Black Books and Christmas etc.

Merry belated Christmas to you all, said the predictable teenage blogger.   

 The next matter which, again, you could all foresee: the Stuff What I Got For Christmas list. It goes as follows—Alligator by the Natiional, Biophilia by Bjork, Annal Calvi’s self-titled album, Matilda the musical soundtrack, Either/Or by Elliott Smith, Black Sheep Boy by Okkervil River, Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins, book about Sweeney Todd, piano sheet music (simplified Chopin yayayay), Sweeney Todd Broadway recording on DVD, the Inbetweeners Movie DVD, Mary Poppins DVD, Amadeus DVD, animated Alice in Wonderland DVD, journal, Edward Gorey book and calendar, Trivial Pursuit, Black Books on DVD, puzzles, chocolate, other smaller things. Am I spoiled? The only downside of Christmas is feeling that I am being given far too much stuff.

 In truth, the only thing I really wanted for Christmas, though everything else is absolutely great and I’m so pleased, was the Black Books  box set. I’ve, um, already got through season one. Super short British seasons but nevertheless. Words can’t describe how happy I was when I opened that present. It’s another additional to my British comedy obsession. I’d recommend it, but you’ve gotta understand that a.) it’s about ten years old now and not the sort of comedy you’d see nowadays, so you’ve gotta take that into account when judging it and b.) it is one of the weirdest shows you will ever see. It’s really, really, really good and I’m basically obsessed. I’m also reluctantly in love with the main character, Bernard. I say reluctantly because he’s a misanthropic, standoffish, self-absorbed, melodramatic, chain-smoking, binge-drinking, weird, reclusive kind of a person. He owns a failing book shop; he loves books and overlooked the fact that he’d have to interact with people in order to make the business a success. He’s either drunk, hung over, sulking, or asleep, basically. I also think he’s wonderful and oh how I wish this show had never ended, sigh sigh sigh.

 Everything else is much appreciated and has been keeping me occupied when I’m not fueling the Current Obsession. That National album? Good lord, that is a great record. The band have changed so much, you wouldn’t believe. And I thought the change between Boxer and High Violet was a big leap, wow. I think this music might be what you call Americana. Don’t quote me, but that is my impression so far. As far as I know I’ve never been interested in Americana before. I love getting into new types of music. They have a song on the album called Karen, which is forever stuck in my head. So far I’ve only listened to Bjork and Smashing pumpkins before. Bjork is very, very good although it’s easy to over-listen. Smashing Pumpkins is actually for 7^th grade me, because that was when I first wanted Siamese Dream but my parents were convinced they had the record somewhere, and they just couldn’t find it. It took the reissued version to convince them to get it. It truly is a brilliant album. One of the best things of time off is being able to listen to so much more music than I can otherwise. As far the DVDs, I didn’t ask for all of them, also in regards to the Disney ones, I’m trying to watch everything I never saw when I was younger. Haven’t watched any of them yet (see: The Black Books obsession). I’ll probably watch the Inbetweeners soon, if my parents don’t consider it in too bad taste. Present wise, this has been an A+ Christmas.

 I always love the last day of school before Christmas. Free from any responsibility, I read Kerouac’s Dr. Sax for much of it. We watched a movie in English and my view was blocked by the boyfriend of the girl next to me sitting on the desk in front. He is not in our class, so I can’t say I understand why he’s there. The food we brought in for the math party it turns out was sufficient in quantity, thank god, although there were about a thousand cookies that no one ate. Again, reading and nothingness. Watched a video in 20^th century. We have been given an assignment that is too time consuming over the break. Biology, we had coffee cupcakes and watched a video. School is over! Fuck school. I’m so tired.

 The run up of the last couple of days to Christmas was kinda weird. Like, crazy manic weird. We decorated, or overdecorated the house obsessively, made gingerbread, cut paper chains, put marzipan and icing on the cake, et cetera. Also, drove around to look at the lights. One street as absolutely covered in them; good thing they were raising money for a charity, as so many people were just driving down the tiny street to see them. It’s tradition to have baked potatoes on Christmas eve for us, so that too.

Christmas day I woke up with a headache and an inability to see. It was odd. We’re dogsitting for friends until January, which I don’t entirely approve of, but the dog arrived today so yeah. It snowed very slightly in the morning. We opened presents around mid day, which was fun, and listened to Led Zeppelin, and then we had lunch which was cool and then we watched Harry Potter and Black Books and played games. Fun Christmas, yeah! The next day, Boxing Day to us Brits, we went for a walk and it was very cold, and then we watched more DVDs, ate too much food again, did a puzzle, and played games.

 I just got back from seeing the second Sherlock Holmes movie. It was okay. None of my family thought the first one was particularly amazing so I don’t know why we went to this. The first was better, but the cinema was weirdly empty so it was good. I don’t really like the interpretation of Sherlock in the movies. I never understood the appeal of the BBC version of it either. I suppose Sherlock just isn’t for me. But I’ve been lazy as hell for the past few days so it’s good to get out of the house. We are listening to Bjork and the dog is sitting by my side. Her presence is sometimes pleasant, sometimes irritating. Overall, not bad.

 Christmas break is the best.

tongue tied

Woohoo grouplove, this song will make your life.


It’s December 22^nd and Christmas is aalllllmoooost here this is wonderful. Unlike last post, I’m currently in such a wonderful mood because the hard parts of school are done with and the house is all decorated and it’s only three days until everything will be amazing. Ahhh I’m far too sentimental and mushy you know. And sometimes the opposite. I’m a paradox.


Christmas mood, which I will continue to go in about no matter what anything else, was exaggerated by a holiday piano recital. And I definitely could not play the piece as I wanted to and this kind of stuff makes me more nervous than it used to. So, I was very very very unhappy and stressed going in. But thank god the others weren’t extraordinarily good. Like, they weren’t bad, they were okay, I didn’t think I stood out much on any points. Luckily, the small child scheduled to play the Moonlight Sonata before me (playing, um, Silent Night) was a no-show. That was the best thing in my head, which is probably sad. I was happy after cause I got compliments from strangers and my teacher said I did well. I doubt it, if nothing else because flats + pedals is a bad combination, but nevertheless I was in a good mood after that. I place too much emphasis on external validation. Yay.

 As far as other Christmas stuff goes, I bought my sister a Bonsai tree and I’m listening to the Dear Hunter’s White EP, which features bells. Also went to the mall, totally unrelated, but malls in December are as terrifying as as they are wonderful.

English. Monday. After a weekend of not editing my shitty essay, it was collected and all hope of retaining a good grade in that class was lost. We were then assigned our next book, which is The Things They Carried by Tom O’Brien. And oh my god, I don’t like war books. I don’t like war books one bit. Least of all Vietnam war books. And oh, it is a long book! We’ve also been assigned the most impossibly terrible project to go with it. It’s also an ‘ongoing’ project which just compounds the problems. We had to get into groups and another group asked if I would be with them, and my Regulars got so irrationally annoyed at this. I am literally Judas to this one power-wielding maniac girl. (in this situation, she sees herself as Jesus, I am quite confident). My English teacher, get this, is making us do art. In an English class! I am not an artist! I cannot do art! What is this! I will do so badly and it’s not due until late January but I’ll put it all off till the day before! Woohoo, yay! All about creativity! Which is not my strong point! And my teacher’s one of those who things I should designate an area of my house to collecting materials for these art projects. Silly teachers, people don’t give a fuck, that should be one of the pillars around which you should design your projects. To make matters worse, we’re also being forced to do graded ‘seminars’ every single day. Talking. To everyone. And getting failing grades if I don’t. We’ve done this twice now, in which times I’ve found myself either falling asleep, doodling Black Books-related cartoons on the backs of the worksheets we’re given, or observing how my pulse and breathing rise when the thought of actually speaking up comes to me. Is it worth it? I don’t know. And do you want the –why-talking-for-the-sake-of-sound-and-good-grades-is-the-worst speech again? I’m going with no. After day one, there were about eight people who had not spoken. Now, we are down to two. The other will drop out in good time, and I will be all alone. After this, my teacher looks at me and says “Naomi: you’re quiet”. And I say “yes”. That isn’t even persuasion or questioning or gentle teasing like the other teachers do in this situation. It’s neither here or there. Yes, I am quiet: what’s your point? Jesus. Today, we were supposed to watch Elf in the class, but the DVD didn’t work so now we’re watching an inspiring and uplifting tale about a reluctant genius who’s living against the odds. Never could I be more thankful to have a hiatus from this class.

Math hell continues, although it’s getting less and less intense as time goes by. I did well enough on a quiz but my teachers impossible grading system means my grade isn’t going to get any better because of it. Sigh. We’re promised a party tomorrow (last day) if we bring enough food. She has not specified the amount, because her thinking is fuzzy and irritating. I’m taking in enough to feed the class for a week, though, just to be certain we don’t have to work.

Normal 20^th century week, boring work, and we were given the most impossible in-class essay you can ever imagine. And we were gonna have two days to work on it, but then he made it one, so what I wrote was absolutely terrible. I am so done with work! And the essay was too hard, far too hard. And we watched videos. Tired tired far too tired, that’s me. And we’re given extra work, I suppose, cause the teacher’s are working to rule starting in January (most likely). Nothin’s fair.

My bio teacher thinks letting us watch an episode of House is a good thing to do when she’s not there. And I….really, really, really don’t like House? Well, I’ve only seen a handful of episodes but all of this just don’t sit well with me at all. Waste of time? Yes. We had a quiz today and it was easy cause it was partially open book but I still worried too much about it before. Typical me. Oh dear. This stupid class. Good thing is talking about genetics now; I love genetics. One of my favorite areas of science. We did an activity was chromosomal disorders today and it wa really neat.


