Directly in Hurricane Gustav’s path, that’s where. 

Well… maybe not exactly in its path.  I don’t think I’d be that crazy, but I’d definitely be down there, volunteering wherever I could to help people get ready or escort them out of the area if possible.

And then I might just stick around near the coastline for some snapshots and video that I could upload to my blog. 

Ok maybe I am a little crazy.  I don’t really value my life that much anyway, and since I don’t have a house or a family of my own that I’d be leaving behind, who would miss me? 

Seriously though, this is what I would live for.  Without being tied down to a job or a house, I’d be a free spirit able to roam anywhere in the country, and since my income would be drawn from my blog earnings, I’d have more time to volunteer for any charity driven projects that I come across during my travels.

In fact, if my blog were already enjoying financial success, I’d probably be in Mississippi or Louisiana now, Red-Crossing my way around the states for a while and then driving down to the coastline so I can watch Gustav cross over.  After all, nothing says fun like being trapped in a category 5 hurricane. 

I’m not sure why, there’s just something about massively violent storms that truly warms the cackles of my heart.  I was actually born during a hurricane too, the lights flickering on and off in the hospital while the entire building shook and rumbled from the sheer force of the hurricane winds.  Total chaos while the doctors delivered me, the same way you might expect it to be if it was the Antichrist himself being born.    It was said that the circumstances of my birth was an omen of things to come.  Hee hee.

But seriously… 

I may not be able to achieve my financial goals with this blog anytime soon, but since I will be debt free in a few months, and my site still generates a modest income, if I can’t break free I might at least be able to extend the rope that’s been tying me down, and travel in short spurts here and there instead.  Since I regularly have four days off every other week, I’ll have the opportunity to take extended weekend road trips to wherever I want to go, and I’ll be able to blog about it all too.  For the short term that’s an entirely feasible goal for me, and if I keep paying down my debts at the rate I’m doing, by this time next year it may all become a reality.  Baby steps here, baby steps. 

In the meantime, my prayers go out to all those in the path of Gustav, and hope that the damage won’t be as extensive or as destructive as many of us originally feared.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of hot babes.”

Happy Independence Day!

It seems fitting that my credit card balance would be cleared in time for today’s celebration, and hopefully by this time next year my car and college loans will be paid off as well. Hard to believe my credit card debt was as high as $8,000 only a few months earlier, partly because I had to pay for the costs of new hearing aids, but I just kept furiously paying it down as much as I could, until by some sheer miracle the balance finally read zero for the first time in 4 years.

Once my car and college loans are taken care of as well, I’ll be completely debt free and enjoying a near perfect credit rating, especially since I will have paid off the car loan at least a year and a half ahead of schedule. So, debt-free, no ugly history with exes, no kids to complicate things, stable job with superb medical benefits, and I drive a sleek black fully loaded SUV. Girls should be lining up the door here, and yet nobody wants me. At least nobody sane that is, and just that one criteria seems to eliminate a good portion of the female populace.

*Sigh*

That’s part of the reason why I want to travel, and once my debts are cleared I’ll have to decide then whether to throw caution to the wind and quit my job so I can roam the country as a working nomad. I’d like to believe that there’s a place in this vast nation of ours where I can truly feel like I belong, a place I could finally call home, because it sure as #@$%ing hell isn’t this sewage dump of a New York town. I’m never gonna know for sure though until I start putting myself out there.

At the very least I’d be free from the shackles of a dead-end office job, with no ties to anything and the freedom to pursue any course I desire, and embark on any adventure I wish. Maybe then I’ll finally find…. her, and by then I wouldn’t have to worry about the trials of a long distance relationship, because I’ll be able to go to wherever she is. Unless of course, she’s in Australia.

Ah well, for now I’ll just celebrate this little victory over VISA, in the hopes that this will signify the beginning of my very own personal independence.

Ok, so I’ve been playing around with OKCupid for the past couple of weeks, sifting through literally hundreds of profiles, trying to find someone, ANYONE, with a good head on her shoulders that I could talk to. I’m so lonely.

I actually did find a few nice ones though. Pretty, morally upright girls, one of who mentioned her distaste for OKCupid’s lewdness (she gets 20 points for that) and her love for 80s music (she gets 5000 points for that).

They were all active and visited the site on a regular basis, so I decided to send them a friendly email commending their profiles and asking them if we could be penpals or friends.

I got completely blown off by everyone. 2 weeks of obsessively checking my inbox every ten minutes to see if they responded, and… nothing.

Now before I start going off and calling them rude, icy-cold hearted spawns of Satan and earnestly hoping that they would spontaneously combust and explode into a fiery pus filled death, I’m willing to concede that all the women I contacted just lead busy lives, and may not have had time to get back to me yet.

Therein however lies the reason for why I might be royally screwed.

I’ve been thinking about this: these girls seem happy enough, living busy and productive lives, with loving families and a large circle of friends. Why would they need me then? Unless of course, they’re only interested in a sperm donor to help them make babies, in which case once the child is born they would then go back to refusing to acknowledge my existence (except for the paycheck, which they’ll happily take of course.)

