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hello, this is my first journal entry. it really sucks that i'm such a procrastinator, but what sucks more are several things that are occuring very in-the-moment: first of all, i'm about to win a chess game but this stupid opponent dude won't move. but oh well, their time ran out anyway. second, my extremities are uncomfortably cold. i am not in the mood to retrieve socks or gloves. third, i need to compose and i have yet to do that. i should be doing that. now, in fact. but not really, i should really be working on this. because i've been procrastinating this for weeks. but i've done the same for my composition. i need to have something by 5pm and it is currently 2:30 and i have no time until perhaps 4:30 and half an hour is nowhere near enough unless bach decides to be nice and possess me. (if you don't know, bach was known to be a fast composer. one of the reasons i can't be bach.)
on another note, i kinda dig this journal. it doesn't feel as limiting as gdocs or paper journals. and it's really easy. maybe i won't even style this. i mean, i don't like my default font, but it's simple and i like that. also, it is so nice that the first word of my sentence isn't automatically capitalized here. maybe that's my favorite thing.
but back to composition because that's what's on my mind. i'm in the middle of writing this piece for piano that had a nice start but is really lost right now. i have no idea where it's going. it sounds pretty, but a little mushy. like microwaved lunch. i'm also working on a piece for oboe and marimba, which has a cool premise but doesn't really function as music yet. why, you ask? well, it's supposed to be about bluebeard (it's a folktale about this dude who, shockingly, has a blue beard, and is kinda creepy but this young woman goes and says she'll marry him but there's this chamber in the house she's not supposed to enter but of course she enters and there's a bunch of dead women and blood in there so yeah it's pretty freaky), or more specifically his wife, who i'm calling pandora because she kinda is one. i even wrote this crappy poem based on the story that might go along with the piece. but i cannot, for the life of me, compose with ease. it does not come naturally. it needs to come naturally to sound natural. i hate what i have. i don't know what i want. even if i knew, i wouldn't want to write it as soon as it gets out of my mind it starts to seem and sound worse. it's worse than writer's block because you can hear the piece and hear how bad it sounds. i think eyes can lie easier than the ears. especially since i have bad eyes. these days, when i'm in a zoom or something, i start to see two of everything and i get super spaced out and then mr. headache comes in to say hi.
so you see what kind of mood i'm in.
ugh i'm trying to change the font and it isn't working, i'll probably fix it later. a million years later.
I CHANGED THE FONT! AND THE BACKGROUND COLOR! im so happy omg this font is a million times better! i want to do a lot more, but first, to ear training. that's the saturday class life for you. alright, i'm in the waiting room. what i wanna do is try to make every other entry a different color, not a contrasting one like orange, but something that'll distinguish different entries. maybe a nice light blue would work. in that case, i'd need to style each div separately. let's see if i can do that.
now THAT is beautiful. i even did margins and padding. and a new background color for the whole thing. it's so pretty. i love it. by the way, my ear training class has begun. i'm just not paying- oh i got called on. it's fineee. oh gosh, i really shouldn't be writing this sort of stuff here.
okay, my ear training class finished early. i'm itching to play chess. these days it's been putting me in a mediocre mood because that's the level i am, a mediocre level, but still. i'm a bit addicted. there's a chess board on the coffee table that i sometimes just stare at when i'm working. and there's this period between when i get in bed and when i acutally get to sleep that i have, and these days, i have these flashes of chess in my mind a lot at that time. not like beth playing chess on the ceiling, of course, but just little images of satisfying moves, like a fork between a king and a queen. or a race to promotion, which i always win. anyway, i'm going to play a couple rounds now. i might come back depending on how it's going.
WINNING STREAK OMG
it is, once again, friday, and I feel meh. honestly though, mondays are so much better. i'll tell you why in a minute, but first:
i'm behind again. i really need more codesketches. thing is, i just have a lot more fun writing here about trivial things. i could stylize this all day, but codesketches frustrate me a little. because magic doesn't seem so magical once you know it's not magic.
in the last ten minutes of this class, here's my plan: i'll set up my argument for Monday supremacy, and then i'll try to do a variation on the chicken nugget dance and move it here. and then in my next entry, i should come up with a list of cool codesketch ideas.
