Rocky Horror Picture Show

The shopping for this took place immediately following the 2nd Milestone presentations. I gave some cash to Sadie and had her shop for me, as I had to work.

Dawson gave his money to Arthur and sent him. He realized only later that this would likely end up in something a tad more scandalous than his original intent. Apparently, though, when it comes to Rocky Horror, scandalous is what you're going for.

I know I went on some trip on this day, because I clearly recall coming back and being really, really exhausted, and then having to change in about 10 minutes flat, and having nothing to wear, and ending up wearing this long shirt that was "totally not revealing" along with sneakers, because sneakers are comfy. I maintain that Arthur worse sneakers, so they were fine, but I've been told that the fact that Arthur was wearing pink tights and an extremely short miniskirt negates this.

I borrowed tall socks from Minette and a belt from Kaylee, loaned my not-even-that-short-but-at-least-belonging-to-someone-with-a-vagina shorts to Dawson (who got a really, really weird stain on them, actually), and had at least three guys try on my one pair of pathetically low heels, in hopes that they could find something that fit (those they fit declared them rather horrifically uncomfortable).

We headed out, I fought to stay awake. I was that behind on sleep. We walked all the way there with relatively few odd events, aside from me walking briskly in the front along with James and Hassan because we looked less scary to whoever we walked past than did Ululani and Arthur, who were leaning more in the "going all out" direction, and Arthur's skirt rather inconveniently blowing up and scaring the bejeezus out of an innocent passerby (although I really could have done with out the spandex demonstration).

We got to the theater. There weren't enough seats, so I sat in the aisle and alternated between leaning on Zsa and Teresa, both of whom thought the show was very, very weird. Morrison was the audience favorite and got to get married. I fell asleep about twenty minutes in, and when counselor Hannah and tutor Kaylee decided it would be just cruel to make me stay any longer when I was clearly very ill (read: wanted an excuse to take a cab back), we left.

Most of the Rickoids we walked past were out cold. Apparently movies about transvestites are not our favorite kind of entertainment.

We prefer Truth or Dare.

Oh, and before I forget: Hi, Bart.

The Degree of Neglect

That you have been experiencing is pathetically large. Much of it stems from the fact that I got rather ill on the 11th (the day we're pretending it is right now), and the rest stems from a lot of interesting occasions related to the opposite gender that I will not transcribe here because my RSI blogs are not precisely anonymous.

Regardless, I apologize, and I will try to make it up to you as soon as I can.

On July 11th, I slept until noon. I was up late as well, and I suppose I could relate that in my account, but there wasn't much to relate, aside from the fact that Rube and two of his friends had visited the evening before to play frisbee, and that they'd wanted more people than just me, so I'd called Dawson, who was with Gabriel, and we spent like ten minutes about a hundred yards apart, waving at each other without the other one seeing, on the phone going "I'm doing jumping jacks." "I can't see you" "Seriously, I'm right here!" while Rube and friends looked confused.

We eventually rounded up a larger group of people, but then those PROMYS jerks proceeded to kick our butts, which was somewhat bad. Apparently Rube's whole long distance running and good hand-eye coordination thing makes him good at frisbee. How very frustrating.

Anyways, back to the 11th. I got up at noon, and then my wonderful family came to visit about an hour later. My sisters (Shelby in particular) were very appreciative of the ball pit, which is understandable, considering that it is completely and utterly awesome. Eventually the family left, and I went to W20 with a backpack full of papers and settled down to read.

About a half an hour later, I felt like complete crap, so I walked back to Simmons to recuperate. I was so hot after the walk that I lay down on the couch on the first floor and refused to move. My tylenol, however, was upstairs. It was an extremely unfortunate situation.

At some point, Teresa came over and asked if I wanted her to buy me some medicine. I said that I had some upstairs, I just hurt too much to move, so I gave her my key and she went up to get them.

However, Teresa is an international student, and she didn't know the names of pills, so she brought down my entire bag. Unfortunately, the entire bag consisted of a giant pink plastic Victoria's Secret monstrosity, because it was the only thing my mother could find in the house that was opaque and large enough to put food in as well. Larry, who was on the couch opposite me, took one look at the bag and began to laugh. Teresa left, I rolled over and ignored Larry, and then I thought about how to get the bag upstairs without either moving or letting too many people see it.

A few minutes later, someone shoved their hands over my eyes. They felt squishy, warm, and biggish, and there is a limited number of people who would do such a thing to me, so I growled "Nicholas" in an angry voice. The hands immediately went away.

It wasn't Nicholas.

"Oh my god, I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else," said the boy, who was, I think, one of the MITES.

"Yeah, I figured."

"Sorry."

I shrugged.

"This is really awkward."

"Yeah."

"Like, really awkward."

"Yeah." Suddenly, I had an idea. "Hey, do you want to redeem your awkwardness?"

"Depends what I have to do."

"Can you bring this bag to my room for me?"

"Okay."

So, I gave him the bag and my key, and away he went.

Larry rolled over to look at me. "Did you seriously just give him your room key?"

"Yes?"

"You trust him?"

I shrugged. "I guess so."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

"You don't know him!"

"I dunno, I just trust people. Maybe it's stupid, but I do."

"Oh."

Larry and I looked at each other, then turned to look at the elevator, then we both began to laugh somewhat hysterically.

We were still laughing when, fifteen minutes later, the boy returned, my key in his hand, apologizing for how long the elevator took.

I continued to lie on the couch and moan for quite some time. At some point, I called Dawson to beg for food, who called Ululani and got him to bring me a bagel. I got first Nell, then Bing to sit on my legs and keep them warm, and when Dawson showed up I got use of his towel as a blanket, and Maxwell brought my my ipod, and the moral of the story is that if one moans about how crappy they feel for long enough, people will do nice things.

Yay!

Tea Learns All About Health

Also known as it is late and I don't feel like writing a real post so you're getting more schoolwork.

Obese children are at risk of heart disease because they have old-person arteries. However, parents pretend it's baby-fat and elect not to put their children on diets and destroy the self esteem of a miniature person. Also, this is boring and fat related and blech, so not happening.

So, moving along to the second health article. This one is about a new virus in South Africa. It causes flu-like symptoms but is followed by death from respiratory and circulatory collapse, which basically sucks. There were four deaths and one recovery and nothing else. Phew.

Viruses are scary. They are also invisible. Like Harry Potter while wearing his invisibility cloak, but evil. Well, not evil. Self-serving, I suppose. Ebola is also scary. It's intangible, too, which is a big word, which I am adding here to make myself sound more intelligent.

Also, best description of viruses ever "semi-alive bundles of nucleic acids." I'm not certain it's strictly scientifically accurate, but we can pretend.

Why My Problems Are Puny

Well, I haven't got very many of them, for one thing. Just the typical constantly careening self-esteem of a teenager, lack of any sort of romantic anything ever, a relatively minor health issue, on and off anxiety, fairly frequent social paranoia, clumsiness and a severe case of the geeks. Well, that last one isn't so much a problem as a solution. And, all in all, none of those are particularly bad.

A lot of teenagers have horrible self-images, so the fact that mine sometimes is good is definitely a good thing. Lack of romantic anything ever is hardly unusual for a sixteen year old nerd. Thyroid problems are easily medicated. The anxiety I deal with. The social paranoia is vastly improved upon by large numbers of awesome friends. The clumsiness is cute. I mean, I'm 5'9", so I could probably do some serious damage and I probably look ridiculous, but I'm saying it's cute because it makes me feel better.

And geek is fun. As is nerd. And I'm probably more nerd than geek, anyways.

There is also the oft-recommended there-are-children-starving-in-Africa method. This is basically reminding yourself that somebody else has it worse. Watching The Kiterunner, for example, will do that to a girl. Because, seriously, at least I wasn't hunted down and killed or raped. Visiting the hospital also helps. I went to see Avon today. I drove on the highway, by myself I might add, and then crawled from the exit to the parking garage, trying desperately not to get hopelessly lost (I know the hospital is very visible, but roads are confusing!).

I finally got there. The people in the hospital are so nice, Avon included, but the whole experience is still somewhat terrifying. I mean, hospitals don't bother me- I'm very comfortable with hanging bags of blood and IV lines and people in scrubs. It's just I hate the idea of being so sick that one has to go to the hospital. Illness is so utterly random. I know that it's not, really, that it's the product of genes and of environment, that there are any number of things I could be doing to keep myself healthy, but there are still the totally confusing syndromes like ITP. Idiomatic Thrombocytosis Purpleosis, as I told Avon I call it. It's scary, the way people can be here one day and gone the next. I don't like to think about it too often. It's the lack of control that bothers me. I'd like to be able to say, unequivocally, that I'm going to live for 78.6 years, have 2.5 kids and 1.3 husbands, but I can't, and, sometimes, that terrifying thought seems like more of a problem than the whole list of the ones above.

Good morning, bloggites

I apologize for three postless days. I have been, unfortunately a bit under the weather. Well, that's kind of a lie- I'm not sick, just so stressed out about my research paper and tests and everything else that writing at all seems like just another drain on my energy. However, now that I'm at it again, I'm beginning to remember that it is, after all, rather fun.

Thursday was a very long time ago, and I can remember nothing that occurred then. I suppose it can't have been all that interesting, but it really is unfortunate just how wonky my memory is. I suppose it's the stress. Oh, wait, it's beginning to come back to me. I spent about an hour on the phone with Caroline helping her with the Utexas for physics. Shelby came over and started yelling at me to help with the dishes, and I went "No! Physics tutoring! Go away!" and, miraculously, she did.

Friday I saw The Princess and the Frog, which is now my favorite movie of all time. I couldn't stop smiling while I watched it. I even smiled while I was crying during a sad bit, but not the sad bit that you're supposed to cry at, so god knows what's up with that. The animations were gorgeous. I love that all of the surroundings look like gorgeous paintings, but the characters are still their classic hand drawn selves. I love the way the handful of little lines on their faces can do so much. The music was wonderful, to top it all off. Another bonus- prince Naveen is very hot. Animated characters have a remarkable tendency to make one swoon.

After going back to Nyx's house, I stayed out past driving curfew playing scrabble with Tybalt and Kathrya (and Nyx, who won, of course). My saving grace with my parents (who got home about ten minutes before I did and promptly flipped out, cause Shelby hadn't left out a note saying where I was) was that I stayed past eleven listening to Kiwi as she told us about how all of those kids our age who are partying and drinking all the time will drop out of college and become bums who hang out at bars in town and show up in the paper's police blotter.

I look forward to it immensely.

Why the show sucks:

At first, it was only Vina, a bit part, who had to leave rehearsal a few weeks ago because she was throwing up. Then Blamo missed all of hell week and the entire opening weekend, but he was only Joey Biltmore, so nobody really cared. Then Shen twisted his ankle and broke two ligaments at the end of the first act and did the second act on a cane, but everyone figured he'd be fine in a week. Then we reached Wednesday, and discovered that Shen had swine flu. Ordinarily, his understudy would step in, but Ian is the funniest Big Jule ever seen this side of the Mississippi, and even though Joey, who actually is big, was understudying Big Jule, it just wouldn't be the same, so Spencer, who plays Nicely-Nicely, and knew most of the lines already, offered to step in. Now, Spencer isn't double-cast, but he has an understudy, so he would play Nicely-Nicely and the whole shindig should go nicely, but, see, Harry the Horse, one of the larger gambling bit parts, is double cast with Brandy Bottle Bates, but one of them got sick a few days ago, so Nicely's understudy got trained as Brandy-Bottle Bates, and Harry the Horse went on being Harry the Horse, but with the understudy promoted, they had to train someone else as BBB, and he royally messed up his line, calling Adelaide's jewelry "repulsive" rather than "vulgar," but to make matters worse, the other Harry the Horse got sick, and we're already down so many gamblers they decided to have the assistant assistant director do it, but he knows none of the lines, so he's reading out of the script, and to make matters worse, Emily caught swine from Shen, seeing as how their always nuzzling noses on stage, and her understudy knows most of the dialogue, which would normally be fine, cause Shen could cover it up, but since he's gone, and Spencer really only knows the dialogue for the scenes that Nicely-Nicely is in, the entire pre-Lament dialogue went entirely out of order. To top it all off, Kate wasn't there, so I don't know what will happen if Nick's sister ends up playing across from both him and Sam, because there's no way all of that kissing is going to go over well.

Illness

I have a low grade fever and will be staying home from school tomorrow. Hopefully the dress rehearsal will manage without me.

A long, relatively boring day

Rufus is in awful condition, again. It makes me nauseous just to look at him, so I'm not eating enough because he's in the kitchen, and he's sick, which is sad, and the whole thing is pretty much just a steaming pile of awful.

I ought to write something meaningful here. I ought to be able to come up with something worth reading. However, all I can really manage is a whimper of emotional and physical pain.

Woe is me.

Haiku

A Classic:

Haikus are random

and sometimes they don't make sense

Refrigerator

My Variation:

I have a license

Jurassic Park is boring

Minor stuffy nose

Bloodwork

I went to the walk-in clinic today because Dad thinks I have lyme disease. Mom brought the results from my last blood test, a year ago. The doctor at the clinic took one look at the test and said that I didn't have fifth disease when the test was taken.
"what?"
"No acute antibodies. Only immunity."
I was shocked. That meant that all last summer, something was wrong with me, but not what I thought.
It was probably lyme disease. Which I could have treated the first week and been fine the rest of the time. Gaaaahhhhh.

Oh, and I'll answer my first question. How do people have green eyes?
"Green eyes are the product of low to moderate amounts of melanin and probably represent the interaction of multiple variants within the OCA2 and in other genes, including perhaps the red-hair geneGreen eyes are the product of low to moderate amounts of melanin and probably represent the interaction of multiple variants within the OCA2 and in other genes, including perhaps the red-hair gene"

answer curtesy of wikipedia.
Oh, and I am now on vacation. Posts will be somewhat sporadic through the 24th.