Okay, this is it. The hundredth post. And I know what you’re thinking: this one better be good. Well, it might be, because I’m about to leave for a county fair. That’s the thing where they show off giant pumpkins, have pie-eating contests, and weigh pigs to see which one is the fattest. Because everybody loves an obese pig. I’ve never been to one of these before, because frankly, I didn’t know they still existed. I’m thrilled to be attending one, because “county fair” seems like a wholesome place to be. (Like the library.) If it’s anything like the one they showed in the cartoon version of “Charlotte’s Web,” I’m gonna pee myself with excitement and overstimulation. Alternatively, it could be a handful of beaten-up rides and games, a crate containing a goat, and a hot dog stand. But we’ll see how it goes.
There were no giant pumpkins. I didn’t see anybody cramming pie down their throats. And while I did see ONE pig and piglet, they were not being weighed. BUT there was a horserace (yee-haw) and I guessed which horse would win and got it right. So if you need somebody to pick yer lottery numbers for ya, just gimme a ring-a-ling. I don’t know why I’m talking like a tobacco-spittin’, spur-jinglin’ cowgirl. Nobody there talked like that. For some reason, I thought they would all have Southern accents and wear flannel shirts, but what I got was a handful of sullen teenagers slumped behind cotton-candy and funnel cake stands, and sweaty middle-aged men working the overpriced rides. It was a little like a watered-down amusement park, for the most part. The standard rate for rides was five dollars per person per ride. Three dollars to try and shoot a basket and win a big stuffed monkey. But there was a whole big thingie of farm animals. It smelled just lovely. Really. Cow poop and goat breath are both such lovely aromas. But with pinched noses, we bravely marched into the pens and petted the smelly things. They were adorable. There was also a whole room of cages of rabbits. Of all the words in the English language, I think the one being used the most in that room at that time was “cute.” Everybody moved from cage to cage, cooing and making comments like, “Oh, my little bunny-boo, you are so cute,” “That one is adorable!” “Oh can we keep this one Daddy? Oh pleasepleaseplease?” “Oh my god you cutesy little thing! I just want to smother you with snuggles and kisses, my love!” And believe me, I chimed right in. These rabbits were for sale, and my sister went nuts. “DADCANWEGETONE?!” Of course I wanted one of those little twitchy-nosed lovebundles. But with our house already overtaken by a big slobbery dog and a rapidly shedding cat, a bunny was out of the question.
That fair was expensive. I already noted how much the games and rides cost (so we had to skip them, D:) but we cheated our way into getting a lower cost. It costs ten dollars for an adult, ages 13 and up, to enter the fair. It costs 6 dollars for a child, 12 and under. My dad asked me how old I was. “I’m twelve, right, Dad?” I replied. He was like, “Twelve? Okay,” not picking up on the sarcasm. Then he strode up to the counter before I could tell him otherwise.
Dad: “Two adults and one child.”
Me: “Wait...”
Cashier: “Okay, that’s going to be $26 dollars.”
Me: “Hey Dad, you know I’m not...”
Dad: -forks out two twenties- “Here’s forty, can I get a couple singles with change?”
Me: “Dad...”
Cashier: “Fourteen dollars change... is four singles enough?”
Dad: “Sure.” -walks away-
Dad: “Now, what was that you were going to say?”
Me: “Never mind.”
Yeah. So we basically cheated the ticket guy out of four bucks. But I think the county fair gods deserve it for not having giant pumpkins or pig-weighing contests. The fair was fun, though. The highlight of the day was when a big guy slurping an Icee was looking at T-shirts with Twilight people on them in the gift shop, and asked his daughter, “Hey, is that the Jonas Brothers?” Another strong point was when a dad holding his son said to the son, “You’re such a stupid kid,” and the son went, “Shut UP, Daddy!”
Afterwards, we had a late lunch in Pleasanton at the High Tech Burrito. I ordered a burrito just to see how high tech it really was. Another disappointment. It was just rice, grilled chicken, salsa, and cheese all wrapped up in a tortilla. No microchips. No SMS N75 calibration units. But it was a good burrito.
On the way home, we stopped at a dollar store. After a year of strict no-spending, it’s tough to ease myself back into my old lifestyle of an occasional purchase. I bought a pair of jeans when I was at the mall with a friend, but returned them awhile later after deciding I didn’t really need them. And at the dollar store, I saw at item that I was absolutely enamored to. I couldn’t pass up this product, no matter how much it cost. And hey, it was only a dollar anyway. My first purchase after a year of spending nothing was A WATER GUN SHAPED LIKE SPIDERMAN’S HEAD. Oh yes yes. I had to have it.
We came home and I went swimming. After dinner, my sister and I took the dog for a run. It started to get all scary and dark, so after a half hour we scrambled for home. Now I’m sitting here with the chlorine and sweat still clinging to me, typing a blog entry that probably won’t get posted till tomorrow, rushing through it because I really need a shower right now.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Every time
It used to be like, every time something happened, my first thought would be, "I so have to blog about this when I get home." If I ever had some sort of weird thought/idea, I would make a mental note to record it on this blog. My life, my mind, and my blog were bound to each other and functioned as one.
Now, I'm letting my summer roll by without being documented here. It feels weird, as if I'm going to have to catch up on everything at some unspecified later date. Allowing myself to live my life without blogging about it feels crazy and wrong. I think I had become obsessed.
I have not made ANY progress on the Europe journal thingie, thank you very much. Sitting here at the computer copying from handwritten pages onto the "New Post" screen is not the way I want to spend the precious hours of my summer.What I've been up to:
Now, I'm letting my summer roll by without being documented here. It feels weird, as if I'm going to have to catch up on everything at some unspecified later date. Allowing myself to live my life without blogging about it feels crazy and wrong. I think I had become obsessed.
I have not made ANY progress on the Europe journal thingie, thank you very much. Sitting here at the computer copying from handwritten pages onto the "New Post" screen is not the way I want to spend the precious hours of my summer.What I've been up to:
- Reading. I bike to the library at least once a week to check out a stack of books and return the ones I had checked out previously. I like the atmosphere there. Everybody is quiet, for the most part, and it's air-conditioned. It feels wholesome or something to be spending time at the library. Instead of, say, the mall.
- Bike rides, all the time, every day, every trail, every neighborhood. I started with familiar trails and neighborhoods, then started fanning out further in all directions from my house, discovering new places to pedal. I like to alternate between coasting along and rocketing down the trail. Going faster is my preference, though. I feel like a beastly demon of speed. Oh yeah.
- Chores. Not much to be said about this one.
- Grocery shopping. It's kind of Zen, or something. I can't wait until I'm out of college and living in a little apartment somewhere, planning my meals and cooking for myself. I want to scan the rows of canned soups and pick out whichever ones I feel like eating, compare prices on bags of shredded cheese, make selections of packages of veggies and boxed dinners in the frozen foods aisles, squish and sniff and inspect the fruits and vegetables in the produce section to test for ripeness and freshness. In the meantime, though, I shop off a set list that my mom has sent me along with. It's still very stimulating, though, at least to an easily amused being like me.
- Practicing softball with my sister. She's on a superstar summer traveling team, so I pitch balls to her, field the balls she hits, and throw the ball back and forth to build up her Arm Muscles of Solid Steel. And to work on my Arm Muscles of Ligaments and Tendons.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Europe, Part 1
I counted the months, the weeks, the days. Countdowns were started on every calendar in my possession. I wrote the counts on the corners of my planner in neat red ink, and in big swirly writing on the whiteboard in my room. It still has the “1 day left!” written in bright green ink across the top. I remember how satisfying it was to mark down a “1” after having started at over a hundred and patiently writing the painfully large triple- and double-digits. I etched the numbers in the margins of papers, memorizing the number of days and weeks left. There were new numbers each day, printed in unused corners and vacancies in homework sheets, glancing out from behind notebook pages. The digits repeated themselves everywhere: I wrote the numbers down again and again to reassure myself that a good thing was coming, something worth waiting for.
The good thing came, and it was absolutely worth waiting for. The Europe trip rocked me to the moon and back. I loved visiting a place with something to see everywhere you turned, history and artwork lacing the cities. Knowing that there was sure to be adventure ahead with every step I took was so, so diatonically different from the long, dull days at home that I associate with summertime. I kept a journal of the whole thing, which I’m going to type out here. Enjoy a nice long post after seventeen days of nothing. (It’s so weird to refer to the last seventeen days of my life as “nothing.” Those days were the furthest from “nothing” that I have ever been in my entire life.) (Oh and uhhh the first one is in Spanish. Use WordReference.com or something if you want, or just skip that entry.)
June 17, 2:54 P.M. (US Time) Estoy en el aeropuerto. Estoy esperando la hora tres y media. Eso es cuando el avion va a Europe. Vamos a ir a London primer. -upside down exclamation point- Tengo que montar el avion por diez horas o mas! Compre una merienda sana y rica, y tengo tres libros buenos para leer. No pienso que lo va a estar muy mal. Pero tal vez lo va a estar pequito aburrido.
June 17, 2:30 P.M. (US Time) I just got on the plane. Right on schedule. I’m sitting next to a nice lady and her mom. There is enough legroom, plus little headsets so you can listen to music. They provide a nice thick magazine to read, and also blankets and pillows and those weird eye cover thingies for when it’s time to sleep. And there are T.V. sets to watch movies on. The flight will be good. 10 hours? Pssh. I can make it. P.S. I have a window seat. That means I get a great view, but have to inch past two people if I need to pee.
June 17, 4:05 (US Time) Wait, how is it already 4:05? We just took off a while ago. My watch must be wrong, or maybe we hit a stitch in the timezones. The takeoff was cool. First we coasted along a concrete path for a solid ten minutes, watching other planes whiz by as they gained enough momentum to veer up, up, and away. I watched a few as they angled upward and lifted off the ground. They looked like little birds or something, not big clankety machines. I watched them soar upward, but then suddenly a cloud would wrap itself around a plane and swallow it in its fluffy white mass. Planes climbed into the sky, then--whoof--disappeared. It was exciting to feel our plane tip upward and wobble in the air. I couldn’t wait to get devoured by a cloud. Watching the earth drop away from underneath me was awesome, but also a little scary, but really interesting. We sliced right through a cloud on the way up. At first my view was shrouded by a puffy white blur, but then we pulled out over atop the cloud. IT WAS WEIRD. It looked like a meadow of marshmallow glop, or cotton, or snow. And clouds, I guess they’re a lot bigger than they appear. The cottony marshmallow snow stretched out forever in every direction. I guess that is what it feels like to be stranded in Antartica.
June 17, 10:30 P.M. A few hours ago, I looked out the window and saw a lovely sunset. An hour or so later, give or take an hour, it was beginning to darken, just slightly. I took a peek out the window just now, and the sun streamed into the dimly lit plane. I’m guessing we’ve crossed over to a different time zone, then. Sunrise doesn’t occur at 10:30 in the night.
June 18th, 10:45 A.M. (Paris time, I finally changed my watch.) Clouds are weird. Sometimes they’re all fluffy and yummy-looking, and sometimes they resemble big old hunkering clods of styrofoam skimming mountaintops. When you’re atop a cloud with early sunlight spilling across it, it’s like a miniature heaven. When you’re soaring through the interior of a cloud, it’s just a flurry of white. Sometimes clods are a semi-transparent sheet suspended above the earth. Sometimes a cloud is just a stray wisp of water vapor hovering in the air. Spend eleven hours on a plane, and you begin to appreciate clouds.
June 18, 1:00 (Paris time) This is so weird. I never slept on the plane, just sat there until the lights came back on and they started serving a breakfast of salty ham and sour yogurt. So now it’s tomorrow even though it feels like yesterday’s today. We have to wait for four hours in the terminal. Everything here is painfully expensive.
June 18, 5:00 (UK time) We’re through with plane flights and passports and such. I bought exotic foreign candy bars at a terminal to bring home so people can ooh and aah over the weird wrappers and then snarf them down and say, “gee, I shoulda savored that, considering I’ll never be able to get ahold of one of those again unless I fly to the UK!” A voice on the intercom announces, “For security reasons, any unattended baggage will be removed and destroyed.” That made me chortle.
June 19, 7:25 A.M. (UK time) SO today we get to do fun stuff, not security checks or bus rides and all. Today we take a walking tour of London. That’s going to be fun. You know what wasn’t fun? My shower earlier this morning. It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to turn the thing on. When it came on, finally, the pressure was all messed up. So I reached up to fiddle with the showerhead, and had hardly touched it when it fell off and clonked me on the head. The water started shooting a jetstream straight across to the other wall. I cupped my hands around it in a pitiful attempt to somehow shove it all back into the wall. It never occurred to me to just shut the water off. Then I grabbed the showerhead and clamped it over the hole where the water was flooding from, stepping onto the ledge and balancing delicately on the edge of the tub in order to reach the spot where the showerhead needed to be. Gingerly, I adjusted the pressure, stepped down into the tub, and washed my hair at warp speed, bracing myself for another blow by falling showerhead.
June 19, 8:50 A.M. (UK time) The bus chugs along. London has a lot of pretty brick buildings, but we have yet to arrive at famous attractions. After dinner, we can go see a play, which would be very glamorous and fun. But it costs 40 pounds, or 70 dollars, so maybe not.
-London sets apart a bit of land for every living space, where people used to keep cows and goats. The “common grounds” are now used as parks to walk dogs in, have picnics, and stuff. Only people living in the group of houses/apartment building/whatever can use the common ground, but everybody has one near where they live.
-There are about 18,000 taxis in London. Most people don’t own cars because parking is inconvenient and expensive- $6/hour.
-Houses are squished up right next to each other to make room for common grounds. Townhouses don’t appear to exist here, but probably do in less bust parts of the city.
-King Edward made an oath to travel to Rome and help them in their time of need before he was king. Once he became king, he had to stay in England and help his own country. He asked his priest what he could do to compensate for breaking the oath, and was told to build a church dedicated to Saint Paul. The king did so, and built a house next to it to live in. Before the church was finished, he died and was buried in the abbey of the house. <-- Saint Paul’s Cathedral: we’re going there right now. Our tour guide just told us that little story.
We’re in Brixton, in the western part of London. This is where you buy sarongs and samosas: Indian goods. There are Arabic, Russian, and other communities here in London as well.
June 19, 10:00 A.M. (UK time) We saw Big Ben, the London Eye, and the Houses of Parliament. It’s striking to have these iconic things that I’ve only ever seen in movies, on television, or in pictures suddenly come into view. I took a picture of a long skinny thing, which turned out to be a monument dedicated to the Fires of London. The city burned for four days and four nights, and a thousand people died. Depressing.
