TMR – Accept no Substitutes

Slow day. Slow week. Wish I wasn’t scheduled for tomorrow since the Tera beta starts at 3 (I’m not going to be able to use all of my checks for something useful, so why use any of it? ^.^), but I’m scheduled and I don’t see any good way out of it without causing problems (Plus, only the truly stupid decide to not earn money so they can go and waste some). Even if it’s slow tomorrow too, I can use the opportunity to start with my brand spanking new Net+ book. Plan’s to take the test in early March so the more time I can spend on it, the better. (Plus it’ll keep me logged out of sketchy AOL sites while I’m on the clock. ^.^ …though I guess that’s not funny until I say that I’m typing this in my AIM mail since the work mail won’t send to outside accounts…>.>)

Had a dream today. I don’t remember the details, but it was another of my strange HS dreams so it doesn’t matter. Every now and then I have some strange dream about me being in some HS or college that melds aspects of the two doing something. It’s nothing exciting. I’m just doing something. Today’s was notable (relatively speaking of course), because I was apparently back in Hawai’i. I may be in FL now, but I spent 6th through 9th grades in HI. It was pretty cool. Of all the people I’ve met Hawai’ians are the coolest. They’re generally so laid back and the whole culture is insanely inclusive (‘cept for white people. Boy do they not like white people… XD). It’s probably why I’m into alot of the stuff I’m into now too. I still would have ran into Sailor Moon and DBZ regardless, but Crayon Shin-chan was the first anime I’d ever seen (assuming the japanese animated cartoon based off of, not one, but two japanese toy lines known as Transformers doesn’t count). I wouldn’t say they were the most important, but those 4 years were pretty important years for me. So when I woke up (’cause I only remember the dreams I have right before I wake up) I was thinking about what would have happened if I’d gone back there. Not for vacation like a “friend” (she’s nice, but honestly, you can’t really be friends with someone you don’t talk to, ya know?) of mine did a little while back, but to stay. And at the time it seemed like even if I went right now it’d all turn out all right. But I was fresh off of sleep then and stupid. But still…

Like now. If I was to say screw it, instead of trying to find a job around here, that I’d try to find a job in HI for when the tax season’s over, then what would happen? As far as any uprooting of my life is concerned, there’d be little to none. ‘Cept for my comp and tv I wouldn’t need to bring much with me. In fact, I could leave the tv too, since it’d probably be cheaper just to buy a monitor instead of shipping a moderately sized flat-screen. All the rest of my stuff could go into the storage unit that I’d still be paying for regardless. Then I’d just buy new stuff ’til I didn’t need any of the stuff in storage and just get rid of all that. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve got no real job or IRL friends to break from and barely speak to most of my family anyway. The ‘rents would be… something… about not being able to see me anymore, but I think they’d be behind it. Moving 1/4th of the world away isn’t something I’d just do on a whim, so I think they’d see that thought went into the decision and not jump straight to “Over My Dead Body” mode. I dunno anything about the HI job market (any more than I know about the FL job market…>.>), but I can’t imagine that it’d be any harder to find a comp repair job there than here. Part of the reason why I decided to try to get in the business is because of the fact that it’s a job that’s never going to go away. Everyone needs comp repair everywhere nowadays (well… everyone and everywhere civilized… >.>). Plus, unlike the Space Coast (which has ‘a”, but not “a good”), Oahu’s got a decent bus system so I’d be able to search over a bigger area than I could when I didn’t have a car. And I’m not going to have a car. I know it’d cost to ship a tv over there, so I don’t even want to think about shipping a car. I’ll just give it back to my dad since it was his to begin with anyway. …”I’d”…>.>; I’d also just find some cheap dump near Ewa Beach to live in ’til I find a not-so-dumpy apartment. I don’t think finding a place to live would be as difficult as finding the job in the first place. All in all, it’d be crazy, but if I had the money in the first place (which I may or may not after all is said and done with this place) and could find a place to hire a guy with no exp and can’t come in for an interview (driving 2+ hours for an interview is bad enough. Flying 10+ would be murder) then it wouldn’t be so bad.

