Blog #61 - Redheads

     So, this could quite possibly be the easiest blog in the world if I just copy-pasted my Commonplace paper, seeing as how the entire paper is written about such a subject. But that would be the easy way out, and I prefer to keep some integrity in my blogs! Well, not really, but at least an illusion of such I guess. So about my concern... I'm concerned about the decreasing number of redheads. According to some studies or something or another, redheads should stop being born after the year 2055 or so. This saddens me because I find redheads to be very pretty in general, and all the guys remind me of Ron Weasley. I'm not exactly sure what could prevent this other than like a redhead breeding program. Of course, maybe there could be some way in the future to genetically engineer the redhead gene into people. Maybe make it into a dominant gene, as opposed to a recessive gene. I'm an extremely dominant person myself, and I'm not sure I have many recessive genes to really pass on. As far back as I can think, my family has had brown hair and brown eyes. Well, except my half-sister, but she got the blonde from her father. In the future, will we be the kind of people who keep genetic oddballs in zoos? That would be incredibly terrible and interesting. I'm curious about the future. I forgot to do the last two blogs because I was freaking out about my car. By the way, if anyone found some keys with a green keychain and beads that spell “Catfish” please tell me, as I'd like to have my keys back.

Blog #56

Since I moved around a lot, and I'm a bit socially awkward, I just have a small group of close friends. They are pretty much divided into two groups, and only a few people travel between the two groups. In one group is my friend Dyllon. Dyllon is a self-proclaimed fourteen year old girl, as he follows pop culture closely and gossips quite a bit. He listens to a lot of punk music, but is also the reason I got into Paramore. We have similar tastes in video games, and his hair is at least as long as mine.

Brandon is my juggalo friend. He's part of the group that Dyllon is in. Brandon has the odd hobby of reading up on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms; he could at one point give the details of nearly 300 different officers in the dynasty era. He's a pretty chill guy, and the main reason that I'm into Twiztid and Atmosphere. We have plans to go to the Gathering next year!

Spencer is the friend I share all my weeaboo tastes with. He's part of the other group, which tends to be a bit more anti-social and nerdy. If either of us ever find a good manga, we tell each other and instantly go check it out. Sadly, he moved to an apartment and has completely stopped hanging out with the friend group.

If I had a best friend, I suppose Montie would be it. Montie is part of the anti-social friend group, which meets every Saturday night to chill and play games like World of Warcraft. He has the same taste in books that I do, and we can spend hours and hours discussing the Wheel of Time series. Although all my friends tend to be smarter than the average person, most of them have done a cost-benefit analysis and figured that getting an easy degree at a low-cost college would be much more worth it in the long run. This has led to none of them going to OSU, much to my dismay.

Blog #55

      I have several favorite places, mostly depending on my mood. Typically, I'd have to say that my room is my favorite place. It has all my computers docked in it, my television, and most of my gaming systems. It has my bookshelf as well, although I'm not typically a fan of buying books. I keep blankets over my window to help facilitate sleeping during the day. When I'm in my room, I'm usually laying in bed, either on my laptop or reading by lamplight. My room is my comfort zone, quite possibly the only place I can sleep in. When I moved elsewhere, I greatly missed the comfort of this room, which my brother tried to take over, rather unsuccessfully.

      Otherwise, my favorite place really changes. My father's old computer room was a fantastic place. I spent a lot of time in my preteen years playing Runescape there with the oddly fantastic smell of tea and fig newtons. For reading, I believe that my favorite place is the beach. The beach is one of the few places I don't listen to music as I read, as the typical sounds of the beach are relaxing enough for me.

      In fiction, I have a place that I just enjoy reading about. The Ireland that Nita Callahan experiences in the fourth book of the Young Wizard series is definitely the place with the best feel. The author really puts a lot of effort into describing the majesty of a rural Irish area, which she does well because I'm fairly sure she lives in such an area.

      On a side note, tonight was my last night of work, since I quit due to having a summer job lined up. This means that I can finally grow out my goatee again! I am kind of curious as to what became of my coworker who took an 8 day vacation and dropped out of college because she was 100% sure that the world was ending on the 21^st. I rather hope she doesn't kill herself, but I guess I'll never really know, eh?

