8/19/2010

Je suis une grande nerde

et je ne sais pas la mot pour "Nerd." Mairde.

So... yeah. I really am a big nerd. If you can tell by the title if you're not Jessie, I'm a high school student. Une Americaine. Donc, I don't have year-round school and am currently on summer break. I'm not entirely sure what I'm taking a break from, though. Swimming is/was still going on, all summer long. I still got my Internets in. I read books. Everything's good but really boring, because I'm missing two key things.
1) My friends
2) Un-lazy serum

Most people love summer because they can hang out with their friends all the friggin' time. The problem is setting this sort of thing up. I hate talking on the phone. I'd prefer texting, but I have it not. IMing is good, but you can't do it on the go. And nobody uses email even though I love Gmail to pieces. (I before e except after c...) Also, If I may call attention to the title, I'm a nerd. Consequently, my friends are nerds in the best possible way. Nerds stereotypically and in reality aren't very social. It's kind of hard for anyone to set anything up when everyone's either offline gaming or offline reading. D:. Furthermore, I've had two-a-day practices for swimming pretty much all the damned summer, which was fun, but most people want to go to the pool or the beach and my good suit is at school and mt tankini/board short combo is worrisome, because there's one too many pieces to keep track of. (I love spell check. It keeps me from sounding like a complete idiot.) I miss my friends, in short. I want to wander into the cafeteria in the morning after practice and hang out with them for a while before school. Five days are too long.

On to initiative. Left to my own devices, I am an incredibly lazy person. Nothing would get done except for feeding myself (too much). One only has to look at this blog to see the proof. Most of my posts are from August, and half of them copy/pastes of a story thing I'm working on. (btw, it you wanna read it more, check out my gallery at titanswimr.deviantart.com . I finished the first bit, and it's in there.) Actually, I haven't really worked on it a whole lot more, but the basic plot line of bit 2 is fairly well constructed in my head, as is some bigger-picture stuff that will happen to the members of the Brethren. Ah, hang this paragraph. It has no point.

On to my nerdiness. We got our school books about a week ago, and I've been set on reading all my English books, and they're damned good so far. Oedipus was weird, but a nice exposure of one of my favorite time periods/settings: Ancient Greece. Twelfth Night, I'm proud of myself for getting through that. It's long and dry, but 'twould be funny if performed. I'm halfway through In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez. It's an absolutely awesome book so far, and Jessie, you's danged well better put it on your reading list. It's beautiful. The narrator changes, present tense is used as the voice of one of the characters (and I lovelovelove voice), and the plot contains enough rebellion and love to make this into an Orwellian historical fiction. Just go pick it up. It's really damned, and one of the reasons why I'll love English. Next will probably be Dickens' Great Expectations, and Macbeth afterward. (Yeah, two Shakespeares. Ohemgeebers.) After that will come my little novel for French, tome I of Les Miserables. (It's like, 60 pages! D:) After that, my Computer Science textbook, intended for APCS (AP Computer Science) students.

And now it's half past midnight and I've got eight o'clock practice tomorrow. good night

tl;dr~ I miss my friends and school and like reading my English books. Also I'm a nerd.

8/10/2010

Je suis... je ne sais pas de tout

Sorry about the lack of updates. I'm kind if lame like that. I;m gonna start talking about what's up with me now, not that much is...

Varsity swimming starts up again tomorrow. I'm ambivalent about this. Being a lazybutt is nice and all, but it's really kind of boring. I've got nothing to do with myself but sit and stare at a screen now, and maybe write a little, but that's it.I want to go swim and see my friends and stuff, but I don't want to have to deal with the difficulty of practice or toning down my weirdness to an acceptable level, cuz I've gotta do that for swimming and most of school.

My brother's on Omni, not Journey, so ca me fait triste. The legacy is over, and he's got to be on the obviously inferior team. And some neurological society has decided that they need to show the kids how to be organized and stuff. Glad I dodged that bullet.

And I've been tagged to do a double meme with my friend, and I'm going to have to not be on my new laptop for that, cuz I've got only 512 megs (MEGS, not gigs) of RAM, which isn't near enough for drawing with a tablet on an image that big. :'(

So, yeah. That's the deal with me.

Fjords,
Niki

8/09/2010

Avez-vous vu? Les titres sont toujours en Francais.

I wrote some more. Ohey, I need a better (geekier) nickname for Erick. "Psychic Erick" is admittedly uber-lame. Halp please?

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Now clubs at Splitway have two requirements: acceptance and advertising. You have to let anyone join who wants to, and you have to advertise your club on the board. Most clubs post huge glittery behemoths. We agreed that we wanted to keep our club a kind of secret. We couldn’t really, but we would try our best. The rules didn’t say how long you had to advertise your club, so we chose to make a small sign and post it only on the first day of school. Scott being his nitpicky self, we couldn’t make a crappy sign, so we let him design it. It was very minimalist, barely fulfilling the requirements of the advertisement. It had the club name and room number on it, as well as saying that we meet every day after school. We chose a room in a back hallway of the school, away from most eyes.

So we were quite surprised when somebody knocked on our door on the first day of school. I was even more surprised when it was Tess who opened the door. I think we all were a little startled to hear her talk.

“Hi, is this the Brethren? I saw your sign on the club board. Can I come in?” se asked.

