I'm not sure if almost being attacked by a goose counts as bad luck. It does look like, however, that it's a part of a series of unfortunate events, because I hear that bad things come in threes.

For one, our garage is having issues again. Whenever I try to get the door to come down, it stops partway and then tries to go back up again. I have to keep clicking the button on my garage door opening device until it finally manages to get all the way down. ...And even then, the garage door still tries to go back up. I'm thinking that the Rin/Len Kagamine song called "Remote Control" should have its lyrics rewritten to complain about my struggles with the garage door. I've even taken to going out through the front door (gasp! I pretty much never use the front door unless guests are over) just to avoid dealing with it. I'm worried that someday the garage will try to open on its own while I'm not around, and someone will come in and steal my bike. (This has happened before. My dad had his bike stolen many years ago, only it wasn't from the garage)

As for the other bad thing, it happened to my mother. We've always had issues with chairs and the legs of the beds in our house. Many times I've gotten up at night to use the bathroom and ended up stubbing my toe against a chair leg. It's happened so much that I suggested getting a bed with special legs so that you won't kick it (I saw an ad for it in a magazine), though as usual my parents weren't paying attention. Well, now my mother was walking to the bathroom at night and her toes hit a chair leg really hard. She didn't think it was a problem that night, but the next morning it hurt a lot and she couldn't walk properly. Turns out that she's fractured a bone (or bones) in her pinky toe. It'll take six weeks or so for her to recover.

What a bummer. Just the previous night we were thinking about going swimming sometime soon. Looks like I'll be swimming solo. There's practically no chance that my dad would ever agree to go swimming. When we were in Hawaii a couple years back, my mom and I were drifting out in the ocean...My dad, on the other hand, paced back and forth on the beach, an angry expression on his face. Barely got his feet wet and had only a sunburn to show for it.

But I guess it'd still be nice to go to the beach sometime. I'd like to go swimming in the ocean again. It's really salty and makes the undersides of my arms sting, but it's still...both relaxing and strenuous at the same time. A vacation-y sort of exercise.

I suppose in the end I can't enjoy it as completely as I used to be able to. At this age there's too much to worry about. I have to study to take my SATs, and these days it seems colleges expect you to get really serious about some extracurricular, and spend your summers on a job or internship or volunteering or something...It takes the fun out of the things I enjoy, being told by college prep people that I have to go make money or enter competitions with my hobbies. I never should've written Stanford and Harvard down as colleges I want to go to, because it's not true...Sure I'd like to go there, but that's not my goal.

Then I end up wondering why I'm so afraid to aim high. Maybe it's fear of failure; that has always worried me. Maybe I'm trying not to do whatever everyone else is doing again. I know it's silly of me to do - just because something is popular doesn't make it bad. But I feel like I can't just go along with the flow without thinking it through first. I think that I'll lose what makes me unique if I follow what other people are doing. Sometimes I don't want to be like other people and sometimes I do. I don't really know who I want to be anymore.

Labels: bike, broken, college, family, garage, garage door, goose, individual, injury, problems, remote control, SAT, song, stress, summer, swimming, theft, toe

A few days ago, I dropped my Nintendo DS.

It's not the first time this has happened. I've dropped it several times before - on carpet and even on my driveway. But this was the last straw that broke the camel's back.

I can't turn the DS on anymore. It lights up for a short while but then flickers off with a kind of cracking noise. I've tried tinkering a little with it but it doesn't do any good.

I was hoping that maybe my parents might have an idea how to fix it, but they said that it was simply getting too old, and probably whatever broke was inside the DS, so there's no real way to get to it without taking the DS apart. (But since it can't turn on anyway, I think it's worth the risk to try and open it up so that there's a chance of fixing it. But I'm not knowledgeable about this kind of thing, so I have no idea what I would do even if I get into the inner workings of the DS.)

If I'd taken more caution and hadn't dropped it on the ground, it would still work. It might have served me yet for a few more years. I know that know one has the power to change the past. But I sure wish I could do something about it.

Maybe it's because I've never seen someone die or attended a funeral that the demise of an object can affect me so much. But maybe it's best that I never have to deal with the pain of someone dying in my life and that this be one of the few things that I've grieved over.

Labels: broken, change, death, drop, fix, funeral, impossible, nintendo ds, past

I know, probably there are a lot of blog posts of mine by now which are somehow or other related to death. Sorry, but it seems like it's following me. Or maybe I'm following it. I am probably superstitious now since I spend my time counting crows.

I had better get to the point. I always keep a flashing keychain on my backpack. The keychain has my name on it, and so I don't need to bother introducing myself, or if people forget my name, they can just glance down there (theoretically...). It is solar powered and one side says Hearst Castle since that's where I got it from. Hearst Castle is a mansion on a mountainside in California. Pretty nice place, wish I had swimming pools and a view of the ocean like Hearst had when he was alive.

