September 19, 2000

School.

Extremely hectic. I woke up well-rested thanks to my Nyquil, and was ready to go on time (more or less as usual), but I was forced to wait for my brother to complete his phone conversation with Sheena (also as usual). Then he couldn't find any toothpaste. I told him it was in the drawer. We finally got on our way a little before 7:30am. The bell rings at 7:45 -- it gets earlier every year -- and with traffic being as horrible as always, we were late. I finished up my reflection drawing in A.P. Art 1st hour, and then ran back out to my car to get my presentation for Anatomy. I was less than thirty seconds late to class, which was quite impressive seeing as how we only have five minutes passing time. It takes at least that long to walk from one side of the school to the other, taking into account the overcrowded hallways and numerous slow-walking sophomores. I constantly get the urge to push my way through and scream, "Out of the way, bitches!" but I could never bring myself to be so rude to complete strangers. It would greatly reduce my list of tardies though.

A.P. Stats was easy as always, if not very interesting. I enjoy doing some of the problems, such as the standard normal distribution and whatnot. At least that's got set formulas and rules to go by. Much better than trig.

A.P. Psychology was a long lecture on all the basic common-sense type aspects of the practice. I can't wait to get to something more stimulating than Structuralism vs. Humanism vs. Fuctionalism. I managed to stay awake somehow. Norman and I talked instead of taking notes. Oops. He's my diva-wannabe totally ghetto bald-headed talk-to-the-hand sorta friend. Thanks to him, class is bearable.

Band - blah. Our theme for this marching season is Latin music, and most of it sounds the same to me. Salsa Man, The Contender, Green Onions, Lock You Up, Pegasus, If you Can't Rock Me and a few others learned thus far. Not to mention the usual School Song and The Star Spangled Banner. I can only thank god I play the piccolo instead of a baritone or some such nonsense.

I left for French class afterwards, grabbed a quick bite to eat at Becky's house on the way there (white grape juice and a plain bagel), and then sat through fifty minutes of French. I still don't have the version of Cyrano de Bergerac that I need for the homework. We have a test over the entire book Wednesday, and I haven't even started. Smart.

Home. Slept. Went back to Hope College to watch the Cyrano movie, only to find my class waiting in the library with no video. Our prof had forgotten to reserve it. Nice. So I went back home. Got sick to my stomach after eating numerous chocolate chip coconut cookies and spent a while in the bathroom. Miserable. I should be at band practice, but I really don't feel like driving anywhere after puking. Perhaps it's bed time.

I have to look forward to only work, and parsing HTML and XML. Ack. And more importantly, I've discovered that I'm only truly productive when I'm exhausted.

Today I also have to find a copy of Oracle, which is priced atrociously. They actually charge first by the amount of processors, then by the megahertz rating of each chip.

young developers suck

I used to be a developer, I was a code monkey with the rest of them, but I turned to the dark side of R&D, so I get to knock up silly stuff on new technologies and hand them to the code monkeys to develop. Plus I tend all the new and funky hardware.

But the monkey standard is going down hill. Last week I had someone who came to ask me for help tracking down an error, who hadn't even checked the error log, and once I made him do that, he didn't know how to lookup the Windows Error Codes.

I have 4 iPaqs on a desk, running version 3-5 browsers, one machine dedicated to each browser version, and a spare machine for IE5.5, Mozilla and Netscape 6. Do they check their development for browser compatibility? No. It's not difficult people, get off your lazy backsides and walk to another desk.

But what started this rant was some idiot coming to me with a DLT and asking if I could restore the contents. Problem is he backed up using ArcServe. We use Backup Exec. He didn't see the problem. He thought because the tape was a DLT any software would read it. Then he demanded I install Arcserve to restore his tape. Except our DLT drives are our live backup server, with scheduled backups (we use DAT for the developer boxes). So he expected me to stop the backups, install his crappy pirated backup software, restore his stuff, then reconfigure the DLT array.

I can't wait till his 3 month review. I get to input on the developers, as I'm outside their department. Looking at his code right now, I'm going to kick his ass.

Still, off to Rome this evening on a business trip. I wonder if you can buy Pope snowglobes.