Blog #54 - Maybe a bit obvious

Story Number One:

So I moved down south near the end of my high school career. It was an odd part of North Carolina, rather rural to be honest. The kids in my school were fairly nice people, and it was thankfully hard for them to be openly racist due to the large percentage of minorities in our school. Despite this, several accounts of simply amazing stupidity arose, and I will tell some of the stories that I witnessed and see if you believe them. During civics class (I had to re-take some lower level courses in order to graduate, because Ohio let me skip them to move onto advanced courses), we were discussing the election of Obama. When discussing the president's somehow debatable ethnicity, one girl raised her hand and exclaimed “I don't understand why everyone keeps talking about how Obama is the first black president. He wasn't, Martin Luther King Jr. was.” In Science 9 (why I had to take Science 9 even though I'd taken AP Chemistry, and was in AP Bio, I will never know), we had to track a storm front through the United States. Our teacher told us to name two states the front was currently in. The kid beside me turned at me and asked, “Cody, what is a state?”

Story Number Two:

I once saved Middle-earth. See, my uncle gave me this cool ring on his eleventy-first birthday, and then some old guy appeared. The old guy was a friend of my village, and was better known as a wizard. He said that the ring was a source of evil and that we needed to destroy it, so he sent me and a few of my friends to destroy it in a mountain. We met some cool people along the way, such as a king, a dwarf, and an elf who could walk on snow without making tracks. Anyway, after a lot of walking, we managed to elude an evil eye on a pedestal and eventually toss the ring into the mountain. After awhile, some birds saved us because apparently the ring made the mountain go berserk with lava.

Story Number Three:

I was driving on my way back up from North Carolina during a blizzard. My father had warned me very carefully about driving on ice, primarily because my great-grandmother had died on a patch of black ice. Unfortunately, my car was a piece of junk. I couldn't turn my car off during the entire trip, because the starter was effectively dead, and it had taken me three days to even get the thing to turn on. The trip is a total of 450 miles to my home in Newark, Ohio. As I hit Virginia, the snow started coming down so hard that I began to worry. News reports had told me that the eastern states had been getting a lot of snow recently, and that some areas in the mountains had several feet. Because I was first trained to drive on ice before regular driving, I was fine driving. However, when I hit the West Virginia border, my engine began to make a strange noise, and my RPM would drop to 0 very slowly. I quickly exited the highway and found a gas station. My car died completely about halfway in the road, halfway in the station. After several tries, I managed to get it into the station completely. When I asked where I was, I found out I was pretty much 220 miles from either home of mine, exactly halfway between. The blizzard was so bad in this area, the gas station had no more gas to give to people because the gas trucks couldn't come to refill the gas. So I was stuck, hundreds of miles away from home, no car, in a blizzard, in a gas station that wasn't open all night. Fun times indeed.

Blog #53 - Music

      I suppose that the word that comes to mind as I sit here and write this is the word “music.” This choice was probably influenced by the fact that I'm sitting here listening to music as I type up future blogs. My current choice of music is... well, I'd rather not say. It's not a band I particularly like listening to, but it's just so fantastically angsty that it's amusing. Music has always been a huge part of my life, and it's just everywhere nowadays.

      Throughout high school, I was always lauded for my musical ability. I started band back in intermediate school. The euphonium was my first instrument, although I really wanted to play piccolo (but I was told that I had to go through flute first, and I said no, because a flute is a girl's instrument, according to my eleven year old self). As I got into high school and joined marching band, jazz band, pep band, concert band, and anything I could get my hands on, I started trying my hand at other instruments. Due to lack of other actual euphonium players, I was always first chair. When I tried out trombone for jazz, I took a year watching the seniors blow away everyone with their skills, then succeeded them as first chair for jazz (although I wasn't the best... Our top trombonist could just play one mean fourth trombone). I also tried tuba/sousaphone for concert and marching bands. After spending a year under the tutelage of the most amazing tuba player I've met, I became pretty good. The year after that, she had graduated and the second chair (a thug who was oddly amazing) took her place. After he got expelled, I was giving the daunting task of being the section leader of the low brass for marching band. I failed at that pretty badly, in many aspects. One of my members was expelled for pulling a knife on someone while we were at a football game. I was a terrible teacher and couldn't teach the other tuba player how to play at all, so he was simply kicked out. The two euphonium players were both recruits from other instruments, and I could barely teach them how to read music, let alone play their instruments properly. The trombones were pretty independent, and were more under the charge of the trombonist field commander than mine, so that was pretty okay.

