Read, Blink, Call

College apps are seriously about to take over my life. It's this small benign tumor that has existed forever but suddenly turned malignant senior year. So...nothing much has been happening, except lots of exams and papers.

Barged the library book sale today with Alice. This is probably one of the few things I will miss when I leave Acton. I think I saw Julie's mom there, but mother and daughter look so different I wasn't sure and didn't say anything. We ended up browsing cookbooks, and I got a cute book on cookies with lots of pretty pictures but probably crap recipes. Still, the pictures are pretty. Alice got a book of cool gourmet appetizers (or hors d'oeuvres, since I just learned the h in hors d'oeuvre is aspirate while researching for my French homework.) Anyways, we are TOTALLY having a cocktail party. Yes. Even if it's freakishly expensive and we end the night hungry. We have to try those recipes. So here is the list of books I bought. $2 each.

A Light in the Attic
Where the Sidewalk Ends (this Shel Silverstein books are from 1987! but they look brand new)
Maus, Part I (I searched to no avail for Part II)
The Corrections, Jonathon Frazer
An Anthropologist on Mars (It had an octopus on the cover--irresistible!)

Afterwards, we hung out in the "old" part of the library. We always say that Acton is this boring old town, but it does have a rich history. (First person to die in Revolutionary War: Actonian!) But looking at the pastoral paintings and colonial artifacts--this Acton seemed so foreign. Not my AB anyways. I read a passage from The English Patient, which almost made me cry. Then I tried to memorize Chinese instruments, which almost made me cry too, but for a entirely different reason.

Later, I was randomly browsing the Internet and found an article about dressing as celebrities for Halloween. Lo and behold, who do I see? Malcom Gladwell, author of Blink. He deserves a picture of his own.

Blink, by the way, is an awful book that I've only had enough patience to read half of. It's also 3 days overdue from the library. Crap.

Got a new cell phone today. It even takes photos! How exciting, I've finally caught up with the rest of the world. Same number as before.

All About My College Apps

Hear that? The soft sigh of satisfaction. The silence of the keyboard. I'm done, done, done with the U Chicago app.

I think finishing my first college app should be some cause for celebration, even if it's just running around my house 5 times. Now is the hard part: the time for laborious finger-crossing and half-drawn breaths. I got the U Chicago course catalog in the mail yesterday and wow! I can study ancient American civilization in Oaxaca, Mexico. And rub shoulders admist a sea of lovely British accents at the London School of Economics. And take classes in dinosaur science, and transsexualism (Claudius, here we come), and the economics of crime, taught by none other than S. Leavitt of Freaknomics! And spend Friday night coffee discussing Marx and Smith. Okay, that last part is slightly less exciting.

If I don't get in, I think I'll start a massive hunt for razor blades. My dad keeps expounding that "Chicago is a safety! Duh." (He got this bit of wisdom from a random lady on the train.) People me that I'll get in without a problem, which is comforting to some degree, even if I know they just say that to be nice. Actually, what really shook my confidence was when my counselor said I had an equal chance of getting into Harvard and U Chicago. Either he grossly overestimated by chances at Harvard or he thinks my chances are so small at both schools to have little difference. Neither explanation bodes well.

Back to more positive thinking, I managed to write an essay that works on both the Uncommon and Common Apps. This is a rather remarkable feat I say. Despite the notoriety of UC's app, it's really not that bad. Hell, talking to Olga made me realize it's actually much shorter than Brown's. Through some economizing and strategezing, I only need 3 essays between 10 colleges. What I have left to write: a dozen short responses, UMich essay/Common App short, Harvard/Yale supp, scholarship essay for WashU...hey that's it. Not too bad if I leave it all to winter vaca, right? Especially because the two other essays are mostly written and the scholarship essay is on film, which should be rather easy. What is hard is answering questions like, "Why do you want to attend BU?" when the honest answer is, "I don't want to attend BU!" If all goes well, I won't even have to apply there. Hopefully.

The Bluest Eye

"Then she stopped staring at the green chairs, at the delivery truck; she went to the movies instead. There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as a possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assess in it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scales one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the long roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and white images came together, making a magnificent whole--all projected through the ray of light from above and beyond."

Silly girl, this does not happen to you, does it? My dad actually accused be of this a while ago, telling me I was lost in a fantasy world. Seeing that this accusation came from my dad, I immediately leapt into a defense without thinking about the possible truth in his words. I still don't think it's true, but maybe I should at least consider the possibility. As much as I revel in the depressing and the abstract , I've realized that many films I love are unrealistic. Amelie? Pure whimsy. Wes Anderson? Encased in his little hermetic world. But then there is a strain of the bleak and oppressive: Brazil, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Fat Girl. Perhaps the opposite is true of my father's words: cinema has aged and jaded me to the world.

