My dad needs to CHILL. If you guys think I'm high-strung about post-graduation plans, you should listen to him lecturing me and my siblings.

"You need to study more for the standardized tests."

"Look at what a mess your room is! If you keep attitudes like this up you'll never be mature enough for college."

"Did you update your resumé recently? Let me review it one more time."

"Hurry up with that scholarship application, Klarya. It's due in April you know."

I wish he'd back off. When he gets riled up he starts to corrode things around him. At our house, the floor of his study is completely melted and warped from years of his anxious pacing.

That's one of the plusses of living on-campus: my parents and I have room to breathe. For whatever reason, as soon as you hit junior year parents suddenly become teeth-grindingly aggravating to you. And vice versa. My personal theory is that it's because the child's resonances start becoming more assertive, and often run at intervals/frequencies/ocillations that clash with the established parental ones. But my friends Réka and Rètta think it's just "part of growing up". Like how momma birds know when it's time to fling their babies from the nest so that they'll learn to fly. Obviously, their theory is a lot less fun to think about.

Of course, I still miss my parents sometimes. They visit me once and a while out here, sometimes with my little sister too. And there's always Psyhigh's different communication methods, like the ponds or the whispering rocks or Yahoo! email. Though with the recent gate glitches, it's been kind of hard to get good reception through any of those methods. But that doesn't stop my dad -- I'll never understand how he managed to send me this list of "college prep assignments" through the cheese and ham sandwich I ordered at lunch....

It's really hard to comfort a friend. To know the right words to say, and when to say nothing. To feel when it's appropriate to offer a hug or a tissue. At the end of it all, I can't even tell if I helped them or not!

Once I tried using Auratic Manipulation to help my friend get over a bad breakup. When he wasn't paying attention, I'd flick and swipe away the negative colors and pull at the faded positive ones. Instead of making him feel better though, it MADE him feel better. His entire centricity was off for weeks. And it definitely didn't make the heartbreak scar on his secondary aura level heal any quicker. It was a complete fiasco.

So I've gone back to the "mainstream" comfort methods. Fluffy blankets. Warm beverages. Active listening. It doesn't have the flair or immediacy that most Psyhigh things do, but maybe that's good. It doesn't matter how many eyeballs you have, or which dimension you're from, or what ritual you follow to speak to the Ancestors. At our core, we all feel bad sometimes, and we all need a little sympathy sometimes. That's something this schol has taught me.

...Jeez, I need to write that down. That'd be great on a college application essay!

I just finished all my homework. And all my club responsibilities. And practicing for my AP tests. And updating my resume. And other junk. I'm so beat. I feel like I could hibernate for a year... which isn't good. Fun Fact: Psyhigh loses roughly 0.14% of its student body every year to accidental hibernation spells. That's why there's an assembly on the issue bi-annually, y'know.

There's rumors that one kid fell asleep out on the quad, and he went so far under that you couldn't wake him or even move him. He didn't age or anything either. It was like nothing in reality could touch him, but he was still firmly IN reality. But anyway he finally woke up, it'd been half a century and a tree had grown around his right shoulder. It was a really nice tree though, good energies, so no one could bear to chop it down to free him. So one of the teachers (some kids say that she was really his girlfriend from before he fell asleep, which would be a really awkward reunion) found an old phasing technique and helped him just kind of un-be in the tree. The tree is still out there, they say, and your dreams get ramped up to their maximum if you sleep by it. Well, if you believe teen rumors that is.

As for me, I prefer my bed for sleeping. Not only is it comfier, but I won't get in trouble for breaking curfew.

Today was pretty great. I finished all my homework in study hall. A cute guy lent me his pen in fifth hour. My guidance counselor(s) said that my standardized test results will be done being materialized and meditated on by Tuesday. I watched some kid running around with an adorable Psychic Service Dog. I found a dime on the ground. I'm just in a good mood I guess. The universe must be trying to balance out my energy polarities after I had the bad luck with that flu. Hmm... I need to remember to report this to the Positivity Club. Looking at back on the day's fading tracers with my Other Eyes, there are signs of the sort of thing Ioëëa was trying to tell us about last meeting.

My mom sent me one of those care packages in the mail, too, today. When I talked to her last through the Whispering Ponds she'd warned me it was coming, so I made sure the rituals were completed in time. As we all know, if you don't set out the proper offerings the Delivery Werverlers will give you the wrong package, or scuff it up on purpose, or sometimes shoot toxic lasers from their horns. But that kind of issue only happens in the frshmen halls usually, thank goodness.

