Saan's book turned out to be a hardback instead of paperback and had to be sent back. Maybe she'll see her paperback copy someday. Her movie was sold out, so she didn't get to hang out with Yif. And now she's sulking behind her pc.
It's late, and Saan should be filling in this blog... But Jay, who's always on while she's asleep, apprently got up early and decided that some RPG'ing and talking to the weird Belgian chick was in order. So you get nothing and Saan gets a little bit of good in her bad day. Nyah.
Saan's day, apart from having forgotten to do a few things for class, having something she actually studied for being called off due to technical problems and her book not arriving (but then there's tomorrow!), sucked.
So, today, you'll have to get by with the high point of my brother's day, who studies electronics-ICT. Today, in Rubes' Thingamabob Saan Would Not Understand Even If He Explained It To Her class, the professor, like always, was tlking about bit. One bit, two bit, you know, the one or zero your pc uses to make this message legible. Now, Dutch has a diminutive suffix: '-je' or 'tje'. A bit's pretty small, so the prof tends to use the suffix a lot for this particular word. Often in plural, in which case it sounds particularly like: "And over there," *Points with his nifty laser pointer* "we have three bitches." And so on. For two hours straight. Another reason to believe that articulation is everything. Or that the accents in Antwerps are getting more amusing each day.
The sad part is that Rubes did not discover this until now, with a professor he also had last year, for the same subject.
The blog now has an Official Neopets Account. Honestly. Username's Irreality4Dummies. Objectives for the account: -To get a Pack Rat Avatar (1000 items in safety deposit box) -To have more money than Adam -To get as many avatars as possible -To have one or more honey potion(s) -To get a good set of battledome weapons
Saan didn't pick the pet's name; she adopted him from the pound.
Today, Saan, in a moment of temporary delusion, went to a karate lesson. Yes, come on, give a nice laugh behind that screen of yours. It was her first, and will most likely be her last. Her body is being very unhappy with her right now.
It started out okay. Saan, completely having forgotten that she was going to meet her friends for a tryout lesson for karate, had decided to sleep in sinfully late. At a quarter past ten, Yif got let in by Saan's little sister, who helped Yif get Saan to wake up and get dressed. Breakfast got skipped, the fact that Saan hadn't drunk anything forgotten, along with the little factoid that Saan probably wasn't in shape enough for an hour of warming up. Four oreos burn off awfully quick. During the stretching excercises--after letting Saan try to do a few push-ups (push with the arms, fall on the knees, skip the next push-up, try again), kicks (her calves are currently begging for her to just convince her mother to put on the second duvet, pull the flannel covers over it and forget she ever woke up today), punches (Her bi- and triceps have stayed nice and close to her body for the entire day. Movement is highly overrated) and listen to the kia's of the people who had something else than a white band keeping their gi's closed--Elly kindly requested Saan move to the side of the hall if she felt like fainting. Yif, being naturally more supportive and believing in Saan's abilities, just asked if Saan was feeling alright. Then the sensei picked some poor sod named Kevin (to who Saan offers her deepest apologies for being such a slow learner) to teach Saan, Yif, Elly and Sanne the basics. Saan, who was more concerned about the way her vision was swimming a bit, did not hear and was not able to reproduce the words meant for the stances. The basic stance was fun. Two fists, feet at shoulder width, arms bent at about ninety--no-a-bit-over-actually degrees. So it was not the 'one arm on your hip, the other dangling by your side, pelvis tilted a bit, roll your eyes and ask what the hell he was going on about' stance. Then came the problem of making a fist. Don't put your thumb on the inside of it. Don't let your nails show. Make sure your knuckled are on a nice and even line. Wrist, no matter what Kevin or the sensei asks in line with your bottom arm. Then came 'punching'. Arm, at the uttermost point of your punch, at slightly less than one hundred and eighty degrees, palm down. Reaction arm folded in line (with what wasn't said, which was probably the reason Saan did it wrong only eighty percent of the time) next to you, palm up. Free translation: 'Keep your reaction hand at the point where you can feel your knuckled against your chest, and the arm folded, but straight behind you', or thereabouts. Do not punch to the side. Do not push to Elly's side either. Push to the middle of your own symmetry axis. Different heights for the punches gave similar results, though not for Saan alone (the others screwed up a few times, too). Kicks were pretty much the same. Saan refrained from any power-shouts (though Elly didn't) because she was half-sure it'd come out like 'Pudding'. There's making a name for yourself, and then there's making a name for yourself.
