Today (or yesterday) I was awoken & terrorised by weird continuous thumping noises from the above floor, even though that gave me only 2 hours sleep. I was frankly pissed off. Though trying to dose back to sleep, eventually... Woke up late in the afternoon. Ran to Pollock and finally paid my flat rent.

In the evening I went to the CompSoc's End-of-Term meal at The Apartment. It was really nice. Really nice steak with fries, which Susanna kept on nicking. Dessert/sweet was extortion. You pay £3.60 for a tiny ball of ice-cream on top of 3 eclair balls, when you could buy a huge tub at Safeways for £2. Though they did make a wierd arty drawing impression on the plate using chocolate sauce. There was:

  • Mark Miles (nine9)
  • Paul Hamilton
  • Alex
  • Nicolas
  • Leynos
  • Iain
  • Kate
  • Susanna (my sister)
  • Bruce
  • Michael Eng
  • and me
Interesting evening with the usual CompSoc conversations like, the smell of washing up liquid, how do you define what spring washing up liquid smells like?, and why the cup's in Star-Trek look like massive pyramids. etc Plus why have different flavoured shower/shampoos/washing up liquid when it's all going to get washed off anyway???

Kate started talking about wanting to watch an Alien film and wondered why there were two different boxes (Alien & Aliens). Also she brought up horrible topics like the 'brain part' in Hannibal, eatting alive insects and the insects trying to craw back up your throat (which scared Mark), etc. There was the usual bendy spoon entertainment (which scared Mark).

