i was playing a tree trunk in a forest of fools

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci were a Welsh Britpop band from the 90s who never got as much recognition as they deserved. I assume this is the case because they incorporated mariachi brass into their music and they sang about things like playing a tree trunk in a forest of fools and joining a Spanish dance troupe because the British summer weather was shitty. I think this band discovery gets me all the indie cred.

Not the best weekend ever. It’s one of those weekends that you think is going to be good, and then it isn’t, and you feel disappointed and sad and just end up compounding the error. Hanging out with friends on Saturday was a plan that unfortunately fell apart, and so me and my mom went looking for stuff for my Halloween costume instead. I don’t know that I’ve mentioned this before, I probably have, but whatever I’m being Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd. She has a pretty generic witchy thing going on, but I’m all up for it. I really love Victorian clothes, men and women’s, especially men’s, which unfortunately will never be acceptable for me to wear, so dresses and stuff will suffice. I sort of like the idea of spending the night as an Edward Gorey character a lot. Also, I just love all things Sweeney Todd. Apparently stuff of this sort was vaguely popular in the 70s or 80s or something, says my mom, ‘cause I already have these black heels which are perfect and lacey gloves thanks to her. I need red/black tights and a dress(a dress! When did I last wear a dress?!). Also the character choice means I’ll probably need to take a stab at—horror of horrors—eye makeup, which I don’t ever wear. Still not sure about that. I love Halloween and I’ve always revelled in dressing up, and also just for looking for the pieces of a costume. I mean, if you just walk into Spencers’ and grab a sexy bunny outfit or something, whatever, up to you and I really don’t mind, but I just think half the fun of the whole event is looking through multiple places and taking individual things and watching the whole thing form piece by piece. It’s a sort of halloween passion that I don’t think many people invest in over the age of eleven or so, isn’t it? Ah well, it’s fun all the same. Apart from all the crappy halloween stores we tried, just in case, you know, and they were awful and these were Gryffindor scalves and black lipstick everywhere and, ugh. Hyper judgemental? Yes. But still!

I think I spent most of the weekend watching loads and loads of the Inbetweeners and I started reading A Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which so far is quite enjoyable but also weird and slightly difficult to follow. And oh, Sunday? Mom showed me this part of a forest round here I’d never been to before, it’s amazing. For whatever reason my mom knows the nature walks round here inside –out, and believe me there is an awful lot of them. It’s...impressive? Helps with things like this.

Otherwise, I spent much of the weekend working on a bio project. It didn’t take an overly long time, not like that macromolecule project which, my god, was awful, and the info was fairly accessible. All we really had to do was create an info sheet and write a case study. I’m getting no points for aesthetics in the info sheet but the information’s there, albeit in a kind of waffly, long-winded fashion. Think I overdid it on the case study. I’m prone to either overdoing or violently undergoing projects. It was two pages long single spaced and it didn’t even make a hell of a lot of sense. Later in the week, we’re supposedly doing an activity where we use these info sheets and case studies to assign diseases. Or something. I don’t know, it sounds like the sort of thing a lot of teachers say they’ll do but never actually get around to working on. Again, we’ve been working with the microscopes(still nothing broken on my behalf, thank god) and today I looked at onion cells and my own cheek cells stained blue and it was neat. I have a quiz tomorrow on cell organelles and I know nothing about ‘em.

And, tonight is he big day with that research paper. It’s due tomorrow and I’m so screwed if I think I’ll actually have any free time tonight. So far it’s about ten pages long, I think, and I’ve edited something like three of these. And, I repeat, it’s due tomorrow. I procrastinate, but this is bad even by my standards. My teacher’s being very particular vis-à-vis citations and stuff, and just going through all of that nonsense is very much taking the majority of my time. It’s not going to be very good, but it might be adequate if I just don’t sleep tonight. The ‘just don’t sleep’ route is one I seem to favor a lot at the moment, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly.

