(warning: particularly old content) I don't ask for it to make sense 
4/30/02
Things I need to get done but have no desire to do and so they aren't getting done :
Washing out the container I took my lunch to school in a couple weeks ago. Take out the cardboard waste associated with my computer that's been in the living room for a couple months. Pay my parking ticket.
Things that I want to get done in a general sense, but never seem to "get around to" :
Getting that CD burnt for Mom's Mama Day gift. There was something else, but I've forgotten it.
4/28/02
I have a very strange one-sided relationship with Wil Wheaton these days. Namely, I have reserved the place for him in my mind and in my soul that I usually keep for my friends. As in people I actually know. In person. When I hear that he's been down, I want to email him to offer support. When I hear that he's been happy, I want to congratulate him. I tell my friends what he's been up to lately, and he pops up in my dreams every now and then. It's absolutely bizarre. I don't email him, of course, seeing as there's about a hundred people a day who either he DOES know or who are complete fucking WEIRDOS that do email him. In one sense, I feel as if my paltry words would be but a worthless, forgettable drop in the bucket for someone who, you know, is famous. In another sense, I don't want to be a fucking WEIRDO. It's one thing when "normal people" email me out of the blue, asking me about things I've written here. I get maybe one or two every couple weeks, right? And those are people on my level. It's just a completely different thing to try to email somone "famous," even if they seem to be the sort of person you would have befriended in an instant had you grown up together. I've never had this sort of experience before—I've always been willing to enjoy celebrities when they impinge on my consciousness, and let them slide back off into the water when the movie is over or the TV show finishes. Babble babble... I'm not even sure how to really put the whole thing into words, which is somewhat welcome. It's been a long, long time since I had a fundamentally new experience. It'll resolve itself into nothingness when I don't pay attention to it... when I do pay attention to it, I think I shall suffice in sending what karmic warmth I have his way. For entertaining me when I was a child, and for giving me hope for people who are Somebody, he deserves it.
4/27/02
Spike and Mike's again this year... overall, a better offering than last year's. More funny stuff, less gross... plus Rejected was on again. But I get home in a sour mood... phooey.
I'm a BANANA!
4/26/02
So cold... I feel as if I'll never be warm again. The dampness settling into my bones, the chill creeping up my fingers... this is November weather, not April. Bah humbug.
4/25/02
I had an odd sort of day today; the sort where it starts off horrible (I was nearly in tears at one point) and ends up quite nice. I want to broadcast to the world : Whomever it was that called my house accidentally at 1:07 pm today, and woke me up, thank you. Were it not for your wrong number, I would have been down at least 20%, if not likely more, on my paper from late dings.
4/24/02
The frustrating thing is that I've worked on this damn paper all week, and I'm STILL up at 4:30 am trying to finish it the night before it's due.
Guh. I guess the one nice thing about staying up was that I figured out how to get the damn phase diagram to come out right. On the other hand, it's 6:16 and I'm expected to be in at work at 10:30 to start a day that won't end until 9:00 or so. I want to cry. Oh yeah, and the whole being done thing? Well, it's done. But it sure ain't good.
4/23/02
Read too hard? Read too hard?
Read too hard? Honey, an ass!
Oo Lola! Oo Lola!
Oo Lola shouts "Sick! Must kill!"
"You buy a meal and beer," he says. "You buy a meal and beer," he says.
Joe was a hooker at Beetle-Halloween. Joe was a hooker at Beetle-Halloween.
Read too hard? Read too hard?
Read too hard? Honey, an ass!
Oo Lola! Oo Lola!
Oo Lola shouts "Sick! Must kill!"
Must Kill! Must Kill!
"You buy a meal and beer," he said. "You buy a meal and beer," he said.
Joe was a hooker at Beetle-Halloween. Joe was a hooker at Beetle-Halloween.
Oo Lola, Oo Lola! Oo Lola, Annie and Sam.
Oo Lola, Oo Lola! Lil' kill meal, chill out!
Oo Lola, Oo Lola! Oo Lola, Annie and Sam.
Oo Lola, Oo Lola! Lil' kill meal, chill out!
Oo Lola, Oo Lola!
snicker. I don't know what it says about me that I've watched this about five times today and laugh my ass off. every. single. time. But I'm pretty sure it's nothing good.
4/22/02
How very little I got done today outside of working on my paper (and even that didn't get DONE or anything) is simply mind-boggling. I didn't even get around to doing laundry... my feet will hate me tomorrow for lack of clean socks.
Post-schoolwork decompression is a valuable thing, but I wish I had a way to do it here other than watching TV or doing various computerish things. I need to get a subscription to a weekly magazine (or a couple monthlies) so that I can have something to read while laying in bed. Novels don't work, of course—anything that makes my brain put forth effort doesn't count as a decompression activity. I wish I could substitute useful activites like doing dishes or vacuuming, but apparently those may only substitute for doing homework, not as after-homework activities. Bah humbug.