June 19, 11:05 A.M. (UK time) I have been attempting to take pictures of myself with background through the window. It is not working tremendously well. Oh well. We are off to the Buckingham Palace now.
June 19, 11:45 A.M. (UK time) I’m back! I got lovely pictures of the Changing of the Guards, but none of the interior of the castle. Mrs. Kalman said it was too crowded. You would need to make reservations several months in advance. D:3 <--tilt head to the right.
June 19, 7:50 P.M. (UK time) WHAT A DAY. TOO MUCH TO SAY. AND I’M ABOUT TO GO OUT AGAIN, ANYWAY. Oh wait, I do need to announce that I just took my first subway ride. It was certainly a very pushy-shovy atmosphere. As in, lots of pushes and shoves. And when the bus thing took off, nobody in our group knew to grab ahold of the nearest pole or seat back or subway ridee, so we all lurched backwards and stumbled all over each other while the more experienced subway riders looked on in disdain and smirked.
June 20, 5:35 A.M. (UK time) Done with a country already! We are taking a train to Paris today and kissing Great Britain goodbye. Yesterday was a lot of sightseeing INCLUDING National Gallery-Buckingham Palace-London Eye-Houses of Parliament-Big Ben-St. Paul’s Cathedral-Piccadilly Circus--- and that was all very fun. Between attractions, we were given a lot of free time to shop, visit a marketplace, find a cafe or supermarket, and go to nearby parks. It was a “meet me here in two hours” type of thing. I liked having the freedom. Sarah, Shirley, and I went to a local supermarket and bought little plastic tubs of pasta to share. With the split cost, it was only 50p. While I was there I bought a bunch of those weird candy bars that they sell here but not in the U.S. How mysterious and elusive. I’ll have ten! Yeah. They’re pretty much the entirety of my gift shopping. “Yeah, I’m back from Europe, have a candy bar.”
Anyway, we walked back to the square, where we sat on the curb and watched a streetpreformer whilst shoveling pasta into our mouths. It was delicious. Then we went shopping for a while, which included my purchase of a can of authentic English tea for my momma. After awhile we wandered through a market, and by then it was time to return to the meeting spot. The tour guide led us up through a Chinatown, then down a row of side-by-side theaters, and landed us in Piccadilly Circus to use the restroom and take photos for a few minutes, before heading to the National Gallery. I really liked the Monet paintings. Up close the paint just looked like sloppy strokes and blurs, but the further you backed up, the clearer the image became. The paintings had the most clarity when you stood at the other end of the room. I’m off to breakfast now, more later.
June 20, 10:05 (UK time/11:05 Paris time) I am in a Eurostar train at the moment, headed to Paris. I’m unsure whether to use Uk time or Paris time, so I just put both in the heading. And since I already talked about yesterday, there isn’t much to document except the morning’s commute. But I guess other stuff will come up as I write. OH WAIT first I wanna say that the food here is wonderful. The first night everybody had spaghetti from the hotel restaurant, and last night we had Indian food. In England. But lunch is awesome because we get to go wherever we want to eat: yesterday it was a supermarket. They have entire aisles dedicated to lunch items, a la carte or full meals, ready for you to pick up and eat as soon as you step out of the store. There are sandwiches, wraps, cold pastas, salads, sushi, fruit salad cups, pizzas, stuffed pita, and also THAI SPICED AND COCONUT LEMONGRASS CHICKEN ROLLS!! which is what I got at the train station earlier on today to eat on the train at lunchtime. Why doesn’t Safeway offer such a gargantuan variety? Possibilities of lunchfood here are endless.
I hope everybody enjoys the harried phone message I left last night. It cost a dollar a minute, which included the time it took the phone to ring.
June 21st, 7:10 A.M. (Paris time) Sorry I didn’t write about my day in Paris yesterday. It was all go-go-go for the entire day, and we returned to the hotel at ten til one. In the morning. I would complain more about that, but the Eiffel Tower sure is pretty at night. I wish we could have rode to the top, but the lines were miles long and only one elevator was working. We were given ten minutes to look around a bit and snap pictures. Going to the top would have taken several hours of standing in line.
Now I’m all out of order. We didn’t see the Tower until later on. After the train, we dumped all our stuff in our hotel rooms. Sarah and I are rooming with a 17-year-old from Arizona. Then we took a Metro train to the Louvre, which was FANTASTIC. After edging our way into the crowd circling the Mona Lisa and taking a picture, we stumbled out, relieved to have that over with, and roamed through random rooms for a while. The place is so BIG. It’d have taken forever to see the entire thing, a week at least. Two hours was notably insufficient. But going outside to the gardens and pyramid was nice, too. The air was crisp and the sun was out, and there was plenty to see out there. Our nest stop was the Eiffel Tower, which you heard about, then dinner at a place with the unfortunate name of Flam’s. But the food was GOOOOOODDDD STUFFF. They make pizzas with super-thin crusts, then top it with sauce, cheese, onions, and ham. We sat at a long table, and they set down pizzas randomly. Once a pizza had been finished, they would bring out another. I had to control myself, because I know I could have eaten ten of those things. So I loaded up on salad instead. After that we revisited the Eiffel Tower because it was all lit up and glowy. Then there was an extra excursion for those who’d signed up and paid twelve euros. It was a boat cruise along the Seine. Guess who signed up and paid all by herself. That was really fun; they played music and told us little facts about the bridges we were passing under and some of the buildings we were seeing. It was kinda cold and kinda really late, but at the end when we pulled in near the Eiffel Tower, it was flashing a million tiny lights all over the place. The Eiffel Tower SPAHKULS at night. 11:00 P.M., for just ten or fifteen minutes. We had to take the grimy Metro home. It stopped in the middle of one of the tubes, and everybody lurched backward, and I thought we were going to die, but everybody laughed and made cheerful “what’s-going-on” noises, and after a minute of panic I realized that that just happens sometimes. Today we’re sightseeing again. I need to go to breakfast now. Lots of stories later!
----
You know what, guys? It is so tedious typing out that whole journal, so that’s all you get for now. I keep wanting to write blog entries, but can’t until I get this monster of a post out of the way. I’m sorry for taking so long to write this thing. I haven’t been on the computer much, so I couldn’t continue chipping away at the journal. At this point, summer is already half over. I’ll try to put up the rest of the journal, in small increments, up before September comes!
The good thing came, and it was absolutely worth waiting for. The Europe trip rocked me to the moon and back. I loved visiting a place with something to see everywhere you turned, history and artwork lacing the cities. Knowing that there was sure to be adventure ahead with every step I took was so, so diatonically different from the long, dull days at home that I associate with summertime. I kept a journal of the whole thing, which I’m going to type out here. Enjoy a nice long post after seventeen days of nothing. (It’s so weird to refer to the last seventeen days of my life as “nothing.” Those days were the furthest from “nothing” that I have ever been in my entire life.) (Oh and uhhh the first one is in Spanish. Use WordReference.com or something if you want, or just skip that entry.)
June 17, 2:54 P.M. (US Time) Estoy en el aeropuerto. Estoy esperando la hora tres y media. Eso es cuando el avion va a Europe. Vamos a ir a London primer. -upside down exclamation point- Tengo que montar el avion por diez horas o mas! Compre una merienda sana y rica, y tengo tres libros buenos para leer. No pienso que lo va a estar muy mal. Pero tal vez lo va a estar pequito aburrido.
June 17, 2:30 P.M. (US Time) I just got on the plane. Right on schedule. I’m sitting next to a nice lady and her mom. There is enough legroom, plus little headsets so you can listen to music. They provide a nice thick magazine to read, and also blankets and pillows and those weird eye cover thingies for when it’s time to sleep. And there are T.V. sets to watch movies on. The flight will be good. 10 hours? Pssh. I can make it. P.S. I have a window seat. That means I get a great view, but have to inch past two people if I need to pee.
June 17, 4:05 (US Time) Wait, how is it already 4:05? We just took off a while ago. My watch must be wrong, or maybe we hit a stitch in the timezones. The takeoff was cool. First we coasted along a concrete path for a solid ten minutes, watching other planes whiz by as they gained enough momentum to veer up, up, and away. I watched a few as they angled upward and lifted off the ground. They looked like little birds or something, not big clankety machines. I watched them soar upward, but then suddenly a cloud would wrap itself around a plane and swallow it in its fluffy white mass. Planes climbed into the sky, then--whoof--disappeared. It was exciting to feel our plane tip upward and wobble in the air. I couldn’t wait to get devoured by a cloud. Watching the earth drop away from underneath me was awesome, but also a little scary, but really interesting. We sliced right through a cloud on the way up. At first my view was shrouded by a puffy white blur, but then we pulled out over atop the cloud. IT WAS WEIRD. It looked like a meadow of marshmallow glop, or cotton, or snow. And clouds, I guess they’re a lot bigger than they appear. The cottony marshmallow snow stretched out forever in every direction. I guess that is what it feels like to be stranded in Antartica.
June 17, 10:30 P.M. A few hours ago, I looked out the window and saw a lovely sunset. An hour or so later, give or take an hour, it was beginning to darken, just slightly. I took a peek out the window just now, and the sun streamed into the dimly lit plane. I’m guessing we’ve crossed over to a different time zone, then. Sunrise doesn’t occur at 10:30 in the night.
June 18th, 10:45 A.M. (Paris time, I finally changed my watch.) Clouds are weird. Sometimes they’re all fluffy and yummy-looking, and sometimes they resemble big old hunkering clods of styrofoam skimming mountaintops. When you’re atop a cloud with early sunlight spilling across it, it’s like a miniature heaven. When you’re soaring through the interior of a cloud, it’s just a flurry of white. Sometimes clods are a semi-transparent sheet suspended above the earth. Sometimes a cloud is just a stray wisp of water vapor hovering in the air. Spend eleven hours on a plane, and you begin to appreciate clouds.
June 18, 1:00 (Paris time) This is so weird. I never slept on the plane, just sat there until the lights came back on and they started serving a breakfast of salty ham and sour yogurt. So now it’s tomorrow even though it feels like yesterday’s today. We have to wait for four hours in the terminal. Everything here is painfully expensive.
June 18, 5:00 (UK time) We’re through with plane flights and passports and such. I bought exotic foreign candy bars at a terminal to bring home so people can ooh and aah over the weird wrappers and then snarf them down and say, “gee, I shoulda savored that, considering I’ll never be able to get ahold of one of those again unless I fly to the UK!” A voice on the intercom announces, “For security reasons, any unattended baggage will be removed and destroyed.” That made me chortle.
June 19, 7:25 A.M. (UK time) SO today we get to do fun stuff, not security checks or bus rides and all. Today we take a walking tour of London. That’s going to be fun. You know what wasn’t fun? My shower earlier this morning. It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to turn the thing on. When it came on, finally, the pressure was all messed up. So I reached up to fiddle with the showerhead, and had hardly touched it when it fell off and clonked me on the head. The water started shooting a jetstream straight across to the other wall. I cupped my hands around it in a pitiful attempt to somehow shove it all back into the wall. It never occurred to me to just shut the water off. Then I grabbed the showerhead and clamped it over the hole where the water was flooding from, stepping onto the ledge and balancing delicately on the edge of the tub in order to reach the spot where the showerhead needed to be. Gingerly, I adjusted the pressure, stepped down into the tub, and washed my hair at warp speed, bracing myself for another blow by falling showerhead.
June 19, 8:50 A.M. (UK time) The bus chugs along. London has a lot of pretty brick buildings, but we have yet to arrive at famous attractions. After dinner, we can go see a play, which would be very glamorous and fun. But it costs 40 pounds, or 70 dollars, so maybe not.
-London sets apart a bit of land for every living space, where people used to keep cows and goats. The “common grounds” are now used as parks to walk dogs in, have picnics, and stuff. Only people living in the group of houses/apartment building/whatever can use the common ground, but everybody has one near where they live.
-There are about 18,000 taxis in London. Most people don’t own cars because parking is inconvenient and expensive- $6/hour.
-Houses are squished up right next to each other to make room for common grounds. Townhouses don’t appear to exist here, but probably do in less bust parts of the city.
-King Edward made an oath to travel to Rome and help them in their time of need before he was king. Once he became king, he had to stay in England and help his own country. He asked his priest what he could do to compensate for breaking the oath, and was told to build a church dedicated to Saint Paul. The king did so, and built a house next to it to live in. Before the church was finished, he died and was buried in the abbey of the house. <-- Saint Paul’s Cathedral: we’re going there right now. Our tour guide just told us that little story.
We’re in Brixton, in the western part of London. This is where you buy sarongs and samosas: Indian goods. There are Arabic, Russian, and other communities here in London as well.
June 19, 10:00 A.M. (UK time) We saw Big Ben, the London Eye, and the Houses of Parliament. It’s striking to have these iconic things that I’ve only ever seen in movies, on television, or in pictures suddenly come into view. I took a picture of a long skinny thing, which turned out to be a monument dedicated to the Fires of London. The city burned for four days and four nights, and a thousand people died. Depressing.
June 19, 11:05 A.M. (UK time) I have been attempting to take pictures of myself with background through the window. It is not working tremendously well. Oh well. We are off to the Buckingham Palace now.
June 19, 11:45 A.M. (UK time) I’m back! I got lovely pictures of the Changing of the Guards, but none of the interior of the castle. Mrs. Kalman said it was too crowded. You would need to make reservations several months in advance. D:3 <--tilt head to the right.
June 19, 7:50 P.M. (UK time) WHAT A DAY. TOO MUCH TO SAY. AND I’M ABOUT TO GO OUT AGAIN, ANYWAY. Oh wait, I do need to announce that I just took my first subway ride. It was certainly a very pushy-shovy atmosphere. As in, lots of pushes and shoves. And when the bus thing took off, nobody in our group knew to grab ahold of the nearest pole or seat back or subway ridee, so we all lurched backwards and stumbled all over each other while the more experienced subway riders looked on in disdain and smirked.
June 20, 5:35 A.M. (UK time) Done with a country already! We are taking a train to Paris today and kissing Great Britain goodbye. Yesterday was a lot of sightseeing INCLUDING National Gallery-Buckingham Palace-London Eye-Houses of Parliament-Big Ben-St. Paul’s Cathedral-Piccadilly Circus--- and that was all very fun. Between attractions, we were given a lot of free time to shop, visit a marketplace, find a cafe or supermarket, and go to nearby parks. It was a “meet me here in two hours” type of thing. I liked having the freedom. Sarah, Shirley, and I went to a local supermarket and bought little plastic tubs of pasta to share. With the split cost, it was only 50p. While I was there I bought a bunch of those weird candy bars that they sell here but not in the U.S. How mysterious and elusive. I’ll have ten! Yeah. They’re pretty much the entirety of my gift shopping. “Yeah, I’m back from Europe, have a candy bar.”
