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.