The other day my sister stopped me in mid-speech as I was explaining some science thing to her and said "I can't explain it, but you're so Veronica right now. So you!"

I took it as a compliment (although I'm not sure what it had to do with the science stuff) because I have virtually no idea what my personality is, and it's reassuring to know that it actually exists. I have no idea how people perceive me, for the most part. I credit this to my general lack of self-awareness and my tendency walk around in a daze when I'm thinking hard, which is frequently. This leads to a very strange state of being. As a kid I thought I was pretty much the strangest person there was, so repulsive that no one would want to be friends with me. I slowly dropped that idea, but my self-blindness made it difficult. It was more of a logical deduction than anything else. These people like me, and they've got good taste, so I can't be that bad. These people treat me like everyone else, so I must be somewhat normal. I get hit on at parties, so I must be decent-looking. Etc.

The people I like most tend to have very natural personalities, ones that they are seldom fully aware of, so not knowing exactly how I come across can't be such a bad thing. Over the last few years I've learned to stop relying on other people's opinions of me to judge my own worth, but my self-awareness hasn't significantly increased, so I'm left with almost nothing to go on. After spending a good deal of time trying to figure out how I was supposed to reach an understanding of myself from an outside perspective, it dawned on me that I didn't really need to. I'm usually aware enough to avoid offending people, and I must have some kind of personality, so why not just let it go and express itself? I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.

As for Joyce Carol Oates, I'm not particularly offended by her writing; she's just not so amazing that she should be quoted on the back of every book printed in this decade as though she were the New York Times. I've seen her bullshit quotes on the backs of some of my favorite books ("a story by William Goyen is like nothing in this world but a story by William Goyen") and I don't think she has the authority to judge writers that are clearly better than her--and yet she's always given a prime spot on the sleeve. I keep reading her books, trying to figure out what the great mystery is, and I'm consistantly dissappointed. No matter how hard I try, I can't find any redeeming quality to her work, and I'm a pretty sharp reader. There are tons of mediocre books and mediocre authors out there, but none so celebrated and so publicized as her. A friend who I respect deeply recently suggested to me that I look into a certain college because she was teaching there. The whole thing is very frustrating.

One of the only things I really know is that I don't want to end up like my parents.

It's a long story, but I took some medicine at two yesterday that I'm apparantly allergic or hypersensitive to and have been suffering an aching stomach since. So until a few hours ago, I hadn't left the house since Friday night. I read half of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, one of the books Iowa assigned me, did an SAT practice test, consumed an ungodly amount of jello, ordered things from Amazon, googled X-men characters, fumed about the undeserved popularity of Joyce Carol Oates, filled fifteen or so pages in my notebook, discovered that Isaac Asimov wrote over 470 books (and wrote a considerable amount in reflection of his life), bought five-dollar tanks tops in the basement of Urban Outfitters, listened to Chuck Berry and Cat Stevens, watched some Seinfeld, and generally procrastinated studying math.

Lately I find myself wanting to look elegant and somewhat Austrian--a combination of French sexiness and German simplicity. I guess it's in my blood.

Finals hate me. Here's what's happened so far:

iPod broke.

English final- Sarah told us in class that it was at 8:15. Alex, Max, Nijel, Chris and I showed up at 8. Turns out it's at 12:15. I didn't even have an iPod to pass the time with. We were all coffee-stoked and by the time the test started I was ready to fall asleep.

History paper got deleted after about five hours of work. When I turn it in, the glue has gotten stuck to the cover picture and Ms. Reyes has to rip my folder to get it off. Then she asked me why the pictures weren't in the text. "My computer broke" is never a plausible excuse, so I made something up.

Layout took forever and still hasn't hit the press.

I was exhausted last night after helping Harry pick new shoes and feeding both him and Zack, so I went to bed at 10. At 11 they wake me up to say that on the answering machine Tim left a message five or six hours ago telling me that the Spanish final is at 8, not at 12. So I lost five hours of study time that I had been counting on. I couldn't study at 11, so I tried to go back to sleep, but I stayed up worrying until 12:30.

