So here I am. It's 8:46 Pacific Time as I sit here, and I'm listening to Korn's Untouchables CD. Why, GhettoAardvark, are you sitting here and writing this node? Isn't there something else you could be doing? Actually, yes. My high school's homecoming dance started at 8:00. Yeah, it's probably going to be a "totally lame" dance and all, but... I was actually planning on dressing in black. Pure shock value, you see. I live in a particularly mediocre-sized town, and the sight of myself in black trenchcoat and white face makeup would've been good for at least some laughs, if nothing else. So, with all these ideas, why am I not there?

The gods have seen fit to torment me.

I consider dances the realm of those with dates to them. I ask the first girl out two weeks before said dance, so as to make sure she's still open. I ask Kelli, a girl I've known for several months and thought/still think I loved. She turns me down, on the grounds that "she doesn't really do homecoming," what with her shyness and all. No problem, I think, I can find someone else. So I ask Tricia, a girl I've known for about as long as Kelli. She actually says yes.

Cut to three days later. We split up, on the grounds that the relationship is too weird to continue. We're still friends, but us kissing and such is simply too uncomfortable. Again, no problem, right? I still have a week and a half until the dance. I ask Chelsea, one of the few gamer chicks I know, and she says yes, and that she was thinking about going in black too.

Cut to the Friday after school. I'm hanging out with Gibby and Katie, Gibby's ex. Katie, a friend of Chelsea's, reveals to me that Chelsea is going with someone else. "What? She said yes to me." "Sorry. She actually said yes to this other guy first. She was going to tell you today, after lunch, but she kinda tries to avoid confrontation." WTF? Confrontation? She shouldn't have said yes in the first place, then! Oh well. As sort of a half joke, I ask Katie to the dance right there. She accepts, as she really doesn't to go with this other guy. Fortunately, she hasn't said yes to him...

That night, I end up doing some things I really shouldn't have, and Gibby ends up extremely pissed and doesn't talk to me all weekend. (I'd rather not go into the details.) Katie and I are now going out.

Monday morning: "Sorry, but I can't date you. My parents won't let me date Mormons." See, the Quakers have this weird vendetta against Mormons. The Quakers can date potheads and atheists, but not Mormons, because the Mormons eat their kind, or something like that. I just made that whole eating part up, but the rest is true.

An update on the score: 3/4. Yet, defying all logic, I still don't have a date to the dance. It is now Homecoming week, and everyone has now been asked out.

Except me. I've pretty much given up on it, now.

Ah, the next Friday. The Friday before Homecoming, to be exact. I'm looking forward to Gibby and I drinking away our sorrows in Mountain Dew and telnet. I head over to his house. He isn't really mad at me any more, but doesn't want to talk about it. I can accept that. Oh, and Gibby has a date to Homecoming.

"What?!" "Yeah, I was talking to some of her friends, and they said she didn't have a date. So I asked her."

Now, this is the part where the whole torment by the gods thing comes in. I spend two weeks on a vomit-inducing emotional rollercoaster, asking out four girls, and still have no date. Gibby, on the other hand, engages in idle conversation and has one, the night before the dance. It's almost enough to inspire me to cutting, were I really that self-destructive.

Thanks for listening. I needed to get that off my chest.

There was a rabbi and priest...
Maybe not.
Today I found myself unsure of life, waking at 8 to the blare of the alarm clock, which manages to snap my late morning light sleep dreams. Most of which I can't remeber past half an hour, even if I try.
Today I get to see relatives which I haven't seen in a while, and today I get to be subjected to the torment of 6 kids and their parents talking.
I wouldn't mind the kiddies, but the parents on the other hand....
At some points the noise of everyone having seperate conversations at the same time drive me downstairs, quiet, I want quiet!
You see I am not an extravert, I'd rather sit outside watching the kids play to make sure they don't eat cyanide or kill each other or something, than sit inside making chit chat noises with people whom I don't know one bit.
Maybe the premise is learn about these people, get to know them even if you don't give a shit, but I don't fall for it.
What good is knowing the inner secrets of some school mom who happens to have a kid who goes to the same class at my brother's school?
So me and my brother in law occaisionaly hide outside talking of mathematics and science drinking chemicals in the form of le' coffee bean, untill the wind blows (it is Wyoming) and it gets too cold to ruminate about the state of the world.
So I hide out.
After the noise machines leave I'm on the computer on E2 writing nodes to get disintergrated, though I don't care. This one will too I'm sure.
Now its 11:30 and sleep (sleep) comes soon.
See ya tommorow.

I got adopted by a cat.

Now, I have a cat back home in Houston whom I love dearly, a calico named Twinkles. I had planned since I got an apartment to bring her up here at some point in time, but the longer time goes by the more I worry about it. She's going on 17, which is really old for a cat, she's an awful traveler and hates change more than I do. The more I think about it, the more I know I should let her stay in Houston. I've tried to deny this to myself over and over, but the universe itself seems to be telling me to leave her be. Getting her here, every time something comes up or does not work. But I kept holding out, telling myself I'd find some way and wouldn't just get another cat unless it was in a way I could not deny it was a cat I was supposed to have. Silly me, of course.

I went to petsmart Thursday to buy $5 worth of supplies for my betta and POSSIBLY a hamster so I'd have something alive and furry to greet me when I got home from classes. I went to play with the adoptable kitties, because that usually cures my cat fix for a while and I've never found one who screams out to me to take it home.

I was playing with a small tortiseshell female who was giving me a look of "who are you and what are you doing? go away!" and turned to leave when I felt something and looked down. A pair of paws had worked their way through the bars and wrapped around my knee. I opened the cage to play with him and instead of cowering in the corner or trying to hop out and run away like many shelter animals, he hopped right out into my lap (never hitting the floor), sat in my lap, looked me in the eyes, and purred. How in the world could I say "no"?

