The conundrum of connection

After watching a video about social media killing social connections, I have realized quite a couple of things. Here's the cipher.

We are living in the Internet age: the era of mobile technology, immersive video games, and ever-changing
status updates on our social media profiles. We see and experience life like we have never experienced before: literal gigabytes of information that can be accessed by a quick click of the Search button. The average modern smartphone is more powerful than the entire console used to send a man to the moon.

I think the internet makes it harder for
us to be happy.

But, I acquiesce, that this ease of information we have is the reason why people are feeling more and more lonely every day. I think it is because they see the entire world and then look scornfully at themselves in their current state. Whoever haven't browsed profiles at a dating website, and asked themselves, "Why do all the attractive people have to be so far away from me?"

This desire to be in close proximity with attractive people leads to a feeling of loneliness, a creeping sense of depression, a persistent thought that everyone in their city is unattractive compared to the supermodels and pop stars and swooners who live hundreds of miles away.

However, this global view of the world blinds the person's eyes to the personal connections he makes. He does not see the attractive lady sitting on a park bench, the adorable puppy who gleefully fetches a thrown stick, the supportive friends he goes out with on a weekend night. He fails to savor these little moments that should build him up and instead longs for the caress of the "perfect one": he so much aspires to get to Oz without stopping to admire the majesty of the yellow road he's travelling on.

He looks at the majestic stars through a telescope but he does not see the chair holding him up.

The person should then realize that he is not alone in the world: he is just alone on the internet.

Cheers to the freakin' weekend

Over the past 7 months, I have become drunk more often than the past 3 something-ish years of my life in Canada. Here's the plaintext.

This year in university was what I could say the most exhilarating year I have been on. After being included in someone's circle of friends (who I just met online too), I found myself going to house parties, making friends with people I barely knew, and having to pretend to be sick because I'm way hung over.

I met my buddy Brandon over our university confessions page. He had an interestingly awesome last name, so I added him on Facebook. It was only until the first few minutes of sending the request that I realized that this is the boyfriend of our family friend's sister. I was mortified. I very rarely add family friends as "friends" on any of my social media profiles, let alone my own relatives. But I went with the flow and let everything take its course.

He went to my other friend's Halloween party, and that's where it all started. He met a guy in the party who I shook hands with as well, and found out that he throws awesome parties. I went to one, initially awkward at what mess I'm in, going to a party where I knew only one person.

Alcohol made it tons easier for me to say hi to random people, shake their hands, and talk with. I decided to bring a camera to one of his parties. Halfway through the night, I began taking pictures with my hefty DSLR, fueled by my alcohol-induced mind. I was a shutterbug. I took some 200ish pictures, and the next day gave me great surprises.

Looking from the shots the previous night, I instinctively knew when to shoot, and at what angle to do it. I was shocked at how perfectly candid all my pictures were, and I pretty much documented every nook and cranny of the party. I posted them on my profile, and as they set my pictures as their profile and cover photos, I believe that they thought the same. I decided drunk pictures are a good idea, and I lugged along my trusty camera to house parties ever since.

I went from being a random unknown university boy to a guy who regularly gets invitations to go out for drinks. Sometimes, I wonder what it would have been like if I did not add this boy who's the boyfriend of our family friend's sister on Facebook.

I would probably still be skulking on my bed every weekend, typing how alone I am in this tundra. Before, I asked for even just an acquaintance, a small set of friends I can maybe go for a Starbucks with. Now, I have hundreds of them. I can literally post on my Facebook profile and send 80 people knocking at a door, ready to party.

They might not be "share-secrets-with" friends [at least not yet], but hey, you cannot turn down alcohol and all its wonders. After all, misery is best shared with company, eh?

Hello, old friend.

I'm back. And as always, here's the plaintext.

I have written on this blog 7 months ago, and I can say that indeed, a lot have (has? I can't English) changed since then. My last post was about my little Dungeons and Dragons group. It has been a while, but this summer, I have to leave the group temporarily to fulfill the demanding requirements of a new job I have just gotten.

