Today a group of women came into Sofia's for a gathering. there were thirty of them, all in red hats and purple clothes. thirty old women in scarlet hats and purple clothes. they were members of the society of the red hat, which is an social group for old ladies to get together and gossip and be bawdy. it's based on this poem by jenny joseph:

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

with a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

and satin candles, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

and run my stick along the public railings

and make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

and pick the flowers in other people's gardens

and learn to spit.



You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

and eat three pounds of sausages at a go

or only bread and pickles for a week

and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.



But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

and pay our rent and not swear in the street

and set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

heehee. the old ladies were very nice, and some of the hats, i must admit, were fascinating.

i'm buying myself a new toy online, yay...well i will be, once my mom comes home so i can use her credit card. haha i'd tell rae now that i'm getting one before her--and it's a cool sounding one, too--but she's not currently on her screen name. oh well. tomorrow is another day. damn things take two weeks to get here from california. i want to play NOW!

Today was our senior outing at High Meadow in granby. it was ok, although there wasn't really a whole lot to do besides wander around or sit in the sun. We got our yearbooks, which turned out really well. unfortunately, there's not a single picture of me in the entire thing besides my awful senior photo, not even in the club pages because i was absent on club day. yipee.

i don't really have anything to do tonight, not that i have any energy to do anything with. i sort of have a much smaller social life now that greg is housebound for god knows how long. i might be going to the diner with sara tomorrow night, i don't know....we were there just last night, though. it was after awards night. i won a bunch, the only ones im really happy about are the plaques for english and biology. i did so well in both those subjects. oh and i got fifty dollars for working on voices for four years muahaha. my spanish class is getting to watch selena in spanish. mrs barret lied and told us the juniors were going to have to review grammar for a month. bastards.

there were so many hot guys at high meadow today! scott's inscription in my yearbook encouraged me to pick up tons up hot guys at parties in college. i laughed and had to tell him that i wouldnt be picking up anyone...im picked up and spoken for. it's weird but sometimes i wish i could do it over again with greg in a different way, not because it should have been different, but just for that initial thrill of not knowing the other person, not knowing what's going to happen. instead of meeting at sara's house or at the play, meeting him at a park or a concert, with no one to introduce us, and just having to wing it. i think i like things dangerous. it was the whole manuel thing that corrupted me, of course. what higher adventure can there be for a teenager than meeting a guy in another country who doesnt even speak your language and making out with him in his hotel room? (this is the part where i curse myself once again for being a stupid little sophomore who was so worried the teachers would catch her that she ran away far too soon.) when i think back on him i always smile, and then i shake my head in awe at my own daring. didn't know i had it in me, and i almost didnt....maybe i wouldnt have done it if meredith hadn't been around, rubbing off on me like some dark fairie dust. it was because he said i was beautiful, really...i had never believed anyone who said that before that point, and i didn't believe a lot of people who said it after, until greg. i don't know why i believed it. something in his eyes made me realize he meant it, even though hilary had to tell me what he'd said. i still have his address written on a scrap of paper that's jammed behind a picture frame that, amusingly, holds a picture of me and greg at last year's prom. i think i didn't want to put it in my box for fear it would be lost. it's so small. maybe someday i'll go to sevilla. i never saw it, but it's supposed to be a beautiful city. maybe i'll look him up, even though he'll have grown up and moved away by then. i've had dreams where i walk through madrid and meet him again, though we don't realize it at first.....when i wake sometimes i think how ironic it would be if he was actually my soul mate, and we met at so young an age like ships literally passing in the night. when i woke the next morning he was gone. i never even knew if they won the championship, but for manuel's sake, i hope they did.

