Too Easy - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/59/fire

This topic is too easy.

I spin fire.

This is so easy to talk about fire, and about people that aren't afraid of fire, but should be, that I don't even want to write a full topic on this.

I have been burnt.

I've had my leg light on fire, my arm on fire, singed hairs, charcoal markings on my clothes, shorter than normal eyebrows, and I even have a scar on my right arm from when I spun fire and I was too stupid to wear long sleeves.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iTOzyc1efg
I have so many stories about fire it's sort of boring. I've played with fire, almost got arrested for fire, talked to people in Sweden because of my interest in fire, and I've done it all, with fire.

Fire is the least scary thing in the world for me. Spiders are scarier than fire. Fire can be controlled, spun, mastered, and harnessed, that nasty spider that wants to kill you in your sleep because you rolled the wrong way can't.

Fire can be a source of art, creation, and design. Fire can be something amazing and inspirational. Fire is something that you can look at and understand. I know that I should be afraid of fire, and treat it with caution, but if you're in control of it, careful enough that you know what you're doing, and you know exactly what you're doing, fire is a tool that is strong and powerful.

I'm going to call this one in, and just say that I have stories about fire, and hopefully I'll have an excuse to put them in a different piece in this long series ahead of me. We're only in 1997 in this series, we've got a decade and some change worth of material to go over. Hopefully somewhere in there I'll have a better excuse to tell you a fire story in a setting better than an episode titled "Fire".

I've Been To Parties Bigger Than Your Town - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/58/small-towns

I grew up in Las Vegas and I loved it.

Las Vegas is 2+ million people, huge, metropolis of a town. It has everything in there, it has a mix of every culture available, and you can get lost there. You can drive for an hour (on surface streets) and still be in the town, and the town is only getting bigger. North Vegas is growing like crazy, Henderson is practically part of Las Vegas now days, and more people are moving in. I love a huge city. Having all of that at my finger tips whenever I want it, even if I don't want it, is invaluable to me. That's what I want out of a city.

Then I went on my mission.

My first area, Borlange, is, compared to Las Vegas, a tiny town, about 41,000. Then I got moved out into the forest to the absolute tiny town of Karlskoga, that tops the charts at about 27,000 people. It was at that point that I realized that there was no way I could ever live in a truly isolated small town.

27,000 people.

I still shudder at the thought of how small that is. I went to a high school of 4,000 students, and we were only one of the dozens and dozens of high schools in my city. I don't even think that there were 4,000 kids old enough to be in any school from 1st to 12th grade in Karlskoga.

Before I served my mission, I went to EDC 2005.

EDC 2005, was roughly 30,000.

After my mission I went to EDC 2007

In both of those pictures, are just ONE stage of the multiple stages that made up EDC's. But what's depressing about those pictures, especially the second one, is that there are more people in that second picture than there are in the entire city of Karlskroga Sweden.

While in Sweden I realized that I just can't do small towns. Small towns are limited. They have one thing that they do, they have a majority population and there is definitive 'normal' people that are doing good, typical, expected things, and then there is the obvious two people who are the outsiders. If you're not normal, there's no support for you, there's no friends, you're alone. That loneliness, that feeling that no one in your entire city would ever be able to understand you or what you are thinking about, is something I can not live with.

In Karlskoga I found out what it feels like to be one of the only twelve people in the area to believe a specific way. I knew how lonely that felt, how lost you feel, how impossible it is when if you don't get along with one of those people, suddenly you have no one to talk to.

Then there was the utter lack of diversity. I love that I am who I am, but the idea of having an entire city of 27,000 people that are just about the exact same version of one another, is scary to me. I love who I am, but I also need other people around me who live differently, believe differently, live differently, or do anything that I don't consider normal. That opposition is what makes me better, and helps me understand who I am.

This is where my current residence starts to send me up the walls. Pleasant Grove Utah has a population of about 34,000 (again, I've been in parties bigger than this town). Not only is the community small, the town small, but the diversity is small. I realized today that there is not a single take out Thai food restaurant in the area. There's a Panda Express, and then a knock off Panda. I can get a double order of orange chicken on fried rice, but there's no way I can find an order of pad thai, or a healthy gallon sized styrofoam cup full of wonton soup. Everyone here is a copy of each other. Everyone here believes the same thing (or at least says they do). Everyone here is white. It's not by choice people believe and act the way they do, it's because there's no other option, and it kills me.

