Sometimes, I am livid.There are some problems with having an online journal that many of one’s real life friends can access as well as one’s mother and online friends. There are sometimes when I feel like I can’t express myself the way I want to here, which is very frustrating, because a journal is supposed to be a place for everything. For instance, today..I know there are probably some random online people I don’t know reading. Then, probably Carrie or Maki or Ross..maybe my mom. Mia seems like she always reads it, which is a little intimidating. Especially because most of my other friends have just found it boring. I finished a new site. It’s really kind of a mini site, but I put a lot of thought into it: Blind is eye. (Did you see that coming?) I really need to make a new layout for imaginaire..I have an idea for one but I have this weird feeling like I don’t want to use the desktop, which is where psp and the layout is. Maya has the psp disc. I’ll see her on Wednesday though. I can’t wait to see how her hair is. Plus I missed her..Tomorrow is a big day! The first day of the last week of summer school, then immediately after that I have photography camp and then after that Japanese. I think it will be a little rushed, like eating-meals-in-the-car rushed. We’ll see.
I feel really stupid. I looked at the Final Fantasy VIII Configuration (okay..I know I bought that game like two years ago, but I have the worst luck with it), and all the graphics tests said fail, so I assumed it wouldn’t work on Waffle. I was wrong — I just tried playing it this morning, and it worked. And it got the past the point where the desktop froze. And went on, and on. I am convinced. I guess Waffle isn’t so bad. To try out using Waffle in public, Katie and I went to Bethesda. We went to this pseudo-funky coffee shop called Xando, where I have seen people using laptops before. We didn’t even buy anything, we just sat down and turned it on. That’s when Katie’s friend Alexa pointed out that they actually have places to plug them in, so I could have brought the plug and not relied on the battery. Oh well. Then we went to Barnes & Noble to the Starbucks that is on the top floor, and saw other people with laptops looking hip and serious and professional. Hehehheh. They had them plugged in too. I turned it on and Katie started writing her “book”. I am not kidding, she has made up her mind she is writing a book about a girl who is a vampire and doesn’t know it. I am really doubting her skills at the moment, but she really believes she can do it, so why not? She wrote down character notes and the first line or something. I think the coffee place in a bookstore is stimulating. After a while I showed her what FF8 looked like, but I think because it was running on the battery, it was reeeeaaally slow. Meanwhile, she or Alexa managed to get a fingerprint on the screen. So we walked to Staples to try to get that solution that you can use on LCD screens, but they didn’t have it. Katie bought this $8 crap camera that came with film and a battery. I couldn’t believe that it could be a decent camera for eight bucks, but any form of photography is fine by me. So she bought it and then we loaded the film, and spent 20 minutes trying to thread the wrist holder thing, and finally took pictures. We totally wasted film just snapping pictures of us making stupid faces. Katie couldn’t get the flash to work, but it turned out the battery was just put in the wrong way. Ha. I told her that from the beginning.
So..if I can take Waffle to the coffee shop, can I use it at school? I don’t know..
I hate it when just as I settle in to being lazy and being satisfied with this one someone has to go make a layout that I really like. The layouts at my sites now are incredibly simple because I just can’t think of anything, or get what I want up. I am having trouble expressing what I want in a layout. Maybe I’ll think of something soon…In summer school, our class has begun the grouping/crowding. Ties have been formed. A group of girls from my school have their crowd, Mairead hangs out with kids from the Blair Science Magnet, the “bad” kids who always make funny comments and fall asleep in class are all chums. Somewhere along the way I have been shoved out of the groups..the girls from my school are nice, but I have never really been that friendly with them, or interested in what they do. Mairead seems more than happy to forget about me and hang out with the kids from her school. I like them alright, but when I try to hang out with them I feel like I am just following Mairead aimlessly around. Pointless. I’m glad she assigned our seats now, so at least I can talk to the people sitting near me. I did talk to someone new today. He is going to be a senior next year at my school, B-CC. I recognized him from school (I think almost anyone would..besides that our school is only like 1200 people), as the (in)famous ID-boy. For the entire second semester, he was the guy who had his ID around his neck and taped to his head. He never forgot a day, and when kids ripped it off, he just taped it back on, to protest ID badges. The school newspaper even wrote an article about him. At summer school, of course, his forehead is pleasantly absent of an ID, and he was kind of nice. Today’s activities? We had a speaker on substance abuse, but the prison warden ended up more telling us stories about his jobs at different jails and saying how much fun he had. Then we watched an incredibly depressing movie, After Jimmy. Other than that, I am getting a little sick of my movie watching position. I am in the center in the second row back from the front, so the TV is always reeeallly close, and there is a boy directly in front of me. If I sit up, his head blocks part of the screen, and my back hurts. If I lie down on my desk, it has to be lying on my arms, otherwise I’m too low down. And I have to lean to the right, and look between Jesse’s (the boy directly in front of me) and Vendi’s (the girl next to him — we are seated in pairs) heads. If I try to change position and lean to the left, I can’t the see the screen at all. Needless to say, by the end of a two hour movie my arms and back are sore. Also, Blair is so huge half of the rooms don’t have any windows, just flourescent lights. So when the lights are off, the room is totally black except for the TV. The teacher had to wake up five kids during different points in the movie. When the lights are turned back on, everyone is temporarily blinded. It’s worse going outside.This wouldn’t be a big deal if we didn’t watch a movie every single day. Not that I’m complaing. The actual lessons have been pretty stupid.
