it's a fine life

So, the title and the above are two different songs. But from the same musical! When I was about eight, I was obsessed with Oliver. This was during the (ongoing) period of my life when I thought the combination of drama and Victorian England was just the best thing ever. My mom bought a copy on DVD back from England, and just got round to watching it a few days ago. I guess my feelings were mixed, but it still had a sort of charm about it. Who Will Buy, Oliver, It's A Fine Life, Reviewing the Situation, and Boy For Sale are still, you know, fun to listen to. Especially the last, god, I love that song. This reminds me how imperative it is I watch Scrooge sometime soon. And, naturally, Sweeney. Oh musical theater, sort out your fandom and I'd like to get to know you better.

I also watched Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers a few days agoand I don't think six-year-old me would be happy because I'd forgotten how long and sort of uneventful that film is. If you spent a week not getting anywhere near enough sleep, yeah, you are gonna fall asleep. As I did. and I love LotR, really i do, but that was just...god.

I have a knack for desperately wanting things slightly before Christmas. Thursday I got Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas music (seasonal, at least) and Submarine by Joe Dunthorne. The former is awesome. You have five disks, four of them EPs one more of a full album, and he's doing covers with a few of his own songs in between. Also you have essays and drawings and stuff to go with--superfluous Christmas crap all round! I like the balance of cynicism and sentimentality that most people feel about Christmas. It's like Tim Minchin's 'Wine in The Sun', which is a great Christmas song and, oddly, one I have the need to listen to every 4th of July. I'd recommend White Wine in the Sun, even of Tim's other stuff isn't for you. I'm a bit of a christmas music connoisseur, if I say so myself. The obscure French carols Sufjan's into add fuel to my flame. My favorite christmas song, and the most unoriginal choice, is Silent Night. Silent Night gets a mention in the Songs for Christmas pamphlet. Also I have to play it at a piano recital soon. Oh! And Submarine is pretty fantastic. Like, I would say it's my favorite YA novel? Admittedly the only YA books i haven't been tempted to sort of mutilate and destroy five or ten minutes after reading are Submarine and Perks. And my interest in Perks has sort of waned since reading it. Oliver as a protagonist is just great. A common criticism of YA protags is their perfection. Like, Charlie in Perks, the endlessly emotional, endearingly detached, unrealistically empathetic, popul+ar-with-the-seniors super genius. And Oliver, the same age, is the sort of person who, age fifteen, read Perks on a whim, took it in, and decided as many an imperfect person in his situation would, that he was going to mold himself to become Charlie. Well, Charlie if he had sociopathic tendencies. Oliver's unique but also completely realistic, and actually really accurately depicts a flaw that YA authors, ironically, seem to miss out a lot: uncertainty. But it's believable! Trust me! Pretentious and pompous and cruel as he may be, Oliver's thoughts are fascinating and funny and stuff, so yeah, cool book.

Having a day off is wonderful, even if I did spend most—or all—of it trying to get my head around cellular respiration. It rained a lot and I had an incredibly shitty piano lesson that day. Fun fun fun. Thank god it wasn’t a half day, like originally scheduled.

My 20^th century presentation was awful as could be. Yay, awful presentations! They truly are the bane of my existence. My classroom is the size of a small canyon, and I can’t speak loudly. I don’t know why teachers think I can help that. Why would I talk quietly if I had the choice? Jesus, some people. And shouting “Louder!”at me isn’t conductive to anything. I mean, c’mon guys, think about it. This whole shtick which I’ve heard so, so many times just makes me passive aggressive and eager to sit down and stop presenting. My goal in life is to do reasonably well, or decently well, or just not terribly, at anything that doesn’t involve social interactions, to prove everyone a lesson. Sigh, some people. We watched songs from the 60s and stuff on Friday. Surely I can’t be the only one who doesn’t ‘get’ Bob Dylan? And not just his voice either, his music and lyrics and everything. Maybe the song I heard just wasn’t a good place to start? Hmmm. We then talked about freedom, and as with most of these discussions we vaguely discuss the topic and then zone in on the question on whether anything at hand is communistic. I mean, Jesus. Otherwise these people are fairly left wing, so I really wish I knew why this keeps happening.

Friday was funny cause it involved two humiliating public presentations. The other was in English, although it kinda started the day before. Cause we were randomly assigned into groups, and told to read sections as if we were the characters (sections with little or no dialogue sometimes, so I don’t think much thought was put into the activity) and our group didn’t get on at all but we persevered. And I was told to read, and I was too tired to argue otherwise. And then another group asks if I’ll narrate for them. And I don’t know why they did this. The only thing that comes to mind is them being deliberately cruel, though that’s not the sort of thing I’d wanna actually assume…and for whatever reason I’m too thick to say no to this, so later that class I do read for the section, and there was a hell of a lot of reading I had to do, but I did it. And that was fairly okay minus the usual nerves with presenting, only the next day my teacher starts with some nonsense about my soft voice before I present what I was supposed to be presenting (narrating on Thursday, assigned stuff on Friday) and some people snicker? Which I guess is a fairly expected consequence but all the same my head was saying ‘fuck you’ for a little while after. I hate group presentations so, so much.

