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Oh my god, yes! I wish I knew about these sooner when I was in less-serious years at school! I saw one in Hong Kong but didn't buy it! It's a.... You guessed it, A roll-up Keyboard! (A music making keyboard, not computer keyboard 0mg) http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/61-Keys-Roll-Up-Soft-Keyboard-Digital-Electronic-Piano-/310324021438?pt=AU_Musical_Instruments_Instruments&hash=item4840c0c8be MY PLAN: 1) Buy it 2) Roll it up 3) Put it in my pencil case 4) Take said pencil case to school 5) Open pencil case 6) Unroll keyboard 7) Play the keyboard during class 8) Become popular WOOHOO

I posted the previous entry yesterday but it didn't publish it i am starting to get used to forum i like

Since this is my last week on Sals (I effectively leave for college at 8am Sunday), I want to bring some closure to a few things. One of them is the DM+ Mafia game, the storyline of which I plan to post in the Story Mat (staff permission permitting, of course. (Personal closure won't be happening, hopefully, as I'll be pretty liberal with leaving contact details. When your hoped-for future career depends upon publicity, Internet anonymity seems a little less important.) Others, a little more universal, I plan to address in my leaving topic, which should be up at some point fairly soon. That leaves, of course, the real-life threads that this blog deals with. I hope to have time to talk about Gordon College soon. Right now, though, I'm going to talk about Gaia a little bit. (Some of you may remember that she's the girl who I made blogs entries about for, like, nearly two years. My apologies.) Since I doubt many people remember the intricacies of my personal life from years past- briefly, Gaia is a girl who used to go to my youth group and who is now going into her sophomore year at Gordon. I had a massive crush on her for about eight months; two months in I was convinced that, contrary to my previous resolution, it WAS worth it to ever bother getting into a relationship rather than remaining single forever. Then she told me, eight months in, that she didn't like me in that sense. I was devastated, and took months to get over the fact. I was almost reluctant to go to Gordon because she was going there. There are really a lot of remarkable things about her and about myself, and also about our "relationship." (I hesitate to call it such, but there isn't a better word.) To explain this properly, I think I have to talk about myself for a bit. Although girls seem to be drawn to me in many ways - I think I look pretty good, I'm funny and outgoing and I'm also pretty trustworthy and nice, for what it's worth, I only seem to attract girls that I have no interest in, and I can't handle flirting. It just seems strange. Maybe it's my autistic tendencies speaking, but I really don't like meaningless small talk that has only one purpose, a purpose entirely contrary to what's actually being said. I mean, I've found myself flirting with girls that I like - or something like it, anyway - and it seems to work fairly well, but I don't have any urge to move directly beyond flirting into a relationship. I do, however, want a deep, meaningful and loving relationship with somebody very badly - and I'm capable of that, I'm pretty sure. The problem is that I think in order for one of my relationships to succeed, it has to start from something meaningful and work its way out - not start from something shallow and overtly sexual and work its way in. I have the same urges other guys have in terms of "endgame," obviously, and the same need for a partner to share life with. I just don't have the desire for the stupid stuff in between - the flirting and the playing games and other bull. I want to skip all of that without just going straight in for sex or whatever. This is hard. From what I understand, feeling this way about relationships used to be more common, but cultural values changed, for better or worse, and now I'm stuck with being the way I am, which is annoying but hopefully worth it. (The people who know me best think that there's virtually no chance of me ever getting divorced.) Anyway, this is where Gaia comes in. I figured out in retrospect that the reason why I stayed so fascinated by her, even when I realized that "wow, she's good-looking, but there are other fish in the sea, d'oh," is because I felt as if I had a connection with her that was deeper than I've had with almost anybody else. I don't mean that I knew her better than almost anybody else, I'm not that naive. But there aren't many honest people who are willing to open up and talk about things that are difficult to talk about - like life, the universe, God - and she's one of those people. Her thoughts are strikingly similar to mine, but in root, not in development. We swapped philosophical poetry and essays for a few months last spring - while I still obviously liked her way too much - and while we weren't too comfortable around each other in person (she's never been in a relationship either, I think, and honestly is pretty similar to me in some ways, social-wise), we really talked up a storm on Facebook. It was annoying, though, because usually when I did wind up spending much time with her in real life, I ended up just making her feel uncomfortable. I couldn't tell if it was entirely my fault or not. I worried about it for a long time, even though she liked over a third of my numerous FB statuses for several months. We're almost back to normal now, socially, after her being off at college for a year. Last week she asked me if I could drive her up to SoulFest, a Christian music festival in New Hampshire, which is about 2.5 hours from where we live. (She contacted me on Facebook while I was on a page containing nothing but my status, on my Safari browser, and because my status began with "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH," the title of the browser flashed from "Gaia messaged you" to "AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH" every couple of seconds. :) I thought it was pretty funny.) Obviously I'm taking her, since I'm planning to go anyway, so it should be a fun ride up. After she got off Facebook, I had a long think about where I stood with feelings. I realized that I would definitely take her out if I knew she was interested... but at the same time, I realized that I would take any girl I liked out if I knew she was interested. I feel inexperienced enough that just the experience would in itself be worth it, at this point. I feel badly behind the curve. I also realized that I would be less eager to take Gaia out than another girl whom I felt equally attracted to, because I care more about her friendship. That was important. I know where I am now. I know that I'll always have a soft spot for Gaia, but I wouldn't call it a crush anymore. That said, I really long for that deep connection with another human being, that intimacy of mind which could patch all of the ragged holes that my character has. I care more about that than the physical nature of relationships. Is that unusual? I don't really know. I would guess not, but the conversations I have with my friends seem to indicate otherwise. Most of them seem way more interested in sex than anything else. I don't know whether I'm mature beyond my years or a hopelessly naive adolescent. Very possibly both. I wish I'd met somebody besides Gaia whom I felt such a strong connection to. Even though I don't have a crush on her anymore, I think about her in that crush "slot" all the time, just because I have nobody else to think about. There are seven billion people in the world; finding somebody else I like shouldn't be so friggin' hard. Ah well. I guess that's partly what college is for. So much for closure.

So hi everyone. I have a second to post here again. (And by that, I mean "I waste 5 hours a day procrastinating and then complain that I have no time to do anything, including procrastinate through posting here," but hey, wording is everything.) First semester is over. I feel dead on my feet, because a) I never get any sleep, b) I rarely hang out with school friends anymore, and c) I procrastinate so much. But the work I do do from time to time seems to be paying off. I'm now in the top ten percent of my class, accepted to the honors program of Gordon, and I made the high honor roll (all As) for the first time since fifth grade. I have an A in AP Government and Politics and Honors Physics, plus an A- in AP Literature and Composition, AP Statistics, Honors Pre-Calculus and Photography I, which is pretty nice by my standards. I'm really tired of the grade treadmill, but since I've been thinking about it so much recently, it seems honest to talk about that first, before anything else. Aside from a wonderful weekend up at Camp Berea with my youth group last weekend, things have been pretty grim of late. On some days, every word that comes out of my mouth feels negative and cynical. My grandmother is slowly but surely weaving her way towards death, although at least now she gets to die at home, rather than in an institution. My future has been bothering me, especially because I'm still having difficulty with friendships. The people I fit in with the most are those who I have difficulty communicating with, paradoxically, and those I connect with most easily (the guys in my physics class who make up the majority of the basketball team) are also the ones I have the least in common with, and the least potential for deep friendships. To further complicate matters, I have a recurring and increasingly plausible theory that a rumor is circulating that I'm gay, and I don't really know how to rebut it, either. Stuff's a puzzle. I don't enjoy being unusual. I don't enjoy talking about myself all the time, either, but I guess that's what a blog is for. Basically the feeling that I have no idea what's going on, anywhere, is gaining strength. Things feel meaningless because the people I've grown up with will all leave town in a few months, along with me, and if there's one thing I hate, it's goodbyes. I'm sure this bothers everyone, but I've only talked about it with Dean, and he may be one of the guys who thinks I'm gay, which has been putting me off-balance, because he's also slightly awkward and it makes conversations difficult when he may or may not think I have a crush on him. I worry about this too much. But nothing seems very important right now. I'm not sure I can handle being in control of my life yet. I can basically take care of myself, in every sense but the financial one, but I hate the idea of running my own life and making my own decisions on how to fundamentally think. I make the wrong choices. Most people seem to. I can only deal with things within parameters. We can only control a limited amount of aspects of our lives, and the overwhelming weirdness of having the world before me scares me. I need somebody to talk to again. This isn't working out. I can't keep closing myself off within a realm of work-and-procrastination and not having any deep relationships with anyone. I'm not sure what's better: heartbreak or apathy. This entry shouldn't have been public. I didn't proofread it or anything. It's not remotely entertaining, and it perpetuates my tradition of writing blog entries mainly when I'm in a bad mood, which isn't a good thing. But it's therapeutic, I guess. And hopefully nobody will judge me too harshly for essentially ranting about nothing.

I would say that this has been an "odd" week, but I don't have normal weeks anymore. This year I got a new legal privilege and my first good-looking ID, though, so we'll call that significant oddity and progress. :o This has been by far the most tiring week I've had yet. Dozing off in AP Stats has become an almost regular occurrence, which is fine because it's my easiest class and I still have a straight A. (It's easier than Photography I because I can do math, and I can't draw. :/) I'm having trouble staying awake in Honors Pre-Calc too, but fortunately I have all the best teachers this year, by an extraordinarily fortunate coincidence, and in most classes there's enough active discussion that it's easy to avoid the Eye Escalator Plague, as I call it. Our Pre-Calc teacher even plays MC Hammer songs for us as we work. :o Gaia, who just turned 19, has been liking over half my FB statuses and a number of my comments this week. This makes it much easier to deal with her being away. I'm glad she's away at college for selfish as well as selfless reasons - it's much easier to adjust my attitude towards her and girls in general when she's not here. Facebook is a medium for expression where I can express myself better than anywhere else, and although Gaia uses it a little less than I do, it's even better for her. She's less fond of witty statuses (and statuses in general), but her photos are diverse and flattering without trying to be. And her statuses are almost always awesome possum quotes, usually from hipsters or musicians or Christians or, most commonly these days, all three. :/ My father is a problem. My brother's hookup seems to have affected him after all: he's now suddenly giving me relationship advice and trying to get me to date some of the girls in my circle of friends. I don't have any particular objection to doing so - besides the fact that I'd prefer a lasting relationship and anything I start now will be doomed by college - but it's slightly galling to take advice from him, not only because his manner is presumptuous (he thinks my social status is rather pitiful because I can never act myself when he's around) but because he allegedly hid in the bathroom during his senior prom. He may be a Harvard grad, but he doesn't know the first thing about loving people. Or perhaps he does, but he's missing two of the top three things, in any case. On Thursday we had a half day, and so I walked to a downtown restaurant - because my car's battery is decaying and needs to be taken to the shop - where I hung out with Dean and a bunch of other friends, mainly girls. (And my prom date, incidentally. I was embarrassed to realize that the fact that I knew her less than anyone else in my friend circle at the dance hadn't really changed in six months. :/ ) It was fun, but relatively uneventful, and we lounged around downtown for another hour or so before heading off to the party store and picking out Halloween costumes. We all plan to go as members of the Fellowship of the Ring. I'm Gimli, perfect since I'm 6'2". :P I dunno how I'm going to pull that off. Dean is Aragorn, because he chose last and nobody else wanted the role. Somebody needs to slap us in the face and give us all some sense. :/ Then we got ice cream and sort of drifted off to our houses. I went on Sal's and then did my entire outline for Chapter 5 of AP Government and Politics. It was an appalling job, longer than any single project I did for AP US History in a single night - and that was my hardest class ever. It wasn't the longest document I've ever typed, because I'm more efficient than I used to be, but it was 13 single-spaced pages long and nearly 6,000 words. This was my first all-nighter of the year, and I think I'd forgotten what a strange sense of...ecstasy... all-nighters give me when I can make it through the night. By six in the morning I'm running entirely on adrenaline, I've been listening to pumped-up music for hours, and I feel empowered, because I know I've just completed the single hardest thing I ever have to do in life - defeat my own body while keeping my mind intact. It's more than mind over matter - it's turning both of them into something meaningful, proving that mistakes (procrastination) and troubles (homework) can be overcome out of sheer willpower, and a little prayer and technology thrown in to help. It's a magical feeling to watch the dawn at the end of an all-nighter, as if the entire world is artificial and it's only getting around to remaking itself as your finish your own process of creation. Then, of course, you have to go to school. And on Friday I had AP Lit as my first class, where we watched a movie, so I obviously fell asleep. And so, losing the adrenaline edge, I subsequently (and literally) nodded through parts of AP Stats, Honors Physics, and Honors Pre-Calc. It wasn't a particularly bad day, but it was an incredibly hard one. :/ In the evening I drove my brother to the football game, the first time I'd driven without my parents. It was a wonderfully freeing experience, even though it was slightly scary barreling down the street with no parent beside me, merely a little brother in his band outfit. That night, after switching back and forth between hanging with Dean and my youth group friends (a terribly awkward situation that I don't plan to repeat), I couldn't find my brother or Irene, so I was able to drive home entirely alone. Now THIS is true freedom. And although I've been cursing freedom lately, with the impossible task of finding the perfect college before me and nobody besides me who can make the choice, this is a kind of freedom that is truly worth it - a sort of reward for growing up.

