Everything's happy underground.

Okay, I'm thinking a little recap is in order, followed by the other neat stuff. The last two weeks have been some of the most interesting in my life. Seriously. And, and interesting aside, is that all this stuff happened since the last time I'd seen my friends. Guess they're bad for me.

Saturday, November 27th: This was the last time I'd hung out with any of my friends before yesterday. It was that day when me and Adam played Sonic the Hedgehog like addicts.

Monday, November 29th: This was the day that, due to flooding in a building at Ryerson, it was announced that all of my assignments due until the end of the semester were now going to be optional and weighted by other marks.

Tuesday, November 30th: This was the day my nephew Ryan was born. It was also the first shift at my new job, which I've now had a few shifts of. It's boring, but seems like a good thing for a student to do.

Thursday, December 2nd: This was the day I got my new shoes. They really are pretty good. I don't think that the insoles were a good idea, I've since removed them and had no trouble with foot pains.

Wednesday, December 8th: This was my first exam, in computer graphics. It went well. Really well. Like, it really shouldn't have gone so well, but it did. So that was nice.

Thursday, December 9th: This was my exam in music, and it went well too.

Saturday, December 10th: On the 10th, I had two exams. I had one in my data communications course, and one in comparative languages. The data communications one went quite well, I think, but the comparative one, as I'd expected, was total ass. What a bad exam. Like, fuck. Eh, I'll do depth below, I've only been brief on everything so far.
This was also the day I found out my brother was diagnosed with cancer.

Tuesday, December 14th: This was the last exam, in algorithms. I think this went well, too.

Wednesday, December 15th: Had a coffee with somebody I haven't spoken with since high school, and that was nice.

Friday, December 17th: Jeff and Liz had a holiday party.

So, the exams all went really well except the one I'd been maintaining the worst mark in. I think the mark in that class will be pretty freakin' bad, but all of the others will be like B+ and better. That exam, geez, it was written like a psychology test. It's not a matter of knowing which answers are right (because for every multiple choice question, 3 of the choices are right), it's a matter of getting inside the prof's head and trying to understand exactly which way he intends to shaft us. It wasn't cool.

Part of the reason I was so successful, I think, was this new method of well-wishing. Sometimes when my mom says, "Good luck," I make a comment along the lines of, "I don't need any luck for this one,". She instead decided to tell me, "I hope they ask the questions you know the answers to,". It was awesome. It worked so well with the first exam, that she said it on all of the other exam days. I can only reason that the reason the comparative languages exam was so bad was because it was the second exam on one day, and the magic of that benevolence was only in effect for the first one. That's why having two exams in one day shouldn't happen.

That night, my parents came home and told me that Jeff had been diagnosed with cancer, which wasn't really anything that anyone had expected. I've heard it's totally inoperable because of where it's located and how intense it is, but I always end up with this information from a secondary source. Anyways, this is bad news, but Jeff is maintaining high spirits. Our holiday plans took a bit of detour and now mom and dad are going to be here, at the condo, forever (roughly). That part kind of sucks, but it's not a bit worry in the grand scheme of things.

Mom and dad, at times, seem quite resentful towards me for not being more outwardly sad. Carrie said she feels similarily. We both try to maintain a good attitude because we know that's what Jeff wants, but mom and dad seem to find that to be a bad thing. On Monday, after my aunt/boss Beverly heard about Jeff, she told me I could take any time off I wanted that day. I phoned in on Wednesday to say I wasn't coming, and dad made some comment about how lazy I was or somesuch. Personally, I'd just finished my exams, and thought now that I wasn't concentrating, it would be bad news for me to be answering phones all day. I got pretty pissed at him about that.

I don't like crying, I hadn't done it for a long time before this whole situation. I did it once when I remembered Jeff doing something really silly and absentminded once, and I'd told him he would make a hilarious old man. That's when it got me. Other than that, I've been trying to remain stable in support of him and all. Once we get too sad, it's as if we've given up... but people have recovered really bad situations before. Maybe it's not likely, but being miserable for an indefinite about of time isn't going to really benefit anyone.

