The Friday’s Feast is sporting a brand new URL! Come out and play!

Appetizer
What are you proud of?
I have been accused of being prideful in the past… not sure if its good or not, but I am proud of my countries, Colombia and the US. I am proud of my family and the way I grew up. I am proud of what I do and how I do it!

Soup
What is the best thing you’ve ever won as a prize?
I wish I could tell the best story, but it involves a friend and his Mom… and its kind of private.

Salad
Name something you do that is a waste of time.
Uh… Besides Mafia Battle… I think probably video games. I don`t watch as much TV as I used to, but I think that is more of a waste of time than video games.

Main Course
In what year of your life did you change the most?
2004 was probably the year I changed the most. I was probably shaped more by that year than any other in my life.

Dessert
Where is a place you consider to be very tranquil?
Home, and I think it should also be for everyone… I think home should be a safe heaven.

Before we get into the actual post I have to tell a story. Back in the College days when I saw both Melissa and Travis all of the time there was 3 Johns. One was John Pearson, then John Green the III and last but not least there was me. (Disclaimer * Names have been changed to protect identities.) It was tough to have 3 John’s around all the time, but I thought that with the last names we had it all figured out. Little did I know that my friends had a nickname for me behind my back.

Pearson was absentminded at times. They had kept the nickname secret for a while, but one day while bowling John P put a name I did not recognize up on the score board. That is when I first found out I was being called Paco behind my back. All of my friends waited for my reaction, but I embraced it. There are only 4 people in the world allowed to call me that to my face, they earned it by putting up with me during college and those are Melissa, Travis, the Vodka kid and Eric. The other people from that era have pretty much dissapeared from all of our lives.

Now you can understand why my first online handle was Devil_Paco. If you have known me for a while in the internet world, you would have probably gotten an e-mail from that e-mail address. It has now been retired for about a year… not sure why I kept it for so long but it was almost like a reminder of simpler times. While being with that same group of friends I came up with the handle Logtar. I was tired of having to use something different every time a system did not like the underscore. Playing Warcraft II over a home made network (which was a big deal back in 96) I decided that the Ogre’s were saying Logtar after you gave them instructions. I am sure my interpretation was not the most phonetic persay, but hey, its 6 characters and it was unique. I have only found two posers trying to wear the logtar handle… believe it or not this tirade is not about handles… is about my fast horrible attempts at web design.

The very first webpage I wrote cannot be found anymore. That is a shame because it was sweet… ok, it was not but since there is no record of it, I can believe whatever I want. We can call that (Site-Beta). The first release was under another name of my webmonster was done under the geocities banner flag… and it was called (Devil_Paco’s Homepage). I thought those days of horrible web design were over, but then My Space came out to make me wrong.

I thought I was super slick when I did the second version of my website, and I was even more excited with making graphics and that point… I thought I had true design skills… here is (John Guzman Personal Web Page). Frame on the top… back then it looked better when it was seen on a smaller screen at low res. I even built the little click buttons for my links, but no mouseovers yet.

After that I have a site that I did not update much, but I did have a version in Spanish of it. I remember I put a picture of my first house there but I think that one is not backed up all the way… I then started sporting the logtar handle in the URL. I even had my very first rudementary blog like page… lol.

I then started to think of a domain and I settled on something simple, something that would be easy to type and easy to remember… why not my handle! And Logtar.com was bought. The First version started being worked on here, but the final version was actually finished my one of my friends back then. It was a very heavy background with just some text… but it was a start… around the same time I discovered Jason’s blog and I thought wordpress was the coolest things since sliced bread… I have not looked back ever since.

Right now, logtar.com has two subdomains. The blog, and Proyecto Colombia. The website about Colombia is going to go through some mayor changes… stay tuned. My main domain is a little more driven towards the professional world… and well, if you read my blog you know more about me than you ever wanted to know. One thing I do wish I had done is to have kept screen shots of my old blog versions… we’ll see, wordpress is cool enough to let me go back to old themes… someday maybe. Hope you laughed as hard as I did.

