Wow...it's Saturday, and I'm grounded. At least till I clean my room. That likely won't be happening in a little while. I like my room when it's all cluttery and stuff. I mean...it looks boring when the floor isn't covered with homework papers, and CD cases and books...I probably should pick the stuff up, though, since it doesn't do any good to walk all over them. Eh...I'll do it later. I'm a regular procrastinator.
Well, a couple days ago I got my hair cut. And we aren't talking little innocent snip, snip. We're talking chop, chop. Almost a foot...I got eleven inches off. And surprisingly, my hair is still on the long side. I guess that's what happens when you grow your hair to your hips. Oh well. It is soooo much easier to take care of now, you have no idea. My hardest knots now are equal to the easiest ones I had brushing through my insanely long hair. And it feels much nicer, too. Ahhh.
I think I've officially decided to do something in my life related to microbiology. I cannot tell you how much I love that class. It is the greatest. And Mr. Soderberg, my teacher, is the greatest too. We study diseases, stains, etcetera. And we did this really cool epidemic thing where we pretended we were epidemiologists studying an epidemic down in Georgia that broke out in this group of people camping outside and partying all the time. It was sooooooooooooooOOOOOOOO cool! We had to identify how the disease was spread...and that was hard to find because it could have been a) aerosols because they were all close together, and breathing the same air b) contact, because they were "involved" with every single member of the opposite sex in the camp, which made it so they were also exchanging fluids with the members of the same sex, c) something spread from mammals, because there was a dog in the camp, and a squirrel that got killed and was lying around, d) food, because there was a guy who was sick and had said he prepared food for all the campers, and e) mosquitos, because it was summer in Georgia, and they were sleeping outdoors; naturally, there would be a mosquito problem. I guessed it was Malaria...because it was spread through the mosquitos, and the sympoms of the patients were the same as the symptoms of Malaria-- high fever, aching joints and muscles, mental impairment and chills. Anyway...you can see what a nerd I am. I love this stuff. So I decided I'm either going to be a doctor, or an epidemiologist...or something of that sort. That would be the most exciting thing ever! And I don't care if I have to go to school for the rest of eternity if it's studying what I love...
Anyway, I think I'm going to write a book. I'm not planning to be a writer when I grow up, because I hate conforming to all the stupid guidelines set for people to get published. Few authors ever get to break the rules...and I'd want to. Anyway, I'm writing for pleasure, and to say something. Surprisingly, I have something to say, and I think I can only say it by writing a book. I doubt anyone will read it, but I'll express myself enough. I'll get my mom to critique it...heheheh.
Well, I'd better go if I want to get tennis practice in before I'm off to babysit the most energetic kids to have ever walked the earth. I hope they don't work me to the point of exhaustion tonight-- I took a nap even to get enough energy to make it till, oh, nine o'clock when they go to bed. I can count on chasing them all over the house for two or three hours straight....

So...I have a question raised up in my mind I've been pondering for awhile. About right and wrong. About justice.
Murderers and rapists. They are viewed as complete bad guys. They commit unthinkable crimes. They hurt many lives, take them away. They shatter the exitence of innocent people. They give people scars so deep, they sometimes never heal in their entire lifetime. They are evil, aren't they?
Yes.
But is it not true that at some point in time the rapists and murderers were themselves victims? The people who kill...they are lost. They are screwed up, to say it straight. Insane. They've lost it. Why? Because of past abuse. Someone has hurt them. A lot of times, it's childhood related. No, I take that back. Most times, it's childhood related. Sometimes it's the parents fault. Sometimes it's someone else's...a lot of times when it's someone else's, it's someone else who abused them, or took the lives of those they loved. They cut themselves off from emotions in self defense. They have a painful void inside them, and they try to fill it. They don't know how. They are lost. They try to vent their frustrations by committing crimes of violence. They hurt other people, thinking revenge will help fill the void. They are wrong. What would heal them would be to be touched deeply by someone. To love, and be loved back. But what are the odds that that will happen to a murderer or rapist? What are the odds, in their situations, they will find love? They will destroy people. They will start the cycle over again...hurt more people. Kill a child's parents, hurt the child and the child will grow up shattered just as they are.
Can anyone ever understand them? Is there a possibility that someone can reach out to the shattered soul? Is there any hope for them to heal sometime in their life? Or is it just the only answer to lock them up or send them to their death?
That's what I've been pondering. Without a question, what they do is wrong. It's the opposite of what they need, and it keeps the cycle of violence and hurt going. It can keep going...and going...and going...unless we try to stop it. Can it ever be stopped? Who knows? But what if...what if there was someone who had the courage to reach out to someone else and love them and heal them? And also...what if they got killed in the process?! I don't know. I don't think I'll try making friends with mass murderers anytime soon, but...I just think too much.

