Blogging from bed, again.

Okay, one of the inherent perks to a laptop is this: being able to use a full, ten-finger keyboard to blog.

Thanksgiving went off without a hitch. We left the house only a half-hour behind schedule, which is unheard of in my family; we had Burger King for lunch, and they've brought back the Italian Chicken Sandwich (formerly the mediterranean chicken sandwich, but still so delicious); the Packers beat the Lions; and the turkey wasn't dry.

So all in all, plans for the family went well. It's really good to know that things can work out better than you'd hoped sometimes.

Mall of America tomorrow, of course, might prove tricky. I've only got $125 to spend between about five relatives' gifts.

I'm always so caught up in hilarious misadventures, sometimes I think my plans will never go off smoothly. I guess only time will tell if the best laid plans can't still go awry. Maybe there's hope for haphazard ones, though.

Mac vs. Cheese

I had to check out a laptop from the library in order to be able to do my homework over the weekend, due to the fact that I can't really haul my iMac around very well. Twenty pounds of raw computing power fixed on an anodized aluminum stand that are required to be plugged into an outlet don't really transfer well to the idea of "the road."

So I have this lappy at the ready for when I need to punch out my pages of the group project on The United States of Europe for my macroeconomics class. I took on the task of writing about how the unification of Europe tackles economic principles number 5 and 8. What are economic principles 5 and 8, you ask? I don't have a clue. We just knew that there were eight principles to be divvied up, and so I took 5 and 8. To balance this out, I'm also spearheading the presentation on one of the principles, which finally justifies my owning of Apple's alternative to Powerpoint: Keynote.

With the rough five variations of laptops to be checked out from the library, it's a mixed bag whether or not you'll get a laptop that's actually usable. In this sense, I lucked out, getting an HP something-or-other with an AMD Turion dual-core, 64-bit processor, and a little sticker ensuring me that this sucker is Windows Vista Capable. In other words, it's better than the Pentium 3s that I could have been stuck with.

But now that I'm finally using a computer other than my Mac for a prolonged period for the first time in a year, it's time to make the brutal comparisons.

First of which is that I'm relegated to Meebo for talking to my friends. This is by no means a bad thing. Meebo rocks. But the fact that I can't install any of my preferred IM applications on this machine is a bit of a downer. What if I like AIM? Of course, this isn't a problem relevant to Windows, it's just the cold, hard fact of being on a computer I checked out from a library.

This, however, isn't: the colors of Blogger are horrendously muddled. To the point where the normally tan interface is a disgustingly drab gray. It may or may not be a good thing that the color reminds me of Doane's food...

My other big gripe with this laptop is that good lord, the speakers are absolutely terrible. I never realized just how good Apple is at tuning their speakers, or maybe just selecting speakers that don't suck, but these speakers, and the ones in the monitor of my family's computer (which is also an HP) leave a veritable ear load to be desired.

But other than that, this will get me through the weekend swimmingly. Now the question becomes one of "will I actually do any of my homework?"

Refocused

og. That's just how scatterbrained I am. My train of thought goes from one thing to another without necessarily finishing one thought. When I was a kid, I wanted to be in the video game industry, and then I got sidetracked with theatre for four years. Granted, it was a very fun four years and I hope to get sidetracked with it again, but it did distract me from my video games for a very, very long time.

This blog was to be finished last night, but distraction kept that from happening, too. Getting sidetracked is just a part of life, I think. Given the number of things that we all take in and do over the span of a day, it's impossible not to become distracted to the point of actually forgetting what you were doing in the first place.

Take rehearsal tonight, for example. It was supposed to be a complete run of the first act of Arabian Nights. The first act begins with a dance number, though, and we ended up rehearsing that for the first two hours of tonight. Then we only got through roughly the first hour of what we were supposed to get through.

We had a specific goal in mind coming into this thing, yes, but we ended up diverting from that for an insane amount of time. And it upset me a bit, and it tired me a lot, but the fact of the matter is that the dance is probably going to be better because of it, and the first act can be finessed later. It takes less practice than a very intricate dance scene.

So it was a good thing that Robin got sidetracked tonight, and decided to work on the dance. Even if it was crap to do it there, it will pay off later.

But getting sidetracked isn't always a good thing. Sometimes it can lead you to stay up for about an hour or four more than you wanted to one night. It can even lead you to break a promise you made to a friend, or cause you not to see that something in front of you is better than something in your peripheral. It can cause us to get distracted from the bigger picture, from what you've got.

