Jacob Martinez

Blood pronounced /blud/

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 22:51:25 -0600

I’ve never understood all the half-marathon braggadocio. You did half of something other people do? I don’t put a bumper sticker on my car for eating half a footlong sandwich.

I donated blood today for the first time ever. They said I would feel a satisfied feeling at the thought of saving lives but I didn’t. I like looking at blood though.

I also could have given everyone there HIV (if I had HIV and desired to use it as a weapon), because my last name is very common when they looked me up on their system they printed out a form for me and thought I was a Joseph Martinez. This is after I gave them my ID and social security number for them to look up.

If I died today my only regret would be that I never payed any...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 23:42:38 -0600

If I died today my only regret would be that I never payed any attention to Ashanti or Ja Rule back in the day. I remember when they used to be big when I was in middle school but I was listening to the wrong music.

Eddie Grant - Do You Feel My Love

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:55:06 -0600

Eddie Grant - Do You Feel My Love

I just cleaned up the rubbers on my ping pong paddle and man it feels good. All I want to do is go...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 23:12:43 -0600

I just cleaned up the rubbers on my ping pong paddle and man it feels good. All I want to do is go bust some skulls but I have no one to play with.

Whoever said a man cannot live on special editions of twilight,...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:31:17 -0600

Whoever said a man cannot live on special editions of twilight, potato chips, and a 5-lb bag of Hot Tamales* alone was a stupid liar.

*Not pictured

I bought a 32 pack of valentines cards but I only know, like, 3...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:50:46 -0600

I bought a 32 pack of valentines cards but I only know, like, 3 people.

Pretty Didn't Matter

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:54:47 -0600

The one-liners in Pretty Little Liars are out of this world.

When we met she had a pair of brand new white shoes that she was afraid of getting muddy. We stepped very carefully in those days. A year after we lost touch I saw her and her shoes now tinted brown and ripping at the seams. I met someone who I didn’t have to step so carefully around.

There is a guy that goes to my school (or maybe he just works there) that I’ve been dreaming about every few days for the past couple weeks. He always wears this big oversized hoodie and when I pointed him out to my friend he said “Are you dreaming about him or are you really dreaming about his hoodie? Think about it, if you dream about a guy controlling a puppet with his hand are you dreaming about the man or the puppet? The puppet, obviously, the man doesn’t matter.”

You will never again know these things and my heart weeps for...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:46:59 -0600

You will never again know these things and my heart weeps for you. WEEPS!

An old lady talked to me in line at Wal*Mart and somehow conned me into giving her my email and...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:59:00 -0600

An old lady talked to me in line at Wal*Mart and somehow conned me into giving her my email and phone number for some kind of pyramid scheme she’s involved in.

Let me dissect that:

An old lady attempted communication with me and succeeded, violating my Never Talk To Strangers policy. Mind control? Extreme Suggestibility Spray?
She asked if I needed “additional income” and said she would send me some information about her “WORK FROM HOME ON A COMPUTER MAKE THOU$AND$ OF DOLLAR$ AN H0UR!!!11~~~” ’job’ and I gave her my info violating my I Have No Interest In Money policy.

Luckily, I was aware enough to give her semi-fake info. Do you remember back in the day when everyone figured out you could put periods and plus signs in a Gmail address and it wouldn’t change who received the email? And remember also how Gmail made a huge mistake and allowed people to sign up for email addresses with periods in them even though if someone signed up for the same email address without periods they would have the same email address as you?

Ex: aouiddd@gmail.com will sometimes get emails meant for a.o.u.i.ddd@gmail.com and vice versa.

Well I have an email address like that which I never use because someone else has the same address without the periods and I constantly get his mail. He’s always looking for a job too (and not getting one because his future employers are sending information about interviews and rejections to Me, BWAHAHAHAH!).

So I gave the old lady that email address and hopefully this other me will get the email and get a job finally.

Paul McCartney & Wings was so much better than The Beatles....

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:20:11 -0600

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Paul McCartney & Wings was so much better than The Beatles. Accept it.

That's What. That's What.

