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?