why should we even care?

today's title comes from iron man by black sabbath. here, enjoy it:

if you haven't heard by now, i went to see iron man 2 at midnight the day of/after my ap lit exam (which was ridiculously easy, i felt so smart...look for that to change on thursday when i have to take two econ exams). i liked it even more than the first one but my appreciation of these movies has always been based on how long robert downey jr. is on screen, so it was definitely worth going to the midnight showing, even if i did have to suffer through school on four hours of sleep (and not one drop of caffeine until i cried to an unnamed school official for coffee - did you know that officially teachers can't provide us with anything caffeinated because it's a "drug"? those fascists). luckily we weren't doing anything too strenuous in class on friday...or anything at all. we mostly spent the day playing board games in various parts of the school. i'm guessing the last few weeks of school are going to hover somewhere between "easy" and "laughable" or the hard work scale.

oh, and a little thing called prom happened yesterday. it was...like every other dance i've been to, actually. the only new additions to the formula of bad music + good dinner + fun group + pretty clothes and nails and hair were the limo and meggo. and even meggo doesn't really count, since s-la and i have both tagged along to her dances before. at least i sort of managed to dance with my shoes on for a little while? i find that impressive. so does robert downey jr.

after, however, something wonderful happened. i learned how to take out my contacts. and it neither ripped in half nor mysteriously popped out while i kept stabbing my eye with my finger. all the credit for that goes to s-la. so, who knows, now that i've figured out how to touch my eye without horrible things happening maybe i'll even start wearing them regularly. maybe.

an alternative name for this holiday is gratuitous rdj gif day, just so you all know

today was mother's day. it was pretty uneventful. i presented the momster with her prezzie, she flapped around a bit, we went out to eat, the end. i'm mentioning this because it's sheer lack of drama fills me with glee. i learned long ago in middle school to include a handwritten disclaimer with all of her cards and presents banning overly emotional displays of affection between us, since hallmark hasn't seen fit to create a card with that addendum. they should really get on that. would any of you want to be cried on and called pumpkin for, like, an hour? i don't think so. this way is so much better.

anyway, i'm still pretty tired/operating on a sleep deficit, so i'm going to cut this post short. look for longer blogs this week, though, since things are finally winding down in school.

said the joker to the thief

today's title comes from all along the watchtower, originally by bob dylan and covered by every decent musician of the last 20 years. if you don't have it already, download it.

i've been a bad, bad blogger. let's just call april the month of bad blogging and leave it at that. and i'd like to think that i'll make it up to you next month but...prom. and AP exams. so my blogging will probably remain sporadic until at least early june.

so, before i talk about anything else, i think i'll update you on my life. yes, i know - you've all been waiting on the edge of your seats for this.

the highs? b day early release turning into the Hijack Empty Classrooms to Watch The Amazing Race on a Promethean Board Club. getting fours and fives on my econ and gov practice exams. new books. new makeup. forgetting lunch at home and having the momster's assistant drop off robeks and chocolate covered strawberries. glee. bones. kings of leon tour dates being announced. having audrey hepburn on a shirt.

the lows: calc. physics. homework. ap exams. realtors and buyers and sellers being in and out of the house at all hours of the day and night shrieking things like "the contract hasn't been ratified yet!" and "what's it's mris number?" and "oh my god will you all shut up?"

...okay, maybe that last one was me. but in all fairness it was extremely annoying having to listen to real estate talk the one time i actually finished my homework and went to bed early.

minor complaints aside, i've been feeling pretty lucky lately. maybe it was the unexpected smoothie windfall today, or the even more unexpected side-trip to tyson's to get this:

and this (in air guitar):

or maybe it's just that i'm glad not to be a rape victim with multiple personalities (see my last post). lately i've been thinking that life? it's been pretty good to most of us so far.

i've kept a list of quotes as long as i can remember. some of the notebooks are so old the pages are actually starting to yellow (don't worry - the glitter gel pen remains as bright as ever) and i actually have to squint to render my oh-so-lovely-hearts-and-stars-over-the-letter-i middle school handwriting legible. i looked through a few of them last night and found it ironic that two of the first things i wrote down could be summed up like this: great art comes from great suffering.