High school is over, as of today. Had some fun exchanging honks and middle fingers with heather on the way home. me, her and adam engaged in a musical horn ensemble at a stoplight, and the guy stuck in the middle of us was laughing like he'd never seen hyperactive teenagers before. it was slightly sad pulling out of the parking lot with all the teachers waving at us, knowing that i'll never be their students again.

i just finished dissembling my beloved backpack. minus all the patches and safety pins, it looks limp and forlorn, adorning the trash can. it looks so ordinary. for two years i've always been able to spot my backpack, anywhere, because it was so darn colorful. even the safety pins, which were originally put there only to keep my backpack together and not as a fashion statement like everyone thought, were familiar to me. if someone's skirt was falling apart, they always came to me to ask for a pin. it was useful. now everything is out of it, and im slowly collecting a pile of junk that i will no doubt be saving. like the note heather gave me in math class after graham asked her to the prom in music theory. my detention from senora barret. multitudinous notes from meghan, pictures jessi gave me, those lollipop condoms that have been in my backpack for months. i said goodbye to my locker today, too, A113. and a not-so-fond farewell to my hated calculus book. muahahaha.

tomorrow night is the award ceremony, the last one i will ever have to sit through. i wonder what i'm getting this year, aside from the voices award and getting called up for graduating with honors. i'd love to get the ap english award, but we had a lot of good students in our class...cross my fingers. other than that, i can't think of what i've really excelled in. spanish, maybe, but meg bonney is always really good too. i only get A minuses, she gets As. bio, meh, probably not, we were all smart there.....haha no hill awards....math not a chance in hell...oh well. i really don't care. we're done. little pieces of paper are unimportant. yet i have a memory of what must have been freshman or sophomore year and rae being upset because she didn't win as many awards as her parents wanted her to. then i saw her mom and she looked all annoyed. weird memory.

High school is over, as of today. Had some fun exchanging honks and middle fingers with heather on the way home. me, her and adam engaged in a musical horn ensemble at a stoplight, and the guy stuck in the middle of us was laughing like he'd never seen hyperactive teenagers before. it was slightly sad pulling out of the parking lot with all the teachers waving at us, knowing that i'll never be their students again.

i just finished dissembling my beloved backpack. minus all the patches and safety pins, it looks limp and forlorn, adorning the trash can. it looks so ordinary. for two years i've always been able to spot my backpack, anywhere, because it was so darn colorful. even the safety pins, which were originally put there only to keep my backpack together and not as a fashion statement like everyone thought, were familiar to me. if someone's skirt was falling apart, they always came to me to ask for a pin. it was useful. now everything is out of it, and im slowly collecting a pile of junk that i will no doubt be saving. like the note heather gave me in math class after graham asked her to the prom in music theory. my detention from senora barret. multitudinous notes from meghan, pictures jessi gave me, those lollipop condoms that have been in my backpack for months. i said goodbye to my locker today, too, A113. and a not-so-fond farewell to my hated calculus book. muahahaha.

tomorrow night is the award ceremony, the last one i will ever have to sit through. i wonder what i'm getting this year, aside from the voices award and getting called up for graduating with honors. i'd love to get the ap english award, but we had a lot of good students in our class...cross my fingers. other than that, i can't think of what i've really excelled in. spanish, maybe, but meg bonney is always really good too. i only get A minuses, she gets As. bio, meh, probably not, we were all smart there.....haha no hill awards....math not a chance in hell...oh well. i really don't care. we're done. little pieces of paper are unimportant. yet i have a memory of what must have been freshman or sophomore year and rae being upset because she didn't win as many awards as her parents wanted her to. then i saw her mom and she looked all annoyed. weird memory.

I've read three books in the past few days: Michael Crichton's Airframe, Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. they were all very different books. airframe was very technical, very well-researched, and engrossing. harris' book was very intriguing, but more in terms of character development, or should i say character revelation, as most of the tale is told in flashback. the hitchhiker's guide was amusing in the sardonic way it treats lifeand the Big Questions of the universe. I also got the sequel, the restaurant at the end of the universe, which i plan to read tomorrow since i only have two periods of school before i'm done with high school. oooh and a new book of billy collins' poetry. well not entirely new, it's "selected and new poems" which means it has my favorites from all his books in there! i wants it, i wants it! except that it's twenty two dollars for a pretty slim volume. i'm notoriously cheap when it comes to buying books. i consider them a good buy only if they're inexpensive. i consider paying more than twenty dollars for a book outright fleecing, and only for harry potter will i stomach it. the thought of paying a lot of money for a book that i don't know that i'll like or will have a satisfactory ending, one which i may never read again, is not to my liking. i buy books that i already know i love and would like to have permanently in my possession, like harry potter, howl's moving castle, the oracle glass, the master of all desires, the last don.

but i love billy collins, i truly do....he is my number one favorite poet. i used to love ee cummings, and before that ae housman, and then tennyson, and i still like them, but collins' poetry uses the most mundane images in the most extraordinary ways it just hits me like nothing else i have ever read. oh well--i'll put it on the List of Things to Tell People to Buy Me When Gift-Giving Occasions Occur and I Am Out of Ideas. i dont have one of those, but now i do!

So here I am, trying to pick out classes for next year and really wishing that I could call greg up and ask his opinion on everything, but I can't because his father is a royal dick. I read his xanga today and it made me sad, not because of what it said but because of the feelings behind it. I'm sorry that he has to go through all this, that he has to be made a prisoner in his own house. That's just not right. I don't agree at all with the way his dad treats him. if greg hates school, i'll bet a lot of it is thanks to mr paul and his crazy ideas. I know greg is intelligent, and he can do well if he wants to. He just needs to find out what he wants to be doing, on his own time, and not at the behest of hitler.

when i think about greg and his father, sometimes i think of my dad and what he would have said about all of this. he probably would have agreed with mr paul and grounded him for those grades. not even the programming classes; if he brought home that C in math, all hell would have broken loose. heehee. greg got a better grade than i will in math! if dad knew what im getting in calculus i bet he'd have a heart attack and die all over again. we can't all be math geniuses, dad. sorry. i get the sense that my dad would have done much the same as greg's if i were to be in his position. of course, my dad's version of childrearing was such that that wouldn't happen. he'd never let it get that far, and as his daughter now i would never let it get that far. i think if i failed something, i would be haunted by the thought of his disappointment in me. i think after the fiasco of my dad's first year in college, failing was never an option for him. which made the rest of his life so much harder, never being able to accept that he couldn't go as high as he wanted to. i have long resolved not to let my limitations eat me alive. all the money in the world will never make up for the joy of being loved. i hope my dad never lost sight of that, but i sense that he was embittered by the struggles in his professional life. he was never a failure in any sense, and i hate the thought that perhaps he died thinking that he was. not true. just not true. i loved him, and i love greg, no matter what happens or what he chooses.

perhaps the beginning of my dad's college career is portentous. he was a brilliant student in high school, but he ended up partying his first year at Lowell and failed right out. my grandpa made him spend all summer painting houses. when he went back, he was on the dean's list until graduation. my dad only told me this once, and i honestly could not believe that my straight arrow father, who railed at my sister for getting bad grades in math and for not being an all A student, flunked out of college. i laughed. it was incredulous. he hated it if i referred to it casually, especially in public. i think it must have shamed him, that memory of his initial failure. i asked once if this meant that i would have one year to screw around with in college, and he just glowered at me. guess that was a no.

Rae told me a quote she might use in her valedictory address, i forgot the person: "If you want to be happy, be."

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Wallace Stevens

I'll admit to not being entirely conscious of the meaning of all these lines...but it gives me a picture, and it's one I like.

Today is my last full day of classes at Northwest. Yipee! After today, no more biology for me. I've thrown out my lab notebook, disemboweled my AP review book, and trampled upon my stupid lab goggles that made us look like giant insects. muahahaha. there will also be no english for me after friday! i'm out of her excruciatingly long exam. yes, there will be a hill exam, but only for one of the two periods. the second period we're having a party! spanish is still up in the air; i'll find that out today. math i obviously have to take, but i don't think im going to get a D in the class. oh and graduating with high honors only takes into account the first three quarters of senior year! score!

