I don't write much. Aside from this journal, anyway. Here, I write far more than I should probably bother. I have no watchers, largely because I don't put out much art, and no readers, largely because I have no watchers. The function of an FA journal, it seems to me, is to inform watchers and readers of the writer's general circumstance, perhaps informing the aforementioned watchers and readers of why there's not been much art, or perhaps providing some entertainment. I have no watchers or readers, and my journal's not very entertaining anyway.

Generally, journals are for personal bookkeeping, so I guess the name "journal" is a bit of a misnomer, although there's no better word for it.

All last week, school started late for WKCE standardized testing which only sophomores take. Because of this, I was able to sleep as late as I needed, usually from ten at night to eight in the morning. Ten hours of sleep. I'd wake up feeling great, with that general air of "this is going to be a good day". Before noon though - and always before noon - I'd feel like shit. I'd want to go back to sleep after not even four hours of being awake.

Keeping with the theme of being a mess, here's a bit of copypasta from a post I made on another webforum:

"Now see, this stuff about being unhappy about an inevitable breakup that I see after -every relationship I can think of- with little exception... it's why I've always been deterred from trying to have a personal relationship with anyone. Ever. I don't think I've ever, -ever- thought "I like that girl, I wouldn't mind dating her" (except one, who just wants to be friends) because I don't want to bother with the torturous pain everyone seems to experience after dating someone for a while. It's why I never really wanted to love anyone in particular. All this love shit seems to end badly, like a drug addiction that's fun at first but then just gets to be more and more pain."

I'm not just moping about with this. I want someone to prove me wrong, because if not, that would be really depressing. With the whole idea of entering a completely different society via this fandom, though, I might be able to abolish this notion and begin reconstructing my ideas of personal relationships.


Along those muddy lines, I'm going to switch fursonas. The reason for this is that my current/past (whichever, for varying grammatical interpretations) one is based off of my ideas of the real, functioning "IRL" society, in which I mostly try not to take part. Practically everyone I've met is some huge douche, so I stick to the sidelines and only make myself known to certain people when I want to be. That black canvas jacket I wear all the time has helped me a lot to this end, though that wasn't its original purpose (I just wanted to cover up my crippled arm that everyone kept pestering about), so it's an important personal symbol to me on the matter of not being noticed.

That's why I chose a wolf. I can apply whatever meaning I want (the wolf form is very strong, agile, and most importantly, expressible) but in the end the most important factor is that it's generic. A run-of-the-mill fursona in terms of appearance, one that lets me see without being seen.

But, if that's what I want, why make a fursona anyway? I've got an account, that's all I need to be able to see, and having an identity at all detracts from the "without being seen" part. So I reasoned, and you really don't want to bother reading my reasoning, that this site at least is one place where I -do- want to have an identity, where I -do- want to be seen. So a wolf is not for me, no matter how much meaning I apply to its figure.

So I switched, to a lynx. It has those features I admire in a wolf, and is even more slender in form, except it's not a run-of-the-mill character. In mythology, the lynx is a ghost-like creature that can be somewhere without its presence being known, so accordingly I can revert to the theme of "see without being seen" should I need to in the future.

So I'll have a drawing up sometime in the future. A good one, I promise.




END TL;DR WARNING

Yesterday we had our first real event of the year. Our show choir performed really well, and the band too (though my guitar solo kind of suffered onstage, even though it was really good during rehearsal).

Eleven o'clock: brunch at a restaurant halfway between our city and the next city over, where we'll be performing. Nice conversation with the Show Choir people. For cultists (and show choir is unarguably a cult) they're really not so bad. We played a forty-person game of telephone, and the phrase went from "Make up your own message" to "Mirror mirror chicken mirror." My omelet was also really good.

One-thirty: Rehearse at the high school we'll perform at. We're mostly just dicking around; my amp is set up next to the drummer so I can never hear anything anyway.

Two o'clock: Dress rehearsal. S'all good, we didn't have anything to clear up during the earlier rehearsal. S'all good. But the band's too quiet.

Four o'clock: Performance! There are some other show choirs from some other schools, but they seem kind of subpar to me. Our performance itself is really, really fun.

