I Need a Hobby

Today I want to discuss something that has been a great annoyance for me for the past year at least. As I am getting older I am beginning to grow out of my childhood hobbies, yet I am not replacing them with anything new. I guess I should start by going over what my childhood hobbies were. I was the typical nerdy boy who was obsessed with video games with a collection of Xbox games that numbered over 100 at one point. This is the original Xbox of course. I got it when I was very young because my father is a computer engineer which has resulted in an upbringing centered around technology. Pretty much every dollar I got as a child went straight into the video games. And for those of you who think that video games make people violent I would love to inform you that I was practically raised with a controller in my hand and I am not violent at all. On that note I would like to derail the original point for a second to discuss this topic of violence and video games. People need to realize what exactly the video games do because it is true that they do in fact do something, but not in the way we like to assume. Video games make violent people more violent, but not non-violent people violent. This may seem contradictory but not if you look closely. If you do not "get off" on violence and murderous crimes then a violent video game will just be a fun time waster such as Tetris or Pacman. The only time that video games will effect the violence levels of a person is when that person already has a natural attraction to violence. If this is the case then the video game will serve as a test to show how much the said person enjoys the violent act. Some will say that they will release this desire through video games, but that is not completely true. For most people violence is not an energy bar that will eventually be depleted, but instead is an addiction that will grow. If a person fixates on the violence in a video game, then in some cases that could roll into reality when the person realizes the pleasure they achieve from violence. With this the video game did not create the violence in the person, but instead just showed the desire for violence that was already in the person to them. If you are a non-violent person than most likely you will remain that way unless a severe tragedy or event happens to you. An unimportant game will not change a personality trait. With all that said I will move on to some other hobbies I had which also resemble that of  typical boy. I watched plenty of television, played sports through my school programs (wrestling, baseball, and football), and many other smaller fads throughout my childhood. I don't like to include the fads as hobbies, because I consider a hobby to be something that lasts for a considerable amount of time. Something like Legos or Bionicles is just a fun thing that was popular at the time, but not an actual hobby that I naturally enjoyed. Once those items weren't really popular I eventually moved on to something else which made it a fad not a hobby. I know that I had other hobbies, but I won't try to thing of every one and bore the reader too much. My point is that as I have gotten older I have lost most of my interest in video games and television due to the obvious lack of productivity and usefulness  of the tasks. Don't get me wrong I have no problem with video games or TV but I personally like to make a hobby more productive now. Some people gain a lot from video games and they are an amazing stress reliever, which is great. I have gotten to the point that I cannot sit and play a video game or watch TV for more than an hour or two without feeling this overwhelming sense that I could be doing some much more productive. So I no longer watch TV and I play video games only on the rare occasion when I am feeling extremely lazy or I have friends over that want to play. All of the childhood fads have of course faded away like fads eventually do, and this has left me without a key hobby. I am now writing this blog in an attempt to create a good hobby for myself, but I can already tell that I will need at least a couple more hobbies to fill a week with. I love being active, but now that I am older (using this term very loosely) I have noticed how expensive it is to be an outdoorsy person. I don't drive a rugged, adventurer car or own a lot of equipment for doing things outdoors. I love to kayak, hike, mountain bike, and rock climb, but most of the time I lack the funds or friends to do these activities. I have also come to the obvious idea of spending time reading, but I also get the same feeling about reading fiction books as I do with watching television and playing video games. Reading is an amazing thing to do, but I always feel that reading about an imaginary story is no different than watching a show about an imaginary family or playing a game based on an imaginary world. All of these seem to be fun, but not very productive or meaningful. When I read I prefer for the books to be non-fiction and often times educational as well. This also results in the inability to read for really long periods of time due to eventual burnout on the subject. So now I feel stuck in a place where I want a hobby to fill my time with, but can't seem to find one affordable and productive. I have looked into volunteer work and things like that, but so far they all seem so difficult to actual get started. This may just be my laziness kicking in, but I can't seem to actual get a solid, continual volunteer activity going. I have an amazing girlfriend that use to take up a ton of my time, which I loved, but now with things like school and work getting harder and more time consuming we do not get as much time as we use to. I am not saying that this is horrible, but just pointing it out to show that the relationship doesn't take up a huge portion of my time anymore. If anyone has any ideas for great hobbies I would love to hear them. Right now I bounce back and forth between watching way too many movies, which I am aware seem like they should have the same effect as TV or fiction books but they don't, and wasting my time with stupid game apps on my phone which drive me crazy more than full console video games. I realize that it is not very logical to turn away video games as a hobby, but to replace them with a smaller version of a video game on my phone. The stupid games are just so addicting that I found myself continuously turning to them in times of boredom. This is an addiction I definitely need to get rid of. I believe that this brings an end to this post. Thank you for reading.
Sincerely - CO