My aunt arrived here last night. She always stays for Christmas. She’s still pretty jetlagged but it’s fun having her here. She’s not like most family in that seeing her is totally relaxed and everything. Today was the best, I came home and had—oh my god—no homework or anything to do. And we listened to her new Led Zeppelin CD. (Revelation: I like Led Zeppelin) and for the first time in ages got to relax. It was sunny and the house was a mess and the music was very loud. It was so wonderful. And we also went shopping cause my aunt wants to browse the local shops every year, even if it’s just craft shops or something, and we kind of bought far too much stuff but it was fun. We also made gingerbread again. Amazing amazing amazing.

 Do I foresee an actual good night’s sleep tonight? It seems so.

St. Vincent! Is really really good and I love her. And this song is wonderful so listen to it.

My god, I have had one awful week. It always happens this time in December and I don’t know why, but all I know is that you’re practically counting down the seconds until days are done and until you can have Christmas break and just not care at all. It’s tough and you’ve no idea how relieved I am that this is over with.

Interesting day Monday, ‘cause I woke up with a  headache and a ringing in my ear, and although my mother takes the typical English attitude to sickness(which is, you will go to school unless you are about to die) most days, for some reason I got to sleep in this day. Hoorah! And she had to go out Christmas shopping which for many a fifteen year old means loud music And it was pretty fun and almost lucid; I dressed like it was summer, ate food on a strange schedule (I’m usually very scheduled), read books, and listened to the Killers. It was fantastic and I’m either easily pleased or far too hard to please at all.

 And then not to be melodramatic or anything—who? Me? Never!—but the rest of the week was like the worst thing ever. Looking back on it, I’m not entirely sure why but, you know, there you  go.
I’ve been essay-writing in english for a book I didnt’ care for at all. I really go in for specifics and am kinda hyper meticulous with essays so to not enjoy the book I’m reading makes it all too difficult. It truly was a terrible book. And it was just another shitty thing to do even when I had no time to do something like that, what with studying and work and being so incredibly tired and frustrated. The essay rubric doesn’t make any sense, either, and my teacher is the mockery of the class because of it. Interestingly, we also had a power outage on Thursday. We were typing in the lab. The first story was of a squirrel getting caught on the power lines, although later that squirrel became a branch. We were shuffled outside and then shuffled inside and the power didn’t come back until about an hour and a half later. Which is fine unless you cannot type the essay without the power and you don’t have time to type it after school and your teacher doesn’t moie the date back. So, yeah. The first draft was awful and surprise surprise no time to edit it much over the weekend, and peer editing is just such an awful exercise for everyone. Fucking educational system. Apparently not having a thesaurus.com tab constantly open on your computer while you write constitutes bad writing. Repeat a word once and you are just terrible. Hmmm.

This week on algebra, I got a very bad grade on a test. I was still sick, I was exhausted, I didn’t have time to study, I missed the review on Monday which meant I was probably at a bit of a disadvantage. We were tested on things that we went over once, things you wouldn’t think to study if, like me, you hadn’t been told to. As you’ve probably noticed, if I don’t find a loophole out of lackluster grades it absolutely kills me. I have bipolar self-esteem, if you excuse my using the word bipolar in that context. Stuff like this just feeds into the cycles, you see. But this has a few other repercussions that are more awful. Most other teachers would judge you on your entire performance in a class, which for me has been consistently above average, but my teacher doesn’t seem capable of this. I am now wearing the metaphorical dunce cap. This is very hurtful. She’s also moved me away from everyone I know and talk to sometimes, to the front of the class. And I find it very difficult to function at all at the front of a classroom, I always have: whoever thought moving kids to the front of the class will make them contribute and learn more had no idea what they were talking about. She made us take notes too quickly, while I was moving seats, and didn’t give me enough time to copy anything down and then interrogated me for answers as she went around the classroom, picking on people, having us work on questions as a class. She picked on me. She did this a couple of times, still without the proper notes to answer questions. I think teachers need to learn that “I don’t know” means just that. I believe putting others through public humiliation is unacceptably cruel, especially people who obviously don’t wanna speak in front of the class and who are most affected by things like this. But no, this teacher and most all of the others will just keep pushing away until they give you an answer. Even if the answer is nonsense. “Tell me, what’s the capital of Poland—you!” “I...i don’t...I don’t know” “Just say anything” “The square root of sixteen?” “Well at least you answered” (the imaginary class laughs at you from this time—you self-loathe until the bell rings and you can leave).  This rule applies even if answering makes the speaker want to cry and just get the hell out of the room right then and there. It’s all about noise for the sake of noise, doing things quickly, not caring about anything, and going through humiliating hell each day. I fucking hate the education system here, really. Even when I’m doing well at something it’s all just so awful, depressing, and humiliating. My teacher’s attitude in this class has yet to change and every day I dread the class.

I miss an easy day in 20^th century, watching a video, and the following Tuesday and Wednesday were shitty discussions. Then on Thursday, I should have studied my brains out for a test by then but alas, could I be bothered? Debate days are weird. One of the many high school events that seem to exist even though the explanation for why they exist seems to have been lost long ago. And we were made to sit by class, so it was kinda impossible to do anything useful with the free time. The girl next to me reads Catcher in the Rye and narrates her thoughts to me; I don’t know her very well. There were two debates: the first about emphasizing science and technology in schools to get an advantage over other countries, the second about the national slogan. I could have landed worse debates, true, although try as you like to hide it it’s too difficult to cover up your personal opinions on the topics entirely. I tried. My teacher, who plays devils advocate like you wouldn’t believe, made all these snide comments about the debaters now that they were outside of ear shot. Slightly unsettling. And! Some person asked questions who talked so painfully slowly it was embarrassing for everyone in the room. I don’t know why I’m complaining. Could have been a worse class, you know? But damn it, debate club doesn’t make much sense to me and yet I’ve gone before and not entirely against going again if I ever have an evening with enough time? It’s so odd. Actually, one main problem: overuse of the word decorum. Decorum! Jesus. Some of these kids are scarily college-oriented; the whole decorum business kinda gives it away. Ah Jesus, must stop being so judgmental of literally everyone. But not before I mention how absolutely terrible Friday was, because it was review for a test, and for some reason my teacher is one of those ones that managed to pick up the (incorrect) idea that playing jeaopardy is a good way to review things. And we were kinda roughly put into teams, and our team was about a third of the size of the other two, and the big team has all the loud people and god I don’t know about fucking war; this unit’s been awful. Take this, plus the typical deterioration of questions to asking about America’s Next Top Model, plus being with someone who, after getting the dates of Wilson’s presidency a few years off, continues to spend the next three quarters of an hour telling you how he doesn’t care, and you become so incredibly frustrated and tired and sick of everything. See, fucking jeopardy, this happens every single time with this game. Last time I was stuck between Potterheads, the raving lunatic fringe of the fandom types, and if it weren’t for some pretty snappy knowledge of the stock market lord knows what I would have done to them.

 The only problem with bio is the quizzes. Cause they’re too hard and it’s too time consuming to study for them, so even if the classes themselves aren’t awful, as is often the case, then just having to do the work makes everything much worse. Too many labs this week. First, we cut up flowers, then the next day we looked at photosynthesis in old leaves vs new leaves. Usually we can pick our lab partners, but for whatever reason they were randomly assigned this time. I was with three girls who I don’t know very well. It wasn’t much fun. We also had a quiz this week! Fun fun hell. I did okay but it’s irritating, what with everything else I seemed to think was going on. It’s pretty sad if the best thing that happens to you in a week is some person commenting on you getting a slew of good grades. These grades, incidentally, have been down to luck and perhaps the heightened since of value that comes with everything when you’re sleep deprived. We’re talking about cancer no in that class.. My teacher says it’s kinda weird to do right before the christmas break.

It’s the weekend now, thank Christ, and next week is the last week of school, I have a huge test on Monday and a piano recital on Sunday. This week has been terrible and blah blah blah I’m going to bed goodnight.

it's a fine life

So, the title and the above are two different songs. But from the same musical! When I was about eight, I was obsessed with Oliver. This was during the (ongoing) period of my life when I thought the combination of drama and Victorian England was just the best thing ever. My mom bought a copy on DVD back from England, and just got round to watching it a few days ago. I guess my feelings were mixed, but it still had a sort of charm about it. Who Will Buy, Oliver, It's A Fine Life, Reviewing the Situation, and Boy For Sale are still, you know, fun to listen to. Especially the last, god, I love that song. This reminds me how imperative it is I watch Scrooge sometime soon. And, naturally, Sweeney. Oh musical theater, sort out your fandom and I'd like to get to know you better.

I also watched Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers a few days agoand I don't think six-year-old me would be happy because I'd forgotten how long and sort of uneventful that film is. If you spent a week not getting anywhere near enough sleep, yeah, you are gonna fall asleep. As I did. and I love LotR, really i do, but that was just...god.

