We Are Stardust; Billion Year Old Carbon

So.  Library of Congress.  Pretty damn sexy.  I'm gathering material for another video, but so far all I've got are some artless pictures of the capitol, and a few subway shots.  The D.C. stations have curved ceilings, and it really feels as if you're walking inside a big tube... I've been imagining myself in the veins of a whale, but I'm just a geek.  Anyway, to keep the wolves at bay:

 

(Okay, also of the LOC's Jefferson Building.  And my Christmas tights)

 

I've been transcribing lots and lots of interviews with master violin makers, many of whom have impossibly thick German accents.  As a non-violin playing, part time classical music-listener, I'm learning a lot, but it sometimes gets a little dry.  Far more exciting for me is the two-disc "primer" of international jazz that the Library's jazz curator (they have a curator of jazz.  A full time specialist curator of jazz.  This man... I will meet him next week.  He unearthed all these John Coltrane/Thelonious Monk recordings nobody knew existed.  And these discs, especially the Brazilian stuff... he has amazing taste).  But this weekend should be fun.  Tomorrow I'm planning to meet up with a couple friends from Turkey!  Americans who were on that programme with me.  One lives a little outside D.C, and another's at college in New York but in town for the weekend... so glad I picked up on his facebook feed.  And on Sunday, my godfather's taking me to Thomas Jefferson's old house, Monticello.  By all accounts it's an architectural marvel with beautiful grounds, and of course the history is fascinating, so I'm very glad about that.

So, I know I'm throwing lots of videos at you lately, but I guess it's just how I'm relaxing these days.  You get my leftovers, but I think today's is pretty damn fantastic.  

 

Am I becoming a safe-box again?  A place for people to put their secrets, where they know they won’t escape, so that they don’t have to put up with them kicking around their heads all day?  I know that’s not right – nobody takes me for granted here, and I’m always more than happy to listen.  I think I’m jealous of them, though.   Jealous that they can tell me what’s going on.  Jealous that they trust me.  I can’t tell myself anything, and I’m about as ready to trust somebody else with the shit that goes through my head as I am to broadcast it on FM radio.  I don’t write what I really need to say here – I can’t.  My family reads this.  But if I could bear to tell the internet how I really feel, maybe I wouldn’t have such a problem showing emotion among the people who raised me. 

 But what do people see in me that lets them talk?  I don’t judge them, I tell them it’s not their fault.  But that’s not it.  Nor is it that I won’t tell – there are plenty of people who won’t and my guarantee is no better than theirs.  But I don’t want people to feel beholden to me.  I want them to like me and spend time with me and never feel that they owe me anything.   

Yeah, it was probably the first time I realized I was gay.  And I got sooo depressed because I thought being gay meant being an outcast....a bum.  And I thought, "Gee... I'll never get to wear nice clothes!"  I really do love A Chorus Line.

I want them to fall in love with me, not thank me.  But at the same time it feels so good to keep my head in someone else’s crisis, to feel needed and clung to.  But having everyone’s secrets, knowing more than everybody else and not being able to say a thing – that doesn’t feel like power.  That feels like a trap.  I don’t want to be that responsible.  Except I do, because I can and people need me to.  And if I can help them I’m obliged to.  Christ, maybe I should be a nun or something.  Hah!  Imagine.  Imagine me being that sincere for three seconds.  imagine me being Christian.  Imagine me being subservient.  I can't.  

Oh, darling, you're not old enough to wear a bra.  You've got nothing to hold it up!

My mother's in England for a week or so, visiting my family and her friends and people like that.  I'm going just after Christmas for a week or so, then coming back to the States for my Library of Congress internship.  I'm very, very excited about that.  

There's a girl at this school who's actually from the town we're in, and tonight I went to her house for dinner.  It's just across the street, and six of us traipsed over in the snow (it's been falling all day and is the most beautiful, sparkly stuff I've ever hated) and were ushered in and fed the most wonderful meal I've had in weeks.  Her mother is from New Orleans and has a delicious accent, and the food was just as good.  There was rice with onion gravy, there was corn and cornbread, soup, chicken, sweet tea.  There was a butter pecan cake.  And afterward she put what was left into boxes for us... I can't wait for lunch tomorrow.  But for now, I never want to think about eating again.  I just want to sleep.  The house was lovely to be in too.  I forget about certain things here.  Cars and living rooms.  Mothers.  Incandescent lighting.  Etc.  And there were confederate flags hung on the walls, and framed pictures of my friend when she was a baby, and carpet on the stairs and a warm kitchen and a fully stocked bar in the basement.  It was a wonderful hour and a half.  Now I'm facing my chemical demons in the school library, and looking forward to crawling into bed.  How boring I've become, no longer groaning at the thought of closing my eyes long enough to miss any fun.  I keep finding things in my bed - pens, clothes, a fedora that's not even mine.  I should excavate properly this evening, but I probably won't.  

Those tights I ordered a while ago turned out to be extremely unstretchy and short, so I've cut off the feet and made leggings.  They're making me very happy. 

...And Back

And, my god, it feels good.  Everyone's quite stressed, what with finals coming up and a whole week of (unproductive) break right behind us, but I am just so happy to be back with my friends that it's almost okay.  I had a rather mixed week at home.  On the one hand, it was brilliant to see my friends (and Brokeback Mountain.  Awestruck) and go to school - I stayed in the art room this time so there was no awkward biology-crashing, and my teachers seemed happy to see me and everyone who didn't know I was coming to visit treated me like I was back from the dead.  I also ate excellently and feel very pretty as a result - I love the way my back looks when I've gained a little weight.  However, there was a lot of fighting going on as well, and if a breast cancer scare (false alarm, thank god) can't unify my family and get us to stop bickering for ten minutes, I don't really know what can.  But, yeah.  If you have breasts and are thirty-ish or older you should go get a mammogram.  Now.  Did you know that one in eight women in the United States is diagnosed with breast cancer? 

I just joined the swim team.  Yesterday was the first practice, I hadn't done butterfly since eighth grade, and I am sore.  I know that sounds like a completely idiotic thing to do right before midterm exams, but I slept so incredibly well last night that, if this is anything to go by, it might actually help my grades in the next couple weeks.  This school doesn't technically have any sports teams, so for things like football soccer we just play with the local school, with which we share the academic building, but for some reason we can't do that for the swim team.  So I and the only other MSSM girl have cajoled two other girls from our school into swimming, so that we have a relay team.  Otherwise we couldn't compete.  I used to hate swim meets and I am sure they're no different now, but we have a nice pool here and being on the team exempts me from fitness classes - which would conflict with the practice schedule anyway!  So, I'm quite well-satisfied with that and hope to fulfill one of the boys' predictions that I'll have six-pack by the end of the season. 

That's really all that's going on... I have to finish the rough draft of my midterm English essay - about satire in Huck Finn - and study like hell for a chem test that looks about as friendly as my sister after she gets caught taking other peoples' Christmas presents out of my room and decides that the best course of action is to scream, slam doors and cry loudly enough to render us all deaf for several hours....but that's another story.

I got a few lovely birthday presents.  The primary one was, of course, a contribution to my new lens, but I also got a couple lovely books and some beautiful new tights.

Okay.  Sites That Are Blocked At School (Mostly For "Pornography") That Shouldn't Be:
Some of Smitten Kitchen.  Like, this one.  This is a food blog!  What the hell, people?!
Stockings HQ
UK Tights
My Favourite Underwear Blog   (However, this is absolutely fine for us to look at, apparently!  Jesus, people, find some real porn to block)
And loads more, but I don't want to incriminate myself by going on all these sites to get the links in one day.


Okay, so here are those recipes I said I'd post.  In both cases, I used yoghurt and milk instead of buttermilk.

Chocolate cake   (in this one I used Green&Black's ginger chocolate)

Ginger-apple-upside-down cake

Night!  I'm high on Fawlty Towers.

It's None Of It True

Now, I don't mean to go all sentimental photo-montage on you, but a friend of mine, one who talked me out of all my money convinced me to get my camera and all ensuing tchotchkes, made this and it's really too good not to show you.







In other news, I'm home after an uncommonly pleasant bus ride.  I woke up at sixish, with far more ease than almost everyone else in the school, mostly due to the fact that I hadn't gone to a midnight-ish showing of Harry Potter the night before (I passed most of my birthday evening wandering about outside and looking in at the boys' windows - there is some frightful pornography to be seen on those walls).  Anyway, I came outside for breakfast and there was a thin layer of snow on the ground and more falling.  It was absolutely magical, and even in the groggy, cold, flip flop-clad state I was in I was delighted.  Boarding the buses was fun - I was the last on - and I found the usual company for my route enhanced by an addition with whom I listened to several issues (is that the right term for a podcast?) of The Bugle before dozing on the shoulder of a lovely boy whose taste in music rivals those of even my friends here.  He approved of the above video.  All through this is was snowing rather thickly and the bus was cold, but when I woke up we were 'south' and it was ridiculously sunny again.

I'll skip the part where I drag my father underwear shopping and go right to the food.  I swear, my next post will be nothing but pictures of what I'm eating.  I have been reduced to tears by real food that I didn't cook.  Last night, we had greens and Brussels sprouts with ginger and roast chicken and parsnips and garlic and potatoes and beets and carrots.  It's not the meat that I really miss, oddly enough - I could go vegetarian after having been at school this long - but it was all gorgeous.  I made fairy cakes, but went to bed before dessert.  Five weeks without a break is too long, though I don't imagine the scotch and soda helped.  In any case, I was out at seven-thirty, back up at nine and then asleep for the next twelve hours.  Then to a friend's house for a stunning breakfast of eggs, sausage and biscuits, and home with some other friends to make two cakes - count 'em - watch Torchwood and eat roast lamb with rice and lentils and open a few birthday presents.  I'm going to school tomorrow, just to hang out in the art room and catch up with whomever is cool enough to drift in there, so I've got to go to bed now.  Studying for finals starts tomorrow.  Just remind me. 

(Oh, what a lot of tags!)