Anyways, Mom sent the usual stuff, like candy and more toothpaste and some spiritual plane focusing crystals, but she also put this weird mask in this time. It's completely smooth and white, with only a thin hole to see through. On the inside are all these inscriptions and carvings I can't read. In her letter she says if I wear the mask for ten minutes every night it'll help with my acne. But last time I got something from a family member with unrecognised languages etched in it, I was gradually teleported to a cult headquarters experimenting with inverting auras and bringing leg warmers back into fashion. So I think I'll run these carvings through the school's ultimate-poly-omni-language-izer before I put them anywhere near my face. It isn't the most accurate tool, but it's sure better than Google Translate.

Thank heavens, I finally kicked my illness. Turns out I accidentally walked under the ladder in the Scientia Wing -- you know the one. It's ebony black, and has two rungs missing, and has this historical tragedy tied to it, and if you walk under it bad things happen, and during Thanksgiving we put a stuffed turkey on top? Yeah, that one. Never walking near that thing again. I missed being able to breathe through my nose.

It's weird, I come back from my sick leave and there's a whole wave of new kids in my classes. Usually students don't transfer as upperclassmen, because of Psyhigh's trial by fire policy for transferring credits, but they've appeared regardless (and curiously unscorched, I might add). Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII told us with her shapes that some of these new students will be in our class tomorrow, and that we better get along with them or else. Then she started the chapter exam by making all the shapes explode. She's dramatic like that.

Gosh, I hate chapter exams. In the Introduction class to Dangerous Shapes and Dangerous Shape Studies all you have to do is Sense the shapes and Know the proper Avoidance Procedure. But in the AP class, you have to Understand their personalities and allergies and behaviors and not just dodge, but Manipulate, Persuade, and occasionally wrangle them like cows! If I don't manage to get a 4 on that AP exam, I swear I'm going to cry.

I hope these new kids know what they're getting into. I met one of them in the grand living room in the northwestern dormitory (a.k.a. Senior Territory). She was asking around about secrets told by the coffee stains. I'm not the best at coffee interpretations -- I've always felt tea and soda were easier dialects to read -- but I found a good one for her. It was about an amphibiod student, who had a secret tailsman hidden ontop of one of the bookcases. But the tailsman got corrupted, and started causing... bad things. This kid tried to fix it, and spent many nights crying into his coffee as he desperately researched solutions. The Tailsman Repossession Squad eventually tracked down the tailsman and contained it, but the amphibiod boy was never the same again. The story kinda gave me the creeps, but the girl... uh, @Jessica Moon I think it was... she seemed to like it. Funny, that name sounds familiar.

Dang, I've been rambling for too long. I'll sign off now. Kudos to anyone determined enough to read through this obnoxious wall of text.

I've relapsed. Luckily it's the weekend so I don't have to miss any classes today, but I feel like one of the wraiths squeezed into a pickle jar in Master Dur's classroom. Achy, and squished, and lethargic, and gawked at by passerby. At least the wraith is in a constant state of suspension so it doesn't actually process what's going on around it. I get to be fully aware of every drawn out "tick" of my roommate's grandfather clock.

I still don't know why she brought that. She claims it's for "aesthetic", but it just makes our dorm even more cluttered. Not to mention, it totally ruins the room's feng shui. I think there might be some sort of family charm attached to it. If I look at it with my Other Eyes there's what looks like purple veins made of crystal stetching from its center to the walls and floor and ceiling, pumping a glittering silver liquid off to unknown places. It's comforting to watch it flowing.

Hm. That's odd. The sickness has extended. Now all I can smell is tuna fish salad. Fish is supposed to be banned in our hall, on account of Werqui Porpoiseson, the Atlantian chick. I'm just going to curl up in my blankets and hope this goes away. Maybe I'll chant a mantra for a while, try to clear my head (and with luck my sinuses too).

I still feel kinda under the weather, and some of my hair is still sticky from the cocoon, but I was well enough to join some of the other girls at the Psychic Feminist rally event. We had a great time. There was ice cream, shenanigans, an incident involving two policemen and a ghost of a wyvern....

I had to head back to the campus early, but while I was there it was pretty great. Usually I only go to that club's meetings so I can put it on my college applications, but after today I'm actually sort of invested in the cause. Though that may just be this souvenir keychain influencing me. They were passing them out during the parade. After I clipped it onto my purse, it started heating up and buzzing softly at seemingly random intervals. I'll ask Grüdden to analyze its intents and state of being tomorrow at Synchronized Bed Throwing practice. (Insomnia High might've beat us this time, but with a little more practice we'll cream them at Sectionals!)

