norbork

Seriously, I'll write a real post in a bit. It's just really hot, and the power just came back on, and I'm tired.

Lots has happened. Tennis! Yeabooks being late! Some random Eastern European dude on a bike telling me all about his awesome 100-200km rides, and how last month he's done about 200,000 km at least while I was sitting in a park. Um. Okay. That's 6 451.612km/day. Which means that if he was a pro, going at 25mph - or 40km/h, he would need to ride 160 hours per day.
And he wasn't wearing a helmet. Right on, bud, right on.

Via merpmerp



The Challenge:
- Post 3 things you've done in your lifetime that you don't think anybody else on your friends list has done.
- See if anybody else responds with "I've done that." If they have, you need to add another!(2.b., 2.c., etc...)
- Have your friends cut & paste this into their journal to see what unique things they've done in their life.

1. Played waterpolo at seven in the morning while listening to Amy Winehouse.
2. Performed at Roy Thompson Hall.
3. Gone sailing, solo, in a boat in which the rudder had fallen off. 

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (didn't really like it... although I kind of had a girlcrush on Jo March when I was a kid)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Uh, read some of them. Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar (which I really liked), Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth. Still have yet to read Hamlet, which is further down on this list)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (I was rechecking this list to see if I'd missed anything, and then I noticed this. Just... look, I know a lot of people love this book, but... ugh. Sorry. Hated it.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (en francais, admittedly)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (one day, I will get through this behemoth. It's not for lack of trying.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (oh man, I completely forgot how much I loved this series when I was a kid. This was the mainstay of my childhood, people,)
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo




This list needs more of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke and Jules Verne. And not just because I'd score better that way.
Also? Yann Martel.

Please stop driving your SUVs.

Thank you,

Jenny
(and everybody else who wants to live on this frigging planet too, I assume)

So I haven't really been doing very much - I'm studying for my boating license, and I woke up this morning with my eyes so puffy I couldn't see (I'm not sure why), and I am rediscovering just how much shin splints suck. One good thing that came out of all this knee crap is that before, shin splints would be debilitating, but now they'll start hurting and I can't help but think 'bitch, please', and another few kilometers sail (slowly) by. Never broke a bone, so I guess this is the most debilitating thing that's ever happened to me. In other news of personal injury, I hit a locker with my face the day of the chem exam. I now have a big dent in my left cheek about an inch and a half long. It looks like a facial wound from a movie - you know, the kind that's painful but oddly not disfiguring at all.

I found an artist whose work my mother and I saw in Vienna - we'd gone to the Secession to look at some of Klimt's work (the room with the Beethove frieze conviently included chairs, because you need about thirty or forty minutes to even begin to take in the entire thing) - on the intarwubs the other day.




The more interesting stuff isn't available on the intarwubs, sadly, but here's a pretty good example.
Here's some other stuff I found kind of interesting while trolling the art sector of the intarwubs.




And a link to freakishly huge sand art. I'm not sure if this is the guy who did Spiral Jetty or not. Possibly. Maybe. (via Dark Roasted Blend).





And... uh. I was going to put some of Annette Messager's stuff up, but the web's not helping me find any of the pieces that I liked, so here's Klimt's Judith holding the head of Holofernes instead. (Geez, the picture quality sucks.)



And one you've probably seen already, of Adele:




And just so you know I haven't lost my mind or anything, here is a cute invertebrate sea slug thing of some kind, an angler fish, and a snail infected with a freaky parasite called Leucochloridium_paradoxum.






Planet Earth is pretty cool, guys. Just sayin'.

I'm listening to way too much Massive Attack again.

I just finished my first exam. I should be studying for my other three, but I don't want to. I'm tired and cranky and really weirded out by the weather.

I wasn't really going to go all public about it, but that athletic banquet at my school the other day which I may or may not have blogged about? Was also an awards ceremony. And yeah, I got an award - two of them, actually - plus, on top of that, my medals from Regionals (which I was pretty bummed about  - geesh, I should have given myself a little credit; I came into that thing limping, with two braces, and got scratched from my two favourite events ever and all I could think of doing was whining about how I hadn't made it to city finals? What kind of a dumbass am I, anyway? Don't answer that). And I didn't really want to talk about them; I still don't.