Wake Me Up When It's Over

There's just no hope for me.  You'll never predict me.... I'm just femme fatale all through, you'll never know what's going through my head, you won't hear from me in weeks and then, suddenly, I'll be calling you again, writing to you, because I need you... (Okay, maybe I do want to be Liza Minelli.  What you gonna do 'bout it?)

Not true.  I was actually thinking earlier about what an ironically disappointingly uncomplicated person I am.  But suddenly I want to talk about it.  Or I just want to talk.  Yes, dear, to you.  Doesn't that make you feel wonderful?  No, I'm not just another politician who wants to make your life easier, your tax money go better places, your kids more successful and more likely to kick the *censored* out of the Chinese kids on the future economic playground on which they'll play.  I just want to talk to you.

Hah.  Actually, I have no idea why I suddenly feel like writing again, but I want to write about food.  I was just watching NYTimes thanksgiving recipe videos, and they made me hungry, of course, in such a happy way.   I can't wait to get home.  I can't wait to sit on my friends' couches and talk with their families and eat and drink and feel great.  I can't wait to fight with my family, because it makes me feel so much less alone.  I love living here - it's basically college on training wheels, living in the dorms here - but I am looking forward to a week of being someone's baby again.

But watch me - in an hour I'll have changed my mind.  I just did, after all... food does strange things to me.  I'm really emotionally attached to it.  I wrote this a couple days ago:

I haven't been writing recently, I suppose because I just didn't want to, and because I've had plenty to think about that I can't write about.  I'm also sick of my mother reading this and calling me up and asking me what's going on.  And I feel like a bitch for saying that, but it's true - I don't need my family to know when I'm upset or sick of all this.  They're nearly three hundred miles away.  It can't do any of us any good and I'd rather they didn't get upset. 

I guess I've also had other people to talk to recently.  Internet, you're cool but you don't give much back.  I have friends here, with whom I can actually have a conversation that's not a glitchy facebook chat or a text message.  Again, the internet's great but it's just not good enough.  I want to lie on my bed at home with my friends at home, and talk to them and tell them everything I can't tell people here, just because we all live together and it would all get out.  I can't wait for this week to be over.  Friday's my birthday - there are so many November birthdays here - and then we go home for a week.  I won't have to remind myself to eat.  I will fight with my family and be happy because it'll be normal, and I won't have to feel guilty about withholding information from people and I won't have to be a diplomat quite so much.  I just want to go back to what's familiar and be loved in a totally un-novel fashion. 

And I have been too tired.  I can't make myself go to sleep and I always get up way too early and get nothing done.  I haven't felt well lately - watch this space, a concerned relative is about to call me and call the staff and tell them to check my room for blades (they'd find a big chopping knife, actually, and I'd be screwed if they took that away, because they've opened up the kitchen) - and I've hardly got the drive to be sociable any more, let alone care about schoolwork.  I just do it. 

I've also noticed my heart going crazy every time I eat chocolate. 

Angst.... it's not my line of business, but it's viral here.   Anyway, I am going to forget about things for a little bit starting tomorrow.  I'm going to go home, if that's what it still is, and cook in a kitchen that's not full of people who can't cook and seem to independently support America's entire cake-mix industry.  I'm going to read Siddhartha just because a friend threw me a copy, and I'm not going to get dressed with anyone in particular in mind for a whole week - I might not even get dressed at all. I'm almost ready to leave - my sheets are washed, I know what I'm taking back with me and my fridge is almost empty. 

I've probably mentioned how much Norah Jones I'm listening to at the moment.  I decided to take some pictures and set them to Wake Me Up, though I don't know why.  Actually, I really don't like it when people do that, but I don't care today.  And if you've been reading me for any length of time you'll recognize some of these pictures, so maybe they'll be a little less meaningless.

Anyway, today's my birthday.  It's eight and I just sat up in bed.  I only have one and a half classes today, most of the school is going to see the new Harry Potter film this evening, after a big dinner they're putting on just for me  for the holiday, and I've also got play practice.  Hello, 16.

Some People Are Too Good

When I was ten and a totally awkward misfit and my mother was pregnant, and we'd barely been in America a year and everything was completely crazy, I met this wonderful woman at our local farmers' market.  She wove scarves and spun the most beautiful yarn, and there was this smell about her silk dyes - I'd spend most of every Saturday morning burying my face in her gorgeous weavings and talking to her.  She taught me to spin, and then she taught me to weave.  I went to her studio all the time and sat at her enormous loom, and I learned to weave simple patterns.  She lent me a small loom that sat in our dining room for a while, and I loved it, oh, so much.  I haven't thought about that for months at least, but I realize just how much she looked after me now.  When I got into something when I was little, I would become obsessive - the Tudors, weaving, reading, cooking... those two stuck for good.  And I'd sit at this loom for hours, and bring her my work, and she was the most wonderful person in my life.  Her scarves and other things are absolutely the most beautiful things in the world (and certainly some of the best craft on the Maine coast), and you can find them here.  She also teaches for the Haystack art school, which is very well-known and respected on the Maine coast, and she's a fantastic artist.