I have a knack for desperately wanting things slightly before Christmas. Thursday I got Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas music (seasonal, at least) and Submarine by Joe Dunthorne. The former is awesome. You have five disks, four of them EPs one more of a full album, and he's doing covers with a few of his own songs in between. Also you have essays and drawings and stuff to go with--superfluous Christmas crap all round! I like the balance of cynicism and sentimentality that most people feel about Christmas. It's like Tim Minchin's 'Wine in The Sun', which is a great Christmas song and, oddly, one I have the need to listen to every 4th of July. I'd recommend White Wine in the Sun, even of Tim's other stuff isn't for you. I'm a bit of a christmas music connoisseur, if I say so myself. The obscure French carols Sufjan's into add fuel to my flame. My favorite christmas song, and the most unoriginal choice, is Silent Night. Silent Night gets a mention in the Songs for Christmas pamphlet. Also I have to play it at a piano recital soon. Oh! And Submarine is pretty fantastic. Like, I would say it's my favorite YA novel? Admittedly the only YA books i haven't been tempted to sort of mutilate and destroy five or ten minutes after reading are Submarine and Perks. And my interest in Perks has sort of waned since reading it. Oliver as a protagonist is just great. A common criticism of YA protags is their perfection. Like, Charlie in Perks, the endlessly emotional, endearingly detached, unrealistically empathetic, popul+ar-with-the-seniors super genius. And Oliver, the same age, is the sort of person who, age fifteen, read Perks on a whim, took it in, and decided as many an imperfect person in his situation would, that he was going to mold himself to become Charlie. Well, Charlie if he had sociopathic tendencies. Oliver's unique but also completely realistic, and actually really accurately depicts a flaw that YA authors, ironically, seem to miss out a lot: uncertainty. But it's believable! Trust me! Pretentious and pompous and cruel as he may be, Oliver's thoughts are fascinating and funny and stuff, so yeah, cool book.

Having a day off is wonderful, even if I did spend most—or all—of it trying to get my head around cellular respiration. It rained a lot and I had an incredibly shitty piano lesson that day. Fun fun fun. Thank god it wasn’t a half day, like originally scheduled.

My 20^th century presentation was awful as could be. Yay, awful presentations! They truly are the bane of my existence. My classroom is the size of a small canyon, and I can’t speak loudly. I don’t know why teachers think I can help that. Why would I talk quietly if I had the choice? Jesus, some people. And shouting “Louder!”at me isn’t conductive to anything. I mean, c’mon guys, think about it. This whole shtick which I’ve heard so, so many times just makes me passive aggressive and eager to sit down and stop presenting. My goal in life is to do reasonably well, or decently well, or just not terribly, at anything that doesn’t involve social interactions, to prove everyone a lesson. Sigh, some people. We watched songs from the 60s and stuff on Friday. Surely I can’t be the only one who doesn’t ‘get’ Bob Dylan? And not just his voice either, his music and lyrics and everything. Maybe the song I heard just wasn’t a good place to start? Hmmm. We then talked about freedom, and as with most of these discussions we vaguely discuss the topic and then zone in on the question on whether anything at hand is communistic. I mean, Jesus. Otherwise these people are fairly left wing, so I really wish I knew why this keeps happening.

Friday was funny cause it involved two humiliating public presentations. The other was in English, although it kinda started the day before. Cause we were randomly assigned into groups, and told to read sections as if we were the characters (sections with little or no dialogue sometimes, so I don’t think much thought was put into the activity) and our group didn’t get on at all but we persevered. And I was told to read, and I was too tired to argue otherwise. And then another group asks if I’ll narrate for them. And I don’t know why they did this. The only thing that comes to mind is them being deliberately cruel, though that’s not the sort of thing I’d wanna actually assume…and for whatever reason I’m too thick to say no to this, so later that class I do read for the section, and there was a hell of a lot of reading I had to do, but I did it. And that was fairly okay minus the usual nerves with presenting, only the next day my teacher starts with some nonsense about my soft voice before I present what I was supposed to be presenting (narrating on Thursday, assigned stuff on Friday) and some people snicker? Which I guess is a fairly expected consequence but all the same my head was saying ‘fuck you’ for a little while after. I hate group presentations so, so much.

Bio test was fine. I did well, in fact. Sigh sigh sigh, I must get over stupid arbitrary school things. I wish I couldn’t care about these sorts of things. Sadness. Shouldnt’ve spent all of Wednesday studying for the damn thing, I know. But, I am a pedantic twat. The happiness after Thursday was done was out of control. We’re talking about plants now! Photosynthesis, leaf structure, etc. Given too much homework this weekend, and had to repeat it word for word via text to someone in my class. We looked at leaves through microscopes. It was a little bit awful, because microscopes are the worst and my partner has to ask the teacher for clarification about everything, and I was sat opposite a guy who decided to say everything to the tune of You’re Beautiful by James Blunt for the entire block. And this guy talks a lot, believe me.

Saturday was a wonderful day. Best day of the year, or one of, of course, because we got our Christmas tree(s)! We have too many decorations for just one, unfortunately. The place was cold but we're slightly earlier with this than usual so the selection was better. They usually have a fire going outside, and I was disappointed they didn't this time. I listened to In Utero in the car on the way there. it's traditional that everyone in my family gets a new ornament each year. in England they had this huge warehouse of ornaments, and we'd spend hours there. The one I got this year is sort of pale blue and frosted, if you get what I mean by that. it's not bad. We decorated the trees the following day. Listening to the old Christmas CDs. We have too many christmas CDs. My dad got new lights for one of the trees, red/blue/green, the other is just white. One of them is has unusually sharp needles, so much so that I genuinely got scratches on my hands from this. And my mom has this one christmas CD (yes yes yes, I will repeat this), of covers, that was really cheap but we listen to it every single year, and I love it to pieces. And we have so many random, stupid, crappy decorations but it's so much fun getting them out of their boxes, organizing them, decorating the trees. We did a good enough job, and it took a while, but oh it was so perfect and ahhh god, too much sentimentality for my own good. The christmas mood is finally here. We even made gingerbread men on Sunday, and they were amazing and stuff. So much music, food, sugar, decorating, even without snow it’s wonderful. I can’t wait for christmas, guys. Really I can’t.

I found this band years ago, but I'm only getting into them now. I love the lyrics to this song.

We have a day off school tomorrow. Initially it was just a half day, but they changed it cause we lost a day in November that we were supposed to have off cause of a power outage. I have to study tomorrow, but this is good news.

  It’s been a boring few days. Pretty awful on Saturday, when I was dragged along to the mall with my mom to look for clothes. It was odd, because by the time we’d got there my mother and I had already had an argument, but about whether a song on the radio was by My Chemical Romance or not. (it was). Which was an interesting sort of mother-daughter argument, if nothing else. The mall wasn’t as busy as you’d think. And it made me very happy, because I love malls at Christmas time more than I should, given that I’m not a big fan of the crowds. It’s just...the cheap gold and red christmas trees, guys. And the terrible covers of the same five or ten songs in all the shops. Unironic appreciation for the creepy christmas feeling. I did get stuff, but I had an awful day and was pretty unhappy for various reasons, which continued well into the night, including when my mom said we should also watch Brave Little Toaster for the nostalgia or something. It wasn’t my day. I’m moody but even so. On Sunday, too! But less so. Went looking for DVDs, specifically movies, I might wanna ask for, for Christmas. And then I remembered that movies are awful. Where do people find good movies? I don’t get it. Oh, but I did find the US DVD version of Submarine. Aesthetically much better than the UK one. Plus, I think it comes with a little note from the protagonist, which is pretentious and anti-American and just so Oliver that it’s endearing. In the way that Oliver Tate can do really despicable things and somehow you can’t help but like him. That I suppose was a good moment. Spent much of the rest of the day studying for biology, reading Hemingway, and listening to bad music. Disappointing weekend, although my mom did get chocolate christmas candy and what have you(19 days, guys) so there were good elements.

  English is boring as hell. I like to think I approach books with an open mind, but this A Lesson before Dying thing is awful to me. It’s melodramatic as can be, the characters are boring, and the plot isn’t interesting. It’s making going to the class every day more and more difficult. My teacher’s really into it, so I find it hard to get along with her. Her naive, repetitive, i’m-so-into-literature shtick is tiring. Also, I don’t understand being put into groups to answer questions, or present, or anything. We’re not getting anywhere and it doesn’t make sense. I want this book to end. Soon.

This week in 20th century, we changed seats at last. I am now with a passably decent group of people. The only problem is, because we have round tables in our oversized classroom, I am facing directly away from the front of the classroom most of the time. It’s quite irritating and my back hurts coming out of that class sometimes. I always feel very uncomfortable because I have to have the chair fully turned away from the desk, and I feel too exposed like that. We’re talking about Vietnam in class at the moment. It’s fairly tiring. Looking at every war in the 20th century that the U.S. was involved in, it’s kinda like ‘okay, hurry up, I wanna stop now’. That kind of a feeling. Yesterday was a lecture, today we watched a video of actual troops in Vietnam at the time. Also, peace stuff. All the hippie movement seemed to be arguing for something important in wholly irrelevant and juvenile ways. Hmmm. Oh! And I’ve gotta do my first presentation in that class on Friday. Well, something resembling a presentation. We’re in groups, arguing either for or against a lesson learned from Vietnam. My teacher’s way into ‘critical thinking’. Although, I’m rather baffled, because I’m supposed to be arguing that we shouldn’t go to war in south east Asia, and the people in my group have told me to connect this to Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t know what my, um, geographically confused group expect me to do. So, I’ll probably end up not doing anything, and come Friday I’ll have nothing and they’ll hate me and I’ll read a single sentence off someone else’s work in the presentation. Ever the dysfunctional group worker and presenter, that’s me. My teacher’s always talking about how necessary group presenting skills are, and every time he does this I just become a little more resolute in my conviction to take up a career with the most minimal social interaction possible.

