Sunday, November 30, 2003

Am I funny or just insane?

  Friday, November 28, 2003

I hope everyone had an awesome Thanksgiving. Being my first Thanksgiving without leftovers of my own, I was really hoping to find some restaurants that offer leftover turkey sandwich specials. To my knowledge, none exist.

  Thursday, November 27, 2003

I have a theory: logic is not the know all, end all of the universe. Human beings have advanced because we have made irrational decisions based on our feelings. Otherwise computers would all ready be running the show.

I already adhere to rogic, which is basically things that make sense, but only to me. Falling down those stairs is a rogical thing to do I might say to myself. From now on though, if thinking things through seems like it would take a little too long, or there are no discernible results from the thinking process, than I'm going on impulse. Look out world!

  Tuesday, November 25, 2003

I've been Mr. Popular lately. In chronological order: Tom, Aymond, Brandt, and Keacher have all mentioned me in recent posts. I must be doing something right, or I'm just a good reference to compare themselves to so that they look cool. Either way, attention for me! Yay!

  Monday, November 24, 2003

Props to one Tyler Hicks-Wright. The man spent eleven straight hours with just me as company and didn't even show the first hints of going insane. This is no easy task. The last time I was with a person for that long was my ex-girlfriend Meghann after prom night. It was remotely successful, if I recall I spent hour eleven of that interaction hurling wads of mud at her from the face of a cliff.

My nineteen month dating drought is over. Now I can go back to pondering trivial aspects of women in an effort to position myself better with the respective woman I went on the date with. We call this "the game" and man do I suck at it.

I told my date I had the hots for her the first time I saw her and she didn't believe me, insisting that the first time eye contact was made I gave her a "Who the hell are you!" look instead of a "Well hello! Who are you?" look. I found this post to prove what I thought. Check out the first sentence of the second paragraph: ignore all of the married woman part though, it's not true.

  Sunday, November 23, 2003

Aymond's World! Party Time! Excellent! Steve has left quite his little footprint on my stay in Terre-Haute. Because of his recent influence I have gotten the urge to just rant on my blog on about three or four seperate occasions. Instead, I will just share some of my insight on the man.

I like Aymond, mainly because the range of topics I can discuss with him encompasses the entire range of discussable topics. I was telling him about this, and referred to him as one of my 360 friends. Steve is also unemployed and was staying in Terre-Haute despite not going to school there anymore. His boat is a little different than mine, but his voice was a constant source of sympathy, at least sympathy of the Steve Aymond variety.

I have discovered that Steve has the ability to encourage me to be myself, it's a quality I don't really see in men, and from this moment forward I will forget that I said that, but the man appreciates who I am, and I'm grateful for that. He also has the ability to run out of 1st Wok and throw up on the curb, but that's a different story.

Steve called on Friday to say that he was leaving, some exerpts from the message:

"I'm heading out... the Pike house is sorta out of my way... I'm outta gas and I need to go in the other direction... hopefully you'll stop by again sometime soon... give me a call sometime. See you later."

Typical, I'm not offended by his lack of a visit, it just would have been a hug and a handshake anyway. This morning he wrote a post and in part of it he compared me to God. I would suggest not to make such comparisons, but from what I gather from the post and the message, I have left quite my own little footprint as well.

Now that I think of it, Friday was super huge and I can't believe I didn't say anything about it. In the news of all news, my good friend Bill Middendorf was back from Iraq, I believe he gets a couple weeks off around Thanksgiving. I'm reluctant to share too many of his stories, because I don't know what's cool to tell the universe and what's not, but they were really awesome. Make sure if I see you in person I tell you about them. In the place in Iraq that he is stationed he found this room just filled with these awards that Saddam would give out to good citizens or something. So he took a whole stack of them, and he's been giving them to his friends. After we went to the bars and dinner he presented me with my own Saddam Hussein Award, for being a good guy. It's awesome, it's got a picture of Saddam on it and all this stuff written on it in Arabic. I showed it to the friend who came over last night. I'm really proud of it, and I will be showcasing it for the rest of this trip as a barometer of the coolness of the people I know.