I've seen her since then, at farmers' markets and fairs, but not much at all.  She sent me a gift when I got into the National Spelling Bee.  She sent me a graduation present when I got through with eighth grade.  And I love her, enormously.  She still sees my mother, because she sells her granola in some of the same places.  But I was really surprised when one of the dorm staff told me I had a package a moment ago, because I hadn't ordered anything and my parents wouldn't be sending me food three days before Thanksgiving break.  It was a birthday present from her.  There was a card, and she made me a cushion.  It's beautiful, purple and blue with a wide ribbon sewn onto it with cakes - kitschy without being overly so - and she still knows me so well... there was also a jar of jam, and a bar of chocolate.  As I said, she knows me.  Today was terrible for me - I'm really confused about a lot of things and people here, and I'm stressing about midterm exams, and I was so tired - and I nearly cried when I saw the inside of this box.  If there are people like that in the world, who, after six years, will go and find your address and make you a package for your sixteenth birthday, then there's some hope for us as a race, isn't there?  I need to go and write to her now, and then study more than bears thinking about, but I am going to sleep with that cushion tonight and I will think of her and people like her and try to be more like them. 

I Am Not A Fashion Blogger. I am Not a Fashion Blogger. I Am Not A...

But I have figured out The Secret.  Yes, that one.  The one on which the only-recently-fallen empire waist...well, empire... was founded, and that only fell because people got sick of looking semi-pregnant.  And now, two years behind everyone else who's ever worn clothing made of something more sophisticated than fig leaves, I know this secret: High waists.  They make your tits look bigger.

Now, I actually found this out by accident this morning while I was getting dressed.  I had put on a a longish skirt, whose hem I wanted to raise so that my new skeleton socks were a little more visible (do I actually think like this?).  And, just as an experiment, the kind you'd never try out unless you were all alone with the mirror  your roommate was very fast asleep, I sort of...pulled it up.  And.... well, I belted it.  And bang!  Where did you come from?  I don't know what kind of optical-perspective-illusion-THING this is, but I shall definitely treat it with care in the future.  I feel like there's a reason I didn't get the memo about this when it first started happening...no matter.  I don't like to be in current style anyway.  So, yeah, I kind of loved what I wore today - so much that I didn't even change it between classes.  Crazy.

 (Credit for these two goes to my neighbour again)

But this post was actually meant to be ALL about my legs.  I know, right?  I always thought of myself as a semi-serious writer... but I get too excited about tights to let these past you.  So, maybe not my legs, but the way I present them to the world...or some other pretentious bullshit like that.  I like clothes, so get over it and then I'll talk politics with you.  It doesn't make me a ditz.  I adore tights and an early birthday present I ordered myself from Sock Dreams (I couldn't think of another excuse) arrived yesterday.  There's difinitely a theme to what was in the package, but I plan to wear these all year:

The photos of the stripey tights and the spiderweb fishnets are from the SockDreams web site...haven't worn them yet but I can't wait.  But I took these:

I think they're my new favourites.  They come to just above my knees, but I'm quite tall.  These all shipped for free, by the way.  So go get some.  I was everyone's favourite Leah today at school (I really hope I did okay on that math test....and there's a chemistry exam tomorrow!  Eeek!) and had loads of fun - several people sort of looked at me like I had three heads when I told them I ordered socks online.

 Not a great day for food - dinner was pretzels and goats' cheese, but I've got a Plan.  It involves pancetta.  I will keep you posted.  And I've got some other news that I don't have time to go into right now - they're about to switch off the internet - so don't let me forget to tell you what I'm official photographer for.

Good night!

Home For Not Much Longer

It interests me how the standards in 'quality' for writing and images are set up.  When writing is 'dirty' it's trash, no?  It's a trashy romance novel that people are ashamed to read, until one comes along that has a couple good reviews as well as a chapter that turns them on in just the same way.  Then photography - well, anyone can press a button while someone looks sexy, right?  But if that's the case, all photography and every claim it has to 'art' status is invalid.  And why is Robert Mapplethorpe's work considered art, not just porn?  Because he was good, better than almost anyone else who took nude photographs or anything else in his vein of work.  He was skilled above them in the same way that the Pullitzer-winning writer is more adept at writing than the outcasts who publish those paperbacks.  But Robert Mapplethorpe and, oh, I don't know... Nabokov?  Or whoever it was that wrote Madame Bovary.... they weren't always great artists.  They must have started off as unskilled as the 'pornographers', they weren't born with their talents.  So when did their work become art - socially acceptable, intellectually prestigious - and not cheap kicks you keep under the mattress?  Because they have been recognized and legitimized as artists, is their pre-quality work 'art', too?  And if these great figures in culture were writing, photographing, painting, singing - somehow expressing - sex, then, goodness, they were certainly thinking about it.  Just like everybody else.  Because their expressions of sexuality are more valued, were their actual thoughts about sex also somehow more 'okay'?

No, this picture has nothing to do with what I've just said or what I'm about to say - I've got no clue what that is anyway. 

