What's up world? Only about seven more hours until I'm done with this week and the college defined weekend has officially begun. That's something to look forward to. Also tomorrow, I'm visiting my 4th favorite airport in the world, Atlanta, on my way to Idaho for some family appeasement.
In this blog, I talk a lot about how I belong in the air and everywhere the airways take me. That is something I truly believe in. The more I grow older and mature the more I find this to be true. No matter what is happening in my life, no matter what is affecting me deep down, no matter what I stress over and no matter what causes me to lose sleep at night; there is always the light at the end of the tunnel which is flight.
Nothing can calm me like the intoxication of flying, even as a clueless passenger, from the grips of Louisville into a Class B airport on a busy Friday afternoon. Over 10,000ft the headphones go on, and the Owl City begins to play. The plane turns left over Clark County, an airport that has captured a piece of my childhood, and towards somewhere exciting.
As I grew up flying all over the place, I used to have the naïveté of enjoying flying somewhere new. The feelings of excitement and adventure were due to the fact that I had not yet been to my destination. My face was pressed against the window in hopes of seeing planes and buildings and landscapes I had yet to experience. But as I grew taller and smarter, my list of airports I'd flown into grew as well. Now it's to the point where I've explored 18 of the 30-some class-B airports in the country, and most more than once. If my life continues as projected, by the time I retire there will be very few airports I've never visited. And that's pretty cool...
So since I've been to Atlanta like ten times since I've had a pilot's license, it's a pretty routine occasion for me. We take off, make a small turn towards Elizabeth town to join the V4 airway, take that to Bowling Green KY, which initiates our Rome4 Arrival into Atlanta. We cross Erlin at 14,000 and started heading left to put us on a right downwind for 25R. We land, turn left, and taxi to terminal C or B. I'm going to know exactly where our plane is, for the entire hour and a half. Instead of my forehead glued to the window waiting to see something new, I'll be calmly sipping coffee while listening to whatever music sets my mood, telling my parents what intersection we just crossed; they count on me to keep them informed.
It's the most relaxing way to spend a Friday afternoon, even if I am going to fucking Idaho. And luckily for me, I just have SIX more hours until my weekend begins (it seems I've been writing this for an hour).
In other aviation news, our flight to Madrid via Chicago got canceled. So now we have to fly through Miami. That's right. Miami. My #1 favorite location in the entire world. And I'll be spending my Christmas eve eve eve eve eve relaxing in the brand new North Terminal Concourse D, pointing out to my girlfriend every single thing I know about the airport (which is a lot, she'll have plenty to learn). From the starfish on the walls, to the American Airlines Dispatching Center, to where the 747 Dreamlifter parks, it will be another handsomely relaxing occasion for me.
Due to the amount of work and effort I'm planning on putting into this semester, I haven't had much time to sit down and think about how great of a vacation I'll have once it's all over. I'm hoping this will speed time up a little bit. Regardless, in the meantime I'll just ride it out. Until next time...
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
Blacklist of Ordeals
How's life loyal readers? I hope it's good. I have a little over a half hour to squeeze out a much needed blog post. Unfortunately I don't have much I'm willing to blog about.
I had my first power-weekend. That's when as an RA, you're on call to deal with any issues that arise for the entire weekend, and you also have to work desk a lot. You get like a hundred bucks or so for doing it. You have to do one a month. So, I had a busy weekend. I crossed a few things off my bucket list.
I made a drug bust. Some dumbasses (who for the record called my girlfriend a 'bitch') tried to bring weed into my dorm. That didn't last long. They went down pretty hard. I made them cry. There's nothing I love more than to watch a dumbass go down.
That was the fun part.
Then I had to handle a situation which a resident tried to off himself. That, for the record, was something that wasn't really on my bucket list. In fact that was the opposite. That was on the blacklist of ordeals. That was perhaps the one thing in my life I never wanted to have to ever see or deal with.
My bucket list is pretty deep. Everything I can really think of is on it. For example; I want to land a plane before I die, I want to wear wings before I die, I want people to look up to me before I die. Few countries aren't on that, and it gets bigger everyday. The things I've checked off my bucket list usually yield a great story. That's perhaps my favorite aspect of my list of accomplishments, the stories I tell about them can light up a room full of family members and friends.
Don't get me wrong, I don't just throw everything onto my bucket list. There are somethings I just don't care about doing. I have no desire to design my own building, or land a massive marlin while deep sea fishing like some of my friends. I have no desire to ever write a book, or play an instrument for thousands of people to hear. The reason is apathy. If I really wanted, I could dedicate my life to something besides flying. I could accomplish anything I want. The things that make my bucket list are the things I care about. Everything else, I remain indifferent about.