Whew! A whole week without writing. Tuesday was another semi-boring day of summer school where we watched Rudy again. But when I came home, our visitors arrived! Mayumi and Kana, exchange students from Japan. They were tired but Mummy wanted them to shake the jetlag, so we went to Montgomery Mall and just kind of browsed around. Wednesday wass fourth of July!! We went downtown to D.C. early in the morning — me, Kana, Mayumi, Mummy and Katie. First we had lunch at the Post Office Pavilion and looked at a dozen souvenir shops. We went to the Folklife Festival on the mall, but it was really crowded and dusty, so we decided to go to the Natural History Museum. I hadn’t been there in a long time, so we looked at the dinosaurs and then watched a kind of boring IMAX movie on caves. Then we went to the National Gallery and looked at the modern art. By this time it started raining.
Most people just sought shelter at the gallery doorways, but we braved the rain and walked to Chinatown with raincoats and umbrellas. We ate at a nice Chinese restuarant there, and Mayumi and Kana guessed that people sitting next to us were Japanese, and talked to them. They were nice and took pictures of us with Mayumi and Kana’s cameras. Then we had a snack at a Starbuck’s. It had stopped raining and looked promising for the fireworks on the Mall. But right as we got there it started pouring, so we took refuge like a ton of other people, in the Natural History Museum. Mummy asked a security guard if he thought there would still be fireworks, and he said with a smile that D.C had never missed a fireworks for rain. So we sat on the stairs in the museum and dried off, while Katie and I sang every song on the Third Eye Blind CD. Finally, it was dark and 9:00, so we went outside even though it was still raining. There were actually quite a lot of people just like us with ponchoes, umbrellas and raincoats standing and sitting on the grassy field waiting for the fireworks to start. When they did, you’ve never heard a bunch of happier people. There was a little girl who yelled, “All right!!! Cool!! Whoooooo!!” for half an hour straight. It stopped raining, and a crowd of people behind us starting singing the national anthem. At the end, every one clapped. On Thursday it was back to school where I researched obsessive compulsive disorder. Um..very interesting. When I came home, I took Mayumi and Kana on the bus to Bethesda to see Moulin Rouge..that’s right. For the fifth time. But it was still great!! And they loved it and said it was a great movie. Katie came in twenty minutes late because she had the wrong time for the movie.Friday, more summer school, where we started watching The Three Faces of Eve about a woman with split personalities. It was bizarre. Mummy picked me up with Kana and Mayumi and we drove to Baltimore. We passed the convention center where Otakon will be..it’s not as big as I thought it would be, but still a good location. We went to all of the shops around the Inner Harbor and bought some stuff at Gap and Bath & Body Works, which they don’t have in Japan. We even rented a paddle boat and paddled around the Inner Harbor near the aquarium for half an hour. We had supper at a Tex Mex restuarant, and then passed some time by watching the free concert by Plunge, some indie rock band. It was actually pretty cool, even though their songs were all variations on the same theme, and they jumped up and down and ran in circles while they were playing guitar. Then we headed to the aquarium and spent a lot of time at all the exhibits and eventually saw the dolphin show, which was awesome. Today we went to see A.I. It was really good — Jude Law and Haley Joel Osment are great actors, and the movie was really good plotwise and had cool robots. It was really tragic and depressing and ironic in the end, though. Kana was crying — I was exactly doing that, but the ending kind of bothered me. It wasn’t really just sad…but weird. Anyway, after the movie Mummy dropped them off at the conference they came to America for, so now the house is kind of empty. I need to study Japanese and write a paper on obsessive compulsive disorder, while listening to the Third Eye Blind cd, and trying to make some progress on guitar (it’s not happening.)
Today was the first day of school.
I mean, summer school! For the past two weeks just fooling around, I forgot that it started today. I had to wake up at seven, which wasn’t so bad. Then Mummy drove me to Blair (Maya’s school) where summer school for all the schools in the near by area is held. Mummy came in with me. Blair is intimidating. It is huge; when it was first being built a few years ago a lot of people thought it was a shopping mall. I went inside to find a mob of faces I didn’t recognize. Then I saw Julia, a girl from school I’ve known since seventh grade with two of her drama friends. They were taking Health, too. I found the list of names. Julia’s last name was Heynen, I was just a few names above her. The two pages were divided into three classes, but only two room numbers were given. We asked an official looking teacher, who said that the first 42 were in the first room, and the rest were in the other. We went up the stairs and took about 10 minutes to find the right room. I sat down in front of Julia.I looked around the room and recognized a couple people from B-CC, and Michael Burnim, this guy who went to my preschool and afterschool until sixth grade. I hadn’t seen him until then, so I was kind of glad I was on the other side of the room. I am shy like that. The same thing happened in fourth grade when my ex-next door neighbor Geoff came back from Singapore after a few years. I completely avoided him. But then look at last year. He was in my NSL class and funny. Anyway, I think he’s shy too, because he didn’t say anything.Also, five minutes late a smiling girl came in who looked a little bit familiar, and then she waved at me, and I realized it was Mairead (sp?), Maya’s friend. She was really nice, and truthfully I liked her better/got along better with her than Julia & company.After about 15 minutes of 40 or so kids sitting quietly (a change for high school — but none of us knew each other) a teacher finally showed up. She had no clue what was going on, and realized that our class was kind of big as kids continued to trickle in until 8:30, dragging more chairs in with them. Then another teacher came in and told her that there were only 4 VCRS (and you know Health totally relies on videos) for the entire summer school. Our teacher started taking attendance. Every other teacher I have had has no problem with taking attendance, but this teacher paused about seven minutes in between each name. After calling about ten names she realized she was supposed to ask what school we went to, so she had to start again.By this time, the other Health teacher was coming in with books and annouced that tomorrow, another teacher would come and there would be three classes, like on the original list. Good, I was in Mairead and Julia’s class. Then the lesson actually started (if you could call it a lesson.)
