I'm Back and In Business

Well, I'm in buisiness in if going to do library to study and do homework because the house has been inundated by members of the extended family counts as business, and I say that it does.

It's good to be back. I was gone for quite some time because, as I explained in my previous post, I was busy making an animation.



And there, my darlings, is said animation. Hooray for being done! Hooray for staying up past midnight to finish! Also, hooray for book awards, for taking two hours out of my animation time (it's okay, I got cool books. Yay Shakespeare!)

I'm still a bit sleepy, which manifests in some rather severe overenthusiasm. I apologize.

My Time is Devoted to Video

For English, we have to make a thirty-second visual. I've elected to make a thirty second animation, using the computer, of said visual. So far, I've had three false starts (I'd picked a scheme that was beyond my meager abilities).

There is one of them, embedded above. Now I'm working on another, in which we see kids just sitting in a classroom, occasionally raising hands, and we see both their thought bubbles and how pissed off random gifted kid gets when his teacher, after he asks too many questions, begins to ignore him. In this one, I plan to actually animate the people, which should be a big help.

Yellow

The last of the mindbenders...

Yellow is a color. It is a primary color to painters and a secondary color to anyone working with light. It includes shades and tints ranging from buff to goldenrod and can be used to establish a variety of emotions. Depending on the context and subject, yellow can create the feeling of a sunny glow or of a festering wound.

Many people associate the color yellow with Van Gogh's sunflower still lives. These paintings are in a palette of cheery yellows. The earlier paintings are pleasant, with newly picked flowers. A later one, the most famous, is done in warm yellow tones and shows flowers with less petals. Sunny yellow warmth is in both paintings, but the second also utilizes darker yellows in the dying stems.

Shakespeare, too, uses yellow's decaying connotations. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet describes "dead men's rattling bones, with reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls." I found that quote by using "find" on the entire text of Romeo and Juliet, searching for the word yellow. These rotting skulls contrast Van Gogh's sunny flowers.

This essay is so bad, I cannot believe that I passed sophomore English. I mean, this is my rewrite of it today, which is still pretty bad, but, well, the actual thing sucks balls, basically.

Not that I would ever dream of using such inappropriate language.

No Matter Where You Go You Stay Where You Are

As some of my older readers know, when I am not in the mood to generate a current post, I reach into the past. For today, I'll go back to an old English mindbender, written on September 11th, 2008.

The Mindbender is: No matter how far you go, you stay where you are.

A Summary:

People are boring, and constant, and never ever change, and I think that whole concept is obnoxious. My introduction is only two sentences long because I am lazy. Also, I'm using the first person, because I'm cool like that.

The Palace Thief is a book. It involves a big Roman history competition and togas, but all anybody cares about is that Patrick Dempsey is in the movie. I suppose that I can let Cammie keep her weird George Clooney thing if I can have Dempsey. Anyways, the cheating boy in the competition grows up to be a cheating, good for nothing grown up. He stays where he is. Isn't that a great example?

I think the cheating boy is a dickwad. I'm going to try to pretend that he's an isolated dickwad.

Oh, darn, Sarah Bareilles says that people don't change either. Since it's set to music, she must be right. Wait- Sarah's actually talking about moving around in the literal sense. But it's a song, so we'll pretend that it's figurative.

People are always trying to change, so the mindbender is wrong. I know that it's actually right, but I am going to be an optimistic for as long as I possibly can.

The End

Interestingly, even though the mindbender was written on September 11th, I make no mention of September 11th, despite the fact that it is a somewhat important date. To see if I even thought about the historical significance (twin towers! ahhh!), I went through my old journals to find something. Below is my September 11th entry:

Still Crampy. Still bleeding profusely from my vagina. It is muy disgusto.

Mom's going to the hospital tomorrow to have her uterus scraped out. She has to be anesthesized and shit. It's kinda annoying, but standard procedure. Intellectually, I'm sure she'll be fine, but I can't shake this odd foreboding feeling.

