Jukeboks

I’ve never made a New Years resolution. Or at least I can’t recall ever making one because I’ve never made an effort to do one. Last night, while studying at Ant’s House with Shirley, Cindy, and Phil, we somehow started talking about pimples, acne, buttne, chestne, backne, and lots of other stuff related to hygiene. I will try to do three things that are related to hygiene. So I guess this is a late New Years resolution. Or a spring resolution.

One thing I will try to do is switch or clean my pillow cases once a week. I’ve told myself to do this a long time ago, but did it once and stopped. Phil told me that Riley told him that switching the pillow cases often can help reduce acne, something that I’ve been struggling with for many many years. He told me that Riley used to have bad acne, but switching his pillow cases often has helped. Right when I got home, I washed my pillow cases and replaced them. I’m off to a good start!

Another thing I will try to do is to stop picking at my scabs and pimples. That’s two things, but I guess they can both be tied into one because picking at mu pimples leads to scabs. Picking my pimples and scabs is a very hard to break habit of mine. Cindy kept telling me to stop picking my face as I was studying, yesterday, but I just couldn’t. Picking my face only leads to more pimples, which in turn leads to more scabs. I don’t like having all those pimples and scabs all over my face because it’s pretty unattractive.

The last thing I will try to do is to stop plucking my beard. This is another hard to break habit. This is very closely related to picking at my pimples and scabs. Whenever I pluck my beard, I tend to pluck skin off and leave scabs all over my chin. And more scabs leads to more pimple and scan picking. Another reason I want to stop plucking my beard is because plucking with my finger nails make them split in half and causes my nails a lot of pain. Hasn’t been working out so well, yet.

I’m a very bad movie critic. I don’t base my rating of a movie on the story line. I base my rating of a movie on what can be seen, not what can be perceived. If a movie has amazing action scenes and is produced well, I will like that movie. I like to look for flaws in movies because I am a semi-perfectionist and probably have a mild case of OCD (or not). I noticed little things. For example, if the main character has her hands down besides her body, but when the scene changes to another camera angle and her hands are behind her back, in my mind I’m thinking “FLAW!! Her hands just teleported behind her back!” Flaws won’t break a movie for me, but it just gets me a little worked up when I see them, since I produce my own videos and hate when I make little amateur mistakes like that.

If I don’t understand a movie, I will dislike it. I have to understand the movie to like it. A movie that requires too much brain power is a bad movie, in my opinion. I don’t want to watch a movie and have to rewatch it or read a review/plot to catch the little bits of details I missed or did not understand in the first place. I want to watch a movie and understand it as I am watching and leave the theater happy. I also do not like when parts of the dialogue in a movie is very inaudible, due to murmuring or slurring of words. In cases like these, no matter how long you turn your volume up, you still won’t understand what the heck the dude is saying and it could be a very important part that is missed.

Dear Birthday Girl,

It’s finally your sixteen birthday. I totally forgot until I saw, on Facebook, one of my friends say happy birthday to another person who has the same birthday as you. I never thought I’d forget your birthday, but it looks like I have.

From the day I met you, I had already planned on doing something for your birthday. I’ve never planned anything for someone’s birthday because I usually get invited to birthday events so this was special and important. At first I did not put too much thought into it because it was your sixteen birthday and you probably will have a sweet sixteen. But as your birthday closed in, it seemed like you probably would not do anything too big on your birthday.

So I started putting more thought into it. We joked around and I told you I would get you a BMW. I’m pretty sure you knew it was a joke because there was no way I would have gotten you a car. I actually gave it some thought, but there was no way I could have gotten you a BMW. Maybe if you were my significant other I would have tried, but that would have probably led to nowhere. So, then, I thought of getting you a high quality diecast model of a BMW since I do collect high quality diecast model airplanes. But I didn’t think you would care too much about a model, so I talked to our friend about it and we thought of getting a bear for you and naming it BMW. For a while, that was the plan until we hit some potholes and stopped talking for a bit.

When we started talking again, your birthday was approaching fast; in about a month or so. I had to think of something else to do. I kept wanting to know if you had anything planned for your birthday and kept asking you, which raises your suspicions. I insisted that I was just wondering. One time, I even said I wanted to make sure you slept on time as my excuse. I talked to our friend again and we decided, with 2 other friends, to surprise you at your house. I wanted to ask your mom to let us in your house while she distracted you away from home to surprise you. But our friend said that would probably not work, so we decided to bake a cake and surprise you at your house with it. This was two weeks away from your birthday.

Then when it was a week away from your birthday, two of our friends decided to not want to surprise you anymore because of some recent complications. I still wanted to surprise you. I decided to just ask if you were down for some dinner on the weekend before your birthday. You said you will see, but it did not happen because you never got back to me. At this point, I still wanted to surprise you, so when it was the weekend before your birthday, I called everyone up, again, to ask if they wanted to still surprise you. They did, but we couldn’t find a good time to do it. And at this point, we hit another rocky road, so when we could not decide when to surprise you, I was quick to say ‘let’s not surprise her, I don’t care anymore’.

And that was it. Just like that, all my planning was quickly thrown out. Just like that, I forgot it was your birthday. Just like that, I have stopped caring. Just like that.

