Apparently a month ago, Incubus (blake's favorite band) went into group band therapy for the second time. This means that they've been fighting amongst themselves, which is a very bad thing as it produces bad music and breakups.

Don't get me wrong; this is nothing new for the band. Before Make Yourself (the album with Drive) came out, they threw out their old DJ since he was being mean to everyone else. But this one really could be bad news since they're famous and all that crap. The cynic in everyone says the whole band's probably sick of the Brandon-Boyd-as-teen-idol junk.

I just hope he doesn't disappear as my musical idol.

At last! The new look is online. Many thanks to Alejandro the messican sex god for all his artistic help.

So much has happened. School started the day after the last update. Here's my breakdown of the day, for all 2.4 of you who have been wondering:

AP Physics to start the day - how can you go wrong with a teacher named Jim Beam?
AP Lit - ugh. I hate this class after a mere 4 days. Tollison is still sitting on the fence between really hard (a tolerable quality) and really fucking retarded (not so tolerable).
Tutorial - I have this new guy Metcalf as an advisor (he's the freshman history teacher) and he's damn cool. And so is his room, in terms of temperature. Like, 30 degrees max.
Study hall - wahoo! not bad timing, always something to get done right around 3rd period.
Honors Economics - So this new guy Weinburgh isn't bad. Has high expectations but makes for very interesting discussion. My advice to anyone in his class: act like you're a hard-working person.
Lunch - Easily the worst time of the day. My theory was right: Oakies still suck, by and large. Luckily I have friends to bring me lunch every now and again.
AP Spanish - The perfect post-lunch zone-out class. Andersen's a great guy, and thankfully his class is easy no matter how little attention I pay.
AP Calculus BC - Best class ever. An entire year in this class is the reward for surviving calc AB. Lighter workload and a jovial atmosphere are home to a mere 4 students and many many jokes at the expense of Joanne.
Honors Choir - What do I have to say? It's choir. Same as it's always been and always will be. But that's not a bad thing, nor is being a senior in choir. Since Claire's a senior now too, all these cute little senior perks seem to be popping up out of thin air. It's quite nice.

Oh! And there's a new feature here. The longer link at the top is a link to short stories written by moi, such as ones that don't get published in certain Oakridge literary publications. Right now there's just a placeholder story in place to keep things from breaking, but it will soon be replaced with an actual, functioning, interesting story. I promise.

So I'm home from Mesquite, my vacation for the year. Website is back up and running, and summer's over. Back to the mundane, selfish, mean, conformist Oakridge people and their recycled jokes. To anyone who goes to Oakridge, with 4 exceptions, you suck (you know who you are, and if you're questionable about it then you're probably not one of the 4; and no, I won't tell you which you are).

Summer in review:
-Wolfenstein activity came to a halt (the team that I currently call home, silent service, takes the summer off in most cases)
-Started to mesh with the amigos.
-Massive amounts of work that inspired me to take a risk someday.
-Picked up Super Smash Bros. and somehow, the amigos got just as good at it as I did.
-Visited UT and made up my mind about college. Still looking for backups.
-Met that one chick, whatever her name is.
-Made a 70% on that stupid Faulkner book that may as well have been written in pig latin.

So the inventor of the frisbee died. Strangely, he wants his ashes put into Frisbees. But, it's the passion for those silly little discs that make him admirable:

"We used to say that Frisbee is really a religion -- 'Frisbyterians,' we'd call ourselves," he said. "When we die, we don't go to purgatory. We just land up on the roof and lay there."

So I went on a date Friday night. I feel bad for simplifying a whole evening with Stephanie to a mere eight words, since the whole time was absolutely wonderful. In fact, up to a certain point, I felt like I could describe it as "magical." Then religion came into play.

I'm not upset about the fact that she's a Catholic. And she's not upset about the fact that I'm agnostic. It was, instead, one of those tiny, insignificant details that made me wonder if I truly am an optimist.

Anyway, this date was just plain lovely. First came dinner at the Japanese sushi bar / hibachi place in downtown FW. She had never had Japanese, and thus had never seen the guy cook right in front of her. A dish of fried rice and sesame chicken, splashed with a big fire, left us both happy and ready to take a risk.

The risk was in the form of Four Day Weekend, a 5-man improv troupe where Caravan of Dreams used to exist. The risk comes in at the door, where it's really 18 and over. So we pick up our tickets (while I had been shaking with nervousness in the line) and walk straight in. The show turned out to be hilarious - I couldn't stop merrily telling the poor girl sitting next to me how elated I was to have gotten in the door.

