| {who could ask for anything more?} |
[Nov. 30th, 2009|04:57 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  busy | ] |
So I was with Gyakuten Saiban Meets Middle School Orchestra today, and it occurred to me that it's my last week with them for the whole semester. On Thursday I'll conduct a piece at the sixth grade concert and then I will be DONE.
I was a little sad, I'll admit. I kind of wish I could say things to them. Give them all a little personal something to remember me by. "Bailey, someday you will look your gender. I promise." Or, "Ki, in three years you will break hearts." Or, "MACKENZIE IF YOU DO NOT FUCKING PRACTICE OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK I SWEAR BEFORE ALL THAT IS HOLY THAT YOU WILL NOT LIVE TO SEE THE NEW YEAR."
But I can't do that. So instead I just patiently tune their shitty rental violins and applaud their beautiful, heroic attempts and think to myself how nice it will be to see them all again. After a break. God help me, after a very. long. break.
My workload is crushing me comfortably again. :D GSU app is finished and has only to be paid for and submitted. NYU app has me panicking, as a family emergency has rendered Ziggy unavailable, which means I will be preparing all my auditions by myself, and oh btw those need to be sent out WITHIN TWO WEEKS. Final internship presentation, as well as SURPRISE ESSAY, are looming terrifyingly. My calculus final is TOMORROW with all the rest of my performance finals following in merry succession. I have a chapter of econ a night to complete all week (and this isn't even me procrastinating, it's Allred realizing he has about ten days left to teach us the rest of the textbook).
Ah, panic, darling, how I missed you. <3 Come into my arms and let me get you into a good stranglehold before Christmas break. You will not break me this time. |
|
|
| [you're the sky that I fell through] |
[Nov. 27th, 2009|07:14 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  full | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Owl City - If My Heart Was A House | ] |
My idea of being productive over Thanksgiving break: Looking at my internship presentation rubric and linefacing for five minutes as I realize just how badly I procrastinated. Then going back to having fun. :D
It won't be difficult. It's just boring and kind of a bitch. I have to talk interestingly for five minutes about middle schoolers playing the violin badly. siiiiiiiiiigh.
But! My second Thanksgiving was wonderful. I want to have two Thanksgivings every year. Yesterday's turducken was delicious and amazing, and I felt so happy and welcome at Nicole's, and it was just... lovely. :3 Every bit of it was wonderful.
Today's, though, was lovely, too, because my family and our Thanksgiving traditions are just... strange and beautiful. We all got up, Mom started cooking (extremely cheerfully - this is her favorite meal of the year) and the rest of us piled into the car to go hiking, which we do every Thanksgiving to get out of her hair while she makes delicious things, because the other part of family tradition is that no one eats before the main meal. When we got back the food wasn't quite done, so Mom pulled me into the kitchen to help cook.
She's such an incredible cook. All the food was traditional - stuffed acorn squash, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, sweet potato souffle, mashed potatoes, and a twenty-pound turkey that barely fit in the oven. And as we cooked we danced around the kitchen together and sang along to Sport Freunde Stiller and Die Prinzen, and Mom taught me the German way to make gravy and heated up a bottle of Glühwein to go with our American feast. Just like every year.
So the food was delicious; the traditional sleeping off of the tryptophan was marvelous; and now we have reached the end, where Mom sits in the kitchen with a beer and her laptop, watching YouTube videos of the German pop stars of her childhood and singing along and crying. This is contentment. :D |
|
|
| this is actually the best holiday of the year |
[Nov. 26th, 2009|10:18 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  thankful | ] |
| [ | music |
| | some opera dad's listening to | ] |
Well, Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. :D We're having ours a day late to accomodate poor Mom's working schedule, but as I will be nomming turducken at Nicole's, this is a-ok with me. This is my favorite holiday - because it involves vast quantities of delicious food, which is always awesome, and because it's not a goddamn gift-giving holiday. Christmas is just depressing these days, seeing as I started seeing the displays in October; but there's nothing to sell on Thanksgiving, and so it's one of our few holidays that's still actually about something. I love it.
