Spring, Please Hurry Up

This may have been the longest, greyest, snowiest winter I've ever experienced. We didn't see the grass up here at Purdue from Thanksgiving through mid-February. With the wind chill keeping things down in the teens or single digits for daytime highs, most of the winter has also been rather cold. Yes, I know, there are colder, greyer places to spend the winter, but there's a reason I'm not living in one of them.

Last week we got a nice warm spell with days up to fifty degrees. It was grand. I even got to wear a skirt. Naive as I was, I thought that this faux-spring would be enough to hold me over until vrai-spring arrived, but I was wrong. I'm more impatient than ever. It's currently below freezing, and it snowed enough yesterday to stick to the wet, half-thawed ground. Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring, and if we don't get one I'm going to have a choice word or two for him.

People keep on reminding me that it's still February, and that early March is just as bad. Yes, I know that. Yes, I also know that spring will get here soon enough if I'm just patient. But I'm not, so I'm just going to mentally huff and puff at the weather for a few more weeks until it does what I want because it's the proper time and not because I told it to. In the meantime, I'm making my blog more spring-like, as you may have noticed.

I hope you haven't minded my complaints. They're only to be taken moderately seriously. On another note, I should be writing more often this semester, so I'll see you again soon. Have a happy stupid, grey, cold February day.

A Review of the PMO Christmas Show (and Christmas in general)

I was not impressed. Yes, I could see that hours upon hours of hard work and preparation went into it, but I really couldn't stand most of the show. The entire first half embodied all that I hate about Christmas, and there's an awful lot to dislike about what Christmas has become.

First I will present a brief commentary on the aesthetic impact of the thing. While being rather important to any performance, my opinions of it successes and shortcomings are overpowered by the worldview reasons I will be sharing shortly. Everything was executed very well according to its own style. I'm not a huge fan of some of the style, but I will admit that it was well-performed. The first act was so loud and brassy and glittery and over-the-top. And this is coming from someone who loves musicals. The overall visual impact from the Cantata (the second part) can best be summed up in one word: trippy. It was a nice, mellow, soft, pastel colored sort of trippy, but it was trippy nonetheless. In fact, I said as much to Adrianne the second the curtains opened. But the second half was much better as far as music goes. I love listening to songs in Latin, and there were a few during the Cantata.

Before I go off on a tirade about the first half, I'd like to give a few additional compliments to the content of the Cantata. It contained lots of songs that use words like "God," "Jesus," "Christ," "Lord," etc. Words that ought to be essential to the holiday - and indeed to every day.

And now for my attack on the ideology of the first half. Oh dear heavens, it was atrocious. Apparently PMO would like to wish you a very merry humanist Christmas. I couldn't decide whether I'd like to punch someone, puke, or sit there open-mouthed. The overall message was that you need to use your imagination so you can believe in Santa Claus (because we all know that belief is a wishy-washy sort of thing that requires wishful thinking and suspension of reality - unlike knowledge) so that you can be inspired by him to love other people. So I'm fine with the loving other people part, but everything leading up to that was total garbage. I mean, the final song said that love was the reason for the season, and that only by believing in Santa Claus could you spread the holiday love. Bullshit. Will people stop watering down Christmas? Love doesn't mean you share toys and food with the needy around the holidays because that's what Santa Claus did. Love means you share your life with everyone all the time, whether they deserve it or not. You know, kind of like God did by becoming a human and dying in our place. The infinite lord and master of the universe inhabiting a human body for a few decades and then dying a horrendous death is the most extravagant and humble display of love and power this world will ever know. That's what Christmas is about. It's time for us all to refocus.

Stop Putting Science in My Art

I've discovered that landscape design may not be the best fit for me. I mean, I love coming up with landscaping ideas, and I love implementing them, but I'm getting fed up with site plans. Given that that's most of what I would be doing as a landscape designer, it might me time to find something else.

The problem with site plans is that they remove what I love most about art. I love the adrenaline rush of spilling my ideas onto paper, or canvas, wire, soapstone, linoleum - whatever medium I'm using. I love taking mistakes and redirecting my work around them. I love getting messy and cleaning up. I love interpreting reality however I want, whether it's realistic, abstract, or something in the middle. I love communicating ideas and emotions, personalities of people and places, things that can't be said just with words.

With a site plan, I'm thrilled while drawing haphazard sketches, but once I approach the tracing paper that joy is replaced by grim determination. My materials are limited to a few different colors and weights of paper, thin black pens, and reasonable, tame shades of markers and colored pencils. Mistakes mean starting over or having a flaw that nags you every time you glimpse it. There is no room for mess; smudges are detestable, and every line has its proper place. The only freedom of interpretation I have is choosing/coming up with the best shape for this bush or that tree or determining how realistic I want my shadows to be. I must communicate the plants and features in the landscape as succinctly and obviously as possible. It's true that different landscapes express different emotions and ideas and whatnot, but that doesn't easily translate to a site plan.