I know these are somewhat vile things to say. I'm not a parent with an oldest son who has cancer. I just wish they understood where I was coming from with my radical new way of thinking... and I think... that if I explained it to them, they'd cry more. I don't want to do that, so I'll just keep to myself when I have to. That's how it's been so far. I don't really dig sitting in this tiny room so often to be non-confrontational, but again -- that's not a big worry in the grand scheme of things. In fact, I've been getting out a lot lately.

Between working and exams, I played some Ultima VII. I forget if mentioned that in order to prevent myself from playing Sonic the Hedgehog so I'd do my graphics assignment, I gave Adam my PS2 memory card. This was on the 28th of November, so that's the last time I'd played a console game. As always, when you need a distraction from doing schoolwork, you'll find one, no matter how hard the quest to do so may be.

A lot of people didn't know where the swamp boots were from in the new shoe post, so I thought I'd take some funny screenshots to highlight the degree of freedom in Ultima VII. Unfortunately, nobody I present them too finds them very funny. Hm.

Fuck that, here's a few of them anyways...

In this picture, my healer, Jaana, had died and I didn't have the necessary magic to revive her. As such, I decided to bring her to the king for a free revive. That lazy bastard was asleep, so I put her bloody corpse on his bed. He didn't wake up.

This is the avatar's little girlfriend. I took a lesson from Georgina and decided to try to impress her by putting a dead rat on her bed. Then it didn't seem "complete", so I put a dead cat there, too. I don't think she was especially impressed.

I decided that the avatar's girlfriend just didn't have enough stuff. So, I cleaned up the polluted lake and put all the garbage in her house, then I cleaned up two of the neighbour's houses and put all of their possessions and many dishes in there, too. I'm sure she'll be thrilled when she gets home...

This is a stay-at-home dad, only he doesn't realize that isn't a baby boy, it's a ham.

A horse got on my flying carpet before I took off. It was quite hilarious trying to fly around with the horse aboard... it's actually harder to control for some strange reason. I think, perhaps, the horse can't move backwards or something, so one direction was always blocked. I'm not sure. Anyways, by this point I just wanted to get the freakin' horse off of there...

I killed everybody in Lord British's castle except the king himself, and then decided to cook a feast in my honour. I took two of the babies and put them each between two slices of bread. Strangely, the king didn't especially seem to mind any of this carnage.

After said carnage, I decided to at least sort out all of the bodies for him so he could revive them more easily when he got around to it. That lazy idiot was probably napping again.

Okay, now, did anybody find that funny? Fuck. Guess that was pretty much a waste of time, but hey... that was the point.

On Friday I went to Jeff and Liz's holiday party and was pleased to see the mood was quite high. I went with Carrie and Pat, and we showed up more than fashionably late. Jeff was sitting near the door, and Liz came over when she noticed we were there. She said to him, "We might as well tell them now," then turned to us and said, "We got married this morning,". What was really funny was that I didn't really have to figure out whether they were serious or not, I just thought it was pretty cool. I heard today that when my parents found out they actually wanted to see the certificate because they didn't believe them.

Anyways, their party was pretty cool. I talked to lots of people there. I met the guy who hosts this website, which was nice because I always pictured him as one of those evil machines that wants to conquer the human race. Carrie and Pat were parked at my place, so we left a little bit early, but yeah, it was really cool.

Times have been really intense, like I said. Sometimes I actually have to kind of book times to do stuff with people because I've been busy. It's sort of fun pretending I'm grown up. Also, everything has been really great lately, aside from the one really bad thing. I guess that's just what happens sometimes... it follows my shittiness conservation theorem, I suppose. It just sucks that I am not the victim of the shittiness, because that means I can't do anything about it.