Anyway, we walked back to the square, where we sat on the curb and watched a streetpreformer whilst shoveling pasta into our mouths. It was delicious. Then we went shopping for a while, which included my purchase of a can of authentic English tea for my momma. After awhile we wandered through a market, and by then it was time to return to the meeting spot. The tour guide led us up through a Chinatown, then down a row of side-by-side theaters, and landed us in Piccadilly Circus to use the restroom and take photos for a few minutes, before heading to the National Gallery. I really liked the Monet paintings. Up close the paint just looked like sloppy strokes and blurs, but the further you backed up, the clearer the image became. The paintings had the most clarity when you stood at the other end of the room. I’m off to breakfast now, more later.
June 20, 10:05 (UK time/11:05 Paris time) I am in a Eurostar train at the moment, headed to Paris. I’m unsure whether to use Uk time or Paris time, so I just put both in the heading. And since I already talked about yesterday, there isn’t much to document except the morning’s commute. But I guess other stuff will come up as I write. OH WAIT first I wanna say that the food here is wonderful. The first night everybody had spaghetti from the hotel restaurant, and last night we had Indian food. In England. But lunch is awesome because we get to go wherever we want to eat: yesterday it was a supermarket. They have entire aisles dedicated to lunch items, a la carte or full meals, ready for you to pick up and eat as soon as you step out of the store. There are sandwiches, wraps, cold pastas, salads, sushi, fruit salad cups, pizzas, stuffed pita, and also THAI SPICED AND COCONUT LEMONGRASS CHICKEN ROLLS!! which is what I got at the train station earlier on today to eat on the train at lunchtime. Why doesn’t Safeway offer such a gargantuan variety? Possibilities of lunchfood here are endless.
I hope everybody enjoys the harried phone message I left last night. It cost a dollar a minute, which included the time it took the phone to ring.
June 21st, 7:10 A.M. (Paris time) Sorry I didn’t write about my day in Paris yesterday. It was all go-go-go for the entire day, and we returned to the hotel at ten til one. In the morning. I would complain more about that, but the Eiffel Tower sure is pretty at night. I wish we could have rode to the top, but the lines were miles long and only one elevator was working. We were given ten minutes to look around a bit and snap pictures. Going to the top would have taken several hours of standing in line.
Now I’m all out of order. We didn’t see the Tower until later on. After the train, we dumped all our stuff in our hotel rooms. Sarah and I are rooming with a 17-year-old from Arizona. Then we took a Metro train to the Louvre, which was FANTASTIC. After edging our way into the crowd circling the Mona Lisa and taking a picture, we stumbled out, relieved to have that over with, and roamed through random rooms for a while. The place is so BIG. It’d have taken forever to see the entire thing, a week at least. Two hours was notably insufficient. But going outside to the gardens and pyramid was nice, too. The air was crisp and the sun was out, and there was plenty to see out there. Our nest stop was the Eiffel Tower, which you heard about, then dinner at a place with the unfortunate name of Flam’s. But the food was GOOOOOODDDD STUFFF. They make pizzas with super-thin crusts, then top it with sauce, cheese, onions, and ham. We sat at a long table, and they set down pizzas randomly. Once a pizza had been finished, they would bring out another. I had to control myself, because I know I could have eaten ten of those things. So I loaded up on salad instead. After that we revisited the Eiffel Tower because it was all lit up and glowy. Then there was an extra excursion for those who’d signed up and paid twelve euros. It was a boat cruise along the Seine. Guess who signed up and paid all by herself. That was really fun; they played music and told us little facts about the bridges we were passing under and some of the buildings we were seeing. It was kinda cold and kinda really late, but at the end when we pulled in near the Eiffel Tower, it was flashing a million tiny lights all over the place. The Eiffel Tower SPAHKULS at night. 11:00 P.M., for just ten or fifteen minutes. We had to take the grimy Metro home. It stopped in the middle of one of the tubes, and everybody lurched backward, and I thought we were going to die, but everybody laughed and made cheerful “what’s-going-on” noises, and after a minute of panic I realized that that just happens sometimes. Today we’re sightseeing again. I need to go to breakfast now. Lots of stories later!
----
You know what, guys? It is so tedious typing out that whole journal, so that’s all you get for now. I keep wanting to write blog entries, but can’t until I get this monster of a post out of the way. I’m sorry for taking so long to write this thing. I haven’t been on the computer much, so I couldn’t continue chipping away at the journal. At this point, summer is already half over. I’ll try to put up the rest of the journal, in small increments, up before September comes!
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
I'm in Europe!
And having colossal amounts of fun. I get home in four days, or maybe three. I lost track. I miss my blog. This is costing me half a euro.
See you!
See you!
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
My plane takes off at 3:30
And won't bring me back to America until July 3rd. Don't expect any posts from tomorrow 'til then.
I should write about what I've been doing the last couple of days, but it's going to have to be quick because I need to return some library books before I leave the country. Reading is actually a lot of what I've been up to. I got a big stack of books from the library, and placed them in several locations around the house. There's one on my dresser for late-night and early-morning reading, one on my desk for when I'm waiting for my mom to get ready when we're about to go run errands or something, one on the bay-window sill next to the kitchen for reading during meals, and a scattering of others in other places.
I have so much more time for fun stuff like hikes down to the Quicksilver reservoir, long bike rides, little craft project things, walking my dog around the neighborhood, and whatever else. Summer is amazing.
Okay, I have to go. We need to be at the airport in an hour, and I still have library books to return. Sorry for the short post!
I should write about what I've been doing the last couple of days, but it's going to have to be quick because I need to return some library books before I leave the country. Reading is actually a lot of what I've been up to. I got a big stack of books from the library, and placed them in several locations around the house. There's one on my dresser for late-night and early-morning reading, one on my desk for when I'm waiting for my mom to get ready when we're about to go run errands or something, one on the bay-window sill next to the kitchen for reading during meals, and a scattering of others in other places.
I have so much more time for fun stuff like hikes down to the Quicksilver reservoir, long bike rides, little craft project things, walking my dog around the neighborhood, and whatever else. Summer is amazing.
Okay, I have to go. We need to be at the airport in an hour, and I still have library books to return. Sorry for the short post!
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Summer
I won’t try to argue with the fact that Christmas is the best day of the year. But the first day of summer vacation is a close second. What other day fills you with that exhilarating rush of freedom, provided by the knowledge you have over two months ahead of you to spend any way you’d like? There are some limitations (not enough money to go bowling, mothers sometimes unwilling to give rides to friend’s houses, extra summer chores, etc.) but those obstacles hardly stand in the way of two free months.
As I did last summer, I composed a list of things to do during the vacation. My calendar is nearly blank now, but I’ve been filling in the empty boxes with Stuff To Do. Tomorrow, I’m going to write funny quotes and also “inspirational” quotes every few squares on the sidewalk out in front of and beside my house, and also glue a quarter to the ground. That way, people strolling past will have a reason to look down (read: to see the quotes) and they’ll spot this COIN. I can never resist the temptation to bend down and pick up a coin lying on the ground. It’s so amazing, like an omen or something. Whenever I get change after a purchase, I always toss a coin on the ground once I exit the store, so somebody can experience the joy of finding it. I doubt anybody in the human race will ever be able to spot a quarter on the ground and just leave it there. No organism in the world has that degree of self-control. But anyway, I’m going to be watching out my front window, peering over the sill and keeping a tally of how many people either don’t notice the coin, or spot it and leave it (gasp!) and how many people jump on it and start scrabbling at its edges and try to pry it off, to no avail, and then straighten up and toss back their heads and strut off pretending the incident had never even happened. It’ll take up the whole morning, probably, searching for good quotes, laying down trails of chalk spelling them out, gluing a coin to the ground, then retreating to my window to look on and chuckle. Then, I’m going to walk to Leland with a stopwatch and pedometer, record how many steps and minutes it took to get there, then return and walk back, record, come back home, walk back to Leland, record, and so on until I have a considerable amount of data to work with. I’ll average out the amount of steps and minutes so that when school starts up again (shudder) I’ll know exactly what time I need to leave for school in the morning in order to arrive just as the bell rings. I’m gonna have to start all over again: last summer I did this with the middle school on two different days, and got it down to a science. I calculated the average and found that in order to arrive at 8:10 exactly, I would need to leave at 8:06. I usually got there either on time or a minute-or-so late, which didn’t matter because I’d always make it to class before the final bell.
Today was a slower day. I woke up at quarter to noon, no lie. (It’s the first day of summer-- I deserve it, right?) After a shower, I biked over to my grandma’s house to walk her dog for about an hour. Then I moseyed around her neighborhood and the one next to hers a little on my bike, riding down the streets and deciding which house I liked best on each street. After a while I returned home, ate a late lunch of cantaloupe cubes and leftover steamed broccoli, and walked to the library with my sister. I promptly shoved several girl-books into my sack, you know, those ones about a girl who goes to school and, I don’t know, gets in a fight with her friends or something, develops a crush on somebody, deals with some type of queen bee/mean girl person, and then works it all out by the last chapter. The literature equivalent of a chick flick. I devour those things. They’re perfect light summer reading. I picked up some books more stimulating to the brain just to make myself feel less guilty, then bought a mango Italian soda at the cafe while my sister browsed the DVDs and music.
I went home and made teensy hamburger patties from a package of ground beef, then sliced up tomatoes and onions and stuff and made a salad. We were going to have “sliders,” my mom had said as she handed me the ground beef, as in “fun-size.” Both of those terms are hers, not mine. I just shrugged and headed to the grill. I don’t like hamburgers, but these thingies were actually delicious. I made very skinny little patties and put a lot of pepper on them before grilling. Plus I slathered mine with Dijon mustard and piled on a whole bunch of pickles and onions. AND I made cantaloupe-flavored frozen yogurt for dessert which I am very proud of because I didn’t even use a recipe. :) I just plopped vanilla yogurt and diced cantaloupe in the rarely used ice cream machine and hoped everything would turn out well. Which it did. It tasted like cantaloupy yogurt.
So anyway, this post is from yesterday. I hopped onto the computer really quick today to post this. Just a reminder, I’ll be gone from the seventeenth this month to July 3rd. I’ll be home just in time for the Fourth of July, which is obviously not celebrated over there. I just hope I’m not jet-lagged. I’ve never had jet-lag before because of my never having left the time zone-ness, so I’m kinda worried. Is it scary? Does it kill you?
As I did last summer, I composed a list of things to do during the vacation. My calendar is nearly blank now, but I’ve been filling in the empty boxes with Stuff To Do. Tomorrow, I’m going to write funny quotes and also “inspirational” quotes every few squares on the sidewalk out in front of and beside my house, and also glue a quarter to the ground. That way, people strolling past will have a reason to look down (read: to see the quotes) and they’ll spot this COIN. I can never resist the temptation to bend down and pick up a coin lying on the ground. It’s so amazing, like an omen or something. Whenever I get change after a purchase, I always toss a coin on the ground once I exit the store, so somebody can experience the joy of finding it. I doubt anybody in the human race will ever be able to spot a quarter on the ground and just leave it there. No organism in the world has that degree of self-control. But anyway, I’m going to be watching out my front window, peering over the sill and keeping a tally of how many people either don’t notice the coin, or spot it and leave it (gasp!) and how many people jump on it and start scrabbling at its edges and try to pry it off, to no avail, and then straighten up and toss back their heads and strut off pretending the incident had never even happened. It’ll take up the whole morning, probably, searching for good quotes, laying down trails of chalk spelling them out, gluing a coin to the ground, then retreating to my window to look on and chuckle. Then, I’m going to walk to Leland with a stopwatch and pedometer, record how many steps and minutes it took to get there, then return and walk back, record, come back home, walk back to Leland, record, and so on until I have a considerable amount of data to work with. I’ll average out the amount of steps and minutes so that when school starts up again (shudder) I’ll know exactly what time I need to leave for school in the morning in order to arrive just as the bell rings. I’m gonna have to start all over again: last summer I did this with the middle school on two different days, and got it down to a science. I calculated the average and found that in order to arrive at 8:10 exactly, I would need to leave at 8:06. I usually got there either on time or a minute-or-so late, which didn’t matter because I’d always make it to class before the final bell.
Today was a slower day. I woke up at quarter to noon, no lie. (It’s the first day of summer-- I deserve it, right?) After a shower, I biked over to my grandma’s house to walk her dog for about an hour. Then I moseyed around her neighborhood and the one next to hers a little on my bike, riding down the streets and deciding which house I liked best on each street. After a while I returned home, ate a late lunch of cantaloupe cubes and leftover steamed broccoli, and walked to the library with my sister. I promptly shoved several girl-books into my sack, you know, those ones about a girl who goes to school and, I don’t know, gets in a fight with her friends or something, develops a crush on somebody, deals with some type of queen bee/mean girl person, and then works it all out by the last chapter. The literature equivalent of a chick flick. I devour those things. They’re perfect light summer reading. I picked up some books more stimulating to the brain just to make myself feel less guilty, then bought a mango Italian soda at the cafe while my sister browsed the DVDs and music.
I went home and made teensy hamburger patties from a package of ground beef, then sliced up tomatoes and onions and stuff and made a salad. We were going to have “sliders,” my mom had said as she handed me the ground beef, as in “fun-size.” Both of those terms are hers, not mine. I just shrugged and headed to the grill. I don’t like hamburgers, but these thingies were actually delicious. I made very skinny little patties and put a lot of pepper on them before grilling. Plus I slathered mine with Dijon mustard and piled on a whole bunch of pickles and onions. AND I made cantaloupe-flavored frozen yogurt for dessert which I am very proud of because I didn’t even use a recipe. :) I just plopped vanilla yogurt and diced cantaloupe in the rarely used ice cream machine and hoped everything would turn out well. Which it did. It tasted like cantaloupy yogurt.
So anyway, this post is from yesterday. I hopped onto the computer really quick today to post this. Just a reminder, I’ll be gone from the seventeenth this month to July 3rd. I’ll be home just in time for the Fourth of July, which is obviously not celebrated over there. I just hope I’m not jet-lagged. I’ve never had jet-lag before because of my never having left the time zone-ness, so I’m kinda worried. Is it scary? Does it kill you?