Reusing the same shapes over and over again isn't art. Getting better results by tracing others' symbols than by creating your own isn't art. Marking where to put this plant or that lamp isn't art. These designs are more like a mechanic's blueprint than an artist's landscape. I can't stand to cold, scientific, restricting sense of it all.

So what now? I'm not abandoning Landscape Horticulture and Design. At least not yet. This week I meet with my advisor to take care of scheduling, and I will be taking classes assuming that I will remain in LAHD. I'll probably take an art class both as relaxation and to prepare for the possibility of switching. The following week I have a mid-semester meeting with my professor for the landscape architecture class that set all of this off, and I'll be voicing my concerns to him. Maybe I just haven't given site plans enough time, or maybe he has suggestions for learning to view them differently. It's possible that I will be switching majors to fine arts, adding it as a second major, or considering an art master's. At some point I'll talk to a fine arts advisor about whether or not that would be feasible, what sort of careers are available to art students, how likely it is that I can find and get one of those jobs, and other things like that.

However, each of the three aforementioned possibilities (switching majors, dual degree, and a master's in art) have their fair share of problems. If I switched majors after this year, I could still graduate two years from now with problem at all. Unfortunately, I'd need to leave the College of Ag and the HLA department, and they're sort of my home away from home. I see my friends there more consistently than I see anyone else, and I'd hate to leave them even if I'm just crossing Marsteller Street. There's a sense of family on the ag campus and in the hort buildings that you can't find anywhere else at Purdue (except for my church).

If I do a double major, I would need an extra year to graduate, and I'd be taking at least 18 credit hours every semester. I would no longer have a scholarship for the final year, and if Josh were at a different college for grad school that would mean yet another year of separation.

Getting an M.F.A in studio arts seems like my best option, but it still has a few drawbacks. First, I don't know what my chances are at getting in if I don't have a B.A. in art. Taking lots of art electives in addition to the requirements for an art and design minor would help, but I'll need to talk to a fine arts advisor to get more information on that matter. Second, I don't know how easy it is for art grad students to be T.A.'s or what I would get paid for it. It would definitely be a lot less than I would get paid for working as a full-time landscape designer. Once again, I'd need to do some research to see whether or not that's a realistic concern. Third, if I were to get a job in landscape design after all, would people be less willing to hire me because they might have to pay me more as a person with a graduate degree? This is another fear that may not be founded in reality, so I'll be bringing it up to my hort advisor when I meet with him next week.

And then there's always the possibility that I will learn to love site planning for what it is rather than disliking it for what it isn't. That would be convenient. I'm not giving up on it yet. And whether I pursue a career in landscape design or not, I can assure that I will be gardening for as long as I am able.

I apologize for my lengthy and angsty rant, but I just thought I'd get it out there. Putting this all in writing has helped me see what my best option is and how to go about planning my course of action.

Book Review: Frankenstein

This book followed The Man Who Was Thursday in my Colombia leisure reading. It started off strong, but by the end I was thoroughly disappointed. This book may have been whinier than even Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I really don’t care how anguished Frankenstein was over creating the monster, or how emotionally devastated the monster was about being rejected by humankind. A sentence or two – maybe even a full paragraph, to be generous – would have sufficed to communicate that they weren’t very happy people. Furthermore, I did not find many of the characters very interesting. Clerval was a good fellow, the monster was somewhat interesting, the poor French peasants in the cottage had a touching story, but that was about it. I suppose Frankenstein was alright before he went emo, and I do support his decision not to make a second monster based on his Scotland reasoning (his initial reasons on the ice field did not satisfy me). I never really connected to any of the other characters, particularly Elizabeth. I really didn’t care very much about her at all.

I did like how the story was set inside a collection of letters. That was a neat idea. And I also approved of the fact that the guy writing the letters (I forget his name) decided not to drag his crew on a hopeless adventure. I’m sure I could find other nice things to say about the book, but I’m not sure what they are. Given my liking for efficiency, wasting over a hundred pages on whining was enough to completely estrange me from this book.

Book Information
Title: Frankenstein
Author: Mary Shelley
Year Published: 1818

Clearing Up This Circadian Rhythm Business

Whenever my psychology teacher tried to explain the Circadian rhythm, he skewed one point. It's not a hugely critical point, and he wasn't too far off, but the way he skewed it irritated the living daylights out of me (which is sort of a really horrible pun because this deals with daylight)(please just ignore that - I'm tired and it's showing).

The term circadian rhythm (see if you can parse it) refers to the biological clock or daily cycle of energy levels that humans (and pretty much all surface-dwelling animals) go through. There are phases of increased wakefulness and increased drowsiness. The exact pattern varies from species to species.