An hour and a half later, we're at the Coffee Haus just across the street, watching people over an Italian soda and an Eskimocha and watching kids in riced-out cars circle around the block trying to pick up coffee-house chicks.

The whole thing went perfectly. On the way back to my car (parked in the Sundance garage on the north side of downtown), Steph turned to me and said "you did good." My heart sank, and looking into her eyes I felt like I was a puppy. We reach my car, and I've been struck down by the fella upstairs: my tire's flat.

I can't do much car maintenance, but I can figure my way through changing a flat. So I pull out all the necessary tools from the trunk, jack up the car, and take the little bolts off the wheel. As I'm pulling the tire off, the jack falls over, and the car no longer has a wheel on it as it falls to the ground, right on the axle. I wanted to start to cry, and promptly jump off the garage from the nearest window possible. An old (40) woman, with 3 kids, parked on the next row over and offered to help. They were of little avail, so I handed Stephanie my cell phone and told her to get a ride home.

She refused to leave.

Shortly thereafter, a patrolling Bass cop appeared behind me. I was saved when he called over the radio for a guy to bring up one of those giant hydraulic professional-grade jacks. The guy appeared in 10 minutes, and the cop duo told us to stand aside (which I happily did) and the tire was changed very quickly. With my new tire on, the cops began to leave, and one turned to me and said "You're lucky you weren't under that car. Anything under there would have been crushed."

And the guy was right. Luckily, I think I was saved by reflexes: when things got bad, I pulled away from that car as quickly as humanly possible. Luckily, my car turned out fine, body damage notwithstanding. Its little fall didn't hurt anything, and we got home safely. I was silent for several minutes, still trying to get over the stress that just about killed me. Stephanie broke the ice, tenderly pointing out that "it could have been a lot worse." I refused to accept it, for the date which had been magical a mere hour ago had turned into a massive stress-fest resulting in my own humiliation and complete freaking out. Coming onto I-30, I motioned back to downtown and said to Stephanie "See, that's the reason why I don't believe in God."

She replied, "That's why I do."

for the halo fans in the hizzy.

This should be the first post using the newly re-written backend. It should be within this week that I finally get the new version online. Yay!

i'm on the old design, wtf?

i got tired of seeing a single green page. so sue me.

i'm actually spending the current moment working on a new version, wahoo.

So immediately after the four-day TCU experience (see below), I went off to Austin for the Honors Colloquium, where some 600 seniors such as myself were fed massive amounts of UT propaganda, some cool classes, and treated to the Swank� cookings of the Jester Center cafeteria, splashed with a gourmet luncheon served up by the School of Liberal Arts.

Here's the full report, blow-by-blow (it's a boxing term, you sick freak):

Day 1. Drive to Austin. Takes approximately 4 hours since I made a couple of stops while still in town up here and stopped again in Waco to satisfy the little voice telling me that a Spicy Chicken Sandwich is a very good idea. Arrive in Austin, successfully park the car and wander on into Jester, my (sad) new home for two whole nights. I hop on the elevator, head up to the tenth floor, now with a travel bag plus another bag full of freebies (UT notepad/pen, t-shirt), and toss everything down on the bed without bags on it.

My 'cohort' was the group of people who I hung out with most of the time. Consisted of about 20 people plus 3 teachers and 4 students as counselors. A clique quickly formed: myself, Ryan, two girls who were roomies named Natalie and Jane, a crazy guy named Stephen, and one counselor, a fourth-year student named Milan (but pronounced the idiot way: Millen). We all had lunches together and stuff like that.

Night 1 consisted of a massive presentation on biomedical engineering - the stuff you hear about on the news: cloning, stem cell research, 'growing' body parts, etc. Thoroughly boring, except for the strange part where 600 high school seniors giggled at the use of the word 'foreskin.'

Day 2. Breakfast in Jester was surprisingly tasty, thanks to a handful of glazed doughnuts. Had two classes in the morning, the first an astronomy lecture on the beginning of the universe. Basically, it's UT's opinion that the Big Bang theory is true, and the guy spent an hour and a half rationalizing it. Consider the following:

Scientists have estimated the universe to be approximately 13 billion years old. There is stuff out there that's 13 billion light years away, so it's taken the entire 13 billion years for the light that was there when the universe was first formed to reach us just now. So, when we look at that stuff through a telescope, we're essentially looking back in time, and the result for about the first 30,000 years is blinding to telescopes, comparable to looking at the sun through a pair of binoculars.