4/21/02
What can I say? Nothing happened today. I did some more of my paper. I translated some of my Japanese homework. I made dinner that was so icky that I threw most of it away and vowed never to make anything out of a box again. I got in some walking. I got sucked into watching a 2-hour Discovery Channel show on genetic history that had about 20 minutes of real information and 100 minutes of them loving their camerawork. Big fooking whoop.
Snippets of dreams the last few nights—tracking down Brandon, who had been abducted by gangsters and was being tortured by being tied to a rock in lashing waves. Having to move into Wil Wheaton's house because I had nowhere else to go, and going jogging with him and his family.
4/20/02
I got a page written of my paper today, and most of my calculations worked out (even to the point of some rudimentary error analysis). Now, in a normal quarter, the fact that I've gotten this done on Saturday when the paper isn't due until Thursday would be nigh onto a miracle... this quarter, I'm bemoaning that I didn't get it finished today. I'm screwed.
4/19/02
Shit... I hope that they count my dropping my tuition off in the box before they look at it in the morning as being "on time;" they upped the late-tuition fee to 120$ this year. So, as to what I came to terms with yesterday... it's funny, how there can be parts of your personality that are glaringly obvious yet that you continually gloss over, until a chance conversation with a TA brings you to verbalize it. I am the sort of person who is extremely good at using tools to solve a problem. It shows up in all aspects of my life, but most relevantly, in my studies : I'm good at using tools of grammar and vocabulary to identify the meaning of a paragraph in either English and Japanese, for example. I'm good at using tools of chemistry to identify unknowns, for example. I am NOT the sort of person who is good at devising new tools for a new problem, nor am I the sort of person who is good at divining why my tools work. There is no particular shame in this; I'm quite good at the sort of logic puzzles that all of these situations eventually reduce down to. Another example—if I already know something about the code, I'm a great bug finder / fixer... I'm terrible, however, at writing new code of my own. I'd simply never thought about it exactly like this before... rather than everything in the world boiling down to a single concept / skill that I seem to only sometimes be able to understand / utilize, there are instead a SET of basic concept-skills—and it really isn't necessary in life to master all of them. Simplistic... yet worthy of a moment of internal epiphany when applied to oneself.
4/18/02
I had a good day today, a genuinely good one. I came to terms with a fundamental aspect of my personality, which I'll write about some other time, because it's 1:15 am and I haven't started on my homework yet (sigh).
4/17/02
I should go figure out how much this extra prep the night before I start a new lab is actually gaining me, gradewise... because I'm really not certain it's very justified to be losing this much sleep. And I can't even get coffee tomorrow morning, because no matter how hard it may be to be in lab in the morning sans caffiene, jittery hands are worse. Damn you, Chem 461, damn you.
4/16/02
The trap : I'm too stressed out to go to sleep. Yet, considering the time, the only thing I could really justify staying up for would be to go over the thricebedamned stuff for my new lab starting Thursday, or pre-work for my Japanese speech next week. But if I do more homework, I'm just going to stress myself out more. I can't fucking win.
I'd forgotten how nice the laundry outblow by the 71/2/3 bus stop smelled.
4/15/02
The birds that chirp at 3:00 am have always disturbed me.
4/14/02
I woke today at 3:30 pm, having slept for nearly 12 hours. At 9:40, I'm contemplating going back.
4/13/02
Points to me; I correctly predicted that Robbie Williams' Rock DJ, Pearl Jam's Jeremy, and Nine Inch Nails' Closer would all make it onto MTV's "Top 20 Most Controversial Videos," and that Smack My Bitch Up, by Prodigy, would be #1. Can I call it or what? Must be all the time I spend on Rotten. I'm glum, if anything, today. Not down enough to be depressed, not bitter enough to be angry, not anything enough to be anything. Just about 4 inches of hair shorter and feeling about the color of the shirt that I wore today. There was a particularly low point, but I suppose that since I can't be completely sure that it's Jake, despite everything matching, I'm not really allowed to hold on to it. I've been thinking about him a lot lately; thinking about the differences between us such that he actually did what I've thought of so often. Makes me feel pretty fucking pansy, at which point my self-preservation instinct steps in to point out that perhaps it's better to be pansy about something like that. Stupid, stupid self-preservation instinct. I hate you.
4/12/02
Sometimes, nothing feels quite so nice as a long sulk followed by a good meal.
4/11/02
I am not well. The old darkness has been growing within... a slow process to be sure—I only really started noticing it around finals week last month. Unfortunately, that means it had been expanding for some time before that. The fog of self-doubt, worthlessness, and despair has wrapped ever more tightly around me; eddying around one small triumph here, one happiness there, but ever extending tendrils forward. I dislike it, for I hate it when I am depressed without valid reason, or at least when other things should, reasonably, be making up for whatever is depressing me. Feeding on itself, the failure of rationality to force the darkness away becomes a new source of pain, an endless irony.
