Attempts to guilt-trip me in texts really irritate me, especially when the person doing it is someone I already don't like or trust.

Going to get a new car in the spring, once the snow is gone. The truck is just too expensive to drive seventy miles a day anymore. Thinking about either a Ford Fusion or a Honda CR-Z. Also going to get a stick-shift instead of an automatic, better gas mileage and all that.

Feels good being away from Facebook. The only thing I miss is Words with Friends.

Lets listen to some Meat Loaf for a while.

I've asked myself often why I keep helping my brother, even when it was a great inconvenience or I know he's probably lying about why he needs the help. He's not been one to help himself in a way. It's almost always his own fault for the situation he's in.

This morning I realized why. I was dreaming about something random I can't really remember, but I remember the end of the dream right before waking up. I was sitting with my father talking about something, and he got upset over something, almost talking to himself about it. It had something to do with my brother, and then my brother walks in. He realized how upset our father was, and suddenly I felt like I did when we were kids. My brother had done something that tipped my father over the edge, and I wasn't able to help him. I was a small boy again, full of fear of my father and not big enough to help my big brother, who was also not big enough to defend himself. I remember all my brother could do was yell out for our mother, and I can remember the terror in his voice. Of course, our mother isn't large enough to stop my father either, if she had to. My father never hit my brother, but it did go so far at least twice that my he had him pinned to the wall by his neck.

I feel like my brother didn't have a father to go to for help, but instead he had one who would just get angry when he didn't do things right. My brother never made it easy, but still I don't understand why my father was like this, and I'll never ask him because I don't care about the answer. He is and will always be my big brother.

To this day I still hate my father for making me feel that scared and helpless each time it happened. I help my brother when I can, even when it's probably his own fault and he's probably lied to me or someone else about the situation, because I'm big enough to help now, and there isn't that awful fear anymore.

You've shaved for spring. From nice long full beard to clean-shaven and buzzed. You might as well be joining the Army with this look. Of course a week after shaving the weather goes back to frigid temperatures with wind. Now your face is always freezing and you can't do much about the wind getting to your neck unless you buy a scarf.

Roomies smoke too much pot. To you it smells like old roadkill, and they keep using whatever magazines are handy to do their sorting. If they would at least get the motivation to clean sometimes you might not be so irritated. Seriously, it's so hard to get your drink into the cup without spilling it all over the counter, and also too much work to wipe that little spill up with a napkin. How long does that take, three seconds? And one of them has a girlfriend somehow. You should have a harem.

New guy at work will be on your shift tomorrow. Hopefully you got some truckers wanting complicated transactions so you can get past this Trendar hump and he won't be so nervous about it when he's on his own. Other than Trendar he's doing fine.

You brought up the proposal to the roommates about walking around naked, as long as it's only into and out of the bathroom. A resounding, "No." Bummer. They asked for at least shorts. You countered with, "Just a long shirt?" That at least got a laugh out of them, but still, "No."

Watched Juno today for the first time. Likely to be the last time unless it happens to be on television again when you're bored. You still feel warm and fuzzy, one of the better movies you've seen in the last few years.

You feel like you're just about over all the crap your brother did in the past to make you hate him. You don't feel like you hate him anymore, and even seeing the car you paid for being driven by him doesn't bother you. You'll probably be helping him with yard work at his place whenever he calls you about it. You can't really remember a time when your relationship with your brother wasn't hateful, at least coming from you. You're hopeful that you can experience a brother to whom you're actually brotherly for a long time. It's much less stressful, and it's a bit happy even.

You still hate your job. You're almost to the point where you'd rather dig ditches just because then there wouldn't be any customers to deal with.

You can remember that you used to doodle all the time in school, all the way back to first grade. Nowadays you can't think of anything to doodle on the rare occasions when you have the urge to. It's frustrating, having the creative itch but being at the same time blocked from satisfying it. You're not sure when the block developed but it's been with you for a couple years.