When people ask me for help, I’ll help them. When people ask me for a ride, I’ll drive them. When people ask me to spot them, I’ll spot them. Not only will I help people when they ask, but I’ll offer to help. I’ll offer to give people rides. I’ll offer to spot people. These things are no big deal to me. Sacrificing a little of my time and money to help someone out is perfectly fine with me. Giving rides and helping people are very easy for me to do because people usually help me and give me rides when I need them. The one person that comes to mind would be Tiffany. I really wanted to go to Ant’s house a month, or so, ago because Tiffany and a bunch of people were watching Disney movies there, but I was at home and did not have access to a car. Tiffany was willing to come to my house, which is VERY out of the way, and drive me to Ant’s house. She wasted a lot of gas and time just to come pick me up. Another time, I needed a ride home from Ant’s and she gave it to me without hesitation.

Spotting people is usually very easy for me, too. I usually have enough money in pocket or in my card to spot people for food or whatever. But I’m a very forgetful person and usually will forget to ask the person for the money back. I’m fine with that because the way I think about it is that sooner or later, that person will have helped me enough so that the money I used to spot them will balance out. But that argument is not very justified because if a person I spotted has helped me out enough to cover the money they owe me, I’ve probably helped them out 2x as much, so technically, they owe me more now. So at the end of the day, I will still want my money back.

But that brings me to another point. I don’t like to look like a stingy person because I am not (or at least I don’t think I am). I feel like constantly asking people back for my money back makes me seem like a stingy person because it seems like all I can think about is money. So I usually don’t ask for my money back and that is why I forget. But that’s a stupid mentality because it IS my money in the end. Ever since buying a new car, I have been very on top of my money flow. In fact, I have dug through my iPhone and wallet to look for names and numbers. Having your name with a number next to it in my iPhone or on paper in my wallet usually means that you owe me money. This just goes to show how forgetful I am. I need to write it down to remember. I went through all the names and numbers to see who owes me money so I can get it back.

Just last week, I reminded someone that they owed me money. I spotted him a few months back and he definitely forgot that he owed me money. In fact, when I reminded him, he insisted that he paid me back. Usually if a person pays me back, I cross their name off the paper, throw away the paper with their name on it, or erase the iPhone entry. I know for a fact that he did not pay me back because I still had his name on my list and I explicitly do not remember this person ever paying me back. Well, in the end, this person did pay up. I bad in the end because he was convinced that he paid me back, so in his eyes, I was stealing money from him, when in fact I was not. I felt so bad that I apologized to him. Then after Ambassadors, he kept telling me that I owned him. He said he couldn’t get any food because I took his money. Really now…

After this incident, I am going to be more aware of spotting people. If I do spot someone, I will make sure they pay me back. If someone spots me, I will also make sure I pay them back. I might even stop spotting people. So if you read this post and you ask me to spot you and I say no, you will know why.

I haven’t been posting to my Tumblr as much as I used to. Even though I have 24 drafts saved, I never had the time to finalize them. I also have a bunch of notes on my iPhone that are posts for Tumblr. I’ve also got some stuff on private. Let’s explain a little about how my Tumblr posting works.

When it comes to Tumblr posts, I work with a 4 zone system. I have 4 zones for my Tumblr posts. The four zones, in no specific order, are Published, Drafts, Notes, and Private.

Published is exactly what it sounds like. Anything in the Published zone is publicly published posts that are pushed to my blog and onto people’s dashboards. These are usually (99% of the time) finished works that I will never touch or read again. I’ve typed up my post the way I like it and have quickly and carelessly checked for grammar mistakes. The only time I will ever read the post again is to check for errors, make corrections, or to use as a reference in a new post.

Drafts are also exactly what they sound like. These are works-in-progress. When I think of an idea, I will put it down as a draft either as a topic sentence or as a a half complete post. I do this because I am a very forgetful person and if I don’t put it down immediately, I will forget. Usually, I will put down as much as I can before getting bored, which usually is not enough to meet me requirements to make it to Published. When I get bored, I’ll save the draft and go on with my life. I tend to never go back and revise a draft because I am either too lazy to or I have, by this point, completely forgotten what I wanted to say in that post. That is why I have 24 drafts saved.

Notes is another draft zone. The difference between Notes and Drafts is that I only put things in the Notes zone when I get an idea, but am not around a computer to type it down. So I use the Note app on my iPhone to take down these on-the-go ideas. Notes and Drafts work the same, but there seems to be a slight tendency for Notes to get fully worked on and published on the same day. The slight tendency for Notes to be worked on and published on the same day comes from the fact that I frequently check my Notes as I am laying in bed trying to sleep. This is when my brain juices start flowing and all my ideas come together. I’ll keep typing until the post is complete. When a post in Notes is complete, it gets sent to Drafts, where it has a chance of being forgotten like any other draft. If an idea in Notes doesn’t get worked on the same day, I will forget about it in the same way I forget about my drafts.

And Private is also exactly how it sounds. Anything private that I do not want the public to read goes here. Private posts are 100% complete, but too much information to be publicized. Sometimes, I will go through my blog and change some public posts to private.

So that’s the jist of it. As a side note, this post was completed in one sitting, but sent to Drafts and published after a day of being in Drafts.