Everything but suicide. I couldn't care less if I ever go deep sea fishing or not. But I've never wanted to touch suicide with a ten foot pole. There's been a deep set fear throughout my maturity that I simply don't possess the ability to deal with a situation with the emotional gravity of suicide. If an individual is so disgustingly depressed to the point of wanting to hurt themselves to the point of death, how in the hell could I possibly intervene and potentially save a life if I needed to? I can trust myself with a plane and a lot of money but when it comes to a suicidal individual, I am OUT.
But of course, a situation that I prayed I would never have to deal with, an individual who I feared the most came to me. I was singled out of a crowd of FIVE FUCKING RA'S THAT WERE ALSO AVAILABLE to deal with a suicide attempt.
No one died. So apparently I passed the test that I feared I'd fail. So I really can't be that distraught. Until next time (with a happier topic)...
Friday, August 24, 2012
Room to chill
What's up blogosphere. I don't have as long as I'd like to blog today, because I got a fucking parking ticket and need to fill out a damn form for the Air Force. Luckily however, it's Friday, I got a free Redbull (one of many) and my classes end at 10am. That's enough to be happy about.
I remember several times throughout the spring I'd blogged about going to the zoo with Doug. Well I did allow time for that, and Doug and I did go to the zoo recently! While in the African Gorilla exhibit, there was a typical African hut set up so we could see what life is like on a less privileged continent. Those poor people, they have a hammock, and a few stumps to sit on. And everything they owned (pots, pans, buckets of water, clothes, etc.) was attached to a hook and hung from the ceiling.
Doug brought about the idea that if he and I were African, living under these circumstances, we'd make the best of it as we do everything else and be completely happy. He was like, "Bro check it out! We'd have all our stumps and hammocks set up so we could have plenty of places to sit for when are friends come over! We could make instruments and gadgets and gizmos with our infinite creative wit and always be entertained! Just hunting, gathering, and freestyling with our boys when we're done with our chores! And we'd hang up all our belongings so we'd have room to chill!" And when you put it like that, it's like damn Doug that doesn't sound half bad.
As long as you have food, shelter, and love; the rest of your happiness is determined by what you make of your situation. (Now of course this example is slightly flawed because most African countries lack the three necessities of food, shelter and love. But let's say Doug and I were in Botswana where everything's a-okay for the most part.)
So for example, I live in Haggin Hall. The Foreskin Fortress. The Penis Palace. The Bagpipe Barracks. The Crotch Castle. That one. Unfortunately Haggin is usually seen as a third world country. The Christian Student Fellowship does mission trips to Haggin. We see Sarah McLachlan commercials on TV asking you to donate to end the poverty and misery of my dorm. When I invite friends over, their reaction is usually of the "I mean we can just go to my place if you want" variety.
I however don't see my situation like this. I see my dorm room the way Doug saw that African hut. I see all the good; plenty of places to sit, 24-hour bro visitation, a ping pong table that always has bros to put around with, and likewise I always have room to chill. But instead of dwelling on the bad, I make fun of it; the I-know-the-pesticide-men-on-a-first-name-basis-because-I-make-them-spray-my-room-twice-a-week kind of bad.
I'm not just happy about my situation, I'm thrilled with it. And that usually goes for any situation I find myself in. This is the reason that I continue to not believe in "boredom". Teenagers obsess over two things: not being bored, and being able to 'chill'. In reality, the two sensations are identical. They are both defined as the lack of activity, just one is intentional and the other's not. What is the most boring thing you could think of? Would an 11 hour flight from Madrid to Dallas make the list? The way I look at it, there's nothing more relaxing than an 11 hour downtime session. Next time you're bored, just relax; you clearly don't have anything better to do.
That's called making the best out of a situation.
In senior year of high school, my favorite English teacher had us write down a list of 20 things we believe in. A tangible list of things that define us by our beliefs. I completely went to town on the assignment. I had the most well thought out 20 ideas, and each one completely described an aspect of my personality and ego in a sentence. My teacher had us turn these in within the first week of school, and she kept them. She held on to them until the last week of school, after 9 months had passed. She gave them back to us to show us what we most strongly believed in 9 months prior. Out of the 20 sentences I had listed, I still strongly agreed with about 18 of them.