I am back in the material handling and warehouse industry. Two summers ago, I was working for Federated Co-Operatives as an order picker for their warehouse. My supervisor gave me a picture on how I fit in the system, and what I do is I pack the grocery, produce, and dairy supplies of every Co-Op store in Saskatchewan.

I lift boxes. And put them in a pallet. For 8 hours. And if that sounds easy enough, just think that these pallets have to be the same height as me with my hands raised. Filled with all kinds of boxes. And I have to get 85 items an hour, no matter how many cases they want (100 boxes of pop? That's just one item. 84 more to go in the next 60 minutes)

Yes, I work in something similar to this.
Orange and blue as far as the eye can see.

But yeah. Now I work in an eternal -2 degrees Celsius (which is fine by me, due to the sweltering summers coming up)... a little sacrifice I have to make to get a little luxury in life. I get paid way above minimum for lifting up to 50 pounds repeatedly (which is a nice workout for someone as scrawny as I am). I tend to look at the positive things before I start on the 5th, and not look at the fact that I will be exhausted by the end of my shift, and that I won't be able to see my Pathfinder group all summer, and that I have to say goodbye to all the familiar faces and friends I made while I was toasting buns at McDonald's.

It's good to be back here in my blog. It's been a long 7 months, and a lot has (have?) changed.

The hegemony of fantasy

I know the title makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but forgive me. It rhymes.

Here's the plaintext. So I was supposed to be playing my Thursday game of Pathfinder today. Basically it's Dungeons and Dragons; and if you thought I couldn't get any geekier, I made a decision last year to awkwardly join this little fantasy role playing group... and it was the best decision I have ever had in my life.

So in Pathfinder you and a group of friends make a character sheet that you fancy, and you go exploring landscapes as someone called a game master describes it in vivid detail... and depending on how you made your character, you carry out actions that affect the game.

I was a wizard. Then I drowned.

Ultimately mourning over my first character's death, I made a new character: an elf archer.

That one drowned as well. 

But it got reincarnated. 

As a chick. With wings.

I have 2 sets of this, so far.

I remember the times when I first joined this group. It was the same month, September, last year. I was only invited cuz I was bored, and I was not busy Thursdays anyway, and man it was the most awkward day in my life. 

I went in with the usual prejudice about Dungeons and Dragons: that its players are those big guys with square glasses who haven't heard of God's marvelous gift to man called a bathtub. But in this group, none of that stereotype exists.

After a year of playing, I can say that they have been the most awesome group of people I have met. We killed goblins and undead and giants together, and after countless deaths, I have gotten the hang of Pathfinder. I even bought new dice today, which is awesome. I bought a cool d20 die with blue and red swirled on it, and four d8s. I don't know why I bought 4 d8s... probably it was a frustration buy because I couldn't find any good miniatures that look like my current character.

And with my new abilities and spells because I leveled up (I role-played that I went scouring the town for magical scrolls, which I meticulousl studied and is now part of my repertoire), I can't wait to rain death on every goblin that stands in my way. Oh and if you're wondering, my character is a female Aasimar arcane archer, who both excels in shooting arrows and casting spells. Pretty wicked.

I had a Coke slushie today.

And if you've been stalking my blogpost well enough, you'll notice that it was what I always got for at 7-Eleven. A plain Coke slushie.

To further my advances into my old habits, I went and ate instant "ramen" noodles at 11 o clock in the evening, watching Dexter and tweeting about it. Thing is, all of these stuff is what I used to do the same time 2 years ago. And as I found myself immersed in my old habits, I felt a deep sense of nostalgia.

That this is how things are supposed to be.

But you see, things have changed. I've met so much people (and lost most of them), I'm still stuck up in school and can't even talk to my seatmate, I've cut my hair shorter... but I fell back into my old nuances. Maybe it's me wanting to go back to a time when I was merely a spectator of thousands of worlds described in the written word, when life was Coke slushies, pepperoni pizzas, and late-night TV marathons. Maybe I wanted to go back to a time when life was simpler.

But then again maybe I'm just longing for a friend still.

I've read my old blogposts (which mind you, was made about a year ago), and I could embarrasingly say that I am still encountering the same problems as I had back then: still at a loss for words.

I would kill for one of these.

Gone are the times that I have written dramatic blogposts, treating everything as a cryptic metaphor for something else. I am not promising though, that I would update this blog more often (which I always do, by the way, everytime I have had a long period of time between posts... which nobody reads anyway) Probably the future me will have an easier time reading about posts that detail what happened in my day, without having to worry about what satte of mind I was in when I was writing such posts.

So today, I went to school. I tried with all my might to not skip a class, and miraculously, I did. For the first time in this week, I was able to attend all of my classes. Awesome. Then I bought some awesome dice (I'm into Pathfinder by the way), had a Coke slushie, played some Crysis 2... and gave up when the objective was too hard to accomplish.

Looking at it, it was probably a very average day for me. I was actively trying to ignore the bugging compulsion of regularly checking my phone for... messages, and I succeeded. I kept myself busy by watching Dexter and thinking about life when it was still simple.

Gaming 101

I'm quite the professional when it comes to collecting shelfware: software (in my case, video games) that only get played for the first three hours then left on the shelf to gather dust.

Right now, I have 25 Xbox titles, only four of which I have been able to finish till the end: Splinter Cell: Conviction, Halo: Reach, and the Left 4 Dead duo.

Yeah, I really couldn't play this character much.

Saying that I'm a casual gamer would be the understatement of the century. Don't get me wrong, I got all giddy and hopped all over the place when Halo 4 was released, I drooled over the gameplay of Final Fantasy XIII, but I couldn't seem to get myself to finish an entire game within a week, which is the norm... I think.

Talk about taking slacking off to a whole new level. If there's a game I always play, it would be the multiplayer games of Left 4 Dead 2, mainly because it always changes with the dumbness level of your coplayers, and because you get to shoot things that don't shoot back.

Now I'm in the penultimate mission for Halo 4, and I'm having a rough time with it. This is usually the time when I put it in the shelf to gather dust. But then again, it's fucking Halo 4, the first in the Reclaimer trilogy. I should at least finish it on Normal difficulty.

So when my buddies ask me what video game I like best, I typically reply with nothing, and when asked which one I'm good at, I reply, "Uhm... Spy? At uhm... Team Fortress 2?" Yeah, because the Spy's only job in the whole game is to hide until he can backstab someone.

Frex, I suck at video games. Hopefully it would come off with more practice.

I put on my robe and wizard hat.

The megaphone

Sometimes when I write a post in this blog, it feels as if I'm talking to no one. That I'm just a small squeak amongst the thundering voices around me.

It's red. I like red.

Sometimes I miss the activity. The buzz of comments around my posts, the countless eyes that read my thoughts and my cryptic messages. I was quite the popular kid when I was in elementary, so I took this for granted. Because everyone had their eyes on me. Because in the same school where I studied, my mom was a teacher. Because I was favored, studied, liked, investigated. Every move I make is observed.

The attention was all mine.

And now, here I am, writing to a blog that anyone barely notices. Like in the real world, my voice is a dot in the myriad dots that punctuate the internet. A small contributor to the vast knowledge of society, the massive archive of human thoughs and feelings, all within the bits and bytes of the digital world.

But maybe then I liked the solace. Maybe, I liked how only I can read my blogs, that it just serves as a personal archive of my own thoughts, unblemished by the pressure of pleasing my audience everytime I click Publish. That in my own little space on the internet, I could be me.

Then I shrug all these thoughts, and think, Whether my blog is popular or not, I still have trouble expressing my feelings plain and bare on the internet, anyway. That I still hide my thoughts in cryptic forms, that I still take pleasure in bewildering my readers so as for them not to have an actual glimpse of what I'm talking about.

Cucumbers.

Good luck finding the meaning behind that. In the end, it doesn't matter how popular or unpopular I am, it's whether or not I trust anyone with my thoughts that matter.

Pizza.