The office has just emptied, as though in a vacuum. I went to the toilet, then emerged to discover myself in a small business version of the Marie Celeste. Coffee lies on desks, still warm. Pringles tubes sit out in the open, asking to be raided. Eating stolen food, I ring the secretary to ask what's going on. Apparently, Gordon Brown has just announced that petrol tax will not be cut, ever, and the protesters can go fuck themselves. Of course, he used political terminology, but that was the gist of it.

The result? The blockade starts again, at 12.00 hours (right about now). Seconds out, Petrol Crisis round 2. Everyone in the office has fled to panic-fill their tanks. They'll spend the rest of the week criticizing people who do this.

I walk to work. I get to be smug bastard. Nothing beats that glow.

---

Looks like this latest one may be all hype, a vapourware blockade. Even if that is the case, they've already shut down all the petrol stations in Stroud due to dangerously large demand and/or lack of petrol.

Still, I gained an hour off work; I'm not complaining.

Had to get up early to talk to a visiting lecturer and then attend his seminar. Hidden Markov Models and Viterbi stuff ``based on'' linguistic observation of children. He would have been better to use the term `inspired by' rather ``based on,'' since all the linguists present thought it was a crock (linguistically speaking, of course).

Pretended to work on my Piled Higher Deeper, emphasis on pretended. Sat at my computer and updated full text works in Everything metanode, wrote a dance node and a literary node or two.

Started a new dance class with a friend of mine who needed a dance partner and dropped by my regular Ceroc dance studio with him, as i'm trying to get him interested in dancing. It's not working very well, as he's got very little free time, and dancing requires heaps of practice when you start, especially if you have no confidence.

Now rapidly approaching midnight, need sleep…

Another day dawns at Cornell University.... (at least its not snowing yet).

This morning was pretty weird. I was woken up by my phone ringing (a wrong number of course) exactly 1 minute before my alarm was set to go off. I'm still pissed at the person on the phone though... and i don't know why.

Tuesday is my light day, because most classes are Mon Wed Fri. I have my intro to chemical engineering class, and my group meeting with my advisor. Thats about it. I have Tae Kwon Do class later at 5:00 pm, but that doesn't count as an academic class.

I think i'll play badminton during the three hour break i have today.

Ouch.

Yesterday was the first day of the course and so at 8am I was given 36 little students to look after.( officially they are called participants but we call them pants for short) They are mostly fresh out of college and so damn eager its quite sickening. Eagerness is no substitute for aptitude however and none of them finished the day's activities on time. In fact most of them were here until 10:30pm, and of course since they were here I had to be here. aargh. I finally got them all out of here around 10:40. I was at the bar by 10:45. If this keeps up its going to be a long two weeks.

I was swamped by a wave of depression at about 1am but luckily I had drunk enough that I passed out before too long.

The weekend was good though. Went into Chicago in a stretch limo and got some rooms in the Allegro Hotel. On the way I saw a Rescue Rooters van. Apparently they clear drains of tree roots and the like but my Australian interpretation of root introduced connotations that i found most amusing. "Bad date? call rescue rooters!".

Anyway we started the night out at Kingston Mines. Fantastic blues but a bit subdued for people with as many recent late nights as us and we were in danger of crashing early so we went searching for a place to dance.

We eventually ended up at a place called The Drink. The front bar was absolutely abysmal but then I wandered through to the dance floor and in the words of one of my English companions it was playing "really bangin house man". It was too. We danced until about 4am, I swear that DJ was trying to kill me.

The crowd in there was a little strange for the music though. I am becoming increasingly convinced that Americans can't dance. They just short of shuffled and lurched drunkenly from side to side, and seemed to be somewhat bemused by us.

We created some interesting dance floor dynamics though. At first we would attract women. I assume this was because we were a group of guys who were there to dance rather than pick up and we were having fun. After a while we would be surrounded by girls, and this would cause an influx of males who were trying to pick up, and who would chase all the females away. Once all the girls were gone, the guys would slowly disperse and then the girls would start coming back. The gender balance around us kept fluctuating between wild extremes all night.weird.

Next weekend we are planning to go to the crowbar in search of americans with dancing ability.

Kung's USA Daylogs prev next

Today was boring. Being in the UK the most exciting thing that happened today was an email hoax saying that the fuel blockades were starting again, which lead to mass panic buying. People are stupid.