Bio test was fine. I did well, in fact. Sigh sigh sigh, I must get over stupid arbitrary school things. I wish I couldn’t care about these sorts of things. Sadness. Shouldnt’ve spent all of Wednesday studying for the damn thing, I know. But, I am a pedantic twat. The happiness after Thursday was done was out of control. We’re talking about plants now! Photosynthesis, leaf structure, etc. Given too much homework this weekend, and had to repeat it word for word via text to someone in my class. We looked at leaves through microscopes. It was a little bit awful, because microscopes are the worst and my partner has to ask the teacher for clarification about everything, and I was sat opposite a guy who decided to say everything to the tune of You’re Beautiful by James Blunt for the entire block. And this guy talks a lot, believe me.

Saturday was a wonderful day. Best day of the year, or one of, of course, because we got our Christmas tree(s)! We have too many decorations for just one, unfortunately. The place was cold but we're slightly earlier with this than usual so the selection was better. They usually have a fire going outside, and I was disappointed they didn't this time. I listened to In Utero in the car on the way there. it's traditional that everyone in my family gets a new ornament each year. in England they had this huge warehouse of ornaments, and we'd spend hours there. The one I got this year is sort of pale blue and frosted, if you get what I mean by that. it's not bad. We decorated the trees the following day. Listening to the old Christmas CDs. We have too many christmas CDs. My dad got new lights for one of the trees, red/blue/green, the other is just white. One of them is has unusually sharp needles, so much so that I genuinely got scratches on my hands from this. And my mom has this one christmas CD (yes yes yes, I will repeat this), of covers, that was really cheap but we listen to it every single year, and I love it to pieces. And we have so many random, stupid, crappy decorations but it's so much fun getting them out of their boxes, organizing them, decorating the trees. We did a good enough job, and it took a while, but oh it was so perfect and ahhh god, too much sentimentality for my own good. The christmas mood is finally here. We even made gingerbread men on Sunday, and they were amazing and stuff. So much music, food, sugar, decorating, even without snow it’s wonderful. I can’t wait for christmas, guys. Really I can’t.

I found this band years ago, but I'm only getting into them now. I love the lyrics to this song.

We have a day off school tomorrow. Initially it was just a half day, but they changed it cause we lost a day in November that we were supposed to have off cause of a power outage. I have to study tomorrow, but this is good news.

  It’s been a boring few days. Pretty awful on Saturday, when I was dragged along to the mall with my mom to look for clothes. It was odd, because by the time we’d got there my mother and I had already had an argument, but about whether a song on the radio was by My Chemical Romance or not. (it was). Which was an interesting sort of mother-daughter argument, if nothing else. The mall wasn’t as busy as you’d think. And it made me very happy, because I love malls at Christmas time more than I should, given that I’m not a big fan of the crowds. It’s just...the cheap gold and red christmas trees, guys. And the terrible covers of the same five or ten songs in all the shops. Unironic appreciation for the creepy christmas feeling. I did get stuff, but I had an awful day and was pretty unhappy for various reasons, which continued well into the night, including when my mom said we should also watch Brave Little Toaster for the nostalgia or something. It wasn’t my day. I’m moody but even so. On Sunday, too! But less so. Went looking for DVDs, specifically movies, I might wanna ask for, for Christmas. And then I remembered that movies are awful. Where do people find good movies? I don’t get it. Oh, but I did find the US DVD version of Submarine. Aesthetically much better than the UK one. Plus, I think it comes with a little note from the protagonist, which is pretentious and anti-American and just so Oliver that it’s endearing. In the way that Oliver Tate can do really despicable things and somehow you can’t help but like him. That I suppose was a good moment. Spent much of the rest of the day studying for biology, reading Hemingway, and listening to bad music. Disappointing weekend, although my mom did get chocolate christmas candy and what have you(19 days, guys) so there were good elements.

  English is boring as hell. I like to think I approach books with an open mind, but this A Lesson before Dying thing is awful to me. It’s melodramatic as can be, the characters are boring, and the plot isn’t interesting. It’s making going to the class every day more and more difficult. My teacher’s really into it, so I find it hard to get along with her. Her naive, repetitive, i’m-so-into-literature shtick is tiring. Also, I don’t understand being put into groups to answer questions, or present, or anything. We’re not getting anywhere and it doesn’t make sense. I want this book to end. Soon.

