(I’d apologise for posting twice about this for anyone subscribed to the feed, but if you’re still subscribed to the feed, you can consider this a reminder to unsubscribe. All my posts are going there now!)

WordPress.com is okay. After all, I’ve used it for all this time without complaining too much. But there were some annoyances. For instance, the fact that all the tag links go to a list of all posts on WP.com to use that tag. I mean, what’s with that? This is my blog; I don’t really want to encourage people to surf right through like this system encourages. They’re supposed to be interested in what I have to say, and stay. Okay, that’s a little selfish, but a more compelling reason is that a lot of my tags aren’t designed for any use other than on this blog. For instance, when I tag a post with “Tigger”, I’m talking about my cat. If someone else tags their post with “Tigger”, they are probably NOT talking about my cat. Consequently it makes no sense to show people every post on WP.com tagged “Tigger” — they’re different topics. People want to know about my cat!

WordPress.com is also very limited in what I can actually do with my blog’s design. If you pay you can edit the site’s CSS (not that I would pay for that), but nothing will let you alter how posts, pages, the navigation, the archives, etc. are arranged. On my old site’s front page, I had two different loops to show two different lists of entries: asides, and the titles and one-sentence summaries of my most recent posts. I liked it that way — I could differentiate between two different styles of post, and all was good. But I can’t do that here.

Over the school holidays one day I was really bored and decided to open my theme files and convert them into an HTML mock-up. So I could relive how the layout looked in some format other than a puny thumbnail, I guess. Then, unable to resist the temptation, I started making alterations and improvements. I thought about the categories I really wanted, how wide I really wanted the columns, and how I really wanted the front page designed (I decided the most recent entry should be more prominent than just a little link, because surely casual visitors would want to know at a glance whether the post has been updated since their last visit — without needing to look around).

In the end, I found myself really inspired to work on my website’s design. Only, tragically… I couldn’t. I could only work on this lame HTML demo’s mock-up. No one would ever see what my hard work and thoughtfulness had produced! What a depressing thought.

So I did what any reasonable person would do, and sought out some subdomain hosting. Before I’d even made up my mind to emigrate from WP.com, I’d heard some good things about Bubble.nu, so I checked that site out. After a few days thinking about it, I filled out an application, and within an hour I received an acceptance email.

All of this means: I have a new blog, available at jess.skyness.org.

Of course I also decided to attempt a switch to Chyrp to see if it’s better than WordPress. Honestly I haven’t made up my mind yet. One of the downsides of the switch is that the complex realities of porting a theme from one templating system to another means that 99% of my carefully-considered design changes did not actually happen. But on the bright side, at least I have the freedom to work on it now.

Also unfortunately, Chyrp’s templating system doesn’t seem to be well-documented. I mean, if you read the templating tags you can work out what every single one of them does; it’s easy to pick up that way. Unfortunately, that tells me nothing about the OTHER tags I can use. You know, like the ones that would let me have multiple loops on the front page. Or how to link to an RSS feed. Or how I can get an RSS feed of just one category. (Okay, I guess neither of the RSS feed things relate that much to template tags, but just continuing on the theme of hard-to-find documentation…)

Because the link somehow got lost in the middle of the entry, I’ll repeat myself: new blog: jess.skyness.org.

However the real point of this entry is that we got off the train at Melbourne Central, and caught an escalator up from the station part to the shopping centre part. At the top of the escalator — just as you’re getting off — is a sign saying something about “escalator safety” and enlightening people about to how to avoid dying on them. Because you know, a lot of people find that very challenging. Apparently.

The reason the sign amused me, and why I bothered taking a mental note of it, is that it was at the TOP of the escalator. I mean, this is an upwards-going escalator, and it doesn’t change directions. Basically, the government cares about you enough to tell you about how to avoid killing yourself on an escalator, but not enough to tell you before your escalator journey is pretty much over.

