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washed out, originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

I got one call at 5:13AM for a PE job. I normally think those jobs are great and would have taken it immediately, but the teacher left on his “Special Instructions” that he requested a particular person to sub for him. So even though the system called me and offered it to me, I declined in deference to his wishes. It was a mistake I guess because I did not get another single call for any district this morning. Now I’m sitting at home annoyed that I’m not making any money. Maybe I should look for work for the summer. Any ideas?

I meant to write this last night but ran out of brainpower. Then I wrote it today and got fucked over.

Yesterday was a bad day, but that’s another story. Seventh period rolls around, the end to a long day. Very late in the period a girl comes into class with a note. Her first names were Marie Antoinette, I thought that was clever of her parents. About five or ten minutes after she comes into class, while I’m reading my book and the rest of the class is doing a worksheet not necessarily quietly but peacefully enough, she starts talking to me, or talking at least.

“This school sucks,” she declares. “I want to go to Notre Dame.”

“Oh, really? Why is that?” I ask.

“Everyone here is a slutty tramp or a snobby prude,” she says.

“There is no one who fits anywhere in between?” I inquire, prodding her.

“No. Even I go between the two,” she insists. “I know I’m a hypocrite, but at least I can admit it.”

I continued the conversation by making her defend all her statements, asking questions, making her reconsider her reasoning. I think I do that a lot, especially when people make generalizations. I knew it would not bother her because she is the one who started speaking so frankly in the first place; she wanted to talk. She was going on about how people were all followers and she didn’t like how everyone fit themselves into a category. Then she started talking about how it bothered her when everyone made racist jokes and whatnot. I told her about all kinds of things I hear at high schools everyday that disturb me. It bothers me when people classify individuals by “accidents” (in Aristotelean terms) of their beings. Race, gender, place of birth–these things cannot be controlled, cannot be chosen by an individual and therefore completely out of bounds for criticism, or as the basis for anything really. She agreed. I could sense a strong individualist within her somewhere.

“But I’m just a sheep also though,” she claims, “I like Mary-Kate and Ashley movies just like everyone else.”

I tried to explain that simply having a preference for something that other people like as well does not make one a “sheep” as she put it. A person is free to like anything he or she wants, but if one only likes things because others do, rather than it being a personal preference, then of course that person is just a follower of the crowd.

“Do what you like, like what you like, don’t worry about others,” I tell her. “Making yourself happy is the most important thing you can do.”

That was about all there was time for because the bell rang. It was odd, she shook my hand and said it was nice to meet me. Although she had a very negative outlook on things, I could tell she was a thinker. I was 15 or 16 once, I have the journals to prove it. It just goes like that. There is someone real in there though, I think she’ll emerge from adolescence just fine.

(This was better the first time.)

I just typed up the longest post ever and went to publish it, but I wasn’t logged in. I lost the whole thing.

I got to see Julie for the first time in almost two years on Friday. She was in town finally and had a chance to see me. It really doesn’t seem like it’s been that long since I’ve seen her because we talk all the time, but it was in her last semester at Berkeley that we actually were in each other’s physical presence.

We went to an early dinner at California Pizza Kitchen. Do not ever take this girl there. Although she must be commended on her ability to know exactly what she wants, I pity the next waiter who comes across her.

“I want the Chopped Chicken BBQ salad but I don’t want the jicama, and no cilantro, and no dressing. Oh! and I don’t want the tortilla strips in it, but could I get the breaded onion rings from that other salad? Oh! Oh! and could I get BBQ sauce on the side instead of salad dressing?”

Yeah.

Julie is one of the crudest people I know, and I love her for it, so it’s funny that she was almost uncomfortable about how much we talked about sex during our meal. She says it was because right over my shoulder was a group of old people and right next to us was a mother with a table full of children. I thought it was loud enough in there and we were talking quietly enough for people not to hear us. Julie said that people’s ears prick up when they hear the word sex though. Maybe just your ears, Julie.

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i want more, originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

I was up until after 3am on Thursday night because I was doing all kinds of fun conversion stuff. Earlier that night I had convinced a very bored Akiko to come with me to Fry’s because I wanted a new scanner. We then went to Tapioca Express. It really had been a while since I had that stuff. I had litchi milk tea with pearls, mmm.

I was taking a bunch of pictures of her, but my mistake was letting her get ahold of my camera to look at them because she deleted them all. I ended up with a great video of her just staring into space blinking, and then glaring at me. It’s not to exciting, but I think it’s great.

