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Pardon my bluntness, but Cari, babe.... NO ONE deserves to be treated that way and that little poo eater needs to be punished. You can punish him without him knowing it was you. Go to your school counselor and tell him/her EVERY thing. Show him/her the yearbook. The little a** wipe could go to jail for that kind of s**t. I don't ******** around with sexual harassment and neither should you. You're a STRONG, INDEPENDENT young woman. Start acting like it. Stand up for yourself. Make it clear you DON'T put up with s**t like that. And if your "friends" think less of you for standing up for yourself, then they're not really your friends. You should have friends who beleive in the same kind of justice and morals that you do!

[/end rant]

I love you, Cairi...

Well...really good friends know the difference timing makes. I need a good point and laugh every now and then, so I don't get a big head.

And I like my friends with different morals than my own, sometimes--it can be a real treat to see something from another person's view--in fact, I've had that very thing said about me before.

Will update on my life, later--
~Andrew

Today was a good day. I barely saw Cliff. It was the last day of highschool for my friends sad, but inevitable. We all stayed afterschool and hung out. Then Matt agreed to give me a ride home. He had to run some errans first which ended up taking like an hour and a half. I wasn't complaining on the inside, but of course I had to act annoyed at every new thing that popped up. wink I'm going to miss this. I wish they could stay in highschool one more year at least.

And ruin my good standing, no way. Plus I think I would notice when they called me to hang out. ~Huh, who are you? No you are in my locker. What? Ahhh....~ No, I'm just going to have to acquire new friends or just hang with my not so close friends in school.

yeah, school does kinda suck in that way...

but hey, we had to take the ubiscut bs here. it was like 2 hours a day for a whole damn week. but once you took it you didn't have to take it again, which was a plus so the 2 years after (since you take it as a sophomore) you get to sleep in during that week. Then there's the ACT, phhh. stupid people always giving us tests and s*** like we don't do that much anyway. College is harder, you don't pass you still have to pay bookoo bucks. Plus you pay like $300 a semester for books, and that's for 4 classes and they're used too. The teachers aren't always there at the same time every day or all day so if you need outside help you have to go to one of the workshops or set up an appointment with the teacher.

I hated my English teacher, she was good and we did learn a lot, but she was so punctual. If you had the staple on your essays going the wrong way she'd dock you points. We had to do like 5 drafts for each essay and I think we had like 4 or 5 essays within a matter of 4 months. My math teacher, ugh god, did everything right out of the book, and graded on completion, not right or wrong, so I didn't know if i got the answer right or not, so come the tests we had I just bombed them.

Any way, my work is going to put me in electronics instead of being a cashier, it's a 50 cent raise up front and if it goes well another 50 cents afterwards. I'm still not too happy there right now but the people are being nicer, our main electronics guy was on his break while I was on lunch and he was talking to me about the switch and he said "Having you up front isn't doing you justice," which was a complete compliment that made me happy. It's true, I just chose cashier cause it was open easy, and a job.

They're going to swap me and this other guy (thats irritating them right now rofl ). I swear he has A.D.D. cause it's hard for him to focus on one thing at a time, even though some of us multi task, we still get it done, but it takes him twice the time. So right now I'm neutral with them, we'll have to see how the switch goes.

/end rant (sorry for the long post, i haven't posted in a while anyway)

~shadow

edit: i have 3 classes this semester, and we're paying like $1,350, they charge by credit hours and for the semester I have 12, which is full time, which I have to be thanks to my dads irritating insurance.

Posted on Facebook!
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"Changes (Fate, Sacrifice, and Identity)"
So much has changed, and yet, nothing at all. Graduation has come and gone, leaving a hole in my heart where high school used to be. I've seen friends here and there, joined Facebook and cut my hair (two things far too long put off), shed tears and written poetry.

Still, it feels sometimes like nothing has changed. I still worry about school, although those worries are now more fiscal than academic. I worry about friends, and more than ever before, my heart is filled to bursting with feelings of joy and sorrow, bitterness and sweetness, longing and apprehension, numbness and hypersensitivity--and always the feeling of being on the cusp of life.

When I think of all the people who I care about so much, and might never see again, melancholy washes over me in tides of bittersweetness. I've had a fight with one of my closest friends, and pain, guilt, and inevitability stab me in turns. I am tortured by my memories, but am also assuaged: perhaps in simply knowing these people--in learning to love them and accept their love--I can be healed. Perhaps the pain of my memories is like stinging seawater on a scrape. Or perhaps...perhaps it is just another reminder of my mortality. Only human. Too human.

Still, there is a redemptive quality to all of this, a cleansing that accompanies this harsh cutting. In the story of the phoenix, it must be immersed in fire before it can be reborn. In the story of the butterfly, it had isolation to grow its wings and dye its colors into them. Perhaps then, the pain and the loneliness will give way to fated change, where hopes and dreams rise gently like the pink light of dawn into the bleak, doubting, lightless world. Maybe it's not too late for Drew to become Andrew.

I think it must be in these possibilities and opportunities that our golden threads can truly shine--that the clouds reveal their silver lining to us. In the waning days of my childhood, the new day of my adulthood begins. Sad as it may seem, the world has turned the page on Drew, and now Andrew must begin. I accept the sentence--the old must give way to the new.

But then, you probably know what it means to sacrifice who you are for who you must become. Even if you won't admit it, even to yourself, there it is. Like virtues in the background, like the distant light of fate peeping through the darkness to bring visions of the future, direction to the lost, answers to those who dare to look upwards--there it is.

And so I see it, gleaming in the distance, and thus I begin my journey--not of space and time, which I have a good deal of--but a journey of the spirit and the self.

So much has changed, and nothing at all. But still more must change if we expect anything to get better. Mahatma Ghandi famously said, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." And so I must be, too. A tool for only that greatest virtue to use--that the world might keep turning, and tomorrow might be a better day. This is the nature of sacrifice--that one must give up something precious to something even more precious, with no ideas of personal reward.

I wonder how many people I will have confused without meaning to, and how many others will feel shivers of knowledge on their skin as they read this. Will another pair of eyes meet mine as I stare up to the waning of the full moon?

Only time will tell.

Love & Vale,
~Andrew

So, last night the guy I've been seeing for the last two moths or so and my friend Charlene and I were hanging out.

The three of us went out to dinner, and while we were sitting together up on the Spirit Catcher by the lake, he reads the last page or so from Edgar Allen Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum

Then he pulls out this little box and he whispers "Candies, do you want to be with me forever?" Then he opened the box, and there was this beautiful little silver ring. What else could I say but "of course... Forever and ever!"

So now, I'm engaged! I just had to share that, I'm so happy!