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With this blog.
Let's face it. I've updated, what, twenty times this whole year? Probably a little more than that. I don't even feel like checking.
But this blog just doesn't have a purpose anymore. No one's reading it. The little that I do have to say is either self-serving or pointless, or both. I feel like the only reason I keep posting at all is the fact that I want to hold onto the notion that the people that I've come to know and love over the past five years aren't going to just disappear completely like nearly all my friends previous to that did.
But there's two problems with that. For one, they didn't disappear, I did, and just didn't make enough effort to keep in touch. It's my own fault. So... I can't really blame them for not making the effort either. If I were to see them again, I'd love to catch up on old times, and find out how they've been doing in the interim, what they're up to now... but ultimately, why should I be losing sleep over it? I've moved on. I hold nothing against them, I've no reason to think they hold anything against me. Our paths have simply diverged. Maybe someday we'll meet again. Maybe not. God knows.
That's the other problem, and again it's my own problem, one which I refuse to really acknowledge anymore: that preconceived notion, that horror that I'm going to lose touch with people again, is not something I actually expect to happen. I do, honestly, expect to hear very little from my various friends across the globe these days... but I also expect that someday I will see them again because they are, in fact, my friends. I have a compunction within me to make an effort to see them again someday, however long a time may pass from now till then. So... it's really a moot fear.
My reasons for keeping up this blog have thus faded into obscurity. So... I guess I will too.
Well, not really. As far as I know, the people that I care about the most have my phone number and my email address, although I wouldn't bother with the email. I never check it. I feel like email was IMing before IMing was IMing, kinda like IMing was texting before texting was texting. It's two computer generations backward. The only thing it's really good for anymore is sending your resume out. Which is more than I can say for IMing.
At any rate, I imagine that some day I'm going to want to start actually blogging again, for reals this time, and if and when I do I'll be sure to post a link here.
And... well... I guess that's it, then. Take luck, everyone.
Song stuck in my head: Circles - Incubus
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I'm not sure if anyone who'd appreciate this will be reading this, but I have to say this anyway. I've made a terrible eerie discovery. During our Bible reading tonight, I was flipping through the pages of the new Bible my mother got me for my birthday, a Holman Christian Standard Bible version, which I'd never heard of but I've determined is pretty much 85% NIV and 15% NKJV. Anyway, my Bible's got these sections in the front, middle, and back of it with various little blurbs on how to attain "Authentic Manhood" (my mom figured, as a new husband, I could use some of those, I guess), and one of the blurbs, for whatever reason, lists the various ways the various religions of the world say you can get to heaven, with Christianity, of course, being listed last as the actual way. One of the religions listed was Mormonism, and Ang and I discussed very briefly how strange a religion we both thought it was considering it's technically a Christian offshoot.
From there, I mentioned how it's at least not as weird as Scientology, which of course required further investigation via the Internet and YouTube. We watched part of the South Park Scientology episode, about Xanu and thetans and all that, and then found our way to an actual video of actual Tom Cruise, Mr. Scientology himself.
Here is that video.
Why do I share this? Believe it or not, I'm not merely wishing to show how ridiculous Tom Cruise and Scientology looks. They can go ahead and believe whatever they darn well want, after all. No, I have a much creepier, much more troubling reason for linking this video on my blog.
Watch the video. Insert the words "Christianity," "God," or "Holy Spirit" for "Scientology" here and there. Boom. You've got Harvey Johnson. As in, my old director/professor/guidance councilor. Harvey.
Song stuck in my head: eh, nothing really
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Okay, let's move on from all those messy depressing blogs. I'm sick of them too.
So my job just became a lot more interesting. The new schedule was most definitely a restructuring of the whole company. The short story is that with the economy in as bit a shamble as it is, people just aren't flying right now. This time last year, ATS had as many as 21 flights go through the four terminal gates we service. As of right now? 9, and sometimes 10. And that's just for mornings. So, a couple people got the boot, and most of us have to deal with part time lines.
