I updated the site today and added these two rants as well as trying to bring my “Friends:” series up to date. Check them out! Post comments if you want to. I do have a hit counter, so I know people visit, but it’s nice to recieve feedback once in a while!

Bye again!

Just because I say that you’re a distant friend doesn’t mean you’re not a friend. It’s just that I seem to have two or three “tiers” of friends, for lack of a better term. To crudely break up my friends into categories, the way I can roughly evaluate how “close” my friends are would be by the following criteriea: (1) who I speak to on a daily basis, (2) who I hang out with when possible (be it by my own choosing, or by the fact that they were there anyway…), and (3) who I usually talk to the most when I’m out of school.

The number of “criteria” met essentially categoriezes my friends. My close friends have all three; my friends / acquaintances meet two of the three; my “I know you but not really” friends usually only fit one. It doesn’t mean I hate you or anything, it’s just that’s how the cards fell out. For one reason or another, these are how things are, in my eyes.

The opinions are, of course, subject to change. I just decided to post this, as to prevent anyone from taking offense at their metion in the Friends section. And if you’re not there, don’t think that you’re not my friend. It is in no way an exhaustive list of my friends. I simply don’t have enough time to update it to add everyone. Although I’ll try to add friends upon occasion (as the list needs extensive work!), omission doesn’t indicate anything. It just means I haven’t had enough time to put you in there!

Take no offense… I hope everyone understands. Bye!

Post-mortem

In moving to this new blog, I can’t create a “friends” section like I had before, so those posts will merely be migrated over with a “Friends:” prefix to make them easy to distinguish from regular rants and posts.

Also another person we call by her nickname; she is really “Rebecca,” but somehow the “Re” got dropped… Now, she is always at the movies with Alison, Caitlin and Liz. But she never says anything. At the movies or at school. … EVER … Very smart, but very quiet.

Yet another band geek that lives in the general North Raleigh vicinity, although I think she lives further off towards Leesville than anyone else does. She is the other marching band geek that’s not in a daytime band (I refuse to call them sit-down bands, as that’s a rather … dumb … name; it sounds childish).

Properly named Elizabeth, everyone calls her Liz. So do I. A friend of Caitlin and Alison, being how I know her, besides the fact that she is a band geek. (Almost a prerequisite for being my friend; this rule has very few exceptions. I don’t “enforce” it, but that’s just how my friends have panned out.)

Has done marching band every year, I believe, but I don’t think she’s in band this year. I might be wrong; I don’t keep track of some people’s schedules. An interesting note, however, is that past going to the movies, my friends rarely ever go to parties. And when we do, it’s almost always at her house, since she’s the only one who actually takes time to organize one. I feel bad for always having parties there, but everyone else is so darn lazy (including myself)! Basically, another fellow “North Raleigh Band Geek.”

I don’t even know if I’m spelling the name right! She and Alison are just about inseparable, so where you find one you find the other. Likewise, I met her through Andy, and/or the carpool (to the best of my knowledge). My memory is also unclear. I only know the “gory details,” as it were, for my closer friends.

Although she also shows up at the movies, she is more aptly described as an acquaintance. Insofar as I don’t have much to say to her on any given day, if I say anything at all. But I also say very little, so my silence doesn’t necessarily mean much. As a striking pattern, she is also a (marching) band geek, as most of my friends are.

Yeah. I guess you could call us friends, although it’s usually limited to “hi.” Which is the case for several reasons. I met her (along with several other people) through Andy, since they all live in the same general area of North Raleigh (when I moved here further north, several years ago). So usually I only see her while I’m with other friends.

I can’t remember precisely when we met or whatnot. It was probably during middle school, but my memory is clouded. I know we all (Andy, Caitlin, Alison, Leslie and I) carpooled home from Marching Band last year, as I recall. Anymore, she is there along with others whenever we go to the movies (which is not very often). Of course she’s a band geek. Has a weblog too, but I can’t remember where it is. I’ll post a link to that when I find one.

Yes this is an obvious reference to Monty Python. I’m trying to update this site on a more regular basis, because it seems to be dying (the average hits-per-day is going down, which is the best indicator that I have…). And I’ll try to put more in it, and so follows my day.

School… Yeah, that was OK. I finished the webassign in APES, we went over AP prompts in Calculus (which is starting to get extremely old, but I suppose it’s a necessary evil…). History was more notes, but it involved FDR, so it was… interesting, to say the least (Ria and Jenny always make political discussions interesting…). Went to the park for lunch, as usual; the weather was absolutely beautiful (and still is as I write this, since my window is still open). Wind Ensemble was a flop; a lot of people didn’t show up and Hunter did a dispropotionate amount of talking (though, my memory is foggy), but we rehearsed Gavorkna! I’ve gotten to play it both times we’ve performed it (Syphonic band 2 years ago, and Wind Ensemble this year!). German was also a flop, since we covered the minute details of the stuff for the incoming exchange students. That will be intereseting, and I’ll post about them later. English was, yet again, a flop—IB students finished their tapes (I did mine in the fall, so I just got to listen today). Nearly put me to sleep. But I resisted the temptation.

