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.

Only Here...

...at the geekiest school in New England, would we get a half day of classes off for Pi Day.  This is, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, today, March the fourteenth, because of the numbers.  π = 3.14..... and the date matches up, etc.  So.  I had two classes this morning, and now I'm free until the various π and pie-related contests start after lunch.  We'll be having pie baking and eating contests, π recitation, we're auctioning off teachers to be "pied," ("we" being the student senate), est., etc.  So, today is basically one very bad, very long pun.  Oh, and THIS IS HELL WEEK.  It's official.  Three hours of rehearsal every night during structured study, for which we have to make up with awkwardly scheduled study halls throughout the day.  The Importance Of Being Ernest will be the death of me. 

I've submitted my application for the Senate Page Program to the office of Olympia Snowe.  That's very exciting.  I'm also just sort of waiting nervously for next month, when I'll hear about NSLI-Y and whether the Middle East has gone so mad that they won't send me there.  Or that I just didn't get in.

Bitterly cold outside, and I'm hungry.  And getting sick of Great Expectations.

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:

DISCLAIMER: Nothing I Write Here Is True

Not even that title.

Having read this over before posting, I feel that this needs another disclaimer: I am not a psych case.  I am a thoroughly with-it, under-control, normal human being on hyperdrive.  But no, really, you'll understand when if you get that far down the page.  I am never in therapy, very rarely cry and do not project angstiness into the world on a regular basis - I had that gland removed as soon as I got up here.

Oh, and Blogger is being most irritating and insisting that I have filled up my free 1GB of space in Picasa and must pay Google $5.00 a year to upload any more.  See the sacrifices I make for you, dear reader?  I shall pay it, but you must promise it will not be in vain. 

Well, that chemistry test was far more entertaining than expected.  We were all sitting there working on our stoichiometry problems as our teacher sat in front of his computer when, about fifteen minutes into class, Single Ladies started playing very loudly.  He looked utterly stunned, and after we'd all taken a second to absorb the fact that the music was coming from his speakers, he stammered that it had been a pop-up, that he'd been looking at e-brochures.  Nowt so queer as folk, I suppose... but the poor man was mortified.

Another week down, and there's Pulp Fiction in my future.  I do love weekends.  One afternoon last week I called in sick (I was, genuinely, suffering from the effects of exhaustion, eating nothing but pretzels for two days, and an English essay) and turned off all the lights in my room except for the fairy lights, and just laid on my lovely wide bed and dozed and read The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe and listened to a rain storm.  When excused from classes here, one can't really go about looking healthy, but I had visitors and we sat and chatted for a lovely long time.

So, on Tuesday something really weird happened. 

If You Can't Handle Me At My Worst, Then You Sure As Hell Don't Deserve Me At My Best

Okay.  Horrible week.  And we only had three days of school!  But after getting back from a disgustingly indulgent holiday on Tuesday and all throwing ourselves at one another with an abandon usually reserved for sex and seizures, desperately keening and making arduous declarations of adoration - how the last four days apart had rent our souls - we didn't all really settle back into the work thing - the weekend was too close to take the interim seriously.  Bad Idea.  So, I'm guessing it was the under the combined strains of two all-nighters in a row (I may or may not have been found sitting in front of essays in my underwear at 3 a.m., eating chocolate-covered almonds and dry coffee grounds to stay awake), a flu jab, malfunctioning uterine lining and forgetting to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner yesterday that I sort of collapsed last night and spent a few hours alternating clutching my stomach on the floor, drinking litres of very cold water very fast, shivering and sweating...  I think that last night was the first time in recorded history that I've gone to bed before my roommate.

When a friend and I decided to make ourselves some eggs recently, we found them frozen... and cooked them anyway.  It was so weird.  We peeled off the shells from these gushy, crystallized, freezing-melty eggs and threw them right in the pan, and they were delicious - but strange. 

Oh, I'm getting really excited about my birthday, which is in less than a month.  I've been known to obsess, and I'm trying to figure out what to do - it falls very fortunately on a Friday this year, and, less fortunately, one day before Thanksgiving break.  Also, Hallowe'en.  And I know, I know, everyone at school who's reading this is going "What?  She's English!" but I lived in a rather American neighbourhood in London and we always had crazy parties and pumpkins and costumes.  My best year, I think, was sixth grade, when I was a box of Kleenex.  I painted it myself and everything, and since then have worn a box almost every year.  This time, I'm being a Rubik's Cube.

