Good dude, bad night...

If you could feel how my face felt, you would know how mace felt.  Well, enough of that Kanye West stuff.  Right now, I'm working on some Perl stuff on the school's servers, thanks to the wonder of putty. 

I'm also sitting here waiting on the status of a student loan from CitiBank.  I swear, when I go back for the fall, the world will not be enough.  lol.  No more crap.  Seriously.  I've been reading this book called The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.  It's a pretty good book that I've been trying to actively follow.  It works.  I feel better about a lot of things now after reading it.  I'm not worried about too much anymore.  Contrary to popular belief, that's not just me withdrawing from caring about anything.  Now, I'm just more concerned about the present and the future, rather than futilely trying to worry about stuff that I did in the past. 

What's happened has happened, and you can't change what's already happened.  If you could, sh*t, we'd all be something totally different than what we are today, because, haha, hindsight is 20/20.  Agreed?

Of course.

So, yesterday, after taping The Apprentice Marathon on CNBC for nearly two weeks straight on DVR, I got to watch the final episode.  Yeah, this is old news, but haha, I don't think Bill should have won.  If Trump is smart, he'll keep Kwame around to run that golf course.  Heh.

But, I have to get back to doing stuff.  I'm supposed to be working on an essay that I'm going to turn in on Saturday.  Whoo!

I have a great deal of respect... for my father now after reading the letter he wrote my mother.  He obviously possessed a deep-rooted need to say these things to her, but of course, couldn't verbalize it.  I finally see that all these years, my mother spoke from the point of view of somebody who really didn't understand--from somebody who really did come from a place where the grass was much greener and much more fuller. 

He said he didn't blame his parents for anything that happened to him that was bad.  I thought this was very noble in the fact that he attributed all the family's idiosyncracies to the fact that they were young.  He didn't blame them.  He had come to terms with what went wrong, but all that had been wrong was continually uprooted by my mother in her seemingly never-ending quest to prove a point when she figured she was on to something. 

It almost disheartened me to read the letter because it presented a side of my dad that I had never seen before, but had always wanted to see.  He had been portrayed almost as a bad father, yet this was not the case.  In the end, I just wish he spoke to us more. 

I knew something was up though.  I always felt bad myself when my mother would bring up nuances about my dad's past as if it was wise or productive for her to do so.  My dad remarked that he never felt so low.  That, I fully understood.  But, the most poignant thing, however, was that he said he never talked about my mom's family.  It was the truth.  He acknowledged that no family was perfect, but either way he never spoke about my mom's family in such a poor light as she had talked about his.  I thought it was the cleverest way to say that she wasn't being fair.  That was the truth;  she wasn't being fair in that respect.

He also mentioned that he learned a long time ago to not open himself up to her to say some of the things that he said in the letter.  Why?  Because she would throw it back in his face.  And sadly, throughout the years, I've learned to not tell my mother anything that I thought she could use as ammo against me later when trying to fuel one of her tirades that sought to explain why I was such a flawed person.  It only takes one episode of having your thoughts thrown back at you in such a harsh way to learn to never open up to somebody again. 

In the end, I can't make out my parents to be perfect.  Nobody is.  But, it's the choices we make that determine what happens.  My dad's choice to write that letter and my mom's choice to show it to me have me believing differently in each of them now.  I guess I can finally see them for what they are and not what each of them made the other out to be. 

Broadband.

Wo ist meine...?

Supposedly, we have broadband internet access coursing through the veins of my house now. I don't really know though, because I'm making this entry via Earthlink's dialup service--that which I have had for the last two years.

My dad switched from DirectTV back to the cable company with digital cable and supposedly, broadband internet access. I guess something went wrong today, and neither of the computers have been touched. lol. Either way, we've got digital cable, the type where you can rewind live television. I've been sitting here recording episodes of The Apprentice since I never got to watch them in school.

Donald Trump, as you know, has become really interesting to me for all the entrepreneurial vigor he's shown in his real estate career. I read his book, How to Get Rich, and I probably already said before, it was really motivating. I'm going to go to the library tomorrow and see if I can find his other books to read. I'm off from work for the next three days, so I'll have time to do that.

Otherwise, I really need to get to work on my scholarship essays. I've been in heavy planning for the essay that deals with reasons why more African-Americans than ever are earning college degrees. I have answers, I just need to form a coherent essay around those answers. It'll be fun writing the essay though. It shouldn't be a problem--I'm the kid that got an A in freshman composition! lol.

Also, I talked to Desiree tonight for the first time in like two and a half months. We had one of our usual hardy conversations about our gripes in life, particularly dealing with our fast food experience. It seemed like I ended up giving a discourse on how to run a restaurant. lol. She hated food serving times which really are totally stupid. It was really good talking to her again though.

