2 Year Anniversary!

Holy shit! Two years ago today I created Sycophantic Laughter! When I started this blog I had no idea what I really wanted to do with it or where it would take me. I never really thought about the longevity of the blog, so now that it is two years old, and I've updated it with some regularity over the span of those two years, there is actually some information here that might be mildly entertaining. I still find entertainment in it, and that's all that really matters to me anyway, so I'm satisfied. For as long as this blog continues, I think I will use November 28th, the anniversary, as a day to blog about the year that has passed, a reflection of some sort. I'll start with some of the larger topics. A year ago at this time I was still in undergraduate college beginning to think about final exams coming up very soon as I returned to school from Thanksgiving break. Today I'm in jail attempting to avoid dropping the soap in the shower. I have just begun to serve my five year sentence at the local pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Actually, I'm working full time for lowly wages and I'm desperately searching for another job with much more room for growth and advancement that is not located in the young adult wasteland that I currently find myself in.

This also marks the first year since eighth grade that I have not been part of a school's track team. I'm planning on running at a mini meet or two, maybe all three, in December. Then I'll evaluate where I am in terms of track shape and consider joining a track club. I would really like to continue running track for a little while longer while I'm still capable. I also miss the adrenaline rush of hearing the starter call "runners to your mark!" What a rush that is, there's nothing like it. That adrenaline rush of knowing it's time to race, let's see what all this practice has been for, rivals no other feeling I have yet had in my life. Track has had an extremely large impact on my life and I hope to continue to compete in some capacity for a bit longer. I also have the insatiable desire to perform better than I have before and beat all my personal bests.

Hooray for 2 years of bitching and nonsense!

I also recall on Thanksgiving one year ago (2011 for all you dumb asses out there) my uncle asking me if I had a girlfriend, to which I replied the negative. Then he asked me if there were any potentials, to which I said yes, because there was one. Over the course of the year that one has lowered to none. Then just the other day I saw one of my friends from high school that I've only seen sparingly since he went off to college the year before I did. One of the first things he asked me was if I was seeing anyone. I'm absolutely not! In fact, I've gone blind! He told me he wasn't having any luck either, and that all girls are crazy. I think it's funny how generalizations get thrown around when speaking about girlfriend/boyfriend relationships. Girls tend to say that all guys are the same and, in my experience, boys tend to say that girls are crazy. I disagree with both statements. I look at individuals. There are some boys and girls that I like, and there are also some boys and girls that I most certainly do not like. Of course people can change how I perceive them based on their actions toward me or just in general. This doesn't happen often though, for the most part once I get a certain reading on a person, that reading does not usually change. Even people that I like piss me off immensely from time to time, but that's no reason to completely change your feelings on them.

What I'm saying is I don't consider myself a profiler, just because I think one girl is a crazy bitch does not mean that I think all of them are. Even when I've had failed relationship stuff happen. I actually still speak occasionally to a girl that I once got close to even though I haven't physically seen her in about 3 years now. The funny part about this section of my life over the past year has to do with the girl that I had in consideration for a girl friend. During my junior year of school, mainly the second semester (2011 again if you have trouble following), I spent a great deal of time thinking about how to tell this girl that I did not want to date her without hurting her feelings. All I can say is that the tables turned a bit, but as the old, wise Rafiki said, it's all in the past.

Now I'm going to perform a complete 180 and talk about something I started almost a year ago, a blog post about how life is like Mario Party. I've mentioned this piece of work in various other posts over the past year, but still have not finished it. I have actually only sat down to contribute to this piece just once. In one sitting early last December I poured some thought into this work. Whether I finish this piece or not, I'm going to continue mentioning it just so you remember and keep the hype up (but there really is about zero hype). I think I'm going to Duke Nukem Forever it, and by that I mean I'll keep talking about it for years upon years, and maybe ten years from now I'll release it when the hype is about to boil over and everyone will be severely disappointed by the piece of shit that I took so long to put out! How do you like them apples?!

One thing I'm glad that has changed in my life over the last year is that I'm out of school. You have no idea how happy I was to graduate. I couldn't wait to get the f**k out of there. I know that I would not have felt this way had I been able to live with the same group of guys I did sophomore year, but damn the end of senior year dragged on like a cancerous tumor killing me from the inside. If there is one thing that is for certain, I was not happy at all during the last stages of senior year. I'm very happy to have peace and quiet at night for sure.

