Life; unlike you ever thought it would be… unlike you ever thought it Could be… – Feelings; amplified beyond that which you ever could have imagined, beyond that which your body ever experienced before… – Ideas; foreign and appalling at first… interesting and possible at third or fourth glance… – Normality; tossed aside and trampled by the desire to set new standards, to walk the path least traveled. – These are the things that have fueled our lives over the past two and a half years… these are the things that have come to change who we are and what we had become. — These are the things that I was never to talk about on this blog.
But that ends today.
It has been nearly 6 months since I last wrote on this blog, marking the longest leave I have ever taken. I am saddened in that fact if only because I lived vicariously through the words I typed on this page. I’m a sentimental bastard at heart, a fact easily proven through the endless pictures I take and again through the year and a half of my life that I captured almost daily through the pages of my online diary, my story to the world. Yet, I let all that slip away in the workings of everyday life. I watched it fade away as I worked on being the best that I could be, doing the most that I could do. And succeed I did. — To give a brief summary of the past 6 months since my last words on this site: I spent April mostly sick from purely not sleeping. I ended the live comedy show on campus with a bang and etched my legacy as executive director of one of the most successful student-led groups our campus had ever seen into the pages of our University’s history. I then remembered that I was supposed to be graduating in a month and so I focused deeply, through the sickness and seemingly unsurpassable weariness, and gave it one final push. By that time, the endless caffeine, sugar, and other natural stimulants weren’t touching me. Adderall, which had previously been reserved for tests and other important events, was a daily occurrence just to keep me awake and functioning. What was supposed to push me above and beyond what I’m normally capable of wasn’t even bringing me back to the level I had once been… – It was a rough month.
Despite everything that was against me, I ran that final mile with sweat burning so badly that I couldn’t see, with muscles already having given out, and yet I crossed that finish line and collapsed. – I graduated cum laude with the only outstanding senior award in my major. I gave my all to four years at one university and graduated with a diploma I am proud of… and almost no physical strength left to enjoy it. – Writing this blog now, looking back on it all… A surreal feeling hits me. I remember starting this blog the very first day of the first summer session as I started my freshman year of college. This blog has been with me for all of my college experience, from literally the very first day until the very end. I have captured part of my life in these pages… – That’s big for me.
After graduation, we had a couple days before we left for vacation. We had booked a cruise along the same route that we had gone on our honeymoon. We went on the largest cruise ship in the world this time, and it was literally a blast. We drove down to daytona beach for a couple nights prior to the cruise and hit up a couple clubs that had been recommended to us. Having not really partied at all through college due to our religion, we weren’t really into the party scene that much, but daytona gave us a unique glimpse into the party scene that we hadn’t previously had, and we really enjoyed it. – We then ventured down to fort lauderdale where we spent one night in an amazing suite and hit up the local clubs there too. Florida brings a different party club scene than we had found locally and we really enjoyed it. – Saturday we got up, boarded our ship, and spent an incredibly relaxing week on the ocean. Again, I cannot express how amazing the caribbean ocean is. If you haven’t been on a cruise on Royal Caribbean, you simply must go at least once. It’s unlike anything else, even Carnival 😉
We got back from our trip and decided we were going to move. Staring in the fall of 2013, we had started to become somewhat close to a guy friend that I had met in class. I was slipping away from my closest friend from down here… I guess we were just wearing on each other after that long and being that much aline (we’re both stubborn-headed), but I started becoming close to… we shall call him “jeff”. – Over the last semester of school, we had started partying at our apartment. Jeff was somewhat new to the party scene and joined us as we explored this new aspect of our lives. – Jeff and I are a lot alike. Like, not just a lot… we’re EXACTLY alike. We literally are the same person. The only two areas where we differ are in the fact that he doesn’t like tomatoes and he he has more of a lactose intolerance than I do so he doesn’t eat ice cream. Literally, in Every (and I mean every) other aspect, we are twins. It’s fucking creepy-weird. – Anyway, because of our similarities, we quickly became best friends. Then we became best-best fiends. We all got along so well that he started spending most of our weekends just hanging at out apartment. By the time graduation rolled around, he was practically living there. – This brings us back to May and the return from our cruise:
Jeff had stayed at our apartment with my sister while we were gone for a week and a half, and when we got back, we all entertained the idea of getting a house together. We all got along so well, why wouldn’t we? – So, we began house-hunting and actually found one within a few days. We jumped on it and literally moved out of our apartment and into a freaking house over the next two weeks from the end of may into the first week of june.
