I'm Really Starting to Hate Facebook

The title to this post pretty much says it all. Facebook and I are not getting along right now.

1. When something happens in Boise or makes national news everyone makes essentially the same damned post. Take the death of Osama Bin Laden for instance; not only did I have to get it 24/7 from every media outlet on the planet, I then had to go on Facebook and wade through 250 posts all saying that Osama had died and how awesome it was. I am almost tempted mute everyone out of my news feed and nominate like two or three people to represent people on my friends list who are for the lack of a better term, B-List friends to make the status updates that I know all of the rest of them are making too. This way I just see three possibly funny or creative news updates instead of 250 updates that all say the same thing.

2. There are some people who are on my friends list that I can't stand. But I can't "unfriend" them because of connections to other people or family that would cause awkward situations. They are essentially the Facebook equivalent of testicular cancer. If you take measures to get rid of it, you risk losing a testicle but leaving them on there is slowly killing you. I know you can make it to where you can't see their posts but I am hesitant to do that because sometimes other friends refer to the peoples' posts and I don't want to be out of the loop.

3. People say the dumbest things in their status updates. When I post, I try to make the post funny or creative in some way. I despise posts that say, "Today, I ate at Denny's". Seriously, you really had to let the world know that? Idiot.

4. This part sounds mean but I am really not trying to be mean at all. Many of my friends have kids. I love that my friends have kids. I even like hanging out with most of their kids. But I have a couple of people on my list that insist on doing nothing but posting pics of their kids and telling me that their kid farted and it was funny. What I really really wish people would do is make a Facebook page for their babies. Then if the kid does something funny or you have the sudden urge to post 522 pictures of them in succession, you put them on the kid's Facebook page. That way, I don't have to see all of them or hear about every time they eat something they aren't supposed to. Like I said earlier, I love that my friends have kids, I just wish I didn't have to hear about them as much. I think you think things your kids do is way cuter when they are indeed, your kids. From an outsiders perspective, most of the things other peoples' kids do is kind of boring.

5. Do not use your damned Facebook site to sell crap or advertise for a business. I will admit, I am slightly guilty of this because I do very occasionally plug my photography stuff. But I do not use my profile page to whore out my Etsy goods or announce every time there is a dog that needs rescuing or every time my boyfriend's mediocre band is playing at a venue that I have never heard of. When people do this occasionally I am not bugged, when people only use their profile pages for this, they should be banned. That is why Facebook has pages for businesses and causes.

6. People who group invite all of their Facebook friends to something should be shot. It makes the people being invited feel like they don't really matter and it makes the people hosting the event look lazy and uncaring of who really shows up. If I am invited to an event that every single friend this person has is invited to, I am not showing up. Invite me personally or don't invite me at all.

7. All Facebook games and the people who shill for them should be shot. Nuff' said.

8. Facebook is not the place to share bible verses that mean nothing to anyone other than yourself. Facebook is not the place to put your extreme political views regardless of what side you are on. Facebook is not the place to tell me where you are at any given point in your day. Facebook is not the place you should go for personal validation.

That is all, I just needed to get this out. I feel better now.

Ticking Down

The clock seems to be ticking down on everything as of late. Less than two months left in this school year, just over two months until Malia and I are married, just over two months until our honeymoon which I am beyond excited about. Lots of widgets are in a clockwork motion and winding down to zero hour for a lot of big stuff.

I am superduper excited about Malia and I's honeymoon. Since there is a chance she will read this post before we set off, I can't say much about the trip other than it will be epic. I think I mentioned earlier that the honeymoon will be a total surprise for Malia and I have been planning it for almost six months now. But Tyson, you and Malia haven't even been engaged that long! Very true, I have been planning this honeymoon since Malia and I started dating again. I knew that once we started dating for the second time, we would get married so I have had ideas percolating for quite some time. I hate keeping secrets, especially good ones but I think this one will be worth it. I call it the Honeymoon of Infinite Mystery for a good reason. It should be entertaining. Man, I want to say more....but I can't.

With school winding down, I am finding it exceedingly hard to concentrate. I am just like the kids I teach in this sense. After Spring Break, I have to give it my all to not be useless for three months. I am excited for the end of school for a number of reasons. First, I have two kids graduating this year and I am excited for that. Second, I am photographing the prom and graduation ceremony for the school. Third, I get to teach summer school this year! I am teaching Government and Economics to a student this summer and am very happy to teach something other than Special Ed. It will be a good breather for me.

Malia is pretty much moved into my apartment now. The move and the wedding are stressing her out. She is currently sleeping at her brother's place but she stays over at my house until bedtime usually. I think living in two places has been hard on her and it is starting to stress her out. I have been trying to keep the place clean so that she doesn't get stressed about that. I love her sooooo much and I hate to see her bothered but there isn't much to be done about that.

