Charisma82 writes...

Hey! Wow, has it already been a year since the last Gathering? It feels like just a while ago. Sadly, just like last year, I was not able to make it to the Gathering of the Gargoyles. I'm not as crushed over it as I was last year, or the year before that, or the year before that… but still, I figure that I will get to one of them one of these days, so keep having them, and I'll hopefully turn up some day. I didn't do a pre-gathering journal yesterday because nothing really happened yesterday. So here it goes for the first day of the Gathering of the Gargoyles (from the point of view of someone not being there)…

Friday, June 22, 2007: The First Day of Gathering of the Gargoyles

Today started way too early for me. All of my days for the past 4 weeks have started too early for me. I signed up for a summer class and was fool enough to sign up for a class that started at 7:00am. I've been waking up a little bit before 6:00am every morning because the school is in a different town and I have to drive a while to get there. I am definitely not a morning person. I'm used to going to sleep late and waking up late. I've been forcing myself to go to bed at midnight so I can be awake enough for the class every morning. But fortunately for me, today was my last day, so I no longer have to wake up so early. Actually, besides waking up early, I really liked the class. It was an English class that dealt with a lot of literature, which I enjoyed. We read a lot of short stories, poems, and a few plays in the class. The teacher even showed us the play "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on video that was made back in the 30's. I really liked it and was able to keep up with the names, mainly because of watching Gargoyles for as long as I have been. Since today was the last day, we had a final. We had to write a paper in class about 1, 2, or 3 different pieces of literature we'd read in class and connect them together to make a common point. I chose the poem entitled "The Ruined Maid" by Thomas Hardy and the play entitled "Overtones" by Alice Gerstenberg and talked about how moving up in social class isn't what makes a person happy, which I proved with the two pieces of literature that I chose. There was more to it, but I'm not going to get into all of that here. We were supposed to write out the paper by hand in MLA format in ink. I decided to write it out in pencil first so I wouldn't make mistakes on my final copy. Because I did this, I took up the entire 2 hours, continuously writing. My hand felt like it was going to fall off once I was done. Though it took me a lot longer to write the paper twice, I was glad I did. I didn't have any mess ups on the final draft. I was very fortunate that my paper was only 6 pages long, because that's all the paper I had on me. I couldn't afford to make mistakes.

After I finished there, I headed home (and got to hear Fuel's song "Hemorrhage" which I rocked out to). I got home just as my mom and sister went off to work. I got on the computer to do my usual rounds of checking up on e-mail and looking at my usual websites (including, of course, ASK GREG). After that, I sat around the house for a while before I became tired and knew I had to get a nap in if I wanted to last the rest of the day. I slept for about 3 hours and got up around 4:30pm to 5:00pm.

Around 6:00pm, my family (my parents and younger sister) and I took off for Family Fun Night at our church. Before we got there, we stopped by Carl's Jr. for some dinner. I didn't eat much since I wasn't feeling that great. We got to the church building a bit before 7:00pm and were the first ones there. After waiting for about 20 minutes, we had more people show up. We played cards and ping-pong. I've decided that I need to start playing ping-pong every day until next week when I go up to camp. I say this because one of the main sports up at camp is ping-pong and I found out how much practice I need when playing it tonight. I think the most fun game with ping-pong is Around the World in which a bunch of people line up around the table and take turns hitting the ball back and forth. It's not as easy as it sounds or looks. After ping-pong, about six of us decided to play hide-and-seek walky-talkies (which is basically hide-and-seek with a set of walky-talkies in the mix). That was fun. It's not so easy when the entire building is pitch black dark and you can't turn lights on. I have the best hiding spot in a closet under a set of stairs that no one ever wants to look in because there is so much junk in there and it is very dark. I was really mad when one of the younger girls decided to hide with me then decided not to because she was afraid of the dark, and then told everyone where I was once she herself was found. Now that my hiding spot has been blown, I have to find some other great hiding spot. Anyways, we ended up leaving there around 9:45pm.

When we got home, Dad really wanted to watch the baseball game that had the Colorado Rockies in it because he grew up in Colorado. He was sad when they lost at the very end of the game (sorry if I ruined that for anyone… I hope I didn't). My mom and I played Mancala (a game played with flattened marbles and a wooden board…I don't know how else to describe it) while we watched some show on the top 10 funniest women ever. It wasn't that great of a show, but there was nothing else on that the family could agree upon to watch (my mom, sister, and I wanted to watch Pirate Master, a show we got hooked on at the beginning of summer break, but my dad put his foot down and said no). My parents went to bed around 11:30pm and my sister and I stayed up to watch the AFI's top 100 movies in the past 100 years that we'd recorded on Tivo earlier in the week. It was good. We didn't know about half the movies in the countdown, but were excited to see the ones we did know. It finally ended around 1:30am. My sister went to bed, and now I'm in my room typing this.

So all in all, this was actually a busy day compared to the past couple of weeks around here. I wish I could say that I watched Gargoyles so it would seem that I'm keeping the spirit of Gargoyles alive during the Gathering of the Gargoyles (since I'm not there), but I'm too tired to start watching one of them. I'd probably fall asleep while my eyes burned trying to keep awake. Maybe tomorrow I'll do some Gargoyle watching…

Thank you for your time and all that you do.

-Charisma82