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Dazed and confused

Well, I don't know whether I am coming or going. I woke up at midday, four hours late for work and feeling terrible. I called in sick with a cold as the reason, even with my croaky voice both the secretary and my project leader weren't even slightly sympathetic.

So that is my physical reason for feeling bad

I lied to you last night without even realising it. Is it OK to lie if you don't mean it? I don't think so. I tried explaining to you what I was thinking, but fell flat on my face. I think it is because I have been living in my fantasy land for so long that I blur the boundaries sometimes. (sometimes? more like all the time) I've been so used to being alone that dropping the safety blankets and communicating to you has been an almost entirely new experience; something I am simply not used to.

Dreams explained

I've been trying to justify to myself my combining of dreams and fantasizing. I'm not doing very well, even to myself. More lying to you about precisely where the specific events happened: whether in waking life whilst daydreaming, or whilst asleep. I am not really doing myself any favours, even with this daylog. I suppose that what I am trying to say is that do you prefer me to dream, or to fantasize about you?

I dreamed about you again last night, at least your name was spoken whilst I was asleep. I don't know; you were there with the diamonds and drugs, but you were a shadow to me. Do you know the effect you are having on me? You just turned me upside down when I wasn't looking.

I don't know how I am coping with this. Assuming I am coping.

But don't stop. Never stop. Keep me living in a bjork song.

he's exploring
the taste of her
arousal
so accurate
he sets off
the beauty in her
he's venus as a boy

he believes in beauty

---

A note to other noders, please ignore such confused blatherings. They are written for a specific girl in mind, one who does not leave my thoughts. I apologise to you for addressing it to her, and for leaving my normal trains of thought. Normal programming won't resume anytime soon, I hope.

Last night on the way home I pass an opening party for the new trendy store (the name escapes me...Mark Jacobs maybe?) on Bleecker & 11th street, across from the Magnolia Bakery. Celebrities, TV cameras, beautiful people spilled out onto the street drinking Sauvignon Blanc. I think: there goes the neighborhood. The last thing we need in the West Village is another flurry of overpriced, high-overhead trendy stores. It's bad enough that Sex In The City is constantly being filmed here.

I tried to watch the Olympics again last night. Thank God we have a TiVo, because otherwise it would be entirely unbearable. NBC seems to think that Olympic coverage should consist of 20% commercials, 65% "human drama" stories and awards coverage, and only 15% actual footage of sports. In fact, TiVo didn't even help much: I started watching with a 1/2 hour delay, and I caught up to live almost instantly as I zipped past several useless interviews and Bob Costas rambling on about the Chinese. I paused it, watched most of a ST:TNG rerun, and when I returned had to zip through another 15 minutes of drivel before getting to the U.S. women's volleyball game, which they started covering in the second set.

On NPR this morning they ran a story about Americans who live near Canada who are watching Canadian Olympic coverage just because it doesn't suck ass the way NBC's does. It bugs me that a company like that can pay $705 million for exclusive U.S. broadcast rights and then fuck it up so much. Why do we tolerate the sale of exclusive rights to broadcasters in the first place? I think some kind of Dutch auction strategy would be preferable, where the top three are given access. At least then we have a decent shot of getting at least one network that is willing to just point the camera at the athletes and get on with it. I can't wait for interactive television to mature, so we can do away with the overproduced crap that the networks want to foist on us.

The worst bit of last night (while I am in rant mode) was the coverage of the men's gymnastics. I already knew the result, because NBC is tape-delaying everything, and I saw it on CNN's website yesterday afternoon. At first their coverage angle is: show every last thing the U.S. competitors do, including stretching out and wiping their noses, and almost nothing else from virtually any other country except a smattering of the major competitors that were a threat to the U.S. medal: Russia, and to a lesser extent, China. It's as if NBC misses the Cold War, because of the drama that would surround the Russia-U.S. rivalry. Except that Russia didn't win-China did. In fact, Russia didn't even get silver: Ukraine did. How many Ukrainian gymnastics did we see? Virtually none! Only the last few when it became obvious that the Russians had lost the silver, and if so-and-so doesn't stick his landing in the parallel bars they will lose the bronze to Japan, which is "unthinkable" in the words of NBC, since they are Russia after all. They didn't even get the name right: it's "Ukraine" not "The Ukraine". It's a sizeable country with the population of France and an abundance of natural resources. They have nuclear missiles. But the average American has no idea where it is, since it was part of the Soviet empire until it broke free in 1991. Instead of taking the time to tell us this, or (better yet) show us some of their athletes doing their stuff, it was ignored. No drama. I don't know which possibility upsets me more: that NBC thinks this is what people want, or that they did their homework with focus groups, etc., and that it actually is what Americans want to watch, and hence I'm a mutant for actually wanting to see a volleyball game start-to-finish.

