Understanding In A....

It's been almost two years now, but the memory is still fresh in my mind. A day that couldn't go any better, but it tried to anyways. 5 friends, unaware of what might happen next. After climbing rocks, laying in the sun, playing on structures made for 5 year olds, we finally decided it was time to see where my new house was. After stopping at the house, it was decided that a shortcut would be taken to get to Alfred where we would all go for a nice swim at the lake. About a half mile down this shortcut, the day comes to an end. Tires squeel, brakes lock, tires lock, car skids, backwards is forwards, horrible screaming, I grab on and all i can say is "oh shit" before it's over. As my eyes open and I hear what I know is the sound of fear coming from my friends mouths. We all climb out of the car that now looks like the car from Back To The Future when its wheels turn to the sides and it flies. I run down the street, call 911, and wait for people to show up. When the ambulance shows up, I watch as my friends who are 17 are strapped to backboards and taken to the hospital simply because they can't legally sign that they are ok. I sit inside the ambulance and have my pulse taken, which at the time was twice the regular rate for my body to be running at. They told me if I didn't calm down, I would have to go to the hospital anyways. I lower it a bit, and I climb out only to climb into the back of a police car that takes me and my other 18 year old adventurer back to my house. The day ends there, but every day this summer I drive by the same spot. Every day, I grab tight and it is as if I relive it every day. I understand the feelings, and I understand the reasoning that I have for them.

Not really sure what this post is really saying, but I guess I can point it to the fact that if the car had gone left instead of right, if we hadn't hit the tree and instead went down into the creek, I may not be here this moment, I may not be writing these things, and I wouldn't have ever met or influenced any of the lives that I have in the last two years. Its hard to think about, but at the same time it makes me stronger. It allows me to realize how much I have done. How much I have accomplished and how much I still have left to accomplish before anything like that ever happens again.


Splintered piece of glass falls, in the seat, gets caught
These broken windows, open locks, reminders of the youth we lost
In trying so hard to look away from you
we followed white lines to the sunset
I crash my car everyday the same way....

Pride in what you do

After thinking about the last couple days of dealing with my friends, I don't only think that I am alone, but know for sure. I have realized that I have little to nothing in common with my friends, and am constantly trying to get out of the conversations that they constantly bring me into. In the last four days, I've been criticized about my major, my friends at school, my lifestyle, my website, my choice of words, the topics of conversation I bring up, and pretty much just my entire life in general. The only thing that my friends can seem to do is pass judgment on my life, and all I can do is defend myself to the point where they make no sense and just say that they are right about anything that comes up. I'm a 20 year old game designer and I am damn proud of it.

When stress is all there is

The last post was about the positive stress and pressures that I have, I feel that it is only natural to balance that out with the negative. For over the past year now, I have had more stress than I sometimes think I can handle. I have learned to deal with it, but sometimes it can be a little unbearable. The stress manifested without my knowledge and has taken its toll on my body more than it has my mind at this point in time. I found out that the stress was releasing itself while I slept last summer. The release was that my teeth were grinding together to the point where I woke in excruciating pain. After multiple dentist appointments, I found that I had worn four of my teeth, one on each side upper and lower, down to the nerve and would need root canals on them eventually. The temporary fix that they put on each tooth has worked up until now, but I am reminded of it every night before I sleep.

The stress also manifested this last semester pretty drastically. While in the shower, I felt an enormous pain shoot to the back of my head. The pain was so bad that I blacked out for a few seconds and woke up just before I fell to the floor. The stress that I manage is probably none more than what others manage, but I just seem to be better at putting it off rather than dealing with it outright. I just hope one day I can be at a reduced stress state and be able to really not care or worry about things as much as I currently do.

I can feel the pressure

I have overwhelming amounts of pressure to succeed from everyone around me, and it seems that people are always expecting me to be someone. For about the last 7 years I have lived with the notion that if you don't like who I am, that's your loss. I am not going to be changing for every single person that I meet just so that I can make everyone in the world happy.

I am me, take it or leave it. The pressure that are coming from all around me are constant, and strenuous, but are sometimes needed. With the pressure comes encouragement though. I know my parents expect me to do well and push me to be the best that I can be, and that is a little daunting. But with it comes the encouragement that I can do it because I have people that believe I can. It's the same with my brother, but I think he has even more stake in it. He, being around the same age, understands things that I do a lot more than my parents, so he can push me to be doing more things constantly. The other pressures are my friends and teammates. I will always be pushed on by others in groups, and this will hopefully allow me to turn out my greatest work. So, the pressure is hard, and I don't really expect it to get any easier, so for now I will allow it to be here, and I will use it to its best potential possible.