---

As for The Bluest Eye the novel, I think I've encounter one of the formative books of my reading. Yes, that's a little hyperbolic, especially considering I hated and promptly wiped it from my memory when I read it 2 years ago. Silly sophomore then. It's funny how I so wholly repudiate my past selves, always establishing my present person as the most superior. I also think I sound like a douchebag right now. It wasn't until Dan and Katie remarked on the stilted vocabulary that I realized how pretentiously I write. Ack.

So for more disjointed thoughts (or stream of consciousness as more literary types would call it), the irony of Crick lecturing us on black "funkiness" and "vitality" is rather. . . disconcerting. New England high school valedictorian, Harvard grad wants to teach us the black american experience of poverty? What? I have to say though, he's a very competent English teacher even if discourses on "funkiness" seem pretty hokey coming from Crick.

Load! Lock! Launch!

Physics rocks. Today's physics adrenaline rush lasted long into French class, where I could barely concentrate on Claude Chabrol with my head lost in carbon paper and shiny ball bearings. Never had I been as pumped as with this Hitting the Bulls-eye lab.

The target of our projectile launchers was a 3 centimeter strip taped onto the linoleum floor. Before reaching this landing strip however, our ball bearing had to first arc through the air and pass a 10 sq cm hole. Only then could it land to crossed fingers and held breaths, hopefully within that strip. With some nifty finagling and not-so-clever math tricks, we tickled our calculators into producing the correct numbers.

To chart my emotional well-being during physics lab, I'd use the graph y= cos x: we begin at a peak of excitement, plunge to the minimum value somewhere around 3.14, and then slowly claw our up through hairy equations and crooked rulers until we reach that emotional high water of launch time. That pi mark represents the time when we were hopefully lost in the quagmire. Only through playing the "dumb girls in science card" did we get McClung to show that we could in fact change our projectile launcher to zero initial height. But after that, the sudden breakthrough sparked a torrent of calculator punching, where more progress was made in 10 minutes than the entire previous 50 minutes.

It sounds really kind of cheesy, but it's moments like these that remind me of college essays. For a moment, I think I finally understood the sweet taste of teamwork and success.

Yea, but physics. I don't often give much thought to the male/female disparity so decried by educators, but it is ridiculous in higher level classes. AP French only has 2 guys out of 20, and our physics class is 20 guys to 8 girls. I found out that Sue, Steff, and Mary are all considering dropping physics, which made me really sad. Not only will there be serious testosterone overload in 3/4 Physics, but if these are Asian girls--an especially resilient breed in math and science. How does this bode?

It is the pursuit of the goal, not the realization. Right?

This is patently ridiculous. I'm in the middle of reading all the following books:

• The Bluest Eye
• Blink
• The Good Earth
• Lolita
• I Capture the Castle
• Atonement
• One Hundred Years of Solitude

Even throw in a few textbooks for extra measure. How many will I actually finish? All. Someday, someday. In the same land where Gmail inboxes fill up. Randomly starting and never finishing books is a very, very bad habit. I have to kick it.

Searching...Literary Eloquence

Aside from being unworthy of comparison to classics and the Bible, college essays are not the place to look for literary eloquence. They are the place to find amateur writing, cheesy posturing, comma splices, and thesaurus overuse. They are not repositories of any kind of insight or enjoyable reading experience.

Unless you are some damn genius who writes with skill, authenticity, and flair. And we have way to many of those in our school. I've come across quite a few poorly planned and written essays, but there is more than a fair share of great. Reading Daphne's oh-so-brilliant college essay only exaggerated my personal inferiority complex. What am I? Woefully untalented at sports, art, and music. Inadequacy reigns supreme today. Flipping through books of "successful" (keyword is successful, not good) college essays, I realized I must really try to find disappoint in my charmed life.

My essay is such a load of bull. There's enough quirk to register on U Chicago's eccentro-meter but it'll tip the weird-o-meter at other schools. Laurel, a perfectly nice normal person, reminded me of this.

Sigh. Must study for physics quiz NOW. Poor little rich asian, Acton, emo girl signing off.