Pit was interesting. Not that I played much, as we didn’t work on the section(s) in which I play more frequently. Crap; I need to get drinks for tomorrow. sigh But otherwise pit was OK. I still suck at my part. Not that it’s unusual for me to have that problem, but I digress.

Got the money for AP exams today, so I’ll turn that in tomorrow morning. Then we went out to dinner. Not much to be said there. So I got home at about 7:45, and I’m just now getting motivated to work on whatever I must.

Whew! More later, folks! Bye!

So last night I did very little reading in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass… Instead, I decided to watch the Academy Awards. I had some sort of misconcieved notion that Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers might actually win something decent. But of course, the Academy is big on movies that are adaptations. Oh wait, The Two Towers is an adaptation. Let me rephrase that. The Academy loves adapatations that take very little interpretive skill, such as interpreting a musical, for which all the stage directions and such are already set. Something like adapting a book into a movie obviously takes less skill. Umm right. The Two Towers so got gyped. But I’ll stop ranting about that…

Once the awards were done, I came back upstairs and got all homework-conscious at the end of break. A rotten way to end, if you ask me. I decided to do some more reading in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and I did—albeit until 1:40 in the morning.

Since I didn’t have time for a shower last night (because I was watching the Academy Awards, albeit for no good reason as things turned out), I had to get up at 5:20 this morning to do that. I also had to shave, since I’d been too lazy to do that over the weekend.

So my point is: I GOT WAY TO LITTLE SLEEP LAST NIGHT. (This is such the case, that I’m rather bleary-eyed at the moment) And not only that, I’m now sleep deprived for no good reason.

Okay, this is a can of worms that I probably shouldn’t open… I’m opening it anyways. Worms are a part of the world, no matter how much we may (or may not) dislike them. I tend to be a rather opinionated person, to say the least. Well; I’ve decided to share these particular opinions with the world. I’m entitled to my opinion, no matter what.

I’ll post the content as updates, for two reasons: It keeps the main page shorter, and my opinions may shift later, at which point I’ll post another update. Anyways… less technical jargon—more opinion sharing…

Post-mortem

It seems I never got around to updating this section, though if you know me, I’ve probably told you more than once how I was displeased with the rationale and methods that were used to justify the United States’ pre-emptive strike against Iraq. I’ll say nothing more, and put this often-inflammatory issue to rest.

So I don’t have any plans over break. Scratch that; I’ve got work to do, but I’ve been successful (so far) in not doing any of it. If I can kick myself into doing the work early this week, I’ll be freed up for the rest of the week, hence reducing the amount of stress, because I’ve set some by-the-end-of-spring-break deadlines that I have to meet (pertaining to this work).

We had mentioned going bike riding somewhere, but I’m not sure if and/or when that will pan out, although it sounds like a really neat idea.

OK, I’m off for now, because I’m trying to work on my Extended Essay (has to be done by the end of break), but I’ll probably be posting more later. Until then, bye!

Update

So I spent today running a massive software upgrade on the server… everything seems to have gone well, but if you encounter any problems, please let me know. But aside from that, not much has happened to day, which is good and bad. Good, because I’ve had another low-stress day, but bad, because I’ll have to do my work later on, which means more stress then. Oh well.

That’s about it for today. Ciao.

Update, part two

I finished my Extended Essay! Hurrah! One less thing to worry about; now I must move on to the other big projects facing me, such as my Eagle project…

Well I’ll let the story speak for itself. We managed to get talking about gas milage on cars anymore and the following two lines came about…

**Luke:** We went 300 miles without having to fill up.

**Me:** So how far did you go?

What I really meant was something along the lines of “how much gas did it take,” but that’s not how it came out—it was still really funny though. The sad part is that I got 6 hours of sleep last night…

This deserved an article all to itself, so I’ll post sometime later about my day, as I’ve neglected to do for quite a while.

Well since my last entry was entitled burnout, I decided to use some reference to what burning yields—smoke. It really doesn’t have any meaning that pertains to this article. Anyway, my weekend’s gone rather smoothly. I had to get up and go to pit Saturday morning. Then I got lunch and headed over to D.H. Hill to finish my Historiography. Which I still haven’t finished. I have my last source, but just need to do the citation/annotation for it and then write my evaluation. A rather quick procedure if you ask me.

So that’s my school update for the weekend. Otherwise, I haven’t gotten much done. We went to the NC Symphony’s concert on Friday, which featured music from various movies and such. I really enjoyed it. But that’s about it for this weekend. I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to manage my pit music, but that’s something I’ll figure out tomorrow.

That’s it for today!