personal reflections

Originally posted February 23, 2017 It’s been a while since I wrote one of these. I guess my memory might be fading as I get older.

Originally posted April 21, 2012 This is a Magic card story. A lot of the card-specific details have been left out to make it more accessible. (If you’re a Magic player, you’re probably smart enough to fill in those details on your own anyway, but feel free to ask me anything you’re curious about.)

Originally posted September 11, 2011 When I started college at UMBC in Fall 2002, I had signed up to live in the dorms, but I hated it so I ended up commuting to school. The problem was, if you lived in the dorms you couldn't have a regular parking pass, only a provisional one to park in the satellite parking lot. There was no way I was parking in that lot, because it's a bit off-campus and you need to take a shuttle to campus once you park. I live life on the edge and often arrive within 5 minutes (either before or after) of the start time of whatever it is I'm going to, so having to include a 30 minute shuttle lot detour every day was out of the question.

Originally posted February 17, 2011 Friday Draft 2

  Originally posted February 17, 2011 If you don't play Magic, I advise you to skip this note.

Originally posted November 9, 2010 It was the year 2000, and I was in the 10th grade, on a class retreat along with everyone else in my 10th grade class. I went to a private, Catholic high school, and we had a fair amount of retreats. If you've never been on one, it's basically a field trip to a secluded location where you have carefully supervised (read: boring) fun, eat free food, and listen to a few religious-themed talks that are supposed to help you grow as a person and as a Catholic. I can't remember the exact theme of this particular retreat, but it had something to do with relationships. I guess as 10th graders, we were getting to be around that age.

Originally posted May 28, 2010 When I was 15 and taking driver's ed, one of the kids that was lucky enough to share that misery with me was this guy who was cool and pretty funny, but he was definitely not-so-bright, so a lot of the time he was funny in that blissfully ignorant way where the rest of us were secretly laughing at him and not just with him.

Originally posted May 6, 2010 It's 2001, I'm in the 12th grade and it's my favorite holiday: Halloween. Some of my high school friends thought that it would be fun to go trick-or-treating one last time as 16-17 year olds, so by 7PM we were in crappy rushed costumes walking around my friend's neighborhood asking people for candy.

Originally posted April 26, 2010 On Thanksgiving day in 1990, when I was 5 years old, I was spending some time with my family after dinner. Our family room had a miniature rocking chair, and I was sitting in it. Now, if you've ever been around me for an extended period of time, you might have noticed that I like to lean back pretty far on chairs that I'm sitting in. Well, I wasn't any different when I was 5. I was leaning back pretty far on the rocking chair and ended up falling back and splitting my head open on the sharp granite edge of the base of the fireplace and had to spend the holiday evening in the emergency room. (You'd think that I'd have learned my lesson after that.) I ended up OK and only needed a few stitches. When I think about this nowadays I start cracking up, because after I split the back of my head open, I was bleeding, crying, and screaming "AM I GONNA DIE??? AM I GONNA DIE???" I think it's hilarious that my 5-year-old self automa...

Originally posted February 17, 2010 When I was around 5 years old, I used to think the lyrics to AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" were 'Dirty Deeds and the Dunder Jeep', leaving me wondering what on earth a "dunder jeep" was.

Originally posted January 22, 2010 I decided to compile some statistics about the birthday wishes I got this year.

Originally posted January 10, 2010 When I was in the first grade, at school during recess I used to play Friday the 13th with one of my schoolyard chums, where one of us would pretend to be Jason and chase the other one around with an air-knife. I was the one who came up with this game, mostly because it was shortly after my brother got Friday the 13th for NES as a gift for his birthday. As a 5-year-old, I wasn't satisfied with pretending to be "Jason," because there's tons of Jasons, how would we know which one I was supposed to be? So I would chase my buddy around the parking lot shouting "JASON KILL!!" I figured adding "kill" to the end made it clear enough who I was supposed to be.

Originally posted December 5, 2009 It was 2006 and I was at a department store in Kobe, Japan. I walked past an employee folding some clothes and noticed that her shirt said "College Park, Maryland" on it. I thought it was pretty unreal to travel to the other side of the planet and see someone bearing a location that's only minutes away from where I live. Maybe not if I lived in a big, popular, tourist-y location, but College Park seems pretty obscure, so I had to ask her about it. Unfortunately, she didn't speak English, so I had to try and ask her in Japanese.

Originally posted November 23, 2009 From: ********, David A Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2009 9:57 AM To: Majlaton, Alexander S Subject: My Cubicle

Originally posted November 3, 2009 When I was 11 or 12 I was at a carnival or a theme park and decided to play the booth game Fool the Guesser. In this particular version of the game, you paid a couple dollars and the guy running the booth guessed what month you were born in, and if he got it within 1 month you lost, otherwise you won a prize.

Originally posted July 14, 2009 It was 2005 and I was obsessed with the movie Breakin’, the terrible prequel to the often-referenced Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. Some of the reason why I watched it over and over was the hilarious cheesiness and some of it was the dancing (which was actually pretty fun to watch), but most of it was the music: it had an awesome soundtrack. Of course since I jumped on the bandwagon 20 years too late, the only ways I could hear the music aside from watching the movie over and over again were to get the soundtrack on vinyl, or on an overpriced ($100+) out of print collectible CD, or by finding a track list and assembling the mp3s from Kazaa or WinMX or whatever crappy Napster replacement was still operational. You can probably guess which one I chose.

Originally posted June 6, 2009  I haven't taken an English class since I was in high school, but when I did have to take them, I made the most of the situation by not taking it seriously. I always tried to find ways to turn corny assignments into demonstrations of my quirky, hilarious creativity. If it meant making everyone laugh, I'd have easily taken a B over an A.

Originally posted May 25, 2009 I've decided that I rather enjoy writing notes on Facebook. It's an exercise in creativity, and it's a lot more fun and less terrifying than I thought to share things about myself and be vulnerable. This story takes place at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2003.

Originally posted June 27, 2009 When I was 5 years old and in the first grade, a girl in my class would yell "Stop it!" or "Go away!" at me for no reason every time I walked by her desk, which bothered me because I had to walk by hers to get to mine. I was complaining about this to my 17 year old brother and the advice he gave me was this: The next time she yells at you, say to her "Look honeychild, I ain't got time to be foolin' around with yo' mess."

Originally posted May 11, 2009 Let's face it: there just aren't enough opportunities for you, the reader (and hopefully dear friend of mine) to get inside my head, so I've decided to write a note and tell you about a dream I had.

Facebook discontinued the Notes feature and made it incredibly difficult to access any notes that were previously published. Some of my notes still exist, but there's no easy way to access them all in one place now - you have to dig through your entire post history which is very tedious. I'm going to attempt to rescue as many as I can and post them here.