02:28 am greencastle, july 7; 03:28 pm taipei, july 7

...now, to write a quick one before i attempt to find somebody with whom to go do something. well, then. yesterday i didn't do much; got up, went to class, did some stuff, came back, talked to carl and barney for a while, gamed a bunch, and slept. wait, more than that happened.

yesterday morning, just after i got up, i got online (miraculously), and, even more astoundingly yet, there were a bunch of people online! you know, like, the kind to whom i talk! i had no more than an hour, though, before i had to leave for class, so i didn't get to chat for a terribly long time, but it was definitely very cool. finished going back through vgcats and decided that it's pretty much the equivalent of penny arcade. amazing. and...that was about it for then.

...until class. well, see, wednesdays are when i'll be teaching two classes--the storytelling class and the conversation class. storytelling is only an hour, and next week i'll be reading a story from this reasonably sized packet of transparent stories that can be projected onto a white board. after i read each slide, i ask a question of the students to ensure that they mostly understand it. huh...not that, you know, more than one or two of them do, but if i prompt them just right, they give the right answer and i can pretty much feel okay praising them, which i do regardless. or try to, anyways. the pages also have chinese on them, so i think i'll go over that, too, so that it's easier to translate hard words and whatnot. the conversation class...ooh, boy, is it fun with just one other kid in the class. yesterday, it was just ted and me...for two hours. well, we had some other guy sitting in to watch us--another one that looked like mebbe a college freshman or sophomore, but is actually just my age, also going into his junior year of high school--but all he did was occasionally comment to ted in chinese, thinking that i didn't understand, where really i was just trying to get ted to speak in english. meh. uhh...he left after a while, but i spoke to him a bit, and it turns out that he'll be teaching at the same cram school in two years, after he graduates, for the summer. or something. i dunno...but i had to keep coming up with all kinds of questions, as simple as i could possibly make them, after totally scrapping my original idea--modeling and having the kids ask questions. hrm...what did *i* get out of it? well, this sentence of ted's: "I like computer games because the airplane can eat cookies and water." now, disregard, first, the fact that i typed "airplain" the first time, and, second, realize that i'm not making fun of him, i'm merely posting the vague similarities between his logic and that young friend of petey's who wrote that story about the eskimo living in the pineapple. or whatever. interesting, no?...but i ended up spending most of the time just asking him questions about a stay that he had in japan, apparently, a bit ago--less than a year, but i have no idea when. he liked it, though.

...but moving on, later that day, my phone crashed. uhh...it's a motorola. i'm not sure why, but i just got a call, it vibrated a bit, then started to ring, i opened it up, looked at the number, hit answer, and watched as the colors turned grayscale, then static-y stuff took over, the audio changed pitch, turned into just a solid note, and it died. well...after a few seconds, i thought, "wow, that was really weird. uhh...i think i'll write down that this happened--i'll definitely have to tell people about it." then i turned it off and back on, and it worked well enough. once again, really weird. no problems since. i guess i'll just keep on...not killing it, then.

...and later on barney, carl, and i talked for a bit, failed to get another computer's wireless card to respond, and gamed. nothing important. but today...i found like half a gb of music. good music, i've heard, but much of it i haven't yet. and a bunch of new, nice indexes. i'm pretty happy about that. also went searching for software and came upon a whole slew of shareware file encoders/decoders and rippers (you know, to change wave files to mp3, or mp3 to ogg, or whatever, and to rip to formates besides wma or wav), and i found one pretty cool freeware to mp3 ripper, so i checked that off my list, but none of the decoders would let me queue more than five files to convert at a time. this really, really upset me. it took forever, but i finally got one for which two sites had dead links but google could turn up for me. finally...so now i'm changing all those bloody wma's on my mp3 player to mp3. at 7x real time. well...at least i have the memory to spare.

uhh...class today. it was alright. limericks; the little kids totally didn't understand. but...by the end, with a whole lot of prompting, they could kinda work out their own single lines. kinda. they didn't seem to be able to grasp the concept of rhyming through lines, only single words, and the rhyme scheme as a whole was way over them. yeh...nothing else remarkable. oh, right, and my mom'll be in hong kong by now, so i'm on my own (with these other people) in taipei.

few days ago i decided that my mucuous membranes hold a grudge against me for something. see, my eyes alwasy feel really dry and occasionally itchily so, and my nose is always stuffy, runny, or just plane uncomfortable. bled twice yesterday, once each nostril, once while i was lying in bed, and once on a bus. that was kind of awkward. got a couple weird looks holding a bloody hankerchief (of my mom's, no less), squeezing my nose, and tilting my head back. ugh. at least it stopped before i had to get off the bus. huh...it itches almost all the time, too. and if i rub it? it gets irritated and itches more. then it starts to run a bunch and smells strange. this bothers me. much.

uhh...gamed more again, today. was pretty fun. tons of smash bros. just a handful of losses. even went one on one with barney at the end at beat him five kills to one, marth against link, if that means anything to you. no items, final destination. meh. and this, with me having been used only marth all these other times we've played.

uhh...oh, yeah, so...uhh...nope, i've forgotten. well, day off tomorrow. and saturday. and sunday. if only everybody were so lucky...but really, i think that if i were ever able to choose on what days i work, realistically, friday, saturday, and sunday would probably be the most favorable for me to relax. no question. of course, it'd be awesome to get payed while never showing up for work at all, but i think a four day work week is relatively reasonable. well...probably not until i'm at least 40 or something, but i can hope and dream, right? what? oh...okay. well, worth a shot. (where? yeah, that's right.)

hrm...so i suppose i'll queue a bunch of stuff to translate wma to mp3 and leave it overnight. hopefully it won't overheat or anything. meh. it'll probably be fine. tomorrow...what'll i do? besides sleep in, that is. hrm. mebbe go shopping or something, mebbe see about a movie. iunno. i'm sure i'll let you know.

(and oh, man, i just realized that i started this post about eleven hours before i came back to finish it. which means that it spans across almost twelve hours! sweet!)