“Can’t Sleep, Can’t Eat, I’m Sick”

Meh, I feel like crap. Coming down with a cold.. it sucks.

Couldn’t sleep last night. Went to bed around 23:30 or so, awoke first around 00-something, then 02-something, then 04:28, and actually, I’ve been up ever since.

I took some decongestant last night about an hour before I went to bed, and it totally did not work. =__=;

I keep getting my ass handed to me on MW2.. goddamn South American board.. I ran out of ammo on my primary weapon, so I’m stuck with some shitty thing with 0 accuracy that I can’t even see with when I aim down the sights.. got two guys that forever stay behind a wall.. meh. Also, I finally purchased Castle Fairfax on Fable II. It is NOICE!!!!! But then it’s like after you sleep in the bed for the first time, the butler comes in to wake you and tell you the castle’s under attack, so you gotta go out and defeat all these bandits. It’s not bad. Turns out they got in by a hidden passageway in the library, so you go explore that, and it takes you down to like a dungeon-type area. Kill more bandits, then there are five doors. Four lead to prison cells like, and one leads onward. There are two levers, one opens the prison cell doors and lets out all the ghoulies, which are more bandits, hollowman hobbes, balverines and.. more bandits. It’s kinda funny though, when I was fighting the balverines, in the corner of my screen, the bandits and hobbes were fighting, several of them took each other out! Haha. Anyway, the fifth door that leads out leads to the Fairfax tomb, where there are more hobbes to fight, then you get to the main crypt. There, you find the big fancy potion that lets you change your Hero’s gender, but if you choose to drink it, you must before you leave the room. I chose not to. I like my hero being a badass chick lesbian. xD Haha. I moved my wife into Castle Fairfax.. she looks so out of place in the Fairfax gardens with all the rich folk (I tend to always marry one of the prostitutes from Bloodstone).

I was going to go to the library today, but I feel awful. I’ll probably go tomorrow.

My app to BookSneeze was accepted. I’m wondering.. I don’t honestly care for the books they have available now. Their Twitter account says new books should be up next week. I wonder if I should go for one of the books they have now or wait.. I’ll probably wait.

I’m hungry..

Watched Raw last night.. zomg, so much bullshit!!! DX lost the Unified Tag Team Championship to the Miz and Big Show cos Shawn Michaels is having some sort of crisis. I really hope this isn’t the end of DX (again). I like them together; they’re funny. The Miz is such a little person.. it’s funny, every time he says he’s awesome, he puts on this constipated face.. and CM Punk.. what an idiot. I swear the guy looks so much like Jesus. What really pissed me off was Randy Orton’s match against Cody Rhodes. That was total bullshit. Cody’s a little punk bitch; Randy would’ve had that win if it hadn’t been for Sheamus’s snow white-looking ass. Now, I love me some Irish man, but Sheamus is like a fucking ghost, he’s so pale. And I’m sure he’s not so bad, but I hate how they’ve got him so pumped up like.. He’s like this nobody kind of guy who just popped up. It’s just not believable that veterans like John Cena and Randy Orton would have trouble against him. And he talks all this shit.. while other veterans like Triple H, the Undertaker, Batista, I’m sure they’d wipe the ring down with him. But seriously, Sheamus needs to stop living in caves and see some sunshine.

Look! It's Snow White!

I know my grammar is kinda out the window on this one, but I feel like shit, so I don’t care.

Elektrolik~

Smokes and spirits: proof I’ve been watching too much #GhostHunters

Another night, another dream. This one’s not another nightmare. It’s not disturbing. If anything, it makes me want to hop up and down all exited like..

Like this litte guy:

So then let me tell you about it.

Myself and my parents.. became paranormal investigators.. of all things. I do believe that comes from watching too much Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International (I just can’t help it, it’s so good, I’m addicted! /me fiends ).

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. My parents and I are paranormal investigators. We’re investigating some random house. Since they smoke a shittonne more than I do, they keep going out for smoke breaks, which is pretty stupid, I think. If you’re investigating somewhere, you shouldn’t be going out to smoke during the investigation. You never know, you might come across phantom smells of cigarette smoke, and how would you know if you yourself reek of cigarette smoke? The only time I think one is correct in having a smoke break during an investigation is if one gets knocked the fuck out, but how often does that happen really?

