a++ would smuggle into space again

Today was so very, very awkward I have no words for it. XD (It is still Sares' birthday in case you somehow, through complete blindness, missed my previous fifty thousand posts, and she is still awesome. <3)

( in which Emma encounters facepaint and models )

Overhead, without any fuss...

Can you complete that sentence? If not, go read The Nine Billion Names of God. No, seriously, now.

Lessee, it's 9:30 ten, and by midnight I need to finish:

1. Amherst science supplement
2. Three Barnard essays holy christ
3. Brown essays (whatever they are)
4. Columbia essay
5. General short answer
6. Independent study write-up.

CHRIST. Wish me luck.

A not-flocked post for once! in honour of finishing Moby-Dick, which has displaced Les Miserables as the novel I wish I had written. (Those who have read my writing and Moby-Dick have permission to groan and suggest that adding more semicolons, or longer sentences, maaaaybe wouldn't be actually so beneficial, hmm? Or, or more tangents on unnecessary topics, I THINK THAT IS WHAT MY NARRATION NEEDS.)

I am so glad that I managed, somehow, to be unspoiled for the ending; it was worth the wait. About a third of the class went up to Kirby Cove and read it around the campfire. Everyone made this "Oh, Ishmael" noise at the last line. Then we had s'mores and slept out on the bunker that has a perfect view of the north side of the city -- the bridge was lit up in the dark and absolutely gorgeous.

I got, quite literally, no sleep at all, although I did manage to have a dream in this doze of a play (Shakespearean) where the incumbent king was challenged to a duel (for the kingdom!) at such a such place in time and swore that "by that time, the kinghood would be decided," and then showed up at said street corner quite late. His opponent said, "Look, how little he cares for the crown! you are forsworn, and have forfeited" and the king-in-waiting looked very grave, and then one of his lackeys lifted the crown onto his head, and he said, "No, I swore the decision would be made before this time, and while you waited to run me through, there was a vote, and I am now king."

Today has been kind of surreal in consequence -- fuzzy about the edges. The Open Mic was at lunch, and I got up the guts to go up and perform Primroses (song I wrote) in front of the school. On piano. Apparently people liked it? That was nice, even if my hands are still shaking.

And now I've just finished a calculus test and am listening to the Eagles (Take It To The Limit; my math teacher's joke). So. Good day?

So homework has, with no ceremony whatsoever, made me her bitch. That's okay, but it means that I haven't been online recently, and it means that I will probably continue to be not-online for a long time.

Woe.

On the other hand, to pass the time in my one class of total tedium I've been heavily decorating the cover to my assignment notebook with Metric lyrics and illustrations. It now has every patch of space filled in with all the lyrics to Live it Out, plus things like zombie arms, ribbons turning into roads, hot chicks in nurse outfits, and winged exit signs. This probably says more about my psyche than it should. But, ahaha! I am ... triumphant in my boredom in Spanish class! C'est finite, unless that's not how you say it. Scans forthcoming, since I promised them.

Uploaded My Wandering Days Are Over for the Italian Cousin last night, and then remembered that I'd uploaded it the night before for Sares, because I am smart. Here's the link for all of you, to put some substance into this post.

Also, the other day, by which I mean last week, I made an iconpost which Heidi immediately trumped with a much prettier iconpost, so go wander over to posticonic if you find yourself with free time!

Walking home from school was rather fun. It's about three times the walk that it used to be, which sounds horrific until you know that the walk home used to be fifteen minutes' brisk walk. Not that the walk was ever brisk -- it always took me half an hour to get home. It cheered me up, then, that this new walk took me about an hour. Rock! My walking-fu is strong!

The scenery is nice, too; it's a part of the city I hadn't ever explored, and there are these lovely lamps along Hugo Street. I keep imagining Victor Hugo going "Non! My street must have fake Parisian streetlamps! None of these American travesties of concrete!" One window was festooned with absolutely the most lovely fabric I have ever seen. Sari fabric, I think, in dark rich blue, bordered with a thick bar of gold which was itself interwoven and bordered with red. I sketched the way it fell but I really didn't do it justice.