So when I got home, after I set up my new scanner, I began investigating how best to stream the video on my site. I thought of turning it into a flash file, but what could I do that with for free? After finding a few different freeware tools that didn’t do exactly what I wanted, I came across a little command line program which worked perfectly. SWFTools did exactly what I needed by converting my AVI file into a SWF file, playable with the Flash plugin.

Go look at how it turned out. I love how it loops perfectly.

The lack of sleep caused me to go to bed quite early on Friday. Saturday came around though and I offered to take Akiko to eat Mexican food which she has been craving for six months. How one can go without Mexican food for more than a week I cannot understand, but anyway, we went. Jessica had just gotten off work downtown and met us too. That was fun.

After dropping Jessica back off at her car, Akiko and I hung around at the corner of W. San Carlos and S. 1st St. for quite a while. I think we were trying to come up with something to do. We ended up at Carrow’s for cobbler and milkshakes. Yum.

I’m happy it’s Saturday. I already slept too much and it feels kind of good.

The last few days have just kind of slipped by. Hung out in SF with Tiphereth last night. That for sure will be the last time I see her for six months. She’s really excited to go. It’s nice to meet people who get excited about things. Passion for things needs to be encouraged in people. Anyway, I’m glad to have met her.

Started a new book too, I’ll mention it when I feel like writing more.

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Dairy Foods Ice Cream, originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

On Friday night I had another adventure. I got a call in the daytime from someone I had met recently on a website. I was with my friend Amanda at the time so I said that I would call her back later. It was an unexpected call, but very cool. She was going to be down from San Francisco and wanted to meet up for a bit before going off to see her friend here in San Jose. When I called her back she planned to jump on a bus to get down here. I get a call a bit later:

“I missed the bus by ten minutes. If I take the next one I won’t be there until 10:45. You should come up here!”

That was a surprising request. I was not expecting it and needed to be seriously persuaded if I was going to do it. Well not really. I wanted something to do, she sounded like an interesting girl, and why shouldn’t I do something that I normally wouldn’t do?

I agree and drive up there. She had been waiting at the Caltrain station the whole time. Tiphereth is her name, raised by hippies she tells me. I’m not dressed to go out dancing or anything, and a bar doesn’t sound too appealing. We decide to drive to the beach and hang out there.

We had much good conversation. She was interested in boring stuff I had to talk about: religion, theology, other stuff. Then she decides she wants to go in the water…

I’m not really sure why I’m listening to her, but I begin to take off my shoes and roll up my pants. We run out to the waves. We go in less than knee deep, but then a couple surges come in and soak us to the waists. So we retreat because it’s very cold.

After hanging around by the water and dancing to her version of “Super Bon Bon” (which was incredibly cool that she knew it even), we sat around in the sand a little longer.

Then it was time to depart. I dropped her off, probably to never see her again because she’s moving to a Zen Monastery for six months at least. It was a real fun time though, I’m glad I went.

I went to Golfland yesterday with Amanda. Miniature golf was pretty fun, well anything with Amanda is a blast of course, but the greatest part was in the arcade afterwards. We found this game that had little guitars attached to it called “Guitar Freaks”. It was like Dance Dance Revolution but with guitars. The entire thing was in Japanese and I couldn’t read anything or understand it, but I figured it out. I was so good, it was awesome. I got to play these Japanese pop songs and punk rock songs that were totally fun. All the practicing alone in my room finally has a way to pay off. Someone please buy me one, they only cost $1695.00.

For more than a year now, since I returned from Washington, D.C., the news hasn’t interested me as much as it had in the past. I was very cynical about politics after that, and even the 2004 election wasn’t too exciting to me because the “choices” didn’t thrill me a whole lot. The only reason I would ever turn on the TV was to see if the Pope had died.

Well, now it’s happened. It’s strange in that there has only been one Pope for my entire life. The idea that he can replaced is a bit unnerving. I’m going to be glued to the TV and the newspapers and the internet for the next month or so though. A conclave to choose a new Pope seems to be one of the most exciting things I’ll have to witness in my lifetime, although it’s bound to happen again in the future.

I read the authorized biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope, a few years ago. It is extremely dense. It took me quite a while to get through; I read a couple of other books at the same time. But what I learned about the man was profound. I especially appreciated how he could elaborate his reasoning behind all the views he held. Even if I didn’t agree with them, it is refreshing to read intelligent discourses on weighty matters. He wasn’t one who simply said, the Bible says, so you must listen. He would go into much more theological detail which I could greatly appreciate.