Steog100

31: Drunk friends who suddenly contact me at random and say HEY WHAT ARE YOU DOING UP LATE PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BRO MAYBE YOU SHOULD GET A JOB.

I HAVE A JOB. IT’S CALLED COLLEGE. I AM FURTHERING MYSELF SO I CAN GET A BETTER JOB AND EAT MACARONI AND CHEESE FOR FOUR YEARS WHILE I WEAR MYSELF DOWN WITH ENDLESS AMOUNTS OF STRESS. IT’S TIME TO STOP TALKING TO PEOPLE WHILE YOU’RE DRUNK. JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE A BREAK BAGGING GROCERIES AT ALBERTSONS DOES NOT MEAN YOU GET TO IMPLY I’M A LAZY SLACKER BECAUSE I GET TIME TO PLAY VIDEO GAMES AT THREE IN THE MORNING.

32: Not being coherent enough…

33: Not trying hard enough (some people say I try too hard, but my sense of perception is very jumbled at times).

34: Not reading enough books.

35: My trial and error method of problemsolving. Trial and error things are a natural thing to me, but it’s sometimes ineffective and sometimes costly. I’d like to develop another method of problemsolving.

36: Worrying that bad things might happen to me.

Bad things happen. They are inevitable, but I keep thinking that somehow if I devote enough time to avoiding them, consciously thinking about every step I take and every action I make (I didn’t want to sound like that old song), that somehow I’ll be invulnerable. I believe it’s called preventative action.

But not even preventative action can save me or anyone else from awful, terrible things. So it’s really not worth worrying about.

37: The horrifyingly high cost of medical care (this is not a repeat, I swear). I watched Sicko and I remembered the story from the beginning about the guy who had to choose between two digits on his hand because he couldn’t afford to reattach them both when they were severed. And this worries me a lot.

Then I remembered HillaryCare and PNAC and despite that issue really pissing me off, I won’t get into that because that’s another can of worms, and despite my political affiliations (self-appointed Obamaite), I don’t want to offend the readers and get myself on a ‘100 things that piss me off’ list. (1: THE GUY WHO WRITES IN DETAIL ABOUT HIS LIFE WHO INSULTED MY BELIEFS. 2: THAT GUY, I MEAN, SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS HIS DEAL?)

38: The DRM measures on the newest EA games. I want to play them. But I hate activation measures and I hate being told how many times I can reinstall my game. That’s not effective at all, it hurts the consumer and it doesn’t affect the pirate. I really was looking forward to Red Alert 3.

39: I’ve got a collection of Chekhov stories sitting unread on my tabletop counter and it’s been unread because I’ve been playing Colonization, which was my favorite game when I was a small child. Go figure.

40: When you are small and you hear that the only friend you’ve really ever loved in the world during a dark, dark time gets run over in the street by a drunk hick and his monster truck tires at three in the morning.

21: Getting worried over my college grades and then realizing that I’m doing just fine (even if I failed a class). This constant stress is taking it’s toll on me.

22: Other players in Left4Dead. Somehow, there’s the one jerk who tries to cheat through the game, act rudely and yell at other players for not playing as well as they are, and generally being douchebags over a video game.

23: Me acting like one of the people in 22 and then suddenly realizing it.

24: Me realizing how screwed up my teeth are and how much I’m going to have to pay to get them fixed.

25: Living in a town with a terrible economy and no jobs whatsoever.

26: Having to go to college because there’s no money to be found. That is not the reason you should ever go to college – and who knows if there will be any sort of job after you get out in your respective field? Not to mention the crushing debt from student loans which I am not looking forward to at all. I’m surprised there was a refund involved in going to college, though. It’s something, but it’s not enough to live on at all.

27: Medical bills – I had to go in for emergency surgery for gallstones and my family, while I sat there in a cot sweating and staring at the television in a morphine addled haze, was able to negotiate the bill down to a small sum. Small enough, I’ve realized, for my family to ignore while it all goes on my credit rating. And I believed them like the naive little moron I was. Now I’ve got a major hit on my credit rating and my family doesn’t really care about helping me out – their advice is just to ignore it. I refuse to take that for an answer. I guess this is more about financial responsibility rather than the bills themselves, which leads to…

28: Not being responsible enough.

29: And never having enough money.

30: One more thing – I hate Myspace. It’s the ugliest social networking site I’ve seen – and probably the most broken too. When I was there I got hit every time with security exploits that forced me to change my password constantly all so I could keep in contact with a bunch of people. I can do the same thing in real life and I won’t have to watch every single click or tell people to change their passwords because spammers are using their accounts to send spam.

