School is beatin' up on me.

It isn't making me sink into a deep depression or start completely losing it, but it's making me physically dead. I sense a sick day coming around the corner. Oh wait. I have tests just about every day for the next three or four weeks. Guess that won't be happening. So anyway, now I can complain about my physical ailments. For the sake of most accurately recording my life, of course. It all started on Sunday, when I woke to find that my stomach was not going to cooperate with the rest of my body. Namely, it was not going to allow much room for movement. Or breathing. Or thinking functionally. I don't think God really likes it when you curse while begging for pain relief, but it hurt, darn it. I just love 'that' time of the month. Fortunately, my mother went to get me up for church around eight and found me paralyzed in my bed, trying to figure out how to breathe when my stomach was not allowing for any below neck movement and got me some Advil. Which relieved the pain in about ten minutes, as a nice dose of Advil is apt to do. But I was still tired so I opted out of church. Turns out that this is fortunate because I was laying there, thinking about how much I love Advil for a while. And then I decided to get up. When I did? Oh my God, my neck snapped in two or something, right then, and I fell back onto the bed, due to not being able to keep my head up. At this point, figuring my body was at war against me or something, I dragged myself across the room to the ever faithful Google and typed in my ailment, begging the internet for cures. I couldn't finishing reading them before needing to put my head down again, but I figured out that you're supposed to take some meds and heat it. Because I was alone in the house, I could not get into the meds. Well, mostly, it was because I couldn't walk. But also because I'm a rule follower and would never take medication with consulting my parents first, I guess. Heating it was also not an option because of the lack of mobility. So I lay on my bed, staring at my walls for a while until I figured it was maybe a good idea to at least try to do something about this situation. I shifted around until my neck stopped screaming with pain, and then I got up and held it that way. I then spent about forty minutes trying to do french homework, giving up and going back to bed, ripping the tags off of old tee shirts so I can wear them inside out, and listening to Heatmiser. To make a long, extremely boring story somewhat shorter, my parents got home, gave me medication, and then made me do the rest of my homework. My neck hurt a little for the rest of the day - and still does now - but it was much, much better. And then, when I woke up this morning, I found that I didn't have much of a voice. In fact, I had none. So I got to school, trying to convince myself that the voice would come eventually, and found that it did not. Still. Which meant I got to hoarsely whisper so that I could finish an english project with my friend until the voice made an appearance halfway through first block. And now I can't breathe through my nose and the voice comes and goes. What fun. After a short, mostly unscarring visit to the dentist today, I also have some gums that feel as though daggers have been plunged through them. Oh, and a lingering scar from gym class last week. Apparently, I do not 'bear crawl' properly. Oh, and also? Today when I was putting in my contact, it shattered in two. I yanked the bigger piece out before my eye died due to having plastic forced into it at five am, but the smaller one is quite possibly still lost somewhere in my eye. Which isn't good. My eye hurts, my parents made me take out my contacts this evening because it hurt, but I'm sort of worried it's just lost inside my head forever or something. So, tomorrow, I shall be more careful, I guess.

That was so much whining, I don't even know what to say about it. Oh well.

I went to the library on Sunday to finish an english project with my friends. On the way there, I kind of noticed that it's the first thing outside of school I've done with school friends since the sixth grade and wondered if this means that I'm a total loser or just way more reserved than I used to be. And even though it was a project and therefore they technically had to be there, I still count it as something outside of school. Mostly because we spent half of the time stalking some cashier at the McDonalds across the street. I don't have all that much trouble finding people to hang out with during school hours, but I don't understand how anyone can meet their best friend in school. I mean, I met mine on a video game forum, so maybe I shouldn't talk, but it seems sort of random. And I'm bad at getting attached to people: I'd have no reservations whatsoever about leaving my current school for a better situation, should one arise. Makes me feel like there's something abnormal about my level of teenagegirlness. But perhaps it's a dellusional projection on my part and I shouldn't worry.

Piano is so, so fun right now. I haven't gotten a new song assignment in about three weeks, but the Chopin prelude I'm playing right now is the best thing ever, so I don't mind. Plus, I'm still playing the Bach Prelude I've had for months now, and I can honestly say it's my favorite piano song, bar none. Even out of the Smashing Pumpkins and such that I've figured out. I've improved it a lot, so that my sixteenth notes are no longer completely random and my dynamics are... there. And I can go extremely fast, even if it usually ends up screwing up at the end. It feels odd to play really fast, you don't think about what you're doing, your fingers just kind of know what to do and you can listen. Worth two and a half months or work or whatever I've put into this thing. My lessons have been moved to Thursdays, to fit my sister's gymnastics schedule. But that's fine with me because I'm not totally ready anyway.

Can't think of anything else I feel like informing the world of at this time.

Oh wait, yes I can. My mother's friend's mother - I know that's hard to follow - is an author, which is always striking to me because I've never even been close to knowing one before, and somehow, my mother set things up so she's reading my novel and giving me feedback, and I sent her the prologue and first three chapters on Sunday, even though I'm not totally done editing them. She hasn't replied yet, as far as I know. But I really, really hope that she doesn't tell me the idea has no potential, or I can't write at all, or give me some meaningless compliment because I vaguely know her, so she has to. That'd make the whole endeavour worthless.

