So… yeah. Drama updates!

I’m not really sure.

Tech week started on Monday, which I really didn’t talk about. We’re basically going and perfecting [ and in some cases just starting to implement ] our procedures and stuff. Thankfully, this isn’t a major show so the hours aren’t really as insane as they could be. It’s only four hours instead of the six we had to deal with when Wizard of Oz reached Hell Week last year. It is weird that we’re only having two performances of the play, though. I can’t say that I mind — it means that I get Sunday off to do homework and stuff. I am a bit disappointed that the shows are at the same time (7pm). I still have to miss the original plan for T’s birthday party — as much as I hate the movie, I like the people I’m going to see it with and that’s really all that matters — though hopefully plans can be restructured and we can do something else.

The play is coming along better than I thought it would. The script is actually much better than I thought it would be and the actors are fairly good. I have one complaint with a girl who only seems to be able to talk in monotone, but aside from that, I have no qualms with the production. I just really can’t wait until The Wedding Singer rolls around. I’m really looking forward to that one and apparently it’ll be very intense. A meeting was held today [ technically, because this'll be posted at about 12:10 ] yesterday to give both parents and students information about the company and the progress we’re doing.

Apparently the Cappies will start again during January and I’ll be able to sign up and stuff. It really does seem like something interesting and it gives me a reason to go to other schools and watch productions that aren’t my own. Who knows? It might make me enjoy theater enough to try acting myself [ as if that will ever happen ].

I’m Trying to Acquire More Practice With This

Okay, I paid more attention to the page that describes how email blag posts are handled1. If everything works well, this should be posted under 3 categories and it should have a nice title.

I’m actually looking forward to using this function a lot more and maybe publishing some blag entries from school or wherever I’m not able to access it.

//_^

1 By the way, I found out how to publish posts using my email account and nothing else! I was going to mention that, but I kind of got carried away with fiddling with this. Sorry…

Here we go.

This is that later post I talked about. The one I saved for the subject I neglected to talk about.

Here it is: I’ve become greatly enamoured with a girl in my classes and I have no idea how to deal with it. She’s an awesome person and I’m worried about messing something up with her…

For the last few weeks, I’ve become more and more attracted with her and I have no idea what to do. I can’t really say that I know this person very well and I think that that’s a fairly big setback for me. I don’t want to try to progress with anything without knowing what she’s like or fairly basic things about her. I’m just nervous that she’ll think that all of the effort to get to know her was just to get into a relationship with her and I was just treating it like a means to an end. Maybe I overthink things too much, but it’s a valid concern, whether she thinks it or not. Relationships and connections should grow organically and trying to speed it up artificially in order to get a certain result is disrespectful to her.

She’s a bit outside of what I would usually say that I’m attracted to in a girl. Really smart, kinda medium height, fairly attractive, and has a really good personality. I’ve been aware of her for a long while but this year’s really the first time I’ve been able to talk to her. I actually wonder what I shall do.

[ As a plus, the internet has given me one of the most heartfelt and honest things that one can give as a Christmas present. I'll see if I can find what I need for it by Christmas. ( Of course, now I have to get gifts for all my friends in order to even it all out. I should probably find a way to get more money soon. ) ]

Really, why don’t I do this much?

It’s a horrible habit that I should really fix because now I have so many things to talk about that I have no idea where to start.

I suppose that I’ll start from the last post. That was for Poetry Out Loud, an endeavor that tries to promote poetry reading and hosts a few poetry readings at the National Book Fair every year. Of course, I didn’t win the right to continue on the competition because I got stage fright and forgot the introduction to one of the stanzas. I am ashamed. I do have to say that the one who won really was amazing and I hope that she went on to win the school competition.

Of course, lots have happened since then and a lot happened before that. I really should write more.

The play was a fairly good success. By the end of the week, the tech crew managed to cut its moving time from 25 minutes to ~6 or 7 minutes. The play itself was really well liked though no one really came because there was barely any advertisement for it. Tearing down the set was a depressing, tiring, exhausting, tiring, quick, exhausting, and tiring experience — we were able to demolish a two-story set and clean it all up in an hour.

