I (heart) NY

Well!  New York has passed gay marriage.  Happy Friday, everyone.  This is so utterly fantastic.  To celebrate, I am going to make a tumblr.  That link is for all you people who are so committed to blogspot (all 11 of you) that you don't even KNOW what tumblr is.  But no longer.  This is your introduction.


So.  A lot has changed in the almost two months since I've posted... sorry about that.  It started with good intentions.  See, there was this math final.  And two weeks before it, I kind of quit recreational internet.  I took the math final, which was very important to me.  In that, if I failed the final, I would fail the course.  And so I quit the internets.  The fun, cool, sexy bits, anyway.  And then I took the final, passed the final very well and the course with a C+ (yes, I'm HAPPY) and unquit the net.  Except I forgot about this part of my responsibilities to humanity.  Sorry about that.  I was in Colorado for a bit (pictures when I have a better connection) and my family's moving, so, um, yeah... 

I have a job!  I work five hours a week for $7.94 an hour at the local library.  Yeah.  Feeling good about that.  It's actually really fun, and I'm learning a lot.  I took out a book yesterday about flappers and the sexual revolution in America, and I learned that in 25 years of legal prostitution in Nevada, there has not been one single case of HIV, making it the safest sex industry on this silly planet.  I've also been taking out a lot of DVDs, because it's summer, and I and a friend staying with me have watched, among less-good others, Pulp Fiction, Slumdog Millionaire, Brüno (I died), Speed and two episodes of Sherlock (I can forgive it for crowding out Dr. Who, it's that good).  It's not like being in China - not that I'd KNOW, would I? - but it's all right. 

 

Oh, and that post underneath this one from a hundred years ago.  It's not true any more.  The schedule.  See, I'm now taking Physics and American literature.  Why, you ask?  Oh, well, have I mentioned the page program I'd applied to?  Yes?  Well.  I sort of got in.  That means I'll be spending the second semester of my junior (next) year of high school in Washington, D.C. working on the United States Senate Floor.  I'm extremely excited about this, but the Page School doesn't have bio, and I took chem this (last?) year (NEVER AGAIN), so physics it is.  God, help me.  So, I'll need to spend half a year in sensible shoes and gray skirts.  KILL ME.  I am going to get the craziest underwear imaginable.  And I've gotten myself new glasses, really big silly purple ones.  I'm having fun with them, though it's a new prescription (this baby's legally blind, darlings) and I had some... moments today as I tried to do things like climb stairs and reach for teapots.  Anyway.  See?


Oh!  And I'm going to Israel with my family and my cousin (redundant?  But excited!) in January!  Very excited, never been before, and while I am NOT a blindly pro-Israel pro-Netanyahu jew (this apparently makes me anti-semitic in some circles), I am extremely happy that this plan is going through, and I'm going to brush up my Hebrew.  no, really.  I think I'll take an online course in the time I'll have from turning down another minimum wage job at a local inn.  This is a very disorganized post, can you tell how much I've slept of late? 

I Feel Like I'd Be Happy If I Could Just Have An Oozing Chocolate Chip Cookie With This Milk

Somebody turned on the sunset.

 

It's nearly summer.  I'm sunburned, the grass is dead but dry enough to sit on, and I'm almost happy.  Messy and unfocused is good.  Dates are good.  Hairbrushes, painkillers and cold showers aren't.  Globalization is a stupid thing to try to write a final paper about.  Winter is a dead thing.  Butter isn't enough.  Spelling is stupid, but it obsesses me.  My phone number is a mystery.  My hair is a tangle.  My shoes are lost and my mind's in the gutter with the rest of me, I like it there.  Rilo Kiley won't leave my skull quiet.  I need to eat something, and my fingers are sticky.  Yeah, we'll all be portions for foxes. 

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.

New Amsterdam, It's Become Much Too Much

So... yeah... I haven't written anything in forever.  It's because I don't love you. 

Yesterday the weather was a proper April fools bitch and ruined our weeks-long run of achingly-almost-spring-ness by dumping eleven inches of snow on our heads.  Thanks, babe, much appreciated.  This was a nice short week, though, and now there are only two more until break.  It's almost as if there's a god.  However, today ruined all my (slim) chances of believing such a thing.  This place is a public school, which means we have to have a certain number of school days in order to, you know, get state funding, etc.  So, instead of operating on a normal high school schedule, we occasionally cram mandatory "school days" into weekends.  This is apparently "theme weekend" though nobody's mentioned the theme.  I guess it must be math and science.  What a lovely change.  So, I sat through two hour-long lectures on meteorology and weather broadcasting.  The first one was actually incredibly fun - the guy was from Alabama, said "I'm jus' sayin'..." about three hundred times throughout a lot of different powerpoint presentations that could really have been consolidated, but were okay because they concerned things like storm chasers, nutcases who drive into hurricanes with their video cameras, and what a bitch the TV weather broadcast industry is.  The second one, after lunch... well.  I was honestly fighting to stay awake.  But not very hard.  It wasn't worth it.  He gave up maps of the United States.  We drew lines around pressure zones and things like that in different coloured pencils.  Or we were meant to.  I drew lots of little purple circles. 

