Because You Deserve Something Beautiful Today

Lady Snowblood is said to be a favourite of Quentin Tarantino's, and you can absolutely see O-ren fron Kill Bill in this video.  Besides that, it's really stunning music - I was tipped off by my jazz friend from the Library of Congress.



I go home tomorrow!!  Buses leave at 7 am, kill me, but I am going to have a deep, hot bath, eat roast lamb and sleep.  Now I have to do some emergency chem homework. 

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.

If I Never Loved I Never Would Have Cried

I made you a video, because I was locked in a tower by a fire-breathing dragon.  So you can listen to my accent being totally incongruous with Simon&Garfunkel songs, and laugh.

This is a hell chunk of school.  Only two more weeks, then it's back home, thank goodness.  But we've all been sick.  Horribly sick.  Today (probably yesterday by the time I get to posting this - damn internet curfew) my friend and I were both feeling really ill and sorethroatish, she more than me (grammar?) and the nurse wasn't in so we had to go to the dean of students.  This man is fundamentally miserable, hates teenagers and, I'm fairly sure, resents us like hell because we aren't vibe-sucking stick insects.  I feel okay about venting here, because I'm fairly sure he doesn't know how to read a blog, but if you are reading this, sir, please know that I think your behaviour toward us today has bee immensely unfair and unkind, and does you as little professional credit as it does human.  You may be a good person, but you're not a nice one.  He didn't let anybody off classes at all - and he knows we're not slackers and that we're aware that being sick makes us fall behind.  We don't want to have to take the day off - yet treats us like criminals.  He makes me feel like a really deplorable person when he's around.
Anyway, I don't want to bitch at you about it, but that's just not cool.

Ohhh, and it's tomorrow now....




So, let me know what you think.  I have to go take some horrible school-wide standardized maths test now, but I promise I'll do some proper writing for you later today - I've got a study hall.

'Tis The Day Before The Math Final

And all through the dorms, people are lazing about in pajamas and alternating between study and hanging and feeling wonderful because they're inside in pajamas and it's snowing and they have fairy lights in their rooms.  At least, I am.  No classes AT ALL today, so I didn't get up until 8:30 when I got hungry and went and stole some milk from the cafeteria.  I'm half-packed, studying and actually feeling okay about most of this test.  I took the chem test yesterday.  It was all multiple choice, only an hour, and I think I passed.  I brought my laptop in my backpack and, as we were all about to start the test, reached in and opened it and started playing Single Ladies.  Everyone got it and laughed and it was all good fun... do you get it, too?  Remember I told you about that time?  And after the test, the teacher let us make liquid nitrogen ice cream (damn...that's my old url).  So much fun.... it actually boils when you pour it into the cream, and there's so much vapour.  The night before, I'd made myself roasted mushrooms and potatoes and creamed spinach.  And that day I wore neon pink and black striped thigh highs, so I felt pretty good.  Pictures coming soon.  Oh, and today I have another shoot with my Maytag model - this time for a Lookbook contest where you style people to look like characters from a TV show.  Needless to say, my tights are hot currency. 

Well, I'm going to spend the next 3 hours (swim team after that....it's a pain but I sleep well) eating, taking pictures, studying, and finishing Siddhartha.  Why, God, WHY must the math final be at 8:30 am?  And be three hours long?  Why?  But I will survive....  my mother wants me to play that at her funeral. 

I am so excited to get home.  I can't wait to see my friends and spend time with them while they're not at school, and cook and watch films and then go to England, and then D.C!!!  Aaah!  And I just found out I'm going to Colorado for a few days this summer... more on that later, but I've never been that far west and I really want to see the mountains.

Flashdance.... 

I Wrote This On Thursday, Posted It And Then Deleted It

I got a 48% on my last chemistry test.  I don't know what's going on.  I used to be that girl who got upset if her grades were in the low 90s, because there was just no effort involved in an essay or test.  But that's not true.  I worked hard, I guess, but everything last year just looks so easy compared with this... and so I've taught myself not to care too much.  I know I'm at a horribly challenging school and everyone's in the same situation, and I deal with the ego blows.  But I am not dealing with this.  Not very well.  I don't understand, I'm getting behind, and I haven't got the self-control to say no to a massage or conversation and go study.  Why should I?  Don't I want to have something to regret from high school?  But writing that I realize that the academics are all that will speak.  Why do we have to figure out how to get through secondary school at the time when we could spend every hour of every day figuring out what's going through our blood and still not work out who we are.  I don't know who I am, but I don't think I like her very much.  She lies, she can't take anything for an answer because the minute she's got what she wanted she wants to move on.  She's not a hypocrite and she doesn't try to hurt people, but she wants to do things that would.  So maybe she is.  And you can tell she's not very decisive.  I also sometimes worry that she's too assertive.  I feel like people think of me in very masculine terms sometimes, just because I'm very assertive and loud and.... I don't know.  I definitely can be extremely girly, but I'm somehow.... ashamed of that.  I feel silly.  So I try not to do it. 

I'm listening to the Hairspray soundtrack in study hall and failing to study.  Vanilla can be nice but, truth be told....  I've got swim practice next, and then ensemble.  Oh, the people round here can barely pay their rent/they're tryin'a make a dollar out of fifteen cents.... My trombone still makes me happy, but I don't play much because it makes me miss jazzband and my friends at home.  When push comes to shove... I love that term.  I don't know why.  I wrote a song a few years ago, and that was the only rhyme I could come up with for love, but that bit was terrible.  It started like this:

You're my cure

You're the one

That I call when I'm blue

And I always sleep better

When I'm sleeping with you

I've been writing again.  Just in the past couple days, and I don't know why.  Suddenly in chemistry I'll just have to scribble a line down, and feel like the romantic, idealistic little girl I was so glad I no longer am a few weeks ago.... wow.  Tense fail.  (anyway, maybe that's got something to do with my grades) But maybe she's more honest than whoever sleeps in my bed and layers my tights today.  

Half the dorm is sick and the rest of us are hoping for a quarantine.  It could a) be fantastic for studying b) cause midterms to be canceled.  Either would be dreamy.  Just to be locked in my room would be a sort of socializing detox.  I'd have Skype and iChat and facebook, but I would probably finish all the books I've started instead of talking or working.  But I do love the people I live with, the way they're just here for me.  Today at lunch, one of the girls from the other wing just wandered into my room and we had lunch on my floor - just bread, cheese, salami, things I had in my fridge - and chatted for twenty minutes.  I love that.  'Cause the wold keeps spinning 'round and 'round....

I spend so much time calculating what to say, wear, write, listen to, so that everyone will think I don't care what they think.  So *censored*ing stupid.  And I'm scared to post this, because I'm that indestructible, un-angsty, bouncy, perky, immune-to love, immune-to-hate chick.  But here, something's different.  I have never, ever felt like anyone was attracted to me before, but it's only now that I'm sort of learning to be ashamed of my body.  Which I love, by the way.  As you know.  I love my arms and my thighs and my neck and my face - but they don't feel like mine, like parts of my body.  And, conversely, weirdly, I'm "throwing it around" a lot more than I did at my old school.  I guess I'm just more comfortable with these people.  One of the teachers gave me a hilarious look yesterday evening because a friend of mine came over to me and we put our arms around one another's waists, just the way we always do... I just want to get out of my body and everything it means and tells people.

I hate geography.  It's the only thing that keeps me apart from my friends.

Feelin' The Same Way All Over Again

I feel like a real mess.  But today I'm very glad that I use blogspot.  Please, Tumblr, get off your knees so I can read!  Loads of people are sick here, and I feel awful, too.  Why must we be so ill here, so often?  When I woke up this morning it was snowing, wet and heavy, and about half the teachers didn't make it in today.  So it's a semi-snow day, I suppose... I'm a bit jealous of all my friends at home, though.  They're so far south!  Why do they get a cancellation while I still have to sit through technology class?  Ugh.

On Friday night, the chemistry teacher used alkali metals (or something) to light this enormous bonfire in a field by the school.  It was dark and cold and a lot of people got sick of standing in the rain, but I stayed out there a long time.  It was rather magnificent, and the local fire department kept getting calls because of the light and smoke and explosions.  I went out the next morning around ten, and it was still burning.  I stayed for nearly an hour taking pictures, and when I came in one of my friends felt my hands and looked at me like the idiot I was for forgetting to wear gloves. 

And, my god, can we all just take a moment and be grateful and retrospectively terrified and incredibly relieved that we live in a (mostly) post-Roe vs. Wade society?  Can we just be glad of that?  In a lot of states, including the one I live in, you need parental consent to get an abortion before you're 18.  But you can get one.  And you can get condoms.  And birth control.  And plan-B pills.  And abortions.  One of my favourite Supreme Court cases is Griswold vs. Connecticut.

Okay, that was a ramble.  My grades are slipping.  I posted about that earlier, but then deleted it.  I'll redo it, just scroll up.  But I'm pretty sure I failed my last chem test as well, though I was sure I understood it, and I got a C- on the rough draft of my final essay.  It's evening now and I'm feeling horribly cold and sick.  And there is So Much To Do.  But enjoy the pictures.  I'll be memorizing the charges and solubility of ionic compounds.

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.

