Northeast Here I Come, Diving Through Glass, and Peter Parker and Mary Jane

I leave for the Northeast on Friday.  That leaves me basically four days to get my act together.  I signed up for my fall classes at UF last night and tweaked it this morning.  Because I didn't get notice of my acceptance until late in the game, there were many classes I wanted to take that I couldn't due to them being all filled up.  Oh, well.  I'll be on the ball next time.  I chose core classes for Journalism plus a mandatory Economics class.  I'm pondering the idea of going for a double major.  I'm interested in English but may go for Political Science or History along with Journalism so I will not be perceived as a one-trick pony when I go looking for a decent job.  

I'm now down to 206 pounds, which means I lost another pound in the last four or five days.  I want to keep the weight loss going throughout the summer even if it is at a slightly slower pace. I plan to drive to D.C. all day on Friday and then hit Philadelphia on Saturday.  After that, I may go to Pittsburgh, then back to the Baltimore-D.C. area and then on up to my home state of Connecticut.  And so the zig-zagging will go on for the better part of three months.  Dhrits told me today he's pumped.  I don't want to go but in life you have to do what you have to do and you might as well make the best of it while you do it. 

I'm starting two summer online classes to finish up my AA degree at Santa Fe tomorrow. Animal Behavior and Meteorology- it should be a blast to study in-between long hours of driving and hard work in the summer sun.  Every day, I try to smile and laugh at least once every waking hour.  Otherwise, I'm wasting my time.  No matter what I must go through in life, I have found that one gesture to myself makes life inexorably better than it would be otherwise. Generally, I also find that things I dread are unfailingly never as bad as my mind makes them out to be.  That's why I find Nike's motto of "Just do it," not only corny but incredibly true.  I have a scar on my arm in the shape of the Nike symbol.  Once, when my brother was seven and I was eight, he ran out in the rain to get something from our Dad's truck in his underwear.  "That was really fast," our father said.  "Oh yeah," I said, also in my white briefs, "I'm faster."  "Why don't you guys race?" our father said.  And so we did, to the stone wall across the lawn and back to the door.  The race was tight, so I dove head first through the glass window at the end in an attempt to win.  The dive didn't win it for me but it was a tie and that's when I cut my arm into the Nike symbol.  In my mind, I wanted a rematch but I was bleeding too much.

I just got sucked into watching Spiderman while flipping around the channels. I have to admit, it's a good movie.  I always hated when girls like Mary Jane went out with losers like Harry Osborn instead of someone like Peter Parker, who is so much the better man.  Similarly, in school as a teenager, it never ceased to amaze me when girls I liked were interested in certain other boys instead of me.  I knew who the boys they were interested in really were and felt like Joe Jackson in the song, "Is she really going out with him?" Then I would think, well if they're that stupid, then maybe I don't want to go out with them anyway. Perhaps, I thought, girls wanted boys to compete for them.  For me, that was a big turn-off.  I had an ego and felt if I wasn't recognized as being obviously superior, then the prospective girl wasn't worth my time.  "You never made a move," Harry later said to Peter.  Peter felt bad but accepted his fate of a lost opportunity.  Whatever the case, I like Peter's attitude when he finds out about Mary Jane and Harry in the first Spiderman movie- he's a little sad but keeps his head up with a positive attitude.  Neither does he judge her like I probably would have at his age. 

Shyam went to New Vrndavana for the Festival of Inspiration.  Radha is not staying over here for the first time in months.  She visited her mother for Mother's Day.  I watched the Celtics win on a last second shot by Big baby Glenn Davis with Govinda while he typed his resume for an internship in architecture.  The house now seems empty now but soon I'll be out on the road and miss even the luxury of this emptiness.