Three Shades of Awesome

So I’m writing this from the line up in front of the Apple Store, I’m close enough that I can see the entrance I can smell the employees, and I can smell some of the incredibly ripe customers in line… actually wait that was earlier I think the stinky people left.  I’m now sitting in a lawn chair that Chris went home and got… did I mention Chris doesn’t love in Winnipeg?  Did I mention this was after hour six of waiting in line and we were entirely aware that he could leave and get home and get back and we’d still be in line!

Hey all, so I’m trying out a purdy need Safari extension, it’s called Scribe Fire, I confess I want to fix the icon… slash I will probably fix the icon, maybe I’ll email the developer, but the layout and everything is actually super clean and pretty nice.  Dare I say better than the default WordPress layout… actually very clean, very nice to use, I’m pretty impressed!

Now, I’m not talking about that menno style peace… you know… with your neighbours, that’s pretty hard to get to (kidding I’m actually fairly peaceable… if I’m not busy oppressing you…) rather I’m talking about that place where you say, I’m at peace with the world around me.  I’m cool with my situation.

Right now I’m in a place, that for some people might not be a calm place.  I just left employment at a company that was fairly lousy to work for.  But you know, I’m actually doing awesome.  Part of that comes I think from the fact that I try not to let a single thing define me, or at least I’m getting better at that.  I used to find myself in the things around me a lot when I was younger.  I was a Mac user, I was a Christian, and boy was I eccentric.

I revelled in the notion of being different.  Partly because, I wasn’t comfortable with the notion of being like everyone else.  Today, I certainly wouldn’t call myself typical, I’m hardly an everyman.  But I’m a happyman.  I’m finding more and more I’m getting to a place where I like who I am.  I’m not perfect, and I’m aware of that, there’s a million things about my life that I would change if I had the ability to drag and drop new aspects into my life.  I’d have a bigger apartment, sexier body, and life would be a lot more like on TV… incidentally I’d have a really big gun, no consequences, and a catch phrase!  Needless to say there’s be a new punishment for being a douche bag in public and it’d be named David!

But, I’m not a sexy gun toting law unto myself, and you know, it’s probably for the best… since a lot of people are douche bags in public you know.

Anyway, no I’m just really happy with where I am in life right now.  I have my nice little nook of an apartment, a great guy in my life, a Church that I love, and I’m gonna have an iPhone 4 soon.  So I’m just really content.  Not to mention the job thing will come, but you know… I’m just gonna keep on pushing forward, I gots money in the bank so I don’t really feel a crunch there.  I’m just kinda sailing along.  I’m making sure to be careful how much money I spend on random crap, and I’m just gonna be careful on stuff.

So yah, in a lot of ways I’m just choosing how I’m gonna be.  But I’m choosing to be awesome.

So, many of you may be wondering why I’ve made so few updates lately.  Well… one of you may be wondering that.  So for that one person… in… argentina… who’s wondering, here’s the answer.

I’m happy.

I’ve been kind of scared about blogging about being happy, since evidence seems to suggest that a dark force of nature, potentially with green glowing eyes, reads my blog and hunts down all things that make me happy in an attempt to generate more content from me… it’s a theory.

See the last day of may, I had some rather lousy news, I found out I didn’t get into RRC, which I’m still trying to wrap my head around.  That said, the next day I met someone awesome, someone named Chris.   Chris happens to be cute, nice, smart, and in general, about as awesome as I am.  In fact, our awesome levels (technical term) seem so compatible that we’ve actually been seeing each other ever since we met, for those counting, we’re going on two months.

The whole situation, has left me… well rather happy.  It’s been rather eerie, but I have very little to complain about, which means, very little to blog about!  I mean, how many entries can you make about how happy you are?  That’s just not that interesting!

So, what’s happened in the mean time?  Well, I actually got a job as a graphic designer briefly, well… very briefly, just under 30 days sort of briefly, yah, really briefly.  I started out working in the “plate making room” at a label making company here in Winnipeg, I’d been told that I’d do two weeks in the back then I’d be in the art dept.  Turns out what they really wanted, was to string me along with the hope of that job, while actually planning on shoving me in whatever dept they felt like for a while.  So… yah.  I got one week of actually doing what I’d been told I was to be hired for, after that it was mostly repetitive work prompted by random beeping.  It really felt like just a level above watching the fry cooker at a fast food joint…

So, I actually quit that job yesterday.  But, never fear, I actually have a pretty good lead on a job that I’m rather sure I’ll enjoy a great deal… but I can’t really talk about that.  Until that all gets worked out though, I’m hoping to get back on at the call centre I was working at for a while, I actually kind of miss the people there.  Not to mention it gave me time to write while I wasn’t taking calls.  Not to mention when your whole job is giving people discounts on products, even if the pay sucks it’s hard to really hate your job.