A redeeming quality of a fairly not so good few days. A bio test on the hardest unit of the year got moved two days! I spent much of the weekend, including just about all of Sunday, studying for the damn thing. Because the nanowrimo-induced sleep loss caught up with me, and my brain seems to be incapable of staying active last block of the day, I’d found it impossible to take in any of the cellular respiration information from the past week. This annoyed me especially when faced with a detailed diagram of the Krebs cycle, and the knowledge that I must memorize that and many other things of equal complexity in two days. I was decently prepared by Monday, and we reviewed the whole time, I accidentally annoyed the people I was supposed to be working with. Oops. It was so good on Monday to come home and get an e-mail saying it’d been moved cause of Tuesday’s recently-added schedule changes. (15 minute talks, by guidance counselor, with the principal about the hazing incident mentioned in the last post. The Fox news vans and what have you are gone, by the way. Same old round here. And it wasn’t so much any revelation of new details on the incident, as some may have expected, but a call to arms not to have it happen again. Anyway). Unfortunately htis change meant watching the most tedious nature documentary you could ever possible imagine. Seed dispersal. The majority of it was dedicated to animals shitting to spread fruit seeds. “I’d rather have just failed the test today” said the guy next to me. And everyone else agreed.

  I’m looking forward to having a lazy evening today, possibly watching some QI or playing video games or something, staying up late, having a relatively relaxing day tomorrow. Apologies for my moodiness in this post. It hasn’t really been my sort of few days, but it’s getting better. Also, my Sufjan Stevens CD’s gonna get here in a few days, and we’ve only a few weeks left of school. And I bet you’ve heard more than enough about Sufjan Stevens here, yeah? Yeah. Things aren’t bad. So that’s my incredibly terrible post for the moment guys. Enjoy?

nanowrimo is done, thank god

So you know that really frustrating habit Kings of Leon have, where they either write really, really good pop-rock songs or really, really terrible pop-rock songs? yeah. Well my friend made me a mixed CD (my first mixed CD!) a couple days ago, and this was on it, and yeah..I was reminded of that.

Nanowrimo is over, thank god. I won! Got to 50k at about eight in the evening on Wednesday. It was surprisingly early for me. And I’d been having to catch up on a number of missed days work. It got tiring. Nanowrimo is a cool experience and I’d recommend it to anyone to try, but you do become completely worn out by the end of it. Thursday was hell because the last four weeks of all the energy spent on this crap came back to haunt me, and I was just a zombie for most of the day. I had no energy to do anything and much of the school day was spent trying to consume all the sugar I can just to keep me going. And I went to bed at nine, got nine hours of sleep, and I still woke up completely exhausted. I doubt I’ll have time to catch up on much sleep this weekend, either, because I have a quiz about cellular respiration on Tuesday and it’s the hardest unit in bio this year and I’ve literally been unable to pay any attention in class this week. I had no idea what was going on, at all. Well, actually no one has any idea what’s going on just because the material is so fucking complicated, but the majority of the class already has a benefit over me in that they were conscious, I assume, for many of the lectures. I’d just throw in the towel and make do with the D I’d be sure to get if I looked over the stuff for twenty minutes, but a couple of people expect me to do well. I’m not trying to be arrogant. I’m not smart and I don’t do outstandingly well in school. Somehow on the line, I might’ve gotten one or two passably good grades in that class and now there’s a president. How the really intelligent people at school cope with this, I’ve no idea. It’s frustrating how I just succeed something realty difficult, nanowrimo, and now I’m thrown into something also very very difficult. I can’t be granted a moment’s simplicity in terms of the work I need to do.

At least it’s December. It’s been a very warm November and with the change of the month I’ve moved from the “please don’t get cold and snow” mentality to the “I will be suicidal if we don’t get a good amount of snow by Christmas” mentality. I love December so much. There are gonna be a lot of irritating things to do in school. I have nightmarish memories of the science project I was doing this time last year. But! There are pretty Christmas lights and cookies and the malls are all gold and red and plastic Christmas trees. Advent calenders, too. Crappy Christmas movies. Christmas Christmas Christmas, basically. My aunt’s coming to visit in a few weeks and I have a holiday piano recital in a couple of weeks where I’m going to play a really embarrassing rendition of Silent Night. I am too sentimental and too attracted to things that are beautiful in a banal way. Hence, listening to carols and watching the Snowman every day this month.

A few days ago my mom spontaneously decided it would be a cool idea to go see the Boston Ballet do The Nutcracker Suite in Boston with my sister and aunt. I’ve never seen a professional ballet and I’m not very familiar with the show (except, like, the Sugar Plum Fairy, obviously. That was a ‘jam’ about two weeks ago for me, god knows why) but I do like the Tchaikovsky I’ve heard. I also love going into Boston, which is a totally underrated city by the way, especially in the evenings for shows and stuff. We got tickets for the 29th, I believe, and I’m super excited. Also, Kasabian released North American tour dates! Got tickets for March, at the House of Blues. I love Kasabian, and I love the new album. I’ve never seen them live before but they look like an amazing live act. The music seems to work very well for it. Listening to things like Fire live sounds too good to be true.

Today has been a crazy week. At least, for our school. Over the end of thanksgiving break, a story surfaced about a hazing incident that happened with the basketball team over the summer. I’ll spare you the details; it’s really unpleasant. Some then- juniors were being douche bags to some then-freshman. And it was pretty serious and it’s caused quite a stir. It also spread like wildfire. Before the week started, we’d had three or four local newspapers publishing short pieces on the incident. Mid-week, we’d gone statewide. And by Friday we’d been featured next to the kardashians on yahoo worldwide and had Fox news reports harassing kids leaving school for information. Because of the huge popularity of this story, anyone who I don’t know irl may actually know what I’m talking about. It seems a weird thought, but people have had relatives in, like, Costa Rica calling them to ask about what’s going on at our high school, so it wouldn’t surprise me that much. There isn’t a great stream of information coming from the school about it, so I’m thinking the whole thing will dissipate come Monday. Some people have been expelled, one of the victims has moved schools, and they’re still looking into the coach’s role in this. (secretly, I think the coach is annoying as hell, so i don’t really mind whatever consequences he may get). Our school is hugely into the sports stuff, and there have been some accusations that the kids who did this were still allowed to try out for the team this year. I don’t know. I don’t mind our town, but everyone else avoids it like the plague. Hey, we’re mentioned as one of the uber snobby towns in Catcher in the Rye and now, our basketball players are evil, yay. It’s been, as my biology teacher put it, a bit of a “rough patch” for our school this week.

Oh, but when it rains it pours. Yesterday, the teachers of the town passed work to rule, which is going to be implemented come January. Some time last year it was proposed, as a way to cut spending, that 20% of the high school staff should be fired, ands the remaining 80% be given an extra class each year. Ever since then, the teachers have been fighting this. A few weeks ago, they started picketing outside each morning to oppose the idea. And that wasn’t working,so this was a plan that came about, and now it’s gonna happen. It’s all kicking off round here at the moment. The kids at the school basically hate the idea, and it annoys me because now they’re claiming that they care about the teachers (as my history teacher explained to me earlier today, the teachers don’t think they can handle having another class), even though almost no one have a damn about the teachers until it directly effected them. I’m trying to have an opinion on this, but I’m just sick to death of living in a school system who have absolutely no idea how to handle money. They’re like, yeah, let’s build new schools and buy new projector things and get nice computers and get a youth center and let one of the middle school health classes buy fucking bouncy ball things to replace their chairs (I kid you not), yeah that all works, oh but buy the way we’re getting rid of loads of teachers and they’re gonna give you shitty lessons because of it. I don’t know the details of it, but it just looks like the most reckless, self-indulgent spending you could possibly imagine and I find it difficult to care too much about any of this because of it.I doubt the work by rule thing will stay long and it doesn’t affect me as much as most people, anyway. I mean, it’ll just work out the way it always does with the school, in that someone proposes an idea to save money because they have absolutely no money, then loads of people get angry about it, then the idea is resolved, and it all works out that way until we built up to the committee feeling they have to make a genuinely awful change, like this. Whatever happens with this, the school will keep buying its shiny things and keep trying to change things after. It’s sad. Sad and irritating for all, involved, I think. Again—“rough patch”.

It’s interesting watching all the mundane things still happen around school with all this going on. All things considered, it hasn’t been a terribly bad week. I fell asleep during bio lectures, which I will regret when I’m frantically up studying the stuff late Sunday night. Watched videos about the Cold War and took a difficult quiz about World War II. Continued reading, discussing, and doing group work on a Lesson Before Dying. Still, I don’t understand the appeal of that book at all. Watched a slightly weird Chinese film during philosophy club. That's it.

Yeah, so, good night everyone.

when I'm with you

hello



It took me forever to understand why everyone was so into Best Coast, but now i do, and I love this song.

It’s Monday and depressing as hell because I had the most perfect thanksgiving break I’ve ever had, and I slept so much. 12 hours a night. For this reason, I don’t suppose there’s an awful lot to report. I also wrote loads, caught up on Nanowrimo, which I pretty much cannot wait to end, listened to the yellow/green/blue Dear Hunter EPs a lot (all superior, astonishingly, to the black/red/orange record, which I loved). And I made a lot of english pancakes.

Was reminded on Thursday of both the good and bad aspects of being a non-Thanksgiving celebrator. First, like I’ve mentioned repeatedly, you feel isolated and everything’s all peaceful and strange. But you also realize that there’s kind of not a lot to do. I did go for a walk, it was very warm and I spent ages outside, which I haven’t got the chance to do in too long. Once that awful afternoon sluggishness goes away, it’s very very nice and I got to eat salmon and try to rewatch Dead Poets Society (I don’t know why—I don’t like it very much, but it’s just that sort of mood) while my dad sent electric drills through the front door for a good four hours. Yeah.

I didn’t go black Friday shopping. I never have, for all the reasons most people don’t go black Friday shopping, number one being oh my god all the people. All the crazy, manic people. And imagine being one of those few people who inevitably gets trampled to death during all of this? You just think you’re going out for a cheap iPad and that’s the last thing you do in your life? Morbid, slightly, but mostly just weird. At least, I didn’t go out shopping in the early hours of the morning. I did do so in the afternoon, I wanted to look at possible DVDs I could get for Christmas. I love watching movies on christmas day but at the moment I’m totally out of ideas. I’m not opposed to doing that teen Disney nostalgia thing where I ask for every single Disney movie I never watched or ‘got’ as I child, to be perfectly honest. But still, any other movie ideas are appreciated, if you’re willing to give any. I see pitifully few movies, so I’m basically up for anything. I feel stupidly obliged to watch some ‘classics’ more than anything else. If only I knew what those classics were. I rewatched Submarine a few days ago and anything similar would be appreciated. I went looking for the Submarine book a few days ago with no luck. Speaking of other movies, my favorite movie when I was about 8 was the musical version of Oliver Twist from the 60s. I was, uh, disappointed with how it shaped up now. I still really love a couple of the songs, but a great deal of it was very middle-of-the-road.

I was pretty miserable on Saturday, but I can't for the life of me remember why. One of those things. My dad made me go shopping for my mom’s birthday. He rushes through anything and I can never find anything good. It was fun in the evening, though. And the mall's just getting its Christmas vibes and everything seemed nice and warm. I got my mom a DVD. In the evening I watched Submarine (should start keeping track of how many times I do this) with some friends; it was their first time. For the most part, they seemed to like it. The following day I did all the homework I say I’d leave to do over the weekend, celebrated my mom’s birthday, and went shopping in the evening for candles with my mom, and drove around the town looking at christmas lights.

I’m still exhausted and today was nothing special, or good. I was given a book to read for English. It’s called A Lesson Before Dying, and it’s by Ernest Gaines. I don’t like very much so far. It sounds rather melodramatic, and I don’t find it very compelling to read. Shame. We also read a picture book, in pairs. I think my partner may hate me. The book was supposed to be about the dangers of conformity. It was called “The Bear That Wasn’t” and I didn’t know what to think. My teacher's a funny person. Have I mentioned she gives 20-minutes lectures on how she doesn’t talk much and wants to leave us to our own devices for most of the class? Yeah. Bio was awful, seeing as I feel asleep during a lecture and then had to participate in a group activity that involved blowing through a straw into a pink liquid which just happened to be an irritant. And the straw was about two inches long and I got the stuff all of me and, god, not pleasant. I also got the
highest grade on a math quiz and English quiz.

Two days of nanowrimo left and things are looking up. Also, I uploaded the Submarine soundtrack to my ipod, and it is perfect. Excuse the either frustratingly or refreshingly short post. I think I write too many lengthy posts here, but a couple of people have told me otherwise, god knows why. Anyway.

days off for thanksgiving are the best

Hi everyone



Once you get over the fact that this song is ballad-like and that the singer has the most whiny, nasally voice of all of the whiny, nasally singers in indie bands of this ilk, this song’s a nice one.

Guys, guys, guess what? It’s Wednesday and the week is over! At fucking last. Woke up today feeling very sick (5-6 hours of sleep for about a month or so, I would imagine is the main factor) even though I didn’t have much homework yesterday and basically sat around watching old Peep Show episodes for a few hours and eating food and not caring in the slightest.

I love thanksgiving. I don’t celebrate it, since I’m not American, but I love it. I don’t really know why my family don’t celebrate thanksgiving cause we see fireworks on the 4th of July and stuff. Bit complicated to get together, I suppose. And the rest of the family is a couple thousand miles away. The good thing about not celebrating thanksgiving is that it gives you much more free time. While everyone else is travelling and eating and being lazy and doing whatever it is people do on thanksgiving(ooh such a mystery to me), I get to stay in my house all day and eat and be lazy, but to a lesser extent I suppose to the thanksgiving-celebrators. Also a lot of people complain of crazy families at this time of year, same with christmas, which I don’t have. At all. Ever. My extended family’s so small, anyway. Additionally, no one in this family is particularly concerned about getting in the car at four in the morning the next day in order to buy half a dozen plasma screen TVs or whatever it is you crazy people do on black Friday. I’m really not sure. Is my foreignness showing too much? I’ll reel myself in. Point is, although it more or less works as the latter bookmark to the much-appreciated loveliness that is autumn, it’s still a holiday that really fascinates me, and I really enjoy this week even without celebrating it. Plus, I totally cannot wait to show my love for Christmas wholeheartedly without looking manic and weird. Much appreciated.

Naturally, not an awful lot’s happened this week. I’ve taken an English test and my now my teacher’s brought out her specialty: a crappy low-budget sap story with minimal relevance to anything we’re doing in class. Guys, it’s about overcoming adversity against all the odds. Try as I like, I cannot both watch this film and not be judgmental.

My algebra teacher has been out for some days now and the entire class has taken up their favorite in-class hobby again: mocking her. She’s...difficult to like, at least the way she presents herself in class. Also she does things like tell kids in class they have cute dogs, and then continue with “wasn’t there a dog in your car this morning?” when they act totally baffled. When they say that no, they do not have a dog, she continues with “oh. Guess I was looking in the wrong car this morning”.

Over the weekend I had to write a few paragraphs from the perspective of a holocaust survivor. We had to share them in class a couple of days ago. This...is not an activity that sits well with me, for some reason. Especially the inane ways in which sharing partners are decided. I don’t really know why it’s of such great importance that we should share with someone of the opposite gender. I would have chosen someone of the same gender, yes, but as we’re not editing I don’t see the big deal. Silly teachers and their silly teaching things. Oh, and we did a debate! The day when we were planning, news had broken that our much-hated interim principal is getting rid of coffee machines. God, I make this sound important. But still, that was all people seemed capable of talking about that day, as opposed to the validity of atomic bombings. (if this caffeine purge happens, how will the teachers react? At the moment they’re picketing in the mornings for better teaching conditions and stuff. I’m awaiting the day their slogan changes to “Contract & Coffee Now”). Ahhh aren’t I just painfully unfunny. Whatever, the debate was just catastrophically awful, although somehow our side managed to cobble together a winning argument. He did that thing where for five minutes only the quiet people can talk. And did I talk? Guess. He will never wear me down.

There are times, rather more frequently than most expect, where I’m basically fine with high school. I mean, if you ignore things like group presentations , early mornings, overcrowded cafeterias, and those knee-high socks all the jock guys wear, going there most days is fairly painless. However, one day a year I’m reminded of the existence of pep rallies. Certainly I’m always aware of pep rallies, it’s just easy to allow them not to feel real every other day of the year. And then you go to one and it’s as if when, at that point where you considered skipping the pep rally and you asked yourself ‘how bad can it be?”, that all the forces of darkness in the world combined their efforts to create the single most painful 90 minutes you’re sure to experience in a very long time. Is there a single person, cheerleaders and football players included, who feels any semblance of happiness from these things? I don’t know if this is customary for all high school pep rallies, but at our school there’s one crazy old lady in a clown costume who I’ve never seen anywhere else before going around shouting at people to plug in the fucking inflatable animals; she’s pretty into it. For everyone else, it’s another wasted period of time where the only things you can think about are about how unnecessarily loud the crappy school band are and how you really wished you’d just got the nerve to skip the damn thing. This year we even had pie-eating competitions and failed dance routines! Oh, it was a train wreck. I feel like when we warn incoming freshman against things like being scared and wearing their backpacks too high, we should mention pep rallies with similar warning. That or we let them suffer. I don’t mind.

Tonight I’m going to go to my friend’s house and watch American Horror Story. And, uh, that’s it. I look forward to sleeping a lot over the course of the next few days.

sunrise, sunset

hello hello hello

I’m in a Dear Hunter phase. Here’s a song.



Tell me that isn’t so beautiful. That’s the first song on the Blue EP. I’m not necessarily sure it seems like a blue sort of sound to me...I’d have gone with purple myself. Nevertheless, I love it.

Today has been the craziest week ever, homework wise, though I’m not entirely sure why. Well, that and the combination of nanowrimo, which I’m about 5000 words behind on unfortunately. I probably could have managed without all of that. But with it, not possible. I’m so glad this week is over. Next week is only two and a half days, thank god.

When we’re not working on grammar in english, we’re going on about collecting thanksgiving food for less fortunate families. The whole school’s doing it—it’s a good cause, etc. and I can’t complain. Slightly confused cause I had to go through hell, when we assigned foods I was out and my teacher can’t organize anything for the life of her, and it’s been a nightmare to establish just what I’m supposed to be bringing in. Sigh. I’m growing to dislike her more and more, and I shouldn’t because it’s all totally irrational, it’s just the coffee-drinking and the movie-watching and what have you. I could do without it. She was out today and we watched something about the Nuremburg trials (20th century debates and now here; just can’t get away from them). Doing nothing was good. It was one of those weeks where you seemed perpetually, endlessly busy, and just watching a video was like an amazing breath of fresh air, for no good reason. I’m so tired; I keep getting headaches.