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Magic Eyes
Okay, I found a blog quiz thing on a different blog SO I'M GONNA DO IT NOW OKAY! Some of the first questions are kind of awkward but whatever.
have-you-ever
1. Ate Crocodile?
Yes
Sadly...
have-you-ever
1. Ate Crocodile?
Yes
2. Slept in a different bed?
Yes- hotels
3. Made out in a movie theatre?
Noo...
4. made out with 2 different people in one night?
Noo...
5. Thought your cousin was hot?
No
6. Been in love?
No
7. Slept?
Yes
Sadly...
9. Gone over the speed limit?
It's not like I've ever driven a car or anything.
10. Painted your room?
Yes, but only one wall
11. Drove a car?
see answer to question 9
12. Danced in front of your mirror?
YES
13. Gotten a hickey?
No
14. Been dumped?
No 15. Stole money from a friend?
No
16. Gotten in a car with people you just met?
Yes... at safe organized events. You know, those organizer mom-people who go like:
*checks name sticker* "Okay honey, you're in Group B, so you'll be riding with Mrs. Brown, over there with the blond hair?"
17. Been in a fist fight?
With my sister :D
18. Snuck out of your house?
Kinda-but-not-really
9-lasts
1. cigarette:
Eeeuck.
2. beverage:
Water, last night.
3. kiss:
Never
4. hug:
I don't remember...
5. movie seen:
Hotel Rwana
6. cd played:
Something by the Beach Boys that my mom put on.
7. song listened to:
Lifesize by a Fine Frenzy
8. bubble bath:
Forever ago.
9. time you cried:
I don't remember.
25 questions
1. Where were you 3 hours ago?
Asleep
2. Who are you in love with?
My cat.
3. Have you ever eaten a crayon?
I tasted it, but I didn't eat the whole thing...
4. Is there anything pink within 10 feet of you?
Yeah
5. When is the last time you went to the mall?
Last weekend, I think. Or maybe the one before that.
6. Are you wearing socks right now?
Yep. With flamingos on them. :)
7. Do you have a car worth over $2,000?
Aren't all cars worth that much...? But anyway no.
8. When was the last time you drove out of town?
Salinas, a few weeks ago.
9. Have you been to the movies in the last 5 days?
No... haven't been since I watched 17 Again.
10. Are you hot?
No it's morning right now... I'm cold.
11. What was the last thing you had to drink?
Water
12. What are you wearing right now?
Clothes.
13. Do you wash your car or let the car wash do it?
C. none of the above
14. Last food that you ate?
Toast
15. Where were you last week at this time?
Either eating breakfast, brushing my teeth, or blogging.
16. Have you bought any clothing items in the last week?
No... none in the last YEAR!
17. When is the last time you ran?
Yesterday.
18. What's the last sporting event you watched?
Few weeks ago, my sister's softball tourney.
19. What is your favorite animal?
Penguinsmicecats
20. Your dream vacation?
...is gonna happen! Sightseeing in Europe.
21. Last person's house you were in?
Mine. In fact, I'm still here.
22. Worst injury you've ever had?
A scrape. From falling out of a tree. It was a rather large scrape. But nothing very serious.
23. Have you been in love?
Yes. With a feline.
24. Do you miss anyone right now?
Yes
25. What is your secret weapon to lure in the opposite sex?
WHAT
very-interesting
1. Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, and find line 4.
systematic, can be correlated with geographical re-
(the rest of the word is "regions," by the way. Don't wanna leave you hanging, there :])
2. Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What's there?
Air.
3. What is the last thing you watched on TV?
Chopped. A week or two ago.
4. Without looking, guess what time it is:
(I continued the post from this morning, so it's later now)
4:40
5. Now look at the clock. What is the actual time?
4:55
6. With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
Dryer.
7. When did you last step outside? What were you doing?
About an hour ago, to pick up my glasses/go to the bank/ get a haircut.
8. Before you started this survey, what did you look at?
My cat.
9. What are you wearing?
Wait... didn't you already ask this?
10. Did you dream last night?
Probably, but I don't remember any of them.
11. When did you last laugh?
Two seconds ago. I was trying to think of the last time I laughed, and then I remembered and it was funny so I laughed again.
12. What is on the walls of the room you are in?
A map, painting copies from Seattle, clock, picture frame I made with my sister in like fifth grade, painting copies from Ikea, and watercolors from childhood.
13. Seen anything weird lately?
Yeah, YOUR FACE.
Just kidding.
That was a really bad joke.
14. What do you think of this quiz?
The questions repeat themselves a lot.
15. What is the last film you saw?
Speak of the devil.
(That's not a film, by the way... it's just that I JUST SAID THERE WERE REPEATED QUESTIONS AND THEN LOOK HERE'S ANOTHER ONE.)
16.If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy?
If the idea is unlimited money, I'd donate a bunch of it to help starving people in developing countries.
And THEN I'd go buy a whole bunch of clothes, probably, and also a trip for my whole family to go to Spain. Also maybe a beach house in Santa Barbara.
17. Tell me something about you that I don't know:
I have different hair now, and also glasses. I'll show you later.
18. If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
I would get all the poor starving homeless people into homes with food and also get rid of this whole "economic crisis," plus I'd make it less expensive to travel and give the Native Americans their land back, and the animals too, and turn every resource into a renewable resource so we wouldn't have to worry about depletion, and I'd stop global warming.
If it's only one sentence, it's only one thing, right? :)
19. Do you like to dance?
No.
20. George Bush:
This is not a question. And he's literally history now.
21. Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?
Sunflower is she's blond, Esmerelda if she's brunnette.
22. Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?
Darn-it-I-wanted-a-girl.
23. Would you ever consider living abroad?
OH YES.
24. What do you want to say to God when you reach the pearly gates?
What's the "pearly gates?"
1-word answers
1. whats your name spelt backwards?
ynneJ
2. What did you do last night?
Sleep
3. The last thing you downloaded onto your computer?
Personas for Firefox
4. Have you ever licked a 9 volt battery?
Huh?
5. Last time you swam in a pool?
About a month ago
6. What are you wearing?
Oh my Zeus!!
7. How many cars have you owned?
Ningun.
8. Type of music you dislike most?
Stuff like Coldplay and Snow Patrol... generic guitar/drumset/boy's screaming-singing voice stuff.
9. Are you registered to vote?
No.
10. Do you have cable?
You mean like TV? I think so.
11. What kind of computer do you use?
Mapple. (I never know whether to call it a Mac or an Apple, so.)
12. Ever made a prank phone call?
Yeah.
13. You like anyone right now?
No.
14. Would you go bungee jumping or sky diving?
¡Claro que si!
15. Furthest place you ever traveled?
Florida
16.Do you have a garden?
Who doesn't?
17. What's your favorite comic strip?
Garfield
18. Do you know all the words to the national anthem?
Just the first verse.
19. Shower, morning or night?
Mornin'.
20. Best movie you've seen in the past month?
Well, I only watched one-and-a-half movies in the past month. They were at the same quality-level or whatever, but I only watched half of National Treasure and I watched all of Hotel Rwanda. So, I'll just say Hotel Rwanda. (Geez, how many times have I had to mention that movie in this quiz?)
21. Favorite pizza toppings?
Pineapples and olives.
22. Chips or popcorn?
Chips=bleh. Popcorn=meh. So, I'll say popcorn.
23. What cell phone provider do you have?
Verizon Wireless.
24. Have you ever smoked peanut shells?
What?
25. Have you ever been in a beauty pageant?
Why would I?
26. Orange Juice or apple?
Apple.
27. Who were the last people you sat at lunch with?
My dog.
28. favorite chocolate bar?
Those little dark chocolate Ghirardelli squares filled with raspberry goo.
29. Who is your longest friend and how long?
Uhhhhmmmmm I actually don't know.
30. Last time you ate a homegrown tomato?
Yesterday. From the garden. In a salad. With balsamic vinegar.
31. Have you ever won a trophy?
Yeah.
32.Favorite artist?
Alison Sudol. (A Fine Frenzy)
33. Favorite computer game?
Dropple
34. Ever ordered from an infomercial?
No, but dreamed about it.
35. Sprite or 7-UP?
Wait, aren't they the same?
36. Have you ever had to wear a uniform to school/work?
Yeah.
37. Last thing you bought at Walgreens?
I'm more of a Long's Drugs kinda girl. But I actually do remember, it was in Arizona, and we bought a pack of marshmallow Peeps.
38. Ever thrown up in public?
No.
39. Would you prefer being a millionaire or finding true love?
Millionaire
40. Do you believe in love at first sight?
Eh... I guess it could happen, but eh.
41.Can exes just be friends?
Yes.
42. Who was the last person you visited in the hospital?
Grandma.
43. Did you have long hair as a young kid?
Sorta.
44. What message is on your voicemail machine?
Ugh I don't wanna go check.
45. Where would you like to go right now?
Rome.
46. What was the name of your first pet?
Ditto the goldfish whom I bought for twenty-five cents.
47. What kind of back pack do you have, and what's in it?
The normal kind. And school stuff.
48. Last incoming/outgoing call on your phone?
Incoming: my dad. Outgoing: my grandma.
49. What is one thing you are grateful for today?
Good health.
50. What do you think about most?
My Europe trip, and also what it would be like to live with no food and no money and no family.
So that's that. Now, as I stated up there^ as a response to one of the questions, I got new glasses and new hair. Wanna see wanna see?
Y-e-a-h, so, that's that. Also, today was the last day of intermediate school. Figure I better have that on this post somewhere. It was weird walking to school knowing this was the *last time* I would take these steps, and entering my classes knowing this was the *last time* I would pass through those thresholds. Well, maybe I'd go back to visit my teachers, but it was the *last time* that I would belong in the microcommunity inside. It's so weird though, because it doesn't even feel like summer right now. As soon as I stepped outside of the classroom when the final bell rang, I was expecting to feel a jolt of excited energy, or at least a whoosh of relief, but it just felt like walking out of a classroom on a regular old day, going home to do chores and walk the dog, then eat dinner and fall asleep. Just waiting for summer was more exciting and fun than summer itself. It's like a wrapped birthday gift, with endless potential: there could be anything inside. As soon as you tear off the colorful paper and discover what's inside, all of the exciting rush of what could have been inside is gone. But that's probably because I haven't even done anything yet, and it pretty much has been like a normal school day with the exception of early dismissal. I hopped on my bike to kick off a summers-worth of long rides through both new, unfamiliar neighborhoods and trusty tried-and-true trails.
The people who are going on Blackwood's trip to France get to leave tomorrow, lucky ducks. I have to wait all the way until next Wednesday. Bleh.
But now, I can actually see Europe without the fuzzy curtain that usually hangs over my vision. The strength of my vision prescription tripled with these new glasses. (I'm not even exagerrating right now... the optometrist person told me.) God, the world looks so weird. Everything looks so up-close and three-dimensional. Things seem closer than they did before, and I can read road signs from far away. I have magic eyes.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
The Final Chapter
Tomorrow is
the last day of school and then
school's gonna be over
and then
you know what's next?
SUMMER
and
EUROPE
and
BLISS
and oh my taquito I am going to explode from excitement. I never really get so-called "spring fever," but "summer fever"...? Oh yeah. And this year, I am ready for it more than I ever have been in my life. Today the rest of the eighth graders went to Great America to stand in lines and sizzle in the sun. Me and a bunch of other people who decided not to go sat in a classroom and watched a movie. It was fine-just-fine, except I didn't really know anybody except Matt and Mikaela, and I don't actually know Micaela really, and Matt ditched halfway through. I created a masterpiece-ful work of art as well. I was drawing a giraffe, but then I didn't have room for the neck so I had to draw the neck and the head sprouting from the bottom of the page while the body was at the top.
Like so. I wrote "to be continued" next to the cut-off body so as to justify the head poking up from the bottom.
The next few hours of my life:
6:00 Walk to my mommy's classroom, shove wriggling kids into their Jack and the Beanstalk costumes, lug props into the cafeteria, arrange finger foods on a cafeteria table, and herd bumbling family members into the caf and get their butts onto the seats in front of the stage.
6:30 Sit back, relax, and watch adorable first-graders sing Jack and the Beanstalk songs off-key and mumble lines into microphones.
7:00 Clap for the talented performers, then subtly nudge people outside with the promise of delicious finger foods to shove into their faces.
7:05 Fold and pack the costumes, disassemble props, drag everything back to the classroom, hand out little bags of "magical" jelly beans to the performers while cracking mild Jack and the Beanstalk jokes. "Don't let your mom throw those out the window, now!" "Those are most certainly worth that cow you traded for them!" "Better make sure to not drop those, or a giant beanstalk will grow in your yard!" (Read the play or book or something if you don't understand the listed wisecracks. If you're familiar with the story they're real knee-slappers, lemme tell you that.)
7:30 Go home. Make dinner. Eat dinner. Sleep. (next day...)
8:05 Leave for school.
8:15-1:00 Last day of school, suckas. I'm bringing a camera to take pictures of people because all the cool kids bring a camera to take pictures of people.
Then it's pure freedom. I'll probably dance and smile in joyful lust for a while, then realize that I am very bored. I'll have six days until Europe. I hope I don't pee my pants waiting. That would be unpleasant.
the last day of school and then
school's gonna be over
and then
you know what's next?
SUMMER
and
EUROPE
and
BLISS
and oh my taquito I am going to explode from excitement. I never really get so-called "spring fever," but "summer fever"...? Oh yeah. And this year, I am ready for it more than I ever have been in my life. Today the rest of the eighth graders went to Great America to stand in lines and sizzle in the sun. Me and a bunch of other people who decided not to go sat in a classroom and watched a movie. It was fine-just-fine, except I didn't really know anybody except Matt and Mikaela, and I don't actually know Micaela really, and Matt ditched halfway through. I created a masterpiece-ful work of art as well. I was drawing a giraffe, but then I didn't have room for the neck so I had to draw the neck and the head sprouting from the bottom of the page while the body was at the top.
Like so. I wrote "to be continued" next to the cut-off body so as to justify the head poking up from the bottom.The next few hours of my life:
6:00 Walk to my mommy's classroom, shove wriggling kids into their Jack and the Beanstalk costumes, lug props into the cafeteria, arrange finger foods on a cafeteria table, and herd bumbling family members into the caf and get their butts onto the seats in front of the stage.
6:30 Sit back, relax, and watch adorable first-graders sing Jack and the Beanstalk songs off-key and mumble lines into microphones.
7:00 Clap for the talented performers, then subtly nudge people outside with the promise of delicious finger foods to shove into their faces.
