This weekend I caught a marathon of the new WB show, Beauty and the Geek. I'd heard about the show before. It's the new thing that Ashton Kutcher came up with. The idea is they pair up hot girls with nerdy guys and make them compete to not get voted off and ultimately win money in classic reality TV style. When I first heard about it I thought it was going to be really shallow and crappy. When I watched it though it wasn't as bad as I had thought. There were definately clashes where the girls and the guys weren't used to each other's worlds. Overall they ended up getting along better than they had thought they would and the people leaving the show really did seem to have learned something.

The whole brains tradeoff for beauty thing isn't as balanced as they'd like you to believe. The guys are trying to learn things like massage, women's fashion, and asking for girls' numbers. Theses are things that are very hard for them on an emotional level but things they'd like to improve. They had the women doing math, car repair, and "rocket science". It really wasn't that hard, even for them, and it wasn't like they cared. I don't think they were really learning anything or improving. They did benefit from hanging out with the guys.

Anyway, I was thinking about going on the show. I've thought about going on reality TV before. I watch Survivor a lot recently and I always think, "what would I do in that situation". I like the idea of actually playing the game. Showing what I could do in those challenges (I'd be good at any that involve staying under water a long time).

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Today was the last day of final project presentations at the ETC, and my group presented. That should make me done with school for the semester, and you'd think I'd be happy, but that's not quite how it went. Oh our presentation went well. I think people were pretty impressed with how much we accomplished this semester. The dome, our project, was something that people at the ETC didn't have real confidance in, and as was our goal, I believe we restored faith in the dome as a viable platform. Although why we had to work on a clearly second class project in the first place is unknown.

And that's just the beginning of the problem. We went third today, right after the two largest and most successful projects. I don't think it would have really been fair to put anyone after them. Compared to what they achieved, our work looked pathetic, even though that was really only due to difference of objectives. Our goal was, without a client that actually wanted our games, to make many prototypes to test features of the dome. So not only does work that is intended for the dome have to some strict limitations that make it hard to achieve a high quality look, and not only is work built for the dome almost impossible to show outside the dome without another reduction in quality, but our goal was explicitly not to pollish our experiences. In contrast, the Give Kids the World movie, along with Animateering, and the Interbots Initiative had client with a definitive idea of a deliverable on a close deadline for a very finished product capable of being played with by kids.

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I have to bring this up. More and more lately I'm worried about not finding a job. I haven't really gotten an internship ever. I've worked for Randy at Stage3/ETC for four years. I worry that if I don't find some kind of internship this summer I'll never find myself a job ever. This is a persistant nightmare I have almost every night before going to bed and sometimes more often.

I'm trying to finding an internship, sort of. I wish I could spend more time, make a better portfolio, and send out more resumes. I haven't had enough interviews yets, but I still want to find more. I'm just so busy with work I don't have time to find a job. It is really stressing. I fear that I don't come across right or that I do the wrong things and companies won't see why they should hire me. I just can think of so many reasons that I would not get offered an internship, not that I don't think I'm definately qualified.

Tonight was greek sing. It brings back some unhappy memories. First of all, I wanted to help out with ABTech, setting up and doing tech for the event. Of course I did help set up, but what makes me mad is that because I was a brother of AEPi, I'm not allowed to help out during rehersal or the show. I guess the worry is bias, that I might try to give unfair advantage to AEPi or adversely affect other shows. Some think it seems valid but I do not agree. First of all, it isn't like I'm looking for an especially important job with a lot of influence. Secondly, I was never very involved in AEPi greek sing and have no stake in their success. But most important is a thing called professionalism. If I'm going to do something then I'm going to make that my priority and focus. I am able to have multiple hobbies and keep them seperate. In protest I did not help with strike, although it was also since I had to get up early the next day.

Having been shunned by ABTech, I had no choice but to attend Greek Sing with AEPi. It felt weird being there like it always was in the past. I've been a bad brother with regards to greek sing. I helped out only slightly my freshman year, didn't do anything my sophmore or junior year, and was only actually involved one out of my four years. As much as I like theater, particularly my rare opportunity to perform, I have not capitalized on it. I've felt bad because of it, for both reasons.

The other thing that greek sing brings is girls. I have been and was this time uncomfortable being around which ever sorority we were working with. This probably comes from a comraderie developed over the weeks working together that the other brothers had that did not.

Well, that all being said there isn't much I can do about it now. So this year AEPi did Pippen with Zeta and won 3rd place.