Here's why: It's been five months since I've been able to do any actual swimming. I got back in the pool two days ago and it was pretty nice, but I'm slow and my form sucks and it's hard and I'm all flubby and useless in the water. My five-k time's increased by nearly ten minutes - what used to be a 19:30 has turned into, well, something like a 27-29. It's not about the times, though - I've never been, nor am I going to be, first place at anything, which is just fine and well and cool. I got two MVP's for always showing up and trying hard - sports used to be just head games, but now I can't tell whether it's the wiring in my head or my arms that isn't working right...

Ack, this is even whinier.

Let me explain:

When you swim a lot, on a team, competitively, you work on form. A lot. It's safe to say that 90% of our swimming consisted of form or pacing drills. And when you do that a lot you start to swim more efficiently. Your hands don't pull straight back; they move in an S to grip the water, which becomes almost solid when you do that so it's almost like you're climbing up the bottom of the pool; your hip is supposed to drop down with that arm and rotate so that you look like you're wobbling, but what's really happening is that you're reducing the amount of water dragging on you to this slipstream that forms; watching Olympic swimmers, you can observe a bow wave forming that they kind of cruise behind. High elbows, don't let your hips snake, etcetera etcetera etcetera. People who are smarter and more athletic than I have written reams on the topic of drag reduction and freestyle technique. And this is freestyle, not butterfly. This is the first thing you get taught.

So I've lost my feel for the water. I'm just flailing. I still go pretty fast but there's no grace to it; I can't quite get my grip around it like I used to. And I'm frustrated and annoyed and I don't feel like I deserve these two ridiculously nice plaques and kind of ugly medals because that was a different person who got them. It doesn't really feel real any more. It all happened to someone else, a very long time ago, and the only reason I know that it really did happen is because I miss everything about just being there, at six forty-five AM, trying to fit a swim cap over hair still plastered down with snow and not being able to do it because I was laughing so hard - and I guess you can't miss something if it wasn't really there to begin with.

I'm bad with people, especially people my age, unless there's something between them and me. Like a computer screen, or that nasty fucker of a hill at Centennial, or hundred-meter repeats of rabbits and... oh, fuck, I don't know. A bunch of the seniors are graduating this year, too, all really cool, really nice people who I never would have got to talk to otherwise, who I can't talk to outside the pool, and who I'm never going to see again, and I hate this, I hate this, I hate this so much. I want to get a time machine, grab this stupid shit, give it to me-of-five-months-ago and then punch myself for not realizing how good I had it and still - and still - complaining.  I sure as hell don't feel like I deserve all the awards and shit now. They're not really mine.

Okay. Now that's off my chest.

Other than that, things have been alright. I sound more upset here than I actually am; mostly, I'm just nervous over exams and kind of tired, and the bio exam went over really well although I should have probably not drawn a polka-dotted squid on the cover page and neither teacher nor textbook had any clue what a mesosome was, but everything else was fine. I'm more worried over physics and chem, really.

And my  EeePC exploded the other day. I plugged it into one of our (still not properly installed) sockets and there was some sort of short-circuit.. odd, because I'd plugged it into that outlet  several times before and it was fine, but now it's broken. It rained on my camera the other day,  too. I made my first video for a physics project, and my mother and I planted five trees, three of which had rootballs with a diameter the size of my entire torso and weighed more than the two of us combined.

And also because I need to procrastinate from studying for my exams. All four of them, which I have to write in a row, each lasting for two hours. Sigh. 


1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you


Taken from "The Encyclopedia of Outdoor Survival".

The first signs are a gritty sensation in the eye, which can proceed to intense pain and loss of vision. Snow blindness can be distressing but it is not a serious condition. Prevention is the best answer - if neither glasses or snow goggles are available, a strip of cardboard, cloth, or bark with narrow slits cut for vision will suffice.

I tag:
grimjiminember
gruberman
bunnyhero
merpmerp
monkeyman

My bike got stolen, my exams are coming up, I took some really gross photos of questionable quality, and random little tidbits haven't been really working out. That's alright, I guess.

We had our athletic banquet/awards ceremony thing last week, which was kind of fun except for the rain. And we had a concert at school - an outdoor one - the night my bike got taken, and despite the thirty degree heat it was pretty good. My chem teacher sang a Radiohead song, so all was going pretty well.

I've got to write a couple of pages on my notions of heaven and hell, although my views on heaven and hell and spirituality are better summarized by a blank. I wonder if I could get away with that.

It's sweltering in here. Augh.

Sigh. I wish I was better at this whole painting thing.