Though that could be more related to my audition tomorrow. Turns out there'll probably be only one piano, so that guaranteed spot- basically unattainable. Not that I won't try, but I'm somewhat lacking, confidence wise.

But it's alright. Worst case, I'll apologize to the set painters for my illness and join up. I'll go once or twice a week and paint out my sorrows, then try not to cry when everyone walks out and they're having fun and Ryan is being sexy and wahhhh!!!!

Well, that did not help.

I need to go to sleep I'll try to dream of D (I think?) from music theory, and hope that Mario turns out to be wonderful (and takes the train).

See, better already.

As I'm sure you noticed, this, too, contains no mention of terrorists. My aversion to discussion of world disasters seems to have been present for at least a year.

Interestingly, the mindbender is saved as 5.doc, but is titled mindbender 4.

How very peculiar.

Doodles

A few weeks ago, at SHP, I was doodling on my course calender, my typical swirly swirls of awesomeness. Then I realized that I'd accidentally drawn a penis. Then I spent at least ten minutes drawing other swirls and polka dots in a way that masked said penis without actually making it look like I was engaged in a massive cover-up job. It was pretty fantastic.

Dino refuses to believe that I actually doodled the spirals on the back of my assignment planner, for instance. Whenever anybody says "cool planner," he says, "she didn't draw that." Because he's a liar. And the derivative of acceleration.

Julie says that she thinks she missed out on the doodling thing. I think it's a life skill, acquired slowly over years and years of practice. Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours, and all that schtick.

Guidance from Above

Or, more aptly, those wonderful people installed in our school whose sole purpose in life is to help us navigate the many pitfalls of the modern educational system. I refer, of course, to guidance counselors.

Today, during my period four drawing class, I went to the guidance office. When I got there, the secretary with a slightly chipmunk-like appearance and a grating New York accent informed me that my counselor was still in the freshman parent breakfast, so I settled in for a good long wait. While I was there, an extremely loquacious freshman shared with me her entire long, drawn-out story of trying to go down a level in Spanish. Apparently her teacher refused to sign a form, the department chair is on vacation, and the whole thing is a giant puddle of mess.

So, after my counselor made it back from the breakfast, escaping past the hoards of garrulous parents, he had to run off with the unnamed freshman in search of her spanish teacher. When he finally got back, the period was half over, so I only received a limited amount of my requested college guidance.

However, I did learn the following.

- "Just between you an me, you should really take four APs next year."

- "I don't think a tech would be the right approach for you"

- "You really shouldn't rule out Yale."

Right, because I could get into Yale. Honestly, Mr. Counselor, I think we're raising the bar a tad too high here.

All About Me

This is a powerpoint presentation I made in 4th grade.

1. My Family

-My dad is an architect. He loves to ski.

-My Mom takes care of my sisters and I.

-Genie is my sister who is in second grade.

-Shelby is my sister who is in kindergarten.

-Rufus is a friendly three year old dog.

-Flossie is a shy and sweet six year old dog.

2. My Favorite Special Is Art

-I enjoy painting.

-I like making things out of clay.

-It's not too tiring.

3. My favorite animals are dogs.

-I have 2

-They are really fun

-They are comforting

4. My Hobbies

-Skiing

-Reading

-Bike Riding

-Tubing

-Using the Computer

5. My favorite Book is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

-I like fantasy a lot

-It really gets into the characters personalities

-It has a lot of funny bits

6. My Favorite Sport is Softball

-It's Fun

-I don't do too much running

-I can practice with my dad

7. Thank you for watching my show!

I hope you enjoyed it.

Honors List

Today, Gretchen came over, and we decided to combine our interests in gossip and academics to produce: The High Honors Predictions (Wood Knocking Enabled). This is also an opportunity for me to come up with lots of fun nicknames.

First, the top fifteen, also known as: Our Wonderful List, by Us.

1. Bryant, the somewhat smarter twin.

2. Tybalt, the other really smart twin.

3. Yuma, the Asian boy who likes to say "um." He is here because he is smart, and we like him.

4. Clara, who played Clara in the nutcracker and did very, very well on the math midterm and plays violin. We needed a girl on this list.

5. Julie. Because she is Julie.

6. Mario, because we like him more than

7. Livny. How we wish that he was stupider.

8. Brian. His first name is Avon's last name.

9. Jeff. Tierra is obsessed with him. However, he has taken a lot of journalism, which might pull down his GPA, but whatever.

10 and 11: Tea and Gretchen. Because we are awesome.

12. Avon or Natalie. They have the same first name, and we aren't really sure.

13. Sonny. The taller of the two workshop boys from Avon's elementary school.

14. Ariadne. Her dad gave a speech to our math class.

15. Nyx, because we love her. She's pretty good at school, too.

It'll be interesting to see if any of this rings true after another year and a half.

Also, I've been taking art classes at the art center in a nearby town. My teacher has a porno-stache, and it creeps me out a lot.

SAT-IIs

I'm taking the Math II next weekend. I just did a practice test today, and it took me an hour and a half. Definitely not a good sign. I'm going to blame my current state of illness and the fact that the practice tests are harder than the real ones. Hopefully that's it.

In other news, I got to honk the horn today. Well, actually, Mom leaned over and honked it when we were in a parking lot and some idiot decided that he could back up through our car. Fortunately, he didn't succeed.

I also decoupaged a binder for presenting our U.S. story. Beautiful, no? The newsprint is a bit more wrinkled than I would have liked, but I haven't done a collage in a while, and I'd say that it's still passable.

Also, my piano teacher has decided that I have a composer's ear and should learn to write songs. My response was, "Ummmm.....uhhhhhh....maybe?" He's also decided that I should write a musical, and my assignment for this week was to develop a plot. The best that I've got so far is a high school senior who fakes her own kidnapping because she doesn't want to go to college, gets a job doing- well, something. I haven't quite decided yet. She falls for a guy who is following the exact path her parents want for her, but refuses to admit it, instead staying with an idiot stoner type. Then- um, well, I haven't thought through the rest. I'm pretty much just bouncing ideas around at the moment, hoping to hit something inspirational.

At best, it beats the one I thought up some time in eighth grade, in which a young man finds out that he's going to die in six months, and pretty much sets out to get laid. He succeeds relatively quickly, but when the romantic entanglements start, he panics and leaves, not wanting to saddle a girl he actually likes with his death. He decides to try to save himself, and, if he succeeds, he'll go back to her. A creepy doctor has something that will prevent cell death, so he uses some, then takes a number of them home to his ex-girlfriend's house, intent on getting back together. She, who has turned to drugs in his absence, takes a needle and shoots up, but she immediately starts writhing on the floor. She stops breathing, and the man decides to commit suicide to be with her. However, due to the injections, both become zombies, and the show culminates with the smash hit song "Zombies in Love"

Pure genius, let me tell you.

I'm still waiting.

Casual Fridays

Or, in my case, shoeless Fridays.

I just don't like wearing, shoes, okay? It isn't as if most people even notice, and when they do, they laugh, and think that I'm slightly insane, but whatever.

I did, however, wear shoes to the gala (which I went to with Nyx) last night. We had to conversations with other people while we were there. In the first, we ran into Kerry and Lysander.

Nyx and I walked up to them, Nyx started talking a bit, and I stood there kind of awkwardly, because the conversation wasn't really related to me at all. After a minute, give or take 45 seconds, she decided to introduce me.

"Oh, guys, this is Tea. Tea, this is Lysander."

"Hi, it's nice to meet you," I said.

"You too," he responded.

We both stood awkwardly for a moment while I tried to determine whether I should attempt a handshake, since his hands were full, but it felt rude to just stand there, so the silence dragged on for a bit, until Nyx opened her mouth to talk and Kerry and I interrupted simultaneously, him with "I know Tea already" and me with "I already know Kerry."

I checked out of the conversation at that point.

