Wait. May?

This year has gone by faster than both seventh and eighth grade. It's a good thing. I'm not exactly thrilled with Junior High. I need a change of scene. This last semester has gone by especially fast. It's feel like it was only a few days ago that I was waiting to audition for the School of the Arts. Minutes ago that I got new music in the symphony.


The end of the year is going to be really enjoyable. My concert for youth symphony is this Saturday. I am so excited. The theme this year in Russian music. Most of our piece are very exciting and fantastic. But there is one song, Elegie by Faure, which is completely different from the others. I love it so very, very much.



(Sorry about the quality; It was nearly impossible to find a recording of this with Orchestral Accompaniment. At least with a buggy computer it was)


I also have the Ninth Grade Dance coming up. To be honest, I'm only really excited about the peripherals of the night. The dance itself holds no real excitement for me. I'm more concerned about wearing a pretty dress, going to a fun after party, and attending the awards assembly the next day. I think most of the ninth grade class at my school is of the same mind frame.


Market is starting up this weekend. The market is such a nice place to be in the summer. It's friendly and busy and interesting. The people we work with are all really decent people. We're a fairly tight-knit group of vendors, I think. Similar interests and priorities. The customers are cool too. Just happy to be out in the sun, window shopping.


I wish we had more of a garden in the new house. We've had so much clean-up to do in the yard, that we haven't really had time to plant any flowers. I miss the cherry tree that was in our old backyard. For a few weeks in the spring, it made everything delicate and articulated. And the lilac trees, with their dense blooms and heady scent. Peonies. Tulips. Snap Dragons. Heliotrope. Hydrangea. I miss them. Next year though. We'll have a wonderful garden next year.

My Review of Ten things I Hate About You

I watched this movie on youtube this weekend. I'm not crazy about the romantic comedy genre (Love Actually notwithstanding), but with sterling reviews from all of my friends, I figured, it couldn't be that bad.

And now, because I don't really have any good blog fodder up my sleeve, I'm going to review it for you.

The Bad

Andrew Keegan (Joey): A typical asinine jerk that everyone falls for. Not a very realistic character, though. In reality, if someone is a asinine jerk , they'll at least try to cover it up. If they don't, nobody dates them. They are not coveted. Also, I think there was something majorly wrong with his make-up.

Heath Ledger's Singing: His acting during the singing scene was superb. Truly laugh-out- loud funny. He just doesn't sing the song that well. The pitchiness was kind of distracting. I know I'm nit-picking. Sorry.

The Cliche: The fact that there was even a senior prom mentioned in the movies suggested that there was going to be some cliche moments. I can kind of forgive that, since I was expecting it, but then there were other tired scenes in the movie that kind of got to me. The almost-kiss-in-the-car scene, the "I'll tell you a secret, if you tell me one of yours" sequence. The song dedication. Stuff like that. Not entirely unexpected, but a bit of a disappointment

The Good

Heath Ledger (Patrick): was adorable, in a "I'm-trying-to-be-tough-but-my-smile-is-too-nice-for-that" sort of way. I loved the scene where he sings, "Can't Take Eye Off of You" to Kat (Even though the singing wasn't, as mentioned, very good), and the scene when he watches Kat in the guitar store. He was a solid character, flawed enough to be realistic, but not angsty. I loved the way he held Kat's face, and touched her hair.

Julia Stiles (Kat): Julia Stiles did a good job of creating a sympathetic character. Even though a lot of the scenes where she was unhappy were written badly, she still managed to exude authentic vulnerability. It also helped that she is a really good dancer. And that she was in the Bourne Trilogy.

David Krumholtz (Michael): Because he was in Serenity, a much better movie.

Larisa Oleynik (Bianca): I know you were supposed to dislike her for most of the film, but she was in the end, one of my favorite characters. She was sweet and naive. She had a typical popular girl role, but she made it interesting.

I guess all in all, I liked the movie. It was funny and the characters were likable. There are worse ways to spend two hours of your life.

Clarification

I think something happens to your brain in that first year of Junior High or Middle School. People become declarers. Nothing can just be said, quietly. It must be shouted and told to everyone of slight acquaintance. It only follows that sometimes you misrepresent yourself.
In seventh grade, things opened up for me. I met people that were artistic in the ways I was artistic. I assembled friends that were handpicked. There was power in that. But things were getting bigger for everyone else too. It triggered a kind of "landcraze" for lack of a better term. Everyone was trying to establish themselves as something unique. Hence the declarations.
Going into Junior High, I was fairly well established within myself. I knew what I liked and what I didn't. I was good at English and Music and Art. I was not good at things like Science, or Math or anything analytical. I didn't really feel the compulsion to spell most things out.
Except when it came to relationships.
For some weird reason, I felt a manic determination to let everyone know that I did not like "Nice boys". Things like "Brutally honest" "Mean" and "edgy" were thrown around when I talked about what I liked in guys.
I kind of screwed the pooch on that one.
Because words like those make me sound like I'm into the "Bad Boys". Which I'm really not. I'm into honest, sincere boys, that will not fluff up the truth. Who will tell me exactly what they think of me and why and who will let me see their minds with clarity.
Also, they must have a wonderful sense of humor, be good with kids, play an instrument, and wear sweaters.
I was selling myself short. Obviously there was more I was looking for, than just "Truthful to the point of painful". More than "Edgy." But I declared myself that way. I made it seem as though I was only looking for one quality.

Another thing I used to parade about was "I'm never going to get a boyfriend". I said it all the time. But (most of the time) what I really meant was this: I'm not ready to date yet. No one I have seen is quite right for me. I'm not right for them.
When people ask me why I don't have a boyfriend, when people joke about my lack of a boyfriend, I say to myself "You brought this upon yourself. These are your very own words thrown back at you" I wish I could go back and tell my seventh grade self to be a little quieter. It would have made a difference, I think.

Going to an entirely new school next year is going to be a really good thing for me. Because I've already been thrown to the bottom of the barrel before, I'm going to be prepared. I'm going to let people find out about me on their own, without me just coming out and telling them. In Junior High, I've learned how to do that. And I am grateful for that.

Music Patterns

So I go through these patterns annually. I listen to certain artists at certain points during the year. It's striking what a subconscious reaction it is.

I was on the bus the other day, and it was sunny. The kind of sunny that makes the air cleaner and everything look shiny. Finally beginning to feel like summer could be a possibility. I was listening to my iPod, like I do every morning. I found myself inexplicably listening to songs by Imogen Heap. ( I love her. Never been disappointed by anything I've heard from her). I was struck by how adamantly I wanted to listen to Heap's music.

And then I remembered back to last year, the week before Easter. I had been listening to Imogen Heap then too. And the year before.

The choices my brain makes are so specific, that I could tell every you every particular artist from every month. Tori Amos and Damien Rice in December. Sufjan Stevens in November. Joanna Newsom in March. It's a very strange phenomenon. Does it happen to any of you?

This Sunday is Easter. I am so excited. We get to go on my father's Easter egg hunt. It's usually takes about eight hours to complete. It's really not even an Easter Egg hunt. More just like a hunt through various cities following a trail of clues that my Dad has left for us. It just happens to take place on Easter. Anyway, Dad's been spending a lot of time mysteriously running off to craft supply stores, so I know he's working on it. It will be beautiful. And clever. Maybe this year I'll post some pictures from the actual hunt, now that I'm computer savvy enough to know how to post photos.

Speaking of computer savvy; I am really surprised how much I am learning in my digitools. I mean, there are redundancies. I know way too much about inserting a picture from the internet into a word document. But I'm also learning stuff about publisher and photoshop and excel. The teacher is Ms. Hilmer, this adorable little instructor. She's completely organized all the time. It makes me a little bit jealous, to be honest. Everything is laid out before class, and almost all questions are answered on the worksheet. There is a clear goal to each lesson. It's efficient, in a word.

I kind of resented the required Digitools class at first, but over time I've really grown to like it. Just not microtype. Microtype still sucks.

Spring Break

Tomorrow I'm going back to school. I have very little to show for the week off. Unless you count breaking the world record for most cough drops consumed over a three day period. I have been really ill. Some sort of flu. So I spent the majority of the break sleeping.

I just got finished with Ironside by Holly Black. Like the two books before it, Tithe and Valiant, it was excellent. Believable plot. Interesting and sympathetic characters. They are some seriously good books. My favorite book in the trilogy is Valiant. It's the only books that is centered about Val, an average teenage runaway. I really hope Holly Black writes another book about her. Val has this great troll boyfriend and as a couple they are really enjoyable to read about.

Something I really look for in series are references to previous books. I get really excited when a familiar character is mentioned in a plot that they are not involved in. Holly Black does this really well. The references are quite subtle, but they make the book ten times more immersing for me. Anita Shreve, the author of Fortune's Rocks and The Pilot's Wife, does something similar. Most of her books take place in or around the same house. There are constant reminders of previous story lines and characters. It brings new life to old stories that have already been read.

The weather has been so lovely for the last two days. I have completely forgiven the utterly miserable weather that preceded it.