All you Americans on my f-list: I hope your turkey day is delicious, fun, and not full of family feuding; all you non-Americans: it might not be your holiday, but I'm thankful for you guys. <3
I leave you with what I now consider to be the picture that defines my life.
( Okay this is a huge fucking picture so it gets cut )
Mizu, I think I kind of need a Nerf gun now, so that we can do this again, only on larger scale and with enough darts for both of us. When they start making grenade launchers, I will be at your doorstep with one within the hour. |
|
|
| {they say it's better the second time} |
[Nov. 24th, 2009|05:08 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
MRS. PINNER: I'm just over here on the piano. Playing weird stuff.
MRS. NA: Please listen when Mrs. Pinner plays weird stuff, guys.
MIDDLE SCHOOL ORCHESTRA TEACHERS: We do the weird stuff. |
|
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| [she said she's found someone who's gonna hold her hand] |
[Nov. 23rd, 2009|02:48 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Reel Big Fish - She Has A Girlfriend Now | ] |
You know how sometimes people on your friendslist post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.
Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out. :'D
( Actually, this will fill in nicely for what I would have posted anyway. ) |
|
|
| {over my head I hear music in the air} |
[Nov. 22nd, 2009|11:34 am] |
Went to ten a.m. Mass this morning. Father Al said the homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King, and it was beautiful. I mean, it one of those homilies where when he finishes five hundred people go dead quiet for a moment while they get over the waves of awesome resounding through their souls. As Father Al turned to go back toward the altar in preparation for the profession of faith, somebody up front said loudly, "Beautiful." There was a smattering of applause that began to grow in volume as the crowded church picked it up.
Father Al all but dashed back to the ambo. "No, no, no," he said, waving us into silence. "We don't applaud homilies. They crucified the savior whom I serve. They didn't applaud him."
Eighteen years a practicing Catholic and the simple beauty of it still finds ways to stun me. |
|
|
| [and will you step in line or release the glitch] |
[Nov. 21st, 2009|09:54 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  cynical | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Silversun Pickups - Panic Switch | ] |
I'm starting to get the sneaking suspicion that my economics teacher has never actually graded anything I've ever turned in.
What brought me to this conclusion:
-I noticed that I've never gotten a single question wrong that I haven't left completely blank. I'm not bad at econ, but jesus, in half a year you'd think I'd fuck up once or five times.
-I know he doesn't write them, but the questions are such bullshit I don't think he even reads them. Occasionally we get one that says something like, "What does the textbook say about the interest rate's effect on the aggregate demand curve? What conclusion does the book draw?" (My answer to this one: "READ THE FREAKING BOOK." I got it right.)
-I am passing the class. This is proof enough that he is not grading anything.
So, I'm testing my theory. I have twenty-one short-answer questions to finish by Monday on monetary and fiscal policy in relation to the aggregate demand curve. I am working through them with the usual brain-killing slowness, seeing as they are over TWO chapters and not in order; but in every answer, I am replacing the word "money" with the word "kittens." To see if he notices.
God, I hope he does. Even if he fails me for the assignment (even though my answers are, I think, correct if you just assume that the currency of the United States is kittens), if he doesn't notice it I don't think I'll be able to find a reason to do my homework ever again. See, Allred's a cool guy who seriously loves econ and tries to make what even he admits is a really boring class interesting for everyone (even if he accomplishes this by yelling things about tater tots at random people in the middle of his sentences), but if I can pass the class with an A by skimming the chapter every week, sleeping through the class, and taking ten minutes to write about kittens in the evening, I'm actually going to be really sad.
Scholarly integrity. I has it.
