一百.Cent.Ett Hundra.Ciento.εκατό

It's been a wild ride but a milestone has been reached - my hundredth post! From what started as a simple online account of the goings on of my life and my opinions on world events, this blog has grown into something way more. This blog and the people I have met and become friends with have been such a great help when things in my life got tough or just out of control. I even got to share some pretty noteworthy moments of my life with you guys like my coming out to my mom despite there being some initial difficulties with understanding why and how her one and only son was gay. But all in all, starting this blog was a great decision and one that is paying dividends at levels I never could have imagined.

The only nagging issue is a short hiccup about two months ago when I changed the location and url of my blog. Because of unforeseen issues beyond my control popping up, I had to move myself to a new location in the blogosphere; but with that move, I lost the majority of followers I had at that time. Despite still being listed, they still don't receive updates even two months on (Isn't the only remedy is to unsub and then resub?). While more of a nuisance than "red alert" problem, I still feel bad for suddenly "disappearing" without notice - especially people like southern, and Pierre who were some of my very first followers. (side note, Pierre recently celebrated a similar centennial, you should go pay him a visit)

In spite of all of this, 100 posts is something special for me. So here's to another hundred posts and hopefully more. You guys really are amazing! *cling cling*

All the best,

JP

P.S. - a special thanks to Dzyan, as he was my first true subscriber (and a sexy Mexican one at that)

Priceless

Wool Pea Coat - $50

"Clearance" Abercrombie and Fitch Button Down Shirt - $55

AE Jeans - $25

Seeing an elderly woman go up to and complement a gay couple about how cute they are together - Priceless

Maybe there is hope for society in this lifetime after all.

I hope you had a safe and memory filled Christmas!

JP

Merry Christmas!

The lights are dimmed, the fire, casting it's dancing light on the floor, is crackling away, and the tree, bedecked with glittering ornaments, is shinging bright. For sure, it's Christmastime.

I hope you're spending this Christmas with your family or with someone you deeply care about this year, and that you will have a lot of fun and memorable moments in the process.

For me, it's never truly Christmas until Darlene Love sings "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" on the Late Show; it may just be my favorite holiday song of all time along with "All I Want for Christmas is You" by Mariah Carey. I'd like to share it with you-



Merry Christmas

JP

Avatar

Great day. Let's start off with that. Today was a great day because I got to spend an entire day with some of my close friends that I rarely get to hang out with. Since we never really have time to hang out outside of school collectively, a group of friends and I decided to just clear an entire day and just have fun, and you know what, it worked. In the end it worked out to be a great day of ice skating (or ice shuffling in my case), lunch, dessert and then seeing Avatar.

At 11:30 we all met up at Reston town Center which is a large outdoor restaurant/semi high end shopping complex to go ice skating at the outdoor ice pavilion before it got too crowded. In total about 8 of us made it (out of 11 originally) and we set off to go rent some skates. To my dismay, they only had hockey skates for my shoe size which annoyed me since I can't skate with hockey skates at all because they have no spikes along the front of each skate, also combined with the fact that the skates were rather dull and slightly misaligned they made skating that much more difficult. When I got on the ice, I had a fun time trying to figure out how to move forward without falling flat onto my face but eventually ended up just shuffling along and eventually shakily gliding, luckily I wasn't the only one who had trouble, one of my other friends had trouble too. We ended up making chains of people as "insurance" which helped sorta and we got a few laughs when some of us "fell" but got saved mid-fall via the chain. To make things even better, there were some pretty cute guys there, and maybe I was hallucinating but there was only guy that I encountered a few times too many for it be be just coincidence if you get what I'm saying. By 1PM we left to go get lunch at Big Bowl which is a sorta Pan-Asian restaurant who had some pretty awesome chicken Pad Thai. We also exchanged secret santa gifts, my santa got me a pretty cool therapeutic cookbook which features recipes which feature heavily on supposedly curative herbs and the background histories on each which is perfect for the history-cooking nerd I am. Afterwards we still had about 45 minutes to kill so we decided to go to Cosi and order smores for all of us. So the way it works at Cosi is that they bring you a giant platter with a small gel-fueled burner in the middle surrounded by graham cracker, hersheys bars and giant marshmallows and skewers. Essentially uou roast your marshmallows yourself and build your smores on your own (pretty awesome). I ordered some hot chocolate to go along with that which was deliciously rich and choclolately. We left around 3:40 to go to the theater.

So, how good was Avatar, James Cameron's $237M sci-fi CG-breakthrough super film? Well, initially I was kinda suspicious as to how good it was actually going to be. Usually there is so much hype surrounding the film that it ends up being a disappointment when you actually see it and I was worried this is how it would turn out. Well, I am happy to report it wasn't in fact, it was very good, superb in fact in terms of visual amazingness. (Spoiler Alert!) Taking place in 2154 on a Earth-like planet (actually moon) where humans are trying to mine a mineral which supposedly would solve Earth's energy woes, it follows the tried and true story of human falls in love with alien being (aka forbidden love, cliché #1) and then helps save a "savage" race and planet from human capitalistic greed and destruction. Isn't this a not so subtle hint to the native american relocation/plight during westward expansion? Cameron did an amazing job with the setting of the movie, it was absolutely stunning and scarily realistic, I can only imagine how amazing it would have looked if we saw it in 3-D. The creatures and inhabitants of the planet were beautiful in an alien-way and the landscape was so realistic that I would have been fooled if it weren't for the floating mountains which reminded me of the islands of Halong Bay in Vietnam. The plot itself wasn't the best in the world, too many clichés in my opinion (I'll list later) but the visuals more than made up for it. The final battle scene was especially stunning. If you haven't seen the movie yet, i really suggest you do, in 3-D preferable, I can only imagine how good that would be for this movie.

