On Turning 17

I missed my own birth time this evening. Whoops.

Oh, well. I'm not that distressed. I mean, it's cool to turn a year older, to have another year of memories behind you. It's just, I have this big moment of "growing older many times a year"- when I start the school year, finish the school year, Christmas, New Years, my birthday...it adds up.

This does, however, mark a year from when I decided to start blogging. Well, as I'm sure you're aware, it's not like I actually did, but we can ignore that fact.

I think that's enough musing for a day. Who wants to hear about Mario?

Well, today in science research I went over to the computer right away, with Julie, but the one on the end didn't work, so I switched over her, and ended up sitting between Julie and Mario. On the other side of the bank of computers, her feet propped up on the table next to the printer, sat Krystal.

Aside from asking Mario if he was going to class tomorrow (as of right now, yes, but if anything changes he'll text me) and noting that he got a haircut ("it looks nice." "Thanks.) I mostly stared at my powerpoint and occasionally chattered with Julie about birthdays and Fridays and other information of some interest but not interesting enough to repeat.

At some point, somehow, we got to talking about gym, or being late, or something to the effect of Mario showing up half an hour late for gym this morning.

"Was that actually half an hour?" I asked.

"Yeah, about."

"Remind me again how you still have credit in gym?"

"Oh, all the absences are excused."

"How do you manage that?"

"I woo the woman at the front desk."

"You know Patty?!?" interjected Krystal (assume that all of her dialogue is in all caps with multiple punctuative symbols at the end).

"That's her name?" said Mario.

"I don't understand this whole wooing business," I said again.

"Well, I basically convinced her that if she gave me an excused note, that was all she had to do, but if she gave me an unexcused, she would need to go online, and fill out a form, and it would really just be far too much trouble."

"And that actually worked?"

"Once."

"So what'd you do today?"

"I said I had to pick up my brother."

"Because your brother doesn't live with you..."

"I go to the gym before school."

"Ah." I crinkled my eyebrows, thinking, as always.

"Wait, you go to the gym before school?" said Krystal, loudly, as always.

"Yes."

"Do you shower?"

"What?"

"Don't you smell bad?"

"Um."

"Do you shower when you go to the gym."

He looked at her.

"Wouldn't you smell bad?"

"What, do you want to smell me or something?"

Krystal, taking him entirely at his word, stood up and walked around the desks. She started leaning towards him and he stood up, using what height he has to his advantage. She put her nose near his arm and sniffed.

Mario looked rather confused as she continued sniffing up his arm. Julie and I were, by this time, in near-hysterics.

"I can't smell anything," announced Krystal.

"Um," said Mario.

"Lemme try your hair," she said, unsuccessfully attempting to bring her nose close enough to his hair to smell it. She then brought a stool over.

Mario tensed and leaned back slightly, his eyes all screwed up. His face looked like one a small child would make before getting a shot, something of an anticipatory wince.

Dr. Verona caught sight of Krystal on the chair and said "Krystal, demerit."

"He made me do it!"

Mario snorted but returned to his work, which seemed to consist of repeatedly highlighting the same words on a UPenn website.

"When you scroll over a person, it highlights the fields they work in, and when you scroll over a field, it highlights the people."

"That's handy."

"I suppose so." He then proceeded to give the computer monitor that oddly intent stare of his, and Krystal returned to her seat, and the conversation ended.

Facebook, English, and other Interesting Occurrences

Last week, Mario friended Genie on facebook. I told her that if he so much as said one word to her, she was to tell me immediately, and if it was anything creepy, I was going to threaten him, my unthreatening, kind-hearted demeanor be damned. Nobody messes with my sister.

Today, Krystal yelled across the English room to me.

"Tea, I didn't know you had a sister!"

"I do. I actually have two."

"Wow. I only found out yesterday."

"How odd."

"Yeah. You want to know how I found out?"

"How did you find out?"

"I stalked you on facebook!"

"What?"

"I was stalking you on facebook, and I was looking at your graffiti, and there she was."

"Oh, that's, um, nice, Krystal."

"I know."

Otherwise, in the realm of facebook, Mario is a creep, and Andy is totally awesome, even though it's starting to take me more than a half an hour to respond to his posts.

We're Going Back To Mindbenders

Because Tea goes to the doctor's office doesn't sound like very much fun.

I mean, the loud disco music was kind of fun, but mostly weird. And beyond that, it wasn't all that interesting. Although, I did see Krystal, and she, rather uncharacteristically, gave a very intelligent overview of neurology to my mother. I really do think that she's hiding some relatively serious brains.

We shape our dwellings, and, afterwards, our dwellings shape us.