My outlandish speculation is that they’re trying to maintain the illusion that they care (hence this helpful sign) while they’re actually trying to wipe out that segment of the population that is actually stupid enough to die in an accident because they didn’t understand “escalator safety”. Such a purge could benefit society (how much use are people that stupid going to be?), and if the government can still look like it cares, well, everybody wins!

Really, I have no idea why it’s placed there. Maybe it was actually supposed to be placed on the other side of the escalator (for the benefit of people going down) and the workman screwed up. But I like my theory better. It’s more amusing anyway.

I have a condition called Klippel-Feil Syndrome. I don’t mention it very often because for some reason, I rarely remember that I have it. I’ve had it all my life and the thought of not having it is unimaginable to me. It’s like, someone born in a country without ready access to modern technology isn’t going to spend all their time thinking about how they don’t have a computer. That’s just their life. Well, it’s the same with me.

But occasionally, something happens — even something as minor as wanting to put a watch on my wrist — and, frustrated, I’m forced to recognise I have a disability. It took me ten minutes to get this damn watch on, and even now it is on, it’s on pretty loosely and keeps sliding around. So annoying.

Having KFS isn’t terrible, though. It can be really terrible — it can cause blindness, deafness, neurological issues, multiple organ failure, and so on and so forth — but I didn’t get it that badly. Many of the bones and joints in my right arm are malformed. My shoulder and my wrist are both malformed. I have four fingers on that hand. Elsewhere, my right lung is really small, my spine is “twisted” (whatever that means, because I don’t know) and my head is tilted thanks to the “twisted” spine. That’s it. It’s all superficial, physical stuff except that I have reduced lung capacity. Nothing to threaten my quality of life, anyway.

There are several things I can’t do, but seeing as I don’t even try to do them, they rarely remind me of my disability. For instance, I can’t drive. Do I care? Eh, not really. Walking and public transport work just fine. If I want to drive (which I begrudgingly guess I do…) I will have to get a car specially modified for me to be able to drive it one-handed. This is pretty much the entire reason why I haven’t bothered applying for my learner’s permit yet. I’m not buying a car before I even work out whether I can be bothered learning to drive, and yet there doesn’t seem to be an alternative.

What used to irritate me a lot when I was younger, but which isn’t much of a problem any more, is people assuming that I’m intellectually disabled. Most infuriating thing ever. It makes we want to punch people in the face. At the very least, I want to scream at them and demand to know just how many years spent living in a cave was required to create that level of ignorance. Assuming my mind is defective just because my arm is? How does that work?

But I know they’re not malicious and that these infuriating people actually think they’re being tolerant and understanding, so instead of punching them in the face, I politely steer the conversation to matters through which I can demonstrate my immense intelligence. I use lots of long words and ask something intellectual — usually something about foreign politics — and they’re usually too intellectually challenged themselves to understand what I’m talking about, and then they get flustered and ask stupid questions like, “Do you go to school????” I mean geez, of course not, you stupid people. These are the Dark Ages and my parents are still trying to track down the fairies who abducted their healthy child and replaced her with the demonspawn that is me. And demonspawn don’t attend school.

Once I even had this infuriating substitute teacher for PE who thought he was being really considerate by asking me, “Do you know how to throw a ball??”

I stared at him, dumbfounded, for a couple of seconds. “Yes,” I told him.

“Are you sure?” I nodded slowly, and he went on, “Hmm, well, just in case, let’s brush up on this, okay?”

So then he demonstrated to me how to throw a basketball. I couldn’t believe he was doing this. When he handed the ball over to me, and patronisingly said, “Now you have a go,” I waited for him to step back and then “accidentally” threw the ball into his leg. He confiscated the ball off me and decided I was incapable of participating in the class. Good times.

As I recall, I’m pretty sure that was around the same time I decided there was absolutely no point in me trying to participate in PE, and I refused to do so any more.

