Jared W. Smith

Wow, I haven’t blogged since Monday. Maddening, indeed. It’s just been a maddening week in general. Where do I begin?

• Monday was somewhat stressful. I got a haircut and throughout the day I was fairly nervous for…
• Tuesday. Tuesday, I slipped on a suit and interviewed for the second Webmaster vacancy at the College. I felt good about the interview afterwards, and I’m approaching the wait with cautious optimism.
• Wednesday brought along a lot of work to do and a lot of craziness. I got home promptly at 5:37, changed, and by 5:40 I was in the backyard working on tweaking my mechanics to get my velocity up a bit. (LOL.) About 75 pitches later, I go inside and text my friend Sarah, who is, naturally, going to a Riverdogs game and invites me along. Three innings later, I cram into an already overloaded two-door Civic and manage to make it to the ballgame sans breakdown or traffic citation. It was epic. We enter the game in the fourth with the Riverdogs holding a 2-0 lead and Sgt. Slaughter, the ’80s and early ’90s WWE and later G.I. Joe icon signing autographs. Naturally, I blew it bigtime and didn’t get an autograph from him. I do, however, manage to reach 60 on the radar gun. Not only that, the ‘Dogs pulled out a 5-2 win over the Rome Braves. Sweet. I then have some post-game beers at Sarah’s and call it a night around 1:30.
• Thursday was one giant ball of madness. The morning was somewhat reasonable, but the afternoon…yikes. My dad signed my car over to me, so I decided that yesterday would be the day I got the re-registration of the car in order. I go to the DMV on Lockwood with all the stuff I need…except a tax receipt, which meant a trip to The Four Corners of Law to pay the Charleston County Treasurer a visit. I got that straightened out (though they absolutely butchered my name on my tax bill — who the [EXPLETIVE] is Jerad?) and rolled back up to the DMV. I will say this much — I don’t know whether it’s because I went at 4:30 or what, but the DMV seems to have really improved over the years. Getting the registration was actually a pretty painless process and went well. They even had screwdrivers for me to pull my old tags off and put the new ones on. Very cool. However, it’s what happened between drives, with the assault of phone calls from work and from a very persistent telemarketer who was on the voice equivalent of getting on his knees in order to get a sale (he eventually hung up on me, lol) — that’s what made it really stressful. That, and the whole driving downtown in the rain with people who don’t know what they’re doing thing — that also bothers me a bit. But that’s all squared away now. I get home at 5:15 and promptly kick off my shoes and begin working in Photoshop…and that brings us to…

FRIDAY. Thank God. One more day of work and I’ll be free. Tonight I’m seeing an old friend from high school and the plan is to catch a movie and stuff, but I’m kind of hoping she might be persuaded by a ballgame, but we’ll see. Hehe. She’s moving soon, which completely blows, but oh well. Gotta make the best of the time she’s got here.

I’m listening to the symphonic version of Bleeding Me by Metallica now. I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff like that lately — Mark Mancina’s Twister score is fantastic, particularly the track entitled “Cow.” It’s intense, and I always love when a composer mixes in a symphonic arrangement with wailing guitars, and Mancina did that perfectly. I do wish, though, that the portion of the score that segued to “Humans Being” by Van Halen was on this album. That was probably my favorite part of the movie. Twister really is great — I mean, Van Halen and tornadoes, swirled together. Jared bliss, in a nutshell. I should pop in the Twister DVD and watch the end credits before I go to bed, with the clouds in motion and such.

There’s a lot going on. Summer thus far has been quite a wild ride. Don’t think I’d have it any other way.