Six o'clock: Dinner at burger king. The whole band piles into the bassist's station wagon except the violinist, who we race to Burger King. We go maybe 45mph downtown and luck out when we find the place in such a foreign town. The band is able to order and finish eating before all the Show Choir kids have even ordered.

Seven o'clock: Second rehearsal. We actually run through all the songs, and they all sound great. My best solo I think I've ever played with the whole ensemble.

Eight o'clock: Second performance! Even better than the first one.

Ten o'clock: We all go back to a show choir member's basement to hang out and watch the video of our portion of the show. The show choir had some really cool, well-executed choreography. By this time I'm tired as hell after spending the whole day standing up.

Eleven o'clock: I head home and sleep almost immediately. It's been twelve hours now without using the Internet.

Ten o'clock the next morning: I wake up and discover that I left my jacket at the school where we performed. Shit.

Whatever though. I had a good time, and that wasn't my only jacket. Now we have a long time before our first competition, and I'll have time to do something -other- than practice for show band all the time.

Cheers.

My Halloween costume was Dr House. All my friends were telling me that I could never pull it off, that it'd suck balls. I got to school in the morning ('cause the students dressed up on Friday), though, to eat breakfast with a couple of them, who said "Shit... he did a pretty good job." The most difficult part of my Halloween costume, Dr House, was finding a cane, and getting a haircut. Seriously, directing the barber was harder than I expected it to be. In the end, though, it came out really well. I abstained from shaving for a month just for this costume, and the facial hair ended up working quite nicely. Walking with the cane like House was surprisingly easy, and I was recognized by many students in the halls between classes.

Calculus is the best class ever. The teacher's costume was Dr Horrible for Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and he won an award for best costume among teachers. He's got a picture of him and the only two Calc students (including me) who had costumes, and I asked him to email it to me, but I've yet to receive it. After everyone got to class, he put on Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for us to watch and afterward read us some vampire stories. Best teacher ever, I tell you.

Also on Friday, the same girl I asked out but whom I thought had rejected me asked -me- out via Facebook. So I picked her up at seven o'clock Saturday to go see District 9 at a theater that buys damaged copies months after movies hit theaters to show them at crazy-cheap prices.

Now, caffeine has not been good to me lately, but I really like soda, so about 100mg (lightweight, right?) of the stimulant got into my system and made me really hyper. It wasn't comfortable, so I took a couple sleeping tablets (first depressants I could find) to even it out. Because of this, I had the side-effects of both, including a mild headache and painful stomach. Because of this, I got lost on the way to her house and we ended up being ten minutes late. She was fine with that, though, and laughed it off. Neither of us are seventeen years old, but the theater didn't card us and let us into the theater ten minutes late without a problem.

Remember what I said about damaged copies? In this particular one, the screen was unbelievably shaky and the sound was muddled and almost inaudible, so it was unwatchable. She suggested we leave the movie early (hadn't a clue what was going on even after a half-hour) and invited me to her house to play a Nintendo Wii game. I agreed, and we left joking about the waste of five dollars (yeah, the tickets were two-fifty each)... to find my car's starter switch broken. Again. I called my dad, who walked me through the process of replacing the fuse that had fried in the hood, and she (by the way, this pronoun's antecedent will always be the girl with whom I was on a date in this blog) watched me work with the car, quite entertained.

So I tried to start the car again, and... the fuse blew. So there's a persistent short-circuit somewhere. I called my dad again, who agreed with the short-circuit theory, and came to pick me up. I told her that she should probably call for her own ride home about then. She did so, and our rides arrived at about the same time, so we bade farewell and that was the end of it. As of this writing, my car is still in that parking lot.

tl;dr the movie blew and my car sucks but I liked hanging out with her anyway.

Yesterday I took the road test, and passed. It was actually almost a fail, but all the mistakes I made were justified ("being too far towards the center of the road"? bullshit, it was a residential area with no oncoming traffic and all the parked cars were on my side). Anyways, I passed the test yesterday but forgot my paperwork at home and so couldn't get my license until today, when I brought them to the DMV.

So my dad drove me to the auto shop to pick up my "new" car, a manual transmission 1999 Plymouth Breeze with 180,000 miles that was previously owned by my sister, after being owned by my father. It was in the shop because the starter switch mysteriously became unusable sometime last week, due to a burnt fuse somewhere in the hood. Among its other problems are: no working radio set, non-adjusting side mirrors, broken electronic locking system, and almost-burnt-out headlights (so I have to use my high-beams at all times when driving at night, even when downtown).

But hey, I'm not complaining. It'll get me places, and it has a pretty good fuel economy.

Also, I finally managed to get a hold of a leak of Julian Casablancas's new album "Phrazes for the Young". It's... alright. It's got this 80s pop tone about it, which many people I'm sure would like but which I don't find appealing. Which is a shame, 'cause I preordered it yesterday. Maybe it'll grow on me like "First Impressions of Earth" did, an album he made with the Strokes. It's a really, really good album but at first I didn't like it because it took too long to get used to and deviated too far from their other two albums.

In other news, I hate high schoolers. You all know who I'm talking about. The collective back-talking idiot who's always making some snarky comment and drowns out all the other noise. The masses who clog the school hallways when they stop to loudly bicker with their superficial friends. The people over whom I can't hear 20dB of music out of headphones, and more importantly, over whom I can't hear the morning announcements in class. It's because they block those announcements that I missed last week's show band practice, wasn't aware there wouldn't be one tonight (I drove a half-hour out of my way only to find out I'd have to go back), and had no idea I'd be performing on one occasion.

That is all.

I don't live within walking distance of anything mildly entertaining and I don't have a driver's license, so I'm pretty much all alone at home. I've spent god knows how many hours practicing my ass off on guitar and piano (oh by the way, I started piano lessons yesterday), can't think what I should try to draw, exhausted all I can think to write about, even tried composing some music. I have no schoolwork to do, I have no books to read besides a shit-ton of medical journals in the basement that are beyond my comprehension, and I've listened to all the music I can stand to listen to. None of my friends on Steam are online. I watched five episodes of House, MD today out of sheer boredom.

Hell, I'm even writing a filler entry in a journal that hasn't seen the light of day about how bored I am, that's how bored I am.

And I tried sleeping. It doesn't work. For the past couple of weeks I've been more tired than normal but haven't been able to fall asleep easily, averaging four or five hours a night.

By the way, I play guitar for my school's show band, which is the band that accompanies the show choir. Anyway, today was a rehearsal for the only song for which we have music, "Got to Get You Into My Life" by Earth, Wind & Fire. I think it's coming along pretty well - I can't read standard notation fluently, but I memorized specific phrases and chords and read just the timings off the sheet music. The guitar solo is pretty fun to play.

Seven-thirty, we're supposed to meet in the jazz room to practice. I get there early, maybe seven-twenty, and hang out for a while. Seven-forty, nobody else is there. I walk around, looking for people who might know where I'm supposed to be, and run into the show band's bassist, who tells me he's practicing with the drummer in one of the practice rooms but he thinks that just the rhythm section is supposed to be there for the performance.

... What? It's a performance? The choir director said for everyone to be here for the rehearsal at seven-thirty. Nothing about the performance that's supposed to be at eight.

So we spend the rest of our allotted practice time finding and setting up an amp for me, as well as confirming with the choir director that I'm supposed to be there. It's during this time that I'm supposed to discover that I'm out of tune, but I don't until we're all onstage. Right before we all walk on, I ask the bassist if I was supposed to wear a uniform or something, and he says we're supposed to be in all black, but what I have is fine and it doesn't matter anyway.

We go onto the stage with the show-choir, and I set up my amp. It's really quiet - everything seems to be. Except the drums and piano. I pick a few quiet notes as a sort of soundcheck, and the choir director leads me in along with the pianist. I'm still surprised about the performance and haven't had any time to practice directly beforehand, so I can't think of the right notes and ultimately decide that playing nothing is better than playing the wrong notes. Then the piano and horns (where are the horns? they weren't there) have a short segment after that, and I stop to appreciate how nice the piano part is - bad mistake. I'm caught off guard by the lack of guitar notes that I was supposed to play.