All I could do was sit there with my jaw barely restrained from dropping. I wasn’t thinking very well at all. This was the invisible girl, the one that I’d seen (maybe even admired) from afar, come to see our club. I wasn’t quite thinking at all. I looked over at Scott. He was polishing his glasses, something he only does when he’s nervous. Cliché, I know, but that’s Scott. Greg, fortunately, is a very quick thinker, recovering admirably quickly from the blow.

“Yeah, it is. Come on in, pull up a chair.”

I looked back over at Scott. His glasses were back on, his eyes narrowed in distrust. Scott is a great guy and everything, but trust is a big issue with him. I guess it’s because he’s kinda nervous all the time. He was still thinking, though. I could tell; his fingers were tapping the desk next to him. I remained silent, but excited.

Tess smiled. “Hi, I’m Tess. Um, I saw your sign on the club board, and it didn’t tell me much of anything about the club. Um… yeah.”

She looked kind of nervous to me, more nervous than Scott normally looks. Her hands didn’t seem to want to keep still, and her feet were hooked behind the table legs to keep then from jittering.

Greg looked at her and pulled his cheesy little half-smile out. “Hey Tess. M’name’s Greg, this is Scott, and over there is Erick with a K. Never forget the K.” Scott tapped his foot, I waved a little. Greg shifted in his chair. “Could you give us a moment? We really weren’t expecting anyone, on account of the size of the sign.”

She brushed a few strands of hair from her face, and then let her hands return to fidgeting. “Sure. I’ll be right here.”

“Awesome. Guys, over here.” He beckoned us to the hallway, and we followed.

“I don’t trust her,” said Scott, once we were outside.

Greg rolled his eyes. “Big surprise, dude. I’m all for letting her in. Did you see her—?”

“No, no I didn’t, you perv. Does she even go to school here? I’ve never, ever seen her around. Not in class or around the school or at lunch or anything. We shouldn’t just let some stranger into our crusade….”

I cut in. “I have.”

Greg laughed. “Of course you have, Erick. You see everything.” He’s not exaggerating, here at least. I tend to see more than most people, like that Mentalist dude. “So tell me, Psychic Erick, what is out young lady in there like.”

I took a breath, and began, arms gesturing freely but not hugely. “She’s been in our school since we were. She’s our age. Her last name is Colton. She’s in most of my classes, so she’s smart, but she never, ever talks. She never raises her hand, even. She’s got maybe two friends, but they seem close. The shirt that she wears most often and probably likes the most is simple, red with only the 1-up mushroom on it. She never wears makeup, and I’m all for letting her in.”

Greg slapped me on the back. Hard. “Okay buddy. Let’s take a vote. Should we let her in?”

“Aye.”

“Nay.”

“Aye. Sorry Scott. You’ve been outvoted,” said Greg, with a smile. “Well, we’ve gotta give her a choice. Let’s go fill ‘er in.” He opened the door, and we all walked back in.

8/07/2010

Parce que je peux ecrire.

So I was writing and then Jessamyn bugged me about posting so here's a post of something.

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Tess Colton had always been something of a mystery to me. Actually, she was kind of a mystery to everyone. She was in many of my classes, so I knew that she was a smart kid. She never raised her hand in class, though. I’d never actually heard her talk until that day. I only knew her name through eight years worth of attendance. I think she had maybe two friends in the whole school, and the school’s pretty big. She was invisible; hiding in plain sight. I still saw her. She was invisible but I saw her, so it was with great surprise that I saw her walk in the club’s door that day.

Let me back up a bit and tell you about myself. My name’s Erick. Yeah, Erick with a “k.” It’s a weird spelling, so people are in the habit of messing it up. I like the way it’s spelled, though. It’s different, a hell of a lot more different than I am. Anyways, I’m a sophomore at Splitway West High School, and yes, there is indeed a Splitway East High School, which is indeed our bitter rival because of old soreness about the division. The school’s name is apt. Tess is a sophomore as well, along with my best friends, Greg and Scott.

I’m a nerd, and I’ll admit it freely. I play Pokemon, I watch Star Wars, and I enjoy programming. I’ve got the glasses with the black frames and the pale skin and the malnourished build that all come from dark rooms and video games. Greg and Scott are nerds, too. Greg likes building robots and taking things apart to see how they work. Once, he took apart the thing that told the oven how to cook and then his mom came home and sighed and made salad. Scott’s a big fan of random facts, starting most of his sentences with “Hey, did you know.” He also spends half his time working with Firefox and Wikipedia, because he likes things like that.

So, yeah. We’re big nerds, all of us. We’re definitely not the biggest nerds in school, but we’re up there. Remember when I said that Splitway was an apt name for our school? Well, it’s apt in more ways than one. There is a huge division between Populars and the rest of us. There are normal kids, but they are the minority. I’ve had to buy myself a couple of extra packs of underwear because of the state of things. Hell, even the cheerleaders get into the bullying. All of us geeks and nerds and stuff are kind of like sheep. We do nothing to help ourselves. My friends and I noticed this at the end of last year, when we were freshmen. It bugged us that the popular kids could push the rest of us around and have nothing bad happen to them. We decided to fight back, in our own half-assed way. We made a club, and we called it the Brethren.