Anyway, We were investigating this house, and they’d headed out for another smoke break while I was inside alone. I walked into a room and saw what looked like a white mist forming on the far side. At first, I’d thought it was just my eyes going blurry, considering it was late, and I was getting tired, but I rubbed my eyes, cleaned my glasses, and sure enough the mist was still there. It started to move towards me. As it did, it darkened–the white became black–and a humanoid figure formed. Before me manifested the apparition of a woman with long, dark hair and an old-fashioned, ivory-white dress. She stood there for a moment, just looking at me. Slowly, I bent down to pick up the mini-dv on the floor and happened to record her just as her image faded away.

It was really exciting. Some time after I awoke, I remembered there was a Ghost Hunters marathon running on Syfy. Guess what I’ve been doing the last several hours? Even skipped the Super Bowl. Now that it’s almost done, I’m probably going to watch even more episodes of what I have on my laptop hard drive. Fun fun fun.

Elektrolik~

A recount of my first nightmare in many years…

My first nightmare in many years.. This occurred the morning of the 29th of December. Even over a month later, I still remember all of it, and it perturbs me so.

I had a friend, a best friend, though whose name was never mentioned. This friend had a child, a young baby boy, whom I’d babysit often while this friend was at work. In the beginning of this particular mare, I found myself in a large but shabby old house–the residence of this friend–which had been renovated into a number of apartments. It was late. This house was located in a particularly troubling neighborhood. I was alone in the apartment, save for the baby and my friend’s elderly grandmother, who was fast asleep on the main floor. I moved to the second story where the baby boy slept. He was young and still very small. I was about to change his diaper when I heard a noise from outside, like someone was approaching. Thinking it was his mother returning, I decided against the changing. Just then, a bright light appeared. Glancing outside I saw a helicopter with a spotlight shining along the house. On the side of the house was a flight of stairs leading to an exterior door to the second story. I pondered whether the family kept the door locked but was afraid to check.

Then I saw him–a man standing on the landing outside that door. A police officer stood before him, shouting for him to put his hands on his head. It happened so fast. He moved his hands to his head then swiftly whipped out a gun from his jacket and shot the officer. He then punched through the glass on the door, opening it from the inside. I grabbed the baby and made a run for a small closet to hide. I heard gunshots and a scream, and the door to my haven flew open. A woman from another apartment tried crawling in with me, but the intruder was right behind her and shot her dead. He then began shooting at the walls of the closet, the bullets penetrating the thing drywall, flying all around me. I was hit several times in the arms. The gunshots and screams moved off into different parts of the house, down a story, then outside. It continued briefly then stopped, the gunman presumably killed. I’d thought all was fine again until I realized the little being cradled to my chest was bleeding. I blacked out.

I then found myself on a bus. All around me was chaos: people injured in the shooting, people crying, people bleeding. The bus was racing down the city street to the hospital. I sat, bleeding, but the pain from my wounds did not register. What did was the weight in my lap–the baby. He was bleeding profusely from the abdomen. I looked at him, and he at me. He did not cry, but when I looked at him and saw the light fading from his eyes, felt the life force spilling out of his little body, heard each breath grow shallower and shallower still–before my eyes, this little being slipped away, and I felt myself slip away with him… until he was no more.

I awoke then, sobbing for a good hour.

Dreams often fade with time’s passing, but still, I remember each horrifying detail as if it had really occurred, and still, my hands tremble terribly. Never before has any dream, any story, any event–real or fiction–terrified and disturbed me as much as this particular dream had. I pray I never have to repeat this horrible mare.

Elektrolik~

Renovations and other things…

It’s about as good as I can do with this free stuff. It’s all good, though. I decided to drop the Turkish since my Turkish sucks, and I won’t be able to take Turkish for a while anyway.

Academically, things have all gone arseways.

Oh yea..

All gone arseways. Everything. I couldn’t afford fall tuition, so I’m unable to register for spring, so now I merely sit on my ass all day and think about how to kill people. How lovely.