I want to travel the world and unintentionally anger people from other cultures with my hamhanded American arrogance.

11: People eating while using the computers while in the library, huddling up to the LCD monitor with their cheap third-rate cafe coffee and their horrible cafe-made freeze dried sandwiches, loudly smacking their lips as they eat while surfing through their Myspace profiles. Occasionally, their annoying phones will go off. And they are always there when I need a computer the most.

It took a lot of effort not to swear profusely when I wrote that.

12: People (especially mothers) who think that one drink of alcohol is going to turn anyone into a rampaging, drunk alcoholic. I understand the fear behind this – alcoholism is not a good thing in the slightest – but if the person’s responsible and levelheaded, then your fears are just going to irritate. Relax, it’s just a bit of liquid fun.

13: Helicopter parents.

14: Being up late surfing the Internet during the night before Christmas.

15: Ayn Rand. I don’t have anything against her personally, I just find her philosophy abhorrent and her stories even more so.

16: The current rash of ‘emo’ (or whatever they call them) haircuts where one big lock of hair is draped over half of their face leaving them one eye open to see. It may be trendy but I think it looks pretty stupid, like the barber wandered out of the shop in a distracted haze and left only half a haircut.

17: My sometimes feeble understanding of things, and the subsequent attempts to articulate them. I feel like the biggest dork when this happens.

18: Other people who play games online. Sometimes I meet genuinely friendly people, but other times I meet utter douches who act like they are thirteen.

19: Being unable to wrap Christmas presents correctly.

20: Gift cards.

I wish to clarify this – a gift card to a particular store in general is not a bad present – it shows thought in the person you’re shopping for, but were very unsure of what to get. It shows you know the person in particular, that you’ve been listening to someone’s interests, thoughts, personality. Thus I feel a gift card to something like Applebee’s or The Home Depot or Gamestop or wherever shows a modicum of consideration and thought.

However, I consider ‘general’ gift cards like American Express or Visa gift cards to be extremely lazy gift choices. If you’re going to do that, why not save yourself the $5 processing fee and just give the person you’re shopping for the money instead? You’ll save five bucks. Heck, you can give $5 more than you intended, and it would be more of a gesture than spending it on a general-use gift card.

1: After a long, hard, brutal semester, taking a look at my college grades and realizing that I have not blown it, and in fact, I did pretty decently, even more so than I initially thought.

2: Putting a computer together and getting it working.

3: Installing an old game I really like after forgetting about it for the last ten years.

4: That lovely period of reflection and thought after finishing a book.

5: Old, bleepy video game music.

6: Taking apart my pen and putting it back together without a thought.

7: Kittens!

8: When things are not as bad as I realize.

9: Watching a documentary that really fascinates me.

10: That ending sequence from Werner Herzog’s Stroszek.

1: Someone complaining about how there’s nothing on TV despite remaining glued to the television set like a baby to a bottle. This gets exponentially more irritating after every hour this happens.

2: My printer not accepting pristine, fully compatible ink cartridges straight from the store. Spending $40 on ink cartridges and finding out they don’t work is one way to put me in a really bad mood.

3: Someone coming up to me and saying “There’s something on my computer!!” only to find out that it’s an error message that can just be clicked off without any consequence, such as ‘No new updates found’ or ‘The anti-virus update was applied successfully’. I can understand if it’s something incomprehensible to the human eye or a recurring error message that won’t go away, but if it’s obvious that the person is not reading the error messages and just running to me to make it go away when they’re fully capable, I can’t help but get mad.

4: Bleedthrough on cheap LCD monitors.

5: Being looked down on because I play VIDEO GAMES.

6: Seeing dead cats in the road.

7: Windows Vista.

8: Bit rot.

9: The realization that I’m playing too many video games.

10: Being unreasonably scared of things that don’t really necessitate fear.

This is shamefully embarrassing because I’m a writer and I plan on writing a book, thus the best way to write would be to read. Granted, I’m in college and I find my time being sucked up quite a bit, but I still don’t feel I read enough.

I’m not interested in self-publishing, as I feel I would be forcing myself upon others. I need some kind of screen so I can see if I’m going in the right direction, just how many notes I’m hitting, and if someone actually enjoys what I do enough to print it on dead pulp and maybe even pay me for it.

I’ve been writing for quite a bit and I want to publish something, but I feel real uneasy about it. Is my stuff any good? Am I a good writer? Or have I wasted my time?

Yet I’ll never know if I keep hoarding all my stuff to myself, convincing myself through this one flaw or this ugly spot that I’ve missed that it’s not ready yet, and that I should just put it away and forget about it.

I’m perplexed.