But yah, in general, my spirits have been pretty well… stupidly good.  Turns out all those times people told me that “Nobody but you is going to make you happy” were actually totally wrong.  Turns out that actually, having someone to hold hands with, or to put my arm around, or to put my head in his lap while he runs his hands through my hair… is actually really good for me!  Turns out that having someone else in my life actually keeps me really grounded, and helps me not put all my eggs in one basket.  Turns out, in general, I’m a lot more sane when I’m in a relationship… or at least when I’m in a relationship with Chris.

I know you might be wondering about Chris, just a brief summary of him, he’s awesome.  That’s really all you need to know.  I don’t need anyone stalking him or anything, but seriously, he’s great, at first I nearly wrote him off because he was too hot to possibly work out with, but it turns out not only is he hot but he’s also smart!  And he’s a strong person.  All in all when I look at all the guys I was willing to settle for, I’m so glad that things didn’t work out, because I wouldn’t pick any of them over him.

Anyway, so for now, I’m hanging out at home, trying to finish off my book, playing through Final Fantasy 3, and in general enjoying life.

OK, so I got to go out for a movie last night with some friends… and a special friend… hehe… special friend… he rides the short bus… wait what?

Anyway, we went to see Avatar the Last Airbender, only they’re calling it the Last Airbender, because there was already a lousy movie made by James Cameron this year called Avatar, and they didn’t want to be confused with a different lousy movie, M Night Shyamalan wanted nobody to confuse his lousy movie with a different lousy movie.

According to my short bus friend (maybe that should be my pet name for him?  Nah I think he’d probably not appreciate that… especially since he’s pretty smart… and cute… and… am I gushing?) he didn’t mind it, though I guess that’s because he hadn’t ever seen the cartoon.  Of the four of us he was the only one who’d never seen the cartoons.  Those of us who had seen the cartoons were for the most part busy trying to find ways to say we weren’t horribly disappointed at the lack of soul the movie had.

The unfortunate thing is, while I imagine the producer/writer had his own idea of how the story should be told, what really made the original story wonderful was the vibrant colours of the world, the jovial characters, the whimsy of it all.  Now it would have been one thing if they’d tried to go darker while still having a whimsical character, like the Doctor in Doctor Who, that show manages to bounce between darkness and whimsy at the drop of a hat and it always works amazingly.  But the fact is M Night isn’t nearly as good as the writers of Doctor Who.  (Even if he might have a bigger budget.)

I will say that the effects were brilliant, though they were done by Industrial Light and Magic so that’s hardly surprising.  My issue is that not a single character was developed.  The closest any character came to being developed was Zuko, or his Uncle.  Though at the same time they took Uncle Iroh from being this goofy old man who seemed to choose to be completely out of touch with reality while actually being the most in touch, into this much more dark and serious and borderline sexy character… what was with that?

Also my biggest complaint, they pronounced the names of nearly ever character wrong!  This isn’t one actor with an accent pronouncing everything wrong, this is the main character’s name being pronounced Ung, instead of Ang.  I believe they still spell it Ang, but they pronounce it Ung.  Instead of pronouncing Iroh’s name I-row, they pronounced Giro, Ye-row.  Anyone who’s watched the whole series is going to look at that and just say… wtf?  Sokka, which in the cartoon was pronounced Sa-ka, is now pronounced so-ka.  And… yah… in general just ugh.

Not to mention the story telling was just lousy.

The irony comes in that the entire movie event wise sticks to the cartoons strangely well.  They obviously left stuff out (which I won’t complain about… though they didn’t even introduce Sokka’s eventual girl friend… probably cause they didn’t want her to upstage Yui) but much of what they did cover didn’t make a lick of sense!  Events blended into each other, without making much sense.  In the first “book” most of the episodes take place in the earth Kingdom, given that that’s the largest section of land, most of the season is spent trying to get to the Northern Water Tribe, in this one they visit one earth kingdom village, and they follow the show fairly tightly (aside from the fact that instead of being on a metal ship that the earth benders can’t bend they’re placed in what’s essentially a big quarry which is just a little stupid… I’m sure they didn’t need the Avatar to show up and just remind them they could actually fight.)

After that though they made a few mentions of things in the earth kingdom, but largely it was ignored.  Again though part of that is for story telling time, so that’s fair I won’t complain that much about that.

The whole “blue spirit” section was just badly done.  The episode with that was so much better.  The fight scene was cool, but that’s about it.

What I really hated about this movie was that it was entirely driven by a loose telling of the story, with nearly no character development and all the time that could have been spent on the character development was spent with shaky fight scenes that were difficult to follow where nearly everything was black with random flashes of colour that looked like people were fighting.