marv

so my stitches came out last monday. it looks like it's completely healed superficially. you can barely tell that it was gaping hole a week ago. there's still a giant lump on the inside and i cant feel the left side of my lip (i'm guessing i severed a ton of nerve endings?) but nevertheless, no infections, clean heal. i'm very thankful.

i haven't been able to go down and pick up live rock off of the reef yet so i just bit the bullet and picked up some live plants and a few critters for my fish tank from petsmart. one was a little red wag fish i named Pam. the other is a little red crab i named Marv. I say 'was' and 'is' because Pam swam around for about 10 minutes and croaked. I felt horrible. Like, for a day or two afterwards and everything. It's hard work. I thought I had the levels and everything where they should be. I guess I need to read more. Ol' Marv is just fine though. I bought a little pagoda looking house for him and he loves it. when i get home from work i hide a freeze dried brine shrimp behind a plant or a shell for him. he pokes his little eyes out of the window of his pagoda to see if the coast is clear and then he'll come out and snack. shrimpie time for Marv is becoming my favorite time of day. it's hilarious.

Call of Duty 3: Modern Warfare
for XBOX360
I'm no good at videogames. At least in comparison to people like Adam. I think over 80 percent of the videogames I've ever played since NES I never even got close to beating. Computer animated bad guys shoot at you, the screen flashes red, your health depletes, the controller shakes, it just a little too much anxiety for me. I bought an xbox360 because I wanted to play online with Adam and talk to him over the headsets since we live farther away. I guess this review is about how far videogame technology has come since the days of playing Duck Hunt in our grandparent's den.

Adam told me to pick this game up. He said it was it was super fun. It's also won almost every videogame award and has been dubbed "game of the year" and the most "photo-realistic game ever created". Most videogames you run around, shoot stuff, run around some more, and then it's over and I think that gets pretty old. Normally I only play one until I die and then I say "forget it" and go do something else, never worrying about getting shot at again. I was surprised that when I started playing COD4 I had to force myself to turn it off and go to sleep. It's that addictive and that engrossing.

It's split between playing two different soldiers. You play as a Marine fighting street combat in a depiction of the battle for Baghdad. The second you play as a British SAS soldier fighting along different fronts in Russia. The missions range from defending a tank while fighting insurgents from the streets of a fictionalized Baghdad to sneaking through abandoned apartments and alleyways of radioactive Chernobyl.

I cant get over how much detail and attention to realism they put into games now. Coupled with how powerful the xbox360 console is, it's as close as you can get to being in a firefight than actually being in one. I think? I've never been in a gunfight. And that's where this game shines for me, the amount of detail to realism. When a grenade goes off next to your soldier, the sound dims to near nothing and all you hear is the whistling of your ear drums. When you aim down your sights, the background blurs respectively in your peripherals. Your squad yells out for cover fire when they need it. Insurgents flank you in the alleyways. Even in terms of gameplay, it's not completely running and shooting between levels. Some levels are intermissions of the sort. Like during the scene when a nuclear bomb goes off and knocks your helicopter out of the air. You can look around from the back of it while it crashes and then walk around the burning streets for a few moments until your character dies. Your vision is all red and you can hear your character coughing. The screen lurches back and forth and you even have to press a button to get him back on his feet after he falls from the pain. It's all part of the story and it really draws you in. To some, that's just interference between running and shooting, but for me, it made the game really interesting and kept me playing. And it's full of little things like these.

Probably the sweetest thing I found in the game is that they incorporated my truck, the 1991 Toyota crew cab 4wd pickup truck into it. Perfectly modeled into the game. You can find them all over the streets of Baghdad. I spent about five minutes looking in and around it when I found one. Even the center console and the seats are like mine. And then I shot out the windows and tires and lobbed a grenade into the back of it and watched it explode. It was so awesome blowing up my own truck in videogame form.

So if you happen to be at Best Buy and they have a TV hooked up with this game running, take a minute and play it, or at least watch someone play it. I think it's the most advanced videogame ever made.

Here are a few videos of it.

Street fighting on the Baghdad level


nuclear explosion level (pause at 1:10 to see my truck :) )


