I'm starting week three of exhaustion because I can't sleep. I started not being able to string together consecutive hours of sleep a couple weeks ago, tossing and turning and waking up frequently throughout the night. This results in me being a zombie during the day, which explains all of the lost days I've experienced lately. Also, when I wake up around 3-6, I get really hot and have to toss off all my blankets -- I just did so now. Though before now, I never got out of bed like I did this morning, and now I feel cold.

I've worked the depressant's circuit to try and get some rest. Sleeping pills: tried'em... No good. Light amount of alcohol before bed to make me even more drowsy: tried it... No good. Heavy amounts of alcohol before bed, I've done that too: I actually am able to sleep for 5 or 6 hours, but that's it. And the following day is lost because I'm hung over. This isn't a solution because I can't live life constantly getting shitfaced every night -- a point I drove home to myself last night as I emptied the rest of my gin into the toilet.

Last night, I refrained from eating for a few hours before bed and didn't consume or imbibe a single depressant. The result was the same.

And now I'm facing another lost day.

Besides going to the doctor (which I will try to do today), anybody got any suggestions? Because if this keeps up, I'm going to flunk all of my classes.

I've come to the conclusion that I hardly ever use Livejournal.

Either that or I come on here when I'm a mental mess, having just another one of those days that seems to happen all too often, and my mind is blank while staring at a computer screen, looking for something to entertain me while I can hardly string two thoughts together and think in a coherent manner.

I've been having too many of these days lately. My cognitive abilities break down and I can't study. Since I'm a college student and studying currently equals my life, this is not good because I keep falling farther behind on my work.

I'm not sure how many more days like this I can have before I fail.

And I'm not sure how I can avoid having days like this.

All I can do is hope that I don't have them. Somehow, someway.

In the meantime, I haven't fully convinced myself that everything I touch doesn't turn to shit. I never have, probably never will, and I imagine this is one of my biggest problems, too.

I got home from work around 9:30 tonight, and my brain was feeling nimble so I decided to get some reading done. But before then, I lifted weights. So I wouldn't feel tired afterwards, I skipped the whole drinking water thing while lifting weights and drank a mug of coffee instead.

I got some reading done.

I just watched Hot Fuzz.

And it's past 2:30 and I'm still not tired.

You know, that whole coffee thing was a stupid fucking idea.

I have a couple problems with it -- which relate to problems with simple questions in general. But first of all, my results:

87% Dennis Kucinich
86% Mike Gravel
86% Chris Dodd
79% John Edwards
77% Hillary Clinton
77% Barack Obama
77% Bill Richardson
74% Joe Biden
36% Rudy Giuliani
30% John McCain
24% Ron Paul
23% Mike Huckabee
19% Tom Tancredo
18% Mitt Romney
8% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

No surprises there for me. I'd love a Kucinich presidency, and it's a shame that such will never happen. I'm a bit surprised that Biden didn't rank higher on my list -- I actually think the guy would make a decent Secretary of State. That's something I never admit to my multitude of blogging buddies, fearing that they might disown me... And I've already burned enough bridges on the liberal side of the blogosphere, but that's another story altogether. Maybe I'll get to it someday.

Now, the questions from the quiz.

( Click here to learn more about Darfur, the economy, alternative energy, and lions and tigers, oh my! )

The only reason to follow football is to dish out punishment to your friends when their teams crash and burn. This is easy with the NFL, too, because there's so many choices. For some reason, many football fans don't like their hometown teams. They like a team from a town they have absolutely no connection to. I haven't seen this phenomenon happen with other sports... In baseball, for example, people like either their hometown team, Yankees, or the Red Sox. There isn't a random Kansas City Royals fan out there. But there are random Chuckafuck City, USA fans outside of Chuckafuck -- thus increasing the number of people within my vicinity that I can make fun of.

Case in point, an old coworker of mine, who has never lived in Pittsburgh, is a Steelers fan. I got home last night and my roomie's boyfriend had the Steelers/Jacksonville playoff game on, so I sat down and watched. I'm not a football fan, but I understand the game and wanted to keep watching this playoff matchup because, quite frankly, both teams sucked so bad that I was laughing my ass off the whole time.

