commotiocordis

So, when this theatre thing says "approximately 3000 words in length", am I going to get knocked off for it being much closer to 4000? Because this is even without a lot of the stuff that I had intended to put in there; it's maybe 2/3 of all the stuff I wrote over the semester and a half so far.

Edit: Well, damn. You know it's late when I was somehow thinking that I was only 100 words over, and not 1000. That is way too much. *starts trimming*

Ah, bugger it. I've been actually working on it for about 3 hours, more or less straight, so that's impressive. Because a lot of what I first wrote was rambly as I was writing about the rehearsal I was observing as it was going on and such, so I had to not only type a bazillion pages worth of crap but fix and rewrite it all too.

Now onto the math. Grr. As I don't know how I'm supposed to do this thing as it gives us a bunch of data and I know the type of equation I'm supposed to extrapolate (it's half-life of a malaria drug), but my calculator won't do that. So, umm, I'm just going with the best thing the calculator can give me. Because I still have a lot of history to learn (as he didn't frakking teach anything, as usual), a bio lab to finish, and a 3 paragraph english thing to write after that. The only one that actually might get done tonight (as it has to) being the math, however. Everything else can be done shittily in the morning or during the day.

Last day before spring break, though, yay for that. After this, it's mostly all review for finals and such in my harder classes, and all the major paper type things are done save one more in English, I think. Good.

Staying awake purely thanks to the power of Diet Dr. Pepper and slightly stale popcorn. (It shouldn't be stale as I only made it last night and this stuff lasts forever because it's made in the actual popcorn machine type thing, but it rained late last night and was horridly humid both inside and out and that killed it slightly. Still tastes good, just have to chew it longer.)

So. Was making cookies. I was like "Okay, let's give people cookies for Christmas." Yeah, no. They didn't cook right. Twas my fault, though, as they said 10-12 minutes and they weren't done then, so I put them back in for another 10 minutes and they still weren't done, so instead of going short increments, I stuck them in for another 10 and then they got too dry.

And then my dad was like "Oh, you can microwave them too." And he put one in, but we have two microwaves, see (no idea why) and he put it in the newer, stronger one, so it burned really badly. As in, that was almost 10 minutes ago and I can still barely breathe even though we've got the microwave sucker fan thing going that sucks the air to the outside.

Spanish final tomorrow. Not nearly as worried about that as I think I should be. Math is what's going to kick my ass. Haven't studied for any of them, though.

Still don't know when we're leaving for Texas. Looks like Saturday morning. My grandma wanted mum to just pull me out of Friday school and go down then, but I was like "Yeah, says right here that if you miss a final and don't have a note from the appropriate medical or legal authority, you get a zero. Not happening."
Though my last two finals are bio and chemistry; I only really need to put my name on the test of the former to get an A (because I've got like a 97% and this final combined with the midterm that I got a 98% on only make up 10%, meaning that even if I don't answer anything, I've got a 92%) and the teacher of the latter said that as long as we pass the final, it really doesn't count. So they're easy. But not missable.

Been reading fics to myself lately, which makes me smile. Especially because some of the really long ones are impossible to do in one take straight through so I'm merging bits together and the program I've got to do so (Sony's Acid Express) is pretty darn cool and I feel accomplished every time I make a seamless transition thing from one clip to another. The reads aren't great because I'm doing them while lying on my stomach on my bed into my Mp3 player and usually doing them in one take unless they're over 10 minutes or I majorly screw up. Like fumble on a page turn or something. That's happened a couple of times. It's like *pause, paper crinkle* and, next page. I tend to just restart from the beginning, though.
And has anyone else ever tried to do dialogue switching back and forth from a British accent to Southern US and back all quickly? That's hard. I can do both accents relatively well on their own, but trying to also man them up (because it was Reed and Trip from Enterprise, both men) and do them quickly was majorly challenging. Didn't sound terribly accurate.
Grr at me a bunch of times screwing up and deleting the wrong file from the player. I try to delete the one that I just recorded, but it doesn't always start on the delete menu with the most recent one, sometimes it goes from the one before or from the beginning and it doesn't tell me how many tracks are on there, so I just have to guess what number I was on and I've been wrong at least twice and deleted complete, good, one-take reads.

But if anyone else has/knows of places to get good fics in recognizable fandoms on audio, I'd like to see them. I've got a couple that I really want to listen to, but I'm forcing myself to save them for the trip, and that's only a few.