OK, I'm feeling much better now.

The Amazing Donut Guy apparently didn't show up this morning, so my neighborhood indy coffee bar just had bagels and muffins. Sigh. I made my way out of there past the sea of leashed dogs playing and sniffing each other, and off I went to work.

Passing Bank Street, I couldn't see any evidence of yesterday's 7-story geyser, but then again the streets were wet from rain, so who would know?

3:15 -- Lunch, finally. It's ark-building-level rain out there right now, so I just hit the "gourmet deli" thing in the building. It's not great, but at least you don't have to go outside. They must double their business on days like today. The upside is that they have Yoo-hoo(tm) chocolate drink, alias chocolate milk. At least, I think there's milk in it...hold on a sec: water, dairy whey (dairy whey?), high fructose corn syrup and/or sugar, non-fat milk! Also "7 vitamins and minerals". Phew. Boy do I feel better after reading the ingredients.

5:19 -- Ay me. It continues to rain. The thumpa-thumpa-thumpa against the glass on my window is kind of soothing, but at some point I have to go home. That won't be anytime soon, though: And miles to code before I sleep

I love the quiet of the middle of the night. You can feel the sleeping going on. I have to get up tomorrow, but I don't care. I have Sierra Nevada in the fridge, I have books to read, I have a digital VCR full of programming, I have the web and E2. There's 120 minutes more until the hour of the wolf. Let's get busy.

Life is most confusing. After a few weeks of swearing I was not going to get involved with another woman for a good long time, I'm losing my resolve. I don't want to get back into dysfuctional bullshit like last time, and I think I have things figured out, but then she smiles, and everything seems different for one instant. Arrrgh! I am defenseless before the evil powers af the female sex!

Fencing is starting to get really interesting. We're getting into unknown attacks and defense (ie you don't know what your opponent is going to do). We started wearing full protective gear today, it's like trying to fight in a band uniform and a catcher's mask. Oh well, it beats getting poked in the eye with a foil.

I logged in today, and noticed that E2 nuke request is now called E2 deletion request. Haven't we taken this PC crap far enough already? I can see being offended by the term "XP pack rape", but what's wrong with the "nuke request"? Are we changing to be more sensitive to persons of an irradiated nature? What's next, renaming the Epicenter nodelet to be more sensitive to Bay Area noders? Let us keep our violent metaphors in peace, reinstate the nuke request.

My September 19th started at 2 am, I got in from work. A bunch of freshmen were drunk last night, (It's Monday night, why?). I went to sleep, woke up at 8 am with terrible cramps and leg pain from working on my feet for 6 hours straight. I was misrible, I called my best friend who convinced me to not go to my first lecture. So I layed in bed until 10 and went to my next class.

Microbiology lab and my bacteria did not look happy, I think I should give it crack.

When I did a Grahm stain and spilled purple dye on my fingers.

I went to my job interview with purple finger tips. The lady's assistant interviewed me, he was about my age, so I think I did really bad cause I was being my usual smart ass self because he was too young to have authority. I have another 3 hour lab in half an hour. I think I have to crystalize something and snort it..

No.. Wait... I dunno..

I am off to class... If somethign that's actually intresting happens, I'll node on it later.

Today sucks. It all started with me waking up and grabbing my glasses, when I looked at my glasses the frame was broken. I don't know why perhaps some random act of god, but whatever, but I really need my glasses .
So I am up, thinking it is 8 am (school starts at 8:30) look at a clock and it is 11:15 (school ends at 12:15). I am not going to school because there is no point, so I watch Chill Factor! Awful movie ends and I am bored.
After the movie I decide to fix my glasses, 1 and a half hours later I am sitting here with a clump of lens, tape and metal. As I said before today sucks.

