matt dash low dot com

…my Macbook. Without it, I would suffer from some form of phantom limb syndrome or massive withdrawal

…my job. It’s not often I get to get paid for something I love doing.

…my friend. Who made me join an online dating site because she insists it’ll be good for me. I don’t know what I’m doing here.

…my sponsors. They help keep my sites running.

…my gadgets. My iPod, my DS, my PDA and other stuff help keep me sane.

…my coffee. It gives me the start I need to get through my day.

…my friends. They just seem to know what to say at the right time.

…my education. Even though I’m not done yet. It’s nice to learn about stuff.

…my followers. I don’t know why they follow me either. Must be my deodorant.

…my wry sense of humor. Don’t ask.

…my TED. I learn so much and I love the ideas there.

Just being here, too. That’s always good.

I never check it. There’s a good reason for it though.

It’s because I don’t know how.

Yeah! I’m serious!

You know for some reason, I developed this reputation as this tech whiz and guru of computers? That was a total mistake. I should’ve invested my time into something more useful like cooking. A man’s gotta eat. I’m getting a little weary of Michelina’s too. I never learned how to check my voice mail. The most technical thing I know how to do on my phone is transfer ringtones like Journey and Rocky and set alarms for obscene hours in the morning. I even made my friend change the wallpaper on my phone because I had no idea how. It’s a picture of lillies or lilacs or whatever flowers that are white. I don’t even have a clue how to change it so I’m stuck staring at flowers every time I open my phone.

So from now on, here’s the goddamn procedure if you wanna get a hold of me. Go ahead and call. If I don’t answer and it goes to my voice mail, don’t even bother leaving a message. I’m never going to check it.

Of course, there might be cases where I’m otherwise preoccupied. I could be in lecture. I could be asleep. Or more than likely, I’m deeply engaged in an enlightening conversation with a most captivating woman who demands my complete attention.

Let’s put it this way.

If you really want to talk to me, keep calling. If I really want to talk to you, I’ll answer.

There’s two types of people in this world: Those who admit to singing in the shower and those who won’t admit it.

We’re terrible singers. But there’s always that one guy who will sing along with the radio on a road trip who is absolutely bad at it. Regardless though, the shower is a great place to let loose our vocals in the privacy of our own home without having to face any kind of public humiliation. Rest assured, the range of our repertoire is extensive and dynamic. Without further adieu, here’s a sample of some shower singing samples.

Journey – Don’t Stop Believing: Classic. Ever since Family Guy brought it back, it’s been a staple since.

Bon Jovi – It’s My Life: You can take a guy’s wallet. You can steal a guy’s heart. But you will be hard pressed to take his independence.

Frank Sinatra – Fly Me to the Moon: Frank Sinatra has the voice that every guy wants when they get older. Until then, we’ll keep trying until we can pull it off.

Beatles – Any song: You can get away with just about any major Beatles hit. I personally prefer Yellow Submarine. Love Me Do works. So does Let it Be. Help. Eight Days a Week. The list goes on and on.

Justin Timberlake – Sexy Back: Yup, it’s still fairly popular. Don’t be judging now.

Survivor – Eye of the Tiger: If it’s on Guitar Hero, it’s fair game. You can always say that you’re practicing your vocals for it if you get caught. Eye of the Tiger is a great addition.

Joe Espositio – You’re the Best: I almost forgot to add this Karate Kid song to the list!

Matthew Wilder – Break my Stride: Ain’t nothin gonna break my stride, nobody gonna slooow me down wha-oh!

There’s probably a bunch more, but that’s all I could get off the top of my head. What songs do you belt out when you’re in the shower?

I’m always worried about something. My mind’s consistently in overdrive. I haven’t slept well in months. 6-7 hours of sleep a night. It’s not uncommon for me to go to bed at 12 AM or 1 AM and be up at 7 AM. I feel tense and uptight when I am awake. It’s a difficult thing for me to simply just “let go” of stuff.

I could use some help. What do you do to unwind?

My birthday has come and gone. Received many well wishes from lots of people. Thank you! My birthday was spent mostly in peace and quiet. My party was the week before. I went out for dinner with a friend who I had not seen in a long time. It’s great catching up with people. I should do that more often.

I’m tempted to try to track down a random person on facebook once a week and just meet up with them for a while to see how they are. But that could prove a logistical nightmare.

Insomnia

It’s midnight. I’m having difficulty sleeping. This happens when my brain’s on overdrive. There are times when I think too much. I’m both blessed and cursed with a far too analytical mind. I think about what the best case outcomes are. I think what’s the most likeliest to happen. I plan for the worst but I assume the best.