I think I'll also take this time to look into the future. I hope to get the chance to make Fagula with my friends. Fagula would be a short film about gay Dracula, who would say "I vant to suck your dick." I also want to create my own series of creative stories. The main villain, while I don't know what his name or motive would be yet, would say "suck my clock" a lot.

Honestly I don't really know what else to say now. My life has changed immensely over the past year, much of if for the better, but I can only sum it all up in the vagueness that I just told you. I guess there are multiple layers and I have presented some for your entertainment, torture, or however you feel when you read my crap. I am happy to report that the week leading up to this two year anniversary was amazingly great. I spent the weekend hanging out with some friends that I don't see with much regularity anymore and I was highly amused at how surprised these people were that I came out drinking with them. I think they were all pleasantly surprised. I had a great time, too, and I'm looking forward to what the future holds...

Toninho or Mark?

Today marks the passing of another monotonous day filled with mundane tasks, some which are quite menial. Thus is my life at my temporary assignment. I get really bored at work all the time which prompts me to think some very strange thoughts and conduct some social experiments that are probably only amusing to myself. I have been at this job for about five months, but it was originally only supposed to be an assignment lasting a few weeks. The main point is that I have been there for almost half of a year now. The reason that I am bringing this up is because one of the people that works at my place of employment calls me Mark. I realize that sounds a lot like my actual first name, but there is a sign outside my office that says you have to check in with Toninho (it doesn't say Toninho, it has my real name, but it would be funny if it said Toninho) if you are a visitor or you're delivering some shit. So I'm not going to say anything. I'm going to let this continue until she either realizes that my name is not Mark or I move on to another job, whichever comes first. I'll take bets now on which will come first.

During the hours of the day when I lack much to do I get to thinking ludicrous thoughts. I've been contemplating penning a book titled There and Black Again, a title playing off good old Bilbo Baggins' There and Back Again. My tale would not concern a Hobbit, though, rather it would be about the adventures of a black man in the wonderful United States of America. This story would paint an astonishingly bright picture of a black male in our current world dealing with economics, successes, failures, triumphs and downfalls, but mostly stereotypes and racism. I'll give a brief synopsis here of this tale that I will never actually write, but I'll certainly think about it very hard. The main character would be named Lamichael, who was raised in hood with his younger sister Shaniqua by their single mother, Lafonda. After a rough childhood, Lamichael excels on the football field and manages to get a free ride to Arizona State University where he neglects attending class and leaves for the NFL after his second year (but he was still at freshman standing). He makes it in the NFL garnering a lucrative contract with the Oakland Raiders (welcome to Oakland, bitch!). However, this is when tragedy strikes, Lamichael's career is ended after four years when he tears his ACL.

Depressed about losing his athlete status and ability to support his little sister and mother, Lamichael tweets nonstop, thinking people care about what he has to say. Lamichael gets into recreational drugs and begins drinking in an effort to drown out the pain of his lost career and his sister turning into a whore. The recreational drugs and alcohol lead Lamichael into harder drugs and he's addicted. Lamichael uses all his money on drugs, alcohol, and helping Tyler Perry create more shit until one day Lamichael is back to the hood with nothing. Nothing to show for his once wonderful football career. There and black again.

In other news, I was proposed to today. I brought a Sobe beverage to work today for consumption during lunch. When I opened the plastic bottle and glanced at the cap, it read "MARRY ME?" I pondered the question for a little while before coming to the conclusion that this could never work. I respect the bottle cap's straight forward question and enthusiasm, but I think we are two incompatible pieces of this world. I declined respectfully and will remember the day for all of eternity. In the end I took my happiness into account as the largest factor in this matter, and I think I can do much better. Speaking of love (well, sort of), a few posts ago I shit on Green Day for the release of their song "Oh Love." I ripped the song and said that it sounds like modern Green Day so I wasn't really surprised. I am happy to say that most of Green Day's new music from the albums Uno! and Dos! is actually pretty good and reminiscent of what Green Day used to sound like. Hooray for Green Day for making fun, catchy music again! I like this type of Green Day much better than the Green Day that produced very political music during the 2000s. The explicit, unedited versions of both albums are the way to go, I don't like edited music, f**k that shit.

While I'm on the subject of music, how about Fifa soundtracks? I think they are fabulous and Fifa is my favorite way to discover new music. Go listen to The Naked and Famous and Youngblood Hawke now, both brought to my attention by Fifa 13, which is a great game by the way. I'm still struggling to decide if I should purchase Black Ops 2 or not, but I must say there have been some very good games coming out lately.

