Positive thoughts, E-mails, Weight update
Today I had time to reflect and realize just how small my current problems really are. I may be slightly overweight, but I'm happy. I may be having issues with one of my classes, but I'm doing extremely well in the other. I may be embarrassed of what my life is now, but one day I know that I will be proud of what I have and who I am. I may have lost contact with so many of my cherished friends, but I have someone who loves me so very much. There is always something good to appreciate, there is always something that deserves credit for just being all that it is, especially when other things arn't going the way that I had hoped.
I'm not sure what it is about this time of the year. My whole outlook takes on a more positive tone, and I'm more sensitive to what is going around me. Maybe it's because I don't feel so trapped in the house, since the weather is actually worth going outside for. I had always said that winter was my favorite season, because it was so beautiful... but the older I get, the easier it is to find beauty in all seasons. What makes them different is how the spring and summer months seem to warm up my attitude.
Though, I'm sure me listening to an old Enrique Iglesias CD that I found today has a little something to with my upbeat attitude. While I may be bubbling over with positiveness, I might as well comment about how the past few days have gone, even if some of it touches on issues that I was fuming about earlier this week.
After playing a heated game of e-mail tag with my programming design professor over the past few days, he has stopped responding... or, he has not responded to me in more than 24 hours since my last e-mail to him. If he does not respond by tomorrow evening, I will contact him yet again. It is probably just the competitive side of me, but I take his silence as me having found a way to prove him wrong. Even if he e-mails me back sometime this evening asking me to restate the same argument for him yet again, it has felt good for most of today just to feel as though I've finally stated my view clearly enough to have him at a loss for words. I seriously doubt that even if it really got to that point, that he would change my grade to a 50% like I have requested... but at this point, just being right, and convincing him that I was, would be enough for me in the end.
I've been trying to keep to a pretty regular diet. Having anything I want for dinner (though it works more like my breakfast, since I wake up at 1 every day) and then having a Pot Pie and some Special K as my two other meals. Every other day my mother and I do about 10 minutes of stomach exercises, and sometimes we go on a mile long walk together. When I feel up to it, I'll go into the garage and work slightly on my arms (since they're terribly weak, I can't do much with them without them feeling like they're going to fall off), and sometimes do some things for my legs. Otherwise, I do 50 sets on each side of something a Seventeen magazine called the "six pack twist", or something along those lines. When I look in the mirror, it looks as though I've lost a great deal of weight in my face and in my stomach, yet I'm still hovering around 139/140 pounds. Each time before I step on the scale, my mother says "muscle weights more than fat!" I'm sure if I converted myself from drinking soda to drinking water that I would lose weight at a much faster pace, but I just can't get into it. Bottled water, tap water; it all tastes like I'm licking metal to me.
I've been anxious to put up the photolog I've been working on. But, currently my domain is having some problems with the thumbnail script that movable type has, even though I have all the necessary programs installed for it to be running properly. I submitted a support ticket about it 3 days ago, and though they spent roughly 2 hours troubleshooting with me 2 days ago, they stopped after they recommended I install a special script on my server to see if that works. ATM, that NetPBM isn't working either, and though I have responded to the ticket, asking for further assistance with what they suggested, I haven't heard anything from them. I'm thinking I'll have no choice but to either upgrade the request or submit a whole new support ticket on the matter.
Oh... and as I told Matt I was going to do, I'm going to post one of the many odd things me and Matt were saying on the phone yesterday evening. I don't think he really believed I would post it, either by forgetting to do it or simply not wanting to 
But here it is... it's meant to be funny, but it's got some "inside" jokes in it too Caution to those who don't like graphically perverted things:
"Hump me like an un neutered puppy with your thick penis!"
Heh... I try to keep such a proper tone in this journal, but I'm so much more of a pervert IRL.