All right, tonight's exhausted perambulation stops there.  I am so ready to go back to school tomorrow.  This weekend has been great, totally indulgent on my part in so many ways, but I miss my routine and pretending to myself that I have the discipline to sit down and get something done.  His Girl Friday is the leading candidate for the highlight of the holiday just at present, though the food has been stellar as has seeing my friends, of course.  And the apple beignets....I'll get the recipe for those up soon, because they were heaven.  I am ready for snow cover for as long as I can fry doughnuts and watch films with sexy people I want to kiss my friends, either here or at school... but I'll take it back, I'm sure, after a couple weeks snowed into the dorm.  It's sure to happen soon.

I stay up so late on extended weekends.  I don't understand it, but I quite like being there for the margins in between days.  They're quiet and more interesting.  But why can't I bear to go to bed?!

Okay, this is going to be a ridiculous post, with no organization at all.  I have to write a bill for Youth In Government.  I don't know how to write a bill.  I don't know what to write a bill about.  Everyone else seems pretty clear on this... is it something I just missed out on, like algebra II or that memo explaining what all those internet shortcuts stand for (rofl, anyone?  I am at a loss)?

What We Do Here

Yesterday, after getting up off my downstairs neighbors' rug - there was a Saturday-night sleepover.  You should see my nails - and dragging myself to the cafeteria to make up for the dish duty I'd forgotten about the night before, I begged off a cappella with a sore throat that's still bothering me and went for a walk with the guy whose hair I dyed a few posts back.  We took a couple pictures while roaming the grounds, and this is a celebratory post because I can now upload them.  I was having to do it by email before, which meant limiting it to about three photos per post.  Unacceptable.  But the tech guys here are all-knowing and I can now do whatever the hell I like with photos, as well as access the iTunes store and finally watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.  I have to keep this really short, because I have a chem test on Thursday and an English paper due Friday that I haven't even started, but here's what we did. 

Oh, and my Maytag model asked me to do it again.  He's dyed his hair since, and I haven't done much with these photos, but here they are anyway.

 

I'm also filling out my application for the NSLI-Y programme again.  I don't think I could graduate from here if I did a year or semester in Turkey, so I'm going for a summer in Tajikistan.  I need to know more middle-eastern languages. 

Another Week, Another Package

...Except the package had a dozen eggs in it.  And, carefully bubble-wrapped as they were  by my dear and loving parents, only six made it.  It was a bit of a mess.  But worth it, because there were also apples, bread, goats' cheese, a little jar of homemade chocolate sauce, nuts and carrots.  I am a very happy girl today, and not just because of that.

Here we have these things called 1/3 reports.  As in, every one-third of a semester.  The first of these reports is coming out this week, and I can't belive that a sixth of the year has already gone by.  I know approximately how I'm doing - I think I have Bs in chemistry and tech, and my average in maths is hovering in the mid-seventies.  I got back that big English essay, which turned out to be an A of some kind, and so I'm hoping that that will reflect my average in the class.  I feel like my grades are slowly getting better - there were just a couple of rough first tests.  İnşallah.

I also have a double bed now!  In that the bunk beds that I formerly occupied are now side-by-side on the floor.  I'm going to get a big pad to keep the mattresses together, but I slept on it like this last night and it wasn't even much of a problem.  This photo of my room shows you just what a distracted cleaner I am, but there you go.  Now that that big swath of wall under the turkish scarf is free, I'm going to fill it up with some posters - I've got a nice black-and-white world map, and a Banksy print in the mail.




And last night, I dyed my neighbor's hair for him.  Bright red.  He looks absolutely amazing, and it was loads of fun.  Oh, and I've started reading The Kite Runner, which is an abfab book, people (I'm aware that I'm probably the last person on earth to figure that out).  I'd read Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and enjoyed it immensely, but I think this one is even better.

 

I can't write more because I need to get to the local shop for flour, milk and sugar before dinner, and have a massive amount of studying to do, but wish me luck with those reports.
Hoş çakal!

The Grindstone: Modern Education

Oh, well.  All extended weekends must pass.  My bus was the first home, at about half past five, and there was no seven-to-nine structured study as people were trickling in all evening.  I hung around in the lower lounge with people and, among other things, read someone's anti-feminism post-modernist short story and was offered $20 by one of the guys.  To feel my breasts.  People, take pity on me in the asylum I live in, and … oh, I don't know… go watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes this weekend.  That'll make me happy.  It's what I plan to do, after a whole lot of nonvolunteer work that the school organizes for us to do. 

But, really, it's nice to be back.  It was great to see my friends at home, to visit my old school (It feels so weird to write that), where I sat in on a French class and realized that I still have all the vocabulary, but can't conjugate in anything but Turkish, and to sleep in my own bed, and be woken up by my little brother at ungodly hours – before one p.m.! – but I'm glad to be back on a routine.  The weather's really cooling off here, but I was able to watch a bit of the football soccer game (I confused a lot of people this evening when I told them about it in british terms) that the local school was playing tonight.  Boys' team.  A couple friends are on their team (that's what we have to do if we want to play sports), and 'we' were actually winning when I left to eat some of the glorious bread and cheese and vegetables I dragged back with me.  There were many jokes made on the bus about gardens being shifted, and they developed into a (rather speculative) discussion about when plants stop photosynthesizing.  We are geeks and we are happy.  (I am all about the brackets tonight, aren't I?)

