Real This Time?
This is terribly fascinating.  I would say, without any scientific polling or analysis of any kind, that I roughly clean my room once every 3 months.  I've only been living in this apartment for about a month and I can think of 3 separate occasions where I have tidied up or completely cleaned my room.  So the statistics have reversed completely, how amazing is that?  I mean, I'm not a clean person at all but I'm changing that.  I clean my dishes right after I'm done using them, I've been picking up trash left around the living room, even when it's not mine.  And not complaining about it.  It's nice to have a clean place.

And it's nice to have a nice place to keep clean, a place worth calling your own.  That's what this apartment is to me now, and I'm not even really staying in my own room, just someone else's temporarily until I move across the hall in August.  I can look out the window and see city lights close by.  They keep me comfortable.  Knowing the orange and white lights outside are there means that civilization is just outside my door, I'm not lost in the woods anymore like some helpless child wandering with his face drenched with tears. 

Having a gym downstairs I think was the simple secret to me getting back into respectable shape.  When its just downstairs and I don't have to drive halfway across town to work out, it becomes infinitely easier to motivate myself into going down there and just running and lifting a few weights.  I'm quite pumped about getting this weight off.  Got Dragoncon coming up, I wanna be in good shape for that.  Or at least, better shape.  So again, hooray for this new apartment complex thing I live in. 

I am so in love with Atlanta.  It's all a dream come true, to be horrendously cliche.  I haven't even put the city to full use.  When I go out and do things, they're pretty mediocre events like just driving down the road to the comic shop, or going to movies, or out to eat.  Shows too, not as many as I would have liked to have gone to, but there are always new opportunities.  Little Five is an oasis of joy, just heading down there and wasting the time or buying a CD is an absolute joy.  I had a day off from class today and though my time was spent well doing laundry and buying toothpaste, I wish I'd gone down there.  It's been way too long since I've been down there. 

Everything just generally feels like a forward, truthful, legitimate movement towards self improvement.  i don't know what my final expectations are.  But I think this part I've figured out:  I'm not changing into someone else, I'm becoming the person I was born to be, but has been hiding underneath all this time.  It's like everyday I pull away some piece of hardened, clay-like, dry flesh and it crackles and breaks in my hand and there's some new flesh underneath, something stronger and brighter.  Some days the pieces are smaller, other days they're larger.  I just hope I have the courage and the will to tear it all away, to go the whole distance.  Encouragement is helpful.

It's only 10 days until The Dark Knight comes out.  That seems like such a long time, but such a short time.  After we'd seen Batman Begins, Justin and I pretty much started our countdown to the sequel right then and there.  I'm especially encouraged by the initial reactions by the critics at media screenings, one critic actually compared it to The Godfather II, The Departed, and The Untouchables.  That's a pretty high class of films to be compared to.  On the same token I saw a great little documentary about Hunter S. Thompson that was done by the same guy who directed Taxi to the Dark Side & Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.  Excellent job done, even if the story dragged on a bit tediously, but then the man did so much in his life it's difficult to narrow it all down into 2 & 1/2 hours. 

All of August is going to be completely free for me.  Should I find a job?  It would be wise.  But I want to do an internship in the Fall.  Conflicts!