We'll destroy this world for you

From Space Dementia! A very... haunting, ominous space-rockish kind of song. I used to not like it much except for the piano parts at the beginning... but I love it now! That's always the case with Muse, it seems.

School has become way too stressful. The only classes I have A's in are French III and possibly AP psychology... and physics (whoa I almost wrote "psychics" for a moment there!). Like... I'm epically failing in AP US, pre-calc (REGULAR!! For goodness' sake! It's all stupid, careless mistakes that weigh me down, 'cause I know the material! That would be the first.....), and AP chem. Actually I really like AP chem (the class) but... it's always tragic when you expect to do better than in actuality. I don't think a 0 out of----- I don't even know, 15? 20? is considered good... at all. Obviously.

But I'm not going to drop any APs!! I can't. I've already started it and I want to finish. Time is all I need... That's why I must must must do well or otherwise there will be disaster.

I've been procrastinating on my psychology homework with Polyvore secret sets for over a hour now.... :p

http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/profile?id=1004862

79 secrets since I made the secrets account 27 days ago. Wooooow. That's pretty amazing, and surreal (I think that's my new word)!!! It must feel so good for the people to liberate their secret to the world, anonmyously. I think the anonmynity is the best part :D

"H8
IS THE ONE FOR ME
YOU GIVE ME ALL I NEED
AND HELP ME CO-EXIST
WITH THE CHILLLLL

YOU MAKE ME SICK
'CAUSE I ADORE YOU SO
I LOVE ALL THE DIRTY TRICKS
AND TWISTED GAMES
YOU PLAY ON ME

SPACE DEMENTIA
IN YOUR EYES
AND PEACE WILL ARISE
AND TEAR US APART
AND MAKE US MEANINGLESS
AGAIN

YOU MAKE US WANNA DIE
I'D CUT YOUR NAME ON MY HEART
WE'LL DESTROY THIS WORLD FOR YOU
I KNOW YOU WANT ME TO
FEEL YOUR PAIN....

OOOOH..."

It's stuck in my head. And that piano melody tittering and playing over and over again... Caps Lock is fun for capital letters, btw!

Most Amazing Night Ever!!!

"Wow, that was so goooood!!!!!!!!!"

That was all me and my friend could say after the Muse/U2 concert. Literally.

The weather was a gorgeous autumn day... Like crisp, with a slight breeze... And we started off with total panic after we realised my friend didn't have her ticket! So long story short, I had to figure out my dad's password to recover the tickets online. What a frenzy... The day was filled with amusing incidents though :D Like when we finally got to FedExField, we walked out of the car and were in awe of the huuuge stadium... so much so that we forgot our tickets! :p But I remembered. Thank goodness!

Muse was the supporting act, and we had to wait for about... a hour before they finally came on. It was an open stadium so we could see the cotton-candy-coloured skies above before it was finally dark, and the moon was overhead. So beautiful... I felt so at peace.

And when they finally came, I was so excited!!!! Like... wow. It's THEM!!! In person!! Matthew Bellamy, and everyone! Knights of Cydonia was first, and then... they played Hysteria, Supermassive Black Hole, Starlight, Uprising, United States of Eurasia, Plug in Baby... I feel like I'm missing something... Oh well. It was terribly short, I thought, but they sounded EXACTLY like their CD recordings/music videos!! (give or take a few extra guitar riffs) Wow. They're great live!! Their lighting and special effects on the big screen were reeeeaaaallllyyyy nice. Esp. on Starlight! All these psychedelic swirls... It was over way too soon >.< It'd be nice to see them on their own headlining tour sometime!

Then was U2!! We actually bumped into our pastor's wife (but we didn't see the pastor...) and another couple from Church there. It was pretty surreal! I wonder what they thought of Muse. But it was so funny, 'cause we went out to buy French fries and when we came back, the previously relatively empty stadium (I guess not alot of people know about Muse, still, in the U.S...) was FULL. Like every seat PACKED!! Wow. What a transformation!

U2 was... absolutely phenonmenal. I mean, I never really listened to their music prior to the concert but I was expecting to be blown away and coverted to a fan :D Bono is so inspirational. There was this rocket-like thing that glowed and looked really pretty, like a castle, in my opinion. And there were jets of lights right above our heads. The special effects are so nice. And there's this awesome screen with the lights show... My favourite effect was the disco-y lights scattered, lighting up on everyone. And then the "Milky Way" with everyone waving their cell phones in the darkness. And the music... wow. It ranges from like... peaceful to motivational to rock. And Bono gives inspirational mini-speeches... The whole night was just amazing. I wish I could do this every year for my birthday! :D

It was about 2 a.m. when we got home... A sleepover on a school night 'cause it was way too late to drive back to my house.

I felt like falling asleep in every single one of my classes today... but it was so worth it.
But now yesterday feels like so long ago..... Like I can't believe it happened! Once you're out of the stadium, the magicness disappears and you feel so surreal... Like "Did that really just happen??" Aha.

That's one life goal complete :)

If I could rearrange the periodic table...

I would put Iodine and Uranium together.
(I and U! Like I love you... me and you together... get it?)
A chemistry joke from Cat... lol.

Music list :)

1. "Sink Or Swim" ~Tyrone Wells
2. "1234 asIAN remix" ~Feist
3. "Sing For Absolution (Acoustic)" ~Muse
4. "Hometown Glory" ~ADELE
5. "Space Dementia" ~Muse
6. "The Outside" ~Taylor Swift
7. "Inseparable" ~Jonas Brothers
8. "Bulletproof" ~La Roux
9. "Morning Lullabies" ~Ingrid Michaelson
10. "If I Talk To God ~The Last Goodnight

I'll add the YouTube links later..... AP chem and history calls. It's all so confusing... I feel like I can't even get the easiest labs right, but I'm clearly doing all the calculations accurately!! So odd >.< But...

The Muse concert is in THREE days!!!!!!!!! :D I'm so excited!!!!

"Kamikazi airplanes in the sky
Are we going down or will we fly?"

I love that line from "Sink Or Swim." Thanks Cat!

"I like it in the city when two worlds collide
You get the people and the government
Everybody taking different sides."

"Even when we're miles and miles apart
You're still holding all of my heart..."

Crunch crunch crunch

I'm eating a Honeycrisp apple and it's sooo good!!! Hence the "crunch crunch crunch."

So hyper!!!!! I don't think I'll do anything tonight, no homework at all! And I failed two pre-calc quizzes, but oh well! Like I don't even caaare... Afterwards I remembered EVERYTHING about the unit circle, though, so it was like... "Darn!! If only I knew that like 5 minutes ago!" But whatever.

I want to make some friendship bracelets for people... and read 1986... I mean 84... My friend gave me a doll I really liked since forever! And these little butterfly pins made out of feathers. They're painted to look like butterflies :D And the wrapping paper Cat gave me also had butterflies on it... aha. And my A+ essay was also on butterflies! Tis a butterfly streakkk.

A hour goes by REALLY fast when you're talking over the phone.
I wish time could slow down! I hope I didn't make you miss your breakfast!! >.<
Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes!!!!

First day of being 17, 364 days left until 18... Oh my gosh that is scary!
I liked being 15.
Oh, today's the first day of autumn!!! On my birthday! :D That happens. I feel special

Dix-sept ans!!!

Oh my goodness.

So at 12:00 a.m. today, I turned 17! Is that surreal or whaat? I feel pretty old now x) But my friends were all very lovely and gave me gifts! Aaaw.

The rainbow cupcakes and brownies turned out good, and I ended up giving brownies to everyone in my AP chem class 'cause I felt bad since I was only giving it to my friends... My teacher even set aside time for us to eat even though we're never supposed to eat in that class :D Awesomeee. Perhaps my rainbow cupcake will convince her to not fail me on our massive, epic-ly hard test on Thursday!

Z pizza + Starbucks possibly tonight...
And phone calls! :D

Love is our resistance

^The new Muse album isn't -that- bad. Which is good. But definitely inferior to Black Holes & Revelations!! Nothing beats that :p "Resistance" is really 1984-esque. Like I can just picture it as being the soundtrack to the book or something. Annnd... I can't get "I Belong To You (+Mon Cœur S’ouvre À Ta Voix) out of my head... "I've travelled half the world the say/I belong to you." Exogenesis: Symphony Part II (Cross Pollination) is the best of the symphony in my opinion. It's magical! But enough about that.

Today was a great day! The weather is sooo sunny and wonderful, and my friend came over afterschool and we walked around in the Sunshine Circle. And later I took pictures of these really pretty flowers. They were all bathed in sunshine and looking so lovely! So colourful and nice... It reminded me of the Alice in Wonderland photo shoot I had, for some reason. Probably just the nice weather!

And I tried orange marmalade for the first time today. My dad's trying to get us to try something new every week. And starfruit!! It reminds me of someone :D But I don't know how to eat it... lol.

So today my friend told me that out of all the AP lang classes, there were only two people who got perfect A's on their essay... And guess who?? I was one of them!!! :D And our teacher read my essay to the class and at the end, everyone was clapping.... It was a bit embarrassing, but wow! I can't believe that my teacher thought it was that good >.< Actually, he said the language was really beautiful, but he didn't quite understand the end at all... Aha. Oh well. Invincible!!

And now I have to bake rainbow cupcakes/brownies for tomorrow.
I don't even have that much hw!!! Yayness. I guess I'll just be reading 1984 and making friendship bracelets tonight.

MERCI BEAUCOUP :D

Hey!
Thank you so much for the birthday wishes, my special friend!!
And I seriously can't believe that it's come this soon... like just two weeks ago I thought my birthday was in the distant future! But time flies.

I'm actually getting apples instead of cake, but it's a long story so I will be telling you in our telephone conversation. And it's nice of you to compliment my baking skills so graciously :p I'm not -that- good!

Together we're INVINCIBLE! :D
I love that video, btw! But I remember I had it on my iPod, but I wanted to watch it and couldn't find it... I have to re-upload it!
And ick, ham. It is quite disgusting, even though Ponyo loves it. Oh well, I forgive her 'cause she's so cute!
Thanks again for everything! And everything you wrote made me smile.
Together foreverrrrr!
Today felt like my birthday, even though it wasn't... Aha.
Maybe it's because of your birthday wishes! But it's okay.
Last day of being 16.
I should wake up at 11:59 p.m. and post something :p
Hello, goodbye.
"I feel like I really ought to thank somebody/So I ought to thank you/Thank you thank you thank you/Thank yoooou." ~Nonpareil of Favour (of Montreal)

Mille neuf cents quatre-vingt-quatre

I finally get to talk to you, but it was merely for ten minutes.
Sometimes I feel so guilty for waking people up so early just so I can talk to them... It's so selfish of me. But I wake up at like 7 on weekends, so... I'm just weird.

Here's my butterflies essay, but it's pretty mediocre... I only like a few lines... And why is the font so ridiculous big and bizarre?? :( "Each one so fragile and prone to accidents, flying in a looking-glass world of disaster."

The end was inspired by something my friend said about Kurt's death being a brilliant end to his amazing persona... Lol. It's actually kinda appropriate though :)

A blur of dotted yellow wings in a field of hydrangeas. The most subtle flutter, so small, it makes one wonder if it had ever been there at all. Butterflies are a subject of wonder in the natural world. Such tiny, delicate creatures living in a perilous jungle filled with predators… A butterfly’s wings are transparent, covered with shimmering, iridescent scales. They belong to the Lepidoptera family, which means scale wing. Each shingle is filled with colour and ultraviolet patterns that cannot be seen by the human eye. The delicate scales can be held by a human being, but the more fragile darlings may die at the infinitesimal caress of a hand. Butterfly wings have 125,000 scales per square inch. Think about that in relation to humans, who have about 100 hairs per square inch on their head. Butterflies can carry 50 times their own body weight. Imagine a microscopic butterfly, flying along to the nearest flower with 50 other butterflies on its back. Each butterfly is born as an egg, then transforms to a larva, pupa, and finally, an adult. The metamorphosis process is arduous and painful as the butterfly forms its organs and body from a bound cocoon. When they first emerge from their chrysalis, their wings are more delicate than ever, and terribly wet and wrinkled. It must then hang upside down to pump blood into its wings to inflate them. The paper-thin wings must be completely dry before butterflies can fly. If the wings are torn, there is no repair. Free-falling from the heavens above, stumbling amidst the brilliant blue skies, and finally crashing to the ground with a halt.

