Another slow morning.

I don't have class until 2:00. At Covenant, I would have probably stayed in bed all day except for brief forays into the Great Hall for food. I would have watched cheesy anime or episodes of Castle and Lie to Me for hours. I would have eaten lots of Cheezits.

However, since I'm not at Covenant and I'm in St. Augustine, Florida attending class at Flagler College for a year, I'm sitting on my little brother's bed thinking of anything to do.

It's weird not have my friends around. I miss them so. And I simply cannot stand the majority of students at Flagler. (I promise you Gabe if you keep interrupting class with your stupid attempts at informing everyone in the room that you and the professor are, like, so close you're, like, friends or something, I'm going to strangle you. If, of course, Professor Young doesn't do it first. He really doesn't like you Gabe. Get over it.)

I'm done with homework... for the most part. Got a paper due next week. Nothing that needs to be stressed about right this instant.

I've played Test Drive Unlimited 2 enough to be sick and tired of the crappy physics engine. Nevertheless I will inevitably be drawn into slinging my back-heavy Audi sports car around corners again in about an hour or so. That game is deeply flawed and yet so absorbingly entertaining. I spent four hours straight searching the islands for wrecked cars so I could refurbish them and make them drivable again. A Jaguar race car, a Shelby Daytona race car, a '64 Beetle, a classic Citröen 2 CV, a dune buggy, and an AC Cobra. Now any car nut can tell you what at least four of these cars look like. And anyone, upon seeing any of these cars, would probably want to drive it. The game is so full of just amazing vehicles you can't help but want to collect them all. An Arial Atom? For 50K? Yeah. I'll take it.

Still, I wish the game designers had smoothed the roads out so I wouldn't bottom out every single time I pass over the tiniest of bumps in an SUV.

I'm going to be writing my final paper for history class on Kristallnacht. The first step in writing the paper is completed. I know how to spell Kristallnacht.

What the aytch ee double hockeysticks?

Are people actually reading my blog?

I've got well over a thousand views and I know they're not all from me or Jordan. Baileigh occasionally reads it, I think. That's still only three people. Well, Katy follows it. So maybe she reads it too? All the others who follow my blog don't ever say anything to me about it so I assume they're not really reading it either.

Also... I was checking my stats and I got a hit from someone in Germany. Since when have Germans been interested in me? Maybe someone was searching for David Hasselhoff and they misspelled... it... as Alan Cheney...?

There is literally no reason why I should have gotten upwards of 20 views just yesterday. 20 separate people cannot be reading this crap. Even if some of them logged in to read it multiple times from different IP addresses, that would still mean at least 10 different people read what I posted yesterday. Or something. I really have no idea how this works.

I'll tell you what though, I've been thinking about starting a webcomic. Or something. I've discovered that if you advertise other web comics or online stores like Amazon on your blog and people click those links and buy something, the site they bought from sees that they came from a link on your blog and then they pay you a percentage of the money that was just spent. Apparently a lot of people know this. That's why Jeph Jaques has so many advertisements on his Questionable Content webcomic page. He's making bank by selling his own merch and advertising other groups merchandise as well. There's a lot of money to be made doing something like that. Too bad I can't draw.

Writing sucks. So many times I hear artists say, "Man, I wish I could write like you. That's an amazing talent." They have no idea. No one is going to spend $20 on a well written paragraph at a comicon. Forget that a well written paragraph could take as long as a month to get right, no one would want to buy it unless it was a full size book which could take years to produce and most likely will not get published. However, fanboys and girls will open a friggin' vein and bleed gold for a half-assed cartoon of their two favorite characters from a manga or a comic in an awkwardly sexual situation. Writers can't earn to save their lives. Artists can spend a week in focus on a particular painting and sell it for $200 bucks. If I could earn $200 bucks a week writing, I'd wouldn't be driving a car with a dented front bumper. So you know what artists? Just... shut up. Nyah.

I promised Jordan I would post... so here it is. Yay...

Jordan and I have been dating for over a year now. This is... unbelievable to me. We're talking about marriage. Planning our lives together. I never seriously considered this as a possibility. Someone like her... I've just always assumed that kind of girl was just out of my league.

Before anyone objects, I should probably unpack that statement. It's not just girls as beautiful and wonderful as Jordan that I thought were out of my league, it was all of them. I don't want to sound like I'm digging for pity, but a lot of what I'm about to say is pretty sad stuff. Know in advance that I'm not looking for anyone to feel sorry for me.

I've been a loser all my life. From the day my older brother decided he didn't like me, which was day two by the way, to my first few months at Covenant. As a kid I was constantly teased and picked on by my brother. As soon as I got into school I alienated myself by being a smart ass. No one wanted to be friends with the kid who knew everything. I don't know when it first started but after a while I got it into my head that I just wasn't cool enough. And I don't mean just not cool enough for some people, I mean everyone. I had friends, but they only wanted to hang out when it was just me and them. If I hung out in a group, I was the butt of every joke. No one wanted to admit they really liked me. It was uncool to be too close of friends with Alan Cheney.

This of course led to distorted views of girls. I liked girls. A lot. Probably too much. I would watch them in class and daydream about how they'd one day realize how, even though I was skinny and had buck teeth and freckles that I was much nicer than the other boys and they'd want to be my girlfriend. At the same time, though, I hated them. I hated them for laughing at me when I said something uncool. I would hate them so it wouldn't hurt when they made fun of me or made disgusted faces when their friends teased them about going on a date with me. They always said stuff like, "It's not that he's not a nice guy... I just don't think of him that way." No one thought of me that way. At least not till high school and those girls were desperate wrecks who I knew would have made horrifying girlfriends and I had enough intelligence to avoid them.

