Don't Forget, Tomorrow Is Ride Your Caterpie To Work Day!

Don't forget, tomorrow is Ride Your Caterpie To Work Day!

This isn't a serious display of skill, it's just my brother in a hilarious-sounding kart. He normally plays much better... but seriously, just LISTEN to it. And look at it. Makes Luigi's death stare much less threatening, no?

Ride Your Caterpie To Work Day is just a dumb joke between my brother and I. I know it's a Wiggler.

For some reason I always laugh more at people's reactions to a joke than the joke itself. Even if it's just a really bad pun, sometimes people will groan and I'll laugh hard enough for people to stare. I just find them incredibly amusing; I'm not sure why.

This becomes a huge problem when it's a perverted joke... I struggle to not laugh because I don't like that kind of humor - and I'm not laughing at the joke, just at how others are reacting to it. But I always chuckle or something, which makes me feel bad because people might take it the wrong way.

Even when I tell jokes, it's more for the reactions I'll get than the joke itself. I'm not really a funny person, but I'll try to say something so odd, dumb, or sarcastic that people react in strange ways. Blank stares in particular are my lifeblood.

Paranoia pt. 3: Panic strike

The year was 2011, the end of the year. I had just finished my first semester of gifted/boarding school. The paranoia thing was all but a bad dream, and I'd had no problems for years. Plus I was home for Christmas break, and who doesn't love Christmas?

A few days before Christmas, late at night, I felt my heart skip a beat for no particular reason. This was followed by my heart beating very softly, like it was having trouble beating at all. I was worried that it was some greater problem (cancer! flesh-eating bacteria!!), but then I was able to tell myself "Nah, it's just your paranoia again," as had been so effective in the past.

It didn't work this time. I was still afraid of it, because I could still feel it. I wasn't imagining the strange feeling, just the possible reasons for it. I was able to bat away the fear of those reasons, but not the issue itself. And because of this, I had my first panic attack in several years.

I don't think I've yet described what a panic attack feels like to me. It's like I'm about to faint at all times. All of the nerves in my body simultaneously feel numb and on fire, and I'm overcome with an immense fear of oh my gosh WHAT'S HAPPENING TO ME! Whatever I was originally afraid of is just replaced by fear, locking my brain and my body into panic mode. It doesn't hurt, there's no pain, but I do have a little trouble breathing, and a lot of trouble thinking about anything else.

So I woke my mom up and told her what was going on. She tried to allay my fears of what was going on with my heart (it was probably just an air bubble), but of course that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was the attack, and she sat with me for about thirty minutes before it finally released me from its grasp.

After this incident, I started having panic attacks regularly again. Yet there was a weird pattern: I only had the attacks when I wasn't at school. I had to be home on break. Clearly the stress was having a negative effect on me, but why only at home? What I did understand, however, was that they were triggered by my fear of the random pops and squeals of my body.

I went to summer school that year for a relaxing "semester" of American History. I was actually enjoying the format and the learning, and especially getting to meet the new students. But a harmless situation turned into a nightmare when one of the students was giving out cookies and jokingly said they had marijuana in them. I knew it was a joke straightaway, but I had already taken a bite and for a moment before the joke registered I was a little afraid of it (I do this with everything, it's pretty normal by now). Long after the fear had already gone away (as well as the person involved), I had a panic attack - this time at school.

It was like some kind of sacred place had been ruined for me. I knew I never had panic attacks at school, so I didn't have to worry about them there... but the following year (my senior year), I started having them more regularly at school as well. I had no one else to go to except my hall advisor, who was incredibly worried about me but seemed to handle it pretty well. I was always afraid that I bothered him too much, especially since they often happened at night.

It wasn't until the attacks were almost a weekly event that I knew something was very wrong. Almost all of them were triggered by my body, most on the left side surrounding my heart. The more often it happened, the more I was convinced something was wrong, and the faster my panic attack triggered. So I convinced my parents to get me to see a doctor about my left side, or at least my panic attacks.

Here's a list of dream jobs so I can get a post on here

Games journalism for mid-sized internet audience

Let's Player/video reviewer for multi-channel network

Programmer for small indie company

Level designer for larger company like Wayforward

Game localization for Nintendo/Sega

Social media/PR for any gaming-related community

Anything where I can be a part of the gaming community

Job assessments from the deep: The repetitive redundancies.

How many places have you worked at in the past? None, this is my first job.

How many times have you been fired? None, because this is my first job...

How many times have you received a promotion? Didn't I just answer that a second ago?

How many times have you been suspended from work? Look, I know this is an automated program, but you could've at least programmed in a skip for these questions.

So for some reason I decided to spend all of last night (seven or eight hours!) making the Tetris Attack character icons into Pushmo. I've determined that A) these make for really tricky puzzles and 2) I need a life.

In all seriousness, they are great puzzles, and I'm proud to have gotten all 13 of them done... mostly so I don't have to anymore. They work on both systems, like the last ones. If you want to try them, the full album is here:

http://imgur.com/a/lW8IG

Sprites ripped by Angelglory.