Boleman and Friends: The Blag

Just so you know, he really cares about you.

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Executive:
    Rejoin Texas Young Democrats
    Enact a "Rule of Thirds" for meetings:Social-Educational-Organizational
       Create committees for said divisions
    Fix Website
    Begin Using Demopolis - Through YDA
Speakers
    Craig Watkins-Dallas County’s District Attorney
    Member of Texas’ NARAL Chapter
    Member of Clean Water - Texas
    Member of Watts for Senate Campaign
    Relay For Life Representative
    Member of Hilary for President Campaign
    Member of Obama for President Campaign
    Member of Edwards for President Campaign
Collaborations
    NAACP and Pre-Law Organization/Mailing List for Watkins
    Baylor Women’s League and possibly some Sororities for NARAL talk
    Baylor Eco for Clean Water talk
Presentations
    Habeas Corpus in the US/Guantanamo ACLU materials

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Study: Iraqis May Experience Sadness When Friends, Relatives Die

BALTIMORE—Are Iraqis capable of experiencing grief on a personal level, like Americans? A new study suggests yes.

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Rob: One of my best friends, Rob, died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine. There was no sign of it being a suicide, but he was never one for showing his emotions, let alone announcing them in a letter ante-mortem. I knew that he was depressed, he was kicked off and out from his school and baseball team, and his parents cut him off financially and emotionally, from what he told me in his last weeks and days.

Matt: I went to Galveston for Spring Break, while there I met up with a friend, Matt, who I first met through Rob, and normally only see when one or the other was high. Matt and I go to "The Spot" to grab something to eat. While there, Matt shows me the last text message he ever received from Rob, "i just got 4 grams". Matt has always been closer to Rob, there was a serious love between friends there that I’ve never seen before. Matt took Rob’s death much harder than me. He self medicates with various substances to escape what he feels. I see in Matt the same, if not greater intelligence that I have. It hurts me to the core to see him doing to himself what led Rob to his death. I feel obligated as a friend of Matt and Rob to be there for him, and try to get him out of the cycle and circles that he’s in. I know Matt wants to do better for himself, and that is something that he really has to want before he can achieve it. But if he stays in this city he’s bound to go back into the lifestyle he wants to get out of.

Jonathan: I’ve been friends with Jonathan since I went to his birthday party in kindergarden. We were both social misfits in a class of only 38 people at its most populous. We still have the same sense of humor, and some similar interests. Every band performance of his that I miss, I feel as though I’m ruining a friendship that I will never have again.

Javier: Third grade was when I began to be friends with Javier. He was cool, fun and also Mexican. Which was (and still is) a rarity in Galveston Catholic School. He left GCS for a new charter school at the end of 5th grade, then transferred to public school after a year or so. In my 8th grade year, I decided to go to public school, since the local Catholic high school wasn’t really the sort of place that I wanted to go to. During lunch on my first day of Weis Middle School, I saw Javier with some other guys. I was ecstatic to see an old friend in the new environment. When I came up to his table he greeted me, but told me that I had to sit somewhere else and began, with his other friends, to insult me. I walked away and didn’t talk to him for the rest of the year.
    Freshman year of high school, I go into my Computer Maintenence class and see Javier. He greets me and talks as though last year never existed. I played along and put aside what he did before. We were best of friends for most of high school. He went into BESTT (my high school’s tutoring program), and I did too. In our senior year, I was over at his house, playing PS2 or watching a movie, when he gets a call from some friends. He says that he’s going to a party, I ask if I can go along. He replies, "Are you serious?…no." He leaves and I drive around the island for an hour or so. I decide that he is no different that he was 8th grade, and I no longer want to associate with him. I call up Rob that night and we go to Hastings to check out the tech magazines. I tell him about what happened earlier and he tells me "Don’t worry about Javier, he’s a waste of human. He’s horrible at baseball and he’s an idiot too." I laugh and agree.
    I’m still avoiding Javier. I make a point to not to answer his calls, and pick places to go that I know he wouldn’t visit.

Bryant: Introduction to Electrical Engineering my freshman year in High School was when I first met Bryant. He’s a cool guy in my view. He was into computers, and a bit of an anime nerd back in the day. Not to the point of fanaticism, but he was knowledgeable on DBZ and Cowboy Bebop. We have the same sense of humor, same quickness with a joke and eerily similar trains of thought on almost any subject. I am more than proud to say that he is the best kind of friend a person can have, and I’m happy to know him.
    Earlier this year. Bryant did a little myspace prank where he announced that he was married to a new girlfriend, Athena. I knew that it was a joke because he never told me. When I asked him about it, he said "I didn’t want to tell everyone because you know how Galveston works", to which I responded "But, I’m above that", and he replied "Yeah, it was a joke." I finally met his new girlfriend in June, and I really didn’t take a shine to her. I made an abortion joke with Bryant, and she didn’t like it. Later I made an atheistic joke, with Bryant high fiving me. She was not amused. I told Bryant with her present, "Don’t let her tell you what to think." or something like that. She was visibly offended. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I just blurted recklessly what was on my head.
    I later realized why I was such a bastard to her. She is, in my view, an embodiment of Galveston: attractive, controlling and not very intellectual (I know that it’s extremely arrogant and presumptuous to say that). I don’t like that Bryant is with her because she is what is trapping him on this island. Bryant is very intelligent, he could of more than excelled at Ball High’s AP program. If some of the folks I saw in AP programs are now at state universities, he is more than mentally qualified for strenuous higher education. I know not everyone is meant to get a bachelor’s or higher, but not everyone is as intelligent as he is.
    Now, Bryant is working at the oil refinery in Texas City, earning a good sum of money. But I feel as though he is avoiding me due to what I said in front of Athena. If that is the case I will openly and whole-heartedly apologize to him for what I said.