Random updates from the past week or so.

On Monday, I worked at the table at lunch for Transgender Day of Remembrance and got to use the line (in response to one of the principals who had gained a lot of weight really recently and Sadie thought might be pregnant) "rapidly expanding first trimester ass".

Monday night, up the entire time doing that paper so on Tuesday, I got home and pretty much just went to sleep and woke up in the evening (because I didn't have to go to school on Wednesday and so decided that I could sleep as long as I wanted).
Didn't remember that it was my brother's birthday (to make a long story short so this makes sense, he had a birth defect thingy -- you may remember my rant about the disgusting article that called the anencephalic baby an 'it' and "baby", quotes included, and talked about them parading him through the streets; this is why -- and died a few hours after he was born in 1999) on Tuesday until I dreamed while I was taking my extended afternoon nap/sleep thing about my mom crying. Totally forgot with the whole english paper thing that it was the 21st, and that was the only part of the dream that I remembered when I woke up, and I knew somehow that that was why she was crying. Yay, weird subconscious reminder dreams.

Did nothing the entire break. Got up at 4:30 on Friday to go down to Circuit City to try to get House season 1 (advertised for $13!) but parents didn't wake up until 7:30 and we didn't get there until 8:15 or so, so naturally none were left. Nor was the cheap hard drive just like my last one that I decided to get to use instead of the bulky one and only use the bulky one for backup and storing big movies and episodes and stuff. But the ad said season 1, and that was what was (supposedly, I heard from one person who had been there when it opened that there were only 3 copies) out there to be bought, but the picture on the ad was of season two. So I wanted them to give me both of them. Though they didn't have season one or season two at the first place, so I went to another store that had copies of season two left and made them give me it for the cheapy price. So yay for that.

And I knitted a whole lot. Made this bigish longish half a scarf, but I picked up a stitch somewhere and you didn't really notice that and I didn't notice that until I was quite past where I gained it (and still can't even see exactly what row I picked it up in) and so I just dropped one on the end, but that you can notice, so I'm kinda angered about that. You didn't notice my screwup, but the fixing of the screwup is obvious. I'm definitely going to go back and rip those last ones out until before I dropped it now so it's not so bad, because this thing is pretty long and I can't stand just wasting it.

And I finished Sula, at least. Haven't prepared for the presentation on the dumb Sula thing yet. Not doing that now.

So I did do some stuff over break. But none that actually helped me school-wise, save reading the book.

Finally went to the gym today after months of not going (I've gone maybe 4 times since school started at the end of August). I've gotten totally weak. Lost my mad sexy triceps. Though I was doing the tricep thing a different way (the right way, actually, now) so that would probably explain why I had more trouble than usual, because I was working a slightly different muscle when I was holding my arms a different way. But my mad sexy triceps are back, more or less, because I worked them enough that they're close to the old definition and should be back to normal if I keep going regularly. Watched a couple minutes of "The O'Reilly Factor", that was too sickening so I switched it to C-SPAN and watched some people from the US Institute of Peace talk about Syria/US relations without really saying anything which was only slightly less depressing, so then turned it to Fox, but "House vs. God" was on and that was the episode in which Wilson lost his awesome for sleeping with his patient, so I watched a few minutes of that until the first scene with Wilson and the patient and then just turned it off because we were leaving.