I like the person I am now, and I don't regret the person that I was before, but I am glad that I have changed. I don't believe the old me would have made it this far without a heaping amount of trouble.

The Internal Struggle to Survive

Weekend, the time where I can attempt to relax and take the time to do what I want to. Not sure what this weekend has in store, but it will probably be nothing special. While talking to some friends at lunch today they brought up my game that I had designed for class first semester this year. They talked about it and joked about the concepts and made fun of me for the different things that were in it. I went along with it, but when one of my friends said he read most of the 20+ page design document, I felt a bit of pride. He then went on and recited some of the things that I had wrote down and made up for the game. They were talking about _MY_ game. It all hit me at once and I felt an enormous amount of pride in the fact that there were people actually talking about it, even if they weren't all that serious.

The problem with home is that the only person I have to talk games with is my brother, and he is gone for the entire summer. There is no one here that even remotely understands the things I talk about when it comes to games and I have to realize that and change what I say when talking to them. Refering to a certain game is out of the question unless its Zelda or Halo, two games I rarely cite. I've tried to just steer the conversations away from games for now, but I just don't really have interest in Olympic swimmers, Chemical Engineering, or Material science, which are the other topics that are normally discussed.

The internal struggle that we all have every day has been affecting me more and more. I'm finding it hard to do anything but have a blank expression all the time. There is little that excites me from the hours of 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. I find that the only times that I am actually calm and relaxed are when I am playing games and allowing my brain to actually do some sort of coherent thinking. I just keep telling myself, only 9 weeks left, then I can start to hopefully enjoy my awake time a little bit more.

Blindfolded

Not sure if this post is going to be understood by all, but here goes anyways. The explanation of the name at the top of the blog comes to head. Blindfolded is the way that I see myself going through life. I believe that everyone goes through this way of life at one time or another, depending on if they actually acknowledge it. I live through this Blindfolded life by accepting it and grasping it so that I know its what I'm doing. I know that the unexpected could be coming at any time and because I know it could happen, I always try to prepare myself and keep myself one step ahead of whats going on. There are things though that I can't see and can't even begin to look into for whatever reason. I just try to tell myself, that in the end, things will turn out well, no matter how bad they look at any given time.

I constantly find myself thinking about what exactly I would be doing if I were in Burlington right now instead of here in New York. I'm trying to not think about it because I can't know for sure if I would be happy, but I believe that i really would be happier. I guess I will just live out the next 72 days of this summer and know, for damn sure, in every single part of my mind, that it will be the last summer that I spend here.

The Safety Of Routine

Wake up.
Shower.
Get dressed.
Get in car.
Turn on Ipod, Open coke.
Tune out parents on 15 minute drive to work
Arrive at work 5-10 minutes early, unable to open the door until 8 a.m.
Enter office, sit at computer until 9:30
Drive cart to post office
Pick up mail
Drive cart back to mailroom
Sort mail
Sit and wait until 10:45
Deliver half of the mail
Return to mailroom
Wait until lunch
Take an hour for my half hour lunch break
Return to mailroom at 1, only to have to wait around until 2 when UPS and Fedex make their drops.
Deliver rest of the mail
Listen to my boss make fun of everyone until 3:15 when he lets me out early
Wait until parents get out at 3:30 and proceed to drown them out with my ipod once again on the ride home
Get home, crash for a couple hours, eat dinner, "relax" until I fall asleep.
REPEAT.



This routine has gone on now for two full weeks and I am pretty much bored and slightly disgusted at the fact that I can generalize every day of work I have had into such a schedule. I need something that changes from day to day. I need something that I can look at and not know exactly what is going to happen every minute of every day. I need something unexpected, and I don't mean not having my bosses just randomly not come into work so I have to run the whole mailroom. I know that I don't want to be here because my heart doesn't change its beat when I come in or while I'm here. This is why games mean so much to me, they keep my mind active and they keep my heart racing.



If you follow a routine for too long, you'll forget that there is variation...

Because I Know I Can

Well, here I am again, at work, boss decided to not come in and never told me, so I'm sitting, hoping that a whole shitload of shipments don't come in/go out. I realize I should be happy with this job because it isn't exactly the hardest thing in the world to do and, well, I have a job that pays me. But still, I'm not exactly content with the work that I do and I'm just hoping that summer ends faster.

