This is the fiftieth entry of my blog, which is more than any other blog I've ever written. What a great relationship.
I would like to welcome my friend Pierre to the wonderful world of blogging!
I'm currently reading The Blue Girl by Charles deLint, in which his protagonist accuses JK Rowling of stealing the image of Harry Potter from his friend, author Neil Gaiman. Talk about poetic justice, now we've got battling fictional characters!
Rereading, my last, blog entry, I have, noticed, that I use, the comma, way too often, which makes my work, very choppy. I appolgize, to all, my readers, about, this point.
Well, my exams are finally over, at least for this semester, which means I don't have school until next Wednesday, the day, coincidentally, which marks the last twenty four hours of being younger than sixteen.
Unfortnatly, for these days off school I am trapped in my house because the snow just keeps coming down and eventually we're just blocked on all sides by a giant wall of snow that will probably stay there until spring. I'm starting to get cabin fever real bad. I've got a lot to do that is not school related that I've been waiting for some time off to do, but I can't seem to focus. My new rule is that the amount of time I spend watching TV per day must equal the amount of time I spend reading or writing. We'll see how long it lasts.
On a completely unrelated note, I've recently been having dreams that are really realistic. So realistic, infact, that I believe in them as if they actually happened once I wake up. Last night I dreamt that mom at started working again, and when I woke up I asked her what her new project was. She wasn't, of course, but for an hour or so I really believed it was so. A couple nights ago I dreamt that I got to school and my timetable had been ripped off the inside of my locker. I got to school and wondered how I was going to figure out what classes I had, only to find that my timetable was still on the inside of my locker. When I mentioned this to my friend Danielle, she commented that it was the last day of classes for this semester, and that my timetable would be obsolete by the end of the day. Weird.
Now I'll never have to worry about my DVD player motor being run down ever again!
Last week a friend of mine lent me her Witch Hunter Robin DVD box set. It was okay, but I really didn't find it as great as everyone says it is. It seems to have an interesting plot, and the animation is really realistic, but it moves way too slow, and it seems a bit pretentious. Also, although the plot was interesting, they didn't seem to have a good flow of information, just a little trickle here and there and blasted you with it near the very end.
That's one thing that I find annoying with TV and Manga: they never give you exactly what you need to know, and they never go at the right speed for the viewer. When you read real novels, you're given all the facts necessary to understand the story, the rest is left to be filled in with your own imagination. With TV, you're never sure if the information you're given is important or not. With novels, you can also rewind and speed up to another part of the book at your leisure without having to worry about missing something important.
Tomorrow I am going to take my grade 11 advanced exam. I'm a bit nervous about it. This is because I need to decide soon whether I want Calculus and Physics next year or Biology and History. I'm afraid that I'm not smart enough to take Calculus, although there is not any reason to think that. My math mark has always been in the low nineties, even in the advanced class.
Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, recently wondered why there aren't more women in top math and physics positions. He said that it could be because of the roles we are raised from, or genetics. I think there may be a third reason that has not been said. There are many intelligent girls in my Math class who don't the inclination to take further math. I think the reason that this is because they think math is nerdy, and looking at the people in my math class, they would get that impression.
Anyway, it's weird that I'm so into math when I'm such a daydreamer. You'd think that with all the writing and reading I do my favourite subject would be English, but it's not. English is too subjective, it's hard to be taught. At least with Math you know when you're right.
Today all of Atlantic Canada has been shut down because of a giant blizzard right outside our window. Everything is closed. Even the big mall in Halifax. The list goes on and on and on. Ironically, we are one of the worst hit areas and yet the university where dad works is still open. Poor dad.
One thing that really bothers me about winter is that the only time it's cold enough to need to wear slippers, you can't, because the air is so dry and you build up a lot of static electricty wearing them. It really hurts. You get shocked every two seconds.
To any of my friends who are looking for something to do on this school cancellation day, I've put up the two first chapters of Lost in Six Billion Dreams to read.