Here's the interesting part and the part where Mr. Crawley goes a little bit wrong. If we were be to removed from all light and schedule cues, our circadian rhythm would follow a 25-hour pattern rather than the 24-hour pattern that most of us live by. The presence of sunlight light inhibits the production of the hormone melatonin in the pineal gland (he didn't know the name of the hormone or the gland, but I'm not very concerned about that) and resets the circadian rhythm to the usual 24-hour cycle.

Mr. Crawley went wrong on two points: one actually irritated me, and I probably wouldn't have taken note of the other if I hadn't already been irritated. He frequently attributed the 24-hour adjusted cycle to scheduling tendencies and completely ignored the extreme importance of light. One can have a completely unscheduled day, but if natural light is present, the circadian rhythm is as it should be. Gollum's circadian rhythm wouldn't have been off because he had nothing to do - it would have been off because he lived underground for years (he didn't use Smeagol as an illustration, but I like to). Mr. Crawley implied by his tone of voice and a few other clue that the 25-hour cycle was the better cycle and that we were somehow being restricted from natural life by the existence of schedules. Furthermore, one day I added that sunlight was the main factor in resetting the biological clock, and he made some absurd comment to the effect that the fact that we have to add a leap day every four years because we aren't following the 25-hour cycle. That makes no sense. The earth's rotation follows a 24-hour cycle, so it would behoove us to do the same. The earth's orbit follows a 365.25whatever day cycle, and the extra .25whatever isn't added because we ignore the 25-hour cycle that the unchecked circadian rhythm would follow.

I am completely aware that this doesn't matter at all to most people. After the few days he mentioned the circadian rhythm, it didn't even really matter to me. It's okay that he seemed to interpret the resetting of the biological clock in a slightly different fashion. He may not have intended to imply that schedules were evil, and there's a good chance that he realized pretty quickly that the whole leap day thing was unreasonable. It did matter to me on the day I started this, so I thought I'd type it all the way through anyway.

The Annual Bagworm Dilemma

I think I've already told my reader(s) about the bagworm dilemma, but I hadn't when I started this. I'll type it up anyway. Bagworm season has wrapped up for this year, thank heavens, and I can only hope that Purdue doesn't have many (or perhaps any) of the little critters.

Bagworms are little caterpillar-like bugs. I'm sure they're the larval form of some other bug, but I don't know what bug. They're kind of cute and I love the way they crawl around. Here's the source of the dilemma: they kill trees.

Do I kill them or let them kill trees? Do I let everything proceed naturally, or do I intervene? Obviously, there's no way the bagworms can eliminate huge amounts of trees. They' haven't yet. Birds eat a lot of them, and I'm sure many more die in other ways. But they attack without discrimination, and sometimes the loveliest of trees and shrubs are their victims. But I have major issues with killing things, even bugs that kill trees.

I've gone through a variety of solutions. One year, we burned the nest that attacked a tree near our house. Another year, I collected them and dropped them down into a sewer so I wouldn't be quite so directly responsible for their deaths. The next year, I mustered up the determination to actually step on some of them (with shoes on), but I felt pretty horrid about it. This year, the bagworms came during a week when I was pretty messed up physically, mentally, and emotionally, and the strain was almost unbearable. There was one day when I actually became sick to my stomach every time I saw one.

At the end of this year's season, I decided that this mental agony was a little - okay maybe a lot - dramatic, over-the-top, and unnecessary, so I set out to develop a final decision in regards to bagworms. If they decide to invade one of my trees, they're done for. If they invade a different tree and I'm called on to help eliminate them, I will lend a hand. However, I can't stand to just squish every one I see, so I'll let the other ones go. It's really rather ridiculous that this ever caused me such an issue. I'm glad it's been resolved. I hope (using the true meaning of the word) that my resolution will remain firm and I will never again be unduly troubled by the adorable but deadly bagworms.

Nihilism in the Choir*

As my readers know, the Finneytown Chorale received a 1 in class AA at contest last weekend. This means that we qualified to move on to state contest. After a vote, we decided that we'd try it. Unfortunately, today we learned that scheduling conflicts would make it nearly impossible to go on any of the four possible contest days (well we could still actually fit in two places, but our teacher doesn't seem to be trying very hard). Because of this, anarchy and nihilism will reign in the choir.

Anarchy was already a problem. My teacher has never demanded much respect from the students, so he hasn't gotten nearly as much as he would like. Surprise, surprise. But I won't rail against Mr. McKee's classroom "control" at this time. I won't spend much time describing anarchy since I've given some description in person to my readers in the past. I'm just sick and tired of non-stop chatter and nonsense. People talk while other people talk about why we shouldn't be talking all the time. It's immensely aggravating. It's not like we're the concert choir, full of people who just needed another credit. We're all talented musicians, and an extremely high percentage of us are honors kids and "good students."

Now that we're not going to contest, we have nothing to work towards (as some people see it). This is where the nihilism comes in. With no purpose/goal to work towards, there's no reason for the hooligans not to cause mayhem. Some of my classmates and I would consider it a good enough goal to simply create beautiful music and to share this music with our family and friends. However, about half of the problematic people are seniors with severe cases of senioritis. They really don't care about anything school-related at this point, even if that means being inconsiderate towards others. My teacher might have us do this awesome but incredibly complicated Eric Whitaker piece, and maybe that will inspire some to actually work. I have my doubts.

A few of my friends and I are actually considering how nice it might be to have a study hall fourth bell with AP exams approaching. I probably won't switch classes, though. I've stuck with it this far, so I might as well finish strong.


*My original title for this post was "Nihilism and Anarchy in the Choir" but "Nihilism in the Choir" sounds like an awesome band name, so I had to leave it that way.

In Which The Man Tries to Prevent Me from Being True to Mine Ownself

I have a particularly low voice for a girl. My friend Mike has a particularly high voice for a guy. We've agreed that he'd do quite well as a first alto, and I'd do quite well as a first tenor, so we decided to switch voice parts for the senior ensemble song. He chickened out, but I still learned the tenor part and have been singing as a tenor for the past few weeks (and blending far more easily into the tenor section than the alto section).

On Friday, our conductor finally figured out that I've been singing with the guys. He had an issue with that, and told me to go back to the alto part. So now our formation is thrown off, I need to relearn the song (I know both parts, but I keep on finding myself singing an alto-tenor hybrid part), and I stick out. The alto part for the song is in the break in my range, which means I have to sing loudly to get a decent tone, and there are some notes on which I can't change my tone much to match my section or I'll lose the pitch (or they could just sing darker like they're supposed to).

I'm considering sticking it to the man and singing the tenor part anyway. He didn't even notice I had switched parts from listening - he noticed when I filled a tenor slot in the formation. I blend so well as a tenor that it's nearly impossible to tell by ear that there's a girl singing with them. I don't see why he's so adamantly against me being a tenor for just one song. I'll have to talk with him about it. If he's still against it, I'll just be an alto. I see no reason to pick a fight with my conductor just to prove I can.

Frustration and Music

Why? Why does the orchestra suck? Why don't the members of chorale care? Why am I still part of either?

This year in orchestra we have barely 30 members, and the total apathy and lack of skill is simply astounding. For starters, intonation is abominable. I can understand occasionally missing notes, but our degree of not-skilled-ness is inexcusable in a high school orchestra. For example, one of my fellow violas consistently plays a B flat rather than a B natural during a viola solo no matter how many times I remind him that he's wrong. I think the violins think they're playing the right notes, but they aren't even close to in tune with one another. It's hard to say much about the cellos. I'm so excited when they actually play that I'm willing to give them a bit of a break. The music we're playing right now isn't that great. I don't mean that I just don't like it: I mean that musically it isn't good. The harmonies are sub-par, and in one song they build chords that shouldn't fit into the key we're playing in. It's just bad. Even if we had decent music and we could play in tune, we still wouldn't be making music. There is minimal dynamic contrast, scarcely any phrasing, and a negligible amount of emotion. Add to all of this the fact that our teacher is unreliable and garners little (if any) respect from the orchestra. I come to school at 7:15 in the morning every day to participate in a group that I am thoroughly ashamed of. Why? I have a tremendous amount of love for my viola, but I have no time to plug into a group of devoted musicians outside of school. I can't wait to play in college. After all, it can't get much worse.

The chorale is the top audition chorus at Finneytown, so all of its members are talented. In this way it far surpasses the orchestra. Unfortunately the class is unbearable. People never stop talking. Literally. Some people talk while we're supposed to be singing, and more than half of the chorus bursts into chatter the second we pause in a song. It's ridiculous and irritating. Absurd, even. The director has to tell us to fix the same things day after day since few people pay any attention to him, so we can be stuck on a single passage for days with minimal improvement. Like the orchestra director, the chorus teacher doesn't demand much respect. He is generally liked (unlike the orchestra director), but nobody pays much attention to him. I despise that class so much that I'm considering dropping it and jumping into AP Art History (which I originally wanted to take, but rejected for the sake of chorale). I do love to sing, but I can always sing elsewhere. I'll probably audition for the vocal jazz ensemble (even though jazz isn't exactly my thing), and if I make it I'll give more serious thought to the idea of dropping chorale. I'm not going to go into all the reasons for and against taking art history instead of chorale, but it's going to be a more important decision than it may seem. The issue goes far deeper than chorus versus art, and my choice could have a major impact on how I make future decisions. I'm going to have to put a lot of thought into this.

Thank you, readers, for reading through my disorganized mental dump. Sometimes it's nice to vent a bit.

The Red Car

I drive the red car. Note that I do not call it my car. It is not mine. I would not have bought that car. It does not fit me personally at all, but I could live with that if it didn't have such a vast quantity of problems. I once gave Stephanie/Alex/Alephanie/Stephalex (take your pick) a ride home, and he made the following accurate observation: "It sounds like your car is falling apart as you drive it."