There are a few other people here who are into photography, which is nice.  I can't lie around in plain view without somebody instigating an impromptu shoot, and I'm running out of space on my hard drive!  (Who cares?)

Oh, and, if nothing goes amiss, I'm going to the Common Ground Fair this weekend!  It's been said that if a bomb were dropped on the Common Ground Fair, Maine's surviving hippie population would be countable on one hand.  This is completely undesirable, as they happen to make it a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining place to be – from their no-refined-sugar-within-the-gates policy to the totally delicious deep fried shiitake mushrooms, falafel and gyro (who'd have thought?), to these ridiculous displays of hundreds upon hundreds of varieties of dried beans, barrels-full through which you are allowed to run your dusty hands for as long as you should please… I get very excited about the beans.  There's no disgusting typical fair food or people, and there are all sorts of lovely animals and – my god – activists.  I'll admit, my primary motive in signing up for the trip this weekend is so that I can go to all the political booths, from the Amnestly International people to the Trade With Cuba people to the My Body Is Not Public Property You Freaking Right-Wing Conservative Bastard And I'll Have Abortions Whenever The Hell I Want To people and sign their petitions and buy about forty pins and badges to stick all over my backpack… oh, wait, I don't use one of those any more.  I shall have to find something else to stick pins into…

So, there's really not much more to report.  Oh, wait, sweatshirts: L. gave me his, you know about that.  Well, his girlfriend, my lovely down-the-hall neighbor, had another lovely hoodie that belonged to her maybe not-so-lovely ex back home, and, though I'm not quite sure how, it's become… well, mine.  And I love it!  It's blue and warm and soft and utterly delicious.  That I'm coveting sweaters surely means that summer must be over in my mind, and I'm loath to bid such an eventful season farewell, but I am looking forward to the rest of school.  This time last year, I couldn't imagine myself doing that with much of anything other than resignation – to wasted time and unfriendly people, alleviated, admittedly, by my wonderful darlings at home and a couple good classes.  But to actually be excited about this year is, well, exciting.   I'm enjoying myself here.  I know, right?  Maths homework, which I'm taking a break from right now, is actually quite fun in a therapeutic/numbing sort of way, and I have to ring up my dad in a bit to get him to scan and email a baby picture of me – some secret project the English teacher has lined up, and I forgot to get one while I was home.  But there's always a buzz of sorts in the dorm and the academic building, as they so grandly call it, and I do love that. 

Okay, I have to look what I've said in the face now and go enjoy my maths homework.  Hoş çakal!

'Home?'

School doesn't feel like summer camp any more.  I'm home for the weekend, but I keep catching myself saying 'when I get home...' and 'I need to take such-and-such home.'  I haven't really lived here in this house since pre-Turkey, and I suppose it can only be taken as a good sign.  But it makes me a tiny bit sad.  I have to think about where things are in the kitchen, and what colour the floors are, and things like that now.

Of course I'm eating myself into a stupor - in preparation for another month in a town whose only shop doesn't have butter -  and it's great.  Greens, eggs, yogurt, meat, bread... stuff that's just better here, as well as special, coastal things.  I think we're having mussels at some point tomorrow, and my dad's melons have gotten so ripe and juicy and beautiful that I died this morning... okay, afternoon... when I got out of bed and came downstairs to find something to eat.

I am also finally over being sick, which is wonderful.  I took Friday off as well as Wednesday, which is a shame because I have to make up for that huge chemistry test next Wednesday morning.  All my friends here have school tomorrow, so I shall study insanely.  By Friday evening I felt better and did some hanging, and a few of us decided to watch Some Like It Hot.  We made cookies and locked ourselves in one of the rooms on my wing, and, ah... bras were put on stuffed panda bears, for a start.  And when Marilyn Monroe is all over Tony Curtis on a 23-inch screen and there are blankets all over the place and you're as tired as we were, strange things happen.  We also burned pieces of broken furniture and, for some reason, used-up Korean math papers, on the camp fire they sometimes set up on Friday nights.  Midnight lights-out annoyed the hell out of me, but I was glad later because we all got up at 6:30-ish to get on one of three 7:15-ish buses to go home... four hours for me, and then another in the car.  However: I acquired a really, really nice sweatshirt on the bus (thank you, L!)

(I took this before stealing his sweater.  He's now said I can keep it (I hope it looks as good on me (wow, parentheses withing parentheses inside more parentheses... I'm treating this sentence like algebra)), because he's cool, and yeah, I know he's reading this).

 (I figured out that my camera has two different black-and-white settings - genius amateur that I am, the manual is still on my to-read list) and then a few more clothes with my currently-extremely-popular-with-me mama before going home.  I tore the Gap men's section up looking for just the right cardigan, and also (my host mother in Turkey will be pleased to know) found, finally, some brown mascara that didn't cost a year of college (My god, they give you a lot of free crap when you buy makeup.  I now have all these removing things and sticks of black eyeliner and colourful powders I get the feeling are intended for eyelids and lord knows what else that I'll never, ever use.  Okay, I lie, I will use them, for photo shoots, I'm just amazed what these companies will do to sell you a tiny tube of sticky supposed-sexiness.  So actually, that's kind of cool).  That made me happy. 


