Uuuuggh.. I feel so tired and weird x__x I stayed up until 5 AM yesterday night simply because that darn 4th book of Diana Gabaldon's got really good at about 12:30 AM. I felt alright during school, albeit a little groggy first period, in which I had a physics quiz, but I woke up enough for my French final, the first half, which was an essay in which I forgot two "ne" thingies because I am stupid. I remembered one, forgot the other two, since the phrases de peur que, à crainte que, avant que and à moins que are followed by the subjunctive form AND a ne before verb, for no particular reason I can discern. And I think I misspelled a few words. "Heureusement" always give me trouble. It is evil. Not that I am against French or anything, it's just that I enjoy complaining about French teachers, spelling and grammer. I took a year of Spanish in addition to nearly 5 of French, and I like the language I ended up studying. I just would really, really prefer it if my school offered Japanese. In that sort of sad, desperate way that has led me to reject any college which does not teach Japanese, or have a study abroad program in Japan. Ehh... I remember my half-semester of Chinese language. I retain from that "Nihao", the knowledge that I am physically incapable of pronouncing several Chinese sounds, the ability to hear the difference between Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and a strong desire to learn no more of the language. Eric, if you are out there, thanks for being the other half of my two-person Chinese class, and Calvin & Hobbes forever. ^^ ... My spanish class that same year was three people, come to think of it. Chris, Katijia and I. Occasionally, they were both absent. ¬_¬ And Mrs. Paramio... "You must do your éstudies!" And I saw her at the train station two years ago, and she said hola, but all I could hear was, "Deedeedeedee, deedeedeedee..." xD that would be the twilight zone music. What did that year of Spanish do for me? Well, every once in a while I will have a Spanish break-down in French class. This year, I attempted to say "number" in french because I was asking Mrs. Khatir about number 10 on the board. And I said numéro, got confused and trailed off, said nombre, mumbled nom, and then just went, "Ah! Dix, dix, le conjugation... c'est... uh...." Yeah, occasionally, I get really articulate in foreign language -_-. Numéro is actually the correct word... I had to look it up, though. I mean, I just did NOT expect a french work to end in an "o." It just seemed wrong, somehow, for that moment. Not to mention, a few months ago I was trying to remember the word for yesterday in French, and the first thing that pops into my head is "ayer." It is very similar to "hier" but whatever. Somehow, this rarely happens with French and Japanese.

Well, having successfully sidetracked myself off into Canada, I will continue with my sleep-deprivation theme. I went to karate on two hours sleep, which was a Bad Thing. Exertion while sleep-deprived leads variously to extreme fatigue, dizzyness, and fainting. For me, I mean. I lasted a half-hour well enough though, but Pam managed to royally piss me off, damn her, she tells me "good" when what I just did was blatantly NOT. And other things but mostly in that vein. Grrrr at those evil hard bow stances, which my achilles tenon does not want to cooperate with. Oh Craig, when you get back from Italy, you will not be happy with the state of my katas -_-. I took a nap, unplanned, at about 7:30 PM and I woke up around midnight. I have homework, but I don't think I'll be able to do it. The weird thing was, when I woke up I was extremely dizzy and disorientated, and felt a little sick. I ate some cold chicken, and managed to be really philosphical about the fact that it was a dead animal I was eating, which can only happen when I am very out of it. That sentence came out weird. What I mean is, most of the time I can eat dead animal flesh without feeling any compunction, a residual effect of being best friends with a militant vegetarian. She would say, "That's a dead cow you're chewing," and I would say, "Damn straight it is. I like mine bloody." I'd be serious, too. xD. But sometimes the fact that I am eating something else's muscle and fat gets to me, generally when I eat ham, which I hate. It just screams PIG BODY to me. I like bacon, though. Damn, this blog entry is bizarre. It's just that the chicken started to talk to me as well, but I ate it anyway. Yeah.

Evilness gave me a CUTE Duo oekaki for a present, making me very, very happy ^______^ (although any emotion I lay claim to is blunted by tiredness right now) I shall reciprocate, but I don't have time at this particular moment. My cel painting for Cartooning is underway, after the FIFTH sketch I did for it. Thank god. Hellsing influences are blatant, and MP agrees, but I like Hellsing so whatever.

My dream during my nap was one of those frusterating, trying-to-do-something and not getting it done dreams. But in it, I was watching a random shounen ai anime, but then my dad came over and started watching it too (right at a good part), so I had to turn it off really quick. He just ruins that sort of thing for me. I can't even watch Will and Grace with him. But he is much better than my mom. ....Do you know what she did? An architect came to the house a few days ago, and my sister related what happened to me, since I wasn't actually there. Mom said hello, shook his hand, and showed him around the house. But as soon as he left, she immediately started washing her hands. When asked what she was doing, she said, "He was really, really skinny. I think he was an F-A-G. You never know what kind of germs those kind of people have." ... O___O can you believe it? She is a nutcase. She is offensive, rude, and many other words I can think of. Things like this make me want to run away and join a gay pride group, to spite both my parents. Then again, my dad has that whole Lesbians-are-better-than-Gays thing going on. *gag* Mom once told me that she believes Lesbians are woman who are afraid of men, and who've had a man do something bad to them in the past. .... Ugh!! The insanity, I can't take it. Soon I will be forced to watch Gravitation all over again, as an antidote.

