That random journal by that random girl

Yeah, my journal's going Friends Only. I didn't want to do this, in fact, I avoided it for as long as possible. I used to have it public for Simon, who didn't always post with his LJ account, and for the random people passing by. I had a good time talking randomly with Arancaytar from Spiderweb forums, and with Eli Dupree, who found my journal via a Google search, but I guess those days are over. Recent events has shown me this is no longer an option. While I respect the individual in question, I had rather thought he'd have respected my wishes better than this.

Maybe in a few years, I can open this back up to the public. 'Til then, it's been fun, y'all. May you have more sunshine than storms, an abundance of laughter and good music, and God's still small voice directing your feet onwards in this life.

Best,
Sarah/Arcblade/that random girl

Dear American Popular Culture,

FUCK YOU.

( Yeah, it's a rant. Just a rant. Keep walking, it'll be fine. )

Today is gonna be a good day.

The Passover (the overpass from KE to main campus) has a game that I and a few others play as we walk over and back every day. While crossing the bridge, we walk directly over East Beltline, which has four lanes of traffic. As I pass over each lane of traffic, I check to see if any cars would have run me over if I were walking directly on the road.

There's no particular point system, but the larger and more exotic the vehicle I get hit by, the better I feel the day is going to be (because I didn't actually get hit).

Today, I got hit by an EMT ambulance. :D Today is a good day.

Apparently Calvin just joined some kind of Microsoft program that gets the staff and students in CS and Engineering Departments free Microsoft software. Not Office, but XP, Vista, and Windows 7, along with some coding software I may just yoink merely 'cause it's free.

It's funny, though, because now I have a copy of Windows XP Professional. And it was free. And legal. This is ironic, because maybe 2 weeks ago I finished installing/setting up a bootlegged copy of XP Home on a partition in my laptop. And y'know, if I'd just waited, I could have had it legally, easily, and not had to use a DVD to burn stuff on. Or had to fiddle with that stupid WPA kill application because the dratted thing wouldn't validate.

Think maybe God's trying to tell me something here. Heh.

I realized this vaguely awhile ago, since I do most of my processing in my head, but I figured other people, who find my insistence that I NOT name my stuff perplexing, may want to know. That last sentence was horrible grammar.

Anyway, I don't name my stuff because I consider it merely an extension of myself. My car, for instance, is not me, but allows me to almost grow wheels and reach speeds I could only dream of running. The same idea applies to my computer. It extends my capabilities. It is not my beloved friend who has accompanied me through several years of my life: it is like my hands, or my legs, or perhaps more aptly, like portions of my brain.

There are portions of the brain that deal with specific body parts and specific human capabilities. Damage the temporal lobe, and you'll have issues with the things it deal with. But you don't name the temporal lobe "John" or "Leslie" or even "Alexander the Great." It's just "the temporal lobe."

Hence, I don't name my stuff.

Dream:

( In which I find diamond dust, don't fit through a window, can't make small talk, and encounter George W Bush. )

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.

( Books, yo )

You've been tagged. If you are reading this, please copy all these goofy questions, writing your own response, and tag 25 other victims. Tag me to, so really you just need 24 more people. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you - but not in a creepy stalker kind of way.

To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your PROFILE page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your title as "Getting to know each other!", tag 25 people including me (tagging is done in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.

1. What time did you get up this morning?
7:54 AM- my clock runs fast.

2. How do you like your steak?
Kindly treated from birth to death. After that, medium rare. Unless you're talking about getting one around the Northeast, where medium rare means "dripping red." In which case I prefer medium well.

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
UP! It was fun. I had a good time talking with Joe.

4. What is your favorite TV show?
Firefly.

5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?
Eh... I guess I'd probably want to live somewhere on the West Coast. The weather's nicer there.

6. What did you have for breakfast?
Mostly Cheerios, with a bit of cinnamon Life on top for flavor. In skim milk. And a strawberry yogurt on the side.

7. What foods do you dislike?
Quite a few veggies, sadly. I also dislike balut on principle. And curry. I really don't do hot stuff that well, I guess.