Being disabled has its advantages. Firstly, I was allowed to quietly drop PE. I explained that there was no point in me taking a class in which I could barely participate, and my PE teacher and coordinator and everyone agreed and for a year, I did not take PE. Then I got re-added to the class, and my new PE teacher insisted that I choose a sport to practise. It could be any sport I liked, but I had to choose something. At first I was annoyed, but then he suggested that I might like walking.

Secondly, I really don’t know how different a person I could be if not for this disability. For instance, when I was little I wouldn’t learn to walk, so I learned how to read and speak instead. Perhaps it’s possible that if I’d been learning to walk, I wouldn’t have been as interested in knowledge as I was, and wouldn’t have accumulated so many random facts in my head. I also tend to think my personality would have been completely different. When I was little I endured some bullying about my disability, but I was quick-witted and developed strategies to outsmart such bullies. This meant it was no fun to bully me — I actually remember one particularly stupid bully (four years younger than I was) throwing a tantrum about how I wasn’t getting upset and how it wasn’t fair — and no one bothered. But maybe, if I hadn’t had to hone my snark abilities during primary school, I’d be less predisposed to snarkiness now. Wouldn’t that be horrible?

Being disabled sometimes excuses me from the requirement of following certain social norms as well. If I can bear the thought of others thinking I’m intellectually disabled, I can sing along to my iPod and flash goofy smiles at strangers and everyone leaves me to skip along my merry way, figuring I don’t know any better than to act in such an abnormal way. Of course, I do. I just don’t care sometimes. I don’t try to use this as an excuse to ignore really important social norms, though, and I wouldn’t advocate doing so. We have to have some consideration for others’ delicate sensibilities.

To be honest, I don’t consider my disability to be a bad thing. It’s just part of who I am, and such an intrinsic part of who I am that I rarely bother mentioning it. That doesn’t mean I’ll take offence if others ask me about it, either. I would much rather people asked about my disability than ignorantly assume I’m intellectually disabled. It’s not like it’s a choice between two evils, either: I seriously don’t mind people asking. If you want to know, I’ll happily tell you. It’s not a horrific, shameful thing, it’s just… well, Klippel-Feil Syndrome.

See, I told you it didn’t make sense.

Grade six really was awesome, though. My best friend and I were determined to be different. Whatever everyone else did, we had to do the opposite. We were hyperactive and creative and we did what we wanted. We took an admirable attitude to everything we did: do everything you’re told to do, and do it to the best of your ability. I’m sure a lot of my teachers would appreciate it if I still had this attitude now.

They’re clearly not as inspiring as my grade six teacher, though. My grade six teacher was awesome. I mean, okay, so half our English work was about sport, and a lot of our other work was also about sport, and he was kind of sports-obsessed, and he liked growing horrid hairstyles (I still remember the moustache… and then the mullet!) to piss us off, and it was practically his life to make fun of students. Oh yeah, and then he had those hare-brained schemes about helping the community. But come on, it was ALL in good fun. And despite all of that he WAS awesome.

The most memorable of his hare-brained schemes was “save the grassy knoll”. Basically, there was this hill that had once been grassy. Then one day, a ton of gravel was dumped on it and the grass died.

My teacher decided it was my class’s duty to clean up the whole area for the benefit of others. This meant moving thousands of pieces of gravel, BY HAND.

Everyone else in my class thought this idea was the most horrible idea they’d ever heard. But like I said, my best friend and I were determined to be different. We decided to stand out from the crowd. “HELL YES, MOVING TONS OF GRAVEL BY HAND!” we cried. And we were determined to be the best gravel-movers there ever were.

It wasn’t the first time we volunteered for a task like that, either. Grade 5/6s at my school had two duties: bell duty, and bin duty. The former involved ringing the bell at the start and end of every class, and there was MASSIVE competition for who got control over that. EVERYONE wanted the authority to decide when classes began and ended. The latter chore involved carrying stinky rubbish bins between the bike shed and their proper locations before school, and vice versa after lunch, and NO ONE wanted to do that. Teachers usually had to force people against their will. But not my best friend and I; we volunteered.