So what do you do when you have difficulty sleeping?

Completely uneventful day. Most of the time was spent on Professor Layton. Except now I have low DS power and I can’t seem to find my damn charger anywhere. I fear the worst. I broke my 5 day streak of having instant dinners. Went out and bought me a whole chicken and made rice. Mmm! Nothing beats chicken and rice.

Oh, get this. I was flipping through channels today after watching So You Think You Can Dance. I stumbled across a TV show where a bunch of football players were doing Beyonce’s All the Single Ladies dance. I just about fell off the couch laughing. Turns out the show’s called Glee! It’s some sort of musical/comedy type show. It’s the first I’ve seen of it but that’s mostly because I don’t watch much TV. I admit, I did find it entertaining.

Tomorrow it’s off to grab a haircut and maybe hunt for a DS adapter.

Had to share this. This is what schizophrenia’s like in comic form.

Today’s psyc tutorial. I always look forward to psyc class because there’s one individual who I’m keen to see. Except I can tell she doesn’t seem to feel the same way as much since week 1. But you know, it’s university. People come and go. There’s probably only 2 real friends I’ve made in university that I’ve maintained contact with for more than a semester.

So today we get assigned our debate topics. We chose from a list of what we preferred and our what sides we would like to argue.

Some of the topics include:

Is media violence harmful to children?

Do Millgram’s obedience experiments help explain the nature of the holocaust?

Are mind and brain the same?

It just so happens that the topic I’ve been assigned is “Does evolution explain why men rape?”. In this debate, I’ve been assigned the affirmative position. I am so not looking forward to this. I was really hoping for media violence but nope. Instead, I get a topic which is going to make me sound like a douche unfortunately.

But it gets better.

Who is my opponent? None other than smoker chick. I’m sure we can share sources and the like, but we won’t be able to collaborate or work together or anything.

After tonight’s lagfested raid, I did some more reading. Right now I’m on the chapter on online dating. I’m not even at that stage yet. But then I got a call from my friend. I guess she had nothing better to do and wanted to try to help diagnose me. So we went over all past relationships and crushes and I explained what the deal with each of them was. She managed to isolate one important thing. I had no problem approaching people in high school and getting rejected. But something happened after high school. She noticed I wasn’t as bold anymore and became more cynical. To be short, she hammered home that I wasn’t really trying and was coming up with excuses that may or may not be truth.

Personally, I think that some girl in a relationship already (even though it’s rocky) is a valid excuse.

And I don’t know if I’d be able to date a smoker. She did insist she was trying to quit though. I still have my reservations.

She completely decimated my time theory though. After taking into account sleep, WoW, writing, school, travel time, she said I still had 58 hours left over per week to either spend time with or chat with someone. For whatever reason, I felt I had less time than that. There goes my defense.

What about money? I write freelance, which is sort of stable. But then she mentioned what monthly expenses were like. I suppose the reason why my reasoning was all skewed in such high extremes is because I’m basing it off my last real relationship where I paid for most of the activities. I believe those types of people are called gold diggers.

Apparently the diagnosis is simple. Fear of failure.

I wonder what House would do. At least I got to chapter 2 of Professor Layton.

Monday. The start of another week. I’m not a big fan of mondays. I opted to go to school a bit earlier today. Hopefully I’d be able to meet a friend there and we could spend some more time chatting. Turns out that wasn’t the case! Before I knew it, it was time to hit the lecture hall. I think I saw stats girl sitting at a nearby table but I couldn’t be sure. For whatever reason, my friend managed to become friends with her.

It’s a long story.

Sociology’s just about the same as I remember it when I took it several years ago. I’m retaking it again to hopefully boost my GPA. I did well on the tests, but I sucked out on the paper. The class felt very bland. I was sitting next to one of those really over-eager first years. Yeah, the one that raises his hand to answer every rhetorical question the prof asks. One of THOSE guys.

Managed to meet up with my friend after. Not only that, this was the first time stats girl and myself were formally introduced. Seems nice. But she’s way out of my league. Anyway, she offered my friend a ride down the side of the mountain. She should’ve taken it. I would not have minded if she took her up on that offer. My friend asked me if I wanted a lift down to Lougheed with her, but I said no. I don’t know why. I’m sure stats girl was being kind and all. I have this weird idea that a person of a higher social class wouldn’t be interested in anyone below them. I know it’s not always the case. She still intimidates me.

All I can say is, I’ll never understand why amazingly beautiful women go out with douchebag guys. Must be one of those things, I guess. Oh well.