I tell my roomie's boyfriend, "If the Steelers lose, I'm gonna send my coworker a txt saying, 'Man, that game was like Big Ben riding a motorcycle.'" We both got those evil giggles. To explain this, "Big Ben" is the nickname for the Steelers' quarterback, and he's famous for injuring himself after crashing his motorcycle and not wearing a helmet. I still find it ironic that he has to wear a helmet at his job, yet he neglected to wear while humping a crotch rocket.

Anyways, the Steelers lost and the txt got sent today. I feel like such an asshole, but in that good, harmless, smart ass way... Ya know? At least football, the omnipresent uber-religion of America, is good for something.

My resolution for this year is to learn how to become a better student. I need to accomplish this by managing my time better and learning how to study more efficiently -- which means figuring out a way to stop procrastinating. Time management is the key to keep up with another resolution: to stay in shape.

Bucking the trend, my fitness goals have nothing to do with New Year's resolutions. Ever since I ended up losing around 80 pounds of myself, I've been resolved to keep that off... And besides, exercise is a compromise in feeling better. Here's the trade off: you can push yourself and feel like shit during the time you're exercising then feel great afterwards, or you can not exercise and feel like a lesser form of shit 24/7. I'd rather feel good 23 hours a day than face the alternative, since I've already lived in the alternative.

You have to ease into an exercise routine, though - especially when you're me. Being hypoglycemic, any change to my normal routines causes my body to go through blood sugar fits and crashes for a couple of weeks. So it's best to stick to whatever workout routine I have going. This is where the time management resolution comes in.

Last summer, just having moved to Western Mass and not wanting to pay gym fees (I'm too broke to cover such costs), I bought a weight bench and exercise bike so I could work out at home. I eased myself into an exercise routine, and took it with me into the school year. I felt pretty good.

Then a number of things hit: I had to get a new job because my old one wasn't paying the bills, we had to boot one of the roommates out of the house which caused a week's worth of drama; and the workload from my classes started eating me alive. By November, I had fallen out my exercise routine. I tried getting back into it in December, lifted weights once during the month -- the next day, my back was killing me. And for days afterwards, my back was killing me, so I went to the doctor. He gave me some stretching exercises to do and told me to take it easy for a month.

It's been a month. The new semester hasn't started, so, here I am again. Less fit and trying to get myself back into a routine. I started lifting weights again last week, which instantly led my body to demand food at all times. And I haven't yet hit the exercise bike... Reason being that when you roll out of bed after sleeping for nine hours and you still have bags under your eyes, you don't want to fuck with your body.

I've been taking it easy, slowly trying to get back into an exercise routine. Apparently, I'll have to take it even easier.

!@#$.

Had I stuck to the exercise routine I started last year, I'd be bench pressing Volvos by now. So here's hoping that I learn how to manage my time better this year.

When it comes to Christmas, I'm the laziest gift-giver ever. I'll usually purchase gift cards, just give people moneey, or.. On the off-shot chance that I get somebody an actual gift, I duck the element of surprise by not wrapping it. This is the only way I can beat out my cousin Sean in the laziness department, since he does bother to wrap his gifts -- by throwing said gift inside of some newspaper and crumbling up that newspaper into a ball. There, it's wrapped!

I don't think my family has even taken Christmas too seriously. If retail chains had to depend upon customer like us to give them a boost during the holiday season, they would go out of business so quickly...

This year, however, I wrapped one gift. I value history, be it ancient, national, local, or family -- and I realize that this gift will have family historical value.

It's a Commodore 64. Computer, monitor, and disk drive; all with the original packaging, cables, manuals, etc. The boxes are a bit aged, but the actual computer itself still looks new. I'm giving it to my brother in law who, as you might of guessed by now, is a super geek.

The C-64 was his first computer. A few months ago, I saw these C-64 boxes sitting on the lawn, across the street from my house, free for the taking because my neighbors were moving. I contemplated whether or not I should snag it. The "I don't need any more crap" part of me said no, but the geek part of me said "Are you kidding me? Hell yeah!" But what pushed me into taking it was my brother in law -- if I told him there was a C-64 across the street from me and I didn't take it, I'd never live it down. Five minutes later, all three boxes were in my living room and my roommates were wondering if they should give me and the C-64 some "private time."