So...just wondering. How can anyone know for sure that they are not insane? Can't an insane person think they are a teenager living in the United States of America and attending a high school? How do you know that everything you think is real is not just a hallucination? How do you know you aren't some old granny or grandpa screaming her/his head off in insanity in the loony bin? Just a thought. ;-)

Whew! I don't have a D in history anymore. It raised to a C. For now. I'm balancing on thin ice here. I have two A's, five B's, and a C. I'd prefer a lot better. I mean, come on! This is pathetic. Oh...and yesterday something tremendously interesting happened. I can't believe I'm so stupid! I've done a million stupid things...this has got to top 'em all. Even the time when I was nine and I sat in my laundry basket and got stuck at one in the morning during my parents' party, and was stuck their screaming my lungs off when my parents couldn't hear me because of their music for two hours. All right...morningtime. I drive to school, get there about seven ten. Whenever I am driving, I have a tape playing in my car. Because I've heard it so many times, I know what song comes after what song, etcetera. My tape player automatically switches from one side to the other, so...yeah. It was on side B when I left, and when I was driving into the parking lot, it had switched over to the very first song on Side A, and then I turned the car off, grabbed my key, headed out and locked the car securely, especially since I had my cell phone in the glove compartment. So I went to school, and in the middle of my third class, French, I have lunch. Whoppee, lunch. And I needed my cell phone. So I headed out to the parking lot to get my cell phone. I didn't drive the car or anything. Why would I need to? All I did was open up the passenger's side, reach in the glove compartment, grab my phone, and head back in. Yep, that's all I did. I was horrified at the end of school when I realized...oh, crap! I didn't have my key! I ran all around school trying to find it, searched all my belongings from pockets in clothes and backpacks to my entire locker, and I coudn't find it. I remembered that once I left my key by accident in the keyhole to my trunk, and immidiately panicked. I hadn't gone in my trunk, though. Had I left it in the keyhole of my freaking door?! If I had, I imagine anyone could walk up to it at that point and find a nice discovery: a free car! Key...full tank of gas...brand new transmission. What more could one wish for?
I was screwed.
I ran out to the parking lot, remembering where my car was parked. To my horror, it wasn't there anymore! Oh, crap! OH CRAP! I was dead. "Uh, Mommy? Daddy? My car got stolen today, because I'm a freaking idiot, and I left the key sticking out of my door!" Right. "All right, Jess," I said to myself. "Focus. You have your cell phone. You can call the police if you need to. But before that, you need to search the entire parking lot. Wouldn't it be fine and dandy if the police showed up and found your car in the parking lot?" So I did just that. And guess what I stumbled across on the other side of the parking lot? My car! Halelujia! My car, with the key in the ignition, and the front door unlocked. Someone had decided to take my car for a joy ride. Ugh. But they hadn't stolen it! I opened up the door, and turned the car on, observing my surroundings. Ew. My car smelled like cigarette smoke. They had smoked in my car. And my sun blocker, that I had set in my back seat before, was thrown in the trunk now. They had several people in my car. The tape was on song five. And the keychain from my wallet was ripped off. They had gone through my wallet, probably looked at my license and known who the idiots's car was they were driving.Great. They'll get a kick out of this for the rest of their stupid life.
But seriously. I was lucky they hadn't stolen my car. It wasnt' very nice of them to take my car out, and invade my niche. But they had parked it back safe and sound, when many people would just love to take my car, and sell it for whatever it's worth. Get forty seven hundred dollars trade in value, and run. Not too bad of a gift to discover. In the meantime, I need to find some money to purchase a brain. Or I will find myself lying in a ditch in the near future for some reason or another.

Al right. Today is absolutley insane. The rest of the week will be too, as well as next week. Ever heard of CSAPs? If you live in Colorado, you most certainly have, and if you are a student in Colorado, I would bet my piano that you've taken more than one CSAP test. This week, the freshman are taking the test. That shouldn't really effect me, should it? After all, I am a sophomore. But because the freshman are taking the tests in classrooms they usually don't have their classes in, we all got our classrooms moved. So today I had history in a language arts classroom, and French in an art room. And my lunch schedule is thrown off. I get to end it by 11:30 instead of 11:52. Well, that's no fun! Grr. And next week, I get to take the CSAP. I think it's math and something else-- let's hope they don't have a history CSAP. I'd so flunk it. And today...parent-teacher conferences. I am SCREWED, let me tell you. My history teacher is sure to have everything in the world to say bad about me to my mother. "Your daughter flunked both of the tests we've taken thus far (andit doesn't really matter that EVERYONE in my class flunked them because they were AP tests and had no relevance with what we were reading in our history book or what we went over in class) and she has missed two assignments this week. You should probably take her car away so she has no life and has nothing better to do than study freaking history." Believe me, I could find a million things in the world better to do, including stare at a white wall. Oh well...my microbiology teacher will have good stuff to say, and so will my science teacher, and poetry teacher, and math teacher. I'll live....for now. Whew.