Oh, and then there were these.  How many articles of clothing do you see in this picture?  This kind of thing - clothes so loud they keep me up at night - sets me squealing.

Saturday evening, I was back with the kids and it felt good.  There are apparently some really fun new international students at my old school.  I'm going to try getting permission to visit on Tuesday, just so I can hang out more and be berated by all my old teachers for not deciding to go to art school or something and heading up north.  I'm going to bake some cakes to bring back with me, and also need to restock on essentials such as chocolate, chocolate covered almonds, chocolate dipped pretzels, hot chocolate, chocolate caramels and toothpaste.

Well, on Tuesday it's back home to school, and I have miles of essay to wrestle before I sleep, so, iyi geceler, take care of yourself, world, and I will talk to you whenever the hell I next get around to it.  Not that you're not the center of my universe, dear reader.  It's just that my math teacher doesn't love you as much as I do.

Photos!

I went to our wonderfully clever technology person here, and he fixed all my problems inside of a half hour despite being a total non-Mac person (this school's crawling with the infidels).  So, I am now able to upload photos!

They asked me to do a quick shoot.  They picked the laundry room, where the lighting is motion-activated and therefor totally unnegotiable, but everything worked out.  We must have been in there about 45 minutes, and I took hundreds of photos and had the best time ever.  I'm building up a rep, too.  People see my photography books lying around with kitchen implements I'd been sketching or whatever, and they know whose they are. 

I'm not done editing these (you'll see a couple of them need cropping), but I'm very pleased with them and my models are okay with being posted (on of these is his facebook profile anyway), so here you are.

Oh, other than that not much is going on... Not too much homework this weekend, except for a load that the tech teacher assigned.  He's big on positive/negative debates about technology, and today we watched clips about the benefits of WoW to society.  Yeah, I know.  But I've got to write some sort of paper about a good or bad aspect of some piece of modern technology...does that include food processors?  Electric toothbrushes?  Sliced bread?

I suppose I may as well make this one of those crazy posts with way too many pictures... Here are some of the weekend.

I have biking in a half hour, and I need to eat something.  Oh, I made chocolate cake last night.  Lots of fun.  I'm getting way too many kicks out of listening to the Beatles interspersed with Marina and the Diamonds... okay, bye.  Sizi özledim, ama şimdi internet var, ve herkes çok mutlu!

Back to the MSSM

Sorry, but the Beatles are the best.

I am back.  And not projecting from the future.  No, Turkish-speaking-Bacon-eating bloggirl is back online, and how*.  Let me work backwards for a bit here.

I came home this weekend because I of that eye appointment/fair, and I missed school yesterday.  Thank god I didn't have math class, because that would set me too far back for words.  No, but it'll be tough enough catching up with Chemistry.  Chemistry!  I have a science class that I like.  Someone is messing with cosmic cogs and levers at the moment, and I am liking, you know, math and science.  Earth-shaking.  Oh, actually, I saw my math teacher Anyway, I get home late Thursday night and on Friday I hung out with a couple friends, made blueberry peach cake, watched The West Wing and totally failed to take enough pictures of the beautiful town I live in and never really appreciated before.  Stayed up until about 2 a.m. making pie crust and talking to someone back at school - it sounds like I'm missing a wild weekend.  This morning I baked that pie (blueberry) and took it over to the fairground to enter.  My old school's jazzband plays for the harness races every year, but considering the torrential nature of this morning, the horses were kept home and the band played their set uninterrupted.  The bad director, whom I'd been a little scared to face after leaving him so suddenly - if temporarily - second trombone-less to come to this school, saw me and went and dedicated a song to me, with a cheery 'wishing her good luck at school up north'.  The man's either trying to guilt me into tears or okay with my leaving.  Either way, it was great to see my friends play, and after helping them break down we spent a couple hours doing Fair Things.  This means we spent a couple hours alternately cooing at cows and piglets and llamas, and eating.  How we ate.  I again forgot my camera, but I'm kind of glad because I do not want to remember what I've eaten today.  It was wonderful.  Smoked ribs, sticky buns, incredibly high-qual sausages, lobster roll, lime fizz.  Then I brought home my pie (came third this year - very happy) and ate some of that.  It was a little runny, which will be why it didn't take first, but all parties pronounced it yummy and that was fun.  This evening I didn't eat dinner, understandably, except for some cake my parent brought home from a neighbor's wedding.  I still have to do battle with chem, though.  And if you're thinking 'my god, this girl's a food slut,' you're only kind of right.  Because the food at school is frankly Not Good.  There's a kitchen in the dorm, and I cook myself stuff every day, but it's hard to find time to eat as much...it took my performance today to convince my mother that I'm not developing anorexia.  This state of affairs, combined with biking class (we got through the most gorgeous rolling fields and toxic clouds of ozone) and maybe, maybe, my new tendency to NOT eat ten pieces of baklava every day, makes this weekend a total non-problem.  I'm actually feeling rather svelte.