Anyways, on to the main point, I have been called stubborn and difficult to deal with at times throughout my life. I've realized lately that the reason for this is because I can't stand being unable to do anything about things. If someone tells me that I can't do something because that's just the way it has to be, I become incredibly frustrated, and even angry. I feel that anything can be changed and anything can be done as long as you know that you can do something about it. I never want to be told "You can't do that." I believe that as long as you can truly, and without doubts, believe in yourself, you can do almost anything you want. Now, this is all in context of course, I'm not saying that if someone tells me that I can't lift a truck, I'm gonna get mad, but if someone tells me that I can't help someone or that I can't help a problem, then I'm going to prove them wrong, not just to prove them wrong, but because it is what I do, and who I am.

The Goal

Today I had sort of a revelation of sorts. While playing Team Fortress 2 and just dicking around for fun, I was told by a kid that I sounded like I was twenty. I thought about it for a bit, and then realized that this kid thought I was too old to play video games. He, as he said at least, was 12 and was criticizing me for playing games. Now, I could have gotten aggravated about it, but i just sat and thought. I left for a while and now am back writing this, and am still thinking about it. I normally wouldn't care less, but this random comment just seemed to hit me and made me realize that I am where I am, doing what I want to do, and setting my future up for myself. It may sound a little selfish, but I am independent and am making my own decisions in life.

Now, this may not mean much to anyone else, but it strikes me as just another moment in the growing up that I am doing. Had it been two years ago, I would have laughed before completely yelling at the kid until he didn't know what day it was. I know some people have noticed the progression that I have made over the last two years and I myself have noticed it as well. I can only hope that in the final two years that I still have at college, I can grow as much as I already have and can secure a spot for me in this vast area we call the world.

Start the Takeover

How to begin...

I started this before and didn't like the direction it was heading, so here we go. I don't really know what I'm doing right now in life. I'm currently stuck in New York in a dead end minimum wage job for the summer. This job isn't all that bad, but I look around me and see what my friends are doing. They sit around and play cards all day and get paid almost twice as much as I do. I hate to say it, but it really shows that life isn't all that fair.

I'd rather be back at school. Even if it meant I was stuck at a minimum wage job up there, at least I would be happier. I should have applied for a job with the EMC this summer, but just couldn't bring myself to doing it for some reason. Maybe it was the constant rejections that I got from game companies over the last couple months, or maybe I just resigned myself to coming back to NY and working just like everyone always does. I realize, now more than ever, that if I don't escape from here soon, I may never make it out.

Before my brother left for Florida, he talked to me about all the people he went to school with, who are mostly all graduated from college by now. He went out and hung out with them and came home only to realize that none of them had anything to show for themselves. They were all working minimum wage jobs at places like Walmart.

Now, not everyone can see the turnout that keeps getting stuck in this area, but I can. When more than half your graduating class goes to college in town because they are either too afraid to leave or too afraid to pick a major to go study, you notice that you have to get out.

This brings me to going to Canada next semester. I know that Montreal is not all that far out of the country, but it still is just that, out of the country. My friends here at home constantly make fun of the fact that I told them that I'm studying abroad. "Canada isn't abroad...", "That's such a joke." I wouldn't mind them saying this if they themselves had gone abroad somewhere, but no. These are kids that have barely left the state, let alone the country, to do anything more than vacation. It's not only the fact that I'm going abroad, It's the fact that I am damn proud to go to Champlain College. I work at AU and know how the campus is. Compared to Champlain, this place is a hellhole. There is nothing, there is no one, it is just a dead end. Both schools house about the same number of students, and if I had the choice, I would pick Champlain over Alfred 100% of the time. Because of the fact that I am proud to go to school for my major, which was technically hard to get into, my friends find it funny to make fun of me at every turn or any time that college comes up. I have no regrets going into the field that I am in now. I will not doubt myself, and I will stay true to what I want to do in life, which is to make games.

Life isn't always what we want of it, and I can understand that. I'm able to push through any adversity or any problem with nothing else but people that believe in me and help from those around me. I am damn proud to have the friends that I have to this date, and I regret little to nothing that I have done up to this point in life.

It is our mistakes that bring us down, and it is our friends that bring us up and make realize what we have done, in turn making us better people.