I’ve come to a realization. I have social issues. Obviously. I’ve developed an inability to trust. It seems the closer I get to someone, the less I trust them. Suppose you and I had a class together. In the beginning, I’d trust you just as much as anyone would trust someone they just met, which wouldn’t be very much. But as the term went on, and we got used to seeing each other every day at the same time, as what would seem like a friendship or even a mere acquaintance developed, I’d begin to trust you less and less. I’d begin to suspect alternative motives to your actions regarding myself, and thus, paranoid, I’d begin to withdraw myself from having any sort of contact that could be avoided. It began several years ago and has become worse as time went on. Interestingly, this is the first time I’ve admitted this publicly. Meh.

Anyway, regarding my schooling, I am working to get it all sorted out. I got most of the debt taken care of, just waiting on stepda’s tax return check to get to him, so we can pay off the last remaining $453.72. Then I’ll be looking into transferring to MCTC for a bit.

In other news, I want to move to Ireland.

I’ll be honest, I’ve become addicted to Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International: Ghost Hunters because it’s awesome, and Ghost Hunters International because of Barry FitzGerald. Oh yea! ^^ Barry is this incredibly sexy Irishman with this incredibly sexy accent. I wubz him!  I want to marry an Irish guy. It’d be the epic of all epic to marry Baz himself, but that’s too fantastical a dream, so another nice Irishman would suffice, I guess. Lol.

Like eh.. I started a new writing project.. Ohhhhh lawd!! How many times has that been said before?? SMDH.. But srsly, I’ve been in kind of a writing funk since September. I haven’t written anything decent since then. I haven’t written anything for myself since then. Anyway, I think it’s a pretty decent idea, paranormal with a little bit of romance, comedy.. I’m still in the planning stages, but pretty soon, I’ll get to the actual writing of it. Hopefully I’ll get around to finishing this one.

A dear friend of mine shared this thing.. I can get free books as long as I write a review on them. I’m going to go for it. Who doesn’t like free books?

Elektrolik~

Métamorphoses

There is a fan-made video on YouTube set to the song, “Teardrop” by the trip-hop group, Massive Attack. In this video, images of the cosmos shot from the Hubble Space Telescope are fractured in a kaleidoscope-like fashion. As the song plays, the images morph. The shapes and colours shift, forming new patterns, though remnants of the old linger still. In a similar manner, the Hmong identity, over the years, has shifted, morphed. The Hmong culture has changed, evolved with each new experience the Hmong people have encountered, the new building upon the foundations of the old. To the Yang family and to Kao Kalia Yang, the meaning of being Hmong changes with several significant life moments.

In 1975, at the close of the Vietnam War, to be Hmong meant to be prey. The new communist government in Laos declared execution on all Hmong who had aided the Americans in “The Secret War.” Villages were ravaged. Whole families took to the jungles, fleeing the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers whose sole intent was to kill. The soldiers could not tell a Hmong who had helped versus a Hmong who had not. To them, all Hmong were the enemy, and through the jungles they hunted them like wolves hunting caribou. The soldiers were not the only danger they faced. Sickness and starvation and infection from their wounds also hunted them. Kalia detailed, “They were all torn and broken: shrapnel into skin, blood seeping from scratches, jagged cuts from rocks flying through the air” (Yang 21). For years, they lived under constant threat of disease, death and capture. For years, they made their way through the dense vegetation in hopes of making it out of Laos, of crossing the Mekong River to Thailand with the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese seemingly forever on their tails. When they finally did make it to Thailand, they would find that being prey would fall away to being something else.

In the camps of Thailand, the Yang family and thousands of other Hmong families learned that to be Hmong then meant to be prisoner. The Ban Vinai Refugee Camp was overcrowded and surrounded by fences with armed guards like a prison. For the years they were there, the Hmong could not live, only merely exist, caged like animals. In the eyes of a little girl who grew up in the camp, “When she noticed that they lived in a place that felt like it had an invisible fence made of men with guns who spoke Thai…she learned that Hmong meant contained” (Yang 1). Death and disease lingered in every corner, every shadow. Few had the privilege to go beyond the camp gate. The Phanat Nikhom Processing Center, too, was dusty, unsanitary and “surrounded by a high fence that was as sharp as knives” (Yang 92). More armed guards stood watch in high towers. Contained, they were indeed.

