Eric's Weird World

We're at an end ...

I hope you all enjoy Day 35. I wrote it over a month ago hoping it would help me get back into the swing of writing. Unfortunately, I don't have enough time to keep up with this blog and all the other projects I have going. My sincere apologies. I might return to finish some more stories in Eric's Weird World, but I can't even begin to give you an estimate of when that will be.

Thank you to everyone who kept reading patiently, waiting for the updates that never came. Again, I'm sorry to have kept you waiting for nothing.

Here are some of my other projects:
http://unpublishedart.blogspot.com
http://www.eamann.com

Day 35

Where has the time gone? It's been a whole thirty-five days since I started chronicling my life online, but it doesn't feel like it's been nearly that long. To be honest, it really feels like a month ago I wasn't writing anything, but to know that I'm on day 35 just freaks me out.

I decided to take on a part-time job now that writing has become a daily routine and my course schedule has lightened up. In addition to that, I need a more efficient way to finance my climbing habit. Shoes, harnesses, chalk bags, and memberships can be expensive - particularly when they're well used.

I tried to convince a bunch of other people to join my climbing today, but they all stood me up. All the better for me, because I had full run of the gym by myself for a whole hour! I climbed everything from the VBs and V0s that I learned on, and then completed three different V1 routes. Quite an accomplishment for me. Finally, I tried a V2 route on for size.

It's called "Split Stems," but I have no idea what that means. What I do know, though, is that it's really freaking hard. It's in the corner by te crack, and you have one handhold and one foothold each on each wall. So you're stradling the crack in the corner; doesn't sound glamorous, and it's even worse to try to hold on to.

You shift your weight side to side and gradually move up to the point where you're 6-7 feet off the floor. Then you have to shift your weight to the left and grab hold of a big jug above your head. I got all the way to the last handhold, just a few inches from completing the climb, before I stopped.

When you hands get sweaty and start to slip, you can grab some chalk from the bag on your butt and reinforce your grip. When your feet get sweaty and start to slide in your shoes, you're SOL. I started to slide around on the last foothold and decided it would be safer to come back down than to try to lunge for the last hold.

Oh well. If I start on that route tomorrow I think I'll be fine.

Day 35 of 100 - Summary: Sweaty shoes suck.

Day 34

I made a job-costing mistake today. It was simple: I didn't listen to the career coach's advice and kept my old email address on my resume. After all, who really wants to manage more than one address anyway? And I wasn't going to make my friends all change their address books. On second thought, though, maybe I should.

A while ago I sat in on a career seminar with a self-proclaimed "career coach." I really thought the guy was full of himself and spent the five hours drawing unicorns in the margins of my notebook. When we were finished, I was given my resume with his comments on it and asked to review it for later. I laughed at his notes, though, because they were mostly about my email address.

Last week I applied for my dream job. It was a management position for a bar at one of those beach resorts. Just think, all the booze you can drink, you're paid to wear sandals and not button up your shirt, sunbathing while working is encouraged, and all of your living expenses are paid-in-full. What could be better than that.

I was amazed to get a call for an interview from the agency I went through. You see, I didn't so much as apply for the job as I did sign up for a round of random interviews. The resort job was just one of the 10 positions I was interviewing from. And I was selected at random, not chosen for my qualifications. But hey, an interview is still an interview.

Everything was going well, and I seemed to have it in really well with the resort owners. They promised to email me their decision by the end of the week. I was thrilled and could see no reason they would not hire me. I spent all this past week waxing my surfboard and packing for the tropics. The position would start next month, so I'd take time off from my graduate studies and finished them off in a year or so after a nice long vacation.

I didn't get an email like I was promised today, so I called the number the owner had listed on his business card. I got right through and asked him what the problem was. He told me simply that he could not email me and because he had no further contact information, was forced to move to the next name on the list. Then he said something I'd rather not recount here before hanging up the phone.

Maybe the career coach was right. I shouldn't have listed "hotandsexymanmeat@domain.com" as my email address.

Day 34 of 100 - Summary: Listen to the man you pay $200 an hour for a 5-hour presentation

Day 33

I watched the big game today. I made a bet with my brother that the Horses would beat the Grizzlies today. At stake was a day at the gym. I love making safe bets.

The gym is very expensive and I'm to cheap to buy a long-term membership. The ironic thing is that I've been to this particular gym three times already this month and an unlimited monthly membership is only four times the daily fee (i.e. if one day is $10, a monthly pass is only $40).

My brother doesn't have his own equipment, though, so his daily pass costs a little less than twice what it does for me. So I was really excited to win the bet. Now it's time for me to go show him up in the gym, too.

I'm not competitive. Not at all.

Day 33 of 100 - Summary: Only make safe bets.

Day 32

I bought my girlfiend a Valentine's day present today. I think she'll really like it. And because I trust that you can keep a secret, I have no problem telling you that I bought a ::blank::.

Did you really think I'd post up here what I bought? Remember, my girlfriend is also a frequent reader of this blog and might just happen to read it today. I'll let you know how she likes it when I give it to her tomorrow though.

To make sure I would be able to pick it up on my way to her house I had to call ahead to the store and have them get it ready for me. I also wanted to make sure I'd have plenty of time to stop by because I had no idea how bad traffic would be. Sure enough, they were open until 10pm and the man who answered the phone was kind enough to check on the gift for me.

After I got out of class I took the train back to my car and hit the road. I made it all the way to town and stopped at ::blank:: to pick up the gift. It was ready for me and the store owner was nice enough to wrap it for me, too. I will definitely keep that store in mind in the future.

Now, though, it's late and I don't want to type much more. I might wake her up and she had to get ready for work in 6 hours.

Day 32 of 100 - Summary: Planning ahead is great!

Day 31

To those who said I wouldn't even make a week I say: "neener, neener, nee-eener!"

Today was a typical Friday for me: frustrating and boring at the same time. I have a class where I'm not allowed to use my computer but am forced instead to use a regular old pencil and paper for note taking. I know there are those of you rolling your eyes at me this very moment, but listen to my point. I do the readings before class like I'm supposed to, but the lecture is directed at a class assumed to have not done the reading. Therefore, the first hour or so tends to be a recap of the material I already know, followed by a discussion of said material when I was required to already write a 1000-word essay discussing the material.

So I get bored rather quickly.

My computer would serve to allow me to use my time more productively. For instance, rather than listening to the professor explain again why page 35 was important, I can be reading ahead for the next class, working on other papers, polishing the story I'm working on, or entertaining you with witty blog posts. Instead, I sit there and draw useless pictures of cats and dogs in the margins of my notebook. Productive indeed.

Fridays are also kind of a false-summit for my week. (Author's note: Those of you who've never heard the term "false-summit" should try climbing to the top of the hill sometime. You'll find that you get more and more tired as you near the summit and will have several instances of thinking you're "almost there" only to find you have several hundred more feet to go. The tiny hills that make you think you're almost to the top are called "false-summits.") Everyone else enjoys Fridays because they are the indicators of care-free weekends, enjoyed with days of sleeping in and free from worries about work. My Fridays, on the other hand, are harbingers of the so-called "day of death": Saturday with a 9am 6-hour class on law.

Believe me, it sucks.

But today was at least moderately relaxing for a change. I finished my laptop-free class and hurried over to the rock gym for a quick climb. None of my usual climbing buddies were interested in joining me, so I climbed alone. Their loss, I made it to the top of a problem I've been working on for the past few weeks. It's rated a VI, which is the hardest I can do at the moment, and was the route I fell from last week. The wall and I worked together this time, though, and I was allowed by the wall to make it all the way to the top and back down (hanging upside-down, remember) without falling. I even did the route twice.

Then my hands gave out and I collapsed on the third attempt.

Day 31 of 100 - Summary: Don't try too much after a long, boring lecture.

Day 30

"Business in the front, party in the back." Well, that's how I've heard mullets described by certain comedians. What I saw today on the train, though, was a complete reversal of that wonderful saying.