I've tried LARPing (Live Action Role Playing, for those of you who, like me, don't know *censored* about that particular facet of 'geek culture').  It's a huge deal, played with swords and spears and various other weaponry composed of plastic piping, foam and duct tape.  I hate sig figs because they made me fail a quiz, but I feel like I did all right on a chemistry test on Wednesday.  I love my AP composition class to death, and the teacher is starting a photography club!  I'm starting to save for a new lens...one that, um, zooms?  And I've taken hundreds of photos already... god knows my classmates' antics are worthy of being recorded.  I also just heard that I got into the a cappella group, which practices for four hours every weekend.  I auditioned Wednesday and didn't think it went very well, but I'm really excited to have gotten in.

Oh, god, what else.... have I made it completely clear that I love it there?  The classes are extremely demanding and I'm doing three to four hours of homework every evening, but the other students are fantastic, the teachers actually care and there's not this feeling of just going through the motions.  Last weekend there was a dance where people actually danced, and this week it was horribly hot.  This hurricane was preceded by the most awful, stagnant heat, and inland Maine is like the midwest anyway - there's no medium, it's either stifling or bitterly cold.  I feel a little boxed in there without being able to smell the sea, and I'm sure winter will be hard... but I'll worry about that when it happens.


And now that I'm back to dull old Maine again, lots of my friends are flinging themselves across the planet.  AFS is heart-wrenching for those left behind.


Well, I have to go be excited to go back to school.  Or, rather, do maths homework.  Both.  I actually can't wait.  I missed my friends here like mad, and it's been fantastic to see them this weekend, but I'm ready to go home now, for another two weeks.


And there are other ukulele people!  One girl has an electric one...and I'm playing ukulele in the band!  Marilyn, move over.
And I do apologise for this post: haphazard even by my standards.  But there is no way I'm reading it over.  Just don't care that much about sentence structure tonight.
Herkesi sizi seviyorum!


*blame Lorna Lilly for that particularly contagious bit of the '50s

Son Gün Evde (Last Day At Home)

Ahh... my last day at home was lovely.  I spent it with a very good friend, and we finished packing, went to the beach, watched A Bit Of Fry And Laurie on YouTube (sweet, unblocked YouTube) and loaded up the car.  After she left, I and my parents made a lovely dinner: grilled salmon, chard with bacon and a gorgeous mushroom risotto, stirred to perfection by yours truly.  Carrot cake left over from the Celebrity Spelling Bee fundraiser the night before - remind me to tell y'all* about that later - was dessert, along with a big bowl of grapes, and followed by a lovely deep bath.  

Yes, those are my darling pink converse, pictured here on the shore of Turkey's Salt Lake.  They get around, and now I am wearing them up on the Canadian border.

Guys, look up a certain individual named Dan Savage.  Just do it.

That's about all.  Enjoy September.

On and on

Say that you remember

On and on

Dancing in September

On and on

Never was a cloudy day...

*I am missing my friend from Georgia.

Gosh, I got a lot done today.  I guess that's what happens when you get up at seven-thirty.  I mean, by half past eight I was in town at a quick meeting with a lady who works at Mamello English School.  It's a school in Lesotho, mainly attended by HIV positive, disabled or orphaned children, and I did my bat mitzvah charity work raising money for it with a charity spelling bee.  We're organizing another bee fundraiser for the school together this year, and we needed to go over a few details.  After that, to the supermarket to buy them out of dry goods for my dorm kitchen.  Onwards to other shops for things such as chef's knives, a mobile phone and a Hepatitis vaccine.  That one was all right until I started reading the information sheet that the nurse gave me afterwards.  Shudder.  Oh, and an eye appointment for contact lenses!  I have, I'm told, a very strong blink reflex.  I took the things out just now before having a bath, as on the first day one is only meant to wear them for four hours, and I got the second one on my first try!  They're very difficult to put in, and my eyes are a little sore now, but it's just magical to be able to see perfectly with no glasses.  I'll get used to dealing with them, and it's so nice (if strange) not to have anything on my face.  I shall probably decide to start wearing eye makeup a little more regularly (which means the happy coincidation - why isn't that a word? - of my remembering, having time and caring enough to deal with it), because my lashes are so pale they are actually invisible, and I look very different without frames, but no matter.  With a class schedule that doesn't start up until NINE THIRTY every day, I can afford to spend a little more time getting ready.  At the moment, though, I'm just spending time getting excited.

A friend who's been away almost as long as me this summer just got back home, and I am going to have people over sometime this week to say goodbyes and parti.  Tomorrow holds blueberry fields and a final visit to the cinema before I venture into the vast and internet-less depths of the first two weeks of school.

Yes, you read that right.  I shall have to figure out how to auto-post.

Another note: I have decided to be more cynical.  Not in life - I don't know that I could.  I mean here.  I feel that I have been deceiving you, my dear sweet millions, my gasping, adoring masses, of my true nature.  You may not like it, and I may not care - unless you are reading this in a country with a truly gorgeous flag, in which case I adore you with every fibre of my heart not already possessed by baklava - but we shall manage, shan't we?