It is red. Red is, by far, my least favorite color. And the red car is, well, redder than the reddest red times infinity. All of my readers have seen the red exterior. Some of them have looked into the car and observed that every bit of the interior is also red, with a few bits of chrome and black.

The air conditioning does not work. Most of the time I can deal with this. My windows are pretty much perpetually rolled down. However, there are some days when the atmosphere is so vilely hot and humid that having the windows rolled down is not enough. Then there are the rainy days. I am more than happy to leave my windows down while I drive in the rain, but my passengers don't always share that sentiment. In addition, when I drive on the highway with my windows down my hair flies in my face and I can't hear my music.

It literally stinks. It's not bad when it's completely dry, but if too much rain gets inside, I'm doomed to endure a strange musty scent faintly reminiscent of stale pop-tarts. This can last for days or weeks, depending on how much water the seats and carpet absorbed. Closing the windows after it's already been raining for quite some time (my dad does this all the time) makes the smell nearly unbearable when the doors are opened again. I have an air freshener, but it's taking its time in doing what it does. My air is much fresher than it was a few days ago, but I still dread driving it after it has spent the day in the sunny school parking lot with the windows rolled up.

The stereo and radio are completely out of whack. The front passenger speakers don't work. Normally. On occasion they will roar to life when least expected. This isn't really a big issue for most songs, but there are some songs that have certain sounds coming from each side, so you don't get the full expreience unless all the speakers are working. Sometimes the radio flat out dies, only to rise once more anywhere between a few seconds and a few days later. The first time it happened, I had no clue what was going on. I tried turning the volume on the radio all the way up. I tried turning the volume on my ipod all the way up (I listen to my ipod rather than the radio). I tried skipping forward and backward on the playlist. About a minute after it had died, it came back. I had not yet turned down the radio or the ipod, and the song that came on started with a loud yell/scream noise. Jonathon and I jumped (maybe that's an understatement). Every time the song starts we laugh. Ask him about it sometime, and I'm sure you'll get some exciting and elaborate tale.

The seat does not come up very far. It comes up far enough that I have a perfectly safe view of the road, but it's low enough that people can barely see me over the steering wheel and low enough to render the sun blocking apparatus completely useless. Despite the sheer awesomeness of my sunglasses, they aren't dark enough to ward off much of the sun's mighty glare.

The hood will not open. Or at least I can't get it to open anymore. I've watched people open it, and I've opened it myself in the past, but it will no longer open for me. I kind of really need to refill on windshield wiper fluid. I can't completely blame the car for this until I ask someone else to try to open it, but I really do believe, based on how it's behaving, that something is jammed in the simple mechanism that normally allows one to open the hood.

From time to time, the rearview mirror will fall off of the windshield. This is obviously dangerous and unnerving.

The alternator recently gave up on life. Fortunately, it was easily repaired, but I don't know how long that will last. I like being able to start the red car.

It makes strange noises. We call it the cricket car, because the sound it constantly emits sounds somewhat like a herd of crickets (do crickets come in herds?). We've tried replacing all sorts of bands and belts, but nothing keeps the crickets quiet for long. It can get really annoying. When turning left, oftentimes it sounds like a turning podracer. I like this noise, but I have no idea why it happens and that makes me nervous.

The speedometer is off. However, once I figured out that I was really going 3-5 mph slower than it was telling me, I had no issue adjusting.

The gas gauge doesn't work. It normally tells me that my tank is either full or way below empty. I have to watch the odometer instead and reset it every time I fill the tank. This means that I can't fill the tank only partially, for I will have no idea when to refill it if I do so.

Now, the engine is unhappy. When I push the gas pedal, the engine wills to disbelieve that I am pushing it as hard as I am. Sometimes it disbelieves that I am pushing the pedal at all. Then it snaps back into reality and jerks forward. To anyone listening to the engine or monitoring my speed, it would sound and look like I was pumping the gas pedal. It normally only does this for the first several seconds after I stop or apply the brakes. Yesterday, it was so bad that I was surprised to have made it home.

Even though my mom and I know that the poor red car needs to be put out of its misery, my dad is in denial of that fact. He believes that it's not as bad as I say it is, or that it can easily be fixed. To be fair, all of our cars have been nicer to him than to anyone else (someday I might tell tales about my mother and the demented car), so he really isn't getting the full effect. But he also develops attachments to cars and hates to give up on them until they're completely dead. Or until they catch on fire. That happened once, after my mom had insisted that something was amiss with the car. My mom has decided that he will get to drive the red car for a day or two on his hilly ride to work. Then he can judge whether or not the car has issues. I the meantime, I get to drive the old blue truck. The old blue truck is a topic for another time. It is nowhere near as bad as the red car or some of our past vehicles, but it's got a few oddities of its own. I will look exponentially more ridiculous driving it than I do driving the red car. There will be no skimping on wearing the sunglasses as long as I drive the truck. The sight is sure to make people smile at the very least. I love to make people smile.