Ms. Wood taught us the six step decision process and gave an example about her own life. Her husband smoked, so she had to make a decision. Some of her options were a little ridiculous..like living in a house she owned in West Virginia and commuting to Maryland every day. At this point, a guy with a buzz cut, who I think goes to Blair, raised his hand and asked, “What was he smoking?” That got a lot of laughs, but the teacher being the ridiculous ass she was said something like, “That’s a good question! Cigarettes, I think..but it could be..I don’t know!” Who divorces their husband just because he smokes? Then she gave us some busy work and left the room for 30 minutes. We socialized. When she came back it was time for break. Mairead and I went outside, but as soon as we left the building we realized the doors were locked behind us. Then three minutes later:”Summer school students, Blair is a CLOSED campus. You may NOT leave the building.” Oops. Maired snuck us in a side door. For the rest of class we watched “Rudy” a movie about a short guy who wants to play football for Notre Dame but doesn’t even have the grades to get into. Finally, it was almost 12:45. “Tomorrow we are studying mental illnesses. We’ll be looking for mental illnesses in books. Not in this room.” Hahahaha. Then I took the RideOn home, with a few kids from B-CC. Summer school isn’t that bad.
Yesterday was going to be a boring day. I called up Katie and we argued for 20 minutes over whether to see crazy/beautiful or A.I. There was no way I was seeing crazy/beautiful and there was no way she was seeing A.I. We thought about seeing half of each, since they were showing at the same time. We flipped a coin. We argued some more. Finally, we just decided to go to the mall and decide when we got there. Mummy drove us to White Flint, the kind of stuck up “classy” mall that Nick hates. We got pizza at the eatery, and then decided to buy blue from the Border’s there. But after finding the Third Eye Blind section, they didn’t have blue. Unbelievable. I’m not sure how we came up with the idea to leave White Flint, but a few minutes later we were walking to the White Flint metro station. We came to the conclusion that we were never going to come to a conclusion about crazy/beautiful vs. A.I. So we decided to see Moulin Rouge. Yes, (if anyone has been keeping count) for the fourth time. (Mummy, I told you we saw that other movie because otherwise you would have been mad at me!) There were eight minutes until the train that went to Friendship Heights came, so Katie called her mom on a payphone and found out the time that Moulin Rouge was playing at Mazza Gallerie (the equally stuck up expensive theatre in Friendship Heights…but at least it has stadium seating and Surroud Sound). It was playing at 6:50. A quite glance at the Metro clock told us it was 6:40 then, with seven minutes until the train came and four stops from Friendship Heights. I rememeber when I saw Moulin Rouge with Nick, it was already playing the movie at 6:56 in Bethesda, for a 6:50 movie. We ran onto the train, counted down the stops and ran to the elevator. A nice woman in it told us which way to get to the movie theatre. The we ran up the escalator to the top floor. Two tickets were $19.95. What the hell? Katie said something like, “Natalia, you’re only going to have 5 cents left!” The lady heard and charged us the children’s price. That was so nice of her. I said thank you about five times and then we ran into the theatre. The movie was only just starting — as in the beginning credit were being shown, even though it was 7:10. We ran up to the top of the theatre and tried to figure out where there were free seats. Each time I’ve seen Moulin Rouge, an older crowd has been there that laughs at the remake of the Police’s Roxanne, the verse from Material World, Elton John’s Your Song, and the infamous “the hills are alive with the sound of music.” By this time, Katie and I knew most of the lines and said then. I hope we didn’t disturb anyone. We left early, and went to the Border’s across the street to buy Blue. It was funny how excited we were, even though it wasn’t exactly a new release. We looked at the CD booklet and the lyrics and the thankyous. I still haven’t listened to it, because I need to find someone to burn it. I don’t want to listen to it before Katie, I’m not sure why. I’ve read the CD booklet a lot of times now. They have a ton of pictures of the studio, and I could see there was an acoustic guitar. (yay!) Last summer I moped around the house and went to camp. I’m glad I’m actually doing stuff this summer even if it’s just hanging it out and watching movies.