7:05 Fold and pack the costumes, disassemble props, drag everything back to the classroom, hand out little bags of "magical" jelly beans to the performers while cracking mild Jack and the Beanstalk jokes. "Don't let your mom throw those out the window, now!" "Those are most certainly worth that cow you traded for them!" "Better make sure to not drop those, or a giant beanstalk will grow in your yard!" (Read the play or book or something if you don't understand the listed wisecracks. If you're familiar with the story they're real knee-slappers, lemme tell you that.)
7:30 Go home. Make dinner. Eat dinner. Sleep. (next day...)
8:05 Leave for school.
8:15-1:00 Last day of school, suckas. I'm bringing a camera to take pictures of people because all the cool kids bring a camera to take pictures of people.
Then it's pure freedom. I'll probably dance and smile in joyful lust for a while, then realize that I am very bored. I'll have six days until Europe. I hope I don't pee my pants waiting. That would be unpleasant.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Today the eighth graders practiced for promotion. That means we marched in neat rows up the quad steps, then sat in folding chairs while the principal muttered into a microphone. He held it too close to his lips. I don't know about the rest of them, but all I heard was a bunch of spit ejecting from his mouth. Anyway, that somehow took 'till eleven thirty. I went home and ate a waffle and carrot sticks for lunch. It is so wonderfully sunny today. I just had to go for a bike ride to the lake. But now I'm back, and of course I just have to write a blog entry.
Still amazed that summer's here. Almost. How long will these next three days drag on? I am nine days away from the plane to Europe, ten days away from the hotel in London, our first stop. What I just realized is that Mrs. Goldman, with her broken leg and all, might not be able to go to France! :O She was planning to go on the trip with Blackwood, but if she can't even come to school I doubt that she'll be able to board a plane, you know? I feel bad for her. If my Europe trip were to be snatched away for one reason or another, my heart would shatter. X3y retarded. Here, I'll go make a google image search and put a picture on my desktop, and upload it and resize it and hope I don't faint from ex haustion in the process. 
There you go. A broken heart.
So anyway, I added a chatbox in the sidebar. I tried to make the colors correspond to the background of the blog, but as you can see, they were more off than I'd guessed. At least the thing is green, right? Right? Yeah so, feel free to pop a message in there. I think I put something there yesterday, but I kind of forget what I said. Probably something along the lines of "HEY LOOK i has chat thingie now!!!" Because I am so intelligent.
By the way, I just realized that I put the wrong link for the post "Melancholy phantoms eye our skins" Look up "Rangers" by a Fine Frenzy for the right song. There's actually a multitude of phrases in that song that make no sense. I love it.
I have an eye appointment today. I'm so excited. I'm gonna get new glasses, ones that actually get rid of all the blurry fuzzy stuff that clings to things in my vision. My old glasses don't really work anymore. When I put them on, the blurriness is diminished, but not gone completely. I want to get cool square thick-rimmed ones, with like, red frames or something. They'll make me look smart.
So. I'm going to go do something productive now.
I<()>I
Still amazed that summer's here. Almost. How long will these next three days drag on? I am nine days away from the plane to Europe, ten days away from the hotel in London, our first stop. What I just realized is that Mrs. Goldman, with her broken leg and all, might not be able to go to France! :O She was planning to go on the trip with Blackwood, but if she can't even come to school I doubt that she'll be able to board a plane, you know? I feel bad for her. If my Europe trip were to be snatched away for one reason or another, my heart would shatter. X3
There you go. A broken heart.So anyway, I added a chatbox in the sidebar. I tried to make the colors correspond to the background of the blog, but as you can see, they were more off than I'd guessed. At least the thing is green, right? Right? Yeah so, feel free to pop a message in there. I think I put something there yesterday, but I kind of forget what I said. Probably something along the lines of "HEY LOOK i has chat thingie now!!!" Because I am so intelligent.
By the way, I just realized that I put the wrong link for the post "Melancholy phantoms eye our skins" Look up "Rangers" by a Fine Frenzy for the right song. There's actually a multitude of phrases in that song that make no sense. I love it.
I have an eye appointment today. I'm so excited. I'm gonna get new glasses, ones that actually get rid of all the blurry fuzzy stuff that clings to things in my vision. My old glasses don't really work anymore. When I put them on, the blurriness is diminished, but not gone completely. I want to get cool square thick-rimmed ones, with like, red frames or something. They'll make me look smart.
So. I'm going to go do something productive now.
I<()>I
Sunday, June 7, 2009
This girl is a failure.
I failed the project. I felt like jumping off a cliff.
But as I sat there mourning and staring desolately at the PIV, at the B burning a hateful zouo into the screen, wondering how all my effort could have amounted to something so lowly, it occurred to me that getting a B on a project was not a huge problem compared to all the tragedies of the world. There are people starving in Argentina. There are men with wives and children getting kicked out of their houses because they can’t pay the mortgage, and end up on the streets. When I went to Mexico, there were little kids everywhere peddling gum and trinkets for money, or just plain begging because there was no way otherwise to get it. There are little kids in China working under horrible conditions in factories making Happy Meal toys and getting paid two cents an hour. Some people in Africa dig holes in the dirt and sleep there simply because there is just nowhere else to go. There are alcoholic mothers who come home late at night, drunk, and beat their children until they wail and bleed when they see they haven’t gone to bed but were instead sitting in the moonlight waiting for their mommy to arrive.
Earning a B on a project? Not so bad. As much as I tried to look at it that way, though, the burning shame of failure was nestled into my gut and there to stay. I guess we’re all going to fail sometime or other. It’s part of life, right? I should accept that I suck at everything and will never do anything right. This project just proved it. My consolation is that I still have an A in the class, and an A in all the rest of them. But on this project, I have a B.
Ugh. I'm going to continue this post in a few days or so. Assuming I don't go hang myself on a curtain cord. (Just kidding!)
Okay, the continuation, as promised. I've been kind of busy with construction stuff. For the last few days I worked on assembling and building the vanity for the bathroom, and also "caulking." Caulk is this weird rubbery stuff that you squirt and smooth over edges. Whatever it is, my daddy says I'm an expert at it. And my daddy don't lie. But today, I had free time, so I went TOILETRY SHOPPING! Yeah. I walked to Long's and bought a super-cute little deodorant stick that's like, two inches tall, and also some Exfoliating Power-Clear Scrub, to be decanted into a smaller container. (Which is soap to be slathered upon the face, to prevent acne.) I wanted to buy a cutesy travel-size sunscreen, too, but they were all quite expensive, and I needed money left over to buy oriental chicken salad at P.W. :)
Anyway, I constructed a packing list, then kept adding things in the margins, so I rewrote the whole thing. But then I still kept adding on, so rewrote it again. Did you know you're only allowed to bring one quart-bag's worth of liquids with you? I found that out on the TSA website. I couldn't even fit all my little soap-bottles and stuff in there, after a good fifteen minutes of rearranging and cramming. Bleh. I still have more packing to do, though: I'm not going to put in the clothes until the last minute, because I might want to wear them. plus, there're some things I need to mooch off my sister. (I don't have seventeen day's worth of clothes... not even ten day's worth! Eek!) I should have bought something at Long's to bribe her with. Oh well. Maybe I'll go again another day.
So anyway, sorry for not posting for so long. I feel guilty, but caulking is importanter, right?
But as I sat there mourning and staring desolately at the PIV, at the B burning a hateful zouo into the screen, wondering how all my effort could have amounted to something so lowly, it occurred to me that getting a B on a project was not a huge problem compared to all the tragedies of the world. There are people starving in Argentina. There are men with wives and children getting kicked out of their houses because they can’t pay the mortgage, and end up on the streets. When I went to Mexico, there were little kids everywhere peddling gum and trinkets for money, or just plain begging because there was no way otherwise to get it. There are little kids in China working under horrible conditions in factories making Happy Meal toys and getting paid two cents an hour. Some people in Africa dig holes in the dirt and sleep there simply because there is just nowhere else to go. There are alcoholic mothers who come home late at night, drunk, and beat their children until they wail and bleed when they see they haven’t gone to bed but were instead sitting in the moonlight waiting for their mommy to arrive.
Earning a B on a project? Not so bad. As much as I tried to look at it that way, though, the burning shame of failure was nestled into my gut and there to stay. I guess we’re all going to fail sometime or other. It’s part of life, right? I should accept that I suck at everything and will never do anything right. This project just proved it. My consolation is that I still have an A in the class, and an A in all the rest of them. But on this project, I have a B.
Ugh. I'm going to continue this post in a few days or so. Assuming I don't go hang myself on a curtain cord. (Just kidding!)
Okay, the continuation, as promised. I've been kind of busy with construction stuff. For the last few days I worked on assembling and building the vanity for the bathroom, and also "caulking." Caulk is this weird rubbery stuff that you squirt and smooth over edges. Whatever it is, my daddy says I'm an expert at it. And my daddy don't lie. But today, I had free time, so I went TOILETRY SHOPPING! Yeah. I walked to Long's and bought a super-cute little deodorant stick that's like, two inches tall, and also some Exfoliating Power-Clear Scrub, to be decanted into a smaller container. (Which is soap to be slathered upon the face, to prevent acne.) I wanted to buy a cutesy travel-size sunscreen, too, but they were all quite expensive, and I needed money left over to buy oriental chicken salad at P.W. :)
Anyway, I constructed a packing list, then kept adding things in the margins, so I rewrote the whole thing. But then I still kept adding on, so rewrote it again. Did you know you're only allowed to bring one quart-bag's worth of liquids with you? I found that out on the TSA website. I couldn't even fit all my little soap-bottles and stuff in there, after a good fifteen minutes of rearranging and cramming. Bleh. I still have more packing to do, though: I'm not going to put in the clothes until the last minute, because I might want to wear them. plus, there're some things I need to mooch off my sister. (I don't have seventeen day's worth of clothes... not even ten day's worth! Eek!) I should have bought something at Long's to bribe her with. Oh well. Maybe I'll go again another day.
So anyway, sorry for not posting for so long. I feel guilty, but caulking is importanter, right?
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Melancholy phantoms eye our skins
I don't what that means. The title, I mean. It was in this song, which I listen to... often. Very often. I don't particularly like any of those individual words, "melancholy," "phantoms," or anything, but they sound nice all strung together in that order.
Blarg. This would be an appropriate time to get to the point, but un-surprisingly, there isn't one. I could list some countdowns here: Eight more days until the end of school, twelve more days until I board the plane and take off for Europe, nine more posts after this one until I reach the big one-oh-oh. (One hundred.) Promotion dance is on Monday, I think. So, four days. I don't know when the ceremony is, but now I have to wear a medal to it. I was given some sort of eighth grade student achievement-type award yesterday, and now I have to wear it to promotion ceremony. It's blue and yellow. My dress is pink. *cue mighty clash* The entirety of next week is full of non-academics. Us eighth graders dance, practice walking across stages, walk across stages, and go on rides at Great America while the rest of the school takes their finals. I haven't made up my mind whether or not to go to Great America yet. I have to decide before tomorrow morning... when I leave for school... because that's when the money for the trip is due.
Oh yeah. I'm in trouble for not mentioning Billy here on the blog. Hi Billy. Okay, done.
I haven't talked about what is major buzz at school: Mrs. Goldman went to see the Wicked play in San Francisco, and fell down the stairs on her way out. She twisted her leg-bone (pebula?) and snapped it in two places. Ouch. I feel bad for her, but also almost a teensy bit happy that she isn't here. ^-_-^ <-- That's a devil face, by the way. The pointy things are horns. And it's red. Because the devil is red, I think. Anyway, this means that a sub hovers in the corner of the classroom while we do whatever. Today me and a bunchload of other people vandalized Goldman's chalkboard with random doodles and messages, then erased the evidence before the bell rung. I think we should have left it there. It was all rather interesting to look at, in a smudgy chalk dust/misshapen scribbles kind of way.
Blarg. This would be an appropriate time to get to the point, but un-surprisingly, there isn't one. I could list some countdowns here: Eight more days until the end of school, twelve more days until I board the plane and take off for Europe, nine more posts after this one until I reach the big one-oh-oh. (One hundred.) Promotion dance is on Monday, I think. So, four days. I don't know when the ceremony is, but now I have to wear a medal to it. I was given some sort of eighth grade student achievement-type award yesterday, and now I have to wear it to promotion ceremony. It's blue and yellow. My dress is pink. *cue mighty clash* The entirety of next week is full of non-academics. Us eighth graders dance, practice walking across stages, walk across stages, and go on rides at Great America while the rest of the school takes their finals. I haven't made up my mind whether or not to go to Great America yet. I have to decide before tomorrow morning... when I leave for school... because that's when the money for the trip is due.
Oh yeah. I'm in trouble for not mentioning Billy here on the blog. Hi Billy. Okay, done.
I haven't talked about what is major buzz at school: Mrs. Goldman went to see the Wicked play in San Francisco, and fell down the stairs on her way out. She twisted her leg-bone (pebula?) and snapped it in two places. Ouch. I feel bad for her, but also almost a teensy bit happy that she isn't here. ^-_-^ <-- That's a devil face, by the way. The pointy things are horns. And it's red. Because the devil is red, I think. Anyway, this means that a sub hovers in the corner of the classroom while we do whatever. Today me and a bunchload of other people vandalized Goldman's chalkboard with random doodles and messages, then erased the evidence before the bell rung. I think we should have left it there. It was all rather interesting to look at, in a smudgy chalk dust/misshapen scribbles kind of way.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Blarg.
I am having trouble constructing a topic sentence for this blog entry. I keep starting sentences, and then deleting and rewriting, deleting, repeating. And, as it stands, I really don’t have any idea what I’m going to talk about.
I went to a retirement ceremony for Miss Stephen today. She had cancer, but she seemed to be in pretty good condition. (God, I sound like I’m talking about a used car or something.) She’s moving to Texas to be close to her family. There was a “royal ceremony” where the principal gave her a crown. And a staff thingie. And a robe. And roses. And a diamond necklace. Then we were all invited to join in for a rousing chorus of an Ode to Miss Stephen. I moved my lips a little bit and wished more people were singing so I could too, and people wouldn’t notice my voice sounded like a strangled goose because everybody else’s voices would overlap (was that the right word?) it. A bunch of retired principals and a handful of former colleagues went up onstage and read very touching prepared speeches off 3X5 cards. After all the people aloof the stage finished up with their praise and memories, occasional mild jokes and moments of stifled sobs, we were directed to the refreshments station thingie. The line was a thousand miles long. I skipped out on standing around for an hour amongst pocket-tissue-carrying old ladies and hungry little children and went to go help my mom in her classroom instead. Then I came home and washed windows, consumed salad and cantaloupe for dinner, and came up here to write a blog entry. I’m going to have to leave in about an hour, though. There’s a meeting tonight in Mrs. Kalman’s room to discuss Europe. Gweesht! I don’t know what the heck that was. I’m just trying to convey excitement here, know what I mean?
