So my summer has been pretty exceptional. I started off with a visit from a childhood friend who I've known since kindergarten. He came down from Arizona to visit for a week. I can't say we did too much. We hit a bangin' end of the year costume party which I attended as Spencer Gibson dressed up as Jesus. This was lot's of fun. Other than that I can say that having a friend stay at your house for more than 2 days can become old, especially when both of you enjoys playing video games a great deal. There was lots of Starcraft, and lots of Gears of War. And also I must say, this year I began to become a little worried about what people might think when I described to them how my male friend from a long ways away was coming to visit me for a week, staying in my house, and sleeping in my bed. (I slept on a bean-bag chair).

After that week was up it was my turn to head over to Arizona. As we were waiting in the airport I stopped into the book store and picked up Life of Pi. I must say, that was a fine book. Although I left it alone for the majority of the time I was gone beyond the plane ride, around the last couple days of my stay I got over that hump some people describe as the beginning and actually started enjoying it. One night I was up until 4 in the morning reading about a hyena who had clawed his way into a living zebra's belly. About the book I will say that the story with the animals was a much better story. Mostly because it didn't involve a man's face being sawed off and eaten.

In Arizona we didn't do a lot. It was 115 degrees there for most of the week. We swam a couple times. We played Halo a couple hundred times. I did see Transformers a day before it came out, and it was enjoyable, though it's not what I would call a good movie.

I also saw the new Die Hard, and I should describe to you my relationship to this series. When I was still working at Little Caesar's I did not do a lot of things. I went to the mall, and bought expensive presents for people more, and I blew it on lonely but wholly enjoyable Friday nights. These Fridays included me ordering a monstrous Pizza Hut pizza, running down to Blockbuster, renting R rated movies which they weren't supposed to let me have, playing Gears of War with Spencer and Andre, and then devouring the movie and the pizza. The best of these R rated movies which they weren't supposed to let me have were the Die Hard movies. Watching a man romp around a larg building killing Germans theoretically shouldn't have been so enjoyable. But it was. From these movies I derived quotes the likes of "Yippee-Ki-Yay Motherfucker" and Now I have a machine gun, Ho Ho Ho. Let me note that the latter is best when in it's original form: Written on a dead man's chest using his own blood. I estimate that these films probably made my life about 2.5 times better each time I saw a new one.

That being said, the new Die Hard was good, but sadly if it were available at Blockbuster, I would be able to rent it. In other words, they slashed the R rating, and when it's a movie about some dude who kills people really good, taking away rights to blood and gore is like taking away the movie's soul. I still prefer the original Die Hard, and the third in the series Die Hard: With a Vengeance. You should see these films if you have the means, and if you are not female. If for some reason you are unable/unwilling to see the fourth (new one), this might sum up the experience.

Back to Arizona. Aside from the Halo-playing I met my friend's friends. They are a cool lot. To expand: I met them on two occasions. One of them was a Dungeons and Dragons get-together, and the other was a LAN party. If you do not know what a LAN party is, I will expand further. LAN stands for Local Area Networking. It's when everyone decides that playing games with each other over the internet isn't cool enough, so they pack up their computers and bring them all to one location to network them. The term LAN party isn't exactly fitting because there is no actual party-ing involved. As for the Dungeons and Dragons, I watched them spend a couple hours devising their band of heroes and rolling dice, and got the chance to school one in Guitar Hero.

Upon my return to the good state of Washington, where people roam free outside their houses without fear of being literally pan-seared on their own patio, I saw that one Harry Potter movie. I might add that I wasn't exactly planning on seeing this one at all, much less at a midnight showing. Andre called me up though, and we had a good time. I saw our friends Lexie, Kelsey, and a bunch of other people there upon leaving, however- they were dressed in a pagan garb, waving around mock witch-sticks and screaming obscene witch-chants. As we drove away I informed them by way of shout that magic isn't real.

