I've been having lots of dreams over this past holiday season. Not really dreams that make me happy, though - I seem to have more and more nightmares these days. When I was younger, I was a major worrywart, though now I slack off a lot more and have a "whatever happens, happens" mentality. Can't say it's a good thing, because even if I might have a blast during the day, my sleep will be haunted by the fears that I've buried. My winter break's coming to an end, and it's rather depressing thinking that I have to go back to the tiresome daily grind again. One of the earlier dreams was about going back to school...except it was far stranger than I'd imagined it would be.

I assume that I returned to my high school, considering that in the dream I "knew" that I had 7 periods. But I had science first thing in the morning, even though it's my last class of the day, and there was a strict lady with short hair and glasses instead of my teacher. And one of my friends, who is not in my science class, was sitting near me, and her cell phone rang in class (which is impossible! She doesn't have one). I didn't have a locker, so instead I put down my backpack on the ground and was rifling through it when another friend of mine came along and told me, "I heard there's a great dessert menu!" (Since when would school lunches include such things?) I said that it sounded great, but I wasn't sure if I should eat it (I'm bound to overeat if I have too much tasty food around). She insisted, "What is food for besides eating?"

The strangest thing by far was PE. There was no locker room to change clothes, so we went into a building that looked alarmingly like a supermarket. Boys and girls all changed in that room, no privacy at all. And in the swimming pool, some guys were just fooling around, and then they must've challenged the dessert friend from earlier, because she got really fired up, saying "OH YEAH?!" and swam at a demonic speed.

I had another, shorter dream, where I was at my elementary school campus, walking with a friend I met in middle school and one who moved away when I was in 5th grade. We passed by a huge pile of brown stuff, which was apparently camel poop.

Last night's dream was weird, too, and it involved the friend who was in my dream's science class. Some of our friends had gone off during the school lunchtime to go to a nearby 7-11 and buy some food, so we decided to go too, after they'd left. But I was having difficulty getting out of the school, and could not find a way out except for trying to crawl under the barbed wire fence (luckily, there was a driveway that we walked down instead). But we didn't go to the 7-11; somehow we ended up at some other stores, one of which was a GameStop, and my friend went in and started admiring the TV screen, which was playing some Japanese commercials for video games. I don't remember what happened next, but somehow we ended up at my house, and I started to panic when I realized we were running out of time and had to get back to school. I suggested that we go out the front door and just walk back to school, but my friend, oddly enough, became very angry with me and insisted we go back the way we came. Problem is, I had no idea how we'd gotten to my house in the first place, so I followed my friend, and there were two men in the house. They went over to a wall, and one of them reached his hand into it like it wasn't solid. And he must've found a doorknob, because a door formed, and he opened it. We ended up in the outdoors, in a place full of plants (which I now suspect might've been a different version of my backyard). I don't remember anything else, as I woke up right then.

Dreaming's pretty hard work, even if it sounds like such a lazy activity... I wake up tired every time I've been having dreams. I guess it's because in a way you've been awake all night long - running around, talking to people, living an entire other life.

Labels: 7-11, camel poop, cell phone, changing clothes, dessert, dream, fantasy, friends, lazy, life, new year, night, PE class, school, slacker, sleep, strange, stress, time, worry

I've never actually watched the movie by the same name, but I still wanted to use this as the title of this post. XD

I am sure I have had a lot more than one missed call in my time, whether it be on my cell phone or on my home phone. For one thing, I don't really have my cell phone turned on most of the time, so it's highly likely that if you call me there, I won't pick up. D: And then I'll see your call four days later or something ridiculous like that. (Unless I'm staying home by myself, in which case it's better to keep my cell phone on to make it easy to stay in contact with my parents, so they know I haven't been kidnapped or that someone has broken into the house)

And as for the landline phone, I don't always pick up the phone. Oftentimes I just let it ring until the answering machine goes on and then listen so I know who's calling. It gets annoying when people call asking for my parents because they want to sell something to them or something like that. And it's also annoying when we get automated messages from the library or people running for political positions. (Well, I don't mind getting messages from the library so much. XD)

It was pretty funny because one time we were listening to the answering machine and then the superintendent's voice came on. He was encouraging people to vote for Measure B or something like that. My dad picked up the phone and said, "We've already voted for it," but the superintendent kept talking. That's when he realized it was just an automated message. (Well, I guess the superintendent is busy, so he can't really be giving personal phone calls.)

But hey, just because someone's got a lot to do or is a well-known public figure doesn't mean they can't take a little time out of their schedules. My math teacher sent an email to Steve Jobs to inform him about a problem. iPhones don't work around the area where my school is (actually, probably all cell phones using AT&T don't work in that area. How annoying).

So my teacher asked if any of us had parents that worked at Apple because he wanted us to get our parents to bug their superiors and somehow or other get Steve Jobs to reply to his email. He said, "If Steve Jobs sent me an email, I would reply to it!" And we were thinking to ourselves, "Yeah, but it's Steve Jobs".

But it turned out that Steve Jobs had read the email and had forwarded it to someone in a major position at AT&T (unfortunately I cannot recall who it is). This person then wrote back to my teacher saying that there was a tower planned to be put up later in the year, but it might be postponed. If necessary, a smaller mobile tower might be set up to give coverage to the schools. It's the kind that gets used when there are natural disasters or something like that. Apparently it's actually pretty big even if it's not quite a permanent tower. It would be pretty amazing if that happened. Kind of makes me think of the butterfly effect that was being talked about in language arts class, which is where something small can cause events to happen and eventually leads to something big happening. (I actually had a layout for the blog up before that was called the Butterfly Effect, haha.)

Labels: answering machine, apple, automated, busy, butterfly effect, cell phone, coverage, email, famous, hole, layout, mobile, movie, one missed call, parents, phone, steve jobs, superintendent, tower

I didn't know who Ansel Adams was until quite recently. While I was on a school trip to Yosemite National Park, all of the students would walk to the theater for our evening program every night (usually something informative, like about rock climbing or climate change, but one time we just hiked outside and played a game similar to hide-and-seek). We always passed by a place called the Ansel Adams Gallery, which sold gifts, and I think you can rent cameras there, too.

Once I returned from Yosemite, I visited the library and checked out some magazines. I usually look for science-related magazines at the library because every trimester we must present a scientific news article. I happened to see the magazine called Popular Photography, and I have checked out a few of the issues (not particularly new ones, but oh well). I was looking at an article about 30 photo-friendly cities in the USA when I saw San Francisco, in 2nd place. And it was mentioned that Ansel Adams broke his nose in an earthquake in San Francisco.

I've probably written about this before, but this still keeps on happening to me. I even saw the very same camera that I have - a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3A - in an edition of the Popular Photography Magazine. It was apparently a good camera for a not-too-expensive price or something. In fact, when I was at the Campanile in UC Berkeley, someone asked my dad to take a picture of him, and he had the same camera, in the same color. I suppose it's just a common camera. (Not like my old Nikon Coolpix, it was a pretty rare one. A silvery sort of color. I sure miss it, even now.) But it's still unsettling to see it in other places. It's kind of like how I'm bothered by seeing people with the same name as me.

Ever since I arrived home after my trip, I've been feeling a bit out of sorts. For one thing, my dad left for Shanghai, China, to visit his family. It's pretty quiet because it's only my mother and I around the house. That's kind of a good thing, and kind of a bad thing. I'm not really used to having less noise around the house. But it's kind of good since I get to talk my mother more than usual. (My cell phone ringtone is starting to annoy me, though. I figure I should change it, but I actually still haven't figured out how)

Speaking of my cell phone...I'm still frustrated at it. Sometimes I think I don't get any signal. One time I was walking home from school and needed to call my mom, so I whipped out my cell phone and dialed her number. I kept hearing it ring, and ring, and ring, and finally I was told that the call wouldn't go through or something. I kept trying this over and over while I walked. I finally managed to reach her when I was near a school (I think the schools should all have cell phone coverage). What good is the cell phone if you can't even use it? Also, my mom said she called me on my cell phone, but I don't think I ever heard it ring. She says I probably had my cell phone on mute or some other mode where you can't hear the ring, but I don't know...I think perhaps it really is hard for me to get a signal, which will be troublesome if I ever desperately need to get in touch with someone.

Recently, I visited Cold Stone Creamery, my favorite place to get ice cream. There's actually a place Cold Rock Creamery, but I've only seen it in Australia. (It's not bad either. They have some different flavors.) My mom had some coupons, and I always leap at the chance to save money on yummy food. Cold Stone now has warm sundaes (we had a buy-1-get-1-free coupon for it, but sadly it expired before we had the chance to use it...) and I think my mom might like those. She used to complain about how ice cream was too cold for her. It kind of ruins the point of ice cream if it's cold (and it isn't all that fun to drink "ice cream soup") but it still does sound like it would be tasty. And it'd be nice during the winter.

