from steve:

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Avium: whoops, sorry.. typo
Avium: I meant to join #chess
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i'm in jen's profile! wahoo! thanks jen, you made my day:

15 days til I get to see my lil cuz!!!

razi came over and screwed around on my violin for an hour or so. that thing's loud as all hell. i was hoping it would piss off some of the neighbors to the point of coming over to complain, so that maybe we could get to know some of them. but no one came over. =\ but i got to watch razi try to transpose his expertise on the guitar onto the violin. i guess i forgot to tell him that the relationships between the strings on the guitar aren't the same relationships between the strings on the violin. but that's okay. he gave a little concert of fur elise, unforgiven, and various other songs. ^_^

must go make my bed.....

my laundry's done. all my clothes and my bedsheets are toasty warm. ^_^

i shot 186 today. i wish that i had shot a 200. that would have been an extra 30 points on my final grade in archery (out of 1000). oh well, i guess what comes, comes.

went down to the drag with rob after archery. outside of the co-op annex, there was an old man playing greensleeves on the violin. his beard and wild hair melted from grey into white. i watched and listened for a while, and decided to place a dollar into his violin case. without pausing his music, he bowed low. i smiled.

the pictures of madrigal turned out pretty well. i got a shot of vijay's character forcing wendel to his knees and plucking the dagger right out of his hand. i think i'm all caught up with my scrapbook now, everything that should be in the scrapbook, in the scrapbook. i still have about six exposures in my small camera that i need to take, and then i can get those developed as well.

"a shattered heart involves debris"
— Erasure, from Fingers And Thumbs

michael and i went down to HEB, and hung out there for an hour and a half or so. we read stupid birthday cards and cards for other occasions. we stared longingly at the ice cream section for a good twenty minutes or so. ended up getting some white grape juice as well as some other blended berry juice. now i'm hooked on white grape juice, and i need to pee every hour.

maybe i'll go adapt always by erasure for the guitar.

repost:

"i can't believe i finally found
the prisoner the free man were all in my mind
...
i can't believe my core was shaken
i gave up the ghost of everything i was before
...
i can't believe my dream is over
i woke up this morning with nothing but light in my eyes"

— Live, from Call Me A Fool

Glacius17: what do u wanna do when you grow up?
Raging Aardvark: i want to be known by my friends for who i am. i want to make a decent pay to live comfortably, whatever job i have. i want to have met my soulmate, and to have anchored myself in a place. i want to say hi to the nice woman down the street, and have her say something about the nice boy four doors down. i want to wake up in the morning to my dog licking my face.
Raging Aardvark: but as to what i want to do, i have no idea
Glacius17: sounds good to me.
Raging Aardvark: you?
Glacius17: I want to become successful doing something nobody would think i would become successful doing, especially my family. In the process i would like to find a software engineering job where i have to wear a suit to work, park somewhere where it is difficult for everyone but me to find a spot, work with people, and help design software to propell society forward. I would like to come home from work free from depression, despair, or outrageous stress and actually spend some time playing with my kids, discplining when necessary, teaching right from wrong, good from bad, nice from mean, and encouraging all that is good in life. I hope to be involved in the lives of my loved ones, helping in any way that i can, and be involved in a global community promoting understanding and tolerance of all people. I just wanna be happy.

sibyleris: GIVE IT TO ME GIVE IT TO ME!

happy birthday, cheuck.

take this:
"Fulfill your life with this video and impress that hot girl or guy that you've been obsessed with."

run it through a web translator to spanish, and back again, and you get this:
"it satisfies its life with this video and impresses to that girl or hot individual who has obsessed to him with."

credits to kevin

JenChiang: get my makeup from Katrina too

one interesting pet peeve of mine: evangelists. to me, they come off as theocentric. i figure, if god wants me to be a devout believer, he will make things so. will a man preaching fanatically somehow make me see the light? i've never thought so. this morning, someone signed my guestbook, preaching to me the greatness of god. it annoyed the hell out of me, because the act more or less was striving to make my personal domain into a tool for religious imperialism. it's like what savage garden says in their song, affirmation: "I believe that God does not endorse TV evangelists." robert pointed out that he was only trying to help:
RuroniKenshin83: he thought he could help you and he was wrong
RuroniKenshin83: misguided altruism

i guess the thing that annoyed me most about the incident was the fact that it didn't even have anything to do with the contents of my site. if he gave religious commentary on my site, then i would have been okay with it. but this was what his attempt at relevance looked like:
Hello!
Read part of your blog this morning and found it to be interesting and at the very least a different viewpoint.
Praying for you,
XXXXX
then, he added what looked like a pretyped testimonial of the wonders of god. which was longer than most of my posts. jeez, he could at least try to make it seem relevant. i get enough spam in my inbox; must i deal with it in my guestbook as well?

