I've gone and done it again.

It's another faceless night with another set of pointless tasks to complete. It's one arbitrary event after another, leading to a test or two tomorrow and a break starting Friday. It's not that spectacular a night; it's about as important as the last three months' worth of nights have been. In fact, if it hadn't been more than three months since my previous update, I probably wouldn't find reason enough to write something tonight.

And I weigh the possibilities: Spanish, or writing?

On the one hand, the quarter exam is tomorrow. In the long run, making a good grade, they say, will help me to be a better person or something. They say that on my (hypothetical) trip to Spain the choice of whether to use the subjunctive or indicitave form of the verb will be so incredibly important that, if I choose incorrectly, I may not be able to order my food and I could starve to death cold and alone. Also, it's a well known fact that, as I will encounter billions of Valencians who speak only Spanish, words like "valenciano" are muy importante, and should be incorporated into my everyday vocabulary at all costs.

On the other hand, screw Spanish.

That's my train of thought. I like my logic, as fallacious as it may seem to be.

So here I sit, in the prime of my youth, after a good two full paragraphs, and I've only justified my decision to update my website. Now, thanks to obligation or whatever, I feel I have to keep writing. So to fill space, I'll include some unreleased rarities and b-sides (or, some things I've written that never quite made it). Please note that these were left unfinished--and, in some cases, were intended to be spread out over several updates.

February 23, 2002

I don't know where I'm going with this.

There are so many things I could write about. And I'm willing to write. Why nothing comes to mind is beyond me.

I'm writing less and less. A couple of years ago, I could sit down and write about anything. I could write for hours at a time and not come to a blank. (Granted I typed a lot more slowly back then, so an hours' typing was probably less than I remember it being.) Then, as time went on, I wrote less and less. Now, as you can see by the date of my last update being January 1, unless there is some divine reason for me to produce something somewhat readable, I don't. It's not a lack of free time, it's not a lack of will, it's just that I don't write. I've attributed that all to a lack of things to write about in days and weeks and months past, but in reality I am seeing it's not true.

I turned sixteen a two weeks ago today. Every year, I tell my parents that I don't need anything for my birthday; after all, why should I get something just for living another year? It's nothing special; most people do it. Not living for another year--there's something worthy of recognition. But another one out of four score isn't that big an accomplishment.

Sometime in April, 2002

It was a long night.

It could have been the longest night of my life.

I wasn't awaiting the adventure that was to come in mere hours. I wasn't wondering what kinds of adventures and misadventures I would get in to in my escapades throughout Florida over the course of the next four days. Then, what was I doing awake at this time?

Homework. What else? The quarter officially ended at 2:27 Thursday afternoon, but I wasn't going to be there Thursday. I was going to be schmoozing with Congress in the capitol of my home state. Fun? Sure. Consequences? Of course. I had to do all of Thursday's work by Wednesday.

Because of this, it is hard to pinpoint exactly when Day One began. By definition, it began when the clock struck midnight at the end of Tuesday. However, as I didn't sleep, it could be argued that Day One began at 6:30 AM Tuesday morning. However, nothing interesting happened, so for my purposes Day One began at midnight.

I am never asleep by midnight. Usually by about 2:00 in the morning I am in bed, but never by midnight. Tonight was no exception. The night was full of geometry and Spanish and music theory and not much else. In the wee hours of the morning, there's nothing on TV to distract you from your work. The rest of the world (or at least the rest of your time zone) is asleep, and you know that's where you should be. This held over for myself as well as the rest of the world. I look at the clock. Almost three in the morning. I blink, and it's almost four. No worries, I'm not tired. I work throughout the night, watching as hours of my life go by. I will never get those hours back. It's sad.

Six O'clock in the morning is when I finished my work. Six O'clock. I hadn't slept, by this point, in 23 1/2 hours--but that was okay with me, thanks to the power of motivation and caffeine. Plus, you don't have to wake up in the morning if you weren't asleep to begin with. I just had to make it ... how many more hours? I didn't want to think. I wandered off into the darkness, got in my car, and rode to school.

Ahh, school. It was almost a welcome sight after staring at papers and textbooks for hours on end. I did not consider the fact that there would still be papers and textbooks to stare at for the rest of the day. I preferred not to consider that; I was happy.

Time went on. My schedule that day was so screwed up. I went to seventh period instead of fourth period, I went to second period instead of seventh period, and I skipped sixth period altogether. Even after rearranging my entire schedule that day, I still managed to forget to finish my Spanish exam. Drat. I didn't realize that, though, until after school at a Show Band rehearsal. It was about that time that my heart sank into my chest as I remembered that I forgot to remember to go back to Spanish and finish that exam. Too late now. Oh well, I tell myself. It'll work out later. Won't it?

