Monday, January 18, 2010

Sites You Need to Sign Up At

I love these sites. They all have some kind of use. Try them out.

Quizlet - Online flash cards. This site helps you memorize things so quickly. I use it to study for vocabulary sometimes. And it doesn't look yucky either. I hate it when sites have a great idea and use and stuff, but it looks tacky. But this one even has nice animation! Yay! Try out the little sample on the homepage.

Playlist.com - Just compile all your favorite songs here. Each playlist can hold up to 200 songs, I think. I usually have 2. One for all the songs I like, and then one for just replaying a small group so I can just listen to what I feel like listening to at the moment. It's also great because you can use the search bar while listening to music at the same time. So it doesn't stop the music everytime you search up an artist or song.

Remember the Milk - This is an online to-do list. laurapoet introduced me to this one. I just signed up a few days ago. It's easy to use, and has an awesome name. I usually just rattle off everything in the little blank-where-you-type-tasks and press enter after each task. Then all I have to do is just click it off my favorites and then check off what I've done. You can even share to-do lists, if you like.

Flickr - This is a site with photos. Like DeviantArt except with only photography. Like photobucket but without all the tiny icons and animations. And much better photos than the kind you'll find on Google images. I mainly use this for favorite-ing amazing photos. Really, just type in a word and out comes all these gorgeous and cool and amazing and snazzy photos.

Blogger.com - Get a blog! It's really fun to just talk about anything you want, particularly yourself. And the great thing is, no one has to listen if they don't want to! So you don't even have to feel bad for talking too much. And you can add little things to the sidebar!

DeviantArt - A website full of art. And all kinds too. Traditional, digital, jewelry, ceramics, film, literature, flash, and a lot lot more. My personal favorite is the emoticons. Not just :)'s or :('s here. Nope. There's giant 100x100 emoticons, very long emoticons, static emoticons, treecutting emoticons, pirate-ninja emoticons, swinging around the world emoticons, and there's just so many of them! I love them so much that I'll even provide a link to the emoticon section, since it's kinda hard to find.

FutureMe - Send an e-mail to your future self. Maybe in 2020 or something. If you sign up, you can change the e-mail it'll be sent to in case you change e-mails. All the future-emails you send will also be compiled in a little list. The list only shows the title of the e-mail you send though, so you can't cheat and look at your e-mail before you get it. It's fun! I sent one to myself, which is supposed to arrive in 2016, when I'll be in college!

Geni - Well, I just found this. It sounds interesting. Basically, it's an online family tree that you can make. You just add relatives, and you can make profiles and send stuff.

Now just 2 other sites.

1000AwesomeThings - 1000 random, awesome things like "stomping dry crunchy leaves on the sidewalk", "when the hiccups stop", and "typing in your username and password at the speed of light". Not completely up to 1000 yet, but still cool. :D

BookArmy - I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds cool! It says, "Never read a bad book again". Anyway, I'll try it later. You should try too.

And I'm listening to, "Where Do I Go?" by Marie Digby.

That's it!

Friday, January 15, 2010

Happy New Year!

I'm alive. High school is busy, as usual. Happy 2010!
I have no new year's resolutions, so I'll make some right now.


1. Get all A's.

2. Sleep earlier.

3. Stay in contact with everyone.

There we go. Ok, so I was thinking. When I was 8 years old, I thought I was going to be a normal person. Go to a good school, another good school, and then another good school. And then I would get a part time job at a cafe and serve coffee to people. I always thought that was an awesome job. It looks fun. The only problem is that I can't handle situations with people, but I figured that I would know how to by the time I got the job. And then I would do everything else as a hobby. My plan kind of stops after college, simply because I didn't really know what would happen after that.

So now I'm thinking, if my 8 year old self could see me right now, would she be happy or surprised or confused? I keep changing my answer, but at the moment, I think I would be kind of bored. Everything is pretty much the same. I'd be happy to know that I survived middle school. I think I'm stranger than before too. And then I would be annoyed because nothing amazingly interesting happened between then and now. Nothing like, I learned how to play the clarinet, or I actually learned Spanish and Chinese and could speak it fluently! I hope that in 10 years I'll know how to speak both easily. Or almost as easily as with English. Although I'm horrible at explaining things in English, so that might be a problem.

Also. I've been staying up until 2:00am almost every night doing homework and sometimes even working ahead a tiny bit. Or finishing some art that I had been procrastinating on before. And I tell myself that I'm preparing for the future, so I can get into a good college and then a good job and all that. But then when I do get a good job, I'll keep preparing for the future. So I'm afraid that I'll always be preparing for the future, and never being in the future.

And everyone is preparing for some kind of future. We save our money so that we can use it when we need it later. As a kid, I ordered cafeteria food. I always left all the best stuff for last, but just when I started to get to the good stuff, we had to go, and I had to throw away all my wonderful food. I kept doing that, just because I'm stubborn with those little things that can so easily be done another way.

Anyway, the point is, the future never comes, right? It's like how everyone thinks about the past even though its all over. And then everyone thinks about the future even though it never comes. And it feels like we never think about the present sometimes, because it's over in an instant before it goes into the past. But if you pile up all the times you think about now right now, do you think it would be greater than the piles of future-and-past-thinking? I rarely think during the moment. It's always a little afterwards that I remember it.

I frequently think, "Record this moment." because I feel like I need to stop and absorb everything sometimes. Because this time, you can tell yourself, I know my mom's presence is over there, and my friend's presence is over there, and I'm sitting here, in my room right now, and it's cold. And then maybe if I want to recall something later, I'll remember it better. It works though. I remember a bunch of random times when almost nothing is happening because everything is normal.

Of course, you have to close your eyes when you do this. Because it's too easy to just think, "Record this moment." all the time and then forget it all later. At least with closing your eyes, there's some kind of risk involved. People could look at you funny, for one. Same with wishing. When you wish on something, usually, you don't have forever to do that. So by closing your eyes, it's almost like a little bargain. If you open your eyes too soon, the rest of the wishing time is gone. If you open them too late, then the whole wish doesn't count because you were being too greedy. Or something.

I've forgotten the whole point of this post. Oh well. When you start going off on tangents(I learned that word from my English teacher, because we often go off on these during class.), a lot of times you forget what you wanted to say originally.

Oh, and one more thing. Thinking. I think thinking is when you talk to yourself in your head. When you think actual words. Usually I do that when in doubt. But sometimes when you're undecided, your head is completely quiet. And most of the time, I guess we just do everything silently because it's instinct or routine or something. So if I just gave you an excerpt of my thoughts, it would be like:

Agenda.
Uhh.
Math-no-two hours.

in a span of 2 hours. It's weird how when you sing along to stuff, you don't think the lyrics in your head while the song is playing. It just comes up out of nowhere, all the words in succession. Same with reading and emotions and stuff. And talking to people. So not much word-thinking, I guess. A lot of times I wish I could just print out a script of my thoughts so I can see them all clearly. It's like when you draw things from life, but it's harder because only one point is in focus, but when you draw other parts, you focus on that part. And then since we have 2 eyes, lot's of times a line or shape changes if you close one eye. So taking a photo and drawing that is way easier cause you can't change it by looking at it.

Alright. I'm done.

And I am listening to The Saltwater Room by Owl City. I like that song right now.