School pretends to be in session, but really we're just planning freshman picnics and writing college essays. I wrote mine about NaNoWriMo, which is ... um ... an interesting choice, considering I've given up two years in a row. If I make it a triumphant sort of hero's loss, says the college counselor, that might be okay, but I have to stop using compound complex sentences.

I like compound complex sentences.

I'm listening to Metric right now and remembering the first time I bought a Metric song, the end of freshman year. I had Combat Baby because it was free on iTunes one day, and I loved it, but I hadn't listened to anything else because the little snatches of their CD didn't appeal to me at all. Finally I bought The List on a kind of off-chance. It was the first time I realised that non-classical music could be a cohesive whole -- that you would have to listen to a whole song to like it, or make musical sense of it. Previously everything I had was either pop or jazz, both of which you can pretty instantly tell if you're going to like or not. They're like sonnets -- repetitive forms with a lot of freedom -- so if you don't like the opening quatrain, you're probably not going to think, what a great sonnet! There's always the chance the couplet will grab you, but not always. But suddenly there was all this free verse around me (read: indie music.) Stuff you had to give a chance to grow on you.

... Actually, not coincidentally, the end of freshman year was when I really started liking free verse, too. My metaphor is more literal than I meant it to be.

I don't know why it took me to the end of freshman year to figure out something quite that simple, but it's one of the revelatory moments I remember most clearly.

Sundries.

• Saw Superman Returns with the brother two days ago Liked it, to my horror, even Superman. Liked Lex Luthor more. Thought it was misogynistic (juuuuust a tad), but hey, it's comics. Deeply yearning for a JLA movie or at least a World's Finest movie. Come on, people! Superman/Batman! Brandon Routh and Christian Bale, the world's cleanest-cut OTP! I will make a small concession and settle for Apollo/Midnighter...
  
  
• The storycircle_rp logs continue to progress, slowly but surely, along the road to completion. evil_overlords was over yesterday (much with the rejoicing) and we finished the mass dinner date, and starting writing more Roderick + Lady Consort. She ... has decided to pretend to be a decent human being, because that's terribly amusing. i continue to be disturbed that she lives in my head. Also, a gratuitous Radmyr and Roderick flashback. To the Days Before Everything Went Hideously Wrong. It says something about Roderick's life that we have to go back something like five years to approach that state.
  
  
• Been reading milliways_bar in what I laughingly call my free time; I remain amused at the thoughts that are provoked by this, such as "Damn, does Mal mean Kaylee is literally turning into an angel or just that she's had lots of good sex?" and "Hmm, Sunny Baudelaire sounds like baby Kitty Pryde, which makes a lot of sense," and "Bernard Wrangle looks astonishingly good fighting Voldemort's armies of doom with a ninja turtle by his side." I'm sure the M'waysers on my flist are rolling their eyes fondly at me and going, "Yes, of course," but, but, shut up.
  
  
• freeformchick rocks, for lo, she has updated the urbanfantasy, and Bad Things are happening to Thomas Rasiah, and even if that makes Juilliard do a little happy dance in the back of my head, I am on tenterhooks. Go friend and read.
  
  
• I did spectacularly miss meeting up with capiberry and cafe_fiend, and when I say spectacularly I mean I fucked it up to a degree that is truly hilarious, were you not either of them, or me. I mean, I missed them by a good two hours. Details are not forthcoming, because they intimately involve location and MUNI and things like that, but I am still kicking myself. And now cafe_fiend is in Scotland and I'm pining like a wilting flower. Luckily capiberry remains! (Although it's quite possible she will never wish to speak to me again. I mean, I wouldn't. I would want to kill me with sticks instead. Um. *goes to fumble for her phone number*)
  

Two things of some import:

1) AIM remains a bitch, and will not allow me to log on. I suppose I should reboot the computer, but considering that I ... am way too lazy to, essentially, come talk to me here if you want to talk to me! Which should be all of you, obviously.