8. Favorite Place to Eat?
Noodles. Cheap *and* delicious. :D

9. Favorite dressing?
Ehh... I actually don't use dressing on salad anymore. It used to be ranch, though.

10. What kind of vehicle do you drive?
1997 maroon Ford Taurus. Nothing flashy.

11. What are your favorite clothes?
The kind that don't cut off my circulation, preferably with lots of pockets.

12. Where would you visit if you had the chance?
Do I have to pick one? I need to get to Japan at some point. Portland, Oregon as well. Possibly England. Maybe Austin, Texas, also.

13. Cup 1/2 empty or 1/2 full?
Needs refilling, either way. Seriously, I'm not singularly optimistic or pessimistic. I have both, along with some cynicism, idealism, and the particularly stupid brand of optimism that'll hope against all hope.

14. Where would you want to retire?
Meh. Maybe somewhere on the West Coast. Or, if I get good enough with Japanese, Japan would be nice. Or, if Ipvy ever gets around to conquering the world, I'll settle down to rule New Zealand quietly for him.

15. Favorite time of day?
Early morning (if I'm not dead tired) and late afternoon. They both have this amazing golden sunlight I love.

16. Where were you born?
Some hospital in the Twin Cities, Minnesota.

17. What is your favorite sport to watch?
Fencing!

18. Who do you think will not tag you back?
Haven't a clue.

19. Person you expect to tag you back first?
Dunno, don't care, really.

20. Who are you most curious about their responses to this?
I haven't even decided who I'm tagging yet. :P

21. Bird watcher?
Sometimes, but it's not really a hobby so much as an occasional pastime when I'm bored.

22. Are you a morning person or a night person?
Definitely a night person.

23. Do you have any pets?
One red albino cornsnake, who recently stopped starving himself. ^_^

24. Any new and exciting news you'd like to share?
What is this, the gossip panel?

25. What did you want to be when you were little?
It varied. I never really settled on one thing.

26. What is your best childhood memory?
Best? Meh, my memories aren't that organized. I do recall biking to the Northwest Racquet Club fondly. All by myself, a couple miles, and then I could have my run of this big athletic club. They had a pool and weight lifting machines, ping pong tables, racquetball rooms... even an indoor track, unless my memory deceives me. Anyway, I loved the place.

27. Are you a cat or dog person?
Eh. I like animals. Both cats and dogs have their problems and awesomenesses. I'll take either, really.

28. Are you married?
Nope.

29. Always wear your seat belt?
Yep. I don't really feel safe in the car otherwise.

30. Been in a car accident?
Not really, no. Doubt a rear-ending counts, neh?

31. Dirty dishes in the sink when I wake up in the morning?
If there are, they're not mine.

32. Favorite Pizza Toppings?
Pepperoni (which I can't have anymore) with pineapple. Mmm...

33. Favorite Flower?
I like Forget-Me-Nots, but I don't really have a favorite.

34. Favorite ice cream?
Cake Batter, curse you Calvin College. Sooo tasty!

35. Favorite fast food restaurant?
Dun really have one.

36. How many times did you fail your driver's test?
Once. I ran a stop sign that was the most faded piece of crap I'd ever seen. They replaced it within the next month, the bastards.

37. From whom did you get your last email?
Er... I think it was from Twitter, telling me some spambot wanted to follow my nonexistent updates.

38. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card?
No credit card.

39. Do anything spontaneous lately?
Eh, not really.

40. Like your job?
Meh. I volunteer. I just got back from the one I don't really like (the pound). The library's not bad.

41. Broccoli?
Fortified with vitamins and minerals. I don't like it, but I eat it.

42. What was your favorite vacation?
Grandpa and Grandma VA's 50th anniversary got us a week in Cancun. Good times.

43. Last person you went out to dinner with?
Er... Must have been my parents. Sunday dinner thing.

44. What are you listening to right now?
Squeakings of the house, birds outside, and the music in my head.

45. What is your favorite color?
Blue

46. How many tattoos do you have?
Zero.

47. How many are you tagging for this quiz?
Said to do 25, right? So 25.

48. What time did you finish this quiz?
Why is this not the last question? I'm not done yet...

49. Coffee Drinker?
Nope, I likes my tea.

50. What foods do you dislike?
Did I not answer this question back at the beginning? (checks) Yes, I did. Question 7. Bah.

Today's thought:

Telling a person with anxiety problems to relax is like telling a person on fire to calm down. It just doesn't work.

Yeah, so.... dream time.