I love the way greg and I can have fun doing absolutely nothing...happiness can be a couple of couch pillows.

Frank O'Connor's short story "My Oedipus Complex" is so great! i would suggest that anyone read it....very clever. Also Saki's "Tobermory", which is about a cat belonging to some very shallow society folk who is taught to talk, and suddenly becomes a threat because of all the gossip he knows.

The Hollow Men

T. S. Eliot (1925)
I


We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar


Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;


Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


II


Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.


Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --


Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


III


This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.


Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


IV


The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms


In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river


Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


V


Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.


Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow


For Thine is the Kingdom


Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow


Life is very long


Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom


For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the


This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

That's just such a good poem....the first time it overwhelmed me. I didn't like his poem "the waste land", but this is just good...it's his condemnation of "subjective idealism", people who retreat from one another and put everything into abstractions and do nothing, until they are finally only hollow men. So good!

Skipped school yesterday to see the Matrix Reloaded with Ashley. It was entertaining in terms of Neo's attractiveness, some of the fight sequences, the amusing revelations about his true role as the One...or One of Many? As to the philsophy which fairly dripped from every character's mouth--it seems anyone with a bad accent and a penchant for verbosity can be a philosopher these days--I wasn't that impressed. Perhaps it was not the quality of what was said but the quantity of it. i felt as though whatever message the Wachowskis were trying to send was lost in the rubble of everything else they insisted on saying. Yes, causality is a conundrum that will make your head hurt if you think about it. Free will versus fate is mystifying. But maybe it's supposed to be. Or maybe saying that's the easy way out. Either way, I still found the movie to be somewhat less than the nirvanic experience other people have claimed it was. Of course, they think the rest of us are missing something. It could be true, or they could just be reading too much into it.

Or maybe I am just quick to be cynical about some people these days. It seems that if you really want to believe what someone says that they believe about themselves, and then it just turns out not to be so true after all, you have trouble believing them again....

Home and free and sister-less for the whole evening. Joy!

There was a woman in Sofia's today who had such a dark tan that I would have thought she was black except for her facial structure. Her boyfriend was lighter, but they both looked like they'd been cooking a little too long. I almost couldn't take my eyes off of her, I was so disgusted. It made me wonder if she just didn't know that she was causing possibly irreparable damage to her skin, or just didn't care? As we learned in bio, one of the ways a cancer starts is when a mutagen alters a certain kind of gene in a cell, an oncogene. Cancers don't just pop up from mutations in any gene; it has to be a gene that controls cell division or cell death. Once the mutagen hits an oncogene, it can become the proto-oncogene of a cancer, dividing at an incredibly swift rate with nothing to halt it. UV light is a mutagen; it changes the DNA in your skin cells. If the DNA in a cell is injured, there are little mechanisms that go and try to repair it. If it can't be repaired, the p53 gene is activated--the cell suicide gene--and the cell is instructed to self-destruct, and you wind up with a sunburn. But if the altered gene just happens to be p53, or a gene that tells cells to stop dividing, then you're in some serious trouble. It's like taking away the brake from your car. The cell will divide continuously and won't self-destruct, forming the mass of cells known as a tumor. There are hundreds of mutagens, including cigarette smoke and asbestos. I just could not believe that anyone would willingly bake themselves in the sun without sunscreen if they have any understanding of what that UV light could be doing to their cells. That's so idiotic. I'd rather be pale year round than have melanoma when I'm thirty. I think the same thing of the girls at school who spend so much money on tanning salons during the winter and before prom. It's crazy! If you're so desperate to look brown, go spend five bucks on some self tanner at CVS. or roll in the mud. whatever.