This was the ninth week of school.  While I'm of the opinion that nine weeks is far too long to spend anywhere, I do feel obliged to acknowledge how remarkably pleasant these ones have been.  I have friends with whom I chat and walk and watch films, almost more than I did before.  I am able to feed myself to the extent that I have not yet died, nor become so remarkably emaciated that some concerned faculty member has had to have me hospitalized.  While I do not particularly care about chemistry or advanced math, they have not taken any particular dislike to me and are the subjects in school I get along the worst with.  I live with a hundred-odd people who seem to be able to tolerate me far better, on average, than they generally can at home, and while I'm sometimes slightly put out by having to yield my grip on some friends to their paramours, that would happen anywhere and is, I suppose, the price of not having one or any of the accompanying grief (though I get more than my share of other peoples').

I've started Three Cups Of Tea, that incredibly famous book about the mountaineer who got lost on K2 and was taken in by Pakistani villagers and then decided to build trillions of girls' schools around the Taliban.  As everybody else in the world, which is who's already read this, knows, it's quite fantastic once you get past the disconcertingly ghost-written introduction.

Finally, the first read-through for The Importance Of Being Ernest was yesterday - I'm Miss Prism and quite enjoy my part.  The improv club also met for the first time, and both promise to be thoroughly enjoyable and quite satisfactorily distracting from any coursework I might happen to consider doing in the coming year.  I am well pleased.

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!

Illness and a Surprise

Nice to meet you, Tuesday.  Leave me alone.

I've been sick... running a low fever on and off since Sunday night.  There's something going around and hitting a lot of people badly enough to make them miserable but too gently to keep them in bed.  That and the rain are turning the dorms into something of an energy sink.  It's really not nice out, and I am not looking forward to biking tomorrow.  I went walking around campus today after classes, and twenty minutes wiped me, I'm just so tired.  Yesterday evening I slept on one of the lounge sofas for almost an hour.  I actually got myself a blanket - shameless.  I overslept this morning despite that, though it didn't matter because I get up at least two hours before I need to be anywhere.  Hung out in the kitchen, made turkish çay tea, ate the last of the gorgeous (I feel justified in saying this, yes) quiches I made on Sunday and chatted with one of the guys who gets to clean our kitchen instead of the cafeteria's.  A lot of the Beatles and Gilbert and Sullivan on the laptop.  And that extremely tame kick has sort of been today's highlight, so far.  The weekend was quiet but very nice, and I still didn't get all my homework finished.  I did, however, get to watch Casablanca and V for Vendetta.  Both were excellent and the latter was new for me.  Almost the best film I've seen. 

I'm failing maths.  Have I mentioned that before?  I'm one grade-point from being moved down, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.  The teacher for the non-accelerated course is meant to be fantastic, but if I can I want to stay on the faster course.  It's not particularly difficult material - I understand what's taught in class - but the one test we've taken so far was just evil.  I couldn't finish because there was so much of it, and it was horribly difficult, somehow.  I think a lot of people had trouble with it, though, and that's normal.

I'm not sure what to attach to this one in terms of pictures -- I'm sort of writing to put off editing an essay.  I hate what I've got so far, and I've got to fix it when all I really want to do is hide it in some folder and forget about it and never read it again. 

Some books I'd ordered came over the weekend, too.  My list, as soon as I'm done with Emma and Catch 22, goes:
The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
Thunder From The East: Portrait of a Rising Asia
Three Cups of Tea

I can't wait to get to them.  I'm actually finding a lot more time for reading here than I used to.  I just hang around the lounge and throw myself over furniture and alternate homework, chatting and reading.  I love it and I'm off to do some of it now before structured study.

Okay, actually, I went out in the middle of writing this, and I've got a package!  I haven't excavated in full yet, but the day just got a lot better.  Spelt bread, butter, gouda and manchego cheese, some really delicious apples, dried tomatoes, mushrooms and beef, Nutella, crackers, cocoa powder and a note from my parents.  I am so glad I did not eat dinner.

With that I leave you to toil before the books of wisdom -- feeling just a little bit better.

The Problem of 'Stress Not Quite Covering It'

It's about half past ten at night and we just had a fire drill.  This involved absolutely everyone, all hundred-and-something students and all the res. staff, exiting the dorms through one very narrow door on my wing, right next to my room.  Delightful.  Then we huddled outside in the surprising cold - it rained a lot earlier and civil feet were with civil rain made cold - as the standard roll-call who's-missing oh-damn-we're-locked-out procedure took its course.  A dearth of clothing of the underneath variety rendered yours truly particularly chilly, but I got a kick out of just leaning against the wall and watching all these sheepish boys reenter through the girls' wing afterwards. 

And there aren't enough kicks to go around at the moment.  Stress Week.  Today I had another chemistry test - I got an eighty-something on the last one, which isn't bad for a first exam - and I think i went all right, but I spent all of Monday and esterday working on that and not the maths test or English paper that are both happening/due tomorrow.  So structured study was not fun.  I'd be working on the essay right now if I hadn't just bribed a neighbor with copious quantities of chocolate to proofread it. 

Oh, and someone convinced me to run for student senate.  I got all the nomination signatures I need, and I've decided that my platform will be returning to monarchical rule.  I'd also like to do something about the cafeteria.  It's sometimes all right, and actually can be very nice on weekends, but there's also a lot of really not-nice frozen food, and some simply illogical practices that could be easily remedied... such as the idiotic use of Idaho potatoes.  This is Northern Maine, people, get a grip!  That really frustrates me.  And it seems like the student government here actually gets its shit together and does things, which is cool.

In my attempts at avoiding the cafeteria, I've actually made some rather nice friends.  The kitchen is a good hang-out/faux-study spot, and tonight I made pasta and shared it with a few girls and talked about their boyfriends, etc.  I'm also becoming That Deranged Blonde With The Camera.  There's a guy here with really, really incredible style who wanted to join LookBook, and he needed photos of himself and a friend.  They asked me to take them, and we ended up having a 45-minute shoot in the laundry room, and we were all on top of the driers and I got some abfab and some rather risqué shots.  It's nice to have such a range of models, from study-geeks to such pantherine fashionistas.  I have another shoot planned for Saturday with a very pretty new friend, and I promise I'd be showing you all this if the internet here weren't so funky.  It replaces correctly-spelled profanity with *censored*, and I initially thought that blogger was fucking with my posts and shit, but it's just the goddamn bloody school filters (rebellion-inductive).  I can't seem to upload photos to blogger, either, or use iChat, and my mail programme won't send, though it can receive.  I've got to get to the tech guy and have it all straightened out, but for now you'll have to perch tensely on the edge of your chair and just keep refreshing this page. 

And my lovely next-door friend has just returned with notes on my disaster of a literacy narrative, so I'll sign off now.  Weekends used to be a nuisance, but they're becoming my drug... why is it only Wednesday?  No matter, I'm going to read a bit of Emma before bed tonight.  God, Austen is becoming my second-choice narcotic. 

Rosh Hashanah, happy new year.  The Jewish astronomy teacher is volunteering to take people to the nearest synagogue.  I think I'll go this weekend, just to see how they manage it up here.  

Oh, and the dorm dog got into my room today and ate my dried meat.  I've been leaving the door open because I've lost my key.  Whatever.

If You Are Reading This...

The Future is happening.  Not some stupid sci-fi thing, I'm just scheduling this to post in a few days when I'll be at MSSM without any internet... god.  Yeah.  No.  The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is the only science fiction I ever actually enjoyed, and I have read a lot of sci-fi.  But, yeah, whatever.  Right now, or last Friday, I was/am waiting for a friend to show up for a last bit of time together.  My suitcase was/is zipped up, making me absurdly proud of my negotiating skills, because that baby was/is bursting.  No heavy dinnerware in it this time.... My new Le Creuset is/was in another bag.  The only things on my bed now were/are my laptop (which I really hope(d) the school people won't/wouldn't go through and do god-knows/knew-what to all my music and documents and photos while they scan(ed) for viruses), camera, and a small backpack full  of helva and turkish coffee.  That's the bag I'm going to keep close at hand for the first few weeks- in case at any point I realize I'm actually checking into some government-prison-spy-highsecurity THING that I don't want to be part of, because really, I put in my time with the US government this summer - for trekking out into the frozenness with.  Good, compact calories, you see.  I must practice making igloos, too. 

So, who knows what will/has take(n) place since now/then.  Maybe I've become a homesick wreck, which I can't/couldn't quite imagine now/5 days ago, as I feel/felt sort of checked out of my family for these (next) two weeks*.  Perhaps everything is/will be great and I will be/am just itching to put these great photos up of all my new friends and be a nerd and talk about my amazing chem class.  Or the .com crash (read: apocalypse), which would render this existential crisis of a post a total waste of my time and confusion.  Let's hope not, retrospectively and otherwise, and I'm going to stop now before this starts making sense.

*The first long weekend isn't until a month into school, but I have a conveniently-scheduled optician's appointment on the weekend of the local fair.