Trailer

stitches

Yesterday, I went surfing down at San Onofre for the morning. It was the last time I was going to go out for the next week or so, in order to get ready for school and save some tip money for textbooks and stuff. We had a decent sized swell come in over the weekend and yesterday was supposed to be the end of it. I was having a pretty good time, catching waves here and there but I kept noticing that at that area of the beach, the waves were "closing-out". if you're not familiar with the term, closing-out is where a wave breaks in two different spots. it usually occurs at beach breaks with sandbars that are constantly shifting, causing the water to become deeper or shallower at different sections. What results for surfers is nothing short of getting trapped. If you're surfing on a waist or leg-high wave, its usually pretty easy to jump over the curl of the wave out behind it. But yesterday the waves were about head-high. If you get caught in close-out on a head-high, you're going to get rocked.
So I took one on the chest yesterday and it knocked me off my board toward the beach. As I was in the whitewater getting tumbled, my board hit me in the face, right under the left side of my mouth. The force was so strong that my lower teeth sliced through my cheek completely. My initial thought was that i had lost my teeth since my mouth was so numb. but thankfully I didn't. I grabbed my board and road the whitewater to shore (considering I was about 100 yards out). what bummed me was that while i was worrying about my mouth, i ran my board into a rock and dinged the rail. My neighbor told me he will fix it, but i've had this board for a while and haven't dinged it yet. Bummer. Some guys on the shore helped me bandage my face up to stop the bleeding. Then I drove to St. Judes in Fullerton in a ton of traffic. I thought it was funny that i was admitted to the same room they took me to after that accident way back in 2001. My PA-C was really nice, she got me numbed up and sutured everything. It was hard not to laugh while she was working on me, she was pretty funny. Twenty stitches on the outside and inside of my lip. The RNs that helped work on me all complimented me on what a "nice set of smiles i had." i have a picture of me before they worked on me, but i decided that you can let me know if you want to see it, its pretty gnarly. in fact, it still kind of makes me dizzy looking at it.
Some residual carnage.


thank you guys for the texts/emails/calls/prayers. i really appreciate them. sorry i havent been answering, i pretty much slept all day.

prayer

I've never thought of myself as particularly good at prayer. I've also had a hard time understanding how one carries on continual prayer and conversation with the Lord daily. If conversation is what you call it. Since I stopped going to church, reading the Bible and actively pursuing learning what Christ taught, it's been getting harder and harder to apply myself towards a life centered around what God definitely has in store for me. Duh. I could go on about this or that but what I really want to write about right now is prayer and what prayer is like in regards to myself.

Prayer is hard. The times when I do pray its usually over something that's going wrong (or seems to be at least) in my life. "I need this taken care of. This hurts, fix it. Do this, do that. I feel guilty. Etc." And that feels wrong to me. To shut out the Lord when things are good and only pray when it's convenient for myself or I feel I need help. When I pray, it all feels jumbled. It's hard to concentrate. Like you're searching for a radio station and keep missing the frequency. It's no surprise why I don't pray often. I don't understand it very well and the less you do it, the easier it is to not do it. I think.

So this is what I've doing. There are a ton of things about my life that need change. A lot of things I'm comfortable with and a lot that I'm uncomfortable with. Most of which though, is probably not in the Lord's big picture. So for the last two months or so, I've focused all of my strength on drinking. Something I've been doing a lot of for the last three years. It's not something I'm proud of and something that the Lord has been telling me needs to stop. It became a problem a long time ago. From the friends I made after Lindsay left. With touring and the bands. And now especially within the Applebees environment.

Every morning I go surfing, I say a prayer. Right on the shore before the sun starts coming out. I'm usually one of the only few out and I say it while I'm putting my leash on. I say it then because I'm so excited about surfing and happy to be there it's hard to think about anything else besides jumping into the water, thus I have to concentrate really hard and force everything out of my mind. I ask the Lord to watch over Mom and Bill and Adam and Zoe in Vegas. I ask him to watch over the two of you. I thank him for another day of health and the gift of being able to enjoy the things He has created. I ask him for strength to change things in my life that seem almost impossible to do anything about by myself. I ask him to work through me for the rest of the day. I tell him I want to be a role model to the people I am around and that I want to be an inspiration to those who are looking for one. And then soon enough I've finished paddling out past the breaks to the ocean and then I surf and it's nice.

I have a long ways to go on a road I know I'll never find the end to. But I've given up alcohol for good and everyone knows it. You guys, my coworkers, the Lord, Dad, everyone. It gives me the same apprehension I felt before ever telling anyone I had begun to write a novel. If I can't follow through, then everyone knows it. And that's a scary feeling.

But it's been about four weeks since I've stopped. It's getting easier. I'm noticing things about life I couldn't enjoy before. I feel a sense of confidence. The buzz around Applebee's is that I've given it up for good. Managers have asked me why, coworkers have asked why (some with their noses up) and I tell them because I just cant afford it. And it's true. In more ways than one. But I feel its best just to say it that way so I don't put anyone on the defensive or single anything out. It hasn't been easy sitting out on going out with friends, but then again, it hasn't been too hard either. If that makes sense. But you know what I heard last night? My coworker Jenn text me saying she was having a beer at Applebees and that she felt left out. When I asked her why she said "everyone gave it up."

That sense of apprehension, the pressure of following through. I think that's what I'll be giving to the Lord in the mornings before I paddle out.


