Wow, I spent this evening on a grueling study session.  All of it was looking up words, each just a single time.  None of it was spent on practice.  I've only gotten to the letter K.  Luckily, a lot of it is familiar, but there are at least a few hundred new words.  After copying down definitions for a few hours, I began copying words into my wordlist for Pingrid, ignoring the words I already knew.  I started practice, but I was completely drained from looking up so much stuff.  I'll sleep on it and let it all cook.  Overall, I have completed four pages out of ten, most of which I do not know by heart yet.  I will have to spend most of the next several days on this, especially on practice.  Soon as I have the words down, I will have to remove them from the list (pingrid likes to keep old material fresh by continuing to repeat it).  If I do manage to complete the whole vocabulary list, I will go through it and select the ones which still need reinforcement, and spend the rest of my time before the test studying those. 

I expect my next semester will also be grueling.  I've a math class in the morning, then a speech class at night.  I've filled up the day hours between them with electives on CPR and first aid.  I will be spending a week at the beach this coming monday.  Then I'll be back.  Well, I need the vacation from this thick mountain air.  Oh yes, thick mountain air.  The air at sea level is heavy and humid, but it's clean damnit.  I need that.  So I'll live with the extra heat and humidity; it's well worth it for that salty sea breeze.  I need a damn vacation. 

Still haven't had much time to work on that font.  I did make bitmaps out of a scanned alphabet, but I think I may have to make each one on a separate paper, and I'm struggling to plan how to keep them sized properly.  Oh well.  I'll bring paper and markers with me, and by the end I think I'll have a good set.  I bet Alamar thinks I've given up on the game again.  I haven't, I just haven't had the time to get everything done like I want it. 

Dust clogs my nostrils.  Passing hints of cat dander and strong b.o.  The first time I've smelled patchoolie oil in five years.  The stink of old clothes and the depressing drear of repetitive, useless toil.  Less tiring than hard physical labor but more emotionally draining. 

Hopefully not a wasted day. 

Another uneventful day.  My youngest sister has returned from college (away type college) and in about a week, we will be staying in SC near my oldest sister.  Of course, since everybody else decided that the best day to leave would be the day I told them I was taking the HSK, I will be going a day later. There is a small amount of tidying up that needs to be done in service of this event, but overall I am very very ready.  The Atlantic will always be my favorite ocean.  It's warm, relatively calm (at least in this hemisphere), and has the best sea food culture grown up around it.  Nothing against Perú, but they use the wrong species of crab. 

Happy Mother's day everyone.

Yesterday, my internet was acting funny, so I decided to skip posting altogether. 

So, yesterday, very little happened.  I played a ton of Rollercoaster Tycoon and that's about it.  Wathced TV.  Whatever. 

The temperature has returned to it's earlier instability.  Cold spat over the last two days.  Hasn't allowed my sleep to return all the way to normal--such as it is.  Still, I feel a lot better.  Still have a lot of free-floating anxiety.  Partly about being contated by some people I met recently.  I don't trust anyone at first blush, and since I feel things very strongly, those are the people I tend to meet.  Some of them handle it better than I do, some of them not nearly as well, and either direction can have bad consequences for me. 

People tell me that insanity is the expectation that the same behavior, the same problematic thinking, that lead to a problem can ever lead to a solution.  Then they tell me I need to embrace the problematic thinking that got me into such a huge mess in the first place.  As a member of society, I am indeed dependent on other members, but I don't need to be around people that will make me more depressed, more lonely, more interested in ways of destroying my conscious mind.  Wisdom from my big sister says that depressed people who hang out with other depressed people will only become more depressed.  Broken people who hang out with broken people only stay broken.  I deserve to hang out with people who are not broken, desperate, and afraid of their own thoughts.  My fears and loneliness lead me into a lifestyle of drunkenness, only my thoughts and my confidence will keep me out of it.  As for friends, those are great.  As for this wierd nonsense that you can't talk to people on the internet, did it never occur to you that the success of the internet is because of what a great communication tool it is?  You can't see a person's face over the phone either. Human beings are creative enough to form connections in ways you, as an individual, never imagined.  Your failure of imagination should not define some one else's success. 

So.  I went to the study group today.  We took a practice test, which was mainly listening, and it was grueling.  I got most of them wrong.  While we were going over them afterwards, there were a few which became more clear, but mostly, I need to study the packet.  And hope that when I hear the words I will be able to recognize them. 

I found out that some folks I went to the mountains with had gone without telling me.  I had been assured I would be invited.  I'm not saying I wouldn't have gone, it may have been a bad idea for me to go (for reasons I won't go into) but I would like to have been invited.  Still, I could have taken the initiative, which I didn't.  I knida wish I had been invited.  Meh. 

I don't really want to join anybody else's mini-society.  If I have to have one, I'd like to make up my own, thank you very much.  Maybe I will continue doing that.  I'll work out a set of principles, which I haven't really articulated anywhere yet in one place.  Not sure what that would do for me.  Maybe it will help me see where they might not work well together.  See where the contradictions are and if they are good or bad.  I'm certain that it won't do anything for anybody else.  Nobody wants me to join their mini-society anyway, they want me to change into somebody else who can.  I owe other people the courtesy of not demanding the same thing.  It's the same problem all over again.  If we can interact without expecting, then demanding, change from somebody else we're fine.  But then we end up disagreeing about something that is deeply fundamental.  There are certain ideas you have to accept.  There are certain ways your body has to be pigmented.  There are certain feelings that are wrong. I have seen a great advantage of certain philosophies (this is my impression, I do not know these thigns).  That when you relinquish all feelings and all ideas, you'll see that none are greater than others, and that extremity is evil.  Now, I obviously don't believe that, but if I can accept it, it helps me through certain days. 

People are not going to stop being frightening because you say "I don't understand you can say you're afraid of other people." 

I really need to go to sleep, but I want to see the rest of the Fringe season finale.  It's terribly garbled up here, but downstairs, it's almost coming through all the way.  Good night.  I have nothing to do in the morning, so I should be able to sleep a good eight hours, wake up groggy but at least I won't be perpetually nauseated and I won't have a headache.