General: There were people that I grew up with in Galveston that I see on occasion on my return visits. Most of them neutral, but some I feel awkward about. Mainly for the reasons of them not changing at all and falling into the cycle that will eventually trap them forever on the island, or that they had some animosity against me and act not to notice me while walking with friends. I don’t mind it, but it’s that sort of events that make me want to leave this city and go to some place that I don’t have to tailor my trips. I like the idea that home is where the hate is, for the reason that if someone dislikes me, I’ve been there long enough to bother someone, and therefore have been there long enough to make true friends. But with the friends I’ve had slowly fading away, I’d rather just stay far from everyone and actively rot what I have left.

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Origin of the Award

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Here’s a radical idea: if we really want to help, why not ask Africans, not their governments, how they perceive the challenges before them, the dreams they have for the future, and the resources they think they need to realize them? It’s time to let Africa imagine its own future.

read more | digg story

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I really like how this show blends musical comedy with dry humor.
Bilious to Sanguine for the win!

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    It may seem a bit crass to say that I can’t stand missionary trips, but I really feel that they are horribly wasteful. The reasons I’ve heard from people wanting to go to Africa, Asia or South America is to help the children with education and try to do something about the welfare of people in other countries. I wonder if these people realize that the US isn’t as great a country as it seems to be from the inside of your car or apartment. I have more respect for people that take time out of their day to volunteer at a local hospital or after-school program, than a person that goes to Gambia to spread the word of God and teach the people about clean water while on their spring break or summer vacation.
    I’m not saying that I’m against helping a  group of humans that aren’t in my crowd. I’m just saying that if you are wanting to help out a poor kid that needs the attention of someone who cares, just drive about less than 7 miles from where ever you are and spend 30 minutes with him/her. That was the main thing that I saw while tutoring in BESTT, children that just want to be noticed and receive one-on-one attention. The schools aren’t giving them that, the schools are doing nothing more than shuttling the children from grade to grade only focusing on getting the child to score better than the previous year on some standardized test.
    On the healthcare issue, a good percentage of the country isn’t insured and there are deaths due to that fact. Sure it would be nice to know that no more children in the world are starving or dying of dysentery, but they are just casualties of bad management. They are living in an environment that cannot support more children. That happens. People Die. It’s not a very nice thing to think, but children die, and will continue to die. I can’t think of any solution other than letting the population go back down a little, and even then that’s a sticky idea to present.

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    About 2 weeks ago I was at the Baylor Bookstore and I saw that they were selling Business Premium versions of Vista for $10, due to student volume licensing.  So I did what any adventurous individual would do, install on the slowest windows-compatible machine you have lying around and bitch and whine to everyone about how piss poor and memory hogging the whole OS is. The computer I put Vista on was a 1.9GHz P4, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB with a 120GB HD, top of the line only 3 years ago. I installed it, thereby turning my old XP-Pro Partition into a windows.old folder on the c:/, which I appriciated(some folks don’t back-up data before installing a new OS). So 2 hours later, I get a little restless since most of the apps were running in bullettime; even when idle the computer was churning at 15% capacity. Don’t even get me started on running HL2 on Vista.
    After talking to my good chum Cody, I decided to format the whole HD and just go back to my old home, Linux. I’ve been a Red Hat/Fedora kid since RH5, so seeing Fedora 6 available just blew my mind.(The last release I used was FC4-test2)  I downloaded the torrent of FC6 and burnt the 5 CDs required. The CDs finalized, the HD was wiped, the packages were selected and the installation began. I was pretty content at the speed on the install, considering that Vista took 2.5 hours seeing FC churn nicely was a good sight. At around 5:23 AM I realized that the installation was frozen, Disc 5 was corrupted. So I did the honorable thing and screamed bloody murder at my computer while invoking Cthulhu and Poppin’ Fresh. I slept the anger away and started the next day by redownloading the .iso for disc 5 and MD5 checking it. The installation went great, I got it all to work, except for my WiFi adapter. Linux doesn’t like Linksys adapters, well not natively(Damn You ORINOCO!!!!)
    I spotted a forum on a Wi-Fi on Linux site that talked about ubuntu’s better Wi-Fi system, so I jumped over to ubuntu, and that was a chore. I’m used to Fedora’s slick interface that they ripped off of RH. 45 mins later, I installed the whole OS, rebooted and the HD wasn’t recognized.

Moral of the Story: I should of dual booted WinXP-Pro and FC when I was a youngin’.

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I’ve been talking to my mom about possibly taking a trip to Europe, the only condition is that I cannot go alone, which is understandable. That’s where you come in faithful reader. If you have $1.3k and want to go to England or France(where I am now more able to converse with the natives) please leave a comment or email me. The main cost will be airfare, the hotel rate can be fixed/swayed.

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