Even though in English the play on words is not the same… what happened, happened! as in “it already passed” is a powerful statment. One of the most painful things in my life has been that a lot of people around me have not been able to see what they have until they lose it. At times I have felt like I am trapped in a bad psychological sci-fi thriller where I am the only one that can see reality and everyone else is still plugged to the machines. That can also mean that I am crazy and live in a alternate reality of my own… but thankfully I have found other people that are unplugged and have made me feel somewhat sane. At least as sane as they are.

Life is a beautiful thing that needs to be enjoyed. Living in the past is something that many people fall pray of, not realizing that by carrying the past, they clutter the present and don’t leave room for the future. The living in the future can be just as dangerous… wondering what will I do if this happened, how would I react if that happens… While planning is not a bad thing, we never know what tomorrow brings, enjoy the present already!

The past has the power to define who we are, but we still have that whole “free will” option. People think that fortune telling has no power, but wait until you hear something someone tells you in one of those sessions and a lot of times we make those things happen. I believe we can change who we become even with a dark past. Bad things happen to good people, but bad circumstances should not make bad people. Change is difficult but possible, and the fist step towards a clean future is to cut ties with the past.

I hate regret and try to avoid it… I was taught a hard lesson not too long ago and learned the meaning of the word regret for the first time. If I could go back in time, there is now something that I would take back… it does not matter how much I learned, it does not matter how much I grew because of the experiece, it does not matter how much I want to be positive about it… I want that time back… I learned about regret.

I wonder if having failed relationships makes you a better person in the end. I wonder how jaded you become, and how much that truly affects your ability to love. Learning about what to do and not to do in a relationship, does that require pain and heartbreak? Learning to trust your instincts, learning what trust is, learning who deserves trust; does that require your trust being broke? I wonder, is getting married to your highschool sweetheart better than dating a couple of satan’s daughters before you meet the woman of your dreams? Are we going to be able to appreciate the right person when they enter our lives? Do we take for granted our highschool sweet heart if that is only person we have only dated as adults? Is the question, “where have you been all my life” even valid?

Here I am, trying to drink my own koolaid and chocking on it. Maybe this is one of those lessons in life that teaches me about fear. I had feared regret and that is why I had avoided it so much; now I can say that I have experienced regret and can live with it. I can actually say that knowing about regret makes me a better person and lets me know what to do and not to do. It also teaches me not to take anyone for granted… including myself. You would think that a big regret will make you change who you are… in the end, at least for me, it solidified everything that I had believed. It all comes with the territory, being a positive cynic and all!

I cannot understand what is going on with the advertisement world. There are so many commercials on TV that I laugh at, and not because they have great humor. It has become a sad thing when I seriously think that I can do a better job than the people that made that stinker of a commercial.

My first complaint is that I cannot remember the product. It seems like now there are two modes, either infomercial, I will shove the product down your throat for only 29.99 or the Nikemercial, I will show you a closely related “idea” to my product and then show you a logo, yes I am that cool.

I would place most related adds with the infomercial category, except that they are a special kind… why are people so happy that they have herpes?

I really want to have a point, but I am just tired… most people are lucky, they do not get to see the horrible advertisement in Spanish TV in America. I swear that most people think that every single Spanish person is a pervert that watches soap operas all day… that is truly how they advertise. At least some of them actually attempt to make original content for their commercials, the more insulting ones are the ones that are just voiced over.

The invention of the DVR has changed the way I watch TV, since I just ignore commercials for the most part, but when I have to watch live TV, it is almost torture. When are advertisers going to get a clue as to how to sell us something. I guess at this point we have been so trained by them that they don`t even have to try.

So what are some of the commercials that annoy you the most?

Lets be honest, most people do not change their passwords very often. While I keep some of mine fresh, like my email addresses ones, there are many that unless something like going to a phishing page happens they do not change their passwords. I am making this a blog PSA and saying change your passwords today! All of them… if you must have one that you remember, mix it up with a word… so password4mail or password4amazon of course making password the new one you are going to use… be creative, if you need ideas use the guide I wrote… but change your passwords. (also don`t forget to backup).