We’ve pretty much finished with Love in the Time of Cholera and I have to say that I loved the story but I despised Florentino’s character at the end. (Material for a different rant) Pretty soon, we shall start with Madame Bovary and it’ll be interesting to see how that’ll go. I’ve put Don Quixote on the shelf for a while and I decided to concentrate on Cien Años de Soledad, just for the heck of it.

Thanksgiving was fairly uneventful, though I got a PS3 and some games out of the Black Friday rush. All my playing time since then has been spent playing Disgaea 3 and I finally beat the main storyline of the game yesterday. Now I only have 90% of the game to go! Yaaaaaaaaay! Before I really go into that, I think I’ll go start on the other games I have.

Also, I’ve been invited to a birthday party! A party at a movie-cinema theater! — Nefnee: that’s… new — A fairly good friend and awesome person — let’s call her T — has invited me and I’m fairly excited about it. I do believe that the movie will end up killing me, though. I say this because the movie is New Moon, the newest installment of the Satanic conspiracy to brainwash otherwise intelligent but impressionable people, which she chose because it will amuse the greatest number of mindless teenage drones people. I know that she won’t mind me snarking my way through the movie but either the sheer idiocy of the plot or the fangirls that are so devoted that they still go to the movie weeks after its been released will.

There’s really something else I want to say, but that’ll be left for another blag post. So for now, I’ll just take my leave and say that I hope that Avril’s situation improves.

See ya!

Annabel Lee

Ok. I’m trying to memorize this poem by Friday. (Don’t ask) I suppose that a good way to see how much I have to go is to see how much of it I can type from memory.

So…

It was many and many a year ago,
in this kingdom by the sea.
There lived a maiden whom you may know
by the name of Annabel Lee.
And this maiden, she lived with no other thought
than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child
in this kingdom by the sea
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee.
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven,
coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
in this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
my beautiful Annabel Lee.
So that her high-born kingsmen came,
and bore her away from me
To shut her up in a sepulchre,
in this kingdom by the sea.

And the angels, not half so happy in heaven,
went envying her and me
Yes! — this was the reason (as all men know,
in this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind blew out of the cloud,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love, it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we –
Of many far wiser than we–
And neither the angels in heaven above,
nor the demons down under the sea
Could ever dissever my soul from the soul
of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes,
of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
And so all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride.
In her sepulchre here by the sea
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

And how does that compare? …Not that bad, aside from a few minced articles. I just need to practice constantly and try to figure out where the pauses should go…

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate

Abandon all hope, ye who enter

I love this line. It’s probably one of the most quoted things that has come out of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I bought Purgatory and Invitation to a Beheading [ Dante and Nabokov, respectively ] a few days ago when I was buying my school books. [ That is, Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) ] I read Inferno during freshman year and enjoyed it a lot. I may read it before I go on to Purgatory. I finished Lolita about a week ago and even though the middle of the book was a bit heavy, I thought that the ending was beautifully crafted. It was beautiful language and it was very compelling and I liked it a lot. Therefore, I picked a book of Nabokov’s that seemed to have the craziest plot summary.

Also, I’m starting to read Don Quixote in the original Spanish. I actually understand a lot of it, as opposed to the horrible time I had reading a Spanish version of Digital Fortress [ T'was a gift. I'm not that interested in Dan Brown... ] I’m still only on the prologue because I spent some time skipping over the three or four introductions that were added on. It’s interesting pairing Don Quixote and Love in the Time of Cholera, since both of them are written by Spanish-language authors.

School’s going… meh. The new marking period has started and stuff. All of my grades have been lower than I thought that they would be and it’s depressing. The play is… sucking the ever-loving life out of me. I already kind of ranted about it in semi-detail and will not do it again. It’s just that some of the things that we do are tiring. Moving curtains, moving unused props, trying to handle our stressed-out director, and trying to handle the fact that the play is so horribly convoluted that it’s painful. I have trouble following the darned thing and I’m on the crew!