Cooling down to lukewarm
True to form, I have been acting as though I have the maturity of a 5 year old. Over the years I've come to expect it whenever I become angry, upset, or hurt. Like the rest of the human population, I cannot *stand* those feelings, and being as rude and annoying as possible seems to be the only way I've figured out how to deal with it. Like I just cannot contain those crappy feelings in me; having to unleash them out on everyone around me or I'll go insane
I'm still utterly furious and very upset by the grade my professor gave me... but I've completed my "kicking and screaming" phase and gone right into the gritting-my-teeth-until-it-hurts round. I've gone over that question roughly 5 times, wracked my brain again and again, and still have not been able to figure out how anyone who was paying attention to what they were doing could possibly have written any psuedocode or flowcharts without realizing that they would never be able to give the client a print chart of their weekly sales when there was absolutely *no* information given on sale figures. If someone hired me for the job, I would have to tell the client that they either needed to collect more data from their sales records, or from that point on start recording the needed data and then get back to me when they could present me with an inventory file that contained the needed information.
The post I made on the class discussion board 12 hours ago stating my issues and thoughts on last weeks assignment still has not gotten any responses. I made a reply to my actual grade as well, asking the professor to explain why my reason for not putting the extra steps was wrong, but he had not responded to me yet, either. I'm tempted to e-mail him directly and challenge him about the answer.
On to lighter news I guess... I did take my Word/Excel midterm earlier today. I got a 93% on it by missing two question, which still gives me the same 94% like I had in the class before. I'm confident that that grade will always stay an A, since I've basically took 2-3 classes relating directly to those programs while in high school. I'm happy I'm doing well in the class, but it's tainted by the fact that if I was doing bad, it would be pathetic considering how much I've been exposed to the material.
My Programming Design class is nothing but being exposed to completely new material... and I'm apparently bombing it.
To keep my mind off of my class woes, I've been working on bringing back my old photolog. This time it'll have it's own semi-independent layout that I'll be able to easily change to match the colors of this site's layout. It'll just give me something else to do when I find myself dieing of boredom. Playing WoW has gotten a little boring for me... from playing a class I don't really care for, on a faction I don't really care for, and from having 0 social interaction with anyone else in game... dunno, just gets lonely and boring after a while. John's been playing alot more, so it's better if he has more uninterruptible play anyway. So, more things to occupy my time is good. I've ran into a small scripting error, but hopefully my support ticket will be answered soon and I can really get to rolling with the photolog.
Surprise, surprise
Well, so much for my temporary high of having a good grade in my Programming Design class. I just checked my assignment from last week that I was worried about, and he gave me a 25% on it, which kicked my grade down to a 69%. All my professor did was tell me that I did not include the Hierarchy Chart, Flowchart, or Psuedocode... even though in my answer I stated WHY I didn't include them. It wasn't like I had "forgotten" to, I actually had (what I thought) was a very logical reason for not including them. The least he could have done was tell me WHY it was possible in 10 words or less, instead of just treating it as if I'm some slacking deadweight just taking up his time.
I told my mother after I found out about, trying to fight back tears while saying it, because I needed someone to at least understand... and all she did was seem *very* upset, ask me why I got it wrong, and then tell me we'd "talk about it in the morning" since she was behind for getting ready for work. WTF are we supposed to "talk" about, I'm not 5 years old, and talking about it will do nothing but make me feel like more shit than I already do. So I came back to my room and posted my first post on the class discussion thread. I sounded fucking pissed off, and made snide comments like "I need help understanding how I was wrong rather than just having my assignment marked wrong," but I really don't care. I should have gotten a little more credit for actually using my *mind* to come to my own independent answer instead of just copying out of the book like most everyone else probably did. Yeah, they can trace well, therefore they are all worthy of 100s. Sure.
I'd love everyone to be like... oh snap, Chrisy is right, this problem was impossible! Ahhh, everyone else in the class but her got it wrong, OMG! Yeah, right. There will be something obvious probably that completely went over my head, or someone will spout some BS that was completely NOT covered in the chapter but only they know because they read ahead. Or something. I just don't think there's *any* answer for how you get weekly sale figures when all you're given to work with is data on type of animal and price of animal. Fuck this shit.
God, this was such a mistake. A big expensive mistake. And it's not the idea itself, it's me doing it that makes it all wrong. I work my ass off and still can't do well. Why did I ever think I was capable of doing this.