Do any of you guys ever take on the mood of the book you're reading after you finish, and wind up coloring your actions the way the narrator was just coloring his prose, or else end up acting the way the speaker was just acting? I do sometimes, particularly when a book is extremely well-written. It's exceedingly strange. My main focus in the past week has been on reading Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a strange and terribly fascinating novel about a man who kills, whose unbearable internal suffering forces him to seek remorse for his deeds. I won't spoil anything, but the book is certainly riveting. It's not one of those books that you can't put down; on the contrary, although the book itself isn't hard to get through, the words are so powerful that I think I'd have been doing myself a disservice if I'd run myself through more than 150 pages per day. The book is depressing, but bearably so, thanks to the fact that all of the characters have some warmth in their humanity. Even the greatest villain of the book is quite amiable; he gives most of his money to orphans because he's fond of children. Anyway, the main character, Raskolnikov, is distressingly similar to me in a number of ways. I'm not a criminal like him, except in the sense that I sometimes commit traffic violations and random misdemeanors, as when I frighten pigeons and thus break the rightful, just laws of my state. -.- But I have the same unhealthy tendency towards monomania, being obsessed with a single thing (though I'm generally better at resisting this impulse than he is), and I stay shut up in my slanting room far too much, mainly because of homework. We're also both absurd introverts who don't feel alone even when they are alone, but we differ, importantly, in that I actually like people. ;) The character doesn't frighten me, but he does make me very uneasy about living too solitary an existence. As the villain repeats to Raskolnikov, "what a human being needs is air, air, air!" I spent part of Wednesday and Thursday painting my youth group's new loft with a bunch of other teens. On Thursday I went to my friend "Dean"'s house, and on Friday I did another rehearsal with my acting troupe and went to see Inception with another friend of mine (who happens to be in his sixties, incidentally ;)). On Saturday, after getting my senior picture taken I went to a party hosted by another friend, but she and I have literally no friends in common who happened to show up, so I left after an hour. On Sunday, I went to church and then did another rehearsal with my acting troupe. (Our final performance is a week from today.) It's not that I'm secluding myself. It's this infernal introversion and fear that keeps my comfort out. When I was in the middle of Crime and Punishment, a pleasant part, after closing the book and going off to practice parallel parking (which I normally dislike), I was positively cheerful and infectiously delighted with the world. Then as the book went on, I slowly got farther into a feeling of awful suspicion and irritability. Finally, by the end of the book, my brain seemed to have chameleonized into an organ that wished to view things in a positive sense, but was instead, cross, miserable, and intensely guilty. There was nothing to be guilty about, dang it, but the feeling remained for nine hours, even lasting through my sleep. Dreams about strangling arctic foxes probably didn't help. The way I put it to Gaia on Facebook, reading the book is like clambering around in a four-dimensional well. (Incidentally, she got back from her college trip to the mountains fine. In a staggering coincidence, last Saturday I ran into the bus driver who was going to pick her up - I thought about sending him a letter to give her, but thought better of it. She seems to have had a great time and is quite excited for college, judging from FB at least.) I'm going to Texas on Tuesday to visit my grandfather. This is great, because I still need to reread Pride and Prejudice and The Invisible Man for AP Literature and Composition, and this downtime will give me ample opportunity to do so. I'll probably be offline until Saturday.

Not everything the "things" see is good, of course. But still, this is a good "thing." Many of these "things" are unpleasant, squelchy little monsters that wish the world ill, even while some of them are noble "things." When the bad "things" see other bad "things," their morale will be lowered, and then I can strategically take advantage of that fact by pitting them against each other in their confusion. :) Since my last blog entry, I've gotten a lot more confidence back. I prayed fervently that I would have a reasonably easy time transitioning into Gaia being away from home, on Friday, and wound up staying up extremely late on a Facebook blog entry that I hoped Gaia would read. (She's read my other five blog entries, and has enjoyed most of them quite a lot - with the unfortunate exception of the one that was entirely devoted to criticizing one of her favorite authors. :)) The sixth one wasn't quite about her, but it was about a intellectual-artsy sort of thing, definitely her type. It also had a deep message that I thought would be an encouraging thing for her to read right before going off to college. Unfortunately, I don't think she read it, but it did get a positive reception from a couple other friends of mine, so it certainly wasn't wasted. Saturday I decided to spend with a friend of mine - Edison, who I've blogged about several times before, but not for a long time, I think. It was an extremely good decision. He's such a NORMAL friend. :) He likes a deep discussion as much as the average guy, but doesn't have an unhealthy taste for them. We can talk about whatever we want to, understand each other well without needing to get emotional or macho, which is a problem I have with some other guys. We watched Lord of the Rings together, got some pizza downtown, and hung out at the video store for a ridiculously long time. Then he walked me home in the dark and we talked about Metallica, which is a band that I definitely need to listen to more. It's not a favorite for me, but metal is definitely good when you're in the right mood. Sunday was a'ight. Gaia wasn't at church, she'd already left for the mountains. I gave gifts to two of my Kenya donors - a carved lion statuette and a necklace, both made in Kenya and purchased in the marketplace there. They were happy. I had a mellow afternoon and did half of my second AP Government and Politics outline. A friend PMed me on Facebook, asking to borrow my AP Gov textbook. I decided to give it to her tomorrow. My supposedly gay friend with a crush on me, who I talked about last entry, called on Monday morning, asking if he could hang with me that day, since his parents were attending a funeral wake. I told him that he could come over at 11:00, then instantly regretted it. I hadn't gone to the gym yet, hadn't done my paper route and hadn't showered. It was already like 9:00 or so. I'll call my friend "Sean." I dressed hurriedly, then wondered if the outfit looked too attractive and changed into jeans and a blue T-shirt. Like I said in the last entry, Sean is way too physical and affectionate for me to feel entirely comfortable around him sometimes. I didn't suppose wearing less good-looking clothes would hurt. I considered skipping the gym routine, too, then decided I was being ridiculous and went anyway. Maybe it would have been better to be ridiculous, though, because it was already past 11:00 when I finally finished my route, at a run, with the strap of my paper bag bouncing up and down my chest unstably. (Nobody was home, so it would have been really awkward to make Sean just stand around there.) It was an okay visit. As I'd expected, his initial exuberant affection dimmed a bit after the first half hour. We went downtown in the blazing heat, talked about school and the future and stuff, and dined at an illogically expensive restaurant, because we were both trying too hard to be polite. He ordered a grilled Vietnamese salmon, I ordered nothing but a mashed potato side because of the ridiculous prices. He ended up paying for our meal because most of the cost was his anyway, and he had way more money than I did anyway. Then we bought ice cream, and he decided to pay for it, and due to a misunderstanding I ended up reimbursing him way too much. Oh well, he makes even less than I do, so I suppose that's gud. We ran into two people I barely know and chatted, and this was awkward, and got told off by a librarian for being too loud, which was also awkward. Then Sean bought a gallon of water and drank 7/8 of it in the next hour, and we walked around some more and visited an art gallery where the old lady who took care of it asked us to fix her radio. We failed, and went home. Then we wanted to watch The Doors, but my mom said no, because they swear too much in it. So we watched The Blues Brothers instead, which had just as much swearing in it, but it also has really awesome car chases and crashes, so it was worth it. Then I introduced Sean to my friend Trevor and brought over some fruit, just to be a friendly neighbor. (This was five minutes after he and his wife Jill finished making a fruit salad. -.- ) Then Sean's parents called and he went home, so yeah, it was a good day. Then I stayed up until four in the morning because I was supposed to able to give the AP Gov textbook to my other friend by 10AM on Tuesday, and I was logged in to MSN. So I got up at eight, then spent the rest of the day being miserable and writing four paragraphs on John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, again for AP Gov. Right after my friend picked up my textbook, I literally fell asleep in the middle of reading excerpts from "Leviathan," which is this essay by Hobbes, written in the 1650s, apparently by a ghost writer from modern-day Uzbekistan who used his own style of grammar, judging from how easy it is to understand. Now it's Wednesday and I'm good again, but I hate AP Gov. It killed my Tuesday. It needs to die. Today was okay because I went to church and hung with my youth leader "Barack" and some of my friends. (About nine people came, and I was the only guy. This is, distressingly, not far out of the normal order of things. :) )We filmed a video that's supposed to get people to come to youth group, because it's so popular that it's expanding too fast for us to pay for it. We're building a new loft that's supposed to have a drinks bar and a disco ball and a stage and everything, and flood/pool lighting and a bunch of other neat accessories, and I'm already wondering if it will be big enough. Especially with the 40 bajillion new middle schoolers who want to come. (Gaia's sister was there to film, too. I think we have honors pre-calculus together in the fall. She's nice enough, but she doesn't have that intangible aura that Gaia has, which so attracted me to her in the first place. She told us that Gaia wasn't stressed or anything when she left for the mountains. Good news, even though it's no surprise to me obvs.) Then Barack and I talked about colleges, and I think I'll be considering A) Gordon College, B) Wheaton, C) Messiah, D) Williams College, E) Dartmouth, and F) Oberlin. Barack really wants me to go to Gordon, and that's my first choice, too, but I'm not going to blow off looking at the alternatives. Then I drove to the bookstore with my mom and bought Pride and Prejudice and Crime and Punishment for AP Literature and Composition. Crime and Punishment looks less evil than I thought; maybe it's just a better translation than the one I looked at last year. Then I did more homework and finished up with Locke and Hobbes. Sean called for apparently no reason, and even though I know he doesn't do drugs, he sounded completely high. He kept suggesting that we get married, supposedly as a joke, and made a bunch of other gay jokes that bothered me. I told him they weren't funny but didn't know how to get him off the phone. Thankfully the line was breaking up and he realized that there wasn't anything else to talk about after ten minutes, and said so, and so we ended the conversation. And speaking of gay marriage, I dreamed that Gaia and one of her female friends got married last night, after our youth group did a vaguely unpleasant "dungeon crawl" in the city, highly reminiscent of Dungeons and Dragons, which I used to play. Gaia didn't seem happy about it, I'm not even sure what her friend's face looked like. TMI? I'm taking tips from Fruityfed on how to write an amusing blog, admittedly without his consent. :P