This week in 20th century, we changed seats at last. I am now with a passably decent group of people. The only problem is, because we have round tables in our oversized classroom, I am facing directly away from the front of the classroom most of the time. It’s quite irritating and my back hurts coming out of that class sometimes. I always feel very uncomfortable because I have to have the chair fully turned away from the desk, and I feel too exposed like that. We’re talking about Vietnam in class at the moment. It’s fairly tiring. Looking at every war in the 20th century that the U.S. was involved in, it’s kinda like ‘okay, hurry up, I wanna stop now’. That kind of a feeling. Yesterday was a lecture, today we watched a video of actual troops in Vietnam at the time. Also, peace stuff. All the hippie movement seemed to be arguing for something important in wholly irrelevant and juvenile ways. Hmmm. Oh! And I’ve gotta do my first presentation in that class on Friday. Well, something resembling a presentation. We’re in groups, arguing either for or against a lesson learned from Vietnam. My teacher’s way into ‘critical thinking’. Although, I’m rather baffled, because I’m supposed to be arguing that we shouldn’t go to war in south east Asia, and the people in my group have told me to connect this to Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t know what my, um, geographically confused group expect me to do. So, I’ll probably end up not doing anything, and come Friday I’ll have nothing and they’ll hate me and I’ll read a single sentence off someone else’s work in the presentation. Ever the dysfunctional group worker and presenter, that’s me. My teacher’s always talking about how necessary group presenting skills are, and every time he does this I just become a little more resolute in my conviction to take up a career with the most minimal social interaction possible.

A redeeming quality of a fairly not so good few days. A bio test on the hardest unit of the year got moved two days! I spent much of the weekend, including just about all of Sunday, studying for the damn thing. Because the nanowrimo-induced sleep loss caught up with me, and my brain seems to be incapable of staying active last block of the day, I’d found it impossible to take in any of the cellular respiration information from the past week. This annoyed me especially when faced with a detailed diagram of the Krebs cycle, and the knowledge that I must memorize that and many other things of equal complexity in two days. I was decently prepared by Monday, and we reviewed the whole time, I accidentally annoyed the people I was supposed to be working with. Oops. It was so good on Monday to come home and get an e-mail saying it’d been moved cause of Tuesday’s recently-added schedule changes. (15 minute talks, by guidance counselor, with the principal about the hazing incident mentioned in the last post. The Fox news vans and what have you are gone, by the way. Same old round here. And it wasn’t so much any revelation of new details on the incident, as some may have expected, but a call to arms not to have it happen again. Anyway). Unfortunately htis change meant watching the most tedious nature documentary you could ever possible imagine. Seed dispersal. The majority of it was dedicated to animals shitting to spread fruit seeds. “I’d rather have just failed the test today” said the guy next to me. And everyone else agreed.

  I’m looking forward to having a lazy evening today, possibly watching some QI or playing video games or something, staying up late, having a relatively relaxing day tomorrow. Apologies for my moodiness in this post. It hasn’t really been my sort of few days, but it’s getting better. Also, my Sufjan Stevens CD’s gonna get here in a few days, and we’ve only a few weeks left of school. And I bet you’ve heard more than enough about Sufjan Stevens here, yeah? Yeah. Things aren’t bad. So that’s my incredibly terrible post for the moment guys. Enjoy?

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.

when I'm with you

hello



It took me forever to understand why everyone was so into Best Coast, but now i do, and I love this song.

It’s Monday and depressing as hell because I had the most perfect thanksgiving break I’ve ever had, and I slept so much. 12 hours a night. For this reason, I don’t suppose there’s an awful lot to report. I also wrote loads, caught up on Nanowrimo, which I pretty much cannot wait to end, listened to the yellow/green/blue Dear Hunter EPs a lot (all superior, astonishingly, to the black/red/orange record, which I loved). And I made a lot of english pancakes.

Was reminded on Thursday of both the good and bad aspects of being a non-Thanksgiving celebrator. First, like I’ve mentioned repeatedly, you feel isolated and everything’s all peaceful and strange. But you also realize that there’s kind of not a lot to do. I did go for a walk, it was very warm and I spent ages outside, which I haven’t got the chance to do in too long. Once that awful afternoon sluggishness goes away, it’s very very nice and I got to eat salmon and try to rewatch Dead Poets Society (I don’t know why—I don’t like it very much, but it’s just that sort of mood) while my dad sent electric drills through the front door for a good four hours. Yeah.

