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

My neighborhood almost always appears to be a peaceful place. I've never heard gunshots, seen people beat each other up, or any of the stuff that I've seen in movies happen around here. But there's one crime in particular that happens often and goes unpunished: theft.

It's one type of thing that is very commonly stolen, and that would be fruit. I've known for a long time that the usual thieves are squirrels, birds, ants, and all the backyard fauna. Nothing I can do about that, since they have as much right to the land as I do...Well, my old afterschool/summer math teacher said you could hang up these spinning things that would scare away birds (it's hard to describe them...they sort of give you an optical illusion when the wind blows at them), though I have no idea if it's working anymore. Surely even with their bird brains they could figure out that the spinning things wouldn't really attack them. :p

Actually, though, I've seen people become poachers lately. There was one time on the weekend where I was taking a walk and I overheard the conversation of two people. A woman was sneakily taking a fruit (I believe it was an orange) from a plant growing out of someone's front yard. A man scolded her for taking it, but she insisted it was fair game because it was on the other side of the fence and technically no longer on the owner's property. (Well, I guess there's no harm done, I highly doubt the owner of the fruit tree would notice it missing.)

I'm pretty sure I saw someone else who took a fruit too, quite recently. He was walking with his arms behind his back, and I kept wondering why until I saw that he was holding an orange. He also had his hood covering his head, so I couldn't see his face unless I was facing the front of him. Very suspicious! I later saw another old man coming along from the other direction, his hands also behind his back, and once I passed him I whirled around to see if he was stealing fruit. (But that was just me being paranoid, the second old man was innocent. XD)

If you'd expected to hear about something more major, sorry to disappoint you. The more serious stuff that I've caught wind of is in the school environment, what with the copying of homework, ditching of class (though I'd only heard people consider it, I don't know if they actually have), and...smoking. I actually saw a couple of my fellow students smoking one day at lunch when I was walking off campus. They weren't really trying to hide it. It wouldn't trouble me too much except that I figure I'll end up dying of lung cancer while they go along their merry way...

I've always wondered what made people want to smoke. I'd heard that it was done to lose weight (since your sense of taste gets ruined and you won't want to eat as much), or to look cool (no idea if this is true, enlighten me?), or just a mistake - you try it once and get hooked. I have no experience in the matter nor do I intend to have any, but feel free to tell me why you smoke or why someone you know does, if you feel like it.

Well, this is unrelated, but I like to share pictures of similar-looking characters when I see them. I watched the Tales of the Abyss anime quite a while ago and had forgotten about it up until I saw some pictures a few days ago. Tear Grants always reminded me of a Vocaloid, Luka Megurine. (If I remember correctly, Tear sings too. Talk about a weird coincidence, unless it isn't one.) Their bangs and hair colors are different, and Luka's hair is generally wavier, but I thought their outfits were similar.

TEAR GRANTS
click or click


LUKA MEGURINE
click or click

Labels: birds, cigarette, crime, criminal, fruit, luka megurine, neighborhood, people, reasons, scare, smoking, squirrels, suspicious, tales of the abyss, tear grants, theft, thief, vocaloid

Yesterday I saw a terrible, terrible thing. Why, it was so perfectly dreadful I had nightmares for weeks. (Nah, I'm just exaggerating about that. If I saw it yesterday, I could only have nightmares for one day) It wasn't rape. It wasn't murder. It wasn't a kidnapping either. It was... PEOPLE BOARDING A CAR IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD!!!

Sorry for the caps lock use. It's not often that I do that. Well, I should explain what I saw in more detail. As I was walking home, I was almost at a crosswalk when I noticed some familiar figures in the middle of the road. It was my parents' friends' son and daughter, getting into their father's car. By doing so, they were blocking the cars behind them, since you're not supposed to board in the middle of the road, you should pull over to the side so you won't be causing a line to slowly build up behind you. (Otherwise people like my mom will honk at you. Like my mom honked at someone in the morning who was behaving strangely, because they could've moved forward but they just stayed still, and when I got out of the car I could feel pairs of eyes on me) It was even worse that I knew the offenders. I mean, it's one thing to see strangers committing a dastardly crime but it's quite another if it's someone you have actually had conversations with in the past.

Speaking of other crimes, theft seems to be something common at school. Recently a classmate of mine was acting suspicious and then the Weepul my friend had (Weepuls are basically pom pom type things with faces on them. This one looked like an ice cream cone! Was pretty cute) had vanished. There is no real evidence whether the suspicious boy stole it, but who knows...They say that theft frequently happens among middle school students...Also, I haven't been able to find two of my pens. (I'm pretty sure I dropped it or it got lost in the black hole called my backpack, but still, you can never be too sure these days.)

I can now officially celebrate the rebirth of my GIMP. It had not been working yesterday. Probably I had too much brushes or accidentally deleted a file that was crucial to it. So I ended up having to back up my brush files and then delete the GIMP and remove the files belonging to it. Then I reinstalled it and used the backed up files to restore a little of the brushes that I used to have. Now it is working right as rain and I am quite relieved. What else would I use for graphics if I didn't have GIMP? Photoscape? (Doesn't have enough brushes) MS Paint? (Doesn't even have an airbrush tool or anything complicated) Photoshop? (Costs money except for 30 day trial and I don't know how to use it)

Guess what? This is the 200th post! Wow, I can't believe ◆ k a i s o u m i z u has managed to get so far. Bring out the beer - er, I mean, Calpico. (An artificial drink from Asia which comes in various flavors. My favorite is strawberry)

Labels: 200, blog, brushes, calpico, celebrate, crime, file, gimp, honk, middle school, ms paint, pens, photoscape, photoshop, post, road, rules, theft, traffic, weepul

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