4/10/02
Life sucks when not even cute men singing and stripping on a stage can cheer me up. So yeah, they didn't give me the job. I don't know why, and though I've asked, I'm not sure if I want to know the answer. Do I really want to know what is so fundamentally wrong with me that they wouldn't give me a position which I seem outwardly to be so right for? I think I'll just end up being more hurt than I already am... and considering that I've felt all afternoon like I want to crawl into a hole and bawl until I use up all the oxygen and die, I don't think that adding more hurt on is going to do me very good.
Why, god, have so many of the things in the past year that I've desperately wanted come to abject failure? Were my biggies for the year getting Jim back and getting into grad school? Do I get nothing at all else?
4/09/02
Everyone has a superpower. Some people's are minor, some are flamboyant, but everyone does have one, and it is something of an activity at Jase's to identify what a person's superpower is. Seth has long known that his is the amazing ability to attract harmless weirdos; some years ago, he figured out that mine is the dark side to his—I attract annoying, icky, or dangerous weirdos. Zach jokes about the loser magnet embedded in my skull, and someone who doesn't hang around me much might be tempted to think that this joke is merely a joke. I tell you now that it is not—I pull them out of the woodwork like ants to spilled juice. Sometimes it's my (female, not dog-ugly nor overweight) presence in a place like a gaming store or arcade; sometimes it's the trenchcoat, or the Japanese homework in a cafe... sometimes I don't know what it is. I think it was the coat and boots today, at the bus stop. And boy, did I get a doozy.
4/08/02
It's only the second Monday of the quarter, and I'm already slammed with stuff that needs to get done. Whatever karmic force decided to make me have to take fucking p-chem lab needs to get a swift kick to the ass. It's not so much that I really have very much do to for it; it's the stress of knowing that I have such a finite time to get so much done, and being keenly aware of how much I truly suck at chemistry. A sad, sad thing for a chemistry major to say, but it's true. I'm a pathetic farce of a chemistry student, having just forced myself through the past two or three years out of sheer stubborness. It's purely coincidental that I've had decent teachers and a couple lucky breaks—bastard Engel taught me that and ruined forever my maybe-I'm-not-really-so-bad-at-it worldview. (Back to complaining about pchem lab) And it takes 8 hours out of my week, at such a stupid time (well, to give it credit, it wouldn't be so stupid if I didn't have sociology for twopointfive hours later those evenings), and, and, and... I don't like it. Wail.
4/07/02
It's nice when he does stuff so that I won't be sad... I just wish that he truly wanted to, rather than doing it just for my benefit. Not that I really should complain. Sigh.
4/06/02
Heh. The "Weapon of Choice" Fatboy Slim video, with Christopher Walken dancing, gets me every time. I do so love that man.
Dear Jake,
I regret that I never got around to getting to know you again as well as I wanted. I wish you hadn't done what you did, but I hope you feel better, somehow. Thank you for making high school a better place, and thank you for putting a smile on my face whenever I saw you on campus. You will be missed by more people than you would have guessed. Rest in peace, goofball.
4/04/02
I still haven't changed over. I haven't done dishes, either... I expect both will be done tomorrow. Hopefully.
4/03/02
I am so incredibly stressed out about my lab tomorrow, I'm near tears. I've read the experiment (I don't understand a lot of it, woe), I've gone over the suggested reference material (I mostly understood it, thank god), am paranoid enough that I've prepared for the wrong lab that I'm planning on trying to go into school a couple hours early to check (according to what I've written down for my lab schedule, I've got two labs, the first and second, graded by the same TA, which I think is incorrect... I'm hoping that it's the second one that I've gotten wrong, or I'm FUCKED), and generally I'm not in a very happy space. It's all well and good to tell myself that all I have to do is pass the class, but in a case where before even the second day of the class, passing is seeming a dim possiblity at best, it's not all that comforting.
4/02/02
Today, I am depressed. Too bad, because if I wasn't, I'd be really happy.
4/01/02
Fragments of the dream...
A Marine pulling me out of the ice-cold pond I'd fallen into after tripping down the paved hiking trail into nowhere, throwing me onto a tundra.
Ron Howard in the midst of a crowd in the tundra, in a bright yellow parka, trying to pass as a Canadian, asking me for my passport and settling for my drivers' license.
Switch : Teaching the black attorney from Law & Order as part of a swim class, finishing up, heading home with him because he lives next door.
The friend?nephew?brother? of said attorney getting shot outside my window at night, attorney splattered all in yellow paint wailing for the fallen; Jim comforting me as I sat hanging out of my windowsill, trying to get 911 on the line, but getting busy signals or endless rings each time.
Frustration, lots of it (it was the same feeling as when you scream in a dream and nothing comes out... damn 911 isn't answering the phone? wtf).
Ira Blossom from my childhood crackling in on the phone line while trying to get 911, and showing up in a pickup.
That was about where my alarm went off, me extremely upset because there was a man dying outside my window, and fucking 911 was busy.
I'll switch it tomorrow. Off to dreamland.