Avatar is debatably one of the best movies of the year but there were a few too many clichés -

1. Human protagonist encounters a native for the first time, and it happens to be the chiefs daughter
2. Human outsider ends up as "the chosen one"
3. Human protagonist gets drawn into native cause, becomes leader of the natives in quest for liberation and/or to drive out invaders
4. Humans are destructive, greedy and view all alien civilizations as "savages"
5. The tribal chief dies
6. Nature holds the answer/cure to EVERYTHING
7. Main antagonist has some battle scar, usually cuts across the face as is here
8. Human protagonist loses trust of natives, but later regains it in some extreme fashion (such as magically wrangling a mystic bird like creature only 5 people in recorded native history have done)

Granted these might not all be clichés and just recurring themes in movies but there were some of these and some plot holes that didn't really detract from the movie.

Before I go I would like to respond to Ethan's comment on my last post where he noted that I haven't been getting many comments on my posts. The whole purpose of me starting this blog was to serve as a way for me to share my thoughts, feelings, daily events and opinions - sort of an online journal. Whether people read or comment on my blog is not something I am terribly concerned about or anything I'm going to lose sleep over. Since the beginning I never had any expectation for my blog to be a hub of attention and commenting so whether people choose to comment or not is totally up to them and not something I concern myself with. Not to say I don't enjoy reading comments; I love them to be perfectly honest, it shows people are actually reading about what I've been recently thinking about, but that's not the focus of my blog. I admit I have neglected my blog as of late; my posts have been fewer and farther between and admittedly less interesting, especially with school and crew eating up all my time, but the purpose of my blog remains - it's a release for me. This blog somewhere I can share my thoughts anonymously and whether people read or choose to comment or not does not detract from this.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve! Have a Merry Christmas everyone.
(And yes, Merry CHRISTMAS, to hell with political correctness.)

All the best,

JP

An Epic Winter Tale

Do you remember going driving for the first time? Was it just a shopping trip to the supermarket with your parents, the time your older sibling snuck you out for a quick run without letting your parents know or for you adventurous few a full out joyride? (hopefully not). Well, while I'll save my first driving experience story for a later time and post, I did do something I felt was milestone-ish yesterday, and that would be legitimate winter driving.

Granted, it wasn't for anything that exciting, (heck, it's something that ranks near bottom on the exciting list), it still proved to be a day of excitement and in the end learning. I had to go pick up a friend to go to the library and work on a Government project and given the recent storm we had, anything that wasn't a main artery through the town is still covered in 3 inches of compacted snow and ice. Me and my Passat made it out of my neighborhood alright and the main road was okay apart form lanes being much narrower due to massive snow plow drifts along the side, the fun started when I pulled into her neighborhood. I was greeted by piles and piles of nasty grey-brown slush that I easily powered through but then I entered roads seemingly untouched by a plow or sand truck, heck, I could barely see the road. The neighborhood is really close by to my old elementary school and the roads are very hilly and by this point rutted by all the people who had tried to get out. I got down the main hill and entered the small road which leads to her house, the bumps made my car bump and slide a little form side to side and STC had to kick in a few times but I finally reached the final turn.

Now, if all the other roads ranked at about a 6 or so in terms of impassibility, this ranked as a 9. There was only one set of tire tracks leading down to her house at the end of the cul-de-sac. Obviously people were being smart enough to not venture out when the roads are doing their best to halt any progress. I made it down the hill okay but I realized the tizzy I was in by the time I reached the bottom (did I really just use the word "tizzy"!?). The hill was steep, or at least somewhat steep, I just drove down in a forward direction on a set of tire tracks with no where to even begin to turn without getting pitifully stuck, and my car was front wheel drive. After my friend got in, I tried the only thing I could possibly do, and that is reverse up a rather long slippery snow covered hill. I tried to follow the tire track and got about 1/3 of the way up when all progress stopped and a little yellow light on my dash started blinking. It was the traction control light and that meant I was stuck. First thought in my head - "Fuck, now what do I do" followed then by "well this is embarrassing" and finally by "okay, let's try his again". I repeated this process about 4 more times before I decided to start all the way over. further down the road my friends neighbor cleared off their driveway and a cable repair man told us to drive in, make a u turn and try going up the hill frontwards, so we did. This time around, we got a scare half way up but eventually, we got out of the hill of death.

So me and my friend went to the library and got our work done all fine and dandy and we were going to go to lunch afterwards but her parents were a little cranky so that plan was axed. When i wen to go drop her off again, i decided to not go down that final hill again and my friend agreed and said she would just walk the final leg to her house. After that, I went to Baja Fresh to get some lunch and headed home, completing my first winter driving experience.

So, what did we learn?
1. We need more snow plows to clear off the roads
2. AWD really is necessary sometimes
3. Drive slowly
4. New Englanders and Mid-Westerners must be part eskimo to be able to endure this weather four times over every winter.

Happy Holidays!

JP