I didn't have any place to set it up, though. And I kept on thinking, "Omigod, my brother in law is going to think this is awesome!" And those thoughts turned into, "Omigod, if I give this to him for Christmas, it'll be the best present ever!" And besides, that's only fair -- my first computer was a Commodore, but it was the Commodore Amiga. I never came of age with the C-64 -- he did. This was his childhood I was looking at, how could I not give it to him?

So I got all three boxes wrapped up today. The element of surprise is important here. Also, noting a headline on today's paper about a Christian Iraqi family in Providence welcoming "Papa Noel," I decided to translate that into Arabic for my present's tag, which now says "From: بب نول". After all, if I'm giving a gift that will go down in family history, I want my brother in law to know who it's from. One geek to another.

My semester is OVAH!

Like any semester at college, this is a learning experience on how to be a better student. And given my problems with procrastination, I've a lot to learn -- and it's rather daunting. I chatted with a polisci grad student from my Arabic class as she was packing up, and she showed me the two boxes of papers she had for her two grad courses this semester -- containing 9000 someodd pages. Each course required her to read 300 pages a week. That's a lot -- and that's what I'm working towards managing in a couple years time.

For now, inbetween semesters, I have seven books I plan on reading. If I can get a 100 pages per day done, I should be able to accomplish the goal... But I can't remember the last time I read two books in a month, nevermind seven. So if I can get three done, I'd probably be happy with that... But I'm trying not to think that way.

As for this semester, I haven't gotten my grades back yet but I think I might have gotten a B and C mixed in there... That's something I won't abide by for next semester.

There was a girl in my Middle Eastern history class that I've wanted to talk with all semester, but never got the opportunity to because I could never think of anything to say that would break the ice in that non-creepy, non-I-really-wanna-talk-to-you-and-I-hope-you-don't-catch-me-checking-you-out-20-times-per-class way.

As fate would have it, she sat behind me during our final for the class yesterday. And as fate would have it, she dropped her pen and it skidded down a couple rows in front of her. I heard the pen drop, saw where it went, and immediately handed her my spare pen so she didn't have to ask the professor to get up to get her's back.

But, as fate would have it, this was my spare pen:


For those of you who haven't heard of Hot Air, I don't suggest going there -- it's a very evil conservative website. And I also don't usually take pictures of my pens, but this one had some stories behind it. I got it when I was playing journalist at CPAC last March and it lasted an unusually long time for a cheap, disposable pen. Sometimes I had to use it at work, giving it to customers who used a credit card to pay their bills. Whenever using that pen in such a situation, I always worried about two things: A) advertising a site I found deplorable; or B) it would affect my tip because my customer already knew about the site.

Now I'm worried about her going to that website. I never got a chance to talk with her after the final (which is a shame because the pen would have finally given me an icebreaker), so if she remembers any impression of me, it's going to be me giving her this pen... Then afterwards, going to the website it advertises, being insulted, and wondering if anyone carrying such a pen is a huge asshole who's a fan of the shit on that website.

Ah, well. So it goes. At least I won't have to worry about my tips anymore.

Coming just in time for Christmas, now you can get your friends and loved ones used Red Sox players' jockstraps. No, really!

What got me thinking of this story were the recent bits in the Herald discussing sales of various Red Sox players' undergarments on eBay and other auction sites. Apparently a pair of Manny's skivvies fetched $160 while Tek's earned $255. The big money, however, went to none other than Matt Clement, whose boxers sold for over $400. Ladies and gentlemen, this last point may be proof that it's finally time to abandon the Earth and colonize Mars.

Most recently, as Red Sox Monster pointed out, Youkilis' jock strap was made available to the public on eBay. The listing was eventually taken down -- no doubt after an appeal by FEMA -- but the very fact that it was out there, the very fact that someone sat down at a computer and reasoned, "Someone will pay money to have Kevin Youkilis' used jock," is a concept as frightening to me as nuclear war, open heart surgery, and the Spice Girls reunion tour all rolled into one.

I'm only buying if skidmarks are included.