I better stop before I get too mad or anything. I'm not in the best of states right now. Hehehe. You know, I am glad my parents are too dense to notice the compromising position that Kamui and Fuma are in on my lovely 3-foot tall scroll in my room (it's the red and olive-colored one with the matching outfits ^^). Nor do they think to look closely at any of the pictures on the wall. I think the whole anime thing mystifies them, a lot.

: feathre dropped by at 2:10 AM :
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: Monday, June 3

Strange circumstances always leave me feeling vaguely inadaquate to the trials of life. Well, sometimes a lot more inadaquate than just vaguely.

*feathre contemplates the literary personification of hair that shampoo bottles love to persist in*

Sunday: I went shopping. I dislike shopping, I haven't gone for about 3 months, and before that about 5. The complete and all-consuming rage that I tend to feel towards most clothing stores really got out of control this time. I'm not sure what I did, and what's a little scary is that I didn't realize I was doing it until after we got home. ...I think... I wasn't shopping for myself, but was in fact shopping for my conflicting views of who I am. I bought very few clothes that really expressed who I was.. in terms of style.. I was buying stuff for the person who I might become, in a few years. And I didn't even notice until it was all over! I bought two shirts that are meant to be worn bra-less. Bra-less, can you believe it? And I bought them! Well, they were on sale, but that is besides the point. Oh, I'll just shut up now. There's not much point in talking about it. The shirt I am wearing now is very bright green, but I liked it. Vici tells me I look like a frog. I think, personally, that the effect is reminiscent of some of those gag escort-service shirts I've seen people wear. *shakes head, disgustedly*

Monday: people are so weird. Why are some people so very, very strange? Certain people have been getting on my nerves, BIG time, but I think it's just me, they haven't changed or anything like that. You know, the only human beings of the male persuasion who've told me I looked "good" in the appreciative-type way, have been my two uncles. My freakin' UNCLES, for god's sake. Weird, the both of them. My mom's brother was just being a jerk and making fun of me for liking pumpkin pie and putting sweet 'n low in my coffee, saying that it kills brain cells. I'm sure it does, in massive doses, in rats. Am I a rat? He's just weird. I don't think he ever grew up, plus he went through a nasty divorce recently. Not to mention, when I was like FIVE years old, I said I wanted to marry him. I said that to about three people when I was five! Who cares? But no, he has to bring it up, and say that now he's available. But not to worry, he'll wait until I'm out of college. What a severe weirdo. My aunt says that since he's being a jerk to me, that means he likes me. Greeeaaat. On the other hand, my uncle who is my grandmother's second husband's neice's husband, and is not even related to me, just said that same sort of thing to be himself. I think he will continue to be like that even when he's like 90 years old. Whatever. But his daughter is my cousin, who is my age. Ick. Looking back on this entry, I am sure my English teacher would be so very proud. I've gone totally colloquial. Which reminds me that just today, just TODAY, my English teacher says to me, "...when you were standing up there, I noticed you've really grown up. In every way." Yes, that is what she said. She is most definitely a candidate for number-one weirdo in my life.

Well. There's really nothing you can do except nod, smile, quietly leave when they're not looking, and become a hermit as soon as humanly possible. Damn weird people.

: feathre dropped by at 5:56 PM :
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: Sunday, June 2

*whines at stats4all.com to work*

: feathre dropped by at 11:12 PM :
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A doodle I drew in math ^^. It says that math is stupid, in case it's unreadable. Hehe, I have no idea who or what the person is. Well, whatever. I updated with something new in Art, Scribbles, finally. Hehe. I'm gonna make myself do more color stuff. I've already made progress, manga-wise, thank goodness, and I think I discovered the holy grail of inking secrets the other day. *frowns* I can't articulate it, though, and I'm afraid it'll leave me. After three full years of trying very, very hard to ink smoothly, I think I deserve to have found it. ^___^ On the other hand, I could have no idea what I'm talking about. But I can fake smooth lines pretty well. I just reduce the page to 32% of what it originally was ^^ I have all my notes right here.. font and percent black of shading, all that stuff. *looks at page 3 on her desk* Well, I still have to sketch and ink a lot, but I will put stuff up once the story becomes a little clearer, in about 6 pages. Then I shall have chibi fun. Then I will start chapter 2, in which Kaylen appears, and he will finally stop berating me to draw him. Bwahaha.

