Looking to break a mental sweat? Then http://deathball.net/notpron/ isn't the place for you. This place is more like "GIVE YOUR BRAIN A HERNIA!)!!(&!". The puzzle to end all puzzles.

I was allowed to miss 8 questions on my permit test. Any more and I would have failed. I missed exactly 8. Jesus, it was scary to watch the lady grade my paper out of the corner of my eye and count everytime she made a mark on the test with her red pen. But after her 8th mark, she called me over and said, "You're lucky, you barely passed. Study up on the questions you missed. Congrats, here's your learner's permit." *Whew*

4 hour CYO rehersal on Saturday seemed like hell. Probably because our past like 3 rehersals have all been only an hour and a half due to the Nutcracker Orchestra thing. I still don't know like half the people's name that I hang out with during breaks. Heh.

After CYO I came home and took a nap cause I was reeeeeeaaaaally tired for some reason. Woke up, took a shower, got dressed in concert attire (pretty as a princess!), and whisked off to Downtown San Diego at the Westgate Hotel for the BRAVO performance.

Here's what I don't get. Tickets to the event costed $200 each. You'd think that people who would shell out that kind of money to get in would actually give a crap about the performances. But while we were up on stage, people were rude as hell not shutting up, not even listening. Yeah, it sucked. By the end of our performance, most of the audience was gone anyway. Mostly in part of weird planning by the hotel cause like there were 17 stages and all the performances overlapped each other, so if you wanted to see the next performance start you had to leave the current one before it ended. Oh well, as Mr. Gilson said, "I don't care, they're giving us $1000 to do this. I'd do it again in a second."

After we ended playing, most CYO people left, and only like 7 stayed for the afterparty. I waited for 2 and a half hours with Allison for the party to start. Yeah, that was really... not fun. Nothing to do anywhere in the hotel so it was boring as hell. So we just strolled around Downtown, went to Horton Plaza (where all the shops were closed), and along the way Allison would drop sandwhiches off in inconsipicuous places for homeless people to take. Still boring as hell. And for all those people that didn't believe that me and Allison would go ice skating in our concert attire, guess what? We did. Hah.

The wait for the party to begin was hell, but when the time finally came, wow, what a turnaround. It was like reeaally classy. I don't even know how to explain it. But as the night wore on, it became less and less classy as people stopped drinking wines from glasses, and started chugging down the booze from the bottles. The smell of alcohohal was strong, and everywhere around us you could tell people were a bit... drunk. I'm happy to say that I abstained from any drinking :P. Instead, I had like 5 things of Ben & Jerry's icecream. The dance was fun. The afterparty was fun. It was worth the wait. I wish more people I knew could've been there, though.

The short APEC quizess that I take at the APEC book's publisher site usually give me a general idea on how I'll do on the chapter's test. So far, its been fairly accurate at predicting what grade I'll recieve on Raskin's test. This chapter, I got a 100% on the quiz. Let's hope that means something.

Another "Wow" from ConceptArt: Lucifer's Wife.

It doesn't seem like anyone's caught the fact that she's holding her violin and bow in the wrong hands. That is, ofcourse, unless she is a left handed player... which is extremely rare...

Haven't yet seen The Incredibles? Then do it. Do it NOW. As soon as you can, anyways :P. You'd think that Pixar would have run out of its creativity juices by now after making so many hit movies already, but I honestly think that this one may be their best yet.

Looks can be decieving, huh? The last time I was in a room with so many little kids was when I saw Toy Story for the first time like 7 or so years ago. The previews for this movie were VERY kid oriented... almost down to Winnie the Pooh level. Maybe that's why while I was sitting there waiting for the movie to start I was doubting that I had made the right choice in wanting to watch The Incredibles.

But once it started and things got rolling, oh did they get rolling. The film is amazingly creative. I doubt any of the little kids in the theater actually understood the plot of the story or how much imagination went into the constructing of each scene. They were probably in there just because there were colorful animated characters on the screen (hey, when I was a kid, I was obsessed with anything that was cartoon, even if there was no sense behind it).

So yeah, I really recomend watching this movie.

By the way, at the theater I saw Sammie and Jane, who were with their own group, Kevin, who was with his group, and a girl by the name of Linda who goes to Mira Mesa High who I'm sure none of you know, but we've been friends since like... ever... because we had the same nanny as infants. I hadn't seen her in like... a year?

Today in CYO Allison decided to come down from her seat like a gazillion stands in front of me and be my standparter in the back. lol. Next week CYO is playing at the Westgate Hotel in Downtown. Tickets are $170 a pop to get in. Not tickets for the concert, because we're not playing a concert, but it still makes me feel really God damned important :P. We're playing at an event (for charity?) where apparently a lot of important people in San Diego will be at, including the mayor. According to our conductor, Mr. Gilson, "It's like a prom for big people." I heard that last year the governor of California was there. Maybe Mr. Schwarzenegger will drop by?

My certificate from completing the online driver's ed class that I took came by mail today. And my to-be driving instructor came by my house to give me the form that says I'm enrolled in his driving program. That means that I now have all the papers I need to get my permit YEEEHAAAW! I'm sceduled to get my permit next Friday... assuming, ofcourse, that I pass the test :P.

Its always interesting to see how life unfolds.

Sometime ago, maybe about 2 years, I discovered the books by the author of Iris Chang. Her works delt with matters directly related to the Chinese people in some way. She wrote about famous Chinese scientists, the lifestyle of Chinese immigrants, etc. All her books were well known in the Asian literature world. Particulary famous was her book The Rape of Nanking, which told about the the brutal attack on a single Chinese city by Japanese soldiers where hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Its called "the rape of" because thats what was most prevalent during the attack. Countless numbers of rape incidents took place. In fact, my grandfather's own sister was a victim of rape by Japanese soldier, while pregnant, and was afterwards killed. The event in history is also known by others as "the Forgotten Holocaust" because not a particulary large number of people know about it.

Eventually, I read all of Chang's books. Last year, I even went to a book signing that she was at in a small bookstore in La Jolla and got her autograph on one of her books I owned.

Today I found a small article in the back of yesterday's Union Tribune which stated that she had commited suicide in her car with a gun after coming out of a hospital for depression. She wrote a note asking her family to remember her as the person she used to be before she fell ill to depression. Her family consisted of a husband and a 2 year old son.

Now I sit here with the book that she had signed in front of me, turned to the cover page with her signature on it. Makes you think, doesnt it?

And now, a short presentation from the Random Blog Generator:

Today my teacher was watching a TV show about homosexuality in the Dark Ages. She was a little fascinated by the topic, so she began explaining my friend Archibald about it, and he began yelling:

"Oh man!.. Dude! I was just learning about the Dark Ages in class!"

But then when my teacher got to the part about the homosexuality, Archibald suddenly got this dangerous look in his eyes. But the next day, Archibald's cousin told me that the reason Archibald was so freaked out was because he used to write a lot about homosexuality. On weekends Archibald can be really strange like that, but all he cares about is my own good...

The hell? Never trust a machine to write your blogs for you.

The highlight of my day was during PE, watching Kevin shove a ping pong paddle into his pants and position it so it looks like he has a huge boner, then run into a nearby basketball game, poke some unspecting Asian kid with it, and seeing the kid leap back and shout, "WHAT THE FUCK?!!" lol. Hilarious stuff.

The Seven Deadly Sins. All I can say is, Wow.

Don't worry, I'm sure your mom thinks your cool.

Its done... I guess. You can obviously tell that my centering skilLz are crapped up (there's like 2 and a half inches of blank space at the bottom of the paper). Also, I'm not entirely pleased with the way the shading came out. Strangely, I think its somewhat of a downgrade from what I could've done 7 years ago when I was more serious about this kind of stuff. Click to enlarge and see it more closely to its actual size. Once again, what you are seeing is a little bit distorted because of the scanner.

I usually don't show work-in-progress's, but here's one that I'm doing now that I have free time without water polo. A scan doesn't do it justice. Quality if crappified after scan. Click to enlarge

Here's a picture that Nauzli took of me a few weeks ago when the whole water polo team had to wear their speedos on the outside of their clothes to school. If you really want to know the story, look back in the archives somewhere.

Today was possibly the coldest day in my life. Up until now, I thought that the once night in 6th grade camp standing outside the mess hall (seemingly forever) was the coldest, but now this probably tops it. It actually wasn't all that bad until the water polo game... after the sun went down and the pool wasn't heated. Being in the pool felt almost as bad as being strapped to the front of a speeding truck naked at night while its raining and the wind and rain is whipping at your body. Maybe not that bad, but it was still FREEZING. I can't even begin to describe it. Thank God polo ends this week, so we won't have to endure that another day.

I really can't see how the people in girls' water polo, which starts next week, will be able to stand it.