I got a laptop yesterday. It is a Compaq Presario V20000z series (how many 0's...?) and it has an AMD Turion 64 processor and 512 MB of RAM and it has a DVD/CD burner and that's all I know! I had to learn that all to be an informed consumer... Sigh...

Anyway, it's lovely and pretty and all (I made sure I liked a pretty one...) and I stared at it for twenty minutes last night... It wasn't even turned on.

Also I've got about three-quarters of my iTunes library uploaded into it... However it has no internet connection (and I don't want one on that computer) and so every CD has to have the track names, artist, album, et cetera manually typed in, because it has no connection to the Music Store.

What this signifies is that I'll be around a little less (but still around) because I will be writing for real. I wrote like five pages last night. It's great to be able to do that without being distracted now.

Turns out Word has this cool feature where you hit the "Read" button and it changes the format so that the writing is shown as it would be if the pages were standard book size. So it's about two hundred and fifty words to a page, and they're smaller than usual. It turns out that my twenty-some-odd typed pages translate to about forty-five! So if I actually did somehow get myself published, it'd be about four hundred pages. Which is amazing.

A random name question... This is a strange name, but deal... It's a strange story, written by a strange girl who HAPPENS to like strange names. "Rene" (reborn) for one guy. I particularly like the meaning for this character, and what happens to him in the story... It's very appropriate. But also uncommon.

My auntie (who looks exactly like me, talks exactly like me, et cetera, even has a photographic memory like me, only she's taller AND thinner... X_X) is coming down from Chicago with her [fraternal] twin two-year-olds and six year old son (three boys!!!! YAY!!!!!!!!!) and staying at my grandmother's house about forty minutes from home. My grandmother has no internet and no cable. So I shall be disconnected for the next week. Sorry, but I won't miss you, so don't care too much.

:P Don't take it personally. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

A friend and I spent five hours putting stamps and address stickers on our art teacher's gallery invitations. There were somewhere between eleven and twelve hundred. It made my back, shoulders, legs, and left arm hurt like hell. But I also got forty bucks for it..... So now I only owe $260 for my lappy (I only have to pay off $300!!! SPOILED!). We bonded over the fact that we both are really embarassed that we sing along to songs on the radio and sometimes there's notes that guys can hit that we can't (Aerosmith, for one...). It's embarassing. We have man-voices. However, this is not to imply that we sound like men when we talk. The sound itself is feminine and all, but the pitch is LOWLOW... Oh, well. I'd rather have a MAN-VOICE than not have vocal cords...

We listened to KISS for a while, on the radio, but the people there are absolute morons and they played one song three times over the space of an hour, so we switched it. That worked for a while, but it got staticy and soon enough it had merged with another station and we were mostly just hearing furniture commercials... So we went back to KISS and heard SINCE U BEEN GONE for the fifth time. All these songs sound the same... they really do.

I hate Kelly Clarkson's like "new style". She's just screaming into a mic. I can do that convincingly, with no voice lessons and a man-voice and all.

You know what would be a lot of fun to write?

I shall tell you!

Something from the perspective of someone all-powerful. Like, the Trojan war from Aphrodite's perspective. I bet I could pull that off well, the ditzy-conceited thing. I mean, it's like ME, but the most beautiful being in the universe with godly powers to boot! But, no, I am serious.

But not something that indstrious. Be looking for something like within a day or two.

I spilled my heart to my mother in the car two days ago. She was getting mad at me for staying up too late and I started CRYING. Yes, indeed... :| I couldn't believe it even as it was happening... so she was like, "What's the matter?" But I honestly don't know, only that SOMETHING's the matter with me... I mean, I've always been really emotional, and sensitive, and moody, and all, but the past like two weeks it's been out of control, like I flew into a rage on Sunday because my sister wouldn't get me a muffin when she got her donut, and I was wearing a nasty white shirt because I was unprepared for church because apparently there's been an order from the Vatican that there are to be no shorts except Bermudas (for women) and preferably skirts, because it's been too immodest at church lately.. which I totally understand and respect and all, exceptI was pressed for time and so I ended up in this tee that the sleeves are too boxy on (short sleeves) and the neckline is WAY high, like embarassingly high. You can't even see my collarbones when I wear it... So I don't. :x Anway, I flew into a scary rage... I was afraid of myself....

Okay, so anyway... I was like sobbing and she was trying to figure out what the hell's wrong with me, and she concluded that it's that suddenly I've gone from EXCEEDINGLY high stress to nothing at all, and it's given me like a crash. I'm a busy person; I always have been. I need to have something to do.

So she made me go to the gym and run on the treadmill... :x endorphins...

No off-the-handle emotions today whatsoever.

Okay. Yesterday I was reading Girls in Pants and listening to Coldplay, Rush of Blood to the Head.

In between every chapter there is a quote. They are very nice quotes, too! I like them very much, which is code for "I can be bothered to read them.

I was at the very end of the book. Last quote. Coldplay, "I'm going back to the start."

