Under the Skin

I know that it's silly to love inanimate objects, but some of them have life and personality. I'm going to share these personalities with you today. First, my violin, Evangeline. Yes, she has a name, and she picked it. One day, I was practicing, and while talking to her about what we needed to put forth, it came into my mind, and I guessed it must be her name, because it's made sense ever since. Evangeline is happy, and mellow with a soft tone on chords, but loud and unsatisfied with my lack of ability to play her as she could be played. She's absolutely right, so I don't blame her for it. Now, I started thinking that my dance shoes must have had names as well, because I'm come to notice that they seem to have life in them as well. But I internally asked them and asked them, but then I realized that they were mass produced, unlike Evangeline, and thus probably were not made with names. So, I started looking for some good names, and presenting them to the shoes. ...

Now, I'm a younger one, compared to some, but still I can't help but think that the worlds today is changing faster than it has before--on so many different levels. Yesterday, I was a group leader for Activity Days Camp. They have all sorts of different art supplies that I never had when I was in elementary school. Erasable colored pencils, erasable markers, erasable crayons, and crayons, markers and pencils that come out when you twist the bottom. Why didn't they have erasables when I was in elementary school? But even out of crayola, weather people are usually right these days! When did that start happening? And we've triumphed over so many diseases that rarely are diseases at Evergreen contagious, except for the (get this) super developed antibiotic resistant strain of tuberculosis. There are so many advancements, think of the cell phone. I remember how clunky our first cell phone was, and we thought it was high-tech! I remember no-sound, black and white PCs...

Hello again, everyone. School is officially OUT! If you are not in school, this is one of those feelings that you can only remember, and never feel again. The euphoria that is contains is so beautiful, I cannot even describe it to you. And I'm a novelist! It's the feeling that you don't have anything that you HAVE to do. I like doing things, but in school, breaks aren't fun, because there are still obligations. There are no obligations through the summer. It's wonderful. So, this summer, I'm intending to be productive, but still to do as I please. And that's all that there is to id.

Hey, I've some interesting news. I had heard of her, but until today, I'd never heard Avril Lavigne sing. I don't know whether or not she's cool or not, but I actually kind of liked her singing. It was a solid sound, and I liked the feeling that she brought. Anyway, today, I went to the first Girl's Camp meeting with my girls. I'm Unit 5 and I have the nicest bunch of 2nd year girls. They're really great. The Girl's Camp Theme is from D&C 25: 12- "For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads." Therefore, each group has picked a different song and a theme to go with that. We're "You Can Fly," and thus, we are pretending to be pixies. It'll be fun. The only thing that's sort of a little ironic, is when me and the other two KitKats (Youth Leaders) were thinking about themes to present to them, we tho...

So, if you haven't already noticed, I try to be positive, but I always come off as negative for some reason. Therefore, I am trying to change my outlook on life. For starters, I am not allowed to be negative for the rest of the week. If you're a positive personality, you probably don't realize just how hard this is. But I'm determined. To help me in this endeavor, and to prove that I'm not as negative as I think I am, I've made a list of little things that make me happy. I once heard them being called natural highs: *Being able to explain something in scientific terms: it makes me feel confident in my world *Warm socks straight from the dryer *Cleaning out an old file or box *Organizing my room *Learning something interesting about a language *Getting the beats of my hardshoes just right *Feeling my violin vibrato very easily, and on that line, feeling my violin strings ring in sympathy with sounds around me *Seeing a complete stranger wave or smile at me *mo...

Today in Driver's Ed, I was thinking. Well, duh, we'd hope I do that a lot of the time, but here's the thing. They think that by showing us all sorts of graphic movies, that they'll change our driving habits. Now, I've never planned to drunk drive, road rage, and street race, but there has been one time in my life that I just thought, "I will never be a reckless driver." So, I'm a volunteer at a Hospital. When I graduate from high school, I'm planning on going to nursing school, so I just volunteer there to get some idea. But anyways, once, I was rounding up wheelchairs that had wandered from the herd of hospital supply, and I was rounding some up in the waiting room of the ER (or ED as they call it at Evergreen Hospital where I volunteer). In this waiting room, there was a police officer and a man with handcuffs on. I didn't know what was really going on, but from the questions the officer was asking the handcuffed man, there was some rec...

I think that pretty much sums up my life: the life where nothing happens. All the same, I suppose that I should tell you all about it. I don't even know if people visit this thing, but I suppose it could be counted as a journal, even though I don't share nearly as embarassing of stories here as I do in my journal. This week, however, I began Driver's Ed. It's a horrible experience, to tell you the truth. We watch movies...on the weirdest things. Then my instructor rambles for about an hour, and then we watch another movie. And the teacher pronounces "okay" as "o-key." And she says it after about every sentence. Besides, where most teachers will call on you with, "Yes?" or your name, she will say, "What?" in a way that sounds mildly annoyed. Our drive cars are Lancers. They're not that attractive. And all my friends went to Swerve Driving School, instead of Defensive Driving School where I go, so they can't even sy...

Now, I couldn't actually suddenly start talking like a normal human being. I must stay as nerdy as I possibly can, for as long as I possibly can. Therefore, today I'm going to talk about a war that's going on between Celera and the Human Genome Project. The Human Genome Project is a government run genetic research project, where Celera is a private genetic research corporation. Celera brought research to the forefront, bringing the concept of *gasp* computerizing the decoding of nucleotide bases and therefore genetic code. Celera's system can decode 1000 nucleotide bases a second. The Human Genome Project did it all by hand. Human Genome Project employs thousands of geneticists, where Celera does even more work with very few geneticists. Human Genome Project is nearly entirely government funded, where Celera doesn't take a cent of tax money. But Celera claims that the Human Genome Project should release their data to the public (aka Celera). After all Celer...

So, I've made the unwilling leap into the 21st Century. Journals are a thing of the past, apparently. Now, we have to blog. So, I decided to get with it. Right now, I'm waiting for the world to become interesting. This translates as: school to get out. Yeah, you heard me, here in Washington, school is still going strong. Not until June 22nd are we released into a higher level of living. I say this because I am convinced that school is modelled after Satan's plan (yeah, that's a Mormon, Plan-of-Salvation reference). We do not have any choices. So, if I use my time wisely, I don't feel any satisfaction in the concept. Oh well. So, just to clarify: the title, The phoneme refers to, what a shock, a phoneme, which is the smallest unit in linguistics. That's right, my English teacher. It's not a morpheme. A morpheme is larger than a phoneme. A phoneme is a sound, a morpheme is a grammatical building block. Like unladylike has three morphemes: un, lady,...