I didn’t go black Friday shopping. I never have, for all the reasons most people don’t go black Friday shopping, number one being oh my god all the people. All the crazy, manic people. And imagine being one of those few people who inevitably gets trampled to death during all of this? You just think you’re going out for a cheap iPad and that’s the last thing you do in your life? Morbid, slightly, but mostly just weird. At least, I didn’t go out shopping in the early hours of the morning. I did do so in the afternoon, I wanted to look at possible DVDs I could get for Christmas. I love watching movies on christmas day but at the moment I’m totally out of ideas. I’m not opposed to doing that teen Disney nostalgia thing where I ask for every single Disney movie I never watched or ‘got’ as I child, to be perfectly honest. But still, any other movie ideas are appreciated, if you’re willing to give any. I see pitifully few movies, so I’m basically up for anything. I feel stupidly obliged to watch some ‘classics’ more than anything else. If only I knew what those classics were. I rewatched Submarine a few days ago and anything similar would be appreciated. I went looking for the Submarine book a few days ago with no luck. Speaking of other movies, my favorite movie when I was about 8 was the musical version of Oliver Twist from the 60s. I was, uh, disappointed with how it shaped up now. I still really love a couple of the songs, but a great deal of it was very middle-of-the-road.

I was pretty miserable on Saturday, but I can't for the life of me remember why. One of those things. My dad made me go shopping for my mom’s birthday. He rushes through anything and I can never find anything good. It was fun in the evening, though. And the mall's just getting its Christmas vibes and everything seemed nice and warm. I got my mom a DVD. In the evening I watched Submarine (should start keeping track of how many times I do this) with some friends; it was their first time. For the most part, they seemed to like it. The following day I did all the homework I say I’d leave to do over the weekend, celebrated my mom’s birthday, and went shopping in the evening for candles with my mom, and drove around the town looking at christmas lights.

I’m still exhausted and today was nothing special, or good. I was given a book to read for English. It’s called A Lesson Before Dying, and it’s by Ernest Gaines. I don’t like very much so far. It sounds rather melodramatic, and I don’t find it very compelling to read. Shame. We also read a picture book, in pairs. I think my partner may hate me. The book was supposed to be about the dangers of conformity. It was called “The Bear That Wasn’t” and I didn’t know what to think. My teacher's a funny person. Have I mentioned she gives 20-minutes lectures on how she doesn’t talk much and wants to leave us to our own devices for most of the class? Yeah. Bio was awful, seeing as I feel asleep during a lecture and then had to participate in a group activity that involved blowing through a straw into a pink liquid which just happened to be an irritant. And the straw was about two inches long and I got the stuff all of me and, god, not pleasant. I also got the
highest grade on a math quiz and English quiz.

Two days of nanowrimo left and things are looking up. Also, I uploaded the Submarine soundtrack to my ipod, and it is perfect. Excuse the either frustratingly or refreshingly short post. I think I write too many lengthy posts here, but a couple of people have told me otherwise, god knows why. Anyway.

days off for thanksgiving are the best

Hi everyone



Once you get over the fact that this song is ballad-like and that the singer has the most whiny, nasally voice of all of the whiny, nasally singers in indie bands of this ilk, this song’s a nice one.

Guys, guys, guess what? It’s Wednesday and the week is over! At fucking last. Woke up today feeling very sick (5-6 hours of sleep for about a month or so, I would imagine is the main factor) even though I didn’t have much homework yesterday and basically sat around watching old Peep Show episodes for a few hours and eating food and not caring in the slightest.

I love thanksgiving. I don’t celebrate it, since I’m not American, but I love it. I don’t really know why my family don’t celebrate thanksgiving cause we see fireworks on the 4th of July and stuff. Bit complicated to get together, I suppose. And the rest of the family is a couple thousand miles away. The good thing about not celebrating thanksgiving is that it gives you much more free time. While everyone else is travelling and eating and being lazy and doing whatever it is people do on thanksgiving(ooh such a mystery to me), I get to stay in my house all day and eat and be lazy, but to a lesser extent I suppose to the thanksgiving-celebrators. Also a lot of people complain of crazy families at this time of year, same with christmas, which I don’t have. At all. Ever. My extended family’s so small, anyway. Additionally, no one in this family is particularly concerned about getting in the car at four in the morning the next day in order to buy half a dozen plasma screen TVs or whatever it is you crazy people do on black Friday. I’m really not sure. Is my foreignness showing too much? I’ll reel myself in. Point is, although it more or less works as the latter bookmark to the much-appreciated loveliness that is autumn, it’s still a holiday that really fascinates me, and I really enjoy this week even without celebrating it. Plus, I totally cannot wait to show my love for Christmas wholeheartedly without looking manic and weird. Much appreciated.

Naturally, not an awful lot’s happened this week. I’ve taken an English test and my now my teacher’s brought out her specialty: a crappy low-budget sap story with minimal relevance to anything we’re doing in class. Guys, it’s about overcoming adversity against all the odds. Try as I like, I cannot both watch this film and not be judgmental.

