So my friend Devon has given me an ultumatum. Join the pipe band with him or learn to sail with him, plus Jeremy and Ja'son and another girl, Heather. I have mixed feelings about being bossed around, but sort of perfer piping if I have to chose.
I swear I will later post the story of my bump and my lip balm collection. I will also post my favorite pretend swears. Tomorrow, or when I actually feel like having an opinion and being witty. It's not that I'm not feeling well, I'm just not feeling it today.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Twisted Flicks a summary of today to come
So yeah, I forgot to mention that on friday I went to Twisted Flicks, yeah sorry. It's an improv show that takes old B-movies and suggestions from the audiance and they redub the diolouge to make fun of the movie and they redo all of the audio. It is really hilarious. It happens the last weekend of the month and since December I usually get invited to go. This time it was called Bloodlust, which I think was an adaptation of the short story "The Game". It had the guy who played Mr. Brady on the Brady Bunch. I went with Jeremy, Ja'son and Devon (he goes sailing with the aforementioned two and is a bass player in my orchestra) plus Ja'son's mom. One of my suggestions got picked, but I didn't win a prize for it. So thanks to me the whole movie the only swearword they used was jeepers. With the hilarious variations of "oh my jeepers!" "holy jeepers!" and my personal favourite "jeep you!"
Today I am mostly going to do homework. This moring I had hashbrows with jalepeño tabasco, which I love. maybe later I'll show you my lip balm collection or tell you the story behind my bump.
Today I am mostly going to do homework. This moring I had hashbrows with jalepeño tabasco, which I love. maybe later I'll show you my lip balm collection or tell you the story behind my bump.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Today
Today I finally got my own viola, that was nice. They had forgotten to work on it over the course of the week that they said they were going to work on it, so my dad and I had a few hours to kill, in Capitol Hill. First we played Frisbee, but not with an actual Frisbee. Afterwards we hung out in a record store and listened to the entirety of James Gang Rides Again and bought an all-told $68 of cds. We ate piroskys, those are always good. Then we went to the violin shop to get the viola, a sixteen and a half inch one, so the sound is really good. It's really nice to finally have my own instrument, I've been renting for almost five years and it kind of sucks because everyone's been on my back about getting my own. Also I really liked the new episode of CSI, it was hilarious.
Friday, April 27, 2007
MRI today
So it turns out that my braces weren't a problem for an MRI. So I had one today, we went in at 8:15 this morning, I was the only patient in the waiting room and I was the first one to use the restroom, I knew this because the water in the bowl was still blue. As soon as I exited the restroom there was a woman waiting to take me back. She took me to a room to change in out of my clothing with metal. My jeans, my glasses, my sweatshirt and my bra. I got some help with the gown and was given some non slip tube socks. Then the woman lead me to the MRI room, which save for the giant MRI tube and all of imaging supplies and wedges and whatnot was sort of decorated like a living room or a waiting room. It was quite chilly because of the skylight window in the ceiling, which I was glad about because I went in feet first and it was nice have a view of the sky. I set up, given a choice of earplugs or headphones with a choice of genres and I picked headphones with classical. There were several images taken. Getting MRIed is a weired feeling, very weird. The high point was I got to keep non-slip slippers. I'm going to see how many of them I can get over the course of this whole thing.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Ahem, oops
So I stated earlier that my lip balm review was coming up this week, well I reread my email and the ladies at chaptastic stated that they were going to use the review in the next couple of weeks and they were going to notify me when they did. Whew, I can stop being quite so anxious.
Mathteam and crocheting
I am on the math team at my school. We are severely in-debt, and if things continue with no recruiting we will have more officers than members. So I am considering giving a portion of my ebay profits to the mathteam. My ebay items consist of mainly crocheted hats. This is of course when I actually post them on ebay. On a similar note my mom has asked me to crochet her covers for her back-support rolls. The yarn is faux-mohair in a seafoam, dusty-pine, light turquoise kinda color. It's Jiffy from Lion Brand in country green. It is very fuzzy, and a little hard crochet in the round for some reason. But it comes out light and lofty and pretty, it would make the perfect flapper cloche, wiht like a ribbon, of course for ebay, and maybe my mom. I. Would. Never. Wear. A. Cloche. It would be way too girly. I'm getting an MRI tommorrow, wish me luck and apperantly my braces aren't a problem.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Whooops
So shortly after I posted the previous post I did some laundry, or at least I thought I did. I put my clothes in the machine, then I went my merry way and surfed the net. About twenty minutes later, or so, I checked the machine to see how my laundry was going. Turns out I did not set the machine, put soap in the machine or even close the lid. But it's all fixed now.