My dad called his mother today, found out that she had another stroke a week and a half ago and even though one of my dad's bum sisters (he and one brother out of 7 kids are the only ones that turned out any good, sad to say) is bumming off of my grandma and living with her on her social security and my grandfather's army money payment stuff, she didn't feel the need to let any of the rest of the family know that my grandma had a stroke. Whore. But I thought it was pretty cool that she figured out that she was having a stroke herself. She realized that she didn't know who the person (bum aunt) in the house was and figured out that she was having a stroke by herself (seeing as how aforementioned bum whore aunt probably couldn't figure it out if it was written on Grandma's shirt). Hospital people were mean to her again: they were making her lie down all the way back (which makes sense, to re-perfuse the brain after they gave her I assume TPA and probably warfarin) though she was telling them that the lying back was giving her an asthma attack. She was like "no, I can't breathe" and instead of figuring out "hey, she can't breathe, let's give her some medicine to fix her breathing and then ask her to lie down", they just strapped her down. And I assume, then treated her for the asthma attack. They did the same thing when she had colon surgery a couple of years back almost; the morphine made her nut out (like it did to her husband; there seems to be a genetic intolerance for morphine and such heavy duty pain killers on that side of the family) and they just figured she was senile and strapped her down and didn't talk to her normal doctor so he could say that she's not normally like this and something's wrong for a couple of days (because my dad and I had just left right before it kicked in) and only did she get fixed up when the non-bum brother of my dad came down there to visit and was all "WTF have you done to her?" But so she's lost pretty much the last 20 years, doesn't remember any of the grandkids (though for some reason my dad is lying to my brother and saying that now she does, because he'd get too upset if he thought that she still didn't, but the last thing I heard from my dad reporting it to my mom was that she still doesn't know), can't remember the date for longer than a few minutes (she asked my dad when they were on the phone several times), etc. But this is much improved from last week when it actually happened and she's bounced back from them before, so it might not be too bad. The only symptom she initially had was a swollen leg, meaning, I'm guessing, deep vein thrombosis from which a clot broke off and went to her brain. So she's got shunts in the leg now because there were still clots down there, but on the good side her heart is looking really good, better than it should be since she's had heart attacks and stuff.

Math teacher went in to labor reportedly last night, wasn't there today, yay for that. Not yay for the fact that the sub is bad (she just reads the steps in the example and doesn't give you time to think about what she's doing so you just copy it all down and try to figure it out later) and her voice is uber-grating.

So, yeah. To summarize, my math teacher being gone=good, sub sucking=bad, House season two for cheap=very good, weird somewhat predicting dreams=strange, going to the gym=good, Lisa Edelstein on Conan O'Brian right after these commercials=sex, grandma having stroke=bad, bum aunt not telling us about stroke=whoretastic. Also, me not knowing what to do for this presentation= v. bad.

Lisa on now. Bye.

Theraflu multi-symptom thin strips are crazy. It's like $5 for only two days' worth, so I'd never buy them, but I sent my dad out for cold medicine because we didn't have any and this is what he came back with. They're those melt on your tongue things and they don't taste horribly, but they couldn't quite get rid of the medicine flavor. Still, it only takes a few minutes for it to hit you. And when it hits you, you know it. I don't know how to describe it, but I just felt weird. I started to notice it working, and then about 30 seconds later, it was like bam. My head was funny and sore like all the moisture in my body got sucked up into my skull, but I definitely lost the whole miserable aching groggyness (though it's got all the "don't drink or drive because you'll be drowsy" warnings, it also says that excitability may occur, which is strange) thing and my brain got clearer and my nose stopped running as much as it had been.

Though I'm sorta ticked because I didn't realize that the active ingredients in the Theraflu stuff and this allergy pill stuff that I considered taking (but dismissed because I didn't know if it would do the same thing) were identical. (Not the pseudoephedrine stuff, but they were both diphenhydramine. Same basic thing.) So my dad spent $5 on this Theraflu stuff when the exact same thing was right there on my counter. Still, the pill stuff wouldn't have hit me as fast as the strips did, which is good. I figure I can take the pills at home and take a couple of the strips to school as they're all individually wrapped and nice and it's hard to get to a water fountain sometimes and sneak a pill into your mouth in the middle of the hallway. Because, though I'm now medicated, I'm still pretty darn sick. Grr about that.

I was trying to figure out who gave me the cold and I couldn't come up with anybody that I hang out with that's been sick recently. Yeah. I think it was my whore of a math teacher. Why me and nobody else in the class that I know of is beyond me, as I try to stay as far away from her as I can. That or the person behind my parents at church on Saturday, though my parents managed to pass it to me without getting it themselves.

And both of my siblings and my mother are off of school tomorrow. And I've got to stay after for dumb quartet. Dumb because the person that I like the most in the quartet is not going to be there so it's going to suck. And really dumb because since she wasn't going to be there, we had earlier decided not to have practice, but I got called a few hours ago and was told to bring my viola. And I don't want to have to stay after when I'm sick. But my Spanish teacher wasn't there today and so I couldn't make up the test from Thursday; therefore I'll have to do it after school on Friday, so they can just figure out how to quartet without me. It's not like you'd notice if the viola part wasn't there anyhow; the cellist and first violinist both brought sets of really bad arrangements of Christmas music where in virtually every song the viola part is just random notes so the violist has something to do.