My algebra teacher has been out for some days now and the entire class has taken up their favorite in-class hobby again: mocking her. She’s...difficult to like, at least the way she presents herself in class. Also she does things like tell kids in class they have cute dogs, and then continue with “wasn’t there a dog in your car this morning?” when they act totally baffled. When they say that no, they do not have a dog, she continues with “oh. Guess I was looking in the wrong car this morning”.

Over the weekend I had to write a few paragraphs from the perspective of a holocaust survivor. We had to share them in class a couple of days ago. This...is not an activity that sits well with me, for some reason. Especially the inane ways in which sharing partners are decided. I don’t really know why it’s of such great importance that we should share with someone of the opposite gender. I would have chosen someone of the same gender, yes, but as we’re not editing I don’t see the big deal. Silly teachers and their silly teaching things. Oh, and we did a debate! The day when we were planning, news had broken that our much-hated interim principal is getting rid of coffee machines. God, I make this sound important. But still, that was all people seemed capable of talking about that day, as opposed to the validity of atomic bombings. (if this caffeine purge happens, how will the teachers react? At the moment they’re picketing in the mornings for better teaching conditions and stuff. I’m awaiting the day their slogan changes to “Contract & Coffee Now”). Ahhh aren’t I just painfully unfunny. Whatever, the debate was just catastrophically awful, although somehow our side managed to cobble together a winning argument. He did that thing where for five minutes only the quiet people can talk. And did I talk? Guess. He will never wear me down.

There are times, rather more frequently than most expect, where I’m basically fine with high school. I mean, if you ignore things like group presentations , early mornings, overcrowded cafeterias, and those knee-high socks all the jock guys wear, going there most days is fairly painless. However, one day a year I’m reminded of the existence of pep rallies. Certainly I’m always aware of pep rallies, it’s just easy to allow them not to feel real every other day of the year. And then you go to one and it’s as if when, at that point where you considered skipping the pep rally and you asked yourself ‘how bad can it be?”, that all the forces of darkness in the world combined their efforts to create the single most painful 90 minutes you’re sure to experience in a very long time. Is there a single person, cheerleaders and football players included, who feels any semblance of happiness from these things? I don’t know if this is customary for all high school pep rallies, but at our school there’s one crazy old lady in a clown costume who I’ve never seen anywhere else before going around shouting at people to plug in the fucking inflatable animals; she’s pretty into it. For everyone else, it’s another wasted period of time where the only things you can think about are about how unnecessarily loud the crappy school band are and how you really wished you’d just got the nerve to skip the damn thing. This year we even had pie-eating competitions and failed dance routines! Oh, it was a train wreck. I feel like when we warn incoming freshman against things like being scared and wearing their backpacks too high, we should mention pep rallies with similar warning. That or we let them suffer. I don’t mind.

Tonight I’m going to go to my friend’s house and watch American Horror Story. And, uh, that’s it. I look forward to sleeping a lot over the course of the next few days.

sunrise, sunset

hello hello hello

I’m in a Dear Hunter phase. Here’s a song.



Tell me that isn’t so beautiful. That’s the first song on the Blue EP. I’m not necessarily sure it seems like a blue sort of sound to me...I’d have gone with purple myself. Nevertheless, I love it.

Today has been the craziest week ever, homework wise, though I’m not entirely sure why. Well, that and the combination of nanowrimo, which I’m about 5000 words behind on unfortunately. I probably could have managed without all of that. But with it, not possible. I’m so glad this week is over. Next week is only two and a half days, thank god.

When we’re not working on grammar in english, we’re going on about collecting thanksgiving food for less fortunate families. The whole school’s doing it—it’s a good cause, etc. and I can’t complain. Slightly confused cause I had to go through hell, when we assigned foods I was out and my teacher can’t organize anything for the life of her, and it’s been a nightmare to establish just what I’m supposed to be bringing in. Sigh. I’m growing to dislike her more and more, and I shouldn’t because it’s all totally irrational, it’s just the coffee-drinking and the movie-watching and what have you. I could do without it. She was out today and we watched something about the Nuremburg trials (20th century debates and now here; just can’t get away from them). Doing nothing was good. It was one of those weeks where you seemed perpetually, endlessly busy, and just watching a video was like an amazing breath of fresh air, for no good reason. I’m so tired; I keep getting headaches.

