I have to say,

One of the best parts of graduating college and moving into the “real world” is seeing my friends succeed. Over the past year I’ve seen many of my friends find their dream job or just excel in a personal project that they really work hard at. We live in a tough world and it’s incredibly gratifying to see them happy. It’s extremely inspiring and I’m proud of each one of them.

Things I’ve Learned in Life

Things I’ve Learned in Life

Experiences > Material Possessions 

Things I’ve Learned in Life

#6

One of the best moments of growing up is realizing what you love and not caring one single bit what other people think.

Post 1000

Well, this is my 1,000th post on this blog.  I wasn’t sure what to do for the long time, but I decided to make a slightly more personal post with some stuff you might not know about me.

Here’s a bit about me that you may or may not know:

• I’m a 23-year-old recent college graduate, holding a degree in Visual Communication. 
• I was fortunate enough to find a decent paying full-time job early on that I enjoy and that lets me use the skills I learned in college.
• I am engaged to the most wonderful girl in the world and our wedding in six months can’t come soon enough.  We got engaged on the beach almost two years ago.
• I’m the creator of The Drunken Moogle.  Maintaining the site and adding content is one of my biggest hobbies.  I have lots of aspirations for where I want the site to go.  I enjoy building things from the ground up and it’s been extremely fun watching it grow.
• My favorite authors include H.P. Lovecraft, C.S. Lewis, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling.
• As social of a person I am, I love alone time. 
• I’m a practicing Catholic.  Growing in my relationship with God is important to me, though it’s hard sometimes.  I do all I can in my actions and words to fight and disprove the stereotype that Christians are judgmental. I try to keep in mind “Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words”, and live by it.
• I love studying religions and religious history in general, as well as atheistic views.  I especially love finding misconceptions about religions.
• Saying I’m a huge geek is an understatement.  I’ve been a gamer all my life, I enjoy watching anime, I like fantasy and sci-fi, and reading about new discoveries in science. 
• I hold in high regard the ability to tell stories, especially through new and interesting media.
• My favorite bands/musical artists include The Protomen, Thrice, The Offspring, The Beatles, Pedals on Our Pirate Ships, Allison Weiss, Daft Punk, and Nobuo Uematsu.
• I believe everyone can be happy
• I believe the key to solving problems is to look at things as simply as possible.  Simple and straightforward advice is the best advice.  This idea is what fuels my “Things I’ve Learned in Life” posts, tagged “tilil”.
• I enjoy food a lot.  I will most likely try any new food offered to me.
• I like meeting and talking to new people.

Well, hopefully now you know a bit more about me personally.  Hooray for 1000 posts.

*confetti*

Thank you, redneck trucker man. Thank you.

Today has been an off day.  Just really slow and kind of frustrating.  On my way home from work, I’m stopped at a traffic light, when I noticed a motion from the lane next to me.  A hand is waving down in my direction as if trying to get my attention.  Opening my window, I looked up to see a bald, heavily bearded, very redneck looking fellow.  I prepared to hear that something was wrong with the passenger side of my car, but instead the man looked at me and said in a very southern accent,

“If you have more than two bumper stickers on the backside of your car… youuuuuu might be a redneck.”

As dumb as the joke was, and how fairly un-redneck my bumper stickers are, I laughed pretty hard and and it made me smile the rest of the way home.  Thank you, redneck stranger.

New resolution for the year: Be a better stranger.

Things I’ve learned in life:

#5

If you don’t have real confidence at a certain moment in your life, an ability to act is a damn close second. 

Warning to recent graduates or soon to be grads: Your sense of time is going to be messed UP.

School is something that I’ve been taking part in for almost as long as I can remember.  Because of this, I’ve often based my perception of time on it.  In high school when someone asked the time, it was acceptable (and more useful) to say the class period and how many minutes into the class you were.  For an extremely long time, I’ve been judging my time by semesters instead of fractions of years.  Breaks from school became natural landmarks in time.  

I have to say that this is one of the weirder, although smaller, parts of graduating.  I’ll find myself thinking, “wow, I can’t believe it’s already almost the end of the semester,” instead of thinking “it’s almost the end of the year”.  

While I still think in terms of semesters, other “landmarks” are missing.  Finals, for example.  Around finals week for the past eight years, I’ve done a lot of my Christmas shopping, online and off, in my down time.  Since finals no longer apply to me, I’ve kind of skipped that step and haven’t had this moment in my brain where I thought, “hey, it’s time to buy stuff for people”.  This has not been helpful, as now it’s 6 days away from Christmas and I have yet to buy more than one or two gifts… oops.

Of course this will change over time and my mind will find new events to use as landmarks.  I think it might take a while though, as many of my friends (fiancee included) are still in college/grad school.  Is it time for Winter Break yet?