This whole summer has been a bit of a mess, and I'm not sure how to think of it. On the one hand, Kenya was incredible; on the other hand, although I've got a little bit of stuff done in the last month, none of it has been particularly memorable. Even Kenya was a mixed bag, as I was torn between the joy of being with the Kenyans and my friends all at once, and my ridiculous unrequited love for Gaia. I spent last night at my friend's house with the rest of our team, "debriefing," and it just felt... weird. I'm not even used to being around people anymore. I feel like it's pretty dangerous, actually, that I'm so secluded in my own house and aren't doing anything with anybody else. I barely spoke to Gaia, and this is the last time I'll see her before she goes off to college, I think. She's leaving for a La Vida retreat up into the mountains for two weeks on Sunday. I'd be jealous of her if I had any more room for emotion, which I haven't. As it is, I'm just plain sad, although I'm happy for her and her upcoming experience. I'm just trying to forget right now, really. On a happier note, I got the name of an severely autistic boy whom I can sponsor. His name is Moudi (which I think is short for Mohammed), and he's 13 and has never attended school. I have a picture of him and I together. My shirt is inside out, because I was just painting and didn't want to get it all messed up. Bad timing. :P That said, it's cool to think that I'll be able to change his life, and maybe I'll be able to write to him, too. :D It costs $26 per month, which I can pay up front, or $300 per year, which I probably can't. We'll see how it goes. My father hates when I talk about giving money to other people, for some reason, so we'll have to see if he lets me save $12 by paying up front. In related terms, my moderate Aspberger's Syndrome is apparently turning into a political issue or something. My friend and Kenya comrade Trevor wants to make a video about my going to Kenya and how that relates to disabilities. I think it's a really good idea, but I'm also reluctant to share more about "living with Aspberger's" because I don't much like being thought of as someone with a "disability" or something. My youth leader "Barack"'s sister, who was there, said she was a little surprised to hear that I had a syndrome and that a lot of people must not even realize that I have it, and I think she thought she was complimenting me, but I was thinking "Really? PRACTICALLY NOBODY can tell." -.- I probably shouldn't be complaining, but I was edgy that night. Perhaps unfortunately, everyone in my church knows that I have Aspberger's, because along with Gaia and Trevor, I spoke about Kenya to a crowd of about 200 people on the Sunday before last, during a presentation we made about Kenya, and I mentioned that I had Aspberger's. It wasn't a very good speech, but apparently I sort of ran away with it, because it moved an awful lot of people. Barack's wife Laura had a tear on her cheek by the end, as well as a few other people. Including Gaia, even. ;) For some reason it made me feel very reassured to hear that I'd moved Gaia just by speaking, no matter how imperfect my speech was. Nobody's perfect, I guess. But as Gandalf says, not all tears are evil. In other news, the comedy team I'm on, and which I'm performing with on the 29th, is pretty bad. Mainly because all of us are ~17 and none of us have acted professionally before. We have really lousy focus. Perhaps more problematic is the fact is one of the guys, who I've known since I was 12, is convincing me week by week that he's gay and has a crush on me. He's told me (twice) that he's straight, but the fact that he's always physically touching me, making up excuses, and is always saying "I love you, man" saying that I'm handsome, making bad gay jokes, making innuendo, and always spontaneously hugging me and saying that he loves me when he's supposed to be shouting "GET OFF THE BUS" at me in one of the sketches. He's not just horsing around; he's a very affectionate, moody guy who listens to Justin Bieber, so maybe I'm being silly, but I have a hard time believing that he really doesn't have a crush on me. I don't want to bring it up with him, but this is worrying me. He obviously doesn't WANT to say that he's gay, and I'm not sure that he is, but in any case it's awkward. In particular, it makes it difficult to act out comedy sketches when you have somebody like that sitting next to you. My longtime neighbors of 12 years, which includes my best friend throughout elementary school, just moved away about a week ago. In return we have an elderly lady who seems very sharp and has already subscribed to my paper route AND agreed to pay me to mow her lawn, so I suppose this is better for my wallet. But not better for anything else. I never did spend enough time with my friend, except for the year or so when he played RuneScape, but it's tough to have him moving away now. I hope he doesn't feel that bad about it. He seems pretty excited, although he might just have been putting on a show. Also, my grandmother might be moving into my room in a couple of weeks, and I'll probably have to move upstairs for my last year at home. I'm not remotely upset and consented to it quickly, because frankly my room has always annoyed me. The rooms in my house are mostly in a circle, and my room is the fastest way through it, so everyone is always constantly walking through it, which explains why I rarely spend much time there. :P Still, that'll be ANOTHER change. How many changes can I handle at once? :D Maybe an infinite amount. All summer, I feel like I've degenerated into this boring creature that's content to sit at the keyboard for 60% of the day and type, type away. While there's nothing more satisfying than seeing my thoughts trickle down my fingers into words that other people will read, there ought to be a limit. I'm anything but content to simply sit here and vegetate. I joined the gym a month ago and have spent about an hour per day there ever since, which has already built my arms up noticeably, but I feel as if the rest of the day is trickling away into nothing. Carpe diem! I'm constantly thinking, and my restless body wants to leap up and take action. But there is always something to do, even if it seems less important to me than simply spending the day with friends, learning to be a strong, helpful person in presence as well as in prose. I want to be someone that is capable of forming a lifelong relationship, someone who is truly capable of being a BFF. Someone who can think of others more often than he does of himself. But this still eludes me. In any case, . :D

It's been confirmed I'm going to Singapore/Malaysia from 1st until 11th of January! :) :) :) Also got a digital camera (6.3 Megapixels) so expect pictures. :glasses: Hopefully will be getting an old computer next week, then a newer one at christmas. :s ~Chris

We're reading Death of a Salesman in American Literature. This is funny because I am the main salesman for the school's literary magazine (I've sold like 20+ copies, not sure exactly how many), and now when somebody refuses to buy one of the copies in Lit class (yes I actually have sold a few in the class), I can pretend to be Willy Loman and spout off piteous soliloquies until somebody buys one. I love American Lit. We never do anything in it except read, talk and watch movies. :/ On the downside, I now have a reputation for being a very aggressive salesman. While most people think it's funny how I'm even willing to try and run down my pastor after church as he's getting in his car just for a few bucks, some people are slightly bothered by it. But nobody that I know. :lol: Our chemistry class is dying, nobody wants to do any work there anymore, including me. We're doing mostly labs now, and nobody even wants to work in the lab at this point. And things are awkward there because there's this one girl, "Emily," who probably thinks I have a crush on her for reasons I won't go into, who has a boyfriend, and whom I work with immediately before Chem and in Chem. Meh, I can deal with it. Hopefully I won't drop a glass vial on her friend's bare foot during a lab again, though. :/ That was embarrassing. (It shattered a second later, too, but at least nobody got cut.) One of my friends just enlisted in the Marines two weeks ago. He's doing the delayed entry program so he can graduate before entering (he's a junior, like me), but he's going to be working out under Marine supervision in a gym several times per week and generally preparing for his official boot camp training next year. His older brother (who ironically was the smartest person in his family) is a druggie, as is his father, and so he has a tough home life. But I think the Marines will be incredibly good for him. He's a very tough guy, physically, and he needs some strong anchoring point. He comes to my youth group when he has time, but ideology isn't enough for somebody like him. He needs action, too. Anyway, I'm happy for him. It turns out my father is being deployed for Afghanistan after my eighteenth birthday, sometime next May. He'll miss my graduation but at least he'll be there for the day I become a legal adult. That means a lot to me for some reason. I wish we could get along better. And I hope he does okay in Afghanistan; he's in intelligence, not any combat unit, so he'll probably be safe. But obviously I'm worried anyway. If you can't tell from the bad, terse writing style in this entry, I'm incredibly depressed. Trying not to show it too much, though.

The seniors had their last day of school on Friday, except those who had to take final exams. The excitement was infectious; for much of the week I'd come down with a bad case of senioritis, despite being a junior. On Friday morning, we had a substitute teacher in algebra, and I spent half the period on and off the computer in the back of the room, playing random songs for the edification of my friends and I. I got next to nothing done in study and learned very little in chemistry and spanish, and then it was already time to go home. The seniors were randomly cheering all day, and my mood was swinging unpredictably between joy, affection, envy and despair. Gaia's a senior and is smart enough that she doesn't have to take any finals, and so with the exception of a couple events in two weeks, I'll probably never see her in school again. This would have been crushing if we weren't going to Kenya together in a month, or if we weren't connected on Facebook. As it is, it was difficult to stand. My parents always raised me to avoid "infringing upon anyone" - to avoid asking anyone for favors, to avoid spending too much time with any one person. This is destructive; it's held me back from a lot of strong friendships. I'm trying to discard this individualistic lifestyle, but it's proving difficult. On Friday night my youth group friends and I went to the beach to celebrate the departure of our seniors for college. We played beach football - in which I cut my foot and tore one of my friend's shirts, but did manage a few excellent tackles and earned the name "LeBron" from Heather, who was nicknaming everyone. :) Then when it got dark we ate cake, gathered around a fire and listened to the life stories of Tim, Heather and a girl I'll call Danielle, who described their life struggles and how they'd coped with them. (Tim and Heather are two of the sophomores who went with me to Mexico; Danielle is a graduating senior from India.) This crazy senior from my school, whom I'll call Josh, came around during Danielle's story and greeted us, then went off to get drunk with his buddies or something. It was pretty funny. I'd never hang out with him outside of school, but he does crazy stuff like order pizza during Astronomy class and bring it up for all to enjoy, so I certainly appreciate him. After this I drove back with an adult friend named Ryan, who's about 29 and lives a few blocks away, and walked around with him for about an hour talking about life. That was pretty cool. I went over Ryan's house again in the morning, along with several of his adult friends, and we ate chocolate pancakes and fried potatoes, then headed over to the park to walk his dog. He thinks his dog is pregnant, which is bizarre - her belly is getting big and her nipples are expanding, but he's not sure when she "managed it," or who the father is. :D CANINE SOAP OPERA IS BEST SOAP OPERA. Then I went to the New England Aquarium with my friend "Edison" for a few hours, after eating a huge lunch in Boston, in the tavern where the toothpick was first used (!). Yep, apparently the toothpick was first employed in 1887, in a Boston seafood restaurant that's about 300 years old. There's some cool history for you. When I got home my friend "Scott" had called for me, and so I called him back and talked for like 40 minutes. He's graduating in a few weeks and wanted to know if I could join up with a comedy troupe he and some of our friends are running. Apparently our main material is Fidel Castro and a rapping priest - I'm hoping I can get the latter bit cut because it sounds disturbing and unfunny, but that may not be possible. Fidel Castro is awesome, though. Hopefully this troupe goes somewhere and the summer ends up even more exciting than I'd planned on it being. :D Then I watched half an episode of Seinfeld with my family, went on Sals and Facebook, and reflected on how nice it is to actually have a life. :D I've been praying about being more socially active recently, and it seems like everything just fell into my lap this weekend, which is awesome. Gaia's looking for a summer job. I'm hoping she can get something good, but she's really picky; she won't even work in a movie theater. Shame. I'm going to end this entry now so I don't blather on into something vague and overly philosophical. If you read this, Gavin, and I don't get back to you on the debate, thanks for the link. It was amazing.

This first week back has been pretty equally divided into fun stuff and not-so-fun stuff. My first semester is wrapping up fast, with only one more week of classes and then exam week. I've got an 85 in Honors Algebra II, which is pretty lousy for me, but I'm hoping to get an A/A+ on the final and bump it up to a B+. I have a B+ in Spanish I, a B+ in Art II, plus (I believe) an A- in Honors American Literature II, both of which should be positively affected by my exam grades. I'm inches from a solid A in AP American History (possibly top of the class, possibly not), and have a solid A in Chemistry. This is worse than last semester pre-finals, but I've got like a 5.4-5.5 weighted GPA from AP History, which is like 104% in an honors class and 112% in a normal class, so that should significantly up my grades. Grade obsession is a sickness, but I guess I've contracted it. :) The first half of my week back, though, was like a non-academic sickness. I seem to have lost all power to work hard and not procrastinate, and I was feeling very depressed for much of the time, albeit not during school time. Ironically, school is probably the cause of my depression, since being overworked is the key to unlocking my stress, but I'm only depressed when I'm not in it. When I'm around people I feel fine, I generally enjoy myself. I thoroughly enjoy school, as a rule - it's even taught me how to pick locks, as I figured out how to unlock the chemistry room with a very, very sharp pencil a few days ago! But when I get home and I sit down alone, I start brooding and rapidly become unhappy again. I've reached the point where my attraction to Gaia has definitely crossed the line into "principally imaginary." It's an obsession, but one detatched from who she actually is. I had an amiable conversation with her walking home from school yesterday (news: She's applied to four colleges, doing lots of paperwork and is stressed about it, especially since it won't be done until February, and lol'd IRL at my Facebook status on Wednesday night), and I felt less strongly attracted to her than I usually do when I'm alone and thinking about her. I still really like her as a person, but my crush on her can now be regarded as an imaginary menace that needs to be eliminated. HELP! :) My brother is acting more mature than ever before these days. He's only 13, but he really is extremely intelligent and perceptive, and I'm noticing it more every week. The problem is that he's constantly critical of everyone around him. :/ He was better last night, but still. You're not an awesome person unless you can admit your failings. I've gone driving several times this week, and I'm finally confident enough to drive around town normally, without worrying about what's around the bend. Granted, I'm still very careful, but that is as it should be. So yeah, colleges. I met with a woman at school yesterday morning who helped me figure out what I'm looking for in colleges, and what I should apply to, come the autumn. I'm looking at a combined English-statistics major so as to net a scholarship of like $10K per year, set aside by a guy who died about 100 years ago and left a fortune to provide money for Protestant males to attend college (lolwut). So the best colleges for me would be ones that don't focus exclusively on the liberal arts, but have a strong bend that way. I'm very strongly considering a Christian college over a secular college, because I'm tired of living in an ideologically divided environment. It would be great to spend four years of my life in a place where my deepest convictions are considered facts, rather than opinions. That said, I didn't have the courage to mention this to the woman I met with until the interview was more than half over, which was a mistake. She advised a plethora of schools for me, including FOUR Ivy Leagues (wth, I don't even have a 4.0 weighted GPA), as well as other top ones like Oberlin, Gettysburg, Syracuse. Muhlenberg, and Amherst. This is great, I guess, but as compelling as academics are in some ways, I'm tired of just shooting for grades. I want to do something more important. Heck, moderating this forum feels more important than grades sometimes; at least it affects more people. I am extremely disappointed in myself at present, and I don't know why, although there are many things I know are factors. I'm caught between wanting a relationship badly right now, and knowing that there isn't any good one to start one right now, not that I can think of. I mean, I could probably get a date if I wanted to, but not with any girls I know really well and would be comfortable with. I don't want to just date randomly or casually. I'm not sure I have time for girls right now, either - but then, I don't have time for Sal's either, usually, and that doesn't stop me from spending hours on it. :P What to do, what to do... Over February break I'm going on a short-term missions trip to New York City to help out at a homeless shelter. With Gaia and several of my other friends, so it should be fun. I'm trying not to keep remembering that this will be a few days after Valentine's Day, and that I'll be seeing Gaia on Valentine's Day because it's on Sunday. Meh. I don't want this blog to become an emo Home for Aged Rants again. Somebody cheer me up! In the meantime, I'll link to the song that played in the background while my teacher performed a rap song in front of all the students this afternoon, in celebration of our school collecting over 6,000 cans for homeless people: I've become so numb, I can't feel you there; Become so tired, So much more aware; I'm becoming this; All I want to to do Is be less like me And be more like you.