After Bill left, I made one last trip to IHOP and I think I might have myself a date before I leave on Monday, I wrote a poem about it:

One, two: buckle my shoe.
Three, four: shut the door.
Five, six: pick up sticks.
Seven, eight: lay them straight.
Nine, ten: I got a date tomorrow biatch!

This seems like as good a time as any to mention something I have been thinking about lately, along the lines of dating. Stay with me, it may still be a little funny, but the following is a serious as I think I will ever get on this blog from now on.

I am quite possibly the most innocent twenty-two year old man in the United States. I'm more touch feely then your average guy, but the boyfriends of these girls I tend to touch a lot describe me as 'safe' (maybe that's why people think I"m gay). I like the fact that I'm innocent, I can do amazing wonderful things with no grand intention. It's been a long while, but when I'm on a date I think of innocent sixth grade stuff, like if it's alright to hold her hand, how to get my arm around her, and if my mom will like her when I invite her over for dinner; I make booger jokes and brag about how cool my friends are, and it's awesome, to me at least. For the girl, I would have to imagine that she's trying to figure out if this is just my act to get laid, and wonder about how many other women I've been scheming. I would also figure this would enter into a girls mind at all the stages of a relationship, even when all I'm trying to do is make new friends. I tell girls how awesome they are, because they truly are awesome; unfortunately, to the apprehensive young lady, that's an indication that I'm coming on to strong, and I scare them away. I guess that's where I got that 'scary' reputation my freshman year: I was anxious to please then, I still am, but I go about it a different way; however, as evidenced by some events this week, I still do a pretty good job at being scary.

So is being frighteningly innocent what makes me me, or do I have to mature my dating attitude? The question may be rhetorical, but I think it describe a sort of attitude I'm going into this date with. I'll still be me, but I'll keep in mind to exercise some sort of restraint and understand that whoever the girl may be, she has some issues about me that she will have to reach her own conclusions about. Me telling her what those conclusions should be, would be wrong, but considering that I will be leaving less then twelve hours after the date ends, I'll probably end up pushing it a little bit.

  Saturday, November 22, 2003

The great thing about staying at the house over break is that you get to be really close to the people who stay there with you. The last four of us: Alan Schroeder (War), Isaac Brown (Pestilence), Tyler Hicks-Wright (Famine), and I (Death) just got back from Fazoli's. We were all decked out in our apocalyptic white t-shirts.

The other three horseman are all sophomores, and none of the evening details are worth blogging about, we just had a good time. It's really amazing to me how much this fraternity has it's shit together when it comes to having guys that are cool to hang out with. I guess that's why I've been here for almost three weeks.

Cartoon physics is pretty cool. You know what I mean by cartoon physics, like when you run off the edge of something you don't fall until you actually realize that you aren't standing on anything. Then you have only enough time to momentarily panic before accelerating towards the ground.

This effect can also be experience in reality. For instance, when you are in a loft and you roll out of bed, if you reach over to the loft ladder and miss by three feet, everything is still alright. Not until you realize that you are effectively suspended in mid air, will you start to fall. Then there is this slight moment of panic before falling the seven feet to the floor. What differs cartoons from reality, is that in reality, there is normally stereo equipment and television stands to look out for on the way down.

  Thursday, November 20, 2003

I showed Matt Brandt how to make a blog yesterday. He kind of already had one before, but it was all hardcoded, at least now the foundation has been laid for him to use it more frequently. Right now it's mainly just some ramblings about how he loves his girlfriend Trish; it's the gayest thing I have ever seen. It will get better though.

You might notice the search box to the left; I've been working on adding it to all navigable pages on my site. It's powered by Google, but I am, as of now, still unsure whether or not is an effective search tool.

I figured it could be of use, say you are my good friend Buck, visiting for the first time in five months: you wanted to see what that poser, Rory, has been saying about you. You type your name into the box, hit return and presto, you are instantly returned a listing of pages that I used your name. Feel free to abuse the service and find out if I've been stalking you. Let me know if you have an suggestions or advice about adding a search: something better, or if it's worth my while. I'm not sure if this is how it's going to stay.

  Wednesday, November 19, 2003

I've been telling this story a lot lately, and I believe that it needs some post-explanation:

This past weekend I got the phone number of two girls at the same time... They work at Arby's... The cute one turns 18 on Sunday.