Furthermore, we were determined to be the most efficient, cheerful bin monitors the school had ever seen. And we succeeded. The school was so overawed by our selflessness and our commitment to duty that they rewarded us with textas at a big assembly, so they could show off our selflessness and try to inspire everyone to be selfless like us. I don’t think it worked. Everyone else thought we were insane.

Returning to the story of “save the grassy knoll”, our teacher kept dropping subtle hints about how good it would be if people “saved the grassy knoll” in their own time, rather than just when it was compulsory. This gave my best friend an idea, and one lunchtime, we spent it trying to be the best grassy knoll savers there ever were. We worked in a frenzy, picking up sharp pieces of gravel as rapidly as possible and running them to the bin. We chatted and raced each other to see who could work fastest and laughed, and it was really great fun.

The only problem was that afterwards, we realised we’d managed to cut our hands on the gravel so badly that we were going to have trouble doing silent reading. So we explained ourselves to our teacher. “Well, we were saving the grassy knoll, and…”

Not that he minded, God no. Instead, he BEAMED with JOY. “REALLY?” he asked. “A hundred house points to each of you!”

At this, one of my classmates perked his head up. “We get a hundred house points just for saving the grassy knoll?”

“Not YOU, cretin. Only if you mutilate your hands, as these girls did, do you get a hundred house points!”

“Oh. I don’t think I’ll try it, then.”

Seriously, I’m not sure why all these memories came floating back so suddenly, but they did and now I just don’t feel right until I’ve rambled at length about them. Which I’ve now done, so yay! Mission accomplished.

It is pretty funny to compare my attitude then to my attitude now. If a teacher NOW tried to tell me it was my duty to move thousands of pieces of gravel by hand, or to drag around an army of rubbish bins, I would tell them they could dream on. IN FACT, even when I was SUPPOSED to be cleaning the school gym in detention, I refused.

It’s not that my positive attitude to such work is entirely gone. At school, our common room is trashed by lazy, inconsiderate fellow students all the time, and a few other people and I have taken it upon ourselves sometimes to force the room into some semblance of cleanliness. It’s done even though it’s a thankless task and it’s just going to be equally trashed the next day. It’s not really unpleasant either, although that’s mainly because it’s my choice. If I were being forced, I can see that I’d resent it.

So I don’t know what I’m nostalgic for, really. Maybe just the mad energy with which my best friend and I worked at times. Or maybe the days when the ideas of “selflessness” and “duty” didn’t make me dissolve into cynical laughter. Or maybe I just miss the fact that I never injure myself through selflessness any more…?

I’m familiar with this phenomenon of coming to appreciate the finer points of songs I initially loathed because it happens to me way too frequently. The main problem is, I listen to the radio each morning. Well, I guess that depends on your definition of “listen” — most of the time I don’t actually wake up when the radio turns on, but the music infiltrates my dreams and then I have singing-and-dancing extravaganzas in my mind. Anyway, the point is, I subject myself to popular music on a regular basis. The other point is, the radio station I listen to is very repetitive with its selection of popular music, so I’ll usually hear a song every single morning for several weeks until it stops being so popular and is supplanted by something else.

Occasionally, the radio plays a song I like. More often, it plays songs I think are pretty mediocre. Slightly less often, it plays songs I can’t tolerate. The kinds of songs that make me want to smash my radio, like I mentioned in the first paragraph. The ones that compel me to switch off my radio at any rate, only then my morning becomes silent, so I’d rather have musical accompaniment. Just… not when the music is that.

But the more it plays the exact same songs, the more I become desensitised to them. The songs I used to think were mediocre start to sound good. The songs that used to make me want to smash things start to have redeeming features. Don’t ask me to tell you what they are because I won’t be able to, but the song just starts to sound… okay. After a lot of repetition it may even start to sound, well, good.