But this morning my iPod was miraculously fixed and I realized that I was actually pretty well prepared for my Spanish final.

I think it's a good sign.

So I work on my history paper for five hours and in the morning at seven a.m. I discover that all of my work is gone. I'm never using a PC again.

And our punk-rock neighbor with the black hair and the sweet bulldog is gone and Sonya is back. She's been pounding nails into the walls all morning while I was wasting post-its trying to find all of my citations again.

I guess I always felt that I didn't need to say this, but I've thought that many times and have usually been proven wrong.

I don't particularly value intelligence or beauty. I enjoy them and I think that people should strive to achieve them, so in a sense I do value them, but I don't use them to judge the values of people. I try not to, at least. I'm sure that to some extent I do. But I'm also constantly aware of the fact that these things are inherited, not earned, and I dislike people who assert their superiority on the basis of intelligence or attractiveness alone.

What I value in a person is that which is done by choice or learned. I value education. I value skill. I value inspiration and love of life and sense of humor. I value the choice to think. I value passion. I value optimism. I value intellectuality. I value effort. I value the ability to bring out the best in other people. I value the ability to make people laugh. I value the ability to be happy. I value the ability to love.

I know I'm smart and I think I'm acceptably attractive. But I don't think I'm better than other people for those reasons. I judge myself by the standards mentioned above, and by those standards I'm not doing particularly well. I have a very strange sense of humor and consequently have trouble making people laugh, I can be extremely pessimistic, depressed and apathetic, I seldom work hard, and I'm inherently somewhat antisocial.

Lately, however, I've been more inspired to think and write and work. I've been more alive and passionate. I've laughed more. I've been more intellectual and social and playful and loving. I've been working my ass off. So I'm getting to where I want to be. I'm not there yet, though, and I won't be for a long time, and I know it.

As promised, some favorites:

Amphibrach- a three-syllabled foot: stressed, unstressed, stressed. It isn't taught much any more.
Anagnorisis- a moment of recognition or discovery by a protagonist, usually plot-related and most frequently used in reference to Greek tragedy.
Aposiopesis- a breaking-off of speech: "What the--?"
Bathos- an unexpected drop from the lofty to the trivial, sometimes employed on purpose but usually the mark of bad writing.
Chiasmus- two juxtaposed sentences or clauses in which the syntax is the same but the placement of the words is different: "They respected him because he was powerful and he was powerful because they respected him."
In Medias Res- starting a work in the middle of the action
Litotes- affirming a statement by negating its opposite: "Was the loft big?" "It certainly wasn't small."
Meiosis- purposeful drastic understatement
Metathesis- switching a vowel and a consonant or two consonants in colloquial pronounciation: "aks" instead of "ask," or "bird" instead of the Old English "brid"
Pathos- the quality in a work that evokes emotion
Paralipsis (or Praeterito)- highlighting something by claiming not to mention it: "It wouldn't be fair to talk about his small salary."
Pathetic phallacy- atribution of human emotion to nonhuman objects, usually the weather.
Periphrasis- obnoxious use of more words than are necessary
Synaesthesia- using the vocabulary of one sensory experience to describe another
Trope- any member of a category of figures of speech that extend the literal meaning of words by inviting comparison to other words, things or ideas. Metaphor, synonym and synechdoche are all types of trope.
Zeugma- using one word to modify two or more other words in the same sentence, often in a different way: "he took his hat and his leave."

The 5 types of irony in literature:
Verbal- a statement that, by its context, means the opposite of that which it expresses when isolated
Situational- when two characters' understandings of a situation contrast sharply, such as Wilfred Owens' use of wartime slogans to highlight the injustice he sees in war
Romantic- when the writer distances the reader from the plot and characters by reminding the reader of his or her presence.
Dramatic- when the reader knows more about the plot than a character does, giving the characters' words and actions added meaning. Frequently employed in tragedy.
Cosmic- contrast between the purposeful actions of men and the indifference of fate. Thomas Hardy is often erroneously credited with inventing cosmic irony.

Isn't it cool?!