So I wait for the next part where I have notes, just some simple chords - GM, GM, am, am, GM, GM, etc - and then I finally find out that I'm out of tune. I turn off my amp and attempt to tune up, but between the drums and bass I can only barely hear and tune the highest three strings acoustically, so most of my part's shot, except for the solo. I turn the amp back on but remain silent until the guitar solo.

The solo, surprisingly, goes really well for me. I hit almost every note, and the ones I don't get fudged in such a way that it still sounds alright.

And that's the end of the song. We all walk offstage, and some of the people in show choir congratulate me for playing so well. This really irks me, as while they're really good sounding sincere, all they could possibly have heard were a few out-of-tune chords and a short (eight bars), exceptionally quiet, rather simple solo.

Now that we're offstage, I suppose it's time to call my dad and let him know I'm ready to be picked up. This is when I realize that I don't have my phone with me - I forgot it at home. I have to ask the bassist to use his. Now, I'm actually not so great with unfamiliar technology, especially cell phones. I have trouble dialing a number, and have to have him do it for me.

The song I "played" for was apparently the last one of the show. While I'm waiting for my dad to pick me up, people shuffle out of the school, mostly little kids (twelve, thirteen years old, maybe; we must have been playing for middle schools) and who seem to be their parents, many of them telling me how well I played. Ugh. I endure maybe five minutes of this, and wait ten more for my ride home to arrive. I get in the car with my guitar and finally I'm leaving. It seems like almost everything that could possibly have gone wrong, went wrong.

Better luck next time, I guess.

I was playing bass at church, like I do every Wednesday, and inbetween songs I was tapping my hands on my knees. A girl nearby, who sings during the hymns I play on, she saw me doing this, and asked me if I'm a drummer because drummers do that and she needed a drummer for her symphonic metal band. A couple weeks later (yesterday), I got a call from the keyboardist, who seems to be leading the show, who wanted me to show up and play for them. So I loaded my shitty drum kit into my shitty car, and shortly got another call, informing me that I could play lead guitar if drumming didn't work out.

So I drove halfway out to the middle of nowhere to some garage where these guys were practicing. The girl from church wasn't there, and neither was one of the guitarists who I know from Japanese club, but the rest of the guys, they're pretty cool. They told me that their current plan is to cover Disney songs (as a metal band of course) until they get their own compositions together.

So I drummed for them on "Arabian Nights" from Aladdin, and it was awesome. Afterwards they all agreed that the song sounds so much better with percussion. And then we jammed out, and it was awesome.

So even though I'm not really a good drummer, I must be good enough for this symphonic metal band, who must be really desperate to accept me. And I'm now in a band.

Yes, that's right, I'd estimate an inch and a half of snowfall, approaching Eau Claire's 1909 record of 1.7 inches this early in the year. It's barely autumn, and the leaves haven't even fallen off the trees yet! Ah well, it'll all melt by tomorrow.

In other news, Julian Casablancas's solo album Phrazes for the Young is to be released next week. I'm psyched, and to go with it the Strokes have been recording all summer for their new album (whenever it's supposed to be released).

Also, I rediscovered Do Make Say Think, a band from which I downloaded two albums but to which never got around to listening. They're quite excellent, a post-rock group from Canada with strong jazz influences. They actually released an album just three days ago, and I'm hoping to catch them on tour (no scheduled dates in Wisconsin? fuuuuuuuuu).

That's all that's new in the week since I've posted here, other than that I watched two and a half seasons of House, MD. Great show so far, good enough for me to waste most of my time on (and I usually make a point of not wasting away in front of a television).

There's this bar, an hour's drive from my home, where on the first Sunday of every month they host an open blues jam from six- to ten-o'clock. Blues isn't quite my favorite genre (I don't listen to any blues bands much at all), but the music at this jam is good. The guitarists, generally, are excellent. The bassists vary in skill more so than the guitarists, but are always at least good enough to keep a groove. The drummers are pretty rare, but the one who showed up tonight, man, he's really good. Rolling with one hand, all this crazy hi-hat work... it was incredible. Oh yeah, and one guy went up with a jaw harp.

