So, I'm at a pretty cool place right now.

I can do almost anything that I've ever dreamed of doing in my life. I've kept all the right doors open, and I'm young enough (sub 20), that I can essentially do everything but become a sports star (Oddly enough, I still try).

I'm in my second year of an Engineering degree, majoring in Physics. I can go into Nuclear, Photonics or Micro-Devices. Pretty sweet right? But who knows. I've been scouting for jobs already, and graduation is at LEAST 3 more years away. I'm getting ahead of myself here.

I could join the military; reserves, air force and navy are all interesting options to me. I'd absolutely love to be a pilot, and what better way to become an astronaut. As silly as it sounds it's still a longtime dream of mine to someday fly a jet, or work somewhere in the space program. This is something I can potentially achieve if I stay an engineer.

I could take any academic course in university imaginable. I don't love every subject, but I could make myself excel in almost any field with mediocre effort (not to toot my own horn...) should I take a different path.

I love the piano. I don't have one right now. I've been playing for over 14 years now. Some years are off years, such as this one, but others have been very intensive. I've completed my grade eight certification, which allows me the technical prerequisites to enter a music school. Should I want too, all I'd have to do is practice an advanced repertoire for 5 or 6 months and audition. I almost did 2 years ago when deciding what to do.

Again, I like where I am right now, but the last thing I want to do is regret not taking more chances and following my dreams later on in life.

The only part that's holding me back is myself.
If only knowing what I want was as easy as doing it. I don't feel a push or pull in any direction. They said I would. I feel like I'm drifting.

WHICH REMINDS ME!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=I39tlC7Sy9Q

This is a good song, and it eerily feels like me right now.

NOVEMBER 22nd
Edit: I'm bored.
Just got the Daft Punk Alive Album, Kanye West Late Registration, and the Gorillaz D-Sides.
I think Kanye West is probably the better album, although Daft Punk has huge replay value.

Ciao 'till the 29th. Although I should probably be doing some studying.

NOVEMBER 23rd
If you watch any anime, I probably don't want to be your friend. It isn't you, it's me. Just don't get me started.

So, I'm at a pretty cool place right now.

I can do almost anything that I've ever dreamed of doing in my life. I've kept all the right doors open, and I'm young enough (sub 20), that I can essentially do everything but become a sports star (Oddly enough, I still try).

I'm in my second year of an Engineering degree, majoring in Physics. I can go into Nuclear, Photonics or Micro-Devices. Pretty sweet right? But who knows. I've been scouting for jobs already, and graduation is at LEAST 3 more years away. I'm getting ahead of myself here.

I could join the military; reserves, air force and navy are all interesting options to me. I'd absolutely love to be a pilot, and what better way to become an astronaut. As silly as it sounds it's still a longtime dream of mine to someday fly a jet, or work somewhere in the space program. This is something I can potentially achieve if I stay an engineer.

I could take any academic course in university imaginable. I don't love every subject, but I could make myself excel in almost any field with mediocre effort (not to toot my own horn...) should I take a different path.

I love the piano. I don't have one right now. I've been playing for over 14 years now. Some years are off years, such as this one, but others have been very intensive. I've completed my grade eight certification, which allows me the technical prerequisites to enter a music school. Should I want too, all I'd have to do is practice an advanced repertoire for 5 or 6 months and audition. I almost did 2 years ago when deciding what to do.

Again, I like where I am right now, but the last thing I want to do is regret not taking more chances and following my dreams later on in life.

The only part that's holding me back is myself.
If only knowing what I want was as easy as doing it. I don't feel a push or pull in any direction. They said I would. I feel like I'm drifting.

WHICH REMINDS ME!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=I39tlC7Sy9Q

This is a good song, and it eerily feels like me right now.

oddly enough, I'm not excited. I'm turning 19, which pretty much lets me do anything I want to in Ontario. last year i was old enough to buy porn and lotto, and i still haven't excersiced my right.

i hate the big deal that people make of birthdays. sure, you get a nice feeling if a couple good friends wish you one, but who are these people i haven't talked to since my last birthday trying to get in on a celebration?

w/e, i've been able to get booze or smokes from friends for years too. It's landing on a wednesday and i've got 8:30 class on thursday, so I won't even go to a good pub and have 2 or 3 pints to celebrate. my friends are more excited than I am.

meh. at least i don't have to worry about NG making a huge deal about it.