I am aware that Halloween has passed, but going off what I have mentioned about Halloween over the past year, I found a video that backs up my thoughts. How fitting that this video should come to me courtesy of 30 Rock, a truly spectacular show which I consider my favorite at the moment. Feel free to view the video below.

You know what's coming up that I find exciting? Sycophantic Laughter will turn two years old in less than two weeks! I can't believe that I've had this blog going for that long and managed to garner so many readers! Get it because not many people actually read any of this? Just got to keep sucking until you suckceed. Maybe one day one person will stumble on this blog and get some marginal entertainment, but probably not. Now that I think about it, this blog is basically what I've gone through in my "adult" life since I created it shortly after my 21st birthday. A birthday that we can agree marks adulthood since by this age you can drive, vote, buy cigarettes, buy porn, gamble, and drink legally. I would like to thank all my friends that are still with me at this point, they are all important to me. Recently I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to take a Dennis Eckersley approach to people that fail to add any value to my life, "f**k 'em."

One last random interjection that has nothing to do with anything else I've written of in this post. Let's talk about Twitter. Twitter is a social media site that doesn't really bother me because the whole thing is basically bullshit. By that I mean that it's just a status update machine, because we really needed one of those. I like Twitter though because it limits the amount of pointless stupid status updates on Facebook, something that seriously needed combating. Also, most of the accounts I follow are run by people I don't know, so I don't see as much useless shit that I don't understand or care about. What I do notice about Twitter, in regards to people that I follow that I actually know, is that most of the communication on Twitter goes back and forth between people that see each other every day. Most of the people I know on Twitter tweet things that pertain almost exclusively to the people they live with at school or see all the time, and then the people that these tweets pertain to are usually the only ones who respond, favorite, or retweet the tweet. So, in my opinion, I think that's useless. Why not just talk to them or text them? Just an observation of mine. I think Twitter makes people feel like they have a voice, so hopefully that helps them sleep at night. I know it helps me sleep.

Yeah, f**k 'em

Lucky you, I'm done now. Thank you for spending, maybe even wasting, a few moments reading. Be champions.

I R Perplexed

Yesterday, just before leaving from work to enjoy the weekend, I was offered a full-time position at the business where I have been working on a temporary basis since the middle of July. When I first took this position it was strictly temporary and it was only supposed to last for 30 days I think. Now it's November and I'm still there. And now I have the option to make it a permanent thing, but the question is do I want that? I don't know right now. The position is not what I had, at any point, envisioned myself doing for a career and I'm not sure I want to commit to it at this stage in my life. What I really want to do is go work in a much more booming area for people in the young adult age range like myself. I have no problem with the area I'm working in now, except that it is a wasteland for young adults. If I was in my forties looking for a nice quiet place to live/work, I would probably be all for it. But at this point in life I want to go do things and not have to drive for an hour plus to get anywhere near a good time. I also think that accepting the position full time would make continuing to run track extremely difficult given the location of indoor tracks compared to where I live now. Also, I don't want to live in my parents' house for the rest of my life and I don't think I could afford even rent with the money I would be making.

Sooo, I'm very perplexed right now. As of right now I plan on keeping the job on temporary terms. I just feel like I want something more, actually I know that I want something more. I'm happy, but I'm not satisfied with my life yet, at least to the point where I would basically decide to live for a decent part of my young adult life within the constraints of the aforementioned (I like that word if you haven't been able to tell from any of my other posts) wasteland. I still want to run/compete, I still want to meet new people that are around my age, I still want to be able to go into the city on weekends and not have to trek for over an hour to get there, and I still want to eventually get an apartment or some place to live with friends. That is a very vague description of what I would like my life to be like and I'm not sure accepting this offer will allow me to live out any of those things.

In conclusion, I'm a huge piece of shit because I'm most likely going to keep this a temporary thing. I'm sorry, but my hopes for life surpass what I believe I can accomplish at the job I currently hold. Like I said before, I'm happy, but I'm not satisfied. In fairness, though, I doubt I'll be satisfied until the day I die. I always want more or something better, sometimes I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. Oh well, I've put up with myself for twenty-two years, so I think I can stand myself for a bit longer.

One thing I'm absolutely not perplexed about is Halo 4. Holy crap do I really like this game on first impressions. I've only played online for about an hour and only completed one of the campaign missions, but so far I think it is ridiculously good! Maybe I'll do my own extremely opinionated review on it once I've played a bit more and finished the campaign. In other video game news, I have started working on a post dedicated to the things I yell or say in a very violent way at my television screen when I'm going on a hell-bent rampage over video games because they are pissing me off. Stay tuned for that! I hope you'll be able to visualize me wetting myself into a rage induced coma while reading it!