3:00 in the afternoon. It was officially time to leave school, so of course, the buses weren't there yet. I stood there, among the rest of the 50-person group (out of whom I knew two) in the hot March weather of Florida. We all waited patiently, as the heat rose higher and higher. Ten minutes went by. Twenty. Half an hour. A full hour. Finally, the single charter bus pulled into the parking lot.

"Load up, we're getting out of here." That was the command. And so load up we did. Our bags were in the lower compartment of the bus and we claimed our seats. Twenty minutes later, the bus pulled out as we embarked on the five hour ride to Tallahassee, Florida.

The bus was crowded. It was full of weird people who I didn't know and didn't want to talk to. I managed to get a seat next to one of my two friends on the trip, so it wasn't a bad ride, just slightly uncomfortable. Me and my friend passed the time with jokes, cards, conceptualist art, and drinking games for a while. But how long can such things remain entertaining? (If you answered "Not very," you're correct. Give yourself a cookie.) Luckily, it was about that time that somebody decided we needed to put a movie on. So they did.

MOVIE REVIEW: Legally Blonde

I think I enjoyed this movie. If by "enjoyed" you mean "fell asleep during," of course. I think it had something to do with someone who wanted to be a lawyer and did stuff at Harvard or something, and it had some, like, actors and stuff in it. But I fell asleep at the beginning of it and woke up in time to see the climactic courtroom scene. Never has a scene been so dramatic as it was here. I would give this movie two thumbs way somewhere.

Right after the movie, an announcement was made that we had only one hour left to travel. I looked at the clock, which informed me that it is about 19:30. Good, we should get there in time to find something to eat and still get a good night's rest. It wasn't until the same announcement was made an hour later that I realized that they were lying. I hadn't eaten anything of any nutritional value for over twenty-four hours at this point. I had a Pillsbury Toaster Strudel for breakfast and a 100 Grand candy bar for lunch, and hadn't eaten since. We were supposed to stop to eat somewhere along the road--but we didn't, we were behind schedule. Bah. I was starving.

Then, somebody sitting near my friend and me noticed that we hadn't eaten anything the whole trip, and offered some Honey and Nut Chex Mix, popcorn, and cookies. My friend (who hadn't eaten in almost as long as me) and I accepted with a "Thank you" and ate. It wasn't much, it wasn't healthy, it could be argued that it wasn't even food, but it was something.

We arrived at our destination, the La Quita Inn, at about 21:45--9:45 PM.

May 18, 2002

I hate being bored. With being bored comes the urge to do something; usually for me, that urge is unsatisfyable, as nothing doable exists around the house, and ten months of the year it's too hot to go outside and find something to do. When it's not too hot, I have access to a local Burger King, an over-priced convenience store run by Oriental people (the Park Avenue Mart), and beautiful downtown. But what can you do in downtown, really? I mean, there's, what, antique shops and restaurants. It's really hard to enjoy places without money.

So what do I do? Why, I sit around the house, in the air conditioning, waiting for an inkling of something going on. Usually, my wait is in vain.

October 7, 2002

I can't remember the last time I updated the old Hole, but it must have beeen a while ago. Before school started, I do believe.

Now here I am, entering the ninth week of my schooling process. It is 2:34 on a Monday morning. There is a history essay worth 11.something percent of my grade due later on today that I really haven't started. There is a calculus review that I have been working on, on and off, for several hours, with no apparent progress. I'm sure there is some sort of chemistry or Spanish or English that I am forgetting about. 2:36 AM. I'm making a cup of cappuccino right now--from a mix, of course, no fancy gourmet crap for me--my second cup within an hour. Bags have long developed underneath each of my eyes, and often times I find that my eyes aren't opening up again after I blink.

My night has been full of coffee and cappuccino and chocolate and generic soda and generic diet soda and anything else I could find that had some sort of caffeine content. At this point, I can say, pretty much without doubt, that, no matter what I do, it's the caffiene talking.

2:40 AM. I just burned my tongue, and I am beginning to wonder why I didn't start my homework sooner. (The same process happens every night, basically.) I have to wake up (assuming I'm asleep) at about 6:00 to go to school. But that doesn't stop me from not doing my work. If there is one thing I can do, it's procrastinate.

2:42 AM. My tongue still hurts. I just realized my fingers were burned from picking up the coffee cup. I've got an empty stomach, and I'm feeling particularly teen-angsty at the moment. Perhaps I should start a band, write a song, speak for a generation, and kill myself.

2:44 AM. 2:45 AM. 2:46 AM. I'm wasting time. Nothing is being done. I have been hunched over the keyboard writing this update for the past few minutes and nothing has been written. It's just wasted time.

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