A stance different from the basic (bend knee in front so you can't see your toes, other leg behind you, legs apart at shoulder width) gave the hilarious result that it had the option of a freaky little walk (first fault: Kevin: "Keep your feet to the floor, it'll keep you stable" thirtieth fault: also Kevin: "Every foot I hear stomping on this floor from now on will earn you all five push ups!") and a freakier turn (Kevin: "Right, right...Wrong, wrong."). And that shoulder width is pretty much impossible when your feet are nowhere near enough for your shoulders to set the width. Kevin pushed, Saan and friends faltered and nearly fell. Stability when you're trembling with hungry-hungry-hungry-vibes is something like a man to try and get an erection with only half a pint of blood in his system. After five push-ups, which were not caused by Saan for once, the lesson was over and the non-members could watch the sensei and his students bicker over storing the equipment. Apparently, when you're a member, it should be a "god-damned" honor to clean up cushions that were hit by about a million sweaty feet. When they got to the dressing rooms and Saan had her shoes back on, she stole Elly's (gallon of pure, fresh, tasy, nutricious, wet--)water and drank about a quarter of it. The next ninety minutes got wasted on calling home, eating pizza and having fun with friends. Saan's going to go sleep now. Saan's going to go sleep and never going to crawl back to the karate lesson. Best idea she's had all day.
Saan's having a bit of concentrational issues. Someone turned on the tv, so she's cathing random tidbits of it. Circus pigs get taken excellent care of, so they swear they will be enemies or Rome for the rest of their life and they love Maria! Maria! Maria! on the intro of Comedy Casino. So enjoy the webcomics on www.countyoursheep.com and http://www.countyoursheep.com/.
Saan is happy because: -Tomorrow it's Friday. Yay, Friday! -She received a mail of shipment after cancelling a book order on site a, who refused to send anything, and ordering it from site b. So, unless the mailman eats it, Saan will finally have the book she's been waiting....nearly a year and half for. Yay, book! -She's filling in her blog before the end of the evening news. -She does not have a boring historical novel for Dutch. Nope, she has a hisotrical whodunnit, located near her own home. -She didn't have any screamingly bad grades this week. So Saan's enjoying her happy moment. You should get off the pc and enjoy yours, too!
Saan's computer time got cut short when her pc got cleaned in and Saan was not allowed to go over the wet floor (her slippers have gone AWOL) and she still has some showering and schoolwork to do. So no post.
Music is the soul's way of talking, or so several people say.
If that's true, Saan's soul is one of the more pained ones out there. Or so you'd think when she finds her flute (every Tuesday afternoon, while cleaning up her room) and decides to try a song she hasn't heard in ages. Or tries to play her sister's piano. Her sister's better at the playing part of it. And the actual singing of it, too. The singing's been better since Eve was about... Say, three. Think Scala for toddlers and Scala for kids. Think grandmas who buy top ten records and three naughty little stars on Christmas Eve, and you have a pretty accurate idea about what you could hear squeaking in Saan's house up until a few years back.
Saan's better at listening to it. Preferably at the lower volume settings of her pc, MP3 player or cell phone. Her brother is going half-deaf and has to rattle the neighbourhood at X PM to enjoy some music, or let all passerbies (Trust me, that word doesn't get any better-looking) know which song he's listening to, even with in-ear headphones, which basically gives you five to six decibels more. The only time of year Saan allows for the volume to be turned way up is the annual trip to Germany, with the annual sing-along-cd. Schnappi, Céline Dion, the Pizza Hut, The Cranberries and Strawberry Shortcake echoing through the Eiffel. Saan's mom gets dumped with the youngest cousin and Saan's aunt in a different car to assure at least ninety minutes of sounds, with most songs replayed at least once. You have not been on a family trip after trying to dance the Macarena in a car that's overloaded even without the three loud kids in the back seat. Compiling that cd is about as far as Saan's musical talents go.
Her brother's very musical, if he can program the piece in his pc and let it be played by a bar code reading, lego-robot. Which he actually did once. Baby shampoo with milk can be musical. 34r, 933|<$ //0rLD//1D3. Saan's not the only one not quite right in her family.