Butterflies are all cold-blooded; they depend on the sun for warmth so they can fly. If their body temperature is less than 86 degrees, say farewell to flying… Death will be greeting them at the door. Imagine a cold winter night, when soft snow flurries gently fall to the ground. While children are rejoicing over the lack of school, think of the butterflies that may be freezing to death. A poor little thing, lying still on the side of a road, hidden by the frostbitten grass. Butterflies weigh as much as two rose petals, but inside their compact bodies is the ability to travel thousands of miles. Adult butterflies don’t eat; they only drink. Yet they are filled with energy to flutter their miniature statures around the world. Their life span is quite short, ranging from three days to forty days. The occasional butterfly can survive for ten months. Perhaps the next time you’re walking, there will be some butterflies that magically appear in your path: small brownish skipperlings, cobalt-blue gossamer-wings, glitter-dusted elfins, majestic monarchs, papilionidae swallowtails, buttercup-yellow sulphurs, magenta-covered checkerspots, metalmarks and tortoiseshells. Each one so fragile and prone to accidents, flying in a looking-glass world of disaster. All living beings are. We yearn to have wings to fly, like those precious butterflies.

We are so breakable, the casual events of everyday life shattering our weak and vulnerable wings. They have just begun to grow, one’s self-confidence and independence emerging from the cracks, when a sudden event can bring the world crashing down. Someone special leaving for two years, the words “Did you hear about her?” whispered softly as cruel rumours, a divorce, the slow but inevitable drift between friends… Kids often dream of flying when they’re young, and many still do. Dreaming of sprouting wings to fly out of this place, to soar far, far away, even if they don’t know where they’re going or what the future holds. From being in a cocoon to the final stages of metamorphosis, coming out of that shell is like saying “Hello” to growing up, leaving behind a world of innocence. “It’s better to burn out than fade away,” Kurt Cobain says. To die, to be humiliated, to be embarrassed, to feel the pains of growing up----- wouldn’t it be all worth it if only we could touch the skies above for just a nanosecond, and race towards the galaxies with exuberance and recklessness? As the feeble butterfly struggles to get up after its wings have been snapped in half, its death marks the final, brilliant stroke on a painting, a masterpiece. It, like we, have learned to fly, if only for a moment.

Winston and Julia. 1984.

"Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no question that she had done it intentionally. It was something small and flat. As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of paper folded into a square... He readjusted his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work toward him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting:

I love you.

(95).

Après moi

Since I can't text to save my life on a cell phone (I'm terrible with cell phones... and I never text!), I've been using the "Alpha" key on my calculator :D What can I say? I'm bored.

It's fun to figure out how to type smiley faces.
And hearts.

I saw this guy that I kept on seeing last year with orange-bleached hair. This year he has blonde streaks. He looked quite the part of Sid Vicious (it's like the American version... maybe he and Taiwanese Sid look-alike can be friends!), wearing alot of chains/chokers and all black... these gothic bondage-y pants? Hmm. Then I saw this Whasian guy who always has the coolest hair. Like... it used to be all spiked up, then it was normal, now it's like... poof! With wax in it, I think? It always looks nice, anyways.

I think I'm actually figuring out how to make cool friendship bracelet patterns. Hurray!
Thinking of someone special.
Tu es plus léger que l'air, libre comme l'air! Tu as l'air chouette avec ta chemise de Rolling Stones...
:)

Maybe I should take your name out, if you mind at all...... but I don't care at the momenttttt :D Hope you don't mind x



Je veux sourir tous les jours quand je suis près de toi.

Butterfly Hearts

I haven't spoken to you in five days.
It seems like a bit.

We read this in English and our assignment is to mimic this essay... Like, present a natural fact and then led in to a mephator about life... My first thought was to do butterflies/bats, and then supermassive black holes. But the black holes didn't work out (it just didn't flow), so I'm doing butterflies now. But it's so terrible! I like the idea, but it never turns out the way you want. Maybe I'll post it here sometime so people can critique it :O



Joyas Voladoras
by Brian Doyle

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Woooow.
I thought the ending was good...
And did you know that butterflies only weigh as much as two rose petals?
Infinitesimal is a cool word :D

Autumn dreams

The weather is so beautiful outside I just want to take a really reeeeally long walk. It's a bit warm today, but still really sunny and nice.

I've been making friendship bracelets again. Ever since I learned The Secret Of Friendship Bracelet Making, my bracelets have been alot better! :D The secret is....







...tie two knots for every forward knot! :) Then the bracelet doesn't curl and ends up looking really niiiice. Yay! I think I actually discovered this while bored to death on the airplane to Beijing..... But I seriously have no clue how to read those knot diagrams that teach you how to make cool patterns!! Like this peace sign one....... http://www.friendship-bracelets.net/pattern.php?id=1425 and http://www.friendship-bracelets.net/pattern.php?id=2520 (Bob Marley colours!!!) I can only do the step-by-step ones.

My bus is way too overcrowded in the morning AND in the afternoon! It's always three to a seat, although the nice thing is everyone is squashed so close together, it's a like a bridge of people! So you won't fall down when the bus makes a crazy turn or anything like that!

I can't believe next week is my birthday. Time is flying by now...!!
I love drawing jewellery and watches on my arm with coloured pens. It makes school fun :D

"We're all quite mad, you'll fit right in."

It's such a shame my cell phone doesn't get long-distance calling. My dad says it's because our phone plan only allows for two cell phones to have the long-distance calling ability. Pfft. Maybe I'll just steal my dad's phone :p

9/9/09

^So cool, right??

So school started yesterday and it seems to be dragging on... Terribly long. But I looove my AP psychology class and teacher!! It's about the most exciting thing ever :D

Quote of the day from my AP US class: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." ~Carl Sagan

I wish!!

So there's like alot of posters in my psychology classroom. Of Montreal, Radiohead (my teacher's favourite band apparently!), A Clockwork Orange, and... Pink Freud! Lol, that made me laugh. And so far I'm not drowning in homework! Hurraaaay.

I wonder why it's so cold at school. It's ridiculous! Maybe they're trying to freeze us all. And I heard my debate coach is terrorising his psychology class :p

Bored of school alreadddyyyyyy...

Reply To "From A Facebook Note"

Those terribly annoying phone lines are going to surrender tomorrow because we're invincible!!

Everything you wrote has totally made my day (or night, rather). Thank you :)

And you treat me awesomely... No arguments there. Paris and everything will happen most definitely! And then one day I'll open up a bakery there!

"There's no one like you in the universe."

I love you! :D

"Imagination is the best way to say, "Fuck you!" to reality

^I found that quote whilst making sets on Polyvore! Sorry for the vulgarity, but I thought it was amusing. And quite true ;D

Imagination by MissWonderlander on Polyvore.com

It's funny how after running for 40 minutes straight while blasting your iPod, you feel so much better.

Today was so hectic, ranging from euphoria to total hysterical giggles to frustration. My friend just discovered a webcam-thing called YouCam on her computer (after she's had it for like three years... aha) and we were messing around with it. It's like you can make silly faces and put in special effects. Some look like you're in Alice's world and through the looking glass. Pretty trippy and colourful! The funniest part was making up voices for these adorable talking animals. My favourite was the lion plushie, which reminded me of Butter Lion. So cute :)

I can't add text on Polyvore anymore for some reason, and that upsets me... But I'm spreading the addiction of making these online collages. Aha...

Autumn is here and I love it so much! The weather is absolutely gorgeous and lovely. I want it to stay like this foreverrrrr... I'd like to go on a walk-and-talk journey with someone.

There's not that much to write about, nor is this an obsession. But my new favourite smiley face is =] It looks kinda weird here though... I dislike brackets in general.

Oh, and my grandma's mint tea recipe to combat the swine flu really isn't bad.