19 X 2001 - 13:22 - tristitia4/ira3

Oh, right, my science competition team thingy got into the second round of this supposedly Bay Area-wide high school science competition that is supposed to be a lot like Quiz Bowl. Almost everything that was permitted in the first round (calculators, copies of the periodic table, textbooks) is now prohibited, so we'll see how we do. Right now, we're tied with three teams for fourth place, and only two teams get into the third and final round. *shrugs* Since I got into the second round, I'll be getting a new t-shirt out of this. Heh. I know that's not the most important thing, but really... I'm not all that excited about the competition. Especially since my orchestra is going to be unhappy if I do too well and get into the third round because then it will mean that I'm going to miss a rehearsal and I'm convinced that they already hate me because I was something like ten minutes late to one rehearsal a week ago and blegh and I'm going to have to miss another rehearsal because my school orchestra which as far as I'm concerned should have a glass bottle rammed down its throat suddenly is being put on the winter jazz concert which coincidentally falls on the same day as one of our rare thursday night rehearsals and ARRRRRRGH!

So I'm a little bit annoyed about that but I'm having problems sustaining any feeling for very long because right now I'm sort of dozy because I have the day off except not really because I have two cello lessons today with different teachers and also I have to go spend an hour writing Chinese with a brush and my parents are going to be upset that I still can't read Chinese even though I can draw the pretty black lines. And I should probably go to have lunch soon considering the local time here and really, am I making any sense?

And I really should start thinking about what I want to do for October's poetica-collab entry but when you don't get out much and you live in a city that was originally mostly sand dunes, there's not much to do besides the ocean, and luckily for me I happen to love water in many of its forms (except maybe hail and snow) so maybe I'll write about that and about the really cool guano-speckled rock formations off our coast. People think the rocks are white with birds but little do they know that the birds are all on land trying to get hot dogs from the poor tourists who aren't coming because they're afraid to fly and they're afraid they might catch weird diseases and anyhow they're being laid off so there's not much money to get out here and the City sold its soul to tourism long ago and what the hell are we going to do now? because we're not a banking center any more, not when our two largest banks moved away, and we never were a center of the digital economy, whatever that was, that was San Jose, and we refused to dredge our port ten years ago so all the traffic is going to, my God, Alameda/Oakland, and who the heck knows where those places are? And I think even Stockton and Sacramento get more ship traffic than we do, and that's just, just, you know, pathetic. And the tourists that do come come in shorts, ha ha, I pity the poor fools, because don't you know that San Francisco is never shorts weather? It's almost never sweater weather, either, but it's very rarely shorts weather and ha! the sweater makers will be making a killing down at the Wharf. And the Wharf is dying, the crabmen aren't selling enough because the tourists aren't flocking to the streets, and I wonder what's going to happen to my City (yes it's mine, shush) because we sold our souls long ago, and the neighborhoods are fine, but what about the people who have to work with nonexistent tourists? And we're at the height of fire season and across the Bay in some places it's like what happpened ten years ago never did and it's like "oh, our house is surrounded by inflammable vegetation? i'll clear that later" and the streets are STILL narrow and the hills are STILL covered in brown grasses and the fire crews STILL can't get out there in time and with statistics like 11 fires since 1923 and something like 6000 acres burned total and even with better equipment and even with grazing goats and even with UC Berkeley clearing brush and with more fire breaks in public lands, there are still wooden roofs, wooden decks, kindling, stretching from El Cerrito to San Leandro, and when will we learn? Because we're still at the height of our fire season and people are saying that the East Bay hills are one of the worst fire risks in the country and whatever we call them up here, the Santa Anas are blowing this year... we don't do anything. It makes sense not to worry about earthquakes, as long as we live here they're going to happen and we can't do much besides brace and bolt and stick with putty - and, incidentally, build with wood frames because they're much better than brick or concrete in an earthquake - ah, but those wood frames are hell in a fire.

And I need to stop thinking about everything, need to stop worrying, need to go and do some theraputic Latin translation, but I can't, not in this state of mind, depression coming to the fore and I watch myself babble in a futile attempt to force it down, watching the people who care for me and for each other worry about each other, sink deeper into depression themselves, I try to comfort them but in the end how much can I do? I'm just a kid... and I want everything to be burned out of me, the pettiness, the bitchiness, so that I might replace it with something better, something able to better relate to people, something able to offer more comfort, because right now I feel I'm doing a damned bad job of it, and take a look: it's becoming so obvious when I don't like a person because I'm no longer willing to cut them so much slack, my explosions are to be feared because they are relatively few, al explodes a lot but we make up afterward but when i explode there is nothing to be done, my explosions are to be feared because in the time between i draw them further into the blast zone... and I'm not making sense and this is getting about as long as one of my entries in borogoves's guestbooks, proportionately, and so I think it's time to end this here.

grex, gregis m. flock, herd

From this word comes the English word "egregious," from ex "from" + grex "flock."