     When I entered high school, I also gave a try at choir. Freshman year, I was a new kid who basically had to learn all the steps from our amazing upperclassmen. They graduated, and the choir fell into the hands of the sopranos. As sophomore year came about, I was good enough to try for the show choir (that says nothing at our school though), and even got into honors choir. I was chosen as the leader of the tenors, which was a terrible thing. First off, I'm a baritone, but we just had a complete lack of men who could sing with any decent range. Second, I'm a terrible singer, but among the tenors, you could say that I was the cream of a bad crop. I moved away from all that my senior year to a school were the musical program wasn't nearly as extensive. I basically played in the marching band, and not much else, mostly because that's all they'd really let me do. It really killed me having so much free time that I wasn't filling by dancing, singing, or playing for people.

      Music is just fascinating I guess. I mean, it has such an effect on mood, and comes in so many different styles. I really enjoy listening to so many various genres. My parents were classical fanatics (my middle name is Amadeus, my brother's is Wolfgang, sister's is Mozart!). Playing music while reading really helps to even further block out the outside world. Plus it makes those long drives so much more bearable. Recently, I've had the most current Twiztid album on loop. They've taken a different spin than they usually do, focusing on more emotional issues than the horrorcore associated with them. Although I enjoy their horrorcore music just as much, their new album is still great. Definitely one of my favorite bands, right up there with Scatman John, Paramore, the Pillows, and the Flobots. I actually knew about the Flobots way before they were popular, because I have friends who in Colorado who frequent the underground music scene. Scatman John... I'm sad that he's dead, his music is the most cheerful, light-hearted music that I've ever listened to. I also love Pomplamoose, a Youtube-based band that just has two amazing musicians in it.

      Oh, if you're wondering why this blog is so long, I mostly just like talking about how good I am at something, if you couldn't tell. I'm also procrastinating on studying for my math midterm. Thanks music, for allowing me to go off on a tangent about pretty much anything I want to write about for nearly half an hour. But alas, I really need to go study. Also, if you got all the way here past my pretentious, pompous writing, kudos to you.

Blog #51- Comp Science and Engi

     I am (pre-)majoring in computer science and engineering. Basically, computers have a lot of potential, and I like working with them, so it seemed like a good idea to go into a major focused on them. Best of all, it's one of the several majors that leads into what I would like to focus on after graduation, which is nanotechnology.

      I also want to major in biomedical engineering, as it also leads into nanotech (for medical purposes), but I'll have to drag my grades up a bit for that. I took some classes at a branch campus when I was 14, and although I did well in some classes, I didn't do so well in other courses. I mostly wasn't used to how a college works as compared to how middle school classes worked, so I ended up not turning in much homework (I didn't know that the teacher was even collecting it!) Apparently the only reason I even passed Psych 300 with a D because I managed to set the curve on most of the tests. Not to mention my grades last quarter were terrible, but I learned how to not pass my limit during the week of work and school, and I'm now actually able to study for classes and not sleep through exams!

      I'm also going to try and minor in Japanese, mostly because I want to study in Japan at some point. Either Japan or Australia, although Australia has some fantastically disturbing animals that I'd rather just avoid. If I somehow strike it rich, I'd also like a home in rural Ireland. Ireland just has the best scenery in the world, in my opinion at least.

Blog #50 - Robert Jordan

      I want to meet Robert Jordan (that's a pen name though, his real name is James Oliver Rigney). More than any other dead person (besides Jesus, but hey, I'll do someone besides him), Jordan is the one person of whom I want to ask several questions. See, Robert Jordan is the author of my favorite book series, The Wheel of Time. The WoT series is supposed to be 12 books long, and has been going on for over twenty years. Jordan had been suffering from declining health for some time, and swore to his readers that if he died, the series died with him. Needless to say, when I first heard the news that he died a few years back, I nearly had a heart attack myself.

      Thankfully though, Jordan had decided to leave the series in the hands of Brandon Sanderson. Jordan left several notes about the series, and had about 50,000 words of the twelfth book already written (he managed to finish the eleventh before his death). Although Sanderson has done a masterful job at keeping the feel of this epic high fantasy series going. Sadly though, he hasn't kept up with Jordan's humorous ankle and spanking fetishes that were always appearing throughout his series. Despite all this, I want to meet Robert Jordan and ask him any details that he didn't leave behind. I want to ask how he would've wanted it written, and whether anything differs from his vision of the series. Although thankfully, the last book has been split into three different books. The final installment of the series will be released in early 2012. I'm looking forward so much to the conclusion of what is the most epic fantasy series I've ever read, and dreading the massive ennui that will probably hang around me for weeks afterward.