More insomnia - probably needs to be edited

My interweb isn’t working. It apparently waited for me to rent a movie on Amazon and then turned itself off. Oddly enough, the data on my phone won’t connect either. I can turn on the hotspot thing, and my computer will connect to the internet from that, but my phone won’t actually connect to anything. WWF, IMDB, chrome etc, nothing on my phone will go online, but I can use my phone to make my computer connect… Mysterious. Since I can’t connect to the “my Verizon” deal on my phone though, I can’t see if there’s enough extra data right now to be burning through it just so I can watch a movie at midnight.

I feel a little bit like total shit and should be in bed anyway. I went to work for Carla today, but after 2 hours of weedeating at their farm in 90° heat, Tammi picked me up and brought me to a jobsite to help put down a sidewalk in front of the house they are fixing up. By the time Salvatore and I put the sidewalk down, the temp was up to 95°, with whatever amount of humidity equals “my crotch is so sweaty it looks like I pissed myself,” and Tammi asked me to do some digging in front of the house to lower a few spots down and fill in a few holes while they went inside to work on the steps in the air conditioned house. That doesn’t, and didn’t, sound like an unreasonable request so I went at it

The thing is, digging in Virginia is a pain in the ass. The “dirt” is actually this unforgiving red stuff that is equal parts compacted clay, rocks that range in size from golf ball to buffalo skull, and hate. There is a very good movie called Blue Ruin that is set in the Blue Ridge Mountains not too far from here that made me laugh because this small, non-physical type-of-guy was able to quickly dig a grave in the mountains in this same malicious red stuff in no time flat. There was even a big pile of red ugliness next to the grave. Hand digging a grave around here would be quite the endeavor, you could almost see the shadow of the rented excavator on the edge of the shot of him next to the hole he had supposedly dug. Total bullshit scene. Still a great movie though.

 I held out for about 2 hours before I started to get pukey and confused from the heat. I kept finding myself forgetting what I was supposed to be doing. My heart was beating really fast and I felt like I was about to collapse. I finally had to just go inside and tell her that I couldn’t do anything else outside. I was having to rest about half of the time, and I didn’t want to be getting paid to work half of the time and spend the other half leaning against the house in the only 3 feel of shade on the property. I’m just not used to that shit. I just got over being sick, and regardless of how much water I was guzzling (about 6 quarts in 2 hours) I felt dehydrated and weak. After about 15 minutes inside, I was good to go, but I stayed in the house and worked on things in there. I know she would’ve rather had me doing the stuff outside, but she was cool about it. It was understandable, nobody needs to be out there in that if they don’t have to be. I’m sure that if I spent more time doing it I would acclimate and it wouldn’t effect me as badly, but I just couldn’t hack it anymore.

I still feel fried from the heat. My head hurts and I know I’m exhausted, but I can’t seem to make myself sleep.

Bout time

I can finally fucking sign in! I fell off on the blogging for a bit, and then, a few months back, when I tried to sign back in to put up a post, it wouldn't let me log in. It must've been something with my google account because when I clicked on the blogspot link in my toolbar, it signed me in automatically and now I have the little google icon in the corner.

The last post was in February, which feels like an entire lifetime ago. School is obviously done for the summer. I managed to keep my 4.0, and am looking forward to getting back at it in the fall. I would've signed up for summer classes, but the out-of-state tuition is so damned much more per credit; and since I don't even know what I want to get a degree in, or how I want to use my education, I didn't feel like I needed to go way further into debt just to speed up finishing school. It was a good choice, logical and reasonable, but I regret the fuck out of it nearly every day. School is such a great way to eat up time while knowing that I'm doing something good for myself. It keeps me busy. There is always something that I can be working on, and I mostly enjoy it.

Not that I'm not busy now. Work is steady with Susan, at least two days a week, and I just started doing the same type of work out at Tammi and Carla's house/farm. I had my first day out there on Thursday and spent about 7 hours straight weed-eating. The will take me as often as I can work, and I'm going to spend Wednesdays at Shire Folk to help fill the gap left by man-bun when he got too depressed to work.

Caroline and I have been together for several months now. Things are going great. I've always had a hard time writing about relationships, so I won't do a lot of that, but we are incredibly happy and my life is immeasurably better with her in it. She makes me feel like a whole person.

I didn't come on here thinking I was going to write, so I don't have much else to go over. A lot has happened since I last wrote, but if I don't keep up with things on a day-to-day basis, I don't have as much interest in writing about it. If it isn't fresh in my mind, the details aren't there.

Insomnia is a bitch.  It's 2:11 in the morning and I can't fucking sleep.  Not even tired.  Fell asleep for about an hour, and I came to and realized my contacts were still in so I had to get up to take them out but I couldn't find my contact case anywhere so it took 10 minutes of fucking around and that was it.  Fully awake.  Fuck you Jesse, that's why.  No more sleeping till morning.  Damn it.  Hate this shit.  It was a long, tiring day and I was exhausted at 10 o'clock.  There's no reason for me to not be tired.  Honestly, I really like staying up late.  I'm alone, I know nobody is going to bother me and I can just relax and watch a movie or read.  But it fucks up my day if I'm up all night.  Although lately I'm exhausted all day no matter how much I sleep.

Put snapchat on my phone after 8 months of people asking me if I had it.  I always thought it was just a sex thing, not sure why, must've gotten that impression from something I saw or heard in prison.  Cool little toy, but it's just more crap to have on my phone, slowing shit down, draining the battery, and accessing my contacts and location constantly.  (Call me paranoid but) that shit bothers me to no end.  "Team Snapchat" sends you a bunch of these messages at first showing you these videos of exuberant people windsailing and hanging off of each other on the beach, looking excited as fuck to be alive and attached to social media.  I wish they'd make a more realistic promo showing drunk people sending stuff they would rather not have lodged in the memory of somebody else's phone the next day.

Going a but stir crazy.  Need to find something besides work and school and the gym to do occasionally.  I'm starting to become very aware of my limitations (no license or place of my own to have people come hang out at).  It's obviously several steps up from where I was last February, but the fact that I have no way to go anywhere by myself, besides biking to the gym, and no way to go anywhere and meet people, is really getting to me.  I love being here with my dad, and I'm not taking that for granted, but I'm starting to feel pretty isolated.

In the afternoon I'm going with Logan over to Dilwyn to help him load some shit up.  It will be nice to get out for a while.  Logan's good company.  I need to try to get some sleep.  Shit.

20 minutes 'till the jaunt bus gets here and after sleeping an extra 2 hours last night, I am more tired now than I usually am in the morning.  There doesn't seem to be a good way for me to wake up and have energy without taking in way more caffeine than I want to.

School is good so far.  English comp is taking up way more of my time than everything else but it's mostly enjoyable work.  There reading assignments she gives us are terrible.  Not the stuff from the textbooks, but the essays and short stories we have to read and comment on for class.  I suppose it needs to be positive, easy reading so that it's accessible to everyone in the class.  But I still can't enjoy  reading any of it.

Work is going well most of the time.  Susan was a little unaware of how trashed some of her fences were and I know it's taken her longer than she anticipated to get things working, but she knows things will usually take a lot longer than planned to finish and we're making progress.  I helped move some sheep from her house, and Brett and Naomi's, to the farm last weekend. Always fun working with animals.  Not a big fan of getting kicked in the balls over an over by a ewe while lifting it over a gate, but still enjoyed doing it.

second semester

     My second semester of school started yesterday.  I was able to work out a schedule with the jaunt-bus so that I don't have to ride in at 5:30 with my dad and kill time for three hours before class starts, so that's good.  I might occasionally be a little late for my first class but the professor doesn't mind so it shouldn't be a problem.
     First day was good.  The two classes that will carry the bigger work-load are History of Western Civilization, and English Comp 111.  The history class will be a LOT of reading:
The Iliad, Beowulf, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, City of God by Augustine, and The Prince.
I think I need to be done with The Iliad in 3 weeks.  Not that it's that much to get done in that amount of time, but scheduling it and forcing myself to read - and retain - the thing... Still, looking forward to going through all of the material and hearing some discussion.
     The comp class is a little daunting.  A lot of it is handwritten things I have to keep in one journal and I'm not crazy about writing everything on paper.  I've gotten used to being able to edit and tweak things as I work on them.  It'll be okay though.  It's definitely one of those classes where effort counts more than, or at least as much as, the end results.
     Good so far.

New Years Morning

     New Years Day (morning).  I'd lost access to this blog but was able to find the login through my google account so thought I'd put up another post.
     Dad and I spent New Years Eve at the farm with Emilie and Logan celebrating Christmas since they were in Kentucky with Logans family over the holidays.  First Christmas I've spent with family in at least 10 years.  We had a good time.  Emilie made vegetable-beef (venison, in this case) soup the way grandma used to and then we opened presents and played bananagram.  Nice way to spend the last day of the year.
     I've been pretty ill since Tuesday and I'm tired of waking up feeling achey and nauseated.  Once I put a bunch of tylenol in me I mostly feel okay but have no energy.  I've still been going to the gym most every day and that seems to help for a few hours but I just can't seem to get past whatever it is.  I've always been slow to recover from anything though.  I think that if I don't just muscle through the unpleasantness it stretches it out forever so I've learned to just take a little time off and then go back to life as normal.
     The first semester of school went well.  I only had three classes so I was able to put in a lot of time on each one and get a 4.0.  Next semester starts on the 10th and I'm taking 13 credits so I think it'll be the real test of how well I adapt to school.  I'll only be there on Tuesday and Thursday, with all 5 classes running back-to-back on both days, so I'll have plenty of time to work on things outside of school.  Managing my time and not letting things slip will be a challenge.  I was good about (not) procrastinating last semester but there wasn't as much to schedule.  Hopefully I can keep that up.
     Things seem to be as good as they can be in the DOC.  All of the guys are in good spirits.  Still talk to James and Dallas regularly.  Frank and I email pretty often and Z even manages to send a few paragraphs a month.  The new videogram thing on jpay is nice.  I can send 30-second videos to the guys.  It's still only available in Rush City though.  It'll be cool when Stillwater gets it so that I can send stuff to Dallas and Dino and Chris.
     Chris seems to really be getting out there.  He got fired from the editor job at The Mirror and didn't take it too well.  From all accounts, he was pretty stressed and maybe letting the position go to his head some, so maybe it wasn't a terrible thing in the end.  He's over in D-hall working in the kitchen.  That's about as laid-back as a job can be in Stillwater.  Hopefully it gives him a good break from the bullshit.
     Dad picked me up an '05 Shadow for Christmas.  We're turning it into a bobber.  Blacked out the plastic silver stuff on the sides yesterday and there's a seat and fender kit in the mail that I'm really excited to see.  I can't drive the fucking thing until April when my neurologist signs off on me getting a permit so it should look great by the time I'm able to ride.  I was blown away by the gift and I know he's as excited as I am about it.  It's cool having something we can both work on that isn't just home-improvement stuff.
     That's really about it.  Now that I can access this again I might write more.  Daily stuff can fill up a lot of space if you actually write about it.  Or you can not write a thing for months and easily sum it all up in a few paragraphs.  I prefer writing more often though.  I know I'm skipping past a lot of things that would've been worth writing about when they happened but are beyond me now.

journal excerpts

This is just some stuff I've jotted down in my journal while killing time at different places:

My sister recently referred to a sandwich as "dank".  She was talking about sandwiches that Laurie used to make us when we were kids, so its not like she had just eaten a sandwich and was so overcome with emotion that the word "dank" just slipped out.  No, Emilie described a sandwich that she had eaten about 20 years ago, as "fuckin' dank".   Emilie Susan Gooch - Summa Cum Laude, University of Colorado.
They were pretty good, bean sprouts and brown mustard, big tomatoes etc.  Still though.

There is some dude at Piedmont that has called me "Brother" 3 times now; that's every time I've talked to him.  Except we've never really talked, it's just how he refers to me: "Thanks brother" when I held the door for him, "Have a good day Brother" when we made eye contact by the vending machines, "Wassup Brother? As he passed me on his way out of the mens room (without washing his hands).   Fat guy w/a ponytail, curly beard, sandals, neon green backpack, always standing around next to the little bus-stop thing that people have to smoke inside of but he doesn't ever seem to be smoking.  Looks kinda like the singer from My Morning Jacket, I get the feeling he knows this and is cultivating the resemblance.  (Understandable, Jim James is a handsome man).  He seems like a nice guy but it's weird having some post-adolescent hippy call me Brother in such a flippant way.  That's usually reserved for religious weirdos or people I actually consider to be my Brothers.  I know its just some friendly hippy-festival shit - I remember doing it at the rainbow gathering.  But in prison, or even in my life before prison, it actually held weight if somebody you'd known for a while started calling you Brother.  It meant something.  But using it everywhere - with everyone you see - kinda cheapens it a little.  Maybe.  Maybe I'm the only one he says it to because I look a lot like his brother who also attends PVCC.  I could be making some unsafe assumptions here.