Learning about WWII in 20th century is as depressing and generally dull as ever, with occasional bounds of information that are just unpleasant. I don’t particularly want to spend much more time on this damn war unit. We’re watching a lot of videos. Much to the appreciation of the class (and my sort of ambivalence), we watched Saving Private Riot. Or, the fast half hour of it, anyway. I can’t say i understand watching only a fraction of a film. Nor do I understand the idea that i really needed to spend any portion of my life watching continuous shots of people holding their internal organs in their hands to understand D Day. I don’t know how I’d rather learn this stuff. From time to time, it’s quite interesting, in a weird sort of way. I’ve always been a history nerd. It just has a tendency to get repetitive and all the videos, my god, they’re not helping us get anywhere. Over the weekend, we have to write about a real life holocaust survivor. I really don’t want to write any of this.

We had the worst lab in bio this week. We were given the entire block to observe the effects of enzymes under various conditions, and it wasn’t enough, since I had to stay after school for upwards of twenty minutes to finish it. The teacher said it was possibly to do in this time space, but I’m not sure I believe her. As usual, I can’t help but be absolutely useless in labs. Hard as I sometimes try, I never have any real idea of what’s going on or what I’m supposed to do. I’m just vaguely aware somewhere in the back of my mind that time is short and it’d probably help my future in this class if I don’t make the people around me hate me. I can’t really put any of that thought or emotion into what I’m doing, though. The thought that I made slip up and make mistakes throws me off far too much. We had a quiz today(not good—my A has yet to make a comeback), watched the most unabashedly vile video about the digestive system any crappy educational video department could come up with, and over the weekend we have to write about the digestion of a thanksgiving dinner. Creatively. I keep falling asleep in this class even when I try my best not to.

We got tickets for Richard III! It’s in February, a Friday or Saturday of the last weekend or the one before. I’ve gone on about this for ages and I’m so excited that it’s finally happening. It’ll be good to go back to New York City for a while, too. The last time I went was 100 hundred degrees in July and I wasn’t as infatuated with it as I thought I’d be. I imagine, perhaps romanticize, that it’ll be better in February. Whenever I think of new york city I think of winter...but christmas time. So maybe I’m wrong and new york will be awful in february. The question keeps me interested in going.

Fun moment of the week: I was extremely busy a few nights back, and I’m not sure why, and I had to take a make-up piano lesson from a couple of weeks back and it was a group lesson. And I wasn’t told that I’d be playing in front of like ten three year olds? I’d like to emphasize that while I’m not a wonderful pianist, this group of students was random, not based on ability, and I am actually above everyone else there. Just to make sure you’re all aware of that. And it was embarrassing as hell but also absolutely fantastic because I played the Danse Macabre, a simplified version with a thousand and one mistakes and they still look at you like you’re a genius. And I played this other piece, Song of India by Rimsky Karsakov, and I was only marginally better at that because I haven’t played it properly since July or so, and the cutest Asian girl you could ever imagine says “that song reminds me of butterflies flying through”. Just that. It’s probably troubling to know how happier and how much more self-assured I was by those group of fucking kids when I walked out, but hey, there you go.

Fun, but long, day on Friday. After school I walked downtown with friends and an acquaintance. We looked at books, although I didn’t have money for all the Kerouac books I want (‘all the Kerouac books I want’ is essentially everything the guy ever did. I bought a few of them the next day, oh and Hemingway and Slaughterhouse-five.), ate at Bertuccis, all the usual stuff. After some friends left me and my best friend spent a half hour in CVS when it was dark outside cause we were gonna see the school do fiddler in the roof but couldn’t walk back in the dark. And it was funny cause we dropped him off and then he came back about two hours later, and we watched the Lovely Bones with our other friend and played that game where you put sticky notes with a thing on someone’s head and they guess what it is. Fun stuff, really.

I was impressed with Fiddler, which I saw the following day. They did RENT last year and I recall being impressed with the actors (still applicable), but less so with Rent itself. But Fiddler—wow, I really like that. I like the style of the music. It could very easily be a sort of bastardized style stolen from traditional music, but I can’t for the life of me tell, so for the time being I say it’s a really well written thing. I’ve always had a thing for pop music badly fused with various cultural sounds (see: Disney movies), so this sits well with me. I’ll look more into it, actually. I disagree that it’s too long, also. Hey, if nothing else, seeing Fiddler made me check the Fiddler Wiki page which led me to find this thing Bright Eyes did where they took the melody and chords and instrumentation of Sunrise, Sunset and added loads of crazy, frantic lyrics, and moments of heavy guitars and stuff. I’ll post it here sometime. It’s clever because of the way it distorts and twists the theme of the song into something kinda mad and paranoid and stuff. I’ve never known such a hit and miss band as Bright Eyes.

It’s almost December, which means first that Nanowrimo, thank god is almost over(and I’ll have been successful if I catc up on two days of writing or so), but also that it becomes cool to celebrate christmas around other people again. I love Christmas so much, I’m gonna order the Sufjan Stevens Christmas EPs and everything. But my point was—we made the christmas fruit cake this weekend gone by! It got me in the christmas mood. And in a few days I can watch the Snowman and play Silent Night and I will be at my happiest, sad as that might be.

Aaaand now it’s a Friday and I wanna watch In the Loop and eat ice cream, so good night all of you.

take a leaf of paper and draw your mind

hello all

my mom brought back the new Bombay Bicycle club record when she came back from England. Also, journals and candy and stuff. I miss England like hell when I see things like this. Also, she got to spend November 5th(which I miss more than almost anything about that country) at Lewes. Lewes is a little village with no particular significance but they have these huge 5th of November shows there every year. Like, tens of thousands of people are crammed into this village, it's like one huge, terrifying, spectacular riot one day a year. In a way it sounds like something i'd like to go to, though it'd scare me also. Oh well.

Music time.



I hated this song at first. If you do too, I suggest you bear with it anyway. It really grows on you. also, great lyrics.

The English presentation was a nightmare. I think I might hate someone in my group. I try not to hate people, really, because it's usually just such petty things they do that annoy me. I know it's not worth it, but I can't help but become wound up by some of the things people do. Like, this girl in my group, she made cupcakes for the class. See my last post on why this is absurd and I hate it. Then, I am the one forced to hand them out to people. I, who had nothing to do with this nightmare. And when every single person in that room asks and laughs why are we doing this? I have to say “metaphoric significance”. Yes, it has metaphoric significance, guys. That was embarrassing. And she made me talk even though I had little to say during the whole thing and I’m not even going to go into, yet again, why this is absolutely awful. And to top it all off? I looked at sparknotes at one point a few days ago to see if I was going in the right direction(confirmed). Yes yes sparknotes is bad but i use it very infrequently and, most importantly may I add, I use it to check where I am, not to add extra details to what I have. Maybe that’s a silly distinction, but I want everyone to note that distinction before I continue. Noted? Okay. Well, something on Sparknotes was a reference to something, something specific, in the Torah. A metaphor. Fair enough, although that’s way above this level of analysis. And this girl, she takes this reference and fucking uses it in her discussion. She does not know the Torah well enough to make that ‘religious connection’ on her own, might I add. She’s someone who thinks and acts like she’s much more calm, much more intelligent than she could possibly be. I know everyone uses sparknotes to some extent, but within reason, because they have the brains to know that looking like her is not a good thing. And lying for your grades is one thing, I don’t care about that as much as lying to other people in your position. Most people who use sparknotes, they will be honest about it to others in the class when the teacher isn’t looking. This behavior, I could not care less about; it’s innocuous and I don’t mind. Lie to the teacher for a better grade, that’s fine, but be honest to your classmates. However, when that girl makes that statement in the discussion and other people come up to her and tell her she’s smart, she says thanks and nothing else. Here, we have someone lying not only to the teacher but to others in their own position in order to look better. That kind of behavior, to me, is the kind that’s really kind of vile and unacceptable, and it pissed me off so much that someone could lie in such a blunt manner in order to look like they have some sort of semblance of literacy or intelligence or, like, biblical knowledge. I hardly come off looking wonderful from this story for a number of reasons; I am aware of that. But that girl’s behavior is just completely awful to me, it’s hard to describe. In a way, I don’t want a good grade on this project. A C would ride fine with me. Give the awful girl what she really deserves, why don’t you, I’m more than happy to have my grade suffer because of it.

That bio quiz was terrible, absolutely awful. That was the only thing we did on Thursday and it made me very stressed for the entire following weekend. Got it back on Monday and it’s fair to say that it was more than low enough to lose me my A in that class. Today was a very bad day for me, all things considered, shitty bio and even more shitty algebra grade, too. We’re talking about enzymes now. We did an activity about breaking tooth picks, saturation point and stuff like that I think were the focuses. In a weird way, it was kind of cool. I want my A back, if nothing else than for my own self-esteem(which is embarrassingly based a lot on grades and stuff) to be back to the fairly stable place it was before.

