nanowrimo is done, thank god

So you know that really frustrating habit Kings of Leon have, where they either write really, really good pop-rock songs or really, really terrible pop-rock songs? yeah. Well my friend made me a mixed CD (my first mixed CD!) a couple days ago, and this was on it, and yeah..I was reminded of that.

Nanowrimo is over, thank god. I won! Got to 50k at about eight in the evening on Wednesday. It was surprisingly early for me. And I’d been having to catch up on a number of missed days work. It got tiring. Nanowrimo is a cool experience and I’d recommend it to anyone to try, but you do become completely worn out by the end of it. Thursday was hell because the last four weeks of all the energy spent on this crap came back to haunt me, and I was just a zombie for most of the day. I had no energy to do anything and much of the school day was spent trying to consume all the sugar I can just to keep me going. And I went to bed at nine, got nine hours of sleep, and I still woke up completely exhausted. I doubt I’ll have time to catch up on much sleep this weekend, either, because I have a quiz about cellular respiration on Tuesday and it’s the hardest unit in bio this year and I’ve literally been unable to pay any attention in class this week. I had no idea what was going on, at all. Well, actually no one has any idea what’s going on just because the material is so fucking complicated, but the majority of the class already has a benefit over me in that they were conscious, I assume, for many of the lectures. I’d just throw in the towel and make do with the D I’d be sure to get if I looked over the stuff for twenty minutes, but a couple of people expect me to do well. I’m not trying to be arrogant. I’m not smart and I don’t do outstandingly well in school. Somehow on the line, I might’ve gotten one or two passably good grades in that class and now there’s a president. How the really intelligent people at school cope with this, I’ve no idea. It’s frustrating how I just succeed something realty difficult, nanowrimo, and now I’m thrown into something also very very difficult. I can’t be granted a moment’s simplicity in terms of the work I need to do.

At least it’s December. It’s been a very warm November and with the change of the month I’ve moved from the “please don’t get cold and snow” mentality to the “I will be suicidal if we don’t get a good amount of snow by Christmas” mentality. I love December so much. There are gonna be a lot of irritating things to do in school. I have nightmarish memories of the science project I was doing this time last year. But! There are pretty Christmas lights and cookies and the malls are all gold and red and plastic Christmas trees. Advent calenders, too. Crappy Christmas movies. Christmas Christmas Christmas, basically. My aunt’s coming to visit in a few weeks and I have a holiday piano recital in a couple of weeks where I’m going to play a really embarrassing rendition of Silent Night. I am too sentimental and too attracted to things that are beautiful in a banal way. Hence, listening to carols and watching the Snowman every day this month.

A few days ago my mom spontaneously decided it would be a cool idea to go see the Boston Ballet do The Nutcracker Suite in Boston with my sister and aunt. I’ve never seen a professional ballet and I’m not very familiar with the show (except, like, the Sugar Plum Fairy, obviously. That was a ‘jam’ about two weeks ago for me, god knows why) but I do like the Tchaikovsky I’ve heard. I also love going into Boston, which is a totally underrated city by the way, especially in the evenings for shows and stuff. We got tickets for the 29th, I believe, and I’m super excited. Also, Kasabian released North American tour dates! Got tickets for March, at the House of Blues. I love Kasabian, and I love the new album. I’ve never seen them live before but they look like an amazing live act. The music seems to work very well for it. Listening to things like Fire live sounds too good to be true.

Today has been a crazy week. At least, for our school. Over the end of thanksgiving break, a story surfaced about a hazing incident that happened with the basketball team over the summer. I’ll spare you the details; it’s really unpleasant. Some then- juniors were being douche bags to some then-freshman. And it was pretty serious and it’s caused quite a stir. It also spread like wildfire. Before the week started, we’d had three or four local newspapers publishing short pieces on the incident. Mid-week, we’d gone statewide. And by Friday we’d been featured next to the kardashians on yahoo worldwide and had Fox news reports harassing kids leaving school for information. Because of the huge popularity of this story, anyone who I don’t know irl may actually know what I’m talking about. It seems a weird thought, but people have had relatives in, like, Costa Rica calling them to ask about what’s going on at our high school, so it wouldn’t surprise me that much. There isn’t a great stream of information coming from the school about it, so I’m thinking the whole thing will dissipate come Monday. Some people have been expelled, one of the victims has moved schools, and they’re still looking into the coach’s role in this. (secretly, I think the coach is annoying as hell, so i don’t really mind whatever consequences he may get). Our school is hugely into the sports stuff, and there have been some accusations that the kids who did this were still allowed to try out for the team this year. I don’t know. I don’t mind our town, but everyone else avoids it like the plague. Hey, we’re mentioned as one of the uber snobby towns in Catcher in the Rye and now, our basketball players are evil, yay. It’s been, as my biology teacher put it, a bit of a “rough patch” for our school this week.

Oh, but when it rains it pours. Yesterday, the teachers of the town passed work to rule, which is going to be implemented come January. Some time last year it was proposed, as a way to cut spending, that 20% of the high school staff should be fired, ands the remaining 80% be given an extra class each year. Ever since then, the teachers have been fighting this. A few weeks ago, they started picketing outside each morning to oppose the idea. And that wasn’t working,so this was a plan that came about, and now it’s gonna happen. It’s all kicking off round here at the moment. The kids at the school basically hate the idea, and it annoys me because now they’re claiming that they care about the teachers (as my history teacher explained to me earlier today, the teachers don’t think they can handle having another class), even though almost no one have a damn about the teachers until it directly effected them. I’m trying to have an opinion on this, but I’m just sick to death of living in a school system who have absolutely no idea how to handle money. They’re like, yeah, let’s build new schools and buy new projector things and get nice computers and get a youth center and let one of the middle school health classes buy fucking bouncy ball things to replace their chairs (I kid you not), yeah that all works, oh but buy the way we’re getting rid of loads of teachers and they’re gonna give you shitty lessons because of it. I don’t know the details of it, but it just looks like the most reckless, self-indulgent spending you could possibly imagine and I find it difficult to care too much about any of this because of it.I doubt the work by rule thing will stay long and it doesn’t affect me as much as most people, anyway. I mean, it’ll just work out the way it always does with the school, in that someone proposes an idea to save money because they have absolutely no money, then loads of people get angry about it, then the idea is resolved, and it all works out that way until we built up to the committee feeling they have to make a genuinely awful change, like this. Whatever happens with this, the school will keep buying its shiny things and keep trying to change things after. It’s sad. Sad and irritating for all, involved, I think. Again—“rough patch”.

It’s interesting watching all the mundane things still happen around school with all this going on. All things considered, it hasn’t been a terribly bad week. I fell asleep during bio lectures, which I will regret when I’m frantically up studying the stuff late Sunday night. Watched videos about the Cold War and took a difficult quiz about World War II. Continued reading, discussing, and doing group work on a Lesson Before Dying. Still, I don’t understand the appeal of that book at all. Watched a slightly weird Chinese film during philosophy club. That's it.

Yeah, so, good night everyone.

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.