Another year has come and gone. This year it decided to man up and drag a whole decade away with it as it left, which I appreciate in a year. That gives most people of my bent an excuse to analyze a whole decade rather than a year, but I'm only 16, so I don't feel quite up to comparing the 60% of my life I remember to the 40% I don't. You got off lucky this time, blokes. In 2019 I'm going to write a blog entry so long, it'll crash the server and SlashingUK will have to put aside half of his senior citizen pension to restart it. (Or whatever they'll call it in Soviet Britain after King Arthur comes back from the dead in 2012 and proudly declares his support for a communist state.) Anyway, yeah, 2009 was a big year for me. A year ago, I was involved in my first ever genuine crush - and what's more, with someone thoroughly worth it. I wasn't sure if she would ever want to go out with me, or how much she liked me as a person, but I'd just made the decision to dash my decade-long resolution to stay single all my life for convenience and let someone in. I was at the end of an 18-month curriculum about World History and World Literature. I'd begun to be obsessed with youth group and friends, rather than words, Sal's and RuneScape. I was losing interest in games and gaining interest in real life. I was a DM. My blog was about to become a soap opera! And now it's a year later, and so much has happened. I survived an intense, draining, all-consuming and totally worthwhile almost-relationship. I tried to lose interest in this girl several times and failed, mainly because it's clear she DOES like me as a person and has considerable respect for me. (That's the wrong thing to make obvious if you want a guy to stop liking you, Gaia!) I'm smack in the middle of American History and American Literature, with a set of the best teachers I've had teaching them. I got a perfect score on the PSATs - one of like 200 people out of like 1.5 million - and got my best report card since like 5th grade. I know the value of friends all too well and I'm more balanced and reasonable than ever before...I think! I quit RuneScape and got married to an NPC, a relationship I'll apparently stay in forever because I finally found a quest boss I can't beat. I'm a moderator, and what's more, a decent one. I found a new favorite band. My blog may be a soap opera, but it no longer focuses exclusively on a girl none of you guys know. One of the only things I'm less happy about than I was a year ago is my relationship with God. Philosophy means very little when you know God, as does "religion." I had a pretty good relationship with God a year ago, I felt, and I had high hopes of growing further in this. I talked to him about Gaia all the time, in particular. I even went on a missions trip to Mexico, which was awesome. Now I don't feel that I know him as well. I don't know if this is a stage I need to go through or not, but I feel like I'm failing at something. (Not necessarily something "religious," but still, I feel like I'm failing at something.) And this is eating at me, because I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Erm, besides humility, which is a fairly big fail for me at the moment, in my thoughts if not my words. I can use my words to console myself or others for almost anything, but a lot of it falls flat because sometimes it's just rhetoric. I know the right answer to so many things, but the right answers don't always mean what they ought to because I'm ridiculously inexperienced. That's one of the reasons why I want to go to Kenya so much - to gain experience. I have stronger friendships with some people - especially adults, who are less likely to grow less attached to you after not seeing you for weeks. I discovered new skills, like the ability to build and take apart structures and write philosophy. (I built my own bookshelf! :lol:) I learned to drive, though I'm still pretty bad. A girl (not Gaia) told me that she loves me. I figured out that shaving is terrible and that it practically destroys your soul, but I do it anyway. I decided that I'm an adult, at least psychologically. "Adult" with the 18+ definition, not the 30+. My favorite things people said to me this year: "Blankety Censored Blank" (I can't leak it ) - Warn Log, July (I read it in September because I got promoted before I saw it lulz) Extremely rough translation from Spanish: “It touches me so much to see Americans coming so far from their homes just to help out, especially when my own son is just their age, and I've tried to be a mother for all the American boys and girls this week because I know it must be so hard for them to be so far from home.” - Josephina, the awesome woman who took care of us in Mexico :D "I already said this like a million times but - You. Are. Awesome! Not even joking. I don't know why you are in high school ya should be out there writing books and entertaining the world! Write books! I'll buy them all! =D!! Once again, you're awesome! I'm your Fan!" - Girl in my Creative Writing class, June "How could you possibly parallel this masterpiece with mine? Your writing is so grand, so eloquent, so... wow. Comparing this to my story would be like comparing an ocean to a drop of water." - A guy friend of mine on a Facebook essay, December “I really hope I didn't hurt your feelings but I just want to let you know that I am really not interested. You're a great person but I am just not at all interested.” - Gaia. Sigh, thanks for letting me know. I think you picked the right time to tell me. “Thanks for not letting Lit get boring. I think you prevented a lot of naps!” - Girl in my World/American Literature class, June *everything a very inspirational man said while talking to me about the Not For Sale organization and how I could become involved with it - September/October *everything people said after I rewrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1337speak and read it to the class. - October "I love you '[Emanick]'!" - Girl in driver's ed, October – technically she wasn’t the only girl to tell me that this year, but she was the only one who meant it in the “I want to date you” sense. That means something, I guess. ^_^ “He’s a Mexican Pere Noel!” - My youth leader, to a Frenchman who was interested in my combined sombrero-and-Santa-hat “[Emanick] is most likely to break the law by…writing an unlawfully good poem.” - Gaia on Facebook “You’ve just been hit by, you’ve just been struck by…Eman.” -Mad Max Top five best days of the year: 5. March 17, my romantic St. Patrick’s Day. Spent pretty much the whole school day with Gaia, plus a few Hispanic girls from another school that spent too much time flirting with me. ^_^ 4. February something, Saturday on a winter retreat. Played ice hockey on a frozen lake, Capture the Flag, watched The Goonies, etc. Fantastic day. 3. July 29, when I went to see a Skillet concert in New Hampshire with a bunch of my friends. It was awesome. 2. June 27, when my youth group went on a camping trip up into New Hampshire and we went on the most marvelous, silent night hike I’ve ever heard of. So many great things happened that day. 1. April 18, when I watched Gaia act in the Phantom Tollbooth the night before I flew to California and then Mexico. This entry has been all about me, which is unfortunately what you probably expected upon clicking this link. If not, you don't know me well enough. In light of the new decade, though, I would like to resolve to dedicate this blog to other people as well as myself, hopefully eclipsing me as the main character. I've held the spotlight on myself for so long that even when all the grime is cleaned away, I'm not that fond of what I see. The same probably goes for every other reasonable human being. Let's see if I can't learn this lesson early and henceforth change the meaning of this, the most introverted blog on Sal's!

It's just before midnight on Christmas Eve and I'm sitting down after a very long first day of vacation, both good and bad. My family finally got our tree today, after weeks of being too busy to put a toe out of the door without remembering work that needed to be done. Even so, we all spent much of the day in our own little worlds, despite trying to get into the Christmas spirit. It doesn't help that school ends on Christmas Eve Eve for getting into the Holiday SpiritTM. It's been a crazy season. I've been so busy cranking out about a hundred pages of homework (I literally wrote roughly 100 single-spaced MS Word pages for AP US History this month alone) that I've barely had time to socialize. My father's job 100+ miles away as a Latin teacher takes up so much of his time that he's barely had time to get home and spend time with "us" - us not always including my brother, who is now 13 and seems to have decided that he must spend most afternoons hanging out with friends or he has no life. (He may have a point; since he's really smart and just as distractable as I am, he may well spend most of high school inside doing homework rather than socializing, so maybe it's good that he spends lots of time with his friends now and has a solid base to build on.) My mom is just as disorganized as always, but at least that means she spends lots of time at home and so I have SOMEONE to talk to. Sorry if I sound a little bitter or whatever. I'm not used to having such a mobile family. It's not like my parents are in major fights or anything, but it's annoying to see everyone spending the time apart, as I've been raised as a "homebody" and now find the bulk of my "family time" with friends instead. When you have the knack I have for making a hundred half-friends you never really get close to, the satisfaction derived from such friendships is limited. Ah well, I'm still pretty well off overall. And aside from getting about 4-5 hours of sleep many nights, or often none at all, I'm better-off than my family in a lot of areas. I've spent less time on Facebook recently, and I think I might be getting even more out of it. Facebook really is an amazing tool for keeping in touch with people you don't see every day, or just being generally witty when you think of something clever in the right format. The philosophical essay I published here got a lot of positive feedback from the deep-minded people I tagged, including Gaia, who said she loves reading philosophy and made some mild criticism while generally being supportive. She's amazing. I still haven't gotten over her, though I imagine I will when she goes off to college... next autumn. In the meantime, hopefully I can avoid getting depressed over her. That's been much easier lately. Youth group is better than it was early in the year, partly because a couple of my friends from high school are going now. A redheaded guy I've known for years, mildly-sports-oriented, is going, as is a guy I've sort of known since elementary school. I used to wonder if he was going to turn out like one of the unpleasant, white gangsta-like kids who live near him, but fortunately he hasn't, partly because his older brother seems to have. He's also the boyfriend of one of the girls who went with me to Mexico, so that's probably why he's coming. We had a great time at Paintball up in New Hampshire together, although unfortunately the first snow of the year started at the same time as the game, and the masks got so foggy (to say nothing of our frozen hands) that our team, almost exclusively made up of rookies, got beaten in all nine games. Oh well, it was still a blast for all of us, with the notable exception of my friend's brother, who got hit in his manly parts just after surrendering. Ouch! :D I'm working as a draft laborer for my adult friend Larry as he moves his printing shop from one building to another. Gaia, Heather and I are all being employed so as to pay for our trip to Kenya in June/July. I enjoyed my first day working there, of course, finding it very strange that it's ten times as pleasant working with him as it is with my male relatives doing similar but easier tasks. Probably because my father and brother are just as critical as I am but not as sensitive, their introversion making something come off just wrong in their interaction with me, I haven't figured out just what yet. This is why I say that I dislike people similar to me in my moderator profile, which I'm beginning to realize is false. Gaia is also very similar to me, but probably even more sensitive, and I think this is why I like her so much. It's not that she doesn't correct other peoples' mistakes - I recall when she and I both corrected our youth leader simultaneously when he stumbled over a word reading - but she doesn't do it so that people feel bad about themselves. It's a trait that I've somehow managed to learn to a degree, which I hope will make me a better parent one day. Anyway, the work was pretty heavy but both manageable and enjoyable. We did some painting, too, as well as scrubbing. Who your boss and your employees are matters so much in a job that I cannot possibly stress it enough to anyone looking for a new job, if they happen to read this. If you get stuck working with a group of people on a task involving plenty of human interaction, make it a good group. I enjoy working with friends on a job of manual labor more than writing all but my favorite stories or poems, which does not bode well if I want to be a high earner one day. :) We also had a Christmas party on Sunday evening, full of sparkle and excellent food. Almost everyone was there, although a couple of guys spent most of their time on the couch trying to bury their cell phones under a flurry of furious keystrokes from excitable fingers. We won a charades game against the girls - I think, not sure - and then began the longest Yankee Swap round I've ever seen. Some random Jesus magnetic words that nobody wanted circulated around the room, along with a one-foot-long purple clothespin and pink hot chocolate mix. (There really isn't too much good stuff you can buy with a $5 price ceiling.) I drew a box of pomegranate bathing shampoo, pomegranate perfume and other pomegranate-scented accessories... the perfect gift, tbh, since there was no way I was keeping it and it was probably the funniest thing I could possibly have drawn. I swapped it for Gaia's The Matrix DVD, with a sock puppet thrown in, which is perfect since I've never seen the movie and I've heard it's very, very good. The party's host ended up swapping a photo keychain for it, but he invited me over to watch it in a couple of weeks, and then I can apparently take it home. :o Cool beans. Also, Gaia and I have nearly perfected the art of not being awkward around each other. We respect each other a lot, but at the same time we know there's awkwardness there and neither of us wants/has the courage to be very open about anything. I'll live. She'll live, I'm sure. And today I straggled awake from a 14-hour sleep to finally shave (an epic half-hour job that I absolutely hated, having put it off all month), shower, do my paper route and listen to my father tote the tree in. I cleaned my room and stuff, then went to church and watched my father walk out of the service half through. He's never done that before. I don't know what's wrong with him, although I overheard the end of a conversation he was having with my brother about him not liking it when people believe something specific that's false (exactly what, I didn't catch). He's been critical and uptight all day. I had to decorate the tree alone, after an excellent supper and perfect family story-reading session, since everyone else was last-minute wrapping their gifts and my father was acting was acting ridiculously bipolar, going from shouting when someone made a tiny mistake he'd just made a second ago to being loving and pleasant. He and my brother have a flight to Texas leaving tomorrow morning, so this is probably the main source of his stress. A footloose Christmas, then? Heck yes. I wish I could have a normal Christmas again, but this is my next-to-last year before college, and next year may well be even more hectic. Still, thankfulness is key, right? Yeah, I'm thankful for what I have. I only wish I wasn't spending every hour of every day wishing I was at college or with my youth group... that's a tremendous waste of time. I wish I could live in the present for once and stop worrying about things I can't control. My biggest fear, though, is that I CAN control things... I'm just doing it wrong.

