JSmith

The pictures are a little small. Can you make them bigger?

Alright since no one else in chat would create this, I guess I will. I'm probably leaving some off, so if I do just let me know and I can add it Demetz DKStories Trebs Nifter Narcidius L0stOne Raro Andy Viv Shadowgod Sungod Emoe Dezlboi Myr Benji B1ue LittleBuddhaTW Chubi Current Count: 18 Joe

They took pictures, not video

Looking forward to it!

Congratulations and thank you for letting us be part of this site, Myr You've worked long and hard and many don't even know the kind of issues you've had to deal with behind the scenes. Without GA, I wouldn't be who I am right now. Thank you!

Happy Birthday Lawrence! I'll be over whenever I get off work!

Alright so because I didn’t explain it before and I’m sick of people bugging me about it, I figure I’ll post what happened here so you can all get your fill and stop asking me. Part of me didn’t want to post something like this because it had the potential to be somewhat negative and I was trying to stay positive about the whole situation. Well f**K that. I’m pissed so here goes nothing. I’ll start by posting the letter I wrote to him making it official that we broke up. This isn’t word for word because I changed some of it, but you’ll get the main points. I’ve never had to do this before so I’m sorry if it turns out bad, but it’s hard for me. Earlier today I had so many reasons why we shouldn’t be together, but when I’m sitting next to you, I just forget everything. You have that effect on me because I still do love you, but that love has been starting to fade. I’ve been trying to stay positive and think that it can all work out with us, and maybe it could, but I’m not in the right state of mind to do it. I need professional help because I can’t do this myself, and it’s not fair for me to ask you to put your life on hold while I try and fix mine. It’s not going to be quick, and I’ll probably get much worse before I get better, but I know I won’t be able to handle any type of relationship while I’m doing it. Words cannot express how deeply sorry I am. I never intended to hurt you, and it kills me even more to know that I am. I didn’t want to lead you on, but like you said, depression doesn’t fade quickly. When you grabbed my hand and started holding me, everything felt better at the time, but I knew it really wasn’t. You have every right to hate me and never talk to me again, but I truly hope you don’t. I do want to be friends with you. You’ve been such an important influence on me and I don’t want to lose that. I know it’ll take time for both of us to heal, but I’m willing to wait for that friendship. If you don’t think it’s possible, I’ll respect that too. I want what’s best for you even if it doesn’t seem like it. You’re an amazing guy and deserve someone just as great, not someone who’s on the verge of hitting rock bottom. I want you to move on so you can be happy with your life. The longer you hold on to me, the more it will hurt later on. I’m sorry I had to write this in a letter, but I’m not good with words. Call me a pussy, or an inconsiderate, full-of-shit jackass, but I’m not able to do this around you because it hurts so much. Forgive me if I drop this off and go, but staying would just make things worse. We’ve found that out already. I have trouble expressing my emotions, and it’s something I need to fix, but I’m not going to drag you down with me while I do it. No matter what you might be thinking about me right now, I do love you and I always will. You have a special place in my heart, but I need to do this for me. I’m sorry, Mason. You know what I got in response to that letter? Nothing. Not one word. Basically it was a selfish reason to break up. With the stress that I’ve been under from school, work, family, friends, and our relationship, I was starting to crack. I was in a deep depression that I couldn’t work myself out of. I needed to do something to help myself before I did something I would regret. Without all the boring details, I moved back in with my brother and sister, cut back on some hours at work, and tried to patch things up with my mom. Too early to tell if it’s helping, but we’ll see. When I was on my way to class this morning it was 40 outside. Tad bit chilly. I couldn’t find my nice jacket that I always wore, so I sent Mason a text asking him if he had it. Mistake #1 for me. I knew he had it because it was in his car the day we broke up. He flat out lies to me and says he doesn’t have it. I confront him about it and just say “It was in your car…”. Mistake #2 for me. I get the following in return. “Ok. Jacket for Xbox.” He was referring to the Xbox he got me for my birthday. Which in all honesty, I would have given him, but I was about to start a final exam and needed a few minutes to look over my notes (which I didn’t have time to do) and couldn’t respond right away. Apparently he thought this was a no and went off on me. “Or better