Also, in addition to the cut in hours, there is no longer a distinction between the Ramp Agents (my job) and the Cabin Service people. Everyone does both jobs now. Today, I did nothing but clean the airplanes on the inside, which is seriously the easiest job ever. Gotta say though, I cannot believe how much people just leave behind in the airplane for us to pick up after them. Half-eaten Pringles tins (normal size, not the little ones), full cups of coffee, Burger King burger wrappers, whole newspapers shoved into the pockets in front of the seats... I haven't even had to deal with huge spills or anything yet, which I'm sure are fun. Terribly easy, though.
My biggest annoyance with this whole mess isn't even that I'm now working 20 hours a week. My biggest annoyance is the people who didn't get the boot, and in fact grabbed some of the full time positions just because they've worked here for longer and thus have seniority. Incompetent idiots for which there is no better description, and they get twice the hours I do.
Meh. Ang is working now, so we'll be all right, but I'm definitely going to be searching for another job. Now if only I knew where to begin looking apart from warehouses...
Whatever the case, things are going all right. Temperatures are finally dipping below 100°, and it's incredible how much nicer 90° weather is down here than it is... um... anywhere else.
I wish there was more to report. I will say that I'm really happy that football is back in season. I have been missing me some decent sports entertainment. The Penguins' run at the Stanely Cup was awesome, and no matter how much they suck I'll always enjoy watching a Pirates game, but darn it there's just something about the Steelers that I truly look forward to every year. It might be time to change up my site colors to reflect this, actually. I haven't done that in years.
Anyways, to wrap up this post, I'm gonna put up a few photos of my workplace. Yeah, the airport. Any TSAs that might be screening random blogs or whatever, I do this with innocent intents, and if you're really that jittery about my having the pics up, I'll take them down.
Ah yes, a typical me, eyebrow raised, looking like a mook. I do make a good mook, don't I?
This was the wallpaper on my phone for a while. It isn't often cloudy in Phoenix, but when it is, it's gorgeous. That plane was headed to Atlanta later, I do believe.
The view from inside one of the bins that your luggage resides in whilst you travel in the cabin above. That's a more typical Arizona sky there.
All right, enough from me. The Steelers play in an hour and a half, and they'd better have brought their best game. We're playing freakin' Jacksonville. We haven't beaten Jacksonville since 2004. Granted, we don't play all that often, but still. They're always a thorn in our side, and with our running game pretty much non-existent, I'm none too thrilled with the prospects.
We shall see, I spose.
Song stuck in my head: Green Eggs and Ham - Moxy Fruvous
EDIT: 8:34 PM (PST):
Aaaaaaaaaand despite the Jacksonville officiators clearly being paid off to tip the game in the Jaguars' favor, the Steelers still managed to get the W. In honor of their resilience, my colors have been altered as such. 4-1, and we have a bye next week. For once, life is good to be a Steeler. 
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I never know what to say anymore.
I mean, what is there to say, really? I'm really getting sick of my job. I go to work bleary-eyed and tired, come home fatigued, starving, and aching all over, and from the looks of it I'm not going to actually have a decent chance of advancing back up to a genuine full-time position for a good while with the way things are set up there. Tomorrow, as far as I know, I get a new schedule again. I'm a mite frustrated there.
I could talk about current affairs, but that couldn't get much more depressing. The economy's tanking, and if we don't pump billions of new funny-money dollars into circulation soon we could face another Great Depression, but if we do pump billions of new funny-money dollars into circulation the dollar will have about as much value as the peso, taxes will skyrocket with no foreseeable end in sight, and as it is the government's buying up a ton of these banking industries anyway, so all our assets are probably gonna be frozen and eaten up by the Fed in the name of "stabilizing the economy" or something.