Not because it actually is good, I hasten to add. And admittedly, none of the songs that have ingratiated themselves into my mind in this way are songs I love and listen to frequently. However, they do become songs I deem sufficiently good that I download them, rate them about three or four stars in iTunes, and allow them to be played occasionally.

Of course, none of that would really help you to indoctrinate me without the secondary piece of knowledge that I… get songs stuck in my head. At the drop of a hat. All the time. Which is kind of odd because come to think of it, I never see people dropping their hats. Was that idiom coined in an era in which there were National Hat-Dropping Championships or something? “Let’s see whose hat can make it to the ground the fastest”? No? Well, luckily for us, answering that question is really not crucial to this entry.

I’m pretty good at memorising the lyrics to songs. If I hear a song’s chorus even once — EVEN IN MY DREAM WHILE I’M SLEEPING — I’ll probably be able to sing it, or an approximation of it, for days afterwards.

What’s worse, I don’t actually watch what I’m thinking that closely a lot of the time and these lyrics can creep up on me unexpectedly. Like I’ll be making a cup of coffee and will break out into some song, and I’ll stop myself once I reach a line I don’t know and think, “So, uh, where on Earth have I heard that before?”

The answer is always: on the radio, in my sleep. I know this because the radio always plays it again the next morning when I’m awake.

I don’t know if you could actually indoctrinate me through song. Please don’t try it; I may have to punch you in the face. If you did, though, I think you’d probably find that:

1. You could force me to like any song you wanted if you made me listen to it often enough; and
2. I’d probably have memorised the most important lyrics before it got to that stage, and would be liable to burst out singing it at vulnerable moments.

…but perhaps I’m strange.

For a while I was dumbfounded. “What?!”

“Well, seeing as they’re all Americans, I thought I’d make everyone’s lives easier and just spell words their way.”

I spent the next ten minutes explaining that:

1. Americans are going to understand what the word “colour” means just fine, even if they don’t spell the word that way.
2. No, it is not even going to take them a second to “translate” the word. Do we need a second to translate the word “color”? No? Then they won’t either (unless they’re really, really sheltered I guess).
3. It is actually MORE bother to type “colour” then go back and delete the U, than simply to leave it there. And it doesn’t save the Americans any bother either, because as points #1 and #2 state, they’re going to know what the word means.
4. She didn’t even know the person she was typing the comment to was American. She was only guessing. For all she knew, this person came from one of the multitude of countries in which “colour” is spelt with a U, and then her efforts would have been completely counter-productive.

My sister was unimpressed and eventually retorted, “Why do you even care?!” Hmm. Good question.

I replied, “Because you’re not being very patriotic!”

…then she gigglesnorted at the idea that I would care about others’ lack of patriotism. I admit it may seem unlikely. But it’s not that I’m not patriotic, I’m just patriotic in a joking-around, inconsequential way. For instance, I refuse to pay attention to rugby because that’s not what good Victorians do. Victorians follow football. As it happens I don’t really follow football either, and even when I do my team is based in Sydney, but hey, at least I don’t follow rugby! (Besides, I don’t support the team I do because they’re based in Sydney. I support them because for generations it was family tradition to support the South Melbourne Swans, and even when they relocated the tradition lived on. So there.)

Okay, that wasn’t a very good example. But you know what is a good example? My dedication to using Australian English.

I’m Australian, and I don’t mind people knowing I’m Australian. I know Australia has a bad reputation in some circles, but the people who make up those circles should get over their ignorant delusions. Australia has some bad people, like any other country, but we also have some great people, like any other country. Perhaps admitting that your country has similar proportions of “good” and “bad” people to other countries is a patriotism fail in itself, but whatever. The point is, Australia is my country. Whether or not it’s better or worse than anywhere else is irrelevant, because it’s mine.

