BillyStyle

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it in here before, but as a single guy around 30 years old, I’ve been put in so many ridiculously awkward date set up situations; you married people just don’t understand.

I realize that this only represents a small percentage of married couples, so I apologize to the majority of people who would never think to do such a horrible thing. Thank you.

I really don’t know what it is about people, namely married people. And, as a member of a very socially active church, I think things may be even more annoying for me than if I wasn’t religiously active.

I’ll skip really telling any history about set ups I’ve avoided and given in to because that would take too long. I will say that the best thing that has ever come out of any of the “dates” is a good steak dinner and some useless conversation that will never cross my brain again.

See, for some reason, people, mostly church people, feel that they are the ones who know exactly what I am looking for. They have just the girl for me. They often times tell me this immediately following our first introduction. For all they know, I may not even speak English! I’m just a tall, tan single guy (the handsome part is very debatable, the tall and dark part are easily proven) who has a tendency to treat strangers with kindness. These people see a guy like that and jump all over the opportunity to try and add some jewelry to my bare hands.

Now, here’s what baffles me. I would argue that the single most important decision of a person’s life is deciding if they should or should not marry their current boyfriend/girlfriend and spend the rest of their life with that person. So why on Earth would a middle aged married person have any thought at all that they probably know of a girl unlike any that I’ve met before, and will be the one to sweep me off of my feet. Of course there are many variables that lead up to the ultimate decision, but let’s look at the logic of that stranger being right about what my type of girl is.

First, let’s look inside the brain of the schemer, the one trying to set me up with their sweet-spirited girl. What could their reasoning be that could take them so far as to offer to buy me dinner if I but go on a date with this girl? Do they want to feel like a savior to me and have me be forever indebted to them? Do they just thrive off of prodding people into HUGE life decisions on a whim? Do they imagine that I’ve only met horrible girls who eat onions and asparagus, never floss, and haven’t heard of soap? Do I look like a desperate loser who would wet myself if I ever tried to ask a girl out? Do they think I’ve never dated a girl? Do they think I have no taste or horrible vision? Or maybe, just maybe, do they happen to know a 6 foot tall girl with the looks of Kim Kardashian and the personality of Zooey Deschanel’s character in Yes Man who happen to love wakeboarding? (By the way, if you know this woman, please disregard this post and do send her my way.) So far, that last one has never been the case.

Now, I know that none of these schemers actually, deep down, don’t care if I just meet her and say “No thank you.” Nobody goes to that kind of effort for that result, they just don’t. They all want me to date and marry the girl. Think about it. Why would they want anything else? This is the perfect match! I won’t just date her and then leave, get dumped, or dump her, then it wouldn’t be perfect! I will marry her and we will live happily ever after!

Okay, so that’s obviously how I see these people who insist on setting me up with their gentle ogre friends. Now let’s look at some things that seem much more reasonable to me, but never seem to happen.

Strangers never introduce themselves to me and suggest a restaurant to me. They never tell me that they just bought some new socks and they are super comfortable and then tell me where to get them and how much they cost. I’ve never been approached and given directions to a stranger’s favorite place to shop. And nobody has ever hunted me down to share with me their secret to building the perfect grilled hamburger. Why not? Well, in today’s society, that would just be weird!

I’m fine with all those previous things being thought of as a bit too personal to just blurb about to a complete stranger. So, answer me this: Why would ANYBODY EVER think it isn’t strange to suggest to somebody exactly whom they should decide to marry and deeply love the rest of their entire life? I mean really, think about it! All of the things in the previous paragraph would affect a tiny part of my life, and if I didn’t like the pointer, I wouldn’t really be changed too much. I’d either gain from it or just shrug it off. But a relationship affects you for the rest of your life.

I don’t really have a big concluding thought other than if you are one of these people who like to set people up on dates, PLEASE STOP! Tell people about your favorite salad dressing or shampoo or something. STOP TRYING TO RUIN LIVES! When you set two people up on a date, all four people are almost always going to get hurt. You and your spouse are two of those people, the one who got canned obviously will be hurt, and the one who did the canning will have to feel and/or look like a jerk. It’s a lose/lose/lose/lose situation!

Oddly enough, it’s been almost a year since I was talked into going on one of these dates. I ate the food, watched a movie in a theater and took off. I haven’t spoken more than 20 words to anybody involved in that night since, and none of those words were about said night. I’m just constantly baffled at people around me.