I'm back from Thanksgiving, with a number of things beyond count to be thankful for. It's amazing how many things I have to be thankful for, really. It would be much easier to count my curses than my blessings atm. Although these last few months have been rather an intellectual and literary drought for me, I don't think I've ever been so lucky - at least, in the eyes of the world. At school, I seem to be both well-liked and popular. There are several people with whom I maintain fairly close friendships. If there are people who definitely don't like me, they haven't made it known to me, and so they can go on in that manner as long as they wish. :P Even though I have absolutely no experience with dating at this point, I don't think beginning a relationship at this point would be especially difficult if I was bent on starting now. Everyone seems to respect me, even people ideologically opposed to my views. Even though I frequently stay up far too late doing homework, my body is at the point where it can take an absurd amount of ill-rest with very few necessitated changes in lifestyle. I've decided to listen to (almost) whatever the heck I want on YouTube, no matter what genre it is, and as such even while doing homework I rarely have a dull moment. I'm insanely spoiled. I have fulfillment, too. Accomplishing my academic workload takes care of this. Despite our rocky relationship, my dad is extremely generous with his praise whenever I do anything he approves of within his sight, so when I spent more than a dozen on-and-off hours yesterday organizing my war-zone-reminiscent room, including building it a new bookshelf, I had far more than I needed of that. :P Life is being generous to me. The conundrum of this is that all this goodness throws me off balance. My father, while not instilling in me any of his atheist ideology, did implant in me the idea that the world is inherently hostile to people it doesn't already know well. His Hobbes-esque philosophy is that while "civilized" people are capable of loving, generous relationships with people they know, mankind in itself is ungenerous towards other men, and worse, that humanity as a whole does not deserve the free aid of more fortunate people. This former part is true to some extent, but the more people who believe it, the more it tends to be true. It's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. More optimistic worldviews prompt more generous treatments of others, as long as people forbear from hypocrisy and act upon their worldviews. Now I'm surrounded by a quasi-global world that supports me and is, perhaps, giving me the opportunity to support it later. The world is behaving towards me, by and large, as I feel it ought to towards everyone, and I want other people to have the same chances. Yet my very conditioning rebels against not only against these sentiments, but my very life itself. I have been taught, if not in word than in infective attitude, that it is extremely unusual for things to go well mainly because of what others do for oneself, rather than for something what one does for oneself. My dad just doesn't think that's how life works. He got to where he is today - a Latin teacher at a high school - on his own steam, and he expects me to "do better," both because of my better upbringing and, apparently, my work ethic. This is all very fine and good. I am not complaining about my father's treatment of me - quite the opposite. What I object to is his worldview. There are millions of people around the world, billions in all likelihood, that got where they were through the help of others. Yes, if I can work under my own power, there's no sense relying on others overmuch, but just because I can, does that mean that other people, who need others to function, don't deserve my help when I can provide it? (Or anyone's help, really.) The worst part is that this attitude is what I've been raised with, and what I've imbibed to a considerable extent. I feel uncomfortable with everything going so well for myself. I keep expecting for "a thunderbolt" to crash into the middle of everything and take advantage of my not being ready for every scenario. Although I am fiercely resistant to anyone's forcible correction of me (though I've learned to accept most justified corrections by now), paradoxically I'm very mindful of what everyone's opinions are, especially things pertaining to my own actions, behavior and principles. If you make a good point contrary to mine, rudely but well, I'll probably ignore you or make a semi-heated retort (depending on the environment) then ponder it for minutes, hours, or days to come. Of course, I was raised with this attitude, so I'm refuting myself when I argue with this "small world" mentality. Anyway, I have a point about this entry. I'm going on a missions trip to Kenya in June-July 2010, and my parents have agreed to let me go. My mother supports me going, although she doesn't really want me to go "for mom reasons," but she's worried about money since it costs $3,000. My father is willing to let me go, especially since I showed him my Myers-Brigs personality type (INFJ). He says money isn't a concern since I'll be able to pay my way (although the bulk of it will have to come out of highly profitable stocks, which hurts pretty badly :/). But he doesn't support me going in spirit. He said himself that it seems foolish to cross the world to help out people I don't know. Does my lack of knowledge of their lifestyle make them less inherently deserving of my help? I don't think anyone in the universe would argue this, since I don't believe that anyone in the universe believes that my opinions, as opposed to theirs or any other particular human's, dictate the value of people. But apparently my father believes some variant of this. He's a good man; I'm sure he would have helped fugitive slaves who were fleeing from slave catchers in the 1850s, as long as doing so didn't put him or his family at risk. But his military tours, I think, have put him in the mood to doubt the value of "uncivilized" civilizations. He frequently makes dark derogatory jokes about those in the Middle East or Africa. It isn't the fault of "genetically inferior" Kenyan children that they were born that way. I could have been born a "genetically inferior" Kenyan child just as easily as a very fortunate American child, but I wasn't. And while I see no reason to fight Darwinian evolutionary science on principle - not least because I agree with the bulk of it - I will do everything in my power to fight social Darwinism, the relegation of people with "inferior" genes to a lower order. (Okay, that last sentence was a lie; "everything in my power" is a bit much, but it would not be ignoble to dedicate my life to it. (I'd rather write novels, but hopefully I can kill several birds with my stones?)) I'll post more information about my prospective Kenya trip as things fold out. Hopefully I can get more focused and write more in the near future, too. I should have been in bed 85 minutes ago, but it's always interesting making psychological analyses of my family, especially my male relatives. People with my last name - can't live without 'em, can't live with 'em. :P

Hey guys. I apologize for my massive inactivity, and I all but promise that it will increase over the next week and more, to the point where I won't be posting at all come Friday. Because I'm dying. No, sorry, that was just a terrible joke, albeit unbelievable and so harmless. I'm not literally dying, however bad my homework (led by AP US History in a raging charge against my sanity) and Driver's Ed are getting. In any case, Driver's Ed will last until Wednesday, and then on Thursday I'll do my last no-lifer homework surge because on Friday I'm going away for the entire long weekend to a California wedding (which is of two people I've never heard of, although my parents have so I can't play the "this is a waste of time" card). Despite the awesomeness of the other time I went to California, as a short epilogue to my Mexico missions trip in January, this will be different because I'll be with my family. And with exactly four of us, family disputes are perfectly balanced between intimacy and potential prolonged conflict, and we're a pretty strong-willed bunch, albeit relatively "nice" people, and pretty irritable at times. I'm not looking forward to the trip at all, then, because this behavior manifests itself most often when we travel. Ugh. It'd be fun sightseeing if I didn't have my workload and companions in mind, but it will not be sufficient compensation for the probable unpleasantness of the experience. I'll try to be as congenial as possible, but it's unlikely to be easy. Anyway, this is really just an apology for my inactivity, both recently and in the near future. I realize that my absence is a relatively minor liability to the staff, and by extension the forum, and that's too bad. Hopefully I can make up for it in the rest of the year, which promises to be slightly less arduous.

I'm also annoyed about missing youth group because of Driver's Ed. After being on "withdrawal" from it all summer, I was extremely disappointed to learn that I would miss FOUR weeks of it because of these stupid classes. (Predictably, the only night of the week Driver's Ed is taking up four slots of is Wednesday, the night we meet.) And seriously, I really just love my group. Sure, I love Gaia more than the others, but really... I just love everybody in it. So much. It really is far and above the biggest reason sophomore year was the best year of my life. I'm very annoyed about missing a whole month of it. There's an awesome video showing a slide show of all of us, and I can't link to it because of privacy reasons, and I'm sure not many people would care about it, but it really is great. (Can you tell I have OCD? >.<) Speaking of youth group and Gaia, recently one of my adult friends got baptized in the Atlantic Ocean, along with Gaia and her sister. He's in his mid-20s, and despite his really rough childhood and college years, he's an amazing guy these days. His wife was about nine months pregnant (with twins!) when he got baptized, so there was this huge theme of new life and renewal in the afternoon. He's probably a double father by now, since it's been almost two weeks. About this guy, he's absolutely huge - and with blond hair, probably blue eyes and the a physical build so tremendous that no three of us can take him down, even if we all try at the same time, even Hitler would respect him. :( But he's like an enormous teddy bear. (It was partly at his dad's house where I had the best day of my life thus far, so he gets extra brownie points there.) When he got out of the ocean, I was the second person to give him a huge hug - the first guy was one of his friends, who helped him get out of the tough zone from his college years. I'm so happy for him. I'm less happy for myself, unfortunately. Gaia was also baptized that afternoon, as I said, and I should have been really happy for her, too... and I was, to some degree. But the fact that I didn't even know that she wasn't baptized until then, and neither did she have any "rough spots" in her life that she'd overcome, to the best of my knowledge, obviously muted that somewhat. And plus I'm now officially messed up over how to act around her. Sometimes I almost wish I'd never been attracted to her at all, and that I was still set on remaining single all my life, because at least then we'd still be good friends. We're still friends, technically, although we never knew each other that well. But I always act so awkwardly around her these days, I can never have a normal, casual conversation with her, and she doesn't seem too comfortable either. I don't know exactly what I did wrong, or how I messed up. Obviously my OCD has something to do with this whole mess, but it would be stupid to blame this all on a diagnosis, or indeed to blame at all. She actually initiated a conversation with me yesterday as we were leaving school - or at least she said "Hi" as we were both leaving, and it continued for a little over a minute - and this makes me very happy, although not because of the illusion it might create that I could still have a relationship with her. Maybe in time we can somehow sort out this mess and establish a good friendship (again?), because it's not as if we could avoid each other even if I wanted to. The last few blocks of our walk to school are the same, which has got to be the worst source of awkwardness ever devised by man when it overlaps, and we're the only two people in our youth group who seem to be interested in the Not For Sale abolitionist group. (And it's working its way towards local action as we speak, so in the near future that will probably be pretty important.) Plus we're two of the oldest members now, and certainly two of the most mature. I dunno what senior year will be like when she goes off to college. I'm so confused right now. ("Get over it" is very easy to say, I know, but in practice it's rather hideously impractical, I'm afraid.) Continued on Entry 3.

