silverfox

Whooooooooooooooooo I just finished typing my speech on left-handed-ness. But it won't print because my printer decided to be a dog, so I'm gonna put ithere so I can print before class tomorrow.

Picture right now one of those cross-walk signs. The red hand that you see when you're waiting to cross. This is meant to represent a hand being held palm-out, the universal signal for stop. But have you ever which hand it is, or have you ever even thought about it? It is a right hand. Sadly, our culture is dominated by the right-handed population, just as we are dominated by straight white males. Left-handed people are descriminated against, and most of the time we don't even notice.

How many of you have a pencil or pen that has something, even the name of the brand, printed on it? If you hold it in your left hand like you were going to write with it, those words are upside down. Scissors don't work left-handed; the drinking fountain on the wall just outside the door of this classroom has the button on the right side. Manual pencil sharpeners crank on the right side. The door on my shower opens to the right; using your left hand to open it is next to impossible. A computer mouse is made to convienence the right-handed, and the nine-key on the keyboard is on the right. And, of course, the english language is written from left to right. Left-handed people are forced to cover up their writing, which can smudge ink, and it leaves pencil or pen on your hand where it rubs the paper.

Statistics show that roughly one out of ten people are left-handed. But how many of those nine out of ten right-handed people are right-handed opportunistically? Because it's easier? I taught myself how to write left-handed, because it felt more natural. I knew a girl in elementary school who was right-handed until she broke her right arm. She had to learn how to write left-handed to do her schoolwork, but even after the cast came off, she continued to write left-handed. This has led me to question the accuracy of the scientific data we so rely on. Everyone's dominant hand is genetic? Maybe for a small number, but I think that for the vast majority of the population, they could go either way, but they end up labelled as 'right-handed' not because it's their dominant hand, but because the culture of this country demands that they be right-handed.

I had a teacher in middle school who was left-handed. When she was in school as a child, her teacher would tape the pencil to her right hand so she had to use it. What would you do if you were five, six years old and in this situation? You would use your left hand to move it. But what could you do when your teacher caught you at that, and tied your left hand behind your back? My dad's grandmother was left-handed, and when she tried to write the teacher would actually hit her. Left handed people have faced nothing but difficulty. We are no different from any other minority. Do right-handed people think they are superior, because they write with their right hand? They sure don't seem to care, the way they make everything easy for themselves, without a second thought for how this effects the left-handed population.

Personally, I can write equally well with both hands. What do we call a person equally skilled with both hands? 'Ambidextrous.' But that word in itself is a contradiction. 'Dextrous' means right-handed. The word essentially translates to 'two right hands'. Seem a little paradoxical to anyone else? And the term sinister. How many of you have read a book that described the villian as sinister? It is an adjective meaning ominous, threatening, wicked, disastrous, unfavourable .... and the left side. We portray left-handedness as evil without even realising what we are doing.

This is why we need to take the time to do something about it. We deserve the same as anyone else. I believe that we are equal, just as male and female, gay and straight, and all different races are equal. But unlike the other examples, the descrimination against left-handed people is not in the media nearly as much. It is subtle; it permeates every aspect of our society. Don't disregard it just because you don't hear about it every second of every day. If we want to, we should be able to make a difference.

Okies, done. xD; Sorry about that. You get to read my stupid speech OH JOY.

I think I was really meant to be left-handed but was just opressed. Because it feels more natural for me to write left-handed. Plus then I can write backwards and no one can read it. xDD If only I could draw left handed then I would be one hundred per cent left handed. C;

I just tried to call bunches of times. What happened to keep your phone with you?

Hah, that was funny, though. x3

Nah, you'd have to say, it SOUNDS like dead bodies. Not only would that make less sense, it would be more like the original. x3

Have you seen my new picture? Well, not strictly speakingly new; more like 'edited'. Oh well. It's prettyful. C;

But yeah. I'll call you. I just need to wait for my cd to finish, because ... oh god I love this cd. Especially this song. x3 It's so modern rock-ish but so traditional-soundtrack-lord of the ringsy at the same time. Like with the latin choral. And that funny little bit in 3/4. xDD; I've seen this movie much too many times. It's my happy movie! ;DD

OH WAIT WHEN'S GEDRIC'S BIRTHDAY?? Because I kind of have it in winter/late fall/early spring, so ... Did you know that Central Catholic (a high school) is built on an old graveyard? They moved the headstones across the street, but left all the bodies under the school. I didn't even know when I went to their open house, and I thought that place was creepy-@$$. Like you wouldn't want to be in the halls alone. 0_o; And apparently if you go into the basement you can smell the decaying-ness. I'm really glad I don't go there.

How do you get word count on word pad? Because I know you got it for your Tsubasa story ... But I'm too dumb to find it .... xDD;

I think that basically she saw something happen that has to do with Fay and Ashura, so she wants to go to Seresu to stop it. I think it's funny that even knowing it was just a stupid Del Rey screw up and that it's really Ceres, We both still say 'Seresu'. Maybe we should refer to the real one as Ceres and your alternate one as Seresu, just so we don't get confused.