i haven't suffered. not really. if anything, i've been stupidly, ridiculously lucky in life. i might complain about the parents (a lot) or school (even more) but...i got parents who spoiled and loved me. maybe a little too much, actually, since if they'd just had the decency to deprive me a little bit i might be a little more prepared for life in the Real World, but i digress. and school? well, we all complain, but deep down most of us like it. for one thing, none of us would know each other without it. and for another thing, none of us would be reading, writing, or blogging without the wonderful benefits of education - something millions of children in the world still go without.

so maybe i'm not yet capable of creating great art. well, i already knew that - why do you think i'm going to college? and maybe i'm one of those people who you can look at and say, "well, nothing really bad has ever happened to her." i've got thinky thoughts nonetheless.

banana will be blogging about this pretty soon, so i'm not going to delve into this too much (right now) but -

remember when my lit class was reading the poisonwood bible and i dragged out my poor, defeated little copy from freshman year and went back to being in love with it? i don't think i ever blogged this quote, but it's one of the first that i highlighted:

According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame match to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age five I raised my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month's ration of words to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn?

it's a question we all have at one point or another, and i don't think we will ever know answer. god isn't something you can understand; faith isn't a cheat-sheet to all the universe's mysteries, just your place in it.  in other words, there are just some things that we aren't supposed to know because we're human (hopefully). we are supposed to question and argue and grow.

oh, growth. it's a complicated word. for most people, it carries pleasant connotations of preteen growth spurts and too-short pajama bottoms and passing average height. the rest of us mostly hear it and feel bitter. sometimes we even use it to talk about moral growth. sometime like today, i mean.

like it or not, the world has changed a bit since the inklings roamed the streets of oxford smoking pipe tobacco and having Serious Theological Debates. we are, in the words of one lovely new york times article, a generation raised on "pulp and not substance" (if anyone else read that article, mind sending me the link? i never emailed it to myself and i want to reread it). there are people whose only goal in life is to be famous or date someone wealthy, and instead of being the exception, one only has to look at mtv, e!, tlc, or any other television channel besides cnn and fox, to see that they're becoming the rule. these are supposed to be our role models and peers.

basically, we're screwed. see will smith for details:

so what do we do? are we supposed to sit around all day and contemplate life? it's doable, i guess, especially if we add cigarettes and fedoras and french garrets in paris into the mix. we can all swan around looking wan and miserable and contemplating important questions about life, god, death, and the universe. (if you get that song reference, you get a cookie). for true authenticity we should try absinthe and practice sighing asthmatically. oh, and bonus points if you die of consumption.

or, we join the mtv-worshipping, twilight-loving, abercrombie- and hollister-wearing, d-list wannabes that seem to make up half our generation. instructions include buying an edward cullen poster, listening to nothing but top 40 music, and having no original thoughts or ideas.

i don't know about you, but i kind of hate both of those options. i'm not a genius, though - i'm not entirely sure what's behind door number three. i guess that this whole post has actually been one long, rambling, grammatically incorrect way of asking - who am i? what am i? and where do i go from here?

because most of us reading this have the same source material, if you will. we're all lucky. we're all pretty smart or just plain pretty, i love you all for being good-looking, not that i'm shallow or anything. and as soon as we entered this world shrieking with all of our considerable lung power, things started influencing us - family and friends, religion and pop culture. literature. music. the woman you bumped into on the street and the homeless person you pretended not to see. school and work and ideas and plans. that vague picture in the sky that alternately looks like a castle or a prison but is always, always labelled The Future, in capital letters that block out everything else. falling back on someone else's words is easy, so i'll let chuck palahniuk say it better: "nothing of me is original. i am the combined effort of everyone i have ever known."

so i guess that's where i'm going to leave off. mostly because those are the conclusions i managed to reach in my allotted time on the think thought train today. after that i got distracted by the momster's clients offering me cookies and ice cream cake (it was great) and makeup and books and making silly allusions to books everyone has read but which i'll quote anyway. my relationship with life is very, very complicated (take that facebook).

and i can never leave a post without sharing music, so here's lissie's latest:

let the caffeine do the talking

today's title is from we the dreamers by kate voegele. it's a fun song, even in its demo form, since i don't think there's been an official release yet. luckily, it, and everything else in the world, are on youtube, so have a listen:

i know i promised a few of you a music post today, since i discovered a new artist and a handful of songs which i'm dying to obsess over with you, but we have more important matters to discuss first --

i found a prom dress. by accident, actually, while flipping through the momster's copies of the saks catalog.