Okay, so you know the book The Kite Runner? If you don't, read it, I'm serious. If you do, then read this entry and you'll probably be pretty interested. I've been reading it lately, finished it today, and I have to say that it was absolutely amazing. I started it a year and a half ago and stopped quickly because I was too intimidated about what I heard about its sadness. My resolution is to read the entire 11/12th grade summer reading list this year, and this was #3 on the list, so I knew I would be reading it regardless this year, though it wasn't available at the library until just now. And I'm so glad it was, because it's truly an amazing book. If you haven't read it, it's about a boy in Afghanistan and the servant boy he grows up with. It's incredibly powerful. Everyone who sees me reading it and who's read it comments on that. I was told a long time ago that it was awesome and that I WOULD cry during it. To my surprise, although it affected me powerfully and I'm prone to crying while reading novels (for some perspective I had tears in my eyes or on my face for 100+ straight pages for Deathly Hallows), it scarcely made me do that. I had tears in my eyes while reading a letter and I did cry a moderate amount close to the end, but not eye-obscuring tears. Still, it dragged me in and wouldn't let me out. I identified with the main character so strongly, despite having very little in common with him, that I found myself bitterly abusing myself repeatedly throughout the pages, and at other times feeling very self-satisfied and proud, all because of his actions. When I came out of the book, it felt like rising up from the bottom of a deep well. When I came back to the real world, I felt like I was swimming in another world altogether, and I felt saturated and filled to the brim with the mood of the novel. For several minutes after finishing the book, the events within felt just as real to me as reality did. (Okay, that last part I'm not 100% certain about, but I think so.) It was such a powerful, insane book. There's one interesting and pretty specific thing I want to note, but spoilers don't work in this blog, so please stop reading here if you haven't read the book and want to. The villain of the novel was incredibly easy to predict. I don't mean that he was logical and did exactly what I expected him to do, but he only appears on a small range of pages and, though he has a huge impact on the story itself, fades out early and only reappears once, two-thirds of the way through the novel. I could tell exactly what capacity he would appear in forty pages before he reappeared, sixty pages before he revealed his name. There were zero clues in the narrative to this until the face-to-face encounter with him, besides the fact that his personality would fit the persona of the person he was described as. However, as soon as the objective for the main character was made clear sixty pages prior to the guy's appearance, I knew this guy would somehow be behind a complication unbeknown to either of the present individuals. Whether this is a failing of the novel or not, I am unsure. It was certainly extremely fitting to place the character in that capacity, and have that fate befall him, but such an obvious and predictable appearance might have been better off as a surprise. That said, I'm uncertain as to what the author could have done to avert this - he gave no hints as to the man's identity or existence until it became absolutely necessary, but it was such an obvious, though brilliant, plot device. Whatever else, it was an amazing book, and I have doubts about anything else on my summer reading list's ability to eclipse it.

When I'm an adult, my house will have nothing at all to sit in but ROCKING chairs. And when anyone sits down, they will ROCK. When anyone reads a book, uses the computer, eats dinner or watches TV, they will be ROCKING for as long as they sit. It will be impossible to live with my house without ROCKING. I had an extremely empty week in the past seven days, didn't go anywhere at all, pretty much. Even softball was canceled. I didn't even attend church because my brother went hiking and so I subbed for him in the nursery to watch over the preschoolers. They loved playing with Uncle Emanick, because I let them paralyze me and make me fall asleep and force-feed me rotten food. :P They turned me into a robot and made me do silly things. All in all, it was a pretty intense "child care" hour, and I was glad when it was over because I could breathe again! :o I think I'd be a really popular baby sitter, but I don't think the parents would be pleasantly surprised to see how ill-behaved their kids are after I visit them... It was probably good that I had such an empty week, because I needed time to think. Maybe I'll blog about that later. Today was different, though. I went on a hiking trip with my youth group, up to a mountain that will remain unnamed for security reasons, although it was more than an hour from home so it's probably not necessary to shroud its name in mystery. I went with my friend "Eddie," who I used to refer to as "Edison" from time to time in this blog, but I won't anymore because that's awkward. Eddie is a cool guy. He doesn't go to my school anymore, which is too bad, but I'm glad in a way because there were a lot of people back in middle school who didn't like him and picked on him. He's always been on the small side, the opposite of me, and though anyone who physically hurts someone else in middle or high school (especially the middle school, which is staffed by an unfunny version of the Spanish Inquisition) gets punished pretty badly, there are plenty of ways to make a kid sad without that. (I was never a victim of anyone myself in middle school, which has often puzzled me because my past self seems like the kind of person who might be antagonized. Maybe it's because of my height and because I can make people laugh.) So he left for another high school, which is a good one for someone like him who wants to be an engineer. He'll be a great one - for someone who doesn't read much, he's very smart and is a whiz at all kinds of machines and science. We make a good team, because we're similar in a lot of ways, but our areas of expertise are different and so we aren't anything like rivals. He's taught me a lot about other video games, like Halo, and he's the only friend of mine who still plays RuneScape. Last night he beat me to something for the first time - shark fishing. I'm happy for him; usually he's behind me in everything because I've played more, but now he can make money like mad while I toil on in the fields of Miscellenia. Anyway, the hike was fun. Eddie and I raced to the top, which was only about a mile and a half of trail, though the end was really steep and unpleasant. We got there about six minutes before anybody else, but I was so sweaty and thirsty that I'm not sure it was worth it. The water tasted better because I was so beat, though. I got to take pictures of everyone, and unlike last year's hike, I actually got in the picture. Last year I was sitting by a stone wall on the summit and nobody remembered to tell me about the shot. On the way down we took the hard trail, which was "the road less traveled" and so still had BLUEBERRIES. :o We ate a bunch and continued down the incredibly steep trail, which wasn't hard because it was downhill, just slow and tricky going. It was more fun, though. Oh, by the way, Gaia and a lot of my other friends weren't there, because they were practicing for an upcoming play. Lame. After the hike, we drove to a house by a lake and went swimming. Eddie and I and a boy named DJ (his real name, since it's not a legal one - I love that name!) went around the lake in a paddle boat, imitating pirates, and then a new guy named "Sammy" and I got into a kayak and tried to cross the lake. Here's a tip for boaters - ONLY USE A BOAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY STEER. We couldn't control the kayak properly; we could move it ahead but it kept turning counterclockwise. We tried to fix this, but in the end only succeeded in keeping it straight for slightly longer, and once or twice turning it clockwise instead. Then our youth leader called us back for supper from over about a hundred feet of water, and we realized we couldn't get back with much more ease than we could cross the rest of the lake, being right in the middle. :P Sammy decided to get out and hang onto the side - I think he was pushing it - while I doggie-paddled while still in the canoe, which was easier and faster than using the paddles. Within a few minutes, we reached the dock, although I had a rough time mooring the kayak. Eddie helped me tie the knot in the end, since I'm terrible with knots. The rest of the evening was great and un-noteworthy. We played 20 Questions on the way back, with such varied answers as the Taj Mahal, manatees, and "your mom." I love that game.

Hey there, guys. This is a note to let you know that THE RULE ABOUT HAVING TO HAVE TEXT HERE IS EVIL, AND SHOULD BE ABOLISHED. This isn't the subject of the entry. Just a complaint. Anyway, so the summer's been going fairly well. Aside from not being as productive as I want to, which is to be expected, everything is great. I'm not looking forward to the workload of Junior year, the biggest year colleges look for and the year I take on AP History, but for the first time I have a social life at school that I miss. Enjoying other peoples' company makes a huge difference in life, and it's an absolutely essential skill that ought to be taught in every school in the world if it was possible to do so. I like my friends, and I seem to have more all the time. It's good to be coming out of my shell and into the larger world. I just hope I don't lose myself and who I hope to be along the way. Now we come to Gaia. I don't know why I feel such a release in talking about her, but I've felt for a long time that there's always a sort of beauty in honesty, when expressed right, that can't be conveyed in any other way. Anything that's spoken with honesty and feeling, when taken seriously, can become a work of art. I'm sure you guys could flood me with hundreds of exceptions, but let the statement stand. It's true, for the most part. Youth group, which so many of my entries over the past year have been about, has become an amazing part of my life. The largest part of it, to me, is Gaia, but every single piece of it has become special to me. I feel that I owe so much of my increased happiness to the people who make it possible, and so one night, about a week ago, I stayed up late one Friday night writing a long email to the men and women who run it (most of whom I've mentioned here, and all of whom I feel I know on a personal level), talking about the year and how it influenced me, and how thankful I am that they were there to help organize it. I got an overwhelmingly positive response from them. One of the young guys who runs it was so affected by it that he repeatedly talked to me about how wonderful that email was and how I have a great gift for writing, and how he really hopes to read things I've read one day. When my experiences with "church people" in general are so overwhelmingly positive, it really annoys me when I see people talking about churches in general as hotbeds of brainwashing, corruption and manipulation. I don't know anyone more earnest and honest than these people, and I couldn't ask to. People who condemn everything to do with churches don't know what they're talking about, and I'm sick of it. Such an endless cycle, and I seem powerless to stop it. But okay, I'm going off topic. Never mind. I'm extremely lucky to have all the support I do from so many corners, from my family, friends, schoolfellows, adults, comrades, Internet friends, relatives, etc.. Few people are as fortunate in their circle of acquaintances as I am. Thanks, everyone. Okay, on to Gaia, the main topic of this entry. I still like her - love her?? - as much as I have, despite the fact that it's been seven weeks since she told me she wasn't interested in me. I can't help it. She's great. The thing is that whenever I try to define why exactly I like her, everything doesn't add up to why she's so amazing to me. Sure, she's intelligent. Sure, she's a good, kind, caring person. Sure, she cares about social causes, she's talented at many things, she's beautiful. We're similar in a lot of ways, too. But all this doesn't add up to why I like her so much. I know that even if she, say, killed someone, I would still like her as much as I do now. There's something special about her that I can't identify, that I don't feel in anybody else. It has nothing to do with me, except that maybe I'm the only one who feels it. It's simply there, and it makes me feel scintillating at her thought. Anyone who reads this and has more experience than me: Is this what you feel when you meet someone you really care about? Is this what you feel like about your wife/husband? Is that a totally different feeling? I'd really like to know. When I heard that she was going to be in a concert at the waterfront, I jumped at the chance to attend, and I had to wait about a week and a half of FaceBook-addled time for the date to arrive. Due to a terrible mess of scheduling, I heard alternately that it would start at 12AM, 11AM, or 12PM, and end at either 3AM, 3PM, 4PM, 5PM, or 6PM. To be safe (but not TOO safe! :P), I walked downtown early, arriving at the waterfront two minutes past 11AM. Nobody was there, except for several people in purple shirts who were scurrying back and forth under a tent preparing whatever needs to be prepared before a concert. I found out later that the person in charge of the sound system had bailed at the very last moment, and so they had to find a different person to run it from a nearby media store. It took them about an hour to get started up, so I was glad that I'd brought some reading material, namely Invisible Man and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (With my luck, some people will read this entire entry and only comment on this bit, because this part mentioned proper nouns that they have some knowledge of. :P) My cousin from Utah was staying with us for the weekend, and she and my mother were supposed to show up at some point in the afternoon. I didn't want them to come. I wanted to hang out with the other high schoolers who would show up and then start up a conversation with Gaia when she arrived. I held no illusions as to that being especially easy. Nevertheless, even when I expect nothing I expect good to happen at the same time, so when hour after hour passed and nobody I knew showed up, I grew incredibly bored. The concert started around noon, but the music wasn't enough to hold my attention. I'm used to multitasking, and the first chapter of Invisible Man was not "light reading" material. :P Around noon a guy from my bus who I barely know walked by with a dog and said "Hi," but that doesn't count. I did see Gaia's father and have an embarrassingly short conversation with him at 12:40 PM or so. Around 2PM my mother and cousin finally showed up, along with my younger brother's friend and his little sister. We sat around for a while, got a snack, and came back, missing the point when the first of four bands finally stopped playing and was replaced by the second. This time my mother and my brother's friend's family set off for a long walk, and I started talking to my cousin, "Isabel," about random stuff. Isabel is eighteen, and my mother is her godmother. She's originally from an area around Boston, Massachusetts (the capital), but she moved to Utah two years ago for a better life, which indeed seems better from what we've been hearing. She's a fairly typical eighteen-year-old-girl, from which you can tell she's not REALLY my blood relative like my mom pretends. Anyway, she asked me if there was anyone I liked, and I thought about not answering, but I didn't see why not. I've never really talked to a girl close to my age about Gaia before (well, besides Pen), and I figured she might have a little insight, or at least a new perspective. So I told her a fair amount about her, and agreed to show her pictures on FaceBook (lolz), and stuff like that. I talked about why I liked her, how she was beautiful in an unconventional way, how she was extremely nice, how I was writing her a play for her birthday, yadda yadda yadda. A couple to five-ish minutes after we finished talking, I looked around to see if Gaia was here yet, and to my surprise I saw her talking to her friends about ten feet behind me, spread out on a picnic blanket! :P How long had she been there? What had she heard, if anything? Had she seen me? Did she know I was talking about her? Did she care? All these questions I wanted to know the answers to make me sound paranoid. I wasn't. I honestly didn't know if I wanted her to have heard me or not. I certainly didn't want her to have heard that I was going to write her a play for her birthday, but the rest was pretty much okay. She's rather shy, but always more confident around her friends, several of which seemed to be with her. I'd wanted to say "Hi" to her when she arrived, but now that I'd been around her for several minutes without knowing it, and couldn't even truthfully pretend to have just noticed her, that wouldn't have made sense. I hate being so shy. One of the many perks about liking Gaia so much is that the shyness I used to feel around girls has mainly been redirected to only Gaia, because I used to not like anyone, and so, in effect, saw anyone as someone I could potentially have a relationship one. (All subconsciously, of course, I only just realized this.) Now that I know for sure that I like her, I only really feel awkward around her, and that only when I don't have a good reason for being around her. When I need to be near her, like when working on the school magazine, or in youth group, I'm completely relaxed. But if I'm standing near her for the heck of it, I feel like a creep, or a hangers-on, or just somebody who doesn't belong with her. And it's true. I'm not a good match for Gaia, at least not right now. She needs someone that can make her happy, if anyone, and I don't have that effect on her. I think at my best, I'd be a good enough boyfriend for almost anyone, even her. But I'm not at my best at all around her. She deserves someone confident, sensitive, intelligent, and a lot of other things (most of which I possess to a fair degree :s), As someone said, it's not about her. I can admire her, know her for who she is (or what I know of her), and even talk to her. But I can't complete her. Maybe someday, but not now. Now I just have to be content with who I am, without focusing on "making" someone else like me. It's futile, and worse than useless. It can only make her feel uncomfortable, or other things. This isn't "I'm not good enough" Syndrome, by the way. I'm a good person, relatively speaking. She's an amazing person. It's not like she's so far above me that I can't see her toes - although I have nothing in the world against her, I can't be so extravagant with my praise as to make her sound supernatural. :P I might be good enough for her if she wanted to be involved with me and I was fit for her. But I'm not, at least not right now. I've got to learn to know that, and accept that. I don't need to forget about her - quite the contrary!!!!!!! - but nobody will be happier or more honored if I break my heart over her. If you truly like someone, and you're in control of yourself, then you take your affection for them and put it to best use. And what I need to do is put my honesty to work on fiction, not emails or blog entries. If I could add this honesty to creativity and imagination, then I really would have a gift, I think. And gifts are the best things we have for bettering life for ourselves, others, and everyone we've ever known. :)