A Post With No Clothes

I like clothes, people. 
They're nice to pick out and throw together and talk about and think about, and fun to make statements with, and an easy way to confuse the hell out of people by changing them twice a day between classes (guilty).  But do we honestly have to wear them All The Time?  I am really goddamn sick of this whole keeping-on-your-clothes thing in the dorm.  My wing is one straight, long corridor and my room is right at the end of it.  The door to the upper lobby's usually open, and yes, I wrap myself in a towel and dash across the hall to get to the showers.  Who's it going to hurt?  So bloody what if someone sees me?  It's a towel, people.  I wear outfits that cover about half as much of me and nobody blinks.  And if somebody with a penis happens to see somebody without one while they're basically wearing a floor-length dress, is it really apocalypse?  At home I don't have to put up with this shit and I can make breakfast naked if I want.  I'm not used to worrying about who might see me - I just don't care.

But one of the residential staff - that is to say, the teacher whose apartment is on our wing - just stopped me and said I have to be 'more conscious of how covered up I am'.  Christ.  I don't tend to show an indecent amount of skin in general -  up here you can't, you'd freeze to death most of the year - but that doesn't seem to be the point.  Nobody has a problem with shorts and tank tops around the lounge.  We live here, after all, and casual dress is to be expected.  It's not a big deal... who cares what the person sitting next to you is wearing?  Maybe you can see shoulders and, may the good lord preserve us, a little cleavage!  My god, how awful!  No.  Nobody acts that Victorian when it's about what people are wearing to schmooze.  But when you're dashing from the shower room with wet hair and flipflops to your bedroom and are, in this shameful towel-wrapped state, exposed to the view of whomever should turn in your direction for a duration of perhaps ten seconds, you are an irresponsible, loose, slutty troublemaker.  Why do we have to be so... closeted, I guess, about our bodies?  There's no great secret about them.  I don't mean to bitch, but, god, Americans.  H-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e-s.  Your culture orders us to be as promiscuous as we can possibly contrive to be, but the moment anybody, especially a woman steps out of line with the rest, or fails to find anything to be ashamed of about her body, you become Puritanical prudes and slut-shun the hell out of her.  I know I'm technically one of you, but I feel so much more European in this respect.  Give it a break.  These double standards can be damned.  If I'm allowed to go out in a short skirt and camisole but can't be in a towel on the girls' wing, what else can they restrict?  Only read controversial books in public where you can be supervised?  Don't be a Jew where someone might see?

Okay, I know those are different.  Those are 'real' issues, you might say, but this is the same principle - it's people being scared of anything they consider abnormal, of anybody having the guts not to be ashamed of what everybody else hides.  Really, it's so unfair.  It's ridiculous that I should even have to be writing this, and I know it's not the end of the world that I might have to throw on a bathrobe tomorrow morning.  It's just stupid.
 
So I don't sound like a totally boring bitcher, and also so I can attach a relevant photo to this post that's not porn, I'll tell you what else I did today.  This is the beginning of '80s weekend here, which meant dressing up for school today and a fantastic dance this evening.  Tomorrow there's a movie marathon planned which includes Labyrinth, and while I'm sure you're shaking your head at this point because it's full of bad memories of half-hearted spirit weeks and theme days wherever you go/went to school, I can say that, if today is any indication, the people here - students and faculty - pull    it    off.  There were some amazing costumes (everyone came to me for solid-coloured tights.  That's right, I'm the legwear queen here.  Remember what I said at the beginning of this one?  I like clothes.) and a record player in the lounge was set up.  I spent my free hour between tech and chem dancing to Thriller, King of Pain, Hip to be Square and Eye of the Tiger instead of studying for a quiz on solubility of ionic compounds.  It was amazing fun.  And there was more of it all at the dance tonight... and let it be known that I love, have always loved and will always love Wham!'s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.  Anyway, I'm utterly exhausted from way too much dancing, after which there was a costume competition with 5 prizes.  I won one of them, and I guess I could go ahead right now and do that thing fashion bloggers do where they break down their outfits and say what's from where:



-The shoes are, quite obviously, just converse.  They were a present for getting into the Turkey program.
-Socks are Gap kid's.  So I wear my little brother's clothing.  What'ya gonna do about it?
-The tights were a birthday present.  I don't know where they're from but I love them.
-The skirt was a Wet Seal impulse buy for a ridiculously tiny amount of money.  Yes, I'm ashamed, but I'm not sorry.  Thought I'd never wear it anywhere...
-The sweater's American Eagle, but was handed down to me from one of my mum's friends, and I think it might actually be a 1980s piece.
-You can't really see it, but the blue beads were a present from my teacher in Turkey.  She gave us all a little something and knew I was into retro jewelery.  Miss her so much. 






 

My prize was this Smurf shirt.  It's my new favourite oversized tee. 
That's all for now.  Night, everyone!