Seven frigging feet of canvas, kids. Seven. I lugged it across the Atlantic ocean and back again. It nearly got confiscated by Ukrainian customs, because you have to have a special artist's permit to ship your own artwork out of Ukraine.

*tears out hair*

I HAVE FINISHED THE CYRANO DE BERGERAC ESSAY.
YES.
IT IS OVER.


And I'm nearly done tearing apart Wilbur the pig, too. Now I've just got two lab reports, three art projects, and some other assorted miscellany to go. And to think, I thought I'd have free time this week.

Got my MRI done today, lost my wallet last night, went to a drama show and finished up life drawing. I'll post some of the work I did when I get back to school on Monday. I'm about halfway through dissecting Wilbur, who is a massive pig fetus, and we electrocuted pickles in physics class the other day.

Bunch of other stuff too, but here's the GOOD news:

As long as I wear a brace, and as long as I don't go for too long, or too far, or too fast, and as long as it's a flat, grassy surface and I ice my knees afterwards,

I CAN RUN.

:D

We've been doing a lot of life drawing in class lately; also, today, we're beginning the fetal pig dissection. Great way to spend an afternoon, really: draw naked people, then go and cut up some pig abortions. Whoo.

Hmm. Not much else to say. Have biked 100 miles over the past couple of days in commuting and whatnot, which is probably not what the physio people meant when they told me I could start biking again. I am quite aware that I am a dumbass, but I lost my watch and so I just sort of kept going and going and going and then mapping out the distances later and being very surprised. My legs hate me, and I have devoured all the pasta in the house.

DJ and I hung out on Sunday, and I am researching cool things for my physics culminating, which isn't worth a lot in marks because of the exam, but is worth a lot in terms of how much my teacher respects me. I'm thinking of making a transistor radio, which shouldn't be too hard, or doing the double-slit demonstration. Or maybe I'll build a rocket or something - although the last time I did that, I got supplies through the school and I'm not sure where to get them now. I don't know. I really want to do a good job on it, though.

Mother's day is coming up, and I'm finding that I have spent way too much money on art supplies as of late. (Winsor & Newton, you bastards! Stop making such nice ink! At least I managed to stay away from the Copic markers and encaustic medium. Although...). So I am broke, and have no job until July. Also, as of two days ago, I have a credit card. So I was thinking - I know I'm not Van Gogh or anything, but if anyone wants a drawing or something like that, I could set up a PayPal account and sell you something. Maybe? That's not much of a sales pitch, I know.

That's it, pretty much.

So I need to start seriously looking at university programs to apply into. Which means I should have some idea as to what I want to do with my life, which I don't. As far as universities go, it's really just coming down to McGill, Waterloo and U of T. I guess. I just don't really know. Thoughts? Suggestions?

Here's what I've got so far.

1. Aerospace engineering. Pros: very cool, lots of real-world applications, somewhat easy to get a job. Cons: will not be able to use rocket scientist line any more, no need for biology, probably lots of work sitting at a computer staring at simulations or blueprints or something, not super-interested in kinematics.

2. Pathology, microbiology, et al. Pros: very cool. Cons: don't really want to do pure bio, no physics, and wouldn't I need to go to med school to get a job outside a research lab?

3. Nanotechnology, etc. Pros: awesome, very broad applications. Cons: Will probably need to go to Waterloo; will probably not understand a single damn thing.

4. Chemical engineering. Chemical physics. Physical chemistry. Pros: parents happy, probably get a good job, kind of cool, sufficiently broad topic. Cons: do not want a desk job. Do not want.

5. Sociology or anthropology or archaeology. Pros: interesting. Cons: don't have sufficient courses (probably), people are creepy, not very okay with 'soft' sciences.

6. Physics. Pros: AWESOME. Cons: would be very mediocre at it; how do I get a job later on?

7. Nuclear physics. Pros: see above. Cons: am not comfortable with the idea of destroying the planet.

8. Astronomy or astrophysics. Pros: see above and multiply by ten. Cons: Absolutely no practical applications at all.

9. Medicine. Pros: interesting, useful, good money. Cons: not enough money to go to med school, and getting a degree takes a very long time.

And then there's one other thing:


10. Art school. I think I don't need to elaborate on how bad of an idea this would be, especially since I'm definitely not the kind of person who would do very well there. I can't seem to get it off my mind, though.

I've been waiting for this since November.