We’re just about finishing Gatsby in English, and we have a test tomorrow. We started watching the movie a bit, too, the one from the 70s. And we watch movies an awful lot in that class so it’s the sort of thing I’ve become kind of desensitized to, and this movie I thought was patchy, not that I’m any expert on movies. Speaking of films, I watched Dead Poets Society for the first time a couple of days ago. I’d heard loads about it, so I ordered it, and then I watched it and kind of really, really didn’t like it? I’m just saying, I was surprised, given its popularity(if not critical acclaim). It felt pompous and dull and, my god, that teacher. He’s the worst kind of teacher! Why does nobody see that? If I was the kid who never said anything which, let’s face it, I pretty much am, I was thinking I’d get that teacher guy fired for fucking physically holding me in front of the class and making me talk? Cause it's humiliating and um, counts as harassment? And somehow that guy’s behavior is celebrated. Probably explains why so many teachers are so fucking terrible. The attitude to teaching is just all wrong.

Okay, I’ve essay-editing to do, bye for now.

colly strings

Because this is one of my favorite songs--like, ever--and I will continue to spread knowledge of it even when it has absolutely no relevance to whatever I happen to be doing at the time. So, there you go.

Staying up doing the first draft of that research paper was one of the toughest nights I've had, homework-wise, not only this year so far but in all my years of school. Twelve hours, I think, pretty consistently working on that damn thing. So, the lesson learned that is that I should probably be more vigilant about recording my sources. Also, use fewer articles that are totally insidious and biased. Not that that's anything to do with my horrible time-keeping strategies, but it's just something to start bearing in mind anyway. The topic was tough and the research was complicated and I still struggled to come to much of a conclusion on the matter, so I can't say it's the most fun I've ever had with one of these things. I like writing essays, not entirely sure why or how many people are with me on that one. But this essay I didn't like. And that's just the first draft! Fabulous. It was a completely wasted exercise too--the following day we were told to edit these papers amongst ourselves, and nobody did it, so I got to do algebra homework for most of the time instead. I actually stayed after school the Friday of that week to have my teacher edit my paper. Not unexpectedly, he wrote "PROVE IT" in the largest writing he could fit onto the pages several times. And, it just happens that model UN meets in that room at that exact time?And I was sort of at the front of the room rather than the back? And I was offered candy I don't like but felt obliged to eat? It was weird.

And then the next two days in that class we just talked about World War 1 or something, I can't entirely remember. We were given this really awful activity where the desks(we have six round desks in the classroom) were turned upside down to make 'trenches' and we were assigned a side and a German or French name and stupid activities proceeded to replicate trench warfare. Once again I'm faced with another example of experimental teacher not quite working. This happens an awful lot.

And we're using microscopes in bio! I hate using technology of any sort in school. Reason A for this is, of course, the knowledge that if anyone were to break the 200-dollar microscope, it would be me. Reason B is this weird thing where it really bothers me if I do not know all of the functions on something i'm using, like I just wanna sit down and work out why all the knobs we're not using are there if they seem so pointless. It's hardly practical, I know, but all the same it bothers me no end. Presumably it's the same thing as one of the answers you get when you ask someone how they go about learning the rules of a board game, if they wing it or read the rules in depth, etc. Anyway, we're three or four slides in and so far I don't owe the science department any amount of money to pay for lenses absentmindedly smashed against stages or anything, which I think qualifies as success in my mind. We started off with making wet mounts of thing link ink on newspapers, and then progressed to things like bacteria and stuff. We've a lot of stuff left to go, and it's really interesting(microbiology is, Bradly speaking, my favorite area of science and if I ever did go into science, this is what I'd do. Preferably I'd have a job with as minimal contact with microscopes as possible. yep, as a microbiologist). There's even a few moving slides we get to look at later, I think they're protists. I've never looked at a moving slide before, it sounds cool though. Do I sound endearingly interested in this stuff, guys? cause it really is pretty cool.

