...Let me tell you something peculiar.
I got a blister on my left heel a week or two ago on one of the first nights that I started working (bussing tables), and on the following nights I started putting band-aids on it before I went in. Today was the first night I've worked since last Monday, and while going to put on my socks-- I noticed that there was a band-aid on my heel.
Now there's something wrong about that, dude, because the last time I can remember putting a band-aid on my foot was last Monday. That was eight days ago. That means that this band-aid survived eight days of walking and such (on three of which-- the con-- I wore socks) and at least eight showers. Weird, huh? I guess the moral of the story is that band-aids can endure through a whole lot of shit-- and also that I'm an idiot who can go over a week without noticing that he has a band-aid on his foot. :B Dur hur.

Well, the con was fun. I'm not in the mood to type all about it, but it was run really well and we had a blast the whole time-- it helped that we brought good food to eat, and I also got a lot of sleep. Today I just kinda hung out, playing FFIX and RPing and burning CDs and helping my dad clean up the yard. We watched Pay it Forward, too, which is a good movie if you haven't seen it. I also realized today that I am an Ayumi Hamasaki fan and I'm trying to come to terms with the epiphany. If you have any suggestions on how to cope with this problem, don't hesitate to write me.

I've been having a lot of nightmares lately, almost every night, and I don't know why. Usually I dream when I'm stressed, but what the hell do I have to be stressed over right now? Last night, for instance, I dreamt there was this man filled with long, thick needles and he drank liquid silver from a water fountain and all the needles exploded out of him and into the people around him, and for some reason it was my job to walk around and look at how the needles had stabbed and cut and gored everyone. It was disgusting. Real fun shit, my dreams. This is why I hate sleeping.
Not that I've been doing much of it, thankfully. I'm usually in bed around 4 or 5AM after RPing or doing sitework and then I get up around 11 or 12. And right now I'm off to hang out with Beccu and Stephen and work more on our AD&D campaign! We'll probably get all the character-planning done today and then Stephen will have all weekend to get the campaign set up while me and Beccu are at Animazement. Rock on!

Animazement is this weekend and I cannot wait. T_T Right now it looks like Becca and I will be the only ones going out of all of our friends but since we have no room reservation of our own it's definitely going to be interesting. We and Stephen have spent the past couple days getting together an AD&D campaign, and since I've never played it before I'm looking forward to it. Plus Stephen's been a great DM so far, and that'll certainly help. And uh.. that's about it really. Updating a lot of my sites, playing a lot of Final Fantasy IX and KOF99 and just hanging out.

Wow, using a computer is a real cooze when you have no mouse! I had a very vivid dream last night, so I need to transcribe it. This will be a very long post.
Parts of it took place at the synagogue here in Asheville, but most of it was in Athens, where I go to school. It started off with me in the synagogue, except that the synagogue was laid out like the Visual Arts building at school. I was in the long hall that branches off on the left of the main hall of the building, just by the door to get into that hallway. I must have been putting in an exhibition, or doing a mural for the synagogue. I was on the floor, arranging a bunch of different posterboard tiles, some small and square and others larger (like 6x18"), into a mosiac on the lower part of the wall but mainly on the floor itself. They weren't glued down, simply laid there, and I was frustrated that they wouldn't stay in place. The squares were laid in a zigzag pattern on the floor right by the edge of the wall, and the other tiles were just sort of laid in rows on the wall above them and the floor beneath them. The squares were pinkish-white and the larger tiles had colorful images on them; a lot of them were nature scenes (forests, sunsets), but others were simply pattern of colors. I remember looking at one in the very bottom row, showing a man's naked torso, and realizing that it was probably how my mother knew I was gay.
People were passing by me as I worked, but when I finished and was standing up a woman came to talk to me. I knew that she was my aunt, but she had raised me and I considered her my mother (I'll call her mother in this). She was really short and she had dark hair (I knew I did too). She simply asked me how I thought it (the mosaic) looked, and I said I wasn't pleased with it, and she told me she liked it and I never liked my own work. Then we were joined by a very tall man with dark navy hair and a boy my age, who had thick navy hair, dark skin and a leather jacket and was almost as tall as the man, who I knew was his father. I knew the man and my mother were friends, and that I and the other boy had known each other for a long time and that we liked each other a lot but were always too shy to tell each other. As our parents chatted he congratulated me on the mural and hugged me; I thanked him and hugged him back. I can remember how warm the leather on his shoulders felt under my fingers, and how happy I was that he hugged me. We talked for a little while. He said something funny about one of the images in the mural and I laughed a little and touched his arm. I knew that our parents kept taking little glances at us as they talked with each other but they were pretending they didn't notice, because they wanted us to be together.
And then Becca came in the building from the main hall and I could see her coming towards us, with her keys in her hand and her hair buzzed the way she had it a couple years ago, telling me it was time for us to go. I remember my mother telling me something, and I said bye to everyone and trotted off to meet Becca. Then we were driving in the highway in what felt like a big circle because we were lost, and then I caught sight of town (it looked like Athens) and told her we'd just driven around the city in a giant circle. Suddenly downtown, I got out of the car and had my backpack with me; I was going to sit downtown and study. I sat at a table and studied for a while (I don't remember the subject) and then I realized someone-- the blue-haired boy-- was coming up behind me, and it made me happy. But when he started talking to me, I started busying myself with little distractions, like sifting through my backpack for pencils and flipping through my notebook to see previous pages. I was aloof and vacant, I didn't look at him often and whenever he asked me something I had to struggle to find words to say, and my answers were always bland. It was like I couldn't get my mouth to say the things I was thinking. At some point I stood up, and he asked if something was wrong, because I wasn't acting like myself. I told him I was tired from studying, but I remember a lot of it was that I was suddenly nervous to see him. He asked if I wanted to walk with him for a while and I jumped at the chance, and left my stuff at the table. But after a couple paces, my mother was there.
Now it starts to get a little fuzzy. I don't remember what happened, but she was angry over something. She said a big, fast stream of words except there was traffic on the road next to us and I couldn't hear her but was too afraid to say so-- I would be listening to her and then a car would blaze past or blare its horn and she would be completely muted out. She started speaking to me in Spanish, but I could only catch bits and pieces of what she said because of the traffic. I think that we might have been Hispanic and she might have been angry at me for ignoring my culture. Then she started talking to us both again, and I think she said she wanted us to get up the courage to be honest about how we felt. I said something back and pulled the blue-haired boy away, but my mother stood where she was and watched us go. I remember mentioning Becca, or possibly seeing her down the block ahead of us; simply that she came up again in the dream somehow. As we were walking again and talking more, he put a hand on my shoulder. I wanted to tell him how I felt.
Then I woke up.

