I'm in a fairly random mood, so I figured blog posting would be a cool thing to do. So that's what I'm doing.

So, today. Not a particularly eventful day. I went to a parade my sister had to march in, which was sort of fun I guess... it was a Fourth of July parade... as far as I know, the whole parade was just policemen, a couple of search dogs and then our marching band. Possibly because as soon as our marching band passed my dad decided it would be a cool idea to try to catch up with them again so he could get videos of my sister twirling... I have a feeling we didn't get much, because by the time we caught up they were at the end of the parade, anyway. It was sort of good though, because a lot of my friends are in marching band, so I saw them for the first time this summer.

Marching band is a crazy thing. At least it is at our school. It's almost cult-ish. It's extremely based on tradition and every weird little thing they do has been done for about a hundred years. Partially because the band director, who nobody really likes, is ancient. Well, not really, but she's been teaching and band directing for a really long time. I know people whose parents had her as a band director. Crazy. Anyway, my best friend came up with this crazy club or something, I actually don't know exactly what it is, but it's a bunch of us that are against marching band. It's called GUAM. Originally you were suppossed to move the G to the end, so it would stand for United Against Marching Geeks, but my best friend got tired of justifying the moving the G to the end part to people, so now I think we've changed it to Geeks United Against Marching. Yep, we do realize we're calling ourselves geeks. We don't care. It's more of a joke now than anything else I think, based on a couple of my fairly good friends are in marching band, and now my sister, and for awhile my best friend, president of GUAM, was going out with this kid that's extremely into the whole marching band thing. But it's still fun to talk about GUAM when they're talking about band camp. They do that, too. They get back from band camp and it's all they can talk about. The stereotypical "One time, at band camp..." stories really do happen. It's annoying. But whatever. All I can say is if my sister does that constantly after she gets back, I'm throwing something at her head. I'll warn her about that risk beforehand. That way maybe she'll at least be prepared. Wear a helmet if she's planning on telling band camp stories. Something like that.

It was good though, I managed to successfully avoid everyone at the parade that I really don't like but that would have stopped and tried to talk to me had they seen me. I'm a horrible person. I was actually kind of hiding behind a signpost thing at the 7-Eleven. It's actually not even a 7-Eleven anymore, it's like a Cash and Carry or something weird... I don't care, I went there a lot when it was a 7-Eleven, so as far as I'm concerned that's what it still is. My best friend used to live really close to where the parade was, so we occasionally walked there from her house and got slushies. We used to walk around her neighborhood a lot, actually... there was the famous incident when we were walking around in the rain and we saw this huge black snake lying across the entire width of the road that we both assumed was something that had come out of the road or fallen off of a car or something until we practically stepped on it, then we saw it move... only to find another smaller snake half a block around the corner... that was creepy. Then there was the time we walked to Dairy Queen in the rain, and it started completely pouring on our way home... now every time it rains we say we should go get ice cream... we actually walked around there a lot in the rain... and there was a fair at a church near her house that we used to walk to every year... fun stuff. But she moved, and she still goes to the same school and everything, but there's nothing interesting in her neighborhood anymore. Or mine... My neighborhood is excessively boring. We have houses, an overpriced nail salon on the corner, a crappy little corner store down the street, my dad's office up the street, which really isn't that exciting, and that's about it.

I smell like a campfire. Probably because I spent a good portion of the night sitting in front of one. I was at my friend's graduation party, and it was cold, and I assumed it wouldn't be cold, seeing as it's July first and it's not suppossed to be cold in July, so I didn't bother to bring a jacket... but the people whose house I was at just got a fire ring in their back yard, so there was a fire, and my sister and I sat in front of it, and for some reason all of the ashes seemed magnetically attracted to me... so now I smell like a campfire. I can't believe I was at her graduation party. I've known this girl literally my whole life. My mom and her mom have been best friends since they were ten, and our families do things together a lot. We go on vacation together almost every year, although not this year for some reason... anyway, different ramble. This girl is about the closest thing to an older sister I can imagine having. She's almost two years older than me, but it's never really seemed like that much. It always seems like I'm right behind her. When she does something, it never seems like very long before I end up doing the same thing. I don't know if that makes sense or not, it's almost one o'clock in the morning, so it probably doesn't. But it feels like, wow, if she's going to college, I'm going to be doing that before I know it. And it's crazy. The fact that I'm not ready for that is another whole different rant. I guess I'll be ready in two years, but I have to start looking at colleges and things this year. I don't really even feel like I'm ready for that. I have no idea where I want to go. I only sort of know what I want to do, and it's nowhere near what my dad wants me to do, so that ought to be an interesting argument... but anyway, it's summer, right? Chill. Think about swimming and boating and skiing and the Fourth of July and vacation and actually consistently getting up on the stupid wakeboard and that nifty writing class I'm doing in eight days, and nothing else.

It's actually really cool. My mom found out through one of her clients at work about this two week long writing workshop in the summer at this university right in the city. It's for high school students, and there are classes for ficion, non fiction and poetry. There was screen writing last year, but I guess they got rid of that. It didn't turn out very well anyway, they did a play at the end... I guess they wrote it, but it seems more like acting than writing. And it wasn't very good. Not to be mean, but it wasn't. Anyway, I did fiction last year, and I'm doing it again this year. The building it's in is actually really nifty. It's called the Cathedral of Learning, and there are all these nationality rooms, actually classrooms decorated to represent each nationality. I think the university actually has classes going on in some of the rooms on occasion. Some of them are really pretty. I swear one of the writing classes got to use one of the nationality rooms last year... we got stuck in a normal classroom. Boring. I want in a pretty room this year. We could say it's necessary that we get in a pretty room because it's more inspiring for writing or something. Maybe I'll get a teacher I actually like this year, and I can convince them to do that... I sort of doubt it, somehow.

I don't know why I'm looking forward to it so much, I actually didn't like it all that much last year. The teachers I got weren't good. One was a writer, but he wrote westerns, and they were all he could talk about. Well, not all... he also talked about his motorcycle. Which was weird, because this guy had to have been in his mid-fifties, and didn't seem like a motorcycle type. At all. Anyway, he was boring, and the other teacher we had was right out of college, so he didn't really seem to know what he was doing. All we really did was get time to write. They didn't even look at our stories unless you asked them to, and they always seemed to be talking to somebody, so they really weren't helpful at all. I keep thinking that it could be really good if I had a good teacher... and I guess it could. So we'll see. It was annoying trying to find people to talk to there, too... I started out talking to one girl, she was really nice at first, but then she got really weird and I sort of quit talking to her... but it seemed like most of the people there I either had nothing in common whatsoever with, or they knew other people there, and I always feel awkward butting into conversations and such with people who are already friends. By the end of it though, I started talking to this girl that I thought I didn't like at first, and she ended up being really nice. I hope she does it again this year, it would be nice to start off with somebody I sort of know. Oddly enough, her name was Amanda. Apparently I do well with people named Amanda. It's my sister's name and my best friend's. That was confusing at when I first met my best friend, because I'd say Amanda and nobody would know which one I was talking about... but eventually I figured out how to get around that. I shorten my sister's name constantly. Mandy, Mand, Mands... stuff like that, and my best friend is pretty much Amanda, or Manda if I get lazy and cut off the A, because I do that a lot.

I'm going to stop now. Not because I'm out of things to say, because I'm still in the sort of mood that I could probably go on awhile longer about nothing in particular, but because this is starting to get really long, and it's almost 1:30, so going to bed would probably be a good plan.