17:34 EST
Got back from more classes today. Database Structures was a review of basically everything I tought myself this summer about SQL while working for a real company.
War and possibilities of Peace was more of the same sociology style round robin discussion only there are about 90 people in this class which makes intimate discussion more difficult. I've got the first section of the class tonight so we'll see how that goes with a smaller discussion group.

Looking forward to the remnants of the hurricane moving up the coast to hit the Boston area. Storms rule.
I'm also listening to the Bob Dylan song, "The Hurricane," oddly enough.

I have noticed lately my tendency to ideological suicide ... a meltdown of all the ideas, principles, judgements--all the cognitive structures--i have accrued through the years. A kind friend tells me it precedes the stage of greater self-integration, that it's just a step or a rung in the ever-widening sphere of the self, akin to a shaman-initiate in catatonia. I wonder if he's right. This has happened to me before but it hasn't been so pervasive, so confusing, so ... I was young before now I'm old: age has a way of resisting mental fluidity, ever-hardening into fixed dogma. It has bubbled to the surface now, and is about to pop: who was it who said that the road to individuation is narrow as a razor's edge? Is there a drug for this? Let's just hope ...

Did I ever tell you about the time I took a bunch of Japanese girls who were studying English at a crash-course at my University to the university Midnight Madness thing and it was 1 a. m. or something and I had a fever of 103F and my head was spinning even BEFORE I played Quake with a 3-D/VR setup?

. . . well, that's kinda how I feel now.

. . . . . (minus the spinning polygons I couldn't focus on, the pixel-y explosions, and the cute Japanese girls of course)

The night after that we all went to see Brave Combo at some nightclub/bar on Dickson Street and some guy asked me to polka, so I did, despite still having the fever. Then we all had Shirley Temples.

I REALIZE this sounds like a thoughtstream from Zippy the Pinhead, but it's all TRUE. Swear to God.

didn't accomplish anything on yesterday's list of stuff to do. today was busy at work. software went gold. had to help our photographer with some photoshoots. worked on a side project -- writing some tools for the software repository. had to help out a coworker who called from a worksite. got home ~7:30pm. walked the dog. called my man. grabbed a sandwich. now i daylog.

i got some thinking done today. i am going back to martial arts class tomorrow. i am going to finish my term there then switch to a local studio which offers classes in the morning. i am a morning person. evenings are my time to be lazy, to clean the house, to relax, to spend time with my pets. or even work late if i feel like it. i don't like to feel hurried in the evenings. to me, the morning is the essence of hurry. no matter time i go to bed i always seem to wake up around seven. i found a tae kwon do studio close by (i could ride my bike to it) which offers classes from 7:00 until 8:30 am. this is perfect. i will have to start over from the begining but i should advance quickly. it's a good solution.

to do tomorrow:

• the list from yesterday
• go to practice

good night all.

Big day for me. On this day 18 years ago I was born. Yay, I can't wait to register for Selected Service or whatever it's called. Oh, and I get to vote between the worst two presidential candidates since the election four years ago! And to think that I could actually go to today if I beat the crap out of someone whereas yesterday that was unlikely. I am also so privileged now that I can statutory rape girls in my school now too. Boy, I've got so much to look forward to as an 18 year old.

I did get an exceptionally cool gift though. A mahogany, bare wood finish 4 string Ibanez Soundgear SR480! This is a very cool bass guitar for those of you who don't have to change your underwear after receiving one of these as a gift (doing this in a music store can be a real damper). Out with my old SR190 and let the jam sessions begin. I guess it's cool that I can go out and get a stogie if I want one too....

Today, sophomores started their SAT-9 tests. I don't know what it is, but I don't feel they're an accurate representation of student intelligence. It's probably just a hunch, though. (uh, facetious much?) In French, we had a sub, so we forgot the reading assignment, and had a chat about a lot of things, one of which was about the Stanfords, school funding, the new uniforms, and the footballers' steak dinners. Kat stated the now immortal mantra of every person in the "Humanities" career focus sect:

"You made the 98th percentile in Language! Let's build a gym!"

However, I am pleased that I have no homework. To top that off, World History was especially interesting. It'll probably end up that dannye is Mr. Brown, though, and I'll have to go on a rampage in the history department.

Well well well. -sigh-

Today I woke up an hour and a half later than I needed to. Got to work an hour and a half late. I fixed more stupid problems with the site, and made some awesome changes to the MySql database so as to make some things default differently. It's really cool.