Today was one of the odd days when I didn't have anything afterschool in terms of Band or commitees. I watched The Butterfly Effect on the movie network. At the time I didn't bother seeing it in theatres because it got bad reviews. This was mostly because Ashton Kutcher can't act serious, or can't act at all for that matter. Surprisingly, I really liked the movie, despite some of the strange plot turns and Kutcher's bad acting. The whole premise wasn't really explained, but then again, when is Sci-Fi fully explained? The movie itself kept me on the edge my seat. It was addictive. However, if you really want to hear a good story on Chaos Theory, something that interests me a lot, check out the Star Trek TNG episode Parallels where Worf keeps changing from one reality to another based on choices made. Same premise, less violence but more nerdy.
My Generation is often refered to as the N-Gen, as in the "Network" or "Now" generation. I suppose that's true. We are used to having things on-demand. If I'm watching a TV show and the commercials come on, I can't even stand to put the mute on and wait through the break. I just change to another show that I'll be watching at the same time. It's normal for me to, in the middle of reading something or going about my day, suddenly wonder what a term means, or a question about something, and go to the nearest unused computer and google it. I used to be on and off the computer in less than five minutes, but nowadays, I'll be online, and when I find what I'm looking for, I'll then notice something else worth reading, and then something else, and so on, on completely random subjects. Imagine if I did that in a library, in real life. I'd go in, read to sentences from a book, drop the book, and run over to the other side of the library and repeat the sequence. I'd be regarded as a schizophrenic!
If this poem is bad, it's because it was written in about ten minutes after a sudden break in boredom.
Nothing
Our universe is made of nothing,
Where not a thing exists.
And what there is is all spread out
like drops in foggy mists.
Yet being nothing, it must be something,
Though something can't be nothing.
The confusion caused by this must show
Our own brain's vacuous stuffing.
So let's crawl out of our atomic caves,
And the vacuums of space,
To be relieved we are not nothing,
With nothing in our place!
Here are too disturbing/unsettling things I've found on the web about really right wing people.
First of all: Mediamatters.org
Anti-canadianism. I can't believe that people actually think this. "If it weren't for the US Canada would have been invaded by Norway." We don't have a military because we can't afford it, and we have nothing that we need protection against. "Dog sledding"? Yeah, I wish I had a dogsled. It sure would help me cross that frozen tundra to get to school. Carolyn Parrish, the MP interviewed, is a bit crazy, but CNN shouldn't take that as our government hates America.
Secondly: Lambuel and Friends How dare they use my favourite animal to spread fear of Atheists and discourage rational thinking! Honestly, this site is so scary I can't tell if it's real or not. Their alteration of the flag and the "Creation Science Fair" are funny, but if this is meant to be serious it's pretty scary.
On another note, in a month less two days I will be sixteen.
Last night I dreamt that my friend Gwen and I found a baby in the student counsel's sofa. We named it Arthur.
Today is the last day of Christmas break. It hardly seemed worthwhile.
Last night I had three very interesting dreams. My dreams are quite frequent and fairly vivid, but I seldom write them down, other than bugging my mother by recounting them the next morning.
The First Dream:
I was living at the house of some relative of my friend Danielle, on Prince Edward Island. The relative refused to do any dishes, when she ran out of clean dishes she'd buy another set. She had a kitchen absolutely packed with dirty dishes, and the terms of my staying in her house was that I had to clean and get rid of all the dishes. It was the summertime, and Danielle and I decided to take a ride on a humungous tire swing in the pack yard. The swing went up and up exponentially, as if it were attached to the tree by a bungee cord. From above, we could see all the way to Nova Scotia. Then Danielle commented that we were a bit too high, so we kicked and got the swing to go back down to the tree in a graceful descent.
The Second Dream:
I found myself in a McDonald's, and I was trying to decide what to order. The only good thing on the menu was a pasta for 50$. They also had combos based on the most important news stories of the past year, ex: The Sudan Combo, Enron Combo, Tsunami Combo, Election Combo, etc. When they told me they didn't have such a thing as a Small Combo, I started singing and dancing in full broadway flair on the McDonald's floor about how they were going to make everyone obese, destroy the world and steal twenty years from our lifespan.
The Third Dream:
I was kidnapped by Spanish pirates for ten years. When I was finally returned to my family, I could remember nothing of the event, but I had somehow learned how to speak Spanish. I was reciting Spanish words when I woke up.