Sometimes getting sidetracked will take you to heights you wouldn't normally achieve, but more often it's a negative thing, and all you can do is hope that you can get back on your original track before too much of an impact is made.

Sidetracked.

I tend to have a ton of stuff on my mind at the same time. Right now, I'm making conversation with six people, listening to music, and writing this blog. Less than an hour ago, I remembered that I had some German to do. It didn't take very long at all, but it was still annoying to remember.

I'm having a little trouble getting this blog done, admittedly, because I'm having conversations with people online. See, I get sidetracked easily. All today, I knew I had to shave, but then I had to get a muffin and coffee, and then I had to read my book for econ, and then I had to practice music for juries, and then I had other stuff, and other stuff, and then I had dinner, followed sharply by rehearsal. Long story short, I never ended up shaving.

This happens to me a lot. I'll know that I have something important to do, like email my accompanist, and I end up putting it off for way too long because I simply let other things override my thought process, even though the action is pertinent, or something.

And in my spare time, I'm trying to write a fictional blog on here, but it takes a lot of concentration and time, which is being interspersed over the course of many nights' worth of rehearsals, but no afternoons of laziness, or any other such time slot. Why not, I don't know. It's not that I don't want to write the thing, or that I find it boring, or that I even find it to be difficult. I just have other things that I'm doing.

And I don't think there's really anybody who can say whether one thing that I do is more important than something else that I do. But it wouldn't surprise me if this trend causes me to suddenly stop writing this bl

Bad fries, questionable rings, and a pretty good chicken sandwich

The title doesn't have much to do with the topic of this blog, I don't think. It's just the product of Tiger Inn, where I got some bad fries, saw one of the workers pick onion rings out of a deep fryer bare-handed, and got a pretty good grilled chicken sandwich.

In the past week, I've had my American government professor tell me that I seem more depressed recently not once, but twice. I don't know what he bases this notion on. At all. I can't feel any noticeable change in my behavior now compared to when I started his class, other than the fact that I've learned since starting his class that it is far less about American government as it is about the War on Terror, which he regards as the defining issue of our generation (in spite of the fact that nobody in class feels the same way), but as far as my overall attitude goes, I don't think that he could logically base his view of my mental health on three fifty-minute windows of time during which he sees me. Still, I'm not one to take somebody's observation of how I've been acting and just throw it out the window.

I went to my director Robin midday on Friday and asked him if I seemed like I've been depressed lately. He said that he wouldn't call it "depressed," but that I've been acting somewhat different lately. More introverted, perhaps, but not really depressed. This still surprised me, because I don't really think that I've been more introverted this year, especially compared to last year.

And my friends Caitie and Kathryn have also talked to me about how I tend to say things that are really depressing. Even people that I talk to online say that I've been acting withdrawn lately.

Still, I don't notice what everyone is talking about. I'm starting to wonder if I'm wearing my heart on my back and I just can't tell that I'm dumping all of these negative feelings out, or if this is like when you have something embarrassing written on your forehead, and people tell you, but you can't see what it says for yourself, because you're too close to yourself to see it.

In those instances, you always have to find a mirror in order to see what's going on.

I took an online screening for depression today because I was curious as to whether I would test yes to that. My results told me that I was more likely to have bipolar disorder than depression, so I took the online test for that. Three minutes later, I was told that I don't likely have bipolar disorder, and I was out the door and into the coffee shop just in time to get a muffin and a chai latté just before the lunch period started. Still, so many people are telling me I don't seem like myself lately.

Can anybody hand me a mirror?

Lunacy and lunarcy

It is often a practice of mine to do things that I have absolutely no intention of revisiting, even though they're incredibly funny or poignant at the time that I do them. A very recent example of this -- now invalidated by my talking about it on my blog -- is the night of Arabian Nights rehearsal during which I spread water on my butt while I was offstage because my character ran into the scene complaining about diarrhea. It was a stroke of genius brought on by my visit to the water fountain and my incredibly random nature.

Sitting in work-study today, I watched a few episodes of Scrubs, listened to a podcast from IGN Wii-k in Review (while I sat in reverie at the games coming out this and next year. We are looking at another shot at the gaming Golden Age right now), and tried many times to get my iPod to connect to the internet. Being that I'm sitting at the front desk's workstation right now, it's safe to say that my attempts failed.