can you guess which one it is? no? here, i'll help you out. sadly, i didn't have much luck wheedling a pair of the matching jimmy choos out of the momster. oh well, a girl can dream, right?

anyway, since april is national poetry month i thought i'd share a poem with you today:

Bad women
know how to cook
create a miracle in a pot
make something out of chicken feet, pigs feet, cornmeal,
hogmaw, fisheads, fatback, ribs, roots, soy or red beans
Bad women overcome homelessness, violence, addiction and self hate.
Bad women march for equality
education, jobs, childcare, universal health care,
affirmative action and choice.
Bad women flaunt themselves
plump as mangos, skinny as tallow
tall, short
dark as plums and coffee
light as cream and butter
gold as sun on lemons, red as cinnamon
brown as kola.
Bad women don't get old, they get full
full flavored like aged wine
full as harvest's vine
seasoned.
Bad women celebrate themselves,
fingerpopping, hipshaking, big laughed, wisemouthed
hefty thighed, smart thinking women
hatwearing, soft syllabled, eyelash fluttering
tangerine lipstick queens,
small and big breasted
fat kneed, skinny ankled women
who dance without warning
wrap their men or their women around their waist
and dance to the edge of dawn.
Bad women know how to stir
their tears in pots of compassion
add some hot sauce, wasabe, five spices, jalapenos
the salt of memory
stoke the fire of history
simmer in resilience
make it taste like home.

Bad women can burn.

- Janice Mirikitani 

isn't that gorgeous? i love poetry. but not as much as music, so without further ado, i give you sky ferreira.

i feel like i should be jealous that she's my age. seventeen. mostly, though, i'm a little bit horrified, since. well, you saw the video. and i first heard about her because she's getting drunk everynight with friends with katy perry and gabe saporta from cobra starship. her voice is amazing, though. i can't find embeddable links yet, but her cover of miike snow's animal is gorgeous. and i actually really like her single. so, you know, make of her what you will.

anyway, i have to go do my calc flashcards so that's all for now.

contact update

a lot of people have wondered why i never wanted contacts - well, today i present to you the best reason ever to avoid contacts (or, a story from rachel's saturday night)

our lovely protagonist (moi) happens to be very fond of mac's lash-defining mascara. you might even go so far as to call it her best friend. but, in the tradition of all sexy best friends (hello lex luthor, we miss you) it went bad. how? well...

all of those lovely mascara-aided lashes got stuck to my left contact. so i, of course, went with the reflex of brushing/rubbing them out of the way. and when that didn't work, i (being a very resourceful protagonist, none of that wishy washy bella swan nonsense up in here) attempted to take my contact out. in the car. in a maryland parking lot at 11:30 at night. 

unfortunately, no one warned me (oh that evil ministry of magic contact wearing, why must you keep the public in the dark?) that these favorable conditions won't persuade the contact to magically jump onto your finger. so the contact stayed put. and mascara the evil bff caused Severe Itching in the eye area. mon dieu, what was a girl to do?

well, the natural course was to rub the eye in question vigorously. which i did. and then my contact ripped in half. in half. and i couldn't even tell if the other half was still in my eye or not. 

so, after several badly lit public restrooms, many, many restaurant patrons wondering why on earth the insane girl kept touching her eye and going "ohmygodohmygodohmygod", and a very rushed trip home (surprising sans ticket, but only because we explained to the police officer and he let it slide), we got home. 

and then i spent an hour staring at my eyeball in a giant mirror and trying to figure out if the contact (well, half...let's call it halfie, shall we?) was still stuck to my eye and how to get it if it was -- why yes, this period did feature a panic attack, my mother was most unimpressed. by the end of the night we concluded halfie was no longer on my person and so i went to sleep. 

but then came morning, all three hours ago (for me). and my eye still felt strange. so after more rubbing (can you tell i was the little kid in preschool with both hands like permanently glued to her face?) out popped halfie. i'm not sure if i was more horrified or relieved. relieved, for obvious reasons. horrified because a. i'd heard all the sleeping with contacts horror stories and b. because if it'd been in all night and we couldn't see it, where the hell had it been?