Though Frau Haney has yet to return the essay I wrote on kittens in 1960s East Germany watching the sunrise from the Berlin Wall, which actually kind of distresses me |
|
|
| [picture yourself riding under the freeway] |
[Nov. 19th, 2009|09:18 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Paper Raincoat - Brooklyn Blurs | ] |
Four days in the Frigid Northlands with my father. :D I am home. I am happy.
( Annapolis )
( New York City )
So. Great vacation was great. Awesome colleges were awesome. Dad and I bonded a lot. I got a scarf in the St. John's colors.
Biggest adventure: when EVERY PLANE IN THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES broke at the SAME DAMN TIME this morning. Namely, just as our flight was making ready to leave. WOOHOO EPIC DELAYS AND CROWDED AIRPORT.
I like airports in general, though. I love seeing people moving everywhere. I love the impermanence. I love that I can watch everybody and not owe them anything. It's restful in its own way. And I love planes - every time I see one I think with complete confidence that that shit will never leave the ground. And then it does. I love it. :D
To do:
-get into St. John's
-get into NYU
-get into Agnes Scott
-get into GSU
-get into UGA (at the behest of my parents)
-BEG FOR FINANCIAL AIIIIIIIIIIIIIID |
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|
| {breathe in breathe out exhale and inhale} |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|09:58 pm] |
BREAKING NEWS: CLAMP UPDATES REGULARLY AND EXPLAINS SHIT AT THE SAME TIME
( Fangirl cries: 'It isn't even mindfuck!' )
In other news: Finally finished Fruits Basket last night (yes I know SHUT UP.) Bawled like a child, or came close to it. Decided to reread xxxHolic vol. 14 to cheer me up. Realized it was the one with the dead cat in the rain. Nearly bawled some more. Considered that dead cats are becoming something of a theme in xxxHolic. Didn't know what to make of this. Stopped reading and went to sleep.
Also: Realized that technically, CLAMP already explained everything. Only they did it incredibly vaguely with strange and roundabout foreshadowing thirty chapters ago. Now I'm totally paranoid that I'm missing something that's going to be really vital in four months.
...anyway. Done geeking.
Tomorrow I'm leaving on my college visits~! I'll have Internet, though. I'll be back on Thursday having finally seen New York City. I'm so excited. :D
Oh and my concert on Thursday was incredible. Incredible. We kicked so much ass. And my solo went almost without a hiccup, and TJ's piece was the best one out of all of them, and so many of my friends came, and I'm still riding that high because it was so awesome. :DDDDDD |
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| My Mom Is More Awesome Than She Sometimes Appears, part 24601 |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|08:48 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | contemplative | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Owl City - Vanilla Twilight | ] |
Mom: So do you actually have time to read tonight, or are you reading for school?
Me: Kinda for fun. St. John's wants me to have read some Plato by next week. I've been reading Apology all day. It's really good.
Mom: ...I read that. I remember it. Your dad said I was the biggest nerd he'd ever met because I cried at the end.
And she spent the next few minutes flipping through my copy with this dreamy half-smile on her face, nodding at familiar passages, laughing at my annotations, and finally handing it back to me with a "Very good."
I had no idea my mom's a Plato-obsessed philosophy nut. She and Plato have a very similar relationship to me and Milton, actually. Apparently her college experience involved a lot of Saturday nights spent alone in a dorm rereading Republic and crying for Socrates.
Dammit, she needs to tell me these things about her. I would have read Plato before if I'd known. |
|
|
| [and when you wake up everything is gonna be fine] |
[Nov. 8th, 2009|04:34 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  content | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Streetlight Manifesto - A Better Place, A Better Time | ] |
This weekend I slept 9 hours on Saturday. I cleaned for four hours. I ate delicious food and saw Zombieland and played the kazoo with Mizu for a day. I went to Kat's play. I spent a lot of time staring into space. I danced with a vacuum cleaner. I determinedly did not think about Calculus for two days.
Now mom is home from Deutschland. She missed us. We missed her. We're going out for dinner. I'm looking forward to it.