Poor people who haven't played Halo 4

Now I'm going to write about something completely different from the first two things I mentioned in this post that already didn't go together! Thus is the disjointed nature of the my "mind." I wanted to go back and touch, but not like a Sandusky touch, on something I mentioned in my most recent published post. The one called something about how roller coaster rides are cliche. In case you didn't get that title, what I was referring to is the phrase that something, usually life, is like a roller coaster because of all the ups and downs. I don't believe in downs, though. I choose to believe that there are different levels of ups, so in that case, there is no roller coaster life because there is no roller coaster that continuously goes up, up, up, up, and up... until it dies. Now if I've confused you, just forget about what you just read because it is absolutely meaningless, much like most of the stuff I post on this blog. So back to before I was talking about roller coasters as a means of describing life, which is actually just a word like that guy in one of the Matrix explains to us using the word "love." He was totally right, "love" is just a word, just like "roller coaster" and all the other characters I've been using to create other words in an attempt to convey to anyone who cares to read what is going through my "mind," yet another word.

Now I'll go back to before I was speaking of roller coasters and before I was speaking of words to where I said I wanted to touch on a subject from my most recently published post, before this one of course, and not a Sandusky touch. I really want to stress the point that I am not using the word "touch" in the way Sandusky touched boys. I merely want to go through a small timeline of events that recently occurred in my sometimes amazing, yet sometimes simultaneously boring life.

At the end of October I had dinner one night with a lady friend that I hadn't seen since sometime in January. So it had been about nine months since the last time I had seen her. And no, she was not pregnant you sick f**ks. So we had a fine time, but I wasn't really looking for much to come out of it. But somehow it got to the point where we were planning on watching V for Vendetta, going to see another movie in the theater, and hanging out not the next weekend, but the weekend after that. I was still not thinking much of it, because of course I would never turn down friendly hangouts. Over the next week we had frequent texting communication because that's what has happened to communication. Then when it was only a few days before the weekend we were going to hang out, I texted her a question about the upcoming weekend. A few hours later she responded that she could no longer go because she was now seeing someone. That's fine with me, but we had made those plans probably three days ago.What I'm getting at is how awesomely abrupt that was. I'm actually really glad that whole series of events went down because of how amazingly abrupt our renewal of friendship started and for the most part has ceased. I think it's actually quite impressive. In the future I hope to accomplish this in an even shorter amount of time because I'm not satisfied with three days. It could certainly be quicker, but damn was that fast. Definitely was the best thing that could have happened, hopefully for both parties, but I sure as heck know I'm perfectly content with what happened there. I can feel the inner asshole coming out again. I sure do have a lot more fun writing these posts when I write like an asshole. I usually do this by making fun of fat people and their expanding waistlines, degrading people for drinking too much alcohol, thinking less of people who smoke any kind of thing that can be smoked, and writing extremely opinionated things.

Also, why doesn't Blogger recognize the words "texting" and "texted" as actual words. Stop putting that red line that indicates a misspelled word under "texting" and "texted," two words that are heavily ingrained in the English language now. I receive/send out at least 1 texts per day because I'm so popular, enough evidence that the two words should be added to Bloggers vocabulary list. And don't tell me the red lines aren't there, I know they aren't, the red lines only show up on the composition side of posts, not the finished product. So I could misspell every word in a post and it would not have any indication of my stupidity in the finished product except to people who know how to spell. I could make an incredibly racist comment here, but I will refrain and let John Terry do that instead. And speaking of John Terry, I should be commended for writing two articles in a row for Penultimate Round Pick without mentioning John Terry. That is a very hard thing for me to accomplish because Terry has left himself in a position making him an easy target for totally unimaginative jokes about affairs with other peoples' significant others and racism.

One more thing, wtf NBC. NBC was in very high regards with me since it signed a ludicrously expensive contract to show English Premier League games starting in 2013 I believe, and it is the home of my favorite show ever: 30 Rock. What disappoints me and pisses me off to some extent is how 30 Rock, in it's final season, has been moved from it's normal airing time, Thursdays at 8:00 on NBC, because of the show The Voice! WTF NBC! While I don't watch The Voice, I don't mind if they put it on television, but don't f**k with the time slot for the best show on television! For f**k sake, 30 Rock is only half an hour long, leave it alone and put The Voice on after it.

Kindly replace "The Biggest Loser" with "The Voice"

On that note I will bid you farewell for now. Remember to be champions.