Learning about WWII in 20th century is as depressing and generally dull as ever, with occasional bounds of information that are just unpleasant. I don’t particularly want to spend much more time on this damn war unit. We’re watching a lot of videos. Much to the appreciation of the class (and my sort of ambivalence), we watched Saving Private Riot. Or, the fast half hour of it, anyway. I can’t say i understand watching only a fraction of a film. Nor do I understand the idea that i really needed to spend any portion of my life watching continuous shots of people holding their internal organs in their hands to understand D Day. I don’t know how I’d rather learn this stuff. From time to time, it’s quite interesting, in a weird sort of way. I’ve always been a history nerd. It just has a tendency to get repetitive and all the videos, my god, they’re not helping us get anywhere. Over the weekend, we have to write about a real life holocaust survivor. I really don’t want to write any of this.

We had the worst lab in bio this week. We were given the entire block to observe the effects of enzymes under various conditions, and it wasn’t enough, since I had to stay after school for upwards of twenty minutes to finish it. The teacher said it was possibly to do in this time space, but I’m not sure I believe her. As usual, I can’t help but be absolutely useless in labs. Hard as I sometimes try, I never have any real idea of what’s going on or what I’m supposed to do. I’m just vaguely aware somewhere in the back of my mind that time is short and it’d probably help my future in this class if I don’t make the people around me hate me. I can’t really put any of that thought or emotion into what I’m doing, though. The thought that I made slip up and make mistakes throws me off far too much. We had a quiz today(not good—my A has yet to make a comeback), watched the most unabashedly vile video about the digestive system any crappy educational video department could come up with, and over the weekend we have to write about the digestion of a thanksgiving dinner. Creatively. I keep falling asleep in this class even when I try my best not to.

We got tickets for Richard III! It’s in February, a Friday or Saturday of the last weekend or the one before. I’ve gone on about this for ages and I’m so excited that it’s finally happening. It’ll be good to go back to New York City for a while, too. The last time I went was 100 hundred degrees in July and I wasn’t as infatuated with it as I thought I’d be. I imagine, perhaps romanticize, that it’ll be better in February. Whenever I think of new york city I think of winter...but christmas time. So maybe I’m wrong and new york will be awful in february. The question keeps me interested in going.

Fun moment of the week: I was extremely busy a few nights back, and I’m not sure why, and I had to take a make-up piano lesson from a couple of weeks back and it was a group lesson. And I wasn’t told that I’d be playing in front of like ten three year olds? I’d like to emphasize that while I’m not a wonderful pianist, this group of students was random, not based on ability, and I am actually above everyone else there. Just to make sure you’re all aware of that. And it was embarrassing as hell but also absolutely fantastic because I played the Danse Macabre, a simplified version with a thousand and one mistakes and they still look at you like you’re a genius. And I played this other piece, Song of India by Rimsky Karsakov, and I was only marginally better at that because I haven’t played it properly since July or so, and the cutest Asian girl you could ever imagine says “that song reminds me of butterflies flying through”. Just that. It’s probably troubling to know how happier and how much more self-assured I was by those group of fucking kids when I walked out, but hey, there you go.

Fun, but long, day on Friday. After school I walked downtown with friends and an acquaintance. We looked at books, although I didn’t have money for all the Kerouac books I want (‘all the Kerouac books I want’ is essentially everything the guy ever did. I bought a few of them the next day, oh and Hemingway and Slaughterhouse-five.), ate at Bertuccis, all the usual stuff. After some friends left me and my best friend spent a half hour in CVS when it was dark outside cause we were gonna see the school do fiddler in the roof but couldn’t walk back in the dark. And it was funny cause we dropped him off and then he came back about two hours later, and we watched the Lovely Bones with our other friend and played that game where you put sticky notes with a thing on someone’s head and they guess what it is. Fun stuff, really.

I was impressed with Fiddler, which I saw the following day. They did RENT last year and I recall being impressed with the actors (still applicable), but less so with Rent itself. But Fiddler—wow, I really like that. I like the style of the music. It could very easily be a sort of bastardized style stolen from traditional music, but I can’t for the life of me tell, so for the time being I say it’s a really well written thing. I’ve always had a thing for pop music badly fused with various cultural sounds (see: Disney movies), so this sits well with me. I’ll look more into it, actually. I disagree that it’s too long, also. Hey, if nothing else, seeing Fiddler made me check the Fiddler Wiki page which led me to find this thing Bright Eyes did where they took the melody and chords and instrumentation of Sunrise, Sunset and added loads of crazy, frantic lyrics, and moments of heavy guitars and stuff. I’ll post it here sometime. It’s clever because of the way it distorts and twists the theme of the song into something kinda mad and paranoid and stuff. I’ve never known such a hit and miss band as Bright Eyes.

It’s almost December, which means first that Nanowrimo, thank god is almost over(and I’ll have been successful if I catc up on two days of writing or so), but also that it becomes cool to celebrate christmas around other people again. I love Christmas so much, I’m gonna order the Sufjan Stevens Christmas EPs and everything. But my point was—we made the christmas fruit cake this weekend gone by! It got me in the christmas mood. And in a few days I can watch the Snowman and play Silent Night and I will be at my happiest, sad as that might be.