Orthopedist
So today I went to the orthpedist for the bone bump one my ankle. The x-rays from my normal health care office hadn't gotten there because of issues with the computers, or something. So I got more x-rays. Turns out not only has my bump grown more, it has begin to grow independantly from my other skeletal growth. They can tell this because my growth plates are mostly fused but also because the bump has grown much more rapidly in the last few month than I have. In addition to faster growth the bump is no longer smooth it is sort of spiny and scallopped looking. Refer to, if you will, the above picture. This is because I don't have access to my films to show you the nature of my bones. Anyway the appearance of my ankle is of a very large piece of popcorn on the side of the larger ankle bone protruding from the spot by the skinny-er bone. It is protruding to the point at which it is actually causing the other bone to bow more than just slightly and is actually casuing bone damage beyond the bowing. So I'm going to have surgery from a tumor specialist who has the same name as my orthodontist. It never occurred to me that there were tumor surgeons, but it seems like that would be a pretty common surgery. I need to get an MRI before I can go into surgery. And therin lies the rub. I have braces, braces are made of metal, MRI's are giant electromagnets, magnets attract metals. You do the math. After the surgery I guess my bump is getting biopsied to see if I have cancer or something and if the need to take out more, or give some type of treatment. However, in spite of this I feel oddly relieved, this is the end of the line in almost four years of ankle pain and x-rays, this is the first time anyone has proposed to do anything. Strangly relieved is the phrase of the day.
In less grim news my english teacher has started us on Romio and Juliet, which we will be learning to perform with costumes. I have discovered a perfect job, a prosthetist, although I have trouble pronouncing the job title, it sounds like a perfect job. In college you get to study anatomy, power tools, material science and model making. It's only a four year bachelor of science program and then you get to help amputees by making their limbs. It sounds great. Chaptastic still hasn't posted my review, but they said sometime this week and it is only Wednesday.
Talk to you later, I'll keep you posted.
No More Ovaltine Please!
I like malt, I really like malt balls. I perfer brach's over whoppers, but I like whoppers. Whoppers seem less likely to continue to use real chocolate when they no longer have to, but I digress. I would probably like ovaltine. My family always made chocolate milk with syrup, so I have no experience with chocolate drink powder. However I will never, ever, ever, purchase ovaltine. This is because not only are the commercials pervasive, annoying, badly voiced and all around wierd. I am forced to listen to them every morning. EVERY morning, my school bus driver listens to a radio station that plays the commercials all the time, exspecially in the morning. Ovaltine sounds like a cold sore treatment and their commercials are annoying, but I'm sure their product is fine.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Eh :P, Indifference and Exuberance
So, I'm still feeling like I have a cold coming on, or something, but our bathtub is functional. Which is good. My homework is finnally almost under control after an absense. Tommorrow in english we're starting Romio and Juliet. However, I am really excited about one thing. I'm going to have a guest review in Chaptastic, link to the side, it's a lip balm review blog. I'm genuinly excited, I keep refreshing the page to see if it's there yet. Tommorrow I am going to the orthopedist to have a look at my ankle bump, which is growing. I guess I'll keep you posted.
Don't Mess with Chocolate
So it has come to my attention that the FDA is going to pass a bill redefining the meaning of chocolate. This bill allows chocolate manufacturers to replace cocoa butter with other oils and milk or milk fat with milk weigh. The currant definition of rchocolate is that it must contain chocolate solids and cocoa butter if you call your product chocolate. If you call you product milk chocolate it must cantain milk fat or milk. If you call your product dark chocolate you can add some milk fat or solids. Cocoa butter has an extremly different mouth-feel than other fats and isn't as bad for you as most vegetable oils. This isn't a huge political issue, but it's frustrating that corporations are trying to cheat us out of a higher quality product. I'll post a link to a more detailed site.
Pygmalion
This is the preface to Pygmalion, the play that My Fair Lady is based on, by George Bernard Shaw. It is copyright-free, I got it from the Gutenburg Project, I'll post a link with the networks that post videos online. I will try to post an act or chapter of something here at some regular intervel. I'll do Pygmalion for now.
PREFACE TO PYGMALION.
A Professor of Phonetics.
As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a
sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have
no respect for their language, and will not teach their children
to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach
himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman
to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or
despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners:
English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer
England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is
why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have
been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years
past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of
the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J.
Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head
always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would
apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and
Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was
impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked
their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to
conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability
as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his
job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and
perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his
Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in
general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the
days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and
Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor
of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet
on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it
contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of
language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a
phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be
returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of
dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him
afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my
astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable
young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his
personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking
repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been
largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something
called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics
rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing
could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the
university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an
intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any,
include some satires that may be published without too
destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in
the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should
say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.
Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to
the patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and
which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published
by the Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins
describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would
decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a
Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on
earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity,
would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word
Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of
making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on
earth. That less expert mortals should require fuller indications
was beyond Sweet's patience. Therefore, though the whole point of
his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the
language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your
hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with
which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at
whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate
determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script
serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the
most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the
provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but
ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt
for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the
Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business
organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn
Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and
transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where
experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency.
Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as
well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that
nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in
his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized,
may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon
the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but
until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman. I have
bought three copies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed
by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still a steady
and healthy one. I actually learned the system two several times;
and yet the shorthand in which I am writing these lines is
Pitman's. And the reason is, that my secretary cannot transcribe
Sweet, having been perforce taught in the schools of Pitman.
Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersites railed
at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have eased his soul, gave
no popular vogue to Current Shorthand. Pygmalion Higgins is not a
portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would
have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches
of Sweet in the play. With Higgins's physique and temperament
Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed
himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made his
comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do
justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his
subject. I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite
right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings
(heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); for
although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a
seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly
relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the
best places for less important subjects which they profess
without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them,
still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot
expect them to heap honors on him.
Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little. Among
them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe
his Miltonic sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all
portraiture. But if the play makes the public aware that there
are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most
important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.
I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful
play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is
so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is
esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of
the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be
didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be
anything else.
Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with
accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add
that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl
is neither impossible nor uncommon. The modern concierge's
daughter who fulfils her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain
in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands
of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and
acquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done
scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse
than the first. An honest and natural slum dialect is more
tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to
imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I am sorry to
say that in spite of the efforts of our Academy of Dramatic Art,
there is still too much sham golfing English on our stage, and
too little of the noble English of Forbes Robertson.
PREFACE TO PYGMALION.
A Professor of Phonetics.
As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a
sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have
no respect for their language, and will not teach their children
to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach
himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman
to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or
despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners:
English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer
England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is
why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have
been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years
past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of
the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J.
Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head
always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would
apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and
Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was
impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked
their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to
conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability
as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his
job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and
perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his
Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in
general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the
days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and
Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor
of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet
on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it
contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of
language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a
phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be
returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of
dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him
afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my
astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable
young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his
personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking
repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been
largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something
called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics
rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing
could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the
university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an
intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any,
include some satires that may be published without too
destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in
the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should
say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.
Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to
the patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and
which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published
by the Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins
describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would
decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a
Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on
earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity,
would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word
Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of
making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on
earth. That less expert mortals should require fuller indications
was beyond Sweet's patience. Therefore, though the whole point of
his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the
language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your
hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with
which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at
whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate
determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script
serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the
most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the
provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but
ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt
for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the
Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business
organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn
Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and
transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where
experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency.
Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as
well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that
nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in
his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized,
may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon
the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but
until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman. I have
bought three copies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed
by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still a steady
and healthy one. I actually learned the system two several times;
and yet the shorthand in which I am writing these lines is
Pitman's. And the reason is, that my secretary cannot transcribe
Sweet, having been perforce taught in the schools of Pitman.
Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersites railed
at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have eased his soul, gave
no popular vogue to Current Shorthand. Pygmalion Higgins is not a
portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would
have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches
of Sweet in the play. With Higgins's physique and temperament
Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed
himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made his
comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do
justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his
subject. I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite
right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings
(heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); for
although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a
seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly
relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the
best places for less important subjects which they profess
without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them,
still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot
expect them to heap honors on him.
Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little. Among
them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe
his Miltonic sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all
portraiture. But if the play makes the public aware that there
are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most
important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.
I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful
play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is
so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is
esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of
the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be
didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be
anything else.
Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with
accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add
that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl
is neither impossible nor uncommon. The modern concierge's
daughter who fulfils her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain
in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands
of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and
acquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done
scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse
than the first. An honest and natural slum dialect is more
tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to
imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I am sorry to
say that in spite of the efforts of our Academy of Dramatic Art,
there is still too much sham golfing English on our stage, and
too little of the noble English of Forbes Robertson.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Childhood memoir
This is an english assignment, enjoy.
I remember my first pet’s death better than I remember the actual pet; it was a goldfish that I named Fuzzy. Because I was six and the fish was really cute. Fuzzy came from the “food or friend” tank, I knew this because my mom read the orange post-it on the tank with a helpful pictogram of a Jesus-type fish with a xed-out eyes under the word “food” and a smile under the word “friend”. Fuzzy only cost a dollar. We bought him after about a week before I started first-grade I declared, at the height of the sticky Michigan August that I wanted to get a pet. This was a problem because we lived in student housing for grad students who had kids, and weren’t allowed non-cage pets, so we got a fish. The first week of first-grade I had a really hard time sleeping, I don’t know why, I just didn’t sleep very well.
On one of the nights of the first week of first-grade I couldn’t sleep at all, I tossed and turned all night, I didn’t fall asleep, maybe it was because I had a screensaver that made noise, a fish tank that made bubble noises, but it never bothered me before. I felt like something was wrong, like something was going wrong. It wasn’t an unusual feeling for me, I have known for as long as I have been self-aware that I tend to obsess and imbue excess meaning on things. But something felt wronger and more agitated than usual. I think I fell asleep for ten minutes, tops, and then my mom woke me up, I could here burble noises, but I couldn’t tell where they were coming form, I went to check on my new pet, and found him, or it, obviously dead. A freshly dead fish isn’t what it looks like in cartoons, doesn’t float belly up, it just sort of bobs, but even though Fuzzy didn’t really have much of a brain, I could see the dead in his eyes.
We buried him in a Band-Aid box, the next afternoon and I made a Popsicle stick cross and wrote in crayon RIP Fuzzy. Maybe even to this day Fuzzy is buried in the garden behind the house on Macintyre Dr.
I remember my first pet’s death better than I remember the actual pet; it was a goldfish that I named Fuzzy. Because I was six and the fish was really cute. Fuzzy came from the “food or friend” tank, I knew this because my mom read the orange post-it on the tank with a helpful pictogram of a Jesus-type fish with a xed-out eyes under the word “food” and a smile under the word “friend”. Fuzzy only cost a dollar. We bought him after about a week before I started first-grade I declared, at the height of the sticky Michigan August that I wanted to get a pet. This was a problem because we lived in student housing for grad students who had kids, and weren’t allowed non-cage pets, so we got a fish. The first week of first-grade I had a really hard time sleeping, I don’t know why, I just didn’t sleep very well.
On one of the nights of the first week of first-grade I couldn’t sleep at all, I tossed and turned all night, I didn’t fall asleep, maybe it was because I had a screensaver that made noise, a fish tank that made bubble noises, but it never bothered me before. I felt like something was wrong, like something was going wrong. It wasn’t an unusual feeling for me, I have known for as long as I have been self-aware that I tend to obsess and imbue excess meaning on things. But something felt wronger and more agitated than usual. I think I fell asleep for ten minutes, tops, and then my mom woke me up, I could here burble noises, but I couldn’t tell where they were coming form, I went to check on my new pet, and found him, or it, obviously dead. A freshly dead fish isn’t what it looks like in cartoons, doesn’t float belly up, it just sort of bobs, but even though Fuzzy didn’t really have much of a brain, I could see the dead in his eyes.
We buried him in a Band-Aid box, the next afternoon and I made a Popsicle stick cross and wrote in crayon RIP Fuzzy. Maybe even to this day Fuzzy is buried in the garden behind the house on Macintyre Dr.
I'm just gonna bitch
So I've been having a bad weekend, this is my one outlet where I can just bitch, sorry.
My lappy's batery is effed, and it barely worked when it was plugged in, I have a loaner battery until the batery is fixed, but it's annoying and I couldn't really do my homeworl. The bathtub/shower at my house isn't draining and the latest disturbing devolopment is that whenever you turn one certain sink on the water from the sink drains directly from the sink to the bathtub. All while the bathtub spews all the crap from the drain, and all the mold that grows on the crap that gets in our drain. Really gross. I think I'm getting sick again. I have a dry cough, and a sore throat, a feel sort fo eh :p, not great a little fatigue-y but not anything specific. Plus the bone bump I have on my ankle has been hurting a lot. Distressing new is that a pizza place by my house burned down today, and we still have leftover pizza from them in our fridge. More upbeat posts later.