I am not a small town kid. I can't do it. I go crazy in a small town and run to the very large metropolis of the internet to find enough crazy and opposition to counteract the crazy of what happens in a small town.

Borderlands . . . IN SPACE!!! - The Games I've Played

It's here again, another Borderlands game. The good and bad about it is the simple summary that it is exactly like Borderlands 2.

That's a good thing, but a bad thing all at the same time. Between Borderlands 1 and 2, there were changes in the game. The engine looked different, the story line was updated, weapons systems were created that had never existed before, driving mechanics were polished, and things got better all around the board. Between 2 and the pre-sequel. . . the best that you've got is that it's IN SPACE.

The unfortunate thing is that instead of adding to the fun and chaos that is Borderlands, the space element of the entire thing only ruined it for me. With the space deal, you have to contsantly worry about your oxygen levels. If you don't keep an eye out for it as you're jumping around trying to find where to head next, you can run out of O2 and start dying, which is always a great element of any game, not allowing you to run around and get lost and punishing you for not going where you're not supposed to be. The weird part about this is that some places have atmosphere, where others don't. It's sort of hit and miss. There's some places that you wouldn't expect to have an atmosphere have a solid one, but other places don't have a lick of air. You start jumping in and out of air bubbles so often that you stop worrying about it at some points, and just when you start to enjoy the game and stop worrying about the ever decreasing air bar, your air putters out and you start dying for no other reason than you started to focus on something else besides constantly dying.

Then comes the problem with low gravity. Gravity in space makes your jumps super bouncy. It makes sense. You jump on the moon, you jump further than you would on Earth. Logical, works well, and then you do it in a first person shooter that has monsters, items and everything else in this low, floaty, bouncy gravity. Then, on top of that bouncy gravity, you have booster pads (thank you Mario Kart and every racing game for making those part of our lives for no real reason).

Boosterpads, low gravity, double jumps . . . and a boss.

Just think about that one and all of the bouncy fun you run yourself into. Just when you get the boss in your sight, he drops off of one of the six levels that you're having to jump between, or hits a booster pad that launches him into the sky up to the top level. He's bouncing around like a mad pinball who is always able to locate you no matter where you run to, while you're sitting there trying to understand where each of the jump pads leads to, and by the time you randomly manage to catch a pad that gets you to the same level that he's on, he decides to jump off the ledge and disapear for another four minutes.

With the annoying things out of the way, the story, for some reason, just didn't seem to catch my attention this go around. It was a pre-sequel, which means that it's taking place in that time between the two major stories, and so I knew exactly where it was headed. I knew what Jack was going to become, I knew exactly where things were headed, and the only thing that even seemed slightly interesting was the very last scene after you save the day and someone who you do not expect to be there shows up.

The story is also a quick jaunt through areas, with each map having two or three sidequests in them. Compared to the dozens upon dozens of quests that would come with each area in Borderlands 1 & 2, this made the entire world that it was set in seem bleaker than normal because there was nothing to do. I remember back to Borderlands 2 when I would have a list of 10+ sidequests that I would have to do and I could completly forget about the main story elements for a long period of time as I froliced through the levels doing whatever else was around me that had nothing to do with the actual story, for this one there's never that moment.

The final thing that irks me in a wrong way, was that in Borderlands 1 (and to an extent in 2) there were some minor Easter eggs that were interesting to run into, but most of the "optional" bosses and big things that were out there, were all parts of quests and sub events that you could find at a quest board. They were 'secret' but the game was still nice enough to tell you where they were and give you the option of hunting them down and killing them. Remember back in Borderlands 1 the giant Mothra boss battle? Totally options, totally optional, but at least the game told you about it and tried to add it into the story of the world around you. In this game, the secret bosses are 100% secret. There's nothing that talks about them, nothing that points you in the right direction, and nothing that could tell you that they are there. Without the internet, there is no way that you should ever run into one of the hardest bosses in the game.

You never hear about Iwajira, you don't know he exists, and he's actually hidden in THE FIRST map. He's not even hidden later, or on his own map, or in a weird circumstance like some of the optional bosses that you run into in 1 & 2.At least you knew you were about to get your face wrecked when you were headed on your way to Terramorphous.

Not to mention it's a short game. Compared to it's predecessors, the pre-sequel is a small game. I was about to get angry at it and write it off as just a glorified expansion pack that they wanted you to pay a lot of money for, but then new game plus came in.