I had talked to my mom before about it and she was thinking maybe I was expecting too much out of Desiree because of her academics and the like. I guess that was right. Nobody's perfect. That's why I watch The Apprentice and read Donald Trump books.

Heh.

Come get it.

This is real love. So, I was on my way from Bank of America today going back toward the mall area to make my way to Radio Shack, and I saw a grey 745Li and as it passed by Rell's "Real Love" was blaring on my radio. Divine providence? You betcha.

It's too bad I love that song and really dig that car. Even though I fear the cops, I gotta be able to listen to that song whenever I want to. It's based off an old song from A Tribe Called Quest called "Electric Relaxation." Great song.

Anyway, I'm watching one of my favorite movies, Brown Sugar. I saw this movie for the first time last year and couldn't stop watching it. It's great. In the midst of watching it, I thought about compiling a list of all my favorite movies. Here goes:

• Brown sugar


• Tommy Boy


• The Matrix


• Catch Me If You Can


• Honey, I Blew Up the Kid


• Ladybugs


• Rover Dangerfield


• The Little Mermaid


• Shrek


• Shrek 2


• Hollow Man


• Titanic


• Forrest Gump


• The Lion King


• Independence Day


• Home Alone


• Home Alone 2


• Men in Black


• My Big Fat Greek Wedding


• Rush Hour 2


• Mrs. Doubtfire


• Toy Story


• Meet the Parents


• Austin Powers in Goldmember


• Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me


• Kill Bill Vol. 1


• The Passion of the Christ


• Waterboy


• Black Sheep


• Antwone Fisher


• Sister Act 2


• Bushwhacked

Pusher.

IBM Knows Exactly What They're Doing.

Yeah. I took my LCD screen apart. Let's just say that...hmm...I'm just gonna pay somebody to fix this damn thing. I don't have the time nor the patience to deal with that thing anymore.

I took a look at IBM's supply of LCD panels. The outlook on that is not good either. I would pay $372 for it, but nah...

Macadamia Nutt.

Corporate thug. So, tonight, I was reading through some blogs created by venture capitalists, particularly one based out of Manhattan. A lot of the blogs were pretty interesting to read, but I had to stop. My eyes started hurting again. I think I really might have gotten myself into that bind that I was secretly striving for years ago--to get glasses so I would appear to be smarter. Now, I might actually need them. lol.

But, I recently discovered the other night after a long, arduous blog entry, that my Earthlink FTP account had overflowed with that entry. I've used all 10MB on that blog. I guess after a year of constant blogging, what can one expect? lol. Hmm...Good thing for Blogspot.com. Heh, now that Blogger is backed by Google, there should be no limit to the space they can offer users--theoretically anyway. For users, it's just a matter of using that space.

In any case, I'm sitting here with sore eyes after a day full of reading and writing, and no, folks, I'm not in summer school. I've been doing calculus (brushing up on it for the sake of passing calculus II) and writing an essay in hopes of using that cash to help fund my education.

I haven't heard anything from Howard since I mailed that appeal letter off, but hopefully I'll have a decision soon so that I can look into getting loans in time enough to have everything totally paid for when I get to school.

I went to Books-A-Million last night and treated the store like everybody else seems to do...treat it like it's a library. Seriously, folks, I'm sure you've seen it at your own BAMM store. Folks come in with study groups and what look like business meetings. It's almost funny. People come in and watch TV and read the newspapers for free. It's great because they're open pretty late compared with other places. So, I seized the opportunity to go in there and read Donald Trump's book How to Get Rich.

It turned out to be a great read. It contained a lot of useful advice that I'll be very likely to try to implement over the next couple of months. The next month and a half will be very crucial to my longterm success.

How so?

First, I'll be seriously getting into working at McDonald's by requesting more hours (if you don't ask, you won't receive, and you can't let your boss succeed in attempting to royally screw you if you can help it), plus I'll be getting ready to go back to school. Time is running fast.

Plus, I think from now on at work, I'll be following one of Trump's dictums very closely: Always cut out the middleman. Go directly to the person who it would be more beneficial to deal with if you really can gain access to that person. Right now, at McDonald's, that person would be Jackie D. I've already had some rather tacky run-ins with the other manager, so I'm not too much interested in them anymore other than my own capital gains.

Capital gains?

Of course, I have only two real reasons to acknowledge one of my bosses. She makes my schedule and she's a boss. Otherwise, I'd avoid her like the plague. She's turned out to be bad news.

Anyhow, I am attempting to be better about learning things quickly and then hurriedly applying them. Trump recommended gaining an understanding of human psychology, so that is exactly what I am trying to do. Trump is a real advocate of a psychologist by the name of Carl Jung, so I've been reading about him. He has some great quotes that I'll fork over later. lol.