I was born and raised here, so I speak and am literate in Australian English. I don’t see any reason to use any other form of English. Why? Anyone who can understand English can understand Australian English. Perhaps not Strine, but Strine is something completely different and I don’t really understand it myself. Australian English is spelling words the British way, unless the word is “program”, and using a few words that might not be used in other countries, like “whinge” or “bludge” (which both got underlined in red in my browser, by the way — so much for having an Australian English dictionary). If someone is really worried that an Australianism won’t be understood, they can use a different word.

Refusing to use the language you’ve been raised to speak strikes me as taking cultural cringe too far. Fair enough if you want to cringe against the yobbo stereotype — the anti-intellectual, anti-culture, sports-obsessed, possibly violent drunkard — or more seriously, against the racist aspects of our history. But our language? Why? What’s wrong with it?

It’s not that Australian English is any better than any other form of English. But it’s ours, it’s legitimate, and we should use it.

Just to be clear, my sister’s response doesn’t seem to have been cultural cringe. She actually changed the word she’d typed back to “colour” not long into my ten-minute explanation, realising how utterly pointless it was to have changed it the first time. Maybe it was equally pointless to change it back, but what does that matter? At least it was patriotic, in an inconsequential way.

I’ve been using Google Chrome for the past few weeks, after several years of being a devoted Firefox user. I do like Firefox, but there comes a point at which even my lazy self won’t tolerate having all my preferences wiped at random when my laptop crashes. It crashes every day! My preferences didn’t get wiped every day, but even if they were only wiped 5% of the time, that’s once every three weeks. It simply wouldn’t do.

In the hope that Google Chrome would more reliably store my settings, I decided to try it out. I haven’t decided whether or not it’s an acceptable replacement for Firefox (I haven’t even set it as my default browser), but in certain regards it’s much better. It has not once deleted all my preferences, for instance. Unfortunately, there are also ways in which it really does not match up…

The first problem I had with Chrome was with its tabs. If I click a tab and move my cursor too fast, that tab becomes a new window. Worse, it is really hard to put the tab back where it belongs. It becomes a game: can you find the magical pixel over which you must drag your new window to make it go back? If not, you lose! (It’s kind of a self-explanatory game.) Seriously though, this makes any task that involves frequently switching between tabs (e.g. reading the news) intimidating. I don’t want to play that game!

The second problem I have with Chrome is that (my installation of) Chrome is really lazy about loading pages. It’s like it goes, “Man, this page takes more than a second to load? I’m out!” And then it throws up some error page like, “Are you sure this page even exists? I don’t think it exists. How about you find something else to read?”

Blocking ads in Chrome isn’t very easy, certainly not like Firefox where all you have to do is download one extension. Blocking ads in Chrome is hard work. You have to download some extra program called Privoxy which allows you to create something like a firewall between you and the world. And rather than blocking politically sensitive information, you can block ads! (Well, don’t get me wrong, you can block politically sensitive information too. However, seeing as it’s pretty much pointless to block such information from YOURSELF, a better use of this program is to block ads.)

Unfortunately, I’m unconvinced of this way’s efficacy. Sure, it blocks ads. However, it’s not very straightforward to set up. The first time I tried it, I managed to block the entire Internet from myself. (Evidently I fixed it.) The second time I tried it, everything loaded really slowly. Since my Chrome is hardly “the little browser that could”, I ended up with a lot of half-loaded, imageless pages. It then suddenly sped up. I guess right at this minute, this solution is working. These difficulties don’t make me feel particularly secure, though.

Why do I stick with Chrome then, despite all these annoyances? Well, I’m not totally sure I’m going to, but here’s why I have so far:

1. It hasn’t once deleted my settings!
2. The browser’s design is very minimalistic, and I like it.
3. I like the way each tab is split into a separate process. In Firefox, one tab would hang and the entire browser would become unusable. In Chrome, one tab hangs and I can kill it — and even if I kill it, I can reload it to retry the exact same page.
4. Firefox would also have issues where I’d close it, but get told that it was still running when I tried to reopen it the following day. Then I have to kill the process from the task manager, which is an unnecessary chore I shouldn’t have to do. Chrome doesn’t do this.