When I was younger, I had trouble eating hot food. I would refuse to eat anything that was too hot (in fact, I even went so far as to put ice cubes in my hot chocolate so it would cool down to a reasonable temperature). My parents would say, "It's not too hot," but when I tried it, I thought it was still too warm. I wonder if we have different senses of temperature and taste. They don't see any difference in taste between water bottle brands, but I actually have slight preferences in water bottle brands. Also, I hear people are more accepting of alcohol when they get older because their taste buds have died and they can't taste the bitterness as much anymore. If so, I guess it's good if I have a sensitive tongue since that means I'm still young. (It does conflict with my trying to act like an old person, though. But you can't have both. It reminds me of a conversation I heard...A girl was saying to her friend that she didn't want to take some pills because her mother told her not to, since there was a drowsiness side effect. "So don't take it," said her friend. "But I need it..." said the girl - it was carsick pills. Her friend said, "Then take it!" Basically, there's no middle ground - she can obey your mother or she can save herself from being carsick)

Labels: ansel adams, camera, carsick, cell phone, choice, cold rock creamery, cold stone creamery, ice cream, inconvenient, magazine, photography, popular, signal, taste, temperature, tongue, warm, yosemite

Lately my father has been watching baseball instead of golf. He usually watches golf, but since it's almost winter, the golf season is over (I mean, you can't really play in the snow, and besides it's harder to get a cold golf ball to go far than it is to get a warm golf ball, if those Comcast Sports Science videos were worth anything) and the only places they could play would be, like, Hawaii or something. So now, since it's currently still baseball season, my father has turned his attention to that sport.

This means that there are even more similarities between my father and my history teacher than ever before! D: Now both of them are baseball fans who are/were teachers (after all, my dad used to teach, and he might be better at that than being an engineer, seeing as he likes to talk =_=;; ) and both of them often get distracted by their computers. (When my dad is on the computer, if I try to talk to him, he probably won't hear me...) In fact, just the other day I saw my dad going on this website he likes. He was doing some virtual gardening, pulling up weeds with his mouse cursor and stuff. And then he put some food in this place where he keeps his animals. He has weird animals like peacocks. Looks like my dad is a zookeeper now.

The other day, in science class, we watched an interesting video from the History Channel. It was about great engineering disasters, and we got to watch planes blow up and dams break. What I thought was the funniest (I know, it's not funny if people get injured or whatever, but in this one no one died, except there was a car on the bridge) was this bridge in Washington. When it was windy, the bridge would roll about. Search for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on Youtube if you want to see what it's like. Anyhow, the bridge collapsed in a wind storm, unfortunately.

My mom and I like a kind of bread sold at some Chinese bakeries called a "polo bun" (it's pronounced differently than that, though). It's sweet tasting and sort of bumpy. It looks kind of like a melon bun, which is something I saw in the anime Shakugan no Shana. I've always wondered if they are the same thing or not. I've been wondering a long time, so if anyone's eating a melon bun, let me know. D:

Weather is something I mention occasionally in this blog, and so I'm talking about it today, too. Not long ago, it was really hot outside, but now it's cold and my hands are freezing while I type this. I really hate it when the weather keeps changing. I heard that it was hot right now in Shanghai from my grandparents. Is this one of the natural weather cycles of the Earth, or is this caused by global warming, I wonder? There are still people who say that global warming doesn't exist, or that it's being offset by the natural ice ages of the Earth anyway. (But then again, we haven't had an Ice Age for a while...It's suspicious.)

Sigh...I had to switch cell phones. We're changing from Sprint to AT&T because my mom's friend was laid off. Because of him, we were able to get a discount on the phone service, but since he's not working there anymore, we won't have the discount any longer. My mom decided to swap to AT&T since it is cheaper and she says that people who used AT&T say it works fine. Still, I do miss my old cell phone. This would be my third one now and I hardly know how to use it... Plus, I feel like it's bad for the environment, getting new cell phones. I mean, it takes energy and resources to make a cell phone, after all.

Labels: animals, baseball, bun, cell phone, gardening, golf, season, similar, sports, tacoma narrows, teacher, virtual, weather

Today was a pretty unimportant day. It passed in a flash and before I knew it somehow I had walked myself home and called my mom. I tried turning on the speaker on my cell phone and playing piano for her since it must be really boring stuck in an office cubicle all day. Unfortunately, some of her co-workers came in and she hung up, but I didn't notice because I was busy making a big racket on the piano...

I spent too long attempting to replace the furniture in one of the houses in the Sims 2, so I didn't have enough time to spend on the computer doing other things like posting in the Nutrinopets forums and replying to all my comments on Crunchyroll...I guess from now on I need to manage my time better. Then I saw my mom was looking at Google maps so I went and clicked on the images on it and looked at the national parks.

Anyhow, tomorrow I have a busy day because Stanford is having some sort of day where they are letting you take classes (for a price!). I am going to take two afternoon classes so I have to the library in the morning and I won't get any free time until the evening rolls around. But at least I get to visit my favorite college again!

Labels: cell phone, college, crunchyroll, furniture, google maps, music, nutrinopets, piano, sims 2, speakers, splash, stanford, time, time management

Top ↑