Well, the keychain has served me faithfully for more than a year, not far from two years. But age has taken its toll on the keychain. The little part that keeps the keychain attached to its ring has been eroding. I jerked on my keychain too hard (I am too lazy to properly zip my backpack, so I just pull the keychain, since it is attached to the zipper) and a tiny part broke off. It was basically the last straw that broke the camel's back since the keychain fell off. I managed to get ahold of it so I wouldn't lose it but it seems that it is the end for the keychain unless my mom comes up with a way to fix it. (She is the person in my family who is best with little things like sewing and origami and whatnot so we leave it to her. I mean, I have trouble buttoning my shirts and tying my shoelaces...Ironic considering I am a fast typer. You would think my hands would be nimbler.)

I had convinced myself that I was going to make changes in my life this year, so I have been trying to become a more open and charismatic person, but that is not going too well. I won't give up, though! Just like I don't give up on trying to convince my mom that I should have a cat or dog. I think it makes me an admirable person if I keep trying. :p Or maybe it just means I'm too stubborn like my grandma. Well, as a result of these changes, at lunchtime I went into my old teacher's classroom so I could see what happens during Debate Club. I had never really joined clubs much (I tried MathCounts because my mom wanted me to, back in sixth grade, but it was too hard for me to understand. It was funny when someone tried to show the area of a grape, though. And then there was the time I tried to join the Go Green Club last year but I got intimidated since there weren't enough chairs and I didn't know anyone) but now I was curious and I got up the nerve to go in. It was very loud, that's for sure. Two of the students, who were supposedly in charge today, kept banging the weird hammer the teacher has to keep order. We were supposed to be debating whether swine flu is overblown. It wasn't really a formal debate like what I did in the summer once, but oh well. I suppose it was interesting in its own way, even if all I did was listen and not talk. I guess I might go again unless French Week committee meetings get in the way.

When I was walking home not long ago, I saw a blimp in the sky. It said "23andme.com", "Personal Genetics", and "Join the research revolution" or something like that. I guess advertising things on blimps works on people like me, since today I actually went on the website out of curiosity. The Human Prehistory: Prologue video in the Genetics 101 section is not bad. It would have been nice if I learned about humans by watching videos like that back in sixth grade...

Labels: 23andme, broken, club, death, debate, debate club, discord, genetics, hands, hearst castle, history, humans, keychain, stubborn, swine flu, video

My trip to Australia was pretty good overall (because I like Australia as a place), but there was a string of bad things, as well.

- I became carsick a lot. Apparently BMW sports cars tend to be fast overall so if you're driving on a winding road, it's easy to feel carsick. And sometimes you end up with a reckless driver, for instance, Andrew. Sure, he drives alright, but he tends not to drive within the speed limit. I heard he got so many tickets for speeding that eventually he was told that he can either not drive for a while (three months?) or he has to stay within the speed limit. So he set this thing on his car which makes a noise whenever he drives over 60 km/h. But even then I wonder if he notices it. (No offense to him if he does notice it.)

- We went on a tour of the Sydney Opera House - my family, David, Michael, Meggie, and Andrew. My dad used to live in the suburbs of Sydney, but he never went inside the opera house (back then you needed to see one of the shows to get in...My mom muttered to me that he was a cheapskate and they never spent much money on her). My mom had already called Lily, who works for a travel agency, to book English tours for us. The English tour is longer than the Mandarin tour, and anyhow I can't understand much Mandarin, so it would be pointless for me to take the Mandarin tour. But then Gary, my dad's friend, called Lily. First he said he was Meggie's friend (which confused Lily, who didn't know who Meggie was at that point) and then Gary insisted on having Mandarin tours instead of English. Luckily, it got changed in time for us to take the English tour.

- My camera broke. Aaaaah! This is probably one of the worst, if not the worst. I have a Nikon Coolpix camera which I've been using for quite some time. So it's dear to me... (I have a strange attachment to objects which I've had by my side) It broke while I was in Cairns, having ridden the Rainforest SkyRail (it's like one of those lift things, which are either amusement park rides or used for skiers...) to get to a place where they have animals, like butterflies, koalas, wallabies, and reptiles. Anyhow, maybe I was swinging the camera too much, or it was just really bad luck, because when I tried to turn on the camera, it would say there was a Lens Error and you couldn't turn it off unless you took the camera battery out... I really don't want to buy a new camera (I don't know how to fix it, and I heard getting someone to fix it for me would cost even more) because of the money and also because I'd miss this camera. My parents insist they could buy the same kind of camera, but that seems pointless to me. If you have camera knowledge, please give me some tips here!

- My mom's wristwatch broke. The strap came apart and we can't seem to put it together again (it still tells time, but now since you can't wear it, it's just like a clock). So now she had to switch watches. She figures she's probably going to try and buy a new one - she wants that is durable and which doesn't need its batteries replaced (like a watch which has a solar battery, which is what she was using, or one that you can wind up every day. Omega watches are the wind-up kind, but Omega watches are pricey... So my mom wouldn't want to use that to wash dishes and do laundry and things like that, and people could steal it, if you know what I mean).

There's more, but I'll continue it in a further post... (I suppose that's more than three bad things, huh?)

Labels: australia, bad news, broken, camera, carsick, drivers, english, mandarin, mixup, opera house, speeding, sydney, tour, watch

Top ↑