Beyond that I haven't done too much. I've been bus-ing/skateboarding down to the UW once or twice every week. The bus rides let me sift through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Riding, while at the same time I really like just running around Seattle, I hope I can move there one day. While I'm actually in the UW I head up to the 2nd floor of Suzallo/Allen and kind of barricade myself at this obscure desk-area with a pile of books on Hinduism for my extended essay.

All in all, my ventures to the UW are relaxing alternatives to sitting in my house and doing nothing but weeping for my dying laptop and absent Xbox, all while mostly not dressed. I almost had one of these days (the mostly undressed ones) today, but decided to actually do something. I placed inside my backpack my laptop, Zen and the Art, and my green sweater and skateboarded down to the Edmonds waterfront. This was not a straight shot however, in an effort to find some way onto the beach that wasn't at the harbor I ended up searching through about 50% of Edmonds. If you heard the scratch of polyurethane wheels on concrete outside your house today, it was probably me. When I finally arrived I picked out a bench overlooking the beach. On the bench slightly down from me there was a lone 50-ish year old man, sitting there doing nothing but look leisurely, and on the bench slightly down from him there was another lone 50-ish year old man doing the same thing. I was somewhat confused, because usually guys, especially ones like this who had a considerable amount of husk to them, don't usually just drive down to the waterfront to watch the sunset. While I worked on my Extended Essay and read a chapter of Zen while these guys just sat there. I think out of the corner of my eye I imagined one throwing me a stare and rubbing his belly in circular motions.

Hiking back up from the waterfront to where I live, kind of near the school was pretty tough because it's basically uphill all the way. I'll be doing a lot more though- Stefan and I are going to be going on a 3-5 or so day hike around mid-August with Steve Bernheim, a pretty left-wing dude running for city council whose signs you've probably seen. It's going to involve some serious badass living off the wild. We'll be making our way up one of Washington's glaciers from 9-5, and it will involve setting up camp, something it seems which is nowadays only mentioned in Lord of the Rings. We will then disassemble our camp and continue to hike, and repeat this process day by day. There will be no bacon. There will not even be fire. We will eat only that which requires mixed in water, or that which grew directly from the earth. We will not change our clothes, except in times of great need. We will poop in holes. It's going to be pure unadulterated hardcoreness, and I will take pictures.

So I've written this while conversing with our dear friend Daniel Clinch over MSN, and I find it is quite late. I'm gonna sign off. Good luck with your subsequent summers. I hope you didn't read all of this.

The wisdom teeth are out. I survived the IV.

Recovered a lot of schoolwork from my iPod.

Laptop is fixed.

Good times.

Right now I'm eagerly scanning over my iPods hard drive like a scavenger scouring the desert for food digitally. If I do not find anything soon I fear that I might starve to death. And even before this happens, I might just decide that the agony of having my own body digest itself won't be worth living anymore. Capping myself in the head could very soon become a viable option. (Not really, that was purely for dramatic effect)..

The reason I'm pouring over this gigantic 30 GB landscape is because (still, I'm hoping) within this iPod's bowels is every single morsel of work I've done this year, both in school and out. This includes the endless archive of psychology notes, over 50 hours of history notes, a soon-to-be-due french presentation, all the crappy English commentaries I've ever worked on late at night, and most important of all: Every single thing I've done for my extended essay.

You see it all started on Wednesday night, I believe it was. I had left my laptop on, as I usually do. It sat next to my bed complacent and calm, watching over me as I slept, just as a good companion would. Then all of a sudden, as if it were reaching out to me in my dreams, I felt a ripping digital scream. Something had gripped my laptop for reasons unkown, and strangled it to death as I slept beside it. I awoke to find a single solemn message on my beloved computer's screen: "ntoskrnl.exe was not unable to run. File is missing or corrupted".

Note: ntoskrnl.exe is basically one of the few files which lies at the very core of the Windows operating system. Without it a Windows PC is not able to function properly. In fact without this file, you cannot even START your computer without it barfing up a medley of error messages on you and then abruptley shutting itself down.

