Why so silent, good m'sieur?

I am tired and bored and a little anxious so I thought now was a good moment to blog and spew some stress out into the internet. You know, as one does.

Also, my titles are random, as you should know by now.

I miss my piano a lot right now. (Even though it's one in the morning and I couldn't play piano even if I were at home.) On Friday I took the Patterson piano for a spin (not a spin, a...tickle? what is the appropriate idiom for this?) and it was awful; the whole feeling was wrong. At first I was playing Cristofori's Dream and one of the RAs sort of rushed up to me and said, "I love that song!" And I said, in my awkward/overenthusiastic way, "Oh, do you play David Lanz?" And he had no idea what I was talking about and rushed away again...

After that I was terrible, terrified that I was either awful or bothering everyone around me, and there are people EVERYWHERE in this hall and oh god it's so claustrophobic sometimes. I love being truly alone, but I hate being alone and surrounded by people. That's the worst part of college, in my opinion. Particularly sitting in a classroom or lab or lecture hall full of strangers...it's a huge contrast from knowing and trusting and liking everyone in my high school classes.

Also, I can't freaking sing! I never knew until now how often I have the urge to burst into song...an urge I have to repress unless I want to alienate everyone on my floor. (Once I decided to sing in the shower, thinking there was nobody there...I was wrong. Also, apparently you could hear me four doors down. Whoops.)

Ahaha I just realized how whiny I sound. I'm really quite content with my college experience thus far...it's better than I feared, worse than I'd hoped, which I suppose is true of most things. The above is pretty much an exhaustive description of the things I hate about college. The things I love...

~ Coke Zero! I have recently discovered it; it's so lovely! I drink it like water.

~ A few lovely people I've met

~ My sister! Never again shall I be separated from her and her cool hair.

~ My research mentor...perhaps in a few weeks I could just shorten this to "my research," but right now I am still too stupid and can't figure out anything on my own. So it's not really "my" research. Also, I'm doing online safety and ethics training right now...it's torture.

~ My BIcycle, BIcycle BIcycle. I love to ride my bicycle.

~ Autonomy (need I even explain this?)

~ My room. It's pretty decked out. To the extent that we're going to have to take off the posters to pass fire safety inspection.

~ My two goldfish, Mad Eye and Nymphadora, and their bling. (They have bling instead of gravel right now...but I took pity on them and ordered them some black gravel to mix among the bling.)

There, that was a fulfilling and positive blogging experience! Now, back to the sodding safety training.

xxx

Love the art in yourself, not yourself in art.

Hooray for no posts in June!

So, I wrote that speech, about a month-and-a-half ago, and cruised and cooked-out and graduated (graduating is a week-long process at my school.) Call me an emotionless robot, but I really enjoyed that week. We got to go on a boat, and lie out in the sun, and write ridiculously long yearbook signatures. Maybe it didn't register for me as a leave-taking, and I just thought of it as a week of enforced fun in the sun with my friends. I didn't cry at all...except when I was riding home from graduation with one of my best friends, blasting "Get Back to Hogwarts" from A Very Potter Musical for not-the-last-time-but-it-felt-like-it.


I'm unemployed for the summer, so I've turned into a total housewife. I garden and clean and play piano and cook and take  care of my dogs and volunteer and read and indulge in disgustingly long Scrubs marathons and have genteel meet-ups with friends. Unfortunately, I'm hilariously unskilled at all of these activities (except the Scrubs marathons). All my plants are being eaten by the baby groundhog that lives under our porch. He's adorable.


Housewifely industry notwithstanding, it's a lot easier to get depressed when you don't get to see hundreds of cheery people with whom you have everything in common each day. And when the official end of the Harry Potter franchise is only fourteen days away...


(Side note: I'm actually having bad dreams about my parents having to drive us to the Harry Potter midnight premiere, deciding to stop at Walgreens, and causing us to be half an hour late for the movie. It's so frightening. I'm way too obsessed.)


(Another side note: I'm so disappointed by Pottermore. Yes, it might be cool, but why, WHY have an actual COUNTDOWN to an announcement about a website that won't even be launched for four more months?)


(Final side note: I now have the Months-of-the-Year song I was taught in kindergarten stuck in my head. Why, why, why, Delilah?)


Anyway, I'm off to bake bananana bread! Hopefully I'll start blogging more regularly now that I have nothing to do!


x

Song Challenge Day 10

a song that makes me fall asleep...Heartbeats ~ Jose Gonzalez

I first heard this song last year on Bones and instantly loved it. I still sometimes listen to it before bed.

Also, there should be accents in "Jose" and "Gonzalez" but I'm too lazy to teach myself how to do them in Blogger. Also, apparently Spanish people are not as crazy about accents as the French. Can anyone confirm or deny?

In other news, I am trying to write a speech. So far I have written "Spich. By me." This is not going very well.

*Update* I've now written three lines. Just re-reading them makes me bored to tears. How does one write a thrilling commencement address?

Songz Day 9...and the return of the Blog Challenge!

a song to dance to:  Monster ~ Lady Gaga


And because I can't think of anything else to say, I'll do another Blog Challenge day...remember that thing I started way back in Januray? Yeah, me neither.


a habit I wish I didn't have...

I would put procrastination, but everybody puts procrastination. Everybody procrastinates; that's not nearly bad enough of a habit. So here goes!
One habit that I wish I didn't have is complaining about people behind their backs. I guess I don't "talk behind people's backs" in the normal sense, because for some reason I'm not usually annoyed by people I don't know very well -- or at least not annoyed enough to talk about it. What I do is worse: when one of my friends or family members has done or said something to hurt me, I don't confront him/her; instead, I whinge about it to another friend. To the person's face, I act totally friendly and unbothered even though I may be seething on the inside. I can't decide which is the better alternative, though: To tell people off for all their petty slights, introducing discord into an otherwise perfectly good relationship? Or to just remain silent and deny myself the satisfaction of complaining? For little things, I'm leaning towards the latter, trying to be less obsessive about snarky throwaway comments, trying to care less about what people think of me...basically, trying to be less of a loser :)


Sorry, this post was meant to be slightly more amusing than it turned out to be, but I ended up picking a rather dismal topic...have a picture... 

I would never dissect a ewe.

 
...and a ninja-hyperlink, if you found it! Yeah, I spend too much time on YouTube...maybe I should've written about procrastination instead!

Song Challenge Day 8-ish

a song to which I know all the words: Going Back to Hogwarts ~ AVPM

Yup. I'm just that hardcore.

That live video is pretty much the most amazing thing ever, but here's the nice clean studio-ish version if you want it.

You don't understand this love.

um...some more songs?

Yeah, so, Blogger was down, and I was busy and forgot, and...

Let's just get to this, shall we?

a song that makes me sad: Corner of Your Heart ~ Ingrid Michaelson

Not so much sad as creepy. That counts, right?

a song that reminds me of someone: Drowse ~ Queen

My seester, for some reason. Which is weird, because we never sang it together or anything.

a song that reminds me of somewhere: How You Remind Me ~ Nickelback

The Jacksonville airport on Christmas day when I was probably about twelve. I wonder why I remember this so vividly, or the fact that this song was playing. It was good times with the cuzzins, though!

a song that reminds you of a certain event: Since U Been Gone ~ Kelly Clarkson

Prom this year :)

All caught up now!

Song Challenge Day 3

a song that makes me happy: Grace Kelly ~ Mika

There are very few bad moods that this music video cannot cure.

Song Challenge: Day Two

My Least Favorite Song: Sleepyhead ~ Passion Pit

Call me a monster, but I don't like Passion Pit. This isn't actually my least favorite song, it's just a song that is on my iPod for some reason that I have never listened to all the way through. There are definitely songs I dislike more, but who actually wants to go on a search for the world's worst songs?

And now I'm listening to it again, and it's kind of growing on me...oops...I just like the high-pitched creatures screaming in the background during the verses, though.

I've decided that the source of the squealing is Falkor the luckdragon :)

Song Challenge Lolz: Day 1

Hey bugz!

So everybody is doing this song challenge on Facebook, and I don't know where they got it from so I'm just gonna copy them. Except I'm doing it on Blogger because I don't want to clog up people's news feeds any more than I already do with my hilaaahrious/unnecessary wall posts and stuff.

My Favorite Song: Status Quo ~ Starship

This is not actually my favorite song, just my favorite song of the week. It's from the new Starkid musical, Starship, sung by the lovely Joey Richter and written by the lovelier Darren Criss. And it's perfect for AP exam week. (That's true of a lot of Starkid songs, for some reason.)

If you don't know what Starkid is, you are missing out on life. So I've used my newly-found hyperlink power to enlighten you.

Starship

Artsy Fartsy

It takes me forever to go through an art museum. Lots of people tend to rush past the abstract blobs or the paint splotches or the grassy landscapes or whatever they consider to be uninspired, but I rush past all the basins and suits of armor and things that were clearly made for a functional purpose and used by people once upon a time, because that takes all the fun out. (It's a bit creepy to fantasize about the owners of a particular soup bowl when you know that those people actually existed, and slurped and salivated all over that artifact in front of you.)

