well

yet again, i neglect this blog.

however, it is with just cause. i have two jobs now. i generally work a full 40-50 hours a week, depending on how scheduling goes. i'm still running my grandpa and aunt around. on the weekend, if i have time/are not working, i'm actually having a social life with friends. oh, and i'm taking a class. it's online but it still counts.

it's crazy to be as busy as i am now but oddly enough, i like it. being busy makes me feel less bored with my life.

new year, new start, same ol me

i never do anything on time. notorious for it. however, i still have my own list of new year's resolutions that i want/need to state to see if i follow through on them this year.

1) better myself as a person. very general but a good thought nonetheless.

2) become healthier. my actual goal is lose forty pounds over the course of the next year to get to a healthy bmi and at a weight where i feel more comfortable with myself again. i've already taken the first steps towards this by buying food separately from my family (literally, all we have here is hxc processed food) and exercising :/ blech.

3) ride my bike at least three times a week. it's only a cruiser but i love going out on it, i just need to make more of an effort at it.

4) learn a craft. i'm leaning towards knitting right now to kill whatever spare time i have left and to add a destressing activity to my already nutty life.

5) take more pictures. i have a camera, not the best and not the worst, but a simple point and shoot that i should be lugging around with me but never do.

these are all really simple goals, things that ought to be followed very easily so this is my new year. i'm ready to go.

holidays

christmas time. a time of magic and joy and happiness, a time to share memories and laughter and presents, let's be honest here. this year is a little bittersweet for my family. there have been more tears shed than normal, more dregs of sadness being brought back up but in tender ways.

it's been over two months since my uncle passed away and so, this is the first christmas we spend without him. my little sister, unusually thoughtful thoughtful when it came to her gifts this year, got my aunt (his fiance) a calendar made with pictures of the two of them and got my father a photo of him, my uncle and my grandfather who has also passed. my aunt was in awe. my dad cried. he legit broke down and cried.

needless to say, i followed suit. i've always been super close to my dad so whenever i see him cry, i legit break down and sob so there we were, a mass of a family as we huddled together and cried while looking at the picture of the three men before we collected ourselves and just went into telling stories about pete. it still is weird to me that my uncle no longer is a physicality on this earth but it still makes me happy that we can talk about him. even though it still stings to think or talk about pete and what happened, the fact that we can bring up the good things, the stories and the memories, the laughs we had...makes me truly happy.

and so, for the holiday season this year, i have joy. joy for what's happened in my life, joy for what is happening now and joy for what is yet to come. happy holidays.

hello again

dearest little blog (and whoever reads this),

hello. perhaps hello again. consider this the second coming of me. now that i've graduated from college with my bachelor's and have chosen to take a year or so off to attend to familial and monetary issues, i have time to dedicate to you again. how lovely.

that and this being all said, i've yet to decide what to really do with the blog. i want to try doing outfit posts, maybe a once a week kind of deal. expect random bits. expect stories of shenanigans. expect odd photos. expect me.

here we go again.

blog overhaul to come later. i may actually find a use/purpose for this thing yet.

you go marcus coco

i have decided that i have two words that will define my being. unflappable and unapologetic. i refuse to be shaken by the shit that gets flung my way. i refuse to apologize for the decisions that i make, the things that i do, the things that i say.

no regrets, no fear and i will never be afraid.

family

as much as i complain and bellyache about my family and the life situation that i've been dealt, i still love my family very much. this has been made more so present than recent events.

on thursday, october 14th, my uncle pete unexpectedly died of what we believe was an aortic aneurysm. he went to work and left due to not feeling well, came home and became disoriented and coded on his way to the hospital, never to wake back up. it's still hard, harder than i thought, to fully wrap my head around the notion that he's not coming home or that his car outside doesn't mean that he's inside, waiting. he and i didn't always get along and more often than not, i thought he was a goober. he had lame jokes and always waited for me to give him a high five and would bother me at the most inconvenient times but i loved him dearly. i loved how he would always forget to tuck in his shirt or how he knew random sports and music trivia, i loved how he would be nice to the meanest person and how he would tell me that i looked pretty on days when i felt anything but.

i'm grateful for the time and the memories that i have with and of him. i'm grateful that he went quickly and didn't feel any pain. i'm grateful that friends and family have banded around my core family to help us through it. i'm grateful for every day that i wake up and can tell people that i love them. because in the face of this shit that befell us so suddenly, i'm made more grateful for the friends and family that i have and i never want to neglect telling people that i adore them. the hurt will get better with time, i know, but for right now, i'm so happy that i had my uncle pete.

