It is Time for Thoughts

My life is pretty rough right now. Rough in that "nothing going for me and I can't figure out a way to get things going" kind of way. I have so much free time it hurts. I spend my time on an under-the-table job that I can't use as a stepping stone to "real" jobs that is given to me out of pity. Life is too comfortable right now, and I'm not as concerned to move out onto my own as I should be. Articles online say this isn't uncommon. Post high school people are slower to leave the house, slower to marry, slower in all aspects. Afraid to take the risks their parents were taking without a second thought. The economy is slowly recovering but it's still so strained. Every one of my problems I'm facing have articles upon articles saying it's not completely my fault, but that doesn't make me feel better. Education has been systematically worked and reworked in order to help girls succeed, and there's now a vast disparity in later education for boys. There are lobbyist groups pushing the female agenda regarding education and succeeding greatly. Boys, on the other hand, have nothing fighting for them. That's not my fault, but my failure to finish college just means I feed into the statistic. It's not my fault the odds are stacked against me, but that doesn't excuse failure. I don't want consolation for my struggles, I just want to succeed. My friends are having a huge discussion about how women are being objectified and how the feminist movement is super important, but I can't help feel that feminism needed to end 20 years ago and get replaced with "humanism". Why am I not allowed to have feelings? Why is it so strange for me as a man to be sad? Confused? In need of help? I'm surrounded by such wonderful positive influences. Good parents, loving girlfriend with a family that supports me, but why isn't this translating to success? Why am I so comfortable with complacency?

I don't even know what to say anymore. Even when I'm reaching into the grab bag of problems I have for inspiration, the words just won't come out. Is this fear of failure? Is this failure to launch? I wish I could just autopilot these two years. First steps are so hard make. Again my mind turns silent. My thoughts truly do not wish to be written. Mind to mouth has always been a great struggle for me. When I was younger I would always silently question why the main protagonist in video games tended to be silent. Today I realize an answer on that for myself. Talking is hard.

I long for the days of my idiotic youth. What I lack in intelligence, I could easily compensate with wisdom. I wish I could have a meeting with myself at different points in time and just tell myself, warn myself, of the path I took. What would have happened if I played a little bit less, studied a little bit more. Ate smarter, worked out more often. Chase the friends worth keeping and ignore the girls that walked away with clumps of my heart in their fist, desperate to leave their mark on my life. They left quite the gashes, but it was never exterior. I would tell myself to take caution of people I thought were friends. It turns out high school and college friendships are as stable as sand. I would tell myself to stop giving up so much, fight the good fight more often, love the ones worth loving.

Silence once more. I will struggle with you this one final time. I know what I love, what I love doing, what I love having. It's reassuring to know these things but sometimes so paralyzing to know that they can be lost, taken away, pushed away. My support is finite but replenishable. It's tough being me. The life is all laid out for me to live, it's just the shackles of my mind that hold me back. I'm too quick to dismiss. Too ready to relinquish my fate to the odds.

And, without being able to finish, silence rears its ugly existence. This will be all for today.

Current Project 7/24/12

Currently I've been building a new computer and making sure everything works with it. I'm actually pretty proud with the outcome of it seeing as how I got the project started by convincing a friend that I could build a better mac than they could buy. I know that I could, so I was pretty confident.
Here's the layout of the mac they were going to buy:

                         Mac Pro

• Intel Xeon 3.2Ghz quad-core
• 6GB DDR3
• 1TB 7200-rpm
• ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5
• other nominal barebones specs (disc drive/mouse/keyboard)
• PRICE: $2499

I guess my first opinion is that the Radeon GPU is bordering the age of 3 years now. A pretty good quote to use in regards to this is "last year's flagship is this year's mid-range". Currently, Radeon is almost to the 7X generation now, meaning apple is behind by an entire generation of upgrades. The processor is nice I suppose, it's made for servers and doesn't come cheap. It's not even in production anymore. Aged and not up to date again.

So how did I fare against the price from Mac? I did some research and built this:

• Intel i7 2600k 3.4Ghz quad-core
• 16GB DDR3
• 3TB 7200-rpm & 240GB SSD
• Nvidia GTX 560 Ti 2GB GDDR5
• Blu Ray drive
• other nominal barebones specs (motherboard/computer case/power supply/etc)
• PRICE: $1900

At first I worried about whether I downgraded the processor as i7 is more for home and gaming use, and the intent for this computer is video editing and rendering, but then I remembered that Mac will be using the 3 year old version of the processor and once again, the age of it reduces it's quality. The fun part of making computers is over, and now I have to work the Mac OS in there. Luckily my research delved into a "hackintosh" community where there are Mac enthusiasts who also feel the same as I do about Mac...at least in the hardware department. Installing OSX should be a breeze thanks to them. Anyways, that's the status of my current project! I'll go take and upload pictures in a minute.