But anyways, this month there were barely any people at the bar (and not all of them were musicians), so I was up on the stage for about an hour, almost a quarter of the whole event. We all decided to take a break eventually, at which point I decided I was too tired to play any more and left. It was really fun, though. Next month I'll pick up tonight's recording, and post some videos from when I was playing.

It's really interesting, you know, how with one simple convention ("Twelve Bar Blues," I believe it's called) a group of musicians who have never played together before can produce pleasant music without rehearsing beforehand. Up on the stage, we'd be thinking of songs to play, and one of us would blurt out the name of a song and the key it's in - and we'd play it. I never recognized the song (blues isn't quite my favorite genre) but I could play anyway, and fit in with blues musicians.

What's also interesting is that many people praised my performance, and nobody was telling me how I could improve or anything, but I rarely even play bass. I never do any improvisational work on any instrument outside of these jams, and I'm usually just reading tabs off the internet to play on one of my six-stringers. And then I can go up onstage with an instrument I haven't touched in weeks, and make it sound good. One could argue that the bass is just a guitar with larger strings, but one could also argue that those larger strings completely change the manner in which the bass guitar is meant to be played.

These monthly blues jams are really fun.

A couple years ago, a friend recommended Pearl Jam's album Ten to me. I didn't like it much, and I kind of discarded grunge as a genre. Figured I'd never like it much. Recently a different friend recommended Alice in Chains's new album Black Gives Way to Blue. It's actually pretty good, certainly good enough not to delete. I guess it's mostly grunge, but sort of metal as well. I've got a lot on my plate already, but maybe I should give Ten another listen if it turns out that I actually like grunge.

Oh, and speaking of music, I finally bought Tool's 10,000 Days. I'd heard that the packaging won awards or something, and I do actually buy my favorite albums when I can, so I picked it up for fifteen dollars at Shopko. The case has stereoscopic lenses in it, and a few stereoscopic pictures. It's really trippy. Look it up.

Normally I couldn't care less about dating and the like, but given my boredom (even though I've been so busy) I figured I'd ask the girl of my fancy to homecoming. I realized that I have no clue what homecoming entails or how interested I might be in going regardless of company, so I was actually kind of relieved when she said that she already had plans for that day. A friend told me that her response meant definite rejection, and it seems that he's right.

I go to my Lutheran church on Wednesdays to play bass in the music group that plays a few songs during the Wednesday service. I'm not sure how much I agree with the subject matter (I'm mostly agnostic), but it's really fun to play those songs. Now, before these services, the church hosts a dinner every night. At tonight's dinner, a girl who must have been trying to get my attention for a few weeks now at these services walks over to me while I'm eating and asks me for help with her math homework. I'm in calculus and she's in algebra, so when I review her homework I can't help but think "Only an idiot couldn't understand this."

Anyway. After I'm done helping her with her math homework, she starts asking me a bunch of questions like where I plan to go to college and what classes I'm in. After almost every one of my answers she says something along the lines of "that's so cool." I don't ask her any questions like she's been asking me, because frankly I'm more interested in my delicious spaghetti. At some point she thanks me for helping her with her homework and leaves.

This may be a very, very dumb question, but was she flirting with me? I have no idea. Like I already said, dating and having a girlfriend has never interested me much (I've never been on a date, never asked a girl out until today, etc...), and consequently have no idea if she was just striking up a casual conversation or was flirting.

Today after school, I decided that I'd finally get the truss rod adjusted in my acoustic guitar (the 70s Epiphone I salvaged from my basement). Last time I visited the music store, I was advised that the guitar was in severe need of a neck adjustment (I had brought the guitar in to buy bridge pins as I wasn't aware at the time that they're standardized parts). This time, however, the desk clerk informed me that the neck is twisted, and unserviceable. Oops, too late on my part. I hadn't changed my strings in a while (several months now, I think) so I bought some of those instead.

And then I forgot my guitar at the store. /facepalm

While I was there, though, I took the opportunity to play one of the twelve-string guitars there. I had never considered before that, the way they're strung, picking downwards results in a pitch an octave higher than that produced by picking upwards. Interesting stuff, really.

