So. I'm twenty-one now. All old and stuff. Feels pretty much the same as always, actually. The cool part, though, is that now I can buy alcohol and drink scotch late at night while working away at a typewriter and throwing a tennis ball against the wall. i'm outlining a new writing project...

Now a little story; block-quoted for formatting goodness. I originally had this as part of the general entry, but it ended up being one excessively long paragraph. Hence the block quotes of awesomeness.

I think I may fall into a crowd of select twenty-one year olds who don't actually get wasted on their birthday. I had no plans to drink whatsoever, actually, but I relented at one point in the day for a single drink. My parents and my newly-sixteen (her birthday is two days prior to mine) year old sister came down to celebrate the day with me and we all went to Chile's, my restaurant of choice (I'm totally high-class), and at some point before we ordered I decided to go to the bathroom. When I came back out, we had a waiter, which took about fifteen-twenty minutes to actually achieve, and was asked what I wanted to order to drink. As all of the winners on the planet know, Diet Coke is the only rational response to such a query. Though, apparently my Mom had been talking to the guy and mentioned that it was my birthday. I was momentarily in fear of a squad of waiters and waitresses bursting forth from under tables, behind curtains, and dropping down the ceilings to join in unison to perform their rendition of "Happy Birthday" (complete with fireworks), but it didn't happen. That is good, though, because I told my mom that if she went through with it that I'd emotionally emancipate myself from the family.

Anyway, though, the waiter responded to my Diet Coke mandate with a "Are you sure you don't want a drink? It's your birthday, dude. Do you like beer?"

(Not sure why. I'm an innocent little dewdrop).

"Kinda, yeah, but I don't know -- not really in the mood to dr--." I paused for a moment and realized that my parents had been fairly tough in their prodding me to drink and figured out that it actually probably meant more to them for me to drink than anything else, "Well, I didn't bring my ID."

The waiter paused for a moment and surveyed the parents, "S'alright, you look like an honest guy to me. What do you want?"

I took a moment before I could figure out the name of beer I actually liked. "Uh, I'll take a Labatt Blue, I guess."

Then he pulled an unexpected card from his deck of questions, "Want that short or tall?"

I looked around for help. Nobody threw suggestions at my face. "I'll take a tall, I guess."

And there were cheers and grins spread around. Everybody was happy. And then I cured cancer and eliminated AIDS. I then promptly forgot my discoveries due to my easily intoxicated system.

Unfortunately, what this story doesn't relate is the group of five-six sweaty college guys who belched loudly and shouted out any dishes of interest they found on the menu. They also pointed at other people's tables and yelled out a question along the lines of "Is that shit good?" My Dad and I got annoyed with this very quickly, so my Mom ushered us out in a hurry. I then came home, watched the two and a half hours that made up Part 1 and Part 2 of the Battlestar Galactica finale (splendiferous), and then Hobbes and I played Age of Empires for my DS (surprisingly awesome; a longer review at a later time) while I waited for my computer to receive a long overdue format. Overall it was an absolutely spectacular day, even if all I really did was relax. This relaxation actually greatly angered most people, though. Apparently taking my Birthday to do what I wish is a bad thing. Shrug.

Also, I'd like to extend a big "Thank You" to everyone who messaged me or some other sort of communication method regarding a congratulation of my reaching seven thousand, six hundred, and seventy consecutive days of living. My Facebook profile is now filled to the very brim with birthday messages ranging of the general variety to the variety where a big, loud black man threatens to insert something named "Bruna" into my bed to molest me whilst I slumber.

A quick note on games: I'm currently enjoying the single-player campaign for Act of War and I'm also going to be devoting some major time to Red Orchestra tomorrow when it's unlocked at Steam at 2:00pm EST. I'd write more on these games but I'm not particularly in the mood at the moment. I'm also trying to consolidate my entries into fairly easily definable categories for organizational purposes. Eventually I'm going to add a filter to the main site so that certain readers can only read the entries under the categories that appeal to them, but for now I'm just going to make my rambling entries fairly general rambling. My game-related articles are going to be a bit more formal and focused on a single game at a time.

I'm planning on beginning work on Chapter 2 of Paradise this weekend. So those of you that come here for that particular aspect of me can look forward to that. I'll upload whatever I get written over the weekend late Sunday night.

For the movie front, I'll give a one-sentence review of every movie I've seen since Friday. The Hills Have Eyes -- holy disappointing, Batman -- this movie should have been more like its incredibly awesome opening ten minutes. The Ring 2 was more of the same, but I was quite pleasantly surprised with how well that turned out. Saw II did everything the original movie did, but it just did it so much better. Saw II and the Amityville Horror remake take top honors for the bestest horror movies I've seen this year by far (yes, I know the latter was just a remake, but it was still awesome). I'm really looking forward to Slither, though; if only because it looks like an awesome horror/comedy with one of my mancrushes in a leading role. Only two and a half more weeks for this one.

Oh, how I love March.