Back To.

I am sedentary once again. Cross-country is over and I have time to spend procrastinating. This weekend I caught up with all the issues of The New Yorker that I half-finished because I fell asleep on them after running.
It feels so luxurious to finish those long articles. When I finish I like to stretch out, catlike, on my floor, pretend to be extremely knowledgeable for a minute, then dig up another back issue.
Also fun: putting together a Christmas list on Amazon, all books. I'll surely get them, as my mother has a terrible time shopping for me. S/Z, here I come.
So, I procrastinate, but in an intellectual way. At the moment I should be writing a critical analysis of My Antonia. I thought the book was lovely, a Little House on the Prairie without all the sentiment. I would just rather not examine my fondness until it breaks, you know.

Or maybe I just want to read it again.


One of the last days of school, I pulled an all-nighter for chemistry. It was sort of joyous, researching metalloids and eating too much carrot cake. (The plate pictured was only half of what I looted.) I could sense how nostalgic I would eventually be for my pedestrian woes--being tired, feeling gluttonous.

In Spare Moments.

Lately, when I am not exhausted or panicked or happy or hungry, I like to daydream about the end of the semester. In January the school year will be half over.
I could drop calculus and still get three college credits. I could go into regular-flavor, or take a lazy semester elective like Fashion Marketing.
I could drop my virtual class. I like my textbook and learning about art, but am far behind. It is not a class to me, more a time to halfheartedly absorb sculpture. I could instead become a teacher assistant, preferably for a history instructor so that I could listen to lectures.
I could drop yearbook. Highly unlikely but extremely tempting, because going in there every morning makes me sad. In its place, I was thinking a second study hall, maybe the one Anna's in, or a library assistant. Perhaps the new teacher would be kind and let me be tardy every day. I could sleep in until eight and drive to school.
I could drop, er, lunch? I wish. All my friends are there but this week, last week, I have nothing to say and they give me concerned looks. I've started not doing my homework so that I can do it at lunch, which gives me an excuse not to talk. They don't think it's odd--yet--because I am such a notorious procrastinator.
These are my daydreams. To have free time, to read books I want, to whine about senioritis. If only.

What's the Goal?

The goal is to take the experience and fashion it into something worthwhile. To take the scars, very few scars, and decide that they're both usual and unique--usual because everyone has them, unique because none of them are the same as mine. And ignore them. Scar tissue is tough, you don't have to look at it constantly, or at all.

Hey, go listen to "Beeper" by the Cool Kids. I like it.

"If we played by the rules right now we'd be in gym."

I want to skip school. Not in an avoiding-work way, or a perpetually-high way. Just in a Ferris sort of way. I want to be off doing better things.
I'll take a day next spring when the air tastes nice and go somewhere, and do something, and savor the fact that everyone else is in a fluorescent holding pen.
I am not a fictional character and I lack Bueller panache, so I'll have to make up for it with planning and spare cash.
Thinking about it cheered me up just now. Maybe we'll go see the cherry blossoms in D.C. Sure, it's two and a half hours away, but if not now, when?

Not a Princess, Not a Wizard.

This has been going around the Internet; I don't remember where it originated.


The details of this song have little to do with me--no one I know has ever been beaten up, and my best friend hasn't even read Harry Potter, and I haven't learned parts of speech since middle school. But the subject and attitude are spot-on. I sit in class and wish I were elsewhere. It's part of the reason I enjoy Mr. Atkins so much, because he is so angry and he knows that our school is a blue place to be.

Ordinary.

Emma and I are not as close as we were in sophomore year. But we remain friendly and pick up our relationship whenever we're around each other--like this season, when I find myself always in need of a ride and we live four houses apart.
She has the most adorable car--an ancient Volvo station wagon named Betsy, with always some tennis paraphernalia in the backseat and a blastingly effective heater. Emma drives nervously, and does not handle traffic or crowded parking lots well, but I always feel safe in her car.
Also, we listen to the radio constantly. I now know what will be a seminal song for this period, because it is always on the radio, "I Gotta Feeling" by the Black Eyed Peas. It's a derivative little thing, full of Auto-Tune and vague plans to "live it up," but that's what teenagers want. Tonight at the football game, a cameraman from the local news pointed his lens at our cheering section and twenty face-painted boys started yelling. On nights like these it is easy to get overwhelmed by energy, potential and kinetic at once--your young life, how wonderful it is and how wonderful it could be.
This generic feeling makes such verses necessary:
Lets paint the town
We'll shut it down
Lets burn the roof
And then we'll do it again

We're Too Young To Be Critics.

Today was the first time I cried over calculus. Today my dad came back from Italy and I started my application to McGill and--withdrawal.
I wanted to be with them. That's all, I just...I don't remember how to be alone.

Yesterday's song was "We've Got A Big Mess on Our Hands," yeah, well, I wanted something energetic. And it has a beat that made me feel sort of angry and prepared to run three miles, even if I wasn't.

Unreal and Real.

So that was my last 5K. For my school, at least.
Right now my head is not a safe place to be. It's twisty, full of statues that come alive, quicksand that leaves you back where you started and windows that look out on nothing. Best to ignore.
I need to write my Macbeth essay, then sleep, and possibly find out about the real world.

Election Day was yesterday, and my state has a new governor. I do not enjoy this situation but can't be angry about it, I mean, were you surprised? The push for Obama made me proud, but it also underscored a key fact--that our Democrats come out of the woodwork, and mild conservatives vote with them, only for a stirring candidate. Creigh Deeds was not terribly charismatic, and fought a losing battle from the start.

Cross-Country.

Tomorrow is our regionals, which marks the end of the season for me. Our team, made up as it is of new people like myself, will not advance to states, and I, like everyone else, will stop going to practice.
I don't know how I will feel once I have myself back. Yesterday we went through our logs and tallied the miles we ran each week, and they surprised me. More than twenty, sometimes more than thirty. Speaking to my mother about it, I said, "I don't remember that, I must have been so tired."
"Yes, you were...you've gotten better in the past few weeks, though."
"You mean since last week?"
"Well, yes."

Remember how blank I was in June? I was trying to relax in preparation for a year of frantic activity. When July started, everything else did too. I went to Conservation Camp, which was fine, and had three days to see my friends before Lousiana, which was great, and then after that three days before school started, which has been middling.
I have been steaming ahead for four months. I'll keep doing so--Thanksgiving soon, and Christmas, and midterm exams, and musical, and college visits, and homework, and outdoor track, and graduation.
But tomorrow, another chapter will end, cue the dramatic music.

In Comparison.

My sister is going to graduate from college in May.

See, I think I have it bad? She's devolved to thinking very short-term. When school is over, she's going to live at home, work like a crazy person to save money, then go to Australia for a few months and blow it all.

I'm feeling very pragmatic right about now.
And jealous.

Roar!

I spent the hike last Thursday with Alice. We went ahead of our group, speeding through the rock scramble. We took our pain happily and felt very young and alive.
At a pause in the rock scramble, she looked down at me from a big rock and asked, "Are you feeling really manly right now?"
"Oh my god, yes! I was just about to say that!"
It was the only way either of us could think to describe how we felt--powerful, level-headed, leaderly. Entirely nonsense, I know, to pair such qualities with a word tied to a gender. Probably had something to do with a speech we analyzed in English last week in which Lady Macbeth wills herself to be strong:
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'

What Alice and I actually felt as we raced up huge boulders was that we didn't need to look to men, or emulate them, to be made of steel and wonderful things. To make a more contemporary, and less creepy, literary reference, witness this passage from Prep:

What the announcement left me with mostly--I couldn't have articulated it then, and I might not have believed it if someone else had suggested it--was the sense that I wanted to be Adam Rabinovitz. The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn't romantic, but I wasn't sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people's time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.

So, yes: manly.

In other news, wouldn't it be nice to go to McGill University? Montreal! French speakers! An average January high of 22 degrees Fahrenheit!

Frightful.

The world is no longer green.
Or colorful, for that matter.
The leaves have fallen and dried up so it is, once again, Inside Weather. Being outside is not yet odious, but the air of melancholy makes going it alone unpleasant. My streets are now just the things you pass through to get somewhere cozy.
I can't wait until May.