One of my coworkers is a pretty healthy conscious person. Not health nut kind of person, but he likes to play sports, be active and eat good food. I think being around him has made me think a little more about what eat, even though he has never even mentioned a word about food. It has been some time since I ate junk food, I have been eating a home quite a bit or eating at the less greasy food places and I have noticed a huge change. Junk food now makes me sick. Whenever I eat food from one of the places that has lots of grease my stomach just kind of rejects the food. I get a bloated feeling and without energy. The first couple of times it happened I thought I was sick and considered going to the doctor, but then I started to see the pattern that every time I ate some of that food it just made me sick.

I am not sure if it is the low grade meat that some of those places use, but I am starting to get more and more grossed out by them. I think the only two places that I can stomach now are hardees and sonic… but the BK, McD`s and Wendy`s seem to be completely being rejected by my body. I have not gone to taco hell in months.

I worked at McD`s for 3 years during High School. I blame their fries and chicken nuggets for most of my weight spike. I cannot eat a lot of their fries anymore, but those nuggets are still tasty. Their burgers are what has made me feel pretty horrible when I eat them. I have not started working out as consistently as I would like, but soccer should be beginning soon and I need to get my stamina up so I can last a 90 minute match again. I should start running and with the weather cooperating that might start this week, I cannot stand running on a thread mill.

Taking junk food out of my diet should be a good thing. I just wish it was more of me being conscious about no eating anymore rather than my body literally rejecting it. I guess I should take it as a good thing. It is amazing that I can have strong will power for some things but when it comes to food I seem to be helpless. I guess that is just another area of my life that I need to buckle up for and take control of.

I am not talking about the rhythm method, that`s what my parents were using when they had me. This week I watched some of dancing with the Stars. I have to admit it was not as good as I thought it was going to be, except for laughing out loud when the dance coach also called Joey Fatone, The Fat-one. The whole fat thing and how it is funny is another good post, but we are just talking bout rhythm here.

KC has a pretty healthy dancing community when it comes to latin dances. You can find a good party every single weekend, and even though it helps to be personal friends with one of the DJ’s there are plenty of ways to find a club that is going to be playing some great music. There are two groups of people that go out to the clubs to dance latin music. I belong to the group of people that grew up with latin music around them, I learned to dance because my Mom taught me how. The second group are the ones that learned from a dance studio… and do I dare to say, they have no rhythm…

I know I am being unfair because not simply because you grew up around the music you know how to feel the music. I see that every weekend too, other latin people trying to do a dance that does not look anything like it is supposed to, worse yet they are so lost that the music is going one way and they are going another. I am only talking here about the people that can actually dance and stay with the music. Some know how to because they feel it, some know because they have been trained to do a movement with the beat.

My Mom loves to dance, and knows how to do must of the latin dances including Tango and “Paso-Doble.” I can follow her dancing those two, but I am really good at Salsa and Merengue. I have said it before, I am a total dancing fool. I hear a beat (even in a commercial) and I want to dance. My Mom also loves Ballroom dancing and watched it every time it was on TV. I also learned to love to watch the perfectly choreographed couples move on the dancefloor. They knew the steps and performed them with great accuracy, but did they feel the music? Do they have what I call rhythm?

No one is going to pay money to watch me dance like they do professional dancers; better yet, no one is ever going to pay for a dance lesson from me. I dance because it is fun and it makes me happy, I love feeling the music and it is one of the experiences where I feel like something is actully in my blood. A perfect example of this is the movie Dance with me that stars Chayanne and “Wilhelmina” or Vanessa Williams as she was known back then before Ugly Betty. You can see in the movie how different the two ways of dancing are. There is also a glympce of it in the movie Center Stage. When you dance to have fun and actually feel the music, it is a lot more beautiful than if you are repeating steps that coincide with a beat.

I have danced with people that learned dancing from just going out and having fun, and those that are trainned in a dance studio. I have no fun when I dance with someone that is not feeling the music, but its very mechanical about what they are doing. I am sure there are professional dancers out there that love to dance and actually know how to feel the music. Most of the professional dancers I saw in dancing with the stars looked like people that see dancing as a job. At that moment when it becomes a job, it takes the fun out of it.

Rhythm is something you feel inside for me, not something that can be taught. You can learn the steps from someone else, but the real lesson is how to actually feel the music. Have fun out there dancing.