Both tomorrow and Thursday will have me stay at the school from 7am-9pm. T’will be hellish, though that’s what the actors have been doing all this week so I really shouldn’t complain.

So… yeah.

Today’s stuff

Well, today has been pretty good.

I got to go to a video game store and find 3 extremely old and rare games. Katamari Damacy, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Legend of Zelda: Collector’s Edition [ PS2, PS2, and GC respectively ]. I was able to buy that along with Scribblenauts [ DS ] today. I started playing Scribblenauts and I’m really satisfied. The game is fairly well done and I hope not to suck soon.

Secondly, I got to spend 2 hours bowling and completely making a mockery of the sport. I won the first game and then spent 3 or 4 frames of the second game purposely throwing gutter balls. So, yeah.

Thirdly, I finally got my hair cut yesterday. I felt sorry for the person sweeping up later, though. She got hit with an avalanche of unkempt hair. I don’t think that I’ve actually cut my hair in a few months, so it’s nice that I finally got to do it. The hairdresser was nice; t’is the first time I’ve had someone who asked me about my life pretended to care while I was cutting my hair. It’s a weird experience.

That’s it. I have to go and do stuff now. Bye.

Musical Crazy

Lately, a lot of my time has been spent buying the music for soundtracks. A Nightmare Before Christmas, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, Rocky Horror Picture Show, and The Wizard of Oz. I might as well write about the various musicals while I’m here…

The Nightmare Before Christmas: Well, most people know what this is about. Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, gets bored of the same monotonous routine and tries to explore Christmas. He gets severe backslash from us normies in the real world and he gets double-crossed by his not so faithful minions and so he has to save both his Love Interest and Sandy Claws from the Villain.

It’s a really imaginative film with a really interesting design. The claymation and the really poignant, original songs really help to make this movie a hit [ Man, I feel like a dirty, corrupt propagandist ]

Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog: This was my first Joss Whedon production and I’ve got to say that I’m not disappointed at all. Sadly, the production isn’t actually a sing-along and it’s hardly a blag at all. It is, however, one of the most engaging musicals that I’ve seen in a while. The story centers around Dr. Horrible, an aspiring humanist-villain who wants to be accepted into the Evil League of Evil and use that to further his goals to rebuild human society from the ground up.

Sadly, things go wrong and Hilarity Ensues for a little while, until everyone involved experiences a bit of Diabolous Ex Machina. [ I really do have to stop quoting TVTropes so much, don't I? ] It’s a really moving 45-minute piece; it’s made me want to look up more of his works. Firefly and Serenity are staples of nerd culture for a reason, I suppose…

Rocky Horror Picture Show: The cult classic. Sadly, when I was watching it in a totally legal way, the object on which I was watching it started malfunctioning and I had to stop watching halfway through the movie. I haven’t had a chance to watch it again. What I did see, I liked. I really do hope that I get a chance to see it completely.

Wizard of Oz: I was part of the school’s stage production of it last year. I’m just glad that I finally got the soundtrack. I don’t really have anything to say about it; it’s not a particularly good or bad piece. It’s just that I wanted it in case I ever wanted to bring up those not-so-good memories that I’m better of forgetting times last year when I did stagecrew.

There is this series that I’m starting to watch. It’s called Higurashi no Naku Noro Ni. ie, The Moment When the Cicadas Cry. Town conspiracies, murderous teenagers, atrocious murders. I’m only on the third episode and I’m already intensely creeped out. At least one of the girls is a Stalker with an Axe to Grind. Another is a raging girl who can’t control her temper. Things do not bode well for the poor main character…

The Results of an Intense Social and Biological Survey, documented in the most Objective Fashion Possible

Meaning, with as much Vitriol as possible. I’ll probably publish this by parts. I’ll start with the first one or two events, publish it, and then keep editing it until it makes a comprehensive record of the last few days. It’ll make it easier for me to concentrate on everything else I should be doing while I do this…

So, let’s start from the beginning. My school’s IB Science department decided to set up a mandatory field trip for all Physics, Chemistry, and 2nd year Biology kids. We went to this place called [ censored ] and at [ censored ] we were supposed to design an experiment for which we could make a presentation with three or four other people that would be due in two weeks.

