David’s Ramblings

Over the past week or so, I’ve had a chance to sit back and take some time to truly evaluate my life. I’ve realized that I haven’t been fully honest with myself, and I certainly haven’t been honest with others. Obviously, it’s really hard to come to terms with my own thoughts, and it’s even harder to post them out there for the world to hear, but I feel this is the best way to come to accept them.

The words are even harder to type than they are to say. I’ve been sitting here for half an hour trying to figure out exactly how to put this while not actually saying it. It’s almost scary to type. I’ll just get them out before I chicken out: I’m gay.

Wow. It’s amazing what a load saying such liberating words can take off your chest. Of course, I’m sure some people may be questioning how I came to this decision, why I decided to share it, and what I feel about it. Somewhat hard and deeply personal questions to answer, but I figure if I’m going to let it out, might as well do it all the way.

It wasn’t easy for me to come to terms with the fact that I’m gay. It’s easy to try and tell yourself you’re not. Denial. I’m sure it comes even easier when you’ve been raised to believe homosexuality is a sin.

Unfortunately, such things as sexuality aren’t really decisions you can make. Soon you start wondering why you don’t go out on any dates, why you’ve never had a girlfriend, or even a crush on a girl. And then the truth hits you, like a ton of bricks. Such an occurrence happened for me a few nights ago, and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about it ever since.

I decided the best way to just come to terms with the fact was to let everyone know about it. If I’m not hiding anything from them, I can’t hide anything from myself. That’s what this post is about; and Ñas much as I want to hit the delete button Ñ that’s why I’m going to post this to my website.

It’s turned my life around a bit, but altogether I’m rather pleased with myself for finally letting go. I can’t say that it’ll be an entirely comfortable transition, but I’m willing to deal with that. I want the freedom truth brings and I’m willing to forge ahead with my newfound sense of identity.

Update: Please note this post was my lame attempt at an April Fool’s joke.

I got your package.

I’m eating ramen out of real bowls now.

Love,

David

After a nice refreshing week of work, I had to come back to the real world, where I go to class after sleeping in ’til noon. It was a hard transition, but I took it relatively well. It would have helped if I didn’t have to go to the worst class on my schedule right after I got back to Atlanta.

Proofs. What a horrible, horrible class. For those who have know idea what proofs is, let me try to give an example of what it’s like. Imagine you have an infinite amount of real numbers bigger than 0. Now imagine, we want to take the smallest number from that set, and say why it is the smallest.

To solve the problem, we look at it, and (now, stay with me here, as this is the tricky part) we decide to try to cut our own limbs off.

That’s how most of the problems go. Replace limbs with various body parts, cut with various painful verbs, and that’s basically proofs class. For example, this week we are learning to find characteristic polynomials by ripping our noses off.

Needless to say, It was somewhat harsh to get back to that. Especially knowing how badly I’d be failing that class after the last test. Thinking of the last test, I realized that he’d probably be handing back the scores that day. Not that I needed mine. Wouldn’t take a score to know I completely bombed it.

The class went on, we ripped off our noses and turned them into the teacher, and he started handing back the tests. He handed me mine and I looked inside. 91.

ÒHoly shit. No way. I must have got the wrong test,Ó I thought to myself. I looked at the cover. It had my name on it. I looked at the problems. They were in my handwriting. I looked through to see the individual scores per problem. They all added up.

It was then that I realized I had actually passed my test. The shock subsided, and I walked out of the classroom, feeling invincible.

It all seems almost worth it now, even though I’m short a few body parts I wish I wasn’t. I never really wanted kids anyway. For the record, I still don’t know how I got the score. For one problem I actually wrote as my answer: Òf is composite because of Homework #3Ó and got full credit. I didn’t even have to specify the problem number on that homework assignment for crying out loud!

(Also, it’s impossible for there to be a smallest number bigger than zero if you’re talking about all real numbers. You can always divide a decimal into a smaller decimal by dividing by two. )

… and the other things I did over my spring break.

It’s been a while. You both missed me and all of my wonderful posts, I’m sure. But with all of my time to just sit and think this spring break, (there’s not a lot to do in my life without an internet connection involved) I’ve had a chance to think up enough ideas for blogging to last me at least another week or so. However, that’s not important right now. What is important is that I shut up and get to the blogging.

So, Spring Break, a wonderful time for a college student Ñ wet t-shirt contests down in Cancun, lots of drinking, and morally questionable actions involving a person/people of the opposite sex (or same, whatever floats your boat (and no, it does not float my boat)).