I also had soccer practice today. I'm sixteen of course, but I get stuck on the same team quite frequently as middle-schoolers. What makes me look even more out of place is that I'm really tall for my age (6'2"), and have very long legs. A few girls are almost at my waist; only a couple are even up to my shoulders in height.

Anyways, this one girl, she's always saying "hello" to me. When I say "hi" back, she doesn't say anything further. She does this a few times, and seeing no reason to bother, I ignore her. I think this is what gets her annoyed. Later in the session, we do a scrimmage, and she's on the opposing team. Because I have such long legs and because I've been playing soccer over half my life, I'm quite deft at stealing the ball from opponents, and this girl quite often has the ball, which I quite often seize for my own team. I think this is what really sets her off. Normally, you see, we get along kind of well.

Before long, she's trying to push me around. I'm 180 lbs and she's not, so it's more of my inertia pushing against her. She's clearly affected by this, and starts ridiculing my physical maturity based on my age (people have mistaken me for a graduate student, seriously). She starts calling me a thirty-year old, and quite annoyed (not offended, just annoyed; she has a really annoying voice), I push back, just once. Neither of us are engaged in play at the time, so the scrimmage is not affected.

Oh man, but I'm dragging on in this story. Anyways, long story short, the girl bugs me the whole scrimmage. Question: would I have been right in complaining about her to the coach (who is incidentally her father)? Or was it the best thing to do to continually ignore her, like I did (with the exception of one push)?


Man, I've got a huge AP Chemistry test tomorrow. There's a Facebook quiz going around titled something like "How good will tomorrow be?" My result was 17%. Wish me luck.

My average GPA over the first two years of high school has been 3.00 on the dot. Doesn't sound too bad at first thought, but I'm hoping to get into UW-Madison (it's an excellent school, and oh man you should see the library there) after graduating from high school. My brother, a genius with a 3.9-something GPA and a 35 ACT score and a 1590 SAT score and sixty-some college credits upon leaving high school (friggin genius), I think he had some trouble getting in. Even if I get straight 'A's throughout my remaining two years of high school I'll be at a 3.5 GPA, and I don't think I can top my brother's legendary test scores.

At any rate, I'm paying more attention to school now. Actually doing my homework and such. Not only that, but I'm playing guitar for the school's show band! I seem to have a reputation among the music program here or something; I got an email from the director requesting that I play and when I showed up to find out more I wasn't even asked to audition. The director just told me what music we're playing (stuff in the vein of Earth, Wind & Fire, they're alright) and that I could pick up my music when it gets in. Either I'm the only guitarist interested in show band among the school's 2000 students (unlikely) or the show band director regards me as extremely talented.

You know, I don't really think I'm that good at playing guitar. For one thing, I never figured out how to use a pick; for another, I can read standard notation but after months of only reading tablature, sight-reading standard notation for guitar is beyond me. I can practice one thing for a while and then play it reasonably well, but it takes a while. I like to pick out the more difficult songs (a favorite of mine is Steve Howe's Mood For a Day), practice them for a long time and claim that I can play them, when... not really well. The stuff I produce is certainly comparable to the original, but there's this string buzz all over the place and rhythm falters and such. Oh, and my left hand is disabled just a bit. Lame pinky finger, so a few chords are out of reach.

So there's grades, show band, and I also attend Japanese club. Mostly because the Japanese teacher is funny as hell, and I know pretty much everyone in Japanese club, and they're all awesome. I ain't weeaboo. I swear.

And between all this I'm juggling AYSO soccer and percussion lessons. Not because I'm interested in playing a drum set at all, but so I can study rhythms themselves and learn more (indirectly) about music theory. Rhythm is the biggest thing they omitted in that music theory course I took last summer.

And between all that, I somehow find the time to be bored enough to write something as long as this. I have no friends nearby to hang out with because I live miles out of town, far away from everything, so all I have to accompany me are my guitars and computers. And a few books.

In other news, I discovered that I can run audio from my MIDI keyboard through my guitar pedals and make all kinds of cool noises.

In yet other news, I finished reading the archives of Schlock Mercenary (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/). It's an awesome webcomic and you shouuld read it.