Another few days, and another few experiences in English classes with being passively interested in Gatsby discussions. I've decided, in contrast to my last post, not to complain about this element of the class--since it is not forced acting or speaking or drawing(yes, that happens. I'm in an honors sophomore English class, guys, I don't understand why this is happening). On the plus side, I don't seem to be falling asleep as often as the 90-minute lectures might suggest I would.

Apparently the rule is that if you didn’t make much of an effort to get involved with extracurriculars in freshman your, sophomore is the year to do it(or else you’ll never get into college or get a job and you’ll be homeless and starving and die alone and no one will ever love you, or so has been implied to me). And while extracurriculars really aren’t my thing, I was sort of coerced into going to debate club a couple of weeks ago. The only other things I do outside of school are playing piano and going to my school’s philosophy club(which, dysfunctional though it is, I could never give up on), so this is good. Turns out you really don’t have to do anything in debate. Someone brought in cookies, I ate some of the cookies, we were put into teams to plan and I spent the time listening to two acquaintances talk about buying clothes in China and what accents they think they can do, and then you have the debate and listen to three or four senior guys out of the forty odd people there go on about something. Hey, if it requires minimal effort and doesn’t make me look like I spend my time on the internet, I’d say I’m up for it—though that might make me a hypocrite, in terms of attitude towards extracurriculars? Although maybe not, cause hanging around the school in the evening and eating cookies is in some ways fun if I'm not too tired, and fuck college that’s not what I’m in it for. So, there.

Since last night was hell with all the homework and everything, might see if I can get a few extra hours sleep now.

i want christmas already, dammit

I'm just such a holiday person. I was talking about Halloween last post, and then my mom dragged me along to this craft shop to find pumpkin carving things, and of course they already have decorations and tinsel and stuff out, and I just remembered Christmas is one of my favorite things in the world. This year, I'm gonna buy Surfjan Stevens' collection of Christmas EPs and also watch all the Christmas movies I never saw when I was younger. Also, the Snowman every day in December? Absolutely.

I think from now on, I'm just make my life easier and put a song in each post to segue with even less effort. Knock yourself out.




I forgot this song existed until about five hours ago when it came up on shuffle.

Today was a half day for reasons no one in the school district is entirely certain of. However, it's wonderful cause we get these once a month for the rest of the school year, give or take a month or so. All I had was an english quiz, average algebra, a 20th century video(which I thought was mildly interesting, but then my 20th century teacher thought it was horribly boring. not to be someone who shouts about their nerdiness to anyone who'll listen, but that says something), and average bio stuff. Then me and my friends hung around the school for a little while and walked downtown. The place was full of middle schoolers, also when we had pizza a random clump of other sophomores evolved outside. We also looked in a book store and CVS, and went to the library. It was a good way to spend that part of the day.

I'm not exactly sure what's going on around me a worrying amount of the time at the moment because I'm so tired. If I ever go to sleep the day before the day I'm supposed to next wake up in, it's considered a good night's rest, even if it's like 11:45. I don't think I need much sleep relative to some people(which I hear is not a good thing--brain power needs sleeping power, and my lack of any need for sleep worries me, but I digress). It just occurred to me recently, reading back on things I wrote/did this time last year, how much more free time I had then. And I didn't even know it. I was told thins would get easier in sophomore year--perhaps not. Content might be easier--I have too many horribly flashbacks about stress caused by physical science work last year that nothing at the moment can really compare--but it takes up more time(see: my experiences spending multiple hours writing about cell membranes or bacteria or things each night). Also, I don't become interesting or creative or anything when I'm exhausted, let alone the much-sought after place where incoherency meets quirkiness in the face of pure fatigue. No, I move in quite the opposite direction, I develop this obsession with being hyper efficient. If I'm awake and there's time, I can find something to do--this tends to end up in things like me playing piano at midnight, and my mom wandering into the room to ask why the hell I'm playing piano this time, and I tell her how busy I'll be specifically over X number of days and about the perfect time slot available and everything. It's sort of a toned-down Dean Moriarty type thing I have going on at times like this. No matter. I think this contributes a great deal to my current inability to remember things, not little things, but 'vibes' and everything, autumn vibes, normal things, all sorts of stuff. True, Irene did rip most of the leaves off the trees in August so it's not quite as pretty as normal, but all the same, not to whine anymore about this when I could just, you know, skip some homework and sleep but I do miss having a marginally higher state of consciousness, if only so this time in my life doesn't seem like a total blur to me. Sigh.

