this is so amazing it hurts.

"To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."

anagrams to

"In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten."

My Life as a Game

I had a dream during this morning's fitful sleep.

We were on a beach discussing strategies for a game. "I know!" I said, "We have to get two of them to hook up!" "Them" referred to two of our mutual friends, and the idea of this strategy was to simultaneously improve the "relationship" score of two friends at once. The game we were playing was a mutant hybrid of HSX, Facebook, and Sims. Each person is a stock whose price is determined by his or her success in life, made up of scores such as "relationship," "career," and "health." Each player then maintains a portfolio of "friends" to invest it. The objective of the game: make money.

In my woozy, jarred-awake state, I briefly contemplated starting such a game. And then I realized, what was this but the game of life?

synethesia for realz!

The Seeing Tongue

It only takes 17 muscles...

A hobo made me smile today. He carried a sign that said, "If you don't have spare change, please smile."

synesthesia

Geek Love

What is it like writing about a school you've never been to?

It's 2 AM, and I'm knee-deep in browser tads and paper trying to pull together some grand thesis about the file-sharing culture at Cornell. Somewhere in my research, I found a stats page for the hub chat and saw this:

	nick	non- consecutive lines	delta lines	% of total	lines	letters/ lines	random message
1	Ashen	7331	6	10.14	19493	25	"did you look at the ted talks?"

Ted talks! Squee! So college students nerdy enough to watch TED talks are also nerdy enough to bw the most prolific all time user on a hub chat. Do I consider myself in good company?

the last three things in my brain

1. Judgmental people are the worst hypocrites.

2. Explain to me this phenomenon: Asian guys and break dancing.

3. Green, Gauss & Stokes. Conrad. Resnais. Please just go away so I can enjoy my winter break.

self-conscious thoughts

The one thing I'm most scared of is being boring.
And forgettable.
And replaceable.
That I'll leave the room and you won't notice.

This shit is bananas.

A couple weeks ago, I went to MIT and hung out in Patrick's dorm. Saw the stabbing scene that was literally 10 feet away from his room.

Chatted with a couple of his dormmates as they walked in and out. There was one tall guy from Singapore, who bore a vague resemblance to Jet Li. He showed us his extensive -- by college student standards anyway -- collection of cookware, including magnetic bunny-shaped salt and pepper shakers and a banana stand. "My mom bought it," he explained about the banana stand, "Mom, why would I ever need a banana stand? I haven't eaten a single banana since I got here!"

Later, Patrick told me the guy was the son of Singapore's prime minister. His mother, according Wikipedia, is the most powerful woman in Singapore. And she's buying banana stands.

a cream puff

A passage from Julio Cortazar's "Bestiary" leaps into my mind sometimes:

Rema's hands which made you want to cry and feel them on your head forever, a caress like death almost and pastries with vanilla cream, the two best things on earth

Lamont Café, the culinary provider of the undergrad library, serves a gargantuan cream puff. It’s as big as the palm of my hand and as thick as Mankiw's Principles of Economics. More cream than puff. All vanilla cream. As I squish into it, the heavy cream on my tongue reminds me of the caress of death, the tight embrace of homework, the noose of an impending all-nighter.

A cream puff will do just as good as a madeleine. Off to Lamont I go, in search of a cream puff and lost time.

i live in a zoo

I was walking back to my dorm from class today, and per usual, there was a large group elderly tourists congregated outside my entryway. Except this time, the tour guide had the gumption to stand on the very steps of my door, effectively blocking anyone from going in or out.

I made my way to the steps politely as possible, displacing the tourists from my path. Then the tour guide said, "This is the second female we've seen entering the building. We saw a male earlier, so the males and females live together. "

Am I an exhibit at the zoo? Species: homo harvardius, subspecies: Hollisian?

The visitors need to go away.

the internet is a strange loop

I am taking a seminar about the Internet.

I am writing a blog about a seminar about the Internet.

I am conducting research about blogs about classes about the Internet.

I am writing about conducting research about blogs about classes about the Internet.

The Internet is a strange loop.

a general observation

Acceptance into one of the most prestigious universities in the world grants you, out of all things, rejection.

Everything is a competition here and not everyone can win.

Harry Potter and...what?

I must have stooped to the lowest of the low today. Typed the following in my Google search box:

harry potter sparknotes

Why, you ask, would I do something as ignominious as defile the runaway phenomenon of modern publishing? Because, dear readers, I don't remember a stinking thing from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Not even who the Half Blood Prince is. But unfortunately my Sparknoting plan was foiled because Sparknotes was only caught up to Harry Potter 4. I had to resort to Wikipedia.

As I skimmed through the plot overview, I couldn't help but be very confused: Who's Rufus Scrimgeour? Ginny and Harry kissed? Really? Ron and Hermione are going out? The Horcrux was fake? Snape was the Defense of the Dark Arts teacher? Did I even read this book?

The unfortunate answer is yes, thus demonstrating my extraordinary capacity to read a lot and remember little. This is a very useless life skill.

All this memory refreshing is expressly for the purpose of Harry Potter 7 in less than 6 hours. Obviously, my Harry Potter interest has waned since the days I awaited my Hogwarts letter, but some nostalgia draws me toward it. After all, it is the last Harry Potter.

Hallmark Card of the Day: Every Ending is a New Beginning

My first livejournal entry was about how much I disliked LJ. Alas, my first impressions held true and here I return to the blog I started. No eulogies please. It's a resurrection.

It was an established community of high school friends and acquaintances that first drew me to LJ. I had my own corner of the world wide web carefully arranged, but what use if no one came to visit? Driven to fits of nostalgia by the impending end of high school, I longed to cling to those last memories. Yes, we will separate, but we'll always keep in touch through the wonderful thing called the Internet.

It's now deep into the summer--the end of June--and I can feel all my high school connections dying. The strongest connections are stretching, fraying at the edges as we all tug in the divergent directions of college. The tenuous ones have already snapped, like string pulled too thin and too tight. But distance always grows during the summer; it's a natural consequence of things done alone and time spent apart. Usually though, we have September to retie those strings, double knot them, and become one again for the school year. We giggle and gossip and suddenly we are all friends again. Our different experiences during the summer are tantalizing exotica to share in conversation. Our differences made us unique, but it was our similarities that bound us together.

This year, there will be no September, or at least no September together. This year, distance will continue to grow. Our college experiences will become occasional wall posts, status messages, LJ entries, phone calls, and maybe anecdotes to tell at get togethers, but they will always have a foreign tang. With no more mutual experiences, the glue that bonds us dries and cracks, and we have only the past to bring us together. Our pasts may be shared, but we look toward the future and see divergent paths.

I admit to not really trying with LJ. I kinda just cowardly gave on trying to friend more people because by that time, I really was ready to move on from high school. I write about friendships fading and connections snapping, which regardless of the connotations of those words, I find to be liberating. I will go longer be bound by the expectations of my friends, classmates, and acquaintances. I am sad that the people I have shared the last 6 years with will not be with me, but I have accepted that as all right.

High School Revisited

Kate was wearing her red prom dress. "C'mon, let's go!" she yelled across the room, "It's for Acadec!"

Acadec? What the hell? Isn't it over? Isn't it summer? More importantly, aren't we graduated seniors? These thoughts raced through my head as she tugged on my hand, pulling me toward the door. "Well Crick wanted to give us a heads up on next year. Some practical experience -- ya know? We're going jet-skiing!"

