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.