Version 9, Nature talk, Being passionate
So, yes, there is a new layout up. Version 8 was very pretty, and hopefully I'll convince myself to use it again this fall. I was just having uncontrollable urges to have something more upbeat and bright. Something more in tune with the season. I came up with this rather quickly, so I wouldn't be surprised if some felt it wasn't as good as the last layout. But oh well... can't please everyone.
I had gone for another fast paced walk with my mother yesterday. I'm not sure if she had a slower cassette tape in her walkman or what, but I was able to keep up with her much better than I had ever been before. I like walking because it serves some aerobic purposes, but also because I'm just in love with being outside recently. It makes me wish I was 5 again and had a reason to be outdoors as long as I possibly could, all day long. At this age, I simply step outside on the porch and instantly awkward... out of place in general, because I have nothing else to do but stand there, smell the air, and stare at the sky. Going on walks with my mother gives me a reason to look around, and just lose myself in what I'm seeing without drawing attention. On the route my mother and I take for walking, on one side of the road all of the houses there are directly on the lake. I love walking down that road, because the light smell of the water and the sand coming through the trees brings back alot of memories and feelings from my childhood. Just makes me feel content.
I get so amazed at how quickly everything is growing in. There is already almost full fledged leaves on all of the tress. In another week it's very likely they will already be to their full haze of green, which usually doesn't show until mid May. I wish I could go outside and take pictures like I did last year, but now it feels as if I have no reason to. Last year I did it so I could post pictures in the photolog I had going. Now I think of how cruddy quality the pictures will be with my now ehh digital camera, and wonder why I would bother taking pictures when I could see it again the same way next year in better detail than I could ever capture. The pictures never seem to look the same way as they do through my eyes, anyway... that's probably the reason why I'll never be a photographer, but it's discouraging regardless.
I'm not sure what's bringing on all this nature appreciation. I've been having it off and on for the past couple of years now, with each burst of it getting stronger than before. Maybe it's all the Enya I've been listening to. And as creepy as it is to admit, I was first introduced to Enya (other than commercial advertisements) by Jenn, when she had the "A Day Without Rain" CD on one night shortly after the year at Radford had started. Listening to the first track on that CD still gives me goose bumps, and reminds me of laying in bed, with my 3 fans blowing on me, and feeling everything I felt then from being in a new place. All of Enya's songs now mean something emotionally charged to me. I think the music is absolutely beautiful, and I'm not sure why more people don't listen to it.
While testing this new layout under different circumstances, I read some of my journal archives in the process... primarily those from around around August of 2000. My writing style was so different back then. I now write with a much more serious tone, which might be because I'm trying to cover that I have nothing to talk about, or because it makes me feel more like an adult. Overall, I like my quality of writing better back 3-4 years ago... maybe it's because I wrote as if I didn't care, or was detailed yet vague at the same time and that left some element of mystery to it all. Maybe I just explain too many things when I write now, not leaving much for the reader's imagination. Who really knows. Back then, I had roughly 20+ hits a day, sometimes up near 50, and now I'm lucky if I pass 10. But that is probably more due to me being so shy about posting comments on people's sites, as that is the linking method of choice these days.
I really should break out of that habit. I just feel so odd commenting on someone else's thoughts... I'm so used to being a silent observer, that when I try to force myself to say something to let the person know I care and am reading what they're saying... it just ends up sounding exactly what it is: forced. I have horrible people skills. I'm sorry to all those that comment here and I never comment back. It's so odd that I love comments, but am usually too afraid to ever return the favor. Oh, hypocritical me.
The more and more I think about summer, the more I cannot wait to go to the beach. I've even considered taking my laptop with us there, encase Matt and I want to try to make movies of us or the beach then we could save them on my laptop so they wouldn't take up too much room on his camera. Maybe I'd post one of them on here for people to see, if the file size wasn't too horrendous.
I have the goal of trying to be more romantic while in Myrtle Beach with Matt. I will try during the whole trip in general really, but will be focusing on that mini-vacation together as a good way to get me going with it. Usually I have a hard time being romantic or passionate, and I'm not sure why. It just makes me feel awkward, like I'm acting or pretending. I suppose it comes from never having naturally learned and experienced it in my past relationships... or something along those lines. I usually have a "lets get down to business" attitude, which is almost embarrassing to say. Even now just thinking of my past relationships I can see how I've grown into that habit. Matt and I seem to take on opposite gender roles in our relationship... it's funny, and yet so appropriate. I just wish I wasn't so much of a dick sometimes.
