August 26, 2001 9:51 PM

I’ve had a really long day. I woke up at 4 this morning for church. After church I came home and went to sleep. I woke up about 11 and prepared to go to Amanda’s house. I went around 12, and we watched some movies and stuff. I came home and went out to eat with my family. After dinner I played Starcraft. I just got finished a few minutes ago, and I’m really tired. Good night.

August 27, 2001 5:54 PM

I just got home from dinner at the hospital. It was good. I had cappuccino for the first time in my life. I had a really long day today in school, and I have a feeling this may be a bad week. I think I’m going to go take a nap.

August 28, 2001 9:37 PM

Ugh, I’m really not a happy person right now. I’ve got another paragraph to write for my literary analysis, and I have to read chapter two in my history book. All the stress is a tight, pulsing red knot in my mind that prevents me from really enjoying anything until it is untangled. Those two things aren’t my only sources of stress, of course. There’s also the German essay I just got back, on which our teacher wrote “Most of this is cut and paste. Did you really know what you were writing?” Ouch. That hurts like a backhand with brass knuckles; it’s a violent electric shock yanking me out of dreamland and back into reality. It’s all Samantha’s fault, too. Ha, just kidding. It’s nobody’s fault but my own, and I understand and admit that. All of this stress at this late hour on this night is my fault. I should have planned better, or worked ahead instead of procrastinating. But I digress; my German troubles are because last Thursday I had a 250 word German essay about Berlin due the next day. For some unknown reason which may or may not involve my teacher, I learned next to nothing my freshman year in German. It is because of this that I have so much trouble in German today. I’m nowhere near as proficient in German as I am expected to be. So I’ve got this 250 word essay due the next day. I decide to do my other work first, because I actually knew how to do it. That turned out to be a big mistake. It got to around 8:00 and my German wasn’t done. It was then that I talked to Samantha online. She told me that last year in German, the teacher didn’t care if you copy and pasted an essay as long as you knew what it meant. At first I had some very serious qualms about this idea. I thought about all the trouble I could get in if Sam was wrong, and the idea seemed ludicrous. As the night wore on and it got later and later and my essay still wasn’t done, this copy and paste thing seemed to have greater and greater appeal. Finally I gave in and did it; c’mon, Sam was doing it too and so were a few other people in the class. Well here I am now. I don’t even want to know what my grade on that essay was. I looked only for a second – only long enough to see the red underlined writing and the question marks. Ugh.

So right now a know a few things for sure: 1) I have a lot of homework, 2) My grade in German is in serious danger, and 3) I’m going to be up late tonight. Yes, that’s right. I don’t need sleep. I’ll be up all night if that’s what it takes to get all this done. No, I’m not saying it’s my teacher’s fault. From the fact that the majority of students in my classes are not going to be up too late tonight, I ascertain that it is nobody’s fault but my own. Okay, I’m over that now.

Yesterday I got a computer virus. I’d had it for several weeks, maybe even months, and I probably wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t been opening random files in my windows directory. What I found, much to my surprise, when I opened a file called something like reahoj.qqp was a list of screen names and passwords that I had used on my computer. I found my internet service provider login and password, my aol instant messenger login and password, and my email address and password. Whoa. I found several files with similar names in the same directory and I started opening them. Most of them were records of every action I’d taken on the computer on various days down to the keys I pressed. Wow. So I was a little panicked. I asked some friends about the nature of this virus, and one of them sent me to a website that gave instructions for deleting it. I followed them, but when I was done I found that the virus was back under a different file name. The instructions must have been for an older version of the virus. I then downloaded a virus scanner/remover and ran it. It found about six files which it deleted. Awesome, I thought to myself as I restarted my computer. My elation turned quickly to surprise and disappointment as the computer failed to boot up. I reset it several times with no luck. Finally I booted up from a disk and reinstalled windows. Its working now, but it’s a little flaky. Things are crashing more often, and when I start it up it tries to install several assorted devices that are already installed and running fine right now.

I seriously need to update my web page! I haven’t managed to do anything for it for a few weeks now. It’s so much harder during the school year.

Aha, it is lucky for me that I’ve just hit three pages, because I’m running out of things to vent about and I really need to do my other homework. Good night. I really hope I feel better in the morning.