So I’m still a little undecided, but I’m sticking with Chrome for now. I mean, I never agreed to that old TOS which would have handed Google permission to use anything I typed in Chrome in any way it saw fit (or whatever that crazy thing said), so there’s no reason not to, right?

For everyone wandering past and contemplating commenting (ha, or not), here’s a question for you. Which browser do you use, and why?

I’m so sick of hearing about him. He died yesterday morning, my time, so I first heard about his death on the radio. I listen to the radio for the music, not for inane celebrity chatter nor for ads, and the sudden news of Michael Jackson’s death lead to, it seemed, all music being pulled from the radio. Except music by Michael Jackson. But even that was played only sparingly.

Pretty much the entire Internet seemed ablaze with Michael Jackson discussion, and seemingly none of the 100+ people I saw whining about this death seemed to realise they weren’t being very original. At least ten people’s statuses on Facebook included the phrase, “RIP MJ”. On the rare occasion someone posted a non-Jackson-related status, people would comment, “I don’t believe you, you didn’t write RIP MJ!” My friends on LiveJournal wrote about it. People on forums kept discussing it. The news, which I like to follow, was largely replaced by Michael Jackson tributes.

I did not see a single person saying, “I do not care.” I’m guessing my fellow uncaring people just chose not to get involved, as I did. After all, if there are 100+ people whining about the untimely death of someone they don’t know, you’re not going to get anywhere logically pointing out they have no reason to be upset. Logic and celebrity worship are worlds apart. You can’t try to make them mix.

In the end I turned off my laptop and tried to find something else to do. There was nothing else to do so this was a bit of a dud move. This morning I returned to the Internet, tried again to read the news… only to find it still swamped with Michael Jackson tribute pages. Oh my God people, shut up.

I don’t care about Michael Jackson’s death. I could not care less about Michael Jackson’s death. So far as I can see, he was a creepy man who revelled in his insanity and made passable music years and years ago. I can see that his death would be disappointing to anyone who was planning to see him in concert in the near future, and I can see that it would be upsetting to his friends and family. Guess what — none of those people are me. If I feel like listening to a Jackson song — and I never do, it’s not my kind of music — I’ll listen to an MP3. MP3s of his music exist whether or not he’s dead or alive. There is no reason I should be upset that he’s dead. How does Jackson’s life or lack thereof affect me? (I mean, apart from the resultant frenzy being so irritating that I’m writing about it.)

Even stranger is when people cost comments about being “so angry” about the “insensitivity” of people who don’t care about Jackson’s death. I mean, it’s one thing to be upset about the death of a creepy individual you never met. But being upset about others’ failure to be upset? I find that a little weird.

So many people die every single day, and yes, many of those deaths are untimely just like Michael Jackson’s. We can’t care about all of these people’s deaths — everyone would be depressed all the time. Why is this death anything special? Just because Michael Jackson is ~famous~? How is that a reason to care?

I thought I was slowly recovering from that illness. By Monday morning I could move around relatively freely, so I was able to go to school. This was a good thing, because I had two SACs this week that had to be done this week on pain of a $40 fine from VCAA. So I did them. But I think my illness got worse.

I currently have this unbearable, implacable cough. It’s like I’m trying to cough up something, but that “something” is every internal organ in my torso. Once I start coughing, it’s virtually impossible for me to stop. I have to brace my whole body, tensing every muscle I have, to force myself not to cough (or breathe). It’s painful. I haven’t slept well because I keep waking up and coughing in the night, leading to coughing fits and the like. I haven’t eaten well because I feel nauseous and for several days I lost almost all sense of taste.

This cough seems only to be getting worse, so I’ll have to see a doctor tomorrow, not go to school. But my SACs are done with anyway, so I don’t have to feel guilty. I hope I did well on them but to be honest, right this second I care more about getting over this illness.