Over the course of this weekend I slaved ever so hard to find SOME WAY to get these files, the culmination of my high school career, off of this laptop and onto something that worked, where I could keep the files while I wiped the hard drive and fixed everything. Naturally this thing was my iPod- it's hard drive is actual bigger than my laptops, so I was able to store EVERYTHING on it. Joy! I downloaded a crude version of linux, booted it up, and backed up all of my files. I thought I was safe. Key word being thought.

Today I plugged my iPod back into the laptop to recover a couple stray files which I had forgotten to back up earlier. They weren't exactly important, but I didn't feel like having to recreate them when i got my laptop fixed. Things seemed to have gone smoothly until about 20 minutes ago from now, when after plugging my iPod into my computer I was struck by an error message twice as terrifying as the last: "This iPod appears to be in Recovery Mode".

Note: Recovery Mode is the state an iPod goes into one in ten thousand times after being unplugged from a computer without being 'Ejected' or 'Safely Removed'. Basically it is a sign that everything in the iPod has been royally botched, and you need to restore it to factory settings in order to get things running again.

It didn't strike me until 5 minutes later that every ounce of work I'd done this year was on that iPod- now lost in a jumble of corrupted files. Back to the beginning of this sad journal we now are: I've got several programs scanning the remains of my iPod looking for any remnants of old work. I doubt I'll find anything. This means hoping I still have a printed copy of my EE notes. And forgetting about using Psyche or History notes to get college credit. And forgetting about using any of the other important work which I probably will have a need for later but cannot think of now.

I'd like to cry right now, but I'm too tired. I'll wallow in sadness, but without any music to listen to. Because my iPod is broken. And my Laptop is broken. And my Xbox 360 broke down a couple days before the laptop. And my skateboard, which I used to take everywhere with me: stolen.

There was probably a day back before I felt like fate's punching bag when I told myself that I would never write some soggy emo journal like this, and I weep even more for the fact that I couldn't uphold this simplest of promises that I had made to myself.

So yesterday was pretty great. I decided to kick off my Spring Break with a bang.

Basically I woke up and did absolutely nothing until about 3:30, when I had to get ready for work. I had gone out with Andre, Maddy, and Juliet to see Blades of Glory (which wasn't bad at all) and got back at around 12:30, eventually staying up till about 2:00. I had pretty much the most terrible day at work, gladly it was my last day though. They put me on counter and the guy who had been running it earlier hadn't been putting new stuff into the oven. Because of this when I started people would come in expecting stuff "HOT-N-READY" and I had to tell them to wait for 5 minutes, which people can't handle a lot of the time. I spent most of my shift trying to catch up with all the orders and I got off at 7:00 pretty angry and tired.

I had been a nice day, so right when I got home I put on a t-shirt and some shorts and started skateboarding to the mall. This is kind of my way of meditating. It was a nice night, and I had some good music playing so I relaxed really fast. At one point I looked up and contrasting against the glare of a streetlight I saw that it was snowing which gave me this inexplicable calmness.

By around 8:00 it was pretty dark and I was about a 3 blocks away from the mall, heading down the pretty big hill in 188th that descends to the mall. I wasn't going all out on it or anything, I was still on my board but I kept stomping my foot down to make sure I wasn't going too fast. Eventually at one point the hill levelled out and I stopped stomping. I picked up a little bit of speed, and all of a sudden I hit what must have been a rise in the pavement. My board stopped completely, but my body was still in motion- I did a face dive right into the sidewalk, and as my head hit the ground I saw one of my teeth fly out of my mouth. I got back up, pulled my skateboard out of the road and my mouth started bleeding everywhere. At this point I pulled out my cell phone and dialed 911. I gurgled to the lady on the line where I was and she dispatched an ambulance.

I wasn't in pain, but was bleeding a lot, so I laid down, bent my knees upward to keep blood flowing to my head, and just kind of waited for the ambulance to come. As I waited I noticed as a guy across the street just kind of walked by. Though it was dark I doubt he couldn't see me, but he probably thought I was some kid who had gotten drunk and decided to take a nap ont the sidewalk. Right before the ambulance came some employees from a nearby Banner Bank who had seen what happened and called an ambulance came out and put a jacket over me. I feel bad for the guy who did because there's probably blood all over it now.

By the time the ambulance arrived the bleeding wasn't nearly as bad, and I was able to walk over and lay down inside. It was the first time I'd ever been in an ambulance. Pretty exciting. They asked me a bunch of questions- Was I alone? Had I been drinking?, and made sure I hadn't broken anything. It's actually pretty amazing, because though I landed face first very little was actually damaged. My chin absorbed just about everything, and though my teeth had kind of shredded my upper lip (which is the size of Texas right now), my only other injuries were just scrapes and bruises. I wasn't wearing a helmet, and to be honest I could have landed head first or in the middle of the street.

When we got to Steven's (Hospital) I sat down and had to wait about 20 minutes for my mom (who had been in Marysville) to come and give them consent to treat me. I had the dislodged tooth stored in my cheek and they put it in some milk to save in case it could be replanted (the entire root came out). When I was waiting, I noticed that one of the guys who had picked me up in the aid car was missing the bottom half of his left middle finger, so it was pretty hard to actually feel sorry for myself. Eventually my mom got there and in a period of around 2 hours they took my blood pressure 5 times and slid the tooth back in place, which was the more painful than when it had come out.

I was prescribed some liquid Vicodin (which probably has me a little messed up now as I write this) because as it is now I can't really eat anything solid. My mouth is shredded, and my lip is still gigantic. Because of this I can barely talk, and it's pretty comical if I shut my mouth I'm afraid my tongue would cause it to start bleeding again- so my mouth is always open, which makes it really hard to swallow. As a result I get a bunch of saliva pooled up in my mouth and sometimes if I lower it I'll just start drooling all over. It's fun stuff- I'll need to take a picture so that I can show everyone how much it looks like I have Down's Syndrome.

So at present time, I got back from the Dentist's about 2 hours ago. He's got a kind of liquid splint on the tooth so that it doesn't slide back out, but said that there's about a 40% chance that I'm going to have to get a fake one instead. There's a blood clot inbetween the root of the tooth and where it's supposed to attach, so I guess it's going to be hard to tell. Either way he said that if I do get to keep my tooth he'll have to do a bunch of stuff on it including a root canal, which I've heard isn't very much fun.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have riding my skateboard down a bumpy sidewalk late at night. My spring break is now going to be spent sipping gatorade and milkshakes, and getting high on vicodin. I'm hoping the time it takes for me to heal up doesn't cost me the job which I've nearly gotten at Gamestop- I was supposed to get a call today saying whether or not I got the job, but had to inform Andre this morning that if the manager called telling me that I got the job all I'd be able to do is make incoherent mumbles of joy.

It seems little will be distracting me from studying like crazy for my extended essay. Best Spring Break Ever!

And no, this isn't an April Fool's joke.

Here are some pictures...

It's amazing how I can retain my attractiveness.
Or can I?
I'm mounting this on my wall.
Though it would be pretty awesome to carry it around at school...

I couldn't think of anything better to do at 12:30 at night other than make a meaningless livejournal post. It's funny how that works.

This past week or so has been pretty fantastic, not in that anything specifically wonderful has happened to me, though. The biological perspective of psychology might explain it rather simply in that there has merely been an increase in the production of endomorphines within my pituitary gland. While I'm still letting my boss trample over me with assignments of shakerboarding (and as a result excessive amounts of exhaust inhalation), I find myself getting through it like some sort of lovestruck little girl- I just listen to the same Sting song over and over for an hour and a half. People have come up to me during school apparently concerned, because when I was on probably my 43rd captivated listen-through of the song they drove by and mistook me for looking terribly depressed.

My direction is quite the opposite- probably due to the fact that finals are done with, and no matter how they turned out, good or bad, there is absolutely nothing more I can do. To me this is the ultimate peace of mind. The night finals ended I spent the way I hope I can spend many more: Ordering pizza, watching Die Hard (Yippee-ki-yay, Muthafucka), and having thoughtful conversations with my colleagues on the degenerating state of the youth and the hopelessness of female political power. These conversations take place until about 1 in the morning and are interrupted by brief Gears of War gore-fests.

I kind of stayed "out of it" that entire three-day weekend. I accomplished just about nothing other than going to work until my day-off on Sunday. By that afternoon the weather became very nice and I went on a 3 or-so mile skateboard ride to the mall, which was to some extent relaxing. When I arrived I purchased some ice cream from Cold Stone creamery (I am sole possessor of the undisputed greatest ice-cream combination known to man), abruptly threw my skateboard down in front of a chair in Borders, and then delved into some deep and engrossing theological publication. When I felt that my hunger for spiritual thought was satisfied I got back and skateboarded all the way back.

Now it's Thursday, four days later, and we've jumped back into school, back into craploads of homework. The buzz is definitely with ToK. We've been conditioned to fear it- at least that's what I think. Though when I first entered the class, and sat through Mr. Quinn's intense first speech I felt perfectly fine (perhaps even excited?), it was when I exited, and was greeted with uplifting praise for having survived the first class that I felt genuine fear creep into my heart. All the same, I think most of the students who take Quinn's class have noticed that he's like 2 notches above most of the other teachers at our school, except for maybe Crist, solely because he (like Crist) isn't a pushover, and we can sense that. It's this kind of challenge that I think will either begin to drive us to hate him, or feel a need to impress him- a feat which in the IB world is equated with conquest.

I don't know why I've started to say this alot (I used to hate it when other people did), but
Good Times.

Snow has once again graced us with it's presence, and for Andre, Spencer and I this means it's time to indulge in some serious Gears of War. Chainsaw bayonets are being revved up as we speak, getting ready to rip into the flesh of some abominable alien invader. We will drink it's blood, smear the thick syrupy liquid across our faces as war paint, and then release mighty masculine shouts.

Happy Gears of War Day.

  So, I guess it's been a while. I've checked my livejournal just about every day I'm within range of a WiFi hotspot, but I haven't really been posting. I've sort of been lurking in the intarweb shadows... keeping tabs on everyone's lives. Reading between the lines. But while getting to interpret the innermost motives within the people around me is fun, I think I'm expected to reveal something about myself too.
Well... right now it's Christmas night. There's a little fuzzball that's passed out on my beanbag chair next to my bed (a fuzzball of the adorable clumsy kitten variety). Looking around, I guess it's gotten tired knocking over everything knock-overable. I just hope it doesn't wake up in the middle of the night to stumble near me and get crushed while I roll over. 

  My strategy has been to keep it serenaded with perhaps the greatest rhyming minds of today, which seems to be working, but then again I haven't seen this thing remain in a state of sleep for any longer than 15 minutes. Only time will tell. As for me, the rhymes are permeating the outer cortex, and I won't be awake much longer. Good night, I should get some rest. I've got 3 hours of standing on the sidewalk with a Little Caesar's sign ahead of me tomorow.
Merry Christmas. 

  On another note, I saw Apocalypto yesterday. It was pretty great, and I'll admit that though I wasn't thoroughly affected, it was probably the most gory movie I've ever seen. I'm estimating I saw about 5 heads chopped off, 3 people sawed open with a dull blade while still alive, 2 boar testicles ripped from 1 boar body, 2 throats cut, 1 boar testicle bitten into and then vomitted out, 1 face mangled by a jaguar, and 1 birth given underwater. Good times. Excellent movie.

So, I promised a real entry, and I guess I feel like making one...

...seeing as it's now 11:11 and I've got about 3 hours worth of homework to do. This pillar of labor that most IB kids would see as a monster waiting to be tackled has just sort of grown... feasted off of my procrastination. And this isn't the kind of procrastination I think most of the people reading this are familiar with- the kind where you didn't do an assignment the day it was assigned, or where you waited until 8 or so before starting the IB kind, no this is it in it's most raw form, the kind that makes your vocal chords angrilly spank each other when spoken out loud. Procrastination. It keeps me awake, like right now, with a laptop sitting on my stomach and a movie playing in the background (About A Boy it is today), long into the night, I think it was 3:00 yesterday (two days ago by the time I'll have finished with this). By the time I'm actually submitting to sleep, far past midnight, I'm thinking to myself "It's tommorow", characterizing how similar staying up so late into the night probably is to being high on crack.

The next morning's result doesn't at all part course either- Usually I'll wake up after a night of preparing myself to do my homework, stumble downstairs, pour some orange juice into bowl, and then run into a wall before noticing that my bowl is in fact, not a cup.

I'll usually reach a state of complete alertness around the time I catch my bus (which arrives 12 minutes before my first class) or just act like a trooper and take the skateboard. It's all part of a very (involuntarilly) formulaic procedure that's more consistent than was Ms. Thompson's choice of poet for each day's poetry assignment. Every once in a while the lack of sleep will catch up to me. I'll come home from work or perhaps just venturing around Edmonds with some friends and I'll collapse onto my Futon at around 7. 13 hours later I'll wake up and it's off to another exciting day of school.

I don't know whether to blame this recent trend on my job or just a lack of motivation. Whether I've been enjoying a day off of work just adventuring around at the mall, in the woods, etc. or been throwing down a 6 hour shift I still manage to get my work done. Barely. Where I'd probably be prancing about with A's and perhaps a B outside IB I've now painted a bit off the entire spectrum from my report card palette. Additionally it's junior year, and to my great sadness the very last year that will apparently matter, a let down, at least in my situation. A freshman year hope that I could cruise by my first three years in high school with a 3.0 and then just somehow amaze people by giving up my entire life for senior year.

I can now see that's not going to happen.

I think the one weird thing about this though is that it's not like my schedule's packed, my otherwise open-ended days are just thrown off by those silly little homework assignments. One might be reassured however, to hear that the problem is now being dealt with semiprofessionally. The focus of my IB Psychology Behavior-shaping task shall be to eliminate my procrastination through the wounders of Positive and Negative reinforcement, Association and Punishment.

I haven't quite started on that yet.

Alright, the is the last one, I promise. Overcome by lack motivation to get anything done, I took one of the quizzes in Elly's journal. Normally (though I'm becoming less beleivable) I wouldn't post this, but the results made me laugh quite a bit.

Your Famous Last Words Will Be:

"I can pass this guy."

--

There, that's the last one. I promise.

Usually I don't do things like this, but I having nothing but one of these cliche int4rweb surveys I stole from Mr. Calvin to put inside the so far empty journal. Fear not, eventually I'll open up the impenetrable fortress which makes up my life, and expose it's innermost workings to a bunch of strangers over the internet. For now, telling you what tarot card I am will have to suffice.

You are the Hanged Man

Self-sacrifice, Sacrifice, Devotion, Bound.

With the Hanged man there is often a sense of fatalism, waiting for something to happen. Or a fear of
loss from a situation, rather than gain.

The Hanged Man is perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck. It reflects the story of Odin who offered himself as a sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. Hanging from the world tree, wounded by a spear, given no bread or mead, he hung for nine days. On the last day, he saw on the ground runes that had fallen from the tree, understood their meaning, and, coming down, scooped them up for his own. All knowledge is to be found in these runes.

The Hanged Man, in similar fashion, is a card about suspension, not life or death. It signifies selflessness, sacrifice and prophecy. You make yourself vulnerable and in doing so, gain illumination. You see the world differently, with almost mystical insights.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

---

"perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck".

Ownage.

And so it begins...