so i finally broke down and decided to take apart my monitor yesterday. the red's been going in and out (mostly the latter) since i took it back for christmas. i've been annoyed at it, and smacked it upside the....err.....side quite a few times in increasingly ineffective attempts to repair it. and now that diablo 2 has come in (chris ordered it for me for christmas), it has been more and more important that i be able to see what is red on the screen. so i slapped it down in the middle of the room yesterday and got out my tools. of course, this attracted the attentions of joe, being an engineer, and vijay, being a cs major. it ended up being joe who fixed it. he found the faulty wire, fiddled with it a bit, and it worked fine. i feel like this is a programming assignment for cs. we don't know why it works now, but we're not going to question the fact that it does.

a true friend is someone who knows enough about you to ruin your life, but loves you enough not to do it.

mike and vijay are gone for the weekend, for the OA retreat. i hope they have fun. meanwhile, joe and i have the run of the entire suite. we told them that we're going to have wild orgies in their room. mike and jason and john weber and i went to dobie to eat yesterday. i really don't know john that well from clements, but he seems like a nice enough guy. i ended up stabbing his fork and knife into his cheesesteak. rosenquist called me at one thirty or so in the morning and asked to come over and borrow my violin. evidently the eggma trio is recording something, and there is no violin for the violinist. ended up being six people from clements come over to our suite. ah, how we have all grown apart....

erg. i have to write a song by wednesday, and i have no idea what i'm going to do. so i need to shower and get something to eat. it's been nearly twenty hours since i've eaten anything.

hope yours was a good one....

oh my god i can't believe i'm already using my homework drop grade in physics. i planned to get up today about an hour before my classes started so i could get a good start on my homework and then finish it in class. didn't work. i woke up, felt like shit, and promptly went back to sleep. i figured i could skip chemistry, since it was more or less review for me so far. i didn't mean to sleep through cs too, but it somehow happened. errrg. and i didn't do my physics homework. damnit! i feel bad asking rob for the class notes for today, too, since i mean it's my own fault that i didn't go to class. but the sleep! the glorious sleep! i'm sure it did wonders for me, healthwise. my immune system functions so much better when i'm not sleep-deprived. i'm still coughing and sniffling, but at least i am functional. not congested and grumpy and feeling like my head is about to implode at any second.

i finally got around to downloading folding@home. to think that this stuff is the cutting edge of my field.....it makes me feel quite intimidated.

Raging Aardvark: what's a nice girl like you doing alone on a friday afternoon? how about i take you out to dinner and homework?
Raging Aardvark: ~_^
sibyleris: +laugh+ how ROMANTIC
sibyleris: +slaps you in face and storms off+

fencing today. i am so out of shape. such a short period of strenuous activity had me wheezing. or maybe it's the cold or whatever i have right now. erg. i got killed quite a few times by advancing when i should have retreated. when i came back from archery, i found a slip on my desk from jester mail center. my diablo 2 had come in, finally. i can finally go on some dungeon crawls with my brother. so i quickly showered, grabbed the slip and my student ID, and got my diablo battle chest. woohoo! it's sitting by my desk, waiting for the right time to take over my computer.

shana is my new goddess. she likes baking more than she likes eating what she bakes. she delivered a huge plate of brownies to vijay today and forced him to share. oh my god those are good brownies.

michael and i finally beat baulder's gate: dark alliance on extreme mode. now we're using those same characters we used to beat extreme mode to play through easy mode. it's so simple, and we're so high level, that we're going around without armor. we're naked adventurers! we beat the first few bosses to death with our fists! this is hilarious! and there's something vaguely amusing about a guy dressed only in briefs cutting a swath of destruction through a pile of yeti with a flaming long sword.

vijay is creating some art. that means i'll have to write a piece of literature, or a song. but it also means that mike will have to start his webcomic! i'm so very much looking forward to it.

i had forgotten to turn my alarm to "on" this morning, so i woke up to a fire alarm eleven minutes before chem started. cs was cancelled.

ach. i think i am getting sick. my sinuses are killing me, and the back of my throat is starting to tickle. this is like last semester all over again, when all four of us (mike, vijay, joe, and i) got sick at the beginning of the year and kept passing different strains to each other for a month. michael got the worst of it: we had to take him to the health center a few times and even to the hospital once. but it was a very bad start to the semester. i should be getting sleep right now to prevent it from repeating itself.

so i've been lucky so far, in not getting that virus going around that formats and then departitions your hard drive. i went to http://www.protectorplus.com/, downloaded some antivirus software, and scanned: nothing. i hope no more of my friends get it. timbo found twenty viruses on his system when he scanned.