Around this time, I had been realizing that I needed to get a job. I had this shiny degree and no job to make money with, and I wasn’t able to work the 3 jobs that I had been working at the school since I was no longer a student there… so the money flow was dwindling. – I had heard rumor of a job working for one of the factions of our religion, so I hadn’t poured a ton of hours into looking for a job because I wanted to see how it might pan out. Well, this place stalled and stalled, I hadn’t even heard from them other than the contact that had told me he had recommended me for the job… and then in early june I got a call for an interview. I conferenced-called into a call with our internationally-known speaker, who was the director of this faction, and another guy who was just introduced to me as ‘one of the big-names in tech in our religion’, but who actually ended up being a big deal in tech in general… like… knows bill gates on a first name basis, has made over a hundred million dollars in his businesses kind of big. I found all that out later. – The interview went great and they offered me a really low-paying tech job as basically the associate director of I.T. for this multi-million dollar international church faction. – It was low-paying because it was church faction job, but the opportunity to start this high up in this big of a job was surreal for me and presented all kinds of endless opportunities for the future, so I took the job. They flew me out to LA for a couple weeks, (and the flew Her out too… of course), and I had an entire I.T. job dumped on me in two short weeks.
While out there, we had a long weekend that we could see California. – We had never been to california so we thought we would grab a rental car and drive up to northern CA. – Jeff had flown out on his own to enjoy CA with us since we had the free room already anyway, and so the three of us set out on our adventure to drive up the 1. We hit up malibu beach, which was surprisingly cold in June, and then stayed in a random motel part-way up the 1. – Now, you have to understand that up until now, we had grown up as good little kids that hadn’t really done much. Wasn’t because we didn’t have the chance, we just didn’t experiment much. – Well, Jeff had gone really 420 during his first couple years of college before we met him, and he was determined to at least have us try it once since we never had. – So, just for the irony of it, we asked some random surfer dudes we saw walking along the beach in malibu if they had any we could buy… and they not only had any, they gave us like a whole bag. Needless to say, our first 420 experience was shared in a random motel along the 1 with the best of company, and yes, it was most certainly recorded for future memories. It was a good time to say the absolute least.
We drove the rest of the 1 that saturday and arrived in San Francisco saturday evening absolutely freezing. Nobody had warned us that it’s cold that time of year there, so we froze. That night though… we hit up the largest club in san-fran and literally partied like we’d never partied before. Turns out that I hadn’t really been drunk-drunk before (it takes a lot to get me drunk), but we had snuck some mini-shots into the club and I somehow managed to drink most of them myself. I had an absolute blast that night and was Really Really gone. I guess I somehow videoed it because the evidence of exactly how gone I was lives on today. – That was an absolute blast and although we had to head back down the 5 to LA sunday, that weekend will never be forgotten.
I finished my training in CA and the next few months are a blur. – My degree trained me to know a little about every aspect of I.T., but to mainly oversee those who were doing. It’s partly a management degree and partly a detailed degree. Well, the job that I was inheriting was basically doing all aspects of I.T. for this multi-million dollar organization. I literally was tasked with setting up a new office building that we had leased with all forms of I.T. from servers to cabling, to phones, to computers, to security systems, cameras, printers, etc. I knew I was jumping into the water but I had no idea I was jumping into the ocean with waves and no bottom. – Still, the 5 total jobs that I had held while in school prepared me along with the experience I had gained from each aspect from each one of them… and I made it happen. I probably pulled 80 hour weeks for most of july and august and part of this month, but we are literally almost fully moved into the office as of this week! I have a few more weeks to go before we’re entirely done, and I have to go back out to california to finish tearing out the rest of our servers and stuff from out there at the end of next month, but needless to say, I have been fucking productive!
A job of this scale is unprecedented at my level of experience. I have more job experience and knowledge at 23 than professionals in my field who have worked for more than 15 years in the industry. It blows my mind how I was swept into this position, and how it was lined up for me every step of the way. If I hadn’t had every aspect of the jobs that I had all throughout high school and college, I would never have been able to pull off this type of position right out of school. I’m luckier than even I realize, and I realize quite a fucking bit.
So, with this two thousand word essay, I have successfully brought back up to speed the status of my life for the past 6 months. Yea they were a blur, but they were a whirlwind of excitement and change. I thrive on that I suppose.
The intro paragraph of this post is not forgotten. I have held back so much from this blog about an entire aspect of our lives. No it’s not the partying and the drinking… that’s a big part but that’s only been over the past 10 months. Yeah we started drinking a couple years ago but we didn’t really start partying till this semester. – No, what I have to share is much bigger than that. What I have is game-changing, and I am finally ready to share it. – I’ll probably lose half of the 125,000+ followers I have on this blog over sharing it, but that’s okay. My life is finally at the point that I can share it with confidence and share it I shall… very soon.
This isn’t one of those “I’ll tell ya soon”, and I don’t write again for 3 months. No, I’m back and I’m ready to really write on this blog, so within the next week I will share some pretty heavy stuff… – Be ready 😉
