TheLeong.com

I have a blog.

I didn’t really forget about that, I just passively opted to ignore it for the past few weeks. I feel kind of bad about it, like when you ignore your Tamagotchi for a few days and come back to find your little digital creature surrounded by his own digital poop, complete with stink lines. Or were those chocolate chips?  I usually assume stuff is poop if I don’t know what it is for sure.

Anyway many things have happened since I last wrote here. Long story short, everyone and their brother got married. Actually, make that everyone and my brother.  But I’ll go more into that later, since as you three loyal readers out there on the interwebs know, I’m not very good at the whole “long story short” thing.  So instead, over the next few entries, which I predict I will write over the next few days but will really probably be written sometime between now and the end of the year, I’ll try and do an abridged-as-possible summary of the past few weeks, highlighted by my trip to California and my first trip down to Mexico.  It was the nice, sunny, resort part of Mexico, as opposed to the dark, drug-dealer and murder-laden part.  Or is that part actually called Texas?

See you soon?

This blog started out as being a page of random crap, with no goal or reason whatsoever other than to kill time for a college student who wanted to make a website and see what the whole blogging thing was about.  Then for a while I got “into” the whole blogging thing more, fueled by friends around me doing the same thing.  Everyone was blogging at that point, and by everyone I mean maybe 5 of my friends.  (I only have 5 friends so that’s pretty good.)  Then that kind of died out, but my blog was still going like an aging neighbor who doesn’t know when to shut up and go back to their own house.  I just so happened to be moving to Japan around that time though, which meant that my blog would maybe, kind of, possibly, in theory, have a theme or something, considering that most of my stories would be then  about what I found funny, weird, and/or annnoying over in Japan.  Okay in hindsight mostly annoying.

Many years later, I’m now back in the US, none of my friends are really blogging in this sense (thanks a lot Twitter and Facebook!), but I’m still paying around 50 bucks a year to keep my recently re-designed website up and running.  “What is the purpose of TheLeong.com, exactly?” you might ask.  And if you did ask that I’d probably laugh in your face because the “purpose” is the same as back in 2002 when I started this: there is no purpose!  OK that’s kind of a lie.  I’ve said this before a few times, but this website is more for myself than for anyone else.  It’s nice for me to be able to go back and read stuff I wrote years back and reminice about all the great and meaningful things I’ve done.  Yes that usually just means ridiculous food I ate or times when I got so frustrated with stupid people that I actually went so far as to go home, sit on my computer, and write about it for an hour (they call me Mr. Confrontation).

I always tell myself that I need to do something slightly more meaningful for this site, which one day I might (don’t hold your breath).  For now I’m determined to continue blogging and maintaining this site – it just might take me a few months to actually get on track to have a focus or theme.  Of course there’s always the overlying theme that it’s about my life.  Which is of course super exciting.

Back in Bloomington. And yes apparently staying up until 6AM every day for the past week or so has officially ruined my sleep schedule, and I am sitting here in my nice Bloomington pad, 6AM, for some reason not feeling like going to sleep although I have absolutely nothing to do right now. I was feeling a little tired earlier around 2, but why go to sleep when I can watch TV and repair a Red Dragon Megazord?

Partially due to the boredom (not a bad thing) and lack of things to do at home while on break, I’ve become addicted to reading peoples’ blogs. I guess I can’t really say addicted, because I haven’t read that many, but I like to read peoples’ blogs (people I know, primarily) more often now. I don’t have as much of a hankering for reading strangers blogs, because they don’t seem as interesting to me, but I think I’m going to try and read peoples blogs more frequently from here on. YOU are obviously one step ahead of me and are already reading mine. Just some ramblings from a guy who should go to sleep soon. Oh yeah, speaking of blogs, I like comments on mine, because it makes me feel like this has a point/interaction. Use it like a discussion forum. Topic: what is your favorite type of cheese?

Obviously being awake this late is having some kind of effect on my train of thought. Anyways, in the past few hours, I’ve actually ran through my head two or three different “topics” that I could write blog entries about. I don’t always plan stuff out too much before I write on here, which is why my blog is pretty random and all over the place. Nick, of course, has an ongoing list of 30389 topics that he narrows down in a fashion similar to the Academy Awards nomination process. My problem is that I think of a good number of ideas, but am too lazy to sit down and write about them. Either that or I decide that it won’t be a good article (or there won’t be enough to write) and abandon it that way. Just off the top of my head of what I can remember, some so-called “discarded” blog ideas from the past few weeks have been:

• similarities between hardcore anime otaku and sports fans
• college is pretty much a waste of time if you don’t actually get experience in something that will be applicable in the real world
• saw a CNN spot on some hippy school in Chicago. STOP RAISING HIPPIES
• i love Dragon Ball
• Kishidan is 10 years old somehow, and they are still awesome
• semester outlook (I’ll prolly get around to this)

Feel free to borrow those ideas and develop them into some quality blog posts/newspaper articles/pop group songs for yourself; I’d love to see them.

I got my JET confirmation letter (they got my stuff), grades, 2 bills, and a reimbursement check from Sears in my mailbox. Also a bunch of ads. Overall, not the frightening overflow of mail I expected from being out of town for almost 3 weeks. But it’s good to be back; this is going to be a sweet semester. But for now, I must sleep. I’m going to forget what daylight looks like.

Just a test, to see that my blog is now…

So I haven’t really played with HTML in a long time, so what I thought would be a simple task of moving the Blog Archive stuff from the right side of this page to the left side (under the main link buttons, where they are now) became a mega long timewaster. I got to play with Dreamweaver again, and yes it was a pain in the butt. I think it looks better now. I have approximately 600 or 630 pixels (I think) across of actual blog text, meaning that I can also put wider/bigger pictures in blog entries. Hope everyone’s break is going good (if you’re on break). Comments are low; holla if you’re there.

I’m thinking about re-designing my page over break, but I probably won’t because I’m really busy (haha oops Seth). But seriously, I was bored yesterday and went to Borders, where I read a book on Dreamweaver for about 2 hours. I’m a nerd, and a cheap nerd at that. At least I bought a coffee so they can’t say I didn’t give them any business.

A real quick change that I can do in like 5 min if people think it would be good: should I move the Blog Archive and button stuff (on the right of the text) to the left column, thus adding more space in the main area (where the blog text and pictures go?). I don’t know why I didn’t do this initially (well, I do, it was just being lazy with my template), but it would give me more space for blog stuff. If you loyal readers (both of you) think I should do it, or think I shouldn’t, then comment here and I’ll follow the vote at the end of the week.

Funny note: I was at CompUSA yesterday and saw an old couple (about 65 or 70?) who both had the exact same hair doo. It was a badly dyed brown fro. I took a pic with my camera phone, so if it turned out OK I will post it here fo sho.

Also: tomorrow I’m teaching (lecturing) to my old high school video teacher’s class in the morning. I haven’t talked to high school kids like this since Japan, so it’s time to become Great Teacher Anthony (GTA) again! 夜露死苦～！