It's Friday night, and I”m home. I'm too damn tired to go out even if I had any plans. So instead of going out, I'm here drinking, playing Xbox, and watching TV. This weekend should be interesting. Lots of soccer on, between the usual European leagues, MLS starts up this weekend. RBNY isn't playing, but everyone else is. Fox Soccer Channel is showing I think several games tomorrow. I'm going to check them out, even though a couple of the teams are ones I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire, but still it's soccer in the US. Something over a decade ago wasn't even present. RBNY starts their season next weekend, and I can't wait for it.

Other than that, this weekend is sort of a cleaning weekend. going to clean out some stuff I don't need and try to minimize the amount of crap I have. I also have to get my car for being donated. All I have to do is Sunday is take off the registration and plates, and it's good to go Monday when it's scheduled to be picked up. I'm over the whole “it's my dad's old car, I shouldn't get rid of it”, and right now I'm just focused on trying to find ways to save money to get another car.

That's something I've been trying to do recently. I've been doing some exercises I learned to try to boost my self-esteem and help make me focus on succeeding rather than just sitting here on my fat ass stagnant. So far the exercises I am doing is helping, but it's still baby steps. A lot of what I have to change is more breaking of habits than anything, but it's something i need to do. I'll let you in on one thing I am doing. I wrote down 10 positive things about myself, five that I know, and five things I can do, but need to work on. read them over and over in the morning when I first get up, and throughout the day I read them a few times. The idea is that if I keep these things in mind, then over time, they will stick in the back of my mind. I got this idea from a book I've read in the past, and thought I would try it. I also know this works from my senior year in high school, but never thought to try this since. Any Stanners who read this should remember the envelope you got from the senior Encounter of various notes from various friends and family-sort of the same idea, but it's yourself reminding you of your positives rather than friends/family. I actually found my envelope and read it the other night, damn near made me tear up.

Side note-when I found this envelope, I found another one I made of correspondences that I had with someone; old emails and messages that made me feel good that someone out there gave a damn about me in the time i questioned it. this wasn't a positive experience, since reading all this made me absolutely enraged at this person over how things really ended up being, and myself for being the spineless sucker for falling for all this. It made me so angry I wished I never met this person, something I never felt about anyone before. In the end I learned something and the anger and rage I felt did in an odd way bring me closure, so it's all good now.

In doing all this, I have remembered something that I used in life that I should start doing again. It's a rule a boss at an old job showed me, and it can be used for any aspect of life, professional or personal. it's pretty simple. When you do any form of communication with anyone, like you call a chick you met, or you are calling a potential candidate for a job (which is how I learned the rule), if you have to leave a voicemail or the other person said that they will call later or call them later, Give them three days after the day you first tried to make contact. What I mean is if you tried to call/email/Im someone on a Monday, they have until Thursday to respond. If there is no response, call again and then wait another two days. if still no response, don't try any more contact. After this, they don't deserve the time of day from you, let alone another attempt at contact. Now after all this they contact you, I personally really scrutinize whatever reason they give why they haven't gotten back to you. most times I don't bother with them after this conversation, since in reality they couldn't make any time for me a couple days ago and now contacting me on their leisure, that to me is a form of disrespect. I can give two examples of how this worked for me: one personal and one professional.

The professional example was this. my boss told me to call a candidate he wanted for a position he had open in another part of the company (I was doing various office crap-typical temp job). So I call the guy and get his voicemail. I leave a message saying that I was, what company I was from, and why I was calling. I asked him to please respond as soon as possible. I tell my boss this, and he said call back in three days if you don't hear anything. So I wait the three days, and call again. I get his voicemail again and say the same thing I did the first time. My boss says let him know in a couple days if anything comes up. Couple days pass, and nothing. My boss just simply said “Oh well, here's my second choice. I have no time to wait for those who have no respect to call back to give an answer one way or another.”

Now for my personal example: I was talking to this chick for a week or so about a year ago, things were going well and it was all good. We choose the next weekend we'll meet up over the weekend for coffee or something. I say cool. A couple days later I call her up (this is on a Tuesday) I get her voicemail. I figure she's busy and I leave a message saying hi and call me. A few days later pass, and on Friday I call her again and no answer. I leave her a massage to let me know when she wants to meet up for coffee, and figure she'd call me back. After all, she suggested we meet up. the weekend passes, no answer, and her number is deleted from my phone. She called me back, I didn't pick up since why should I if she wouldn't for me. She left a message to say sorry she forgot about meeting up, and asked me to call her back. Well, that was the last time I heard from her, I have no respect for those who claim to forget about something THEY suggested, and don't have a balls to at least admit they didn't want to meet up.

SO that's what was on my mind tonight. hope someone got something out of this. I shouldn't really share all f this knowledge, I could write a book of all this and make a mint. It would put my gifts of writing, entertaining others, and somehow making things understandable for others. Who knows, maybe that can happen one day. I've seen weirder shit happen in my life so far., and that wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary.