The Column

Motto: GET READY FOR FINANCE, BABY Taxes are needlessly confusing. At least that's how I always found them to be. Some relatively simple jargon like "deductible" kept me from understanding what's really a pretty basic concept. Here's what almost 30 year old Aaron wishes he could send back in time 10 years to almost 20 year old Aaron. Top 10: Favorite TV Comedies... Updated from #302 10. Family Guy 9. King of the Hill 8. Last Week Tonight 7. Futurama 6.  Parks and Rec 5. Scrubs 4.  The Office 3.  Arrested Development 2. Community 1. Rick and Morty Quote: "Hold your poop in so it goes up... science." - Jon - "The meat sweats are basically my normal sweats." - Jon - "I got some vodka! I ain't worried." - Jon - "Can you guys please wait until the song is over?" - Derek, who was listening to Rebecca Black's "Friday" out loud at work, to some coworkers who start...

Motto: I don't know why she swallowed the fly I'm literally not talking about the widely-recognized abuse of words like "literally". This is less of a Buzzfeed Listical and more of a series of topics about which I have been contemplating (in the near past) that can be presented under a common theme. "Healthy" - without disease; promoting well-being That's the best definition I know. That is, notionally, what "healthy" is supposed to mean. Sometimes it gets used that way. I think, though, that a majority of cases in which I come across the word it means "please buy my product - don't fee guilty!" or "please buy in to my way of thinking about this". To me, healthy is having the physical and emotional capability to do the things you want to do, to accomplish things that are important to you - that which makes you fulfilled, and continue that capacity in the face of reasonable obstructions introduced by the world and t...

Motto: Think Outside the Box, but Color Inside the Lines The title of this post is not a reference to the Super Bowl. I didn't watch it. I have heard how it went, but I was too busy learning how to ski and spending the better part of my 3 hours on the slope flat on my back. The title of this post is a reference to the progress my aforementioned back has made since the end of January. It was really bugging me, as I mentioned in my previous post. In that post I didn't convey my real thoughts about how chronic pain sucks and how it affects you very well. It's the worst. It's a constant reminder that your body is limited, your time here is limited, the experiences you will have on this earth are limited by both of those factors. Rather than continue down that depressing path, I'll just say that I'm back to feeling good again! Anti-inflammatories work like a charm. As much as I hate relying on a prescription to be normal - I'd rather be on one and feeling norm...

Motto: I Guess Ryan Gosling is Okay This year I am back to my 30 Day Challenges. They bring a variety to life that I quite enjoy. I missed the feeling that the next 30 days might have some lasting impact, might reveal some hobby or trend that you wouldn't know you'd like, or might just be made slightly more interesting. Truthfully I don't know what I'd be doing if I wasn't always trying to better myself in some way. I feel like I'd just immediately get fat and give up on everything. The end of the year last year I fell off the horse... mostly due to an injury. But its lasting impact was the realization that, after 30+ days of not exercising, you sorta feel crappy all the time. So I lifted weights earlier (a lot earlier, this post was several weeks in the making) in my home gym. Which is awesome. Even more awesome once I finish  it. Flooring. Walls. Maybe paint up the unfinished ceiling. Could make for a cool (if a bit expensive) 30 Day Challenge, actually. ...

Motto: Putting the "Multi" in "Multimedia" This column is an exploration of all the different forms of multimedia I can create; it's also an experiment to do so in such a way that I tell all the stories I wanted to tell in this post. Everything in this post is completely original content created by yours truly (if you couldn't already tell by the terrible production value). First off, I want to start with the podcast I made for this column: [Podcast w/ homemade motiff] I got Randall Munroe's book "XKCD Volume 0" for my birthday. It looks like this: [Drawing (MS paint)] [Text (computer)] In this book , there is a selection of the first 600 comics. Rather unexpectedly (for those people that don't read the description of the book, namely, people like me) there are doodles, notes, and puzzles in the margins. Randall Munroe is clever, smart, and, worst of all, educated. With these puzzles, I feel as though I have been issue...

Motto: Shallow and Pedantic Forewarning: This update is all about me. I apologize for the topic, unknown readers, but it's pretty much the only thing I write about. What are you doing here, anyway? That was an inside joke. Sort of. I leave for Thailand in 4 days. But this post has nothing to do with that. That will be soon. Probably next time. What this column IS about, as given away by the title, is Fitness and a semi-dramatic system re-tooling within my life. To tell you that story, let me set the stage with the way things were. There was chaos. The streets ran wild with the long-forgotten children of who knows who. These kids knew they had to look out for themselves - nobody else was. Street fires burned for days. Fire departments had long since gone the way of the dodo and the police force. Did I say they were gone too? Yeah. They were gone. It was a pretty bleak scene. I didn't keep track of the foods I ate or where my money went to. Like...

Motto: I'm a Creative Cat; a Star-Performing Word-Worm Two Days Ago, March 16th, 2013, marked the 1-year anniversary of my first column on Blogger . I've written a lot about the column on the column. The reason for that is that this is a blog about my life and thoughts - and the column happens to be a non-negligible part of both of those things. Blogger has been fantastic platform for my purposes; and I can see myself really settling in here. I mean, I've been doing it for about 1/24th of my life already, so... I guess you could say I'm settled. I want to make it to a 1000 posts, someday... but I'd settle for 100 for now. One step at a time, yo. My grammar is not perfect, and I know that. I've had a particular weakness brought to my attention recently and it now bugs me... I suck at participles. If you've been reading the column scrutinously, there are surely dozens of examples you could have saw. OH THE REASON I WANTED TO WRITE THIS! ...

Motto: Whatever I feel like. That's the whole idea. It's been a little while since I updated. My mind has been on other things. A while back my cousin had me watch a few episodes of Community. I liked it. I told Melissa that I liked it and that she should watch some episodes. Because she's great, she started watching it. She likes it. Because she likes it, I decided to start watching it. It almost sounds like that violates causality... but I think if you follow along with my visual aid you'll figure out that natural order has been retained: Community is great. It's quickly escalated to become one of my favorite shows on TV with some of my favorite character/actor combinations I've ever seen. It's great. Here's a fun fact not everyone knows about me already: I briefly tried to be a cartoonist for the newspaper at the University of Kansas. You see, their comics were terrible. So terrible that I thought - hey, my doodles are equally terrible! May...

Motto: Labeled, Segregated, Categorized, Classified, Sorted, Filed, Tabulated, and Designated This column has been a couple of days in the making... it may be on the long side. You can glance down to get a peak of what you're in for and decide for yourself if it's worth it or not. You know it's worth it. This first bit bounces around some. I had a lot of small things I wanted to say that don't gel so well. I went through and retroactively applied labels to ALL the previous columns. To celebrate, I'm going to add everything to this column that I need in order to give it ever label I plan on using. You can click on any of the labels and see all the columns that are tagged with it. Cool? Cool. As an electrical engineer, I'd like to take this opportunity to celebrate my 100,000th column! I want to see a game of Scrabble played between two people who make crosswords for a living. That would be intense. Pandora, the internet radio station that everyone ha...