I realize that in many set-up type of situations, the schemers are “friends” or acquaintances of the poor target (me). I just see that as a much stronger reason to respect me and let me take care of my own HUGE life decisions.

Now that I got this off of my back, I’m excited to confront the next person who thinks they can waltz in to my life and magically send me spiraling into a storybook tale of everlasting love. This volcano will erupt!

The past few weeks here in Clermont have been pretty windy. We haven’t done a whole lot of quality wakeboarding, and it was starting to get a bit annoying. Then today happened.

In the past 24 hours, I haven’t been one bit too warm or cold and I’ve been mostly just wearing shorts the whole time. The wind has been almost non-existent, the air temperature is like a nice Oregon summer day and the water is a perfect refreshing temperature.

This is why I moved here. My work day consisted of going to work at 10am to cover Bob’s kitchen shift. I did a little emailing and sandwich making. I went for a wakeboard at lunch time and had some fun on the glassy lake. For the afternoon I coached four people and had a great time. Two new moves were landed and one rider landed a toeside 360, which he hadn’t done in a while.

Oh, to explain that title now. At lunch, I walked outside and noticed a big white jet stream to the east in the sky. Apparently a rocket or satellite had just launched from the Kennedy Space Center, cool! Then as we went out for the afternoon set of riding, I noticed a pair of turtles had crawled up on our boat lifts to do a little relaxing in the sun. Later on, I put the boat on a different lift, and the turtles decided it was in their best interest to plop into the water.

It was just an awesome relaxing day with some good wakeboarding. The forecast shows that more of this is to be expected. Awesome, can’t wait. Yay Florida!

Hey there sucka. BillyStyle’s got a new look! I just picked this theme off of a random theme type of site, looks a bit different. I’m not sure about the whole beige-ness of it, but for now I dig it. The site is a bit of a mess at the moment, but I’ll try to get it sort of back to being linked up and imaged up as it used to, but I did this without backing up a whole lot of stuff, so we’ll have some changes!

Anyway, I plan on updating this more. I think I’ve said that about five other times in the past, we’ll see if it sticks this time. Til next post, peace out.

- It’s hot in Florida! Last week hovered around 100 degrees Fahrenheit with 80-90% humidity, but no rain to cool us down. We’re in our busy season now, and we’ve all been spending many hours on the boat. The shallow lakes here are currently right up around 90 degrees, which can be a bit uncomfortable. Now, I’m not complaining one bit. Three years ago I was one of many people stuck in a big dirty warehouse moving huge heavy boxes of furniture to a new huge clean, but still really hot, warehouse in Southern Utah. Man that sucked.

So life is good here in Florida. I’ve noticed that with the weather and my current financial situation, I’ve gradually toned up and my body is in pretty good shape. See, I figure it’s the weather and money I have to credit my shape to because I wakeboard more with nice weather and eat less when I have no money. It’s a pretty sweet deal really.

- Right now, I’ve still got this site hosted in St. George, and something happened a while ago that messed things up. I’m kind of tired of pestering them to fix things, and I feel bad about it because I’m not paying for it, since I used to work for the company. I say this because I can’t upload any images right now, which means you have to wait a bit longer to see the splinters that I took out of my butt last month. They’re pretty awesome.

So yeah, I’m going to move this site to another server I use for my other sites at Bluehost. Yep, that’s an affiliate link right there. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it. If you do know what that means, can ya blame me? They’re good and I could use a buck!

- Anyway, this NBA offseason has been pretty sweet for my teams (yes, I consider Orlando my #2 team these days). Orlando dropped Turkoglu, Lee, and Alston then picked up Vince Carter, Brandon Bass, Matt Barnes, Ryan Anderson, and managed to keep Marcin Gortat, yeah! They’re bigger and badder than before, and I like that.

Portland stayed pretty inactive, although there were lots of talks of moves. They got some young guys I know nothing about, gave away Sergio (no more sweet Spain to Spain alley-oops, bummer) but then got Andre Miller! The dude is the best point guard in the league to never really accomplish anything. He’s a career 14 point, 7 assist, 4 rebound point guard who can post up and has a great knowledge of the game. Word on the world wide web is that Oden is looking pretty good at the moment too. Magic/Blazers finals? Well, maybe in 2011. Shaq might get one more this year.

OK BYE!