Saan, contrary to popular belief, likes fruit (it's just the funny-smelling kinds she doesn't like). It's healthy. It's yummy. You can cover it in chocolate and kill the healthy part. And, seeing it's fruit season, Saan's typing all she knows on fruit. Prepare to be astounded.
The first thing they learn you in kindergarten is that fruit comes from plants. And not to eat the red berries on the bush, or wild chestnuts. Saan's never been a nutty kind of gal and the berries were less interesting than the ladybugs on the bush, so that never was a problem. Strangely enough, this lesson, about fruit, is repeated once more in seventh grade. Apparently, kids tend to forget and start thinking fruit's made in a factory, right along with milk, honey, meat and fish.
This astonishes Saan, but then again, not every kid has a grandfather who for the largest part of Saan's life has had fruit trees, a small plot of land with vegetables and strawberries, bees for honey, rabbits and chickens for eating and, at one point, a white cow. The animals have dwindled down to bees and the odd chicken. The last rabbit got murdered (well, removal of limbs until it bled to death, after it had somehow gotten its eyes pecked out by something, after being sick) by Saan's uncle's dog after it got identified as easy pickings. So Saan's always known how grapes can grow underneath a car port, how funny-growing apple trees make excellent climbing practice and how much yummier freshly picked cherries are from those in the store. Her dog-less uncle, who lives next to Saan's grandfather, has a set of plum-trees, cherry-trees and one apple tree.
Saan's neighbours (or their garden, anyway) has walnut trees and apple trees. These months, the people who rent their house are, as usual, bemoaning the fact that the apples are rotting away in the orchard. Saan, however, loves the fact that her mother is too polite to refuse ten kilos of apples that are mostly good for, well, cooking. Too floury for anything else. All they need is some puff-pastry (though usual pie-dough's much tastier, but puff pastry will do) some sugar and apples.
You preheat the oven (don't know at what temperature. You can always check the website on this one if you enter 'tarte tatin' at google) and take a pie mould. You grease that mould until it's, well, pale yellowish as far as the eye reaches. Then you spread a nice layer of sugar on that. Arrange a few circles of apple parts on that, cover in sugar to taste, put the dough over it and put in your oven until the apples are a golden brown and oozing with caramel. Or before the caramelisation process turns to the burnt stage; it tastes nasty. Get it out of the oven, turn the mould upside-down on a large plate, eat before it cools down. Microwaving it will get you murdered by a bunch of angry Frenchmen. In Saan's experience, it'll turn the apples back to the floury, unappetising, bland flavor, as will eating it cold, or using too much or the wrong kind of dough. Eat it while it's still hot, on a cold autumn night with a dvd spinning away in the player, not worrying about your homework, housework or job.
Or, if it's summer, there's always the trick with the frozen banana, guaranteed to keep kids busy for half an hour. For the dieting readers; with black chocolate, it's worth a point and half in Weight Watcher's Points. You take a banana, peel it, cut it in half, stick a popsicle stick (or spoon, saté-stick, ...) up the flat end and freeze it in for a few hours. When they come out of the freezer, have some hot chocolate sauce ready and cover them in it. For kids: make a large helping and put the bowl in the middle of the table for them to dip in. The world's biggest mess that way, but you won't hear them complaining about heat or being bored. An alternate, fruity breakfast can be small pieces of banana (and probably a few other kinds of fruit), chocolate sprinkles, sugar and yoghurt
Or, for the quick and easy: cut up some fruit and make a fruit salad. Add some yoghurt, sweetened, to taste. (put them in a Tupperware container and take them to work or school for lunch with a picnic spoon, the kind you can throw away; the same amound of dishwashing as a lunch box, healthy, probably a lot less work than dancing the hula to get to the chocolate spread on the top shelf) Strawberry, apple-orange, appel-pear-banana are Saan's personal favorites. The only easier thing is washing an apple and eating it whole.
Saan has recently learned not to put lemons or other acidic substances on aluminium foil, luckily not the hard way. Severals kinds of fruit (example: apple, plum) have HCN in their seeds, a kind of acid that smells nicely of almonds but is quite unhealthy to deadly for your average human being. Cherries can't dry out from lack of water, but burst when there's heavy rainfall due to the high amount of sugar they contain. The only way to dry them out is to put them in a substance with a higher sugar concentration. Leave them there too long and you'll get this murderously sweet, sticky kind of candy.
...a job, probably. Wasting weekends away behind the pc is rather unproductive, and jobs bring in money, with which one can do... fun stuff. Like buy things. Christmas and birthday gifts for friends. Books. Locker-candy. Useless things.