Okay, let’s talk about scary movies. WHAT’S THE POINT? Movies should be a pleasurable experience. I prefer to look at attractive people singing and dancing and having clever little conversations than grimacing at a half-dead guy with his eyeballs gushing out of their sockets, moaning and getting blood all over the place. Does it really make people feel nice inside to see people with their heads torn off and the neck-bones glinting while somebody else wails and starts shooting people? Is it a fun experience to watch somebody get sliced open with a chainsaw? Movies are supposed to be entertaining. The human race must be very sick if we enjoy those sorts of images. Why watch that when you could be watching Hilary Duff flirt with some other attractive being in front of her locker, or Vanessa Hudgens dancing through the halls of a school and singing a cheerful tune? Pretty images are just so much more enjoyable than ugly ones. It’s just the way logic works.
I can’t think of a smooth transition to the next subject, so I’ll just skip that part and move along with whatever else there is to say.
Oh yeah... school is like, done. There are only ten more days left, and I’m through with two of my finals already. Only Spanish and language arts left, plus a simple project for science. (Wait, I think I already talked about this. Oh well.) Thursday is the last testing day, and the rest of the year (One week) is full of nothing. The nothing-ness has already seeped into social studies class: for the past two days we were permitted to sit and chat, or read, or draw, or whatever. Yesterday I created a masterful piece of artwork. Today I listened to Beethoven and watched Steven screw around with dominoes. Which reminds me, I should bring my iPod tomorrow. Not that it’s really mine: it’s my mom’s hand-me-down, scratcheyd Shuffle, which I loaded up with NINE whole songs. Thirty percent of them are in different languages.
So anyway, I need to go now. Well, not really, but I’m gonna go anyway.
I went to a retirement ceremony for Miss Stephen today. She had cancer, but she seemed to be in pretty good condition. (God, I sound like I’m talking about a used car or something.) She’s moving to Texas to be close to her family. There was a “royal ceremony” where the principal gave her a crown. And a staff thingie. And a robe. And roses. And a diamond necklace. Then we were all invited to join in for a rousing chorus of an Ode to Miss Stephen. I moved my lips a little bit and wished more people were singing so I could too, and people wouldn’t notice my voice sounded like a strangled goose because everybody else’s voices would overlap (was that the right word?) it. A bunch of retired principals and a handful of former colleagues went up onstage and read very touching prepared speeches off 3X5 cards. After all the people aloof the stage finished up with their praise and memories, occasional mild jokes and moments of stifled sobs, we were directed to the refreshments station thingie. The line was a thousand miles long. I skipped out on standing around for an hour amongst pocket-tissue-carrying old ladies and hungry little children and went to go help my mom in her classroom instead. Then I came home and washed windows, consumed salad and cantaloupe for dinner, and came up here to write a blog entry. I’m going to have to leave in about an hour, though. There’s a meeting tonight in Mrs. Kalman’s room to discuss Europe. Gweesht! I don’t know what the heck that was. I’m just trying to convey excitement here, know what I mean?
Okay, let’s talk about scary movies. WHAT’S THE POINT? Movies should be a pleasurable experience. I prefer to look at attractive people singing and dancing and having clever little conversations than grimacing at a half-dead guy with his eyeballs gushing out of their sockets, moaning and getting blood all over the place. Does it really make people feel nice inside to see people with their heads torn off and the neck-bones glinting while somebody else wails and starts shooting people? Is it a fun experience to watch somebody get sliced open with a chainsaw? Movies are supposed to be entertaining. The human race must be very sick if we enjoy those sorts of images. Why watch that when you could be watching Hilary Duff flirt with some other attractive being in front of her locker, or Vanessa Hudgens dancing through the halls of a school and singing a cheerful tune? Pretty images are just so much more enjoyable than ugly ones. It’s just the way logic works.
I can’t think of a smooth transition to the next subject, so I’ll just skip that part and move along with whatever else there is to say.
Oh yeah... school is like, done. There are only ten more days left, and I’m through with two of my finals already. Only Spanish and language arts left, plus a simple project for science. (Wait, I think I already talked about this. Oh well.) Thursday is the last testing day, and the rest of the year (One week) is full of nothing. The nothing-ness has already seeped into social studies class: for the past two days we were permitted to sit and chat, or read, or draw, or whatever. Yesterday I created a masterful piece of artwork. Today I listened to Beethoven and watched Steven screw around with dominoes. Which reminds me, I should bring my iPod tomorrow. Not that it’s really mine: it’s my mom’s hand-me-down, scratcheyd Shuffle, which I loaded up with NINE whole songs. Thirty percent of them are in different languages.
So anyway, I need to go now. Well, not really, but I’m gonna go anyway.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Hello Alyssa!
I figured I should dedicate one of my blog entries to you. Here it is. And the comments thing on your blog still doesn't work!! Ugh!! I'll just e-mail you my comments, I guess. :)
The end of the school year always comes so suddenly. I yearn for summertime all year long, but when it finally comes I start scrambling to preserve the year, wanting to stay in touch with this person and that person, sad to know I might not ever have any more classes with so-and-so. This year, some of my friends aren't even going to the same high school as me next year. I might never see them again. *sob*
Two weeks. Those weeks are going to fly by in a flurry of final exams and special eighth grade/promotion events. In seventh grade, laying in the gym with all the girls from P.E. on the second-to-last day of school, we talked about how fast the past year had gone by. I don't feel the same this year. I think summer has come at just the right time this year. Eighth grade dragged on and on and on. And on. But for some reason, I want the last few carefree days to stretch out a little bit longer. The textbooks are in, there's no more homework, the final testing is over, and there's not much to do but watch videos in class, practice for the promotion ceremony, and spend lunchtime strolling in the early summer sunshine. I can't daydream about those days yet, though: I still have finals in front of me. Rusnak's final is just a simple project, so no worries there. Navarro is bound to be easy. I really don't have to worry about P.E. because I have Morninweg, and since that horrible project was Goldman's final, the only ones left are math and language arts. I don't think language arts will be too tough, though. I'll study that and math, and hope there're no epic failures. (Darn. I just used one of pop culture's gimmicky catchphrases. It was an accident, please forgive me.) Then it's off to Europe. I hope I don't explode from excitement. And theeen I'm gonna take painting or maybe sculpture classes at Cindy's Art Studio, that place by P.W. It'll be either another thing for me to suck at, or a chance to discover a hidden talent. I'm leaning towards the former. Leaning so far that I'm starting to wobble, and then toppling over with a splenderific crash. Yeah. I will probably suck at first. But maybe I'll learn, you know? Hopefully. That's why I'm going in the first place.
The end of the school year always comes so suddenly. I yearn for summertime all year long, but when it finally comes I start scrambling to preserve the year, wanting to stay in touch with this person and that person, sad to know I might not ever have any more classes with so-and-so. This year, some of my friends aren't even going to the same high school as me next year. I might never see them again. *sob*
Two weeks. Those weeks are going to fly by in a flurry of final exams and special eighth grade/promotion events. In seventh grade, laying in the gym with all the girls from P.E. on the second-to-last day of school, we talked about how fast the past year had gone by. I don't feel the same this year. I think summer has come at just the right time this year. Eighth grade dragged on and on and on. And on. But for some reason, I want the last few carefree days to stretch out a little bit longer. The textbooks are in, there's no more homework, the final testing is over, and there's not much to do but watch videos in class, practice for the promotion ceremony, and spend lunchtime strolling in the early summer sunshine. I can't daydream about those days yet, though: I still have finals in front of me. Rusnak's final is just a simple project, so no worries there. Navarro is bound to be easy. I really don't have to worry about P.E. because I have Morninweg, and since that horrible project was Goldman's final, the only ones left are math and language arts. I don't think language arts will be too tough, though. I'll study that and math, and hope there're no epic failures. (Darn. I just used one of pop culture's gimmicky catchphrases. It was an accident, please forgive me.) Then it's off to Europe. I hope I don't explode from excitement. And theeen I'm gonna take painting or maybe sculpture classes at Cindy's Art Studio, that place by P.W. It'll be either another thing for me to suck at, or a chance to discover a hidden talent. I'm leaning towards the former. Leaning so far that I'm starting to wobble, and then toppling over with a splenderific crash. Yeah. I will probably suck at first. But maybe I'll learn, you know? Hopefully. That's why I'm going in the first place.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Bookshelves can roar?
*(o-o)* Who says white girls can’t make those cutesy-creepy little Asian face thingies?
Okay. Strange way to kick off a new blog entry. I’m just gonna say right now that you probably won’t be seeing as many posts as usual because of the whole having to use my mom’s computer thing, but also because the weather is just so gol-dinged nice. I don’t want to be inside tapping away in front of a computer. I want to be outside walking the dog or riding my bike, soaking up as much sun as possible before next year’s winter. Summer is so close. Two weeks, and I’ll be done with middle school and packing my bags for Europe. But I still have finals to get through. I took my math exit exam this last week and felt pretty good about it, but my mom says she won’t let me go on to the next level of math even if I get one hundred percent of the questions on the test correct. I’ve had an A just about all year, except for about a month when it was a B+. I wasn’t really having any trouble with anything math-wise this year. “Why not?” I asked. “I don’t want to repeat a class that I earned an A in.” She told me that I didn’t belong in advanced classes. I don’t want to be in an advanced class. I just don’t want to take eigth grade math AGAIN while I’m in ninth grade. But if my mom says so, that’s that. Next year, I’ll be repeating this year’s math class. Which really sucks, because that wrecks my college application. I still don’t really know why my mom doesn’t want me to advance to ninth-grade math in the first place.
I am getting an inkling that you people don’t read my blog entries through. I think that maybe you all are victims of SKIMMING. So I’m going to insert a confusing sentence here in the middle of this entry. If you are not a skimmer, then copy/paste the sentence into a comment and I’ll know who really reads my blog and who brushes over the posts quickly just to get it out of the way. Okay, here comes the sentence: The palm trees couldn’t call after that startled jellyfish because the bookshelf’s roar was so loud. There you go. Now I’m just going to go on with my next subject and pretend this paragraph was never here...
Actually, the deal now is that I have to go to school. It’s 8:01, and I still need to put the dog away and lock up the house. Just kidding. We never lock up the house. Only my dad actually has a key, the rest of us just enter through the backdoor or side door, which are always open. Feel free to break in. Relax, have a snack. But get outta there before my parents find out. :D
Okay, it’s the next day now. God, my life has been so screwed up the last few months. Because of the whole mold thing, we had to move all the junk out of my room and cram it into a teensy guest room. Since the dining room was taken by my sister, that was also where I had to live. I should have taken pictures. There were several layers of random objects strewn over the floor. I had boxes stacked three high, textbooks piled on a chesst of drawers which sat on a few plastic storage boxes. The couch in there got covered with more junk, so I resorted to sleeping on the ground. This was my world for the next few months, as mold people sucked out mold, inspection people came over to inspect, and carpet people came over to install carpet. One of the carpet guys was old. I overheard him talking to my dad: “I’m getting to old for this... I’ve been putting in carpet this whole week and my back can’t take much more. Damn, every day I do this I wish I had gone to college.” (Sorry for the profanity, but that’s what he said and I wanted an exact quote.) No lie, people. I felt bad for the dude. Have you ever had a heart-to-heart with your carpet installer? At least my dad can check that off the Life Goals list. Anyway, we had to truck everything downstairs when the carpet people finally came. I slept in the living room, sandwiched between the dresser from my parent’s room and a stack of file boxes. They finished earlier on today. The carpet is great; plushy and without a single little stain anywhere on it. It is so much better to look at than the bleak, splintery floorboards that had stared blankly at me for so long. I printed out a small picture of a Honda CRV, and wrote my initials and the date on the back. Before they laid down the carpet, I placed it on the padding. I don’t really know why I did that. I guess so that people will know what cars looked like fifty thousand years from today, when somebody else’s toilet floods and they have to tear up the carpet. Then they’ll find my little car picture, look at the date, squeal, and try to sell it on eBay under “Antiques.” (Well, that’s what I would do!) I’m taking a break from hauling furniture and boxes up the stairs right now. I’m home alone, so I can’t be generous and share the labor with my parents. I’m about halfway done... just an hour or two more before I finally have my room back.
Don’t ever take your room for granted, kids. It’s a real luxury that you do NOT ever want to lose. Take it from me: it sucks.
Okay. Strange way to kick off a new blog entry. I’m just gonna say right now that you probably won’t be seeing as many posts as usual because of the whole having to use my mom’s computer thing, but also because the weather is just so gol-dinged nice. I don’t want to be inside tapping away in front of a computer. I want to be outside walking the dog or riding my bike, soaking up as much sun as possible before next year’s winter. Summer is so close. Two weeks, and I’ll be done with middle school and packing my bags for Europe. But I still have finals to get through. I took my math exit exam this last week and felt pretty good about it, but my mom says she won’t let me go on to the next level of math even if I get one hundred percent of the questions on the test correct. I’ve had an A just about all year, except for about a month when it was a B+. I wasn’t really having any trouble with anything math-wise this year. “Why not?” I asked. “I don’t want to repeat a class that I earned an A in.” She told me that I didn’t belong in advanced classes. I don’t want to be in an advanced class. I just don’t want to take eigth grade math AGAIN while I’m in ninth grade. But if my mom says so, that’s that. Next year, I’ll be repeating this year’s math class. Which really sucks, because that wrecks my college application. I still don’t really know why my mom doesn’t want me to advance to ninth-grade math in the first place.
I am getting an inkling that you people don’t read my blog entries through. I think that maybe you all are victims of SKIMMING. So I’m going to insert a confusing sentence here in the middle of this entry. If you are not a skimmer, then copy/paste the sentence into a comment and I’ll know who really reads my blog and who brushes over the posts quickly just to get it out of the way. Okay, here comes the sentence: The palm trees couldn’t call after that startled jellyfish because the bookshelf’s roar was so loud. There you go. Now I’m just going to go on with my next subject and pretend this paragraph was never here...
