The Daily Adventures of Mercat

I'm looking for some old posts of mine because I can't remember exactly when some things happened. This is what it's like getting old, apparently. (Fuuuuuuuck)

1) My oldest post tagged "religion" is about drum corps auditions (which I honestly didn't remember being for the 2007 season? but I guess so...) and "I think I'm through questioning faith". LOL OH WELL. Interesting to see how much my tone has changed in just a few years though, even my posts from 2008 can get kinda judgmental.

For that I apologize.

2) I have been working on a letter to my Mormon friend trying to explain my philosophical situation. I intended it to be just a letter... three hours later, it's 13 pages long and I'm not finished. Whoops. As a result and because I am the world's laziest chef, I am eating half a can of olives that are at least a week old and hopefully not spoiled by anything else in the fridge. BECAUSE THIS IS COLLEGE

By the way, Douche Flatmate has a now three-day dinner mess on the counter, it smells fucking awful. Unfortunately I now have to play the "confrontation and talk about it" game.

3) I forgot that LJ tags were a "new" thing only a few years ago. WHICH IS MAKING IT EVEN HARDER TO FIND MY OLD POSTS FROM HIGH SCHOOL NOOOOOOOOOOOO

4) I wish I journaled more but I'm also glad to see that I have so much written already. And that I've been LJing for how many years now? 7? 8? Jesus fuck. It seems like only a few years ago. I can, however, attribute much of my writing voice to journaling (in the form of blogging). Addressing an audience like you are friends, but like there is absolutely no one in the seats in the whole auditorium. Just an interesting note.

And now back to my search for personal journal entries from the pre-tagging days, so I can get back to this ages-long letter.

P.S. It's pretty obvious these days, I think, that I'm an atheist. So hopefully no one who is looking for a way to get me in trouble finds this. LUCKILY I think I've done an okay job of scrubbing this out of the main google search pages for me, and I need to go back and probably lock some old posts, and I probably should edit my friends list considering friends from 6 years ago can access my locked posts and absolutely zero of them post anymore (that certain group, I mean).

[EDIT] Holy shit I went and checked, it's so weird to see how little I posted the first couple of years. THERE IS SO MUCH INFORMATION I AM MISSING THAT I WANT TO KNOW. And that is why I journal. What was I thinking?! I don't know because I didn't write jack shit. And boy was my tone terrible, which, it's funny, I knew at the time, not that it was bad but that I hoped I could look back eventually and not hate myself and not want to hide or delete posts (which I'm not planning to, at least not for that reason), but geez, how things change. What's even worse? I know how much I changed from grade school to high school, and I don't really have a journal that covers that, either.

As the poster at my old hairdresser's used to say, "you've come a long way, kid."

Have I been busy. Moving things. Cleaning rooms. Trying to get rid of ant infestations.

Learned a new word: formication, which is the feeling you have ants crawling all over you.

Trying to get everything arranged for Outer Banks and Savannah. Trying to get everything arranged for Raiders 30th. Visiting Gramps in the hospital, hoping they will get him out. I hope he can get his heart a little stronger and last more than a few months. I keep thinking about him reading The Walrus and the Carpenter to my fourth grade class, and "faire to Midland", and I want him to get out of the hospital so I can show him my senior presentation. And I keep thinking about ragtime and Hitchhiker's Guide and Ernie Kovacs... Oh, Gramps. Get better, please.

Anyway. Awesomesauce on a stick:



Carrots are orange because of politics!

Like any Cracked article, six "insane coincidences". Sadly, #6 and #5 are the best, because they really are odd coincidences. #1, a little bit, but also data manipulating; there are 365 days each year (except for leap years), and TONS OF SHIT HAPPENS EVERY DAY. Not to mention since our country's founding there have been 234 4th's of July. (Not 4ths of July... they were still 24 hours long, har har) I been I could find you ~even more! strange and unusual~ coincidences out of those 234 days. Shit, son.

Um, and also. #3 bothers me a lot. Why, you may ask? Because it is NOT COINCIDENCE. IT IS CAUSATION. This is the first time I've had to paraphrase this phrase to say "correlation =/= coincidence". The Wright brothers... who lived and worked in Dayton... invented heavier-than-air, powered flight. And they kept doing research here. So when the Air Force got created in 1947, we eventually ended up with *le gasp* an Air Force Base in Dayton. Which encouraged more flight technology and research in the city and the state! And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you end up with a state that has produced SO MANY ASTRONAUTS. We fucking invented flight, now gtfo.

P.S. I do find that article fascinating, my engineer brain just jumped at this annoyance and also I've noticed my writer's voice, a.k.a. my blogging tone, a.k.a. my making comments on the internet voice, has gotten more and more hyperbolic as I have. I don't have a problem with that except where I still do it when talking serious business and since it's text, I'm afraid people will take me literally.

Here's the truth, I am pretty damn shy "IRL". I just enjoy being ridiculous and over the top (...sometimes).

HEY, DID YOU SEE WHERE THEY FUCKING FOUND TANIS?! A little on the technology behind that.

I made a lot of Raiders references the day that was all over. I don't think many people got it, BUT, perfect timing for the 30th, non?! I can't wait to see what happens with the digs. Although I'm sure it will be quiiiiite a while coming.

In case you are still having a terrible day (as I did), here is a MacGuyver intro a guy did of his cat, Steve McQueen. It's beyond awesome.

Idk why but I've been tab-hoarding for weeks. As a result, running roughly 220 tabs was causing firefox to crash constantly. So, here is several days worth of tab writeups, which might mean whatever I wrote sounds a few days old. That would be because it is, but it's probably not too important.

( LOTS of articles )

( a second set, many more articles )

...I read a lot.

So, just read through some back entries. I have about a million "I'll post this soon!" posts. Come Christmas, or Hawaii (where I won't have band, or 12 hours of work a week, or tons of hard classes) I will actually get around to posting as many of those as I can. Some of them I have no idea what I was referring to, though. Also, the post I locked and talked about needing to curse but not liking to? FYI that changed this summer. One summer of drum corps gives you a very filthy mouth, especially when your rookie job is such related... ;) I still have that double-persona ability, and I keep it in check in the right places (99.99% of the time. Sometimes I slip, of course...), and... true to my blog... more on that later. ;)

So, yup! Finally changed my layout. The bright turquoise and green, while awesome, was kind of harsh on the eyes, and definitely attracted too much attention while trying to read stuff in class or whatever. (I mean... what?) It's also very appropriate to me being much more conscious of who I am, and that I am going to Hawaii. Hoo-rah!

[EDIT] One of my backposts is called "Phroyd" talking about psychoanalysis, where I was just being dumb and misspelling Freud more phonetically.

However. When I get my own lawn flamingos, I will name them Phydeaux and Phroyd in honor of Fuzzy (who was Phydeaux, before the vet didn't know how to pronounce it) and my dad (a testament to his weirdness that sometimes I feel like I inherited, but I suck at majorly).