I don't really have a good excuse for not posting.

I don't. So I won't start with an excuse. It's been a little more than two weeks since I've posted, I think? And not even one little survey or post telling the world how I am. Which is fine, I guess, lots of other people do it but I like to try and post regularly. So now I'm posting and making it somewhat better. I wish I could say that summer's been so chaotic, I just haven't found time, but I've had time. I've just spent it occupying myself other ways. Want to hear about 'em? You know you do.

Firstly, I've been playing more guitar. I'm starting to get the skin shredded off the tops of my fingers again, which is cool, even though it hurts. I think I posted about this earlier, maybe, but I've been learning riffs and simple solos, and messing around with power chords, and it's all very fun. Because I'm not taking lessons, I can just let myself do whatever and not worry about learning specific things for the next week. I've learned all of L7's 'One More Thing' and Elastica's 'Blue', which is really easy, and most of Alice in Chains' 'Got Me Wrong' now. And Nirvana's 'Downer'. I want to learn some Smashing Pumpkins stuff, but Billy's insane at guitar, and I'm too lazy to deal with all of the things he does, so I had to put that aside for a while.

I've been playing piano too. I didn't have a lesson for about three weeks because we were both busy, and by then I'd made enough progress to get me ahead to the bridge of 'Psycho', which took forever. I could tell she wasn't sure that I was actually ready to move on, but was sick of making me play the same thing over and over. I don't know why I'm fine with classical stuff that is twice as hard as pop, but stumble over really easy stuff like this. It's annoying. I also got a new song assignment - Bach's Prelude Two in what I think is A minor, but I could be wrong. It's beautiful, if I get good at it, I might upload it to Youtube like I did with Movement One of Sonatina, but it's really hard. Well, not for someone who knows what they're doing, but for me. Especially since I've only had five days to practice this week, and one of them was sort of shortened. Thank God I still have today and tomorrow, I hate disappointing her and I still have no clue what I'm meant to be doing on Psycho, I only have about half of the right hand figured out on Prelude, and so... I have a lot to do.

Lastly, with the exception of hanging out with my internet friends, 'cause of course I'd be doing that, I've been writing again. For the first time in more than a year, excluding school assignments, it hasn't been fanfiction. I started a new novel, and it's at about twenty seven thousand words right now. I want to make it about fifty thousand at a minimum, but I guess I'll be done whenever the story line's finished. And then I can edit to make it longer. So much fun. My story doesn't... really... make sense, so I doubt it could go much of anywhere, but I'm having fun writing it and I've made almost ten thousand words in a day with it, so it's cool to have done that. I think that writing it has probably been the biggest cause in the random death of my blog, but oh well. I'm blogging now, right? And I intend to do at least three chapters today, even if they're not good chapters because I want to finish this whole thing by the time I leave for New Hampshire in a couple of weeks.

Oh. I almost forgot to mention this. I met my best friend. For the first time. In New Jersey (where, oddly, I came out of unscathed). It was pretty darn cool, to be able to hang out with someone who I've only talked to over the phone and over the internet before. I had to beg for it, because my father was really not too happy with the whole concept, but then she wasn't an old man, which meant he could go buy some cables at Game Stop and quit panicking, for the time being. We hung out at a mall for an hour or something, and then we (we being my father, brother and I) had to go. We saw my father's hometown, and this balloon festival thing where a disco band from the nineteen seventies were performing. And then we went to Great Adventure. We also saw Rutgers University, which is where my father went, and I've decided I am definitely not going there. Not only because it's in, well, New Jersey, but because it's huge. I can't handle the idea of taking a bus to get to each class, or wandering around miles and miles of paths. I have this little problem where I get really lost all of the time.

We went to PA over the weekend to see my grandmother, who actually lives in New York. I liked the city, even though my mother was afraid of it for some reason. There were so many hipsters, and if you know me, then you probably know how fascinating I find hipsters to be. I had a good time staking them out and envying their clothes. We went and did some historical things, and then we said goodbye to her and drove home. My favorite part of this vacation was probably, since I have had all interest in American history drained out of me by way of living near DC and having parents, was the mall that we stopped at on the way home. It was a gignatic, garish, tacky place that claimed to have more than two hundred stores. I loved it. I used nine dollars to buy Smashing Pumpkins' 'Machina and The Machines of God', which was one of their three albums that I didn't have yet. I still need Pisces Iscariot and Zeitgeist, but I'm not even sure I'll buy the latter because it's garbage compared to everything else they've put out and I already own most of its best songs. I also convinced my parents to buy me a leather jacket. I've sort of wanted one for more than a year, but yesterday I went on this obsessive quest through the whole mall and managed to find one that was frighteningly expensive to me, as I hate spending money, even when it's not mine, but was apparently pretty cheap for a jacket like that. It's brown, and it has some zippers, and I love it. Because buying stuff gives me a euphoria I don't think is normal.

Music as of late has been The Birthday Massacre and Marty Casey and Nirvana (mostly the Bleach stuff) and Steve Burns and Bikini Kill and Dinosaur Jr and L7 and Lily Allen and the Fastbacks and Love Battery. Oh, and speaking of Love Battery, I finally got around to putting Straight Freak Ticket, which I initially found to be subpar compared to their earlier stuff, on my iPod and oh my goodness, it's amazing. The melodies and such are more subtle, the guitar work is thinner, but it's so good. I can't stop listening to it. Every time I think that maybe I don't like Love Battery as much as I think that I do, they surprise me. I've also been listening to Smashing Pumpkins, of course. When I put up Machina, I'll have almost one hundred songs of their's on my iPod, which I think probably qualifies as obsessive since I, as I mentioned before, don't like spending my money on much of anything. I still need their singles and all that, but I guess I'll get around to that later.

That's all I have to say, for now.