Number 1

It's really cold at 6 am. The burrito isn't much incentive to get up, because the only concern that my body has is that I get back into bed.
I did think that getting up early today for Marissa's challenge was a little bit easier than getting up that early for a class. Not because of incentive or consequences, because those are certainly more extreme for a class (especially my AI class, which is pretty much the hardest one I've ever taken). The real reason that it was easier today is that I know that I only have to do it once and I've satisfied the requirement. If I only had to get up and go to class one morning a semester I'd have no problem getting that over with.
And the sausage breakfast burrito is really spicy. I recommend sticking with the bacon one.
(In case you're not a subscriber, this is in response to my assigned life goals for the week.)

Welcome back, Insomnia

I stayed up ridiculously late last night playing Halo 2, and then when I couldn't sleep when we were done with that, I sat up longer and worked on a program (that was due a week ago). While I didn't end up sleeping very much last night, it is nice to be back to my normal sleep patterns.
The lesson that we learn from this, of course, is that Halo is a cure for cancer and/or depression.

The Life and Death of the Darth Cannon

A little over a month ago my ward had a dumb activity in which I didn't want to participate. So, instead of going to the activity, Tyler and I built a gun.
My friend Ryan and I had built a potato gun in high school, and I think Tyler had done the same, so we both knew the basic operations and what we needed. At the hardware store, we discovered that this is not only a very common practice, but that they don't necessarily like helping with this, so they don't readily sell the parts that we needed. We ended up compromising and making due with what they had, but in the process, we developed a new kind of potato cannon.
The Darth Cannon ^TM had a fail-safe. In the event that the pressure in the chamber was too high, instead of breaking the combustion chamber, it would blow-off the barrel to relieve the pressure. We were invincible. We couldn't hurt ourselves with this.
So, as any good college students who had built a gun, Tyler and I did science experiments on it. (I bet you thought we were going to use it to break things, huh?) We took it to the baseball field and measured the distances it traveled with different fuel-filling styles, until we'd figured out how to best use the Darth Cannon.
Unfortunately, the Darth Cannon met its end this weekend. We'd gone up the canyon to sit around a bonfire, and I'd gotten bored. So, naturally, I pulled the Darth Cannon out of my trunk (where everyone keeps their home-made guns) and loaded it up. I readjusted the barrel because it had gotten a little crooked in my trunk, but I guess I didn't tighten it up enough afterwards. When I shot it, instead of the potato flying out, the barrel itself shot off. This was good, of course, because it proved that my fail-safe would work, but in all of the excitement, I kind of broke off the trigger ignition that we'd put on it.

On not sleeping

When I wake up in the morning I'm always tired and I hate getting up, no matter how early I went to bed the night before. I stay tired for about an hour or so, and then by the time I'm up and doing things, I'm not tired anymore.
The same thing happens when I don't sleep. I get really tired in the early morning hours, around 7 am (which is really the earliest morning hours that exist for me, since times before that are part of my night schedule, not morning). Then by about 10 am, I'm not tired anymore, and I go about my day the same as I would normally, and the lack of sleep doesn't even affect me.
Some people think that if you don't sleep one night then the next night you'll be so tired that you'll just fall right asleep. Not so. Once your day starts and you get over being sleepy, then you've passed the point of no return. You've lost those sleep hours, and you can't catch up on them by sleeping more the next night.
Despite all of these things against me, I have finally found the one thing that can make me fall asleep at any time, regardless of how much sleep I've already had:
Class.

Addicted

It's come to my attention recently that I have an addictive personality. I'm not 100% sure that's the right way to say that, because it makes it sound like my personality has qualities that get people addicted to it (which may be contrary to reality). What I really mean is that I'm easily addicted to things.
My most recent addiction is an XBox game called Knights of the Old Republic II. It's a Star Wars role-playing game. I got it for Christmas but I didn't really play it much once I got back to school. Then last week I was sittin' at home alone and felt like playing a game, so I put it in, and I was hooked. I get so wrapped up in the storyline from it that I start to forget (or hope?) that it's not real and that it's just a video game.
So I'm fasting from the game today because I think if I don't get this under control that I'm going to start using my Franklin planner to schedule what levels I'm going to beat instead of important things, like homework and classes.

In case anyone was wondering how far away the MARB is, it's three Alkaline songs from my apartment.

Accidental Dating

My roommate is really good friends with this girl in the ward, and they studied together for the LSAT and everything, and they spend a lot of time together. She really likes him, but he's not interested in her as more than a friend. Well last night she was over and I asked her if she wanted to go to Final Cut with us tonight, thinking that I'd help my roommate out (against his will) by getting her to come along. Only I forgot a key phrase when I was inviting her: "with us." I think I accidentally asked her out. I hate when that happens.

I've hardly been to any of my classes this week, and I haven't worked that much, and I can't think of anything important that I've gotten done. Maybe I was on a break. I wish I'd known ahead of time that I was going to be on vacation, though, because then I could have taken a trip or something.