Hey friend(s)! Not sure if anybody is still checking here from time to time. I’ve realized that maybe at least once a week, while outside around sunset, I say to myself “I love Florida.” It’s awesome here. I finally know why sunsets are so great here. There are two contributing factors. The whole peninsula thing provides plenty of sweet clouds and good storms for the sun to turn pink, purple, red, orange, yellow, and all that good stuff. When the colors show up, you don’t have to go far to see a lake reflecting all those colors, so you get blitzed with color; it’s awesome.

This morning was pretty fun. We shot a new ad for The Wakeboard Camp. We had around 16 people out behind the boat at the same time. The boat struggled to pull everyone up on their wakeboards, but eventually it worked out. The number got whittled down to 11, and I was one of the fallen. I had chosen to bring a wakeskate out for the experiment, and it proved to just hold everybody back due to the small surface area. Shucks! The ad should be showing up in wake magazines later this summer.

You may notice a new link on the side: Explosions and Boobs. It’s possibly the greatest idea for a website ever. And yes, it’s work safe.

Finally, spinning is winning here in Clermont! People are landing all kinds of new rotation based moves on their shred-sticks. Sweet as!

So I’m planning on going to Canada. It will be my first time leaving the continental 48 states. Sweet ay? It still may not happen though, and if it does, I may struggle to get back. Let me explain. I’ve never had a passport, and didn’t even think of documentation I’d need to get into the Great White North. So last week I ordered my birth certificate, then yesterday I signed up for a passport. I got it expedited, so I should get it within 3 weeks. I think I only need my license and birth certificate to get into Canada, but thanks to a new law as of 2 days ago, I may need a passport to get back in. So my plan is to have people here mail me the thing when it arrives.

We’ll see how that all pans out. I’m driving up there with Cam, my French-Canadian friend in a little, shoot, can’t remember, I think it’s a little Toyota something or other. I’m pretty sure it will be fine, but it’s a 24 hour drive. About the first 20 hours are up the US East coast. I plan on trying out a big ol’ Georgia peach.

Next on the docket is my butt. On Monday this week, I was shooting some hoops in the driveway of work, and I had a run in with the pole that is erecting the backboard and hoop and all that. The story at least starts out kinda cool, because I just recently started getting my legs back and I had a pretty good dunk. On the way down from the dunk, my right butt cheek slid down the wood 6×6 or whatever size pole it is. I took some of the pole with me.

Some good sized splinters made it through my shorts, and I couldn’t quite tell at the time if they made it inside of me too or not. I pulled some out of my shorts and went on with trying to be like Rex Chapman and all was well.

Later that night, after eating dinner, I was brushing my teeth and decided to check out the wound. There was a nice little hole (yes, I just made reference to a butt hole, but not that hole). I picked at it to see if there was anything in there, and a couple minutes later, tweezed out a splinter about twice the thickness of a toothpick and about a half inch long.

That was all fine and dandy, but probably 2 inches past that, I could feel another hard object about the same size deep under my skin. Apparently more wood got crammed way up in there (this is sounding more homo-erotic, not so cool) in my butt. Luckily it’s just the cheek, so no vital organs or veins or anything.

Now it’s a couple days later, and it hurts a bit there. I should probably go to a doctor, but I’ve got weak insurance, and I’m curious to see what my body will do to try to get rid of that thing.

So in a few days I’m off to Canada with some wood in my butt cheek and no passport. Sweet!

Hello there internet people. Spring is here and it feels summer-ish in Central Florida. We’ve been busier than expected at the good old Wakeboard Camp, which is pretty sweet. I can’t remember if I’ve put it on here before or not, and am too lazy to check, but I’ve noticed a funny thing that happens when you work somewhere you enjoy. I end up spending at least three or four more hours a day at work than I am scheduled to work. A lot of that is because I go ride with my fellow coaches, but I also end up just hanging out with the people there.

We get people from all over, so it’s fun to hang out with them. It’s kind of like I’m going to different little hang out spots all over the world, but it always happens about three minutes away from my house. Kind of a neat thing. Just in the past month, we’ve had people from probably seven or eight different countries.

A theory I’ve recently concocted is that many Californians seem to think that California is not one state, but two: Southern California and Northern California. I would add to this that those same folks are unaware that California doesn’t actually end just to the North of San Francisco and Sacramento, but continues on for about another 250 miles or so to the North.

To me, it makes more sense to call the San Fransisco area Central California. Maybe they don’t know what California looks like, I’m not sure. Pay attention though next time you’re around a group of people from California.

Other than that, I’m still me, still riding sideways on the water, still rocking and rolling. Until next time, be excellent to each other!