This was an ethics and morals class, and the point of the assignment was to show us that even some of our most strong beliefs can change in a relatively short amount of time as we gain information and experience. But the amount of ideas we end up chucking are typically small. The majority will be the beliefs that are so strongly set in our souls we will defend them for a lifetime.
I still have my list of beliefs, and about once a year I edit it to throw out the few outdated beliefs and throw in new ones. Every year or so when I open it and reread it. I always get goosebumps because by then I had completely forgotten what was on the list. However, each sentence perfectly describes me to the point it triggers an emotional response.
So one of the items on that list, which I had forgotten about until today, was that happiness will never leave you if you possess the ability and security to see complete brightness in a dim situation. That's one of the 20 sentences that describe me, and probably one of the 18 that will never leave the list as it propels me into a successful life.
I remember several times throughout the spring I'd blogged about going to the zoo with Doug. Well I did allow time for that, and Doug and I did go to the zoo recently! While in the African Gorilla exhibit, there was a typical African hut set up so we could see what life is like on a less privileged continent. Those poor people, they have a hammock, and a few stumps to sit on. And everything they owned (pots, pans, buckets of water, clothes, etc.) was attached to a hook and hung from the ceiling.
Doug brought about the idea that if he and I were African, living under these circumstances, we'd make the best of it as we do everything else and be completely happy. He was like, "Bro check it out! We'd have all our stumps and hammocks set up so we could have plenty of places to sit for when are friends come over! We could make instruments and gadgets and gizmos with our infinite creative wit and always be entertained! Just hunting, gathering, and freestyling with our boys when we're done with our chores! And we'd hang up all our belongings so we'd have room to chill!" And when you put it like that, it's like damn Doug that doesn't sound half bad.
As long as you have food, shelter, and love; the rest of your happiness is determined by what you make of your situation. (Now of course this example is slightly flawed because most African countries lack the three necessities of food, shelter and love. But let's say Doug and I were in Botswana where everything's a-okay for the most part.)
So for example, I live in Haggin Hall. The Foreskin Fortress. The Penis Palace. The Bagpipe Barracks. The Crotch Castle. That one. Unfortunately Haggin is usually seen as a third world country. The Christian Student Fellowship does mission trips to Haggin. We see Sarah McLachlan commercials on TV asking you to donate to end the poverty and misery of my dorm. When I invite friends over, their reaction is usually of the "I mean we can just go to my place if you want" variety.
I however don't see my situation like this. I see my dorm room the way Doug saw that African hut. I see all the good; plenty of places to sit, 24-hour bro visitation, a ping pong table that always has bros to put around with, and likewise I always have room to chill. But instead of dwelling on the bad, I make fun of it; the I-know-the-pesticide-men-on-a-first-name-basis-because-I-make-them-spray-my-room-twice-a-week kind of bad.
I'm not just happy about my situation, I'm thrilled with it. And that usually goes for any situation I find myself in. This is the reason that I continue to not believe in "boredom". Teenagers obsess over two things: not being bored, and being able to 'chill'. In reality, the two sensations are identical. They are both defined as the lack of activity, just one is intentional and the other's not. What is the most boring thing you could think of? Would an 11 hour flight from Madrid to Dallas make the list? The way I look at it, there's nothing more relaxing than an 11 hour downtime session. Next time you're bored, just relax; you clearly don't have anything better to do.
That's called making the best out of a situation.
In senior year of high school, my favorite English teacher had us write down a list of 20 things we believe in. A tangible list of things that define us by our beliefs. I completely went to town on the assignment. I had the most well thought out 20 ideas, and each one completely described an aspect of my personality and ego in a sentence. My teacher had us turn these in within the first week of school, and she kept them. She held on to them until the last week of school, after 9 months had passed. She gave them back to us to show us what we most strongly believed in 9 months prior. Out of the 20 sentences I had listed, I still strongly agreed with about 18 of them.
This was an ethics and morals class, and the point of the assignment was to show us that even some of our most strong beliefs can change in a relatively short amount of time as we gain information and experience. But the amount of ideas we end up chucking are typically small. The majority will be the beliefs that are so strongly set in our souls we will defend them for a lifetime.
I still have my list of beliefs, and about once a year I edit it to throw out the few outdated beliefs and throw in new ones. Every year or so when I open it and reread it. I always get goosebumps because by then I had completely forgotten what was on the list. However, each sentence perfectly describes me to the point it triggers an emotional response.