It’s only been a few days, just one long weekend, which is why there isn’t much to report from the school standpoint. That’s good, I suppose. Ah, yes, but on Saturday? I went to see Manchester Orchestra. And it was, genuinely, incredible. Like, one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. And I haven’t seen anyone in a couple of months at that point, so it was great. My third time seeing Manchester Orchestra. First time, the March before last, I went for the support band, and then I got their 2nd album for Christmas and fell in love with it. Then, saw them in may right before their third album was released. But between then and now I became totally familiar with all of their work and they became one of my favorite bands. We got there early and got a really got place to stand, and I got merch, and then the 1st opening band called White Denim came on. And technically they were good, but their entire set seemed to be one long guitar solo, so they weren’t really for me. The second band to come on was The Dear Hunter. Now, I have heard an awful lot about this band, and the vast majority of it is really, really good. Like, this-is-the-best-band-of-our-time type appreciation. And I’d never actually listened to them before, so I was really curious to hear what they were actually like. And they had one of those big, like, eight-piece bands with all these guitars and synth and stuff, and when they played it really was just a lot of sound to take in. It’s kinda prog and post-rock at the same time, if that makes any sense. They only played a few songs but the response was amazing, and they have this one track which I now know is called We’ve Got A Score To Settle, and you all need to go and listen to that asap. After the show, after Man Orch, I got their record(signed, no less, by two of them!) and was kind of puzzled at its astronomical price. But I learned later on that, among other projects this band have done (frequently pretentious and self-indulgent to an extreme, but worth a listen to all the same), their most recent venture was to release a set of nine EPs, each with the title of a color and four songs describing the emotions and imagery most people associate with that particular color. I had unknowingly bought the entire nine EPs as a set of three CDs, the entire thing titled The Color Spectrum. But I don’t mind because this is something that’s really, really worth listening to. So far I’m only really familiar with black, red, and orange, but I’m getting further into yellow and blue and green, and I’ll finish with violet, indigo, and white at some point. They’re genuinely quite diverse in their sound but they manage to keep everything tied together. Like, Black is rally intense and almost metal like in its sound, red is very much for the Manchester Orchestra fan, kinda still as angry and intense as black but more fuzzy and less intimidating, less synth too. Orange is as close to classic rock as could be imitated. Yellow is beach music, naturally, and as far as I can tell as far green and blue are kind of like Hawaiian, lo-fi things. Really, really great stuff. It’s pretty easy to see I’ve fallen head over heels about this band, and I’ve been listening to them obsessively since the gig, but I digress. Manchester Orhcestra remains the focus for the moment. And a good thing too, because they were every bit as amazing as the Dear Hunter! They opened with April Fool, arguably my least favorite song on Simple Math, but it’s kinda loud and easy to listen to, so it works. They played a bunch of Mean Everything to Nothing stuff after that, including Shake It Out(absolutely and totally wonderful in every way), In My Teeth, Pride(odd choice), and 100 Dollards(again, slightly confused, but I can’t complain). They played an awful lot of stuff from that record—they did I’ve Got Friends later in the night, which is one of my favorite Manchester Orchestra songs, and I think I recall them playing Everything To Nothing. Oh, and they do this really amazing live version of The Only One where it starts off very slow and continues for the entire song, except for the last twenty seconds or so, when they play it normally, that is, fast and energetic. I quite like that. After a lot of that, out of nowhere they played a song off their first album called Sleeper 1972. It’s melodramatic but I like it. And then, my god, they played what is not only my favorite Manchester Orchestra song, but one of my very favorite songs of all time. It’s called Colly Strings and it’s off the first album so they only play it very occasionally, making it even more of a gift to hear it live. And it was so perfect even though Andy changed some of the lyrics a bit, and it threw the crowd off, it was everything I always wanted it to be. And I never thought I’d hear that song live! It’s difficult to describe how wonderful it is to hear it in concert, and you know, I think the rest of the crowd agreed with me on that. It was a little bit impossible to top that for me, but they played Simple Math, Virgin(best live song), Pale Black Eye(underrated), Pensacola(there’s a bit where there’s no music and the band shout “alcohol, dirty malls, Pensacola, Florida bars” and it’s essentially the cornerstone of the song, and this time everyone knew this song and we could all sing along), oh and Dear. Dear was unforgettable. A lot of the crowd had started to clap as the song started, and the thing with Dear is they played it very slowly and were building it up and going faster and faster as things continued, although it’s not a particularly fast song anyway, and the clapping crowd were baffled by this and went on with their thing anyway. You know, large crowds of white people who can’t keep a beat clapping. In the second verse of the song, the protagonist of this song(Andy claims this isn’t from personal experience here) addresses “everybody who has paid to see his band”, and talks about how it still confuses him and he doesn’t deserve it and everything. And Andy changed this to “dear everybody who claps when they see my band/it’s fucking up our timing, you’ll never understand/I acted like an asshole cause it’s ruining this song/” etc. I love Andy, he’s so casual and funny and everything on stage. He seemed pissed at the crowd, claiming other bands can keep time but theirs can’t and that they’re not very good musicians or whatever. He’s insecure, but lovely. Oh, and they ended with River. River is a great song. And I came out of that gig totally infatuated with that band again, literally thinking it one of the best gigs I’ve been to. Absolutely amazing. Oh, and I’ve never been to a gig before where the group of college guys beside me shout “peace be with you!” after every song. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up to the individual, I suppose...but it’s hard to deny that was a unique sort of heckling.

It’s been good to have this long weekend, Friday off and everything, although homework now awaits. Good music will assist me.

the city of mirrors would be wiped out by the wind. (also I complain a lot)

Hey.



One of my favorite Joanna Newsom songs. I sort of love her. I don’t know why I’m listening to this music now. Spring of 8th grade nostalgia, perhaps.

My mom’s spending the week in England, so I’m stuck with my dad, who can be annoying as hell, also I have to write all of the time for nanowrimo(keeping up with it thus far) and I have a rather bad cold which means I cannot talk very easily. It’s a bit of a weird week, but my mom’s bringing me back the new and totally amazing-looking Bombay Bicycle Club record, so it works out well enough. She almost didn't go the England because of the power outage and everything. I really don't like just my dad being here.

In English at the moment, we’re reading a book by Elie Wiesel called Night and it’s pretty famous so I don’t even know why I’m telling you, but it’s about the holocaust. I’m liking it. We really haven’t done much of anything in class at the moment, the power outage kinda threw us off, we’ve mainly been watching videos and reading. Also, we’ve been given a Big Huge Enormous Project for this book, since my teacher really, once again, cannot be bothered to do her job herself. And we’ve been put into groups and told to analyze a certain question and present it. We’re supposed to start class discussions, for gods sake. Like that’s gonna work out! it's supposed to be so relaxed, these class discussions are supposed to be so natural, says my teacher. She keeps telling us to "bring in some coffee" and stuff, these are just gonna be such great and eloquent discussions, we're gonna be a total book club, she says. She's fascinated more by the romance of literature types than anything else, hence the coffee and the book discussions and the look-guys-Hemingway-didn't-even-go-to-college-ohmygod-artists mentality. So we started these trainwrecks today, the first group of questions, and it was all absolutely terrible and all of the things brought up were really forced and just used to get points. I’ve mentioned it before, but forced talking for points makes me very, very angry. And then some of the discussion questions brought up just became sadistic and odd, (presenting group: “what punishment would you give to the perpetrators of these crimes?” girl in class: “life imprisonment. Oh, and daily torture” my internal dialogue: “jesus christ”). We’re presenting on Monday. Oh, and I don’t know if everyone else’s middle schools were as into TEAMWORK and EXPERIMENTAL LEARNING and DIFFERENT LEARNING STYLES as mine was but we were always given these projects and awarded points for creativity rather than, like, effort and good information and stuff. So, people always milked this for all it was worth, and created the most terrible projects ever, full of gimmicks, and it got them As and my work which was thorough and took effort, albeit quite pretentious, never quite made the cut like theirs did. Well, my group because they are hungry for points rather than any sort of self-validation due to effort or whatever, are going down this route and baking the class cupcakes. It has “metaphoric significance”, guys. Of course it does. It’s like when we were in 6th grade and doing science projects the entire time and when planning groups would always say “...and let’s give out candy to the class at the end!”. Except this is four years later. And I thought it was a stupid idea age eleven, too.

Fascinating way to continue the week , in 20th century we’re just watching video after video about the holocaust. Including this really really unpleasant one that was unfinished and stored in London for some time. Some cameraman went around with British soldiers liberating camps. That...was something else. Tough stuff. Oh, but, we also did a mock Nuremberg Trials thing which was awful, especially considering it was just completely scripted and everything. If we’re gonna do a mock trial(god forbid, but I digress) at least allow some wiggle room to make it marginally more interesting. And, I was on the jury. We were told to be put into groups yesterday and the jury didn’t have enough to do, as much as my teacher tried to convince us otherwise. So we sat there for like forty five minutes doing nothing, and did much the same the following day, except the bit at the end where we were given something like forty five seconds to come to decisions on five of those officers. Yep, mock trials done the wrong way. Also I was in the minority in the jurt and no one listened to me. I held my case, though.

Bio, we’re learning about osmosis and, for some reason, the kidneys. I don’t even know. I’ve developed a problem where I drift in and out of microsleep every day, at that exact time, in that class. For twenty minutes or so. We have a quiz tomorrow and it’s going to be absolutely terrible. We also did a lab using liver that lasted far too long, I’m not suqemish but that was vile.

The town postponed trick or trating until Saturday. I was pleased with my costume in the end, although the heels hurt like hell for the night and I couldn't feel my fingers for much of it. Both my parents went way over top with the decorating. We had four pumpkins, and mine took an hour to carve and didn’t look very good, and gravestones and stuff. It was very cold that day, two of my friends came over and we went trick or treating for a while, then came back and watched Sweeney Tod with another friend. it was too cold to stay out for long in the evening, although there was this one house who had home-made baked goods and hot chocolate and stuff out; that was impressive. The movie and rest of the night was great, though. Man, I love Sweeney Todd so much. I want the Broadway version on DVD for christmas. It was a pretty great night. Also, i went to the book shop the day after and bought all this JD Salinger stuff, I’m weirdly into JD Salinger, as uncool as that might be. Unfortunately I’ve already finished the Glass family stuff, such a shame because I really, really liked all of that. I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude a few days ago. Few books have affected me like that one.