Actually, the deal now is that I have to go to school. It’s 8:01, and I still need to put the dog away and lock up the house. Just kidding. We never lock up the house. Only my dad actually has a key, the rest of us just enter through the backdoor or side door, which are always open. Feel free to break in. Relax, have a snack. But get outta there before my parents find out. :D
Okay, it’s the next day now. God, my life has been so screwed up the last few months. Because of the whole mold thing, we had to move all the junk out of my room and cram it into a teensy guest room. Since the dining room was taken by my sister, that was also where I had to live. I should have taken pictures. There were several layers of random objects strewn over the floor. I had boxes stacked three high, textbooks piled on a chesst of drawers which sat on a few plastic storage boxes. The couch in there got covered with more junk, so I resorted to sleeping on the ground. This was my world for the next few months, as mold people sucked out mold, inspection people came over to inspect, and carpet people came over to install carpet. One of the carpet guys was old. I overheard him talking to my dad: “I’m getting to old for this... I’ve been putting in carpet this whole week and my back can’t take much more. Damn, every day I do this I wish I had gone to college.” (Sorry for the profanity, but that’s what he said and I wanted an exact quote.) No lie, people. I felt bad for the dude. Have you ever had a heart-to-heart with your carpet installer? At least my dad can check that off the Life Goals list. Anyway, we had to truck everything downstairs when the carpet people finally came. I slept in the living room, sandwiched between the dresser from my parent’s room and a stack of file boxes. They finished earlier on today. The carpet is great; plushy and without a single little stain anywhere on it. It is so much better to look at than the bleak, splintery floorboards that had stared blankly at me for so long. I printed out a small picture of a Honda CRV, and wrote my initials and the date on the back. Before they laid down the carpet, I placed it on the padding. I don’t really know why I did that. I guess so that people will know what cars looked like fifty thousand years from today, when somebody else’s toilet floods and they have to tear up the carpet. Then they’ll find my little car picture, look at the date, squeal, and try to sell it on eBay under “Antiques.” (Well, that’s what I would do!) I’m taking a break from hauling furniture and boxes up the stairs right now. I’m home alone, so I can’t be generous and share the labor with my parents. I’m about halfway done... just an hour or two more before I finally have my room back.
Don’t ever take your room for granted, kids. It’s a real luxury that you do NOT ever want to lose. Take it from me: it sucks.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Cultural Fair
I’ve decided that “California” really is a very attractive word. So is “America.” I’ve never considered proper nouns when choosing ugly and attractive words.
I’ve already blogged today, so I don’t have much else to say. I’m going to the Cultural Fair tomorrow. I wasn’t planning to go, but one of my friends asked me to go with her, so. There’s not much to say about that. It’s cool, and also free: you watch dancers and stuff that represent culturalness from around the world, plus you get to eat their food for free. I got a crawfish from the Africa booth last year, but never ate it. I carried it around in a napkin the whole time while its beady and STILL INTACT eyes watched my every move. It had the claws in, shell on, antlers or whatever (antennae?) poking out and everything. It did not look edible. It did not smell edible either. But for the eating-cultured-food novelty of it, I accepted it when one of the Africa booth volunteers offered. I mean, why not?
By the time I got home it oozed spoiled-meat odors and was soggy in the backside. That’s why not.
I did get some yummy nibbles, though: there was a squishy rice thing from the Japan booth, and spring rolls at the China booth. Plus I liked the Indian dancers. They get to wear these very cool colorful robe thingies, adorned with pieces of mirror and beads and other shinies. I feel so white when I go to these cultural fair things. All the other countries have such awesome cultures, food and music and all that good stuff, and here I am, American and white, with nothing defining me. Everybody else is painted a million different shades with countries full of rich history while I remain a blank canvas. It makes you feel un-worldly, going to those cultural fairs. Well, for me, at least. In fifth grade, the elementary school had a booth for the United States. The volunteers there dressed in gaudy sparkly red-white-and-blue top hats. They served samples of cotton candy and popcorn in little Dixie cups. I was ashamed. That’s my country. Look at all the other booths: India, where a woman was giving henna tattoos, Islam, where a person was writing people’s names in Islamic, Korea, where a woman taught how to fold origami figures, Greece, where they handed out olives to taste. I am hungry for some sort of ancestry from a different country. I’m sixth-generation white. That means my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother came from Belgium. The rest of them were farmers in Ohio, including my own grammy. One of my friends, her mom was born in Egypt! That is beyond awesome. One of the girls on my former Girl Scout troop is half-Korean and half-Filipino. I’m a sheet of 12x8 white printer paper. A sack of all-purpose flour. A glass of foamy 2% skim milk. Bleh.
BUT they’re always fun anyway. I’m actually going to bring a CAMERA this time, and because I always forget, every single year, I’ve already stowed it away in my backpack. I want to take pictures of all the pretty dancers and stuff.
Guess what? I just jogged to the Safeway complex and back. My sister went to the library to study with her friend, then they both went to Starbucks. And THEN they realized neither of them had money. My sister called me and was all ‘oh please please please bring me my wallet my darling little sister and do it quick ma’am if you’re fond of your front teeth.’ So now she owes me a favor, which is a nice power for me to hold over her. I have to go eat dinner now, but I’m not really that hungry despite accidentally skipping lunch again. I really need to stop forgetting in the mornings. Somehow I manage to FORGET and then starve at school. Well, not really starve. My body has adapted, hee hee. :) My mom didn’t cook anything. She says to pick through the fridge and take what looks good. I guess that means she’d be okay with me skipping out. Augh. Why am I still here typing? I should go to bed. Or maybe go eat, I don’t know.
I wish you could instantly produce a perfect friend with a BFF-o-Matic. You know, just tap in everything you want and then let the cogs and gears make the person. And they’d be disposable, of course, when you’re done with them you could throw them away. Then you could have a friend that you feel so completely comfortable with that you don’t have to care what you say or what you look like around them. I guess that’s what true love is, though. But then, you’re supposed to look all nice for your gal/guy, so never mind. You know what sucks about society? You constantly have to play hard to get, know what I mean? If you’re friendly to a person too much, they think you’re clingy and desperate when you’re just trying to be nice. You never know whether somebody wants you to walk up to them and say hi, or keep your distance. Because what if you’re not good enough for them? It’s hard to tell who accepts you.
<~>
I’ve already blogged today, so I don’t have much else to say. I’m going to the Cultural Fair tomorrow. I wasn’t planning to go, but one of my friends asked me to go with her, so. There’s not much to say about that. It’s cool, and also free: you watch dancers and stuff that represent culturalness from around the world, plus you get to eat their food for free. I got a crawfish from the Africa booth last year, but never ate it. I carried it around in a napkin the whole time while its beady and STILL INTACT eyes watched my every move. It had the claws in, shell on, antlers or whatever (antennae?) poking out and everything. It did not look edible. It did not smell edible either. But for the eating-cultured-food novelty of it, I accepted it when one of the Africa booth volunteers offered. I mean, why not?
By the time I got home it oozed spoiled-meat odors and was soggy in the backside. That’s why not.
I did get some yummy nibbles, though: there was a squishy rice thing from the Japan booth, and spring rolls at the China booth. Plus I liked the Indian dancers. They get to wear these very cool colorful robe thingies, adorned with pieces of mirror and beads and other shinies. I feel so white when I go to these cultural fair things. All the other countries have such awesome cultures, food and music and all that good stuff, and here I am, American and white, with nothing defining me. Everybody else is painted a million different shades with countries full of rich history while I remain a blank canvas. It makes you feel un-worldly, going to those cultural fairs. Well, for me, at least. In fifth grade, the elementary school had a booth for the United States. The volunteers there dressed in gaudy sparkly red-white-and-blue top hats. They served samples of cotton candy and popcorn in little Dixie cups. I was ashamed. That’s my country. Look at all the other booths: India, where a woman was giving henna tattoos, Islam, where a person was writing people’s names in Islamic, Korea, where a woman taught how to fold origami figures, Greece, where they handed out olives to taste. I am hungry for some sort of ancestry from a different country. I’m sixth-generation white. That means my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother came from Belgium. The rest of them were farmers in Ohio, including my own grammy. One of my friends, her mom was born in Egypt! That is beyond awesome. One of the girls on my former Girl Scout troop is half-Korean and half-Filipino. I’m a sheet of 12x8 white printer paper. A sack of all-purpose flour. A glass of foamy 2% skim milk. Bleh.
BUT they’re always fun anyway. I’m actually going to bring a CAMERA this time, and because I always forget, every single year, I’ve already stowed it away in my backpack. I want to take pictures of all the pretty dancers and stuff.
Guess what? I just jogged to the Safeway complex and back. My sister went to the library to study with her friend, then they both went to Starbucks. And THEN they realized neither of them had money. My sister called me and was all ‘oh please please please bring me my wallet my darling little sister and do it quick ma’am if you’re fond of your front teeth.’ So now she owes me a favor, which is a nice power for me to hold over her. I have to go eat dinner now, but I’m not really that hungry despite accidentally skipping lunch again. I really need to stop forgetting in the mornings. Somehow I manage to FORGET and then starve at school. Well, not really starve. My body has adapted, hee hee. :) My mom didn’t cook anything. She says to pick through the fridge and take what looks good. I guess that means she’d be okay with me skipping out. Augh. Why am I still here typing? I should go to bed. Or maybe go eat, I don’t know.
I wish you could instantly produce a perfect friend with a BFF-o-Matic. You know, just tap in everything you want and then let the cogs and gears make the person. And they’d be disposable, of course, when you’re done with them you could throw them away. Then you could have a friend that you feel so completely comfortable with that you don’t have to care what you say or what you look like around them. I guess that’s what true love is, though. But then, you’re supposed to look all nice for your gal/guy, so never mind. You know what sucks about society? You constantly have to play hard to get, know what I mean? If you’re friendly to a person too much, they think you’re clingy and desperate when you’re just trying to be nice. You never know whether somebody wants you to walk up to them and say hi, or keep your distance. Because what if you’re not good enough for them? It’s hard to tell who accepts you.
<~>
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Civil War Day
I'm so scared. I have school today. I leave in six minutes. You know what that means? I have to go to Mrs. Goldman's class. You know what that means? I'm going to find out what grade I got on the project. You already read about what will happen if I fail. So I better not. Remember that one time when I said I was going to Europe? Ever since I even heard about the trip, it's been a constant little thought in the back of my mind. Now this project has cast a dark shadow over most of my brain, and most of what I think about is what will happen if I fail the project. Will my parents kick me out? Will I pass eighth grade? Will I faint? I haven't thought about much else since I turned the project in. Maybe this is whatOCD is. My uncle has a mild case of it and could've passed it on to me. I actually had a nightmare, which felt very real. Mrs. Goldman just handed me the project inside a big binder as I walked into the classroom. I got to my desk, opened the binder, and found agradesheet inside. Guess what the grade was. An F. I thought it was real when it happened, so now I'm a teensy bit scared. What if it was a omen of some sort?
Ha-ha.
- - - -
Okay... it's after school now. And the verdict? Still unknown. We didn't even have social studies class, because it was Civil War Day. I didn't know that until second period, when una amiga informed me of the event. It hadn't been mentioned in any of our classes previously. So I'll know tomorrow whether I passed or failed. I guess I could talk about Civil War Day, then. It was kind of fun, which was unexpected. We sat around on the lawn on the far east of the school and listened to people dressed all funny talk about weapons and uniforms and cans of tomatoes. (I had brisket chili [whatever brisket is] with canned tomatoes in it once. It was good chili, but I left the squishy tomatoes at the bottom of the bowl. I was not about to place those squishy gloppy things in my mouth.) It was a sunny, sunny day today. Blinding. Burning. It felt so good after those long, cold months of extra winter when it was supposed to be spring. We've had erratic weather lately: hot for two days, then cold, hot again, rainy one day, cold for a few days, then warm, and so on. I hope the heat is here to stay this time. Warmth is nice. Humidity... not so much. That's the only thing wrong with California summers: too sticky. I actually prefer the silver-slick cool air of winter, even if it means sharp, cold temperatures. Hot and dry is perfect, like Arizona. Except Arizona was maybe just a little bit too hot. Maybe just kind of a way too much burning, scalding hot. Anyway, the big finale was a fake general shooting an unloaded gun. It was cool. Some people screamed. Somebody screamed too early.Ha-ha.
Talk you Down
I'm so scared. I have school today. I leave in six minutes. You know what that means? I have to go to Mrs. Goldman's class. You know what that means? I'm going to find out what grade I got on the project. You already read about what will happen if I fail. So I better not. Remember that one time when I said I was going to Europe? Ever since I even heard about the trip, it's been a constant little thought in the back of my mind. Now this project has cast a dark shadow over most of my brain, and most of what I think about is what will happen if I fail the project. Will my parents kick me out? Will I pass eighth grade? Will I faint? I haven't thought about much else since I turned the project in. Maybe this is what OCD is. My uncle has a mild case of it and could've passed it on to me. I actually had a nightmare, which felt very real. Mrs. Goldman just handed me the project inside a big binder as I walked into the classroom. I got to my desk, opened the binder, and found a gradesheet inside. Guess what the grade was. An F. I thought it was real when it happened, so now I'm a teensy bit scared. What if it was a omen of some sort?
Ha-ha.
- - - -
Okay... it's after school now. And the verdict? Still unknown. We didn't even have social studies class, because it was Civil War Day. I didn't know that until second period, when una amiga informed me of the event. It hadn't been mentioned in any of our classes previously. So I'll know tomorrow whether I passed or failed. I guess I could talk about Civil War Day, then. It was kind of fun, which was unexpected. We sat around on the lawn on the far east of the school and listened to people dressed all funny talk about weapons and uniforms and cans of tomatoes. (I had brisket chili [whatever brisket is] with canned tomatoes in it once. It was good chili, but I left the squishy tomatoes at the bottom of the bowl. I was not about to place those squishy gloppy things in my mouth.) It was a sunny, sunny day today. Blinding. Burning. It felt so good after those long, cold months of extra winter when it was supposed to be spring. We've had erratic weather lately: hot for two days, then cold, hot again, rainy one day, cold for a few days, then warm, and so on. I hope the heat is here to stay this time. Warmth is nice. Humidity... not so much. That's the only thing wrong with California summers: too sticky. I actually prefer the silver-slick cool air of winter, even if it means sharp, cold temperatures. Hot and dry is perfect, like Arizona. Except Arizona was maybe just a little bit too hot. Maybe just kind of a way too much burning, scalding hot. Anyway, the big finale was a fake general shooting an unloaded gun. It was cool. Some people screamed. Somebody screamed too early.Ha-ha.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Overdue Post
This first part is from long, long ago...
Today in sex ed, we learned How Not To Get An STD. And were also instructed to Always Use a Condom. And in “drug ed” we learned why not to smoke, why not to drink, and why not to use marijuana. The teacher said that the commercials are lying: drinking this beer or that vodka isn’t gonna help you hook a hottie. Darn. We also learned that if you drink too much, you get drunk. And if you get drunk, you can’t drive and you feel funny. Plus also drugs and alcohol kill brain cells. I can’t help but think of all the people who have screwed up their lives completely by getting STDS and doing marijuana. They have stinky itchy crotches and pass out all over the place and walk around dizzily, barfing into the bushes when nobody’s looking. That is not a pretty picture to be engraved into my brain. And I just carved it into yours. Sorry.