Reading Gatsby in English isn’t as great as I expected, not that I really knew what it was I was expecting in the first place. I suppose it’d be alright on a first-time read, it just gets a little tedious being talked at for a full 90 minutes. That’s more or less it. Occasionally we’re put into groups and told to analyze something, only no one really tries(not usually including me, mind), and we talk for 45 minutes and finish everything in the remain five or ten. It usually gives me a nice opportunity to do homework or something, though. Gatsby’s definitely a book you need to read more than once, at least for me. I don’t often re-read things, so the opportunity in itself is good. Even if I have spent most of the in-class Gatsby discussions reading JD Salinger talk about the Glass family from the back of the room. Which i suppose is pseudo-rebellious in a way that makes all the literature buffs shudder. I apologize.

In biology we’ve begin given another—another!—project, this time about diseases. I’m assigned the West Nile Virus. Can’t complain exactly, but at the same time after just finishing a previous bio project I’m not overly enthusiastic about it. Also, it doesn’t seem to have any particular relevance to anything else we’re doing in class, so it really does annoy me all the more. The class has too many labs, and my lab group is bothering me more and more by the day. I really am not proud of being someone who anonymously complains about their classmates online, really I’m not, but my god this girl in my group is insufferable. She thinks of herself as being uber scientific. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but she can be really obnoxious when she needlessly attacks the other members in our group. No one in our group is incompetent—however, we don’t pretend to have more of an avid interest in these things than we normally do. I’m sick to death of being ridiculed and sometimes practically verbally abused if I do one thing wrong or don’t get a sufficient grade, and even more I’m sick of her bluntness being excused as a side-effect of the superior intellect she claims to possess. And I’m basically cool wit being a total hypocrite—yeah, yeah, if I really am sick of her as much as I say, why don’t I just go join a new group etc. I don’t know. I get along well with the others in my group! There—my excuse! This whole thing really is making me hate these labs, though. Even cutting up pink pH-receptor jello which should be relatively fun, she has to draw out to feign some interest and grab attention from the teacher. Ugh, guys, psuedo scientists. Let’s all write free verse poetry instead.

This week I watched In The Loop, the movie based on the Thick of It, which I’ve mentioned countless times but only because it’s absolutely brilliant and hilarious and everyone should watch it no matter how little they know about British politics. It’s genuinely wonderful. The movie, too, you should see—it gets patchy and the plot line tends to drag a bit, but other than that it’s just about the perfect comedy movie. I don’t have as much time for music as I’d like, but I’v been listening to Smashing pumpkins and Manchester Orchestra and people, nothing particularly noteworthy.

Right, since tonight is gonna be an especially late night, finishing a 10-page research paper and all, and nothing really interesting has been happening to be lately, I'll end this now.

almost half way through october

And it doesn't really feel like autumn! Well, kind of. It just started now. More specifically, it feels Halloween-like. Man, I love Halloween. Today I was reading an article about like teenage girls getting exorcisms, specifically how the popularity of the concept reflects society’s misogynistic distrust of women’s losses of innocence, at which point eyebrows were raised. All the same, I love typical spooky things. Except Ouija boards. God, to the person at the party who surreptitiously moves the Ouija board and then screams a second later—I don’t like you.

Apart from that, October can usually be summarized neatly in me moping around waiting for NaNoWriMo inspiration to strike (it rarely does). I reckon things are going better than last year, where most of my thoughts came from looking out of windows at lunch, listening to the Antlers, and reading this god awful Mark Z Danielewski book that for some reason I was really into at the time. I could be all oh-ugh-I-was-so-stupid-last-year, but I don’t think I’m much better this year. Any ideas I have come from melodramatic guitar music, tumblr photos, and wanting to spend most of my time being a moody fuck hanging around at the Jack Kerouac memorial in Lowell. Oh what it is to be a teenage writer.