So, not a great week. On Monday after school I was supposed to take this test that I was supposed to take two weeks ago but I was sick then, or pretending to be, and I was actually sick now. My teacher does dopey things like hear the way I can’t talk and goes ‘oh, take it Thursday then’ after I’ve stayed after school, missed my bus, and walked all the way over to the classroom. And since my mom’s away, I couldn’t be picked up till way late in the evening so I went downtown and did homework in the library and that was my favorite part of the week. I’m sort of at a total loss of things to talk about it. In a little while I’m gonna drive into Boston with my dad to pick my mom up, excuse to go to a city at night, even though the combination of NaNoWriMo and school work is taking up very much all of my time. I don’t even listen to enough music or go for enough walks. It’s tiring.

Since I’ve whined for this entire post, here’s a second song to make up for it. This one’s brilliant. It’s like a tacky halloween thing. happy belated Halloween to you all.

we lost power and it's november and oh my god

Apologies for my rather, uh, more extended absence. Although what do you expect from me anywhere? I lost any sort of real regularity with blogging some time ago. Here's a song.



I've been listening to In Utero obsessively off and on since August. I was in England at the time and out of nowhere I just really, really wanted to listen to in utero--and I my copy of it was an ocean away and everything! Now I listen to it all the time. I have no idea where this came from, really, since I haven't really listened to nirvana apart from when they come up on shuffle in something like three years. I like them more than I did when I was twelve. I really don't think I quite understood them properly back then. I have a more certain idea now, though. And I stick to my belief that In Utero is superior to Nevermind like my life depends on it.

So, we've kind of had a nightmarish few days cause we lost power and it wasn't particularly pleasant, and stuff like In Utero helps. It was a fairly ordinary few days leading up before that, in terms of school and worrying about my complete lack of nanowrimo inspiration and all. Remember me writing that 14-page research paper for 20th century? Yeah, I still had way more work with citations to do that night than I thought I did, and I also happened to have an English test and a bio quiz the next day and I sort of imploded with the stress of it all. I don't handle stress well and this was another example of me being thankful for having a mother who will see me at two in the morning being so tired that directions for the order in which I'm supposed to staple pieces of a research paper seem like fucking quantum physics, and lets me stay off school. (funnily enough I got a cold a few days later). Fun day, though—I ate pasta and watched TV and then at the last minute I tried to study some cell organelle stuff. Can’t really complain. Came back to school the following day and, oh my god, English class? We’re done with Gatsby and doing Harlem renaissance poetry. Knew nothing about it beforehand. And upon reading the packet of some twenty five poems we were given I don’t really think the style is for me, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. And we were put into pairs, completely at random. Before this, I couldn’t really complain about the person I was assigned to work with. We’re each given a poem and told to analyze it and draw a visual to go with it. And that’s the work for the day. So I go over to this guy I’m working with and his immediate—really, immediate—response is “so I’m gonna do the analysis and you do the drawing okay?”. And I respond with “uh, yeah, sure” not having read the poem yet. So he gets onto writing something and I look at the poem and, lo and behold, it’s about a black guy being beaten up by the Ku Klux Klan. Like, that is all it’s about. And, bearing in mind, I have to draw a picture of this. And the teacher thinks this is a good idea. It reminds me of the time in 8th grade where we were reading To Kill a Mockingbird and were told to act out this one scene where the KKK are mentioned in passing and by that time we were so frustrated with this teacher’s ‘innovating learning techniques’ that people in my group took sheets of A4 paper and taped them into cones over their heads. We were working in the hallway. However, I was sort of alone with this assignment and less sure what to do. And so I spent the whole time thinking about this in between being told off by my partner for not doing anything(what was I supposed to do?) and then I went home and drew the poem exactly as it was written. With symbolism and metaphor, my mind was blank, and I already have a problem with being a pretentious fuck with books so I really didn’t wanna do anything that’d lead me down that route if I could possible help it. Even a metaphoric alley had potential to lead me places I didn’t wanna go. When we presented our analysis and visual the following day, I think it’s safe to say the teacher was mildly horrified by what I’d produced, though I swear I couldn’t have done anything better. And she went into this assignment thinking she’d be able to tape these drawings on the classroom walls.

My 20th century teacher was being filmed for something he’s reluctant to tell us about. On Thursday my teacher practically skipped around the room talking to us about Hitler or whatever, while a bored-looking colleague of his stood behind a camera for 90 minutes. The day after we took a quiz on WWI, which was a huge disaster and we had to sit in silence for fifteen minutes cause he photocopied something wrong and had to redo it. Another teacher sat with us and some people made barking noises (mixedlevelclassesmixedlevelclassesmixedlevelclassesihateeverything).

Came into bio on Thursday and what do you know, we have a sub and we’re watching House(half of which we watched from a less-than-illegal downloading site, too). I’ve never seen House before and all I could do the whole time was pick holes in it. Considering I really, really can’t stand medical dramas(and courtroom dramas. And teen dramas. And soaps. Sometimes costume dramas. Really, I’m just a weird comedy purist. But medical dramas do have their own special place in my personal hell). So, uh, yeah, that was sufficiently terrible for an entire block, and then on Friday we had to come in and talk about it, for gods sake. And we also had to do this activity based on the disease projects finished earlier that week and we had the potential to lose points if the information provided by other people(by other people!) as part of a project wasn’t clear enough. So, uh, thanks a lot, girl who thought HIV could be transmitted via monkey saliva. Thanks for that.

I spent Saturday at the mall. I intended to buy stuff for my halloween costume but decent clothes were few and far between and I couldn’t brave Sephora for eye makeup. I spent most of my time trying on hats based on cult internet phenomena, in jewelry shops for my friend, and looking at my favorite obnoxious nail polish in Hot Topic. It was snowing when we left! I got home, had an ordinary Saturday, and then the power went out. Nothing annoying at first, I made a sort of nest-like structure on a sofa and did algebra homework by candlelight. (Scholastic dedication, right there). I even got to watch DVDs on the laptop that still had power. I stayed up late doing that with the expectation that power would have returned the following day. Obviously, not the case. Woke up Monday morning, the house was freezing and I wasn’t allowed to take a shower because we were saving the hot water for our fish tank. The lines for shops selling breakfast were huge, so I read A Hundred Years of Solitude(amazing good, incidentally) a lot and then we went to the mall. And everyone was there, of course. And we made it drag out for as long as possible, and I only bought one thing in the end and we even looked at stupid early Christmas stuff because there really was nothing to do. I got ice cream, though, and lots of food. Ice cream and food are good. I was nowhere near as positive on the second night round, and felt mildly sick for much of it. I read for hours and hours and sat in front of the fire, listened to Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Bon Iver. Oh, this was the 30th, and the next day was the 31st and I’ve been learning a super simplified version of a piano piece I really like called the Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens. It tells the story of ghosts coming back to Earth on midnight of halloween. If you’ve seen Fantasia, it’s a different piece to the one used in the last scene, but the exact same story, you know what I’m talking about. And you have these chords at the beginning that are repeated, and I’m told they symbolize the twelve tolls of midnight? So that’s all well and good, and I was pretty determined to stay up late and play that piece at the exist same time, only I didn’t plan to lose power at the time. It was depressing as hell, I was the only one awake at the time and it was so cold my fingers were literally completely dumb, it was tough to play, and in a way playing the piece kinda freaked me out(go listen to it) but in a totally amazing way. Suffering for art et cetera.

Monday, Halloween, the house was colder than everything outside. Trick or treatinwas postponed. We opened the windows, then we got in the car and listened to albums and observed the damage done by the snow storm, which was only a few inches really. All the same, a lot of trees and stuff had come down. My dad got us donuts for breakfast, a lot of places had got power again and lines at Dunkin Donuts and places were decreasing. We were at a loss for what to do for the rest of the day. In the end I totally got to spend ages looking at CDs and DVDs, though completely forgetting that Florence’s new record was out, and had lunch out somewhere and talked to our neighbors. We had dinner and were gonna go see a movie, but we came home and, thank god, the power was back! At last! In some ways that was fun, but at the same time I really don’t wanna repeat it any time soon. We were gonna have that Tuesday off for some reason anyway, and we did, which was great. And I started Nanowrimo, on shaky grounds, and I carved pumpkins. When we went back to school, some people still didn’t have power yet. That? Must have been terrible.

Guys we’re learning all about WWII in 20th century which for the most part isn’t terribly interesting, but we’re watching the Pianist. We watch a lot of films in that class, though this one I can excuse because I really rather like it. It seems well done. My teacher pronounces pianist with too much emphasis in the a, like how you’d pronounce piano. And not only does it bother the hell out of me, cause I’m very irrationally angry, but whenever he says it I’m thinking A.) that is a common word and b.) you are a mentally capable and knowledgeable human being, not to mention you are older than I am. Why is this such an issue? All I hear is piAnist piAnist piAnist all class long and ah god I’m judgmental beyond judgmental but this at this point I feel this is genuinely detracting from the viewing experience. Oh and, right, new seats! New month new seats, that’s the rule. I am with literally the worst group of people to be established at random. Some of them are decent but friends with the douchebags and I wouldn’ t feel comfortable talking to them at all, and then I’m sitting next to someone I really cannot stand, and I have a whole month of this now!!

We got new seats in bio, too. I’m sat between possibly one of the most outspoken people I’ve ever known (though he is passably nice and everything) and his best friend’s behind me and they are gambling about in the grades in our class.

Right, that’s it for now, Nanowrimo awaits.