I've had this entire past semester off from school. It has been a nice break free from the boredom that usually comes with time off of school. I have filled this free time with a new job, also at a restaurant as my last one was but this new job is less pretentious and more laid back. Casual fine dinning, downtown, further from my house but it's downtown so we have a very different demographic and being able to walk around downtown after my shift is over is a nice feeling. We serve "modern southern" food which is good, things like shrimp and grits, country fried chicken served with some of the best mashed potatoes I've had and sauteed spinach, sounds simple but it is so good.
I don't work all that much though and since the beginning of September I have been racing my bike. My favorite sport, cyclo-cross, the beautiful combination of road racing on mountain bike like terrain. I was fortunate enough to find a local cycling team to join. Every cyclo-cross race I've competed in thus far has been while riding in the Velosports colors of green white and blue. It has been great getting to know my teammates and racing competitively with a select few people, some people I now consider to be my rivals, people I can compare myself to, to test where my abilities are at. Some of these people are on other teams but one of the reasons I'm so glad to be on a team is because they help provide me with goals. I have found, and I find this is true with all things in life, if you pick someone stronger than yourself to emulate then you will become like them, if they climb mountains well, you will learn to stay on their wheel through the toughest climbs, etc. In many ways cycling can be related to the difficulties and stresses of life. I hope to harness this ability in my studies but as it's been so far I have failed to do this.
I still have a difficult time slogging through school and all the bullshit that is associated with it. Fortunately I am nearly done at A-B Tech, the community college that it seems I've spent an eternity at. I'm hoping to go to Appalachian State University in the Fall with an associates of arts. ASU also has a really good cycling team and I would look forward to competing with them while living in Boone if that's meant to be. I still am not certain as to what exactly I would like to study but I have a feeling that I would enjoy something like Global Studies which is the degree I checked out while visiting Boone a few weeks ago. Global Studies involves learning a foreign language, preferably minoring in it, and also traveling abroad, neither of those things I would mind at all! It would make most sense for my focus to be on Japan as I speak some Japanese already and I've been there twice and enjoy it. At the same time I would very much like to study other cultures and their languages. I suppose graduating with a bachelors especially with a foreign focus would open up new doors for me across various worldly locations anyways. As long as I have opportunities to go to new places to learn, and of course race my bike I think I'll always be happy. The trick is that traveling with a bike is so expensive... Maybe country hopping after a few years is the way to do that to make it worth it. I'm excited for my future after college, the degree means very little to me but it seems as though it is the key to currently locked doors.
My best friend recently came back to visit over Thanksgiving break; He just recently graduated with a degree in film. I've always dreamt of doing something big with friends, traveling the world, professionally dancing, making movies, etc. Since my friend has just graduated he is now desperately looking for work in the industry. I suggested to him that it would be fun to make a documentary together. For the past few years I've had ideas of becoming a photo-journalist but the industry is dying out in part due to the rise of consumer photography and the mass explosion of cellphones, everything is recorded these days and it's not been necessary to send a TIME photographer to shoot pictures of a massacre in Africa There are now citizens around the world who record the events on their mobile devices and upload them online. This is considerably cheaper for the editing agency. I fear the days of beautiful photo-journalism are dying out. The photographs that came out of WWI, II, Vietnam, etc are extremely emotional, powerful photographs of human destruction and at times moments of hope. Anyways, I hope that once I graduate that my friend and I can go to Japan and shoot a documentary possibly about the aftermath of Fukushima, shot both from a photography and cinematic point of view. We are both somewhat versed in Japanese and if my studies of Japanese continue at ASU then I should be well versed in the language to translate and work with people in Japan. I still have thoughts of teaching English in the back of my head as well. The JET program still looks appealing as does teaching in Korea...
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