My lappy's batery is effed, and it barely worked when it was plugged in, I have a loaner battery until the batery is fixed, but it's annoying and I couldn't really do my homeworl. The bathtub/shower at my house isn't draining and the latest disturbing devolopment is that whenever you turn one certain sink on the water from the sink drains directly from the sink to the bathtub. All while the bathtub spews all the crap from the drain, and all the mold that grows on the crap that gets in our drain. Really gross. I think I'm getting sick again. I have a dry cough, and a sore throat, a feel sort fo eh :p, not great a little fatigue-y but not anything specific. Plus the bone bump I have on my ankle has been hurting a lot. Distressing new is that a pizza place by my house burned down today, and we still have leftover pizza from them in our fridge. More upbeat posts later.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Mini-musings
So I have been having some problems with the lappy. I am now working on my mom's computer. So to try and get all my blogging out I am going to post all my musings from the last couple days.
Hazelnuts are shaped like garlic, sorta.
Lavender smells very good.
Colonize is colon-ize.
Why can't we call it environment day?
I really want to start a store to sell homemade stuff.
The alphabet soup networks all post videos online, this should be incouraged.
More to come, and in the words of Jeremy, see you next whenever!
Hazelnuts are shaped like garlic, sorta.
Lavender smells very good.
Colonize is colon-ize.
Why can't we call it environment day?
I really want to start a store to sell homemade stuff.
The alphabet soup networks all post videos online, this should be incouraged.
More to come, and in the words of Jeremy, see you next whenever!
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Forensics, no not like CSI
So my english teacher, who is one of my favourite teachers, also teaches debate. She has decided that she want's to have the debate team compete at official competions, if you are a speech and debate geek you can ignore the following. Debate competions means Forensics, forensic competion is a series of individual events, like track and field for public speaking and has nothing to do with solving crimes. The most well known event is probably debate, however there are many more events outlined in the Wikipedia articule, I guess I probably need to get out more if I think that some of these events sound really fun. So yesturday I indicated to my teacher that I would like to partake of some other Forensics events that weren't debate, so I'm going to foray in to the excitin world of individual speech and debate.
On Friday I am going to start Judo again. Finally getting back into a combat sport after I got a contusion (it's a really bad bruise that causes tissue damage, my 209 pound partner's knee fell on my wrist, hard, I was in a splint for a month and recovering for several months), although that was from regular old high-school wrestling.
Finally I have recieved my first comment from someone who I'm not sure who they are. Congratulations Rouge Onion! May you be the first of many readers.
On Friday I am going to start Judo again. Finally getting back into a combat sport after I got a contusion (it's a really bad bruise that causes tissue damage, my 209 pound partner's knee fell on my wrist, hard, I was in a splint for a month and recovering for several months), although that was from regular old high-school wrestling.
Finally I have recieved my first comment from someone who I'm not sure who they are. Congratulations Rouge Onion! May you be the first of many readers.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Light Bulbs and LGBT awareness
So at my house we are trying to use those flourseasant energy saving light bulbs, they are much brighter than halogen bulbs and they last longer. However they buzz ocasinally and the the color and light reminds my school. We use them mainly in the bathroom. All the fun light effects and rockin' soundtrack of a public school library, with all the adventure and excitment of personal hygiene and elimination.
In other news today is Day of Silence, a day to show the silence that prejudice put LGBT people and allies into. So yeah, only written responses today.
I think that I am going to start an ebay store for all my knit and crochet stuff that I am not going to use.
In other news today is Day of Silence, a day to show the silence that prejudice put LGBT people and allies into. So yeah, only written responses today.
I think that I am going to start an ebay store for all my knit and crochet stuff that I am not going to use.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Lately...
I've been kind of on edge, really obsessive, it sort of feels like I'm about to start to freak out constantly. Sometimes when I try to go to bed I start feeling really panickey and scared. So I haven't been sleeping really well. I probably need more excercise. Eurgh.