This is the house I designed for myself to live at in an American Literature assignment. It is extremely weird and overboard and probably would cost more to build (and research) than any other building currently in existence. It's also written badly and half-satirically, because I am not a raving American supremacist (although I am Republican, I'm also not a crazy GOP fanboy). Those of you who debate against me at times, feel grateful that this is only half sincere! <_< The sincere part is what I'd like to do to human traffickers. Hi there. My dream house would have lots of huge wheels on the bottom of it, so it would be able to roll everywhere. The wheels would be fifteen feet in diameter (ten cubits), with big green spikes on it to show that I am not to be truffled with. I would paint the wheels yellow and black so that any bees that wanted to sting me would see bigger bees (because bees can’t see very well you see) and fly away. There would be four wheels on each of the sides. My house would be a perfect cube 1,728,000 cubic feet in volume (a 120 foot edge). There would be a right pyramid on top that glowed yellow with pretty light. It would be designed by a scientist who had worked in Jurassic Park, and it would be a living creature that absorbed sunlight and turned it into yellow chlorophyll to keep its gold-fashioned skin looking shiny. The walls would be painted orange because orange is my favorite color, and they would be peppered with windows the size of arrow slits so that my many servants would be able to fire at any passing Democrats upon sighting them. There would be a door on the top of one of the wheels that I could climb inside by speaking a command word (“the”) that would change to something cool like “antidisestablishmentarianism” on Saturdays and something better on Sundays that I can’t talk about. The door would be painted red, and it would mumble an apology for being that color whenever I entered. Once inside, I’d be in a carpeted world with lots of decorations from ‘80s movies, shimmering as if they’d been filmed yesterday. There would be lanterns hanging all around, illuminating the hallway and making it bright as day. I could cause them to shed any color of light by speaking the color’s name backwards, and I would install a robotic voice that sounded like Microsoft Sam to chastise anyone who said “der” for sounding like as much of an idiot as I did when I started writing this (because I’ve left off trying to sound overly stupid now). The ceilings would be strung with portraits of famous Republican presidents of the past and future like Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon and Sarah Palin’s grandson, Tripp. I would also have a line of refrigerators running along the side of each hallway, packed with health food so that anyone I invited to my house for a sleepover could have the satisfaction of knowing that no animals were harmed in the making of my larder. Adorning my massive dining hall would be a scale model of the Titanic, half-submerged in a real swimming pool. The pool would be filled with bath toys that doubled as memorials to the fallen, with actual sober sentences expressing regret that these people died. Stained-glass windows would open to the higher rooms of my house, and artificial light would stream down from them to illuminate my diamond table, painted like a chess board and populated by self-aware plates, which were all designated as certain chess pieces and played out an endless game of chess of their own volition. The losing plates would have to hold my dinner (consisting strictly of vegetarian food, pork, beef, and steak), and the winning ones would get put through the dishwasher, which they would be programmed to love. To help me get sick more often and thus build up my immunity to all known diseases in the end, I would ensure that the same plates won every time. My servants, which I suppose I should describe now, would all be clones of Waldo from the Where’s Waldo series of children’s books, and they would take turns being invisible. While invisible, they would be genetically imbued with the abilities of the basilisk, so that anyone who made eye contact with them would die. The visible ones would attend me, and when not catering to my whims, they would spend many of the 23 hours they had off every day playing Pokemon video games in the loft at the top of my mansion. There’d be a big-screen TV that would show Rush Limbaugh singing the Roman national anthem (written by my mother) in Latin 24/7, although during the night-time it would be draped in a black veil (studded with rubies) so that my servants could get some sleep. My laboratory would be larger inside than outside by inter-dimensional power. It would be filled with cool-looking test tubes that didn’t do anything and awesome-looking games, novels and sudoku puzzles that transferred my triumphs and chapters read to actual brain activity that produced new machines I could patent, sell, and send the proceeds of the resulting sales of to charity. When I got tired of fun and sudoku, I could learn to smith actual metal instruments like those used in the medieval age from an especially skilled Waldo clone (nicknamed Ralph Emerson) who knew his stuff. Then I would go to the control room of my house, open the wings of my mansion, send text messages to Washington officials to alert them of the reason why there was a huge cube flying around in their government property (I mean, sky), and swing over to whatever anti-humanitarian bully was molesting humanity at the moment (mostly human traffickers I imagine) and challenge them to a DUEL. After an extensive training program I’d undergo in my custom gym (fifth floor on the left-hand wing of my house), I’d be more than a match for anyone with my steel armor, bulletproof body cloak, interior air-conditioning system, and broadsword. When my sword reached their throat, I would order them to yield or face the mercy of Heaven. Since they’d probably (hopefully!) all be cowards, I wouldn’t have to kill anyone and they would walk behind me meekly, stripped of all but basic clothing, to a government shuttle that would ship them off to Guantanamo Bay. Back to the house. The servants’ bedrooms would be papered with pages taken from school textbooks and covered with proverbs that would help them live good, productive lives. The floor would be made up of shifting images from different movies, all vaguely familiar to someone living in the 2020s and mostly dealing with comedy from such sources as Mulan, Weird Al and Al Gore. Their beds would be bunk beds — not that they wouldn’t have their own beds and bedrooms, but bunk beds are so much cooler than normal ones. They’d also have iPods, jPods and kPods, whichever one they preferred, hanging on their doorknobs. If they lost them or broke them, then the cost to replace them would come out of their own salaries. Which is too bad, because I’d only pay them in COCOA BEANS, like WILLY WONKA! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Just kidding. They’d get paid in Euros. American dollars are too good for clones. And now we turn to my bedroom. It would be twenty feet by thirty feet, with a twelve-foot high roof, and would be at the very top of my house. The roof would be very thin so that I could see the golden light of the living pyramid plant above me. The floor would be tiled with photos from all sorts of cool things and places, like the Amazon, Barack Obama’s inauguration, the 2011 American Idol where Jeb Bush becomes #1, youth group events and banquets, and a re-enactment of Custer’s Last Stand in Times Square that I’d invite all my friends to create on New Year’s Day. Holograms depicting various awesome things would pop up all around the room whenever I spoke the code phrase “Do not pass GO; Do not collect $200,” and a great song would arise from the 111-inch flatscreen 3D computer that would sit in the corner of my room whenever I got a Facebook update. A second computer would sit in the corner, automatically governing my own corporation that worked on commission for me to manage my stocks and thus finance my multi-billion-dollar mansion. My bed would be a sumptuous four-poster with old-fashioned designs carved along the sides and a mahogany finish that shone with the energy that can only come from a product that has not been mass-produced, but made by the people, for the people, of the people — and I don’t mean made of human beings, because that’s just not right. The blanket would be made out of dodo feathers interwoven with the fur of a woolly mammoth, both prestigious extinct creatures that could only be hunted in virtual reality. The virtual reality simulator would be in a loft only four feet from the ceiling and stuffed with hay, a nice place for me to launch expeditions through fantastic time and space and bring back real items from my travels. In fact, that virtual reality simulator is what brought me this idea, straight from the hands of my intrepid future self. And I’m going to start building the house right now!

... All hail Emanick, Lord over all that is Minesweeper! Grovel before your great emperor, who has finally managed to beat the LAST and MOST DIFFICULT stage of Minesweeper, in UNDER NINE MINUTES! And just this week, Connor said I couldn't do it! HA! And I looked through the blog archives, and I beat Josh's first high score for Expert Minesweeper! Ha! ALL GROVEL BEFORE EMANICK! :P ...And yeah, I'm overcompensating for being killed in Mafia. :P

I think I'll start blogging again. I haven't been on Sals in months, except for the last few days. It's kind of fun being back here, but then I'm muted, so it's not really a fair trade in terms of happiness. But what the heck, happiness isn't the most important thing right now. I have 10th grade coming up, the first really HARD year of school. I enjoyed a lot of last year, especially the second semester. I hope I get lucky again and have a great year. Who knows. Anyway, I'm tired, and tired means for really boring blogs. I don't really expect any comments on this, except from people who actually know me well on here (you know who you are) and are more interested in me than in my blog. Who knows? Maybe I'll return the favor and start posting regularly on your blogs. One thing that's annoying me right now is how the forum has gotten to the state that anyone who posts a thread about Obama in a negative fashion is going to get labeled as a crazy conservative who wants to pin anything at all down on him. Like me, apparently, despite the fact that I haven't posted on any threads about Obama in favor of the crazy or demeaning theories about him. Whatever. I guess it's that way with a lot of people, and vice versa. People, like me, tend to think that they're better than anyone else who commits the same sins, and I'm not totally unbiased. I just wish we knew exactly why every Presidential nominee did something, and everything about them. The heck with privacy, if you want to lead 300,000,000 people, you've got to be as moral as they get, though that's far from the only important thing. McCain's no shining angel, either. I wonder if being obsessed with people being decent is just a phase I'm going through. I wonder if everyone goes through this. How does it end? Does it end when you do a really bad thing, or when you realize your own hypocrisy? Does it ever end for some people? Is it right? Meh. I wanted to post a Calvin and Hobbes strip on here, but I couldn't find it.