Who's hyper on a Sunday night? Not me, nope, nope. Gotta go practice my chibis ^^

: feathre dropped by at 11:08 PM :
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Well, here I am again. I was not able to go online Saturday. And not even today, either, until just now.

You see, the rest of Friday was quite an adventure.

It was late Friday night and there was a thunderstorm going on. I love thunderstorms, but I wasn't in the mood to storm-watch that night. My dad warned us that we should save in case the power went out, which I did. I was in the middle of digitally shading the second page of my manga when the lights, having threatened us with a few flickers before this, blinked on and off. My computer shut off with a bad-sounding popping noise. When it started to reboot, I just turned it off for good because I wasn't in the mood to continue working. I wasn't worried about it much, since I have a surge protector and this sort of thing has happened before. So a few hours later when I turned it on again, I was quite surprised to find that Windows would not boot up. I restarted, thinking that that might solve the problem. Windows would not boot up, again. Instead, the diagnostic tool that DOS sometimes runs told me I had a partition problem. Ok, then. DOS offered to start Windows in safe mode, so I did. Of course, my tablet won't work in safe mode, so I effectively had no mouse. At this point, I was feeling a little panicky. I had been getting a lot of blue screens of death lately, and I had gotten two blank emails from unknown people just that day, so I was wondering if the problem was the lightning, the partition thing, or a virus. So, keyboarding my way around Windows, I ran Norton System Diagnostic. It told me I had 4 problems with my C drive, of very high severity. I ran Norton Disk Doctor. It told me I had a partition problem with Drive1, I would have to repartition the drive, and if I hadn't made a backup, it STRONGLY recommended that I did so before doing anything. So I tried a backup. At the point when it reached 500 Mb size and hadn't backed up more than 5% of the drive, I stopped it.

At that point, I saw my life flash in front of my eyes. And my computer's life, which is nearly the same thing. It was almost 10 pm, and the SAT II's on Saturday were pressing on my mind. I had planned to spend about half an hour later that night reviewing physics formulas online, maybe checking out a few colleges' requirements. Obviously I wouldn't be able to do that now. As it dawned on me that this problem might be unfixable, I started cataloguing the files I would lose if my drive was re-partitioned, or erased, or scrambled by a virus. My artwork, some of it only existing on the computer. My fiction stories. My electronic diary entries. My past research papers. My science research project. My anime pics, website files, oekakis, winamp skins. My music. My anime episodes -- all the unwatched Trigun, Utena, Card Captor Sakura. My symposium presentation that is DUE next Thursday.

I am not too proud to say that I then staged a full-scale panic attack. I believe it was caused by test stress plus fear of the unknown, since I had no idea what was wrong with my computer. Then, I realized that I had left my physics review book in school, and the work in that book was due on Monday, with a quiz to boot. And then I remembered that all money for magazine sales was due on Monday, as well. Hysteria ensued. I called my mom over, since she was always talking about backups and Norton and this and that. All she could say was to look it up in a book, which is her standard response to everything. She really has no ways to cope with a lot of things. So I remained upset.

I couldn't do anything else that night, so I went to bed as soon as I could, which was still late enough, and on Saturday I took all three SAT IIs with everything hanging over my head, in an unfamiliar school. I wish to state that all of the tests were "eh." In my essay, I used physics examples, and on American History I used fictional knowledge. Eh. I made my dad stop off at my high school and got my books from my locker, with the help of a custodian.

On Saturday afternoon, my saving angel appeared in the form of a really, really huge book on how to fix and maintain PCs. The troubleshooting section had some excellent advice. One, don't panic, and two, try everything that is easy before trying the hard stuff. So, following the instructions, I turned every single thing off, unplugged all the plugs, waited 60 seconds, and then re-connected everything. The computer started up, and so did Windows. My partitions were fine. No virus. Thank god. Then, I tried to connect to the internet.

Nothing happened.

My internet connection had something wrong with it. The network was fine, and my sister's computer in the next room could connect perfectly well. I spent Saturday trying to fix the problem, reading, and working on my manga a bit.

The next time I could try anything was Sunday night. So about an hour ago, I dug out all the cable modem documentation and ran a few programs, re-installed a driver or two. Finally, I ran a little program called winipcfg and restarted.

And here I am.

I doubt I have every been so scared about my computer since I accidently had a book pressing down the esc key while I tried loading Windows. That was very fun, too. I think that now, I will find a better virus program, make a proper backup, and do some random maintenance. I came away from this with a few good things, though. I now know all about partitions and what they are, and how I can check up on them. I know what a cluster is, and why you lose them so often. And I know that to protect your computer from lightning, you can make five or six knots in the power cable. The electricity will fry your cable, but not your system.

Now, I think I shall go do that physics work.

x_x <-- feathre feels stupid, ashamed, tired, and dead

: feathre dropped by at 8:17 PM :
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