We build houses, but when living in them, we are affected by them. For instance, Thoreau lived in a cabin to make his thinking more cabin-like. This was documented in Walden, which I read last summer and am going to reference in every single mindbender I write this year.

My daddy is a builder. I know people build houses. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in my father's pickup truck, looking out the window at the big, rotating cement truck and the masons pouring thick liquid stone into the foundation of a house. I was brought along to more realtor's open houses than I care to count. From all of this, it's been made clear that people build houses different ways for different reasons.

There are the cookie-cutter homes of standard suburbia, each built identically to match the people within them who have followed their cookie-cutter paths towards the American Dream. Houses for the wealthy, however, are grander and more unique. They are designed to allow the rich to easily demonstrate their wealth and prestige to their neighbors. They are often gaudy, with expensive fixtures and extensive floor plans. The houses are shaped by a compendium of workers, and they eventually attract a rich buyer, who eventually moves in.

Guess what? I'm going to go watch American Idol, so I'm leaving you with a cliff hanger. I'm sure you're really, really riveted.

Degrees of Hilarity

Funny is Krystal's inability to think before she speaks, to the point where, when having a conversation in English about how Gatsby seems to be choosing his words carefully, she busts out with a "Wait- people actually do that?!"

Funnier is Tonta accusing Alex of giving her the impression that Alex gave a lot of blow jobs, which, now that I think of it, she never specifically denied. It ended with them both accusing the other one of being easy and Julian yelling that he had no interest in hearing anything to do with Alex and blowjobs, and that Tonta was overly gullible, Alex was being sarcastic, and, "seriously, you were convinced last week that I was sleeping with Maculate!" Alex was so distracted by the idea of Julian and Maculate doing anything that the conversation was derailed.

Funniest were the three sophomores talking about hot guys. "And, well, I just think Holden Caufield is so hot!"

"I don't know, he's a bit depressive..."

"You like emo guys, though."

"This is true. And Holden's pretty cute."

"Wait-" interrupted the third. "Are you talking about literary characters?"

"Yes."

"They can't be hot. They don't exist."

"Two words: Edward Cullen."

"You think Edward Cullen is hot? Is there something wrong with you?"

"No, I don't, but if crazy girls can have crushes on him, than I can have a thing for Holden."

I will take this moment to disclose my middle-school crush on Artemis Fowl. Something about those young, evil geniuses...

Diction in Great Gatsby

"He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two bright, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes hid the enormous power of that body- he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting where his shoulder moved under his coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage-"

Tell me that doesn't sound like it could be right out of Fool for Love or Much Ado About You or any of the other ridiculously cheesy romance novels I read. In face, I definitely remember at least one description about someone who was so aggressively masculine that he made his overly stylish clothes look good, but in an over-the-top, more mediaeval manner. It isn't until the last three words, "-a cruel body," that the whole thing gets subverted.

Granted, I mentioned none of that in class. You wouldn't have expected me to tell everyone about my secret love of bodice-rippers, would you? Instead, we went through the above paragraph and discussed the various harsh connotations of certain words. When we got to "hard" Ms. Seltzia informed us that we would bypass the sexual connotations for now. Krystal, who appears to lack the typical devices to restrain speech, waited two beats before announcing loudly "Oh my god, I hadn't thought of that AT ALL." The class, which had managed, until that point, to keep the snickers away, began laughing.

Grumpiness

As you may have noticed, for the past, erm, 13 days, I have been studiously avoiding writing about a certain someone. As you may also have noticed, I have been largely unsuccessful, and have decided to mark PFM (or whatever we've been calling it) as a total flop.

Now, many of you may also have heard of Counties, which is a girl-ask-guy dance that takes place in- say it with me- January. Not October. Not November. Not even December. January. However, for some strange reason that is mostly unknown to me, the girls of our grade have decided to start asking people. Within of a week of starting school, it was suggested by three different people that I should ask Mario. I decided that there was no way in hell that I was going to do anything in September.

Certain other people, however, decided that they would. This is the crux of my post: as of right now, Mario is set to go to counties with Rachel.

Rachel. Rachel. Seriously, Mario, what the hell?

I spent most of the afternoon freaking out over that question. It was only recently (right now) when I received a news update from Kathrya (courtesy of Krystal, the elevator-taking gossip fiend in my English class), who says that Rachel asked him in front of a large crowd, and he doesn't actually want to go with her, and Krystal was planning on telling Mario to tell Rachel that he has a girlfriend who goes to another school, but I have a feeling that he won't, and that he just didn't want to hurt her feelings, and it's all like a twisted death spiral of awful doominess.

Ahem. Anyways, the idea of Mario and Rachel has left me severely grumpy for most of the afternoon. Operation Forget Mario has been rendered void due to severe jealousy on my part. Pity, that.