I revived my dA account and am doing the solo sketching version of NaNo - NaNoSkeMo? If something good comes out of it, I'll put it up. If nothing good comes out of it, well, it's here. Check it out if you want.

I went to the ER because at 12:22 PM today, I stopped being able to bend my left leg.




(Fish oil? Fucking fish oil? Geez, man, you could've at LEAST given me some Naproxen or something, instead of just doubling my intake of Advil to six extra-strength pills a day.)

So I'm sitting here after having been up for an hour and a half, and I've realized that I have a ludicrous amount of envelopes and, also, nine stamps. This is because I sent my application to Ontario Rangers last week, and since then I've been trying to find creative uses for them. My art show piece is not about envelopes or stamps, however, and therefore I can't really use them.

bunnyhero and gruberman did it, so I'm going to be a trendoid and do the same.  Anybody want snail mail? Post a comment.

I know I'm going to get about two comments at most (I now really want to calculate the average amount of comments per post for this blog, but I've got to get on my bike and go to school as soon as it gets a little lighter out) but that means I'll have two envelopes that I've gotten rid of. The limiting agent (that's not the right word, but I've been studying chemistry too long and it's the first one that comes to mind) is the number of stamps, but that's probably not going to be a problem.   Why am I using so many parentheses? I have no idea. It is too early in the morning to type that word. I refuse to write it again until it's at least 9 AM. Until then, I'm referring to them as brackets.

I'm trying to live more of my life off-line, so don't miss your one-time chance at communication with norbork! Except, of course, when I come on here and whine about my problems.  Don't worry, though, the snail mail is 100% angst-free! Angst means extra postage.

This week in blog:

I have to go to physiotherapy three times a week for the next four weeks before I can even begin to CONSIDER biking, running, swimming, or even going to gym class. I still don't have an MRI, so I have no idea what's going on. It's been two months, and the physiotherapist I went to says he's about ninety percent sure that I've torn two ligaments - one on each knee - and have a hairline fracture in one patella. Track and field starts next week. I promised I'd join this year. I'm no sprinter - I've got one gear and I stick with it - but the siren call of the 3000m steeplechase is tough to avoid. I mean, a pool of water and little 30cm-high hurdles? That is called an easy cross-country course.

The worst part is that I have no idea if this guy's a quack or not. I've been to a lot of quack doctors in all fields of medicine, and this is why it's so frustrating. I have to go three times a week to get my knees ultrasounded and electrocuted and prodded and who the fuck knows if it's going to do any good? Have any of you ever been to physio? What was it like? Did it help? Who do I talk to about this? My parents have no idea and basically just want me to quit complaining already because it's just a ligament, it's not like it's a broken bone pushing out through my skin and piercing a major artery or anything.

Yeah.

Other stuff to come later, I guess. I don't want this to be the teenage angst blog, but really, everything just kind of sucks right now. I mean, there's been some good stuff in the past while - DJ's play and joining a D&D group (I'm playing a monk), namely - but otherwise the last couple of weeks have been crap. Not just because of the knees, either. The physio appointment last night was really just a kick in the teeth.

I want to apply egregious amounts of violence on things right now.

I should be going to school, but I've lost my metropass, I have no money, and I can't bike. Maybe I should just walk eight kilometers. Oh, right. I'm not allowed to do that either.

Back. Sort of. Kind of. Ish.
This is me trying to be optimistic.

So here's another LJ hiatus. I'm sorry.

 I've been having a kind of rough time lately and I don't really want to write about it, because the more I talk about it the bigger it gets and the worse it seems. The fact is that not only am I busy (which is pretty normal), but I'm also just stressed out and tired and frustrated and having to deal with things that are much, much bigger than anything I can reasonably manage.

I meant  this LJ to be kind of a compendium of things I find interesting or enjoyable or just make me happy, but lately there hasn't been a whole lot of that. So rather than having any more sad, whiny teenage angst posts, it's a little easier on everybody if I just don't post at all. Not to mention the fact that it frees up time for me to go into the real world and try to deal with the bits of it that I'm having trouble with, as opposed to just hiding out by my keyboard and playing the woe-is-me game.

I realize this makes little to no difference, considering I post on a monthly basis as it is. I'll still check the intarwubs for e-mail and so on, so it's not like I'm completely incommunicado. I guess this is really just for posterity.

So, um, bye for now. Take care. You guys are all fantastic, awesome people who I really like talking to and being around; it's just that I need to spend a little time away from everybody, awesomely fantastic or not.