Al Bhed and the Undead

Today's lessons are brought to you by the letter frustration, and the number mind-numbing annoyance.

I feel sort of bad about my only entry for yesterday being a lot of mindless screaming, and nothing of substance. Of course, it would take a lot more of that to thoroughly explain my situation. I'm always in some kind of predicament like that, though. So, the meet today sucked. Sucked like very very few meets have sucked before, at least for me. Last week was bad... this week was worse. I was really really tight warming up for the long jump, so I never quite got my mark down. Bad. Worse, the board was moved back two feet, to ten feet behind the pit, which for some reason completely freaked me out subconsciously. On the first jump, I fouled by probably a foot, because I jumped from the wrong board. I moved back, and on the second jump, didn't pop like I should have (freaking myself out again), and nicked my left heel on the back of the pit. Freaking immediate insane pain. I don't think I broke anything, but it ought to be a lovely shade of black and blue by tomorrow morning. Naturally, I completely screwed up my third jump after that, and scared myself at the high jump completely. It was a horrible note to end the season on. The worst part being now I know my coach is going to run me even harder over the next two weeks because I don't have any meets to worry about. It'll be my punishment for not being able to jump in practice. So I'll just end up worse off, because I'm already hurting. Or maybe I'll be really lucky and he'll realize that what I really need, more than more weight lifting and more endurance and all that stuff, is a week off so I can catch up with my work and stop feeling so overwhelmed. If I didn't feel so overwhelmed by everything right now, I won't get nearly so frustrated with people. And then I get snippy, and I feel like a horrible, horrible person.

After I got back from the meet today, I sat around my room for a bit until hisspit came by, and we played Soul Caliber for a bit while everyone went to the KSO show. I was going to go to it, or the basketball game, but ended up doing neither on account of videogames. We had fun unlocking bits of the game the guys hadn't gotten to, through the wonders of button mashing. We ordered in from this strange Jamaican place that had wonderfully greasy food. I didn't realize how much eating nothing but salads at BJ and Subway had made me crave something fatty. Until I noticed at the meet today that what I really wanted was a sandwich basically covered in mayonnaise. Hehehe. Disgusting. So I ate a cheeseburger and a chicken sandwich, and felt better. Eventually people came back from the KSO show, and started taking away the game, so I sat down and wrote my angry entry. I think around 11:30 or midnight I started playing FFX again, on loan from our resident gamer. Playing games around people here is really super-frustrating, because everyone's got an opinion about what you should be doing, especially the ones that don't have any idea what's going on in the game, or how it works. Freaking GAH, people. STOP IT! I felt really bad because at one point our floor drunk and his out-of-town friend were in here being generally weird, and I was super-snippy with them, which was particularly mean of me. Usually I'm not so short with drunk people, unless they're the Sick Asian. Heh, and I thouht it was bad when he sat down next to me while I was playing Xenogears and asked stupid questions. Oh yeah... it was. But at least he didn't tell me how I should be playing the game. "Hey, buy 50 pheonix downs" "Summon something!" "What are you doing? He sucks!" "Use cura!" "What's a guado?" "What's going on since I left?" "Ooooh, you haven't been collecting your Al Bhed translations, have you?" BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! It wouldn't have been so bad if the battles weren't completely ridiculous. I mean... it took me three tries to get through this one, because you'd always get to the end and then the guy would freakin' kill the entire party in two turns. My conclusion is, FFX would be a lot more fun with either a) a small group, or b) being pathetically dorky all on my own. Anywhere over about three people in the room, counting myself, is just too many. I suppose it mostly depends on the people, though. Hmph.

And that, my friends, is the extent of my day. I think I need to settle down a bit... hope people don't pop in tomorrow for extended periods of time. Perhaps hope that maybe I can borrow FFX again and play it by myself, since Xenosaga hasn't arrived yet (goshdarnit, there go my plans for the weekend). As long as I get my drama finished, and my Hum paper started (I've already got bits of it planned, at least) I'll be happy. It would be nice to get my Bio paper started, too, but I'm going to be over-abitious or anything. I'm just going to take some time to myself. Sit around a bit... walk out to the point, since it's supposed to be a beautiful 60 degrees tomorrow... oh dear, if it actually gets up to 60 I will be so amazingly happy. Maybe I'll work on my paper out by the lake. That would be a nice change of pace.

Right now though, I think I'll go to sleep. If I'm lucky, my roomie will get back late tomorrow, rather than like, 8:00. Because if she gets back early tomorrow, or somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, people will be in here all day and I won't get anything at all done. Goshdarnit, her being nice to people on the floor and letting them in. Oooh well, I will deal with it. Even though... no... blargh... I won't even dwell on it now. Gah!

