shooting about some personal drama that just happened to take place on the college campus. It wasn’t until after I had gotten back to the office, eaten my lunch, and started working again when I remembered “oh – I should check CNN to see what that was about.”

For a week after that I don’t think I spent more than 15 minutes without refreshing CNN.com.

Now whenever I start to remember RU and VT, I’ll have something else that makes me sad that I can’t help but think of.

For the first time in years I feel as though I’ve been allowed up for air. It’s left me with an aggravating mixture of emotions – like feeling guilty and liberated at the same time, for example. Although I think I’m justified in not wanting to elaborate on how my life has been the past 2+ years, partly out of the embarrassment I feel in confessing that a computer game broke my heart, I do feel the need to find a way to sum it up so that I can move on. I doubt I will ever fully forget this time of my life to warrant any effort toward recapping other than a few words that acknowledge that it did happen and that I was a witness to it. So, after putting a lot more thought into it than I should of while at work, this is the best that I’ve been able to come up with:

While it wasn’t the worst of times, it was the worst of times. I allowed myself to become trapped in situations that were unhealthy for me – instances that brought out every one of my flaws and weaknesses all for the sake of doing something that I was actually pretty horrible at. I was wrong. A lot. And I completely lost track of the differences between what I want to do, what I should do, and what I have to do. I met a few wonderful people and a lot of awful people – all of which I’m sure I’ll miss at one point or another as I move on. When I look back on the time that I’ve spent I feel as though it was stolen from me, when really all I did was give it away. Once everything finally came crashing down on me, I did the only thing that made any sense at all: I made the right decision at the wrong time.

My life has changed substantially over the past year, and is taking yet another turn with what I am writing now. It has been since November 2005, 18 months, since I have written anything that I actually intended to post. It’s been longer than that since I created a new web site design to finally replace the one that displayed my ugly mug.

This is a representation of a change in the winds of my life. Hopefully it will be for the better.