Came back to labs (KB Centre level 3) to play Counter-Strike. Leynos did an all-nighter stay, well until his next bus at 6am. Mrow-Joe (who is currently sleeping beside me), is sleeping on his keyboard and there's random ascii garbage text on his screen.

~~~ 6:52pm ~~~

I am frankly pissed off today because I just lost 8GB worth of personal files/archive/mp3s/music videos, whatever. I have a 10GB physical hard-drive which is partitioned into 3,3,4GB parts. I keep my OS and programs in primary C, personal archive in D, and mp3s, music videos in E.

My C drive was getting a bit messy and thought it was about time to do a format C: and fresh installation of Win98SE. Curiously I had these old "teach yourself Chinese" CDs that needed old version of MS-DOS. So I thought to give them a try by installing MS-DOS 6.2 + MS Windows 3.1.

On booting up MS-DOS 6.2 first installation disk, a weird blue screen comes up saying it needed to 'configure C: drive' for me. Knowning that MS-DOS 6.2 works on FAT16, I let it continue.

Afterwards, and the labourous installation of good ol' Windows 3.1 then my sound drivers then my CD-ROM drivers... I began playing with my cool chinese CDs... only to find out that they were all garbled characters and I realised you need chinese fonts (or chinese windows).

After not understanding a single word I thought it was time to get back to Windows 98SE. I formated and reinstalled. To my surprise, where the fuck did my D and E drive go??? Basterd MS-DOS 6.2 wiped my partition tables the old basterd!

Please, if you have any ideas on how to get my stuff back I would be very grateful

Some of us are dumb and blind and out of our minds
Walking past each day through fields of land minds

At work, I'm taking a bunch of PCs and keyboards from one lab to store in another. My cart is more than full. The cart is really heavy, so I'm pushing pretty hard to keep it moving. I watching on my left side to make sure I don't hit anything. I didn't see the chair on the right side. BAM. Keyboards fly everywhere. Luckily only two computers fell off.

Then, I was stacking some keyboards in the lab and a lady hands me one of the keyboards that got screwed up. Genius that I am, I reached out my hand to recieve it and a keyboard feel out of my other hand.

Then I'm taking some ZIP drives over to a building across campus. I go over a small bump and one of them drops off. A guy walking by says "Whoa". Thanks, man.

Then I turn a corner and another one falls off.

I look down at my watch.

I've only been at work for two hours.

I hate commuting.

I made my usual commute today, dropping off my sweetie at 88 St. in Queens so he could catch the A train, and then heading West on the Belt Parkway towards Staten Island, on my way to Rutgers University. The trip used to take me an hour or so. Today it took me closer to two.

There was a traffic jam approaching exit 11 (Flatbush Avenue), and I was mad. I thought to myself, "flaming fucking death. There better be flaming fucking death."

Little did I know...

There was an accident involving at LEAST three cars on the opposite side of the highway, closing two lanes on the eastbound side and slowing traffic for rubbernecking on the westbound side. A cop was with two of the cars that had been cleared away; the cars' owners were standing there, looking around, kind of bewildered, hurt, scared, and violated. There were five fire trucks still at the scene, surrounding a car that hadn't been cleared. They were strapping a body onto a stretcher rather tightly. I don't know if the person died, or was just horribly wounded, but they really didn't want him or her moving around during transport.. Then I noticed that one of the people on the side of the road was holding a baby, and I thought about how the person in the stretcher was someone's parent, or child, or lover, or significant other..

And I told myself, "Never again will I wish for flaming fucking death."

I spent most of the rest of the ride trying not to cry, thinking about if it were me, holding my son, and it was someone I loved on that stretcher...and as I watched the traffic pile up from exit 7 up on the other side of the highway, knowing that no one really cared what happened -- they were all thinking "flaming fucking death" too.

Of course, when I got slowed down again trying to get over the Outerbridge off of Staten Island, the first thing that came into my head was ...

flaming fucking death.

I guess old habits die hard. Or maybe, we're just too insensitive to care about other people's tragedies. We'd rather just look at something horrible because it's something to look at.

Maybe next time I see an accident like that, I'll stop to see if there's anything I can do.

Then again, maybe I'm in too much of a hurry.

Tonight, on my way home, I've crashed my motorbike. I am not very impressed with myself, and the fear is still coursing in my system.

The hail that came down was incredibly thick. Hail hurts at 100 km/hr! So I slowed down, and stopped weaving through the traffic.

I have NO idea how it happened, but I assume my front tyre hit a patch of the slushy ice, and down we all went...

I watched the bike slide across 2 lanes of traffic (I was on a 3 lane highway at the time) and I slid on my bum down the third. I am astounded the car behind me stopped in time.

When everything had come to a stop (three lanes of peak hour traffic, my bike 100 meters further down, and myself), I stood up wandered across to my bike, picked it up, and pushed it to the emergency lane. I waved to all the people in the cars that had stopped, and promptly felt embarrassed.

Anyway the bike was okish, and I have a sore shoulder, and I rode home, so i guess all's well that ends well...

This morning when I opened my eyes, it really hit me that tomorrow I graduate from high school. I never really thought about it before, not like I did today. It was always just an upcoming event that I had so much trouble waiting for, wishing the days away for, and now that it’s tomorrow, I wish I had another year before growing up.

I suppose it always happens that way, doesn’t it? Waiting a long time for some big thing that you want with all your heart, and then when you’re about to get it, you realize that the path leading there was much more fun than the getting.

I’m guessing that the reason graduation hit my like it did is because it means the end of a security blanket that I’ve had for 13 years. Every day, I knew where I’d be from 8 AM until 2:30 PM. Every day, I knew I’d see my friends, I knew I’d have teachers helping me get through, and now, that’s all over with. Sure, there’ll be college, but I highly doubt that people there will care whether I cry, pass, fail, or die. Ok, well maybe they’d care if I died, but only if it involved them and a lawsuit.

The point of this is somewhere between “seize the day” and “it’s time to grow up.” I’m really trying to say that all things must happen and all things must change, but there should be no worries, and no regrets, and most of all, don’t strive for the happy endings. “There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends.”
I have two vertical blisters on my hand right now. They are from seperating coconut meat and husk recklessly with a stolen butter knife. It came off in little chunks. They were sweet and sort of crunchy. Ross told us to chop them up and soak them in warm water for a couple days to extract the flavor. I will pick cherries in a couple hours, I will paint edging trim a light pink.

There is too much to want sometimes. I wish everything could be reduced to one thing at a time. Tanya and I sat on the porch. I tried to take pictures of her smashing the coconut with the hammer. Instead I ended up with a short movie of her sniffing the broken fragments, tasting the aftermath, eyeing it for the right fissure to further smash with an industrious look on her face. I took a chunk in to Chris and explained how to eat it, he was hesitant and saved by a phone call. He was cranky, but we tried to be as good as possible.

The night erupted into a kind of ridiculous silly. Everything was funny for no particular reason and it carried along endlessly. We played scrabble and I kept score on the Etch-A-Sketch, answering requests for play by play scoring. We played with letters and words. We sometimes made up sentences to encapsulate words we played. Word play. I thought about my inside thoughts, and how it is hard to bridge the gap to outside ones. Most of the time they are a repetitious cyclic haphazard jumble. I like them that way, people are sensitive, sometimes hostile, to erratic changes in topic. It is hard to be candid with people, they often do not know how to handle it delicately enough. Around a few, it is easy though. Selena leaves soon and I will miss her. Not so much her absence as instead her being gone, the idea of it. Far away.

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