School talk, Weather appreciation
I just put my contacts in after having worn my glasses for a couple of weeks straight now. My eyes have instantly gone back to looking like red and agitated, but I don't really care. I was trying so hard just to see what I was doing clearly in PSP, but straining my eyes to the point of it being painful wasn't accomplishing it. Ah well... I had missed seeing the actual size of everything, anyway. A day or two away from the horrid things won't be so bad.
I'm happy to say that I have A's in both of my classes. At first I was worried, since on my first round of turning in homework I got an 81% and an 80% on another. It upset me so much that I cried for roughly an hour, since the material was either painfully easy or I had spent the previous week reading the text and highlighting it, and I even hand copied down the lecture notes to make sure I knew it... but I still got less than the minimum high 90s that I was expecting. Later on I found out the reasons why I had missed the questions was due to my tendency to right click in "blank" areas of the page when I'm filling out forms. It was just my way to ensure that the page was selected to scroll when I spun my mousewheel, not a textfield, and I now do it out of habit with every form I fill out regardless of whether it has a textfield or not. With the school assignment forms though, if you right click anywhere in the plane of a radio button or the answer associated with it it'll automatically select that answer. Maybe that's how all radio buttons work, but I always assumed you had to click on the actual circle... but anywho. Lesson learned, and I've been getting high 90s or 100s since.
I believe I have exams next week or the week after, and I am a little worried about them. For one, my Business Applications class (which is my shortened name for it) has been so easy, I have not had to read the text... so I haven't. There have been a few things I needed to look up, but otherwise, I knew most of the questions either from common sense of how Microsoft programs work, or from having used the program so much in the past. Programming Design... is different in it's own way. I'm confident I know the material, but I'm a little shaky on my ability to make the correct decisions when proposed with a problem. My recent assignment for that class is a perfect example of that issue... I'm a little worried of getting a big fat 0 on it, but even if my answer is wrong, maybe I'll get partial credit since I stated the reasons for choosing the answer I did. Aside from that, there's also the vocabulary... I know it generally, but when there are 5 or 6 terms that something can go by, and the book constantly mixes and matches the terms with other things that have multiple words associated with it... it just ends up being confusing to me.
After having taken the Programming Design class, it's actually spiked a little interest in me for a career. But maybe it's just the way that it's being taught... possibly if someone had taught me how to make web pages or graphics centering around what a customer wants instead of what I want... maybe I could have made something with the mountains of HTML and CSS data in my head. Course, that would have had to have happened sometime in 1998, long before I ever took my first web page class. In my Programming Design class, I'm drawn to the way that with every new element they introduce, they instantly relate it to an example of how to use it to create something for someone else. But then again, we're only going to be getting into things like flowcharts and psuedocode... none of the real coding languages. I would bet if I were ever thrown into one of those classes I'd change my mind about it real quick.
I mentioned before that I was working in PSP, and I have been... on a new layout. I really do enjoy this one, but I wanted something a little more springy and upbeat. Everytime I look at this layout... it just feels like winter and cold. I look outside and the sunshine already looks like summer... all the plant life in the area is growing at a shocking rate. While this time last year the area was being drenched with rain for nearly a full month, we have basically been flung directly into summer this year. I barley went outside at all this past winter (most people believe that is pathetic, but it was *my* choice not to... why go out in freezing cold weather when you have nothing out there to do) so to me it already being summer is a pleasant surprise. Sometimes I stand out on the porch, just amazed at how everything changes. If there's one good thing my extended break has given me, it's the appreciation of how beautiful the world is. And I'd like the things that I create to reflect those feelings.
I wish I could get back into updating this journal daily again. Usually I find myself mindlessly reading message boards about the games that I play, or even playing a game that I really had not wanted to... just did because I couldn't think of anything else fun. Writing in here might not always be a thrill, but I'll appreciate that I did later. I've got to make myself remember that.