I did date a little in high school. Two girls seriously, one girl very casually. None of them were Christians. None of them were interested in the things I claimed were most important to me. I can't say those relationships were mistakes, but I can say I handled them badly. I always assumed they really didn't want anything to do with me. I couldn't trust them when they said they really liked me. I knew, somewhere in the darker parts of my head, that they were just waiting for something better to come along. I ended up breaking a couple hearts because I just couldn't accept a girl's affections. It was for the best, in the end I think. I dunno. It was really just a huge mess.

Needless to say I was a ruinous car wreck of a romantic when I got to Covenant. I dated one girl my freshman year. She was very sweet to put up with me as long as she did, but she eventually broke up with me because I was so damn clingy. I couldn't stand the thought of losing my girlfriend, the one shred of proof that I was something to somebody. I smothered her to the point that she couldn't take it any more and finally she ended things with me. Everything went kinda downhill from there.

I got involved in bad relationships with girls who cared nothing for me as a person, only for what I could provide for them as a man. I basically whored myself out to get female attention. I wanted so bad for someone to just LOVE ME ALREADY! I did things I'm not proud of, things I sometimes visibly cringe when I remember. I was a prostitute and I wasn't even getting paid. I told myself it was okay. I told myself I knew they were using me but it was okay because I was using them too. When I look back on it now... I can't believe how stupid I was.

So yeah. Never would have thought I'd find a woman who I could genuinely love. I was so wrapped up in the mentality that love was like currency. I could say sweet things to a girl and she'd let me kiss her mouth for a little while and then we'd go our separate ways. That all began to change when I met Jordan.

It wasn't love at first sight. Not by a long shot. To be perfectly honest, I went about choosing Jordan as a pursuit based on some of the most selfish, ridiculous logic imaginable. I picked her because she was younger and therefore easier prey, because she was the prettiest of the younger girls I spent time around, and because I thought, just maybe, if I played my cards right, I could fool her into thinking I was a nice guy long enough to get enough affection to hold me over until I could fool someone else. I'm not kidding, I was a disgusting parasite.

What I didn't count on was Jordan kicking my selfish ass all up and down the mountain.

She fell for my charms easily enough but she balked at how fast she was giving in to her affection for me. She dumped me after 30 hours. I know because we both counted. I couldn't believe it. I'd worked so hard to get myself a source of attention and *poof* it was gone. I was pretty thunderstruck. So thunderstruck, in fact, that I kinda forgot that I'd only been interested in her as a source of affection. I began to spend time with her as just a friend. This proved to be my blessed, glorious undoing.

I fell in love. True love. Not just a ravenous hunger for attention but a genuine and powerful concern that the object of my love should be happy, all the time, as much as I can make it so. I couldn't believe it. In my utter disbelief of what was happening, I confessed my love to Jordan. She told me if I ever told her I loved her again she'd stab me with a fork. Immediately, I told her I loved her once again. She scratched the skin pretty good, but it was a regular dining hall fork and not one of those spear-sharp grill forks or I'd have bled like a stuck pig.

Anyway, things progressed from there. I tried once or twice to find the same love I had for Jordan for someone else, but nothing could be done. I simply couldn't get her out of my head. I pursued her doggedly for a year straight before she agreed to date me again.

She broke up with me after another 30 hours.

This time, I was devastated. I couldn't feel anything. There was a hollow place in my chest and no matter how deep a breath I took the hollow spot would not fill up. This went on for a few days. I can't actually remember much from that time period except this feeling that it was all over and I was certain to never love someone the right way again.

Then, on September 18th, 2010, on the night that the Kilter dance was being held, Jordan called my phone. I was attending the dance with a sweet friend named Mary who'd been kind enough to ask me to go with her. To this day I don't know if Mary is aware of what an enormous kindness that was. Mary was going as Wendy from Peter Pan and she had asked me to dress as Peter. I was trying on my finished costume when the phone rang. Jordan said she urgently needed to speak with me. Still hurt, I almost told her to leave me alone. But Jordan had been my friend for a year now. I loved her, even if she didn't love me back. I agreed to come down from my dorm room.

She met me at the bottom of the stairs. I was expecting laughter, because I was dressed in full Pan regalia, but instead all I got was this open, beseeching look. Right there, with me in Pan mode, standing about four steps above and her below like Romeo to my Juliet, she told me she'd made a mistake. She told me she wanted another chance. She told me she wanted ME. (I probably looked like an idiot receiving a confession of love in a green felt cap with a red feather in it.)

Needless to say, I was really cool about it. I told her I would think about it. The following week I felt like I was walking on air. I was an absolute fool in love. When the week ended and I asked her if she was still sure she wanted to do this, she said "Yes." Confidently. I thought I would die. So we started dating. I haven't looked back. I can't say the same for Jordan. Sometimes she tells me some ridiculous story about how I'm so perfect and she doesn't deserve me and I should break up with her but see, I know the truth. I know what I used to be and I know that she is the reason I'm so "perfect" now. Without her I'd just be a big old bag of douche looking for his next hook-up.

So yeah. This story isn't for pity. It's so Jordan will know why she shouldn't say I'm too good for her and why I'll never let her go and why I love her so much. Jordan is my God-sent angel and through her I have seen His work in redeeming me. And that's the post, yo. Deal with it.