I'd look at it myself with my Other Eyes, but they're on the fritz still. You'd think after attending Psyhich for years I'd have learned some tips for handling my Other Eyes. But so far nothing fixes my sneezing "glitches", except patience. I hope that that doesn't effect my scholarship eligibility....

I'm so tired and achey. I wonder if I'm sick. Maybe I'll just stay in my room all day. I'll miss the Kinesises lab and another quiz in Dangerous Shapes and Dangerous Shape Studies. But in my current condition I don't think I'm able to dodge dodecohedrons manifested of bitter spite the right way. It'd probably be safer for everyone if I took a sick day. I'll just turn on a movie and wrap myself in the sticky cocoon my mother sent me in case I ever caught a cold (it's made of Ancient Willow sap, ornamental sedges, empty diary pages, and a quilt made with love. It has a strong healing aura!). With some downtime, I can get started on this Stonehenge internship application. Let me tell you kids, there's never a moment of rest when you're an uperclassmen. Or it at least feels that way.

a-a-aACHOO! Oh no! Darn it all. There go my Other Eyes. They always act up when I snee- ACHOO! Oh gosh. I can't turn them off. Today's going to be a long day. Don't visit me. I don't want to See you.

I really like the new school uniform designs. I've been looking at them on the flyer School Spirit and Spirits club handed out during lunch -- you know, the ones they folded into heat-seeking paper airplanes and let loose on the crowd. I especially like option #5. It looks the least flammable. That's something people look for in a uniform.

I remember when my brother went here, and the latest fad was to sew a fringe of a void to your school sweater. I'll admit, it did look kinda cool, but the voids would suck up anything that got too close. It especially liked pencils and pens. That's what sparked the Great Writing Utensil Shortages, which led to the Inky Riots, which led to the stricter uniform dress code we have today. When I got accepted into Psyhigh, my brother offered to give me his old void fringe, but it just didn't seem worth the social unrest that would inevitability follow. I keep it safely locked in my antique locket. It makes the necklace a nice toasty temperature.

In other news, I tried to fill out an application today for a summer internship. The position would send me to the Grendle College of Outcasts secondary campus, near Stonehenge. If I get the position, I'll be helping develop modern equivalents to archaic potion ingredients (we need to find a T-Rex toe substitute before the world's supply runs out....). It sounds awesome, but whenever I look at the application my Other Eyes switch on and all I can see is a vengeful abomination being summoned at Stonehenge. I can't tell yet if that means I should still apply for the internship. I mean, maybe it's a friendly abomination? Who am I to judge? Or maybe my Other Eyes are showing me symbols, not literal things. I don't know. I'll go ask my guidance counselor(s) when their office re-materializes.

Eddgarion is at it again. Remember him? He's the one that almost set several species of powerful insects on the school and got our entire hall of dorm rooms put under quarantine. Yeah, he's not my favorite neighbor right now. Especially since he came around a little bit ago frantically knocking on everyone's doors and asking if they've seen a small golden beetle-like bug. Of course no one has, which sent him into a tizzy. Poor guy, the wallpaper started peeling because of his panic attack. Luckily Ginger was there to calm him down before he shattered the windows again. He is so lucky to have her. They're definitely the second cutest couple on campus. They'd be first, but there's this fire-elemental type dating a mermaid and watching them try to interact is the most heart-melting thing. Ugh, I'm tearing up just thinking about it. Don't tell Ginger though, she'll get jealous again.

Oh yeah, Eddgarion. Sorry, got sidetracked again. Well, he says that this gold bug is the only one of his collection still missing, and won't tell us if it's dangerous or not. We'd report the situation to an adult but... quarantine man. I can't go back there. I just can't do it. None of us can. Sooo... yeah. If you see a golden beetle, do us upperclassmen a solid and let Eddgarion know so he can grab it. And no tattling guys. Bad things happen to tattlers.

Alright, I should stop procrastinating and get back to my homework. Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII slammed our class with a lot of homework again. Another kid in the class offered me an Invisible Life Hack to help me get through it, which was super nice of them, but last time I tried to take a short cut in a class I ended up plastered to a ceiling with cerberus slobber. Took them two hours to get me down, and it took another five days for the visions of dead people to fade. Talk about a pain in the as-- er, ahem, pain in the NECK. Pain in the neck. That's what I said. ...Man, I'm an awful role model today.