Okay, it’s a few days later right now. I haven’t blogged for a long, long time. It’s because of that Goldman project... I’ve been using up every square inch of my time on it. I want to turn it in early for the 20% extra credit. I think I’m going to make it, since I only have one more feature and the table of contents to complete. (It’s a magazine, by the way... yeah.) Another reason I’m not blogging is that my dad used his fancy-dancy parental filter to block the Blogspot website. Said I spent too much time blogging. I don’t know if this post will never make it onto the blog, or if it will in a few weeks or months if my dad changes his mind.
Again, it’s a few days later: Thursday. I finally, finally finished that project. But at a cost: it chipped away at my immune system and sanity. I lived off of black coffee and spent many hours at the computer researching and typing furiously long into the night. The ominous taps of the keyboard were the only sound echoing against the silent stretches of darkness surrounding me. Okay, that makes me sound as if I were in a deserted cave. With Wi-Fi. Anyway, I should feel complete relief, but all the stress and pressure of getting the gold-dinged thing done has been converted into unsure, unsteady, nervous worries that I will fail. Which will mean that I Am A Failure Who Has No Friends And No Future and Nothing To Love And Live For. If I fail this project, I am going to seriously consider committing suicide. I will die of shame anyway. If I fail this project, my head will turn into a potato and I’ll shrink until I’m two inches tall and my feet will melt into a thick gooey flesh-juice and my bones will be replaced with sponges, and then I’ll shrivel up into a crinkly, crackly nothing and let the wind blow me into pieces and carry me a thousand miles across the ocean. I’ll float up through the stratosphere and find some other life-sustaining planet, one where I will thrive as its only resident and be a Success. As the years pass I will slowly forget that I am a Failure and maybe, just maybe then I can ride the winds back down to Earth. It’ll take years to get over the failure of such a huge project, though. If I fail, the next time you see me I’ll have wrinkles.
That project made my life hell. It was such a huge amount of work, and I should have known I didn’t have the capacity to finish it all in under two weeks. But I always spring for extra credit no matter what. If I fail, there’s no point in having earned the extra credit, because... I failed.
Now that I think about it, I fail at life too, know what I mean? I mean, I am really a very ordinary person, and I wonder why anybody wants to be my friend. I don’t have anything about me that is special. Some people have these secret talents, like, I don’t know, they can SING! Or, oh man, they can really DRAW! Or they can write these really fantastic POEMS! And some people have outstanding qualities. You know, some people are just outgoing and perky, oh man they’re so FRIENDLY! And others are just so perfect perfect hair face perfect teeth eyes perfect perfect skin perfect they’re just so PRETTY! Or they always have the answer, work’s always done in a flash, god those people are SMART! I’m this dull gray area in a roiling crowd of great personalities and talents. I’m okay in school, mostly A’s but with a B+. I look like a doodle of the general girl. You know, a few sweeps of the pencil equals shoulder-length hair, two dots for eyes, a little dash for the mouth, done. I’m nice to people and people are nice to me, but I’m not so incredibly super fun cool funny cute outgoing helpful caring and so on. I can’t do that pretty lilting thing with my voice (I think they call it ‘singing’) that most girls can do, and I don’t play the acoustic guitar. I’m not the captain of the lacrosse team, and I don’t volunteer at the soup kitchen in my free time. (Actually, that would be fun, but that’s beside the point.) I am this little fuzzy smudge of nothing. If I fail this project, I officially fail at life, and that smudge evaporates and disappears. I really don’t want to fail, because it’s gonna be hard finding another planet that sustains life.
Anyway. I’m glad I could post this, finally. I’m on my mom’s computer again. It feels so weird to have gone so long without blogging. In my pre-blog days, I would write in a “journary.” (Journal+diary= journary, get it, ha ha, not so funny but hey it seemed clever back then. I made it up when I got to the second notebook.) I have five of them now, dating from sixth grade to the present. (I don’t really count my fourth- and fifth-grade ones.) I used to think I was so lame for writing in a notebook and calling it my diary. That is just so fourth grade of you, I’d always think. But now I remember why I journary’d so obsessively. I devoured page after page the last few days. I could write whatever I wanted without having to know any old person could stumble across it online, including my peers who could judge me. Sometimes I edit parts out on my blog, but not so with the good ol’ journary. And in the journary, I could lie. I could say that I got beaten up at school. And I did. I could say I almost drowned in a raging river of rushing aich-two-oh. And I did. I wrote whatever I wanted until the pen ran dry and the pages ran out, then it was on to the next notebook. (Actually, the pen still had ink. But I think the whole ‘pen-running-dry’ thing sounds nice.) I use plain notebooks and nestle them in with old schoolwork so nobody suspects what they might be. Oops. I just broadcast that to the Internet. Oh well, it’s not like any of you are ever going to break into my house at night and steal them. And who knows, you might accidentally pick up an old math notebook instead.
Okay. I’m gonna click the “Publish Post” button now. After two weeks. It’s finally happening. All right, then. Here we go... *click*
Today in sex ed, we learned How Not To Get An STD. And were also instructed to Always Use a Condom. And in “drug ed” we learned why not to smoke, why not to drink, and why not to use marijuana. The teacher said that the commercials are lying: drinking this beer or that vodka isn’t gonna help you hook a hottie. Darn. We also learned that if you drink too much, you get drunk. And if you get drunk, you can’t drive and you feel funny. Plus also drugs and alcohol kill brain cells. I can’t help but think of all the people who have screwed up their lives completely by getting STDS and doing marijuana. They have stinky itchy crotches and pass out all over the place and walk around dizzily, barfing into the bushes when nobody’s looking. That is not a pretty picture to be engraved into my brain. And I just carved it into yours. Sorry.
Okay, it’s a few days later right now. I haven’t blogged for a long, long time. It’s because of that Goldman project... I’ve been using up every square inch of my time on it. I want to turn it in early for the 20% extra credit. I think I’m going to make it, since I only have one more feature and the table of contents to complete. (It’s a magazine, by the way... yeah.) Another reason I’m not blogging is that my dad used his fancy-dancy parental filter to block the Blogspot website. Said I spent too much time blogging. I don’t know if this post will never make it onto the blog, or if it will in a few weeks or months if my dad changes his mind.
Again, it’s a few days later: Thursday. I finally, finally finished that project. But at a cost: it chipped away at my immune system and sanity. I lived off of black coffee and spent many hours at the computer researching and typing furiously long into the night. The ominous taps of the keyboard were the only sound echoing against the silent stretches of darkness surrounding me. Okay, that makes me sound as if I were in a deserted cave. With Wi-Fi. Anyway, I should feel complete relief, but all the stress and pressure of getting the gold-dinged thing done has been converted into unsure, unsteady, nervous worries that I will fail. Which will mean that I Am A Failure Who Has No Friends And No Future and Nothing To Love And Live For. If I fail this project, I am going to seriously consider committing suicide. I will die of shame anyway. If I fail this project, my head will turn into a potato and I’ll shrink until I’m two inches tall and my feet will melt into a thick gooey flesh-juice and my bones will be replaced with sponges, and then I’ll shrivel up into a crinkly, crackly nothing and let the wind blow me into pieces and carry me a thousand miles across the ocean. I’ll float up through the stratosphere and find some other life-sustaining planet, one where I will thrive as its only resident and be a Success. As the years pass I will slowly forget that I am a Failure and maybe, just maybe then I can ride the winds back down to Earth. It’ll take years to get over the failure of such a huge project, though. If I fail, the next time you see me I’ll have wrinkles.
That project made my life hell. It was such a huge amount of work, and I should have known I didn’t have the capacity to finish it all in under two weeks. But I always spring for extra credit no matter what. If I fail, there’s no point in having earned the extra credit, because... I failed.
Now that I think about it, I fail at life too, know what I mean? I mean, I am really a very ordinary person, and I wonder why anybody wants to be my friend. I don’t have anything about me that is special. Some people have these secret talents, like, I don’t know, they can SING! Or, oh man, they can really DRAW! Or they can write these really fantastic POEMS! And some people have outstanding qualities. You know, some people are just outgoing and perky, oh man they’re so FRIENDLY! And others are just so perfect perfect hair face perfect teeth eyes perfect perfect skin perfect they’re just so PRETTY! Or they always have the answer, work’s always done in a flash, god those people are SMART! I’m this dull gray area in a roiling crowd of great personalities and talents. I’m okay in school, mostly A’s but with a B+. I look like a doodle of the general girl. You know, a few sweeps of the pencil equals shoulder-length hair, two dots for eyes, a little dash for the mouth, done. I’m nice to people and people are nice to me, but I’m not so incredibly super fun cool funny cute outgoing helpful caring and so on. I can’t do that pretty lilting thing with my voice (I think they call it ‘singing’) that most girls can do, and I don’t play the acoustic guitar. I’m not the captain of the lacrosse team, and I don’t volunteer at the soup kitchen in my free time. (Actually, that would be fun, but that’s beside the point.) I am this little fuzzy smudge of nothing. If I fail this project, I officially fail at life, and that smudge evaporates and disappears. I really don’t want to fail, because it’s gonna be hard finding another planet that sustains life.
Anyway. I’m glad I could post this, finally. I’m on my mom’s computer again. It feels so weird to have gone so long without blogging. In my pre-blog days, I would write in a “journary.” (Journal+diary= journary, get it, ha ha, not so funny but hey it seemed clever back then. I made it up when I got to the second notebook.) I have five of them now, dating from sixth grade to the present. (I don’t really count my fourth- and fifth-grade ones.) I used to think I was so lame for writing in a notebook and calling it my diary. That is just so fourth grade of you, I’d always think. But now I remember why I journary’d so obsessively. I devoured page after page the last few days. I could write whatever I wanted without having to know any old person could stumble across it online, including my peers who could judge me. Sometimes I edit parts out on my blog, but not so with the good ol’ journary. And in the journary, I could lie. I could say that I got beaten up at school. And I did. I could say I almost drowned in a raging river of rushing aich-two-oh. And I did. I wrote whatever I wanted until the pen ran dry and the pages ran out, then it was on to the next notebook. (Actually, the pen still had ink. But I think the whole ‘pen-running-dry’ thing sounds nice.) I use plain notebooks and nestle them in with old schoolwork so nobody suspects what they might be. Oops. I just broadcast that to the Internet. Oh well, it’s not like any of you are ever going to break into my house at night and steal them. And who knows, you might accidentally pick up an old math notebook instead.
Okay. I’m gonna click the “Publish Post” button now. After two weeks. It’s finally happening. All right, then. Here we go... *click*
Thursday, May 21, 2009
God, I'm so sorry.
I was trying to upload from my phone because my dad banned the Blogger website from our computer. I got on my mom's computer and I see all this gibberish on my blog. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I won't be able to blog for a very long time, not until my dad changes his mind about banning the site.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Sex Ed and the 1900s
We had sex ed today. They've given up on their insistence of calling it "family life" and switched to something more wordy: "Draw the Line, Respect the Line." But sex ed is sex ed, and that is that. I thought it was going to be more intense, but all we did was read a handout about some girl who had HIV, and then draw a strange symbol on a piece of paper that was supposed to mean something. I think maybe it represented my life, or future, or decisions, or something all thought-provoking and important like that. But you know, I'm not really sure.
Mrs. Goldman has heaved one huge floppin’ whopper of a final project on us. We have to pick a decade in the 1900s and produce an entire freakin’ magazine with this kind of article and that kind of article and a timeline and advertisements and a bibliography. (Bibliography-hate waves radiate...) I will admit it, when she told us about it it seemed too incredibly fun to be true. But the bulky massiveness of the project has been crushing down on me since two thirty-four this afternoon till eight fifteen in the night, past my bedtime. I wanted to get a head-start on the project, since there’s a big payoff if you turn it in two weeks early: 20% extra credit. I am so going after those precious additional points. Mrs. Goldman definitely has some favorites, and unfortunately I am not one of them. That means I have to work seven times as hard as the lucky ones who will get A’s No Matter What. But I plan to work that two-thirty-till-eight-o’clock hours at (hopefully) lightning pace for the rest of the week and next week in order to get the extra credit. I meant to churn out pages and be halfway done before the sun rises tomorrow, but even with a continuous working pace I only came up with three pages. The printer didn’t cooperate for a while and I had to sweet-talk it into working again while my mom fiddled with plugs and switches underneath the desk, and the Internet crashed for a few minutes, so those might have screwed up my research marathon. But three pages is good enough for me. I bookmarked every site I used into a special folder and kept every source neatly recorded into a bibliography with correct MLA format. I used color and fancy fonts to make it passably attractive. I browsed Google hits for the best possible sites and kept an eye out for ones that focused on the topic I was after. I took time to note authors’ and artists’ works and cited all the pictures. I did not use Wikipedia. I better get an A on this thing.
Mrs. Goldman has heaved one huge floppin’ whopper of a final project on us. We have to pick a decade in the 1900s and produce an entire freakin’ magazine with this kind of article and that kind of article and a timeline and advertisements and a bibliography. (Bibliography-hate waves radiate...) I will admit it, when she told us about it it seemed too incredibly fun to be true. But the bulky massiveness of the project has been crushing down on me since two thirty-four this afternoon till eight fifteen in the night, past my bedtime. I wanted to get a head-start on the project, since there’s a big payoff if you turn it in two weeks early: 20% extra credit. I am so going after those precious additional points. Mrs. Goldman definitely has some favorites, and unfortunately I am not one of them. That means I have to work seven times as hard as the lucky ones who will get A’s No Matter What. But I plan to work that two-thirty-till-eight-o’clock hours at (hopefully) lightning pace for the rest of the week and next week in order to get the extra credit. I meant to churn out pages and be halfway done before the sun rises tomorrow, but even with a continuous working pace I only came up with three pages. The printer didn’t cooperate for a while and I had to sweet-talk it into working again while my mom fiddled with plugs and switches underneath the desk, and the Internet crashed for a few minutes, so those might have screwed up my research marathon. But three pages is good enough for me. I bookmarked every site I used into a special folder and kept every source neatly recorded into a bibliography with correct MLA format. I used color and fancy fonts to make it passably attractive. I browsed Google hits for the best possible sites and kept an eye out for ones that focused on the topic I was after. I took time to note authors’ and artists’ works and cited all the pictures. I did not use Wikipedia. I better get an A on this thing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