My goodness. I had to get up at eight today for the phone line guy to come put a phone line into my room so that I can get online with my own computer, and that was pretty awful since I went to bed at 2:30 after playing FFIX, my new crack cocaine. He looked like a pretty old man, but he came in my room and saw all my wall scrolls and was like "So, you're an anime fan?" and I was like "o_o Why yes I am!" It turned out his son is into it. It was pretty funny. ...So he got the phone line put in, yay, and I somehow managed to buy King of Fighters 99 for PSX, brand new, for ten dollars at Babbages, double yay, and I'm all happy, and then my new monitor starts acting kind of funny AND my mouse dies. So like, what's the deal? I mean come on. If I wasn't eating a big bowl of buttered popcorn right now I would be running my brain in circles trying to figure out what to think about this day. But buttery goodness comes before thought.

I need to take a second to pay tribute to a friend of mine that passed away this week. He was with me from the first day I had my computer... He was always there for me, showing me the way. But even the strong can fall, and after several months of seizures and blackouts, he finally succumbed to replacement. Old Blinkie, you will be forever with us in our hearts.

OI OI OI I'm going to try harder to keep up with this thing, really! Not that there's too much to report. Monday was my first day back at work, bussing tables at the same restaurant I worked in last year, and I was surprised at how much I remembered-- also at how much my entire body ached afterwards, and I was only on for four hours, which is nothing. Must take a little while to get back into the groove of things. Other than that, I've been spending most of my time with Beccu, watching anime and making fun of Ayumi Hamasaki's live singing (download "Evolution") and mocking a bitch on the GawlML named Misha-chan. I oughta put copies of her mails up here, they're hilarious. And I've been playing Final Fantasy IX a whole lot, also-- this game is way better than VII (not that that would be a hard achievement). And by the way: is anyone going to Animazement on the 25th-27th? Gimme a holler! ^_^

It's a lazy Saturday. Got up around 11 and had waffles with strawberries for breakfast with my parents. That's the third time I've had fresh strawberries in two days-- I guess they're in season right now? ^_^; Er. I want to edit my sites and put more work up on them but I'm using my dad's computer for another week, until a phone line is put in downstairs for my beloved MPU and my AOL account goes from BYOA to unlimited access. ._. The only thing I will miss from my dorm is the cable access.

It's 2:30AM on Friday night and I'm sitting on my dad's computer listening to Jon Secada. You can feel free to end my life now.

So here I am in NC and everything! The last couple days have been crazy, with the pack up and drive here on Tuesday with my Dad and stepmom and then then necessary unpacking, sorting, settling in and running around with Becca and Mollie having much fun. :D I got some of my grades (four of five) back for this semester today. A in 3D Composition. B in American Pre-Civil War History. A in Art History. A in Drawing II. T_T I am so happy. That's a 3.75 GPA right there, and with the A I expect to get in English it will be a 3.8. I'm really proud of myself for getting through everything, even though I had one class more this semester and nine weeks of mono to deal with. But we'll see, whenever I get my English scores back!

And by the way, I'm on a weird Bjork kick, so download http://www.shockcomics.com/shockvids/dec00/bjork.mpg because it's terrifying and check out the Bjork Remix Web, where fans do their own remixes of her songs. Much of the work is tepid but there are some gems, like the DarkHalo Mix of "All is Full of Love" which is exceptional; probably better than the original version. And now I really will work on my 3D Comp shit. No really, I'm going right now...

I leave in three days, dude! I am very much looking forward to getting out of here. But uh, my 3D Composition final crit is tomorrow and so I guess I better go get started on my project...

Well, it has been a very eventful three days. On Wednesday were my English and History tests, both of which I think I did excellently on. For my English essay I had to write about a couple works' titles and whether or not they were good for the piece, and it was a pretty bland topic, but for one of the poems I used ("The Singing Lesson" by David Wagoner, look it up) I got to delve into the poem's sexual undertones and talk about sex and masturbation and pornography and such. That was fun. My Art History exam on Thursday was equally painless. Today I took down my show, a bit of a bittersweet experience. Matt and I went out for dinner and then met up with some friends, got ice cream and watched porn. Don't bother renting Leather Virgin, it's a real dud.

Well, exams start tomorrow and it was nice knowing you. ^_^/)