I guess I really shouldn’t shut this laptop down ever. It takes at least a stop to boot up. I was thinking about writing a story this morning, something that has a bit of my strength in the sensory words, but I’m thinking it’ll be too cheesy and won’t come off right. I guess I should just start writing and see where it takes me. It’s interesting to actually write down my thought process. When I bought this laptop, I knew it’d be really weird and my thoughts wouldn’t chain as well as they do from free thought, but I think the flow will be fine once I get used to the process. It’s just an extension to my brain, a sort of organization of my thoughts. Writing in a laptop is so much nicer than writing on paper. I feel like just the motion of hitting keys is far less straining on the hand than holding a pen or pencil and writing. You can also fit way more onto one page, its way cleaner, and in my case far more legible. I’m not sure where my handwriting went wrong. I think the issue is I just got so bored with school and homework that I started rushing everything that was given to me just to get it out of the way. I’m also pretty sure that I stopped doing some assignments that including handwriting just because I was too bored with it. It really wasn’t until DigiPen that I cared at all about assignments. There have been times and subjects that actually interested me, but it didn’t happen often. Obviously, one thing that got me in the game was math in the 7th and 8th grade. We dropped the insanely useless arithmetic and started getting heavy into algebra and things related to algebra. Considering my math minor is basically an algebra minor, you might see why I started doing homework again. From that point on my math grades massively improved and I kept up the work through to now. Now there is only one other class that I can think of that actually got me to do assignments for it. It was sophomore year French class at St Francis Prep with Madame O. What the O stands for, I have no idea anymore. I started off that year on a bad foot. I really hated French because of the previous year’s teacher and didn’t want anything to do with the homework. Now, I would pick and choose what assignments I got done, I just didn’t care, but after a few times of coming up empty, she looked at me and just said something along the lines of, “What’s going on? Why aren’t you doing these assignments? You have to keep up in my class.” I guess at that point I kind of felt bad. I realized I had been refusing to do the assignments out of spite from my previous teacher. So, I started getting things done for that class on a regular basis, and it is because of that, and the fact that she was actually a pretty good teacher, that I remember the French that I do. Of course the next year we went back to having the teacher from the first year, and my interest in French took another nose dive. Nowadays, I’d say French is kind of cool, but I don’t really have any interest in continuing my studies. If I were to learn a language it’d be German. It’ll be interesting to learn the other half of where the English language comes from. I already know a decent amount of Spanish so getting that other side would be cool. The great thing is I have a laptop now so I can download some kind of German learning program. I obviously wouldn’t be able to do the pronunciations, but if I found myself interested enough, I could do those when I got home. Jackson heights. This is such a long ride, but I don’t really wish I were paying rent right now. If I were paying rent, this netbook would-

I just got booted out of my seat by someone who needed it more than I did. I just learned not to sit anywhere near the end of a train car. What’s funny is that’s never happened to me before, but the day I get a laptop and would find it really uncomfortable to do whatever I’m doing standing up, it happens. I’m not typing standing up right now; I agree when people say that anyone who does is retarded. I was thinking about starting a blog with this writing and calling it Train Thoughts. I’ll have to check on blogspot to see if the name is available.

So, I’m on my way home, standing near the entrance tunnel to the station and I noticed someone attempting to catch a glimpse into the tunnel to see if the train was coming, but then he’d mosey on back to the wall and lean again. This person had no reason what so ever to look into the tunnel. The train wasn’t going to come any faster. I doubt he was going to get all that excited if he noticed a train was coming. It’s not something that completely uncommon either. We want to know when things are near all the time. I’ve thought whether or not I would do the same, but I don’t think I would. I know I used to, but lately, and by that I mean within the last five or six years, I’ve become less dependent on knowing whether something is about to happen or not. Instead, I like to use my imagination to think about what might happen. It sometimes leads to the issue of counting chickens before they hatch, but I have become quite an optimist. That last bit happened at DigiPen when I realized that I’m awesome. It’s an optimism that can certainly get lost from time to time, but always finds its way back, again, once I realize that I’m awesome. Certain people have realized that a way to cheer me up is to remind me of this fact, which is pretty funny and a note to all of you out there. Now, you may be thinking, man this kid needs a slice of humble pie, but I disagree. While I recognize my basic talents, I understand that I am far from what I can be, and every day of my life is spent either making myself better or taking a break from making myself better. I hardly ever really feel a day passing. I only know I’ve been doing something for too long because the light outside disappears (or comes back) or I’m too tired to efficiently think. Days follow this pattern. Days turn to months. And months turn into… well I haven’t been at this for that long so I won’t say years just yet. I’m hoping that I can eventually slow things down and take a long break. The interesting thing is, in my field, you never really fall into a mastery of something to the point where you don’t have to learn very much anymore. If you focus on one thing long enough to master it, that just means there’s something else developing that you’re not keeping up with. I guess that’s why industry vets generally specialize in something and get paid a lot of money to do that one thing. Programming is a profession unlike many others. I guess it’s like being a general handyman. It’s a bit more complex though. We can build our own tools, like a handyman building a drill, but we are still limited by the computer hardware. The only analogy I can think of is maybe a handyman can’t get the part to make his drill able to penetrate solid steel and one day, some part manufacturer offers this part. It’s something along those lines but not quite.