yet jacket for 9 months of wasted life. You would hit me up for some material bullshit. Prick.” I should have just left it alone at that and walked away, but I didn’t. Mistake #3 for me. Still trying to be nice about things, I said “Sorry you felt the 9 months were wasted because they weren’t for me”. I guess I didn’t get the memo saying that no matter what I said, I would still be looking like an ass. His response: “Well I’m glad I made a good stepping stone for you”. Let’s just say it went downhill from there. I completely lost it and started going off on him while at the same time confiding in him. I told him something that I haven’t told another person. Mistake #4 for me. I haven’t told my parents, siblings, or even my best friend. Instead of being the bigger person, he threw what I had to say back in my face and called me a cowardly and disrespectful. I finally made the right decision and sent this: “I’m done. I really do wish you the best of luck in life. I know you’ll go far and I’m sorry I can’t be part of it but you’ve made that clear so far. Good luck and good by Mason.” Never got a response from that. So I get paid today. I was going to check my balance to see what I had in there before I got paid. Turns out I’m $150 over drafted now. I gave him a check for his mom for $200 at the beginning of October for rent. Apparently they decided yesterday was a good day to cash it. I assumed it had already gone through and didn’t plan my budgeting around it. Mistake #5 for me. I’m a f**king dumbass I guess. Now I have absolutely no money in my account, my check will cover the overdraft and fees, but not much more than that. This means I’m screwed for the next 2 weeks. On the ‘bright side’, my student loan hasn’t gone through yet. I have to pay by 5:00 today or I’m not going to be going to Northwood next term. I guess some time off would be good, but that totally f**ks me over overall. There’s no way I can get the money in time, and I don’t know if it’s Citi’s fault or Northwood’s (most likely NU), but it doesn’t look good for me right now. I had planned on saving some money and driving back up to Missouri to my parent’s house with my brother and sister for Thanksgiving. Today’s events completely f**K me over for that so I’ll most likely be at home alone on Thanksgiving. I guess that’s a step up from last year when I was working a 12 hour shift on Thanksgiving Day. Speaking of long shifts, I now have a Sunday shift that starts at 11:00am and doesn’t end until midnight or later. And because there’s only a few of us closing that night, I’ll most likely have to close an area by myself again because the managers all seem to take advantage of the fact that I’m the only one that’s not a dumbass and is able to do it the right way, by myself, and not be there until 3am. Of course even when I do twice the amount of work (when we usually have 2 people closing that area and I’m doing it alone) I’m still getting paid the same, or less than some of the others working. Which is fine because we all started at the same time and it’s been less than 2 months, but when I specifically come to you and ask you for the most possible hours I can get (which used to be overtime scheduling, but now it’s right at 40) and you give me 33 while people that started one week ago are making 39 hours, that’s what pisses me off. Not being scheduled for overtime is one thing, but when new employees have a higher standing than I do when it comes to getting hours, I get a little bit pissed off. Add to all of this that I’ve lost 15% of my bodyweight in the last 2-3 months, I’ve been physically ill on and off and it’s starting to take a toll on me. My body hates me, that’s for damn sure. I rarely eat enough, and even on the off chance that I do eat enough, it never has the nutrients I need. My body has been living on caffeine and ibuprofen for a while now though so it’s starting to get used to it at least. I can stay up for 20 hours without hesitation now. Usually 4 hours is good enough sleep to make it through the day. Mistake #6 for me. I just responded to another text he sent me calling me an immature prick. In a nice way though. He said he wanted to be on good terms, but then added the part about “just wanting to let me know” that I’m a dumbass. Thanks. Appreciate that one, but I think it’s a little late to be on good terms with him right now. My blood pressure is through the roof and my mind doesn’t know what to do. Score one for me though. I turned off my phone for now. So if any of you are thinking about texting or calling me… don’t. It’s time for me to go find something to do to take my mind off all this before I have to go into work and start snapping at people (employees and customers) for being absolutely retarded. Final Score: Dumbass: 6 Joe: 1 Joe P.S. Just in case you didn’t get the context, the song the title of my blog is referring to is The Reason by Hoobastank. I’ll leave the lyrics in a comment below.

