It's Snowball time right now. I feel a sense of regret, at the missed opportunity. I feel a sense of triumph, in that I didn't go. I feel a sense of I need to get some sleep.

I'm feeling incredibly bored at the moment, and due to the fact that I don't think I could retain sanity by reading more of The Awakening... I opted to write something. Nothing in particular, but just something. As pretty much any Bromfielder knows, the Snowball is tonight, and it amazes how much anxiety it seems to cause people. A bunch of people I know are going, and a bunch are not. I personally, as said earlier, am not. I personally have no regrets. I don't really care if everybody else thinks I should go.

But there's not much more I can say about this topic, simply because I don't care that much. Unfortunately, because a large number of people are going, or have preexisting plans, I've got little/nothing to do tonight, with the exception of homework. This sucks. There's nothing going on in school out of the ordinary. My life is in some sort of rut. I feel that every day is the same, I'm even mistaking some days for others because of their total lack of uniqueness. When I try to think what I did over the last week, I have one unifying thought, and that is a blur. A vague and fuzzy memory of going to school every day, and then going home to spend a couple hours doing homework, and then spending the rest of the night doing nothing productive. This also tends to result in more time spent online, because the internet is the ultimate procrastinator's tool, in that it allows limitless distraction.

I'm sure I'm rambling here, so I guess I'm just going to go queue up some mp3s to download, and find something better to do with my time.

Hey Anthony... the problem for me is this. I can't/don't dance. I haven't, nor do I plan to make any effor towards getting a date. I mean, I could, but I don't want to. There are varying reasons for this, including, but not limited to my total lack of spine, and my deep seeded fear of rejection. I suppose yes, at one point when you were grappling with whether you were going to ask somebody yourself, I did give you a good long rant on how you should just get over your self proclaimed fear of rejection, but the difference here is that you had already set yourself to asking her. I've got no initial motiviation to ask anybody. I've got nobody (well, nobody I'm going to mention) in mind to ask. Anyhow, because of this, I can't justify spending 12 dollars to get dressed up and hang around, not doing anything spectacular. I could save 12 bucks, and go over to a friends house to do the same thing, sans fancy get-up, and not surrounded by people I don't even know. To me, the snowball is not an opportunity for anything but boredom and disappointment.

You yourself said that because most of your friends are either going with dates, or not going at all, that you might end up being left out. You could dance, yes, but is it worth 12 bucks and dressing up to go and dance somewhere else? I mean, I just don't get your motivation for going. It's probably just me, and everybody will probably tell me in the near future, either in school to my face, via email or via the discuss button here why I'm wrong.... but that's how I see it. I'm too socially inept to see more.

First, I will establish the variables.

K = knowledge

M = money

P = power

T = time

W = work

Second, I shall present some given equations.

T = M (as given by the well known adage)

K = P (as given by the well known adage)

P = W / T (this is an equation learned in physics)

Now, the following manipulations are performed…

P = W / T	Given
K = W / T	Substitution
K = W / M	Substitution
MK = W	M x both sides
M = W / K	Both sides / K

Given a constant W, we can get the following equation:

The implications of this equation are quite far reaching.  Simply put, it means that if you take any two people, and set them to the same task, and the both put in the same amount of work, the one with the lesser knowledge, will come out with more money.

In simpler terms, the stupider you are, the more money you get.

I can't claim credit, however, for thinking this up. I was provided this interesting concept by none other than the infamous Mr. Gaumond, the math teacher who taught me pre and AP Calculus.

Take a look at my new collection of crappy almost-stories.

I can't believe this. My site got blocked by the school filter. This is incredible. It's time to become an evangelist against censorship.

If it didn't seem to be such a... fashion taboo, I could definitely wear sweat pants a lot more in public. A lot more being more than never. They are damn comfortable.

Sometimes I stop, and I wonder to myself, "Am I squandering my youth?"

Usually, I end up asking myself this during some extremely irritating piece of homework, and I keep on thinking that I should be having fun instead of doing a project that will have no future bearing whatsoever on my life.

Then I remember how most of the things I think will have no future bearing on my life end up having some sort of future bearing. Then I think if I do end up having fun during that time, I might be worse off in the future. So where do I draw the line between screwing around and having some youthful fun, at the potential cost of future success, or buckling down, and getting the work done so as to avoid having to worry about things in the future, such as having a place to live, or food to eat.

Fundamentally, I'm always asking myself one question. "Is whatever I'm doing right now high enough quality to get me to where I want to be in the future? Not above, because that would be wasted effort, not below because I don't want to miss my target, but in the niche I want to be in, and what niche is that?"

Too often I answer myself "This is not high enough quality to get where you want to be, even though you don't know where you want to be. You hate responsibility and expectations, so you subconsciously force yourself into turning in poor quality work, but in doing so, you condemn yourself to probably going to a college where you'll be surrounded by your inferiors, in which you'll breeze through, and end up in a low responsibility, and correspondingly low pay job, and you'll hate your life, but, you'd rather fuck around and enjoy your time instead of getting your work done, so fuck it." Only in less words, and not physically answering myself.

So now I'm torn between changing my approach to work and life, and my preexisting tendencies towards procrastination, laziness, and all consuming apathy.

What, I ask, is the point of capital letters? I'm not about to abandon them, as I did vowels for a while, but even still. What function do they serve? They're used in names, and at the beginning of sentences, but in those cases, most of the time it would make no difference whatsoever whether or not they were there. It's yet another stupid little part of our language that serves no real purpose, yet is supported by people who control the standards of grammar/spelling/mechanics. If I turn in an essay without capital letters, it will be perfectly readable and understandable, however, it will get an F (maybe not F, but some huge penalty, I imagine). I almost consider trying to abandon both capital letters and vowels for a period of time, merely to try to see whether or not it works. I've done "chatting" without vowels, and I've done it without capital letters. Both times, I was mostly (the no vowels bit can get tricky) understandable, and in the case of capital letters, it was a 100% comprehension rate among the people I was talking to. I would abandon punctuation, however that is quite often necessary I think.

I was reading through some of the feedback I get as a result of this site, and in doing so, I started reading a series of web logs, and then it hit me. I don't spend that much time meeting people online. I keep in touch with the people I know, and not with those I don't. I was reading all these web logs, and they were all making refrences to these other web loggers they knew through their blog. Sure, I spend a lot of time on AIM, but I'm never talking to anybody I don't know in person.

So I wonder, do I want to know these people, or I do I want to spend the time getting to know those people, instead developing my already lacking social life and interactions with people I see every day.

I spent 80 minutes today enjoying my life. Just being, and enjoying. It was the most amazing 80 minutes I think I've spent in at least 8 years. It was about 1:00 in the afternoon, and I had been wasting away the morning doing things such as procrastinating, watching part of "Dances With Wolves" (an incredibly good movie, I might add), and just wandering aimlessly in an abundance of nothing on the "internet." I decided to go upstairs for lunch. I was standing in the kitchen, looking outside into the forest, and just thinking, "wow. i'd really like to be outside right now. i think i'm going to go out and eat lunch in the snow." I did just that. I took a backpack, threw in some food, filled a water bottle with some juice, put on some snow clothing to avoid getting wet and cold, and headed out.

I started out running, just charging into the snow. Eventually I found this tree, at the top of a little cliff, and I just sat down, and waited. Where I was, I couldn't see any houses, I couldn't hear the road, the only sign of civilization that was within the realm of my perception was the occasional plane engine I heard flying overhead. It was beautiful. I sat there, eating my bagel, drinking grape juice, and not caring about anything at all.

After I finished eating, I just got up and walked. I didn't walk all that far, because after a while, I found a small clearing, with no trees, and I just fell backwards and closed my eyes. I lied there for a while, I have no idea how long. I actually fell asleep for a few minutes, but was awakened by a chunk of snow that fell onto my face from some tree. After that, I just stayed there, lying in the snow. Staring at the sky. There's something majestic about pine trees in winter. I was lying there, looking into the canopy of a pine tree, dusted with snow, and it just stood there, waving in the breeze. Eventually I started wondering how long I'd been out in the snow, seeing as I did fall asleep. At that point, I grabbed my stuff, and just headed back. In walking back, I decided a couple times to jump, for no reason, down some steep slopes, and let myself tumble to the bottom, and it was fun.

When I got back, it just stopped. Back to the real world. Back to homework. Back to boredom. Back to all the things that I have to deal with every day that I don't really want to have in my life.

When I say I haven't had an experience like that since about 8 years ago... here's what I mean. Before I was 8, I could do anything. I didn't worry about stuff like homework, I didn't care about what was going to happen tomorrow, because I was too busy having fun today. When I look back, I realize that as I've gotten older, I've spent more and more time agonizing about how I'm not having fun, but I'm not going to have any less work as time goes on. I'm definitely in need of a major outlook on life change.

But now, I've got to go back to my homework.

the music pulsing through my ears - i am invigorated - the world opens itself to me - and i still have nothing to write.

please leave suggestions for topics for a random short story I could write for a small schoolwide publication using the "discuss" link below.

Mp3 is my new (well, renewed) addiction, and Napster is no longer my dealer. I have moved on to bigger, better things. I have moved on to AudioGalaxy Satellite. It is superior in my mind, in every feasible way.