So after some hectic bit buying supplies and all, "Barnaby" came home with me. That was his shelter name, and certainly not the one he'll keep. He hasn't told me his real name yet. He's a little orange tabby with white hind paws, front legs and paws, stomach, chest, collar, and about half his face. Hands down the sweetest friendliest cat I've ever owned.

I found out a little more of his story today when the manager of the shelter called me to check up on him. Apparently a local woman with more of a big heart than common sense had been "fostering" in strays for a long time, thinking she was helping them. She had 22 cats when the animal cruelty prevention socety came to her place. 22 cats, none spayed or neutered, two litter boxes for all, the usual "cat collector" scenerio. They went to a local spay/neuter no-kill shelter where all but one--a highly pregnant female who died having her litter which did not survive--lived to be placed. "Barnaby" is the second to last of that bunch, the 22nd cat still is with the woman from the shelter recovering from hernia surgery. Most of the cats, which were at least second generation, were about a year and a half old, and they suspect my little guy is right about there as well. Oddly enough for such an overcrowded population, nearly all these cats turned out friendly and loveable with little socialization, instead of being territorial and hostile. This poor little fellow has a case of the sniffles but otherwise handled his time there just fine.

He's a sweet, quiet animal. He burbles, coos and chirrups more than he meows, and is curious to look at EVERYTHING. He's learned where my laptop power button is, I swear to you, because four times in a row this afternoon he waltzed right across the machine, hit the button, and did it again as soon as I'd rebooted.

Any typos are completely his fault, as his fuzzy little head is on my hand at the moment.

---

10-10-2002 He named himself today. He's now Sam. The lovely thing about that is it can stand for a good many things, and no one knows which one. Samson, Samuel, Samwise (the 'Sam' his name was suggested from, since he has such a sweet, loving manner), or even as a half-joke since it's October, Sam-Hain. The correct answer is all of them.

I was totally fooled tonight by a girl named Renee.

I have two flatmates. Tonight we went out to drink at two bars. For the first bar, we went to Illini Inn, a bar infatuated with the Cubs, the local baseball team. I had a pint of Guiness, while one of my flatmates gained membership at the bar by chugging down a pint of beer. The membership consisted of a membership ID # & future beer discounts. Next bar was White Horse. There I met Renee, the con artist. And also her friend Brad. And another fellow who I didn't catch his name. Later, as I sipped on my gin and tonic, I heard that that she was a Presbyterian from Westchester. ( Of course, the only city or town I knoow of in the UK, being a stupid american, is London ) . I didn't get her horoscope or anything more, however I thought that her foreign accent made her really sexy. Not only that, I was all of the sudden more interested in becoming more knowledgable about the UK.

Afterwards, we were a crowd of 5 pals and Renee at a friend's apartment. We admired the atwork by our peers, displayed at the apartment. We had some candy and snacks. Sipped on some warm cider mixed with Jack Daniel's. Then all of a sudden, shortly after Renee's call on the cellphone to Brad was over, she dropped her Brittish accent. "I'm sorry guys, I can't keep this act up any more."

I was totally fooled. I was convinced she was English, so much so that I thought she was lying to me about being from Northern Illinois. (Perhaps she felt pressured to fit in in America.) I was in a state of shock and confusion for a few minutes. But I guess it worked. Pretending to have a British accent made her seem more attractive as a person, for some reason. I'm not sure if it would go the same way for people with American accent in the UK. And now, here I am noding drunk about the little con artist Renee who had me totally convinced with everything that she said. Boy, do I feel stupid. And drunk.

Renee seemed very satisfied at being successful.

---

Rana points out re October 6, 2002: Westchester is also the name of a town in Illinois.

This morning I tortured myself. I went to Pricewatch.Com and browsed around to see what current buying prices are for computer components.

And I cursed and cursed some more.

Right now my desktop PC is older than dirt, by conventional standards. AMD K6-2/350, 256 MB RAM, 50X CDROM, Voodoo 2 3D card, Riva128 2D card and a SoundBlaster AWE64- that's what I have to work with these days. And my storage space is growing smaller every day. Let's not get into the nightmare that is my monitor and speakers, both of which are on their last legs.

For around about $300 I can get a serious upgrade and bring myself up to modern standards. For $300 I would be able to do the kind of 3D development that I want to do. For $300 I wouldn't have to sit around and wait half an hour for a 300,000-poly mesh to render. To do that would require this: AMD Athalon 1.2 gHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, GeForce3 Ti, 40 GB drive and a motherboard to handle it all. I could canibalize the rest from my current system and not think twice about it. But it'd cost $300 that I don't have- can't have on my current income. And there are other pressing matters to attend to before my computer.

I need to get a better job. I need to do this for lots of reasons, least of which is my computing happiness. Either that, or I need to sell a few stories. I've already sent one story out and I hope to hear back from that soon (though I still expect to get a rejection). As for finding a new, better, higher-paying job... well, that's entirely up to me.

Tomorrow is Monday, the start of a new business week. Perhaps I can try to wake up a little earlier and begin looking for a new job. Being a projectionist is all well and good, even fun sometimes, but it sure as hell isn't paying well enough for me to be self-sufficient.

Today I will cry all day. This happens occasionally. Like a purging of emotions. For somebody who keeps their emotions so tightly under control, the purging (when it comes) tends to take a long time. Of course, there is nothing I can do about this, I will just have to get through the day the best way I can.

I am scared that I will never hear the words "You are Beautiful" again.

I am scared that I will never again hear the words "I love you" and believe them to be true.