Thoughts from Florida

Thoughts from Florida

NOTE: I wrote most of this late one night as I sat awake at Dad’s house, just sitting and thinking. I don’t really remember what I wrote…

I’ve been in Florida for about 48 hours and I’ve only sneezed three times. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I should be completely overwhelmed by my allergies by now. A few minutes ago, I thought, “Hey! I’m breathing through my nose!” I am very sophisticated.

So far, I’ve seen almost everyone in my family, my friends’ nine-week-old baby and three people I hadn’t seen in several years. I hadn’t seen one guy since the late 90s. Technically, it’s now the late 2000s.

I have a job interview some time this week, but I don’t know when. The deal is that I’ll call some guy on Monday morning, then the guy will talk to me for a bit and maybe decide he wants to do a face-to-face interview some time this week. That’s super except I’m planning on going to Orlando this week, so I’ll need to change my plans. Of course, it’d be a lot easier to change my plans if I knew how I’d be changing my plans.

Lucky for me, I decided to rent a car, so I can make last-minute changes to my schedule. Unlucky for everyone else on the road, I got a Chevy Impala. Compared to the car I own, the Impala drives much like I imagine a tugboat drives. The blind spot might as well just be a posterboard that says “Watch out!” and I often imagine I’m trying to hug an oak tree when I grab the steering wheel. I think a lot of my impressions of the car are heavily influenced by the noxious smell that National included. I get the distinct impression that the dude who cleaned my car just opened the door, splashed a bottle of Clorox around and then sealed everything up.

My youngest brother is almost 10 months old. He’s always happy. I actually met him about seven months ago, just after he was born. Then, he just looked like every other baby I’d ever seen. But when I saw him yesterday, the first thing I thought was, “Holy cow… he looks just like I did at his age.” It’s almost creepy how similar we look. For his sake, I hope the trend doesn’t continue.

I’m being forced to consider the possibility that I could be offered a job here in Jacksonville. Since I left for college, I have consistently been opposed to living in Jacksonville, but I’ve never really been sure why. I think the main reason is that I was getting really bored with the city before I graduated high school. Maybe I think I’ll be bored if I move back here. That may be true, but I ain’t exactly livin’ la vida loca in Dallas either.

As I’ve grown up, I’ve been through phases defined by the stages of others’ lives. For instance, I remember when I entered the stage where everyone I knew started getting married. One after another, it seemed like everyone else was tying the knot. Then the babies started coming. A lot of the couples I know are on their second child. Now, some of the earliest to get married are beginning to consider divorce. What’s sad is that many of those couples were previously the couples having babies.

I don’t understand why people don’t take a little more time when deciding to get married. What they don’t realize is that divorce is rough on parents, but it’s their children who are really affected. They get married for a few years, have a kid, get divorced and they’ve moved on within a few years. But the kids won’t be moving on in a few years; it could be 10 or 20 years before the kids can move on.

A lot of people think I’m a pretty funny guy, and a lot of people think I’m an idiot who says stupid things. I know who’s who, and it doesn’t usually take me long to figure out what people think is funny. I met a couple friends for breakfast yesterday and I realized that, although I hadn’t seen either of them in a few years, I still knew exactly what kinda’ stuff would make them laugh. There’s no such thing as something that is empirically funny. Funny is nothing but a perception, and funny people can identify what other people perceive as funny, then use those things to make people laugh. If you don’t think I’m funny, you might consider that I simply don’t want to make you laugh.

My little sister talked me into playing Candy Land with her today. I think she may have hustled me. She kept saying stuff like, “Oh wow! You might win this game!” and “If you just land on that bridge, you’ll be in the lead!” But she just kept beating the crap out of me. We played like three games and I never had a chance in any of them. On its face, Candy Land appears to be totally based on luck, but I think she might have figured out a way to get an edge. After she killed me in Candy Land, we switched to “Gold Fish”, which I later realized was her own version of Go Fish. We each started with only four cards and I later found out that we were playing with a 47-card deck. Neither of us ever won, but after we finished each game, she’d say, “I don’t know why they didn’t put very many Aces in there… do you wanna’ play again?” I think she was playing some kind of mind game with me.

My big-little brother is a black belt in Karate. He was telling me how there’s one student in his class that consistently beats up on all the other kids. He told me this kid once beat every student in sparring, one at a time, in a class of 25 students who ranged from rank beginners to experienced black belts. When I went to observe his class today, he pointed her out to me: she was the 95-pound, thirteen-year-old, second-degree black belt instructing his class. I imagine she’s going to have a hard time finding dudes to date since she probably considers most boys to be pansies or sissies.

My cell phone doesn’t work in my Dad’s house, so I have to go drive around the neighborhood looking for a signal. Earlier this evening, I took a drive to check my messages and I had a couple voicemails and text messages. I realized I wouldn’t be able to return any of my messages if I went back to the house, so I decided to keep driving around while I got in touch with everyone. My plan was working out pretty well until I realized how dangerous it was to be driving around at night, in a rental car, in an unfamiliar part of town while thumbing out text messages on my phone. Did I stop? No. I just kept driving and texting while occasionally saying, “This is stupid.”