For those of you that haven't heard yet, I'm single again. Joe

You owe me $5! I cut, cleaned, and gutted the damn thing. I even cooked the pumpkin seeds! Stupid boy-girl Michelle

SHE DID NOT! I cut everything out and did the mouth drawing by myself. She only drew the eyes and the (non-existant) nose!

Anyone carve any sweet pumpkins for Halloween? Michelle and I did this one... Yeah... we're pretty proud.

I just sent the email. Wish me luck

Sorry guys, but I have to move this to the Games and Humor Forum for now. It's just a useless thread with no value to CJ's Forum. When CJ comes back, I'll let him know it's here and he can move it back then to comment on your posts Joe

Yeah so I last posted in May, and it's now September. Usually I go a month without blogging, but it's been 4 now so I figured I'd give it a whirl. Don't know how long it'll be this time, but I know a lot has happened recently and some of you thought I fell off the face of the Earth... So I just got off work. I quit my last job on Sunday because they were morons and would never give me hours because the month was slow there. No matter what anyone tells you, unless you're working at a higher-end restaurant or you have a big section with a lot of tables, you really don't make that much. Salt Grass sucks about that. You usually get a section of like 3 tables, and unless you get some really nice people, your tips suck ass! People come into a Steak House and order a salad. A f**king salad! I don't care if you're a vegetarian or not... unless you're coming to eat a nice big fatass piece of red meat, don't go there! The salads aren't that great anyways. Anyways to make a long story short, I got another job at a new place called FreeBirds and quit Salt Grass. For those of you that don't know, FreeBirds is a burrito place (like Chipotle, but better!) that's actually a lot of fun. You get to wear whatever you want as long as you have a FreeBirds hat on. The atmosphere is really crazy and fun, and they promote peace and freedom and all this crap. While I don't really care so much about all that, it's still an awesome place. If you have one around you, then go! We don't officially open until Monday, but we have two 'parties' tomorrow where people can come in and eat for free and we get the practice. Unfortunately, I have to work both f**king parties instead of just the one I was scheduled for. Class from 8:00-11:30 and then work from 12:00-10:00. But hopefully it won't be too bad. One of the training managers there is a big flamer and I'm pretty sure he hits on me, but in a joking way. So I'm a smartass to him and it all works out. Plus, I got to break a 1 inch board with my fist today ninja-style! Kinda fun, but hurt like hell!! Just signed a lease for an apartment with Mason today. We move in next week so that's all moving really fast, but it's a nice apartment and we got a good deal on it so we had to do it. Things are going good with us... no real major problems. Just the usual crap that all couples go through now and then. He has his little quarks that I put up with and ignore for the most part, and I know I do shit that annoys the crap out of him, but we're still going strong Pretty sure I should be on some form of anti-depressants. In the last couple months I've lost about 15 pounds so I’m hovering around 139 right now. I've just had so much shit going on, and some of it absolutely miserable and I haven't had any appetite or the energy/will to do much of anything. When working at Salt Grass I would have a lot of time off and I used it to do absolutely nothing. I took a leave from GA for a while to get things sorted out, but I never really did. I had a lot of crap that I wanted to do, but never got around to it. I'd either sleep, or sit on my ass and watch TV. Now with school and a full-time job, I have even less time, but seem to get more done. I've been perking up the last week or so since I started FreeBirds and it's a lot of fun, but today I just completely crashed and almost had a melt-down. I haven't told my mom I'm moving out yet, haven't told her I have a boyfriend (that's a no-no topic around her), and I don't really know how to break it all to her. I thought about calling her and telling her, but I honestly don't think I would be able to hold myself together. I know she'll start crying and either hang up on me or not say anything, and then I'll feel like even more shit for doing anything to begin with, so I decided to write her an email. I started it earlier and had Viv take a look at it before I left for work. Haven't sent it yet. Don't know when I will, but it needs to be done. I'm not ready to be fully on my own yet, I know that for sure, but I can't sit here and live the life my parents want me to live. I've been doing it for too long now and need to take the steps out on my own. My brother is a lazy ass and will live under my parents as long as he can. My sister can probably do the same thing I'm doing and start taking steps to get out on her own, but I don't really care. I might be the youngest of the three, but I'm not going to sit here and live a life that's not me for too much longer. Yeah I still need help and wouldn't be able to make it completely on my own, but give me a year or two and I should be able to. Enough of the sappy crap... school's going well for now. I have 3 classes with my favorite Professor, and they're awesome. He's an amazing teacher and really makes sure you understand everything. My programming class is a bore, mostly because I don't pay attention and haven't done a damn thing in there. It's only one day a week on Fridays for 4 hours, so there's not really much she teaches us. It's mostly out of a book (which I have yet to really open ). Then the last class I have is a complete joke. It's a statistics class where we take reading quizzes over the chapters in the book. The guy can't teach a rock how to sink in the ocean for f**ks sake! He'd probably throw it and have it float on top. It's horrible! But, it's an easy A so I shouldn't really bitch. I just can't stay interested enough when he takes 15 minutes to take the roll... of 30 people! Northwood professors are either hit or miss. They're either amazing or shitty. It sucks, but I have to deal with it for a little while longer. I had a lot more I wanted to say in this, but Mason was talking to me and I got distracted and forgot what else I wanted to get off my chest. Just a few random thoughts: I need a haircut. It's long again and bugging the shit out of me, so I've been wearing a hat all day so I don't have to do my hair Laziness at its best! I had to put a tow bar on the back of my car so people would stop rear-ending me. Twice within a week. Both were when I was at a dead stop, neither of which my fault, but there was never damage to my car so nothing major. I just got annoyed so I figured the next time some dickhead hit me, I'm hoping the 8 inches sticking out the back cracks their radiator. Laundry sucks. Mason's been living with me for the past month or so, so now there's double to do. I'm lazy and only like to do 2 loads max, but I don't have time to get to it and end up having like 5. Bah! Make bigger washers you f**kers! My back hurts and I really need to go to the chiropractor, but I can't afford it. It's completely out of alignment and it's just getting worse, but there's nothing I can do about it for now. Another reason I'm not really eating much is because I haven't really had the money to do so. That should change now that I have a decent job, but we'll see if my eating habits change at all. My hamster is fat. My sister's friend gave him to me, so I didn't really want one, and don't pay attention to him (which I probably need to feed him soon... meh) so he never gets to run. He just sleeps all day. I just put a wheel on his cage so he can run, but he likes to run at night when I'm trying to sleep so I put a rubber band around it so he can't. Call me an ass, but I need sleep damn it! I spent the last two weeks watching Season 1, 3, and 4 of House and can't wait for this season. Really excited about it! I missed the first episode, but I'll catch it sooner or later. Plus, Heroes is starting up again soon, hopefully Grays Anatomy, Dexter (WOO!) and whatever else I'm forgetting. Burn Notice and Eureka have been keeping me entertained, but I'm really looking forward to the fall season. OH! OH! Sunday you all better be cheering on the Packers. They're playing the Cowboys at Lambeau Field. Usually when the Packers and Cowboys play, the home team wins, so I'm hoping that's the way it goes again, but we're missing Favre (don't even get me started on that!) this time so we'll see. Like I said on Viv's blog, I think Palin is a complete nut. I despise her with a passion, but I have yet to decide who I'm going to vote for. Honestly it's a lose-lose situation when you look at it, but we'll see. I think October 2nd is the VP debates, which I'm looking forward to Palin getting her ass kicked! Well, I've rambled on long enough and I think Mason is annoyed that I'm still typing so I'll shut up and go cuddle and grab some sleep. Peace, Love, and Joy! Hah, yeah right… f**K y’all. Just kidding of course Joe (Who went on for 1,724 words. Oops!)