But I love the useless stuff, the pieces that are meant for British eyes only for the artist's eyes alone, the pictures that were clearly made just for the patrons, because of all the people involved. I can stare at them each for five minutes. I read the little blurb that tells me what I should think, I get up way closer than you're supposed to so I can see the gobs of paint on the sides of the knifestrokes (love that word), I occasionally set off alarms and I never notice when someone else is trying to see the painting I've got my nose pressed up against. Oh yeah, and I mentally disparage the curators' frame choices. It takes ages. And then I make up stories about all the people in the paintings and all the people who painted them, and "who was doing what with whom, why, where, and how often." Basically, I shouldn't be allowed in these places.

So last month, when I actually went to a museum for probably the first time in my nearly-adult life, I discovered that I like art. Not necessarily just literature and music and the things that I do, but also things that I could never attempt in a million years (like making wall-sized triptychs out of thousands and thousands of real butterfly wings.)

Basically, I like making up stories. I'm not imaginative enough to create something from nothing, but when presented with a song or painting or dream I make leaps and bounds until I've created characters and situations and lives that exist in my head for a few minutes until my attention turns elsewhere.

There's actually a children's novel called The Second Mrs. Giaconda that's loosely based on Da Vinci and all his dogs around the time that the Mona Lisa was painted. If I had to write a novel, I think I'd start with a picture as well. Although I'd probably choose one that you were allowed to stare at for more than five seconds at a time.

I feel like writing a blog post today

A few days ago, I wrote an extremely emo French essay about "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" with a lot of psuedo-philosophical nonsense about cells and Sylvia Plath quotes and purposely ill-chosen adjectives. I'm really curious to see how my French teacher will react to this. But usually, whenever I write weird (bad) essays or do strange projects that don't follow the prompt at all, the teacher just writes a question mark and gives me a 96. It's kind of nice, actually. Like the time we had to make a visual interpretation of a verse from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and I did a rather graphic watercolor of an African-American child getting its eyes picked out by bees. I had an explanation for this, but not a very convincing one. My teacher just said "How interesting!" I think I'm going to miss that about high school. I can explain so many patently false interpretations with "For some reason in my mind I connected this with [totally irrelevant phenomenon.]" Somehow I don't think that'll fly next year. If I even get to take literature-type courses next year.

In related news, I read The Bell Jar and now I'm really fascinated with Sylvia Plath and mental illness and suicide. We've also been talking about animal liberation in ARC, which begets questions about measuring intelligence and the worth of life as a function of intelligence. And it just strikes me again and again how much of this world is controlled by people of a certain type -- people like you and me who can use computers and words and numbers and other constructs of our imagination. In fact, I'm so good at living this type of life that I can't imagine any other. How messed up is that?

Stressful Gallivants

Hello! Let's just pretend that I didn't completely forget about the existence of this blog, leaving an incredibly emo post about nothing at all on my front page for more than a month. Right, buddy? Right! :)

Soooo here are some numbers which describe the past seven days:

• I took 8 flights, which involved killing a lot of time in 7 different airports.
• I had 3 interviews and talked to a total of 10 interviewers.
• I read 5 books, and loved none of them (sadcat)
• I saw 1 female octopus!
• I ate many slices of Hawaiian pizza (sans meat) for the first time.
• I got to read the in-flight travel magazine for 2 different months, which gave me an unparalleled opportunity to explore my dream of becoming one of those travel writers who get paid to go on vacations and produce badly-written articles called things like "Three Perfect Days in Paris!" or "Don't You Wish You Were Going to Tahiti Instead of Newark, New Jersey?"
• I got 2 free folders, 1 free pen, and 1 entire pad of paper!
• And I took complete advantage of my 1 free breakfast at my hotel.

So basically, college interview trips can be kind of awesome, even though the interviews themselves suck. Also I love fish a lot, and kind of wish I were an octopus.

Desultory

I've got a major case of the desultories today, probably brought on by the unrelenting precipitation. (Snow no longer makes me happy...it just gets in my shoes.) I'm sick of theories and ideas and grand plans and just want to go out into the World and get something done. I thought I was done with those self-revelatory college-application type essays forever, but whaddayaknow, an extra few have just been thrown onto my plate. So here I am, unable to have any new life experiences because I'm stuck recording and analyzing the old ones, trying to impress outsiders with my so-called "achievements." 

You know, I usually don't mind thinking about my own identity and writing down my experiences and whatnot. I usually think that people are "special" -- or to put it more pretentiously, that each individual's experience is unique and beautiful and thus has intrinsic worth. I even usually think it's a great tragedy that no matter how much two people communicate, it's impossible for them to completely understand each other.

Today, I don't think any of those things. I don't want to understand or be understood -- what's there to see? And even though I've already written quite a lot of words in this blog post for nobody, I have nothing at all to say. Do you?

Blog Challenge: 30 Random Facts

Warning...today's blog topic has the potential to be pretty boring, because I have to write...30 Random Facts About Myself. I was going to find pictures or something to liven up the monotony that is my life, but it would probably be copyright infringement.

1. I like airports, but I hate airplanes.
2. My hands get really sore and bumpy when it's cold, so I can't play the piano very well.
3. I play the guitar extremely badly. (Not just in winter, all the time.) The first song I ever played was "Beowulf's Song," a parody of "Our Song" by Taylor Swift, which I had to learn the same day I bought my guitar. I haven't improved as much as you'd think I would have since then.
4. I love the TV show Bones.
5. I love having long conversations.
6. My guitar is named Esmerelda. My piano does not have a name, but he is very out-of-tune.
7. I'm obsessed with Harry Potter. Not obsessed in the robe-wearing, wand-waving way,  but obsessed in that I've read each book more than fifteen times and I connect most experiences in my life to parallels in the wizarding world.
8. I listen to music for about five hours a day, on average. (While doing other things, of course.)
9. I hate winter. If I had the ability to hibernate in winter and then go without sleep for eight months of the year, I would do it.
10. I like doing math (and by extension, physics and chem and other mathsy subjects). I listen to music while I do problems for homework or studying, and I actually kind of look forward to it.
11. 2010 was the best year of my life.
12. I'm really nervous about the whole college decision process, because I'm very afraid of making the "wrong" choice. I don't think I'm the sort of person who could be happy anywhere.
13. The coolest thing I've ever done was meet Carol Greider, co-discoverer of telomerase.
14. I spend far too much time on Youtube.
15. While procrastinating writing my final college essay, I put all the different college-related essays I've submitted together in one word document, and it was 20 single-spaced pages long. I took a kind of savage pleasure in this at the time, but now it just kind of horrifies me that I wasted that much of my life.
16. I'm an odd combination of loud and self-conscious, so if I'm really enthusiastic about something, I'll show it...but then I'll worry about the impression I was giving for a long time afterward.
17. I hate pipettes a lot. They're my nemeses.
18. I have a horrible sense of direction, and have actually gotten lost while directing people from my school to my home on two separate occasions. I think it might be an actual learning deficiency, because no matter how much attention I pay to my surroundings, it's very difficult for me to find my way somewhere.
19. Clearly, I'm not a Hufflepuff.
20. I write a blog, even though about three people read it, including myself. I put it on Facebook for about an hour once, but then I took it off...I guess that's part of the whole "obnoxious yet self-conscious" thing.
21. When I'm by myself, I'm extremely introspective and self-involved, but when I'm with other people or even reading a book or watching a movie, I'm completely involved in their story. Basically, my world-view changes every few hours.
22. Even though I change my opinions a lot, I'm very enthusiastic about my beliefs-of-the-moment.
23. I love being in a lab, and I love research. I can't explain why.
24. I'm incurably clumsy, particularly when I drink coffee or when I concentrate on not being clumsy.
25. My favorite word is "esoteric," which refers to knowledge that's only familiar to a few people. I think the word conveys a lot of nice things, like enthusiasm and devotion and intelligence, and also a bit of absurdity.
26. I secretly know all the lyrics to most Taylor Swift songs, even though I make fun of her a lot.
27. I admire simple writing that doesn't unnecessarily use adjectives to impress people, so I try to write in that style. But when I write under pressure, all the verbosity just kind of spews out. For example, these were the last words I wrote on my English midterm: "...except perhaps the haunting reflection that the temptations and intentions that we find so fascinating will inevitably be subordinated to the inertia of causality." What does that even mean?!?!
28. I analyze my dreams a lot.
29. I have a theory that people glow according to how well you know them, and that's how you can differentiate people you like from strangers. I wish this were also true for navigation landmarks.
30. I published this without realizing I had only done 29 facts. Oh well.