Aaaand now it’s a Friday and I wanna watch In the Loop and eat ice cream, so good night all of you.

take a leaf of paper and draw your mind

hello all

my mom brought back the new Bombay Bicycle club record when she came back from England. Also, journals and candy and stuff. I miss England like hell when I see things like this. Also, she got to spend November 5th(which I miss more than almost anything about that country) at Lewes. Lewes is a little village with no particular significance but they have these huge 5th of November shows there every year. Like, tens of thousands of people are crammed into this village, it's like one huge, terrifying, spectacular riot one day a year. In a way it sounds like something i'd like to go to, though it'd scare me also. Oh well.

Music time.



I hated this song at first. If you do too, I suggest you bear with it anyway. It really grows on you. also, great lyrics.

The English presentation was a nightmare. I think I might hate someone in my group. I try not to hate people, really, because it's usually just such petty things they do that annoy me. I know it's not worth it, but I can't help but become wound up by some of the things people do. Like, this girl in my group, she made cupcakes for the class. See my last post on why this is absurd and I hate it. Then, I am the one forced to hand them out to people. I, who had nothing to do with this nightmare. And when every single person in that room asks and laughs why are we doing this? I have to say “metaphoric significance”. Yes, it has metaphoric significance, guys. That was embarrassing. And she made me talk even though I had little to say during the whole thing and I’m not even going to go into, yet again, why this is absolutely awful. And to top it all off? I looked at sparknotes at one point a few days ago to see if I was going in the right direction(confirmed). Yes yes sparknotes is bad but i use it very infrequently and, most importantly may I add, I use it to check where I am, not to add extra details to what I have. Maybe that’s a silly distinction, but I want everyone to note that distinction before I continue. Noted? Okay. Well, something on Sparknotes was a reference to something, something specific, in the Torah. A metaphor. Fair enough, although that’s way above this level of analysis. And this girl, she takes this reference and fucking uses it in her discussion. She does not know the Torah well enough to make that ‘religious connection’ on her own, might I add. She’s someone who thinks and acts like she’s much more calm, much more intelligent than she could possibly be. I know everyone uses sparknotes to some extent, but within reason, because they have the brains to know that looking like her is not a good thing. And lying for your grades is one thing, I don’t care about that as much as lying to other people in your position. Most people who use sparknotes, they will be honest about it to others in the class when the teacher isn’t looking. This behavior, I could not care less about; it’s innocuous and I don’t mind. Lie to the teacher for a better grade, that’s fine, but be honest to your classmates. However, when that girl makes that statement in the discussion and other people come up to her and tell her she’s smart, she says thanks and nothing else. Here, we have someone lying not only to the teacher but to others in their own position in order to look better. That kind of behavior, to me, is the kind that’s really kind of vile and unacceptable, and it pissed me off so much that someone could lie in such a blunt manner in order to look like they have some sort of semblance of literacy or intelligence or, like, biblical knowledge. I hardly come off looking wonderful from this story for a number of reasons; I am aware of that. But that girl’s behavior is just completely awful to me, it’s hard to describe. In a way, I don’t want a good grade on this project. A C would ride fine with me. Give the awful girl what she really deserves, why don’t you, I’m more than happy to have my grade suffer because of it.

That bio quiz was terrible, absolutely awful. That was the only thing we did on Thursday and it made me very stressed for the entire following weekend. Got it back on Monday and it’s fair to say that it was more than low enough to lose me my A in that class. Today was a very bad day for me, all things considered, shitty bio and even more shitty algebra grade, too. We’re talking about enzymes now. We did an activity about breaking tooth picks, saturation point and stuff like that I think were the focuses. In a weird way, it was kind of cool. I want my A back, if nothing else than for my own self-esteem(which is embarrassingly based a lot on grades and stuff) to be back to the fairly stable place it was before.