I think the wedding planning is moving along. I am not in charge of much in that area so I am not totally sure how everything is going on that front. I think it is going well. I hear snippets and see mock-ups of things. It all looks nice. Wedding stuff also stresses Malia out and I am going to try to help out more in that area. I just want it to be done and to be married to her. It will be nice to have her around all the time.

In other news, I have been really stressed lately. It sucks because it isn't a compartmentalized stress about one particular thing, it is a ton of stuff that bugs me. I hate being a worry wort but I am. I worry about work, going back to school, my health because of my worrying, the wedding, THE HONEYMOON A LOT, money stuff, marriage stuff, friends stuff, etc. I know it is dumb to worry about some of it, especially the marriage stuff. I have a better feeling about Malia and I than I did about Becca and I. I am not sure why that is but it just feels...better. I feel more like a grown up this time around.

Speaking on the theme of time that I started this entry with. I am feeling 31 years old now. This bothers me. I have never really felt my age, I have always felt 25, even after I was older than 25. Not anymore. I think I have been very stressed for a while now and I think that is aging me. This school year has been a learning experience. It has been a great year but it has been stressful. That is very true for the last couple of months. I never feel like I am unwinding, I always feel like I have stuff I need to do (and I usually do), and I can't leave work stuff at work anymore. Work is definitely bleeding into my personal life, like right now, it is almost 7pm and I am sitting in my office. I love my job but lately, its been getting nuts. Two more months.

Speaking of my job, I know I will have a job next year but I can't stop but worrying about how many years I can count on that. Sometimes, working for a charter school feels like being a cog in a time bomb. My job rocks but I question the longevity of it sometimes. This is bothersome because with marriage, kids will come. I just want to be sure I can always provide for Malia and our kids. It would kill me if I couldn't. I hate feeling like a grown up.

Anywho, I need to get going. Malia will be at my place soon and I won't be. Besides, I think I have more than put in my time at the office for the day.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock.

Giving This A Jumpstart

Since my last post, I have been busy. And at Malia's suggestion, I may be starting this blog back up because she wants me to document our lives together. Oh yeah, we are getting married. (^_^)

I asked her on February 5th after she took me out for my birthday dinner. I figured she wouldn't expect getting asked that night and I would surprise her. I was right! She was speechless as we walked around downtown Boise. It was actually kind of funny because for the few weeks leading up to that night, marriage had been a hot topic. Malia worked a bridal show and so we talked about stuff related to that and then her mom, in a moment of infinite tact, asked us outright when we were getting married once night over dinner. I told her it would probably be a year or two and this didn't make her very happy. In reality, I had ordered Malia's ring a couple weeks earlier.

The wedding will be on June 25th in my parents' backyard. It will be pretty chill and fairly small. The honeymoon will start the following day but I can't say anything about that because I know Malia will read this and the honeymoon is a surprise I have concocted for her.

I think we are going to stay in my apartment for a little while rather than getting a house right off the bat. We want to save money and my rent is super cheap. I also doubt that the housing market is going to be turning around anytime soon so we are not in danger of paying significantly higher home prices if we wait. We figure that if we save now, it will help us out down the road and put us on more stable footing for the future.

So that is the big news.

Other stuff is going well too. I am sure I will keep my teaching position throughout next year and I may even be doing some Social Studies teaching this summer if stuff works out. I am still taking pictures and will be launching a professional photography site soon. I am working on the logo for it at the moment and expect to have it up by the end of the month or beginning of April. I need to get a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens badly. After that, the lenses I get will be toys but for portraits and some landscape stuff, I need that extra zoom the 70-200mm would provide.

I have been thinking a lot about Japan as of late. With that earthquake and its aftermath, Japan is everywhere 24/7 it seems. I feel very bad for the people there but I think the damage could have been much worse had it not been for their technology and preparation in the area of earthquakes and tsunamis. Everyone I know who lives over there is doing well from what I can gather and the area that I lived in has been largely unaffected by the disaster. Sometimes I miss Japan. I want to take Malia there someday and show her all of the crazy places that I explored.

Totally off-topic: Tyson, King of the Nerds, picked up an iPad2 on launch day. It rocks in pretty much every area imaginable. Except for the cameras....the cameras on that thing suck. I have been reading a lot on it since buying it and I am very happy with that aspect of the device. Reading books on that thing is a dream.

My family is doing well and my nephew, Broxton will be getting a sister soon! Her name will be Tinley and she is due about a month before my wedding. I am very excited to be getting a niece since there are not a ton of girls in my family. Very happy for Brody and Michaela and Brox.

It is weird to think that I am getting married again and that Broxton and Tinley may have cousins to play with at some point. Me with kids = very very weird. It's a good weird I think but still...odd.

Anywho, I am ending this now. I am typing this as I work with some of my students in a study lab that I run. They are all doing very well today! Time to get back to helping them out!