Give Thanks

For obvious reasons I see it fitting to make this post about Thanksgiving. I am not one of the typical people who just blindly love Thanksgiving and think it is a wonderful celebration. Don't get me wrong I like the holiday because it is great to get with family and give thanks, but it is the history behind Thanksgiving that I hate. If we want to make it just a day that we can get together with family and friends and feast more than usual, then that is great. It is when we try to play the feasting pilgrims and Indians things that I get annoyed, because that is not what happened. Maybe the first day Christopher Columbus got here he feasted and ate with the natives, but even that I doubt. He was a mad man and slaughtered the Indians, and confiscated all their land as his own. I know that without him we would not have the America we have now (not sure if that is such a good thing), but that guy was truly messed up. We try to brain wash our young kids into thinking the pilgrims and Indians got a long and that Thanksgiving was created because pilgrims feasted with Indians and gave thanks for all their good fortune. This is not at all true. We slaughtered the Indians, stole their land, claimed their people as slaves, chopped down their forests, and then had the nerve to create a holiday called Thanksgiving to make ourselves feel better about it. It is like watching Pocahontas, but with an alternate ending where the British actual attack the Indians and kill most of them leaving the ones left to flee further into American soil. Then once they have captured all the  Indian's land they have a big feast and tell their kids who are born after it that Indians were there and just loved what the pilgrims "did for them." Yes it is true that the pilgrims probably gave thanks, but that was only because they were thankful for all the land they successfully stole and the miniature "war" they had just won against the Indians who were incredibly outgunned. So with all that said I will gladly give thanks for all the amazing things God has granted me in my life that I definitely don't deserve and I will enjoy a great meal with family, but I refuse to act like I am celebrating it for historical reasons. I hope that I have not ruined anyone's mood today or made them dislike the holiday because it is great to be with family and give thanks. I also want to say that I will not always make a post every day, but I will try my best to. Some may be very long depending on the topic, but some may be pretty sure. It all depends on how busy I am that day and how much I have to say. Thank you for reading my post.
Sincerely - CO

First of Many

This is the first time I have ever truly tried blogging. About a year ago I did a trial run with blogging and lasted about 20 minutes and phased out, so I don't count that attempt. I am hoping for a lot more from this attempt. For anyone who may be reading this I want to start by saying that I am not writing this for anyone in particular or for a specific reason. This is just going to be my way of getting my daily thoughts down on paper so I can have them to review and read when needed. I think about so many different things throughout a day or a week, but I never write any of it down. Most of the time I forget whatever it was I was thinking about once I new topic appears in my head, so I think it is about time I start keeping a record of my daily thoughts. Just as a word of warning to the reader, whoever you may be, this will not follow a linear format, but rather may be extremely sporadic and random. I am sampling going to write down my thoughts and ideas as they come to me. I am not writing for a grade or with hopes of this being read by many, but instead I write this for myself so that I can release my ideas from the prison that is my brain. I use to never take writing seriously. Not to say that I devalued it, because I love reading people's writings I just never saw myself as much of a writer when I was younger. Grammar was always something that I hated in school and saw little use for, but as I go on I see more and more how writing can be amazing and so useful. I have learned over the years that writing is so much more than grammar, and in the end grammar is merely there to make your writing seem smoother. This may be an obvious point to make, but like I said early that this will just be my thoughts written down as they come to me. I hope to not stop writing and make it a continuous flow from my head to this keyboard. I will try my best to make each individual post fit into one specific category or stay on one topic, but I cannot make any guarantees. Also, I will not be using any names of other people in this, because this involves me and my thoughts and there is no need to involve other specific people. Not to say that I won't discuss my life and the people in it, just that I won't be using names or be too specific as to give away the identity of that person. With all this said I will start the way that all blogs should that are about ones self, and that is by explaining who exactly I am. I will not give an abundance of detail about who exactly I am, because this is about my thoughts and not so much about who I am to the outside world. Truth be told my outside is a reflection of my inside so there will unescapably be some intertwining of the two as I relay my thoughts, but I will try my best to keep this arbitrary and idea centered. Now for that short bio I mentioned earlier. As you may see from the profile name above, that I honestly wish was not automatically listed, my name is Corey O'Neal, but I will get to changing that later hopefully. For the purposes of this article I will be going by CO for the obvious reasons of it being far easier to type than my full name. I doubt I will ever address myself in third person though, because I find that extremely peculiar when one does that. Where I live and how old I am will remain unknown because I see them as unnecessary information, but if they ever seem to be necessary I will debate making that information possibly known. I will give what stage of life I am in, and that is the stage known as being a college student. I am currently enrolled at a university to become a pastor. That is something I can discuss at great lengths, and may be a topic for later posts but not this one. I want this post to just be a general overview as to why I am writing this, who I am, and some random stuff every now and then that has no relation to anything at all. I will give more information about myself as I post more and more as it becomes necessary, but for now that is all that needs to be known because this is more for my thoughts and ideas more than it is for the actual person I am. So the next question I want to answer is why I all of a sudden felt a need to start a blog. Some might be yelling, "Hey!! You already told us why you are doing this earlier!!" Do not worry I am not suffering from short term memory loss, but instead I want to delve a bit deeper into my purpose for writing a blog. Like I stated this will not go in a linear order and will involve some jumping around. I enjoy this style of writing because thoughts are not linear. Some may argue that one thought leads to another, which is true, but that connection between topics made by your brain is not always logical. So as I was saying I am writing this blog for many reasons, none of which are important or impressive. This is just a way for me to deepen my thought process, and let my thoughts free in a way. When you see your thoughts laid out in front of you it is much easier to analyze them and find connections that previously were unnoticeable while they floated around in a web of chaos inside your head. This is also a great way for me to revisit past thoughts to see how I have changed. In the end this is just me writing for the sake of writing. I personal have changed interests completely since my middle school and high school years. I started out as a very nerdy kid, but I still wrestled and played football as well. The parts of me that changed tremendously were my interests. I use to see Math and Science as by far my strongest subjects, and I was the typical guy who despised English. I have always liked history a lot but recently my interest in other subjects has changed. While going through college I have learned that my "passion" for Science and strong like of Math has actually just been a small interest in them. The more I took classes in them in college, the more I realized that they were not my passion and I definitely did not want to spend my life working in those fields. I still really enjoyed them, but that was all. They seemed more like a fun hobby or interest, but there was no great love for them there. My major interest has actually completely shifted to writing and philosophy. I never would have guessed as a freshman in high school that I would eventually come to love English classes and writing papers. Today I would much rather right an 8 page paper versus having to do some math worksheets. I still enjoy the math worksheets, but not nearly as much as sitting at a computer typing away for hours like I am right now. So this may seem like an odd place to stop, but I am going to bring this first post to an end. I feel I have covered my points pretty well, and I am actually feeling a sense of excitement in continuing with further posting in the future. For anyone who may have been reading this; first I am very shocked you made it to the end without quickly clicking the red "x" in the top right corner and never coming back to this site again and second I am very thankful that you have not because even though this is not a blog for popularity or fame it is still nice to know someone out there is actually interested in this enough to read it all the way through.  
So thank you anonymous reader.
Sincerely - CO