greetings, from the future...

there's this guy i see on the bus riding to work with me on most mornings. he's a fairly normal looking guy; probably in his mid-30's, wears sunglasses most days, has dark hair that he keeps slicked back, average height, business-casual. a while ago i noticed he would often make strange/loud snorting and throat-clearing noises. not abnormal, but after he does it every 1-2 minutes on a 25 minute bus ride from 1 foot away from you, it starts getting on your nerves. one of these morning as i was looking at him with disdain out of the corner of my eye i noticed that he kept bringing his hand to his mouth when he would do his cough/snort/clearing thing. i kind of assumed he was just being courteous and covering his mouth. a week or so later and we're on the same bus again, within feet of each other, and i'm seeing his whole routine from a different angle. it turns out he's not just covering his cough, this is what he's REALLY doing: he puts his hand to his m

the only real reason i'm hesitating on going is the cost...   for some reason i find it hard to shell out (probably) about 2k for a trip, but i really should do it. i mean, when else will i have a good friend already over there that knows the area and would be a great tour-guide/travel-buddy. but on the other side of the coin, maybe i'm over-thinking things again, but i also imagine that i'll feel a little... behind? it's just that joe and the people who would be joining us have been living there for a year and are comfortable with the peoples and currency and ways to travel, and i'm going to be feeling totally lost and a bit left out. not that i think they're going to call me "dead weight" and leave me in a ditch on the side of the road, but yea... i over-think things. i'm also wondering if the new-found anxiety i've gained over the past year will cause me to be cranky and anxious; or if maybe the trip will distract me from all the nons

this weekend i had a few strange dreams, sadly i only remembered chunks here and there for the most part, not really enough to write about. i just thought i'd share this one particular chunk that stuck out quite vividly: i was in the den of my grandparent house, which is where the door to the basement is located. meanwhile in the outside world there was a zombie plague spreading like wildfire. i'm not sure who i was with, what we were doing, or what our plan was. i just know we were hunkered down in the den, hopefully formulating a plan. then, out of nowhere a child-zombie busts open the basement door and makes a mad dash at one of us. we somehow managed to subdue him and then we did the next logical thing... we wrapped him tightly in paper-mache. surprisingly this worked really well, and he looked sort of like a zombie/mummy statue. next, it was decided that we needed to find a way to get information from our captive. although i'm not sure what we hoped to learn, other t