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.
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