I went to school again today. Finally got my U-Pass. It starts working tomorrow. RULE. That will save me like $30 a week on public transportation via CTA. I also completely finished (I think and hope) my registration for the fall. It's pretty warm out. I got gyros action from Chicago Carry Out. It was god.

Got back to work after two hours and did little. I was planning on making a popup confirmation on hitting the Reset button on for every page, but I didn't. I'll do it tomorrow. However, I DID make a crossover cable. So now Sam has no excuse to not be pummelled by me in Age of Empires (still no hope for Unreal). I now have a pile of network cable on the floor in my room. It's like 98.3 feet or something. I had it measured by the guy I got it from in this cool contraption that you plug both ends of the cable into and it tells you the strength of the cable and like exactly how long it is. Smart toy.

Then we watched the Simpsons. heh. Yeah, at work. It was fun.

I got my box of Magic cards today!!!

It's a full booster pack box of Mercadian Masques. I haven't opened it yet. I will in an hour. I'm excited. I also won an auction on eBay for four Serendib Efreets. That's awesome.

Today I listened to Grooverider's shit mixed by some weird guy, this one CD Jon gave me at work that has "Tech Step Comp" written on it (it's drum n bass shit with a Photek song on there that I know), Delta 9, Blue Man Group, and the Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel song from the Simpsons. Fuck yeah.

I promise myself now that I'm going to hook that damn TV and VCR up tonite and everything will be pretty and good. Wow. Today was pretty badass, despite the bad beginning. Good day.

Daylogs. Are they, as a friend here asked me, becoming a vote dump? Well, hell, I hope so!

Today continued the never-ending chain of not having enough sleep. Had to wake at 6:30 to take me mum to the airport, at which point there's no reason to not keep going on to work. Stopped after dropping off the car to achieve some caffeine at Dunkin' Donuts. The anti-Starbuck's nature of the chain always makes me feel righteous, and besides, if you don't let them put anything in it the plain coffee is surprisingly good. And cheap. I avoid a donut, reasoning that if I can avoid temptation there I can surely make it the rest of the day without screwing up my calorie intake.

9:42 am:

Bell Atlantic, now known as Verizon (but a midden by any other name would smell...well, you get the idea) explains that my data T1 (which was 5th on the tech's list of jobs on Monday morning) is now 8th on the tech's job sheet. How the hell does that happen? I not-so-tactfully remind them that they are now eighty-plus days late on this T1 install, which instigates a silence, some paper-shuffling noises, and a promise of a callback. Just in case they're not lying this time, I call the colo facility and warn them to be on the lookout for a sleepwalking Verizon tech.

11:33 am:

Oh, that's where those two $10K servers are. UPS delivered them back to the manufacturer and they haven't re-emerged. Call the company and deliver a mild howler.

1:49 pm:

The UPS guys show up with four computers - none of which are the missing ones, and which in fact were all ordered weeks after the missing ones. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I sign for the machines. While the UPS guy is using his neato Buck-Rogers-in-fecal-brown technology datapadd to laserscan the bar codes on the machine boxes, the thing keeps beeping nastily. He tries five times. Finally, with a sigh and an expletive, he pulls a pen out from behind his ear. I wait for him to type the bazillion-digit number into the hideous membrane keyboard, but I'm disappointed. He begins coloring over the bars in the bar code. After a few seconds, he scans again. Nothing. He colors over some more bars. As far as I can tell, he's actually coloring between a few of them, which should technically change the number represented; however, after three iterations of this, the scanner dings happily and accepts the number. I'm not brave enough to ask to see what number it eventually comes up with. So instead of saving us time by reading the barcode thus saving us from typing in a long (but human-legible) number, we've managed to force the delivery guys to learn how to fix bar code labels with felt tip pens. Oh, gee, that looks like an efficient use of time.

4:20 pm:

After twenty minutes of sworking, realize that VA Linux has changed the configuration of their servers yet again - just enough so that the default Red Hat install distro won't actually * $& R%*(&(@! work. Call them to bitch. End up having to hack a CD-ROM onto the thing just to get it installed.

8:40 pm:

Head off for Indian cuisine with a bud to discuss how the hell I'm gonna get my sad behind back into school.