And after exhausting my keyboard of new sounds, as well as Schlock Mercenary of new strips, I'm boooooooooored

I really don't go to football games. I really don't. But on this occasion, I didn't really have anything to do, and a friend of mine was going. So I went, not too optimistic about it (in my opinion, football is just about the most boring sport ever, next to golf) but still grateful for something to do.

After waiting in line for a few minutes and paying the entrance fee, I stand under a tree (it was raining really hard) away from the field and attempt to call the aforementioned friend who I planned to hang out with. He doesn't pick up (I later find out that he's driving at the time) so after a few calls I sort of pace around the area, and run into another friend of mine. This is kind of unexpected, as I don't have many friends and not a lot of them are the type to go to a football game.

So the first guy, the guy I was trying to call, let's say his name is Patrick. The guy I ran into, we'll call him Brian. Brian, you see, is kind of an asshole in a few ways, but is regardless about the closest friend I have. Just as soon as I meet him, he says "Let's go to the [rival high school] section of the stands and cheer!" He's wearing a shirt with our school's emblem, so our group (Brian has some other friends with him) is easily identified. As we parade through stands, we cheer for our school and are greeted with "[our school] blows!" to which Brian always replies "Yeah, look at the scoreboard dickheads, twelve-zero!" The rival school apparently always loses their homecoming game.

We run into a couple girls that Brian's friend knows, so we hang around with them for a while. They're quite the bitches, to be honest, and not too bright either. Somehow people got to what I'd call "horsing around" (I wasn't paying attention; I was scanning the crowds for Patrick). The two girls are being held by the wrists from behind and kind of puppeted around, but are pretty clearly enjoying themselves. One girl aims a playful kick at Brian, but instead hits the hip of the other girl... who promptly falls down, crying. Long story short, she proceeds to fake a serious injury and the inability to walk or speak (blaming it on "asthma," not that the hip is in any way related to the respiratory system). Brian falls for it and is guilt-tripped for having, however unintentionally, held the girl up to be kicked.

I haven't yet found Patrick, and Brian's the only other person here who I know. He's trying to tend to the victim, and isn't displaying any interest in anything else at all, so I offer to get him something from the concession stands. He asks for some water for the girl. I'm hungry so I decide on a cheeseburger. It's at the concession stands that I finally run into Patrick, who's with a girl from our rival school. She's pretty nice. We exchange hellos and I get back to Brian with my cheeseburger and waterbottle.

The girl who got kicked has been carried (carried! can't she walk on one leg?) to the bleachers, where she's sitting now and slipping off, requiring the help of her friend to keep her on her seat. This is what confirmed my suspicion that she's faking injury; when's the last time you had to exert force to remain seated? Brian's still feeling guilty and is kind of sessile, so I look for Patrick again. I find him in the rival school's section of the stands with his girl friend (i.e. friend who is a girl; I have no idea if they're "together").

After conversing with Patrick and his friend I find Brian. By this time he's finally realized the girl was faking (though I don't know what happened to her), so he's back to normal. We had previously agreed to storm the field in the event that our school's team wins, and the scoreboard has barely moved since the beginning of the game (final score: 12 - 2, our lead), so we get ready.

"Storming the field" constitutes running onto the field and cheering; it's really not all that fun. The timer buzzes and everyone runs onto the field. I'm a kind of topheavy person, so when I run fast (as I do now) I have a tendency to fall over. I somersault a couple times and keep running, it feels kind of like an action-movie roll.

After the field's been stormed, I say goodbye to Brian and Patrick and their friends, and head home. It was really the most fun I've had in a while.

And it's really pitiful how little content is on this journal. For the nobody that reads this journal as of this entry, don't expect it to change. I will, however, make a real journal entry this time, not some deep-philosophy-bullshit.

First off, I've been displaying an age of twenty years on my profile. I'm actually sixteen (fourteen when I registered) and figured that it's time to drop the facade. There were two reasons for lying about my age: for one, because on the internet nobody would take a fourteen-year-old seriously (why I wanted to be taken seriously, I forget), and second, so I could watch porn on this site. I loved porn as much as any fourteen-year old.

Now that that's out of the way, it's time for some journaling.