The real interesting thing to consider would be trying to recreate the situation for the dream. Let’s say I went to college there instead of GU. …on second thought, it wouldn’t be interesting at all. It wouldn’t have happened. Even when we were there, we already knew the HI school system wasn’t all that good and were kind of worried about whether or not it’d screw my brother and I up when we moved over here (fortunately, FL’s school system isn’t all that much better…-_-). There’s no way that my parents would have let me go to school there. Given any other non-Ivy League school, I’d say that there’s no way that it’d be as or more expensive than GU, but HI has everything be more expensive. Everything. So I’d have to actually do research to say one way or another, and since that’s not going to happen (too lazy ) I’ll just say that U of H is just as expensive as GU and the cost of living for HI is just as high as it is in DC. And no parent in the world is going to sign off on paying the same if not more (I know it costs more to get to and from HI than DC) for less education. And at the time, I certainly wasn’t going to make any argument to the contrary. Although, assuming money was no issue and I felt then as I do now (that college “education” is a waste of time, money, and effort since all you learn is what you teach yourself) and actually went there, I guess it’d be a better picture.

I’d have had a much better social life (read: a social life), since as I implied earlier, I just fit in better in HI than I did anywhere else I’ve been since. Certainly better than I did in DC (I hated both my roomates, all my classmates, and about 98% of everybody else I interacted with up there…-_-). I would have had better grades either due to my correct assumption about the school system or just having a better social life would have led me to try harder in class. I’d either be more driven to compete with my friends in class (I’ve got to be one of if not the smartest person I know) or to be able to show of my grades. And the friends and grades would have factored in to get me to try harder to finish school. I’d probably still have seen it for the waste it is, but I still probably would have finished.

I dunno what would have happened after that though since, unless something drastically changed in my coursework there as opposed to what I actually did, I’d have graduated with a Comp Sci degree. I didn’t figure out that I was more suited for the hardware aspect than the software until long after I dropped out, so I don’t know what would have happened in Junior year if I was still going towards a Comp Sci major. Would I have decided that programming isn’t as horrible as it seemed? I did have a bit of an aptitude for the work and never really did poorly in the classes that I took. It’s just that the error checking part of it was driving me crazy and I wasn’t all that good at finding an elegant or efficient solution. With me it’s just “Does it work?” and move on. I guess I might have tried some hardware classes, but I dunno how far that’d have gone. All I remember is that when I was at GU I ended up giving my comp to a church friend to fix instead of doing anything on my own when I got a virus or something at some point. At the time, I thought it was esoteric knowledge and I don’t think I’d have even tried to learn it. I think I’d have been able to, I’d just never tried. …although I did install that TV tuner card by myself… But all that was just just putting a card in a PCI slot. So who knows? And I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if I decided to switch majors. I’m an intelligent person and can pick up new skills fairly well. I don’t really have any hang-ups about doing certain jobs and don’t mind getting down and dirty from time to time. There are a lot of things that I could have tried to major in and a lot of things that I could have failed miserably at.

So in the end I guess I don’t really know what would have happened if I’d gone to school there. The first 2 years would have been better, but since I’ve got no experience beyond that, and was kinda of at an impasse at that point, I really don’t know how the rest would have gone and since I dunno that, I dunno what could have happened after. All I know is you can’t trust notions you get right out of bed. Your veiwpoint is skewed to the dangerously optimistic. Of course everything will be alright after you wake up. You haven’t even had the time yet to see if anything’s screwed up yet. Unless you wake up tied up on a rusty barge. I guess you wouldn’t be so optimistic then…

Not much else going on… Got a new mouse recently. The old one was a piece of junk. I think I dropped it one too many times (I’m basically using a TV tray that blocks off access to 1/2 the room when in use so its not as stupid as you’d think xP) and the x-axis tracking got shot to heck. Plus, the transmitter’s always been crap so it’d almost have to be two inches in front of the (TP walks in for appt. whoo hoo! I’m working!) reciever for the stupid thing to work. The new one seems to be better. I wanted one with a bluetooth transmitter, but I don’t have a reciever so, I went with the one that transmits like a router. The 5th button isn’t where I wanted it, but I’m used to ignoring the 4th button on my other one, so it’ll be alright. Only thing I’m wary about is the fact that both mice are MS brand. I bought the first one thinking MS would know what they’re doing, and the strange thing is the keyboard that it was packaged with isn’t that bad at all (just has transmittal problems every now and then), but the mouse has always been crap. But… so far so good…

But anyway, it’s almost closing time so it’s time to wrap it up.