The problem with actually getting a job is: a) finding one: Saan's got the speed and willingness to move of your average garden snail. Something close to home. So far, there's a job at a butcher, but Saan's mom has some doubts concerning Saan and sharp objects at nine AM on a Sunday morning. b) the law: Saan knows vaguely that she can't work more than X days three thirds of the year and as much as she wants in period Y but can't make more than Z in euros, over the space of W months, weeks or one year. c) school: Saan has to have enough time left to do her schoolwork and study for her tests. d) sleep: the later Saan goes to bed, the worse her time asleep and general mood gets. So no night work on Fridays at the uncle's bakery. e) a place to put the money: Saan has no bank account from which she can withdraw money with a credit card. Few people pay out sixteen year olds in cash.
So, so far babysitting has been scratched off the list due to Saan's general impatience with kids, butcher's been vetoed and the bakery has, apart from being fifteen miles away and keeping her up from, say, eight to seven, the downside of being yelled at during that entire time. So she'll probably spend a few days trying to find some info on the subject.
Saan wanted to practice her alternate butterfly, because she had one part of the move down, and mess around a little with her poi in general, but it's been raining funnily all day. The kind of rain that doesn't bother you until you notice your jeans are soaked. So there's not much to do outside today, except go out with friends (There's always a movie... Chances of convincing her friends that the quarter past ten show is a good idea are tiny, though) or stay home and find ways to amuse yourself. Like filling out your blog, watching movies, bugging your family through msn, jigsaws, books, tv, doing very you-things... And sadly enough Saan just feels like going out and, if possible, spin something. Feeling a bit jittery. Wandering around town in the middle of the night sounds like fun, too. So, maybe, just maybe, she'll grab the phone and ask a few people if they feel jittery, too.
Your opinion is target practice for the world around you.
The Declaration of Rights proclaims proudly, somwhere around article 11: "The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law." Then there is the idea that schools which you can finish with a diploma that allows access to a university will not abide illegal actions.
Sadly enough, both of the aforementioned concepts are perfectionistic at best. Most of us come across it every day; you open your mouth, someone else with a bigger mouth doesn't like it and you never hear the end of it from everyone else. The first person's freedom of speech is used against theirselves. Sound familiar, anyone?
Peer pressure pushes people to make nice, even, pretty much identical statistics when polls are taken un-anonymously. Differences in opinion get trated with hostility.
Real-life example: Saan is the only one in class who thinks that in a serious relationship, one or both members may be sexually active with another partner. All of her classmates are against it, but Saan says she doesn't mind and nearly gets lynched in the process. Things like vaginism, differences in sexual drive, handicaps (mental of physical), phobias, bodily differences that nature sometimes brings along (say asexuality and hermaphrodites), complexes, traumas, mutilation with extensive scarring or the inability to... perform as a result, ... don't seem to exist. The idea of Saan's classmates: 'Monogamy is a must, and if you can't have (enough) sex and you're in a relationship, celibacy is the only solution'. Sex and love are not the same and do not always go hand in hand, or so everyone screams all around us. So, in Saan's weird, twisted mind, being sexually active does not match with being in love or making love to someone. Sex is a basic need that needs to be fufilled at some point. The aforementioned proposition never mentions love with the (second) sexual partner, or sex with the first. Saan'd rather her boyfriend goes and pays a visit to a prostitute than he be miserable and, quite selfishly, she'd rather pay for something like that than outright lie to someone she cares about that she doesn't miss anything.
Lying about having another sexual partner is something else entirely. That's cowardice, betrayal, risking things you shouldn't, not caring and being an all-in-all lousy partner in a relationship. Don't even get Saan started on protection and STDs. If you're doing something sexual and your partner doesn't know, fine, it's wrong. If your partner knows, knows why, realises you try to do it so it wouldn't damage your relationship and at least tries to bring on some understanding for you (which in Saan's opinion, a good partner should), why should it be wrong? You're human, you've got needs, handle 'em, talk about 'em, get the fuck over it.
