My dad's adoptive mother, my Grandma Edie, died this afternoon. I didn't know it was that bad even though I'd heard she was in the hospital; I guess Aunt Nancy, who's taken care of my grandma ever since I can remember (all my life, for certain, and I'm not sure how long before), called my parents last night to say that she (Grandma Edie) hadn't eaten or drank anything for five days in the hospital, and they were basically keeping her comfortable. Her kidneys failed.
It's really strange, because Grandma always used to sit around a lot and watch TV and crochet, and though she was never up and running marathons, she didn't tend to get severely sick, either. She was...92? I think that's right. Or wait, not quite so, 'cause her birthday's in the summer. So 91, I think.
She's vaguely related to us anyway, but she adopted Dad and his twin, my Uncle Richie. She adopted all her kids, as far as I know: Aunt Nancy may be hers, but Aunt Lisa (part Native American), Aunt Candy--adopted, just like the twins. ...Oh, and another uncle, whose name fails me at the moment because I don't hear about him a lot; he was apparently very kind and funny, very great with kids--but he killed himself before I was born. They grew up, adopted kids without any Italian blood brought up in an Italian family, Grandma Edie and Grandpa Art. He died before I was born, too, though of a heart attack, not something self-inflicted. ...The adoption continued, actually: Aunt Nancy adopted one of her children, a Vietnamese boy, my cousin Ben.
I haven't heard about Ben, Shannon, or David for years. I have no idea where they are or whether they're coming for the funeral. And Shelley, I can't figure out if she's another of Aunt Nancy's kids. My dad's side so tangled between adoptive and biological, children and aunts and cousins, that I have trouble keeping it straight.
When I was little, we used to call Aunt Nancy every Sunday and talk to Grandma, and it was always an experience, 'cause she couldn't hear that well, and she always asked the same questions, and said "Oh, that's nice" a lot. As we got older, we kind of laughed, our family and Aunt Lisa and my cousin Matt, 'cause she got steadily more, oh, out-there, and she kept thinking I was in college already and--the most bizarre one--she became convinced one year that Matt was off at "cop camp" (his parents are divorced and I only know Aunt Lisa, but Matt's dad is still a policeman as far as I know). I also got the lecture--at the age of about 16, never having had a boyfriend in my life--not to get married, 'cause "Lisa was a good girl, but she got married too early". After a while there wasn't much point in calling anymore, and Aunt Nancy mostly kept up correspondence via Christmas and birthday cards.
That was after she and her husband, my Uncle Ed (now a couple of years since his death by heart failure), moved to Idaho and took Grandma with them. Dad went out there once to visit; he didn't like Idaho much at all, said his two main adjectives for it were "barren and desolate" (though, to be fair, that describes his view of every state in the Mountain Time Zone).
Grandma was at our house the night before she left for Idaho because she was flying out of the airport nearby. I was in about fifth grade, and Dad said early that morning that we should get up and say goodbye, because we didn't know when we'd see her again, us kids especially never might.
And I never did. She's being cremated; I still won't. A little haunting to me, the whole memory.
...We were happy when, earlier this year, Aunt Nancy and Grandma moved back East to North Carolina, where I-forget-which-cousin lives. There they stayed, and for a while Grandma went to a senior citizens' activity center, where they'd do things like flower arrangements or whatever--and Grandma called it "school", said she was going to school. It seemed so innocent: I remember when she used to come and stay with us for a week every so often when I was little, and she'd kind of make a mild nuisance of herself--my dad has his bossy, exacting moments, and he got it from her. But this seemed a million miles away from that--going to school and making crafts, like she was the kid after raising so many. The most company and mental stimulation she's had in some time.
So I was surprised to hear about her being in the hospital--that was a few weeks ago--and more surprised to come back from dinner tonight and find out that she died this afternoon. Maybe I was in lunch or linguistics; maybe it was when Tim and I were sitting around by his computer talking about classes and web pages. I don't know. I never know.
'Cause I'm here at school, and it's like this island: I know so little of the outside world. Everything I know I get in one-sentence snippets from MSN.com when I go to check my e-mail: I still couldn't tell you when the September 11th hearings were or what got said; I know Condoleezza Rice testified, but it beats me what she said. I don't know what's going on back in Rochester, for the most part. I don't know anything about Iraq.
Coming from a household that's gotten the newspaper every morning for most of my life, where the evening news is on from 5 to 8 every night, my dad going from one program to the next, I feel really ignorant. But only when I find out how much I've missed. Otherwise, you know, this's school, classes and clubs and secrets and inner-campus news: we've made our world.
I am being cut off from the world into which I was born. My breaking up with Glenn, that was another string snapped. There's my parents and brother, there's Erik and Matt and Kathy and still Glenn...but Erik, in another few months, he'll be here, across the way at the SUNY school. And Matt, Kathy, and Glenn will be seniors.
I still refuse, so often, so stubbornly, to call this town, this dormitory "home". When I come back from John's dorm, I don't say I'm going home, I say I'm going back. Driving back from choir functions out of town is just that, going back. But more and more often this month, more often than ever before, I've had to smother home half-born on my lips, change it in the middle, even in front of my parents. Over the summer, home will be home and this will be school. But come the autumn, so beautiful around here? Will I still go home every few weeks, without a curly-headed math-geek love to come back to? It was supposed to be my family that made it home. It's my friends instead.
But it's not, because then, why am I still so proud of where I'm from, even a month after the scary night at the gas station? Why is it so much better that when I come back from Peru, I won't be taking up residence here again, but coming back to baseball games and newspapers and my mom's lilac bushes in bloom?
But already I'll miss my friends here so much. And Krystal and Kristin, Khristina and Pascale and Matt and Evelyn and Kate, even people from choir like Shaminda...they're seniors now, they won't be coming back. I've eaten with these people, studied and acted with these people, and now "I say goodbye as soon as I've said hello". But is that worse, or is it worse for those who knew them last year--Albert having gotten to know Kate better and now having to say a bigger goodbye, Tim having half his college years with Kristin and now spending half without?
This entry is plenty long without my going into that, though.
-Laurel
4.26.2004
"These days, days, days run away like horses over the hill..."
and this heart should not be mine to break
I who cannot read even my own desires
I cannot see within even my own mind
and so to have this trust placed in me
so afraid...
Caught that from a friend's lj :), decided to stick it up 'cause it's very good.
Journals due Friday, still however-many million days behind. But last night I vegged out and read. In town there's a place where people just leave books, and if you want one, you donate as much as you think it's worth, put the money in a locked box nearby, and the profits go to the local animal shelter. Or, I've heard, you can leave a book of equal value in its place. All of it run on the honor system. ::smiles:: There are some things I love about tiny towns. Just try that at home: you'd find the box in pieces one fine day and the money gone, all, oh, $10 of it, and that would be the end of the fun. And it would be junior high kids who'd robbed it, like whoever it was that slashed the tires on the school buses (though, I am a little sorry to say, as a fifth-grader I loved that, 'cause we got a day off of school in the middle of, like, April or May).
It is a nice place to live. And it looks like Erik is coming for college to the SUNY right across, so that could be pretty cool.
You know what's going to be weird? Next year there'll be people here who're younger than my year, and, unlike other years at home, I won't know anybody in the grade below on the first day of school. No one's little brother or sister; no year-younger friend from church. No Erik, no Jordan, no Jay Jei, no Erica...I'll make new year-younger friends in CB's 200-level lit class, in psych meth/stat, in honors seminar. Even in chamber choir, come to think of it. Probably not in Advanced Practica, but that's always possible, too.
I mean, people who other people from this school will marry are coming in next year. Somebody's future mate. Somebody's future girlfriend, even. Josh didn't know that among one of the "new classes" was Kristin, who he's most likely going to marry someday. And, of course, it works with two people in the same year, and things like that.
In high school, we had that thing where it's like oh-we're-in-love-we'll-be-married-someday...and, of course, there're always a few like that (so don't kill me, Bethie and/or Nate), but a very decent percentage of people get married to people they meet in college. ...I hated that statistic when I was going out with Glenn. I'm still a little twitchy about it, but now that Becky (APO friend, not theater professor) and Dillon over here are engaged, and the aforementioned Josh and Kristin not too far away from the same, I'm starting to think that maybe there's something to it.
And as much as we shot Mr. K weird looks in eleventh grade, what's wrong, in a way, with proximity and availability? Marriage is so much about each consenting side giving equal effort to help the other.
In other news, Fiddler is over now, which means that I will finally get to see John for more than ten minutes per week, and that poor Albert will be one of the living dead in linguistics class today, 'cause he had to finish his paper last night/this morning.
Oh, and while I'm on about the one place in town with the books: bought (or Erik bought me, since I didn't have a dollar at the time) a cookbook from I think the 60s (that's what my mom said 'cause she was here yesterday; it seems pretty 50s sometimes to me, though), a Betty Crocker one a lot like my mom used to have...it's all funky, but it's also pretty weird. All the quotes are very gender-role-esque: it's hard to find, anymore, the phrase, "This is the way men like their onions." Not to mention the advice, taken from an 1848 cookbook and reproduced there, that it's worse for a woman to make bad bread than for her to have bad grammar or a dress out of style. Okay, so I personally favor the bread above the dress, but that's because I have no patience for fashion. Someone else may think differently. But taste of bread as more important than precision, education? ::sighs::
And all the pictures--the only time you see anyone who isn't Caucasian is when it's a Polynesian girl holding fruit in her arms. I am as wary as the next person of being overly politically correct--I always thought it a little token that Suzy Safety in the Brownie Girl Scout handbooks was a different race or hair color every few pages--but seeing everything monochromatically is a little weird.
Kind of was a different world, wasn't it? Not that we're perfect now, but we've certainly taken steps.
We need to figure out, on a similar note, in what ways males and females actually differ all the time (if those exist), and in which they differ some of the time, and in which it's mostly a matter of environment. Though the problem, as a psychological student who believes that genetics and environment both must have a place, is that all-or-nothing almost never exists. In almost everything, it will be a some of the time. ...There needs to be as many psychology-of-men courses as psychology-of-women.
Or it could be like Megs says, that without divine intervention, you're lost in understanding teenage boys. ::laughs::
In six days, I'll be nineteen.
-Laurel
I who cannot read even my own desires
I cannot see within even my own mind
and so to have this trust placed in me
so afraid...
Caught that from a friend's lj :), decided to stick it up 'cause it's very good.
Journals due Friday, still however-many million days behind. But last night I vegged out and read. In town there's a place where people just leave books, and if you want one, you donate as much as you think it's worth, put the money in a locked box nearby, and the profits go to the local animal shelter. Or, I've heard, you can leave a book of equal value in its place. All of it run on the honor system. ::smiles:: There are some things I love about tiny towns. Just try that at home: you'd find the box in pieces one fine day and the money gone, all, oh, $10 of it, and that would be the end of the fun. And it would be junior high kids who'd robbed it, like whoever it was that slashed the tires on the school buses (though, I am a little sorry to say, as a fifth-grader I loved that, 'cause we got a day off of school in the middle of, like, April or May).
It is a nice place to live. And it looks like Erik is coming for college to the SUNY right across, so that could be pretty cool.
You know what's going to be weird? Next year there'll be people here who're younger than my year, and, unlike other years at home, I won't know anybody in the grade below on the first day of school. No one's little brother or sister; no year-younger friend from church. No Erik, no Jordan, no Jay Jei, no Erica...I'll make new year-younger friends in CB's 200-level lit class, in psych meth/stat, in honors seminar. Even in chamber choir, come to think of it. Probably not in Advanced Practica, but that's always possible, too.
I mean, people who other people from this school will marry are coming in next year. Somebody's future mate. Somebody's future girlfriend, even. Josh didn't know that among one of the "new classes" was Kristin, who he's most likely going to marry someday. And, of course, it works with two people in the same year, and things like that.
In high school, we had that thing where it's like oh-we're-in-love-we'll-be-married-someday...and, of course, there're always a few like that (so don't kill me, Bethie and/or Nate), but a very decent percentage of people get married to people they meet in college. ...I hated that statistic when I was going out with Glenn. I'm still a little twitchy about it, but now that Becky (APO friend, not theater professor) and Dillon over here are engaged, and the aforementioned Josh and Kristin not too far away from the same, I'm starting to think that maybe there's something to it.
And as much as we shot Mr. K weird looks in eleventh grade, what's wrong, in a way, with proximity and availability? Marriage is so much about each consenting side giving equal effort to help the other.
In other news, Fiddler is over now, which means that I will finally get to see John for more than ten minutes per week, and that poor Albert will be one of the living dead in linguistics class today, 'cause he had to finish his paper last night/this morning.
Oh, and while I'm on about the one place in town with the books: bought (or Erik bought me, since I didn't have a dollar at the time) a cookbook from I think the 60s (that's what my mom said 'cause she was here yesterday; it seems pretty 50s sometimes to me, though), a Betty Crocker one a lot like my mom used to have...it's all funky, but it's also pretty weird. All the quotes are very gender-role-esque: it's hard to find, anymore, the phrase, "This is the way men like their onions." Not to mention the advice, taken from an 1848 cookbook and reproduced there, that it's worse for a woman to make bad bread than for her to have bad grammar or a dress out of style. Okay, so I personally favor the bread above the dress, but that's because I have no patience for fashion. Someone else may think differently. But taste of bread as more important than precision, education? ::sighs::
And all the pictures--the only time you see anyone who isn't Caucasian is when it's a Polynesian girl holding fruit in her arms. I am as wary as the next person of being overly politically correct--I always thought it a little token that Suzy Safety in the Brownie Girl Scout handbooks was a different race or hair color every few pages--but seeing everything monochromatically is a little weird.
Kind of was a different world, wasn't it? Not that we're perfect now, but we've certainly taken steps.
We need to figure out, on a similar note, in what ways males and females actually differ all the time (if those exist), and in which they differ some of the time, and in which it's mostly a matter of environment. Though the problem, as a psychological student who believes that genetics and environment both must have a place, is that all-or-nothing almost never exists. In almost everything, it will be a some of the time. ...There needs to be as many psychology-of-men courses as psychology-of-women.
Or it could be like Megs says, that without divine intervention, you're lost in understanding teenage boys. ::laughs::
In six days, I'll be nineteen.
-Laurel
4.24.2004
Breathe in (breathe in), breathe out (breathe out), breathe in...
...and watch (and watch) the day (the day) begin...
I wonder where that Audio Adrenaline CD went, anyway.
It's 8:12 AM and I've been sleeping since 10 last night. Hurrah for that one. Jodi and Devin are up, too. My linguistics paper is done. My acting journals, not so done, but I've got six days, so like, three or four a day should bring me up to speed, right?
We presented the scene yesterday for acting after all--and we didn't do too badly. We were off script, and they only criticized on technical things, like how if I'm going to try to blow out 30 candles on a large cake, I shouldn't blow all in one place. ...I kind of wanted to gesture to our "cake" (we had very little time to practice, so Becky said we could throw the props together; we were using a plastic teakettle to signify something cake-shaped) and be like well, it was realistic based on *this* cake, right?
I am all for acting feedback, but when they say things like that, and like how the brandy in a glass would spill if you swung it around that much (when the person's working with an empty glass), I can't help but think that's getting a little petty. It's a scene in an informal setting. Talk about the blocking and where you should turn yourself, talk about stage setup, talk about the lines and what they mean and the concept of the character, even talk about the costume if they tried for one and it's a little weird (but do not pick at their costume if they obviously are not trying to be costumed: no, rich British people do not wear blue jeans to parties, but they also do not wear logoed shirts and Nikes; do you not realize that they chose not to dress up?). But don't go on for seriously three minutes on how Beau can't use a tape measure even though he's a carpenter. If he really was a carpenter, ladies and gentlemen, he probably wouldn't be going here. If this were a play, they'dve taught him by now. But in a week, to get together multiple times with someone whose schedule is as crazy as yours, to learn lines and come up with placement, analyze your character and then answer a page-worth of questions on him...find something better to use your criticism on or don't criticize at all.
But that's quite enough out of me. And like, now watch, I'll get evil looks out of John. ::grin::
Anydangway (which I've of course swiped right from Strong Bad's E-mail), Becky from APO got engaged last night to her boyfriend. Hurrah for both of them. :)
Today the school is having a festival and I'm riding in the parade with APO and then helping to cook hot dogs, and I don't know what my thing here is, but every time I've had to type dog for the past, like, however-many tries (including the one in this sentence), I keep trying to spell it god. Or hof.
Was ten hours maybe not enough sleep? I'm amazed my dreams didn't go berserk. I know I had them, but I think they were pretty all right.
But I need to go get ready for stuff.
-Laurel
I wonder where that Audio Adrenaline CD went, anyway.
It's 8:12 AM and I've been sleeping since 10 last night. Hurrah for that one. Jodi and Devin are up, too. My linguistics paper is done. My acting journals, not so done, but I've got six days, so like, three or four a day should bring me up to speed, right?
We presented the scene yesterday for acting after all--and we didn't do too badly. We were off script, and they only criticized on technical things, like how if I'm going to try to blow out 30 candles on a large cake, I shouldn't blow all in one place. ...I kind of wanted to gesture to our "cake" (we had very little time to practice, so Becky said we could throw the props together; we were using a plastic teakettle to signify something cake-shaped) and be like well, it was realistic based on *this* cake, right?
I am all for acting feedback, but when they say things like that, and like how the brandy in a glass would spill if you swung it around that much (when the person's working with an empty glass), I can't help but think that's getting a little petty. It's a scene in an informal setting. Talk about the blocking and where you should turn yourself, talk about stage setup, talk about the lines and what they mean and the concept of the character, even talk about the costume if they tried for one and it's a little weird (but do not pick at their costume if they obviously are not trying to be costumed: no, rich British people do not wear blue jeans to parties, but they also do not wear logoed shirts and Nikes; do you not realize that they chose not to dress up?). But don't go on for seriously three minutes on how Beau can't use a tape measure even though he's a carpenter. If he really was a carpenter, ladies and gentlemen, he probably wouldn't be going here. If this were a play, they'dve taught him by now. But in a week, to get together multiple times with someone whose schedule is as crazy as yours, to learn lines and come up with placement, analyze your character and then answer a page-worth of questions on him...find something better to use your criticism on or don't criticize at all.
