Today’s post is a rerun from 2005

What was I up to 20 years ago? Let's find out. This is a post from my Livejournal on August 22, 2005. I was twenty years old. Names have been removed to protect those with names from being named. Footnotes are commentary from present-day me.

So yeah, I'm a terrible Livejournaler. I'm too lazy to update as frequently as I want to. However, here is my attempt at collecting the major events of the last few weeks that I feel comfortable talking about right now into something interesting.

I'm still on straight midnight shifts at work, first of all, which I'm pleased about. They hired a bunch of new people, so the situation there is finally more or less stabilized. There was a pretty rough stretch where I had to work almost two weeks in a row without a day off, but I got through it, no worse for the wear. I'm looking foward⁶ to my next paycheck, which is going to be fat.

I hung out a little with my friend _ before he had to go back to college. That was pretty fun. I, he, , _ and went up to _, the sports bar / restaraunt where used to work, to play pool. _, and myself played five games of a three-player variant. I won the first game, _ won the second and _, the best pool player out of the three of us, won the last three. I didn't mind, though, I was just happy that I did a lot better than I thought I was going to. I really like pool, but I suck at it... I thought I'd be even worse, since it's been several years since I played, but I didn't do too horribly.

That night, everyone congregated at _ and _'s to drink and play cards. I had to work that night, but it wasn't really something I was interested in anyway.

The next day, when everyone was recovering, we went television shopping up at Circuit City. I ended up deciding on a 32-inch, plain ol' CRT television of no particularly notable brand (RSA,⁷ or something.) I realize that in this age of technology, buying a low-definition television that's not LCD or Plasma or anything like that is an evolutionary step backwards, but it represents a dramatic increase in the quality of my television experience. Not that I ever watch TV, but it makes watching movies and playing video games a great deal more enjoyable. And it only cost 250 bucks.

Last Tuesday, _ accompanied me to _ to register for the GED, after a brief unpleasant experience where I forgot how to get to the place and we got caught in the rain. =( I felt horrible about that, but she was nice enough to wait around with me until the seminar started.

So, I had to sit through an informational seminar where, among other things, I filled out the required paperwork, learned how the test would be formatted and scored, and watched a helpful instructional video that taught us such amazingly complicated things as how fill in the little bubbles on the answer sheet, and how to use a CALCULATOR. The seminar was scheduled to be 3 hours long, but was mercifully cut short by about an hour. After that boring experience, I paid my $50 registration fee, and chose a test date. I chose the date closest to the day of registration: August 22nd and 23.

Yes, today and tomorrow. I'll get to that in a second, I'm trying to go in chronological order here.

I had about half an hour to waste before I caught the bus back home, so I went and poked around in _, a local bookstore / coffeeshop where _ sometimes works. I looked in the humor / graphic novel section, and was pleasantly surprised to see that they had both of the Flight comics, books I've been interesting in checking out for awhile. I sat and browsed through them for a few minutes, and fell in love. I bought the first one, even though I probably would have been better off saving the money, since I'm broke until Friday now. However, I rarely afford myself the spontaneous impulse buy, and I wanted to reward myself for taking the initiative to finally get this GED stuff over with. It's a really beautiful book. I've only heard of two of the authors before I bought it, Derek Kirk Kim and Vera Brosgol, but I'm impressed with almost all of the other authors, too. The book doesn't really have a cohesive theme other than, of course, the theme of "flight" (which the book deviates from in a few instances.) The stories are all short, slice-of-life style narratives, often with sparse text or no text at all. I can't wait to get the second volume.

Yesterday, I got together with ____ again and we went to see Valiant, an animated movie about a platoon of English carrier pigeons in World War II.² It was okay, pretty damn cute, kinda funny, not phenomenal or anything. It was really short, only an hour and sixteen minutes long, and the movie felt kind of truncated and incomplete. We got in for free,³ but I wouldn't have regretted paying five bucks for it.

We went to Dairy Queen shortly before it closed, where the cashier told us details about his abusive relationship. It was kind of uncomfortable, but I felt sorry for the guy.

So, today was the big day. I worked last night, so I woke up after almost 5 hours of sleep so I could make sure to get downtown with enough time to find this place again. I made sure to write down the directions on a piece of paper with me to make sure I wouldn't get lost again (the information helpfully retrieved via Google Maps.⁴) And I didn't. I found the place with absolutely no problems.

The testing started at 4:00 and was scheduled to last until 8:00. It turns out, though, that (unlike public school testing) if you finished a test early, you could immediately move onto the next one if you wanted to. I was out of there by quarter after six.

The tests I took today were science, social studies and reading. The ones I take tomorrow are writing and math.

Today's tests were almost insultingly easy. There's not a doubt in my mind that I passed the tests with flying colors, and there's not a doubt in my mind that I'll do the same tomorrow. I'm sure I could have passed the same tests 5 years ago with absolutely no problems.

I'm pretty damn tired. I'm probably going to get to bed pretty early. Just need to do this again one more time tomorrow and then I'm done with it all. It feels good.

So, yeah... things are lookin' up.

Random somewhat interesting things observed on the bus ride home:

• A guy got on the bus carrying a wine glass the he repeatedly refilled with Mountain Dew from a 20 ounce bottle

• Another guy on the bus had a very interesting piece of "bling" - it was your prerequisite gaudy gold-silver-looking chain with an elaborate gold-silver-looking trinket at the bottom, but the trinket in this case was an elaborate metal frame surrounding an LED matrix that displayed a message via scrolling marquee. I couldn't make out what the message said, but it was still pretty freakin' funny. I dunno why that's so amusing, but it is.

• On the ride, we passed a car with a license plate that said simply "WF". For a split second, I thought it said "WTF".

• At the bus station, there were a couple guys digging through the garbage, and one of them was wearing a freaking TIN FOIL HAT. I had to contain myself from bursting out laughing.¹ It was either molded into the shape of a baseball hat, or was actually a baseball hat covered with tinfoil. Either way... hilarity.⁵