Harry and I had our anniversary. LK came home and made me pasta. Burrito Loco is once again crawling with grads. The newspaper is almost done. My english final is on Tuesday and I need to get an A on it in order to get one for the year. Missed Moll's show on Friday by accident but met Mike. Spent the whole afternoon doing layout and haven't touched my History paper yet. A glass of Bailey's made my uncle and aunt seem abrasive and obnoxious. Arguing about whether I'm going to work for a lawyer, a hispanic organization, or Karen Patwa this summer. Clothes-swapping. Reading. Walking. Harp playing. My iPod is freaking out. Maple candy and buttered bagels and summer sausage sandwiches. Meeting my tutor at Starbucks and talking about literature instead of math. Recurring impulse to call Harry just to hear him on the other end. Going to sleep late becuase my parents are out seeing Tom Verlaine without me. Donating clothes to thrift shops to make way for new ones.

All wonderfully unremarkable. Soft and sweet times. Summer is back.

People who are nice to everyone make everyone around them uncomfortable because they highlight their incecurities. (I hope you can decipher my meaning through all those "they"s.) It's almost as bad as being mean to everyone. You have to wonder what they really think of you. On the other hand, it does make things comfortable in social situations.

SO MUCH WORK and Zack and Harry are on their way over and I'm not sure how I'm going to get it all done.

Dancing is awesome. I think I'm going to try to take a tap class this summer.

Hmmm. Now that it's not late last night that editorial I posted about seems a lot weaker. The ideas are there, though. Donovan gave me some good advice about making it less and more dense in the right spots and easier to read. I've got a lot to work with.

While I was eating dinner Harry called (and mistook my mom for Rosa). After a few minutes of conversation he realized that I was chewing into the phone--very sexy, I know.
"V, are you eating?" he asked, sounding shocked and apalled.
"I'm eating barbeque chicken. Why?"
"What are you doing? It's our anniversary! We're going out tonight! How could you possibly forget?"
"Harry, that's tomorrow."
"Oh."

Apparently, he was calling me from his cell phone just outside the subway, about to pick me up for a romantic two-dollar dinner. And I thought about how silly and bizarre and quirky he is and remembered why I love him.

Two years is a long time.

I got in a real fight with Robin in Photo this morning. She keeps forgetting that I'm a junior because everyone else in the class is a sophomore. She forgave me for skipping the most recent assignment, though, because she liked my somewhat freaky photos of a hairbrush and because she remembered that I have two more SAT IIs, and she stopped freaking out.

My dad said that when he was in high school in Nowhereville, Wisconsin and had the only rock band in town, they didn't call themselves "hippies" at all. "You were a square, a greaser or a freak," he said. I don't know why I find that so interesting. I guess everything gets distorted over time.

I get high off of good grammar. I don't always employ it, but I know how to use it and I love when writing is so gramatically correct that there are no bumps to trip on, no confusing references or unclear run-ons, nothing to hinder the experience that the author is trying to convey.

There's also something thrilling about bad translations of good texts. The words are so foreign and stiff and un-English, and the ideas are so fluid and smooth! I wish Nabakov hadn't translated himself. I'd love to read a really crappy translation of his stuff.

And I have in-house because I was late a lot last week. It's a pain but it's probably good for me, because I have so much work these days that I can't afford to duck out to the East Village Thrift Shop or Thai On Two during the school day any more.

Renata just peeked over my shoulder. "'I get high off of good grammar'? Laaaaaame." And then she kissed me.

And that's the story of my life.

So I took one page from my notebook and sat down and wrote a Letter from the Editor. And it's fucking GOOD. I amaze myself sometimes.

I'd rather be respected than liked.
I'd rather be interesting than pretty.
I'd rather be happy than amusing.
I'd rather be smart than sexy.
I'd rather read than watch TV.
I'd rather eat mole with tortillas than eat all of the candy in the world.
I'd rather have love than sex.
I'd rather make art than money.
I'd rather write essays than write poems.
I'd rather be awake all night and sleep all day than do it the other way around.
I'd rather speak German than French.
I'd rather be homeless than have a boring job.
I'd rather be overworked than underworked.
I'd rather hear a harmonica and an upright bass than any other instruments.
I'd rather learn something cool than get an A.
I'd rather be proud than modest.
I'd rather be modest than condescending.