But that's quite enough out of me. And like, now watch, I'll get evil looks out of John. ::grin::
Anydangway (which I've of course swiped right from Strong Bad's E-mail), Becky from APO got engaged last night to her boyfriend. Hurrah for both of them. :)
Today the school is having a festival and I'm riding in the parade with APO and then helping to cook hot dogs, and I don't know what my thing here is, but every time I've had to type dog for the past, like, however-many tries (including the one in this sentence), I keep trying to spell it god. Or hof.
Was ten hours maybe not enough sleep? I'm amazed my dreams didn't go berserk. I know I had them, but I think they were pretty all right.
But I need to go get ready for stuff.
-Laurel
4.21.2004
M-hm.
Still tired. Still crazy. Still buried in homework. Ushering for Fiddler tonight and then seeing it, though, so that ought to be spectacular even though it's helping to create the tension.
My acting journals are due in nine days (only 20 days behind now); my paper is due in two; my scene for acting is probably due in five, but may be due in two.
-Laurel
My acting journals are due in nine days (only 20 days behind now); my paper is due in two; my scene for acting is probably due in five, but may be due in two.
-Laurel
4.20.2004
"Argh! Shakespeare never had this trouble!"
Checking in with another morning report. Two-and-a-half weeks since daylight savings, and I think I've been waking up before nine o'clock every single morning hence. Which drives Lily half-crazy, but drives me crazier, 'cause then I end up tired by two o'clock but when it's actually time to go to bed, like ten or something, I'm awake again.
Still have homework up to my eyebrows, but now I've got ushering for Fiddler to go with it. Starts tomorrow night. But I will get to see the show for free as many times as I want. This will make my acting-class assignment a whole lot easier. It will make my linguistics assignment a whole lot harder to complete (7-11 in the performing arts center every night?!), but that is my own problem.
Speaking of acting-class assignments, my group has not ever practiced our scene, and we're supposed to go Friday. Can you say not gonna happen? Becky will probably let us off, luckily for us.
I figured that once senior year was over, we'd stop dying around April and May.
::starts laughing::
::starts crying::
(okay, not really)
Time to stop beating a dead post.
-Laurel
Still have homework up to my eyebrows, but now I've got ushering for Fiddler to go with it. Starts tomorrow night. But I will get to see the show for free as many times as I want. This will make my acting-class assignment a whole lot easier. It will make my linguistics assignment a whole lot harder to complete (7-11 in the performing arts center every night?!), but that is my own problem.
Speaking of acting-class assignments, my group has not ever practiced our scene, and we're supposed to go Friday. Can you say not gonna happen? Becky will probably let us off, luckily for us.
I figured that once senior year was over, we'd stop dying around April and May.
::starts laughing::
::starts crying::
(okay, not really)
Time to stop beating a dead post.
-Laurel
4.17.2004
Perhaps I'll be a nun. ...Okay, definitely not.
Am writing this because I feel I should update, even though I also feel I should be doing homework.
Honors banquet song went rather well; there are pictures for any who're curious; IM and I'll send. I screwed up just a little, but not badly.
On the cooking project: one cannot substitute a chocolate mixture for a cheese mixture in phyllo dough recipes. The cheese ones came out very well; the chocolate melted and oozed out and turned into, like, anthracite on my baking sheet, and I spent like twenty minutes getting it off. And then inside the croissants the chocolate tasted only fair, a little burned.
Well, we've had so many successes that we were bound for a failure sometime. Next project: unknown. To be determined. I want to throw a potluck dinner, have Lily and John and Devin and me cook things in secret and bring them and we'll eat them. But that would require all of us having time on our hands, to which I reply: Bwa-ha-ha.
Went to see Mystic River last night with Kristin and Tim and Evelyn and Gabe. The acting: well done. The story: hugely violent and incredibly frightening, and with several moments that made you go no no no no NO NO NO NO *NO*! (case in point: busting out your Mafia self and slicing a childhood friend open and dumping him in the river after you tell him you'll let him go if he confesses to your daughter's murder, which it turns out he didn't actually do--which, by the way, doesn't get you arrested, it gets you some from your wife, who tells you that you were right). What, again, made me decide that watching this movie at eleven at night was a good idea? ...Oh, yeah, 'cause I didn't know a thing about it. Imdb.com should be my friend more often.
Acting journals and linguistics paper and feeling like a heartbreaker. I am not having a sane April, if you hadn't picked up on that by now.
One month 'til Peru. One month 'til Peru.
Oh, like that's going to create less stress, being in a third-world country giving seven performances.
-Laurel
Honors banquet song went rather well; there are pictures for any who're curious; IM and I'll send. I screwed up just a little, but not badly.
On the cooking project: one cannot substitute a chocolate mixture for a cheese mixture in phyllo dough recipes. The cheese ones came out very well; the chocolate melted and oozed out and turned into, like, anthracite on my baking sheet, and I spent like twenty minutes getting it off. And then inside the croissants the chocolate tasted only fair, a little burned.
Well, we've had so many successes that we were bound for a failure sometime. Next project: unknown. To be determined. I want to throw a potluck dinner, have Lily and John and Devin and me cook things in secret and bring them and we'll eat them. But that would require all of us having time on our hands, to which I reply: Bwa-ha-ha.
Went to see Mystic River last night with Kristin and Tim and Evelyn and Gabe. The acting: well done. The story: hugely violent and incredibly frightening, and with several moments that made you go no no no no NO NO NO NO *NO*! (case in point: busting out your Mafia self and slicing a childhood friend open and dumping him in the river after you tell him you'll let him go if he confesses to your daughter's murder, which it turns out he didn't actually do--which, by the way, doesn't get you arrested, it gets you some from your wife, who tells you that you were right). What, again, made me decide that watching this movie at eleven at night was a good idea? ...Oh, yeah, 'cause I didn't know a thing about it. Imdb.com should be my friend more often.
Acting journals and linguistics paper and feeling like a heartbreaker. I am not having a sane April, if you hadn't picked up on that by now.
