“Stick and stay and may it pay.”

Thank you. I love you.

Neat things:

1. I played paintball for the first time in 4 years today with a great group of guys. It has rekindled my addiction!
2. I love goulash.
3. I love Fernando, Natasha, Helen, and Jorge. They are like four amazing weather balloons tied to my lawnchair of life! They lift me up so much! All the other tiny balloons that come WITH them are just an amazing added bonus!
4. I love brownies with Dulce de Leche on them.
5. Pug Therapy helps little by little.

I am surrounded by so many amazing people, in such an amazing city. So many wonderful things have emerged in the last few weeks that I should be happy.

But I am not totally happy.
One person, one city, an entire era of my life has such a grip on me at the most awkward moments…

It’s like living in a strange vacuum. I have gotten so used to addressing and conversing with a mind that is so sharp, witty, and talented; that now everything seems so dull-”Everything is amazing, and nobody’s happy”

Why the hell do I care so much about this? I don’t know how to deal with it, save for be mopey and in a self imposed funk all day.

I mean hell, at this very moment I am losing sleep over it!

I can’t talk about it, because then I sound like a “psycho”.

I miss you Tarbaby and Chuckwagon. I really needed you today. I cried when I watched the Beach Boys video we made back in June.

Should I see a therapist?

So, I moved out of our house. I no loner live in Baltimore with Vanessa. After a month of driving each other insane after the break-up, we finally have space. My friend Fernando opened his condo to me in Washington DC, and I have been looking around the ‘hood for jobs. I have an interview at the Lacoste store tomorrow that I am pretty psyched about…THE job can wait. Right now I need to get something to stop the bleeding and stabilize the wound. Also, I opened a Twitter account…I don’t know why, I am not exciting. Check it out at Twitter.com/mattheweide

sigh.

“… Cheery-A, cheery-E, cheery-I, cheery-O, cheery-U…”

• “I like my mom.”

• “I wish I could watch the Amazing Race”

• “This ‘Sumatra’ coffee is very watery”

• “Why am I suddenly infatuated with Tina Fey?

• “Why is ‘Big Oil’ making itself out to be a victim of things like ‘bad public opinion’ when it is proclaiming profits of 200 billion dollars?”

• “Good on the Muslim graveyards of Mumbai to not allow the hotel gunmen to be buried there.”

• “Some things I do for money, some things I do for free.”

• “I hope I get that/those job(s).”

• “Why is the phrase “Prepositioooons!” yelled in an angry manner accompanied with fist shaking making me laugh so much?”

Howdy gang.

So it’s been a bit. That’s okay. Not really much has changed. I am on the hunt for full time jobs in the Baltimore and DC area. In all honesty, the magic of DC is gone. While working in DC is exciting, especially now, it’s the getting there that is starting to take its toll. I can stand the train ride, I can stand the metro ride…but the cost of such a trip eats away almost 38% of my paycheck every month. The fact that my bank, M&T seems to take FOREVER to clear a check also does not help. It takes them 3-4 business days to clear an out of state check…and my paychecks happen to come from the Land of Lincoln. Great.

Vanessa has been understanding of the situation. She’s not exactly rolling in the dough either, and has to pay for virtually everything for her classroom because the school/school board/ mayor/governor won’t put money where it needs to go (*cough* SCHOOLS-TRANSIT) and instead waste it on things like…repaving miles of sidewalk that frankly…don’t need it.

We have started to get out of the house on weekends, because we were both going a little mad. As a result we have seem the following films:

Pride and Glory (Grade: D)
(The first 10 minutes of) RocknRolla (Grade: F)
The Changeling (Grade: B+)
Quantum of Solace (Grade B-)

This party is just about right outside the door of my old Seattle apartment. Sigh. Baltimore was nice, what with people shooting off fireworks, there was nothing like this.

Photo credit: Raul Gutierrez.

Recently I downloaded all of the TED Talks from iTunes onto my iPod. The TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference that defines its mission as “ideas worth spreading”. The lectures, also called TED talks, cover a broad set of topics including science, arts and design, politics, culture, business, global issues, technology and development, and entertainment. Speakers come from a similarly wide variety of communities and disciplines and have included such people as former U.S. president Bill Clinton,Nobel laureates James D. Watson, Murray Gell-Mann, Al Gore, Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales,notable architect and urbanism critic James Howard Kunstler, and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. I enjoy watching them every year, and some day hope to attend the conference. What good I may do there, I don’t know; but I think it would be an interesting experience.

Anyway. I was watching the lecture by Professor Brian Cox (below) about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that was “switched on” on 10 September of this year. I now have a new hero of science. He is an advocate for raising the the awareness of science in the public eye, and is not afraid to call the naysayers out when they try to spread rumors about what the LHC is trying to accomplish (see the title quote). There is something about having particle physics explained to you in a Lancastrian accent that makes it…accessible and understandable. Granted, the lecture’s only about 16 and a half minutes long, and I don’t have to sit through university lectures and work out the Standard Model of Particle Physics, but I am a visual learner so I’ll take what I can get. I also enjoyed another video. I found this video to be very interesting, and has prompted me to think about crows in a much deeper sense. I also asked Vanessa last night if she would like to get some crows as a pet. Could be handy. P.S: The statement about students at the University of Washington is verified as true by Vanessa, who has seen the repercussions of this first hand. Watch the video to find out what I am talking about. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: Joshua Kline and The Amazing Intelligences of Crows.