For lack of a better way of moving on from this, here’s a song by Sonic Youth.



I only know this and Kool Thing by them. I haven’t listened to anything by them at all in three or four years, and they sound way more impressive to me now. I just don’t really know where to start with them, they have so many albums. Should go out and buy something when I have the chance. I don't know how to spend my free time, though. Last weekend was a long weekend, and though I went apple picking and stuff, I wasted all of Monday and then went for a walk.

Nothing out of the ordinary this school week. I’ve been unreasonably tired, though i suspect I’m just catching up from last week where I got five hours of sleep a night and worked relentlessly between these times. Today should’ve been an easier week, few big tests and a day off on Monday and all. Didn’t quite work out that way. Turns out already reading Gatsby just means that I’m just incredibly bored during class. I’ve had John Green run through a lot of this anyway, and much faster. Still, it’s a good chance to reread a book I like a lot. From one spectrum to another, all we do in that class is listen to lectures—gone are the days of spending a whole period coloring pictures to represent metaphors. Now it just goes on and on and on about not a whole lot. We’re writing a bit, though, so I can’t really complain.

Had my first big disappointing grade in algebra this week. I’m still doing okay, though, so no matter. They were silly mistakes. I don’t actually mind silly mistakes, as it means I know that I really do still have a grip on things. Lately we get to color graphs! Back in 8th grade, where we officially did algebra for the first time (though I’d done some before—my parents were more pushy in 5th grade), the notion of doing sophomore algebra would’ve paralyzed me with fear. I think 8th grade me would been very confused by the way things have been panning out so far. I think generally more people should just tell 8th grade me to calm down about things.

Though my 20th century teacher’s been going on about it since day two of school, we’ve finally been assigned out first research paper. The topics looked tedious, but I’m doing something about foreign policy now that I don’t really have any solid opinions on yet. He gave us a bunch of time to research, though, and plan. In its current state, my plan’s elaborate but hopelessly messy. The first draft’s due Wednesday, so I reckon it’s gonna be one of those weekends. Usually I relish that chance to waste a whole period doing online research for essays, but we’ve been given strict guidelines for where we can look and god I’m sick to death of all things scholarly at the moment. I’m sort of obliged to semi-interact with these two girls, one I like, the other spends most of her time scanning dense books about communism and vocalizing most of the discoveries she makes. I’ve done very, very little so far. It’s pathetic. And daunting. Definitely daunting, yeah. Everyone’s further ahead. No matter, I suppose—sleep loss on a Saturday never stopped me before. And now we’re just talking about war, and opinions on this I‘m afraid can make or break my feelings of the class and my classmates for me. We’ve only done brief summaries so far, and in that the D day summary bothered me, but the IRA-England thing was handled with very little bias so I was impressed. Still, I don’t wanna talk about war.

Because writing a seven page essay can never exist without any other added layers of chaos, I’ve been assigned another bio project this week. Also, had to do another la. We’re led by this girl who, after seeing me create a model for a protein with its 280 amino acids placed in order, now thinks I’m incredibly Smart and Academic and Into Science. While I did find a weird sort of enjoyment in doing the amino acid chain, it’s indicative of me not knowing how to use my time properly rather than anything actually, you know, good. I was her prime consultant when it came to testing bacteria colony counts. Interestingly, our results on the procedure were exactly the opposite of what we would have expected to happen. Also, not to endlessly go on about this girl, cause I didn’t really dislike her or anything, but she doesn’t try to disguise her sucking up to our teacher, so our group is always talking to the teacher and staying in class after the bell rings and what have you. I don’t think my teacher is fooled, though I have had a very bad record of trying to get and stay on the good side of teacher, so I don’t suppose I’d know.