So one of the items on that list, which I had forgotten about until today, was that happiness will never leave you if you possess the ability and security to see complete brightness in a dim situation. That's one of the 20 sentences that describe me, and probably one of the 18 that will never leave the list as it propels me into a successful life.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Theory to Why All-Girl-Christian-School Students are Sluts
What's up world? I apologize for not blogging in a dickyear but I've been busy and shit. To update you, I'm now an RA at UK and moved into my castle last week.
This room is fucking huge. It's a triple, three desks, three closets, three times the space, yeah it's huge. I have it pretty damn well furnished and no doubt is pretty damn comfy. It's basically an apartment. In fact our hall director calls it an apartment. I call it a castle. Because it's big.
This is actually the first time in my life I've actually had property under my belt. Last year I had a tiny ass room and I had to fucking share it. Now I have my own bigass studio, and I also have like 18 rooms and little kiddos to look out for that I'm all responsible for. It's pretty clutch.
I've noted this in previous posts, but this will be a paradoxical part of my life as I will be the primary authority over alcohol and marijuana. Like to the point where I get to fucking ruin someone's day. And living in the Haggin residence hall, I'll probably do it more than once. So yeah this is pretty cool.
"Disclaimer to the following section: I have a girlfriend, happily. Dishonesty or immorality has nothing to do with my next topic. They are simply psychological observations I have noticed and find interesting to analyze with the intent of learning what is not previously known. Science mothafucka. Thank you. "
So there's an interesting little case study I've come across during this RA training. Most dorms at UK are coed, which means the staff of RA's is coed. All dorms are coed except for Haggin and Donovan. So naturally one can infer there are similarities of the behavioral differences between coed high schools and gender-separate high schools. Here's what I've noticed.
In a coed environment, the opposite gender is a friend; i.e. just another person. There's no preliminary differences in the way the guys act to the girls and vice versa (other than the fact that you can have sex). Guys and girls work together frequently and usually develop friendships before they develop intimate relationships.
In a gender-separate environment the fundamental dynamic between guys and girls changes dramatically. The opposite gender turns into either a target or objective. Every single girl on the other side of the dividing line isn't seen as a friend or just another person, no that's what the guys who are with you are for. The girls just become the primary mission in everyone's mind.
With the Haggin and Donovan example, it's like every five minutes someone makes a joke about flirting with Donovan girls. And when we're in the same room as them, holy shit the Donovan girls are just as bad! They seem to objectify a dorm full of guys just as much as we objectify a dorm full of girls! Which indeed is interesting. And for everyone in the case study, "being friends" is definitely not part of the motivation for the shenanigans. I have a fairly strong intuition that if there were three single Haggin RA's and three single Donovan RA's stuck together unsupervised, all six of them would get laid somehow! Just because everyone who's gender-separated seems to put a bullseye on the opposite gender.
But this doesn't seem to happen at the conscious level. It seems to be a behavioral difference between the gender-separated and the not; and I seem to be the only one to notice it. But once you notice it and think about it it's obvious.
I think it has to do with survival instincts, like most subconscious behavioral oddities, which trace back to cavemen days. If you are in a group, your mind slips into group-communication mode and all of your minds subconsciously work together, that's how it works in groups and accounts for things like pseudofactionism (the driving force that makes one group of people think they are better than another for dumb reasons like "football players are better than soccer players, go us.") So if there is a scarcity of the opposite sex in our group, like having no girls at all, we as a group become worried that we will not be able to reproduce and pass down the genes of our group. Make sense? So we naturally get super excited when we see a group of the opposite sex, and so do they. In coed situations, there is no sense of urgency. Therefore there's time to not worry about reproduction and what not, so there's less social pressure to get together with the chicks.
The social pressure seems to be a key factor in this (especially with gender-separate high schools). I'll use myself as an example. I have a girlfriend, who's moving in tomorrow and I'm steadily happy about being with. However since she isn't moved in yet, I still get the residual group mentality that "dude, we gotta start asking out these Donovan chicks." It even induces stress. The other Haggin RA's who have girlfriends are the exact same way. The group mentality of gender-separate groups is to get together no matter what. The group mentality of coed groups is the normal, evolved human mindset.
So with that all said, gender-separation (the 'traditional' method) may actually be more animalistic, and harmful to adolescent minds than if everything were just coed. This explains many many many raised questions about, perhaps the 'sluttiness' of all-girl-schools, compared to coed.
I really kinda wish I had some sort of credentials to back me up on my theory or some shit; because as far as I know, no one has done any sort of studies on this and it explains a lot if you sit there and think about it. Especially if you go from a coed group to a 'traditional' group of people your age, you literally find that the way you talk to your friends is entirely different. Oh well. Anyone reading this better cite their fucking sources if they use me in a paper. Bitches. Until next time...