Someone called it a quarter life crisis. I don't know about that, but I've been feeling pretty bad lately. I'm not really proud of anything I do. I don't really feel like anything I do is any good. I'm overcome with feelings of jealousy and worthlessness. I look at what other people are doing and I think "Why can't I be working on a project that is as cool as that?" or "I wish I was doing that" or just "Damn that looks good, I could never make something as impressive and real-looking at that." I suppose whatever you do, there's always going to be someone better, and I should deal with that. Or maybe it is just a lack of perspective. That's probably what other people would tell me. I hear how awesome I am plenty but it doesn't sink in. I know that, but how do I stop feeling like this isn't true.

Stress is part of the problem. I have so much to do I can't focus on doing anything well, and so I don't do anything at all. I'm overwhelmed by all the things I want to do, and so I do nothing. I slept 11 hours last night. I'm overcome by dozens of projects for work, booth, finding a job, my websites, puzzlestorm, dealing with other things in my life, etc. All the things I need to do can't even be listed. Thinking about the list right now makes my head hurt. I can't imagine climbing out from under this pile for months at least. I know I won't enjoy anything I do until I am free of this excessive burden and the thought of not enjoying anything in the forseeable future hurts.

So who do I talk to about this? What do I do?

The phrase "If you don't like the weather wait a minute", which I first heard in regard to New England although I imagine every place has that saying, never seemed literal until this week. All week I've been trying to build a booth, among other things I have to do. I've done what I can inside but now I need to start assembling things outside. I enjoyed this a lot the last 2 spring breaks of my undergrad career. but those were several weeks later. This year it is still winter. It is cold out and has been snowing off and on all week. The really tough part is that it hasn't been consistant. Monday was hot and beautiful. A great day to be outside, and I was wearing a t-shirt. Then Tuesday it started snowing. It has been snowing a little every day, but also getting just warm enough to melt the snow, not really warm though. Today has been the worst. First it is snowing. Then it stops, gets sunny, and the snow melts. I think that maybe I can go do some work outside, but as soon as I get ready, it gets dark and snowy again. It has been going back and forth every 20 mins for hours now. I just want it to be warm and spring. I would have even settled for a nice one week of indian summar like we've had here before. Booth season. Shitty weather. *shakes head*

Sometimes I feel like I am worthless and I'll never succeed at building a decent life for myself. Specifically I'll not be able to get a good job, or even any. Today is one of those days. Today a bunch of the visitors we had at the BVW show are here to interview people. They gave some nice presentations this morning. There's someone here from Imagineering who I would have loved to interview with. Unfortunately I spent so much time working on Randy's BVW show, that I didn't get a chance to sign up, so I couldn't. There were a few open spots with game companies. I don't want to work for them, but maybe I should at least practice interviewing, but how could I do a good interview with absolutely no interest in what they do? I still haven't been able to email the few contacts I got at IAAPA. I'm just worried that I'll never be able to find a job and certainly not a good one. I know I have the skills to work for a number of places, but I don't have the skills to get the job and I don't know what to do about it.

What is particularly depressing is that I know the one place I definately want to work, Disney, and according to Randy I'm not allowed to. Although I think that saying no Disney is a bit of a stretch, I agree that it probably would be a bad idea to try and apply to the VR Studio, which is frustrating because I would be happy there and Jesse was complaining that they had received few resumes from ETC students. They want to hire us, few people want to go there, I do, I'd be good at it, I should be a shoe-in. I should already know that is where I'm going this summer but after the fiasco last year (which frankly I think I take more of the blame than I deserve) that is all ruined. It is just moral crushing looking for a job when you are forced to overlook your most desired option, particularly when it otherwise might have been your most likely to get option.

Tonight I attended the After Your Bedtime party. It was a opening party for the new wing of the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. At $50 a person it didn't quite match the $250 black tie dinner preceding it, but it was still one of the more expensive/fancier affairs I've been to. I got to go the ETC dime as part of the Animateering group since the fruit of the previous Animateering project was installed as part of the new exibits. It was good to see the museum but the whole party experience was something else.

I thought, through my mom, that I knew was wealth and class was, to some degree, but our upper middle class coming from below does not compare to the true upper class who would spend the kind of money on tonight's events. As fun as it was, I don't think I took full advantage of it.

I'm speaking of meeting girls. I don't know how to talk about it even, really. I'm always on the lookout for girls. I'm really at the point in my life that it is all I need, but I do need it badly after 23 years or so of waiting.

Today was a long day, after class, and work, and a party with another masters program that was also supposed to introduce us to women, and The Incredibles which was a great movie where Pixar has outdone themselves again, I went to this party, and now I have to go to bed but be ready for an early and long day of Puzzle Royale puzzle solving tomorrow.

And so I get to the part of this story that is important after 4 paragraphs. There was a girl there. Well, there were lots of girls there, and several that seemed around my age or so.

