You’re probably wondering what I’ve been doing instead of posting about movies on this blog.  My last post was in May, and the last post that was worth a damn was part of a 2008-in-review series that I never actually ended up finishing.  I know this eats you up inside.  What could be so enthralling that it would divert my attention away from delivering to my adoring readers my honest  and insightful opinion on the latest releases and golden oldies?  I’m going to set aside the serious, unfunny answers to that line of questioning and just get straight to a couple of the joke answers.  Since we last corresponded, I packed up my shit and left dusty old Rancho Cucamonga and now reside in a town that people have actually heard of!  When I told my mom that I was going to move to Berkeley to live with my girlfriend and go to school, she was so happy that I had finally lived up to my potential and commended me on being accepted into Cal.  After I explained to her that I was actually going to be attending Cal State East Bay (a half hour South in Hayward), she still tried to pretend to be proud.  She’s a trooper, my mom.

So, the answer to the question of “What the hell do you do all day?” is pretty different in a lot of ways now.  Before, the obvious answer was “I watch movies and then post about my experiences in watching these movies on the internet, and then sometimes I watch movies and neglect to post about my experience on the internet and instead use that time to watch another movie.”

Now, I do these things:

Clean the Kitchen

This is probably my favorite hobby, and the main activity that takes away from blogging time.  We cook a lot now, because we are poor college students.  So, the kitchen gets messy.  REALLY messy.  This wasn’t the case at my old house.  Before, I could cook and cook and the kitchen would just become clean the next day.  Now, if I make a dish dirty, it STAYS dirty…until I clean it.  Oh well, the rent is cheap.

I took this picture at 5 in the morning. This is the cleanest that this kitchen has ever been.  Ever.

I do like to cook, but I’ve started to associate cooking with cleaning.  It’s sort of a crash course in cause and effect that most people get when they’re like ten.  We don’t usually eat in the kitchen, which probably saves a bit of a mess, at the expense of having dishes strewn all over the living room.  How did we get five glasses on the coffee table?  Five people do not live in this house.  ANSWER ME WOMAN.  WHERE DID THE OTHER GLASSES COME FROM?

I am not down with abusive relationships.

Wait, did I write that wrong?  I mean I am not down ON abusive relationships.  I think they get a bad reputation undeservedly.  Sometimes you just need to choke a bitch, and I find nothing wrong with joking around about this very serious fact of relationships.

Test the Fortitude of My Ability to Tolerate Sad, Angry People

Digg.com is the internet’s leading social news website for liberal stoner jackoffs.  If you have an article or video on the internet whose target audience owns a bong the size of a street lamp, Digg is your first stop on the way to fame and fortune!  On Digg, the most popular articles, videos and pictures get promoted to the front page (in theory.  It’s not quite a meritocracy, as it’s generally run by about fifty “power users” whose promotion of an article has more de facto chance of reaching the front, but that’s not the point).  On any given day, you can find ten articles about marijuana legalization, seven about FOX NEWS or Sarah Palin, and several about whatever liberal topic is popular that day.  However, hidden within the walls of a seeming liberal-topia are a tight-knit group of trolls that I consider to be the finest that the internet has to offer.

I sure will, smokin0kie!  In general, you can find some of the most impressive idiocy that I have ever had the pleasure of interacting with when you do a search for the word “libtard” on any comment thread or web forum ever.  I get a kick out of the sarcastic conservative commenters in these threads because they really don’t understand the purpose of humor in these sorts of conversations.  Their humor comes from genuine anger, and so what you end up with more often than not is a bunch of unfunny rantings and really ironic condescension.

This is probably a post unto itself.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve made an endurance test of inundating myself with the thoughts and reasonings of people who are completely different from me.  Over the last year, I’ve spent hours in the hospital visiting my sick mother, only to come home and spend hours reading Stormfront.org or some anti-abortion literature or watching documentaries on the Westboro Baptist Church and I never allowed myself to rest.  I never let myself become complacent, and I never let my intellectual guard down.  Not for a second.  Why?  Why did I do that?  I suffered through the worst depression of my life in 2009, and I did it alone.  I did it without a God.  And I did it while constantly reading about people who were CERTAIN that they knew what the world was, and why we are here. And they are complete assholes.  By “complete” I mean that they have mastered assholeness to the point where they cannot possibly gain any more from practice.  A perfection usually only attained by the greatest of our athletes. Michael Jordan.  Tiger Woods.  These guys.  Did I gain anything from it?  No.  Hell no.  I took a Contemporary Philosophy class my first quarter at East Bay, and that tipped me over the edge.  Those philosophers aren’t certain of ANYTHING.  Phenomenologists have only a shaky alliance with the idea that the toast they eat in the morning exists in any meaningful way. That doesn’t make me feel any better.

This is where I’d like to put the part where all of that mental and spiritual self-flagellation coalesced into some type of epiphany where I learned something deep and meaningful about the human journey.  But it hasn’t happened yet. If you beat yourself up, usually all you get is bruised.  Maybe that’s what I’ll take away.

Wait, this got dark.

Post on Twitter

I use Twitter daily to talk to people.  My Twitter address is http://twitter.com/mikegon/ and it is a great place to find out the awesome things that I think sometimes.  Who blogs anymore?  I mean come on.

Write Fiction

I write some fiction.  My major at CSUEB is English with an emphasis in Creative Writing.  I’ve yet to write my first novel but I’m enjoying what I do write.  I’ll put up some new stuff some time this week, most likely.  I’m working on a cycle of stories based on some middle school stuff that I remember.  This is what college has done for me.  I’ve put away the doomsday prophesies and super heroes and started writing bittersweet reminiscences.  I can almost HEAR the avalanche of job offers from companies wanting to hire dudes who can wax nostalgic about their youth in the internet age.

Get Yelled At By My Neighbors

“Fuck you.  Fuck your family.”

I’m out.

If you have ever unironically referred to the general public as “sheeple,” then definitely don’t worry about not being a douchebag.

I realize that this isn’t some brilliant forward-thinking new concept, but I just spent an hour reading Digg comments in the politics section, and it is not pretty.

spork

Get it??? It’s a pun.

This shirt is only on sale for the next twenty-two hours, so buy it now! I would, but I still don’t have a job and this website doesn’t make me any money (because I suck at websites).

New layout theme.  I’m not done with it yet, so whatever.

I have almost no use for the fancy functionality IntenseDebate offers, but I like the way the comment box drops down out of the post like that.  I made it so you have to log in to comment.  Why?  Because I want to force Stu  Shoe and Spiff to have an avatar on their comments.  Might the increased effort reqired to post deter them from commenting at all?  Maybe but that is a risk that I am willing to take.

Hit up Apple for the HD version.

I’m just posting this trailer because this movie comes out later this month and I don’t think enough people know about it.  I’m pretty psyched for some old fashion Raimi horror antics (Army of Darkness was seventeen years ago and Spider-Man 3 was all too recent) and the I’m a Mac guy has grown on me ever since he played a gay adult film actor in Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I do have one question about the trailer:  if that old lady had all those hell powers, you’d think she would have been able to make some money off of that, and not have to flake on her mortgage payment all the time.  If nothing else, a Hellcurse for Hire business would be a huge boon for the corporate world.  That shit would be recession-proof.