the offending entry has been removed.

went to see waking life with vijay, robert, and michael. it was pretty good. a very interesting style, and some very interesting philosophies. i bet jeff would have hated it. robert got motion sick watching, and opted to only listen instead. i think i would have liked it if i were in a philosophical mood at the time, instead of one of those me-no-can-think moods. a pretty good film, but i still liked L.I.E. better, though. it's more personal. it left me feeling as if i knew the main character.

i've been seeing anime-type art in my head for the past few days. it's not anything i've seen before: this is all new stuff. i have a great picture of my muse, and another of a guy getting eviscerated by a werewolf. i only wish i could draw....

i need to get a drink. all that msg leaves me feeling thirsty.

better. reading rose's blog got me remembering the first time i danced with a girl. it must have been back in 1996, in eighth grade. it was st. john's version of the eighth grade prom, casino night. being the shy, awkward, introverted boy i was (and, some argue, still am), i sat out most of the dances, preferring to hang about the games of chance. it started getting problematic when i ran out of chips for said games. there was a girl whom i knew back then, betsy orton. she was rather tomboyish, and one of the few people i actually liked as a friend at that damn school. well, i say friend, but my concept of friendship was very different back then than it is now, but that's a different story.

anyway, she was hanging back, too. we sat about talking, making idle chatter. i think it was the very last dance, when she asked me to dance with her. so, of course, i said yes. i remember feeling very awkward and self-concious during the entire dance. i don't remember exactly whom it was, but afterward, another member of my class confronted me:
him: hey, so you danced with betsy...?
me: yeah.
him: so, you ask her, or she ask you?
me: she asked me, yeah.
him: yeah, figures. she seems like that kind of girl. you were south of the border, weren't you?
me: huh? *thinks* oh! no, of course not!
him: yeah right. i saw your hand. you were south of the border.
i remember that i didn't exactly like the guy in the first place. he was one of the "popular" crowd, which i always was, and still somewhat am, intimidated by. i really don't think my hand went below the small of her back. i think he just wanted to show off his mastery of slang. well, whatever. now that i look back on it, i think betsy had a crush on me, though i can't imagine why. i was a caustic-tongued geekboy with no social skills whatsoever. the type of kid that you knew got beaten up at least once a week. hmm...i wonder where betsy is now....

it's nearly six. i should really head to bed, get a good five or six hours, and be ready for class. hmmm....i need to get the madrigal pictures developed tomorrow, too....

i guess i'll dodge into the realm of dreams....

man, i swear, this weekend completely tore up my sleep pattern. i usually go to sleep around 4ish, but it's 450 and i'm eating ramen instead of sleeping. joe's even worse: usually he goes to sleep between 2 and 3. currently, he's playing his favourite game: throw money at ebay.

michael got me started reading real life comics. the guy posts a comic every day, and i just read through all of it. more than two years' worth. ugh. i wonder when mike's going to start his own webcomic. he's already got so many great ideas for it. vijay said that he'd be doing so art over dead week, as to force mike (and me! eek!) to get them creative juices flowing.

damn, this isn't good. i've found the tabs to round here by counting crows, as well as best i ever had by vertical horizon. there's too many songs i'm learning right now! i really need to just focus on one or two, memorize them, and move on. but i just can't choose which ones to do!

ugh. i shouldn't have added that flavour packet to the ramen. the bottom of the bowl is thick with msg. and the drosphilia are back again for some reason....

too tired to blog. too tired to write. too tired to think.

"you don't practice your clarinet
because you want to be first chair.
you do it because the music moves you.
because the ability to make music
the ability to make the air sing
to sing for you is pure
ambrosia.
because when you hear music
it flows through you
it is your life source,
as essential to you as air
and if music's not your cup of tea,
then fuck it."

— from robert's blog