The basis for the game is that Athena (remember her?) is trying to tell a story to Lilith (we all remember her) about why she did what she did. You get done with the game, Athena tells her story, and then the best thing ever happens. Brick and Tiny Tina, together again!

The most violent meat head of a man with the most psychotic 12 year old come together, and start to ask Athena questions about her story, and as we learned from Tina's expansion D&D pack in Borderlands 2, everything has to be like it was before, but more awesome.

The entire new game plus is explained by Athena telling the same story to Brick and Tina, but exaggerating the entire thing so that they will like it. In true Brick and Tiny Tina fashion, they love it, but they can't help but interrupt, comment on, and general ruin Athena's story with their side comments.

Just when I was thinking it was going to be a grind to play through the game again (even though a short grind) Brick and Tina show up and tell me to tell the story again, and it's better the second time because I have them to help comment and talk about the story. It's like playing the game with a really weird director's commentary on the entire time.

And then this one gives you some of the good lines from the duo. But that duo makes the game at least 20 times better. It was sort of a lame game, an attempt to add on to some games that are pretty high up on my respected games list that failed, but then it redeemed itself by strapping on the second play through and giving me Brick and Tiny Tina as the voices in my head as the story tries to progress.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a good game. I'm working on my second play through right now, and I'm trying to 100% the entire thing because I don't want to miss a single thing in this game, but compared to the awesome games that were 1 & 2, it just doesn't quite measure up to the creative, amazing bar that was set before it.

Shipping - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/57/delivery

I've never worked in the delivery business, so I can't really add too much int he world of transferring one thing to one place and dropping it off for another person to pick up, but I do have quite a few stories about shipping.

When I got back from my mission I needed a job, so a family friend got me a part time job at a place called Namifiers. It's a stupid company that does nothing but make name-tags and customizable low end swag for companies that want to pay way too much money for a lanyard or a tee shirt. It was menial labor, it wasn't that interesting, and it was the sort of job where the majority of the people that I worked with in the warehouse didn't speak English as a first language, and very few of them had decided to pick it up as their second, and I'm pretty sure that the only time that most of them had ever held a green card was while playing Uno.

Either way, the job in the warehouse was to fill orders, make the stuff, and get things out on time. The only catch to that is that we had an entire huge warehouse to work with, but everything that we did, everything that really mattered was in a small corner of the warehouse leaving us well over 3/4 of the massive floor empty with nothing but random boxes  stacked maybe two or three high, filling up the rest of the place. Most people when they think warehouse think that there are shelves and organization and lots of products, and you'd think for a company that specializes in printing names on things (seriously, that's the ONLY thing they did, their entire company was based on knowing how to put a name on something) there'd be a bit more organization with labels or something like that, but the rows of material just seemed to sprawl in every direction without anything really telling you what was on them except for stenciled black labels on the boxes (that were upside down or turned so you couldn't see them more often than not) to tell you what was inside the mystery box.

Either way, at the end of the day, there was always a rush to get things out before the UPS guy came to pick them up, and this is where shipping got fun.

It is a minor miracle, after seeing how boxes and orders were treated at that place, that any company that is ran anywhere similar to what that place was, ever fills an order. Shipping included the following process: Make a cardboard box. Grab the bin full of name tags, lanyards, or whatever other junk that had names on it was going to some company too stupid to figure out that anyone with a screen printer and a semi-competent graphics designer could do the same job, and dump them into the box. Shove in the invoice in, on, around, or just crumpled up between the name tags, and then slap the box shut with a healthy amount of packaging tape. Most people at this point would then go over to the shipping computer and print out the UPS ticket that would have the address the box needed to be shipped to. That's right, they would completely leave the box that they were working on (just a nondescript brown box that there were hundreds of in the area) to print out the ticket. Once the ticket was printed out you'd head back to your box and hope that no one had moved what you were working on, and slap the sticker on it.

I can not tell you how often I saw wrong orders get the wrong tickets on them, boxes get confused with one another so that they got double filled with two separate orders that weren't related to each other in any way, or even boxes that went out with nothing in them, but had a UPs label on them. Shipping was the final process of getting the order out to the customer at that company, and more often than not, ti was shipping that decided to have some creative fun with their job and completely screw up everything everyone had done to that point to make the order perfect.

Say My Name - My American Life

There is one name change that I have seen in my life, that I have never gotten a solid answer of, or at least not an answer that I agree with. My father, Henry Wesley Walters, changed his name, dropped his first name, and now just goes by Wesley Walters. It’s obvious whenever anyone from his childhood was calling or any of his family was calling because they would ask for “Hank”. The thing about this, is that somewhere, I’m not even sure where, he decides to drop his name, and go with just his middle name. 

