I stayed up until four in the morning watching music videos with my sister. Mars Volta is scary. My cousin is apparently a music purist now and detests all things punk. And everyone hates Good Charlotte except me. We also discussed the rules of moshing and crowd surfing at the Vans Warped Tour. Good for future reference.

The other aspect of my existence right now: change of topic for my thesis project. I'm disappointed. I really wanted my original experiment to work out. My advisor is great and all but I think his vision of my project didn't really match my own. Oh well, what's done is done and while I wish things had turned out differently, it's time to move on. Hopefully this will turn out for the better.

I started a long, serious post about something, but I can't bring myself to finish it. Who needs long and serious anyway, I'll probably finish it someday, but for now, well....So I have a new job. In publishing. It amazes me how this came about, I applied for the job and got it without even having a formal interview. This should be interesting. It's something new at least, we'll see how it plays out. My reasons for wanting this job are not well-defined. Mostly it is an experiment. I'm on the other side of the fence, let's see if the grass really is greener there. Sorry about the corny metaphor, but you get my point.

This optical illusion is pretty neat.

Well, I'm back from Iowa. Iowa is green, green, and more green, like I've never seen before, where things grow just to grow it seems. As a desert-dweller, it was something I couldn't get over. My sister was a good hostess, letting me stay in her house for five days and showing me around. I got to see what her life is like, something I've wondered about for a while. I got to see where she goes to school, this amazing campus that kind of made me wish I'd gone to a bigger and more picturesque university. The college town where my sister lives is what I would call your ideal small town. The houses are well-kept. There are nice parks and a cute downtown area in addition to the beautiful campus. It seems like a really peaceful place to live. I saw about a million farms driving around the countryside, rows and rows of corn and big red barns, up to now things I'd only seen in movies and TV. It was a fun time. My sister knows I have a blog and asked me if I would write about her. Well, here it is. Thanks for everything, sis.

Last night I found my portable CD player (along with my Cars CD inside it) that I lost nearly a year ago and never expected to see again. It was in a cardboard box on top of a bookshelf in the garage. Amazing what you find when you aren't even looking.

Four days left until I leave to visit my sister in Iowa. I can't wait.

OK so I'm going to start writing not knowing what the point of all this is going to be. I'm at a weird place, I'm rethinking a lot of things, this blog, my career aspirations, religious issues. The usual, I guess you could say. The blog, well, I haven't had much to say, my life has slowed down and I don't use it to vent the way I used to. Pen and paper is very therapeutic, sometimes more so than a keyboard and a white screen. I've always thought of myself a writer, but putting words out there on the web doesn't make me a writer, or maybe it does but it doesn't make me a good writer. I write more to vent than anything else, not for any other purpose, really. It's been a long time since I've really considered the craft of writing and practiced at it in order to become better at it, and considering that I've always had ambition of being a writer that is pretty pathetic. I'm not the writer I want to be and I could really use some practice at it. That's a hard truth for me to face.

My research project hasn't been going so well. Things haven't worked out the way I thought they would, I didn't get the results I wanted, and now I'm faced with the prospect of scaling things back to the point of lameness. I don't know why that bothers me as much as it does. I am starting not to care, I'm nearly at the point where all I want is to be done with it and not look back. And yet I feel like I am wussing out of this and taking the easy way out. I'm going to have to stand up and defend this project in front of a group of professors, how can I do that if I truly don't believe in what I'm doing, if I know I did a really lame project and I'm trying to pass it off as my crowning achievement as a master's student? This really bothers me, I am so done with doing things that I don't really believe in. But the alternative is to prolong my work on this, to put even more effort into it and still be faced with uncertain results. It's a frustrating situation.

Religious issues. I have stopped believing in the religion that I was brought up with. A few months ago a man stood up in my church and said that moral relativism was poisoning our society. The alternative to moral relativism being moral absolutism based on the Bible. Anything with the word 'absolute' in it tends to bother me. Absolute morality. The idea that one man, one religion, one book, has the answers on morality and no other views are accepted. That's the main thing that bothers me about religion. I know not every religious person believes this way, but a lot of people do.

I'm really questioning the foundations of Christianity. Whether God exists, whether Jesus was really the son of God in the literal sense, whether spirits exist. Why human beings are here. How can we know what is true, how can we know what we are doing is right. I have been reading as much as I can about it. Books on Christianity, Islam, history books about past civilizations, the Bible, origins of life. Autobiographies written by religious people. I'm still really confused. I am approaching this in an intellectual way (of course), not really seeking out spiritual experiences. There aren't a lot of answers for these questions. There's no way to prove that Christianity is true. Still, I continue on with this path hoping to find some enlightenment on the subject.