Updates

Okay.  It's been a while, and a lot's happened.  I'll go chronologically.

So, Saturday morning we all piled onto the buses to go home for a week.  I brought a friend back with me, and she stayed until Tuesday - which included Passover, a phenomenon she'd never before witnessed.  It was the least organized seder I'd ever been to, and my mother's friends got drunk on Maniscewitz and asked my friend things like "you're not a Mormon, are you?"  We had fun.

So, remember how I was accepted to that Chinese language programme?  Well.  Last Monday, the woman from the Chinese school organizing the trip called me up and told me no dice.  Apparently, NSLI-Y wouldn't supply her school with the grant for me for the same reason they wouldn't send me to Tajikistan - I'd gotten a scholarship from them last year, and for the summer programmes, they give priority to those who haven't studied abroad.  They want repeaters to go for longer.  I a) didn't know that, and b) couldn't miss school for that anyway.  I couldn't graduate.  So.  I'm not going to China.  I cried a lot, but I'm done now and trying to find something else to do.  There are a few people I'm thinking of visiting, and I'll probably find some work and start learning to drive.  But I didn't want to speak English this summer...  As a consolation prize-type thing, the Chinese school offered me a scholarship to three weeks of language classes.  I'll probably take it, to get a head start on Chinese classes next year at school. 

The week improved on Wednesday, when my mother and I got up at something like 5:30 am to drive to Portland.  We stopped for breakfast at some little diner, where I had what must have been the best doughnut in the history of fried things - it was still warm, so crispy, not too sweet or oily or heavy... it was my friend - and cranberry-walnut pancakes I'm still dreaming of a week later.  Then it was onward to Portland, where we generally dance in the streets singing "civilization, darling, we're home!"  This time we were in a hurry, so we just did a little shopping.  Or intended to.  We ended up doing rather a lot of shopping, actually, and now I have some really fun summer dresses, shorts, etc.  There was no time for Trader Joe's, which is the only thing I regret about the whole day, because I had a lunch date to make it to.  I guess it was technically an interview, with a good friend of my Senator who's also the former chief of staff of her husband, who was the Governor who set up my school.  Anyway, the interview concerned my application to the Page Program in Washington.  We had a lovely time, and lovely eggs benedict, and though I haven't yet heard back from the Senator's office, I'm hopeful about being accepted.

After all that, my mother and I drove back home, stopping en route at John's Ice Cream for dinner.  John's Ice Cream is the best ice cream on the face of the planet, it's a tiny roadside shop run by a hilarious, tiny Italian guy, and whenever I have the chance I consume as much of his dazzling product as I can stand to.  He has an astounding range of flavours - chocolate orange or lemon peel and strawberry rhubarb, the best ginger and pistachio, chocolate that tastes like frozen mousse.  We shared a milkshake and two scoops of heaven, and didn't regret it for a minute.  I fell asleep in the car, and was happy.

And now I'm back at school.  I hurt my back on Sunday and haven't been feeling phenomenal, so I stayed in bed today.  Real life will start again tomorrow, but there's only a month left of it!  Granted, I don't know what I'm doing with my summer, but I will never, ever again study chemistry after a few weeks, and that alone makes them worth fighting through.  I'm actually sort of excited about my final paper for AP Composition - it's about globalization - and the rest I can gasp through. 

I found my old art class portfolio from last year.  God, so much has changed... here's my favourite piece from it.

Paragraphs

Well.  I may well be the laziest blogger on the planet.  This is disgraceful.  I have a thousand excuses for not talking at you over the internet for so long, but none of them are very compelling.  So I think I'll just tell you that I was waiting until I had something interesting to say.

Oh, where did we leave off...?  Okay, a few days after my last post, when I still hadn't heard back from NSLI-Y about spending the summer abroad learning a language, my father scanned me a newspaper article advertising this (THANK YOU, Daddy).  It's the same scholarship, but specifically for Maine residents (oh, God, am I a Maine resident?  I'd much prefer to continue to think of myself as visitor after these .... seven years) to go to China.  I sent in the application, kind of on a whim, thinking it would be nice backup for the primary NSLI-Y, about twelve hours before it was due.  On Tuesday night I had a skype interview with a lovely chinese woman who runs some sort of Maine School of Chinese Language and Culture, who kept telling me to break up with my boyfriend without asking if I had one.  It took a while to get a word in and reassure her.  There was also an American woman helping with admissions, and she used to live near my school and I think she approved of me. 