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:37:48 -0600

Liz: Come on, Nick, let's go!
Me: He's not coming, he's doing something with [PERSON OF INTEREST].
Liz: FUUUUUUU—
Me: You can't get in the way of that, Liz, it's love.
Liz: It's not love it's one-sided affection.
Me: Yeah, that's what love is. . .

Question

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:11:35 -0600

Suppose we perfect interstellar travel and find no inhabited planets in our neck of the woods but plenty of planets which could some day support life. Do you think that it would be right, or indeed, our responsibility to “seed” these planets with genetic material that may someday be the groundwork for their entire existence?

I played so much ping pong today and I dominated the entire...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:05:09 -0600

I played so much ping pong today and I dominated the entire time. I’ve beaten three strangers in two days.

None of my friends or I had heard from someone we knew since the 17th which was really odd and I was starting to worry but it turns out he’s ok.

I couldn’t sleep last night so I stayed up and finished Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior. The whole show was really bad but I love how they canceled it right in the middle of a huge cliffhanger that will never be resolved.

One of my bosses at work told us about a technique to prevent against countertransference. It should come in handy.

I bet judges say “I’ll be the judge of that!”...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:15:00 -0600

I bet judges say “I’ll be the judge of that!” a lot.

The first kiss was easy. The second kiss… the second kiss was something different entirely.

I feel good. But I mean that literally, like, my skin feels good to the touch.

Netflix'n The Night Away

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:32:09 -0600

Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior isn’t good. It was barely even trying to be good.
And they use the words “ingress” and “egress” way too often. The only person that’s ever said that in any other show was Lt. Cmdr. Data in TNG.

How To Be Not-Sad. A Few Simple But Not Necessarily Easy Steps For People Who Want A Little More Contentment.

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:38:00 -0600

Step Zero: Identify and pinpoint what maladaptive* thoughts and feelings are and where they originate.

This is an absolutely essential step for any kind of therapy but can often be difficult for people who have never really thought about these kinds of things.
You want to be able to identify how you feel and what you’re thinking at any given point in time.
Also, be able to identify what sequence of events led you to your current state (thoughts or feelings) and what thoughts, feelings, and behavior follow your current state.
Sometimes a daily diary or journal is good for keeping track of thoughts and feelings. In the beginning it may even be helpful to keep hourly entries in a journal EXAMPLE:

1:00pm: I currently feel ANGRY. This is due to BOSS YELLING AT ME.

2:00pm: My body is TENSE I have a HEADACHE. I am experiencing IRRITABILITY.

Heavily detailed journals like the example above are a good start. Eventually the need to record entries will diminish and you’ll be able to identify the cause and effect relationship of thoughts and feelings automatically.

Step One: Put distance between yourself and maladaptive thoughts/feelings.

Here we want to figuratively take a step back from our maladaptive thoughts/feelings in order to examine them.
After we’ve identified our maladaptive thoughts/feelings and their point of origin, we can use this information to create space. Notice how in the following examples the space between yourself and a thought/feeling is increasingly expanded:

“I am feeling ANGRY.” “I am thinking that I WILL FAIL.”

“I notice that I am feeling ANGRY.” “I notice that I am having the thought that I WILL FAIL.”

“I notice that I am feeling ANGRY and that my anger is located in my TENSE BODY/HEADACHE.” “I notice that I am having the thought that I WILL FAIL and that is manifesting itself in THE PIT OF MY STOMACH.”

Via this technique you can put as much distance between yourself and your maladaptive thought/feeling as you want. The goal here is to be able to zoom in and out on your current and past emotional states at will and to examine them for what they are instead of getting bogged down or wallowing in them.
Verbally expanding the distance between yourself and maladaptive thoughts/feelings isn’t the only way you can create space. In the past I have visually created space between myself and maladaptive thoughts/feelings by creating an image of the maladaptive feeling.

In this case, during a bout with depression I turned the feelings involved with being depressed into the image of Haunter the Pokemon.

Now instead of having these feelings emanating from within my body they were separate from my body, constantly hovering over my head, following me wherever I went, and when things got really bad clawing at my body.

