It was the Best of Times, it was the Worst of Times...

I had a bad day sandwiched by two really good days, so I guess it got a little outweighed, don't you think? Yes, I am actually going to write about a few days in my life now, rather than just my thoughts on life. Enjoy, as this doesn't happen often. You know why? Because it takes forever to write everything down. So, since I'm supposed to be sleepy and going to bed and nice things like that, I'll try and condense it as much as possible...

WEDNESDAY: I woke up, fell out of bed, and dragged a comb across my head....okay, no. Paul McCartney did THAT. I woke up, stumbled out of bed, hit the alarm, and stumbled back into bed. I do that so often now that I don't even notice. I do it in my sleep. I don't even remember doing it. I just know I did because my alarm was set for six and I woke up at nine. Not that it bothered me. I ate my breakfast, forgot to drink coffee again, and probably...I don't remember what I did next. I think my mom took the boys to get hair cuts, and I sorted laundry or something. When they got back, we all ate lunch (about two hours after breakfast for me...but that's not as strange as last Saturday when I woke up at 11:30, ate cereal, and immediately after ate cream of broccoli soup). Then we drove to the Y's to pick Hannah and Noah up for swim/water polo. After everyone went inside, I drove to my friend's house thinking I was just picking up him for water polo, but then I ended up taking his brother and sister as well. And we kind of left about 15 minutes later than we meant to, so nobody got to swim beforehand. Water polo went well...Lizzie and I were on the same team, and Alex S. and Kara were on another... :( Someday we'll all be on the same team again.

Okay, now here's the good part (I mean, it seemed good). One of my friends wanted to go to the NC State water polo clinic/scrimmage thing that night at TAC. Nathan and Matt couldn't go because they had obligations to be all "Radical"-ish and stuff, Noah had some other Bible study/prayer meeting HIS parents were doing, and I had Sociology (*sighs out of utter and complete boredom*). I asked my parents if I could just go for the first 45 minutes of Sociology in order to get my name on the roll and have some class time, and then leave for water polo, but they said I couldn't (that made me mad). But...it was all going to be okay!! I went to class, and there was a note on the door...there was not going to be any class that night!!!!!! I was very excited. It was if I was just destined to go to the water polo thing.

So, I went, and for a while my friend and I just stood around wondering if anyone else was going to get there. I knew that it usually takes a little while for the whole gang to get over there and to start doing anything, but it was 15 minutes later than the starting time, nothing was set up and nobody was there. Finally, I mustered up the nerve (having my friend along helped) to ask some tall guy standing around wearing a red warm-up suit and carrying a red backpack if he was there for the water polo thing, and if he was confused too. He said he was there for water polo, but that he wasn't confused, only disappointed. But, to our luck, four more people actually showed up!! We didn't get to scrimmage...we only worked on shots and some offense/defense stuff, but my friend got a lot of one-on-one advice from that guy that's there who always gives you water polo tips. I think his name is Bobby or something like that. After water polo, I drove my friend home, went home myself, and may have gone to bed some time, but I don't remember. But when I woke up it was...

THURSDAY: I woke up at 7:30, one hour before I was supposed to leave to get a hair cut. I didn't want to take a shower, because I knew that I would get my hair shampooed at the salon, but because I had been swimming a lot, I had not had an official shower since Tuesday morning, so I thought it was a good idea if I just took one anyways. So I did. Then I drove to the hair salon-place, and from there on it was down hill. I asked her to re-give me layers, long bangs, and to cut my dead ends off while still retaining most of the length on my hair. Now, normally this particular hairstylist is the only person I trust with my hair, because she has curly hair too. But either she was having an off-day or my off-day just cursed me with other people behaving off-ish, but now I have not-as-long-as-I-meant bangs, I really needed one extra, shorter layer in my hair, and I don't think it's any bit longer than it was last December when I got it cut. I mean, I understand that I had a lot of very long, ugly dead ends, probably two inches of them. So if, in the course of a little under a year, my hair grew 2 1/2 inches, then she cut the 2 inches of dead ends off, I am left with only a half inch of actual growth on my hair. And if it grows another fourth of an inch by December (if I'm lucky), then all my hair would have grown this year is 3/4 of an inch!! I know that seems a little petty, but I really like long hair, and I really, REALLY regret cutting it chin-length in 2006. before then it was down to the small of my back, and I didn't even appreciate it. ANYWAYS, I was a little frustrated over that.

But now I can't remember what my darned problem was, but I was an emotional mess all the rest of that day. I won't go into the dirty, gritty details, but it seemed like everything bothered me. All I wanted to do was either yell and scream, or go play something very angry-sounding on the piano in the hardest, fastest way I could play whatever it happened to be. Although now I do recall putting on my Braveheart CD and attempting to be serene for a moment. But then I felt the inspiration to play Camille Saint-Sans' Cello Concerto (I think that's what it's called, but I don't know...) on the piano, which has a lot more notes in it than I noticed, and I had happened to put that on a CD with the Scheherazade (spelling suggestions, anyone? I think it's right, but what doth I knoweth?) on it, which I had been picking out on the piano for a while, but when I put that on and tried to play along with it, I realized I had been playing it flat, all this time! And while I normally wouldn't care, it just made me more mad. So I gave up on trying to play the piano, because after a while I just couldn't play it hard enough. Then, I knew what I wanted...I wanted to swim, and swim as hard as I could, forever! But then I thought that I should probably get the dishes and laundry done. This was in the evening, and my parents had gone out on a date, and I needed to get stuff done. But by the time I did, and got my stuff ready for swimming, I checked the clock...it was 7:53, and TAC was going to close at nine. Of course, that threw me into a fit of rage, because there wasn't anything else I could do with my pent-up energy. I was basically miserable the rest of the night. I just went to bed after a while...