Facebook

I really don't like Facebook. Yet now I'm a part of it. Urgh. But it's valuable enough for communication purposes that I suppose I will keep it.

I hate how every little change you make instantly shows up on your profile page! Is there no privacy? I mean, it's not like I'm taking part in unspeakable atrocities through facebook that need to be hidden from the world, I'm just a private person who doesn't really want people to be able to monitor everything she does on facebook. For example, I removed my relationship status in order to avoid the possible uncomfortable situations which some of my friends have encountered, and people instantly make assumptions. Incorrect assumptions, I may add. I suppose they've now learned what happens when you make assumptions. Do people really have nothing better to do with their time than to check everyone's mini-feeds to see what they've changed?

I do like the pieces of flair though. It's like a virtual version of the front of my purse!

Burned Out

I apologize for my lack of posting in the past several months, but life gets crazy. And when life starts slowing down, sleep deprivation, stress, and all those other fun things catch up. I currently have a dozen drafts for posts that I never finished, and at least five of them will soon be finished and published. Plus I have plans for a few more. However, now that I have a smidgen of time to myself, I lack the energy necessary to care. I think I pulled my final three-hours-of-sleep night for this school year this week, and I only have one paper, a few tests, a few ceremonies, and exams to live through. I also have my birthday to get through. I'm not really all that fond of my birthday. I'll probably explain that a little more when it comes in eleven days.

If I were to start posting now, I would have to pass everything that I wrote through examination to help cut down on the evidence that I now think in biology and French with a hint of physics and english. This paragraph doesn't flow here, and that upsets me. I added it in retrospect, and there's no smooth way to work it into the previous paragraph.

Today, I am literally burned, but by the sun rather than by stress and fatigue. I spent the day at Kings Island (or is it King's/Kings' Island?) for math and science day. My school took three buses of seventh and eighth graders, a high school math intervention class, and ten of the twelve out of over forty students who have managed to keep straight A's in honors precalculus. The people with my class ended up splitting into two groups: all but one of the guys, and the two girls and the other guy. It was fun. Tim, Sara, and I rode The Beast, Vortex, Flight of Fear, The Son of Beast, Top Gun (or rather Flight Deck, as it is now called), and Shake Rattle and Roll or something like that (that one isn't a roller coaster). Vortex remains my favorite roller coaster but the others were good as well. I really love going upside down. We wanted to ride Firehawk and Faceoff, but the lines were too long. If I ever go there again, I will make a point of riding those two. Then I will have ridden all the roller coasters at Kings/King's/Kings' Island.

Anti-Individuality

So I suppose the purpose of an orchestra uniform is for all of us to look uniformly identical. Our conductor does not support my view that my solid black shirt and skirt needs a little more life and personality to it, but tonight I felt more strongly than normal that my outfit could use a little tweaking to become something more "Maria". At our concert last night, I wore a colorful scarf with shades of green, blue, and purple along with some bright teal knee-length socks which I proudly sported when I had to hike up my skirt a bit to navigate the stairs safely. Although she didn't comment on the socks, she sent one of the first violins over to tell me I had to take the scarf off. Two years ago (I vaguely remember this), he wore a slightly over-sized red bow-tie instead of the customary black one and also had to "fix" the "problem" with his uniform. I heave a mighty sigh and concede that I suppose it makes some sense to be forced into visual conformity when part of a musical ensemble. I did, however dramatically replace the scarf around my neck when we stood to bow.

A few days ago, I could have gone on forever about how annoyed I am/was with the orchestra, but for now I'll focus mainly on the improvement in the past few days.

We sounded a lot better last night than I had anticipated, let's just hope we can keep it up for contest on Friday.

I am back to my rightful spot as third chair! I'm not going into the stupid reasons why Ms. Johnson decided to put me in seventh chair last concert. Even she can't defend her reasoning. If our section leader keeps skipping orchestra (we meet forty minutes before school starts for the rest of the students, so it's not unusual for people to just sleep in and skip), she may be demoted and I could end up as second chair by the end of the year. I might also eventually beat the current second chair viola. Anywho, the first two violas are seniors so I'll be first chair next year no matter what. Sadly, the grand old viola section will go from being the largest section of the orchestra this year with twelve members to the second-smallest with the maximum possible size being seven violists. Most likely we'll have only four, but three wouldn't be out of the question either.

The conductor is an extremely disorganized person and really isn't all that great of a teacher/conductor (although she's a nice enough person), but she's been making massive efforts to improve lately. I hope that they are effective for both her sake and ours.

Optometrists

The optometrist's office isn't a nice place to be, in my opinion. I am always annoyed, conflicted, and downhearted there.