This room is fucking huge. It's a triple, three desks, three closets, three times the space, yeah it's huge. I have it pretty damn well furnished and no doubt is pretty damn comfy. It's basically an apartment. In fact our hall director calls it an apartment. I call it a castle. Because it's big.
This is actually the first time in my life I've actually had property under my belt. Last year I had a tiny ass room and I had to fucking share it. Now I have my own bigass studio, and I also have like 18 rooms and little kiddos to look out for that I'm all responsible for. It's pretty clutch.
I've noted this in previous posts, but this will be a paradoxical part of my life as I will be the primary authority over alcohol and marijuana. Like to the point where I get to fucking ruin someone's day. And living in the Haggin residence hall, I'll probably do it more than once. So yeah this is pretty cool.
"Disclaimer to the following section: I have a girlfriend, happily. Dishonesty or immorality has nothing to do with my next topic. They are simply psychological observations I have noticed and find interesting to analyze with the intent of learning what is not previously known. Science mothafucka. Thank you. "
So there's an interesting little case study I've come across during this RA training. Most dorms at UK are coed, which means the staff of RA's is coed. All dorms are coed except for Haggin and Donovan. So naturally one can infer there are similarities of the behavioral differences between coed high schools and gender-separate high schools. Here's what I've noticed.
In a coed environment, the opposite gender is a friend; i.e. just another person. There's no preliminary differences in the way the guys act to the girls and vice versa (other than the fact that you can have sex). Guys and girls work together frequently and usually develop friendships before they develop intimate relationships.
In a gender-separate environment the fundamental dynamic between guys and girls changes dramatically. The opposite gender turns into either a target or objective. Every single girl on the other side of the dividing line isn't seen as a friend or just another person, no that's what the guys who are with you are for. The girls just become the primary mission in everyone's mind.
With the Haggin and Donovan example, it's like every five minutes someone makes a joke about flirting with Donovan girls. And when we're in the same room as them, holy shit the Donovan girls are just as bad! They seem to objectify a dorm full of guys just as much as we objectify a dorm full of girls! Which indeed is interesting. And for everyone in the case study, "being friends" is definitely not part of the motivation for the shenanigans. I have a fairly strong intuition that if there were three single Haggin RA's and three single Donovan RA's stuck together unsupervised, all six of them would get laid somehow! Just because everyone who's gender-separated seems to put a bullseye on the opposite gender.
But this doesn't seem to happen at the conscious level. It seems to be a behavioral difference between the gender-separated and the not; and I seem to be the only one to notice it. But once you notice it and think about it it's obvious.
I think it has to do with survival instincts, like most subconscious behavioral oddities, which trace back to cavemen days. If you are in a group, your mind slips into group-communication mode and all of your minds subconsciously work together, that's how it works in groups and accounts for things like pseudofactionism (the driving force that makes one group of people think they are better than another for dumb reasons like "football players are better than soccer players, go us.") So if there is a scarcity of the opposite sex in our group, like having no girls at all, we as a group become worried that we will not be able to reproduce and pass down the genes of our group. Make sense? So we naturally get super excited when we see a group of the opposite sex, and so do they. In coed situations, there is no sense of urgency. Therefore there's time to not worry about reproduction and what not, so there's less social pressure to get together with the chicks.
The social pressure seems to be a key factor in this (especially with gender-separate high schools). I'll use myself as an example. I have a girlfriend, who's moving in tomorrow and I'm steadily happy about being with. However since she isn't moved in yet, I still get the residual group mentality that "dude, we gotta start asking out these Donovan chicks." It even induces stress. The other Haggin RA's who have girlfriends are the exact same way. The group mentality of gender-separate groups is to get together no matter what. The group mentality of coed groups is the normal, evolved human mindset.
So with that all said, gender-separation (the 'traditional' method) may actually be more animalistic, and harmful to adolescent minds than if everything were just coed. This explains many many many raised questions about, perhaps the 'sluttiness' of all-girl-schools, compared to coed.
I really kinda wish I had some sort of credentials to back me up on my theory or some shit; because as far as I know, no one has done any sort of studies on this and it explains a lot if you sit there and think about it. Especially if you go from a coed group to a 'traditional' group of people your age, you literally find that the way you talk to your friends is entirely different. Oh well. Anyone reading this better cite their fucking sources if they use me in a paper. Bitches. Until next time...
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