It was cold this morning and I had the hood on my sweatshirt up so I wouldn't freeze to death. The hood has the added disadvantage that I can't actually see anything to my left or right and occasionally run in to people or miss very comical events happening just outside my peripheral vision. The hood does keep my ears nice and warm, though.

I was running late this morning, so I ended up catching a different train that put me 20 minutes behind schedule. There was a completely different crowd on the train at this time, too. I'm used to standing among business people and other college students on the early train. The later train seems to be used by the handful of people willing to be a few minutes late to work, construction workers, and high school students trying to skip first period math class downtown.

It's the last category that caught my eye this morning. After I had been on the train long enough to be comfortable with its artificial heat, I took my hood down and surveyed my fellow commuters. I immediately had to throw my hood back up to keep from laughing. Standing about three feet from my left was a teenager with a backwards mullet. Yes, a backwards mullet.

It was short and professionally cut in the back, so I almost didn't see the rest of his haircut until he turned around. It looked like the front half of his hair hadn't been cut for at least three or so years. Business in the back, party in the front. It was the perfect way to start my 12-hour day on campus; and I'll never be able to push the image, or the laughter that accompanies it, from my mind.

Day 30 of 100 - Summary: My trust in mullet man will never be the same.

Day 29

I saw a sign at school today that I agree with whole-heartedly: "Roommates: cant live with them, can't afford to live without them." My current situation satisfies that situation completely, and I really need to correct it soon or I'll end up with a smaller, less decorated room and a new roommate named "Chuck" at the state penn.

My alarm went off at what I thought was its usual morning hour and I hit it, turning it off so I could roll over and get back to sleep. I managed to get another 15 minutes in before I opened my eyes and waited for the alarm again - bad idea. I rolled over and realized that Paul, my roommate, had set it off by three hours. I thought it was 7 in the morning. But no, I had been woken up at 4am.

I got back to sleep and then woke up to my cellphone alarm at 7 like I had planned. I begrudgingly showered and got dressed without shaving. The lack of sleep caused by the bad alarm made it hard to care about my appearance. Hence the hooded sweatshirt, torn blue jeans, and mis-matched socks.

I made it to campus and somehow managed to get through my one class in an oddly productive caffeine delirium. I passed the quiz today with flying colors, though I can't remember what it was about, and trucked off to a quick group meeting before lunch. We discussed a whole multitude of things, but I spent the few moments of lucidity I had plotting ways to get back at Paul. I dreamt of several different things, the most graphic of which I'll save you from, but they included everything from duct-taping his door shut to reporting his car stolen and then calling in its location while he was at work to have it impounded. I'm a crafty ass, aren't I?

I hopped back on the train to make my trip back towards home. About halfway there, the fare inspectors came on board and asked to see my transit pass. I casually whipped out my wallet and handed it over to the inspector. He nodded to his partner who rudely pulled me from my seat and pushed me towards the door.

When I protested, the first inspector handed me back my wallet and glared at me.

"Nice try, jerk. Now you're getting a ticket and have to walk home."

I looked at my wallet and, to my surprise, disgust, and downright anger, saw that it was not filled with credit cards, cash, and my ID but with neatly cut pieces of cardboard all labelled: "Ha ha, got you again!"

When the train stopped, the inspectors pulled me off the train and wrote me a $250 ticket. Then I bummed some change off a fellow commuter and used the pay phone to call a friend - the inspectors were watching closely to make sure I didn't get back on the train. The whole ride back to my car at the transit mall I reevaluated my plans to seek revenge on Paul.

I didn't come up with anything until I was getting ready for bed, but I still have to smile when I think about it. My plan is to just not do anything. He'll keep looking over his shoulder, waiting for me to play a prank. I'll just let him sweat in anticipation.

Besides, I put his name on the ticket.

Day 29 of 100 - Summary: Roommates can be mean, but I can be downright evil.

We're at an end ...

Day 35

Day 34

Day 33

Day 32

Day 31

Day 30

Day 29

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