The annoyance is both from the atrocious interior design of my optometrist's office (that wallpaper makes me want to sob sometimes) and that little eye-puff machine. That one where they tell you to stick your chin on a ledge of some contraption and look at the lights while they sends puffs of air into your eye. I know it's coming, but I can never stop myself from blinking, which annoys me. Even though the whole point of the machine is to make sure that your eyes do blink when something comes at them, for some reason, I always want to do my best not to blink.

Once I enter the examiner's room and they start testing my prescription with the face-piece-of-the-many-lenses, the internal conflict begins. They always ask whether 1 or 2 looks clearer, A or B, or some other combination. Some days I'm in the mood for everything to follow a pattern, so I get annoyed when the clearer choice doesn't fit in with the pattern. Then I have to decide if I want to follow the pattern or pick the clearer choice (don't worry, if the difference is definitely noticeable, I pick the more defined lens no matter what, but sometimes there really is no noticeable difference between the two options). Sometimes it's the inverse; I'm tired of everything following a sequence so I want to make the order of choices as unpredictable as possible. Most days it's a combination of the two, so I'm stuck with deciding whether to build patterns, break them, or just do what actually follows my vision best. In the end, I usually opt for the latter on almost all of them and even if I don't every time I end up with an accurate new prescription by the time they're done.

I'm downhearted because my prescription needs to be strengthened by at least a smidgen every time I visit. I wish I could keep my eyes from getting worse, or maybe for one day I could be able to see without my glasses or contacts. But the reality is that both those wishes are unlikely so I just move on with life. I can still see better than some by a long shot.

About Digging Your Own Grave

It's generally a bad idea. However, I very nearly managed to do that very thing (figuratively). And who knows, I could very likely still pull that off in a different fashion by the end of this week. Instead I just dug a very deep hole and I should be able to climb back out by tomorrow morning, although a bit sleep deficient.

What I did was this: I created a complex, detailed photo montage of a surrealist landscape that I was to later ("later" originally meant by Thursday, if my art teacher hadn't decided to be amazing this morning, which I'll explain later) reproduce in an accursed style known as photorealism. Photorealism is just what is sounds like - drawing and coloring so that the final product looks realistic enough to be a photo. Normally, I'd have no issue with this method. Sure it's incredibly tedious, but it can be fun in a challenging, make-your-head-want-to-split-open kind of way. I mentioned earlier that I made my own "photo" to copy, but I think I'll mention some of the detail I was stupid enough to put in.
-a unicorn 3/8 of an inch long (yes I measured)
-a school of narwhals that easily fit into a one-inch square
-a wisteria bonsai
-a gorgeous sky full of clouds with indistinct boundaries
-a grove of bonsai, each plant being about 1.5 inches tall
-and an orange-ish colored river (or blood-colored if you're my slightly disturbed friend across the table) with more contrasting hues than you can shake a whole bundle of sticks at
-you get the picture, it has massive amounts of minute details (I wish "details" started with an "m", because I had a neat little string of alliteration going there)

This 9"x12" piece of cruel, beautiful masterpiece was orginally due this Thursday, but Mrs. Ficke is pretty much one of my favorite people in the world right now. It's now not due until next Friday! We don't get any more class time to work on it, but I always do more work on my projects outside of class than inside anyway so that doesn't impact me much.

Unfortunately, I've spent the last three nights staying up late (like 2 a.m. or so) to work on it, and I can't regain that sleep until winter break. Plus I still have a 50 point bi-weekly (full projects are 100 points) assignment due tomorrow, which I started this morning... I made quick progress, but I'll probably be up until 2 again because of that combined with the homework I didn't do last night.

That was "Part I: Art from Art Class" of my near disastrous week. "Part II: Art from French Class" and maybe "Part III: Why A.P. Bio Sucks My Life Force Away" will come in the next few days, if I still feel like writing about them. For now, I need to make sure Part I remains simply a hostile visitor, start diminishing the postponed doom of Part II, and make sure that the immutable dangers of Part III don't come up push me back into the grave I so ignorantly began to dig.

A General Rant at Several Aspects of Society

Particularly high school society, and even more specifically the society of high school girls. Even though I belong to both those categories, my many faults rarely include the ones I'm sick of right now.

First off, why on earth are my school mates so mean to those who are a little departed from the norm? They don't despise everyone who's unusual, which is good because if they did I'd be screwed, but you've all been through high school, so you know who I mean. Yes, they're often socially inept, they sometimes do or say awkward things, and some of them even try to get on your nerves, but that gives you no excuse to make fun of them at every opportunity. There are two girls in particular who everyone teases without reason. True, they do some pretty odd things, but not only are they incredibly sweet people if you ever meet them - they also have had rough lives. And the things that people target them for are things they have absolutely no control over and are things that really don't make a difference in them personally. Seriously. Do teens have some sort of sensor that tells them who's hurting most so they can jab at their wounds even more? For all the other people who are despised, I can generally see a way in which they've brought some of it on themselves, but that still doesn't give anybody an excuse to treat them like trash.