Music this week has been Heatmiser, who is the coolest band ever, a little bit of Jawbreaker, Karmafish and Fragile New Virus, who are both unsigned yet amazing bands I found off of this new website called Jamendo or something, Veruca Salt (excessively loud, on the bus, of course), Smashing Pumpkins, Toadies, Babes in Toyland, The Wipers, Hazel, who are insanely cool, Heavens To Betsey, which continues my hero worship for Carrie Brownstein, Frente!, and a few songs by this band called Hot Water Music. Not very much stuff, actually. I've mostly been exploring a few new bands, feeding addictions to old ones. Don't know what to comment on, besides that my father is now a Smashing Pumpkins fan. Like, enough that he deleted his trance strip club stuff to put Machina on his little MP3 player. I don't know whether to be impressed with my own brainwashing abilities or saddened by the amount of music my father and I are starting to have in common. This kid I know's asssessment of the stuff on my iPod after he looked at it, today? "Wow, you have a lot of weird stuff on here". I didn't really know what to say to that, and since I have about four versions of 'Coconut Mall', I said nothing.

School year is movin' along.

It is. The year is almost an eighth of the way over, now! Interims and all that. I've already rambled to everyone about my unexplainably good grades, but I've been posting 'em since I barely bailed myself out of Algebra last spring, so I shall continue the tradition. I don't have numbers for these grades because our interims only say letters, but that's okay.

English - A.
History - A.
Journalism - A.
Geometry - A. (I happen to know that I have a 99 percent in there because my teacher sent home more detailed interims by way of email. Me. Math. Ninety nine. Makes no sense, but I love it.)
French - A.
Biology - A- (Seriously?! I hate my teacher. I hated her before this, but I hate her more now.)
Gym - A.

So. Basically everything is fine, my parents aren't giving me any worried looks or whining about me slacking off. Which makes sense because I've been spending about five hours a day studying, doing homework, that sort of thing. I desperately want A's so that I can go to school in Washington when I graduate. If I don't get A's, it shall not happen, so therefore, I must get A's. It's a conditional statement thing! Sorta. My biology grade should be an A too. It would be an A if my teacher weren't a bitter old hag who takes out her passive agressive fury on a bunch of innocent freshmen every day. She gave me a C on this science fair packet because I 'didn't put metric units'. Yeah, um, I was listing the plants I intended to use. Can't really put units on that. Oh well, at least I'm not failing, even though I might not have anything close to an A after the unit test we just took. I studied so much for it, but macromolecules and atoms - which I'm learning for the second time, they still don't go into my head - do not stick for me. I'm definitely not a science person.

Enough about that, though. I don't really want to cultivate extreme hatred against a teacher the way I did against my english teacher last year. Too much work.

Last week, my mother, of all people, dragged me into getting a Facebook. For a long, long time, I was vehemently opposed to even thinking about it, but the ten demands a day of, 'do you have a Facebook yet?!' finally made me crack, and when I was weakened by... well, tiredness and stayed home from school last Friday, my mother almost singlehandedly created an account for me and promptly added herself to my friends list. I sort of got addicted for a couple of days, but it got old when I figured out that my friends don't actually have anything to say but that they found a pink cow in Farmville or whatever, and that they're bored. So spending hours a day on there isn't worth it, unless I'm attempting to stalk someone, which makes me feel stalkerish, so I had to stop that too. I wasn't successful, by the way. Searching through lists of eight hundred people has no effect. I hate that profiles are hidden. Makes it so much harder to do any proper stalking. That and I never learn people's last names. So I can't find the friends who actually ask me to find them on there, let alone people I spend time searching for even though I'd never friend them, due to me being me.

My father is a closet The Birthday Massacre fanboy. Actually, he's not really the closet part. Ever since I forced him to listen to my copy of 'Violet', he's been obsessed. He even tuned his keyboard to play one of their songs. We've listened to Violet in the car at least five times now, and he cranks it up louder than anything else he plays. So I ordered the 'Looking Glass' EP for him because his birthday is soonish and I had spare cash and I'm pretty sure he'll lemme listen to it. I love it when I've managed to brainwash my father into something. It's amusing, his ranting and raving about how insanely murderous their lyrics are becomes a sort of manifesto to their greatness halfway through. I don't love that many industrial bands, but they are great, yes.

This is short, but that's okay. Don't have much else to report in life, really.

Music lately has been much Green River. I ordered their album last week, along with Love Battery's Dayglo. Oh my goodness, Dayglo is an extremely amazing album, go out and buy it right now. Sleater Kinney too, I'm really liking One Beat right now. A little bit of Metric, and a couple of other obscure indie groups that my friend is brainwashing me daily to like, Smashing Pumpkins during lunch, which annoys my friends to no end because I space out to it and stop talking, L7 on the bus, Veruca Salt, some 10 Minute Warning. Mostly Love Battery. My devotion to this band goes to insane degrees, or so it would seem. I want to write a fan letter to Ron Nine, begging him to drag his band over here so they can play a show for me and the seven other Love Battery fans who probably live in Virginia. It'd be worth it for them, right?

That's about all, night for now.