I'm back to school, and I'm in a new school - High School. How formidable. How time-consuming. How CHALLENGING. At last I can actually learn some stuff. :D Anyway, this is my schedule for the semester (we only have two semesters): 90-minute periods, starting at 7:20 (we have to go to the bus stop at 6:45 ) and ending at 2:00. Then another bus ride home! That's exciting, because I get to sleep. We have a half hour lunch break in third period, on 'A' Day at the end and on 'B' Day in the beginning. Good arrangement. 'A' Day- Respect (Gym, why do they call it that?) (Elective) Hon(ors) Algebra I Study Period Honors Physics I 'B' Day- Honors World Literature (Lit) I Intro to Art (Elective) Honors World History I Study Period (elective) Well, I have fairly good teachers. None of them are stupid, with the possible exception of my Physics teacher; too early to tell. None of them are mean, either, except for maybe my Honors World History teacher, who is dismissive of pretty much everything. He's funny in his own way, though. He acts very sceptical about Hinduism, and seems to treat Christianity pretty weirdly, but he is a Christian, so that's odd. He actually rates the documentary videos we watch as "1-10," and told us flat out that the one we were about to watch was a 3. He also asks us if we've converted to Hinduism yet almost every class, as that's what we're studying. Two girls said they were, and I don't think they were joking. Amazing. I don't understand why people pick religions because of what they think of them: is Hinduism any more or less likely because you like the sound of it? No. And I think it's one of the least likely religions, because it presumably developed over a period of a thousand or so years, and that is the main hallmark of a people-invented religion. But anyway, I hope they are considering it, because they're athiests, and maybe that will soften up their souls enough to accept Christianity into their lives some time. (For details of why I believe in Christianity, search the Debate Room.) He also told us that the lesson we were studying was probably fictional, but the curriculum demanded that we learn it and so we did. He then taught us the more realistic, not universally known version of the Aryan invaders the next lesson. Pretty honest guy. Gym is an okay class. We had an amazing 90 minutes of Dodgeball where we just ran around and threw balls at each other and dodged, first in teams, then in Every Man/Woman For Himself. Great class, and we almost definitely got more exercise out of it then the next lesson where we played softball. Worst game ever. We have okay pitchers and horrible hitters, and so 95% of the people ON BOTH TEAMS struck out. I got lucky. I'm a horrible hitter, but the pitcher was equally horrible, and so he threw 13 pitches, and eleven of them were balls. One of them was a strike, and one a foul. Both were in the first five pitches. Eventually I just grabbed the ball lying on the field and hit it with my bat. The teachers let the hit count, and I was the only person to make the bases in that half of the inning. Meh. Algebra is a bit dull, but it's okay. I know most of the stuff, although she's hinting that it will be a lot harder soon. I believe her. She assigns massive amounts of homework, which usually takes the entire next study period. I love those. :D She's pretty nice to me, and knows I'm semi-Special Ed, and she often asks if I'm keeping up and doing all right. I miss the directions sometimes, so that's nice. Physics, quite ironically, is the easiest class I have, except for, obviously, Study periods. He gives us very easy problems (at least, they're easy for me; I can't say for sure that they're that way for most of the students, although I suspect they are), and I have no trouble completing it. We get little homework, and I'm one of only two boys in the class to earn a homework pass. We walked around the football field, measured the time with the stopwatch, then walked around the circular hallways of the school, timed that,, and measured the distance. We were closest, although since my partner, whose name I forget already, was the one who walked, he deserves more of the credit. The girls in the class all earned a homework pass when one girl and a boy were both asked to have a contest to see who could hold dictionaries on their outstrectched arms the longest. Thankfully, I was in the bathroom at the time, and so I didn't notice the embarrassment to my gender. (I wonder if I could have won? Probably not.) World Literature is my hardest subject, which is odd because I'm best at that. I scored in the 99th percentile in my better part of it, 96th or 97th in the other part, for the High School Placement test. As you may be able to tell, I'm not a master at sentence structure, and that's what's challenging me. I don't know the vocabulary to describe sentence structure and grammar, and how is that going to stop me from writing well? It's not, unless I put one too many commas or semicolons into my first job interview and end up begging on the street because the boss is a stickler for language skills...^_^ Anyway, the teacher spent the first period lecturing us on her family, and then she handed out The Odyssey and told us to read one chapter per school day. Not extrordinarily difficult, except that you also have to answer about 8-9 questions every day, she gives us 40 vocabulary words every week to define, identify their part of speech, and write sentences for. Okay, still not extrordinarily difficult, but she isn't really going lightly on us. We also have a project due in nine days. Ah well, so be it. High school shouldn't be and isn't a picnic. :D Did I mention that I'm almost always exhausted in this class? Once I absolutely couldn't keep my eyes open, no matter what, so she actually let me take a 4-minute walk outside class. So nice of her. :D In Art Intro, we've just been working on name folders, and now we're doing a line drawing with little pens. Pretty simple - it doesn't really need a thorough description. I often allow my mind to wander here, because it requires very little concentration so far. It's a nice break, and right before lunch. I talk with my friend Alan here sometimes, and he's a nut about art. He takes forever to draw, and doesn't mind distractions. I find the conversations difficult, but I can take them. It's much better than being alone, having friends, as long as it doesn't happen too often. I like thinking of it as a luxury, and I'll try to never, throughout my life, take friends for granted. They're blessings, and I should thank God for our ability to love, or rather, brotherly love. John 3:27- No one can recieve anything except what is given to him from Heaven. ~As long as I have friends in my life, I will be able to deal with being single forever. Now to describe my weekend. It was awesome! My mother's mother is very weak right now(which makes me feel bad about that exclamation point ), and she may not last more than two more years, which is too bad because I wanted a 100-year-old grandmother. ^_^ Nah. Well, I did, but that would be selfish of me. She'll go to the Lord when she dies, and she'll be a lot happier there. The best thing she can do is prepare her mind and heart for Him so she'll be even happier there, and maybe donate money to charity. Her grandnephews and nieces don't need it, and neither do we. (Although our house could look way better! :D ) My point was...I do have a way of getting off-track, don't I? Oh yes. My point was that my mom went to visit her this weekend, and so she and Ben, my brother, who's also Redalert501 on here, went to his friend Adam's house. I was all alone, just the way I love it, except I got to sleep over my friend Sean's house, who lives across the street. We stayed up until 1 AM playing RuneScape, or rather he played RuneScape and I watched. He isn't very nice to me at school (although not mean), because he has to protect his reputation. He's actually on the school football team. He isn't especially popular, but neither am I, and I'm less likable when my mouth is open then closed, since I have an awful stutter and I tend to repeat words under my breath without noticing it. (I've gone a month without noticing that tic. So silly. ^_^) Still, I don't mind. This is the ninth year in a row I haven't been in any of his classes. What are the odds? We've never had more than 200 kids in a grade, and often just 100. And I'm fine with just chatting with him on RuneScape, and real life. It's like the childhood that I already feel like I've never had! :D After a great sleepover, I went to do my paper route and left for a long bagging session and a short walk. Around 11:00, I came back and started playing RuneScape. After 2.5 hours, my friend Ethan called to see if I wanted to come over, and I agreed to do so once I called my mom for permission. I never got around to it. What a fool I am. He came over instead, and we had fun playing RS, and he died. He's level 62, or around there. I got his meager stuff (he wouldn't risk a weapon or armor in the Lumbridge Swamp Caves), and then got some antipoison for him and an Oil Lantern. Then we spent some time in his house, after I'd merchanted a little money. We both had some fun talking about a medieval fair he'd gone to (he's obsessed with medieval times) as we walked to his house, and played Halo 2 upstairs in his room. I got owned, 37-8. That's what comes from my second time playing. :D Ethan and his younger brother Jared were going easy on me too. We went to a cookout at his friends' house and formed teams: Me, Ethan and Jared's friend John vs. Jared and two older girls. We had a trebuchet that Ethan bought (like I said, he's obsessed ) to throw crabapples off the raised back porch, which is 10 feet above the ground. John and I took Jared prisoner several times, and the girls took him away all the time. I hate not being able to touch girls, it's so inconvienent. Wrestle with a boy and it's play, but wrestle with a girl and it's abuse. But not vice versa. Then it's just funny. It's so unfair. We ended up throwing bigger balls, and eventually the whole game disintegrated. We went out to play Manhunt in their neighborhood, Ethan and I v. John and Jared. They won, because it was dark. They didn't come out, even when we said that we surrendered, and so we went back to the house, ate a wonderful meal and watched a pretty terrible show. Few things taste as good as supper as your first meal of the day. We went back to Ethan and Jared's house, and their parents were about to take me home, but I let them finish their dinner in peace first. I am extremely thankful that I did that! :D We played Super Smash Brothers Melee, which may be a tad young for 9th grade. But I loved it! Ethan was tired, so I played with Jared, and we were incredibly evenly matched. We both chose Link, and we had a 99 life Stock game in Sudden Death, where the first person to hit would lose. We had it in the middle of a racetrack, where cars kept zooming by, and the slightest wrong move could knock you off and kill you. It was so challenging, and I had the time of my life. I ended up winning with only two lives left, even though he was leading by six at one point. Simple it may be, but simple pleasures make life a better experience. I went home and stayed up until 2 AM with Sean, as my mom was getting back very late that night. Again, we had a lot of fun. On Sunday, today, my mom was home and took the family to church, where the service was very uplifting. I'd started the day off in a fairly bad mood, but by the end I was feeling incredibly thankful that I could walk, and breathe, and not because of threats of hell or retribution in the sermon - ours is not one of those rude churches. It was about putting nothing before God, and it just put me in a very thankful mood! You can listen to the sermon here. Afterwards, my first Sunday School class of the school year began with an older church member, a sort of "mentor." It's based around fantasy books and their relation to Harry Potter, the Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings. They're all quite moral and religious books, with many subtle references. (For example, did you Harry Potter nuts know that the words on the Peverells' and Potters' gravestones in Deathly Hallows are from Scripture??) It's a great class, and he actually took me to Dunkin' Donuts today for a cookie and some soda. What a great weekend. This is the best weekend I've had in living memory. If only everyone could have weekends like this, then maybe they'd be able to appreciate that God really is a loving God and that the world exists, and is an awesome place, because of Him. If you're having doubts about your faith, post in this entry. My PM box is a little full. :D That goes for any faith, athiesm - that is a faith! - Islam, Hinduism, etc.

Pic of the Day: Title Explanation: From Yogosun's Skillcape video, the line of the background song coinciding with the Smithing emote is "And I'm Wasting My Life, Destroying My Dreams". Since 99 Smithing is my goal for these next few months, I might as well say that that line is relevant to anything I do that wastes my time. :P Pic Explanation: I wasted a lot of time on Age of Empires over Christmas Vacation, and just took random pictures. :) So, I'm back. Back to the Internet. Apparentely our Comcast phone service was down, as was our Comcast internet service. Here's the explanation, I'm not making this up... ...But someone else might be. Some guy on the phone explained this in very technical terms, and this was the best my brother could make out of it... Apparentely some guy in Park Circle, a nearby (seedy) street, put up some beer cans and trash containers on the phone lines, and the weight somehow distorted the connection. :( Something is wrong here. :P Anyway, I spent most of my Christmas vacation playing Age of Empires, instead of dutifully writing my story, which I should have done. That was nooby of me. :P Also I read the full collection of the Order of the Stick comics. They are hilarious D&D comics with the best storyline I've ever seen. Even if they are *a bit* inappropriate. I regret that as well, but not too much as they are REALLY entertaining. I now look forward to all Mondays, Wednesday, and Friday when a new comic is posted. I won't post a link here, since there's a slight chance that mods could give me a black mark for posting inappropriate links, but they are good. If you know about D&D, that is - otherwise, don't bother looking them up. :D At any rate, I didn't waste my time when the Barbarian Assault minigame came out. I raced to battle through all ten waves, completing seven on the first day, then (with great difficulty) completing the last three on the second. I claimed my Granite Platebody, and moved up a step in the world. Now half my armor requires 50 Defense instead of 40. :s Now I'm merely delaying until I can write in my story again. Meh. :P I'm being a noob, but at least it's a new week. Once I get over the shock of homework, I can finish my epic story and publish it to Sal's. I can't wait! :) To Smithing Perfection. :P