and so ends the story. i hope you tell it to all your children in the grand style of horror stories everywhere. don't forget the flashlights, blankets, and appropriate exclamations of pure horror. 

in more happy news, i spent most of yesterday at meggo's, helping her friend get ready for prom. my makeup skills were put to good use on her at least. who knew i could line someone's eyes without killing them?

i can see clearly now...

well, not now that the rain is gone (it's not, in fact it's still pouring outside and the weatherbug radar has the entire county covered in a solid block of red), but now that i have finally given in and gotten contacts. you know, those things i said i would never get (i am highly disturbed by the notion of placing anything on my eyeball, especially my own fingers and not excepting small bendy pieces of plastic). however, after years of mocking me for my inability to join the ranks of the corrective lens wearing masses, my own mother issued me an ultimatum - she wasn't going to pay for my second prom dress if i was determined to "ruin the effect of everything" by wearing glasses. and so, to the eye doctor i went. 

i am now on day two of this whole adjustment period business - specifically, i'm almost out of hour 2 of 4 for the day. so far, i've been convinced that i was going to go blind - in reality, i put the left lens in inside out, dripped lens solution into my eye because i couldn't find eye drops and my eyes are so dry it felt like the sahara had moved to my eye socket, and put my finger on the lens seven times and moved it around just because it looked so weird. 

and in the midst of all this excitement, i decided i'm going to blog my way through this experience. i've been neglecting this thing in the name of homework (the gods of gpantheon will not be denied), so i might as well get back in the hang of things. 

also, last night, i stayed up til 3 doing a project on fallacies for lang. here's the customer testimonial, i think you'll enjoy it.

what's playing on my ipod right now? c'etait salement romantique by coeur du pirate they're really good, and i'm trying to listen to more french music because a. the language is gorgeous and b. i have a test on monday that is supposedly 

ridiculously difficile, so it wouldn't hurt to prepare

what am i reading? the killer angels by michael shaara. actually, it's a reread (and for a reason - it's one of the best books i've ever read, and one of the few war books that i'll read for the battle descriptions and logistical information as much as the characters). i just finished incantation by alice hoffman. it was gorgeous and painful, just like all of her novels. i wish i had her flair for prose; everything she writes, every detail, every choice of syntax and scene, just flows. it's a little magical, to tell the truth. and more importantly, her writing has...oomph. it hurts, in just the right way. if you haven't read her books, start - practical magic is probably my favorite, but any of them will do. 

and it wouldn't be right if i didn't end with the usual pretty piccy from flickr. this one's called, appropriately, let there be light. isn't it gorgeous?

today i....

attempted to find a prom dress...and failed. shopping trip number two is scheduled for tomorrow after noon at 1200 hours. this is an emergency. prom is in three weeks and the only dresses i like are black. and, in a move that truly marks my ocd, i refuse to wear black to prom just because it's so overdone. and, yes, i am fully aware that i couldn't sound more like the stereotypical two-dimensional peddled-to-the-masses-by-the-disney-gods teenage girl if i tried. here, let me make up for it with:

look at the pretty. isn't flickr wonderful? photos like these make me want to give up and become a journalist or a photographer or something intense and deadliney. oh, the limitations being a chronic procrastinator has put on me.

also, i discovered rudyard kipling's poetry. and promptly had a "d'oh" moment -- where was this when i was being forced to analyze the stupid "white man's burden"? clearly the gods of the english department don't want us to like poetry -- it's always the same thing over and over: "stopping by woods on a snowy evening". and, don't get me wrong, i love robert frost, but honestly, it's time to broaden our literary horizons. by now that poem has become the equivalent of covering martin luther king jr,/the "i have a dream" speech in history and/or english class. wonderful the first few times, but a little overpowering in repetition.

also, as it's now after midnight (so what if it was ten p.m. when i started writing this? have you ever tried blogging from an iphone? honestly, it's almost enough for me to give in and jump on the old people/celebrities-who've-been-told-to-by-their-ancient-publicity-people bandwagon and join twitter), here's something to celebrate all the mother's day love. happy mama's day! now look at the pretty.