Open Letters

Open Letters

Inspired by Hank Green. :]
And inspired by my confirmation service.

Dear mascara,
I hate you. I hate that I always forget I'm wearing you and then I rub my eye and suddenly have black all over my face. I hate that you make me look like a porcelain doll. Actually, I hate the ancient societal rules that dictate how women are supposed to look, and I hate the new societal rules that make every woman feel inferior for not looking like Heidi Klum.

Dear robe makers,
Is it your goal to make me look like a giant, flapping ghost? If so, you've accomplished it. You can retire now, and leave the robes the gospel singers.

Dear Kelly Clarkson,
You are amazing. My life would suck without your music to dance around to when I'm up at 7:30 on a Saturday morning to blow dry my hair for confirmation. Because of you I don't always hate the songs that get stuck in my head. Never again will I laugh at your weird outfits or occasional strange hair.

Dear adorable purple Steve Madden flats,
You are adorable, as previously noted. So why do you insist on giving me blisters, forcing my to cringe in pain every time I take a step? Is this because I bought you on sale? Why do you hate me so much? I hope you realize that treating me this way will get you nothing but a life of exhile in the back of my closet, next to the adorable flower print mary-janes that share your hatred of my feet.

Hey, kid in my confirmation class that I can't stand,
What did you just say? Did you really just say "shit"? Dude, you're on the bimah, in the middle of the service. The Torah is six feet away from you. You can't cuss when the Torah is that close. It can hear you. Actually, while we're on the subject, we ALL can hear you. Yup, dude, we can hear you cracking your water bottle in the middle of the service, and we can hear you groaning when the Rabbi comes to give you a hug after the confirmand blessing. If you were five years old, some serious time outs would be in order.

Dear Herd of Blog,
You are fun. I like writing my Textual Confessions of Delicious Ambiguity every Wednesday and sometimes on the weekends. I like that the five of us all have blogging in coming but are different in lots of other ways. I'm sorry you have few readers; I'm sure you'll get more soon.
(Okay, that was obvious and tactless. But we'd love it if you'd follow us.)

What I Did This Weekend: A List

What I Did This Weekend: A List

The only bad thing about three-day-weekends is having to go back to school on Tuesday morning. To describe mine, I'm taking the easy way out. Here's a list.

This weekend, I:
- Watched the pilot episode of the original "Beverly Hills, 90210" and was severely mentally damaged by what was considered fashionable in 1990.
- Sat through the movie "Undiscovered" on youtube and actually smiled at it.
- Introduced my sister's best friend to Heath Ledger through "10 Things I Hate About You" and then was forced to inform her of Heath's death.
- Made popcorn in the microwave for the first time.
- Went to the mall with my sister and her best friend. Bought two pairs of earrings and a purse and listened to sister and best friend speaking in British accents for two hours.
- Watched a marshmallow swell to abnormal size in the microwave but skillfully prevented it from exploding by turning the microwave off just in time.
- Bought pink plaid knock-off Raybans.
- Wrote a rhetorical precis on a part of Maimonides' "The Guide for the Perplexed." Managed to abstain from both *facepalm* and *headdesk*.
- Fell in love with Chris Pine and Zach Quinto simultaniously while watching this video.
- Came across this girl on youtube via MJ's twitter.
- Repeatedly wished I was at LeakyCon. Repeatedly drowned wishes by dancing around my room to wrock.
- Put away the books that were all over my room. Except for the Harry Potters. Because they stay.
- Read the first post on Herd of Blog: Textual Confessions of Delicious Ambiguity, the group blog in which I am Wednesday, starting this Wednesday. Yay!

Hope you had a good weekend as well.
:]

Haiku Fail?

Haiku Fail?

I'm going to blog
With haikus today. So please
enjoy it, it's hard.

That's five, seven, five,
in case you do not know, but
it won't rhyme - no time.

Sorry, I'm no Poe.
Not like Mr. Will Shakespeare.
We'll see how I do.

Wednesday*: Went to school.
State testing equals sad face.
Can't wait for summer.

90210**
Cried last night, Ade, Annie too.
I know it's not real.

But it's tough to watch
When it feels all too real. Know
What I mean, surely?

That's why we connect
With Harry Potter, Star Trek,
High School Musical.

We enjoy seeing
Others struggle with problems
That we have sometimes.

When it's not real it
Turns out alright in the end.
Too bad life does not.

Don't want to end on
A sad note, so here's a joke.
What's black and white and

And more than five words?
Any joke with a punch line.
Ah, well. One more try.

How many sophomores
Does it take to write a bunch
Of haikus and put

Them together to
Make a blog post? There, that's it,
That's the joke. Sorry.

Seems I'd better stick
To full-length posts from now on.
Twitter's hard enough.

Oh well, there's still Hank
Or John if you need a laugh.
Nanny nanny rich

Kid, FUNNY DOG! gets
Me every time. Oops, this has
Turned into an ode

To the VlogBrothers.
Don't worry, Maureen, you're cool
Too. Thanks for BEDA.***

Hope I didn't bore
You to sleep with my attempts
To write in new ways.

With that, good bye. Five,
Seven, five - not as easy
As it sounds. You try.

* I know it's not spelled
as five syllables but you
just have to say it.

** Numbers count as words.
They have sounds when you read them.
Just make lines look short.

*** Pronounced bee-da, in
case you were wondering. The
line still works MONKEY.

November is kind of far away.

November is kind of far away.

It's amazing to have this much free time, to be able to do whatever I want and not have to feel guilty about pushing off homework. I can't wait until summer.

I've been writing lately, something that I hope might last until NaNoWriMo so I can finish it up then. Unfortunately NaNoWriMo's a long way off.

Anyhow, it's a bunch of short narrative things, each between a third- and a half- page long. They're supposed to be memories from three periods of the narrator's life (right now called before, after, and now) and will hopefully pull together to tell some sort of story. I've been writing in present tense because I want it to come off sort of conversational, but I also think it might make the narrator sound a bit stupid, which she definitely isn't, so I need to work on that. The pieces don't really go in any sort of order because I'm not sectioning off the three parts; the first part is sort of introductory but the rest might be able to be switched around. I'm not sure.

Here are two bits. Any opinion on whether it would sound better in past tense? Or if it's crap and I should throw it away right now?


Alone in a Crowded Room – Then
Arielle giggles, pulling me across the room. “Loosen up,” she says, “this’ll be fun.” This isn’t going to be fun, though; this is not how I want to be spending my Saturday night. I bet I’m the only person in the room who’d rather be at home with her mother. Hell, I’d rather be studying, yet here I am.
Arielle downs her drink and dashes off, leaving the empty cup in my hand. I set hers on a table and clutch my own. I refuse to drink it, since it didn’t come to me in an unopened can. I wonder about leaving, just going home right now, when I see Danny come out of the kitchen. I can’t recall whose house this is – Bobby, I think. I wonder if they’re friends.
Danny sees me staring and walks toward me. “Hey,” he asks softly. “I was just thinking about leaving. Do you need a ride home?” I don’t know what to day, so I just nod. When we pull into his driveway, I mumble my thanks and get out of the car.
We get to our front doors at the same time. He nods at me and waits for me to go inside before he does. That’s Danny. I silently hope that he knows that he means more to me than a ride home.

Daisy Chains – Before
Lucky died yesterday, but Mom makes me go to school anyway. She thinks it’ll be good for me to be around people, but I don’t talk to anyone during recess, not even Danny. I just sit by myself on the grass and make chains out of dandelions. In my mind they are big, beautiful daisies.
Then we have to take a big math test, one that will help the teachers decide what math class to put us in for 6th grade. I can’t concentrate, though. All I can think of is Lucky and how she would bark at the mailman, and how her tail would wag whenever I’d feed her. Soon, my paper begins to blur. Across the desk, Danny sees me rubbing my eyes and angles his paper toward me.
I’m halfway done with the test and I know how to do the rest; Danny knows that. He never usually lets me copy his work. When we’re walking home and I ask him why he did today, he says that he doesn’t like seeing me cry.



Has it occurred to anyone that 50,000 is a lot of words? That's kind of a scary number.