In America, Kalia’s family changed, morphed like the Hubble images in the “Teardrop” video, adapting to their new life in a new land. Several babies were born: Xue, Sheelue, Shoually, Taylor and Maxwell. Kalia herself changed. No longer a little girl, she morphed into a young woman. She graduated from high school and went on to college. Her parents were no longer on welfare. They worked hard and saved enough money to buy their own home, albeit a mouldy one. With the coming of the babies and their parents working, Dawb and Kalia had to assist in taking care of the young ones. For once in their lives, the constant threat of death and danger no longer hung above their heads like it had in Laos and Thailand. They were finally living their lives.

The Hmong people in America met new hardships, but with the support of each other, they pulled through. It is by witnessing this that one realizes, though the surface of Hmong identity may change with the circumstance, the deeper meaning of Hmong identity, the deeper meaning of what it is to be Hmong is always there underneath it all. That is, to be Hmong is to survive, to weather the storm, to face through the adversities life gives them and come out stronger than ever. Kalia tells, “We didn’t come all this way from the clouds just to go back, without a trace. We, seekers of refuge, will find [our dreams]: if not in the world, then in each other” (Yang 274). The Hmong people have faced plethoras of hardship throughout history: exile, persecution, extermination, exile again, containment, relocation. Despite all this, the Hmong people and the Hmong culture live on stronger than ever, and as long as they can support each other, they will never fall.

The images in the video turn, shift as the animation plays on. New patterns evolve right before one’s eyes, but the foundations of the old patterns remain at the core. This is a representative of identity. Over time, who one is changes, evolves with each new experience, though one’s inner core remains. For the Hmong, circumstances changed. Who they had to be changed, but through it all, the intrinsic essence of survival, no matter the odds, forever lives on. That is truly a beautiful thing.

_{Yang, Kao Kalia. The Latehomecomer. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2008. Print.}

The Shadow Man

The sky was dark, the air cold and wet with drizzle.  I walked along a sidewalk, alone, going over the prices of the groceries I carried.  Three nineteen, three nineteen, two ninety-six, seven ninety-nine–calculating, recalculating, calculating again–seventeen thirty-three, seven point seven seven five percent tax, eighteen sixty-eight.  I was so absorbed in the numbers, I did not see the man to my left–

–lurking in the shadows.

TBC

Smile for me

The Reason Behind the Prison Gate

After Japan’s unprecedented attack on Pearl Harbor, approximately 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-American residents all across the West Coast were relocated to internment camps.  Men, women and children were plucked from their homes and herded into pens.  What was the reasoning?  What was the rationale used to explain the total disregard of a people’s basic human rights and their foul treatment as if they nothing more than cattle?  Paranoia.

Paranoia gripped the nation after the tragic event.  Government officials called for the removal of all people of Japanese descent from the West Coast, fearing they remained loyal to the Japanese empire.  California Governor Culbert Olson’s reasoning was “the extreme difficulty in distinguishing between loyal Japanese-Americans, and there are many who are loyal to this country, and those other Japanese whose loyalty is to the Mikado.”  Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt reasoned that the “more than 115,000 persons of Japanese ancestry … significantly concentrated near many highly sensitive installations essential to the war effort … constituted a menace which had to be dealt with.”  Paranoid government officials felt the Japanese-American population would rise up and attack the U.S. from within.

However, was this paranoia truly justified?  It could go both ways.  One the one hand, many of the American-born Japanese had returned to Japan for their education and “had become rabidly pro-Japanese and then had returned to the United States.  Emperor-worshipping ceremonies were commonly held and millions of dollars had flowed into the Japanese imperial war chest from the contributions freely made by Japanese here” (DeWitt).  As DeWitt had stated, “time was of the essence,” and it couldn’t have been truly known whether they would have attempted an attack or not.  On the other, entire families—men, women and children—were snatched from their homes, yanked out of schools, forced to close down businesses, uprooted from their daily lives and herded into overcrowded camps for simply being of a particular heritage.  Although the world was at war with Germany and Italy, as well, German-Americans and Italian-Americans were not given the same treatment.  How much more difficult is it really to tell the difference between loyal and non-loyal Japanese-Americans than it is to tell between loyal and non-loyal German-Americans or Italian-Americans?  The fact of the matter is behind the afore-mentioned paranoia, feeding it like raging flames, were the racist agendas and anti-Asian sentiments that surged through the nation during the years leading up to the war.  Thus, freedom is the price a people pays for a nation’s ignorance.