As we went up the stairs, we passed Ryan, Ida, and Cammie. I said, "Hi, hi, hi," my voice growing progressively higher pitched with each, and Ida, who was third, laughed.

"Hi, Tea."

"Hello," I replied, greeting her again, as Nyx and I continued up the stairs.

"Oh," Ida called, "are you wearing shoes?"

"Of course!"

"I don't believe it," said Cammie.

"Let me see," Ida ordered.

I swung my leg over the banister, flip-flop and all. "See? Shoe!"

"Good job."

Unfortunately, I think I managed to lose Nyx's socks at some point during this conversation, which I really do feel quite badly about.

---------

I leave you with my final essay using my midterm planning from Western Humanities, this essay about Historical Values.

During the Renaissance, they like Renaissance Men. This is because this era was horribly repressive towards women, so they didn't want to be Renaissance Women. Also, Renaissance Men knew a whole lot of stuff, like Da Vinci, who was awesome. As far as art goes, there was Michelangelo, who spent years of his life on his back (painting a ceiling, of course). They were also really religious, so Michelangelo painted a lot of overly muscled angels. The government was decentralized, which is a big word, so should be used frequently in essays, so the church took up the decentralized slack with the powerful, decentralized pope, who did many powerful decentralized things, because decentralization is decentralizingly important.

In Rome, they were big on Pietas, which, unfortunately, has nothing to do with Tas flavored pie. They did their duty and had a big army, and the had Gravitas, which we still have too, since I have yet to float away. Gravitas is also exemplified in the Star Wars Storm Troopers, but I have no idea how, since I can't remember what Gravitas is, but it probably has something to do with their sick awesome artificial gravity. Dignitas is like dignity, but spelled wrong, according to my spell checker, and it caused fighting and class separation. This is why my eschewing of dignity and not wearing shoes is good and will end all fighting and class separation.

The End.

Education

My beloved readers: I am currently very tired, so I will leave you with some things from my school life. I was going to give you my Power of One essay from last year, about the supreme awesomeness of Gutenberg (printing presses ftw), but it's a rather well-written paper, and is, thus, both impossible to make fun of and decidedly boring. I did, however, find my planning for my midterm essay on Art Throughout the Ages, so I figured I'd give my year-later summary of that.

From the renaissance, we have the Last Supper, a painting of Jesus and some other guys who look like Jesus, and they are eating supper. It was Jesus's last supper, but everyone else was probably going to eat again tomorrow. Unless they were attending the execution, in which case they probably decided to fast. The Renaissance government was really decentralized, mostly because everyone was so busy trying to be Renaissance Men that they didn't have time to specialize in government and, you know, govern, and whatnot. They mostly went to church instead, cause they were all Catholic. So, the art was Catholic, with lots of Saints and other dead people who were also Catholic. Catholicism was kind of a big deal back then.

During the Reformation, things were reformed. Martin Luther, who is like Martin Luther King only white, redid the whole religious thing and created protestantism. This would establish him as the original goth teenager, as he struggle to be nonconformist and not be Catholic inspired him to go hang out in a different place where everyone was the same, just a different the same.

In Ancient Greece, there were a lot of naked people. We know this because there are lots of pictures of naked greek people. The fancy explanation for this is that they appreciated the human form. The real explanation is that Greece is near the equator and, thus, is really fucking hot. If it was a zillion degrees out and you had no air conditioner, I think that you, too, would rather run around naked.

So, Art reflects culture. Catholic art is Catholic, Reformative art is not Catholic, but it's all protestant, which is kind of the same thing. Greek art is pretty much all naked.

The End

Also, I'm going to leave you with a quote. You're welcome to guess where it's from, although I doubt you will.

"I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes my way."

Today

Regarding Pertinax: the New Wave of Erectile Dysfunction drugs- I'll develop the science, Vicky can do the marketing (lots of old men in bathtubs) and we'll make millions, I'm sure.