Alarm Clocks are SATAN

Hmph. I was all ready to sleep in today. Then, at 9:30 my roomie's alarm clock started going off. So I switched it off. Then it decided to go off again... gosh darn alarm clocks with two alarms! So I had pretty much settled on getting up, but just in case I wasn't certain, my alarm decided to go off. Stupid freakin' world, thinking it can tell me when to get up! Oh well, it never hurts to be awake for a few more hours. It's not like I'm falling asleep right now. Now, all I have to do today is memorize my lines for drama, write a few pages of my Hum paper, and write my review for drama. Oh, and go to my little drama practice. Which will be an annoying little break in my day, but I guess afterwards I'll just go to dinner, so it should work out. It's sad that it's such a pain for me to go to campus.

Hmm... I wish I could remember the dream I had last night. It was pretty weird. I've only been remembering tiny pieces of my dreams lately.

In other news... I hate taxes! As if the university wasn't already putting all its resources into screwing us over, the government has to do it, too. Why does this not really surprise me, hmm?

Nothing a little paint won't fix...

I really wish my roomie would've left her camera around today... Between doing certain people's history projects (A-hem) and working on my actual projects for real school, I walked out to the lake. I made the mistake of wearing real shoes and a jacket, but I fixed that when I walked to campus at 3:30. Abso-freaking-lutely beautiful day. Just put some leaves on the trees, and I'd be happy with this for the rest of the year. Really, it never has to go much above 60 for me (except once in awhile, so I can swim). I felt sort of silly being one of about five people out and about in only a t-shirt, but I imagine a lot of the people still bundled up are those silly people from warmer climates. I mean, heck, becada422 still has to deal with freezing temperatures. I should enjoy this before it decides to snow again on Wednesday. And then it's going to be miserable, because all of a sudden cold will feel colder. It always works that way in the spring, though. I should just be happy that it's ninth week now. Three more freakin' weeks. Then I'm done with this quarter forever. I'll temporarily forget that there's another one after this.

So, aside from walking around and enjoying the weather, today I have accomplished nothing. Of course, I won't be going to bed until 1, so I've got quite a while still to get things done. And they will get done, because I'm in a good mood right now. I sat down and on a whim decided to mix a CD. Right now, I think the most under-appreciated Windows programm is the tiny little Sound Recorder, that has been awesome since dear old "Pigeon" (there's a name I haven't used for her in a long time) and I discovered that we could record ourselves saying weird things and then play them backwards. Anyway, today it was great for chopping off the ends of songs that go into "hidden" tracks so I could burn them onto the CD without having 20 minutes of silence afterwards. Of course, this involved a lot more screwing around with files than was strictly necessary, but I'm a perfectionist, and I'm really happy with the CD I've come up with. In my mind, it's all the same colour, which is nothing I really quite accomplished with my other mix CDs. Ok, so for some reason I classify my music by colour in my mind. I don't know why I do that, but for some reason all my CDs get lumped into a certain colour, and more often than not they get a season, too. Or a situation. For example, Keep It Together is a total autumn CD. Everything to Everyone is for train rides. Anything by Soul Coughing, especially Ruby Vroom, is Cleveland at night, or a city in general. Gordon, more often than not, ends up being road trips with my dad. BOAPS is early summer, by the lake. Thornhill is an absolute start-of-school CD. Most of my Moxy Fruvous CDs, in fact, are late summer. And for some bizarre reason, Filter has become associated with this one trip to Lake Erie with my mom and her friend from Kentucky.

( Anyway, here's the tracklist if anyone's curious. This is a rather dark grey-blue CD. I basically burned it for the last five songs or so. )

My little practice for drama went well. But I realize now that I'm going to have a tough time writing my paper for Hum tomorrow night, so I'd better get at least a page done today. As long as I've got a decent start on it, I know I'm capable of finishing it within a reasonable amount of time. It's just forcing myself to actually start it when I don't technically need to that's the hard part. And I must remember to read that assignment for drama tomorrow, because it's in our instructor's mailbox and I know I'm going to forget it. Of course, once again it's not like I ever really participate, so it doesn't matter a whole lot. It's just... nice to know I've actually done the reading, and am therefore a better student than some other people here maybe. It's all psychological.

Goshdarnit, I am always still hungry after I eat at the dining hall. Tonight I had a big salad and pizza. That is dinner! Gah! It's not my fault they're not serving anything appetizing. I swear, sometimes the food is engineered to have like, zero nutritional value. And, now for a bit of levity... this is what was randomly left in my paste for today:

"And, ladies in gentlmen, in the left corner we have the fascist of all fascists, the Italian invader, the man who helped Hitler conquer France... threatening to attack and annex anyone who comes his way... it's MUSSOLINI!"