The tricky part about this, is that as far as I am able to understand, he never officially changed it. He never went through the steps, going to the legal offices, or doing anything like that, to actually change what he was supposed to be called legally. He just stopped writing Henry on things, and started to write Wesley all over the place and slowly it’s started to change. Legal documents, and even church records, still show him with his full name, but the majority of everything else, shows him with his new name. That’s part of the confusion with all of this because it wasn’t like he got rid of the old name, he still has it. He still has the old name that he didn’t like, but he only has it in super formal, not your every day settings where you have to use your full legal given name. If something asks for his legal given name, out pops Henry, but if it’s just asking for what his name is, he’s Wesley.

The annoying part about this is that as a kid I never thought about it, so I never asked him. I always just thought that his name was changed and it’s no big deal. He had a name when he was a kid, and then he grew up and dropped that name, and now his name is Dad, so it changed a few times and there’s nothing to really worry about. It was by the time that I was old enough to start to understand that changing your name, but not even doing it all the way, was a little weird, that I was already moving on to other things and couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. The best answer that I’ve ever gotten, which I still don’t think is a full answer because it just feels like there’s something missing, is that he just didn’t like it. There was a point in time that he decided that it just wasn’t a good name for him. I’m still not a fan of that because I just know, somewhere deep in the story of my dad’s life, that there’s more to it. There’s never a story that is that simple. I work with students every day talking about how they need to add more details into their writing and they are able to do better than what he gives me.

The worse part about this, is that because I’m me, and my mind goes running a million miles an hour, especially when I’m bored and don’t have much else better to do with my life, I start thinking of ‘better’ more valid reasons that he would change his name. The tricky part about playing that game is that it’s not a legal change. The tricky part about it is that he has something like four or five versions of his name. He’s Henry, Hank, Wesley, and/or Wes. Depending on who you are, how formal or informal your interactions with him are, you get one of four different names, and only one of them is his actual legal name!

My favorite theory, the one that makes most sense to me, si that he ddn’t like something he became or did when he was a teenager (he made the swap somewhere around college, I’m not even sure about when it happened) and so to move on from that life, to show that he was a different person that acted differently, he decided to go with the new name. That’s the one that makes the most sense to me, besides the lame excuse of “I just didn’t like it,” but if you’re trying to move on and/or get rid of a previous life with mistakes in them, why in the world are you keeping it as part of who you are?

Let’s go with the worst case scenario here and say that he really just didn’t like it. As lame of an excuse and a story as that is, let’s assume that the name change really was that monotonous. Who does that? Who thinks that the name that they were called by their parents while growing up, the name that they identified with, the name that is who they are, just wasn’t good enough? There has to be more of a story here! There has to be something in his life that triggered him to make the swap, because I have never seen/met someone who changed their name ‘just because’. There is always a reason. There is always something that triggers it. There is always something better than the person got bored being called a name their entire life by everyone around them, and so they just decided to mix things up and swap it over just because the first name wasn’t “good enough.”

As much as I wish I could get a solid answer, or at least a full story, he’ll never tell me, so I have ot live with the fact that my dad changed his name sometime around his 20’s, and that he’ll never tell me why. Or at least he’ll never give me a reason that I actually believe, because ‘just because’ is not a valid reason to do anything.

Hiding!

Addison loves to 'hide'.

It's exactly what you would expect out of a two year old. It's cute, she thinks she's invisible, and I play along to make her happy. She loves it when I act like she's not there and she's actually hiding, or it takes me a few tries to figure out which room she is in or where she's at. She's not actually hiding, in fact she's just about as conspicuous as she could possibly be because she typically starts yelling out, "Hiding!" over and over again to make sure that everyone knows that she's invisible and can not be found with her head buried into the corner of the couch or a pile of blankets.

I am 28 years old, and I'm starting to realize that in a slightly more adult way, I've been doing the same exact thing in my own life. I keep trying to push things away, and keep trying to hide from what is staring me right in the face, but it's there. As much as I try to avoid it, it's there.

I can't hide any better, and I think it's about time that I suck it up, fess up, and just accept the cards that have been dealt to me. No more hiding, time to pull my head out from behind the pillow that I'm covering my face with, and start facing the truth.

This is going to hurt.
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1987/10/there-are-many-gifts?lang=eng