One month 'til Peru. One month 'til Peru.
Oh, like that's going to create less stress, being in a third-world country giving seven performances.
-Laurel
4.15.2004
"Tee hee! We're cool!" (no! you're not!)-Teen Girl Squad
The past twenty-four hours have certainly been interesting.
Around 4:15 yesterday Sara IMed me asking if I was going to the honors banquet tonight. When I said I was, she was like sing with me; I'm part of the musical entertainment and I need another person! And as insane as it felt to accept, about 24 1/2 hours from the banquet, I did. We threw around this song and that before we finally settled on "I Know Now", from Snoopy (God bless Mrs. Parr for teaching us musicals in fourth and fifth grade instead of famous composers), which we've been practicing at intervals ever since.
We don't exactly sound the greatest, inasmuch as it's a high-pitched song and we have to do it a capella 'cause nobody we know has any sheet music for it, but we can get through it, and we're supposed to be little kids anyway, so why not?
This morning was a singing adventure in itself: several of us from choir, plus our director, sang Aretha Franklin's "Respect" for a lady in the Career Development Center whose 50th birthday it was. She loved it. Like, some people, you sing to them and they have no idea what to do (I mean, crud, I'm one of those people), but she started dancing and just soaking it up. She took a huge amount of pressure off, and we did our best rendition ever of it. Went down to the coffee shop after that and got drinks, heard our director talk a lot about Semester at Sea, which she did last year, where it's a four-month singing tour where you travel by ship to all manner of foreign countries, singing, and you take college classes while you're traveling from place to place. It sounds spectacular, though I'll never end up doing it, of course.
::laughs:: Not that I mind; Peru and London are quite enough for one six-month period.
In acting class we've got new scenes; I'm Lenny in Crimes of the Heart. How did Becky know that Lenny would be my favorite of the sisters? Maybe 'cause Lenny's the oldest child and wants to take care of everybody and is definitely on the loopy side. ...Becky keeps giving me wide-eyed characters, though I don't mind that at all. I am amazed that I have gotten through an entire semester of acting without having to be profane. That certainly won't last if I keep up this theater business.
But the scene won't be easy to pull off: I'm working with three great people--Lily (Babe in the play), Megan (Chick), and Amanda (Meg)--but that means there are four of us, and not only is finding a scene with all of us in it going to take some doing, but so is practicing it, 'cause now there's four of us with wacky schedules to reconcile. It was just going to be three of us, but Megan's scene partner Graham crapped out on her just like he crapped out on Heather last time--he never shows up to class and he can't be contacted; never answers his phone nor checks his e-mail. So, at least for now, Megan's joining our group. Stay tuned for the next episode on that one.
And my Fluxx deck came in the mail today; I will have to teach everyone that excellent card game sometime.
But for now, I should attempt to sleep for a little while. Honors banquet in two and a half hours, w00t!
-Laurel
Around 4:15 yesterday Sara IMed me asking if I was going to the honors banquet tonight. When I said I was, she was like sing with me; I'm part of the musical entertainment and I need another person! And as insane as it felt to accept, about 24 1/2 hours from the banquet, I did. We threw around this song and that before we finally settled on "I Know Now", from Snoopy (God bless Mrs. Parr for teaching us musicals in fourth and fifth grade instead of famous composers), which we've been practicing at intervals ever since.
We don't exactly sound the greatest, inasmuch as it's a high-pitched song and we have to do it a capella 'cause nobody we know has any sheet music for it, but we can get through it, and we're supposed to be little kids anyway, so why not?
This morning was a singing adventure in itself: several of us from choir, plus our director, sang Aretha Franklin's "Respect" for a lady in the Career Development Center whose 50th birthday it was. She loved it. Like, some people, you sing to them and they have no idea what to do (I mean, crud, I'm one of those people), but she started dancing and just soaking it up. She took a huge amount of pressure off, and we did our best rendition ever of it. Went down to the coffee shop after that and got drinks, heard our director talk a lot about Semester at Sea, which she did last year, where it's a four-month singing tour where you travel by ship to all manner of foreign countries, singing, and you take college classes while you're traveling from place to place. It sounds spectacular, though I'll never end up doing it, of course.
::laughs:: Not that I mind; Peru and London are quite enough for one six-month period.
In acting class we've got new scenes; I'm Lenny in Crimes of the Heart. How did Becky know that Lenny would be my favorite of the sisters? Maybe 'cause Lenny's the oldest child and wants to take care of everybody and is definitely on the loopy side. ...Becky keeps giving me wide-eyed characters, though I don't mind that at all. I am amazed that I have gotten through an entire semester of acting without having to be profane. That certainly won't last if I keep up this theater business.
But the scene won't be easy to pull off: I'm working with three great people--Lily (Babe in the play), Megan (Chick), and Amanda (Meg)--but that means there are four of us, and not only is finding a scene with all of us in it going to take some doing, but so is practicing it, 'cause now there's four of us with wacky schedules to reconcile. It was just going to be three of us, but Megan's scene partner Graham crapped out on her just like he crapped out on Heather last time--he never shows up to class and he can't be contacted; never answers his phone nor checks his e-mail. So, at least for now, Megan's joining our group. Stay tuned for the next episode on that one.
And my Fluxx deck came in the mail today; I will have to teach everyone that excellent card game sometime.
But for now, I should attempt to sleep for a little while. Honors banquet in two and a half hours, w00t!
-Laurel
4.12.2004
Augh! Augh! Aughhhh!
April and May need to slow down by about fifty miles per hour. This is now officially a Children at Play zone.
Usually I don't need anything but memory to keep track of everything, but I have got to start writing things down. APO alone is enough to give me a headache.
And I just watched Apocalypse Now for honors, which is basically an artsy horror movie about the Vietnam War. I get back from that, and Evan drags me downstairs to tell me that Weird Al's parents are dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, as though I hadn't had enough of asphyxiation and slow death and crap for one night, but they didn't know that.
I am not angry (though I wish the heck that APO would straighten itself out; Kristin and Khristina seriously need about a dozen deep breaths each), nor am I depressed, but I am feeling a bit frazzled, like I'm about to start laughing, but it will be because I've finally snapped a cerebral string.
Thirty-five days 'til Peru. Let's get that far.
-Laurel
Usually I don't need anything but memory to keep track of everything, but I have got to start writing things down. APO alone is enough to give me a headache.
And I just watched Apocalypse Now for honors, which is basically an artsy horror movie about the Vietnam War. I get back from that, and Evan drags me downstairs to tell me that Weird Al's parents are dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, as though I hadn't had enough of asphyxiation and slow death and crap for one night, but they didn't know that.
I am not angry (though I wish the heck that APO would straighten itself out; Kristin and Khristina seriously need about a dozen deep breaths each), nor am I depressed, but I am feeling a bit frazzled, like I'm about to start laughing, but it will be because I've finally snapped a cerebral string.
Thirty-five days 'til Peru. Let's get that far.
-Laurel
4.11.2004
Dia de Pascuas
Am sitting here enjoying the last few nuances on my tongue of Cadbury Creme Egg (it took me most of my life to start liking those) and pondering just how long it will take me to journal, for acting class, everything from St. Patrick's Day (where I left off) to Easter (the present). Sadly, this is major progress, considering where I was last week.
Easter was fun. Friday was weird--we didn't have Good Friday off, so I went to class. Turns out I was in the vast minority among my friends, 'cause practically all of them skipped class (the school can't do anything about it on Good Friday) and went to this noon church service. And Albert, who's Orthodox, was fasting and in black, 'cause I guess that's what they do, so I felt semi-heretic sitting there in this bright, rose-and-raspberry-striped shirt, eating all manner of whatever for lunch.
Also, I tried my first matzo: candied. Seriously, with chocolate chips and caramel sauce. It was pretty good. But I wouldn't want to eat that stuff all Passover. Gabe and Matt're doing that now because they're Jewish.
Anyway, when classes were over, I got to go home for Easter, and I took Krystal with me. It was fun: we spent the weekend watching Food Network (which I miss) and baseball games (which I mostly don't, but they were cool, too) and coloring eggs and all manner of coolness. We saw Hidalgo with Ananda, Daf, Bethie, and Erik, but it wasn't a huge group thing, as we didn't hang out before or after, just during the movie.
Today we went to church early and had "dinner" at about 1:00, then went over to my uncle's house to see my cousin Nikki, her husband Jason, and their son Brian, who is now three years old and absolutely adorable. He talks very well. And then Krystal and I came back here.
But Uncle Bert and his girlfriend Nancy smoke like chimneys, so I'm going to have a shower after the APO e-board meeting, which I'm attending tonight because I'm in the running for APO secretary (even though I'm newly-brothered and am unlikely to be eligible under normal circumstances, there weren't enough people this year to make a full e-board unless you counted my pledge class).
I promise this journal will be more interesting before too long.
-Laurel
Easter was fun. Friday was weird--we didn't have Good Friday off, so I went to class. Turns out I was in the vast minority among my friends, 'cause practically all of them skipped class (the school can't do anything about it on Good Friday) and went to this noon church service. And Albert, who's Orthodox, was fasting and in black, 'cause I guess that's what they do, so I felt semi-heretic sitting there in this bright, rose-and-raspberry-striped shirt, eating all manner of whatever for lunch.
Also, I tried my first matzo: candied. Seriously, with chocolate chips and caramel sauce. It was pretty good. But I wouldn't want to eat that stuff all Passover. Gabe and Matt're doing that now because they're Jewish.
Anyway, when classes were over, I got to go home for Easter, and I took Krystal with me. It was fun: we spent the weekend watching Food Network (which I miss) and baseball games (which I mostly don't, but they were cool, too) and coloring eggs and all manner of coolness. We saw Hidalgo with Ananda, Daf, Bethie, and Erik, but it wasn't a huge group thing, as we didn't hang out before or after, just during the movie.
Today we went to church early and had "dinner" at about 1:00, then went over to my uncle's house to see my cousin Nikki, her husband Jason, and their son Brian, who is now three years old and absolutely adorable. He talks very well. And then Krystal and I came back here.
But Uncle Bert and his girlfriend Nancy smoke like chimneys, so I'm going to have a shower after the APO e-board meeting, which I'm attending tonight because I'm in the running for APO secretary (even though I'm newly-brothered and am unlikely to be eligible under normal circumstances, there weren't enough people this year to make a full e-board unless you counted my pledge class).
I promise this journal will be more interesting before too long.
-Laurel
4.08.2004
4.06.2004
Tuesday, Tuesday...
Aunggggg, it's Tuesday and I got crap-worth of sleep again.
But I did get something like three acting journals done last night. w00t, only twenty-six or twenty-seven behind now. ::keels over::
So it turns out that I can't shut up in the journal even doing the entries Becky's way, which makes me think a lot harder because I can't just go cognitive, I have to describe things, so I sound boring as all heck, at least to me.
It is 10:32 AM and I got on to say that Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" is an absolutely kickin' short story. ...Or maybe I've read too much Horatio Hornblower. But c'mon, it's a shipwreck.
Also figured out, yesterday, the secret to the "click between the stars and press F2" AIM profile trick that's been going around. Felt all cool, even though I should've been able to figure out long ago how to tap my own profile's HTML.
Time to shower and make ready for acting. Scene gets presented again, for the last time, thanks be to God. I like Stella Kowalski, but let's not have me play her again for a while.
-Laurel
But I did get something like three acting journals done last night. w00t, only twenty-six or twenty-seven behind now. ::keels over::
So it turns out that I can't shut up in the journal even doing the entries Becky's way, which makes me think a lot harder because I can't just go cognitive, I have to describe things, so I sound boring as all heck, at least to me.
It is 10:32 AM and I got on to say that Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" is an absolutely kickin' short story. ...Or maybe I've read too much Horatio Hornblower. But c'mon, it's a shipwreck.
Also figured out, yesterday, the secret to the "click between the stars and press F2" AIM profile trick that's been going around. Felt all cool, even though I should've been able to figure out long ago how to tap my own profile's HTML.
Time to shower and make ready for acting. Scene gets presented again, for the last time, thanks be to God. I like Stella Kowalski, but let's not have me play her again for a while.
-Laurel
4.04.2004
So much for sleeping...
Can't seem to sleep early (hm, maybe that has something to do with being UP UNTIL STINKING FOUR THIS MORNING, COUNTING DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME?!), so I swiped this from Bunny who swiped it from Chris.
Most of these are in no particular order.
//10 bands/people you've been listening to a lot lately:
1) Jars of Clay
2) Cranberries
3) BNL
4) Coldplay
5) The Postal Service (Lily has them playing all the time; they're pretty cool)
6) Beatles
7) REM
8) TMBG
9) U2 (more, again, because Lily plays them, but again, I'm willing)
10) Newsboys
//09 things you're looking forward to:
1) Peru
2) Spring coming for real
3) My birthday
4) Getting a different car
5) Fiddler on the Roof
6) Seeing Glenn and my other friends again
7) Getting a decent amount of sleep
8) Being finished with stressful schoolwork/being caught up on acting journals
9) Summer
//08 things you like to wear:
1) Light blue jeans
2) Dark blue jeans
3) Ponytails or (when I can wrangle my hair into submission) buns or pigtails
4) My APO conference shirt (Muppets!)
5) Sandals
6) CCHS choir jacket
7) White socks
8) T-shirts
//07 things that annoy you:
1) That my dad and the dermatologists care more about my having zits than I do.
2) Said zits.
3) Waking up early in the morning to go to the bathroom and then not getting back to sleep.
4) That I never get phone calls except when I'm sleeping.
5) That my mom, upon hearing that Glenn and I broke up, didn't even give me a day before she started suggesting new boyfriends.
6) My own laziness.
7) Having wasted a semester's worth of credit via Spanish III, Personal Essay, and dropping out of Writing II, none of which got me any credit I actually needed.
//06 things you say most everyday:
1) oh, gracious
2) oh, man
3) ack!
4) crap
5) hi!
6) okay
//05 things you do everyday:
1) get up
2) eat at least two things that can be construed as meals
3) do something with my hair
4) get dressed
5) daydream
//04 people you want to spend more time with:
1) Lily
2) 'Nanda/Daf/Zinni (a group, so what)
3) the Asylum inmates--all those in our corner of the lunchroom (another group, so what)
4) Glenn (even though we're not going out; we could use the friend-time)
//03 movies you could watch over and over again:
1) Dead Poets Society
2) A Night at the Opera (Marx Brothers)
3) Spaceballs (Mel Brooks)
//02 of your favorite songs at the moment:
1) "I Still Do", Cranberries
2) "Funiculi, Funicula", random traditional Italian song
//01 person you would spend the rest of your life with:
1) ::shrugs:: To be determined.
...whee.
-Laurel
Most of these are in no particular order.
//10 bands/people you've been listening to a lot lately:
1) Jars of Clay
2) Cranberries
3) BNL
4) Coldplay
5) The Postal Service (Lily has them playing all the time; they're pretty cool)
6) Beatles
7) REM
8) TMBG
9) U2 (more, again, because Lily plays them, but again, I'm willing)
10) Newsboys
//09 things you're looking forward to:
1) Peru
2) Spring coming for real
3) My birthday
4) Getting a different car
5) Fiddler on the Roof
6) Seeing Glenn and my other friends again
7) Getting a decent amount of sleep
8) Being finished with stressful schoolwork/being caught up on acting journals
9) Summer
//08 things you like to wear:
1) Light blue jeans
2) Dark blue jeans
3) Ponytails or (when I can wrangle my hair into submission) buns or pigtails
4) My APO conference shirt (Muppets!)
5) Sandals
6) CCHS choir jacket
7) White socks
8) T-shirts
//07 things that annoy you:
1) That my dad and the dermatologists care more about my having zits than I do.
2) Said zits.
3) Waking up early in the morning to go to the bathroom and then not getting back to sleep.
4) That I never get phone calls except when I'm sleeping.
5) That my mom, upon hearing that Glenn and I broke up, didn't even give me a day before she started suggesting new boyfriends.
6) My own laziness.
7) Having wasted a semester's worth of credit via Spanish III, Personal Essay, and dropping out of Writing II, none of which got me any credit I actually needed.
//06 things you say most everyday:
1) oh, gracious
2) oh, man
3) ack!
4) crap
5) hi!
6) okay
//05 things you do everyday:
1) get up
2) eat at least two things that can be construed as meals
3) do something with my hair
4) get dressed
5) daydream
//04 people you want to spend more time with:
1) Lily
2) 'Nanda/Daf/Zinni (a group, so what)
3) the Asylum inmates--all those in our corner of the lunchroom (another group, so what)
4) Glenn (even though we're not going out; we could use the friend-time)
//03 movies you could watch over and over again:
1) Dead Poets Society
2) A Night at the Opera (Marx Brothers)
3) Spaceballs (Mel Brooks)
//02 of your favorite songs at the moment:
1) "I Still Do", Cranberries
2) "Funiculi, Funicula", random traditional Italian song
//01 person you would spend the rest of your life with:
1) ::shrugs:: To be determined.
...whee.
-Laurel
4.03.2004
Campus life
Have been pretty busy for the past two days. It's been rainy, and on the 1st we even got some snow (nature deciding, apparently, to make us her April fools for thinking it was spring). But things've been nice.
On Wednesday night, after talking to Glenn, I went and played soccer with Lily and Devin and a couple of their friends. They're starting an intramural team, and I want to join, terrible though I am in comparison to, say, Casey. We kicked the ball around for a while, did drills and a sort of mock game, then stood in the rain to cool off, talking about stuff.
On Thursday we did more Italian-song singing, and John fanagled me into making chocolate chip cookies with him at midnight. Neither of us, as we realized, had any eggs, so we found an eggless recipe. That was okay, even though we substituted granulated and brown sugar for the powdered sugar we also didn't have...but they didn't bake well. The bottoms would scorch and the tops would be half-raw.
::shrugs, grins:: So we mostly just ate big wads of the dough. No eggs; what's the danger?