30 Day Blog Challenge -- Day 1!

Oh hey. So I've decided to do a 30-day blog challenge, but I don't really have a central list of the planned 30 days, I'm not going to do one every day, and I'm basically just picking and choosing interesting topics from all the lists that are out there on the internet. (If you read them, you'll see why I'm doing this. I don't want to "write a letter to my 16-year-old self" or "plan my ideal wedding." Sorry.) So basically, I am...going to write 30 blog entries, in no particular time frame, about random plagiarized topics. How terribly original of me!

Anyway, my topic for Day 1 is Bullet Your Day.

Today, I...

• Resisted waking up due to stress-induced insomnia on Monday night. (I love midterm week. It's a really fascinating opportunity to explore the deleterious effects of learning on the human body.)
• Didn't eat breakfast.
• Went to school, and had a wonderful time taking a calc exam. I spent a lot of the time listening to my stomach growl, whimpering, and asserting that the derivative of 1 was 1.
• Went out to breakfast! What larks!
• Spent an unhealthy amount of time watching wizard rock videos on Youtube.
• Re-read Murder in the Cathedral and Oedipus Tyrannos. Discovered Quizlet. Made 251 Quizlet flashcards for vocabulary words. Incessantly played Scatter on Quizlet. I love you, Quizlet! Composed an internal rant about how our English education is essentially flawed. (N.B. This is all studying...I could have just said "studied," but I felt that didn't fully convey the mind-numbing pain of AP Literature.)
• Ate dinner and wrote this blog.

So yeah, a pretty good day (although it seems like I'm complaining a lot. I blame the midterms.) In the tradition of 5AG, today was awesome because my friend and I ate amazing breakfast foods instead of taking an exam.

Vegan Ginger Snaps!

Today has been one of my favorite days ever. It's snowing a lot, and we didn't have school, so I spent my morning reading Georgette Heyer and my afternoon making vegan ginger snaps. So except for the Dreaded Spectre of Physics, which cast a shadow over a few midday hours, my life is awesome!

These are the vegan ginger snaps! I'm so impressed with their beauty that I've decided to post the recipe, which is combined from different internet recipes and partly made up. It's so easy that when I put the oven on to preheat before I start, I'm actually READY to put them in the oven about ten minutes after it finishes preheating. Which is a big deal, for me. Also, for some reason, I call them social justice ginger snaps. They give me hope that maybe, someday, I'll become vegan...

Social Justice Ginger Snaps

Ingredients:

-1c brown sugar

-0.75 c vegetable oil

-0.25 c molasses (or maple syrup, if you're boring)

-0.25 c apple sauce (can substitute 1 egg, or egg substitute, or 0.25 c plain yogurt...if you are a DISRUPTER OF THE VEGAN-NESS.)

-2 c flour

-2 tsp baking soda

-0.25 tsp salt

-1 tsp ground cinammon

-0.5 tsp ground cloves

-1 tsp ground ginger

-Random amount of white sugar

Directions: Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Combine in the order written, and knead together. Make little balls of cookie dough, coat in lots of white sugar, and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake! Eat!

After you've inevitably eaten most of the ingredients in various stages of cooked-ness, you should have about 25 cookies left. Enjoy!

SO CLOSE.

This isn't Hogwarts!

"This is a concrete box! The pictures on the wall are never gonna talk! And the teachers don't care, and the kids don't try, and the most magical thing we have is fluorescent lights!"

~Hank Green: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2Gt9m64LBg

This song has been in my head alllll day. I think it pretty much sums up my attitude towards education at the moment

...which makes a terrible monster of entitlement and ingratitude, I know.

At the same time, I'm not among those who are already saying "I'm ready to go to college." College will not be like Hogwarts...it'll be even more competitive and stressful and grade-centric than high school. Let's face it, my dream college would actually be more like a Montessori preschool than anything else. A Montessori preschool with a molecular bio major!(Arrested Development reference: "We don't have grades here. A student either learns and gets an "L" or they...fluctuate in their learning.")

I would probably get an alligator in French.

(yeah, ok, nobody knows what I'm talking about.)

So...speaking of French, the reason for my horrible attitude towards life today is most likely caused by a surfeit of Rosetta Stone. I've probably spent about five of the last twenty-four hours screaming "un facteur" ("a mailperson") at my computer. It refuses to understand me. Yeah, this isn't Hogwarts.

Observation of the day: Ellipses....are just as...addicting...as colons: resistance is useless.

(Stolen from the AP Physics Edline page.)

Water Bottles and Steamboats

Hey guys!

The origin of my blog's name will remain a mystery...except for die-hard Bones fangirls such as myself.

Here goes nothing! Happy 2011!

P.S. New Year's Resolution: to avoid disposable water bottles. Also, to get into college!