Suddenly it all made sense to me. I couldn't really follow the logic, but I trusted the logic to flow smoothly. I believed I understood, and that was all that mattered. Kate opened the door to a motley group of AB students on deck, all of whom I recognized but none of whom I knew. Then a whiplash crack, and ahoy! We were off to sea.

The vessel we boarded was not especially seaworthy for the frigid North Sea we were jet skiing in. No matter, we had a trusty chaperon in tow who would surely look out for our safety. A few hours into the trip however, we realized that we had overestimate dthe chaperon. The North Sea was true to it's reputation in serving up a mighty hurricane comparable to Hollywood spectacles of The Perfect Storm. Through the torrential rain and gray skies, our chaperon was nowhere to be found. I took this task upon myself and ventured deep into the creaking ship. As I stumbled through the hallways, a door opened to a looming hall. A lavish feast sat on the long table that filled the hall. At the head of the table, in perfect imitation of Pan's Labyrinth's Pale Man, sat Andrew Crick, frozen and ramrod straight.

Before I could yell any accusatory expletives, the ship lurched and like old movie screens, everything faded to black. Next thing know, I was waking up from a fluffy white bed complete with a fluffy white canopy. My brother had somehow found his way into my bed in the last night/nights. But ah! Who's face is that leering at me? Scrabbling for my glasses, I finally regained my vision
*****

I never finished recounting this dream, and now it's but a hazy memory. I remember the scenes that startled my dreaming doppelganger: waking up to see Green's middle-aged Asian wife, being dumped at a sketchy strip mall, and the line I wanted to end this dream and this entry with: I woke up, and I realized how much I missed school.

An Eulogy

If you haven't noticed, I really have not been diligent about posting recently. Partly I'm just burned out with all the work of the last few months. Also...eh, I'm thinking about retiring this blog. It will be resurrected sometime, when I feel like I need a blog and not a LiveJournal. So yes, that's where I am going. The movie blog will stay, and I will definitely update when I find the time to watch and write again. Otherwise, behold the power of peer pressure. LJ will probably be mostly friends-only. Contact me to add.

Epiphanies via High School English Class.

Last night, I finished my final book for a high school English class. It was one of those rare moments this year that I was entranced by a book, utterly absorbed and oblivious to the ticking clock. This used to happen a lot—I was a voracious young reader—but these burned out high school have been too kind to the leisurely reader in me. Not that my elementary school reading habits were leisurely; they were ferocious, and I wolfed down books and novels by the week.

Recently, I have had to force myself through my reading. It’s not a pleasant experience, and these books that are forced down my throat never stay in my brain. Still, English V H/AP has been a good year. Rather than study for a useless test (Euro), I’d like to reflect on my high school reading list.

Favorite Five: Will Blow Cash to Own
1. The Remains of the Day – Beautiful prose. Loved Stevens perhaps a tad too much.
2. The Bluest Eye – A devastatingly tragic novel. It took a few years for me to finally appreciate it.
3. The Canterbury Tales – Satire with the perfect dose of sexual innuendo. What’s not to love?
4. "Roman Fever" – Ouch. Burn. Women are cruel.
5. 1984 – I <3 dystopia...when it’s fictional. Such precision in social commentary.

Next Five: Will Blow Gift Card to Own
1. The Joy Luck Club – Another reread. Realized the Asian-American experience was all too homogeneous.
2. The Catcher in the Rye – All you people who hate it are just phonies.
3. The Sun Also Rises – “A love story between a nymphomaniac and a man without a penis.” Must read!
4. Macbeth – Shakespeare. Nuff said.
5. Holes – My vote for the most “perfectly plotted” novel.

Bottom Ten: Won’t Touch Even for Free (From bad to worst)
1. Beowulf – Stiff characters and jumpy plot. Get old enough and nobody dares disrespect you.
2. Lord of the Flies – Total lack of subtly. A bitter man ranting unfoundedly about humankind.
3. The Alchemist – Mix every single New Age mantra into fantasy novel and this is want you get. It just tried too hard.
4. Pride and Prejudice – The first book I never finished for class. (I did read it before...) Verbose and gossipy—a terrible combination.
5. Frankenstein – The Wishbone episode was so much better.
6. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – This Wishbone episode was better too.
7. A Separate Peace – Even the HoYay didn’t redeem it.
8/9.The Education of Little Tree & Ragged Dick – Sophomore year was just the nadir of literary merit.
10. Siddhartha – Worthless piece of pseudo-Asian fluff.

The H-Bomb.

You know, I don't actually need to write about Harvard. It's all been packed up and stored away in my memory. I have four years to test my expectations, confront my judgments, and see what Harvard's like for real. I can't say every moment was glorious; there were many times I felt intimidated or lost in a sea of brilliance. I did occasionally feel out of depth. But my reaction was not to beat a hasty retreat, but to confront these challenges head on. And that's what I'm going to do.

After all, I have 3 APs in the next three days. I need to sleep.

Rice is What's for Dinner.

It’s been a while. The only writing I have done recently is cranking out crappy AP Lit essays in my messy, angular handwriting. I feel almost a little rusty at this. It’s been a while since I’ve written a wall of text in front of a computer. No shit, the last time I wrote an essay on the computer was the Acadec essay.

The reason I’ve put off writing about Rice for so long is because I was so duly unimpressed. I found myself in a sea of mediocrity that was just didn’t inspire anything – neither rants nor raves. It was a passing memory that I was willing to simply let fade.

The most important things I learned during Owl Weekend were not about Rice, but about Harvard. This statement pretty much sums up my experience there. It was at Rice that I learned what I did not want from a school. Admitted students weekends are tricky because your experience is formed mostly by your host—one person out of 5000—who is unrepresentative of the entire school. In any case, my host and I were terribly matched, and I knew this as soon as I saw her nose ring, crayon-thick eyeliner, cowboy boots, and short, short American flag dress.

My first meal on campus was a mediocre grilled chicken with a side of mushy canned beans. A welcome from the President, who sounded such like the Doctor from The Princess Bride as promised, was somewhat entertaining. (The most obnoxious laugh punctuated every attempt at a joke.) During the entire speech, I was regaled by the tales of a Lovett freshman, who recounted his Owl Weekend: alcohol, drunkenness, passing out...all that good stuff. I chuckled along, pretending to be amused, until the officials at Rice decided to remind us underage drinking absolutely would not be tolerated on Owl Weekend. My host turned me be with a big sneer and said, “That’s such BS.”

Indeed BS were such attempts to ban alcohol. After the President’s welcome address, we walked back to Lovett College. At Lovett, I was given a warm prospie welcome with a sight of a “Prospie Trap.” This trap was a beer can attached to a string held by a student on the second floor balcony. If any alcohol-eager prospie attempted to snatch the can, the student would pull up the string while a rigged table would fall on the prospie. All the Lovett students thought this was an ingenious idea, and we stood for 5 minutes watching another student (yes student, not prospie), jump for the beer can. His feats were celebrated with cheers and coos from Rice students, while the prospies smiled awkwardly.

After settling into my host’s room, she decided to take me around to meet more prospies and more students. As we walked to the second floor balcony (apparently the social center of Lovett), another host approached with his prospie, shouting, “Hey Tim! I’ve got another climber for you.” Climber for what? Rock climbing? Nay, my naive readers. For the peculiar toaster-grilled shaped walls of Lovett College give rise to another tradition: wall climbing, a sport especially popular among the drunk. Sure enough, people started handing around cigarettes and beer cans, eager to stuff the prospies with illegal substances.

Most of the students seemed unenthusiastic to interact with prospies, except for getting them drunk. While I attempted to make conversation with some other people, I felt like I was talking for the sake of talking. Our conversations were dull and uninteresting, staying firmly in the domain of name, home state, “Are you coming to Rice?” One of the students finally caught on that not all prospies were eager to get drunk, so they herded us into a room to play Apples to Apples. The game we played was overcrowded, dominated by the students who were all friends while the prospies didn’t get a chance to know each other. During the game, one girl said something is very indicative of why I don’t belong at Rice, “It’s so dumb to put Owl Weekend on a Sunday. Yea Rice is academic, but classes are just classes. They’re the same everywhere. You should be experiencing the social life.”

Classes may be classes, but they certainly are not created equal nor are they the same everywhere. Classes actually are limited by the school you attend, while social life is what you make of it. And from what I experienced of Rice’s social life, it kinda sucked. The work hard, party hard mentality that supposedly exists at Rice doesn’t appeal to me. If “play hard” means getting hammered every weekend...well, that’s just not my idea of fun.

When the game disbanded and some went to play beer pong, I went with a few other prospies to the Rice Philharmonics the show. In all honesty, the a capella group wasn’t that great; I think even AB’s are better. (Harvard’s a capella jam certainly blew them away, and Harvard isn’t even that good.) After the show, my host caught the drift that I didn’t want to drink and had some difficulty throwing together a small intimate gathering instead. We hung out a bit with some of the Phils, who were pretty cool people. I could actually see myself being friends with them, but we quickly disbanded as people claimed homework. Thus ended my first day at Rice.

The next day was Monday also known as a school day. I ended up tagging along to Honors Physics with an extremely disgruntled male student (it was early...) and a bitchy Asian female prospie who deigned to talk to white males. When we arrived, the soft-spoken professor was tugging at a piece of rope attached to the windowsill. He had just asked a question and was looking around wistfully for someone awake to answer. Unfortunately, half of the people were sleeping, and the other half were prospies. The class was dull, and even the sliding blackboards couldn’t keep my attention. Nobody looked very enthused, and I was similarly bored.

The next class was econ, and I followed one of the few Rice students I genuinely liked. She confided to me that Econ 1211 was very rigorous course, and she was actually retaking it. Walking into the small, closet-sized, room with no windows, I saw Albert who gave a strangely unreadable expression. The class was taught by a Russian grad student, who despite giving an extremely easy problem set (ie I could do it), couldn’t get any of the class to answer his questions. I tapped my foot and made hushed plans to visit an anthropology class with another prospie.

The anthro class was the one class I visited that I even remotely enjoyed. The professor liked to crack corny jokes, and the students were giving articulate presentations around their final research topics: Colombia, the blogosphere. Yea, the students were actually awake!

I did some things after lunch that I honestly don’t remember. Met some people. Went to some panels. I feel no need to recount everything at Rice because none of it was very remarkable. Things that stood out did so for the wrong reasons. One Rice student, upon hearing my college options, made a sneering aside, “Hah, she’s not going to come here.” Great, if you don’t want me to come, I don’t want to come either. At a social sciences academic panel, the head of the Social Sciences department point blank admitted to me the weaknesses in Rice’s econ department without me even dropping Harvard or Chicago. The highlight of my trip was watching 300 at the Angelicka and hanging out with some fairly cool people. Read the Rice Thresher, which had editorials defending Playboy and lamenting the lack of film culture in Houston.

What I got out of this trip was that Harvard truly does offer me more in everything I wanted. The prestige is just a nice bonus. The people who I liked the most at Rice were all not attending Rice because they had glitzier acceptances to MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Harvard to their name. I'm not sure that this says about me; am I already catching the elitist Harvard bug? I really did feel a marked difference on the caliber of students between Rice and Harvard. I want to be humbled, inspired, and challenged by my students. I know that will happen at Harvard.

Prefrosh Weekend and Hawaii entries to come later.

re: The title. At Harvard, there were a bunch of t-shirts saying Yale is What's for Dinner.

April is the Cruelest Month.

Well, not really, but it certainly feels that way sometimes. The sheer volume of things I have to get done this month is already crushing me under its (volume)/(density). Reading T.S. Eliot and Gatsby back to back in English and Euro is rather depressing its own right.

This long weekend has been pretty low-key. I had a ton of work to do that I've all pushed to today. Yippee! Perhaps Sunday is the cruelest day of the week.

Thursday night Karmen came over to finish watching Devdas--that was the plan anyhow. We actually just lazed around in the basement, chatting, gorging on Canadian/Australian chocolate, and communicating through noodles. Made some plans about college, complained about parents and inane financial aid offices--nice stuff.

Saturday night my parents dragged me to another Asian parent party at Ning's house, except all the college kids were away. Weird thing was the parents had name tags on, giving it a whiff of formal networking. My brother, the dear brother he is, wrote a name tag for me (all the letters backwards of course), and tried to stick in on my butt. Kevin was there and so was another sophomore who kept asking the two of us about college--it freaked me out! I've gotten so jaded about the college admissions process that whenever underclassmen ask me about it, I just want to tell them, "Fuck college." Yea, not a good attitude. Shouldn't scare the underlings.

So of course, all the parents tried to dig college news out of me too, but I stubbornly repeated my mantra of choosing between Chicago and Rice. Alas, no college news stays uncovered in Asian parent gossip circles, so the questions soon turned into, "What do you do to get into Harvard?" When Kevin made an effort to honestly answer those questions, the only thing that would stick in my mind was, "How did I get into Harvard???" Seriously, I still ask myself that. I really don't understand how I got in, some weird fluke in the system. Gah, inferiority complex is already kicking in--another minus in the Harvard column.

As all Asian parents are again baffled by why anyone would ever choose another school over Harvard, Kevin said his mom told him to, "Convince Sarah to go to Harvard." I don't know, but talking over prefrosh stuff actually made me pretty excited. If Chicago continues to be stingy about money, I probably will pack my bags for Cambridge--all of 40 miles away from home.

Edit: Harvard is intimidating...maybe not. I've changed my mind 17 times already.

Positively Jubilant

I'm really happy today. I'm even going around smiling like a dweeb. A nonchronological, disorganized list of reasons why.

• I stayed up late watching the dorkiest physics video on black holes. Stars of the movie included Stephen Hawking, Homer Simpson, and of course, black holes. Mellifluous British accents also assuaged my ears throughout.
  
• Wednesday was my first ever official poetry reading. Despite the subpar quality of the poetry (well...I stopped paying attention), Yusef Komunyaaka had some enlightening things to say about art and literature. It almost rekindled a spark of interest in humanities. It's funny how I find theory much more interesting than the actual, tangible work.
• The weather is gorgeous. Yup, even Google agrees. I managed to change the theme of my Google homepage, so the background is a bus stop, and the weather in the background syncs up with the weather in Acton. My homepage is so pretty and sunny. So is my window. I just took a really nice walk too.
• Dinner at Friendly's last night with Karm, Liz, Mary, Avanti, and Megan was really fun and relaxed. Much better than the tension in the afternoon. Gobs of grease cling to my tummy and hair, but that is all forgotten in the spirit of good cheer. (Look at that end rhyme!)
  