I saw that yesterday and read most of the comments on it... some people are just plain nasty! Just because someone is an actor doesn't mean they don't have a right to free speech. All of those people telling him to stop talking politics just because he's an actor really need to take a step back and look at what the hell they're doing. They can't honestly say that some people shouldn't talk about politics and then turn around in the same comment and say Palin is great and all this other kind of crap. It's stupid! But, I agree with you for the most part Viv I think Palin is a horrible choice for VP. Granted it helped McCain with the conservative vote, but that's one of the reasons I don't like her. She's strictly conservative and then has the same shit going on in her family that she's saying shouldn't happen. If you're that conservative, that's fine, I don't have a problem with it. But when you're being a hypocrite about things, that really irritates the hell out of me. Plus a lot of the shit that's coming out about her practices while in the Governor's Office (the Yahoo incidents, Troopergate, Bridge to Nowhere(In the beginning)) makes you take a step back and wonder what she'd be like in an even higher position of authority.

*cough* I'll ignore some of the above comments I was only given Chapter 6 to post last week. I was told Chapter 7 would be coming from a certain shadowy figure once zeta-reading was completed. That was August 30th... so unless it takes a month to zeta, I think the shadow is hoarding chapters for himself. Go bug him

Blame Steve. It's up.

Just to reiterate what Eric said, this thread is for the Olymics Opening Discussion only. All Chinese Government discussion should be taken to the Soapbox.

There may be a few typos in there. I've already been pointed to a couple of them. I was rushed when I put it online so forgive me

Everyone can always get together outside of the 'official' GA Convention. If you guys want to plan some bigger get togethers with people, that's more than welcome! Set a date and time and start a thread. There is only one (possibly two in the future) official GA conventions per year though where we try and get everyone involved. If you can't come to the official one, you can always pick a date and place where you and a few others can make it, and then start a topic letting others know when and where and ask if they would like to join. The moderation team would be glad to help with pinning any topics for related activities, but the Official GA Convention is going to be set for one date and place with as much notice as possible to let people try and come. Like Trebs said though, since we just started discussing this, the dates and places are still wildly up in the air. If we find that people like a specific place more than the others, we'll try and hold another poll to see when the best time for people to come would be. We've got half a year to figure it out, so don't think this poll is the end

So this is sort of a story announcement, but I'm going to post it here for you all to enjoy. A few of us in the chat room got together and wrote a short flash fiction story. The rules are simple... each person gets one sentence and we go in order of names listed on the side of the chat. Martha and Friends is what we came up with. Enjoy! Joe

Guys, this thread is called 'Show Yourself' for a reason... meaning it's here to talk about members' pictures. I do believe there are a few other threads for personal discussions

Why is this thread turning into an auction?

I quite agree. It's not something to do every time, but occasionally it just feels good!