10:28 pm:

Aaah. Quality time with the ferrets. Much hilarity and chewing of socks amidst noding. Life is - tolerable, then, for the time.

...Back...Forth...

Can we say "sick"?

I'm still feeling under the weather, but not bad enough to warrant me avoiding college. (I happen to like it at Oakland University) Economics struck first, revealing the reason our professor collapsed on Thursday. Well, it WOULD have been revealed to me, had I been there earlier. But, from what I understood, it was more or less a sudden blood pressure drop, or a naturally low blood pressure, or something.

One trip to the OU arcade followed. Ever had a game of Pac-Man where you easily nail well over 20,000 before beating level 2, then completely fall apart in level 4? Arrg.

Coming back home, I resolved myself to start kicking ass and taking numbers, or just taking numbers, in regards to DSL. My brother's already warning me that I'll take a rather large-like speed hit on the downstream (I've got @Home cable now, and the best DSL around here at the moment is 144/144), but I'm not sure I care, if it means getting more than one useable realworld IP addy again...

College came by and dragged me in again late-nite. All the fun of math modeling came to a rather curious twist today as my sickness left me feeling lightheaded and such. I enjoyed the multi-use splendor of toilet paper to it's fullest mucus-collecting extent in class.

Now I'm here, with a less-than-full Xtreme Gulp of Dr Pepper at my side, tissues behind me, R.E.M. and the rest of MP3: The Musical (My MP3 playlist of pure crap) cranking out the speakers, and more questions about math modeling than I ever wanted to experience. Whoopie, good for me.

TODAY'S NEAT QUOTE:
EvilOpie: "I wonder if the xbox will be the first game console to BSoD? :-)"
CaptainSpam: "Nah, it'll use Solaris or Linux, like everything else Microsoft uses internally. :-)"

Today was one of those days for me where a lot of stuff happened for me. Little bad things occured all day, which put me in a bad, angry horrible mood.

I woke up this morning after three hours of sleep, and did not want to get up at all. I was a little late to school, and I walk up to my friends only to see my boyfriend hugging his ex-girlfriend. This in itself did not bother me, but he blew me off when I tried to talk to him, so I got angry and walked off. This created tension with him all day which could not be rectified.

AP English-We had to analyze a poem which I didn't understand. I feel dumb in this years class, which is a new phenomenon.

AP Government-I was stressed out because I didnt do an assignment, but I copied someone's so it was ok. We discussed the whole period which I enjoyed.

AP Calculus- I had to sit in the front and learn about limits. I love math, but I wasnt into it today. My teacher is so weird it makes math fun.

Aid- A nice brainless task that I get to do before lunch.

Lunch- I got to drive off-campus today, and we threw cookies at other cars so it was fun. There wasnt room at the table so I had to sit with my friend Chris alone. My "friend" Josh was yelling at me as usual and telling me the downfall and weakness of our group was all my fault. Understandably, this did not make me feel good.

AP French- We didnt do anything the whole period so it was useless. I got to talk to my friend Caroline alittle which made me feel better.

Journalism-This class is also pointless. I sit with my friends Eric and Erica and we talk "smak" about people the whole time. I feel like such a gossip. I know too many dirty things about sluts now.

After school I went to my friend Chris's house and we hung out for a while. I was really tired and tried to ignore Jesse (my boyfriend). I played pool and discussed relationships with my friend Michelle. I realized that mine wasn't working. I went home and slept the whole day, I have mono and I get really tired. I wake up to the phone ringing. It was Jesse. He tells me that "this is gay" and I didnt quite know what he meant. He goes into how our relationship isnt working, and I dont really want to hear it because I like him and I want to make things work. But we have had this discussion before, and things haven't changed. I start to realize that he was right, we were much better friends. Suddenly, for the first time all day, I am in a good mood which I find strange because the guy that I had adored for so long no longer wants to be with me. I learn today that I can accept that some things can't work no matter how hard I try. I am hurt, but I'll get over it.

The only bad thing that resonates from this day is that I have a huge rash all over my legs and hands. Most likely from the medication Im taking. alex.tan warned me, I need to learn to listen to people.

Another day that came and went with no real impact. Very few people can honestly say that this day changed their lives to any extent. This day will never happen again, and it's unlikely that very many people really care at all.