The candidates for president are both scary prospects to say the least. I tend to prefer Obama, believe it or not, only because he's actually in favor of getting us out of Iraq on a realistic (i.e. existent) time frame, but he probably doesn't have the necessary experience McCain claims he doesn't, and in a time of such economic uncertainty I can't imagine I'd want inexperience over experience. McCain, on the other hand, just plain strikes me as creepy, and with him in office I can just about guarantee you we'll end up fighting a losing battle in Iran, which clearly poses a terrible threat to us from all the way over on the other side of the planet.
I could discuss movies, my old stand-by, but I haven't seen anything new recently aside from Stargate: Continuum, which was good but in a Stargate-y kind of way, which I'm not sure would appeal to most people. Well, it was a good sci-fi action/thriller, anyways. But yeah.
Everything new has become old. I have a hard time remembering life before Arizona. I've been here for four months, now. Everything is routine with no chance of changing it because changing the routine requires money, money which simply does not exist yet and for all we know may not exist at all come the next few months the way the ecomony's going.
*sigh* Normally when I get to this point in a blog it becomes privated. I'm so sick of being down. I'm so sick of being pissed at everything. I just want to live my life with my wife and get by until my Lord returns to take me out of this mess, or until I go to meet Him first.
Song stuck in my head: Lonely Night in Georgia - Marc Brussard
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Have you ever had one of those memories? One that stands out so vividly in your mental databanks that the images, the sounds, the very feelings felt are so crisp and terrible that you cannot, and could never, forget them no matter how hard you might wish? They're like words emblazoned in boldface and increased to 20-point font size, a headline divider separating countless paragraphs of words, words, words. They are moments that quite literally can be remembered as though they happened only 24 hours ago.
I wish I could remember the first day I saw my puppy that vividly.
She was two months old at that point and at most probably about seven pounds of pure fur. She was (and is) the softest dog I have ever had the pleasure of petting, her fur more pleasing to the touch than velvet. This came from her unique mix of breed, which was mostly Labrador Retreiver, but thrown in was an X-factor of some Asian variety which the vets think is Chow Chow and I'm convince is Akitu. Whatever the case, this mix gave her a mostly Lab appearance with downy white fur, flopsy brown ears, a feather-duster for a tail, and a blue-black tongue. She was pudgy, but most puppies her size are, I think, and she definitely had a roly-poly look about her, though she didn't appear very active at first glance, almost exuding the faux-docile attitude most cats seem to naturally take on when they're being held and they clearly don't want to be. Becca, however, wanted to be held.
For that is what I named my puppy after we purchased her from the Syrup Lady. (This is the only name I have to affix to her breeder. My parents and I can't for some reason recall the name of the woman we purchased Becca from, and all we can really remember about her is that she occasionally gave Becca syrup as a treat. That and she originally wasn't going to sell Becca at all.) I named her Becca after a character in the story I've been writing since I was 14, and I in turn named the character after my very first true crush, Rebecca Masevice. I sometimes wonder what Becca Masevice would think if she knew I named my dog after her. 
She was, for the first couple months of my life in New Jersey, my only friend. I spent that summer training that dog into the fine upstanding citizen she is today, teaching her to come, sit, stay, lie down, even got her housebroken. Becca Masevice may have been my first crush... but Becca Baby Blackburn was my first love.
And I do love that dog. I love her like a daughter and a buddy. That first summer, she kept me from going completely insane in my brand new Jerseyan surroundings, and I couldn't have been more thankful for it. All the while it was very apparent that she had a special affinity for my mother, her Mommy (she was, after all, who fed her every morning at 5:30 AM long before I got up), but I still knew she loved me, and that meant the world to me. She meant the world to me.
A year later, on the 5th of May, a Saturday, she escaped the back yard and was hit by a passing motorist.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
It was roughly 7:30 in the evening and I had just finished mowing the front and back lawns a little under half an hour ago. I was tired and sweaty, wearing a simple white T-shirt and my white khaki pants with the button missing, which I always wore when I did work like that. Being tired and sweaty, I had chosen to wind down my evening watching Cartoon Network, Dexter's Laboratory as I recall. My parents were both at the church that evening, which was located directly behind our house in New Jersey. They were rehearsing for a wedding that my dad was to perform the following day. This left me alone with my cartoons, and my beloved Becca.
