April Vacation! It has arrived at last. I'm tired beyond belief and all I wanna do is read and listen to music all week. Which is totally gonna happen.
So good thing the week ended with this kind of euphoria. That's not to say the week preceding it was bad of course, but you know how teachers are, just piling on test after test. I associate April very strongly with warm weather, shorts-wearing, and landfill indie and yet this week will be more like sweatshirts, false hopes, and Manchester Orchestra. No matter! April is wonderful of course and I have so much to look forward to this week...DOCTOR WHO(gushgushgush), Easter, my birthday the following Monday, seeing friends, etc. Fun stuff, really.
It just occurred to me this afternoon that I will soon by fifteen years old. It's an age I associate with those YA novels where these girl's lives start to fall apart(drugs, boys, all that jazz). 14 is young and naive and being a freshman and all the books are about your first kisses and 15 you get into crystal meth and give up on empathy. that isn't true of course and I don't even know where I've gotten this idea from apart from Ellen Hopkins novels(guilty please, okay?)but that's what I associate 15 with. I like 14, I wanna stay 14, even though a year won't make much difference. But you know what's just plain scary? Sixteen. Doesn't bare thinking about.
According to the student assistant in my world civ class, this is the time of year where freshmen get excited about the idea of not being freshman for much longer. It's an interesting prospect. My world civ teacher says that Sophomore girls are the loudest creatures on the planet. Our classroom is in a corridor of sophomore lockers(and it's the block where people have lunch at various times) so I can say I've heard enough ear-splitting screams to agree with this. Now that's all I can think about being a sophomore. My introvertedness will stick out like a sore thumb even more than it does now, next year, if things follow that route.
I really shouldn't be basing my thoughts here on stereotypes, as I've just done for two paragraphs. Stereotypes cause problems.
Speaking of world civ, I finished my group project about France on Friday with twenty minutes to spare. Out of the seven groups we're the only ones done, so we get the vacation free of homework. I spent the bulk of the week doing a timeline from 1400 to 1750. As a history nerd, I'm sad to admit I wasn't very interested in the sort of significant facts I was working with. Our textbook briefly mentioned the Skeptics and seeing as that kinda stuff is really appealing to the agnostic-atheist secular humanist(feel free to snigger.) part of me, I would've loved to delve more deeply into that. I didn't really have time, though, and they didn't have many big events so I was forced to stick to talking about Louis XIV and going to war with Spain. The whole thing was quite a hassle--I'm insanely particular in projects about getting straight lines and such, I can't just draw and write and cut ad hoc. After that I helped draw a boat and looked over the maps some girls in my group had drawn. They HAD done theirs ad hoc. In maps for history projects, yes, I expect outlines and borders and continents to be a little...geographically incorrect and a few island to be missing. However on theirs, it seems Britain and Ireland had been wiped off the face of the planet. And sorry to be your typical arrogant Brit, but, um, those were kinda important countries in these times sooo...you sorta shoulda put them on the map. So that was worrisome.
I had an environmental test on Thursday. This is always, always, without fail, a cause for mass chaos, panic, mental breakdowns, the works. They are the single hardest tests I've taken my whole life and I studied for hours and hours and hours. It was about cycles of matter and I could not for the life of me get it into my thick skull. I studied with a friend and stayed after for review and I suppose it helped, to some extent. I'm hoping for low 80s, percent-wise, that would suit me nicely. That was the focus of my week, and then we did our first lab. I was with the usual three narcissists who I can't seem to avoid in this class. One girl declared how she'd copied her hypotheses from someone who'd already done the experiment. When--shock!--they turned out to all be accurate, she announced 'I got them all right! I feel so smart!". Someone said "you got help, though" and she replied "It's right there in the handout, actually! They were kinda obvious"...good lord, some people, eh? On our last day we had a sub, who was Welsh and was wearing an English football shirt and kept talking about Muse and Depeche Mode which was quite brilliant, and I just did optional notes with a couple of people. It ended on a high note.
Art was drawing the entire week. I love coloring, I'm not a good drawer but coloring's fun. I didn't get very far, though, so I have to take it home to finish this week.
Health is the usual. We were talking about sexuality, and was extremely overjoyed to see that, when we were doing 'Continuum questions', every single person 100% agreed with gay marriage. very strongly agreed, actually. I love you, Massachusetts kids, don't forget to be liberal 'n' awesome. We talked a lot about discrimination and the like and I continued to be very happy with the attitudes of the people. Our last lesson was less decent. we were talking about sun protection and skin damage, as it SHOULD be warm around this time of year. We went over the usual stuff and then the teacher brought out this machine that can show you the sun damage on your face. Totally optional, of course. We had the alternative of making bracelets that are color-sensitive to sunlight. I chose to read instead, which seamed reasonable enough, right? The machine made the attitude of the lesson(one we all know well) rather different, in some ways. A few people lined up to see their faces reflected in neon colors. I could hear the teacher talking about how some have a lot of damage and some they don't and she would comment on their skin tone because of this. She pressured me, multiple times, to join in. For one thing, I don't particularly want to see my face in any light, let alone something that shows all the skin damage I've probably collected("It's not that bad, really, Naomi!" say a few girls who actually go to school not looking completely dishevelled. hmm). Two, I'm British, we don't see the sunlight for most of the year, so I'm pale. I felt embarassed with all the tan-ish girls in my class and the teacher's comments about their 'natural protection' and then that compared to my teacher pressuring me and my redheaded friend to join in. She had to balls to succumb to this shit--I did not. I know the teacher wanted me to join in because I will have skin damage. But can't she see that if I'm sitting there paler than everyone else with more sun damage than everyone else, how I'M gonna feel? Doesn't she think for one fucking second about how other people think, or feel? Doesn't she see, AT ALL, that she was putting such an emphasis on darker skin? I hope she knows I went out of that room never feeling worse about the color of my skin. I've never felt so fucking tempted to go tanning in my life than after that lesson, all thanks to her. Stupidity barely covers the teacher's attitude that day. I don't wanna go back there.
It was our last week for our student teacher in English. He continued to hate us, of course, didn't tell us his first name and made us watch more of the movie that I'm failing to pay attention to. It was his birthday at the beginning of the week and he was caught-red handed at some cheap restaurant being such a college kid, by one of his students. Spread like wildfire to all the kids in his classes. "I'm never going back there" he told us later in the week, after we continued not to let it go. I had to do a portfolio assessment which involved staying up till 12:30 on Thursday writing three very shitty papers on subjects I didn't care about, and I had a couple of tests on Things Fal Apart and Oedipus the King. The teacher and his inabilty to control us will be missed, now it's back to grammar notes and vocab sentences with our usual teacher, I would imagine.
The new Gaga song is the best, end of. Also I watched Tarzan(don't laugh) the other day and I think I adored it more than I ever did as a child. Such a beautiful movie. And the music, oh the music! If the Lion King didn't exist I reckon it would have been my favorite Disney movie, song-wise. Phil Collins, please can I borrow your brain for like a day? Please? You're like some sort of musical god, you're just so, so good. The music is absolutely astonishing and I will be watching this several more times this week. I'll be having the Disney obsession I never had when it was socially acceptable.
Today I did nothing. Nothing at all. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing. Now I'm off to sleep and have a good week. Night, all.
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