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!