DarqByte

This morning, I came to the conclusion that people can make me happy. Happy in a variety of ways, really… They can make me happy by being nice to me, by being courteous on the road, by making it up to me when they totally screw up my meal… You get the idea.

However, this morning I became happy for somebody else (you probably know who you are, you anonymous person!). Said person has now been on a date with somebody and has another planned very soon. Their datee (is that a word?) knows all of the seedy details of their twisted prior relationship that ended in suicide… Oh wait. Forget that sentence, most of it wasn’t true. :p And yet, with this knowledge, said datee is alright with all of it.

That’s pretty cool. I’m totally happy for this person because they may have found their significant other. Stuff like that, sappy stuff even, makes me happy for them and happy in general. I like seeing people in rewarding relationships. Perhaps if I wasn’t in a tremendously rewarding relationship of my own I’d feel differently, but when I’m as happy as I am with Laura, I tend to want other people to be that happy as well.

Congratulations to all the happy lovers out there! Now… Um… Hrmm… Well, I couldn’t think of something funny and non-sappy to say after that, so… Be off with you!

I just want to take this opportunity to thank all of my friends and family for, well, being friends & family.

My wife, Laura, is totally awesome. She loves me as much as I could ask for, at least I think she does. I’m totally in love with her. She puts up with all my garbage BS and loves me despite my being a total nerd and having photo shoots like this one. We’re actually having another tonight for my new facial hair style for March (I already made an iPhone photo on it but am tweaking it for the shoot). She even finds my goofiness attractive, which is quite odd if you ask me, but a total bonus.

The rest of my family is great too. I get along better now with my older sister Katie than I ever did and we don’t see each other near enough. My Mom and Dad, despite being divorced, are still decent friends with each other mostly because of me, and I know they love and care for me, and I get along with them very well. My extended family, sorry I can’t list you all, are all totally awesome too. I get along with almost all of you, save for some that have distanced themselves on purpose.

And then there’s my friends. I’ve got so many friends that I can’t even count them all. Despite losing some from time to time, I tend to increase in friend count by accumulating more and more. The most recent additions to my friendom, Andrew & Amber Morrow and Steven Behnke, are all totally great people that I mesh pretty well with. Damian, Ryan and Will are longtime good friends that I don’t see often enough. Actually, I have so many friends and so little time that I really barely get to see them at all.

Sorry if you didn’t get a mention in this post. No hard feelings really, I’m just highlighting a few. Who knows, maybe you’ll get a shoutout sometime in the near future! Because you all rock!

Now for some lunch.

Why on Earth would you want to cut ties? I mean, you wear them with business suits, it’s not like you actually want them cut like that one Frasier episode… Oh wait, I’m not talking about wearable ties, am I?

Today I officially cut the final ties between myself and my former best friend. Well, actually, the final tie cutting really just came when I removed him as my friend in both Facebook and MySpace. We haven’t really talked in over a year.

It’s somewhat sad to come to the realization that an entire era of my youth has really come to a close. There really aren’t many ties left I have to my days in Clovis, New Mexico. I don’t talk with any of my friends from back then anymore, not even some family friends that we have. No ties remain.

In any case, my best friend and I really were best friends when we were younger. Neither of us were very extroverted when we were younger, and we hit it off well, so in elementary school we only really had each other as friends. There were other kids I off-and-on tried to be friends with, but it just never worked.

We hung out all the time, had a good old time, picked on his younger brother… It was all good stuff really. He ended up moving away from Clovis after 7th grade, where I stayed there through 8th and then moved to Las Vegas.

We kept our long-distance friendship going by writing each other, emailing each other, occasionally visiting and using websites together, such as MySpace and Facebook.

Once he graduated from college, he decided to set out and move here. Laura and I decided that we could put him up in our apartment for a month until the lease was up, then he wouldn’t be living with us anymore. But once her and I decided that we couldn’t afford a mortgage yet, we modified our plans so that we would roommate with him and our friend Louie.

I flew out and helped him drive across the country to get here. Thus, our friendship was back on in full now that we would be living in the same city again, after something like 10 years apart.

Things didn’t even really get off to a good start. He brought his bird with him that squawked all of the time and we weren’t aware he’d be bringing it. Not only that, but while I’d morphed into a much more extroverted person in growing up, he’d stayed mostly introverted. This didn’t sit well with Laura because there was never any conversation between them.

It was also a struggle to get him to help clean the apartment while he was there all day and we weren’t. He didn’t have a job yet so he was home all day… We were even letting him stay with us for the month rent-free, so that didn’t sit well.

When the lease was up, and he had a job, we all moved into a big house south in the Valley. Immediately there was an issue between him and Louie. Louie wasn’t in town yet, with his joining us coming a week after we moved into the house. He still lived out-of-state. Louie had been promised the upstairs bedrooms in exchange for having none of the loft, but my friend ended up taking one of the upstairs bedrooms and its associated bathroom anyway.

Thus began about 10 months worth of aggravations. I struggled initially in making sure I didn’t damage my relationship with either him or Laura, but eventually I basically needed to choose between the two. There were always conflicts going on and he seemed to dislike the fact that I always sided with Laura, my then-fiancee… We got married in September that year so she was my wife longer than she was my fiancee while we were living in that house.

So I ended up avoiding a wedge with Laura and me and then one started with him and me. It wasn’t really my choice as I was trying to retain both relationships. But it was just too hard. His lifestyle and opinions on things made it very difficult to keep things going.

We had grown apart and it was obvious to me. I had different priorities in my life now and a lot of his were still the same. I had to put Laura before him and that really bothered him. But that’s life in a marriage. If it’s bad for one of the two, then it’s bad for both.

So once Laura and I moved into our own house, there really wasn’t much communication with he and I. Even though we both still work at the same place, there’s no friendship left. It’s sad when I think about it. But I just felt that he never properly grew up.

There were so many instances of his not appreciating everything that Laura and I did for him. The rent-free month. The agreeing to room with him until he could get his credit up enough to rent on his own. The fact that I vouched for him to get him a job where I work when they were ready to decline hiring him after a poor coding test. The list goes on and on.

Thus, today was the final cut. Everything else has been separated except for the fact that we work together. A sad day, just in retrospect of my entire life.