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syed wrote a bio of me. i found it amusing simply because it's fun to read about oneself in a positive light.

what the big man had to say:

blake is your internet nerd. at heart. not at hair ... er body. he actually looks like a kid on barney or a pop star. i bet he could pass off as a movie star at anywhere he went. hes a gamer though. he loves the internet, its like his life. no it is his life. hes also tall and he loves to play. games that is, though im betting he likes to play with girls too. hes kinda frisky and he likes to have fun. one of those happy go lucky guys that can crack a safe with his jokes. and hes pretty good looking or suave or whatever you want to call it, im betting hes going to get a lot of girls before he leaves ut austin. and hes a singer, and a good singer. so he has some ins everywhere. hes one of the smartest people i know. he writes left handed so i think he has added gifts. and he can write. hes a hell of a fiction writer. and he can do whatever he wants when it comes to math. he takes math over. hes like got both sides in full function.

so since i'm feeling nice, here's a reciprocal bio:

syed is the genius. take the knowledge that comes with being a nerd (me), amplify it by ten times, and stick it all in a brain that's somewhat more reliable than mine (in that i forget everything), and you have this guy's mode of thought. his academic prowess is how he gained his reputation, and rightly so - i may be a member of the math team and have a high gpa, but since freshman year he's taken over the role of making the school academically famous and destroying brain-based competition like math team, while i sit on the proverbial bench and crack jokes. smarts aside, he's got a lot of things he's unaware of - things like the ability to understand human experience without actually experiencing it (maybe that just comes from spending time with stoners), and a truly wicked sense of humor. a connoisseur of fine women that only have sex with the filthy rich, syed himself will likely become filthy rich and ultimately conclude to himself that money does indeed buy happiness. he often finds himself confused with teenage issues, mostly those relating to the opposite sex, but he can't really be blamed because his family's social values have declared that since he was born. declaring himself 'stupidfatugly,' syed naively decided that there was something wrong with him based solely on comparing himself to the wrong handful of people at school. failing to see the rare good in the teenage species, he reluctantly accepted the role of a lonely genius, blindly ignoring the fact that a massive amount of people came to his side, cheering wildly at awards ceremonies while jealous parents recycled jokes of giving him a chair on stage. syed will slowly awake to the goodness of teenage life - the lack of responsibility, the four-year-bliss that is college, the rare women who are just like him in almost every respect, the surrealism of senior year, and most of all, the few quality friends that he'll acquire - and it will ultimately make him an optimist, if not content with existence. and someday, he'll look back on his high school days and realize that he only trudged through the same bullshit that everyone did, and be proud of the fact that he hardly got his shoes muddy along the way.

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i get at bored at work. the following ensues.

note to self: create website feature to save longer works (short stories) and not publish them on the site until they're done.

the real purpose of this post: it's time to continue a classic short story about a boy and a girl in the forest:

there the boy sat, with his back to the giant tree, all but chained to the ground by the girl, silent with admiration. he did the best he could to ignore the tree, but he couldn't look anywhere without seeing its giant branches curling down, encapsulating him, the girl, and everyone else in the world beneath that one large tree. the boy painfully wished to see the smaller things in the forest, the small, colorful flowers, the rare flying insect that's friendly, the degenerative moss that's responsible for the rebirth of the forest, but the girl simply couldn't understand why he'd want to.

"why?" she asked.
"because that's where the real beauty lies," the boy replied. "don't you see that anyone can see the giant tree in the forest? even the ignorant man can't help but notice it from the windows inside his small, dark house in the village. even the blind man can feel it from the way the wind blows around it. and even the simple, innocent child, who can't see it above the tops of the other trees, knows it's there by that sort of inexplicable conscience we all had before we lost our innocense."

all the girl thought to say in response was, "huh?"

"fine, i give up," said the boy. "look at your stupid tree and be happy. if it makes you happy, that's what matters, doesn't it? i just want you to know that i'm not happy because you had to force me to sit here."

"no, really, what's wrong?"
"i just told you what's wrong!"
"no you didn't," the girl insisted.
"yes, i did. and you decided to ignore it because i made you feel stupid. you realized that the fool is the only one who still respects the big tree. it's only a tree, after all. so here you are, feigning incompetence, still keeping me under this damned tree. i'm through with it. don't ever bring me out here again." the boy got up and began to walk home, looking at neither the tree nor the smaller things he had wanted to see so badly. he knew the girl would become lost in the forest on her way home, but he sarcasically reassured himself that the girl could find her way by the big tree. it really didn't matter to him whether or not he ever saw the girl again; he had spent his childhood laughing at the fool more than the clown because the clown was wittingly acting stupid.

the girl promptly blamed the whole incident on the tree. soon after the boy left, she got up and began to walk home. she was lost until she found more familiar landmarks in the form of giant logs from big trees fallen years ago. she would never walk to that big tree again, but she'd never learn to see the flowers either.