I went to a mall for some reason, with some people I can't remember. I looked through the bookstore, saw the new Harry Potters books, but didn't have enough money to buy them. Wait, what? Yeah, somehow there were new Harry Potter books. They were orange. I have no idea. After that, I saw this video game and started playing it.

You physically walked through the game, and you had one button to shoot. Thing was, to shoot, you had to point the button, which was attached to some kind of plastic sheet, at another part of that plastic sheet, which was apparently a grid of the area. It was stupidly hard to use. I think I ended up running from most of the enemies, which were zombies and werewolves. For some reason, Lexi from D&D, (who also writes Evil Plan, a really good comic), was one of the last enemies I ran into.

I managed to shoot most of the nasties on the last level, which was in a huge mansion, but then I ran out of time somehow... previously I don't think the levels were timed, but this one was, and since it took like four shots to kill each enemy, it took forever. Anyway, I ran out of time. I guess I was supposed to bury some werewolf under the rug in the dog room. Why would you have a special dog room? Bah.

What is it about celebrity and being famous that makes us shut our brains off and not regard the person in question as a person? Is it the awe? The knowledge beforehand that we likely won't ever see the person again? Why is it that when we see a famous person, we think of them only in that context, and shut our brains to what kind of person they are, what they think about themselves, their hopes, their dreams, and so on? Why do we limit ourselves so?

I noticed this effect many years ago, probably the during one of the first times I came into contact with someone I considered famous. Having recognized it, and recognized the person was also a person, I worked to allow myself to set it aside, to see past fame's aura and look at the person him or herself. This is something that must be done consciously, however. I am still susceptible to blinding myself to a person, merely because they are famous.

I can't seem to figure it out. Why do we do this?

I was shelving books at WA's library when amidst the others, some theory books about WWIII already having been fought came up. As I glanced over them dismissively, it occurred to me that perhaps... just perhaps.... WWIII has begun and is being fought right this second. It's a tireless sort of war, mainly fought by idiots and people with too much time. But there are few armies in this war. The only objective is to be right, and battle after battle is fought on every subject. Yep, that's right. WWIII is being fought on the Internet.

Caution: not for the faint of heart.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=200249100507&ref=nf

For those that don't want to watch/didn't understand what they saw: This is a video of a girl watching the protest in Iran with her father. A basij member on the roof of a civilian house shot her directly in the heart. There was a doctor onhand, so he tried to save her, but there was no chance she could be saved from something like that. She died in less than two minutes, despite all the desperate hands that tried to stem her blood.


I've studied Psychology for awhile now. When things like this happen, I always ask why. Why would people be in this situation at all? Why would someone shoot an innocent girl in the heart? I keep thinking back to something in Theories of Personality... "Misery and Stupidity"- the causes of mental illnesses, according to one theorist. But really, it's fear and stupidity that cause things like this. And fear and stupidity are often so inexorably linked in humans.

Next dream. ( Yes. I'm saving space on your friendspage. )

Today's dream was something like a mix between an zombie apocalypse and an exploratory game.

It began with me as me, with a group of people. We'd been traversing the city mainly on foot, which included jumping into trains, riding atop them, and walking a lot. It was a big city, but I guess the only way across the rivers was to risk getting hit by train, or to catch a ride on one... legally or illegally. I damaged my computer some in jumping into one of the trains... lost a bunch of the key covers. There was a good while where I was just trying to pick them all up, and I kept finding ones that were the wrong color (blue. Why the frick were my key covers blue?). A couple times (in the same place!) I missed my jump at this one point and fell into water still holding my computer. Anyway, eventually we got to our cars and drove to this shopping mall.

I, then became some kind of James Bond-ly athletic person, walking through the mall alone, when giant purple snake things began biting people and turning them into giant purple snake things. I think some of my friends got bitten. I avoided being bitten by sheer acrobatic and athletic skill. Victoria from Calvin was suddenly there and I told her what happened to my computer. She explained that the DVD player and speakers wouldn't work any more, but the rest of it should be fine. I checked, and this was so according to my Dashboard. As I took the elevator down, it kind of shuddered slammed down on something soft, then rose up again, slammed down, rose up... The elevator was trying to smush one of the purple snake things, which was apparently so resilient, it wasn't dying.