So...I feel like a bum today. I am so energy drained I can hardly do anything. It was pathetic at the Y. I could barely do my regular routine...and didn't do anything challenging whatsoever, considering that the easiest stuff was challenging. Maybe I should actually sleep at night. That might help.
I'm also reading this book. It's very interesting. I know I'm a nerd, but I'm reading a book called "Genetic Mapping and the Human Imagination" and it's about how scientific research can never sufficiently portray who we are as human beings or what the purpose to life is. It's very interesting: definitely something I've been thinking about a lot. Not just the purpose of life, but what makes someone who they are, and such. After reading what I've read, I don't think it's genetics that has very much say in who people are. There are so many identical twins I've met with the exact same genes, but are very different. They don't have anything in common as far as personality goes. They have different hobbies, different temperaments, etcetera. And regardless of what everyone says, kids aren't all like their parents. It happens, but not as much as people say it does. People always say that my mother and I are exactly the same, but one day on our long camping trip, my family and I played a game where we would switch places with one person and act like them, and my mother and I switched; let me tell you, we could not act like one another to save our lives. And do we like the same things? Some of the same things, but nothing really significant enough to be able to say I genetically inherited what I like, as well as my temperament.

Okay, not for finishing the dream. So we were staring out the window, waiting for the blood red SUV to come. We knew it would. And it did. I was immediately terrified beyond petrification, but then I made myself get up to go downstairs and warn the people in the main lobby that he was coming. I told everyone in our room to hide in the closests and stay in an area where their presence was inconspicuous, so he wouldn't likely target any of them. Then, I walked downstairs, in my pajamas, to the room where breakfast was served. To my horror, my mother, who didn' t know who he was or what he looked like, had him inside! She was offering him a seat in the little restaurant, and when I came over, she smiled at me, motioned for me to sit with him, and walked away to tend to other customers. Would anyone believe me that he was the mass murderer if I said it out loud? And I couldn't! Likely, he had weapons on him, and he would begin to kill us all if I said anything. Adrenaline began to pulse through my veins as I stared at the man over a foot taller than me with short light brown hair, and brown/green eyes. I almost passed out when I saw his eyebrows raise in interest as he began to eye me. "Hello. What is your name?"
Oh, crap! Should I tell him my name? "Uh, I'm Jenny. What is your name?"
"I'm Michael. It's a pleasure to meet you. Are you having your breakfast now?"
I thought a moment. I couldn't leave. He could follow me to the stairs, where I'd be isolated and alone...a pefect place to rape and kill someone. "Yeah, I'm having breakfast now. I'm pretty hungry."
"Well, come sit with me," he suggested, taking my arm and leading me to an empty table. Then, we started takling. Just a little. I had to pretend I didn't know who he was. He certainly was very talented at flaunting his identity. Thus, I went with it. Soon after, my mom and several of her friends who also worked at the hotel were sitting at our table, and he seemed to just fit in with all of us. He definitely was cute...but under that, he was a vile vicious, cold blooded murderer.
As we ate out eggs and bacon, we continued to talk. I really wanted to leave, but I was pretty sure he wasn't going to kill anyone until he got them alone. I was safe as long as I stayed around a large group of people.
But what about everyone else? What of all the innocent people he could isolate in the many flights of stairs we had at the hotel? Or just in their room, or the elevator? There were so many places! The bathroom even. Ahhh!
He took my hand then. Just to hold it. It took everything I had in me not to tremble in terror. Then, I decided I had to look into his eyes, see what I could see. So Idid. And I didn't see blind hate. I didn't see pure evil, and anger even. What I saw scared me even more. He was in pain, had been troubled. I could see he had gone through a lot. I could see that he had hurt so much, he just wasn't in touch with reality anymore. And that alone was more dangerous than hate any day.
We talked for awhile with him holding my hand, and then he excused himself to go to the restroom. I seized the opportunity, horrified that he might be killing someone right then, but I had to tell the people that were in the same room as me.
"Mommy! He's the one. Please, you have to believe me. He's gonna kill someone!"
She believed me. "Oh gosh, I don't know what to do! Jessica...did you see the way he was looking at you? You're his prey. Get out of here! Go somewhere safe!"
So I decided to leave. I would go up the elevator. And hide in my room. But I couldn't go alone. I looked around for my friend, Kim, who was there. "Kim! Kim! Come with me. We need to get out of here!" So she came with me. We went up the elevator to my room. But then he came up to my room, and knocked on the door. I desperately climbed out the window with Kim, and we ran away from the hotel toward the condo, and that was hard work, because it was in the mountains. When we got to the condo, we hid out there for awhile until we saw the red SUV drive up! We were running away again when I woke up.

Good morning. I totally do not feel like doing my homework right now, so my entire day will revolve around finding anything to do besides homework. Perhaps I should do it now and get it overwith...uck. Oh...the treacherous life of a teenager in highschool...Waahh!