Entry 000145; 10.21.02

Ahh, back from the dead.

I'm sure the teeming minions will be happy to see this sloppy, half-assed text gracing a brand spankin' new issue of "ashia's journal." Which is sad, since I tell all of you people to stay the hell off of it in the first place. ::sigh::.

In recent news:

The kittens are huge. They spend a lot of thier time bounding around the house messing the place up. I've long since given up trying to keep order and cleanliness about the place. Eip top is a gigantic fluff ball of...fluff. He likes to scream at me in the mornings when he wakes up. He won't stop screaming until he's had his fill of attention, which means if you remove your hand from him, he'll start squeaking at you again. Pot pie likes to wake nathan and I up in the middle of the night, sometimes several times by begging to be let into the bedroom. Then she likes to try and suckle things that should defintely not be suckled, like my arms, hair, pillows, blankets, clothes, and Nathan. She continues to revere Nathan like a god, and inisists on following him around whenever he is home. Including into the shower.

Speaking of Nathan, he has recently subjected me to the most absurdly over-ridiculous version of a birthday I have ever experienced. Given, I've only exprerienced 20 (if you don't include the very first one) but I'm pretty sure it would beat out at least the next ten or so. His first assault came a week before my birthday, when he presented a present and screamed "HAPPY BIRTHDAIKA!" Which is his bastardization of the jewish holiday on my behalf. He then continued his battery of birthday cards (about 15 or so by the end of it all) and gave me a card a day...or sometimes two cards a day...or sometimes a card with a card inside it...every day. Also they had stickers. And presents, a neverending load of presents that could crush a fat man to death.

On my actual birthday, he woke me up by pouring balloons on me very early in the morning. Never, ever try to sleep in a bed full of balloons. Even though I had suffered a lack of sleep because of my inability to properly finish off my naptime, the day continued along well. We rented some movies, he let me go to work for a bit, (he came) and he spent a lot of time running to his room to fetch me more presents. I think he gave me about one present every hour until the last three hours when he realized he was running out of time and battered me with 8 gifts. He also got me the jade circle I asked for. Except instead of buying the cheap crappy kind I wanted him to buy for less than 25 bucks off the side of the street from a toothless man, he went shopping with my mom and together they bought me a ridicululously nice piece of jade. I told Nathan to bring my mom along so he wouldn't get ripped off by the finangling heathen chinee, but both Nathan and my mother managed to do so badly at haggling (re: they did none) that the salesperson took pity on the poor lo-faans and took a bit off the ticket price, which is initially supposed to be set at a million times the actual value of jewlery because the chinese find a perverse, evil pleasure in making salespeople cry until they give you a discount or thier wallet and credit cards.

Since my birthday was on a tuesday, and there is absolutely nothing to do on a tuesday, Nathan paused my birthday at the end of tuesday to continue it on until friday, when he took me to the bay tower room and then to see hedvig and hte angry inch live. Both things were awesome, though I did have to walk a block or two in the sadistic torture chambers we call high-heels. i ended the wonderful night by dropping all of nathan's jelly beans in the parking garage and making Nathan cry. I am a horrible horrible person.

Hm. In other news:

I want to quit my job so badly I am willing to accept living in my car next year as a reasonable fate. But I can't seem to keep myself out of the place. I keep telling myself that it's only one day a week, that it's a good amount of money for the hours I work...but halfway through the day, I am screaming at Kris that this will be the last time I ever set foot into prints plus again, that I will smash in all the customers faces with hammers and plant a million of the "long" staples into the eyeballs of the princess of turnips we call "Kim."

Jesus Christ it's cold in here. It's supposed to be some ridiculously horrible winter this season and here I am in an apartment with no heating. Ugh I hate worcester.

So as far as school goes, there are good parts and bad parts. Most of the bad parts I called before I even got here. For one thing, the population that the students and administration of clark repeatedly refers to as "diverse" is actually one clump of very similar people that, if spread out evenly amoung the real world, might seem diverse with respect to the natives around them. There are a few very similar species at Clark, mainly the guys, who make up about 0.01% of my classes, the art-girls who are those girls who annoy the fuck out of me for some reason even though I don't know what it is. They seem to be good at absolutely nothing except drawing pictures of trees, and they are so blatantly rude that if you dare to meet thier eyes and smile at them in the hallway, they may rip your eyes out with thier nails. And then there are the other girls, the ones who keep saying how "diverse" they are, even when they are only speaking about themselves as an entire entity. They wear dreadlocks or dye thier hair, they are always carrying around some form of art medium, and they look at you as if you are a worm for not knowing what the hell you are doing. I would like to clarify right now that even though my hair is purple, and I do carry around pens a lot, I AM NOT ONE OF THEM. Oh god I hope not. It's at the point where I am thinking of dying my hair into a natural color just to be different.

So chinese. I love the subject matter but I hate the way the class is run and I loathe my classmates. 99% of my class is some form of asian. the other 1% is bumbling white kids who decided to tackle the mysteries of the east. They are so horrible at speaking there is no word for it. Oh no wait, there are two. "fucking idiot." No matter how many times a teacher corrects them, and no matter how many times they actually say the right word, they ALWAYS go back to saying the wrong word. I have no idea how they manage to pronounce things so horribly. There is this one guy who always says one of the most popular words that everyone uses in every single sentence ("is") and he consistantly pronounces it wrong. The teacher has given up even attempting to make him prounce things right, and instead has just decided to ignore the fact that he attends class. Then there are the japanese kids, who attend class looking down on everyone because they already know whatever type of language asian languages are. The girl is anotehr fucking idiot who can't pronounce things right. A severe handicap of the damned bastards is that they assume since they already know japanese, they can just prounce all the chinese words as if they were just speaking japanese gibberish. I hate. Then there is this tiny creature in my class whom I always want to throttle on sight. And when she opens her mouth, I just want to give up school entirely, leave the class, and throw myself in a river. She looks like a preying mantis, if you stuck those gigantic wax-wips on a preying mantis. don't bother to scale down the lips or scale up the bug. Then add about ten feet of long black hair and put a really tacky, gigantic, colorful little kid's barette complete with little puffy things and shiny reflectors, and we have hong lien. She manages to ask every stupid question there is, questions that if she simply bent her head towards the page open before her, we woudln't need to listen to her ask the same question over again and again while the professor has to explain it five thousand times. I cannot reiterate this enough: I hate. Did I mention that the professor keeps attendance and gives penalties of lowering your grade if you are late to class or if you miss a class? That's right. We're back in elementary school now.

Then there is graphic design. It's a nice solace in a time horribly stupid girls and pretentious art fags. The professor is good, the subject matter is interesting and informative, and the pace isn't that of a second grader reading Burgess. Again, the only problem is the goddan people in the class. Unlike chinese, I don't hate EVERYONE. I only hate a third of everyone. The unfortunate part is that every single one of them sits as close to me as they can get. It's not like they sat there and then I started to hate them. They sat all over the class, I decided I hated them all for various reasons, and they slowly worked thier way over to where I sit. It reminds me eerily of the phenomena of the community sluts and the circus bag. For starters, all of them are blindingly stupid. There are TWO guys in this section, one that sits there complaining so much I want to shove an exacto-knife through his eye. yYah, I don't love the school or the country, or the tree outside, or that spot on the floor either, but I don't sit there making another person listen as I drumble on like a senile old fuck. That's what the journal is for. People can close the browser. I can only get up from my seat to take so many bathroom breaks in one class before it starts to look suspicious. Then there is the smoker. She is a plethora of beautiful aromas. Mainly sharpie and nicotine. She likes to come to class late and smoosh a chair in between me and whomever I am sitting next to, even if there are empty seats elsewhere and the person i am sitting next to is brushing elbows with me. Her scent makes me sick over the three-hour course of the class, and she likes to do last night's homework, which usually consists of coloring in ungodly amounts of tracings with sharpie, right under my nose. I can't stand doing the homework as it is teh the sharpie, but then i am subjected to her lazy ass drying my brain cells. She likes to borrow expensive art materials and leave them around the room until I have to ask her for them back, upon which she proceeds to fetch them and toss them at me, insulted that I made her get up. Then there are the otehr nameless drones who produce final projects that they can't even discuss in critique because they were drunk when they made the project so they don't even know if it's theirs. They like to ask me to give them notes on what they can say they were aiming for when they created it. It's too frustrating and painful to watch them try to think something up themselves, so I end up giving them descriptions and then find myself having to critique the projects, upon which I have to think of MORE stuff to say about thier god-awful art.

Introduction to nature through drawing, aka the crunchy-granola hippie class, is my most painful class so far. I can't see how I could have a more painful time than this. On the good side, we go on field trips every other class, which gives me a chance to take a couple of rolls of things other than nathan and the kittens. On the bad side, I still suck hard-core at non-photography related arts, and it shows. Whenever I walk into the class I can feel the heavily, contemptable air and the laserlike fangs directed at me from the girls who produce gorgeous, boring drawings of trees and flowers and other boring shit that i would otherwise NEVER waste my time, graphite, or paper on. My sketches look like comical doodles of a "special" 5-year old child, and I simply have nothing to say as far as critiques go simply becuase I find the subject matter (nature) hateful and boring. Also, as I mentioned, I have no idea what I am doing. It occured to me this week that this is the first thing, other than rollerblading, that I have ever truly failed at. So this is what it's like to be a flaming idiot.

Photography, of course, is wonderful. Even the stupid people in my class are enjoyable. There is actually one girl who is so stupid, i've given up stifling my laughter when she speaks. Soon after I stopped hiding my amusement, I realized that she is absolutely hilarious. On days when she isn't in class, the class drags on slowly and painfully. Then there is this kid who is the resident awkward know-it-all. If you are having a two-person conversation across the room from him, and he hears anything that he knows the tiniest bit about, or even doesn't know anything but would like to hear his voice anyway, he will, in that miraculous mid-tone that is directed to someone but not to anyone in particular, the one that is just soft enough not to be telling you anything, but too loud to ignore, that yeah, he had a dog that did that same thing that your cat does. Or yeah he heard about the news that a truck fell of a highway yesterday, or, have you heard about the new gX4r53? he's not really a mac person himself, but he can link it to his palm pilot and his dad has one so .... or anyone else you really, really don't want to know and simply couldn't care less about. As another kid in my class said once "who the hell are you talking to?"

Hopefully that will fill your hungering little bellies. I know you people get ravenous when you don't have my blood or my words, and since I don't eat enough to give away blood and i don't know the antidote, I simply have to continue to feed your strange unreasonable addiction to my insignificantly boring life.