I wrenched the doors open and made a run for it. I got to my car and drove away, and some strange aliens (vaguely human, but taller, with sharper, pointier teeth) were cleaning up the road to and from the shopping mall. It was covered with slime, I guess. From the purple snake things. I drove away at reckless speeds, and everyone let me by... until I nearly hit a couple of the strange humanlike aliens. They had dismissed me and more or less gotten out of my way, except that when I nearly hit one, I slowed and apologized. Then they said, "You're not from around here, are you?" And one of them came after me. Suddenly, my vehicle was open air... maybe it was a motorcycle.

There was a short chase, and he ended up biting me and then falling back. But his bite didn't break the skin. He grinned at me and said something along the lines of "Welcome, brother," and went back to his group. My character then considered the events, and said, "This is where humanity will make its stand." Meaning we would join with the slave class that looks mildly human. Then I woke up. I'm not sure why that was a better idea than being snake people, but the character was darned certain it was.

Well, today's little dream managed to combine gym class with D&D...

We were playing a game where you defend gold coins under hats from monsters. The monsters would show up, and you'd try to defeat them before they got close enough to lift the hats and steal a coin. When you lost all the coins, you were out.

So... I'd already had some kind of magic power, and I was using/keeping track of it through a device beforehand (I was on the sidelines before, using my powers like an image editor to make a different game more interesting). But then we began this new game, and I was one of the players. So we all spread out, and I ended up in the back of the gym, part of a line of people.

It was hysterical, now that I think about it, because I think I was pulling Accursed-Lands animals as my opponents. I started with lynxes and bobcats and the opponents kept being wild animals. The nastiest one was an owl that apparently could cast lightning strike, and got me for 102 damage. Basically I was just casting magic missile and whatever better spells I could think of by yelling their names. Sadly, magic missile was never enough to drop a single opponent. I have to look up if "Caustic Vapors" is actually a spell. I was trying to say "Vitriolic Sphere" but I tripped on it and said the other instead.

...doesn't look like it's a real spell. Closest thing would be "Cloudkill" and that would be a bad spell to cast in a situation like that. I cast it at close range, and it would very shortly kill me and the people around me if I let it. That's a neat spell. Maybe I should have Elial take it.

Sabir Rashalea dances lightly, her silver hair gleaming as she spins. Alone here, in this inn room, she needs not the iron self-control she carefully built over the years. Tears and laughter alike mingle in her consciousness, so she dances: quickly, lightly, and almost without sound at all. No rote pattern shapes her exuberant footsteps, merely the remembered past and the hopeful future.

Ducking and weaving, sidestepping and strafing, her eyes bright with emotion, she touches every inch of the floor. As the surge of feelings abates, she draws a pair of daggers, and her step begins to fall into practiced forms. Without a pause, she improvises from one pattern to the next, each movement both graceful and deadly. Now she lunges, now flips insouciantly away, the bright steel flashing in beautiful counterpoint to her hair.

As the last pattern finishes, she throws the matched daggers into the air almost recklessly, and just as swiftly draws two more. Deftly, without even blinking, she pitches these up as well, fielding the first two just in time. Without letting even a moment pass, the daggers fly up again, and she soon establishes a rhythm. Once again, she begins her footwork, slowly at first, but gaining speed.

Back and forth around the room she races, daring time itself to stop and bear witness to her mastery. Over her head and so briefly in her hands, the black and silver daggers sparkle in their paths, tracing barely visible tracks through the empty air. Faster and faster she whirls, high thrust to low parry, dancing with a thousand enemies.

As the last opponent falls, she falls into a crouch, lobbing the held daggers lightly into the air. Quick as a viper, she catches each as it falls, ending with two daggers in each hand, arms crossed in front of her. Her chest rises and falls quickly from the exertion, but her eyes shine with determination and exultation.

I should be working on my homework right now, but recently I've looking at my arms. I gave blood yesterday, so there's a little poke mark on my left arm to match the one on my right, from the last time. If you look very carefully at the inside of my elbows, you can see a myriad of little, slightly shiny poke marks. Old scars, from donations before.

It's hard to tell, looking at them now, what they were. It's hard to pick them out from the natural creases in my skin. But they're there. Five of them, at least, on the left arm alone. Not including the newest one, which is fading to a dull red. It will turn brown, and then fade away entirely, given enough time.

It makes the homework seem kind of pointless, in comparison. Well, maybe not pointless, but not nearly as important as Calvin would make it.