That sounds kind of bad but for me it helped a lot. No longer did it feel like I was drowning in a sea that bubbled up from inside myself.

After creating space between yourself and your maladaptive thoughts/feelings you start to get a little bit of control over how you’re feeling and how your feelings are affecting you, and that brings us to our next step.

Step Two: Now that you’ve got some breathing room, take a breather.

Now is the time to take comfort in the fact that your thoughts and feelings (most of the time) don’t just spring up out of nowhere, and even if they do you can create space between yourself and them.
Eventually you’ll learn to see certain patterns between events and their effect on your thoughts/feelings, and the patterns between your thoughts/feelings and their effect on your subsequent behavior. Learning these patterns will be beneficial so you can see things coming ahead of time.

“Uh-oh! I just made a mistake on this project. And now here come the thoughts about being a failure and never succeeding in life. LOL! Good one brain ;) , that’s just what I need right now. So why don’t I skip the feeling bad for myself part and jump ahead to fixing this mistake I just made and going about with my business.”

Step Three: Keep at it!

If we can identify our own maladaptive thoughts/feelings, and if we can determine the sequence of events that follow and precede them, then maybe (just maybe) we can learn to see them coming and step aside when they do. Avoiding maladaptive thoughts/feelings is impossible, but at the very least we want to be able to allow them to come and go without doing too much damage.
Try to use these techniques every day even if it’s only once a day. It’ll be hard at first but the longer you do it, the more natural and automatic it will become.

Super Secret Step Four: Use these techniques on your happiness too.

Don’t just identify your maladaptive feelings, identify and pinpoint the way it feels when you’re happy, the way it feels when you’re ecstatic, the way it feels when you think it’s time to get out of bed but you realize that you’ve got a whole hour left.
Create space for your good feelings and thoughts. Give them room to operate. Visualize them if you feel like it.
Eventually you’ll see how easy it is to create a kind of synthetic happiness which is awesome, trust me.

______

*Maladaptive - To make it easier to think about you can substitute the words “Bad” or “Undesirable” here, although the word maladaptive is actually the most descriptive. These are thoughts and feelings that aren’t going to get you where you want to go in life (“No time for tears, wasted water’s all that is, and it don’t make no flowers grow.” - Bill Withers).

The man asked me what kind of sauce I wanted with my chicken nuggets and I froze up and said...

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:16:43 -0600

The man asked me what kind of sauce I wanted with my chicken nuggets and I froze up and said barbecue when really I should have said ranch. I really wanted ranch.

Saffron is actually the most expensive thing on earth.

Stellar.io is not going to go anywhere. You guys can trust me on this one.

The entire concept of shaving is so weird to me. I scrape a sharpened piece of steel across my skin to remove hair. That’s such a human thing to do.

My zarda came out way too sweet and I made enough for like 4...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:43:02 -0600

My zarda came out way too sweet and I made enough for like 4 people accidentally. Saffron is cool though, they package them like metroids.

I didn’t go to my cousin’s funeral because I had nothing to wear. For some reason I have...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:22:32 -0600

I didn’t go to my cousin’s funeral because I had nothing to wear. For some reason I have no black slacks. Every time I buy slacks my weight changes such that I only get to wear them once and then I can never fit in them again.

I miss 2 years ago.

It’s not raining so I think I’m going to run to the store to get some ingredients I need to make zarda. All of my meals are desserts.

Words are bolded for no reason.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:11:42 -0600

I kind of don’t want to do anything this entire year just in case the world actually ends. I basically have a reverse case of the “What would you do if you had one day to live?” thing. I wouldn’t do anything, because nothing I did would matter.

I think a bug bit me behind my ear. Either that or I have a pimple behind my ear. I actually hope there is a bug in my bed that’s biting my head while I sleep, because I’m too ashamed to admit to myself that I have a pimple behind my face.

I’ve been in a really good mood for the past 48 hours. This is a record.

Nothing could ever be so attractive as she was in those in-between moments. The second that it took to put her hair in a pony tail. Bending down to slip on a pair of shoes. The way she grinned between each of our kisses as if to say “We’re accomplishing something.”