May 14 has come and gone

May 14 has come and gone

I am so unbelievably relieved right now.

I had a pretty fabulous day, all things considered. This morning I took the AP world history exam, which was extremely long. Technically I'm not allowed to talk about it, but I will say that it wasn't as hard as I expected. (That may be only because I was wearing my nerdfighter shirt for good luck.) Now I'm wondering what I'm going to do with my newfound freetime.

After the test we all left school and headed to Souplantation, where 12 of us ate way too much. (Don't worry, we didn't cut school. We were all excused, as advised by our AP world teacher.) Then I hung out at my friend Ellie's with Alison, Simone, Taylor, and Sharon, where we played Buzzword and Taboo and Sharon took random pictures with my camera.

When I got home at around 4:10, I discovered my sister locked in her room in a horrible mood. She's nearly 13 and she's allowed to have bad moods; I go through that all the time. She was fine by dinnertime but her best friend called about 10 minutes ago and she refused to talk, so I had to tell her friend that she'd already gone to bed. This kind of makes me feel bad about the fits I threw when I was her age. Sorry, Mom.

I do want to note how epically awesome this shirt is. I really, really, really want one but unfortunately they don't ship to the US. I actually saw it in a picture on the nerdfighter ning, which led me to the collab channel Nerds of a Feather. The girl who had the picture actually shows the shirt in this video. I think I may have to make my own so I can be a nerdosaurus too.

DFTBA, all.

Brain Explosions

Brain Explosions

I've been trying to put off blogging until after the AP on Thursday so as to not distract myself, but since I'm not doing much studying right now anyway, it can't hurt. This may sound weird, but I'm more worried about the logistics of the test, like not bringing enough pencils, and my cell phone getting stolen when I leave it in my locker, than I am about the actual test.

I honestly feel like my head is getting bigger as I try and cram more and more knowledge into it - come Friday, everything world history related is getting thrown out. I don't know what good studying is going to do me right now. It's all little things that I can't remember, so even if I look all of them up right now, the chances of remembering all of them are pretty slim. I'm kind of to the point where I know what I know, and if I don't know it then I don't know it.

Plus we have state testing starting Thursday, so I'm missing the first bit of it. Meanwhile all of our teachers are trying to reteach everything they (attempted to) teach us during the year. No one is motivated to do well, though, becase the state tests don't do anything for us; they just make the school look good and earn money from Schwartzeneggar. I guess that's only good in the long run if it means they'll not have to cut as many teachers.

So basically I'm trying to retain everything I know about the history of the world, plus relearning everything I partly learned in geometry and chemistry this year. There's also french vocab to memorize and things to read for English and a LINK crew application to fill out, on which I have to articulate a reasonable answer to the question, "how do you view your role as a mentor to the incoming freshman class of 2013?" Would it be too blunt if I said that my role as a mentor to the freshman class of 2013 was a stepping stone to college?

This had better pay off in college. Or at least after college, when I get a good paying job and win a Nobel prize and marry the man of my dreams, who happens to resemble Milo Ventimiglia and has the voice of Landon Pigg, with a dash of Green-esque nerdiness thrown into the mix.

Very long post on houses that makes me sound like a spoiled brat.

Very long post on houses that makes me sound like a spoiled brat.

Okay, so it's official. My parents are selling our house.

Well, technically, it's not our house. We're not living in it - we moved a year ago - but I lived in it for the first full 14 years of my life there. Then randomly last year my dad decided he wanted a bigger house, he found one, he bought it, and we moved. Moving was a big deal for me - like, a really big deal. I pretty much talked about it constantly and stressed about it constantly and drove my friends insane talking about it.

And then my parents decided not to sell our old house, but to rent it instead. The current renters (they're the second family to live their in the past year) are moving out soon, and my parents' friends' daughter and her husband want to buy it. They'll be in it by the end of the summer, depending on when the current renters move out and how things go with the realtor and such.