so. mondays are definitively better for a variety of reasons. the first one that comes to mind is that monday is like a fresh, blank piece of paper in a notebook. It's like, whatever happened last week, you can scrap that. monday comes, you can start anew. you know when food is plated so beautifully that you feel this sense of both guilt and greed to eat it? i have that sentiment towards many things in life. notebook paper is so perfectly lined and unwrinkled and downright enjoyable. i usually have this one moment, a very short but intense moment, of wanting to put my pencil on the page but also wanting to keep it empty. might be the reason why i haven many journals but zero finished ones. anyway, my point is that monday is like a new page. i wish i could stop time and stay in that block of new-ness forever, but i also want to move really quickly and be my better self and do everything and let me energy go. but by friday, i am just so done. i haven't had anything on the weekends that i geniunely look forward to since very young times. so mondays are better in that respect.
also, mondays have always had more agreeable schedules. all the heavy stuff is done in the morning, so my afternoons are light and chill. on the other hand, the air literally feels heavy on fridays. it's like i'm post-nap. it's amazing how naps manage to make you feel more tired and sleepy than you were pre-nap.
i could easily continue this essay, but i totally forgot about the chicken nugget dance. i need to do that. unfortunately, i only have one minute until my next class and that is nowhere near enough time. i usually fall into dysfunction after school is over on fridays, so maybe i'll make the codesketch in the evening or tomorrow. until then, i recommend that you listen to prince.
and after a notable hiatus, the author finally returns.
okay, I'M SORRY, i've been a mess this month and i still am but somehow things feel a little bit cleared up in the present moment. i'll preface by saying that i haven't come to discuss codesketch ideas today. apologies again, but i kinda need to rant and although i would usually do that in my physical pen-and-paper journal, i'm not in the mood to get up and use my hand muscles.
today was joe robinette biden junior's inauguration. i also went into the dalton building today. today and yesterday, i've gone to school and went to classes for the first time since march. wow. march 2020. or was it february? i'm not going to say it felt like forever ago, because it feels like the 10 months ago that it is, but i'm just thinking about how corona was back then. i vividly remember making a vocabulary chart for English that included sentences about corona and the flu. i was convinced the flu was much more of a concern at that time. i went up and down the dalton staircases, hugging friends and all that jazz. i vividly remember my excitement about traveling to italy growing at an exponential rate. before spring break, everyone was talking about DGI. i had even made a list for what to pack. it would've been my first time at a sleepaway... if a school trip counts. the longest i've ever been from my parents is, like, 3 days. after the italy trip, our grade (8) would've gone to d.c., over the summer i would've maybe gone to a sleepaway camp... and now i'm 14. yeah, i turned 14 almost exactly a month ago. 12/21. it's a palindrome, so you can remember and slip it into a convo with me and make my day someday. just kidding, don't. that may or may not creep out future me. i'd internally question why you're reading this (if you're not ms. josephs [the best comp sci teacher ever by the way {who even has access to this anyway ((all these brackets are giving me dream-in-a-dream inception vibes))}], that is). but alas, i digress.
what was i even talking about before? oh. yes. coming into school. everyone was noticeably tall. i spent most of my break time in the balcony. the inauguration was projected on the large screen in the theater. no one stood for the national anthem. we missed lunch and chatted in the dim. it was fun.
oh my god, i've reached five entries. this is an ACCOMPLISHMENT, guys. it's been a while since i've gotten this far in a journal before. i think i'm partly... or majorly--scratch "partly"--majorly indebted to ms. josephs. honestly, self-willing yourself to write can only take you so far unless you're in a dire situation like anne frank. what i've worked on this week in terms of comp sci is... not much. but i have worked on creating my initials symbol (it's like a combination of H, K, and L in one letter, hopefully you can meet it at some point) digitally so that i can use it everywhere on this website. i also want to do the thing where i have a header at the top of each page where people can be directed back to the homepage or to the other pages. it's just more convenient, ya know? in the long term, i think it'd be super super cool if i could use adobe sketch or adobe illustrator (that's what i'm planning to use to make my initials symbol) to draw images so that when you hover over certain words in this journal, the images appear. that'd be SO cool. i also want to style this a little more, because it IS pretty, but i feel like i'm in the place where i can make it even prettier. what if i made it so that it looked like a book and then you can click on the right side to flip the pages and then with the hover images it'll be like a digital picture book--question is, do i have the time and ability to do that?
ayyyyy, i got the initials symbol on my homepage! it should be on the top right. i think instead of making a header for all the sub(?)pages, i can just insert this symbol and then when i click it, it'll take me back to the homepage.
YAY I DID IT!!