Monday, April 16, 2007
DRIVE
So last night I watched the two-hour premiere of Drive, Fox's new action-thriller-drama. While maybe a little unbelievable, it's pretty cool, very gripping, and Fox is actually doing right by it. Even though it's timeslot is mondays at eight, they aired the premiere after the Simpson's, and I presume in order. It has Nathan Fillion in it, it's hard for me to tell if he is horribly typecast, or if he really only has one acting persona. But Drive is seriously pretty good, Fox even has the videos posted online, in the show's MySpace, so you don't even have to have a tv. Talk to you later.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Step it up!
So yesturday was really busy, I woke up late and then went to Step it Up!, a national Earth Day Protest for Global Warming solutions with my family. It was kinda lame, no chanting, lots of people trying to change indiviual habits and not the system. Plus it rained, a lot, and very hard. Uncharacteristically hard, even for Seattle. So I got soaked to the bone, and then some. My hair is short and curly, so when it started to rain my hair grew to the point where my sweatshirt hood didn't stay on very well. The black dye in my shoes leaked on my feet. After the march we walked to Pike Place, we used the restroom at the most touristy Tully's in the city. We ate some really good food at a Turkish restaurant called Turkish Delight. They make their own turkish delight, but we didn't eat any. I had some pretty good lentil soup and an awesome spinach pie, which the menu called spinach böreks. At this point my blisters got really bad so I took off my shoes, and then my family and I walked around in Pike Place Market a little, while I carried my shoes and probably gave the tourists the wrong idea about locals. Even though I don't even live in Seattle, I live in the Puget Sound area.
Today I have a lot of homework and won't be posting much, if at all. Bye.
Today I have a lot of homework and won't be posting much, if at all. Bye.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
YouTube - Pachelbel Rant
YouTube - Pachelbel Rant
I love this video, I play the viola in my school orchestra, and it is so true. The lower strings almost always get crappy parts, but this guy takes it to hilarious lengths. This video does contane some minor baddish words.
I love this video, I play the viola in my school orchestra, and it is so true. The lower strings almost always get crappy parts, but this guy takes it to hilarious lengths. This video does contane some minor baddish words.
It takes a theif
So my dad and I were talking about how the concept behind the Discovery Channel Show, It Takes a Theif would make a better novel than reality tv show. That got me thinking about the show It Takes a Theif. The title is based off of the homily/saying that it takes a theif to know a theif. I don't really like the show very much. Besides the fact that the main characters don't seem very charismatic to me, the show seems both manipulative and overly informative to the wrong kind of people. The show starts out with them figuring out which house in a given neighborhood would be the easiest to rob, in excruciating detail. Then they wait for the family to get home, they ask permission to do the show. Afterwards they rob and totally violate the family's home and belongings, while making the horrified family watch. Afterwards they give the family a home makeover for home safety. But still, they've just taught the television watching public how to rob a home! Plus it's basically just an ad for alarm systems. It just rubs me the wrong way. If you like this show, email me or leave a comment arguing your case, I promise I will listen and consider.
Profile views, or how I know people are reading my blog
Well I'm still working out the kinks in this blog, so I'm viewing my profile a lot. However I have not visited my profile seventeen times. So people must be reading this. So I beg you, if you are reading this to leave a comment or send me and email. Just so I know that I'm not talking to myself. I promise I will continue posting.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Orthodontics and teh Radio + my mysteriously lost crochet hook set
Hey, so only one post today, probably more tomorrow, or really later today after some sleep.
I went to the orthodontist today, or yesterday, got a lot of work done, it's a big ordeal because my orthodontist is far away from my house and I have some tricky teeth. I'm congenitaly missing eight of my adult teeth, my teeth are/were pretty crooked and gappy and my roots are pretty long so I get a lot of oral surgery because my baby teeth roots don't disentigrate enough. I've had braces for almost four years now. The latest thing is my upper canines, which never got loose, were pulled. But the adult canines hadn't been coming down, even with disintigrated roots, so the did something called an exposure. The oral surgeon cut open my gums, but a bracket on my adult teeth, tied the brackets to my wire, and then closed my gums up. Now each time I have a visit they tie the tooth down to make it come out. This visit was only unique in the fact that the anti was upped.