But let’s pretend for the sake of argument that women are not that conniving and evil. Or rather, let’s assume the women I contacted are basically good and caring folks. But the fact is, their lives are so busy they simply don’t have time to give someone like me a chance. They may check their inboxes maybe once or twice a week, meanwhile I’m checking my inbox once every ten minutes. I yearn for companionship and wubs so badly, but for them it doesn’t seem to be a priority at all. If we ever had a relationship, they could wind up being aloof and distant, meeting me only when they can fit it into their busy schedules, while for my part all I can do is cry into my pillow at night, knowing I’ll never be truly loved. Truthfully though, it would be a severely unbalanced courtship, where I would yearn for her more than she’d ever yearn for me.

It’s times like this when I really start to despise this Internet thing though. I know people would say get off of it and start putting myself out there, but it’s not really that simple.

For those who don’t know, I have a profound hearing loss in both my ears that severely crippled my ability to have a social life. As I grew up, my attempts to participate in conversations and groups almost always resulted in embarassment. I would miss key bits of phrases in a conversation, and when I would try to contribute, people would end up laughing at me because I had completely misinterpreted what they were talking about. It never failed, and it wasn’t long before my intelligence itself would be questioned too. People would just assume I was an idiot and thus unworthy of their attention. Eventually I just drifted away and no longer tried to socialize anymore. My hearing loss certainly played a large role in my becoming a loner, though I still did ok in tightly knit groups and in one-on-one situations. But whenever we went someplace noisy (which was all the time), it really crippled my ability to engage in conversations with the people I was with. Part of what makes it so hard is that when you have a hearing loss, you can’t passively listen and pick up voices easily. You have to exert a considerable amount of mental effort to follow a conversation, and after a while you can get pretty fatigued.

That’s why I gravitate to using the Internet all the time. Here, conversation is easy, and people can’t see me at first so they can’t quickly pass judgment on me because of my disability or looks. Unfortunately though, I made it my whole world, and it’s not a world I want to live in anymore. It’s all MySpace and Facebook silliness topped off with a generous load of unhinged insanity.

Statistics say most couples find each other through friends and family. All my friends though have drifted away, and I’ve been cut off from 99 percent of my family. My parents ironically enough don’t have any friends either (well at least not any with single daughters my age.)

I could go back to school, which would be the easiest way since they are popular dating mills (or to save money, I could just hang out on campus and pretend I’m a student.)

Or, I could join interest groups like a photography club, but I don’t know. Same thing with church, which I really can’t stand (specifically the local ones here). I’d go if I knew there’d be a lot of girls there, but I’d have no interest in any of the church services (except maybe the singles group.) Charity organizations might be a good idea though.

Still, this is a pretty big hole I’m in. I may have to consider the real possibility that I am never going to meet anyone, and that life will continue to conspire against me to ensure that I will always be alone. That’s one of the reasons I want to travel so much. There’s something romantic about the idea of a lost soul travelling around America, looking for the girl of his dreams. Someday, maybe.

In the meantime though, I’ll be checking my inbox. (checks again… still nothing, *&^%$#@!!!!)

After giving my first podcast a try, I noticed I couldn’t get the “Show/Hide Player” and “Popup” to work. It was already past midnight, but rather than just turn in and try again in the morning, I resolved to work on it until it was fixed.

I spent three hours on the problem and finally gave up at 3AM. Man was I cheesed. I hated it when something wasn’t working right, but the more I kept at it, the more it seemed to break. When I woke up the next morning, I sat down and resolved the issue inside of 5 minutes. Sheesh. I need to learn how to let things go until I can come back to a problem with a better frame of mind.

I had other issues to fix though, but nothing really urgent (an invalid feed here, a few poor link colors here, etc..) Still, I spent the better part of my day just doing blog related housekeeping. I hadn’t even eaten till around 4.

I think I need a life. With my plans of attending law school shot to hell, I guess with nothing better to do I’ve been turning my focus to blogging again, even though I’m still not really sure what my niche should be. Hearing the success stories of how some bloggers have managed to monetize their blogs to the point that they could quit their full time jobs has me wistfully yearning for the same. With few exceptions, there’s nothing I’d like more than to travel the states and abroad, living the life of a nomad without being tied down to a job that keeps me in one place. And wherever I went, I’d use my newfound freedom to try to help people. It was the kind of life I could only dream about.

Theoretically, such a life could be possible by being a professional blogger (or writer). But the problem with me is that I have nothing interesting to offer (which also explains why no woman wants me either). I don’t have the kind of material that could draw a large crowd, and I’m just not smart enough or creative enough to build content that could land me a sizable audience. The really sad thing is that I consider writing to be one of my better talents, and I still suck at it. Ugh.

I guess even after 30 years on this planet, I still don’t know who I am, what I like, what I should do, or what I’ve been made to do. This sense of helplessness and lack of purpose is what continues to fuel the suspicion that maybe I wasn’t meant to be born after all. But if I was, then the question remains: who am I? Am I a writer? A preacher? A musician? An actor? A lover? No…. definitely not a lover.

I guess hiding under a rock for most of my life has made me completely ignorant of what really matters to me. Maybe the more I put myself out there, the more I can come to know where my niche really lies.

I took a day trip today that involved a ferry ride to a popular seaport, so while I didn’t have time for real blogging, I did manage to live blog the above photo of the seaport from my cell phone. Moblogging is just too cool.