Class 2 was a panel (a lecture given by 4 profs instead of 1) about the effects of technology. A UT biology professor claims that by 2100, we'll have cured most forms of cancer and aging will be reversed. So, the death rate will massively decline while the birthrate will continue to increase, leading to massive overpopulation which leads to war over natural resources. gg world.

Lunch with the College of Liberal Arts. Quite bad gourmet junk. Ran across campus to Jester, bought a Hot Pocket and ran upstairs to plug in my microwave and eat it, and came into class 3 just on time.

Class 3 was a small class (couldn't have been more than 20) on aggressive journalism. Was interested to hear the experiences of a guy who looked like George Carlin plus a few extra pounds and how he managed to find something out of what he thought was a bad story. For example, he was assigned a story on Christmas Eve where he was to write the heart-warming story of the day about a bunch of doctors working for free on Xmas Eve and Day, giving free healthcare to the poor. As he walked through the door, he spotted a hypodermic needle out of the corner of his eye. That lead turned out to be a false one, but some instances such as that exposed corruption in the US armed forces and the Austin city council. gg.

Class 4 was boring. You'd think 'why athletes choke' would be an interesting subject, but when you have a guy who's more of a sports fan than a sports psychologist, you wind up with a 5-minute lesson expanded to fit an hour. Interesting experiment, though:

In many colleges, freshmen are required to participate in a 3-hour psychology lab: in English, be guinea pigs for the graduate students. A sports psychology study tried to find the source of choking (that is, performing poorly under increased pressure). So, they got a bunch of freshmen who liked golf, and they all hit putts. They would hit the putts from different distances so that they all performed equally (making 7 of 10 putts consistently). The first part of the experiment simply said 'OK, you've hit 7 of 10 putts for a while now, go do it again.' And they did, averaging 7 and a half of 10. The process, up to this point, took 1.5 hours. They added pressure to the guinea pigs by saying 'OK, do it again, but this time if you sink 7 of 10, I'll double your credit and you're free to go.' They all hit either 4 or 5 of 10, even though they had *extra* incentive to succeed. Cool stuff.

Work is now done, so part 2 of the Jester experience comes soon.

So the uber-slowness continues. Basically for the next week, since there's downtime between projects, I'll be doing a big fat nothing since the stuff I had been working on all summer is pretty much done. So here I sit, collecting some 12 cents after tax for every minute I burn by performing some personal agenda, whether it's IM, sneakily checking my home email account, writing gaming articles, or surfing the journals of choice (emily, syed, tina, aroon).

I'd like to take this opportunity to give a huge shout-out to Oliver, who doesn't get nearly as much attention/props/free gifts as he deserves. His journal's boring, so it's not really indicative of what kind of a dude he is, and hence he isn't required reading. But he's very Swank�, regardless. Word up, white boy. Word.

TCU was boring as hell. I was expecting a very awkward situation with someone, who luckily wasn't even there. So four days of rehearsals with Col. Sanders were boring as hell, punctuated by the incoming crop of the talented Oakridge choir freshmen. There's a big group of 'em, which is good considering we lost a really good bunch of seniors last year. Good buncha kids, really. Being the only senior in the group was better than I expected, too. I enjoyed acting thoroughly grizzled, cynical, jaded, stuff like that.

Next post is the UT trip. The astute reader will notice that these posts are only about 15 minutes apart: I do this so that my login doesn't automatically time out (another bug I have to fix) before I hit the Submit button and I lose the story.

So work is uber-slow. Uber-slow meaning I don't expend any actual energy doing work, so I have the energy to use the shift key now. I haven't updated for several reasons:

1. I've wanted to redo this humble abode (which may well be done before school starts, if I can get my code right and get it hosted by my incredibly swank amigo synful).

2. Lack of time - between work and going out with amigos virtually every night, I'm left with no spare time to kill. I'm behind on my summer reading, which will be remedied by renting the 1969 movie version of The Reivers, since Faulkner doesn't write in the language we know as English.

3. A certain girl named Stephanie, who's very lovable and way the hell outta my league. When I was younger, a girl like her was beyond my absolute wildest dreams, and I say that with complete seriousness. But that's all I'll say on her, since lubby-dubby journals get boring/awkward really fast.