Pictures, pictures, pictures. I've been doing a lot of photography lately, but I have nothing to DO with it. I love taking them, viewing them, editing them, printing them, touching them, but then it's done. After the whole creative process I end up with a lovely tiff and nothing to do with it. It's like reading a book that you're really really super into and can't wait to get to the next page, only to find out it ends really badly and randomly without resolving anything. So I stop taking them because they're just sitting around filling up my hard drive. And I *really* want to sink another $300 into my desktop and make a media server with a lovely 750 gigs of RAID 1, but it just doesn't seem… worth it. Not much does these days, I guess. I've started punting most of my 042 psets as soon as I found out it doesn't count against your grade. Thank god I do well on tests, though that may change now that I'm not doing the work. It scares me to think I could become like Dave. He makes me so…. frustrated! He just whines and whines and cries about all the terrible things in his life, but doesn't DO anything about it. I've always been a bit of a copy-cat with people I care about… Stealing jokes, laughs, mannerisms, catch-phrases, habits. I think his laziness and apathy for school is sinking into me, which is a thought I do NOT like at all. It's so hard to think about the future right now. So hard to know what's going on in the present I can't spare time to look ahead. I'm looking forward to the summer, if only because it brings change and gives me a new chance. It's strange, though. I get all bent up on myself and feel bad about not doing much and not having a lot to show off or staying in my room forever, but I could blow the average person away with what I do every day. Hell, I blow plenty of people away who are well above average… Bah. Doesn't exactly make me feel better. Just one more thing to deal with, one more awkward compliment to blush and try to take happily. One more push up the pedestal, one more shove away from the rest of the world. You know how people say it's lonely at the top? They're always portrayed as bastards, those who say it. You know, rich, powerful, egotistical people who belt out the phrase with a fat sarcastic smile on their face as they stare out at their empire or their bank account or whatever it is they've climbed to the top of. That's not what it means though, really. The terrible thing about Gaussian distributions is someone's got to be on the ends. If only things like intelligence, beauty, bravery, were circular instead of linear… No extremes, no average, no normal. All the same distant from one central point, all different but equal. Because all the people in the middle get to look at those below them and get that tingly sense of schadenfreude, and look above them and get riled up, jealous, have something to want, aim for, envy. But someone's got to be on the ends. Someone's got to be beat down by the man, and someone's got to so far above everyone they can't see the bottom. They may seem happy and confident and secure in their position, but that's because you can only see them from the bottom. They're just the same as everyone else in the pile, only a few standard deviations away from the mean. You see the broad shoes, the strong chins, the firm secure stance. You can't see the fear on their faces, the sweat on their brows, the lines and grey hair they developed on their way to the top. Because in a true Gaussian curve, the people at the far end have the furthest to fall.