I’ve had a busy weekend. I’ve had lab write-ups, peving, and finishing Great Expectations, the period of little homework is finally over. Saturday was fun though - I went over to Dori’s house for the Seder. I was a bit surprised when I first went over though - I had put on some relatively nice clothes for the occasion, but all the kids were in t-shirts and the like. I got over it though, and besides, the food was worth anything. People say the French culinary arts some of the best known to man, but the Stern’s can definitely cook. Matzah ball soup, noodle pudding, chocolate covered matzah (ok, so that was packaged, but it was still excellent), and let’s not forget the chocolate mouse. I did have to answer a question when we were trying to find the afikomen though - “Why do you think God wants you to honor your mom and dad?”. I was having trouble thinking up an answer (not that I didn’t have answers), so I said, “Because they’re older and been through lots of things, like hair loss”. Unfortunately, Dori’s dad took that as a comment against him, so there were several jokes made later on about baldness in my family. Ah well, my answer passed the judge’s test.

But look, I have a webcam! Yes, after an hour of frustrated keyboard banging, I’ve finally finished setting up a webcam, which you can see at the bottom of the right sidebar. Heh, I’m watching myself right now. Does my hair really look that bad? Yikes. Anyway, I’ve got it set up to update every five minutes, so don’t keep refreshing the page every other second to see what I’m doing. Though, I suppose that would be a bit more scary than a waste of bandwidth. Oh yeah, and other people get to see me as well. Still more scary. Well, I’m putting my own embarrassment on the line for your viewing pleasure, so be grateful!

I just tried out TypePad on a free trial, and I must say I’m disappointed. HTML editing only with the most expensive plan. A site that is somewhat difficult to navigate, leaving you with no idea where to go. Even with the HTML editing, I couldn’t figure out how to include a picture on one of the sidebars. I picture! How hard should that be? You have no idea how much Blogger spoils us. Blogger gives us as much as some paying services do, and then some. So thank you, Blogger. Now I’m going to eat supper and pretend like I’m not receiving under the table payments from Google.

Arg, mile. Doom. Destruction. The end. That basically summarizes it. I ran, I hurt, and I huccuped. Yes, I hiccuped. After I finished the mile, I started to hiccup, and this wasn’t any ordinary hiccup. No, this made me hiccup every 10-15 seconds or so. For an hour and a half. It was fairly amusing during history though, when we were taking a test and every few seconds I would hiccup, hear Irene laughing, start laughing myself, and my hiccups proceeded to get high and squeaky. They stopped after school, but came back and stayed with me until I fell asleep. My diaphragm hurts.

I think our Theatre group is being way to harsh on our student director, Ali. Everyone is attacking him during rehearsal for having an idea for the play that is slightly different than the cast’s. Most people think that he doesn’t know how to do his job, but let me remind everyone that this is the first thing he’s directed, and it’s not as easy as Mr. Small makes it look. Also, don’t criticize someone’s directing ability before we’ve even gotten to freeblocking. Let him try his own thing first so we can all get some sort of feel as to how the play is going to turn out, and then give suggestions to the director, keeping in mind that there are more than one correct way to put on a play, and that it’s the director’s job to decide which way he wants to do it.

In closing, I just don’t know why we can’t all be a bit more like the Gilmore Girls. We need a lot more hugging, a bit more shrugging off our problems, and a whole lot more talking about our feeli… Ok, we need a whole lot more talking.

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I despise haircuts. You go in to get your hair cut, and the first thing they do is ask you how you want it cut. How are you supposed to respond to that? With a length of hair you want cut off? For me, I can’t remember the last time I had a haircut to visualize how long they cut it. So I end up stammering a few words in response, and they go about their business. They cut, and they cut, all the while making small talk about stupid things (the other person working there this time however wasn’t busy, and she knew Mr. Small, so that must have been the first time someone said something of moderate interest). But instead of cutting it a certain length and showing it to me to see if it’s the right length, they just cut off however much they think looks good, and forgets that you can always take more off, but once they’ve chopped, it’s gone. The hair cut style that appears to be “in” now surprised me. You see, great liberty was taken with my hair today. I think the style was probably called “Buzzcut - The Week After”. My hair hasn’t been this short since I moved to Virginia. I have a forehead?!

Well, I finally know what characters I have to play for the rest of the year. One’s a novice reporter after World War II, one is Norman - the business man who falls in love with Flora, and the last is a monkey (I won’t say anything else about that one). Unfortunately, the rehearsals for Arabian Nights are on Monday during lunch, so I’m going to miss basically every Young Liberals meeting to spend my lunch with Tim Longo (how ironic). I’m really looking forward to our 1 act in Intro though, despite there being tons of lines that are going to kill me with their horrid nature (”Hurrah!” and “Oh. *pause* Oh. (longer pause) Oh.” being my favorite).