The couple moving in has a little baby, and when my mom saw them today she volunteered me to babysit. I don't know why she doesn't understand that this is hard for me. I don't even know why this is hard for me. It shouldn't be; it's just a house, and the one I live in now is a lot bigger and a lot nicer and it smells better. But I still have trouble telling people that I like it whenever they ask me about it. I have trouble accepting the fact that selling a house is a business deal, with a product and a seller and a buyer. They put a price on it - they put a price on the house, the home, where I lived for 14 years.

I had my 12th birthday party in that house. I had my 1st birthday in that house, now that I think about it. I dyed my hair for the first time in that house, and I set off the fire alarm in that house and made the fire department come, and in that house my sister slid down the sofa and hit her face on the coffee table and had to go to the ER.

I shouldn't be having any trouble with this. When I thought about all the things that have changed since we moved into our new house, I realized that none of the friends I have now have ever actually been in my old house (with the exception of one). They know my house as my new house, which kind of makes me sad. Whenever I have dreams about that involve a kitchen or a bedroom or a backyard, I'm always in my old house.

Oh, god. I'm depressing myself. And I bet I sound like a total spoiled brat right now - I move to a big house and hate it. I'm like something off of "My Super Sweet Sixteen."

I'm sorry. I love you all.

Here's something funny that happened to me today: At the AP study session this morning, we were all talking about what we got on our final yesterday. Nathen says, "the test was hard" and then this weird kid says, "that's what she said." And it wasn't funny. And so we didn't laugh.
Okay, sorry, that wasn't funny.

But this is funny.

:\

I Am Mrs. Potter the Jedi

I Am Mrs. Potter the Jedi

My strange friend/stalker/acquaintance who talks a lot Michael Kang likes to draw funny pictures of myself and my friend Alison. (Hi Alison!) He also has a fetish for Octomom. Today he came up with a sketch showing me as a Jedi - I had part of my hair in a braid by my ear today, and apparently that resembles this. My English teacher caught him today, and forced him to hand over the drawing by threatening him with a referral.*

She pointed out such details as the spaceships that look like flying pieces of pizza and the fact that my stick-figure counterpart looks anorexic, and then asked why Dobby the house elf was included. That, my friends, can only be explained by this:



Here you see me, with my husband Harry Potter, and our two children Jack and Allison. The background features such familiar characters as Hagrid and a badly-drawn hippogriff, as well as unique interpretations of the Sorcerer's Stone, the Chamber of Secrets, and a deathly hallow. Also present is a broomstick that my English teacher might interpret to be phallic, a "whipping" willow tree, and a sad-looking phoenix.

So my English teacher continued to examine the drawing of me in space, asking, "Michael, are you obsessed with Natasha?" Meanwhile, Ali and I were laughing so hard we were practically falling out of our seats. Soon the rest of the class became involved, explaining to the teacher that "Dooby" is in fact Dobby from Harry Potter.

After class the teacher called me and Ali up as we were leaving and asked us if we had any more drawings. She already knew about Michael's thing for Octomom** because the drawings are in my journal and she grades those sometimes, but we showed her me with Harry and a drawing of our*** love child, which Michael had cleverly called a blending of our names.

Alas, my friends, I am a Jedi. I've been waiting my whole life for this; my desire to have a light saber is only reinforced every time I walk through a sliding door. Unfortunately, all documentation of my foray into space has been confiscated. At least I can still use my marriage to Harry Potter as my claim to fame.

One last thing: look at what my sister made me! Isn't that fantastic?

* Don't ask me to explain what a referral is. I don't actually know. No one does. It's just bad.
** I know you want to see Michael's depictions of Octomom as well, but unfortunately I left them in my locker. Yes, there is more than one.
*** Meaning Ali and I.

Rant. It's been that sort of a week.

Rant. It's been that sort of a week.

Hello.

I arrived home today to discover this lovely thing waiting for me:



As you can hopefully tell by the face I'm making there, I was being sarcastic about the "lovely." "Their most REVEALING interview ever!" the cover screams at me. Actually, now that I'm sitting here staring at the magazine, I've decided to change the direction of my rant from the JoHos to teen magazines in general. Let's examine some attention-grabbers from the cover.

"How To Tell If He's A GOOD KISSER Just By Looking At Him." I'm actually slightly curious now. Does it have to do with the shoes he's wearing? The color of his hair? How clean his teeth are? Oh, nope. It has to do with dance moves, chapstick, not rushing, and chewing gum. Oh, sure, I can tell all of that just from looking at him, as I frequent dances where they hand out free chapstick and chewing gum slowly and methodically. That seems logical. (That was sarcasm.)

"17 ALERT: More Than 150,000 Girls Will Get Pregnant This Summer BY ACCIDENT." Then there's a little arrow with the words, "Could This Happen To YOU?" The artcile is titled, "The Secret Life of Pregnant Teenagers." It begins, "before you even graduate from high school, you or a girl you know will probably become pregnant." That's really encouraging - that's exactly what they should be telling us. You're going to get pregnant! It's inevitable! Then the article goes on to tell me that when I'm pregnant, since it's totally unavoidable, I will have to give up hanging out with my best friend all night, gossip sessions about guys at school, marathon shopping days, and my dreams for my future. I don't want to get into anything too controversial, but basically, I think it's horrible of Seventeen to assume that the only girls reading the magazine are the ones who are dumb enough to get pregnant.

And now I'm wondering what the chances are that those are the same girls who picked up this magazine at the grocery store just because it had the Jonas Brothers on the cover. Yes, they're cute. Yes, they have a few decent songs. But I can't imagine why anyone would want to date one of them - don't forget about how Joe broke up with Taylor Swift by text message, only to be spotted with Camilla Bell days later, not to mention the fact that pretty much the entire 20-and-under female population wants to date them. Do you really want to be with a guy with that kind of fame, who can't go outside without being photgraphed or trampled, who lives on a bus half the time and therefore probably disregards his personal hygenine, who wears pink t-shirts? I don't care what they say, real men do not wear pink. (Feel free to disagree with me on that, but you can't change my mind.)

I haven't even adressed the fact that the Jonas Brothers are BOYS. As in, they are not girls between the ages of 13 and 21, Seventeen's target audience. Maybe they can attract that type of audience, but the people featured on covers of teen magazines should be people you can admire and look up to and what to emulate. I don't know about you, but I definitely do not want to be a Jonas Brother.

I suppose, though, that it's preferable to have all the girls of the world crushing on the Jonas Brothers* as opposed to Edward Cullen. At least they're real.

One more thing, before I return to my history studying.



That pretty much begged for a face replaced.
Please note that the stack of magazines you can see on the floor behind me is not because I save them all. Why would I do that? I don't have a shelf full of magazines in my closet, no way!)

* It just occured to me that that is the most UNCREATIVE band name in the history of band names. They might as well have called themselves the Brown Haired Boys, or the We Wish We Were As Cool As The Beatles (referred to by fans as WWWWACATB).**
** I just attempted to pronounce that acronym. Now you try.***
*** Are you thinking of wasabi? Cause I am.

Complaining as a Homework Avoidance Technique

Complaining as a Homework Avoidance Technique

I really should not be blogging right now. I've had to hold myself from blogging for the past few days, because after blogging so much during April, it was pretty much natural instinct to want to sit down and blog. But I didn't. Nor, unfortunately, did I do much studying. Instead, I watched JONAS, and a new episode of Hannah Montana, and a new episode of Wizards of Waverly Place, and a new episode of Sonny With a Chance. Now I have 9 days to read a zillion pages in my review book, internalize all that information, and somehow mentally prepare myself to survive a 4 hour test.

Meanwhile, the pile on my desk is growing larger by the day and is now overflowing onto my dresser. I have 2 framed posters leaning on my wall and bed that are ready to hang up and have been for the past 2 months, but my dad just left for Spain for 10 days and they're now going to be stuck in their current positions until he returns. I have about 6 hours of Chuck to watch and 7 hours of Pottercast to listen to. I've actually been writing the last few days and not totally hating it when I reread it, and now it's going to be ignored until I get through my AP exam.

May 15th (the day after the AP test) is going to be quite a day, let me tell you. No matter that it's a school day; when the bell rings at 2:30, I'm free. I'm going to come home, watch "10 Things I Hate About You" about 12 times while eating ice cream, and finally paint my nails like I've been wanting to for weeks. I'm going to dance around to my wrock playlist for hours and reread Harry Potter and sleep. A lot.

The sad thing is, I know I could make time to paint my nails or watch Chuck or listen to Pottercast if I really wanted to. Instead I make time for blogging - or rather, I push other things out of the way so I can blog. I'm doing it right now - I have 2 different books and 3 different writing untensils on the desk in front of me, and yet here I am, blogging.

Ah, well. History will still be here tomorrow.

Oh, hey! You can follow me on twitter! Yet another way to waste my time!

A Journey to Dream World to Visit the Crazies

A Journey to Dream World to Visit the Crazies

I just went to type that title in and realized there's no number for today. That's kind of sad. And kind of not. I kind of don't want to blog today just because I know I don't have to.
Anyhow. I had a very weird dream last night that I think needs to be analyzed.

THIS IS WHERE THE PICTURE FADES AWAY AND WE GO TO DREAM WORLD.

I'm sitting in French class, where my English teacher is explaining a very complicated chart that's drawn on the whiteboard. She's telling us about how to organize our 20-page reports on Stalin and Hitler. There's a girl sitting in the front row who's my sort-of friend. She's fallen asleep, and my English teacher notices. My English teacher wakes her up and starts to yell at her, but then suddenly she turns into my world history teacher. My history teacher doesn't yell a lot; he's one of those silent mad people. So he takes a notebook from a boy sitting next to sleepy girl and gives it to sleepy girl to take notes in. This notebook is yellow, and it looks strangely like the notebook I've been writing in lately.

Then, suddenly, the scene changes and we're in a park. My history teacher passes back our chemistry labs and begins to explain to us his system of smiley faces and un-happy faces and what they mean for our grades. Then I notice a person getting into a car down the street from the park. I look closer, and it's Hank Green. So I point. "Look, it's Hank!"

Ellie screams and jumps up and down as Hank pulls around the corner. She runs toward the car and he pulls over.* He gets out and Ellie says, "you're my favorite! Can I take a picture with you?" Ellie pulls out her cell phone and hands it to our friend Sharon and then the two of us and our other friend Taylor surround Hank.** After Sharon takes the picture, I pull my phone out of my pocket so I can get a picture on it as well. But whenever I hit a button, a picture of Hello Kitty comes up. I'm getting really frustrated, so Hank reaches out to touch me on the shoulder to console me or something. I notice that he has really ladylike fingers.***

Then I woke up.

Obviously the first part of this dream shows how stressed I am with school. I apparently can't keep it straight. I don't know what this has to do with Hank. Maybe it's my subconscious expressing my desire to be watching the vlogbrothers 24/7. It's also a confirmation of the fact that I like Hank more than John - but I like John too. I can't make up my mind, so my dream did it for me, I suppose.****

FUNNY THINGS I HEARD AT SCHOOL THIS WEEK

"I, like, met this boy, only then he was in handcuffs."
- Girl walking near me yesterday when I crossed the street to meet my mom to go to the eye doctor.

"And then she was like, 'I have this habit of turning girls into lesbians,' and I was like, 'Okay, backing away now. Not gonna happen.'"
- Girl in my math class having a discussion about a senior with some other girls.

"Your bag has swine flu. It's from the wind."
- My friend Michael Kang telling me that my bag has swine flu.

This picture.*****



Steven with a cake carrier. He had it on his head right before I took this picture. In a comment on facebook, my friend Erin said, "I'm digging the helmet... were you afraid of bird poop or something?" to which Steven responded, "yes."

WEEKEND

Practice test for the AP exam tomorrow morning, then Sharon and Ellie (and Steven?) and I are going to work on our take-home tests together. Then Sunday is homework day. And study day. And day-for-hopefully-catching-up-on-sleep.

Au revoir.


* Really? Who pulls over when screaming girls are running toward their car?
** Hank never agreed to this picture. Fangirls are unstoppable.
*** I really have no idea what this can possibly mean. The only thing I can think of was that at this point my mom was shaking me to get me up.
**** That doesn't make any sense.
***** Yes, technically I didn't hear it. But I took it. That still counts.