When I first got my group listing, I was fairly disappointed. This guy, whom I will call C, was on my group; I hadn’t really had a very good opinion of him ever since he called my Science shirt misogynistic. I also got a guy whom I was on good standing with ever since freshman year and another whom I had really met through the whole drama thing last year. I thought that it was a fairly solid team, all things considered.

Yesterday was a nice day. We did our best to try every station and decide what kind of resources we would use for the second day, in which we would prove whatever sort of experiment we chose to perform. We went on a boat, on canoes, on a nature walk, and on a pier. We chose our question and headed home, getting to school at 4-something pm.

Today, we went straight to canoeing. The results of today’s journey shall be shown by excerpts of my journal, in which I wrote down detailed descriptions of each of the subjects which I spent the day examining. The first specimen: (Carbon) C.

[ / end volume One, it should have said. It took it away because I wrote it as "an HTML tag." Also, just because I'm in a Chemistry-like mood, I shall make everyone's codename depend on the first few letters of their first name. ]

Carbon: Seems to harbor fairly strong sadistic tendencies. Tends not to examine the farther consequences of actions. Seems to take everything at face value, even when sarcasm is applied in high doses.

Beryllium and Bromine: I don’t really have much to say. They were my other two partners and they were pretty much the ideal people to work with. Intelligent, inquisitive, patient and good at canoeing.

There-is-no-element-that-starts-with-J: That’s really disappointing, really. I’m sorry, J; Chemistry doesn’t think that your letter is important enough to have an element. Anyways, he and I spent a lot of the day together since our groups worked together throughout the whole day. J is a wonderful, wonderful friend and one of the two people with whom I will support talking about literary criticism.

Nitrogen: Neffie! I almost called you Sulfur-34 [ first name, and you're not the only S person from that day. you are the older one, though, which is why you would have been 34 and the other one 32. ] Neffie’s contribution to her group finished by the first two hours [ sea-sickness and nothing else. totally not her fault ] and so she just spent the rest of the day helping out our [ J and I ] groups.

Argentum: Much cooler than Silver’s actual name, by the way. She’s an awesome sophomore whom I hadn’t had a chance to talk to ever since summer camp [ camp.... camp.... camp.... camp.... ]. Yesterday [ Wednesday ] was the first day that I could have a reasonable conversation with her. She was also the person that allowed me to talk to…

Sulfur: The other girl whose name starts with S. She’s a new student who just moved into the area and is getting shafted by the state’s graduation requirements. She has to take Government and Biology while in the IB program. She’s in one [ and sadly only one ] of my classes and Wednesday was the first day in which I was able to have a nice conversation with her. She’s a Twilight fan, but she seems to recognize its faults. In fact, I think that she said that she liked it *because* she had a fetish an attraction to creepy, stalking dangerous guys.

By the way, I met Argentum and Sulfur after the trip, since I waited for my mom to pick me up for about 2 hours past the time when I thought that she would be there. They didn’t actually go on the trip. Argentum’s too young and Sulfur’s in IB Biology; she’ll go next year.

My goodness, I’m an idiot.

A small amount of soul-crushing labor and emotion-draining monotony and I fail to update anything?

Wow. I’m a weaker specimen than I thought I was. It’s been a month and a half since I wrote anything here so I suppose that I have a lot of catching up to do.

First off: school started, and I’m under the grasp of the IB monster once again, thanks to the wonderful talking skills of my counselor. That woman could sell you the Brooklyn Bridge if she wanted to! So, yeah. 6 square meals IB classes a day and 2 extra, which I took to keep from completely rotting my brain. [ Though I'm sure that that's what'll end up happening nontheless ]

Lari and I had a little falling out, and that’s really all I have to say. She’s not really worth anything more.

Mandatory field trip tomorrow. Should be fun. I’ll take pictures.

I have a new idea for a story and I hope to find time to start writing it soon.

I really should install my tablet onto this computer soon. I miss using it…

And… that’s about it.

Bye.