Next weekend. We are doing something. Together. I'll call you, though you probably won't want to talk long if you're sick. I think you do have what I did; it sounds a lot the same. I remember that I was able to taste, though. But then, half the time my throat hurt too much from all the hacking that I could't drink or eat anything but herbal tea with honey in it and cough drops.

I successfully did nothing today. xD; I didn't draw anything; didn't write, or listen to music. I brought the last load of laundry up from the basement, and edited a Fay desktop so it actually fit on my screen, and corrected the spelling of his name. Because the maker spelled it like those Del Rey idiots. But then, because I was feeling particularly lazy and unproductive, I played Kingdom Hearts. All day. I hadn't even finishred Traverse Town the first time before this weekend. Now I'm stuck on Agrabah. God, I hate that world. Every single bloody doorway is barricaded, so it takes about a hundred times as long as it should to get anywhere. And I don't even know where I'm supposed to be going. ARGH AGRABAH SUCKS!1!!!!!1!!11!eleventyone1!! ::keyboard smash::

YOU WERE ALREADY ON TODAY??? AS IN, IN THE LAST TWENTY MINUTESS??? WHY DIDN'T YOU COMMMMENNNNT????

DX;;

I felt like drawing a crappy comic. It's Psyn, and he's hungry, so he asks people for food. Shruikan and Astarael are in rainbow lala land together, so they don't pay attention to him. The Phantom only has an (uncooked) potato, so he decides to find food himself. All the cupboards in the kitchen are empty, so he checks the one under the sink, where, of course, you live. You attempt to glomp him, and he runs away, and hides in a closet, which is of course my workspace. But he doesn't know who I am, so he's all 'wtf' and then .. I haven't finished drawing yet. I decided to draw the entire thing left-handed, so it's kind of shootty, but it's supposed to be drawn by Psyn, so that's okay. The end.

Heh, I don't know if you've seen this. It is amazing. 'Goyle, check the oven, your souffle is burning!' I died laughing.

New Tsubasa! It's mostly just Syao and the 'doll' thing fighting, but there is another flashback of Sakura and Yuuko. I am almost positive that I know what Sakura wants now. xDD See if you can guess. I don't want to spoil the chapitre in case you haven't read it yet ...

But yeah. I'll call you sometime, so try to keep your phone on. And now, I bring to you the first part of my science paper that isn't really your average science paper! So yeah. The language they are speaking is Demon. The words are based on German, the sentence structure is more or less Japanese. So yeah. Without further ado ...

August examined the map Oliver had given him. No matter what way he turned it, it simply refused to make sense. He had to admit it: he was lost, though whether by Oliver's lack of map-drawing skills or by his own lack of direction it was hard to say.
He stood in the middle of a vast, alien landscape, reddish-brown sandstone worn by the wing into columns and arches, eerily asymetrical, monuments to the everlasting yet ever changing forces of nature that shaped the land. Nothing growing, no plants or animals; no sound save that of the ever-present wind whispering over the stone.
August had been walking for hours. Sometimes he would pass or see in the distance one of the huge striped rocks and think that it looked vaguely familiar, but he could never tell for sure. He very well could have been going in circles for all he knew.
He pulled out the map once more. A dot near the bottom labelled Central City, from whence he'd come; an x in the upper left-hand corner marked his destination, just south of a series of inverted v's that were meant to represent mountains, and sandwiched on the other side by a vast forest of stick-trees that were almost comical in appearance. The remaining space, the majority of the piece of parchment, was devoted to this dusty desert. It was almost entirely bare but for a bold, jagged line cutting diagonally across it. He knew he'd be able to find his way if he found the line ... assuming it existed. Knowing Oliver, it could be anything, an obscure science thing or even no more than a slip of his pen. August couldn't read the label scrawled beside it.
As the sun was nearing the horizon, August stopped abruptly. There was a huge chasm opening before the toes of his boots, as though someone had sliced the earth with a giant knife the way you might cut a cake. The blond man was pretty sure he had discovered Oliver's line. The river that had carved it out was barely visible at the bottom of the canyon, a faint line of silver-grey reflecting the uniformly clouded sky. It was dim in the daylight that was fast beginning to fade.
August was just wondering how he might go about getting to the other side, as he would have to eventually, when something struck him from behind. Even running, a regular person should not be able to impart that much force. A pair of human-like hands clamped themselves across his chest as they toppled over the edge of the cliff, the almost sheer walls rising more and more swiftly on either side as they gained momentum. Nine point eight metres per second squared, not counting air resistance. Funny, the things you remembered when you were going to be diced to pieces on a bunch of rocks.
The blond man struggled instinctively against his captor, though to what end he couldn't have told you, as there was no way he's survive either way. A bad idea, as it turned out, for his thrashing had thrown them off-balance, and something had set them tumbling wildly, not to mention the row of small, knife-sharp points that embedded themselves in his shoulder. He gritted his teeth as they hit a nerve, sending pain shooting down his arm.
'Akh, ekelhaft!' his captor grunted. 'Kosten na Menskh de!' August felt a queer numbness creeping along his veins, which seemed to be disconnecting his muscles from his brain. His shoulder, however, did not hurt any less. The river, now below them, now above, was either way coming nearer and nearer, the boulders in it now clearly visible in the swirling, turmoiled waters.
A second away from striking the river, there was a whooshing sound. August feebly twisted his head to see; a giant set of bat wings, thin bony fingers stretched over with a thin, semitransparent membrane that seemed almost scaly in texture, opening like a canopy above them. He wasn't sure if they were real, or a hallucination brought on by pain and the poison that had been on whatever had caused his wound.
But then, miraculously, they were soaring parallel to the river, coming just low enough for August's toes to skim the surface of the water. Then they were rising again, the steady wingbeats lifting them back up the canyon.
The winged creature alighted on a ledge carved into the sandstone, at a level that was peppered with caves, probably once underground springs before the river had cut through them, quarried out to make them suitable living quarters for the winged people. A group of them stood there as though they had been awaiting this one. He knew nothing about their culture, but he could tell that the members of this group were powerful amongst whatever heiarchy they had. Each had different hair and wings, and none of them looked pleased.
'Leiterden! Eindreling fange!'
A male with sleek black hair and poisonously green eyes, and wings like August's captor's stepped forward. 'Ja, abveizen de,' he said in a slithery sort of accent rather like the other's, waving his hand. This seemed to be some sort of dismissal, because the one behind August dropped him, bowed with a murmured reply of verzi-und, and swiftly departed.
'Vesukhen da?' A male with a lighter, more musical voice spoke. August thought he looked like an angel, with his wavy golden hair, wings feathered in snowy white, and eyes of a clear blue.
'Ja,' another agreed, this one a large male with shaggy dull brown hair and similarly coloured muddy eyes. His wings were like the bat wings of the first, but they seemed to be covered in naught but regular skin, blueish veins visible under the surface of the membrane. He dragged a limp August to his feet, and half marched, half dragged the blond man after the rest of the group as the entire ensemble proceeded into the nearest tunnel.
They came out in a sort of conference room, but not in the sense that a human would think of it. It was dim, the only light coming from a torch mounted on the wall, and thus rather smoky. August was set down on a raised, flat stone in the centre of the room; the creatures gathered around, speaking in whispers.
'Jehzt. Ausländren na vas tun da?' This one looked like the youngest; he seemed smaller in general, but he had a powerful aura. He had relatively short, messy copper hair, his wing-feathers striped gold and black, his eyes the colour of molten gold. Despite his youth, he seemed in command, and the others fell silent upon hearing his voice, which, August thought, seemed both light and dangerous at once.
'Essen da?' the brunett grunted.
A female with dark red hair and dangerous amber eyes waved a hand, hissing in dissent. 'Daemonfresr vunskhen nicht!' Her wing feathers were reddish-brown, like dried blood, ruffled in her anger.
'Ne, fleisch na seltzen de,' a creature with black hair, crimson eyes, and velvety black wings stated. The female turned on him, but the angelic-looking male held up a hand, and she turned away, shooting them both a dangerous glare.
'Kommen da?' The green-eyed demon demanded, eyeing August suspiciously.
A male on the thinner side with light grey hair and smooth black wings closed his eyes. 'Daemonsprakh redet nicht.'
The young copper-haired creature lifted a hand. 'Jerdeiner na Menskhenfer redet da?'
They all looked at one another. No one spoke. It seemed that either no one knew the answer, or no one was willing to volunteer.
'Nichtzen da?' Again, no one spoke. He rolled his molten-gold eyes. 'Vas tun da?' he asked again.
'Menskh na gefängnis werfend,' the female suggested offhandedly. The younger one nodded, as though she'd stated something obvious.
He raised a hand again. 'Vählen na. Meinung na artei da?' All of them raised their hands save the big one with the mud-brown hair. August thought it looked suspiciously like a vote, and he would guess that he was the subject of said voting. 'Dieder, ne.'
The brunett looked down disappointedly, muttering, 'Ich na Menskh du vünskhen essen.'
Now that they had reached a conclusion, they were quick about putting their decision to action. They dragged August once more to his feet, and all of them proceeded to storm out of the chamber, not counting the big one, who shuffled after dejectedly. Down the passage they went, the tops of their wings either scraping the ceiling or getting pretty close. They threw the blond man into a dark room, where he lay, incapable of more than the weakest movements with the aftereffects of the venom. There was a grinding sound as the heavy stone door was pushed back into place.
'Human?' a voice rasped from the darkness; weak, but very definately speaking the Common language.
August's last thought before he passed out was the fact that he wasn't alone in the cell.

Yeah. Oliver is this mad scientist-ish guy (think Orrin) who August worked for. He's trying to find Kitsune, because they all need her, and she's not there, but she can supposedly be found in the place marked with an x on the map. When the whole thing is done, I'll probably post it in Apocalypse. But yeah. Keep your phone on.