But apparently, not having needs met or letting frustrations build cannot damage a relationship. Sex without ties is sinful and wrong, even if it can stop the feeling that you are a mutant and a criminal for wanting something your most precious person can't give you. Finding somewhat unconventional means to solve problems is bad and unethical. You can use the limbs of corpses, which belonged to someone who had people who loved them, you can use products tested on animals, which died and suffered because of it, you can use for medical purposes cells from embryos that could have grown into a child and a person, perhaps someone who'd have found the cure for a much worse disease than some rich man who suffered several heart attacks due to wrong eating habits and too little excercise, but you cannot have sex with someone you do not give a damn about to make sure it won't make you forget how much you do care about your boy-/girlfriend.
Peculiar values we have in our world these days.
On a much happier note: Saan's battled down her first heaps of homework and (look!) made a longer post than the pas week or so! Also, the Halloween-chibi's (almost, just needs some color--Yif? Please-ly?--and silver roller pen) finished! That, and there's the very small chance that Saan's UNK!Prehistoric cell phone will (finally, after nearly seven years of faithful duty and three generations of Saan's family) be replaced with a slightly more recent model that will hopefully fit in her pocket without bruising half her hip and weighing a pound and half (not overreacting much, here). She's also received a cut version of one of last Saturday's photographs which due to absolute Saan-with-friends-ness shan't be posted here.
Saan's getting tired of making short posts, so to fill your time, please enoy this movie while she tries to stay interested in a dead guy's pathethic love life.
This post is late for a school day, and short too. Partly because Saan spent her afternoon motivating her sister to do her homework (Behold this mind-boggling logic: "27 has only two numbers by which it can be divided: 1, 3, 9 and 27"). Partly because she spent thirty minutes staring at the SP-LJ's update (Tyler with firepoi doing a three-beat wave, 'cause WW asked please-ly). Partly because Saan is thinking about doing something about her empty school diary (Tyler with firepoi, a few chibis, a few photos, a little word-art, maybe some of itcolored by Yif if Saan asks please-ly enough?). And she wants to see how easy gimp is with macramé string (but where did she leave hers?). And then there's the idea of setting her dad's GPS system voice to Japanese while he's not looking, muahahahaha.
Okay, after yesterday's mass data move, Saan's back. The reason why she was still shifting files around late in the evening was that she'd been to the annual fall event at her old/her sis' school. She'd taken her poi to make the wait for her friends shorter (there is a movie of Saan using them. And of Elly getting them tangled. Somewhere. Heck, there's probably two. Go ask one of the Art teachers in her old school for the disk.) and managed to not-smack the grownups in the face, so no one told her to stop it. She'd even won something, but donated it to the younger sister of someone she knew. Colored sand might be pretty, but it's also pretty useless. The milkshakes were nice, though. Then there was the bright idea to allow herself to get painted. Later, she and her friends shocked people in ''T Wit Huis' by showing up with hearts and flowers all over their faces, though the people deep-frying everything thought it was pretty amusing. Forgetting about having their faces painted caused Elly to wonder why the heck her fingers had turned purple (and why her food tasted so make-up-y, too). Later experimenting proved that the paint came off better with Saan's bottle of Lipikar than with ordinary water and soap. By the time they'd stumbled back to Saan's house (momentary holdup at the half past ten ice cream van while wondering if french fries, lemonade and milkshakes went well with ice cream and cherries) Elly remembered she had to be at a bus stop about a mile off. So Saan's mom gave a lift, since Elly was tired. Yif declined politely for one for her because she had a bike parked at Saan's.
Saan has a tiny harddisk of 27 GB. So she hasn't much room for things like movies. Her brother however, has an external harddisk of 300 GB. And he's not home. So Saan's hogging about 5 GB from his disk for a few days. Sad part is: transferring files takes long and makes the pc go slow. So Saan's typing real slow to make sure she doesn't get typos in this thing, since the letters are lagging. Check back tomorrow.
Saan's doing a little happy dance behind her pc at the moment due to no homework except for the Potato Project for the first three days of the week, the upcoming fall festival and a whole Wednesday of No School! So there's time for: -friends (verrry important) -poi (enthusiasm will probably have dampened some after an hour of still not getting the alternate butterfly right) -sleeping late with no three am wakeup call from the hair dryer (*locks herself up in room*) -writing stuff that's not for the blog (So far that one sucks and it won't get any better due to monthly transfer limit approaching and a Favor Owed) -considering going back to her embroidery for a few minutes (She's stuck. Poor her.) -the Potato Project (MS Word Table wrestling, advanced level) -Figuring out what to do about the T-shirt (XXXL. It makes for comfy jammies, though)