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Well, the Music Video Saga continued. Ben and I did the initial edits like we were supposed to. Kyle wanted to help tweak the editing at the end. He has a better sense of rhythm for syncing to the music as well as it being a good idea to get more opinions now that we're doing the creative part, unlike the American Beauty scene. I was totally find with that. I thought we needed some other input and I know that Kyle would be able to match the sound better than I could anyway. I thought that the best way to do this, though, would be for him to direct and me to drive. That way I could work within the framework of what had already been done so that I wouldn't ruin anything Ben and I had spent a long time on that didn't need to change. I would have done everything he wanted making our video a combination of his tweaks and ours. However, I found him editing it himself. I suggested that I do it, but he claimed that he knew what our video was supposed to be. I guess I probably just didn't get the point across clearly of why I thought I should do it. I think one editor is more the standard of the way these things are done. I got really upset and felt as if I had lost my identification with the work. It came out pretty good, most of the stuff Kyle put in was important stuff that should have been done, but I still felt kind of pushed aside.

Perhaps I should have said something earlier instead of getting mad and blowing up later. I hold my tongue no not be difficult. I don't want to be hard to work with or to cause group arguments. I put the cohesiveness of the group before myself. I'd rather be angry than difficult. I'd rather exclude myself than giving my team a change to overrule me. But maybe if I'd be able to state things correctly they'd have listened, I'd have been happy, and we'd have had a better product. I'm not sure when I should question our process and when I shouldn't. When is it helpful and when is it being difficult?

My group's latest visual story project was to shoot a music video. Our last project was to reshoot a specific scene from American Beauty. We ended shooting it with sock puppets for actors. It was kind of tricky but it came out pretty well. Mike and Kyle did the editing for that one, but Ben and I were doing the editing for this music video.

We chose the song, "I'm just a kid" by Simple Plan. It was really Mike's suggestion, I know he likes them, but I also like that song. I really identify with it because it is about a kid feeling lonely and left out. I have felt that way much of my life. I often spend a lot of time with myself and find myself excluding from doing things with others, even those I consider my friends.

The plot of our video shows him committing suicide which turns out to be a dream. The video is suppsed to be a journey. The rest of the video shows his loneliness and his journey. At first you might not know where he is going, and it isn't clear if he does. He ends up back at the Cathedral of Learning (where he had jumped in the video) and he climbs out to the same ledge. In the end we have someone stop him just in time, because we didn't actually want him to die.

I really wanted to play the part, because of how I identify (except of the suicide). My group complained that my hair was too bright to be depressed and we wanted someone a little younger (i.e. no facial hair). Mike also wanted to play the role. I went out of my way to shave and dye my hair black.

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Orientation is just around corner. That's pretty literal. It's 3:15am now and it begins at 9am, practically now, and the university is physically around the corner from where I live now. As of today the summer is really over. This whole past week has been the beginning of the end, though.

I've been setting up for orientation with ABTech. I've been excited for the usual traditions: Tech, move-in, BBQs on the porch, meeting freshmen, playfair, etc. I worry that the reason I'm still stuck here doing the same old thing is because I don't know how to let go. I've always hated change and loved doing the same things I've loved before. But things do change. As much as I enjoy every tradition, every traditional thing I do also hurts. I have to consider every time that it might be the last. Also, every time might not be just as good as before.

Even though I was gone, I've still spent all my contiguous summers in Pittsburgh, but maybe this really is the last. I'm too old to care about the freshmen even if I do still want to participate in orientation to help them out and give them a good start like I had. I was looking forward to the beginning of this year, but now I'm not so sure.

Some of my close friends returned to Pittsburgh today. I've learned to get along without them: the year in Boston and this summer. Seeing them now, though, makes me realize that doing it with them, my friends, my brothers, was one of the things I loved about move-in. This year they won't be there, most have left town and the ones that are here have moved on past doing it.

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I'm going a mile-a-minute and I felt I needed to write a journal entry before there were too many thoughts to ever deal with. I really just want every thought I ever have recorded any time of day. Maybe I need a voice recorder or something. As far as brains go, my thinker seems to do better than my rememberer which renders the first slightly less efficient than might otherwise be.

Down: Social

No doubts about me as me, but I'm in a very different situation than I'm used to. I used to live with 30 of my friends. Now I live with 3 people. It is a big difference. I never had before and must discover now, the right way to hang out with people. It isn't like I haven't been making friends, I just don't know how to make them good friends. I don't know what to do when people aren't just there.