Or, in my case, work.

Yeah. Work. Not quite the wild and crazy thing most people consider an enjoyable Spring Break. In fact, I imagine people are probably shaking their heads in disappointment. I enjoyed it though. It was actually quite refreshing. Hear me out on this one:

I like doing work. I never thought I’d say that, but it’s true. Really, it’s only the dull, day-inÐday-out stuff that I hate. Design work isn’t very often like that though. I did a bit of manual labor too, but even that, in moderation, can be somewhat refreshing. The entire week was nothing but a complete break from any sort of norm set by going to classes every day, so it was pretty fun.

I started off the break by being picked up by my dad outside my dorm. We drove. And we drove. And we drove some more. Driving cross-country is a long process. It also involves lots of bad yet wonderfully tasty food. Fast food, candy, tons of soda.

For dinner we stopped by an Arby’s in Alabama. The name of the town doesn’t come to mind, but you could tell we were in the deep south, whatever area it was. Especially when the guy behind the counter matter-of-factly stated ÒWe ainÕt got none marinara sauce,Ó to go with our order of mozzarella sticks. They apparently didn’t have a cook with more than seven fingers my dad pointed out as we sat with our meal; we’d only been given seven mozzarella sticks and eight was clearly the amount advertised on the menu. No reason to fuss about it, but neither of us was too impressed, especially when they finally got my dad his sandwich (practically crumpled in half) after I was about done with my entire meal. We remembered it so much, I snapped a picture as we drove by it back towards home:

We stopped for the night somewhere in Arkansas and then started again the next day. 16 more hours of driving, all particularly the same as the driving before it. We eventually got to our destination Ñ the wonderful land of New Mexico. It looks a lot like Utah, so if you’ve been there you’re not missing much. It was nice to see mountains again. And snow too. We got to see some snow on our drive, and there was plenty more waiting for us after we made camp next to a small, nasty pond.

Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating about the pond thing, but I’m not. It was actually a pond with nasty, oily water in it. The reason we were there, in fact. It was our job to evaporate it all away without the environmentalists getting their panties caught in a bunch. I helped my dad set up all of these windscreens around the pond, then we started up the machine and let it do it’s job to get rid of the pond.

I want to mention here that working to put up all of those screens was pretty tiring. It was a full day’s work. I even caught enough sun to get a bit of a sunburn about quarter inch wide on my wrist between my shirt and gloves Ñ not so much painful as just annoying and ridiculous looking.

The next three days consisted of my dad working hard to make sure the pump was running smoothly and me pretending to work on some design stuff whenever he came back into the trailer to get in from the cold. That, and a lot of Family Guy.

The only DVDs we had to watch were my series collection of Family Guy. With only three hours of content to stretch over 3 and a half days, you eventually watch things twice. And then again. And then with commentary on. Needless to say, we got a lot of Family Guy in there, which is fine because Family Guy is completely awesome.

After all the pretend work and watching Family Guy, it was time to get headed back to the real world. This involved another long drive back to Atlanta that was pretty boring and uneventful, but I got the chance to finish tweaking many of the projects I had been pretending to work on for spring break and came back to class entirely refreshed and ready to learn.

What I did over spring break (besides the pictures above):

A bunch of print related stuff: logos, business cards, a poster.

Websites:

www.evapsys.com

www.h2oremediation.com

(Both of these sites are still a little bare content-wise, as my boss hasn’t decided what text he wants on those yet. Ahem. And they’re not perfect designs either, but my boss wanted them up so the content could be put on them as soon as possible. The content which he said he’d have for me months ago. That content is still not on there because I do not have it… Stressed it enough, or should I milk it a bit more boss?)

And some various unrelated stuff because I’m sure you all don’t care:

The location I spent a large portion of my Spring Break at. Pretty, ain’t it?

Me, trying to look serious in a hardhat. Doesn’t work too well, does it? The whole idea of a hardhat clashes completely with the nerd wearing it.

Dad.

I fail at life.

It’s been several weeks since I updated this site. Obviously, this means I am a horrible person. What’s worse is that I don’t know if that will change much over the next week. Spring Break starts now, and I’m not quite sure I’ll have time to get to this website beyond this post (internet connection is unlikely at best).

However, I do have some fresh ideas that I’ve been working on, so maybe you’ll see a few new posts within the next two weeks. Until then, you’ll just have to settle for this.