http://www.sfmuseum.org/war/dewitt0.html
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist8/evac3.html

Enter Elektrolik

001. Name → Elektrolik
002. Nickname(s)→ Ele
003. Zodiac sign → Libra
004. Male or female → Female
005. Elementary → Sheridan Global Arts & Communications
006. Middle School → Steele Middle School
007. High School → Muskegon High School
008. Hair color → Black
009. Long or short → Long
010. Loud or Quiet → Quiet
011. Sweats or Jeans → Jeans
012. Phone or Camera → My camera
013. Health freak → No
014. Drink or Smoke? → Smoke
015. Do you have a crush on someone? → Evet
016. Eat or Drink → Both
017. Piercings → Lobes
018. Tattoos → None yet

HAVE YOU EVER?
019. Been in an airplane → Many, many times
020. Been in a car accident → No
021. Been in a fist fight → No

FIRSTS:
022. First piercing → Lobes, 4 years old
023. First best friend → Jennifer K.
025. First award -> I can barely remember what I wore yesterday.
026. First crush → Emily Something-or-other
028. First big vacation → San Francisco, CA

LASTS:
029. Last person you talked to → My cousin
030. Last person you texted → My aunt
031. Last person you watched a movie with → M.A.Z.E.
032. Last food you ate → Blueberry yogurt
033. Last movie you watched → A.R.O.G.
034. Last song you listened to → “Ciao Bella” by Don Omar
035. Last thing you bought → A bottle of Vault
036. Last person you hugged → I don’t recall

FAVES:
037. Food → Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Mexican, Italian
038. Drinks → Tea
039. Clothing → Jeans, tshirts, hoodies
040. Book → The Meg Series by Steve Alten and Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries
041. Music → Nearly everything
042. Flower → Plum blossoms, lotuses and lillies
043. Colors → Sage
044. Movies → The Boondock Saints, The Rock, The Joy Luck Club, Frequency
045. Shoes → None
046. Subjects → Calculus

IN THE PAST YEAR I … :
047. [ ] kissed in the snow
048. [x] celebrated Halloween
049. [ ] had your heart broken
050. [ ] went over the minutes on your cell phone
051. [ ] someone questioned your sexual orientation
052. [ ] came out of the closet
053. [ ] gotten pregnant
054. [ ] had an abortion
055. [x] done something you’ve regretted
056. [ ] broke a promise
057. [x] hid a secret
058. [x] pretended to be happy
059. [x] met someone who changed your life
060. [ ] pretended to be sick
061. [ ] left the country
062. [x] tried something you normally wouldn’t try and liked it
063. [ ] cried over the silliest thing
064. [ ] ran a mile
065. [ ] went to the beach
066. [x] stayed single the whole year

CURRENTLY:
067. Eating → Nothing
068. Drinking → Nothing
069. I’m about to → Go to bed
070. Listening to → “Hey” by Ice Cube
071. Plans for today/tomorrow → Turkish then home
072. Waiting for → Friday

YOUR FUTURE:
073. Want kids? → Not sure yet
074. Want to get married? → Eventually
075. Careers in mind → Not sure yet

WHICH IS BETTER ON A BOY/GIRL?
076. Lips or eyes → Eyes
077. Shorter or taller? → Taller/Doesn’t matter
078. Romantic or spontaneous → Romantic
079. Nice stomach or nice arms → Doesn’t matter
080. Sensitive or loud → Sensitive
081. Hookup or relationship → Relationship
082. Troublemaker or hesitant → Hesitant

HAVE YOU EVER:
083. Lost glasses/contacts → No
084. Ran away from home → No
085. Held a gun/knife for self defense → Not for self-defense
086. Killed somebody → Not in this life
087. Broken someone’s heart → No
088. Been arrested → No
089. Cried when someone died → Yes

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:
090. Yourself → No comment
091. Miracles → Perhaps
092. Love at first sight → I didn’t until I met…
093. Heaven → No
094. Santa Claus → Oh yea, he died getting hit by a plane
095. Sex on the first date → The date had better be damn good
096. Kiss on the first date → If it went well, why not?

ANSWER TRUTHFULLY:
097. Is there one person you want to be with right now? → Yes
098. Are you seriously happy with where you are in life? → No
099. Do you believe in God → Yes