When we were over in his dorm getting supplies, though, we had to go to the RA to report a screaming fight that was happening two doors down from Libby's room...two guys and two girls, and the one pair broke off the hostilities before too long, but the other kept going, still screaming, the girl telling the guy to go. We heard a blow, and John thought for a second that it was the guy to the girl, and was ready to go start something, but I'd heard it differently, and so had Aly, Libby's roommate--and she and I were right: when the guy finally left, he was holding a tissue to his nose, which I think was bleeding. ...John didn't have a problem with that one. But considering the rest of the fight, what little I remember, that's understandable.
The guy got arrested that night and John's dorm is locked down 24/7 for the next few days: you need a key and an ID to get in. So John, or Tom, or someone else from the dorm would have to come down and let me in if I had any reason to be over there again. Creepy, huh?
Yesterday was a pretty good day all round. Acting got canceled because Becky's dentist appointment ran really late, so I got to have lunch before Am-Lit, which's always cool. I got my Alpha-Bakery cookbook in the mail, too. ::grins:: It's this little-kid cookbook that I had when I was, like, six--the order forms're still on the back of bags of Gold Medal flour, so since they're only $2.50, I sent the form and a money order about a month ago, and yesterday it came. It's awesome--almost exactly like the one I had, except one recipe got changed, and maybe another one got half-changed. And the back section is a little different. But everything else matches the early-1990s version perfectly, the pictures and everything. :)
Am-Lit was cool because I had a Brainiac Moment: we'd read "The White Heron", and the professor was making it out to be some subtle sexual thing (the girl's only nine, what the heck?!), and at the very end I explained what I'd read the story as, and he said, "Yeah, that could work"--and then stopped, considered it, and told me it worked better than what he'd been saying. And then class ended, and I got to leave feeling all cool.
I went to see the band concert last night, 'cause I know a whole bunch of people in the concert band, and they were good. Highlights: "Also Sparach Zarathustra" (theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey), starting in the dark with pen lights and eventually bathed in blue light onstage; "A Ghost Train", which was just cool; and a bunch of Renaissance dances whose names I will not bother to transcribe.
After that, Tim and Krystal and I followed Albert to a game night that IVC was putting on, where we also found Tom and Gabe and Terri and Michael. So we played a bit of Mad Gab (the Tom-stands-in-front-of-us-and-holds-the-cards version, very low-tech) and then a bunch of Scattergories, Tim and Albert and me on a team against about five other teams (a ceramic engineer, a French/English major, and an English major; we did pretty well).
Tonight is the Italian dinner (yeah!); tomorrow is the brothering ceremony for APO, complete (if the weather behaves) with campfire and s'mores (yeah!).
Right now I'm going to have lunch and do some more cleaning: Lily's hosting a student tonight, and it'd help if we beat my half of the room into recognizable shape.
-Laurel
On Wednesday night, after talking to Glenn, I went and played soccer with Lily and Devin and a couple of their friends. They're starting an intramural team, and I want to join, terrible though I am in comparison to, say, Casey. We kicked the ball around for a while, did drills and a sort of mock game, then stood in the rain to cool off, talking about stuff.
On Thursday we did more Italian-song singing, and John fanagled me into making chocolate chip cookies with him at midnight. Neither of us, as we realized, had any eggs, so we found an eggless recipe. That was okay, even though we substituted granulated and brown sugar for the powdered sugar we also didn't have...but they didn't bake well. The bottoms would scorch and the tops would be half-raw.
::shrugs, grins:: So we mostly just ate big wads of the dough. No eggs; what's the danger?
When we were over in his dorm getting supplies, though, we had to go to the RA to report a screaming fight that was happening two doors down from Libby's room...two guys and two girls, and the one pair broke off the hostilities before too long, but the other kept going, still screaming, the girl telling the guy to go. We heard a blow, and John thought for a second that it was the guy to the girl, and was ready to go start something, but I'd heard it differently, and so had Aly, Libby's roommate--and she and I were right: when the guy finally left, he was holding a tissue to his nose, which I think was bleeding. ...John didn't have a problem with that one. But considering the rest of the fight, what little I remember, that's understandable.
The guy got arrested that night and John's dorm is locked down 24/7 for the next few days: you need a key and an ID to get in. So John, or Tom, or someone else from the dorm would have to come down and let me in if I had any reason to be over there again. Creepy, huh?
Yesterday was a pretty good day all round. Acting got canceled because Becky's dentist appointment ran really late, so I got to have lunch before Am-Lit, which's always cool. I got my Alpha-Bakery cookbook in the mail, too. ::grins:: It's this little-kid cookbook that I had when I was, like, six--the order forms're still on the back of bags of Gold Medal flour, so since they're only $2.50, I sent the form and a money order about a month ago, and yesterday it came. It's awesome--almost exactly like the one I had, except one recipe got changed, and maybe another one got half-changed. And the back section is a little different. But everything else matches the early-1990s version perfectly, the pictures and everything. :)
Am-Lit was cool because I had a Brainiac Moment: we'd read "The White Heron", and the professor was making it out to be some subtle sexual thing (the girl's only nine, what the heck?!), and at the very end I explained what I'd read the story as, and he said, "Yeah, that could work"--and then stopped, considered it, and told me it worked better than what he'd been saying. And then class ended, and I got to leave feeling all cool.
I went to see the band concert last night, 'cause I know a whole bunch of people in the concert band, and they were good. Highlights: "Also Sparach Zarathustra" (theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey), starting in the dark with pen lights and eventually bathed in blue light onstage; "A Ghost Train", which was just cool; and a bunch of Renaissance dances whose names I will not bother to transcribe.
After that, Tim and Krystal and I followed Albert to a game night that IVC was putting on, where we also found Tom and Gabe and Terri and Michael. So we played a bit of Mad Gab (the Tom-stands-in-front-of-us-and-holds-the-cards version, very low-tech) and then a bunch of Scattergories, Tim and Albert and me on a team against about five other teams (a ceramic engineer, a French/English major, and an English major; we did pretty well).
Tonight is the Italian dinner (yeah!); tomorrow is the brothering ceremony for APO, complete (if the weather behaves) with campfire and s'mores (yeah!).
Right now I'm going to have lunch and do some more cleaning: Lily's hosting a student tonight, and it'd help if we beat my half of the room into recognizable shape.
-Laurel