Like last night. You felt suddenly creative while watching television, so you ran and got some paper and a pencil to get right to it, then all you could do was sit there and stare at the blank paper. All the creative energy in the world and the only thing you could do was sit there and stew in it, getting nothing onto paper.

You're lucky to get anything written down for this blog anymore, too. When you do get something onto here, it's only because you scribbled it down at work or some other inconvenient place first. The writing does help alleviate some of the creative urge, but it only goes so far.

You've wanted a tattoo for years but only if you can draw it for yourself. At this rate you should be ready when retirement age hits. You have a great idea for what the image should include, but when you try to keep the image in your mind's eye long enough to doodle anything, the best you can do are just brief flashes, each of a different area than the other. Perhaps if you described it in words you could coax out a little more of it. You know you want a small genderless human figure posed as if in carefree flight viewed from behind, seeing only a shadow-image. This figure would be less than an inch long. In the background you can see what the person is flying past.

Dammit, time to get ready to leave work and go home. Time flew by while you tried to get this much down. Inconvenient time and place for writing, as always.

Key Lime Pie-flavored gum is awesome for the first couple sticks. Since those sticks it's just felt like a chore to get through the rest to get my money's worth. I suppose it could be worse.

The Walking Dead was awesome, shame it doesn't come back on until Halloween 2011. I might be able to buy Diablo 3 before then.

The cats are all healthy again. It was an awful November with fleas somehow getting into the house and Eddie getting an upper respiratory infection. Lost a whole paycheck, but hes back to his old ornery self, so it was worth it.

We finally had the first good snow of the season, and goddamnitall my right show has a hole in it that I didn't know was there until now. I've wanted to have a new pair of boots for years so this is a great excuse to splurge.

Still eternally single, but it still doesn't bother me all that much right now. I can't stand certain habits my roommates have so I can't imagine how terrible it'd be for the person sleeping in my bed with me. Maybe next year I'll be interested. Besides, I'm always getting flack for my beard, and if they can't live with the beard then I don't want anything to do with them. Just substituted "live with" in place of "love" so I guess I'm learning to compromise already.

Went to Hallow Weekends at Cedar Point again this year. They did a fantastic job this time with the performers and haunted houses. Last year the wind kept blowing away the fog and it was hard to get scared by the performers, so this year they really went to the next level with costumes just in case it happened again. But there was almost no wind this time, so the fog was there along with the better costumes and makeup making it a big improvement overall.

So at long last I've gotten both parents out of the house. It wasn't intentional, but I'm not going to complain. Two long-time friends have moved in, and I've got the upstairs to myself, though I still need to get some shelving to store my junk. I really could get rid of a lot of it, like an old encyclopedia series that's got to be very outdated by now. No rush, though.

No longer living with a parent is something I've been looking forward to for a long time, but until now wasn't feasible financially. My income hasn't really improved so much as I'm not the only one paying rent anymore. More money left over for nice things now.

My city needs to look into fixing some of the awful traffic light layouts, too, seriously.

It's terrible.

Fully half of my monitor is either completely blank or has content I don't want and cannot get rid of, such as this world cup section. I don't care about the world cup, I don't care about soccer, I don't care what the scores are or who's playing. Can I get rid of this section devoted SOLELY to the world cup? Oh, I can't? Really?

Can I use two columns again so that I can, you know, utilize my entire screen again? No? Really?

OK, maybe this is going to stay, like when Gmail's layout changed. But I can still just use the Classic Layout for Gmail, so I'm sure I can just revert back to the old format for Google News as well, right? No? Really?

WHAT THE HELL?

Well, at least Yahoo! lets me customize a page for news that uses multiple columns and lets me remove any section I don't want and add any new section I want, even custom sections like "Cleveland Browns" or "Penis".

Edit: Ok, I've learned that going to Canada's Google News page lets me use the old format, I just have to delete all of the Canadian sections and add the U.S. sections in. Go Canada.

Epic boredom.

Yup.