CHHHHHAnnukkah has been pretty good so far, getting stuff and all that Jewish gobbletyguk. I got a pretty nice sweater, so that was good. Also it got really cold here for about a week for some reason.

Still havin trouble finding time to talk with all you jerks, but hopefully after the holidays are over and I've turned in all of my applications and culminating projects and whatnot, I will start to be more talkative. The last journal was long and unsightly and was starting to smell, anyways.

To all of my buddies: Sorry I haven't been talking to all of you over Skype, MSN, AIM, whatever. My life has been pretty busy at the moment, what with worrying about getting my college applications in on time and sports and school and whatnot. I'll start talking whenever I get a chance.

I turned 18 last Saturday. Whoopie. Coincidentally, the day of my birthday was the day of my last cross country meet of the season, in which I beat my previous best time for the course and finished in the top 1/3rd. Also I've progressed a lot with my art lately, which no one will be able to see until I upload something for once. Aside from those two(three?) things, nothing else has really happened around here.

Oh, wait, my Visual Communications class. Yeah, it blows. For those not in the know, Visual Comm. involves using computers to design things like logos or modeling things in 3d and many other art related things, using programs like 3dMax, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. For one thing, I find the guy that teaches the class to be very grating due to him always smacking his lips incessantly because he has braces, and making terrible joke after joke, most of which are about the swine flu. He also, for some reason, is irritated that people in the class are clarifying things with him, things that he may have mentioned once or twice.

But what I find most irritating and stupid about the class is how it is run. Most days, the teacher will start up the class with some sort of tutorial for a tool that we will eventually use for an assignment. Then he assigns us two or three assignments out of a book and maybe one "creative" assignment, usually utilizing the skill we learned that day. The assignments are, for the most part, very easy. That's not the problem. The problem I have with the class is that there is either little to no creative challenge to the assignment, like following directions out of a book, which requires absolutely no thinking or creativity and is very boring, or the way the assignment is described is way too broad and it becomes frustrating thinking of exactly what the instructor actually wants to see. For example, one day he assigns us something like "make an abstract piece using lines and gradients." Then he shows us some ugly, boring piece of shit done a couple of years ago.

The thing is, I have no idea of what exactly he defines as abstract and I am quite certain that he as no idea what the word means. I'm sure he thinks it just means "lots of lines going everywhere and eye-singeing gradients all over the place." He pretty much just tells us what to do and goes off to do something else for the period, occasionally coming around and saying "Good job." So far, we have never been given the chance to design our own logos, or draw something and vector it in Illustrator, or anything that has a good balance of freedom and direction, something that allows us to be creative and still have an idea of what we are going to do. At least give us a simple concept and allow us to put our own spin on it without leaving us completely in the dark. Not only is the class boring and inane, but the way he assigns us things to do makes the projects pile up very quickly, leaving me no time to complete them well, making many of them look like crap. Worst of all, I have the sinking feeling that I will leave this class having learned nothing about design or digital art and will forget everything I learned simply because the way the instructor taught it made everything seem like just another assignment to do and not something we can actually apply artistic skill to.

Oh, and he has an entire wall covered in past projects which, I guess, he considers good, but most of them seem to be lazily photoshopped Myspace-esqe photos or shitty anime vectors. I guess that means that means I shouldn't worry about him not accepting my projects because they don't have enough gradients haphazardly slapped on or some shit, because it looks like he'll accept anything I give him. It's just another grade to him. In that case, fuck you Mr. _______, you slimy, drooling, creepy, incompetent loser piece of dog shit.

For the record, I'm not just going to bitch about the class and do nothing about it, I plan to have a serious talk with my "instructor" about treating the class like some kind of shit factory, churning out generic project after generic project like he has some quota to fill. Also, I have nothing against vectoring, it's just that he is teaching us only how to fill in spaces and nothing about shading or anything to make our projects look anything but flat and lifeless. He constantly says that this class is not a throwaway class just to get an elective credit, but it's starting to seem more like one each day.




*name omitted because I'm sure he Google's his name

GODDANG WHY IS IT SO HOT

Well to be fair it's also really humid and yeah so
Germany is pretty neat, I just got back from Dresden where I got HELLA FUKKIN PISSED BRAH(i only had two beers). I went canyoning last weekend with the host-family and then immediately went on another drive to fucking Dresden and I'm so tired I can hardly stand it. I'm sad that I don't have MSN or anything on my phone so I can't talk to you fools

BRO SORRY I COULDNT BE IN WASHINGTON BUT IM DOING GERMAN STUFF aight peace

Anyone that spends an undefined amount of time with me knows that I like to run. I like to run for many different reasons, mainly because it's good exercise, it improves endurance, and if you run with friends or teammates, it can be a good bonding experience. However, most of the time I run alone, which brings up another reason why I like to run: it allows me to think. I feel like I use a little bit of my brain to move forward and occasionally say "hi" to neighbors while putting everything else in a little mental isolation chamber. My thoughts are racing (no pun intended) and I find myself having inner-discussions with myself about whatever is on my mind. However, if you came up to me in the street and asked me what I was thinking about, my words would be inarticulate and slurred and separated by gasping, like any normal person would.

If I think that whatever I was thinking about was, I don't know, "profound" in any way (that's probably a terrible word for it), I try to remember it until I get home. The problem is that once I stop running and my heart rate slows down, those ideas start to get pushed to the back of my head to be replaced by whatever I get distracted by, and on the off chance that I do sit down to write about them, I can't find the right words to express them and I think whatever I do type looks stupid and is quickly deleted. I guess the problem here is expression, but that seems like too easy an answer to me. Maybe I should write whatever ideas I have down in a notebook after I'm done jogging so I can go back to them later. Maybe I'm thinking too much into this and I've just described every single person in the world. Maybe those ideas aren't really worth remembering. Maybe I'm full of it. I don't know. Too many maybe's.

Just a little side note: I'll be going to Germany on July 2nd and I'll be there for three weeks. I may or may not be bringing my laptop so I may or may not be very active, not that I am very active right now because of school and plain ol' distractions in everyday life, but don't be surprised if I don't appear for three weeks.

Another side note: Believe it or not, I am drawing things. Only I draw mostly at school, possibly because there are actually less distractions at school than at home or that I'm in a different state of mind at school. So that means it's all on lined paper and it's all smudgy and messy and I don't have a tablet or anything so I can't draw on the computer. I'll upload whatever I can so it looks like I'm doing something, but for now the pickins' are purty slim.

Guess what, my droogs? I went to Emerald City Comicon this weekend! It was pretty rad. I got a bunch of assorted comic books, a graphic novel (Scott Pilgrim to be precise), and an autograph from Rob Liefeld. Well, technically it was two autographs because all I had on me was a crumpled piece of paper and he couldn't find anything else to sign, but then someone offered some nice paper and then he signed that too. Oh, and Angus Oblong asked to buy my pants for $20 because he forgot his pajamas or something and Dirk Strangely said he'd chip in $10. I turned 'em down (didn't think to bring any extra pants). I started to feel really crappy around 4 pm so I went home. Despite the chest cold relapsing, I had a great time.

Also, I've noticed that more and more of the people I watch are starting to broadcast on ustream. Nothing wrong with that, just sayin'.

Oh, and spring break yay and whatever