> Mount Sims - Wild Light
> Hooverphonic - 2 Wicky
> Felix Da Housecat - Ready To Wear
> Tricky - Brand New You’re Retro

I know I’ve been quite silent this week, but it’s not just my job. Thursday I got my new iPod with video. I can’t put into words how incredible it is. I have been watching music videos (and a movie, today!) on it nonstop. When the batteries run out and I have to recharge it, I’m scouring the Internet for more content or transcoding one of my DVDs into an iPod compatible video file. It is just so incredible. It’s like your own tiny high-resolution television that you can take anywhere you want. Wherever you are, you can watch movies and have all of your music. It’s a wonderful feeling. I just know that I’m going to have to get the 60GB model eventually. I have about 10GB space left on this one (I have the 30GB model), and it’s going to take a long time before I have enough music to fill the entire thing, but it will happen. I just needed the extra storage capacity in order to be able to put a bunch of new music on it that I might not like, and then be able to listen to it on the go and decide which songs I like. I couldn’t do that with the nano. It only had space for a certain number of songs, and I couldn’t do something like put three or four new CDs on it without taking an equivalent amount of music off of it. My new iPod can hold 7,500 songs, and I only have around 2,500 on it and around 70 music videos, so needless to say this will last me a while. Did I say I was an absolute ecstasy? I LOVE TECHNOLOGY.

You do not know how many hours I spent in my room dancing around watching music videos and (especially) iPod commercials on my iPod. LOVE!!!! EEK! Okay, must stop. Must talk about the cons. They say that you can get up to two hours of video playback. I haven’t sat down and measured how long it lasts, but tonight I did watch a movie on it that was an hour and 30 minutes, and then a few music videos. Well now that I think about it, it does last two hours. And I thought it was just Apple propaganda. Coolness. My pod is on top of my computer tower recharging right now. I absolutely love watching videos on the thing, but I have a feeling that’s going to be my undoing. On my old iPod nano, I got a maximum of 14 hours of battery life. And that was cool. I’d charge it up every day and a half or so, depending on how heavily I was using it. And if I was only using it for music on the way to and back from work, I could go days without charging it. But the thing is with this new iPod, if I watch two hours of video I drain the battery and have to charge it up again. So instead of charging my battery once every two days, I could possibly charge it three times a day or so, which would kill the battery four or five times quicker than the battery on my Nano. But that’s okay, I will sell it before the one-year warranty expires.

Anyway, I had a really interesting experience last night. After I got home from the plant on Friday I turned Skype (the incredibly cool Internet telephone program) to a mode I’d never tried before he called “Skype me.” It allows random people to look at your profile and then call you if they want. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that it was three o’clock in the morning and that the only people awake were in China. 10 minutes after I activated it, this really cool guy called Wangfei messaged me. We started chatting, and then we decided to go on to voice chat. We talked until five o’clock in the morning. It was so amazing. I’m never going to think the same way about China again. It’s so amazing… we go through our lives never thinking that there are billions of people living on the other side of the planet awake while we’re asleep. It was such a mind blowing experience. It was so incredible to picture our conversation running literally around the entire planet at light speed. He told me this beautiful thing about his childhood…we compared notes on what our governments were doing, we dispelled myths about each other’s culture…it was amazing. I just can’t get him out of my brain. It’s so strange how these little things like a random conversation at 3 a.m. can completely change our way of thinking about things. I can’t wait to talk to him again.

In other news, I had the most amusing experience I’ve had in a while yesterday, and I was so afraid I would forget it I kept thinking about it all day long and how exactly I would phrase it. Okay, the scene:

I had just gotten off of work on Friday (my morning job) and I was driving home, pondering my friends in this town and wondering if I was going to be able to hang out with Kevin this weekend. I was interrupted in my thoughts by noticing that I was pulling up to a car that looked eerily familiar. It was Misty’s car! She was stopped at the same stoplight that I was stopped at (the Washington intersection). I was in a very good mood that day, so I rolled down my window and yelled “Hey! Misty!” to get her attention. She didn’t even look at me, although her passenger-side window was down at least 2 in. In fact, she stared straight forward for the entire two minutes or so that the light was red. True, I hadn’t turned down my music (come on, you gotta give your love to the Pod), and I didn’t yell very loudly, but still. My suspicions were aroused that she had read my incredibly scathing post about her. I was going to yell a bit louder, but I felt very two-faced trying to smile at her when in fact I didn’t like her at all, I was just lonely again which seems to be the only reason I would ever hang out with her in the first place. And I felt like a terrible person. And then I noticed it.

You know how all there are just certain moments in which you realize that you are terribly cliché, but you love yourself anyway? Well this was one of those moments. In the split-second that her light changed (she was in the turning lane, I was in the non-turning lane), I noticed it. She had attempted to dye her hair blond. Attempt is the key phrase here. It was somewhere between cloudy urine and Crayola yellow. And before I could stop myself, that thought zapped through me: ” I’m so glad I’m not friends with her, her hair looks terrible!”

The light changed, she drove off, and I bursted into giggles. I felt like such a fag, but I still couldn’t help but snicker about it whenever I would think about it all through the rest of the day. So that was my big fagtastic moment of the week. Moving along….

I ended up talking with Wangfei until around 5:30 a.m., and then I slept until the 5 p.m. the next day. So basically my schedule is totally screwed for the next week. But that’s okay. I can blame my new job. I think I get paid next week. I wonder what I’m going to buy with all this money. I think I need a new hard drive… I’ve been copying these 8GB DVDs onto my hard drive and I don’t want to delete them once I’ve watched them. But I feel like spending $140 on another hard drive is a waste of money. Then again, I have had to delete stuff and make use of every last megabyte on my older computers because I never had any money to buy more drives, and now that I am an “adult,” I don’t want to have to compromise. By the end of the year I want to have a terabyte of storage. I love the way that word rolls off the tongue. Terabyte. Mmm…8,796,093,022,208 bits. What can you store with eight trillion ones and zeros? Gosh…thinking about it…It’s almost…arousing. And by my forties I can hope for a petabyte of storage capacity. That’s nine quadrillion bits, in round numbers. Wow. I’m salivating that the thought.

Anyway, I went to my last math class on Thursday. I ended up talking to my teacher a little bit. He was sort of disappointed that I never asked him a single question. I didn’t tell him that I was more surprised than he was. I never thought I would be able to do math. Hm. After this apocalyptic work schedule is over (next week), I’m going up there to take the placement test again. If all goes well, I will be able to take the next higher up class for credit. It’s going to take a long time to finish though. I wonder if my dad going to kick me out before I actually finish. Well, I guess I can’t really feel dread about that situation, because as soon as the ultimatum is given I’m going to be throwing everything in my car and driving straight to Sacramento! *eek!* I can even think about such a situation without getting all giddy and excited. I wonder if the course catalog that I have is also for the next semester. If this information is correct, next quarter I take algebra one, the quarter after that is algebra two, and then the first transfer level class is college algebra. So that’s a semester and a half. This seems too easy. I need to go down to college of the redwoods and his talk to one of the counselors about what these classes equate to in California before I put all my eggs in the Brookings basket.

Once again I have stayed up too late. But I hope to get to sleep sometime soon. Staying up until 4 a.m. isn’t be as bad as staying up until 5 a.m. Sort of. (don’t intrude on my doublethink!)

PS: I just want to say that I have discovered this wonderful band called Hooverphonic. I love this one song by them called”2Wicky.” I was going to post the lyrics, but they sound retarded unless they’re sung by her.

PPS: Dang, just finished editing this post and it’s almost 5 a.m. Wonderful.