the Get Me to Austin to See Aqualung campaign - GMtAtSA (pron. gim-tat-sa) is getting along swimmingly. who am i kidding? it's getting cramps and is in danger of drowning! i told my extended family today. my uncle suggested i (and my posse of fellow Aqualung fans, should they join me) take a Greyhound bus from downtown Houston. the thing is, what if it ends late and we can't get back? a hotel, says my good aquaintance and fellow Aqualung appreciator, L (no, you probably don't know her). i'll have to start saving, then. or washing cars, or mowing lawns, or shovelling snow. (crap, where's all the snow when you need it?)

my parents still think that my obsession is funny. they say that if i complete a task they appoint me, they'll take me, but they have to sit in the back to make sure that i don't die. well: 1) there most likely will not be seats if this is the SXSW festival and 2) i'll be standing in the front (elbowing my way there if it kills me) so Matt and Ben will protect me. i know they'll be playing their instruments and maybe even singing with their eyes closed, but they will save me from evil with RUTHforce. and then there's the possible problem of driving home for three hours late at night. only my dad can drive, and he wouldn't do it.

we were talking and about this and Aqualung generally and suddenly my mum started to fucking* laugh at me (and possibly at Matt, i forget). i got really pissed off, which made her laugh harder. it fucking hurt and i told her that, but she was too busy laughing and didn't give a flying fuck. she said that i'm taking it too seriously. well i am. they thwarted my plans to see Aqualung last time (11th April 2003, Sheperds Bush Empire) and as a result i feel like a deficient fan.

in a way, this whole Hales business has weaved itself around every part of my life. i fall asleep to it, i wake up dreaming of it. if Matt were to say that he was living in Boston for 2006, i'd do anything to get into university there (which will be immensely difficult), even if i were accepted to Caltech (a very very excellent science school in California).

my mum just laughs at things that are important to me. it's so insulting. it's disregarding and caustic and completely insensitive. she laughed at me when i was tryign to explain this little theory i have -

i have an issue with the saying that the world is not black and white - it's shades of grey. i argue that even shades of grey would be too easy to dissect morally. greys are just the linear progression from white to black. the darker grey has more black in it than the lighter grey - you know exactly where it stands relative to other greys on the scale of light and dark. but Life has tangents and axes coming off everywhere. it's ambiguious. it's complex and unfathomable. it's more than just good or evil or somewhere in between - it's colours. (here's where people think i literally mean that the world is in colour, which it is, but any fucktard can tell you that.) there are situations where you have a red and a green and you can't tell which one is darker. or, you've got a shiny black surface - it's as dark as it gets, but it reflects white light. the possibilities are endless and that's why grey is limiting and therefore a shit metaphor.

and that, silly and insignificant as it is, is important to me. my little theory doesn't define me, but if it's the base to my beliefs, then to dismiss it as something fatuous would be saying, "oh, you're nothing." which, i don't know, to me, seems quite hurtful.

this leads me to another one of my grievances, which, Gentle Reader, i'm sorry i am making you read (you don�t have to, but i think it�d be interesting). i have only revealed my Colour Theory to a (badly selected) few. and two have already discredited it. i'm beginning to think that perhaps it�s fundamentally flawed. maybe my understanding of the �it�s not black and white, it�s grey� thing was slightly off when i first heard it. perhaps i have built my life on wobbly foundations or on a dormant volcano, which will immenently wake up and melt me down.

i talked about the Colour theory to my French buddies. the girls seemed to agree. (Wenke, what do you think of it?) however, david laughed and said that i was stupid. you might have noticed that he does not get a capitalised name. he is juvenile and just... simple (which is his problem, but it doesn�t bother him, it bothers me). he speaks fluent French, so is perfectly capable of 100%, yet he sleeps in the lesson and doesn�t do the homework, which is fine until he whines about his 70%. does he not understand cause and effect?

some days ago, he proclamed that manga and anime will take over the world. he seems to think that France and Houston is the world. i pointed out that there are people who don�t know anything about japanese pop-culture. he said that any library would have manga. the school library does, but i�m sure my ex-local library didn�t. i don�t think that the biggish one in Hendon does either. i said that some anime is brainless crap (which it is. there�s excellent, beautiful stuff, and then there�s second rate, badly drawn, badly coloured, badly concieved crap. i grew up watching both. then there�s hentai, which i don�t know.) so he concluded that i don�t know anything.

in the lesson, we had to take some worksheets out of communal files. unhappily, i got the one that he had used last time, and one of the sheets i wanted wasn�t there. so he hands me a file, opens it, rips out a sheet and hands it to me, then rips out another one and takes it himself. we each needed two. and the holes are there for putting them in files. he said that we didn�t need to keep them anyway. well excuse me, but everyone else was there to learn French from said sheets because we aren�t fluent in it. whatever happened to consideration for others? i got pissy and annoyed my teacher who told us to keep the whole grammar section. good.

do i care too much? or am i over-sensitive and petty?

*i can�t seem to say anything intelligent when i�m angry. it all comes out as �fuck� because i like the sound of it.

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th since 5th october 2001