Now I’ve three days to come to cohesive opinion on foreign policy, so that’s it fo

Submarine etc.

Last night, I finally got around to watching Submarine. It came out some time ago, and I bought it on DVD during one of my many visits to HMVs around England over the summer. It is a pseudo-quirky film founded on gimicks; a British sitcom star as director, a sountrack written by the singer in a popular band, a plot line that at first glance would make your stomach churn. Also, I know almost nothing about movies, and very rarely do I give myself the time to just sit down and watching a anything more than a couple of episodes of a TV show from start to finish. So, all things considred, it makes it all the more astonishing when I say I really, really liked this film. Like, wow, what an amazing little thing it is. everyone needs to go and see it as soon as possible. It's just wonderful, and for the first time since my Lord of the Rings obsession some decade ago, I intend to just watch a movie over and over and over again until I know it inside out.

Beyond the above and finally organizing my CDs, I haven't done anything terribly productive recently. Speaking of CDs, the new Kasabian record is a fine edition to my collection. I've been listening even more to the most recent Bon Iver, also Radiohead, Nirvana, Bjork, and the National. I'm almost done with the Thick of It. It's a tough show to get into and a tough show to watch even after the honeymoon period, which explains the three week period of watching all of it, but it is brilliant nonetheless. If I could be bothered to do anything other than watch TV and listen to music all day, then things like "organize my room", "read a lot", and, most importantly "plan for nanowrimo" would be on here, but unfortunately none of that is the case.

On Friday, in English class, we were each--at last--presented with a copy of Gatsby, and then given the whole period to read the first chapter. I was very tired, but it was absolutely wonderful. My teacher was out for three days, and we just got to watch videos about the 20s the entire time. I'm surprised by how vast the school's video collection about the 20s is. Then one of the days we were put into groups and told to find specific information about the time period in the library--a waste of a period, certainly, but one that involved looking through encyclopedias the entire time, so there were interesting moments here and there. In between time, we're still continually put into groups and forced to produce something creative before the class is over; I'm with the same two girls, I seem to have become something of a novelty to them. It's a wallflower thing; it happened last year, with these two girls in my gym and study, and it got very irritating very quickly. I hope the class will get slightly less, you know, middle school-like, as we read Gatsby. However, the chance of us drawing pictures of drunken parties and writing poems in groups where each one is entitled "the Green Light" seems high. We've been promised "a fun, unique activity" on Monday, and we've been told to bring in magazines in preparation. Bringing magazines in for an activity is so rarely a good sign of things to come. The only good news to come out of this class is my getting a 100 on my first proper essay.

I should have something like a 98 in algebra, but my teacher doesn't understand computers, so has given me full marks on everything. It's...a conflicting situation. Is it better to tell her? The answer is yes. But will I? I'll hold out for a little while longer. Dishonesty: improving my grades, once more! I really am a vile product of a terrible education system. I'm afraid it could be a while before my morals catch up with my inherently destructive desire to prove myself through grades.

