Nasa shuttle Atlantis and space station seen passing in front of Sun | Mail Online.

I think I’m going to retire my Tumblr, and just post awesome stuff here to go along with my irregular essays. Cool pic to celebrate the new direction, huh?

I love bowling, but haven’t been since before Christmas. I wanted to be a teacher, but that probably isn’t happening anytime soon. I enjoy cartography, but dislike my current job in that very field. I don’t have a favorite flavor of ice cream, candy bar, pizza topping, or color. I’ve dabbled in Art (Intro to Drawing, senior year), Engineering (Civil, majored for one year), and Television (Four years working the local PBS fundraiser). Would I call any of these things my passion in life? No, probably not.

This leaves me in a bind. We’ll avoid the implications these revelations have on life (I get by just fine. After all, Da Vinci invented the helicopter AND painted the Mona Lisa); but from a blogging perspective, I’m stuck. What should I focus on? What can I write about?

Maybe I should look back to my writing past. Back in high school, I edited my school newspaper. Well, technically, I was assistant editor, but I still had my fair share of lead editorials. What topics did I write about then? Are there any trends?

There are three editorials that I remember specifically. My first ever editorial basically ripped our student council a new a-hole. I attacked them as a do-nothing body that was more interested in having an additional item on a college admissions letter, rather than a group interested in bettering the students they represented (Note, I was far less elegant in my writing back then). The day it came out, a classmate in my German class came up to me and started yelling. As a council member, she wasn’t happy at all! How could I have written something so uninformed? My response was simple; I am a lay-student. If I don’t know, then how many others do? What I remember coming out of it was a new feature in our paper. Every week, a council-member wrote in to tell us, the students, what they were up to. It was amazing to see that I could shape the message like that.

The second editorial I remember penning was for an April Fools issue. The school had to have been evacuated for bomb scares five or six times during the year. Columbine was still fresh on everyone’s minds. So, naturally, I decided to go there. I wrote that, for maximum security in the school, every student, teacher, and administrator should carry a firearm. To keep the natural order of things, students would get handguns, teachers machine guns, and, I quote, administrators “BFGs”. It is probably the best satirical writing I have ever done. I try to be funny when I can. Sure, the emphasis is on “try”, and not “funny”, but I do what I can.

The third editorial I remember writing was a direct result of probably the most famous editorial written during my time at the paper. My editor, Joe, was hunting for something to write an editorial about. Being my cheeky self, I told him he ought to write a negative article on negativity, because it would be ironic and cool. Unfortunately, most readers didn’t catch just how ironic Joe was. Our fearless School Board decided to grill the student rep about it. The local papers had their say; even our adviser was shaking his head over the piece. So I decided to write an article in his defense.

Oh man was that a fun thing to write. I slammed everyone I could in the space I was given. I even called out a School Board member by name (generally a no-no in high school newspapering). I remember a friend of mine, who worked in the SAU office, telling me that there weren’t too many happy people after they got their hands on that editorial. Strangely enough though, the issue went away, and Joe and I were left to continue our weekly diatribes.

I think I can learn something from these earlier attempts at writing for an audience. I want to make an impact. Even if my readership is in the single digits, I want those people to keep coming back for more. I want to make an attempt to be humorous, because sometimes it’s tough to lay off the bad jokes and horrible puns. It’s more fun for me if I write that way, hopefully more fun for you too.

Drat, you know what? Despite all of this rambling, I still haven’t come up with an actual topic to write about. Maybe in my next post. Perhaps I’ll rename this blog “Writer’s Block” and write about how I can’t find anything to write about.

Then my life fell apart.

I guess, in hindsight, it wasn’t all that bad. Breakups tend to suck, but I took this one particularly hard. Took me about four months to get over the depression, found myself ruining any chance to keep in touch with my ex; I mean really, I wasn’t doing too hot. And my Livejournal. Wow! What a crazed lunatic I must have been to have wrote some of the things I posted there. As I recovered from “the dark times”, I found myself abandoning online writing in general, both here (in its former incantation), and Livejournal.

And now I’m back.