Belated Birthday

I realized I didn't write about my birthday at all. I have figured out three possible reasons why:

1. I'm lazy. Highly possible.
2. I once read a short story, or read about a short story, of a girl who goes on vacation and obsesses about taking a photo of every moment so she could remember everything. But in the end, she realizes she missed out on her entire vacation. At the end of The Return, the photos of the vacation show everybody but the father. All the boys have as memories of their father is the journal they dutifully kept. Do I want the extant memory of me to be some dumb blog online? Likelihood of this justification indeterminate, as I don't know what I'm talking about. Possibly something about wanting pure, unadulterated memories, though that is obviously impossible according to psychology.
3. I hated my birthday and some Freudian defense mechanism is helping me cope. Unlikely, but how would I know?

In all, it was quite pleasant and by that I mean nothing horrific. Highlight of the day: Avanti dropping the cupcakes. Youtube moment right there. You know there's a cultural shift when "Kodak moment" becomes "Youtube moment."

A Clockwork Orange

My retinas have been permanently sheered with terror by A Clockwork Orange. I will never viddy Singin' in the Rain the same again.

This is the creepiest guy ever.

The Dreamlife of Devils

It is probably proof of my pessimistic nature that my tests in dreams never end well. "Not well" is actually a veritable litotes here; "horrible" and "big fat F" might do these grades more justice. So my strange and nerve-wracking dream about the Hamlet test ended...er...very badly:

It is 8th period, that time for English class again. Crick hands each of us a sheet of paper typed in that typewriter font he favors. As previously discussed, we then head off to the computer lab for some marathon typing. But as we sit down and prepare to log on, we realize there aren't enough computers. In fact, there's only 4 for the entire class of 20 or so. "No problem," exclaims Crick in his sadistically cheerful cadence, "We'll take it orally!"

He proceeds to explain that the we will make our presentations from a 10 ft high, 2 in wide window ledge, which had mysteriously and quite conveniently appeared in the computer lab overnight. So here combined my three greatest fears: extemp speaking, heights, and English analysis. (Ha! Perhaps there is a method to the madness.)

When it comes to my turn, I climb onto the ledge with great difficulty. How I managed to climb up a vertical flat wall is beyond my comprehension. But exhausted by this physical exercise, my brain is not ready to analyze the passage that followed and I stand mouth agape, holding onto that tiny ledge for dear life. Even when I do struggle to say something, my vocal cords are frozen in a constant tremor--no audible sound escapes.

Sneering with disdain at my befuddlement, Crick says, "Fine, you obviously don't know anything. But I'll give you another question. What is one person who influenced you the most?" I continue to stand frozen. He then started throwing me a torrent of college app questions: "Evaluate one book you have read outside of class. What would you bring to this college campus? Tell us something about yourself? What do you think of the New York Times--"

New York Times! Finally something I can answer. I'll just go on about my beloved Manohla "Man" Dargis and A.O. "Tony" Scott. But as I open my mouth to speak, I instead start falling. Down. down. d.o.w.n.

---

The real test went quite all right, though my concept of "all right" seems to have deteriated with my gross overjudgment of my performance on the Medieval Euro test. I shall cross my fingers and hope the best.

HAPPY BURFDAY!

I'm five years old now, and I can beat you up!

First Taste of Rejection

Since it is college application season, my mailbox was once again crammed full with slick college catalogues and the like. But wading through the thick bundle of mail, I came across one envelope that I had been anticipating: Carleton College. In early September, I had applied to a Taste of Carleton program to visit, dine, and room at Carleton for 3 days entirely at their expense. Considering the program was entirely free, I decided to give it a shot and apply. This is their reply. I'll copy it in its entirely because first rejection letters are a milestone in life:

Dear Sarah:

We thank you for your interest in our Taste of Carleton event. Unfortunately, the response to this event was overwhelming and we regret to inform you that we have filled all of the spots available to us for the event. We know this is disappointing news and certainly not what you had hoped to hear.

There were many qualified and talented candidates like you from around the country who presented fine academic records and strong personal qualities. We'd like to strongly encourage you to visit Carleton on another date and utilize our multicultural flight subsidy which covers half the cost of an airline ticket up to $200. Please contact our office determine the best options for you visit.

We wish you the best this fall.

Sincerely,

The TOC Team

I sent in my application semi-late (on the last day of the deadline, but that was really because of school starting dates than my procrastination--for once), but this letter kind of ribbed me anyways. I know that based solely on academic record--or school transcript, as that was all they looked at--I should have gotten in. Of course, if the response really was overwhelming, then 50 people out of a large pool is a very small percentage, and those 50 people definitely were not among the last 50 people to turn it in. Mwwuah, I'm being long and windy and nonsensical.

But quite honestly, I would have never even looked at Carleton if not for this program. Middle-of-Nowhere, Minnesota was, and still is not a very attractive location. Positive spin: Now I know that I'm not applying to Carleton. Alright, 1 college crossed off, 17 to go.