Who was being very whiney. She was fine for most of the time, but all of a sudden she just started whimpering pitifully at the back door, which, knowing her, didn't necessarily mean she had to go outside, and even if it did she was well trained enough that I knew she could hold it for a good while if she had to. (It's true. Becca honestly gets embarrassed when she goes in the house.) Seeing as I was watching "my show," I was a little annoyed that she wouldn't let up about it, so I figured I'd just let her out for a bit until the show was over. This I did, and she quickly bolted out the door, allowing me to return in peace to see what wacky antics Dexter had gotten himself into this time. (Come to think of it, I think The Powerpuff Girls may've come on at this point.)
Minutes pass. Minutes that haunt me to this day.
The doorbell presently decides to ring, and when I answer it, standing in the doorway is a very anxious-looking Asian dude with spikey hair and reflective sunglasses on his forehead. Before I can ask him why he's troubling me in the middle of my cartoons, he says the words I will never forget.
"I'm sorry, she came out of nowhere. I didn't see her..."
And suddenly, the world became an absolute blur. I couldn't hear him anymore. Fear gripped my entire being as I shifted my gaze from the face of the spikey-haired Asian dude with the reflective sunglasses to the bundle of fur and fluff sitting obediently beside him, a ring of blood tracing her right eye like Petey from The Little Rascals. I knew exactly what had happened. I'd left the gate open when I'd cut the grass and had forgotten about it when I let Becca out. I think I thanked the guy for bringing her back. That I don't remember. What I do remember is running as fast as I could from my front door to the church, breaking up the wedding rehearsal, and calling my parents into the house to figure out what to do with my poor, bleeding, obedient puppy. I remember my mother trying desperately to find a vet at that hour, while the bride-to-be helped us clean the blood off the linoleum. I remember various members of the wedding party congregating in the house, and then finally finding a pet emergency room one hour away that would take her. I remember the car being broken down for some reason, forcing us to take the church 15-passanger van, which nearly died on us on the way over there. I remember hugging my poor puppy the entire drive there, praying desperately that God might spare her, all the while knowing that it was my fault that this had happened to her.
And I remember that through this entire ordeal, from beginning to end, from the moment I saw her sitting there dazed and distraught on the porch to the last we saw her that night in the ER, IVs sticking out of her shaven leg and everything, she did not whine once. Not so much as a whimper. She was as brave a girl as I could've asked for...
*pauses*
Excuse me. Getting a little emotional here...
So why am I getting into all this? Well, the good news is she made it through the whole nasty process just fine, the only ill effects being her subsequent fear of all things cars, and within weeks she was back to her normal wonderful self.
The bad news is... my parents are considering getting rid of her.
I... guess I've seen this coming for a few years now. She hasn't really been "my" dog since I left for college, and that was obviously five years ago, five out of her eight-and-a-half year life. My mom's been taking care of her down in Virginia all this time, and while she certainly loves the pooch as much as I do, the fact remains that Becca is a really big burden on her. Becca's a big dog, like 70 lbs. now, and my mother isn't really in the kind of health to be taking care of a dog like that, and my dad's been wanting to get rid of her for a while now. (He has nothing against her, don't get him wrong. He's just... frugal.)
Now that Ang and I are in Arizona... there's really not much hope of us taking over as her primary owners, unless somehow my parents can manage to fly her down here or something. Where we'd put her is anyone's guess.
*sigh* It's just... it's really hard hearing this all of a sudden. My parents just told me this tonight. They haven't decided anything yet... but they're seriously talking about getting rid of her. It kills me that it's probably the best decision... but I don't know how well I'd really do with that, knowing that she's... just... truly not my dog anymore.
My girl... my Becca girl...
Enough. Nothing's been decided yet. Maybe a solution will arise. A good solution.
I hope...
Song stuck in my head: Do I Creep You Out? - "Weird Al" Yankovic
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