I'm still pervasively tired, but I'm not frantic anymore, which is a lovely change. I'll go to bed early tonight. I've decided that sleep is now the priority. There are certain things I'm just not going to sacrifice, and the lucidity to remember that a child is waiting for me to get her off the bus is one of those things.
Okayokay. I'm ready for tomorrow now. Or, y'know, ready to plant my feet against the floor and ram my shoulder into tomorrow a few dozen times; and even if it doesn't give against the pressure, maybe I'll put a nice dent in it, anyway.
xxxHolic 191 cheered me up immensely. :D Life: needs moar shirtless!archer!Doumeki. Also this arc was so beautiful. I'll buy whatever volume has these chapters in it. |
|
|
| [peer over the edge; can you see me?] |
[Nov. 6th, 2009|05:09 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Owl City - The Tip Of The Iceberg | ] |
I am fast approaching burnout. This can't keep going. I need to throw my arms out and scream STOP and the world needs to stop moving around me for just ten minutes - just five minutes - just thirty seconds of pure, perfect, silence. And there needs to be someone else in that silence. I don't know who. I don't even know if it matters. All I need is thirty seconds in which one other person stands beside me and acknowledges that yes, this is silence, pure and real, not the artificial silence of nights when I can't hear the crickets for the sound of my own breathing, and not the forced silence of sixty-five eighth graders trying to giggle without making a noise, and not the silence of a crowd waiting with bated breath for me to perform - I'd rather hear their collective sigh as I walk off the stage, I'd rather stand in an empty room, I'd rather hold my breath and let the night breathe for me.
I want somebody to hold me close and put my head on their shoulder and whisper You can't. I want somebody, anybody, to stop believing I can do everything. Let me curl up on the stage with my back against my cello and fall asleep for two days, and let them applaud when I wake up smiling. Let me curl up on the bed with my back to someone warm and wake up with an arm over me and a smile mussing my hair. Let me hide in in my own mind for a day. Let me pray for a week.
Someday something's going to happen that I cannot control, and then I will break. My adrenaline comes from the desperate belief that the world is not flying at me, but that I am flying at it - that I am somehow steering my life into the lane that will carry it down I-85 without traffic and without smog, at eighty miles an hour, and that eventually the skyline will rise in the distance and I will suddenly realize the destination I can't yet see. But someday something will come hurtling at me from the other direction and I will crash and I will burn and I will lie in the smoking wreckage and deny that it happened, because dammit I was steering.
(I forgot to go to work today. Just forgot. I still can't figure out how. God damn it.) |
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|
| Zeitgeist |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|08:51 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | tired | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Dead Milkmen - Punk Rock Girl | ] |
You’re sick of smiling with all your teeth, because even your teeth are tired. And when you lay down you realize you’ve forgotten how to sleep, because tomorrow is burning neon on your eyelids and yesterday is slithering up your back and sinking claws into your ear. And you find yourself forgetting the faces of the hearts on your to-do list, and sometimes you think to notice that This isn’t how it should be; but then the ghost of tasklists future flits by, lantern burning, and your eyes can only follow him into the mist. And you seek refuge in the arms of strangers because when life looms you can slip away from them and they will ask no questions, and they will not catch your arm and pray you stay when your heart is screaming with the burning Left-To-Do. And there is no time for pain, no quiet hour of the soul, no waiting for the beauty of a sudden smile; smiles are scheduled for Saturdays, between the audition and the function and the spinning wheels and the sizzling pan and the rows of marching numbers, and music is for Tuesdays, and breathing is for Thursdays, and living you’ll make time for next week maybe; and on Sundays you may spend an hour thinking about God, if time permits.
And time looks at you with that noxious grin
And whispers, “Please—just one more thing?” |
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| see how i cheat myself out of sleep |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|06:24 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  stressed | ] |
ME: *stumbles downstairs at 6:00, bleary-eyed and practically comatose*
DAD: Please tell me you intended to get up at 4:15 after we had that wonderful talk yesterday about Daylight Savings at dinner.
ME: ...
DAD: I almost went upstairs to say something, but... :D
ME: .....
DAD: My little AP student.
FML. |
|
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| ...oh what the hell why not. TRICK OR TREAT. |
[Oct. 31st, 2009|10:30 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Owl City - On The Wing | ] |
I wasn't going to do this, as I was having way too much fun laughing at all of you.
However. I am easily influenced.
1) Create a graphic (200 x 200 max size hell naw) to represent your personal "candy". It should have your username on it, but otherwise can feature whatever you want. Make it something special since it's self-representative.
2) Make a post with the subject "trick or treat?". Put your "candy" somewhere in it, and be sure to repost these instructions.
3) Then, go around other people's LJs and reply to them with either "trick" or "treat". If you reply with "trick", they will give you an LJ dare that you have to perform before taking their candy. If you're too wimpy for that, simply say "treat" and take their candy.
4) List all your collected candies in your original "trick or treat?" post to show off your collection, being sure not to direct-link!
( My goodies! 8D )
The Squirt is carving her jack-o-lantern like Kamina. I'm doing Boota. I love my sister. |
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|
| [people keep on saying that I'm going somewhere] |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|04:31 pm] |
Next time you catch me whining like I did yesterday, kindly kick me in the head a few dozen times until my entitlement complex crawls out my ear and under a rock. Seriously.
Anyway. I played Phaedra for almost an hour yesterday instead of studying more calculus. I played through my All-State excerpts a few times; ran scales with my new bow; and then just because I felt like it I spent twenty minutes playing whatever Vienna Teng song came into my head. It was lovely. (Someday I will find/make a string quartet arrangement of "Now Three" and find somebody to sing it with me. Someday.)
We're finally reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in LA, and I love it, and I was voted Guildenstern and so get to spend a period of every day soliloquizing about the direction of the sunrise and unicorns crossing people's paths. The principal walked in while Rosencrantz and I were harrassing the Player, and couldn't figure out why the word "Rosalinda" had us on the floor dying of laughter.
Anyway. It was fun. Life is good. Don't let me whine anymore, seriously. Turning eighteen means my license to whine got revoked.
:D |
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| KICK LOGIC TO THE CURB AND SUH-LAY-HEE-YAY-HEE-YAAAAAAAAAAP |
[Oct. 28th, 2009|08:43 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | tired | ] |
| [ | music |
| | KAMINA GERARD WAY | ] |
I'm so tired.
Well. Itzhak Perlman was, of course, incredible. Mind-blowingly incredible. I about had to scrape my jaw off the floor at the end of the concert so I could stand and clap.
...So if it was a standing ovation, would I say "so I could stand and ovate" instead?
...Anyway.
In-class Halloween concert today and tomorrow. Dressed as Edward Cullen today. Still haven't managed to get the glitter out of my hair, and so am hijacking the Squirt's jellyfish costume tomorrow instead.
These last two weeks have been exhausting. I'm sick of them. They're just... work. Babysitting. Internship. Calculus. Obligations stacked up to the sky. This weekend was the best, most relaxing thing I've had in a long time; it was near-perfect, and then Monday came back around. I'm sick of not sleeping. Today I slept through Calculus and German and Advisement, came home, slept an hour more, and am still tired. That isn't right, and I'm not even procrastinating! I'm seriously not! I'm just worked that hard, and I don't have time to practice as much as I want to and it's getting to the point where it's not fun anymore. I like being busy; I don't like spending weeks on end in a state of near-panic and waking up six times in the night, positive that my alarm just went off and I need to get up and do more goddamn work.
All I can do is keep telling myself that it has to slack off eventually and keep pretending I don't notice that it never does.
Oh, in brighter news: All y'all who are considering coming to my fall concert inwhichiamplayingasolosoyouhadbetterbethere? It's been moved to the 12th of November. My school, 7:00 pm. :D |
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