My friend Liam recently went through some big life-changes. He quit his job managing at a Gamestop, moved halfway down the coast, and just aced his first semester of full-time classes in four years. He’s been blogging regularly at liamclisham.com now for the past couple months. I envy his new-found dedication, to his life and to his writing. He has a bunch of interesting regular features that I would love to steal if he were to stop blogging, but I doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon.

So where does all of this leave me? I think I’m going to try my hand at one or two posts a week. Things here will probably be related to my personal experiences; most writers can’t get away from them no matter how hard they try. What I do want to do is provide a little more than just a diary. Maybe I can dazzle you with my dry wit, share some relevant youtube clip or picture, or write an essay on, well, whatever the hell I feel like writing about. Hopefully it can be more than a diary, and who knows, maybe I can get an audience bigger than one.

There is no clean, potable water in Boston right now.

Sucks, right? I mean, I can’t brush my teeth, cook anything of consequence, or drink anything other than beer.

Wait, this is AWESOME.

Word broke out (Ha!) about the water main break at around 5pm yesterday evening. By 5:30, roommate Sara and I were at the Beacon Hill Tavern, doing our best to stay hydrated with IPAs and Woodchuck ciders. Yes, I drink Woodchuck cider. Want to fight about it?

We chatted about life, our non-dynamic waiter (Nick? Steve? Peter?), our living situation (may it continue for another year), and the absolutely gorgeous weather we found ourselves sitting in, at our corner table on the sidewalk. The spinach dip was delightful, and we even managed to trade up for a waitress with a personality. Sure, the truck blaring out boil-your-water messages Nightmare Before Christmas-style was kind of creepy; but overall, life without water was kicking ass.

It really wasn’t until today that I began noticing that, hey, the clear liquid might be hiding something.

I tried to cook some chicken to put on a salad. No, can’t cook, because it leaves a mess, and there is no clean water for dishes. Oh, I’m thirsty, but to put more water in the brita, someone has to boil the water first (Thanks Sara!). Brushing teeth? Major pain in the ass. I did my laundry this afternoon. Should I have?

The moral of the story: Most likely, the people of Boston are fine. Doing your dishes with this “un-treated lake water” probably isn’t the best of ideas, but it’s probably not going to kill you, or even make you sick. Take it from someone who’s been drinking well-water run through a single filter for most of his life; not having UV-treated, chemically-balanced water isn’t the end of the world, it just gives you an excuse to get drunk.

Seriously, I’m kind of a home-body. I spend four figures a month to live in downtown Boston, but I rarely utilize my distinct geographical advantage. Maybe I need more friends. This is besides the point.

Because I got to go out tonight.

I was finishing up my work for the evening, thinking about what movie I was going to knock off my Netflix Instant Queue, when I got a call from my Dad’s friend Bobby. Bobby mentioned he had four tickets to the Museum of Science that he could’ve used anytime, but were due to expire on this very evening. Was I available? Well, as they say on South Park, “Does the Pope protect child molesters?”

So I walked to the Museum of Science, aka, the Holy Mecca of my childhood. A place that I could only visit once a year if I was lucky. A place that, as I visited this evening, I found as familiar as the living room in my apartment. “I remember this room, this is where the 3D model of Mount Everest is located,” I told Bobby. “The contours are measured at 5 meters.” Did I read the accompanying sign? No. We walked around the Blue Wing, before hitting up the big-ass Van De Graaf Generator in the electricity room.

Then, we hightailed it to the Omni Theater. Most half-rate science museums might have an Imax theater for educationally-minded films. The Museum of Science in Boston, goes several steps further. Imax … DOME.

We watched two films. One was about Antarctica, and included some really neat video of penguins swimming underwater. The other video, one that I have seen many times before, was about the science of risk-taking. Who wants to watch helmet-cam footage of a basejumper on a screen like that? *Raises hand*

We ended up missing out on a chance to take a simulator ride in the lobby, because that little bit of fun closed at 8:30. Boo, hiss, etc.

The Museum of Science, Boston. Unlike so many other childhood memories ruined by adulthood, this one certainly stands the test of time.