Nav Staff – I’ve been hesitant to talk about this in my blog simply because I know I’m going to think of someone I wanted to tell in person (or at least on the phone or in an email) before they found out here. So if I forgot to mention this to you and you’re completely offended I apologize and would love to sit down and discuss the whole thing over a hot cup of tea. Sound fair?

I’ve decided to make a change in my life. Starting in August I will be joining the FSU Navigators staff team as a part-time staff member. This has not been an easy decision to make and I’d like to take you through the journey.

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Leading Off – Today’s post will be devoted entirely to sports. So I suppose if you don’t like sports you can check back later or read what I wrote yesterday about my birthday. But it won’t just be about statistics as I will go into what it feels like to be the rival school of Titletown U.S.A.

Sadly, It’s Great To Be A Florida Gator – (Though make no mistake, it’s still great not being one too.) It’s difficult for me to describe what it’s like to watch the Gators win another basketball championship. Ignore the fact that they won their first one on my 22nd birthday and their second one about an hour before my 23rd birthday. What really kills me is this team just started making the NCAA tournament a few years ago. Does anyone else remember that? These Gators used to be pretty bad. I remember in high school when it was a big deal that they beat Kentucky. It only took the Gators five or six years to put together what will be remembered as the best post-season starting five ever assembled. All I can come up with is that FSU must be terrible at recruiting. Neither of us were that good back around the turn of the century. Lord knows neither town is much more appealing than the other, at least as college towns go. They must have better facilities or something. Whatever it is, it occurred to me that it really wouldn’t have taken that much for our situations to be reversed. In basketball, anyway. Football is a whole other story that I’d rather not get into.

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My Annual Birthday Rant – Each year since I started keeping a blog in 2004 I’ve written a little post about just how much I dislike celebrating my birthday. Okay, I suppose I didn’t have a rant when I turned 20 but that was because I was new to this whole blogging thing. When I turned 21 I was in a bad mood. No one wanted to celebrate my birthday because the Pope had died the day before. What a jerk. A guy only turns 21 once. And it’s not like I wanted to get smashed, but it would have been nice to have to fight off people trying to get me drunk.

This was also when I first outlined my idea of the perfect birthday. “Here’s the bottom line: the perfect birthday would be if my friends were to hang out with me so long as it wasn’t something done for me. Something they would have done anyway and they simply included me in it.” To put it another way, I don’t want to be celebrated. Not for my birthday. This is coming from a person who craves attention and for years was willing to invent any sort of crazy story just to get it for a fleeting moment. I don’t mind receiving attention if I feel like I’ve done something to deserve it. But on the day of my birth the only person doing anything worthy of this sort of attention and celebration was my mom. Send her a gift.

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Leading Off – It’s been a very busy two and a half weeks, filled with travel, family, a wedding, getting sick, a broken air conditioning unit, Rez Week and one wicked party. Where to begin?

Presenting Mr. & Mrs. Jeremy Howard – The Thursday before St Patrick’s Day I traveled from Florida to Nashville for my cousin Beka’s wedding. I had been eagerly looking forward to this trip for weeks. My wanderlust peaked when all the students left to go on spring break. I really needed a vacation.

Incidentally I was traveling on my sister’s birthday. It was the first time I got to see Alison on her birthday since she turned fourteen back in 2002. It’s weird to think about things like that, measuring time based on milestones missed. Since I arrived at around 9 PM central time I didn’t spend too much time with her on her actual birthday, but I did get to give her a gift in person. Strangely, she also gave me a gift. You’d think after nineteen birthdays she would have figured out how the process works.

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