Stage two of my fish tank is up and operational. Water is in it, the filters and pumps are working. The substrate is settling at the bottom. I've been working on getting the salinity just right and testing the pH levels and for nitrites and so forth. Lots of work. I can't believe how well it's been going though. Saltwater tanks seem so fragile, like they need meticulous care. I'm sure they do but I thought I'd for sure screw something up by now. We'll see how well it goes once we get some hermit crabs and stuff in. I hope my tank is habitable.

you can see the substrate at the bottom of it. Next step is looking for live rock off of the reef down at San Onofre.






The protein skimmer. This sucker cost a chunk out of my tips but is essential for a saltwater aquarium. It sucks water from the tank through a little pump (black thing inside the corner of the tank) and then creates a vortex of water within the large tube hanging on the side. It pumps these bubbles back into the water, catching the waste particles in the top chamber. The bubbles then catch more protein wastes within the tank and provide plenty of oxygen. It's neat to look at it. Kind of looks like something from the OOZE factory in teenage mutant ninja turtles.

It's been a year since my first fix of 24. I picked up season 2 last weekend and have been gratuitously enjoying it since. In this one, terrorists have armed a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and Jack Bauer is trying to find it. Totally beefy. I'm about 6 hours into, meaning 6 episodes. I'm probably going to have Homeland Security knocking on my door tomorrow for the third sentence in this paragraph, just realized.


i found an acoustic version of an old Rufio song online right now. Reminds me of sophomore year. Has it already been six years? man...

Saltwater Aquariums by Animal Planet
B+
Great to read if you're interested in starting up a saltwater aquarium. If you're not, then it probably isn't. It's pretty adamant that you follow what the book instructs and nothing of what other people tell you. They quote a lot of things as "myths" so I found that kind of odd. But Animal Planet is a pretty distinguished publishing company so I guess they can't be too far off from right. I've got my tank pretty set up from reading it. This book is only for beginners, there is nothing of value for those interested in the chemistry of ocean water or the specifics of certain species of fish and invertebrates.

How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers
C
A collection of passages about various people. Some chapters are only a page or two long, while others may be fifty. I don't quite understand what connection they all have with each other, if they have any. Some don't even seem to have any significance. Like the one about a father building a tree house for his daughter and how he had to have at least three walls up before she came home. Others consist of a woman learning how to surf down in Costa Rica while falling in love with a friend. Another is of a man riding a horse across Egypt. A woman who climbs Kilimanjaro. I enjoy Eggers' work, but I don't believe the profanity is necessary towards creating believable dialogue. I'm beginning to think he's a great writer but that he hasn't honed his skills towards creating a polished novel accessible towards a larger percentage of readers. Like a diamond in the rough I guess.



Hope you guys feel better soon!

a little update just before daybreak

it's been raining a LOT down here for the last week or so. I normally love rain and completely revel in it once it comes. But lots of rain also means no surfing. Especially afterwards since runoff is so bad. Especially with all of the residue left from the fires now running off into the ocean, it's just not a good idea. It's been almost two weeks of no surfing for me and I'm about to break. So I'm going this morning. But I thought I would post a quick update.

I uploaded two new recordings to my personal music myspace. The first is an acoustic version of the old Code Brown song "Kids". It was my favorite song we wrote and I'm still sometimes shocked by how well it was composed for our age and inexperience in music. The lyrics were probably the strongest and closest to paralleling what we were going through at the time (drinking, drugs, high school, etc.) I've been bugging Alex and Devin to take the time to go re-record it somewhere and polish it up with everything we didn't know how to add when we were younger (harmonies, lead parts, etc) but they've never really been too into it. So I just recorded it on my own with an acoustic guitar. Sure enough, as soon as they heard they both called me about when a good time to jam would be haha.

The second is a song I wrote a couple months ago called "They're Coming to Get You, Barbara". It's kind of a metal song/punk song. The lyrics and title were completely inspired by the movie Night of the Living Dead. I thought it would be neat to write a song completely around a dramatic situation and see how it turned out. So I wrote about a guy holding back a front door with a horde of zombies trying to break in. He's telling his wife/girlfriend/whatever to hide in the attic and that if he becomes one, to basically put him down. I think it came out pretty well. It took forever creating the synthetic drums on a program but they sound decent, albeit totally on-time and unbelievable. So as a change from the acoustic songs on my page, there is a nifty little metal one up. Devin's new band liked it so much they want me to sing for them. Hmmmm...

www.myspace.com/atransientlight

I picked up my new fish tank two days ago with dad. He bought me a cabinet you would use above a stove from Lowes to use as a stand. I bought a twenty gallon with a filter. I have a TON of other stuff I need to buy before I actually even begin to start putting substrate and live rock in, but it's starting. I'm totally stoked about it and well it's coming so far.











I have a few reviews but I'm running totally behind right now. I'll post more later.




p.s. whatever happened to Doritos 3D chips? they were so much better in the third dimension.