Anyway, hung out with my friend on the skytrain back. We were discussing things different book ideas that we’d write. If I weren’t writing about WoW, what else would I write about? Somehow I came up with a fitness book. Figured I’d call it “Lose Fat with Matt”. Wouldn’t that be funny? Too bad it’d never happen.

After the raid was over, I watched the 2 hour season premiere of House. What a great way to open the series. This is going to be an exciting season.

I started cracking open that dating book I got for my birthday. I didn’t feel like doing anything academic for the time being. Comics could wait, too.

So the very first question it asked:

Why do you want to be in a relationship?

It’s not that I don’t want to be in one. It’s been 5 years since my last real one (which ended fairly horribly). I’ve never been able to go back to the attitude and mentality before. But here’s the thing: I’ve got so many commitments right now and not a lot of time. I wouldn’t be able to invest as much time as I’d like into a relationship that deserves it. It wouldn’t be fair to the girl. Yeah, sometimes it sucks when you go out to parties and you’re like the 9th wheel. I try not to let that bother me anymore.

One of the next exercises involved listing every single relationship or crush and outline why it failed or never started. That’s a fairly decent sized list. Excluding Jessica Alba, I probably came up with around 9. In the early part of the twilight hour, I felt very awake. I’ve had a hard time getting any sleep lately. I sleep late at around 1 AM and I frequently get up at 7 AM. Too much on the mind I guess.

I still have to finish revising my article for the new WoW magazine. Need to come up with two post ideas for the wow.com site this week. I’m also working on an analysis of Robert Gates (US Secretary of Defense). He’s been responsible for much of the budget changes in the US military.

Time to play some Professor Layton!

It turned out to be a fairly frantic but thoroughly enjoyable day. Woke up with some tea and inserted the instant breakfast into the microwave. Started the day off with a bit of Warcraft and then the afternoon was spent working on writing. Got my magazine revisions back from my editor. Whoops, I wrote it from the wrong perspective. He wanted them from the first person whereas I was writing the interviews from the third person. No big deal. I still had my raw notes anyway.

Today was to be my birthday party. My actual birthday isn’t for another several days, but I picked this day because it was the day where everyone would be able to make it.

I also did a Family guy marathon of sorts. Big mistake. I always tend to procrastinate. Watched all of season 7 throughout the day while I was playing WoW (Having two monitors is great). 330 rolled around, and it was time to finish my assignment. It was due later that night at midnight. Yeah, big time procrastinator. I got the message one of my other friends was unable to make it. Must’ve caught something extremely bad. I hope she gets better soon.

When 5 PM came, I had to stop my summary assignment. It was time to go. I would’ve been done in another 10 minutes anyway. Went shopping and dropped money on some ingredients for pasta tonight. I should really be supervised better when I go shopping. Probably with at least 2-3 people to triple check everything.

Arrived at my friend’s basement suite. Sweet and sour onion chips and the veggie platter. I had five carrots. Figured that would be my quota for the evening. I introduced my new friend from SFU to my high school friends. She’s still fairly new to the area and didn’t know as much people. I figured I’d try and help expand her social network some.

Anyway, started off with some guitar hero 5. I was supposed to butcher Blink 182’s Rock Show and Elton John’s Saturday Night’s Alright. I wielded that microphone like a meat cleaver, that’s for sure.

Meanwhile, the ones who were most skilled at cooking were busy preparing the pasta and the sauces. Unfortunately, we were only 1 for 2. The Alfredo was lost. I grabbed the wrong kind of cream. Whoops. I thought the marinara was great with the chicken. My other friend’s girlfriend was kind enough to bake me a chocolate cake. Now even though I’ll eat anything, I have supremely high standards when it comes to dessert. I have to say, her chocolate caking abilities were extremely strong. Only thing was the cake had a huge hole in the middle. It was like a donut. A really large donut. I wonder what happened to the middle.

Naturally, as we progressed through the night, it was inevitable that we would reach the stage where embarrassing stories about the birthday guy were told. My SFU friend had been kept in the dark about this. I figured it would’ve been more entertaining if my friends told the story. There’s no way I could do it justice.

On the bright side, they didn’t tell her my propensity for screaming on high velocity amusement park rides.

Finally, we closed off the night playing some Taboo. This is probably one of the best party games in existence. I think some of the highlights of the night were:

“2.99”
”SUBWAY!” (Correct)
”Sapphire”
”RUBY!” (Correct! WTF Matt, how did you guess that?)

Here’s some of the gifts I received. Thanks guys!

The host got me that book. Funny guy! It was suggested that he gave me his own used copy. Frankly, I wouldn’tve been surprised!

This should keep me off of Warcraft for a while. I have this urge to try and solve puzzles.

Yay! Now I can learn more about Warcraft lore!