We got to play with dry ice on Wednesday in Chemistry. I’ve been waiting for this ever since Amanda brought home a bag of dry ice last year (not that we got to, that was a rare case), and squished it with quarters and produced loud squeals. Plus, I got to hold it in my hands, and put it in coke and drank it - they won’t let you do that in school. Ha, well, tired after reading 60 pages of Great Expectations and peving two sections. Oh, and I get to run the mile tomorrow. How fun. And speaking of the Health/PE super ridiculous combo, my health teacher seems to be confused. One day she will comment on how all she cares about is that we make an effort. Yet we don’t get full credit on our fitness testing (which counts as a test grade) unless we pass the national level on everything. According to her, if you don’t do very well on any of the fitness tests, but try on each of them, you can’t get below a 50%. Wow, an F for trying. How kind.

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I can finally say with absolute certainty (I didn’t know exactly how long we had before) that there is less time in between now and the start of summer break than the length of summer break. That means I no longer have to think, “Yay, I only have to wait this long until summer, but if that time is so short that means summer will be short as well”. It’s a good thing too, because with spring break gone, there are no more breaks left to look forward to. Yeah, now I get to look forward to exams.

I am now extremely annoyed at the fact that we have about 10 pages of peving to do for every history class in the near future. I also hate wasps. And bees. I don’t really care which is which, they don’t sting. But wasps look meaner. I actually spent about half an hour yesterday hunting wasps to find their nest, not that at any point I got within 10 meters of any of them. On an even less pleasant note than that, my chemistry teacher called on me today! The nerve! I thought we had an unwritten deal - I get good grades in chemistry, and she pretends I’m not enrolled in her class. Ah, these young teachers; they don’t understand how things work!

Well, after two weeks of embarrassment during auditions, draft scares and stressful moments when I have to stay after school and have no way of delaying my parent’s arrival at school, Dessert Theatre auditions are finally over. The cast list was posted today - Tyler and I both got in. Of course, I don’t know anyone else in my scenes. It sucks that only 25 people got in, everyone that tried out on the days I did was hilarious. We’re also going to find out which 1 act plays we are in in Intro on wednesday - that’s going to be fun. I also like that they’re going to be our exams. Speaking of exams, I’m not sure if I can exempt certain ones or not. I’ve had quite a few absences this quarter, particularly in French and English (the exams I was planning on skipping).

How is it that I miss all the cool things that happen in Virginia? Naturally, Moby is in Ashland right now, and once again, I can’t attend the rare thing that happens in Virginia that is actually kind of cool. All I need now is for Miyazaki to visit Virginia and for me to be in summer PE or something (not that Miyazaki would come to Virginia as there isn’t any reason for him to do so). Oh, I saw The Ring 2 over break. I don’t know if I liked the original better or not, it was definitely more well done. It dealt with more than just the, “let’s show them scary pictures of Daveigh Chase and call it a day” in the first, which I found entertaining, but not on the level the sequel was. It was the same director who did the Japanese versions, and that was cool. It’s late now, and I have a terrifying test on Romeo and Juliet tomorrow that won’t be over for another 14 hours.

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Ah, April 1st. It’s kind of lost a lot of its appeal to me. The April Fool’s edition of the KTR came out, as well as CHS News Live (not that I can ever hear it, anyway), but they didn’t seem as funny as the ones I’ve heard about/read from previous years. Some websites have done a respectable job in putting out an April Fool’s joke. Google always comes up with a good one. I find it rather annoying the absolutely ridiculous ones, though. The UN shutting down the internet, or the EU banning Macs.

Thursday was the annual talent show at CHS. Again, funny - but could have been better. Obviously, I loved the interpretation on Tunak Tunak Tun, and I also enjoyed “A Whole New World” as sung by Jordan and Mark (in full costume, of course). I was a bit disappointed by the teacher video however. Not only could I not hear most of it (you would think that students would want to heat their teachers make fools of themselves on camera, not talk throughout the whole thing). Oh well.

Just when I thought that website design was the most time consuming and pointless process someone could go through, I discovered the art of being a transcriber (or transcriptionist, for those that like to make their titles as complicated and important sounding as possible). Some people do not have the opportunity to watch certain television shows, so they turn to the web for answers. If they can’t download episodes, the only option becomes transcripts. A transcript is of course simply a typed up version of everything that is said as well as the actions and surroundings. I began the process of transcribing certain shows several weeks ago, but it was only this weekend that I attempted a 45 minute show. The only part about this process that can get tedious is the sheer amount of time it takes. For a 45 minute show, it takes me 5-6 hours. Don’t ask me why someone would go through this, I can’t give you a straight answer. But I nevertheless enjoy the end result of the 34 page, 8172 word transcript that comes out of it all.

In closing, report cards (and grades, for that matter) are pointless, 7 year old laptops are cool, eye liner is evil, and I never want to type another word ever again.

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