Despite switching tables in 20th century, the people I’m like are hardly better than those I was with before. And now, I don’t have easy visible access to the clock. We’ve done one debate and it was horrific. I got put on the side I vehemently disagreed with, and then I was a lazy fuck when we were arranging things, and only said one sentence(in the introduction) during the real thing! It was a tedious class, debating taxes. A handful of interesting points were raised, amidst the pseudo-politicized horrors that occupied most of the period. At one point, my teacher declares that the next ten minutes are only for the quiet people of the class. Luckily I’d been sitting next to two or three of my fellow “quiet people”, which helped to play up the ‘looking-bashful’ thing. But did I speak? Nope. This is one of the reasons I hate debates like this, because it was fundamentally about talking, except no one is in that class of their own accord, unlike in a debate club or real political debate. No, they’re here because they don’t really have any other options. And so, with debates, the talking is forced. Only one or two people in the class have put any thought or conviction behind what they’re saying, but for everyone else, it’s just about looking good for the teacher. And I know it sounds like whining, emotional fluff, but my god do I hate forced talking, cause it’s just empty sound. I consider it especially important to, y’know, make a point of not talking even though the class was almost silent, because I need to show that just cause I’m shy & an introvert, doesn’t mean I’m completely aloof or wishy-washy about things. Down with our extroverted society etc. etc. etc. This is a more prominent theme than any of this Great Depression, foreign policy, economy stuff we’ve been learning about so far this year. We had a test on Friday, and spent all of Thursday reviewing in that favorite of lazy teacher formats; Jeopardy. I hate Jeopardy. I’m not going to get wound up right now about how much I hate Jeopardy, but nonetheless, I really do hate it. We were in groups of three, so I didn’t really have to contribute for most of it, but one of the questions—specifically, “Who was Martin Friedman?” came up, and I was the only one who knew the answer. I tried to tell someone else what to say, but they didn’t want to, and next thing I know someone’s like “Go on, talk!” and I turn around and all my group members have their most strained encouraging(read: patronizing) expressions on. And then this girl next to me—who you might remember as the one who thinks global warming is a lie made up by scientists in order to make money for the government—shouts “Everyone, be quiet, a quiet person’s talking!”. A quiet person. Jesus Christ almighty. I may be quiet, but I’m still a fucking person with, you know, a name, as it is customary to be given to people, loud or quiet or whatever. I was so pissed off I actually scowled at her. She wasn’t deterred. The answer I have to the question was short and, after studying stuff later again, I realized largely wrong, so I was frustrated that the teacher thought it fitting to call it correct anyway because I don’t talk in class or what have you and therefore need encouragement and different standards. The combination of that and the way that by the end of the class the subject matter of questions had deteriorated to Harry Potter trivia, and the way everyone around me was so enthralled in declaring how nerdy they were, left me in a very bad mood for a long time after. Oh, and then there was the moment after I hand my test in, and I’m wearing a Manchester Orchestra t-shirt, and my teacher’s asking if I’m from Manchester, and he asks all these inane questions about England because of it. Incidentally, Manchester Orchestra are actually from Atlanta. But anyway, his questioning was different from usual, because he already knew I was English, he just never said, and most people jump dive first into an interrogation the moment they hear my accent. Questions like this are always awkward, especially the all-too-common “where did you live? Oh a village? Tell me anyway”(why do you wanna know the name of a village you definitely will not have heard of?) and “which country do you prefer?”(Where my honest, if slightly rude, answer woud be England, but only because I’m more used to it and nothing else). I seem surlier than I really am with these questions, and he was pissed off by my short answers. But I got full marks on his test, so I’m hoping he won’t be too irritated by our first real interchange. God, long paragraph. This is the most eventful class.

In bio we’re talking about organic chemistry. It’s a mixed bag of stuff. It varies from really quite intense chemistry at a molecular level, to articles and videos about obesity, made by people who essentially think their obviously incredibly high value to society increases exponentially the longer they go without eating chips or something. That part is wearing. We got a tour around a school cafeteria, and I found out they’re getting rid of the iced coffee machines next year! It was a good moment to be an arrogant non-coffee drinker! I spent much of my week frantically working on a project about ovalbumin, which is a molecule found in eggs. The only information I could find was in journals, and god knows I couldn’t make sense of those. The overall result was mediocre, with my usual I-didn’t-quite-follow-the-directions-properly spin. The fun bit was spending two hours stringing 386 amino acid balls into a specific order on a chain. I had all these colored pom-pom balls arranged in order on the living room floor. I take weird pleasure in unnecessary organization. Beyond that, it was just researching something almost no one knows anything about and sticking it on a poster. Somehow, the presentation wasn’t the train wreck most of my presentations are. Well, it was, but less so than usual. People in that class heard my accent for the first time, though, so now that’s out of the way for pretty much all of my classes, thank god.

I’m free of homework for the moment, so will continue to spend the long weekend watching the same movie over and over until I’m forced to do anything else.

Night.