I stabbed myself

I have this English class (which I hate) at 9am today. That's early for me. It's in the law building, too, so it's about the farthest place on campus from where I live. So I'm late everyday. Well we have this stupid project where we write instruction manuals for products in our fields, and so we were testing each others manuals today (as in reading someone else's manual and trying to perform the tasks the manuals describe). One of the manuals told how to test your blood sugar levels with this little device (that I can't remember the name of), and you have to stab yourself in the finger with this little thing (kind of like what they use at the plasma place). Well no one wanted to test this manual because they'd have to stab themselves, so the teacher said if I tested it she'd forgive all of my tardies. Good deal, huh?

In my CS class that I had today I went in and put my bags down and then I went out to go check on a book that I didn't want to actually buy. When I came back, this dude had sat right next to my spot, and the isle was full, so I had to just go in and sit right next to him, and he smelled so bad. Boys should take showers. Just because you're a computer engineer and you think that you don't have to exist in society is no reason to stop bathing.

Man, I just don't know what to think of chemistry. At first I was all like, this is gonna be the hardest class ever (I don't really know why I thought that except that its a 4 credit class and I know nothing about chemistry). Then when we had lab and spent the whole time doing "stoichiometry" I was thinking, this is chemistry? Dumb. Then today we blew up a balloon with hydrogen and oxygen in it and I was like, AWESOME!

Ok, check out how good yesterday really was:
We got our tests back in Art History, and I was completely expecting to fail it because I didn't know all of these dates and crazy italian artist names and such, but I actually got an A. How, you ask? Well, apparently the teacher liked the essay section of my test so much that it just completely overshadowed the crappy short facts section. I made some claims on the essay that kind of looked at things in a different light than how he presented it in class, but I guess he loved it. So class was good, and maybe I won't fail after all. So I get out of class and Ben and Kim are like, You wanna go to Incubus? and I'm all like, I'm poor, and they're all like ITS FREE! and I'm all like, sweet. Ben and Kim practically own 105.7. They won Green Day tickets, and Incubus tickets, and... well, probably some other stuff, too. So Incubus was pretty sweet (but we missed Sparta) and they did the coolest drum solo ever known to man, SO cool, in fact, that it took 3 members of the band mounting up on percussion instruments, 'cause just one drummer couldn't contain all of the cool that they needed.

I have 8 hours to write a 7 page paper that I haven't even started.

This is the way my computer science class goes:

1. Teacher asks how the homework is going.
2. Students complain, but receive no input.
3. Lecture notes are displayed and read out loud.
4. A student will comment on some discrepancy and ask what it means.
5. The teacher will say that she doesn't know, and ask the rest of the class if they have any ideas.
6. The students bounce around ideas, which may or may not be correct, by luck alone.
7. The teacher moves on.
8. Repeat steps 3-7 until the end of the lecture slides.
9. Class gets out 30-60 minutes early.
   

I'm in this art history class at the Salt Lake Center, and my teachers a little weird (but that's another issue), so there's this one kid that always has these great comments, but the problem is that he won't listen to what the professor says about it. So he has this really good question yesterday about this Goya painting, but instead of letting the teacher answer him, he starts trying to convince the teacher that he's wrong. That's a dangerous move. So the teachers like, fine if you wanna keep discussing this, see me after class, right? But the kid just won't let it go, and then when the teacher contradicts him, the kids all, fine, just drop it; and then the teacher got pissed. He's all, you're the one that keeps dragging it out, so don't tell me what I can and can't drop in my own class, and you need to learn your place, and I'm the teacher, and I've studied this for who knows how long and I think I know what I'm talking about. It was way uncomfortable. Sweet drama.

I have a paper due on Thursday. 5-7 pages. About a single painting. And I haven't even started. I'm a genius. Or retarded. Either way.

So I spent all day on this program today, I didn't go to work or to class, and when I went in to pass it off it worked on every file except the one that it was being tested on. Ug. And then, to make it worse, I tried to run it on the near-infinite problem size and it froze my TA's computer. I'm sure she was impressed. I'm awesome, I know.

So, I went to class today. You'd think that'd be a good thing, right? Well, my almost-step-sister had a dinner tonight because she's getting married tomorrow. The dinner was at 7 and I got out of class at 6. So I call my dad when I get home from class to see how I'm supposed to dress for this thing and he gets all mad that I haven't left yet and makes this big deal about how I can't be late to this dinner, and I'm all like, well do you want me to come or what? and he just yelled about being late, so I hung up on him. So, I didn't go to the dinner.

I failed a test tonight. I think I suck at everything. I'm just gonna give up on life and go live under a rock. Or on top of one. I think it'll hurt less. And I'm kind of a wimp.

If you pay close attention you'll see that a large percentage of the posts occur at 11:59pm. That's a weird coincidence, huh? Guess why. I'm not going to tell you, you just have to guess. So, I was pretty sure that they (you know the ones, its always them) told me that the application deadline for the Animation program was April 16. Well, they lied. It was April 2. I went in today to pick up an application and they told me that the deadline was Friday. So, I'm awesome. I guess it doesn't matter, because I wasn't planning on majoring in it, really. I just wanted to know if I could get in or not. Maybe I should still apply next year. Or maybe I should just pretend that I would have gotten into it and let it go.