One Year Later...

Obviously this blog is pretty much on life support. It has been over a year since I have posted here and I have serious doubts that anyone even knows it still exists. So I figured making a new post would at least serve as a nice bookend to a blog that had a pretty good run with all sorts of plot twists and crazy events to keep things occasionally interesting.

When we last left our protagonist, he was working as a PSR working in an elementary school in Caldwell, ID and preparing to be interviewed by the Meridian school district for a possible job. Things were looking pretty good and they were. Unfortunately, neither the job he was working at or the interviews with the Meridian school district panned out. I quit the PSR job because I got a flood of interviews as soon as I got my special education certificate. It would have seriously been hard to keep my job for as often as I would have had to call in sick in order to go on an interview for a while. There was also some odd stuff happening at the place I worked for that placed me in Caldwell. So one day I just quit.

Then came more than a handful of interviews and assurances from higher ups in the Meridian district that I would land a full-time teacher job with them. In the end, I was told not to take any part-time or temporary jobs because I would "definitely" be in the Meridian district by the end of October. This was last year. I ended up turning down two jobs that were not full time and by the time I realized I wasn't getting a full-time job, I had missed my chance on the two part-time jobs. This led to a three month stint in which extreme frugality, photography jobs, and patience kept me afloat without an actual factual job.

Then one day a person I had gone to school with called me and asked if I had a job yet. Nope. So I was told to go interview at this one charter school who was in desperate need of a special ed teacher. I went into the office and had a 45 minute chat with the director of special ed and a couple days later I had a job. It was 1/4 time and that sucked but it eventually became 1/2 time and now, I teach here full-time and am chilling in a rather spacious office that I occupy forty hours a week. It is a virtual high school which means everything is online. This means I almost never see kids and just do paperwork. For a job in Special Education, this is pretty much the most pimped out gig I could have. Oh yeah, it also pays better than any district in Idaho by a long shot.

So that is how things have turned out on the job front. Am I staying at this school for the rest of my life? Doubt it, but it will do for now and for the next few years while I get my Masters which I am starting in the next year or so. Don't ask what I am getting a Masters in because I am not quite sure. Boise State has basically rolled out the red carpet in terms of degrees in Education based on how I did during my Special Ed credentialing but I am also considering Mastering in a particular History field too. Maybe I will just end up with two Masters so I don't have to decide. Who knows?

My photography stuff is doing well despite me. I basically make no attempts to market myself but have shot weddings, senior portraits, kids portraits, family portraits, Christmas cards, and soon, two graduations ceremonies and two proms. Weird. I am basically to the point where my pics bring in a few extra bucks on a fairly consistent basis. I need to get my more professional site up and running but I will be damned if I have had the time to do that. It is nice though to be able to plan on making a few hundred extra every month for basically going out an playing for a couple of hours. I bought a new camera a few months ago and am trying to get the lenses I need in order to round out my kit but I have already dropped $6000 on stuff and need to recoup a little more before dropping a couple thousand more. I picked a spendy hobby.

Lastly, I have a girlfriend and that is going super well. I don't know what else to say there other than I really dig her and that she probably is one of the few people on this earth who get me. It is creepy how similar we are sometimes. Which is good, its cool.

Lots of other stuff has happened in the past year too! I have a nephew, his name is Broxton. He is basically a carbon copy of my brother in almost every way. Hanging out with Broxton is kind of like going back in a time machine and playing with my brother at that age; you just replace Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Toy Story and that is pretty much it. I will also be an uncle times two in the Spring so that is super cool too. I like being an uncle.

So that is it. I am thirty now and I am finally starting to feel kind of like a grown up. I still play more video games than a cracked out Japanese kid and I have more Legos than any man my age should ever be allowed but hey, life is pretty damned good at the moment and that doesn't look to be changing any time soon. Will I write in this blog again...maybe. I am not promising anything. After all, I can't make more than one post a year it seems and I don't really care anymore. This blog started over five years ago and it has had a good run, we'll see. I would be a shame to let it die...though I kind of already have.

Later.

Another Short Post With Lots of News

Ok here it is!

Earlier this month, I became officially certified to teach Special Education K-12. Go me. It took a year and three lame tests to get but I think it will be worth it. The other upside is that I am done with school again...at least for three years.

Shorty after getting the Spec. Ed. certificate, I applied for and got a new job. I am not teaching Special Ed. but I am working in an elementary school. Essentially, I am doing the same job I was doing, working with kids with issues, only now I am doing it in a school setting and getting paid pretty close to what I would make teaching and getting benefits. Teacher benefits are way better than what I get now but I haven't had health insurance for four years so I will take what I can get. Some is better than nothing. After being in a school for two days now, I can safely say I do indeed want to teach for the rest of my life. I feel so at home in that environment and I like the idea that I am helping out kids who actually need it. Right now, I am pretty happy with my new job.

But why end this post on a calm and serene note? Just before I got done at school today, I got a call...from the Meridian school district....from the head of the Special Ed department in the Meridian district. It looks like I will be interviewing for an actual factual Special Ed teaching job in the next couple of days. If offered the job I will take it. Period. Which sucks because I love what I am doing now and I just started it a few days ago. But I figure I have to look out for my career and I am going into the interview feeling like I have already won. If I get an actual teaching gig, great. If I don't, I still work at a job that I am really enjoying at the moment and only making a couple grand a year less than if I were teaching.

Stuff is looking up lately. Oh and Fall is here! I love Fall!!!!

School Is Done Once Again

Well, I did it. Yesterday, I took my last test for teacher certification in Special Ed. I am pretty sure I passed it and with that little battle won, I am pretty much certified to teach Special Ed. This is good. :)

If you can't tell, I have pretty much left this blog to crumble and decay. I am not sure what else to say, I just don't have the time or the patience to write on this anymore. Facebook has made life a lot easier and I find that since I don't seem too compelled to write on this anymore, the little status updates that Facebook allots me seem to be enough to quench my blogging urge.

Not a ton else has been happening. A few weeks ago, I had a sort-of-but-not-really girlfriend and now I have a sort-of-but-not-really ex. I saw that coming and can't say any of that really surprised me seeing we had nothing in common. When entering into a relationship with someone, it helps to have things in common. :)

Anywho, I wanted to post on here tonight for some reason unknown to me. I will probably post on here again but I don't know when. Life is going well and things are in motion now so that I may be able to actually start a career soon. I really need to get teaching again...and get a house...and kind of be a grown up.

My Six Rules.........That I Try To Live By Most Of The TIme.

When I was growing up, I had fairly simple expectations for my life. I knew I was not going to ever make a ton of money because I have never wanted to do much else other than teach. I think I had a fairly old fashioned view of how my life would go, I would graduate college, get married, get a History teaching job, have some kids, maybe travel a bit, live in a little house, and just kind of be average in my own right.

It is funny how things work out.

Now, I am an uncle....probably on track to fulfill the role of "odd uncle" but nonetheless, uncle. Since Broxton was born I have thought a lot about advice I would give him as well as my own kids when I stumble upon them. I don't know what got me thinking about all of this except that it occurred to me that my job is essentially telling other people how to effectively live their lives when I am not so sure the way I live mine is the best. If people ask me if I am happy, I can't give them a clear cut answer either way. Been better, been worse. People ask me if I really want to teach Special Ed, the answer there is "probably not" but it at least gets me teaching and I do know I want to do that. It isn't a matter so much of wanting to teach Special Ed, more than it is that I can teach Special Ed. People also ask me and joke about me moving away again. I think once you go far away people close to you are sometimes either afraid or eager for you to leave again. For the moment, I like Boise. In the future, I can't say I won't try to take some wicked vacations but I suspect with some regret and relief that my days of living in places not near here are over. I think I am growing up despite myself.

Things I will tell my kids and Broxton someday:

1. Don't expect your life to go as you have planned. I say this with no bitterness; it is the simple truth. I think for a person's life to go exactly how they expected it to go requires an exceptional person and circumstances. I don't know many people who are where they are today because that is exactly where they planned to be.

2. Be flexible, positive, and deal the best you can with whatever comes your way. This kind of ties into the first thing but being positive is the important part, though it is sometimes the most difficult. If you can find good in all circumstances and you find enough good, did anything bad actually happen? I read this in a book once and will probably get it tattoo'd on to me at some point, "Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was." Look at where you are today, what happened to get you here? I like that quote because it sums up the importance of history and the past in one sentence. Good history, bad history, you are the person you are because of it. The same can be said for the world.

3. Be the person you want to be, do what you want to do. The only times I look back and think, "Wow, I was an idiot" were the times I was trying to be something I wasn't. The entire four months I thought teaching maybe wasn't for me is a fine example of this. Be true to yourself.

4. Be afraid as little as possible without getting yourself or others killed. This world and everything in it is an amusement park, enjoy the rides and learn from them. The more you do, the more you learn. Never stop learning.

5. Be happy as much as possible. Sometimes this is a hard one and it is one rule that, like I said above, I am not sure I follow as often as I should. The way I figure it, is that at the end of life, if you can look back and come to the conclusion you had more good times than bad, you had a pretty decent life. Don't waste more time than necessary being sad.

6. The last rule and most important, be a good person. Pick someone in your life that you know to be good and try to pick up as much as possible from them. Sometimes, there may not be a lot of good people that instantly come to mind and when that is the case, the one rule I follow that has never ever let me down is to do what I think would have made my grandpa proud. Happiness comes from good and rule five says to be as happy as you can as often as you can. This means you should try to do a lot of good.