Rather suddenly seems like a very strange word. I can barely remember how to use it. I have a feeling that nothing I've just written makes any sense.

I promise that when finals are over I'll transcribe some stuff from my notebook and write something interesting for a change. Hell, maybe I'll even tackle politics. It could get wild.

Life is so rich! Music everywhere and beats under the skins of everything I touch and the subway under my feet and the hot summer air combing my hair into thick locks and something new to write down every minute. And I'm stuck taking trig notes on my fire escape in my pijamas because I can't go outside until I've studied for my two tests on monday and test and half-final on tuesday.

I don't even care. I don't even mind my period or the fact that we're not having dinner tonight because mom made black mole at two. I don't mind not going busquing with Matt or seeing Harry or going to the thrift market or sipping Bailey's in someone's apartment over a Dylan debate. Studying isn't so bad. Granola bars are enough. My sister is good for conversation or music when I'm tired and the stuff I'm learning is interesting enough to keep me going.

For example: I can't describe how awesome it is that my history final is a paper on the history of Greenwich Village with photos and primary sources. Reading about the Village's writers is almost as fun as actually reading them. And did you know that the Village is the only US neighborhood to have its own definition in the OED?

I ran into Ron Singer on the street the other day and asked him which books he would recommend and he sent an email to Maria Fahey giving me permission to borrow a copy of Literary New York. "Don't lose it or forget to return it, though, because those are out of print and could cost up to a hundred dollars to replace," Maria warned me.

It turned out to be an incredible book, worth more than all of the rest of my sources put together. So I went on Amazon and found it on sale for $0.73. I ordered two. I'd recommend it to any lit nerds like myself out there who're interested in the Village. If there even are any.

I was skimming my second quarter notebook looking for some math stuff and I realized that it was virtually bereft of any creative thought. There were depressing inky drawings of satyrs and blackbirds and such and a few copied poems of other peoples' but nothing new or original. No jotted thoughts or images or even ideas for later use. The backbone of my play was at the very beginning but after those few pages it was just class notes and sketches and grades and homework. I must have really had it bad.

I'm a million times more alive now than I was then. I've never been so open with myself or so strong before. I've never been happier.

And I keep thinking of all of the incredible people I know and how much I love them. I see friends flocking back to the city where the Mud Mobile is putting ice in the coffee again and drunken parties are blossoming on rooftops. I want to photograph them and call them and poke them over facebook and write about them and tell the world what I think of them. And it's almost summer and now I can!

Just read an exposé called Dropout Nation in Time magazine. I can't help but think of the people I knew at Anokijig. Wonderful people. Some without parents, some without homes, some who have AIDs or are HIV positive, some who can't come out without being ostracized (and who do it anyway). Some who died. Some who had 4.0 GPAs and loved theater and had no money to go to college. All beautiful and all beaten down in some way. Everything seemed normal until you talked to people and heard their stories and realized how bad it can be, even in this wealthy country. And I love them and miss them and I am not one of them.

Haven't been blogging much lately. Haven't been sleeping much, either, come to think of it. I've never been so concerned about finals in my life. I'm also probably getting sick and already getting my period. Some of the stuff I'm learning is really cool, though. One of these days I'm going to post a bunch of literary terms just so you can see how wierd and awesome they are.

And David ordered bull penis at a Japanese restaurant on his birthday last night. And took a bite. That's courage, folks.

No sixteen-year-old should have to have her own resume.

I have a million thoughts in my head. My notebook is filling up faster than I can believe. I'll need a new one soon. I have a million things I feel like writing about and no time to do it in.

Life is so wierd.

Don't see Art School Confidential. It sucked.

I love David Tay!

I just interviewed Frank McCourt.

He signed my book--"To Veronica with blessings."

He was hilarious and sharp and outrageous and inspired and I've never felt so motivated in my life.

I don't know if I'll ever come off of this cloud.

I've become so insanely dependent on my notebook that I pull it out in silent meeting, during jazz concerts at school, while I'm walking down the street, in the bathrooms of restaurants if they're classy or at the table if they're not, and all day during class. I write in bite-sized one- or two-line phrases but when I reread a whole page I feel like there's enough material for a novel.

I came to realize that it's much nicer than blogging becuase I can say exactly what I mean, use people's names, and talk about secrets that I would happily tell my friends but wouldn't want my teachers to find out, for instance. Or things I've only told a few people, or have never told anybody. I'm a slightly secretive person by nature.

On the other hand, I can be petty or talk about politics on my blog, which I never do on paper. It's more journal-like and less introspective.

I've really become an addict, though. I don't turn around when I've forgotten my keys but I run back upstairs if I don't have a notebook and a pen (or at least a pen and a napkin or piece of scrap paper).

Randomly, um, the jazz concert was awesome. More about it later. Alida Borgna is beautiful. Dan Yawitz can brighten anyone's day. DaSilva is a sex machine and Justin is the kindest person on the face of this earth. Ali Singer has a soft side and Sarah is one huge walking soft side. And I'm really looking forward to Jazz Vocal next year.

Every now and then it occurs to me that I'm smart, I'm decently attractive and healthy, I'm psychologically balanced, I have an incredibly boyfriend, and I'm living in the greatest city in the world.

The world is at my fingertips.

There are so many things I want to do!

My days are marked now by a pervasive sense of stillness. It is a stillness in which hard work and frenzied intellectual stimulation have their spaces, one in which stress and loud music and rigorous work schedules are but flags marking the slow and steady passage of time. My afternoons are planned in hour-long chunks; my frees are devoted to various kinds of work; my modest pleasures are efficiently planned.

It is a kind of stress so focused, so academic and so intense that there is no room in my life for the social complications which might prevent efficient work. My life is instantly rendered simple and highly enjoyable as I focus on the tasks at hand an nothing else.

It's a state of constant stimulation. I reward myself by biking to school, taking detours when I walk home, writing through all of my classes, eating lunch with friends and socializing in the hallways or in the library when I have a few free minutes. If I get everything done in time I allow myself a few episodes of Seinfeld and vanilla ice cream with chocolate fudge.

I couldn't live like this for more than a month. But it's lovely for the time being. There's no way to describe it other than still and steady, even though I find myself singing in the streets, snapping my fingers to Meeting House jazz, playing the harmonica and teaching people drinking games on a regular basis. The days cross themselves off of my calendar at a perfect pace and life slips by smoothly.

Edited in: in retrospect this is a very long and political post written very late at night. If I were you I'd skip it.




So it's 10:00 and I still haven't changed out of my pijamas, although I did clean myself up a little. I have to admit that I procrastinated badly, giving clothes to Renata, scatting to her piano improvs, catching up with some websites, calling people, binding broken books with packing tape, and finishing a few previously-abandoned books in between history chapters and math notes. But I eventually finished everything I set out to do, and my dad persuaded me to watch an old episode of My Favorite Martian over dinner.

The basic plot of the episode was that Tim went back in time and told a Native American chief not to sell Manhattan Island to explorers for $24 because it was a bad deal. It didn't even consider the fact that they really did gyp the "Indians." It was extremely racist, belittling their religion, characterizing their speech as broken English and literally calling them an ugly race. The worst part was the way it was framed as fun and patriotic, depicting the heroes as bravely winning territory back for the US. It's not as though this was made in the twenties with King Kong or anything, either; it came straight out of the early sixties.

It made me realize that there really was dramatic oppression within our country at one point--so dramatic as to be considered patriotic. I think that part of the reason for lack of motivation in political protests these days is the simple fact that political issues have become less dramatic since then. Most of the current protests are only attended by the groups demanding rights (like the immigration rally in Union Square last weekend) or pertain to international affairs rather than local ones. We can all vote, we can have abortions within six months of conceiving, and we have affirmitive action policies, unemployment and wellfare to prevent class division complaints. The political battles are vaguer now--when can we have abortions? How poor is poor? How much to tax each income bracket?

That's not to say that there aren't pressing political issues to be addressed. There certainly are. But they're not immediate enough to cause passionate protests or real movements anymore. They're overseas, or applicable only to small parts of the population, or based on religious principals that nobody is quite sure of. So nobody cares enough to do anything.

I have been criticized for my belief that protests don't accomplish anything (especially since I said something about it in meeting), but I strongly feel that it's true, and I speak from experience. I spent at least two years going to protests and political events several times a week, occasionally cutting play rehearsal to take trains to Washington or picket fur vendors and sometimes risking arrest. What I quickly discovered was that most protests don't even have coherent causes. Some are better than others, but most take on a festive quality and earn wonder from onlookers but achieve no real effect.

The weekend before last there were four protests within a ten-block radius of my apartment. It was nearly impossible to leave that radius without subwaying two stops out of it underground, which was ridiculous, because I lived eight blocks away from where I was trying to go, anyway. They all made the paper but none of them made the cover because frankly, it's not news any more. Politicians don't fear popular unrest because they expect it. It's trendy to disagree with whatever the government just did, anyway, so they're not really worried about it. There was a time when the prospect of 100,000 people walking to DC was frightening and could cause serious political reforms that changed the way Americans think.

In our modern quasi-socialist nation, the government has no fear of its people. Neither do the people fear the government. These days protests are so common and half-assed that they don't even seem to correlate to political events. There's no attempt to resist or stop them and no attempt to appease those that attend them. Just apathetic silence on both sides.

Even Cindy Sheehan was recently photographed smiling at an anti-war protest in a bright pink shirt with the sleeves cut off, dancing to rock music that supposedly supported the cause, and was quoted saying that "I'm having a great time."

A few months ago some of my friends from UBC walked to protest a cut in AIDS research budgeting and got arrested along with dozens of other people (and released, because Eddie studied law in college and remembered that they can't detain you overnight without a charge). The protest and mass arrests didn't make the front section of the Times, the Chicago Sun Times, AM New York, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Evening Star or the Onion. It certainly didn't effect any changes on the federal budgeting policy. In fact, all it did was help a bunch of people make friends and get excercise. It didn't matter that several of them had AIDs or were HIV positive. The government has developed an immunity to most types of civil unrest, regardless of their sincerity.

New York is probably 90% democratic, anyway, so they're usually preaching to the choir, and they know it--in fact, their entire code of behavior is based on the belief that everyone agrees with them. There's never any indication on the part of the protestors of a desire to talk things over or to persuade others to listen to their perspectives. Like Orwell's vision of government (I've been thinking about it a lot lately), a protest is an end in itself. The pretense of attempting to instigate change is only a historical facet of the protest, an interesting fact that doesn't effect the behavior of the modern activist.

What international crises like those of Darfur and Sudan need is real and effective resources: essentially, time or money. Protestors lend neither. Fundraising, volunteering or travelling abroad to the sources of the conficts are effective ways of working towards solutions. Even letter-writing has its place, although I doubt that it has a real effect on congressmens' decisions. Protesting doesn't.

Whoever signed me up for an "italk2much.com" review got what was coming to them. They wrote that "She’s 16. And she’s got smarts. And she writes unbelievably well." They read my retaliative post before Harry talked me into taking it down and liked it. I know they're right when they say that I need to "lighten the fuck up," but it's hard when I have so much work that I only get to go out about once a week (and by go out I mean go somewhere other than school or a coffee shop to do homework). In three weeks, once my finals and SAT IIs are over, I'll stand on my fire escape and shout "let there be light!"

I know I'm overanalytical, too serious, a little dry, and abnormally academic (although the latter doesn't always translate to interest in my classes). I'm also a hermit at the moment, though, and as I get closer to freedom I feel my wild summer self coming back. After taking an SAT II in the morning, I had a good time at Matt's last night celebrating Chloe's birthday, but got sleepy towards the end and curled up with a Calvin & Hobbes to watch some semi-random people play videogames and cuddle with Harry. Sang Be-Bop-a-Loo-La in the dark on my way home and watched a bunch of Seinfeld with my sister before going to bed in an old Anarchy t-shirt with no grades, bloggers, SATs or relationship problems to plague me.

And today it's almost five and I'm still in my pijamas, eating stale cupcakes and trying to catch up on the work I blew off on Saturday.

On the bright side, someone googled me and got this post from last summer and I definately see my current self in it. (I know, I know, I just linked to myself.) I don't feel any different, aside from the fact that my parents aren't trying to kill me now. And I know that this summer will be even better.

At least it's almost over.

I wrote a fiery post and Harry talked me into taking it down. Anonymous comments are off. By way of clarification, I don't think that the people in my English class are less intelligent or lesser people--I think they don't care, and it makes me sad because I'm very passionate about literature, especially the book we're reading now.

If you don't like me, don't read my blog.

Bob Rosen comments every day that "It's unbelievable! You're actually from fourty years ago! You're like the people I knew growing up! You're like someone from my generation!" The people Bob knew growing up include Mezz Mezzrow's son, so I take it as a compliment. Anyway, it was his birthday today, and we all sang for him and had a lovely time. Bob's awesome.

History of Jazz is happening!

I'm signed up for twelve classes next year, three of which are APs. I don't know whether it's suicide or a great idea, because all of my classes are going to be really interesting but really hard.

And I have an AP tomorrow and an awards ceremony tonight and I've spent the last hour surfing the internet.

And, um, this.

EDIT: MY BOYFRIEND'S AWESOME

I blog too much. Anyway, here's pictures of the skirt I just finished. It's not an especially amazing skirt, and I've made cooler stuff, but it was hard to make the ruffles hang right and to get the waist band to fit and slope the right way, so I'm proud of myself.

The raw materials:


If you ever wondered what I look like naked, it's something like this (but not made out of the Financial Times and packing tape):

The last two weeks have been increasingly political for me, culminating in all-out verbal brawls in three classes today and debate and discussion over lunch and in Jazz Vocal. The wierd part is that I didn't mean to get into debates at all. I'd just say "I think that what this passage refers to is Gatsby's conception of God, not Nick's," and I'd have Sarah and Sophie V. screaming at me (although Trevor came up to me in the library to say that "I was behind you the whole way in English this morning"). Someone said something in meeting about the lack of passion of protestors at the Save Darfur march last weekend and I made a comment to the effect that protests were no longer useful because the government no longer feared public opinion. My entire history class attacked me. Then Tim and Dan Yawitz came to my defense in Jazz Vocal. Then I had lunch with a bunch of local quasi-politicos and talked about the link between evolution and intelligence, which quickly degenerated into a debate over what intelligence actually is. And Maria and I debated subtle points of poetry as I prepared for the AP.

Thinking makes me happy.

The janitor just caught me trying to do the moonwalk while waiting for the elevator.

So I took Jaya's advice and looked a year into my archives, and it was decidedly me but it was also decidedly outdated. I used to be so social! What happened to me? Harry was at Friends and I was doing Bram's World Fair paper and Camille's poetry stuff and my parents' college preoccupation was absurd and I was young and confused and not all that happy with myself. I didn't care about my grades. I cared what people thought of me. And I was a terrible blogger.

I don't take my blog all that seriously any more. It's like scrap paper to me. I update several times a day and then leave it alone for entire weeks. I've almost completely stopped titling my posts. They're not stories at all. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. I guess I'm becoming more casual about things.



Stress is off the roof. I have my AP English test this Thursday, Spanish SAT II this Saturday, and Harry on Friday. On top of that, my dad's an asshole and my mom's half insane. I accredit my survival to Harry, Seinfeld, Frank McCourt and chocolate fudge sundaes.

The other day my dad was trying to get sentimental about the fact that I'm going to college and he pointed to the picture of me at age 8 in front of a piece of the Berlin Wall and said something along the lines of "I miss the days when you were that small." "I don't," I said. "I'm much happier now." I got a strange sense that he wished I weren't.



I bought an incredibly awsome dark red Members Only jacket with a broken zipper at a thrift market and showed it to Dan Yawitz after the play and he said "it's very you." Is there a better way to indirectly compliment someone?