In other news :

ALLOW ME TO RE-INTRODUCE MYSELF.
MY NAME IS HOV, H TO THE O.V, I USED TO MOVE SNOWFLAKES BY THE O.Z.
I GUESS EVEN BACK THEN YOU CAN CALL ME, C.E.O OF THE R.O.C
FRESH OUT THE FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE, I'LL BE THE MUSIC BIZ'S NUMBER ONE SUPPLIER
FLYER THAN THE PIECE OF PAPER BEARING MY NAME, I GOT THE HOTTEST CHICK IN THE GAME WEARING MY CHAIN.

A teaser/review for "The Shadow Boxer, by Steven Heighton".

*Warning* Minor Plot details may follow. Nothing too drastic though...It's like a high school book report. I'm not gonna pull a Fight Club spoiler out of my ass on this one.

This book is fairly hard to describe. Simply put, it has a weird feeling about it. Perhaps because it's setting is so close to my own experiences. Ex: Great lakes of Canada, 1930's parents/grandparents, trying to find success in the 90's. It's only about 5-10 years off my own age so I feel oddly connected.

There are a few differences though. Sevigne the machine, our main character, doesn't come from a wealthy family. Money is hardly a central issue in this novel, as it is in almost every other. This book is much more of a love story. He grows up in a fairly loving family, his French mother moving to Canada after the war with his seafaring father. With a brother and a best friend Meesa, he experiences the same things most middle class kids do growing up in Canada.

So....Why the book if nothing seems to be wrong yet?

Well, his father is a severe alchoholic. It's obvious to Sev by the time he's about 10. His mother brings him and his brother, and leaves for Egypt with another man. They live there for a couple years, when Sev finally gets mature enough to return to his father (where his true love seems to lie in his parents). Sev is an outcast in high school. He's extremely intelligent, tall, and lanky. He gets picked on a fair amount, but never more than once by the same person because he defends himself both verbally and physically quite adamantly. This leads Sev to eventually joining the high school boxing team. He finds out that his father was an olympic class boxer when he was young as well, and was passed up for another fighter to travel over to Africa and partake in one of the many fights with fights Cassius Clay (before he was Muhammed Ali).

However, Sev's friends (artists, poets, potheads), find his animalistic extracurricular rather frightening and they don't understand. After a few fights, Sev heads off by himself to Montreal to become a writer. He jumps back and forth between Canada and Egypt, and after a few more travels finds himself back at home to witness his father's self-destruction. He then moves to Toronto, and focuses full time on a book. He meets many women, two of whom make a lasting impression on him, for better or for worse. Finally Sev has a breakthrough with his novel, gets people interested in it, and then finds himself lost in a world he doesn't really understand. In a drastic way to escape, he travels to the island his father frequently talked about and spends some solitaire time alone there. He faces hardships we seem to have forgotten in this day and age, and everything seems to be put in perspective.

Sev, all his life, has been dancing around the ring, boxing his shadow. He doesn't really know who his opponent is, and keeps getting floored against the ropes by people more experienced than him. He finds Mikaela. His love. She becomes the other boxer for him, not in the way that they fight, but in the way that at the end of it all, tired and beaten, they can rest each others heads on each other's shoulder and not care who's arm gets raised as the victor. Only that they have each other. The book doesn't end this way though :P

However, it's that sort of feeling and parallel that Heighton alludes to for the entirety of the novel, and it seems to make me feel a little uncomfortable that I don't think I've had the same feeling yet, or perhaps because I know I may never because of my chosen career and path in life. .

Either way, this book has opened up a couple new feelings to me, which I always like, and I feel like it's gonna take a couple edits or a couple more days to think about this book and my real reaction to it. It still feels a little fresh to me. Again though, if you ever do decide to read this or re-read it, look for the parallels to boxing in every chapter. They're definatly there.

I recommend to almost everybody. You have to be a fairly avid reader though. This book could be taken as "slow", or "boring" by those not keen enough to dig deep and find the lessons buried behind his experiences.