I don't like the new Internet Explorer version thing. With the tabs and all. Everything's in different places. Not cool. It's only on the new laptop, though, (which is almost out of battery and as such I'm going to have to get off in like 5 minutes) so that's good. It's not being all dumb on the real computer.

My calculus teacher is a whore. I made plans to make up part of a test that I missed on Thursday after school. Wednesday during class she tells me that I have to take it right then. And she won't let me look over my notes first. I was planning to do so before I took the test because I knew I didn't know the derivative formula things for several kinds of problems. And I try to get my notes out to look over them when she tells me that I've got to take it and she looks at me like 'hurry the hell up' and is standing by the door to make me go into another classroom and tells me that I need to go take it now. So there were at least 9 of them that I totally missed because I had no idea how to do them. Out of not that many. So basically, there's no chance of me getting anything higher than a C- on that part of the test. Because she's a whore. I could have remembered the formulas really easily after just glancing over them, but she wouldn't let me. Grr.

I have to use the line "I've seen sinking ships go down with more finesse than he/she did." in a story. Because I saw something like it on an icon and it is so perfect.

Got lots of work to do still. I haven't been doing anything lately because I just can't make myself do it. I just don't care. That's bad.

*battery dying*

Tomorrow is our drama club's Star Trek party. Conceived by Katie, our Theatre Arts teacher, and me during class when we were discussing the 40th anniversary. It's going to be pretty freaking awesome. Just for the crazy geek types like us. I brought my (father's) popcorn machine in after school today, which makes really good popcorn, and as long as I don't burn it, that should be cool.

I just love how the three of us were talking at the beginning of class, and we're just all geeking out over which episodes (of TOS, as that's the only one that the teacher really likes) were the best for us to show, and somebody'd mention one, and we'd all be like "Yeah! Because in that one, the scene where. . . ." The teacher ended up picking all episodes that we'd suggested, just because we're cool like that: "Amok Time", which Katie and I were pushing from the beginning, "Mirror, Mirror" because the mirror universe is just the most fun a Vulcan can have without entering Pon Farr, and "City on the Edge of Forever".

The best part of when we were discussing the episodes to show was when we were talking about "Amok Time", because I go "Let's just face it. Pon Farr is the best plot device ever." And we all laughed and laughed. . . .

(Though we were totally pushing "Amok Time" simply for the Kirk/Spock.)

I've got to get through a calculus test before then, though. Which is going to be hard. The teacher puts things on the tests that we don't know how to do, and expects us to use our mathy skills to figure it out. Which would be okay to do as an activity or something, but on a test where you're timed, it's difficult. Add that to the fact that she doesn't really teach worth anything, and does the same 'you've got to figure it out' crap on our homework, and this is going to suck.

Calculus tests = bad. Calculus tests where you can't use the calculator = really bad.

Oh, and my english teacher is an idiot. Yeah. She told us today that she had "a" article for us on Marxism and Arthur Miller, "a" article on something else, and "a" article on a third thing. 3 bloody times in a row, she said this.
She still interrupts us during Socratic seminars, even though the paper she gave us on how to do these seminars (though we've all done them before) said that you weren't supposed to do that. And she lectured us today after the seminar on how it's supposed to be a discussion, not an argument. She said it like she was chastizing us, when there was nothing even resembling an argument going on. Somebody pointed that out (I would have, but I was busy just sitting there, looking at her in a mixture of disbelief and loathing), and she totally ignored her and just kept on lecturing.

Grr.

But still. Yay, marathon of TOS episodes. Yay, Katie and I sitting there and pointing out all the slashy bits.

Must go learn math and write a proposal for my english essay (though it hardly counts as a proposal when she gives us three choices for the essay and has us pick one, there's nothing to propose).

That english paper that I thought one page would be enough for? Nope. She told me to keep it and turn it in the next day with another page attached.

So, as usual, I wrote it the day after it was due at lunch.

Solo and Ensemble tomorrow today.

But first, the second part of the math test that I failed the first part of. Literally. Out of 5 multi-part problems, in all probably 10 parts, I got 3 of those right. And I don't really expect to do any better on the second part. Because for the first, I could at least use my calculator and not make any stupid math errors. This time, it's non-calculator, so if I say 2+3=8, I'm screwed.