I had a weird dream last night about greg having to use this Love-O-Matic thing to test how much he loved me. It wound up on the second one from the top, which read "Love her,but it's over." And I was standing right there! So when I asked him why that happened, he explained that it was because I'm giong to school next year, and....you know.....these things sort of end, right there. But then I woke up as i was trying to convince him that that doesn't have to be the case. And then meghan and i had a discussion--which practically involved yelling because we were in the cafeteria and it was so darned loud--about going off to college while keeping your relationship. She said she would never do that, and I'm planning on doing that. I guess I can see where she'd be coming from, that it would limit you in some fashion, prevent you from exploring all your new possibilities and all those hot guys at college. But I don't feel like I'd be limited at all. What am I limited from? Pointless weekend hookups? The dating game? I'm not limited from making new friends, of both genders, or from exploring who I am, or having an awesome time at college. Plus, I'm going to college with something incredibly special, that not many people get to have at this age, someone who really loves me. Throwing aside a relationship merely because you're moving on to college is like saying that gee, this was nice, but i'm pretty sure there's something better out there, so...so long! I'm not saying that greg and i are going to last 'forever' and all of that mush, but I have no doubt that we can handle being apart. The thought of being without him for good, for losing something so important to me, is a far worse thought than not seeing him for a few weeks here and there.

Oh yeah, and as for being limited from the hot guys, c'mon, I check out all the hot guys now and I haven't even left yet. Looking at other guys doesn't make me feel guilty, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of guys to look at at fairfield, but I'm not going to feel deprived just because I can't jump every sexy kid i see in the hallway. I've got a very sexy guy to jump whenever I'm at home!

In conclusion, I'm contemplating skipping both monday and this friday. hmm. unfortunately I don't know when the voices book is going to get done.....hrmmmm......

Well I had this lengthy post about prom before, but the stupid blogger decided to kill it before it got posted. i'm not going to try to repeat it; 'twas a work worthy of alexander pope's witty essays, and will be heartily missed. Or maybe i'm exaggerating. anyway prom was a great night, and i cant wait till i get my pictures back. of course, i should drop the camera off if i want the pictures, right?

I'm so ready to get the hell out of here. Every day, every class is a misery now, just counting the minutes till the bell rings. I got another letter from Fairfield inviting me to pick a first year seminar or cluster course for myself. they don't address letters to me as "dear michelle", but invariably as "dear university scholar, please accept our congratulations on recieveing this honor. we cant wait for you to get here and make us look good!" well, that's paraphrased. anyway, the cluster courses do not sound interesting--they're "interdisciplinary learning experiences" that "draw on a myriad of issues and ideas". Read: HILL class all over again. No way. The seminar I'm going to pick is called "The Creative Mind". It discusses the lives and works of artists in all different genres; poetry, prose, drama, film and photography. they take field trips to new york and new haven for art openings and plays, and the culmination of the course is your own creative project. This sounds awesome! I'm going to mail it out tomorrow; there's only nineteen students in each seminar, and i WANT this one. I want it bad. Luckily, the University Scholar deal means that me and the twelve other kids get first pick of all the classes we want, so i'm pretty sure i'll be in.

I listened to greg's cd again in the car on the way home from work last night. At the end he says that I should listen to it whenever i need a smile, and after yesterday (i wanted to die) i needed one, so i popped in the cd and Bam--smile. I must have listened to that thing thirty times by now, and it still picks me up every single time. I love greg!

According to a little book that I was just perusing in the guidance office, called the inside look at colleges, fairfield university really is a "party school" if you want it to be. The beach is only a couple of miles away, so in good weather there's a party there somewhere. Even though it doesn't have the Greek system, it does have the Lantern Point beach houses for upperclassmen--so guess who hosts the beach parties! I'm not worried that I'll somehow get subverted into the culture of "study all week and drink all weekend." However, I don't want to wind up with a roommate whose highest aspiration is hooking up with a senior and getting high every weekend. Bleh. If they have a straightedge box on the roommate form, I'm checking it. I also think they have a dorm that's substance free, so I'd really rather live there. I also must remember to bring my bike down with me this fall, because some of the dorms can be a twenty minute walk from the cafeteria. Ha! I'll bike. It's got a lot of hills, but none that are too steep.

They have StagBucks instead of StarBucks. lol. Now I'm off to read stuff for incomnig freshies on their website!