You know, exams really aren’t that bad. You simply have to review the material in a timely manner, so that you are slowly, but effectively absorbing the material. If you plan ahead, and set time out to study every night before the exams, you can be fully prepared. Unfortunately, I did none of these things due to the homework of last week, so I’m spending the day making literally hundreds of notecards and reading my old english journal entries.

Exam week will not be fun. I started panicking about exams about two weeks ago when I realized that I’d never actually studied for tests like these. Now I’m starting to panic again because I have to know the authors, major themes and vocabulary of dozens of short stories, and then write an essay about them. And while we do get out of school about two hours early, I have West Side Story rehearsal every day after exams for a few hours in which I will be singing, and I can tell you that I will definitely not feel like singing after being tested on the major religions of Eastern Asia.

Now, I’ve decided to try something new. I haven’t been recognizing the many great blogs out there that deserve to be read, so whenever I get around to it, I’ll post the link to a fellow Japan lovers blog. Today (because I’m too lazy to look anywhere else), this blog is from a fellow Charlottesvillian (wait, I don’t think that works…). This Way for the Detour, Ladies and Gentlemen is an excellent blog I found today from which I’m going to be reading the archives for a while. Have fun,

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I suppose I should have posted this earlier, but the Bloggies are currently being held, as they have for the past four years. Each year, people submit their nominations for their favorite blog in categories like photography, region, entertainment, writing, and of course Blog of the Year. Anyone can nominate a blog, but you have to do so by 10PM Eastern this Monday for it to count. Then, 150 people are chosen to be on a panel to vote for the finalists, and the ones that pass their vote go on to be voted by the public again. I voted last year, and actually got to be on that panel - it made me feel all warm and important inside… I just wish you didn’t have to wait two months to see if the blog you voted for won or not, but it could be worse. Anyway, if you actually read any Blogs besides this one, go to the Fifth Annual Weblog Awards website and vote! The paradox we all live in may depend on it! Oh, and I must compliment Nikolai Nolan (who started the Bloggies) on his taste in music and television. Right on, Nikolai, right on.

I suppose that the end of the quarter brings a lot of things. Like the end of science fair, work being finished up, of course the whole studying for exams clause, but most importantly , the end of PE. Today, I took the last PE class of the foreseeable future, ending the months of torture that accompanied PE days. It’s been over 40 classes, and I must say that, despite what everyone seemed to think, it really wasn’t worth it. How would you like to spend four hours a week with a class full of immature 14-year-old boys that like nothing better than to beat up specific people. But it’s over! Take that scum! No more twenty minute grudges on a dropped volleyball or missed catch. Of course, I still have to live through family life with these same people, which promises to be pretty bad.

Right now I’m watching a few minutes of Twister on TNT. It’s pretty much been like this: It’s good that they were able to drive through that raging ball of burning gas and not even get hot, good thing they ducked just in time to avoid that flying house, we just survived a tornado… Let’s make out!, and so on. Oh, and I’m sure glad all those people died to find out the most breaking news of the century - things in tornados spin around in the air!

I have come to the realization that my blog title has almost nothing you to with me, which brings up a topic, naming things. I have the hardest time with this. I’ll want to name a website, get a new username, come up with anything that can change how other people view what I’m putting out on the internet, and I can’t do it (I’ve had this username for over five years now, I hate it, but I don’t have anything better, now do I? Ha, I can even remember when I thought up “plasmaball3000″…Memories). A few years back when I was actually an ok web designer given my age (now I haven’t created something original in over two years, so you can imagine I definitely couldn’t get back in the flow if I tried, or had the time), I can remember sitting around in the computer chair, half watching TV with my sister, trying desperately to think of name for my site. Three hours later, and to no progress, I give up and do something else. These were the days when I could afford to lose hours of my life and still have time for homework and the like, wow have times changed. It took me about 30 minutes to title this blog (a personal best, I must say), but the only reason I thought of it was because of the Mall of America bags hanging on my wall, one of which had the words “You betcha.” on it, and thus my blog was named. That ended up being a very long description of how much I suck at naming things, and the consequences that have stuck with me to today. But I suppose that there are worse names than plasmaball3000… take cottoncandy2012 for instance, or bradsgrrl. I consider myself lucky.

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OMG OMG OMG! ROTFL, this is so cool, it like the first post of 2005, man!

I hate traveling. Never travel on Christmas, to a busy airport (Minneapolis/Saint Paul), directly in the aftermath of random snowstroms in the south (how does the gulf coast of Texas get a foot of snow, while Virginia’s boarding up their houses for the 50 degree weather?), that have caused massive delays and backups of people that keep missing their flights. Trust me, if everything else I’ve ever said was crap (which is was, by the way), just listen to me now. Oh, here comes the sob story:

I’m up at five, I got four hours of sleep (don’t ask), and so by the time I’ve showered, brushed my teeth, and done all of the other stuff you can kill yourself doing in the morning because your so tired, I’m wide awake. Unfortunately, the crew “needed a rest”, so they push back our flight 6 hours until 2:10 PM. So, after using my cats as pillows for the next several hours, we get to the airport.

The bag checkers were, I’m sorry to say, less speedy than the quick brown fox that jumped over the lazy dog. We stood in line for no less than an hour, or more accurately, my sister and I sat down and read while our parents stood in line for an hour, and our plane - leaving early for some reason - missed us by a few minutes. The next flight was in two hours.

So zip ahead a few hours of me staring blankly ahead in the terminal, possible scaring a few passers-by, we get on the plane. Assuming you’ve actually read this far into my boring recount of an essentially boring period of time, I’d like to say this to you - what an incredibly stupid waste of your time! But anyway, does anyone know that horrible taste you always get in your mouth on an airplane? It’s kind of like when you wake up and your mouth has been shut and breeding germs for hours. I can’t tell if this taste is from not talking, the drinks they serve, or the air in the cabin that must have been circulated countless times through the lungs of people you don’t even want to think about on an airplane.

It’s interesting to watch people talk to each other on airplanes. You can watch them talk about their town, school, kids, anything that everyone else they know has either heard or would be to bored listening to them to care. But on an airplane, you have nothing better to do (hey, I’m writing crap about people on airplanes on an airplane, does that tell you anything?). You can see them pretending to listen, but really thinking about if they left the oven on before they left, just waiting for their five minutes in which they’re the life of the party and everyone else in their entire two-seat row wants to listen to them.

Oh, and that thing about Jon Voight I said before I left. You see, he was in National Treasure, acting as the father of a person that spends the movie running around, searching for something related to the Free Masons. But he also played a character in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, as a father of someone that spent the movie running around, searching for something related to the Illuminati (aka, Free Masons). Well, I’m off to procrastinate finishing my science fair board,

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