This post isn't really about my braces. On the way to the orthodontist we were listening to the radio in the car since it is usually almost an hour to my orthodontist. We were listening to kbcs a local radio station, I'm pretty sure it's a public radio station, you'ld have to check out there website. Anyways, their is this one show called the Daily Planet which I really like. It runs from three to five and in the afternoon and plays music from either around the world or music that is unusual. I really like most of the music that runs the gamut from Quebebcois fishing-dances to Thai dance-pop, whith a lot of latin music. They also get points for their name, which I believe is the name of the newspaper that Clark Kent works on, but correct me if I'm wrong.
When I got home from the orthdontist watched some tv and crocheted, but when I wanted to put my hook away, my hook set case had mysteriously vanished. I searched high and low and even moved the couch, but to no avail. There is a happy ending though, I found my hook set case just lying on the floor, cleverly only slightly obscured from view. So this was a pretty uneventlyful day. But I had had some friends over recently to watch Firefly, so my fun quotent has sort of been filled for a spell, unfortunatly before I started blogging. Seriously. Listen To Daily Planet, if you get kbcs.
Up Next: Pictures of my recent projects and YouTube vids I like.
I went to the orthodontist today, or yesterday, got a lot of work done, it's a big ordeal because my orthodontist is far away from my house and I have some tricky teeth. I'm congenitaly missing eight of my adult teeth, my teeth are/were pretty crooked and gappy and my roots are pretty long so I get a lot of oral surgery because my baby teeth roots don't disentigrate enough. I've had braces for almost four years now. The latest thing is my upper canines, which never got loose, were pulled. But the adult canines hadn't been coming down, even with disintigrated roots, so the did something called an exposure. The oral surgeon cut open my gums, but a bracket on my adult teeth, tied the brackets to my wire, and then closed my gums up. Now each time I have a visit they tie the tooth down to make it come out. This visit was only unique in the fact that the anti was upped.
This post isn't really about my braces. On the way to the orthodontist we were listening to the radio in the car since it is usually almost an hour to my orthodontist. We were listening to kbcs a local radio station, I'm pretty sure it's a public radio station, you'ld have to check out there website. Anyways, their is this one show called the Daily Planet which I really like. It runs from three to five and in the afternoon and plays music from either around the world or music that is unusual. I really like most of the music that runs the gamut from Quebebcois fishing-dances to Thai dance-pop, whith a lot of latin music. They also get points for their name, which I believe is the name of the newspaper that Clark Kent works on, but correct me if I'm wrong.
When I got home from the orthdontist watched some tv and crocheted, but when I wanted to put my hook away, my hook set case had mysteriously vanished. I searched high and low and even moved the couch, but to no avail. There is a happy ending though, I found my hook set case just lying on the floor, cleverly only slightly obscured from view. So this was a pretty uneventlyful day. But I had had some friends over recently to watch Firefly, so my fun quotent has sort of been filled for a spell, unfortunatly before I started blogging. Seriously. Listen To Daily Planet, if you get kbcs.
Up Next: Pictures of my recent projects and YouTube vids I like.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Link reviews
So I'm going to review my newly added links and I'm going to try and make a tradition of giving you a review and vivid description of the new links.
- Jeremy's Podcast is an audio blog podcast done by a friend. I've been in it. Follow Jeremy as he discovers that Chinatown is one word, trys not to get hypohermia and other mundane-type adventures.
- Drivel Blog is a blog done by another friend of mine. He post of his life, with or without pictures, picturs with quote, average poems and surrealist flash fiction vaguely in the style of Frank Key.
- El Goonish Shive, this is webcomic, it is hosted on keenspot, a sort of selection of high quality webcomics. El Goonish Shive is a SF-romance-comedy-drama, maybe you should just check it out for yourself, it's hard to explain. The art is constantly evolving.
Appearances of me
Hey, wow, actual happenings to report. I have an appearance to report. I was a guest in one of my friends podcasts. I'll include a link to it, it's episode 5 and I am the female voice, Rachel is one of the many names I might use.
¡Hey all!
Hi, this is the first post to my new blog, are you awake?. The title of this blog comes from when I'm staying up late on the internet and don't really know what to do. I get compelled to type areyouawake in to the url bar and see what happens. Usually I get one of those wierd link type pages for various medicines I don't need. I figure if anyone other than my friends who aslo have small blogs are reading this then they will probably read my blog in the midst of insomnia. In fact i'll probably update in the middle of the night too. I'll post links with long descriptions, thoughts I have in the middle of the night and knitting/crochet projects I am working on/have finished. Talk to you later my little insomniacs. That's what I'm going to call my readers. Bye.
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