Okay, I laughed. I liked that one. But jeeze, what I'll do to kill time!

Well, my sister left this afternoon at 4:00. It was pouring when I dropped them off at the bus. She said she had fun, Heather said so too. I just wish I had felt better for their visit. I had big plans but we ended up just going to the mall in Syracuse and seeing Krippendorf's Tribe. Woo-Hoo. I went to bed at 10:00 last night. How dull. But I was exhausted. I needed that sleep.

I feel mostly better today, just a little drippy and my cough sounds terrible. But I FEEL better. I spent all day watching TV, mostly Ranma 1/2 videos because I was alone and I could. I ate and drank tons of water and I will be healthy.

For some reason, even when I think that I feel like a slug.

I've been making my way through Open Pages, stopping about every third site to visit other people's minds. I'd love to find out what makes them tick. What they relax to. What helps them sleep at night, or what keeps them awake. Maybe it would help me to find what those things are for me. I relax to classical music lately. Or Pink Floyd. When I get it back from Brian's CD player, I may relax to TOOL. No one can accuse me of being narrow minded about music. The three cds at the bottom of my rack up...White Zombie, Eric Clapton, Spin Doctors. But that's just me.

I've been burning a drip candle on my wine bottle all day. The damned thing won't drip. It just runs down the side of the candle and stays there. I'll probably go through a dozen candles before the bottle is worth taking a picture of. Actually...it looks nice now. A little river of red wax ran down one side over the green and yellow parts. I love candles, you can never tell where the wax will go when it starts to burn. When this candle burns itself out I'm going to sleep, but until then, my attention is focused on this little notepad window.

My bookmarks have grown in the past week. I used to check three web pages almost daily, now I check seven. The number is still growing. I should post a list of journals I read, but I almost feel better sneaking around, letting you wonder if it's you.

I do that a lot, don't I? Converse with the reader I mean. I'm not enough of a nut to think you'd respond, really. But it is nice to leave the narrative of my day and feel like I'm involving someone else. I makes this journal more important to me to imagine that someone out there is reading this journal, wondering what I'm going to talk about next, and how my day went. My counter rises a little each day, so I know someone out there cares what I have to say.

I've been writing notes to myself during the day more often. I have a few notebooks in my nightstand that I scribble in at night. I've been writing a lot of poems lately. Some are unfinished nonsense, but others are about things I recall while sitting, or think about, or daydream.

I had the most horrible nightmare the other night. Lurch from the Addam's Family was painting my room, for some reason. Then he was hitting on me. What could I do? Have Brian beat him up? Sure, that'd work. I ran away. Then, thankfully, I woke up before the dream got any stranger.

I should watch what I say...someone might think I'm odd.

The candle burned down but I couldn't resist, I put in a new one. This one is orange, about a foot and a half tall, and lumpy. It's hand-dipped and has a "whole rainbow of colours" in it. I suppose it's imported too...or at least someone had the bright idea to spell colors "colours" and make it SEEM imported so they could charge more money for this foot and a half of brightly colored wax. Oh well...at least this one seems to be dripping.

I got a DARS report from Binghamton today...finally. They never sent one when I declared the CS major, like the woman behind the desk swore on her children they would. She must not have been a mother after all. Anyway, a DARS report is essentially Binghamton's view of my progress toward a degree. Degree Audit something. They finally acknowledged my transfer credits, and my AP stuff. According to this report, I'm done with English classes.

Thank you Binghamton University!

I still need to take Physics, which I'm doing over the summer, two math classes maybe three, and scads of CS stuff. The only dumb classes I have left are a few gym classes, 'American Pluralism', and 'Global Interdependencies'. Cool. I almost feel like a real college student again. With real progress made towards a degree. I almost feel like a sophmore with junior standing again. And after this summer, I should be coming to school as a second-semester junior. Ahead of myself with a safety margin again! Life is good.

In case I haven't mentioned before, I don't want to go to grad school. Unless I have to, I plan to seek out internships which will give me job experience and work my way up to a decent pay bracket with job experience rather than getting a masters before making a serious leap into the rat race. Tiny leaps will be good to start, then I'll hope until senior year that this isn't a silly idea. In senior year I'll pray that the internships I'll have completed will be enough and explore the real world to see how deluded I am.

Damn it's good to be young and optimistic. It helps me enjoy my youth while I can.