The failure did, however, allow one of my iPod's more interesting features to shine through. The feature, you ask? My calendar.

While wholly spectacular inventions in and of themselves, calendars have been mostly overlooked by the general populous as simple chotchkies to be hung on the kitchen wall and ignored until you need to know what day or year it is for the check that you're writing. But the idea of extensible calendars, which allow for much more information than can fit in a 1 1/2 square-inch box, is bringing the practicality and -- let's face it -- fun back into having places to be at certain times of the day.

Perhaps one of the most interesting calendars of the non-extensible form, however, is the giant stone one located in Latin America, cradled in a Mayan ruin. The calendar gives proof that the Mayans were at least dilligent timekeepers, as it has on it the dates of lunar eclipses and other celestial happenings. But unfortunately for anybody visiting the Mayan ruins and wondering what the stars will be doing in 2011, the Mayan calendar only keeps up on such information until December 12, 2010: the day which the Mayans playfully describe as "the end of the world."

Having heard of this back in my junior or senior year of high school from a member of Bellevue East's forensics team, and having been exposed to stories of the calendar before then, I made, in a stroke of random whimsy, a schedule of events for December 12, 2010. I bring this up now, because the very same schedule somehow migrated from Google Calendar, where I first wrote it out, to my iPod's calendar, for me to stumble upon this afternoon. Here's what I've got myself doing:

12 AM - Panic
2:30 AM - Panic some more
6 AM - Spongebob Squarepants
9 AM - Eat breakfast at McDonalds
10 AM - Panic
1 PM - Late lunch
2 PM - Prayer
3 PM - Prayer
4 PM - Prayer
5 PM - The Simpsons
6 PM - Prayer
7 PM - Prayer
8 PM - Work on forensics piece
9 PM - Buy a hammer
10 PM - Build sculpture of Campbell (my forensics coach)
10:30 PM - Destroy sculpture of Campbell
11 PM - Panic and pray

In my exceptional genius, I planned out this schedule and excluded an hour for eating dinner. I'm sure I had a reason at the time for why I don't eat any kind of final meal, maybe in reverence to all of the foods that I should have tried by this point but hadn't, maybe in a kind of observance to God that I'm not full unless I have Him dwelling inside me, or maybe it was just because I knew that I probably wouldn't be hungry that night. In any case, why would it take me an hour to find and buy a hammer?

In the sun

On the top shelf of my minifridge, right next to my most recent acquisition of orange soda, is a single can of grape-flavored Tropicana Twister brand soda.

The story behind this can is a simple one: Tiger Inn used to sell cans of grape soda at the beginning of the year. That's where the can comes from. The reason it's the only one in my fridge is because I realized shortly after getting it that it was actually one of the last cans of grape soda that Tiger Inn would stock. Not being one to simply consume something that suddenly becomes almost unique in a torrent of immediacy, I decided that I wouldn't drink the grape soda just because I wanted to.

I decided that the grape soda would be for a special occasion, like a very cheap and nonalcoholic imitation of champagne. The grape soda would be celebratory.

But since the scarcity of the can is so high, this is quite possibly the most special can of grape soda I have ever owned. It doesn't deserve to be taken after something as mundane as getting a paycheck, or something as common as writing a paper. This takes something that could be deemed a cornerstone of my life.

Arguably, there was a case for drinking it when I turned 20. You only enter a new decade of your life, like, every five to seven years. But I don't really regard an age as a cornerstone. Certainly, it's a milestone, by which I can measure how far I've come up to this point, but as far as achievements go... It just doesn't seem like something to cheer about.

I would say that that's the only real mile/cornerstone that I've hit since I got the can. There's the purchase of this iPod, but that just means that I had $300 at some point recently. Material goods, unless they're monumental, shouldn't really count for much. If this had been an iPod that I won in a contest, or if it had been a purchase made because I won a good sum of money in a contest, then I'd drink the grape soda.

I guess that some people would argue that I am putting too much thought into what I would consider to be a cornerstone. I'm sure that others still would think that it's just a stupid can of grape soda and that I should get over it. It's my belief that these latter people do not have grape soda of their own, and are therefore rationalizing that it's probably a can of sour grape soda, anyway.

And to the former group, I would have to say that I am confident in my ability to discern a cornerstone in my life from the mundane and the routine.

So until I find that cornerstone, I know I'll have that grape soda waiting for me on the top shelf of my minifridge.