In addition there is something I wanted to call Not that feeling again! or "I think I'll have that drink now." The reasons for these strange titles are wholly unimportant. The sentiment is that, for all the progress I've made confidence-wise in social situations, I lack certain essential skills neccessary for moving past the types of social relationships I have now that I failed to develope at the time where it was possible.

Up: Media Lab

It was good to finally see my advisor, pick classes, and find that I had an office. Getting aquainted with the Media Lab will take some time, but I feel more comfortable there after touring around. I felt that I belonged. David is cool and I think we can work together.

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( Preamble )
I often say some really strange things. They all make sense to me. It is just the weird way my brain works. A friend of mine said there should be a place to write them down. I said I had a journal but it didn't really have that sort of stuff. Well it should. I don't remember what I said that day, but here's some nonsense with more to come.
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For anyone who read the journal entry from the other day, I'm sorry for the negative attitude and bad English. Everyone has their down days. I try not to write on those days, but it slipped out. But who reads this crap anyway? Speaking of crap, you have to see Strong Bad's email, one of the features of HomestarRunner.com. It is really funny.

Meanwhile, the number of people going skating is ballooning out of control. Ok, it isn't that bad, but I didn't realized I had so many friends.... who like ice skating.... and are free Tuesday night.

Unbeknownst to our hero, in another part of town, My website has been updated again. You could call this revision 2 of the new design, but then again, who's counting? What's new? Well, I'ved decided that journals and pictures are content I can actually update where as the rest I can't. Plus, why do I need to write pages about stuff that I do if I can just write about it in the journal when it happens? Therefore, the pages become less important. Also, there were too many frames and annoying dynamic database type features, so I got rid of them all. Simple simple simple. The best changes went into bbGallery, the picture browser I wrote. Most of the changes were on the administrator side. I can easily generate and regenerate thumbnails and rotate and delete pictures from the web. Customizing the settings is all standard now. There are a few user changes you may see. Thumbnails really fit into their size now. It won't ever autogenerate thumbnails, instead it will just let you know when there isn't one available. Finally, you can see more details about the picture that the camera recorded.

Ok, that's enough for now. Sleepy time. Keep on scrollin' on....

So, I have tried, today, to be a better student. I realized that despite the fact that I don't think it is important to me, it must be. When I see people who do better than me, or I see how poorly I actually do, I wish I were better. I feel below good students and that isn't what I want. So I tried to do work. To get things done so that I would know what it feels like to have fun with everything done. It didn't work. I realized, "What's the point?" Things were going well, but then I had a sudden realization, and knew that even without work, I wouldn't be happy. I won't ever be happy. It's a tough thing to realize, because I like to be optimistic and think things will *eventutally* work out... but they won't.

Since things were going well, might was well mention them. Halloween party was cool. The party itself didn't go so great, but my costume was cool. Check out pictures. Although, on the note of halloween, there was another party I was supposed to go to and didn't. I really should have but I just can't handle stuff like that, it makes me sad. Also, AEPi had a mixer where we did karaoke. It was actually surprisingly fun. I guess the fact that I like to sing helps but I was surprised that I wasn't really embarassed at all not only to sing in front of 30 or so people, but to sing Whitney Houston.

The ice rink is supposed to open on Monday. That is something I'm looking forward to. I have been waiting to go ice skating for a while now. I already have plans to go with a whole bunch of people. It should be /interesting/. That is what I was looking forward to, but in light of other things, it just can't really make up. I have to try to put on a positive face, and make it seem to others like my life is worth living. Right. Signing out.

I haven't written in a while. It was because I had a really rough emotional rollercoaster ride that left me unable to care about anything as trivial as my website. Oh, and I had a lot of class work. So the situation, for the curious, was this thing with this girl, and it sucked and wasted my time, but I'm over it now and ready to move on.

So back on the update scene here's what's been going on. Class are keeping me busy. Got my first OS assignment back. I wasn't too pleased with the grade despite the fact that ours was the most efficient shell our grader had seen. Efficiency, that is definately one of my things. Still waiting to get into 240 but I figure that if it makes it to the end of the semester I can just say, "Hey, I did all the work, I got an A on the final, now give me my credit and let me go on my way."

TAing is a lot of work. More than I expected but the pay and helping people make it worth it. Today I did 4 hours worth of motion capture, but it came out surprisingly well for my first time. I can't wait to see how it turns out in the worlds. Mocap makes me really feel important. Like I have something special going for me. Let's hope that carries though.

Speaking of things going for me, GRE's went well, so now it must be time to apply to grad schools. This is going to be a tough choice to make if I have to. Free and in Boston, or with my friend where I think would be more my style?

But what do I really want to say today. I feel on top of the world. I used to hit pits and stay down.

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