I feel the need to explain to the people I have told this story to that I am not proud of it. Well, I am proud of the fact that I have an amusing story like this (and it's really funny when you can hear me say it, which is specifically the reason why I did not post this before), but I'm not proud of getting the phone numbers of two minors. I wasn't even trying, it was more like they gave their numbers to me. I only tell the story, because it's me, I don't get numbers and the fact that I got two makes people think, "whoa cool", but then you find out the work at Arby's and their seventeen and then the story turns back into "Silly Rory."

I'm explaining this because I think a few of the people I told the story to thought I was seriously psyched to get digits, and that I made it sound like I was even more stoked that they were underage. I'm not messing with that, and people totally missed the roriness in the situation. Now give or take a few months and a stable job in the Terre Haute area, then maybe I give the cute one a call; she wants to be a Doctor!

  Thursday, November 13, 2003

Last night I had (what is known in the business of addiction and mental illness) an intervention. The intervention is the step where the family and friends talk to the subject, explain that they feel that you might have a problem, and that you need help. It's a very positive experience, but it can be difficult because you are basically telling someone that what they are doing is bad, and they could take it the wrong way. Stu and Cory sat me down and explained to me their concern for my lack of effort to find a job. Their concern was merited, as was Kindinger's a couple of weeks ago, theirs was just more polite. As any addict would, I denied that it was an issue, I tried to compromise with their fear, but no matter how I look at it, I still have to take that first step that all troubled people must: admitting I have a problem.

  Monday, November 10, 2003

I've been pondering something of late that most will think is trivial, but I feel that it relates to many other capabilities of mine. As I made it through college, the greatest thing I ever learned was to think for yourself. This is more difficult than it seems because we all have a lot of pre-conceived notions that we have trouble analyzing. When I felt that I had developed the ability to think for myself I pinpointed three preconceptions that I should sort through to test my abilities: sex, alcohol, and the f-word.

Sex (or lack there of) was the first to cross off the list, after a short deliberation I agreed with my former opinion, and I haven't looked back. The drinking was more difficult, but again after some tooling and after some experiences, I figured it wasn't my thing. So that leaves the f-word, which is also the subject of my recent pondering. I didn't do this often, but over the past couple years I have analyzed my reasons for not using it. I haven't used the word since fifth grade and I found no validity in it's absence. So I have resolved to use it, just not gratuitously.

I made this resolution two months ago; problem is I can't do it. It's been a steady process. I can now type it. Check this out: fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck... FUCK! Weird thing is, when I wrote it I never said it out loud in my head and did everything I could not to think the word. My mind has an automatic *beep* sound that goes off any time someone even says it. Last night I used the word a bunch of times in a dream I had, I figure that it's a step in the right direction. If I am ever going to say it, then the first time it comes back it's got to be worth it: either I better be super pissed, or it better be the funniest thing ever. I had a good opportunity right at the beginning of my re-integration period, but I don't think I was far enough along in the process yet. I had another opportunity four days ago, and I of course didn't come through, that's where this concern comes into play.

Why this is a problem, and what frightens me, is I think this may actually be some sort of mental problem, if not illness. You would think when someone decides to say something, they just would. Why does this have to be a process with me? I suspect two reason, both negative. The first is that I have yet to let go of my preconceptions, meaning I have yet to understand what it means to think for myself. The other is that I have a legitimate mental illness that prevents me from developing the word in my head; if that's the case, then I have a lot more problems then my inability to flick someone off.

None of this is really pressing, but I'm afforded the luxury of thinking about it considering what I'm doing with my life right now. There is no great concern, but there are hints of it. I'm probably a couple more opportunities away before I really start to get bothered by this. Until then, at least I won't be questioned for unlawful carnal knowledge.

  Sunday, November 09, 2003

Cliff Breiding's reign of terror is over! The barely self-supported loft that existed in the room formally known as Cliff Breiding's Room (aka Welte's Closet aka Noonan's Box aka Dupin's Sex Room) cease's to be. I tore it down today to make room for my future residence; over the next week I will gut the place and try to make it a nice little alumni boning cabana.