• The Yale rejection letter. When it didn't come in the mail today, I finally broke down and checked it online. It took a few permutations, but I guessed my password in the end. I knew Yale was a sure-fire rejection (haha...that interview...), so the rejection didn't faze me. The letter even made it happy--and not in the thank-god-i-got-rejected kind of way, which given my dislike for Yale, probably should have been true. Going from past contact with Yale, I was expecting a cold, curt rejection, but this letter made me all warm and fuzzy inside! I leave with a much more positive impression of Yale than before. :D
  

See, I want to smile dorkily for no reason. :D I only wish other people can be as happy as me.

People don't take rejection well do they?

That's why I choose to live in blissful ignorance. I'm a bit aggravated right now, for several reasons. My ignorance is blissful, but other people want to know too much.

College rejections are no excuse to fall part.

Shattered Childhood Dreams

In third grade, my teacher used to make us draw pictures of our future selves, and inevitably, it evolved into the question of, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" Whether it was a latent brown-noser in me or genuine interest, I drew a blackboard, some chalk, and an apple. I wanted to be a teacher.

What folly! Teaching is a last profession I want right now, closely behind toilet plumber and president of the United States. Seeing the mud, slander, and gossip we throw at our teachers now, I shudder to be the recipient of that. And perhaps the worst thing is a private problem: I take everything too personally.

All those things I do unconsciously--filling out crosswords in class, whispering notes to my friends, giving up on hard problems, scrambling to class late because I had to print my essay -- these things would make me feel awful as a teacher. Disappointment leaden with inertia. That's how McClung feels every time physics devolves into toddler play. That's how Crick feels when students turn in papers a week late. (Does Crick have feelings? Ah, we shall see.)

That's how I'm feeling right now. It's too easy to take things personally when people don't do the work you assigned them. I'd be an awful teacher...and an awful leader. I can't stand disappointment, and I'm not charismatic enough to persuade them otherwise. Acadec screws with my mental health.

Wait...list?

Because the MIT decisions came out today (a ridiculous number of ABers got in! Class of 07 rocks!), I spent some time trolling around on CollegeConfidential again. After perusing the usual amusing High School and College Life threads, I made a segue back to an old haunt--the CC Top Universities Forums. Washington University in St. Louis hadn't been visited for a long time, so being bored, I clicked the link, only to find a humongo Official Class of 2007 RD Thread.

Apparently, decisions have been online for 3 days already. But they don't mail them until April 1, the official date. I was rather confused why there were two different (and very far apart) dates, so I went to the website to check for sure. I stumbled into the status site, finding an inconspicuous link buried among many others called Check Your Admissions Status.

Official Decision: Wait List

This either means I'm underqualified (self-explanatory) or overqualified (WashU's infamous yield games). Academically, I find it hard to believe I'm underqualified, but there are many other factors at work. What's strange is that WashU uses waitlist the way MIT uses deferrals: it represents the bulk of the decisions. WashU was scratched off my list when the scholarship notification came negative, so this isn't much of a deal. I just hope this isn't a sign of things to come. It would be awful if I get all rejections/waitlists in the next few weeks; I would have wasted so much time and money when I'd already gotten into my first choice.

March 29 to April 1 is going to be WTF awful.

L'ennui et la melancholie

Good weather causes good moods, right? The contrapositive to that statement suggests that awful moods imply bad weather. Both statement are patently false, the current weather and my current mood prove that.

This daily grind I suffer through has become vraiment impossible, said in the snottiest tone of a French existentialist. I can't even point my finger at why. I just can't stand it anymore. I'm not even going to qualify this entry with some self-conscious nod to emo-ness because there some times when I'm okay with myself, but this is certainly not one of those times. Maybe it's how I can't breath without getting nauseous in my own house, as the dank odor of my grandparent's bathroom infiltrates every square inch. Maybe it's how the TV drones on incessantly, spatting out canned Learning English phrases or annoying Chinese songs. Maybe it's how my mother sees fit to yell at everyone, everything, everyday. Maybe it's how I'm inundated with work I neither like or deem useful. Maybe it's how everyone is sick or grumpy, and communication has degenerated into mumbling and grumbling. Maybe it's how one earlobe is throbbing on the verge of an inflammatory response. Maybe it's how I can't bring myself to care about anything, blase to things I once loved. Maybe it's how other people don't care about things I want to care about. How I talk too much when I shouldn't and talk to little when I should. How I either let people walk all over me or be a bitch, unable to strike a perfect, normal balance.

I sit on front of the computer, clicking and munching and eating, even as my stomach is engorged and my eyes are numb. Looking for something to make me feel better. And it doesn't come. I want passion and drama, and all I find is ennui and blitheness.

I don't know why I feel so down when today wasn't that bad. Weather is by all means terrific: the sky is a cheery blue with the perfect balance of wispy white clouds. Here are the things that made me happy today because really, I shouldn't be this malheureuse. After all, even Albert Camus decided wallowing in misery was not the way to go. Revoltez!

• I single-handedly deflated Anna's massive bag of chocolate and candy.
• I have wonderful friends who have licenses and cars.
• English class was a silly and amusing exercise in futility.
• UChicago has a new admitted student website aptly called the ThickEnvelope, and they spoil their early admits. It's nice to be wanted sometimes.
  
• We're staying at the swanky Hilton in Hawaii, not some cheap motel.
• Word Racer at 7!
  

There is nothing more fucking satisfying than proving someone wrong.

This is a general observation.

Bibliophilia

Today is one of my favorite shopping days of the years: the Acton Memorial Library book sale. What I love about these book sales is that they're a bit like surfing the Internet. You never know what you're going to find -- and specifically trying to look for something is a futile goal -- but the messy, wayward search is the fun of it. Amidst the crowds of people and stacks of books is a hidden book waiting to catch your fancy. And best of all, everything is cheap enough that you can indulge every fantasy.

I only ended up getting 4 books. (Haha, I haven't even read anything I bought last time...) All of them are a little worn, but that gives me license to read, use, and abuse these books to make them my own. I'm always intimidated by brand new books because I hate marring something perfect. So I got an anthology of modern short fiction, Crime and Punishment (I have to read it someday), Waiting by Ha Jin (whose short story When Cowboy Chicken Came to Town still haunts me), and a giant tome called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I'll be tackling them sometime this summer.

Since high school started, my reading as degenerated and devolved, mostly transposed to blogs and forums online. Academic fatigue is also a factor, making me blithe and blase to the written word. I was trolling around the Internet today, aimlessly clicking links, until I got to a Wikipedia list of Newberry Medal winners. As I clicked through the list, I realized that from 1990 to 1999, I had read every single Newberry Medal winner with the exception of one. I was quite voracious reader in elementary school. All of these books were some of my favorite as a kid, and I own many of them. (But everything after 2000 I haven't even heard of.)

1999	Louis Sachar	Holes
1998	Karen Hesse	Out of the Dust
1997	E. L. Konigsburg	The View from Saturday
1996	Karen Cushman	The Midwife's Apprentice
1995	Sharon Creech	Walk Two Moons
1994	Lois Lowry	The Giver
1993	Cynthia Rylant	Missing May
1992	Phyllis Reynolds Naylor	Shiloh
1991	Jerry Spinelli	Maniac Magee
1990	Lois Lowry	Number the Stars

Missing May is the only one I haven't read, but I love love love all of the other books on this list. (Walk Two Moons and Shiloh and lower on the love list, but still overall positive impressions.)

This list prompted me to dig The View from Saturday out of my bookshelf. Why?

"It documents the story of four 6th grade children, Noah, Nadia Diamondstein, Ethan Potter, and Julian Singh, along with their paraplegicteacher, Mrs. Olinski, as they form a group they call "The Souls" and make their way to the New York State Academic Bowl Championship."

Oh man, these sixth graders are so much cooler than us. Seriously. It's not even funny.

Rejection, Deferral, and Weird College Emails

On Monday, I conspired to maximize time away from English class by signing up for the latest possible blood donation slot. My altruism/selfishness was for naught because I apparently have no veins. Instead, my blood diffuses through my body under a thick layer of subcutaneous fat. I walked into English class only 1 minute late. It was all very tragic.

Tuesday was a brief Acadec meeting that only confirmed Crick is severely disappointed in us. Either that or he is severely distracted.

I opened up my inbox today seeing an email about "Your Harvard Application." "Great," I think, "I forgot to send in my transcript." My concerns played out less seriously, but the email asked for a few of my Spectrum articles. What? I find it hilarious that the fate of my application rests on the quality of my Spectrum articles. Oh golly gee.

The Surreal Life

Last night, I was trudging through the mall parking lot in sweatpants, surrounded by a flock of teenagers dressed in black suits and ties. I had in tow a coffee mug, a pink shoe box, and an obese backpack.

These things only happen in Acadec.

States was actually a bummer. After the adrenaline and oxytocin pumped meet in November, states was so much of a letdown. As the perpetual state champs of MA, we carry the arrogance and expectation of winners, so a win, even one by the same 5000 point margin as in November, was just not good enough. Crick was giving us the death glare during the entire team-wide Superquiz fiasco. (Correction: Honors totally pulled its weight in Superquiz and was then awarded a magic 200 extra points. Either my ditziness worked in my favor or something very very strange happened.) We won states with the lowest score ever and even lost Superquiz. Though we were somewhat vindicated when we got 2nd in Superquiz when Crick had predicted 6th or 7th.

But honestly, I'm more disappointed in myself than the rest of the team. I have plenty of faith in my teammates to step it up at nationals, while I apparently need to magically acquire more charisma.

It's days like these that I wonder why I do Academic Decathlon. Back when I was a wee freshman, my parents picked Acadec as one of the activities I had to join to get into college. That's right: they picked it for me. Freshman year was also the year of 2004, the year of CM and VW--the epochal year of ABAD. With this mantle of expectations upon me, I tried Acadec junior year, bombing a few math tests and doing surprisingly well on a well econ ones. When I realized the amazing awesome of last year's Honors team, I promptly slinked away and disappeared from Acadec. But this year, I was determined to try again, even before Crick started his guerrilla recruitment campaign and even before I found out Nationals was being held in sunny Hawaii. But why? It wasn't my parents any more. I had long stopped listening to them, snubbing piano and athletics in favor of less college-worthy but more enjoyable activities.

Maybe it's for the glory. Long ago, I realized that my true strength in academics lay not in a photographic memory or innate smarts, but my ability to take multiple choice tests. In US and World history classes, I'd fly through the MC in less than 7 minutes, as the rest of the class was still puzzling over question 15. And while the rest of the class bemoaned MC questions, I aced them, banking points and time for my essay scores. (Euro is an entirely different story, but let's not go there.) So Acadec is my one chance to capitalize on the skill that frankly is useless in real life. I might as well make the most of it while I still can.

But glory is short-lived. Even if Crick harps incessantly on the 2004 team, nobody outside of ABAD knows what he is talking about. People study, win medals, and move on. In the world of college, Acadec is just another activity you did in high school, and you'll be just another person who won some competition.

What I've always regretted most about high school is never being part of a team. Participating in athletics is an intense bonding experience while you push yourself to your physical and mental limits. Acadec is a "team," even if it often doesn't feel like it and the limits are only mental. During the awards ceremony, our school got accused of having no team spirit, which may be true to some extent. (It's also because we get too many medals to properly cheer without being obnoxious, and by the time golds are announced, half the team is already on stage...That sounded obnoxious, but that's only because MA Acadec is just not that great. I'm really puzzled why other schools don't do better since our team doesn't study or practice, at least compared to CA and TX, but I digress )

There definitely some weird team dynamics, but I'm being wistful if I wished everyone would love each. When you combine students from all strata of high school (as Acadec does attempt to do), you will doubtless have tensions and cracks. But I really do like all of the team. Maybe even love the team as a whole. And yes, I would gladly keep in contact with all of my teammates next year regardless of whether I'm in Illinois, Texas, or New York.

After regionals, I came back replete with <3 and joy abound, but yesterday evening was much more subdued. Superquiz meltdown aside, subjectives were also surprisingly low, but we can do better. We will do better. If we don't, there's too much talent and intelligence on the team going to waste.

Slabs of Oil and Sundry Things

Calculus just leached out of my brain over vacation. I started number 10 during lunch and finally figured out 15 minutes ago that I was rotating the wrong region. Other problems have not been going much better, and slabs of oil make no sense in my brain though they do make my stomach queasy.

Errgh, I've been feeling really stressed out all week. WashU scholarship notifications. I feel mixed about this because I want money but I don't want incentives to tear me away for UofC either. An optimist would call this a win-win situation. I call it a lose-lose.

So Oscars, right. They happened a couple nights ago. Unlike last year, the Oscar ceremony was really classy--from Errol Morris' opening montage to the foreign film tribute to the TV graphics to the costume showcases to the shadow dancing to the sound chorus... Ellen's hemming and awing style bugs me, but she generally fit the classy theme of the entire show. Al Gore, neither a director nor movie star, seemed to be the toast of the night. I was so excited to see the screen combust when Eva Green and Gael Garcia Bernal walked out to present, but they kinda sucked. Her chilly persona and bribe of mummy dress clashed horribly with his small stature and easygoing charisma. Gah.

But.
But.
The most exciting part of the Oscars?

There was a commercial.
For American Express.
Directed by Wes Anderson!

What a Vacation

I like my vacations to be empty and relaxing. I'm depressed and bored during the vacation, only to feel it was a waste of time afterwards. But at least then I'd be happy to go to school.

This vacation, however, has not been a vacation. If asked what I did over February break, I'd have to answer, "Freezing in Albert's house." Not an entirely unpleasant prospect but not exactly what I want to spend 30+ hours doing either. "Study" today veered closer to the VCR and shades of innuendo, both at least tangentially related to the Acadec curriculum. Gender factionalism in Acadec is becoming rather pronounced in contrast to frank admissions of sexual frustration. That last sentence is terribly confusing but probably best left opaque.

I did take some time to chill (and not literally...grr) at Karm's birthday sleepover. What I lacked in sleep, I made in food, eating out half their house. Thank You For Smoking was a slick, charming satire. I don't see the big fuss made over Katie Holmes' boobs since they looked rather (to quote Yi), "32 double A." Steff also came over with Monsoon Wedding, which apparently utilizes a technique called "leitmotif," whatever that means. It was a cute but not fluffy movie. I've also spent a fair amount of time being licked and shedded on by Sue's doggy. Today, we watched 30 min of The Good Earth (really couldn't bear any more than that) and Mulan. XD. Mulan was accompanied by a running commentary of random Acadec facts + hormonal teenage interjections. Good stuff.

"Man Has Become a Tool of His Tools"

This cryptic quote was found on an Acelon impromptu card. Someone thought it was so bad -- and believe me, there are enough bad prompts -- that he took the effort to cover it with a big black X. An ebony letter to mark the spot of this terrible prompt.

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey yesterday, and strangely enough, this quote perfectly describes it. I'm not sure if I have much to say about the actual movie. It was a puzzling aural experience; it had its moments of spine-chilling eeriness. HAL 9000 is one of the creepiest characters ever put in screen, and its red eye(s) make the Eye of Sauron seem possibly tame. But what? I did not get it. The fourth segment lost me in its dizzy shifts in time and place. Gorgeous, visually and aurally, but esoteric. Something I need a lot more time to digest.

Piggy Backing

Sacrificing a rare evening alone, I made a trek in the frozen cold to MIT to watch my brother dance. As a dancer, my brother -- and his whole troop -- are hilariously incompetent, but still young enough that their incompetence is rather cute. The audience chuckled its way through their performance and cheered with amusement at the end.

The other dancing was actually surprisingly competent, especially when considering half the dancers were middle-aged parents of teenagers. There were also three different troops of girls, separated by age. The youngest, decked out in baby pink tops emblazoned with "Angel" and denim miniskirts, made me squirm with undue hip thrusting and such Lolita-ish behaviors. Yikes.

But all in all, the dancing fell on the entertaining side, even though the stage was barely larger than my living room. I came out incredibly pissed off, however, at all the elitist, cultish, and clannish attitudes. First, they wouldn't even let me into the auditorium unless I registered. For cripes sake people, I'm not joining your cult; I just came to watch my brother dance. But I held my tongue and registered, only to be accosted when I tried to eat a grape. Apparently, the guy thought I was a random person who walked in to steal food. When I finally sat down to watch the performances, an acquaintance of my parents came by to chat. I made a mild attempt at politeness, "Shushu Hao" (Uncle), only for him to reply, "Here, there are no uncles. We are all students." Okay comrade, I'll keep that in mind next time.

Hegelian Synthesis

There is a guy who sits everyday in Euro class. He's not a student, or at least not a high school one. His scruffy clothing, reliance on coffee, and stately square glasses give him the air of a slightly unruly grad student, probably getting a PhD in one of those cutesy-dutesy liberal arts majors. His wardrobe consists of wrinkled dress shirts and Crick-like iterations of monochrome sweaters. The hair is cropped and straight , the kind of looks like it's graying even though it really isn't. Face up, he looks like a younger Mr. Beck, though he is much taller--maybe a bit too tall for comfort since he has a hunch, much like the model Zulema so berated on Project Runway (Okay, weird comparison, but it's true.) Everyday, he sits in our class and observes. I think he is a student teacher being mentored by Green.

So Green promised to explode our minds today, but the closest my brain has ever gotten to exploding was imploding out of boredom. Today's discussion on Hegel and German nationalism followed this pattern, dulling my alertness until I was ready to check into Sleepsville like every second period. Strangely enough, however, the class actually got somewhat into Hegel and his philosophy. For me, second period isn't the height of my critical powers, and I usually accept all presented philosophies without a second thought, scrawling it into my notes to decipher another day. This evidently isn't the case for some, since I could really detect a hint of ire in Laurel's voice when she questioned Hegel's elitist views on Germany.

I should make clear that I really don't like the philosphy-lite approach that Green takes to teaching Euro. His lectures on Descartes, Bayle, Voltaire, etc. have struck me as oversimplified and twisted to fit the arguments of his grand scheme of history. He tries to philosophize and teach history at the same time but really just does a poor job of both. Actually, what really bugs me is that he tries too hard to incorporate the often off-base responses of my classmates, which only ends up warping the original philosophies of the thinkers. Not that I'm the final authority on any subjects philosophical, but I do mean it when I say Euro is philosophy-lite. Yes lite, not light.

So back to the whole brouhaha of German eliticism. The fact that Green linked the ideas of Hegel directly to Nazism (a bit too explicit, no?) probably set off a few alarms. But still, that our class was so averse to Hegel really surprised me, still in my semiconscious stupor.

In steps Mr. Guy Who Sits in Our Class. I'd never really paid much attention to him before, though he did strike me as endearingly geeky. But don't you love it when people pleasantly surprise you? He made a compelling defense of Hegel, bringing up a interesting comparison of the state to a house. I was totally blown back by this...really, this made more sense than anything Green had droned on about for 35 minutes. At the end of the class, he made a remark about how Hegel's German nationalism corresponds exactly with the predominant American conscious. Yes, I completely agree again! Thank you for schooling those people who so hypocritically criticize the nationalism of other countries. From a sociological perspective, it is perfectly normal, and desirable, to believe your "group" is superior to others.

From now on, I will pay complete attention to everything this guy says because his two lines have shown more insight than Green has shown all year. (At least on a percentage basis. Small sampling size be damned.) I should probably try to find out his name first. Okay, stalking time.

Font and the Frontal Lobe: An Analysis of Typography and It's Influence on Literary Style

I promise to write this essay sometime. Right now, I have a paper to write on the much more mundane topic of family.

P.S. I don't think the title makes any sense.

P.P.S. There was an apostrophe error in the original title! 79! OMGWTF. There was no apostrophe error until I changed it to one. Oh well, no more editing.

P.P.P.S. This is random: It was Hume, not Hegel who said something about morality. (Though it was in Time magazine; I got one part right.) I feel silly and UofC would surely disapprove.

P.P.P.P.S. Signs telling me to learn German: Berlinale is going on right now, German nationalism is blooming in Euro class, and errr...Crick talked about Hegel the same day Green did. And yea, Nietzsche advertising: White, male, over 40, thinks God is dead.

Midyear Report

So I'm supposed to be filling out an official Midyear Report for UChicago, but I'm shirking my admitted student duty. On the other hand, I did submit an original prompt to possibly torture next year's UChicago applicants with. (zomgGrammarAlert: split infinitive AND ending sentence with preposition.) The essay that's supposed to result from that prompt will probably be sacrificed for Spectrum/Idiosync/Acadec writing instead. Pathetic times.

Notice how none of the above work is school-related. And guess why? Second semester senior. I'm excited for second semester even though first semester sucked in pretty much every single way possible. Honestly, junior year -- that proverbial year from hell -- has been infinitely better than senior year so far. Second semester has a lot of work to do for senior to catch up to junior. (This is possibly because senior has a mass, and thus inertia, far greater than that of junior, making acceleration difficult. Once it gets rolling however, senior can beat out any puny low-inertia junior -- hopefully.)

I've noticed how rarely I write about events in my life here. Partly, it's because I have no idea who reads, and I've realized people are ridiculously sensitive to what or how other people write. And then there is psychoanalysis bit: I'm loathe to record negative events (embarrassingly frequent), and I don't think I can write about events authentically. "Words, words, words"--such artifices of human thinking. This echoes something said in English today. So how has senior year been?

A Midyear Report:

Academics: Grade-wise, neither great nor terrible. Probably won't help my regular action apps, but I don't think they will really make a difference either. Class/teacher-wise, best ofmy high school experience. The quality and enthusiasm on the part of teachers are pretty consistent, though unfortunately I can't say the same about my own enthusiasm. Green is a flippin' exciting and understanding teacher, but I just don't find myself engrossed in the subject. Physics is made awesome by lab and McClung's cutesy-dutesy labs. Leavitt invests so much in her class I feel guilty everyday for my own slackoff-ness in French. Noeth's jokes can get tiresome but his occasional cluelessness is endearing so calc is bearable. English is actually rather inconsistent, dependent largely on Crick's mood.

ECs: This is starting to feel like a college app. For some reason, Idiosync and Spectrum aren't as fun as last year. I feel like my dedication to everything have somewhat deteriorated, which probably just speaks to my own laziness. Acadec is gearing up now, and I do want a free (not in economic terms though) trip to Hawaii, so I will muster my last defenses against laziness. Tutoring is fairly blah, and I think neither of us are too excited about bonding over math.

Movieland: What an abysmal showing this year. I really haven't seen or written anything except for a college-related essay about Brazil. The basement is currently too cold for prolonged periods of inhabitation, but come spring/summer, Netflix and projection will be more frequent companions. A couple more trips to the theater are also in order. I also haven't followed the Oscars at all this year. But...I found a recording of "Rescue Me" sung by Gael Garcia Bernal from the soundtrack of The Science of Sleep that has me incredibly excited. What's more exciting is that it's a rewrite of The Velvet Underground song "After Hours." I listened to it way too many times yesterday. "If you rescue me...I'll be your friend forever...."

Driving: Aren't I supposed to have a license by now? I haven't driven in 1.5 months and I think I drive worse than I did in the summer. iSuck.

RIP Spam 1.0. unRIP college apps.

Be-Lear-Guered

I have only a counterargument and conclusion left to write,
which means I might actually finish before midnight.

Look, I just wrote a poem. How productive am I.
Now I must write an essay. How unproductive am I.

Sigh. I must contrive to amuse myself. Funny they say AP English is hard; all that class has taught me to do is procrastinate and slack.

Matter Over Mind

Have you ever tried to think about nothing? That elusive Zen-like state of calmness. It never works because then you concentrate on not concentrating. But today, I stopped thinking. My mind literally went blank. Nothing. Nada. It stopped functioning. Just like that. My cold has sapped all energy out of me. I go around with a glazed look and gaze at things without recognition. Blargh. My eyes are glazing right now.

I look Superquiz today, which despite its intimidating name, went surprisingly well, resulting in an usually high score : study time ratio. (As opposed to English, whose score:study time ratio is depressingly low.) After literally zero study, I realized it was the least-prepared I've ever been for a test; I hadn't even made an attempt to study nor had I touched the packet since November. Strangely, I think I did better this time than on the first round. Pfft. This actually establishes a terrible precedent: any motivation to study for future tests is gone. (Not that there was much motivation before.)

My zoned-outness extended into Acadec as well:
Jyoti/Yi: Number 19 doesn't make sense. Was that the question thrown out?
Crick: Yea, 19 is a terrible question. It's just screwed up. (Okay, maybe he was more articulate , but my mind isn't recording on such high cognitive levels.)
Me: What's wrong with number 19? It makes perfect sense!!! OF COURSE WINTER SOLSTICE IS CLOSEST TO THE END OF WINTER. GEEZ!
So in King Lear, the most foolish person is actually the wisest. Maybe that's the case here? And no one else realizes my brilliant logic? Yea right. Sigh. And then I tried to make Sue correct my test even though she hadn't taken Superquiz yet.

I need sleep. Good luck getting any this weekend. The next 7 days will be hellish.

To Do for Weekend of January 20

• 2 days of Calc - in my supreme ditizness, I didn't realize there was a back to the assignment sheet
• 2 days of physics
• Catapult
• French Project: write and finish art, memorize presentation
• King Lear recitation
  
• KING LEAR PAPER.
  
• 1 week worth of Euro homework
• Senior Sem advertisement
• Figure something out about Yale
• FAFSA, CSS profile, taxes and crap
  
• Angela's Ashes
  

To <3 or Not to <3

Despite that message at the end of the last post, I still haven't touched math. Procrastination is a way of life.

During math class today, I half-listened to Noeth while cramming Chinese music for Acadec. I know a little of both subjects and not enough of either. Alas, the period afterwards, I sojourned all the way to the red wing to seek out Crick for the music test. He was chatting with former students (yet again), and I got plaintively waved off to somewhere "quiet," which suited me perfectly fine.

I skimmed through the music test while skimming through my daily internet perusals: email and Slate in the computer lab. (Evidently, Chinese music is too boring to occupy my entire brain.) Steff walks in and starts doodling differentials onto my test. As we assess the aesthetic appeal of various terrorists and actresses, I remember I have to turn in the test to Crick next period and get back to work on it. There, I see Steff has scrawled, "I <3 CRICK."

Sigh. I <3 Steff.

Paris. Berlin. Mexico City.

Hunkered down with Youtube and DVD for some lovely and romanticized traveling this weekend.

First destination was Paris via Youtube. Upon learning that the long-anticipated portmanteau film Paris je t'aime was bootlegged on youtube, my hot little criminal hands sought then out immediately. So yes, watching a 5 in screen surrounded by white space and ads is not the optimal viewing experience, but shame on US distributors for not putting it out in theaters or DVD. (Especially when this French movie has so many American directors and stars.) I haven't gotten around to watching them all -- it seems 6 years of French study has been for naught -- though I have been so far duly amused and touched.
Maybe it's just my short attention span, but I adore short films and short stories. It is a difficult art to capture something momentous in only a few minutes or a few pages. Brevity is the soul of wit, no? When done well, a short film is the perfect capsule of a sentiment. When done badly, it just seems very pedestrian. From the segments I've seen so far, Paris je t'aime is a mix of both. My favorite are by Tom Twyker and Alexander Payne (not, interestingly, my favorites directors at all): Fauborg Saint-Denis and 14e arrondissement. Least favorites are by Christopher Doyle and Wes Craven, the former tries unsuccessfully for Chinese-French punnage and the latter is just unsuccessful despite invoking the spirit of Oscar Wilde.

Sunday night, I turned my gaze eastward and backwards in time to 1980s Berlin. Wings of Desire was recommended to me by my UChicago interviewer, and since I recently received a nice email from her, I decided I needed to watch it now. But Wings of Desire is not an urgent movie. It languishes, it longs, it lingers. From its soaring aerial views to the cool black and white , it's a poetic meditation. I actually liked it quite a lot, but I need to rewatch it in a less detached frame of mind. I love the title Wings of Desire because it's haunting, and the same can be said about the film, but I need to let it "haunt" me more. The ending however, just totally lost me; I thought it was terrible and stopped listening.
By the way, on top of sharpening my French, I need to learn German too. The angels in Wings of Desire hear snippets of thoughts that are never translated in the subtitles--how infuriating! The opening lines of the film are echoing in my mind right now. Whoever said German was an angry language never heard enough German.

After a hemisphere change, I found myself in a rambunctious Mexico City. Sólo con tu parejga is a exuberant sex farce that manages to take on a rather serious topic: AIDs. Tomas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho -- creepy priest of Bad Education!) is a serial womanizer who gets a bitter pill when one of his conquests decides to take revenge. I adore the cover art - inventive, loopy, and rife with phallic symbols - sums up the film perfectly.

Now I am off to the utterly unlovely and unromantic Mathland.

Drunken Nerds

Four successive posts UChicago-related. Hmm, I begin to sense a pattern. Anyways, bits and pieces from fellow Chicago applicants assembled from around the Internet.

On why Chicago students drink so much:
The smarter you get, the more depressing you realize the world is. The more depressed you get, the more you drink. (paraphrased)

So, bar jokes:


Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks "Something for you, sir?" Descartes replies "I think not," and vanishes.

A neutron walks into a bar and asks for a beer, which the bartender gives him, and then walks away.
The neutron calls after him, "Hey, how much does this beer cost." The bartender replies, "For you, no charge!"

C, E flat, and G walked into a bar. "I'm sorry," the bartender said, "We don't serve to minors." So E flat left and C and G split a fifth between them.

Essay 1: Claustrophilia

In his book Having Everything Right: Essays of Place, Kim Stafford describes the Kwakiutl tribe of British Columbia assigning place-names based on the natural characteristics of a location, the events that took place there, or the feelings that the site instilled. "Where Salmon Gather," "Sound of Dripping Water," and "Where Dzo'noq!wa Cried Out Oh," were among the names the Kwakiutl people assigned to their surroundings. He'lade, translating to "Place Having Everything Right," was of particular meaning, as it was the name universally given to exceptional locations. What is your he'lade?

I’ve never understood claustrophobia because I have the opposite condition: claustrophilia. Small spaces are my he’lades. The walls encircle me like hugs, and I curl up in my own warmth. It is comfortable and comforting. There is no room for a big scary monster to hide behind my back, and I can inspect every inch of the floor for creepy crawlies. As I press my chin into the groove between my folded knees, I feel good. It’s as simple as that.

Small spaces are common, but they are not created equally. You can find them anywhere: under a table, behind a door, between shelves. But the conditions that create small spaces also make them uninhabitable: too dark, too inaccessible, or even too small. The perfect space is hard to come by, but I happen to have one in my bedroom.

Between my bed and the wall, there is a strip of land that is the exact width of my hips. Holiday feasting usually makes the squeeze snugger, but fat is fortunately squishable so I still manage to fit in. On one side, I have the white blankness of a wall—a potential canvas if inspiration strikes. On the opposite side is the narrow ledge between the mattress and bed frame, where I’ve improvised a shelf perfect for hiding pencils, socks, and midnight snacks. A nightstand makes up the third side, and a clock and lamp sit atop as reminders of the outside world. The groove of my neck fits perfectly on the top of the nightstand, but the handles of its shelves dig into my spine. I’ve gotten used to it, though future spine problems may be blamed on those handles.

Usually, a book or magazine rests on my knees when I sit there. If it’s a school assignment, my left hand splays the book open and my right wields a pencil ready to discern its meaning. More often, I am peering at the glossy pages of a magazine, either reading about Baghdad or the latest misadventures of Sienna Miller. Its floppy pages stay put on my knees, so both of my hands are instead devoted to stuffing food into my mouth. Compressed in that little space between the bed and wall, I have learned two hundred years of European history as well as the intimate details of Miller’s relationships. As thus, I have enjoyed the company of both John Law of pre-French Revolution infamy and Jude Law of Nannygate infamy in that inter-furniture space.

In three dimensions, this place is tiny, but other dimensions exist too, and they can be boundless.

An Immodest Proposal

Apathy and indolence are an especially passive combo. When these two traits are found together in a single person, especially one who is suffering from a severe case of senioritis, it can defeat even the most well-intentioned motivations. Basically, I don't feel like doing anything.

In a lot of ways, senior year has been kick ass awesome. I have great teachers, great classes, and a group of friends I am very lucky to have. But in many, many ways, senior year has been shitty like hell. I don't mean personally...but there has been a lot of anger and tragedy flying around me that I can't ignore. Hopefully, the latter half will pick up.

So before this post totally devolves into emo ranting, here is the real purpose this post: to somehow motivate myself out of wasting time online. During one of those time-sucking periods of internet surfing today, I found a thread of archived U Chicago essay prompts. (This has nothing to do with college, I swear.) The prompts were, as promised, uncommon. Uncommon in that the writing they inspire are not college-essay like at all. It struck me that these prompts were great for expository writing.

So in a typically masochistic decision, I have assigned myself to write one essay a week. Maybe essay is the wrong word; it'll really just a passage inspired by a prompt or answering the prompt. Partly, I feel guilty shirking the responsibility of writing a really U Chicago essay, which I must remedy to ever consider myself a legit Chicago student. Also, I need to start updating again, in less ranty and hopefully more interesting fashion. First course of action: resuscitating that Frankenstein essay...

Last Gasp on College Apps

My last, disjointed thoughts on the beast that has dominated my life over the last four years. I promise: after this, no more discussion of colleges until April.

The Caltech supp has boxes for AMC 10 and AMC 12 scores, as if they're required tests like SATs. Well, since is Caltech, they probably are required tests. Hehe, I can't believe there are people smart and hardcore enough to go there from our school. I think I sit in a bastion of genius, but then I walk into physics class and sense quite the opposite.

Rice Cinema actually sounds pretty snazzy (not quite Doc Films worthy but I didn't expect that), and the people at Rice seem so much more down to earth. They're actually believable students, not precocious teenagers all posing to be the next Nietzsche. I will steel myself for the possibility of spending the next four years of my life in Texas. If this really happens, I will laugh, laugh, laugh.

Yale is boring, elitist, and located in a ghetto. Their attitude on admissions is so condescending. I want my application fee back. *raspberry*

Despite the time I have spent disenchanting myself of U Chicago, I still think it has the coolest emblem. Their spiffy phoenix can rip apart the stuffy shields of the Ivies any day. Why don't they call their sports teams the Phoenixes rather than the boring Maroons? And pictures like these always make me <3 UChic again.


I'm actually pretty happy with all of my "match" schools, and am loathing/apathetic to all my reaches.

In other news, I'm eating a chocolate mint flavored candy cane. Need to ask Avanti where they bought the Asha lollipops because they're yummilicious.

New Year Resolutions

There are three hours left of this first day of 2007, and I am not spending them doing homework no matter how urgent the assignment. (Well, now that college apps are done, nothing really feels urgent.) So according to tradition, New Year resolutions in semi-relevant order. This is the first time I've done them in a while.

• Get to know more people.
• Get closer to my friends.
• Exercise once in a while. Exercising fingers on the keyboard does not count.
• Watch some fabo-awesome movies. Preferably in theatres.
• Be less lazy in everything.
  
• Do a thorough cleaning of my room, including all the spaces under my bed and in the closet that have not seen daylight in at least 6 years.
  
• Make a smart decision about college that I won't regret.
  
• Do some crazy things that I hopefully won't regret.
• Be more engaged.
  
• Get out of New England.
  
• Don't leave trash/dirty dishes around my house.
• Learn to use a sewing machine and make some clothes.
• Learn to knit and crochet.
• Learn to cook. (I feel a housewife trend.)
• Don't let any friendships wither away.
  
• Read all of the books I bought. (Sadly, this is an entire shelf.)
  
• Make sure my brother turns out okay.
  
• Get an official job.
• Do things I sincerely enjoy.
• Travel.
• Never go on collegeconfidential.com again.
  
• Get my writing up to speed.
• Eat like a girl and not a pig.
  
• Seek passion.
  

I'm going to have to be extra efficient and motivated to get all that stuff done. But, I don't want to start this year on a negative note, so no self-doubting allowed.

This year's holidays did not feel holidayish at all. I feel no festive spirit endowing me with glee. No annual spirit of renewal. Not even relief that my college apps are done. I almost feel kind of numb. Hmm, okay, no negativity right? I'm going to sleep now. Five hours earlier than I have in the past week.