I'm standing next to the dining table, talking to my parents. Suddenly I hear flapping.

I turn toward the hallway and see Cici sitting there, looking at us. Huh?

We look at her looking at us. She looks tiny next to my brother's hamper.

I walk over and scoop her up. "How did you get out here?" I ask. "I don't remember opening the cage," I tell my parents.

My room is dark as I transport her back to the cage. "Be careful where you step," my dad calls from the kitchen. "Don't want to trample any budgies."

When I turn on the light, I can see that the cage is, indeed, closed. There are no spaces big enough for her to squeeze through, and I've never known her to try opening the doors before. Somewhat baffled, I place her on the top of the cage and open it up so that she can go back in when she wants. She just sits there and fluffs up.

Budgies aren't supposed to stay fluffed up unless they're sick or cold. I'm hoping it's the latter and not the former...

Anyway, I still have no idea how she got out. I know they can learn to escape (Ducky developed an interest in doing so before she died), but Cici seems to like being in the cage, so it's a bit confusing for me.

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But due to several problems associated with not sleeping and my being a lazy, out-of-shape fatty, I didn't really.

First off, I really didn't exercise during winter break. Well okay, I mean, I didn't exercise ENOUGH. Biking to school today was... not the most pleasant of experiences. I didn't quite have the "Fat Girls on Bicycles" experience, but it was a bit harder than I expected.

I started my day by waking up in the middle of the night and basically having a panic attack because my arm got pinned under my body while I was sleeping, and for some reason I become extremely delusional when I suddenly wake up at such times. (Remember when I woke up a few months ago and freaked out because I thought my nonexistent wedding rings had fallen off my hands?) Anyway, I started shaking my arm around to get circulation flowing because I thought that if it was numb too long, there would be permanent damage and I would lose it... or something like that. It didn't help that it hurt.

I have no idea what time that happened because I was too busy trying desperately to save myself from having to amputate a limb to look at the clock.

In my dreams I was in a dark dingy room with a control panel in the middle and nooses hanging all around. Harvest Moon characters were in the nooses, but they were alive and moving. I turned away and back, and they had each been stabbed with a syringe in the leg, and they were still. I fled to the next room. It had a museum-like wall setup, with small sections in various places for displays to be hung up. It was also dark, and seemed brown and dirty. Instead of pictures or artwork there were tunnels and cracked mirrors on the walls. In the floor next to one of them there was a hole, and there was a ring-shaped door with a rope tied around the side opposite the hinge. If you grabbed the rope you would fall down the hole, and the door would shut and you would be trapped forever. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I was tied to some shelves in Safeway. The entire row behind me was filled with yellow boxes of Triscuits, and the one I was facing had pickle jars. I tried to get down and all the boxes fell on top of me. After crawling out from under them I realized it was my fault, because I had told my parents I wanted to go to the grocery store.

Woke up again probably around seven-ish because my walls have a thickness similar to Kleenex, and are probably more easily penetrated by sound. My door was closed, but I could hear my family talking. And then.... joy of joys, my mom started vacuuming.

I stayed in bed and tried to block it out, even though I have never been successful at doing so. (Whenever people tell me to just "tune out" or "ignore it" I resent them a bit, because it's not something I'm capable of doing)

Fast forward to nine... my alarm goes off. I decide that another half hour in bed won't do any harm, so I set the timer on my cell phone and lay inert but unfortunately excruciatingly awake for half an hour, opening an eye to check the timer's progress every now and then.

I made myself a spinach and cheese omelet on toast for breakfast, then headed out at around 10:45.

Leaving earlier was supposed to be so that I could scout out my class locations ahead of time, but it turned out that my first class is in the exact same room as my first class last quarter. The other two I had today were a bit trickier to find.

Biked home after the first class (Intro to Poetry, which had a very enthusiastic and probably slightly crazy professor) and had some salad. Yay salad.

My class schedule is a bit weird, so I have class from 11:30 - 12:20, and then from 3:30 - 5:15 and 5:30 - 9:15. Since my mom doesn't want me to bike in the dark, I get driven back to school for the later classes.

I was a few minutes late to my second class because of toast and after school traffic. Turned out to be okay though, because the classroom was huge and he hadn't even taken roll or handed out the syllabus yet.

Let me tell you my train of thought during the class:
"OH NO I'M LATE, EVERYONE IS ALREADY HERE!"
"Where do I sit, oh no, where do I sit?"
"Is... that the professor? Is he wearing a suit?"
"The professor is wearing a suit... man this class is probably going to suck."
"I'm so tired, maybe I should just drop this class. I mean, I don't even need it, and the professor wears a suit."
"If I drop, I can just go home right now and take a nap."
"That guy at my table is really creepy looking, and he keeps raising his hand and giving wrong answers. I wonder how he feels about that..."
"Gee, this professor really seems to like his subject."
"I could probably learn a lot from this class, so maybe I should stay... the professor wears a suit though. Why is he wearing a suit? Aw man, this is probably one of those Serious Business classes..."
"Well I guess I'll stay after all."

He let us out early, so I was stuck with nothing to do for an hour. I walked around campus, but became paranoid that people would see me and wonder why I was going in circles.

I passed a fat woman who was wearing so much perfume that you could smell it from five feet behind her. I wondered if she thought the scent would somehow mask her extra flesh, or at least offset it. In any case it did neither.

The environmental studies class, nearly four hours long, was actually quite nice. Or I think it would have been if I hadn't been braindead the whole time. It was a really small class, fifteen people I'd say, and people asked my name and talked to me and were overall very friendly. The professor is this astoundingly energetic woman who used the YMCA method to spell out her teaching style acronym, VAK (Visual, Audial, Kinesthetic). I don't think I've had as much energy as her since I was in elementary school, and I'm pretty sure she's older than my dad.

My mom picked me up just after they started shutting off the lights in the building, and I got home and ate food. Oh, food, how I love thee. Or rather, need thee to sustain my existence. I'm horribly tired, but I think I'm going to do the stupid thing and play Harvest Moon for a few minutes before collapsing on my bed.

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Feels exactly like 2010 so far, I must say.

As you probably don't know/have forgotten, I don't really make New Year's resolutions. (New Years'? Not a hundred percent sure on the apostrophe placement there)

In the past few days I've become wrapped up in Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life, though, so I should probably resolve to not stay up until 3 AM or later brushing virtual cows and making virtual pickles.

I think I'll probably just get tired of it again after awhile, so it's not much of a resolution.

Um, I had a dream that I was in an airport, and I didn't exactly know where I was going but I kept seeing these two guys from my high school. I didn't want to follow them, so I tried figuring things out for myself, and somehow I got captured by this person who could manipulate glass (in a super power kind of way). They were keeping me and some other mystical/magical type creatures/beings in a large circus-y canvas tent. The other captives and I banded together and secured some crystal goblets, which I guess were key because our captor couldn't break them?

Oh yeah, and one of the other people was a vampire, so somehow that meant she got a special trapdoor in the floor for when she needed to go to the bathroom. I fell through it into sort of a sports equipment storage/rec room area and couldn't get back up to ground level to escape with the others.

And... then there was something about a gigantic parakeet in someone's yard. I petted it, and it was about as soft as Romeo or perhaps my pillowcase. That's all I remember.

---

"I wake up happy, feeling good... but then I get very depressed, because I'm living in reality."

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Cici was just at the water bottle, throwing water all over the place. I thought she was just drinking extremely messily, but maybe she intended to get everything wet.

Usually Romeo tries to avoid her, but for some reason he wanted to get near the water bottle after she started making a mess. I couldn't tell what was going on, so I figured that what she was doing had somehow made the water look extra delicious to him or something.

Nope, guess not. He gave up on his attempts to close in on the bottle and started dancing around her instead, chirping and bobbing his head. My conclusion is that she was doing the budgie equivalent of washing a car while wearing a bikini, because he suddenly had the hots for her.

I do not understand parakeet mating rituals.

This entry was the result of trying to write other entries and then giving up and staring at my birds for inspiration. Luckily they happened to be engaging in quirky budgie behavior at the time!

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It's been a long time since
I believed I had my whole life ahead of me

Everything is important
And nothing matters
Simultaneously
When you've got no time left

---Edit---

First time replying to an ad on Craigslist: not good. To his credit, he did say he was in a bad mood in his ad, but wow.

"I've been in a bad frame of mind for close to a month now although I am feeling a little bit better.
I've been in a bad mood for close to four weeks now.
You can vent to me if you're in a bad mood as I will not mind.
I will not mind if you feel like chatting with me because you're bored.
I don't request seeing your picture and it's fine if you're taken as I am not looking for a girlfriend.
I will not be rude to you whasotever if you don't have everything in your life all together.
My AIM screen name is --- "

Me: not afraid of the Craigslist crazies?
Guy: what the heck?
Me: didn't expect anyone to reply?
Guy: I guess you just wanted to mess with me
Me: no, not really
Guy: sure
Guy: goodbye then
Me: ?
Guy: I said bye
Me: your Craigslist ad said you wanted someone to talk to...?
Guy: you didn't say, "hi" or "hey" or "how are you?"
Guy: you went, "So you're not afraid of Craigslist crazies?"
Me: if you'd prefer a more generic greeting I can supply that
Guy: Like really, go mess with somebody else
Me: I assure you I'm not crazy
Guy: whatever
Guy: goodbye!
Me: alright, sorry, bye
Guy: FUCK YOU

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So I had been thinking
BY JOVE
IT WAS THE SHAMPOO

But
Life said "HA JUST KIDDING"

And now I'm sitting here
In my pajamas
Listening to "Alors On Danse" for the whoknowshowmanyth time
(The original, not one of the crap covers)

Stewing in all my qualities
That are not insults in excess
But nevertheless detrimental
I suppose

Here are some stickers that say
Merry Christmas
In shiny ugly colors
Just like everything else about this holiday

I'm thinking about holidays from before
And fires in a fireplace that has been cold for years
A couch that we got rid of that folded into a bed
Putting pillows against the bricks so my cousins wouldn't bang their heads
We used to have a plastic play structure we called the Fort
It had a top level and a bottom one and a pink slide
It was clean because we kept it indoors
But it's gone now

Things are good sometimes
And things are terrible sometimes
If you're terrible all the time
Nobody will believe you when you try to be good
Everyone is looking for those patterns they can cast you in

More than anything
Else
I'm just tired

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