Here's midquarter of the first quarter of my junior year in high school. It's all 'A's, which is a first. Before, see, I never much cared about my grades. "It'll resolve itself somehow," I thought. "I score well on standardized tests, at least." I wanted to get into a good college, but didn't much care for getting good grades. My current transcript is at a 3.00, which isn't too bad, but the significance of this finally struck me: a 3.00 student does not get into UW-Madison.

If I get all 'A's for this year and next (which is my full intention), then that'll bring my cumulative GPA up to a 3.5 or so, which -may- give me a chance at UW-Madison, which is my favorite college out of the few I've seen. The library there, for one, is amazing. I'm not really expecting to be admitted, though.

Unfortunately, I see lots of homework coming up in the future. This doesn't bring good news for my hobbies outside of school (I've had hardly any time to read Laurens Hammond's patent for his famous organ), but I have no choice, as I explained.

Whenever I feel so inclined, I'll write down my thoughts and I won't stop. I'll continue to write the most relevant thought that I have, until I've been depleted. It's not often, however, that I publish these thoughts; not ever, actually. The reason for this is that it's all very disjointed, and all very boring to anyone but me.

Recently, I questioned myself while streaming my mind into the text document: Why do I write so that it will all collect into a massive pile of data that was only important at the moment it was written, and only to me? There would be no result, and I wouldn't learn anything in the process. I figured and wrote that it was because I "had nothing better to do," an excuse I often use when I do in fact have much better things to do but some subconscious reasoning commands me to go through with... whatever it is.

I've spent a great deal of time pondering this subconscious reason. If it's worthless, I wouldn't be writing all these pages, but what is it worth? Who am I speaking my mind to? It must be a letter to whoever may open my laptop after I left my room, forgetting to lock the machine. A passive form of telling a total stranger all about myself. An incomplete satisfaction of my driving urge to meet people.

For what it's worth, though, I think I'm a damn good writer when I keep it to myself.

And then, when I went to install it, I remembered that my motherboard's boot device selection is messed up. It has no boot device selection menu; the best I can do is change boot priority in the BIOS and that doesn't always seem to work. I played around with the settings across the BIOS for a couple hours until I got it to boot up with all three of my hard drives, but Windows decided it wouldn't bother recognizing the new drive. Of course- it hadn't been formatted yet. So I figured I'd format it with an XP install disc - no dice, I can't get this computer to boot from an optical disc.

I ended up hauling one of several old desktop computers from the basement - only one of them reads SATA, and I had to find that one. For some reason it was missing its disc drive and IDE cable, so I had to scrounge around for those. I also had trouble finding a keyboard for it, but in the end I managed to get a quick NTFS format on the drive and managed to get it working on my main computer.

Now I have lots and lots and lots and... of hard drive space, and will likely soon fill it up with HD movies, lossless CD archives and possibly games. Speaking of which I'm almost a power user at PassThePopcorn.org (private torrent tracker for movies) and Waffles.fm (private torrent tracker for music), so when that happens (shouldn't be too far from now) shoot me a PM if you'd like an invite.

I registered a year ago or something, just so that I could browse all of the artwork on this website. I quickly found a couple favorite artists, but didn't really do much else. I went about my life exactly as before, adding furaffinity.net to my list of websites to check every so often.

Eventually, the website anicechat.net was brought to my attention during my short time at 4chan (a few weeks could not have been any worse spent) and I began spending some time there. Within a few days I met a fellow simply named "Furry," with whom I had a very short and boring conversation - later I stumbled into him again in the same way, and he was kind enough to help me, at my suggestion, develop a rough outline for some semblance of a fursona. I haven't seen him since.

I'm no artist. I can't draw, though I have tried from time to time; I don't have a camera with which I could share some uninteresting sights in my hometown; my writing's far from the best as evidenced by my grades in my English classes; a freak childhood injury involving a lawnmower and my elbow prevents me from learning any musical instruments.

But I do my best to keep good company, whether the other party is a friend, an asshole, or merely a stranger. There is very little that can anger or sadden me, and quite a bit that can comfort or console me. I make an effort to keep an atmosphere of humility and of respect.

So here I am.