my aunt

is legit a medical freak. she has these two diseases, wegener's granulomatosis and polyarteritis nodosa, and the combination of the two of them together puts her in a realm that apparently only one other person in the world has been officially diagnosed with. rad fun fact about my aunt: she's been in a shitload of medical journals for it.

my entire life, she's been what i refer to as functionally sick. she's legit on disability because she can't work due to her illnesses but pretty much can do anything else.

however, i'm starting to get really fed up with her. i have to tolerate her shit and shenanigans because she is 'sick' but it's really ridiculous how she milks it and the crap she gets away with because of it. all she ever does is constantly bemoan the fact that she can't drive due to seizures on her record, how she's sicker than everybody else and is worse off and how we need to cater to her whims because of it. you know, a person can only tolerate and accept that kind of stuff for so long.

case in point: her repetition. it's not even noon yet and she's already told me eight times since she's woken up a HALF HOUR AGO that she has a fever. okay? take a damn tylenol, lay down and stfu.

this kind of occurrence is my day to day life. my friends don't believe me until they come over and after are always like wow, wasn't expecting that. i warn people for a reason.

now, i love her and i hate that she's sick but at the same time, her shenanigans are starting to wear me down, wear me thin and drive me up a wall. i do feel better for ranting, though.

time to take her to the doctor.

i was going to write

but then i looked at the lush cosmetics facebook again and saw this hunk of a man again.



ugh, moving to vancouver right now. he is my perfect man. bearded, tattoos and a metallica shirt. dead.

i'm frustrated. i graduate in december and have already plotted out a plan of action. take a year off before grad school to volunteer at the history center here or get an internship with them while i continue to work at lush and (try) to save up enough money for a new car and to get the hell out of here. my mother, however, has different plans for me altogether.

she doesn't seem to grasp the idea that i no longer wish to follow the path that they've laid out for me. i no longer want to live in the isolated little bubble that they seem to have so carefully dictated and constructed for me. i want to be my own person and even if i'm not making much money, i want to do what makes me happy and i don't want to settle for mediocrity.

i can't even discuss any of this with her because once i mention deviation from her plans, she acts like an insolent and sullen teenager and begins to pout and sulk and bitches until i lie and say what she wants to hear.

i need to win the lotto or something. shit.

i'm going to attempt to nurture this blog a little more, make more of a day by day thing. no matter how trivial or inane my day seems.

starting tomorrow.

quick post

update to follow tomorrow. too tired from school work to write anything noteworthy.

one month

and some change. that's legit how long it's been since i've updated this thing. it's not like i can even say that i've been busy. i've just been lazy, haha. let's recap this last month in list form, shall we?

- i started my (last) semester of school. two classes online. it feels weird to be doing school work again. i did not miss formatting papers. blech.
- i've been working more at the store. i love it dearly. i cannot wait for the next few months because of halloween and christmas products, wooooooot.
- i've been helping out the family like always. enough said.
- i started a food blog with my friend alley. ferociousfoodies.blogspot.com

damn. that's really pretty much it. here's my dad singing and cleaning a toilet chair.

weight loss update

so it's actually been about five weeks since i've embarked on my lose weight, look great sort of half ass plan that i've started. i will admit, i've slacked severely on the exercise front. i've only been doing yoga about twice a week but i have been walking around a lot more than usual. i've also been cutting down portion sizes a lot and not snacking/grazing as much as i used to.

that being said, i came out of my room this morning and my younger sister looked at me rather quizzically and asked if i was skinnier. i haven't really been paying much attention the last few weeks so i went and weighed myself and i've officially lost 12 pounds. i can't lie, it felt pretty damn good to see that i've lost that much. my goal now is another 30 and i think it's definitely doable, especially if i step up my game on the exercise front.

my sister also complained that i've been looking cuter than her lately. that part, i'm not as sure about but i think my little sister is gorgeous so it oddly made me feel good. i've suffered with self esteem issues for years and i've gotten to an acceptance level with myself where i think that i'm cute. i'm not model gorgeous but i'm not hideous either and it's taken me a long time to just accept myself. now i'm just trying to improve myself further.

summer time

every summer, a ritual has started to form between myself and two of my friends, amber and lydia. lydia lives in atlanta and amber lives in naples so with me being in orlando, we don't exactly get a chance to see each other often. this year marks the third year of us getting together and going to warped tour.

now, warped tour over the years has seen a decline in bands that the three of us actually like but we still truck through it and spend the day meandering around and seeing new bands, laughing and having all sorts of nutty adventures. the first year was 2008 when we hit up warped in miami. it's how i got introduced to protest the hero (helloooooo, luke hoskin), a warped date on the water with a gorgeous breeze and the longest period of time ever spent by me in miami.


luke hoskin, what a stone cold fox

last year was 2009 warped tour in west palm beach. the venue sucked. there were bands like millionaires and brokencyde that are just a blight upon music. but there was alexisonfire and gallows and chiodos that made everything worth it to me. i also found out that all three of us, embarrasingly enough, like 3Oh!3. Even putting that in print shames me. we got to meet alexisonfire, which was a major highlight to me, and per usual, i took total creeper photos that i am just now gonna post.


steele, the bassist. sweet as pie. what a guy.


jordan hastings, the drummer. also known as ratbeard. i follow him on twitter and i legit find him to be most pleasant.


george pettit, the lead singer. we had run into him earlier and i had given him some cookies. uber friendly.


dallas green. arguably the most known member of the group. his side project is city and colour, which alone is freaking amazing. he seemed really shy but when you have tons of people on your ass all the time, you gotta keep something about yourself for yourself.


wade macneill. my personal favorite member. he held up the line for us so that we could talk to him. sincerely genuine and sweet, he's extremely humble and kind and it's safe to say i'm slightly enamored with him.

this year is 2010 warped tour and year three for our terrible trio to terrorize another city in the state. this year's decided warped tour date is the st petersburg stop. why? because it's a little closer to naples than west palm and st pete in general is a rad ass city. i'm excited for hangouts with my friends and the handful of bands that we're going to see.


especially this one.

it's gonna be a good weekend.

this week has been infinitely better than the last. i feel like shit has shifted in the universe to where i feel like the pile of suck that seemed to hang over my head may not be hovering above me as close as it was. i did bring it upon myself but at least there's definitely been a major improvement.

we've had a few amazing nights downtown with lots of dancing and smiling and laughing. we went to this place called rebounderz, which has tons and tons of indoor trampolines. we bounced on walls and beat little kids and dodgeball. i went bowling with my brother. i took my little sister to lunch. i had a bowling tournament with the girls from work with a lot of ridiculous costumes, lots of bonding time and amaretto sours for me.

it's nice having a social life again after allowing myself to become a quasi-hermit for about two years. it's even better that we've been having good times going out inside of shitty ones. this coming week is going to be full of win, too. kennedy space center, fuddrucker's with my-linh, backbooth for 80's night, ibar for grits and gravy and five year flashback.

i love life.

karma

i generally believe in being a good person. doing the right thing as much as humanly possible and helping out my fellow man whenever i can. i'm not claiming that i'm perfect in it. i'm as shallow and materialistic as the next person but i'm at least trying to become more aware of the impact i'm making and having on other people in the world.

however, this last week has been a really shitty clusterfuck of bad karma both caused by me and doled out to me.i truly do feel that the 'bad' things that are occuring in my life right now are a direct result of what i have caused in karmic damage to others. i know a lot of people don't really believe in karma or the kind of symbiotic balance in the world but i fully do and so i'm just trying to find my balance again before i get the good ol karmic bitch slap again. or an anvil dropped on my head.

random rambling over.

hi. i don't know your name or who you are or what you do but maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan, you are fine as hale.

because i was exhausted from work yesterday, i didn't get a chance to update this sucker but i have embarked upon the start of my new healthy body plan.

i've started doing yoga again and plan on getting at least twenty minutes in each day whenever possible. i've started doing stomach crunches and planks to get a flatter belly, which has always been my biggest body concern and because belly fat is the worst to keep on your frame. i'm planning on doing at least 30 minutes of cardio four times a week, walking around my neighborhood whenever i can with my little sister, riding my bike again in the afternoons. i've cut pop out of my diet, started limiting my portions of food and am trying to eat more fruits and vegetables, less sweets and carbs.

i finally decided to stop being compacent. it's not that i think i'm fat or that i have an urge to be rail thin or have a desire to have anybody's body but my own. i just need to stop being lazy. i've gotten so bad about actually getting my ass up to do anything lately that it's nto really a wonder i've put on some weight. my goal is thirty pounds by december to at least get myself into the healthy range of my body mass index. if i can lose more, that'd be great but for once, it's really not so much about losing the weight as it is about developing better life habits for myself. after all, i got one life to live and i want to make the most out of it and i truly feel that being a few pounds lighter would ease my body aches and pains and allow me more mobility and flexibility in doing the things i want to do. i'm monitoring my progress and will post about it here monthly so i can track myself.