2) ... Abby, sweetheart, did you delete all your NML journals?

Five things of no import at all:

1) My final papers are amusing me to no end. (Although not enough to actually make me want to write them.) One class has been all about existentialism, futility, Sartre, and relativism. One class has been about prescriptive morality. I'm writing my Latin American paper (for the first class) on what García Márquez is telling us to do, and my Shakespeare paper on how he's the earliest existentialist barring Ecclesiastes. Which I'm also referencing for my Latin American paper. Why am I even writing two papers? For serious.

2) Yay, Colin! for The Crane Wife. But we knew that.

3) Thanks to the awesomeness of pushingmetaphor, the NML-script is progressing. I mean actually progressing. I can't overstress the squee I have at this. All the funny lines come from her, obviously. *g* We may have a draft of a pilot, sans all crazy ideas like say pacing, by the end of the week. Which is good, because that's when I go computer-incommunicado for five days. I can do that and my finals at the same time, right? ... Right?

4) And the Juilliard!Alden/John!Thomas AU at the same time too, right?

5) Oh crap.

Friendsmême: Oh, dakegra. Dave and I met over the Fforum, many a year ago. (I'd like to point out that the Fforumites are the only LJers barring evil_overlords who I knew pre-high-school.) The Fforum sense of humour -- bad puns, Britain über Alles (or at least über America), geekery -- helped make me the giant dork I am today, taught me about the Game, and totally failed to make me understand Mornington Crescent. Dave himself has adorable kids and posts myriad interesting links, as well as creating/participating in hundredpics, which is an exersize in posting 100 pics in 100 days, and very pretty.

Next on the friendsmeme: capiberry. AHAHAH YAY! This is our lovely dear friend Ashlyn, who brings obsession to a new and lovely height. (If anyone knows where to find a slightly used Willy Wonka, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Shane-from-the-L-Word, Jim Carrey, Will Ferrel, and most especially Sirius Black, you know whom to bring them to. She will take Very Good Care of them.) I have never known her to lose energy. Even when she's tired she's tired in a sort of enthusiastically floppy way. She even put up with me putting my towel over her head last year when we saw Hitchhiker's together -- a memorable experience, baby's first sci-fi for the girl -- and she puts up with cafe_fiend and I talking about rareslash and manga, although occasionally she yells "NERD CONVENTION" and hits us.

In terms of her LJ merit, after insulting us for years about our LJ addiction hobby, she finally caved, and now comments amusingly and with great fervor on the events of the day. Although with slightly less capitalisation than may be required by law. She also puts a large uncut image at the end of every post, but it it is worth it, because it always rocks, since she is a photographer extrordinaire.

In her honour is the following picture, which I found on Getty. Shirtless man, people!

( Sometimes, GettyImages brings you what you only dream of. *snickers* )

660-720. Not quite good enough yet, but eh, I have till April 1st.

In much more pressing news (at least to myself), I think my thesis for the Latin American Lit paper is going to be "Lispector continually makes the point that no choice is the right choice and all we do causes pain."

NOW HOW TO MAKE THAT SOUND NOT LIKE A BUNCH OF EXISTENTIALIST TEENAGED BULLCRAP, ahahah.

Anyway.

*dies, ver' quietly, in the corner*

Er. In possibly even more pressing news, I wrote Dorian Grey/Stewie-from-Family-Guy.

Because I am insaaaaaaaaaaane. Insaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaane.

Or because cafe_fiend dared me to.

igosleepnow.

I keep trying to draft a coherent entry on the play, and the week, and various musings on the nature of humanity and the all-too-fleeting time left to even the young. ... It's not working. I present my most recent draft:

Finals. Finals, finals finals fiiiinals. Heh. Fiiiiiiii-nals. Finals. Fine. Alls. All's fine. Duuuude.

Play gone. Play! Play gone! Finals. Finals finals finals.

... ... ...

... Braaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiins...