Honest Excuse

I have an honest excuse for not updating my blog. My computer has come up with a very successful new way to irritate me: about fifteen minutes after I turn it on, it abruptly and with no warning whatsoever switches off. I didn't want to go through starting an entry just to have it disappear to the Land of Lost Data. Fortunately, we've discovered that the problem doesn't happen under my Mom's username; unfortunately (since my font-making program is under my name), I can't work on Cyril until it's fixed. I do have the italic for it somewhat finished, but I don't have any numbers done.
-Well. First, the holidays. Boy, it's a stretch thinking back that far. First, we went on up to Dayton or wherever--Middletown, Centerville, one of those--and did Christmas on my Dad's side of the family. I got some good socks like I asked for, one of those neat Magnetic Induction Principle flashlights, uh, some other things, and of course peanut butter fudge. Nana's peanut butter fudge is sublime. And since it's made with sugar, it keeps for a long time, enabling me to eat just one piece a day and savor it for weeks. I think I have seven pieces left.
-A few days later (on Christmas Eve--for tactical reasons, Christmas is never allowed to be on Christmas now), we had Christmas in Oxford with my Mom's side of the family. There I got a few books, also as I asked, and a fishing lure, and a tackle box, and a lava lamp ( I still don't know why), and some incense I haven't seen since, and, uh, some other stuff. Also, I got seventy-five bucks: seventy from Grandpa, and five from Uncle Joe. I have to say: if you can manage it, being Grandpa's grandson can be pretty profitable. Ha, ha, ha. Just kidding, Grandpa. (Kind of!)
-The next year, school started back up. Pfaugh. And so did January. Now, I read somewhere that Cincinnati has never had a snowless January, but, if it weren't for some kind of freaking little flurry or something that happened in the very early days, we may be on our way to the first. We have had just slightly above zero snowfall this whole month so far. There are not words for the contempt I feel for this January. If there were something concrete I could blame it on--say, some machine--a good word would be hostility. If there were something to blame, I could get really involved, probably to a criminal extent, in absolutely ravaging whatever it was until it was torn apart into unrecognizable bits. This has been the suckiest winter I've experienced as far back as I can remember. All season, we've had one snowstorm! And then about four weeks of fifty-degree weather! As soon as humanly possible, I'm getting out of this backward, oil-slicked, dark gray town, this town that's covered tangibly with a thick layer of tedium, where there are no positive aspects or attractions, where the center of town is a Taco Bell, and of course where the school system has been perverted by soulless board members who don't even consider what the students think and whose goal looks to be to turn Finneytown into Big Brother's first outpost, just to give a totalitarian kick to the new millennium. I may or may not go to college somewhere in New England (see below post), but wherever I do, I'm going to move to Minnesota afterwards. As soon as I can, I'll buy a shoreline cabin on a forgotten lake wrapped in dark green pine forest and stretching out far enough to get lost in. During the nights, the only sound will be the occasional thunderstorm every week or so and maybe distant cars on a highway that only exists as part of a world I don't belong to. During the days, there will be the interweaving songs of all the different birds on shore, and the splash of my kayak's paddles and the whiz of my reel as I go out into a distant bay to catch fish for dinner, and maybe the thrum of a mayfly's wings just before it lands on my hand. On vacations, I'll go out paddling, straying for days down a string of interconnected lakes into places where they haven't yet gotten the news that the human race was invented, and then stopping in a distant lake, turning around, and pointing my kayak back to home whenever I decide I want to. Maybe I'll remember those days when I was in a distant land of truck exhaust, police sirens, and the afterglow of city lights electrifying the smog to taint the night sky from black to a sickly purple. Then I'll just shake my head and jump into the water.

Exams were last week. I'm embarrassed to admit I had to take English: I got a B first quarter, because I failed to turn in one assignment. It was the Puritanism and Neoclassicism notes that we had to turn in alongside the test on the test day. I hadn't taken notes in class, because I'm not a take-notes kind of guy, and I never heard her tell us to, and so I stayed up 'til after midnight the night before to work on them. Then, on the test day, there was no exact time when someone said, "Okay, turn your notes in now to this place," and so I didn't. I suppose we were just supposed to staple them to the test. So, I didn't turn them in, and they were worth (whoa!) twenty points, and I got a B for the quarter. Mom, shut up! Yes, it is too late to do anything about it, and yes, I almost ceratinly have an A for the semester anyhow! But I had to take the exam. Otherwise, the ones that you can't get exempt from were math, history, Spanish, and physics. The only hard one among these was history, but boy was it a bear. Fortunately, Mr Volz grades on a curve. He says only one person has ever gotten an uncurved A on his midterm, and she was the person who, when they were reviewing things in class, would say, "Oh, yeah, that's question 18 on test 7," or something like that. On the day I took physics and history, there were three exams scheduled, but there's obviously no exam for study hall, so I had a free bell between them, and it lasted two and a half hours. The exam schedule said students were expected to stay off campus when they didn't have an exam, but just to be sure, I checked in with Mrs Flick to see what I was supposed to do. She said I had to stay on campus! So: not only is the school moronic for making me stay when I had nothing to do, it's also misleading and inconsistent! Well, Aaron invited me to stay in Mrs Lawyer's room to waste time while he finished up some sort of webpage design project for her, so I did.

The forecast calls for warmer-than-average weather, with rain two days next week, and a possiblity of a little bit of snow that will melt anyhow.

This is the first of two new posts. The other is just underneath this one.

Oh, something else

I just reread the comments on my last post, and I noticed they had a distinct collegiate bent.
-I haven't even come close to deciding what college I'm going to go to. A few days ago, BJ was around on his semester break, and I had a nice long talk with him about colleges. He suggested one called Amherst in Massachusetts, and some other one in Minnesota that I forgot. He says pick one I like. Well, I won't try to contradict that advice. But he also says I ought to pick out one with a good reputation for its English department if I want to be an editor. This begs the question, BJ: How am I supposed to know what a college's reputation is? What I really need around now is a big list that says what assorted colleges are known for, and how well they're known for it. Is there such a list? Where do I get it? There probably isn't. So, how do I know?
-Another thing I need to know is how much colleges give for a National Merit Scholarship. It's different with each college. So how do I know what it is for each college? Like, say, does Amherst tell somewhere on their website how much they're going to give me because I'm a Scholar? And if not, how am I supposed to tastefully find out--from each college I'm thinking about? Or am I supposed to just navigate in the dark? And more than just how much they'll give me, here's another question. Where does it say what the tuition is for a college? That at least is probably on the website somewhere.
-Those are the questions I keep asking. Now I've actually asked them of someone.