Now on to the more specific category of girls. Can somebody please explain to me why on earth life has to be a drama-gorged gossip fest? Come on. Does it truly matter who fought with their boyfriend last night or who got wasted at a party? Does that have any bearing on what meaningful uses you or anyone else could put their lives to? Why does there seem to be a need to create worthless drama when you could be doing something worthwhile?

The girl issue expands to the world in general: why the obsession with celebrities, particularly once they end up arrested or in rehab or something? Nobody even knows these people, yet there are so many individuals that make the life of some big-shot the focal point of their life. I can't even comprehend how that could be at all satisfying. Maybe they just want to ignore their own lives because something there is messed up. Well here's a newsflash for them: it's never going to get better if you keep shoving it out of sight.

That's all for now. But I can assure you similar things will be cropping up every now and then. I tend to detest society during the winter.

Captain Jack

My beloved little Finneytown High School is currently in its second year under the reign of the iron-fisted Cpt. Jack Fisher. While it's true that we needed a principal who would actually discipline students and keep the school a little more in line, sometimes Mr. Fisher can be a bit ridiculous.

His most recent decision was that locker signs are tacky, silly, juvenile, unprofessional, etc. and should be removed. So he took down every single sign from every single locker, be it for birthdays, sports, fun, or any number of other random things that we decide to make signs for. How on earth can it matter that locker signs are "unprofessional" when professionals wouldn't be storing their work in long hallways of lockers? Silly? Yeah some of them were silly and even tacky at times, but for goodness sakes, we're high schoolers. Cut us some slack. Silly quirks don't spell out a future of failure and academic slacking. If they did, all their brightest students along with most of the rest of the school as well would be headed for doom.

Several of us have serious issues finding our lockers if we don't look for the signs on ours or on our neighbors' lockers. If my locker number hadn't ended up being one of my favorite numbers, there would be no way I could find it without the adorable sign that my friend Anna made for me (it was brown and green with a panda bear and leaf rubbings that were actually part of one of my art projects). Colors and shapes stick in my head a lot better than numbers, so when all the lockers are the same shape size and color, the only thing to depend on is the signs that are hung (unless your locker is the last in a hall or something).

Furthermore, our signs show a variety of things. They announce tryouts for athletic and musical groups, tell the school when somebody should be wished a happy birthday, encourage performers (be they athletes, musicians, whatever), show team and school spirit, express pieces of a person, and much more. They have even been used to celebrate the lives of the two students who have been killed within the past two years. Does Cpt. Jack really want to take that away? He's always saying that we need more school and team spirit. More unity. We've got class tension down to a fine art, but he'd really rather we supported Finneytown rather than the class of '09 or '08, but he could help by not tearing down what things we do that are aimed towards his ends.

Mr. Fisher has also made several other regrettable decisions (such as the possibility of eliminating AP courses, but that's a rant for another day). Fortunately, we do get a lot of personal amusement out of his existence. Thanks to my mom who first noticed this, it's fairly common to hear him referred to as Grimace the milkshake monster from McDonald's due to the fact that he wears a lot of purple and has a physique much like that of our purple fast food franchise friend. There's also the myriad of jokes relating Cpt. Jack and rum, such as the ideas for t-shirts saying "Where's the rum gone?" or "If it was a dream, there'd be rum" along with others. The chief anti-Fisher movement right now is discussed with the coded phrase "Have you seen page 82 of the yearbook?" I can't really explain this one without a diagram, so ask me about it sometime.

Why You Should Avoid Baby Showers At All Costs

1. They're full of giggling old ladies (surprisingly, they giggle a lot more than the younger women)
2. They're full of pink (even if the baby is a boy you normally end up with a dash of pink)
3. There seems to be some unwritten law that baby products can only come in pastel colors, and those only have so much appeal
4. Pretty much everyone does their utmost to flaunt their girly-ness
5. You hear all sorts of unwanted stories about other women's past experiences with chil-bearing
6. There's no food, only sugary dainty little snacks and there's only a certain nuber of anything you can take before you feel like the veterans are looking at you like you're some sort of pig (even if apple slices are what you take more than three of)
7. You feel underdressed if you're not in a skirt or nice pants
8. You can tell that some of the women clearly don't approve of your purse/bag of holding type IV and its adornments (this one might not apply to most other people, but believe me there's comes a point where it becomes akward instead of evil-ly fun to see them hesitatingly comment on it)
9. Shopping for cards for baby showers is absolutely nauseating (do you have any idea how many say something to the effect of "your life is about to get cuddlier"?)

Needless to say, baby showers won't be becoming my favorite hobby any time soon. And the worst part is I most likely won't be able to avoid attending them because if I ever have kids one will be planned for me whether I like it or not. People don't plan their own showers and they can't keep them from happening either.