Jianwen23: to serve society is to not be?
Raging Aardvark: i am not a slave of society

i always feel so appreciated whenever someone quotes me in their blog. it's the knowledge that someone is reading the stuff you write, and likes it enough to use it in publication. i always feel bad whenever i show up on ann's blog. i mean, i hardly ever talk to her, though i talk to her sister all the time. and yet she mentions me every once in a while.

from kat's blog:
"it was fun, and even if it wasn't the best night of my entire life, this is what i want...i want this endless joyride, this rollercoaster of laughter and tears, love and loss. i want these late-night get-togethers, sick conversations, drunken sprees, weekend madness, midnight walks, random roadtrips, ice cream fests. i want to curl up with another warm body at nights and wake up to a morning kiss and a cigarette. i want to say "fuck it" and mean it, to drop everything and just run, and maybe if i leaned the right way into the wind, i would start flying into the air, because i am so tired of falling. all i want from life is someone to love who loves me back, inner peace, and for god's sakes, just give me a tub of chocolate ice cream."

joe is stirring in his sleep, or perhaps he is lying awake, too polite to tell me to quit typing and go to sleep. i finally got pictures back of that day that we danced on top of robert's car. it always comes down to this: sitting up at my computer, very tired but not wanting to face the next day. tomorrow is full of fake smiles and different shades of uncertainty. tomorrow spits accusations and rushed meals at me. but tonight, tonight..... tonight is comforting in its regularity. i can sit at my computer, tired and slightly hungry, putting off conscience for just another half hour. i can let myself be consumed by that all-encompassing lust for ennui.

banter: she's got huge tracts of land!
Boggboy: ah, but are they rolling or mountainous?
foamsock: and an ample forest, too!
Prinla13: and I know a man who has the perfect plow for it
Glacius17: she must be pretty fat.
Rsilverain: I will steal her land and pillage her food supply, thus ensuring I get it all to myself. BWAhahahahahahahaha

resolutions:
1) get a 4.0 this semester
2) see the world through a child's eyes
3) become proficient at the guitar

Boggboy: but you believe in other things strongly, though. like the power of music to change people.
Raging Aardvark: i dunno about the power of music to change a person. i believe in its power to make me cry, to make me smile, to make me angry.
Boggboy: well, that's what I mean. not necessarily change them permanently (though possible I'm sure), but how music can express things normal speech or noise can't. How music in and of itself can influence things, and how it's not just the musician doing that consciously.

Raging Aardvark: i was bored enough to find out whether glue is really non-toxic today
Raging Aardvark: i don't see how kids would want to eat that stuff. it's so bitter.

kid, you need to go to sleep. you need to get some sleep so that tomorrow you can get up in time to go to jason's place, and then not be completely exhausted after the car ride up to austin. go to sleep already.

kid, you need to clean up your act, starting with that hair. you need to march yourself down to supercuts and shave it back to where it used to be in high school. then put that damn guitar down. it don't pay the bills.

kid, you need to get your head out of the clouds and focus on what is going on in the real world. you need to quit thinking about what-ifs and start thinking about your GPA. maybe you won't get kicked out of college then.

kid, you need to get your flabby ass into shape. pick your lazy butt up off of your chair in front of that monitor and go jog. you promised you'd do it over the break, but you didn't. how do you expect to do well in fencing if you've got the stamina of a chain-smoking petunia?

kid, you need to go to sleep. you're talking to yourself in second person again.

130. i installed morpheus on my dad's computer today and downloaded some creedence clearwater revival. my favourite song would have to be jeremiah was a bullfrog, but it doesn't have a very good guitar part.

Raging Aardvark: have you ever had a feeling deep inside you, that you want to write down, but don't know how?
lilrebecki: i think taht everyone feels like that, and the ppl who can express those feelings are truly talented

i realized that i brought my guitar home with me and hadn't used it yet, so i started playing random stuff tonight. my fingers are even a bit sore, seeing as i haven't really played this much since my callouses peeled this past week. i got curious and downloaded the chords for lookin' out my back door by creedence. it's actually pretty simple, except for the solos. or rather, it could be modded to be very simple. so i did so. and i was singing and playing creedence! w00t!

from michael's profile:
We need to be happier.
We need to make this happen.

i spent the last forty five minutes trying to find out if there's a parameter in the aim url that gets aim to open the profile of the username specified, but i came up with absolutely nothing. you'd think there'd be some list out there of legal parameters for the aim url. oh well.

and steve has found it for me in a few seconds. for later reference:

aim:goim?screenname=screenname&message=message+goes+here
aim:gochat?roomname=room
aim:gochat?roomname=room&exchange=5
aim:addbuddy?screenname=screen+name
aim:addbuddy?screenname=screen+name&groupname=group+name
aim:buddyicon?screename=screen+name
aim:RegisterUser?ScreenName=screen+name&password=&SignonNow=False

i wonder where rose is.....
i wonder where teresa is.....
i wonder where michael is.....
i wonder where chris is.....

Raging Aardvark: btw i think i've been recruited by john to go to the animecon as kenshin T_T
Raging Aardvark: i haven't even watched kenshin, and i'm not scary.
Boggboy: hahaha. you can pull off a Kenshin? this I gotta see.
Raging Aardvark: well, i've got long hair, and i'm short
Raging Aardvark: there's two prereqs
Raging Aardvark: i just need a costume and a LOT of hair mascara
Boggboy: you'll need gold contacts, an idiot demeanor, much larger eyes, the most friggin annoying expression ever in anime, and don't forget - no one can stand in your way, not even whole armies.
Raging Aardvark: gold contacts?
Raging Aardvark: i'll just shout "oro" every once in a while

*sigh*....and now i have to back up my hard drive on cd-r and get some antivirus software.

i hope everything turns out all right....