I decided today would be a good day to share a small part of my life with you.

As you probably already know, my friend Ed and I go to our local community college over the summer to get transfer credits for our primary universities. This summer, I am taking three classes while Ed is taking two. However, the difference is that two of my three classes are online, while both of Ed’s classes are on-campus.

Normally, a regular class day (which is twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays) begins by me picking up Ed from his house in the morning. Both of us have a class that takes place between 9:00 AM and 11:50 AM. After we are both dismissed from class, we go to McDonald’s to eat lunch, and we return back to campus.

Ed has another class between 1:00 PM and 3:50 PM, while I do not. So, I usually bring my laptop to work on some of my online classes, or to get some other stuff done (like writing this blog post). I usually sit in a lobby next to a hallway at the entrance to building E, which is where Ed’s last class is held. Two important things to note there is that it’s next to a hallway and entrance – meaning, there are a lot of interesting people walking by doing some pretty strange and funny things.

Last week, a woman left behind her purse on a chair. She was back today with her purse again, which most likely meant that someone was nice enough to pick it up and drop it off at the lost-and-found, and the woman was fortunate enough to be able to get it back. I didn’t really think much of it until I noticed that she had left. I looked over at her spot, and guess what she left behind again…

A little while later, I overheard some people having a conversation near the vending machines. One person said, “I tried giving my daughter some caffeine because she wouldn’t stop crying, but she’s still the same.”

That sort of reminded me about some of the people who go on the Steve Wilkos show because they think one of their family members gave alcohol to a baby to make it stop crying, and it ended up dying.

Hey, at least it stopped crying.

I guess caffeine could be a gateway drug for the parent to eventually give their baby alcohol and end up murdering it. I guess we might have a local make an appearance on the Steve Wilkos show soon.

And finally, towards the last hour or so, a man wearing bright red pants kept pacing back and forth the hallway, and it ended up being very distracting. At one point, I was counting how many passes he had made, but realized I was wasting my time and went back to my productive work.

Now you know what an average Thursday at my community college is like.

You might remember from a previous blog post (and from the most recent video) that Ed went to martial arts for the first time a while back and had a terrifying experience because he was so out of shape. I coerced Ed into coming to martial arts again today, and I brought my camera so he could make a video. He filmed a bunch of footage during the children’s class when I instruct, so I should probably have the clips cut together and compiled by tomorrow.

During the adult’s class, which was when Ed was participating, we did some cardiovascular exercise for the first portion of class, then Ed and I went off to the side so Ed could practice his kicking. After he learned the technique of the roundhouse kick, I told Ed to hold the shield so I could kick him around a little bit.

I was kicking at about 10-20% power, but Ed still looked like he was in miserable pain. Fortunately, through this process, he was able to learn how to take hits and how to breathe out accordingly so he feels less pain.

Yes, this means that we can kick Ed now without killing him. If you happen to see Ed on the streets, feel free to go up to him and kick him.

Don’t forget to keep an eye out tomorrow for the new video.

On the way back from summer classes today, I drove past this car.

The funny thing about this is that this demolished car was in the left turn lane in the middle of the street, but there was nothing else around it. Meaning, there was nothing around it for it to have crashed in to.

My speculation is that it was going so fast that it broke the gravity barrier and did a nose dive straight into the ground; upon impact, the extra gravity released and the car fell back upright.

Ed’s speculation is that it crashed into another car, but the other car already got towed away.

I like my guess better.

This is probably one of the silliest and strangest errors I’ve seen someone make when it comes to food service.

How do you accidentally put a strip of bacon on top of the entire sandwich and not notice before closing the box?

Anyway, I’m not complaining. It’s a free bonus bacon strip.

First of all, thanks to everyone who congratulated me for reaching over 5,000 subscribers on YouTube and over 300,000 video views.

A handful of people have asked me if I’m going to “celebrate” this “milestone” by making a special video, doing a giveaway, or doing anything special or different in general. Unfortunately, the answer is no.

The reason for this is that, to me, 5,000 subscribers isn’t exactly a great accomplishment, especially con­sidering how long I have been producing online media content. I also have a lot of good buddies who are YouTubers as well, and the number 5,000 looks like ant feces compared to their subscriber counts.

On top of that, even though I have 5,000 subscribers, only about an estimated 10% of them actually consistently watch my videos. I came to this conclusion because a majority of my videos that I don’t post elsewhere – that is, I upload it, and don’t tell anyone through any other social media outlet that I did – only get a couple hundred views, and usually don’t get more than 500. When I post links to my new videos on other places and post them on my website, the number of views on my videos usually triples or quadruples. Thus, I can easily conclude that my direct YouTube subscribers aren’t my biggest audience, it’s my blog readers and other social network followers.

By no means does this mean I’m disappointed, and I am definitely not going to stop making videos at any point. When I post videos, I usually either do it for fun, or for video editing practice so I can sharpen my skills when I’m working on bigger and more meaningful projects with other bigger content producers. I just wanted to quickly address this issue because a noticeably large number of people were mentioning it to me, and I felt they deserved a response. My feelings about my subscriber or video view counts will not significantly affect my future video making, and I will stay consistent to what I have done in the past.

Last year, I was able to take summer classes at my community college to get some really easy transfer credits for my main university. I planned on doing that this year as well; if you read my blog post from two days ago, you know that I recently took my first day of class for this summer semester.

Unfortunately, it’s not going to be quite that easy this semester.

I’m taking nine credits’ worth of class (which is the same as last year), but this year, I have two online classes instead of one. One of the online classes is a literature course, where we have to (literally) read the equivalent of one book a week (I say “equivalent” because sometimes we have to read poems or short stories, but on those weeks, we have several of them to read). Fortunately, the due dates for my second online class are staggered such that one entire unit is due every handful of weeks, rather than having small assignments due every few days.

This literature course is a lot more intensive than I was hoping for, and I ended up having to cram a ton of stuff earlier today because the due date for five different assignments was today at 5 PM, and I found out about all the assignments on Tuesday late afternoon.

This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to be spending less time posting stuff on my website, but it does mean that this migration process is going to take a lot longer than I had hoped because I’m going to have a lot less opportunities to sit down and do a lot of time-consuming work related to something that isn’t as urgent as my academic work.

On the bright side, if any of the papers I write for this class end up being interesting, I’ll post them on my website like I used to a long time ago when I wrote interesting papers more frequently in the past.