ThisIsVlad

so it turns out apparently that i give pretty much the worst hugs in the world. well, maybe not the worst, but i hear that joey and i tie for worst place. maybe i need to join some kind of support group…

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i finally integrated a gallery into my site. i spent forever today uploading craploads of photos into it and now have over 800 photos up there. so if you’re bored, and you wanna see some photos, check out my gallery.

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i found this picture of trent being dorky in brandon’s room… heh.

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last week our cat Maddie (aka worm-butt) had to go to the vet. she *so* hates her cat carrier!!

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once again i went to critical mass. it was hellza fun as usual. this time we filled up catherine’s camelback w/ tons of redbull vodka, so the ride was *extra* fun!!

here’s a few more dorky photos from Critical Mass

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i’ve needed a new watch for while now. my old one broke, and yet i continued to wear it for like a month after that. i kept checking the time on it, forgetting that it was broken, and each time thinking “dammit, i need to get rid of this thing!”. well, i finally got a new one… and i’m not sure if i like it. it was a really tough call on what to get. i’ve worn nothing but Swatches ever since like 1990, but none of the Swatches out now really excited me. i didnt want a metal watch. i couldn’t buy watches w/ leather straps since i’ll be tromping through the rain a lot on my trip. so it was a really tough call, but i found a watch online that looked ok, i ordered it… and it’s *huge*. fucking enormous. it’s a dive watch so i can use it while scuba diving which is cool, but i didnt expect it to be so damn big!! i’ve had it for like 3 days now, and i’m still trying to decide if i like it or not. so tough to decide…

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i’ve always hated the saying “what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger”. for some reason it’s always just seemed like a bunch of bullshit to me. taken in the literal physical sense, the saying is pretty much just dead wrong. someone who loses a limb in a car accident, or suffers a horrible debilitating disease will hardly be made stronger by their suffering. but, the saying really isn’t often used for physical problems, instead it’s mainly used regarding random emotional issues like break-ups w/ lovers or being fired from your job. but the thing is, even then, it’s really so often not the case. emotions and feeling are fragile, and crumble easily… they dont always get bolstered up by enduring hardships. a person robbed in an alley will forever be paranoid, an emotionally abused child may never be quite right again, the person once bitten will forever be twice shy.

i look around at people and sometimes they just seems so fragile and delicate… more and more bent and perforated by life as they go along, banged up by things that dont kill them, but sure as hell dont make them stronger. maybe the quote just depends on the person i guess. one can take hardships and use them for strength while others can endure the same hardships and they will only make them weaker. it’s weird, i’ve always been the kind of person who makes the best of things. even the worst situations for me end up not seeming so bad. i often wonder how i turned out like that. is it because my life has been relatively easy? pretty much every negative thing in my life has turned out ok, so maybe it’s just engrained in my mind that things eventually fix themselves. or maybe is it the other way around, has everything in my life turned out ok *because* of a positive attitude?

hrm. i really dont know where i was going with this….

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i went to yet another funeral yesterday. i’ve started attending these things all too frequently. one again, i find myself at the same old cemetary. just a year ago, there was only one person i knew in this cemetary, but by yesterday, that number had risento 5 people. the person who died was my grandmother’s brother’s wife. my grandmother’s brother had died only a week after my grandma, and everyone suspected that it was really just a question of time until his wife would pass away as well.

i really didnt know her all that well, so when i went to the funeral, i wasn’t sure how affected i would be by it. of course, it’s sad when anyone dies, and because of that i was sad, but it’s not like i would be personally affected by her death. regardless of that, the funeral was really sad nonetheless. seeing all the people that were close to her bawling and sobbing was very very difficult… but at the same time… i dunno, in a way it’s all a really beautiful thing depending on how you look at it. i think people are lucky that we care enough about each other to feel such intense and strong emotions when someone passes away. people love each other and slowly form strong unbreakable bonds together and when those bonds are severed, severed by death, the only thing that can break the unbreakable, it is only right that our whole world should come crashing down on us. i think life would be horrible and ugly if we could just shrug off the death of a loved one and not care. it’s only when someone’s absence can really hurt you, that they mean the most.

one thing i really disliked about this funeral, is that they chose to fill the grave at the ceremony. this means they brought in a bulldozer that lowered a huge cement slab into the grave and then filled it w/ dirt. for some reason, it all just seemed so impersonal an too high-tech for me. a bunch of guys in hardhats and a loud-ass bulldozer… my cousin said it was like we were on a construction site instead of a funeral.

so the funeral was pretty rough, and then we went back to the daughter’s house so everyone could eat. a lot of people made some good toasts. russians are all about toasting and giving speeches. it’s completely engrained in their culture. the saddest toast was one given by my grandma’s sister. she’s the last remaining sibling in the family and all of these recent deaths had really shaken her up, and yet she still got up and made a speech.

*sigh* what a day….