godream

One of these days I will manage to train my siblings to make comments like "but I always thought you were a size eight!" without needing to be prompted.

In entirely unrelated news, I'll show you prom pictures soon, really, whenever I can be bothered to find the links and my brain kicks into gear enough to come up with halfway witty captions. (Otherwise you'd end up with my mom's comments [such as "I forget the names of Alison's other friends" along with the word "late" in all capitals a lot] and we can't have that, can we?)

Also, you'd think the "preview" feature would mean I'd end up editing my entries less. But you'd be wrong.

So it's over.

I think this is maybe denial?

Hugged more L-S people than I have over the last three years combined. (Which actually translates to I think well under a dozen, but still.) Greeted enthusiastically at least one person who had no idea who I was. After long debate, wore both tassels on silly-looking hat. Wore impractical shoes despite the administration's repeated warnings. Did not fall while crossing stage. Have diploma in shiny case. Got lovely roses from parental units. Still have not quite realized that I think this means this is it. Except for the jamaica jammin post-grad celebration thing tonight -- but still. Over. Weird.

In a day or two or three I think I'll have more to say, once it sinks in. High school is over. What does that mean?

It shouldn't be funny. It really shouldn't. It's kind of dumb, actually. And yet. In other news, this is unrelated, moderately tasteless, and also amusing. Also unrelated and random, but less funny, here's me on the political compass.

At some point soon I have to wake my brother up and convince him to drive me to work. I suspect he doesn't want to be woken up about as much as I don't want to go to work, so I'm putting it off. No, telling you about it won't change anything, but it's too late now. :P

Rented Return of the King and Matrix Revolutions last night with a friend who's temporarily home from college. Revolutions -- well, the shiny special effects appealed to me a lot. Still like the first one best, though. It's been ages since I read the LotR books or saw either of the earlier movies, so it was a couple minutes before I started remembering what was going on. Eating during the first few scenes was definitely a mistake, though. Ew. We also watched the Angel and Smallville season finales -- ( half a sentence of sort of spoilers ) -- for a grand total of I think seven hours of TV? Ah, well. It was fun.

I am so not going to talk about the graduation practice march thing that's happening this afternoon. Nope, not a word.

All right, how can I possibly be depressed that I don't have to go to school tomorrow? Honestly. Someone remind me of the things I *won't* miss about this place? All I can think of things I regret, and then I think about what I should have could have done to remedy them, and people I'll probably never see again and places that it would be so comfortable to just stay forever. Argh. And if I'm this bad now, can you imagine what a mess I'll be by graduation on Friday? I am so going to end up spending the Jamaica Jammin thing in a corner with the yearbook in tears. This is just completely absurd.

Except for this one little detail where somehow we left two hours late -- prom was wonderful, amazing, both the thing itself and the hangout time afterwards. One of the best evenings ever. Yes, I danced, in the sense of self-conscious awkward swaying motions that slowly progressed to less self-conscious awkward swaying motions. It wasn't spectacular, but it was okay. Food (very important) was good. Company was excellent. Pictures later, maybe. :)

It's nice when things work out. (More or less.)

Of that to-do list from a few days back:
Fountain maybes, layout, poetry reading stuff
AP exams
Creative writing -- progress has been made, six or seven pages of progress, including three or four that will be very painful to read since they're entirely in second person
Limo stuff (I am forever indebted to grayrainbow and circusrunaway)
Aquatic bio project -- half done, just need to throw in a couple pictures to hit the page count

New stuff on the list:
Cum laude banquet stuff (find something to read, get Mom to get tickets)
... There's something else, but I can't remember what.

So you say: how can just using the second person make a short story unbelievably annoying? ( Behold. )

And as promised, ( The most pretentious story in the whole wide world! [In which I attempt to do all those prose-poetry stunts labelled 'don't try this at home, kids,' and fail amusingly.] )

So we're currently in the middle of the poetry unit of Creative Writing, which is turning out to be much less writing and much more reading. I don't have a problem with this, much, in and of itself. I love poetry, reading it as well as creating it, and some of the stuff the teacher has selected really appeals to me. We talked about Sylvia Plath's "Nick and the Candlestick", which I liked a lot. But why are we doing this -- and only this* -- in a creative writing class? She says because not everyone can write poetry.

Aargh.

Not true, dammit. Not everyone cares to put in the effort to write poetry, not everyone wants to try to channel their thoughts into that vein, not everyone thinks that way out of instinct, but IMHO, especially given the incredible range of possibilities of the form, anyone is capable of it. So what if it's hard? I think writing short stories is hard; it takes effort to come up with a plot and pace it in a halfway-decent manner. I'm sure somewhere out there there's someone who thinks writing journal entries is difficult, that there's a thousand easier ways to express your thoughts. And that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Yeah, poetry can be hard, but that's part of what makes it rewarding, to write or to read. Get over it.

That said, I now have to go write the many prose assignments, having not yet "gotten over it" and figured them out. :P Not that this has *anything* to do with why I'm feeling a bit down about the class.

* Okay, we did one exercise involving cutting out all the 'unnecessary' words from a piece of prose and calling it an ode. Doesn't count.

What made me think that with last week over everything would be smooth sailing from here on out?

Must sort out Fountain maybes and get Mr. Ray to xerox packets that will be about a zillion pages long. Must apologize profusely to Ms. E for being about to miss yet another computer department maintenance afternoon. She's going to kill me. Maybe I can offer to come in some other time?

Must make a final decision about the blankety blank AP exams. ( Two paragraphs of blah blah blah MIT blah blah blah money blah blah blah laziness. ) I felt the need to share. Isn't your day just that much better for it?

Must catch up on creative writing stuff. Which reminds me, I have poetry I can put here now that the Fountain folks have seen it and said ridiculously flattering and way too nice things about it. (And also one or two weirdly insightful things that made me think either I am either deeper or shallower than I think I am.) Anyways -- the first you've seen the rough draft of, the second is shiny new, ( click? )

I'm pretty proud of the latter, as structured poetry isn't my strongest point. The first -- I was totally going to take it out of the submission envelope, except it'd already been emptied, and I'm surprised and ecstatic it went over well.

What else? Study for BC Calc exam(s), maybe ask around about limo groups for the prom though I finally did get around to asking That Guy about all this stuff and it sounded like he was already planning to look into it. *g* I knew there was a reason I liked him. Shoot, and I have an aquatic bio project to do -- it's not so much that it's difficult or time-consuming as that motivation is absolutely zero. Figure out whether I'm going to take the physics C e&m. Come up with good senior pranks -- seriously, I have admin passwords and a master key, and I'm going next year to MIT, home of hacks, I'd feel guilty if I *didn't* do something. Figure out details of Fountain poetry reading. Plot layout for Fountain. And there is no way at all there'll be enough time Wednesday to do everything that needs to get done -- I'm definitely seeing myself hanging out in the annex Friday afternoon... but I'm not a loser, I'm just dedicated. Really.