It’s only been a few days, just one long weekend, which is why there isn’t much to report from the school standpoint. That’s good, I suppose. Ah, yes, but on Saturday? I went to see Manchester Orchestra. And it was, genuinely, incredible. Like, one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. And I haven’t seen anyone in a couple of months at that point, so it was great. My third time seeing Manchester Orchestra. First time, the March before last, I went for the support band, and then I got their 2nd album for Christmas and fell in love with it. Then, saw them in may right before their third album was released. But between then and now I became totally familiar with all of their work and they became one of my favorite bands. We got there early and got a really got place to stand, and I got merch, and then the 1st opening band called White Denim came on. And technically they were good, but their entire set seemed to be one long guitar solo, so they weren’t really for me. The second band to come on was The Dear Hunter. Now, I have heard an awful lot about this band, and the vast majority of it is really, really good. Like, this-is-the-best-band-of-our-time type appreciation. And I’d never actually listened to them before, so I was really curious to hear what they were actually like. And they had one of those big, like, eight-piece bands with all these guitars and synth and stuff, and when they played it really was just a lot of sound to take in. It’s kinda prog and post-rock at the same time, if that makes any sense. They only played a few songs but the response was amazing, and they have this one track which I now know is called We’ve Got A Score To Settle, and you all need to go and listen to that asap. After the show, after Man Orch, I got their record(signed, no less, by two of them!) and was kind of puzzled at its astronomical price. But I learned later on that, among other projects this band have done (frequently pretentious and self-indulgent to an extreme, but worth a listen to all the same), their most recent venture was to release a set of nine EPs, each with the title of a color and four songs describing the emotions and imagery most people associate with that particular color. I had unknowingly bought the entire nine EPs as a set of three CDs, the entire thing titled The Color Spectrum. But I don’t mind because this is something that’s really, really worth listening to. So far I’m only really familiar with black, red, and orange, but I’m getting further into yellow and blue and green, and I’ll finish with violet, indigo, and white at some point. They’re genuinely quite diverse in their sound but they manage to keep everything tied together. Like, Black is rally intense and almost metal like in its sound, red is very much for the Manchester Orchestra fan, kinda still as angry and intense as black but more fuzzy and less intimidating, less synth too. Orange is as close to classic rock as could be imitated. Yellow is beach music, naturally, and as far as I can tell as far green and blue are kind of like Hawaiian, lo-fi things. Really, really great stuff. It’s pretty easy to see I’ve fallen head over heels about this band, and I’ve been listening to them obsessively since the gig, but I digress. Manchester Orhcestra remains the focus for the moment. And a good thing too, because they were every bit as amazing as the Dear Hunter! They opened with April Fool, arguably my least favorite song on Simple Math, but it’s kinda loud and easy to listen to, so it works. They played a bunch of Mean Everything to Nothing stuff after that, including Shake It Out(absolutely and totally wonderful in every way), In My Teeth, Pride(odd choice), and 100 Dollards(again, slightly confused, but I can’t complain). They played an awful lot of stuff from that record—they did I’ve Got Friends later in the night, which is one of my favorite Manchester Orchestra songs, and I think I recall them playing Everything To Nothing. Oh, and they do this really amazing live version of The Only One where it starts off very slow and continues for the entire song, except for the last twenty seconds or so, when they play it normally, that is, fast and energetic. I quite like that. After a lot of that, out of nowhere they played a song off their first album called Sleeper 1972. It’s melodramatic but I like it. And then, my god, they played what is not only my favorite Manchester Orchestra song, but one of my very favorite songs of all time. It’s called Colly Strings and it’s off the first album so they only play it very occasionally, making it even more of a gift to hear it live. And it was so perfect even though Andy changed some of the lyrics a bit, and it threw the crowd off, it was everything I always wanted it to be. And I never thought I’d hear that song live! It’s difficult to describe how wonderful it is to hear it in concert, and you know, I think the rest of the crowd agreed with me on that. It was a little bit impossible to top that for me, but they played Simple Math, Virgin(best live song), Pale Black Eye(underrated), Pensacola(there’s a bit where there’s no music and the band shout “alcohol, dirty malls, Pensacola, Florida bars” and it’s essentially the cornerstone of the song, and this time everyone knew this song and we could all sing along), oh and Dear. Dear was unforgettable. A lot of the crowd had started to clap as the song started, and the thing with Dear is they played it very slowly and were building it up and going faster and faster as things continued, although it’s not a particularly fast song anyway, and the clapping crowd were baffled by this and went on with their thing anyway. You know, large crowds of white people who can’t keep a beat clapping. In the second verse of the song, the protagonist of this song(Andy claims this isn’t from personal experience here) addresses “everybody who has paid to see his band”, and talks about how it still confuses him and he doesn’t deserve it and everything. And Andy changed this to “dear everybody who claps when they see my band/it’s fucking up our timing, you’ll never understand/I acted like an asshole cause it’s ruining this song/” etc. I love Andy, he’s so casual and funny and everything on stage. He seemed pissed at the crowd, claiming other bands can keep time but theirs can’t and that they’re not very good musicians or whatever. He’s insecure, but lovely. Oh, and they ended with River. River is a great song. And I came out of that gig totally infatuated with that band again, literally thinking it one of the best gigs I’ve been to. Absolutely amazing. Oh, and I’ve never been to a gig before where the group of college guys beside me shout “peace be with you!” after every song. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up to the individual, I suppose...but it’s hard to deny that was a unique sort of heckling.

It’s been good to have this long weekend, Friday off and everything, although homework now awaits. Good music will assist me.