Mellow's Corner

I’m sitting here going through tweets that I’ve missed over the past 24 hours, and I’m feeling pretty mellow. I mean, that is what I do, right? Mellow ghost? Get it? Yeah, so I’m thinking over the past 24 hours and really over the past week. What a crazy busy time this has been for me.

Found out on Tuesday that I didn’t pass my class so I’ll be taking that guy again over the length of this fall semester. This is definitely a good thing for me.

Portland plans pretty much went out the window. There’s some small possibility that I’ll move there after school, but I don’t think so at this point.

I’m growing so much and keeping so busy. I’ll be heading to OH mid this week through the weekend. I’m looking forward to that, and then in a couple weeks, I’ll be heading to Portland for a week with Alecia. I’m looking forward to the experience whether or not I’ll be moving there.

Reflecting on this mellow period brings me to an observation. I’m strongly affected by attention and the lack thereof at least some of the time. I think there are times when chilling by myself makes me happy and enables me to deal with problems and reflect, but there are times when I really cling to the attention of a person or two, and I really don’t think that’s good for me. I’m trying to figure out why and how I do it to myself. My relationship with Ashley very much started off this way. I become so jealous for the attention of someone that I tend to hover by my phone waiting for texts and checking every 15 minutes, half an hour to see if I missed a text or something. I’m trying to learn patience and practicality. There’s no reason why anything has to change. Just be myself. I am not defined by the amount of attention I receive.

I am also not defined by my failures or by my successes. I am defined by the character I have to continue on, the character to grow; the character that I display is what defines me.

Well, this has been a post. Perhaps later I’ll reflect on all the awesome board games I’ve got and how I don’t have anybody to play them with at the moment. I’ll see if I can fix that over the next week or two.

I’ve finally found an app (spotify) that will let me look up a song on demand and play it without fail (so far). For a fee ($10/month) it will also let me play the entirety of my music library from my phone without having my entire music library on my phone, or even having my computer turned on. I have 10 invites to this app, so if you’re interested, hit me up.

I, however, am now lacking a sufficient P2P search app for Mac. Anybody have any recommendations? I was using frostwire until they went totally torrent on me and made it so I can’t just search for certain file types. I looked at luckywire, but they don’t have a mac app. Meh, I’m about to be a nurse so maybe I’ll actually be able to afford to get music on the legal.

Perfect transition; I’m here at the end of my nursing school. I have one exam that will decide whether I pass or fail nursing school. Thus, I am at “The Final Countdown!” I’m studying as much as I can with my attention span. I’ve got more studying and prep work to do tomorrow, and I’ll be as ready as I can be for the exam on Tuesday.


The post I’ve been wanting to post is a reflection. I’ve been laughed at and teased a lot growing up. Elementary, jr high, and high school were not good times for me. I know it was “the thing to say,” but lots of people called me gay. They meant it as an insult of course, and I took offense to it. I wasn’t nor am I a homosexual; I like women. I don’t judge homosexuals or homosexuality (your lifestyle is your own, and I will leave you to it without any condemnation from me). Those kids put an aversion to male homosexuality somewhere deep in my brain that I’ve been working for several years to overcome with some moderate success.

My first interaction with a male homosexual (to my knowledge at least) was a man that was my teacher and got me a job at the hospital I worked at in MI. I was pretty oblivious to any signs because I had never been exposed to that type of lifestyle before. I knew him for about a year before he came out to me. It was decidedly bad timing because I only worked there for another week or so which was not enough time to sort through those years of childhood trauma.

I spent some time trying to sort it out. I got in a pretty serious relationship with a girl up there (she eventually became my fiance) so I had more pressing things to think about. While I was an EMT, I became friends with another pretty cool guy. Everybody thought he was gay, but I didn’t think so. Well, privately he came out to me that he was conflicted on the subject. I decided I did not want to lose him as a friend and that I didn’t want to be homophobic. Within the week, he became upset about something relating to my girlfriend and that pretty abruptly put a hold on the friendship we had.

I spent more time sorting through both of those scenarios. That was honestly a couple medium bad situations stacked on top of everything, but I refused to judge homosexuals based on their lifestyle. I knew it wasn’t right for me to judge. Well, me and the friend have since talked and are ok. After I pass my test, I’ll send him a text to let him know I’ll graduate on Friday.

I do have a third friend that is a male homosexual that I hold in very high regard. We have had no falling out. I’m not totally through all of the homophobia mental clutter, but I don’t think that affects our friendship at all. He’s one of the most honest and insightful people I know. He’s in a serious relationship with a man (and has been since a couple years before I knew him) and I have seen them kiss and hold hands. I think this is progress.

Why tell you all of this? I find sharing this information therapeutic. It helps me arrange my thoughts a bit and also help anybody else who is going through similar circumstances. I think some of my Christian friends might find some of this disappointing. To that, I can only say that God is the judge, not His followers; and we should be thankful of that. If baptists decided what would happen to me, I might not end up in Heaven.

MMmmmmmmk. Let’s end it on this:

So, I’m just going to do a short update:

I’ve been passing all of my tests, but I failed my test yesterday pretty hard (41%). When I met my teacher about it, I told her I just didn’t study enough. I’m not sure that was the reason, but I probably could have studied a little more for the exam. It only counts for a half exam so I’m not terribly concerned about it, but it still hurts so I need to get a really good grade on this next one to make up for it.

•Study 2 hrs today

I’ve been ripping movies while I’m home to keep on my hard drive so that I won’t have to bring all my DVDs when I move to Portland (Oh yeah, I’m saying when now XD). I just found a bunch so I’m trying to nom those really quick. Like I said, I decided if Portland is where I feel I should go, then I’m going to stop saying “if” (conditional), and start saying “when” (conscious decision to go).

•Call a couple Portland hospitals/find out job info

And, I’m hanging out with Alecia today (around 3). We’re going to go geocaching. We plan to star off in Castleton perhaps in the mall. I struggled with where I thought a good place to cache would be. Not too many areas accommodate that type of walking too well. Downtown might be better, but parking is terrible. If nothing else, I’m sure we’ll just have fun hanging out.

Finally, I’m going to be in a wedding in a couple months. The groom is a previous roommate of mine. We haven’t talked in quite a while (he tends to keep to himself), but I miss him and the rest of my previous roomies quite a bit so this should be exciting. The bride is my ex-fiance’s sister. I’m going to try not to worry about that part of it too much. I haven’t seen them in almost two years, but I’ve done a lot of growing and healing since then. I think I’ll be ok. I need to make some arrangements for when I’m there though. If I’m in Portland, I won’t plan on having a car around that time and thus will be pretty travel dependent. We’ll see how this goes.

*Call Amanda about wedding details

All in all, this will be a busy day. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to start on it. I’ve got a few things on my to do list.