In other news, today was the last day of the softball unit in gym, and I finally scored a run. This was primarily because Peter, who was in front of me, hit a home run, requiring me to jog around the bases. It was quite annoying, because I didn't really want to run that far, but I suppose I'll have to get over it.

We spent our entire U.S. History class discussing the school's future budget cuts. Due to the economic recession, there are apparently going to be some big changes around the school. None of my classes are going, so I'm not overly upset, but once they start pulling from the art department, I'm going to get pissed.

I'm going to leave you with one of my favorites from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This is a competition for crafting the greatest badly-written literary sentence.

When he concentrated, his thick black eyebrows furrowed, looking not unlike a pair of Hypercompe scribonia caterpillars on a collision course over the bridge of his nose, but unlike them, his eyebrows would never evolve into giant leopard moths, and would find better places to hover after nightfall than around her 40-watt backporch light.

-Jane Auerbach

A Thousand Splendid Suns

I forget, sometimes, what finishing a good book will do to you. I get so caught up in the endless drudgery of schoolwork that, like Atlas, I exert far too much energy to hold up the weight and power of my emotions.

A Thousand Splendid Suns has left me reeling. It is the story of modern Afghani women, repressed beyond belief as war after war tears their nation apart. It's awful, utterly horrific, yet in the very end, there is hope. From the ashes will rise a better nation.

Reading it made me very thankful for the opportunities I have. I can learn, run around naked, fall in love with anyone, and live whatever life I wish to. Yet having all these opportunities makes it that much more difficult to find a purpose. I have no frightening regime, overbearing husband, or mystical enemy to throw my entire being against. I need to find a cause or a goal, instead of waiting for one to find me, because I know that the standard family, husband, and 2.5 kids will not be enough for me.

I want to change the world. I want to take all the broken pieces and fit them together so that they form a whole that looks as if it never had any fissures. There's a reason I like Tetris so much, but it takes more than spatial reasoning to fix a planet. It takes lifetimes, many more years than the 60 that I hope to have stretched out before me. The planet is too great a thing for one girl with one lifetime to fix.

So what do I do? How do I find a cause? Do I fight for the vanadium pipeline I keep dreaming about? Do I write stories powerful enough that people will feel what I feel right now and go out and do something? Do I make music and art in a likely fruitless attempt to leave something behind? Do I spend a lifetime in the lab to maybe, possibly, if I'm lucky, add something useful to the compendium of scientific knowledge?

I don't know what to do. I feel like Ender, and so many of the other characters in my young adult novels, poised on the edge of adulthood, trying to decide between pulling away or throwing myself wholeheartedly off the cliff. I'm not ready to make these kind of decisions. I'm 15. I don't need to know where I'm going until I'm in college, or maybe later. I just need to bend the tedium of schoolwork to my will and use what I learn to create myself, expand my mind and understanding and abilities until I am capable of great accomplishments.

I have so much potential, and so much hope, and so much opportunity, but I can't yet seize it.

I will wait until later, until I'm prepared, but not too much later, because I know that whatever I choose to do will require all the time I can lend to it.

Fearfully yours,

Tea.

Word Bubbles

Yay cool online tools! This is Wordle, a thing-a-majiggy that makes pretty word clouds with cool fonts and fun colors. At left is the Wordle of this blog. They take words (other than stuff like "the" and "a") and score them according to number of uses, size them accordingly, then you can mess with stuff like arrangement, font and color. It is, to say the least, a very entertaining time waster.

Peace out y'all.

Scribbler

Today, my primary activity is rewriting a paper for my United States History class, so I'm devoting a large amount of time to time wasters. One of these is mahjong, which I gave up on, as I've gotten no closer to beating it. The other is Scribbler. This is a nifty little drawing tool, located here. You scribble some lines, adjust the settings, and wait until an awesome picture appears before your eyes. It is, to say the least, incredibly cool. The systems has two major flaws: any changes to the settings apply to the whole picture, so you can't make different sections different colors, and you can't save your work. However, here's a  of screeeny of mine.