FRIDAY: Um...I woke up at nine again. Maybe nine is my magic number. Anyways, I ate breakfast, took a shower, and tried to take Kara's advice on straightening my hair by blow-drying it straight first and then using the straightener, perhaps using some gel to help along the way. Note to self - never take hair care advice from Kara. She was just born with perfect hair that looks good no matter what she does with it, and if she does nothing, it looks even better. It looks the best of all when she takes a shower at night and goes to bed with wet hair, because she wakes up and it's straighter than her normal princess-like wave. I am NOT lying or exaggerating, ask anyone (the Mattrix [her brother], Lizzie, or Sarah [mutual friends], for example). And of course, like anyone, she assumes that everyone's hair is just like hers. But my hair is the kind of hair that most humans have, and it has tighter curls and more frizz. In all my 18 years I still have no idea what to do with it, probably because I've never met someone with hair just like mine (and for the first 11 years I didn't really care about my hair [and none of you will be seeing pictures of me during that period]). I can brush it only when it's wet, and then I must leave it alone. Even after the hairstylist straightened it, I can't brush it. So I think that it's not the curls that cause the frizz, it's just the texture of my hair. And that's very depressing. I always have wished I had the beautiful black, straight, silky, and shiny hair like Asian people have. I don't think it would look right on me, but I love it. Maybe I'll marry the Japanese sushi-making guy at the sushi bar that I went to and then all my daughters...

Oh, that's right. So I tried to do my hair, and in the end it looked like my hair, only the curls were a little more wavy, and it was significantly more poofy, neither of which I was really going for at all. I was doing all this, because my mom was taking me to a nearby sushi bar for a belated birthday present. I really wasn't eyeing the sushi-making guy, I just thought he was good-looking and tall, and that his sushi was very yummy. I had never had raw fish sushi before, because mom said I can only have it when it's fresh. So I tried it today, and I didn't like it very much, because raw fish tastes just like when you're at the beach, and a wave rolls over you and you get a mouthful of salt water. Yeah. Nothing exceptional in taste, and it's very slimy, but that was the fun part. :D The cooked sushi was delicious, though, and I ate way too much. Fortunately they also had some Miso soup that I could have to balance it out. But just talking about it is making me thirsty...*takes a water break*

Okay. After we got back, my dad called to give us some details about my great-aunt Mot, who was at the rehab center and apparently passed out some how, and was rushed to the hospital, where my dad and my grandma had been for the past little while. I answered the phone next to the couch, and after my mom and I talked to him, I forgot to get back up, and I fell asleep for about 40 minutes. In case you're wondering how that happened, my mom's mom took my brothers up to Creedmoor on Thursday and they are staying through Saturday, and I guess my mom was so caught up in all her cleaning she's finally getting to do that she forgot to wake me up. But I woke up myself anyways, and cleaned my chinchilla cage before a change of plans occurred. My dad needed me to go with him over to my great-aunt's apartment and get my grandma's car, and drive that and my dad's car to the hospital so that my grandma could go home when she needed to. During that trip, my dad tried to convince me to come to the Cary High School Homecoming football game with him, but I declined (nicely, of course). I didn't really want to get all caught up in all that public school mumbo-jumbo going on there, and please--if you are or were public schooled, don't take that the wrong way. I just know I would feel really really extremely out of place at something like that, and even if I knew people there, they probably wouldn't be close friends and would all just hang in their own groups anyways. It would be like going to church at Colonial Baptist, but seven thousand times worse. I really didn't want to go.

So after not going, I was home again and did some more chores before finally setting off to conquer my inner raging demons or whatever (unreleased toxins are more likely). I went to TAC and swam. I knew I needed to just swim mindlessly and think over all my issues of time wasting and what to do about making money and accomplishing goals and other problems I just swallow and forget about but that keep coming up, no matter how much I continually force them down...yeah, I think Thursday was like a "Problem Vomit" day or something. But anyways, I started out in the warm water pool, thinking I would swim mindlessly, but then I kept counting my laps, and by the time I got to 450 (yards, not laps, for all you non-swimmer people), I decided it would be a 500 yard warm-up, and then I would move onto something else. Well, when I stopped, I realized how warm I already was, so I moved to the cold-water pool (okay, it's really just called the "competition pool", but it sure is cold). I meant to swim mindlessly again, but this time I started doing a 200 IM, and while that's slightly mindless, I have to concentrate on actually surviving and things like that. I mean, it's usually pretty effortless, but I think I am still really out of shape. I haven't done any real work out for about two weeks, and then I just swim with masters, and they mostly just do freestyle. I made myself do a 100 butterfly, and it was very hard. This is just wonderful. On average in a Masters practice, I'll do maybe a 100 butterfly all total, and that's on an interval of some sort for 25s or 50s. When you're me, that's pathetic. Butterfly is supposed to be my best and most favorite stroke, and now I'm beginning to favor breast stroke, and that's just not right (again, if you're me). I've hated breast stroke ever since I started swimming on a team, which really was only about 3 years ago, but still...wasn't fun. Recently, though, I've developed the theory that I have been doing the stroke in a non-efficient way, and now that I've changed that, I don't have to put as much effort into it, but I have no idea if it's really faster because I hardly get to practice it or race Kara or anything...

I think my problem is that I really miss the Seahawks and I want to go back very extremely bad. Well, we're just going to have to do something about that...but I don't know when. :(

~Jessica

P.S. I really did mean this to be short, but how can I cover 3 days in a short entry? So if it takes you 3 days to read this, it's understandable. ;)