On Wednesday afternoon (oh, my - play-by-play accounts of the week?  No, this will end badly) I got The Email.  The NSLI-Y email. 

"Thank you for applying to the 2011-2012 National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) programs.  The NSLI-Y team recognizes the time and effort you took to complete your application.  Unfortunately, you were not selected to receive a NSLI-Y Scholarship. "

 None of my friends from Turkey last year were accepted to summer programmes!  It's most unfair, because look at this, which was hidden so sneakily on their FAQ page:

Q: Am I eligible if I have already participated in NSLI-Y?

A:  If you have participated on a summer program and are re-applying for the summer, preference will be given to qualified students who have not previously participated on NSLI-Y. Past summer participants are considered highly competitive for semester- and year-long programs in the same language. If you are accepted and you have been on a NSLI-Y program before, be aware that there is a possibility that you will be placed with a different administering organization and/or in a different country.

Well, whatever, I thought.  We'll all have kickass summers whatever.  I called my dad and let him know, cried a bit, stuff like that.  Then, that evening, my mother rang me up from London and told me that she'd gotten an email from the China scholarship people.  She forwarded said letter (I wish they'd just sent it to me) and... um, well:

 

Congratulations!

We are proud to announce that you have been selected as a finalist to participate in the NSLI-Y  program for study and travel in China during the summer 2011.

So, it's not really necessary to say how excited I am about this - or to be telling you, actually.  I started this blog because I was going to Turkey.  This course is a little different, and I don't know everything about it yet - I didn't actually do much research about the programme before applying, but I think I'll take a couple weeks of intensive Chinese classes here, then hop on a plane and skip around China for six weeks.  The interviewers made it sound like we'd see quite a lot of the country.  I know absolutely no chinese and far too little about the culture - I was sort of Middle East focused - but I'm extremely excited to go there, and I'm taking Chinese at school next year. 

So, Wednesday was a shitty day redeemed to the fullest.  You really should have seen me bounding about the dorms, I was - and am - so excited. 

Um... so, sorry to do this whole chronological thing, but YESTERDAY, guess what happened?  Did I tell you I'm playing softball with the local school's team?  There are three girls playing from my school, and though most of the time I've got no clue what I'm doing, I really enjoy it and the other girls are very nice.  They call me London, and when we pass each other in the hallways they yell it out.  It's very sweet. 

Anyway, yesterday at practice, I kind of took a ball to the head.  We were bunting, and it just bounced off the bat and hit me very neatly in the forehead.  What ensued was, in my opinion, a long and drawn-out chain of overreactions on the part of everyone in authority, because I sat down, started to feel sick and tired and dizzy, and was proclaimed likely to be concussed.  After a while of being incessantly talked to and made to respond (they don't let you fall asleep when things hit your head hard, and that was really all I wanted to do), one of the dorm staff came to insist on taking me to the emergency room.  A very long wait and a long story short, I was extremely mildly concussed, dosed up with a lot of painkillers and anti-anxiety pills the combined effect of which made me feel like I'd been hit on the head again, and sent home almost three hours later.  It was not fun, but sleep was sweet.  I'm not allowed to play any sports for a few days, and I feel so tired still that I might just stay in bed today.  But I hope you'll learn from my mistake.  softball is DEADLY. 

Oh, and this is Day of Silence, isn't it?  I hope blogging doesn't count.  I used to have a big problem with this day - isn't speaking up for gay rights a better way to go about it than remaining voiceless as generations of minorities have?  But I think it's a great way to raise awareness, so I'm participating to the best of my ability, ie, not in classes.  If I go to classes.  Hell, I might just sleep today.  We're going home tomorrow for a lovely long week.  And this week was So un-lovely.  Two tests, two quizzes, an English paper and a GMM (Group Math Major - it's evil, don't ask).  I am unbelievably glad it's almost over. 

Well, that's about all.  I'm going back to sleep, and you should, too.