I'm getting nervous.  I still haven't heard back from NSLI-Y, and people are starting to.  One of my friends from Turkey last year is an alternate for this year, and I just want to know so that I can get a job if I don't get in.  But I really want to get in.  I don't care where, though India or Tajikistan would be amazing. 

Groucho Marx.  Goddamn genius.  I've been flipping through a book of his personal correspondence, and the man was just so rude to everybody, and so funny!  Observe this excerpt from a letter to some friend of his:

"Years ago I used to have a girl friend who made a pretty good living addressing envelopes for a mail order firm in Hollywood. She used to get five dollars a night for a thousand envelopes and she would knock them off by midnight. The most of the night she spent in the sack with various men friends. She averaged about a hundred dollars a night, five dollars from the mail order business and ninety-five from the female order business. Well, that's about all there is to the story, it was only a brief romance, but I did salvage some of the envelopes for myself. Ah, youth, that it should be wasted on addressing envelopes."

I mean... people just don't write like that any more.  It's crazy. 

I want new headphones, and I can't decide whether I should get some okay earbuds or go all out for a proper headset.  Advice? 

Well, it's Saturday night, which means pretending to do homework.  Chem test on Monday, and so much English.  I finished Great Expectations, but that bitch of a book isn't done with me... there's still an essay, and So Many Notes.  And I liked Estella, which nobody is supposed to do.  So I feel like if I write an essay happily equating feminism with lovelessness... I'll get in trouble.  Gah.  Whatever.  Night.

Procrastination

All I Want This Year is Something to Regret When I Am Older

Well.  I hate the Wizard of Oz, but I'd absolutely forgotten how cute Judy Garland was and how sweetly they dressed her in that film.  Okay, so this is a test.  I think it's possible to show you my lookbook stuff from this blog.  We'll see. 

It's really nice to be home.  I've seen my friends, eaten some truly magnificent food and watched Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, Billy Elliot and Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil.  I call that productive, don't you?  All magnificent films.  It's bitterly cold and windy here, so I've been staying in, and when I'm not with friends I'm writing songs or gearing up to do bits and pieces of homework.  On Thursday, my mother end I are going to a lecture at Colby college.  It's one of the three really good schools in Maine, and I would absolutely look at it seriously if it weren't so close to home.  But my parents are panicking a little bit about university for me.  The school I'm at, we all do pretty damn well in the national standardized tests.  But the classes are graded so hard that our transcripts don't match up, and so it's harder for us to get into top-tier schools, a lot of people say, than it should be.  Some of the seniors I'm friends with have gotten into all sorts of great places, but some haven't at all, and it is quite worrisome.  SO, my pushy Jewish mother wants me to practice visiting colleges.  I'm not much inclined to think about college at this point, let alone apply to any - I'm in tenth grade, for Christ's sake! - but I suppose it's sensible.  But, my god, you should see the emails I'm getting daily, the stack of promo mail I that was on my desk when I got home.  This whole process... they whore around to get you interested, you whore right back to get yourself in.  It's disgusting, and it makes me want to throw my chem books away, take sitar lessons and major in painting or dance. 

I also went to the dentist today.  I hate that fluoride stuff. 

I've started Great Expectations for English class.  I didn't think I liked Dickens at all, but this seems really great - it's funny, in a very English sort of way, and clever, and I care about Pip.  So, good first twenty pages. 

Oh.  And.  I have discovered eBay.  I mean, how to use it.  And I am just praying, praying that it's blocked at school, because I do NOT need to be spending this kind of money. 

So.  Lamb curry for dinner, then I'm watching the baby, but that's okay because the internet doesn't turn itself off at 11:00 p.m. here!!!

"We Really Don't Understand What Mubarak Was Thinking Of... No One Will Be Able To Control The Anger Of The Egyptian People"

I'm very fond of my solitude of late.  I'm still delighted to be seeing people, and still probably spend far too much time with them, and certainly not enough studying (I found out today that I failed a chemistry test I had felt really confident about.  I don't know what happened).  But I'm equally happy lately to just sit on my bed with a book or my ukulele or my laptop and play by myself.  Everyone's been ill and though we're mostly recovered, the energy's still low.  Lonely is nice, you know? 

So.  Mubarak will not stand down.  He promised.  Well, you fool.  What do you intend to achieve by this?  I've been watching the live English-language stream of the arabic news station here. 