Next up for review:
-Wicked; Gregory Maguire
Read:
-Kiterunner; Khaled Hosseini
-The Memory Keeper's Daughter; Kim Edwards

Recommend a book to me! It may take a couple weeks but I'll probably put it in my pile and read it eventually!

Teaser and Review of "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls.

First things first. This book is a non-fiction. It is a personal account of the author's childhood and teenage years growing up with her parents.

*Warning* - Minor plot details to follow. Nothing like "snape kills dumbledore" to ruin the book.

It starts out fairly oddly. Walls tells us of a brief encounter with her mother in the streets of New York, where she currently lives as an adult author. Strangly enough though, her mother is a homeless woman. Walls doesn't approach her mother, and simply watches her on the street from the window of her taxicab. When she gets home after describing the sensation of seeing someone you love out there like that, she begins to recount her childhood.

This is where the book becomes quite shocking. Her mother and her father are what most people would call scum. They drift from town to town living off the land, tax handouts (whenever they can lie well enough to get one), and the charity of others. In fact, Walls' first memory is of cooking hot-dogs in one of the many apartment buildings she lived at. She was only three years old, yet she already knew how to boil hotdogs on the stove. However, this memory is only a memory because something extravagent happens, since she's wearing her tutu and she's standing on a chair, her dress lights on fire from the proximity to the stove. She remembers running around burning in her apartment, and badly enough that she is taken to hospital. When the doctors start asking questions, her father fights his way into her hospital room, grabs her, and sprints out of the hospital, never setting foot in that town or the apartment again.

Although such a scene seems fairly dramatic and played out, these sort of strange happenings seem to follow Walls as she travels across the country with her brother, sister and two parents. The two parents are essentially what make the tale complete. The father is magical to his three children when sober, he teaches them everything about life; albeit in a different fashion that we're used to seeing. It really is a tough love. However, when drunk, he becomes as reckless as a stray dog. The mother is a free spirit, refusing to be chained down by society or the rules that govern them. This makes staying with the family a logical choice because they are always on the run from bill collectors and people who don't accept their lifestyle.

In the end, I began to feel empathy not only for the children, but also the parents. Yet, the parents seemed to be the cause of all the suffering that the children endured. This led me to feel an almost anger towards society at not accepting the parents, or perhaps because it prevents them of living the lifestyle that they choose without unnecessary troubles. Since finishing, I've come to believe that the family would have done well had there been more opportunities for the mother and father to be sustainable whilest they traveled and drifted as they chose, but since there were none poverty was a setback that they always seemed to be battling.

All in all, this book has changed the way that I look at children and their parents, especially those in poor or squalid environments. I wish that I could have been at a time that I could have read this around grade 8 or 9, I feel that I would have been a much better person in high school, and a more understanding one at that...as I feel it has made me a better person today.

Now, when I hear of children stealing food at lunch, or stealing money from people such as teachers, I no longer think "fucking brats", but "unfortunate souls", and though this might sound pretty cheesy and extremely libertarianism of me in the acceptance of their actions, you haven't read the book yet so blah!

I'd recommend to anyone facing hardships in their life, or if you feel like becoming a bit less ignorant. Even if you start out reading the book with a pessimistic view of life and situations, I guarantee this will change your mind.

:D

To do:
-Make a review for "The Shadow Boxer; Steven Heighton"
-Read "The Kiterunner; Khaled Hosseini"
-Read "The Memory Keeper's Daughter; Kim Edwards"

Recommend a book to me! It may take a couple weeks but I'll probably put it in my pile and read it eventually!

It's absolutely pouring outside, and it's probably one of the worst thunderstorms I've seen all summer.
Yet my slummy neighbours continue to stand underneath a patio umbrella and shriek like the door (and some shelter) isn't like 10 feet away.

Now: Newgrounds.

I've become self aware at how little I notice post count any more. I used to never respect low post counts, but I'm starting to see myself read every post and how sometimes people with a lot of posts make a lot of shitty ones.

So, hopefully I'll keep this in mind next time I press "Post this" and make it worthwhile. Or at least funny.

EDIT : On a side note, I think I'm gonna use this blog as a personal book log. I've seen a couple topics about people not reading enough so hopefully if you glance upon this and see some of the things I've read you might become interested.