Guess what I was listening to? Moreover, what line of what song? The Scientist, and it was on the chorus line!

Weird. But I've always sort of had that line in my head, and I've THOUGHT about it. Usually I don't think much about the lyrics; I just sing along. But I THINK about that line, and not just because of the above circumstance. Before that, I mean. So.... I'll have to think about it some more.

Yes, I love that song, too. But there is a reason that I put that there!

GIRLS VARSITY LAX GOING FOR IT ALL! And that's sort of the girls lax song of the season. There's lines from the song posted all over the school. I think it's like five years running if we (I say "we" because I was on frosh this year) win. And I think we might, because my school has great sports, among other attributes.

All right. What else? Well, one thing comes to mind....

WE'RE PLAYING AT CARNEGIE HALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Next year, my orch and the advanced band. Amazing! I can't believe it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, since I'm no virtuoso and I'll probably never get there again. Interesting that all this stuff is suddenly happening now, with my grade added. I mean, this has never happened, or at least not within the past like 10 years. Band played at Symphony Hall about five years ago, but it's not the same. We're seeing a show on Broadway, too.

I am ecstatic. More so than I was for Disney.

Your private thoughts may not be so private. Scientists from Japan and the United States have figured out how to read a person's mind by remotely measuring brain activity, extracting information of which the subject is not even aware. Science fiction? No. It's real. So far it's pretty rudimentary stuff in that the mind-reading machine can only identify visual patterns a volunteer can see or has chosen to look at. But the researchers are hopeful that the approach will eventually probe into a person's awareness, focus of attention, memory, and movement intention, report New Scientist and Scientific American.

Here's a simple way to boost your memory. If you want to sharpen your memory, attention span, and learning ability, do this one fun and surprising activity. 

This cutting-edge experiment was undertaken by Yukiyasu Kamitani, who is with the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, and Frank Tong from Princeton University. Volunteers were shown patterns of parallel lines in one of eight different variations. When Kamitani and Tong used functional MRI scanning to examine the brain regions that were used to perceive the patterns, they were able to recognize which variation the volunteer was viewing. New Scientist reports that each of the eight line variations corresponded to a different pattern of brain activity; interestingly, the patterns were different in each person.

Oh my! You won't believe what men do in private. Click to find out the surprising answer. 

Here's an eye-popping finding: When two sets of patterns were superimposed and the volunteers were told to focus on just one of them, the researchers were able to tell from the brain images which one they were looking at! One exciting application: Doctors could use it to find out if comatose patients are actually conscious. The study findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

(From Netscape)

I've been sort of afraid of this type of thing for a long time. It really freaks me out.

On a side, Coke is developing a vending machine that can send mesages directly into your brain when you walk by. It's such a terrible invasion.

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Here's a Surprise! Top 10 'Sexiest' Jobs

It isn't money that makes your job sexy in the eyes of others. It's something far more powerful and awe-inspiring. When Salary.com asked America Online users to name the sexiest jobs, the career that came in No. 1 was firefighters with 16 percent of the vote, beating out the likes of doctors, lawyers, and CEOS. Flight attendants came in second with 13 percent.

Find out the jobs that have the most prestige, as well as the surprising job listed at the bottom with almost no respect at all! 

Top 10 Sexiest Jobs:
1. Firefighter
2. Flight attendant
3. CEO
4. Reporter
5. Interior designer
6. Event planner
7. Nurse
8. Teacher
9. Doctor
10. Lawyer

If you do this ONE thing, you'll make more money. Click to find out what it is. 

Whether your job is "sexy" or not, are you satisfied with the work you have done when the day is finished? Only about half of Americans are satisfied with their jobs, down from 60 percent in 1995, according to a survey released by The Conference Board, a New York-based business research group, reports the Lafayette (Indiana) Journal and Courier. Of this 50 percent, only 14 percent are "very satisfied" with the work they do, down from 18 percent in 1995. The largest decline in job satisfaction is among workers ages 35 to 44, dropping from 51 percent in 1995 to 49 percent now.

This is surprising! Fully 71% of workers commit this indiscretion on the job. Click to find out what is--and if you do it. 

The job satisfaction formula: Michael Gartner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer, once conducted a reporting and writing seminar at The Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, where he offered the 80-20 rule. As long as 80 percent of what you do is acceptable, you can probably tolerate the other 20 percent.

Here's the No. 1 tactic you should take during a job interview. Do this and it will boost your chances of getting hired.

I read all my entries and old comments, so go ahead and post in them. Sign my guestbook!

Guestbook!

Guess who this is:

First person who gets it wins something!!

Later... I told you already. No one got it :P Testament to my poor drawing-over skillZ. Stage two:

Original:

I haven't had as much time as I'd like this year to read, because of writing mostly. So. I have to remember htis somewhere.

1. Jane Eyre
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. Les Miserables, maybe long version
4. A Tale of Two Cities
5. Frankenstein

If anyone knows of stuff like this, classics, not American ones, let me know. I need to read classics if I am ever going to have a grasp of literature, and I have to do it outside of school.