Today as English was ending I got very dizzy, and started feeling very cold, and crying.  I think I was just very stressed, and hadn't eaten much... one of my friends was really sick this week, and I was very worried about her for a while.  I guess the tension just built up.  It was just my teacher at that point, and I was incredibly embarrassed, but she was so kind to me.  She went and fetched the Brit Lit teacher, and they talked to me about the difficulties of teaching Dickens, and how failing chem tests doesn't matter, until the nurse came and brought me back to the dorms.  My teacher lent me her gloves, and he had a KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON mug of tea with him that made me very happy.  Then I had a nice cry with my maytag model, who's been awfully kind to me, and went to bed for an hour.  I think this might have been the first time I've cried since I've been here.  My brother just turned six.  I feel very, very old, and exactly six years ago today, I was crying in a delivery room as he was born.


There's no play rehearsal tonight, and I'm glad I shan't miss it.  I'm off book, but still need a lot of work.  The performance is on the 19th of March. 

So, I joined LookBook.  Here are the pictures I've put up so far...  I've gotten some nice attention, and it's a vrey nice online community - though it's basically the vanity of facebook crystallized in photo form... people saying "Tell me how pretty I am," but very interesting and entertaining.  I've never looked great in photographs, which is why I usually take them instead, so it's a fun editing challenge for me. 

[Not A Song Lyric]

I was kind of embarrassed to realize that my last three posts were titled with lyrics having absolutely nothing to do with their content.  I am not doing that this time, but instead giving you a video that has nothing to do with... anything.  I mean, I made it.  It's a song I wrote, but I have absolutely no clue what it's about.  But, guys!  I got a comment on it from some guy in Australia who I don't even know.   That's some yays.  Yep, this is me... excited about a few comments on the blog and a couple stranger views on YouTube.  I'm so clueless.  Hopefully somebody will find it funny one day.

I had my NSLI-Y interview on Tuesday, and I think it went really well.  I was questioned by a very charming couple, who have been AFS host parents in the past, and we got on fairly well.  I think they liked me and what I showed them of the school, and the only thing that's got me really worried is the fact that they didn't even touch the candied nuts and chocolate wafers I'd set out for them.  People who turn down sweets make me nervous.  Oh, know what else makes me nervous?  This shit going down in Egypt.  I mean, bringing the internet down is a pretty harsh blow, and the violence is looking to get pretty scary.  And, also, I mean... Egypt was my second choice for the summer programme.  I seriously doubt they'll be sending anybody there now. 

In other news:  White Stripes:  WHAT THE BLOODY HELL?  I love you.  We love you.  So why the goddamn hell are you breaking up?  This has been a hard week, and you are not helping it or rendering me any more likely to pass chemistry. 

Our awesomely anglophilic Brit Lit teacher here has started a british television club.  We had our first meeting today - ploughman's lunch - and talked about what to watch and when.  Looks like Jeeves & Wooster and Yes, Minister are firsts on the list.  This almost makes up for the White Stripes breakup.  Not quite, but almost. 

Sorry I Haven't Posted In A Week...

...off to London tomorrow.  Lots of news soon!

Pop Culture Is Democratic Until It's Fascist

I decided to be honest.  I decided not to lie about how I live. 

I also had to sort of improvise when it came to showing you just how messy my room is (I've been home almost a week and still haven't finished unpacking) because I didn't have anyone to take the pictures of me in it.  I ended up doing a lot of estimated pre-focusing and using the timer on my camera, which I positioned precariously upon shelves, music stands and a ukulele case and, finally, shamefully, I took pictures of myself in the mirror.  I hope you don't mind.  Anyway, this was a very spur-of-the-moment shoot prompted by an unexpected gift from a neighbour: the ridiculous shoes you see below.  Well, they were just too darling.  I had to put on something monstrously incongruous and confusing and... and sit alone in my room blogging about it.  I do miss school.

There are many terrible, tragic things about my life, but one of the worst is that my feet are US size 11/12.  Since I was very, very little I could never have the shoes I wanted, from the tiny little leather sandals with leather flowers on the straps to the shiny wedges I crave now, and everywhere in between including trainers, flip flops and snow boots.  I very often end up wearing mens' shoes in the latter three categories, and there is absolutely nothing in the world that could very few things depress me more.  So, when these... I just can't absorb how silly they are... things appeared in my life today, I decided something celebratory had to be done. 

 

Can I just be cocky for a minute and say that I really like the way the edge of the mirror distorts this picture a bit?  Especially the detail at the top of the door.

 

If you know me at all, you know that celebrating means cake and loud, clashing clothes.  I already had a cake in the oven, so it was on with the leggings, and I sort of went from there.  (hey, see the mess on my bed?  Somebody, please, tell me that you live that way too.  Oh, and do you like my penguin pillowcase?)  Here's the breakdown: