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!

Ah, the HILL trip. Should I bother to explain? Not really…I was there, I have my journal for future reference, along with the recollections of others. I have no real desire to relive it all step by step. I have to write a paper on the whole experience by next week. Today we had the dreaded conversation about group dynamics. Apparently we’re one of the best classes Mr T has ever had on the trip in the sense that there were no major problems, no catfights, no attempts to solicit illegal substances. However, we are also extremely clique-y, as observed in the lines that were drawn out there. It wasn’t like we didn’t know everyone, or that we were’nt comfortable talking to everyone; that was fine. But when we got out there, it was three groups: the four boys, the four girls (Taryn, Hilary, Nicole and Jennie) and then us, me, Heather, Rae, Sara, Ashley, and Kim. By the end of the trip there were only two groups: us and them.
That is probably something that I will remember for a long while, this truth that there will always be separations, and that I will not always be the person that everyone wants to associate with. I was glad to return because here I feel much more free than in that little group of fourteen. We were all so compressed that the lines were instantly visible, anywhere. Back here, we’re spread out, it’s not so obvious, and I actually feel like people desire my company. Aside from my friends, of course, who were amazing on this trip. The majority of fun that I had was the time spent in their company, not time gazing at the Grand Canyon or even Sedona, which I absolutely loved. People are what matter in life, the people who care about you. Not the opinions of people whom you will never see again after a month or so. Not the charming vistas that you may never lay eyes on again. There will always be sunsets and forests and mountains, but time spent with people who love you is precious. Hey, a tie-in to King Lear! He only learned at the end that the love of his daughter was more precious than worldly power as a king. He was content to live with her in prison, forsaking all his position and esteem. Unfortunately, she was murdered, and then he died of heartbreak, but that has no relation to my story.
Ummm….so yeah. HILL class never became what it was made out to be, but I guess that’s ok. At least I get an easy A- for a class with no work, no tests, a bunch of people I’m friends with and a basic lunchhour. It’s almost over soon anyway. I’m so glad to be back, especially now that I have Greg and Meghan again! Oooh and prom’s coming too. Excitement! And then graduation, and FREEDOM!!!

The HILL trip's a week from tomorrow!!! Yay! I think my mom was a little concerned because there's fourteen of us and only two chaperones. But really, how much trouble are going to get into in, like, Phoenix? Go to some back alley porn store and try to pick up a prostitute? Sure. Of course, Mr T did warn us about watching porn on TV, and mentioned the availability of certain movies *cough cough*. Amusingly, he directed his comments to the boys. I really wish I could bring my laptop; I know i could journal so much better if i were typing. Somehow I doubt that there'll be any cybercafes in the hotels like there were in france. Of course, only Rae was dedicated enough to pay money to use the computers lol. Still, I wish I'd journaled more over there. I wrote some brief notes on little pieces of paper, several of which I've lost--on turned up in my makeup box, of all places; it was about going to Toledo, and how they called it the "living museum", and how I'd spent the bus ride thinking about Manuel. I also have a random memory of getting off the bus in Toledo when we got to the forge to watch them make the swords, and Merideth was telling me all about her plan to come back to Spain in the summer and stay with Christian. Yeeeaaah. That would really happen. She always said that she wrote to him and he wrote back, but somehow I don't think she did.

I just read an article at nytimes.com on how building your dream home in the woodlands of the Northeast can bring a really high risk of getting Lyme disease, which sucks. Apparently, small cleared plots of woodland have three times as many infected ticks; one three-acre plot has 600 ticks per acre, and 75% of them were infected with Lyme disease. Well there goes my dream of building myself a really comfy lodge up north someday. I think I'll just build it in the Pacific Northwest instead. They'ev got mountains and woods over there, and apparently the mice that carry Lyme disease are less populous in that part of the nation.

In other news, the Iraqi Minister of Information is still denying the fact that any Americans have entered Baghdad, despite the fact that several news sources have taken photos of soldiers storming Saddam's palaces and walking through the streets. This guy is still claiming that the dirty Americans haven't even gotten near the city. I wonder how many Iraqis believe him? They showed pictures in the Courant of Iraqis cheering the British soldiers who are taking over Basra. Obviously they can't speak for the entire nation of Iraq, but it supports the idea that at least some of them are happy with what we are doing. Some people are of the opinion that we're not liberating them, we're murdering them and going to war with a peaceful people. Hello, we're not at war with the Iraqi people! We're at war with a crazy dictator who has for decades controlled the lives of his people absolutely. He has murdered every dissenter, crushed every revolt, and determined what his people can wear, watch, hear and eat. He massacred the Kurds in the northern part of the country and used chemical weapons against his own people. He developed weapons of mass destruction with the full intent of using them on innocent people. He attacked a peaceful neighboring country with no provocation, merely out of greed and ambition, and when the UN stepped in to stop him, he turned those weapons on the soldiers. Saddam Hussein is not "good people", and his continued health and well-being posed a distinct threat to the rest of the free world. Ten years of disregarding UN sanctions and a total lack of respect for weapons inspectors show that this man never had any intention of relinquishing any sort of power. The people of Iraq were suffering and dying under those sanctions--should we have waited for Saddam to die, only so another dictator could take his place? I'm not saying that Iraqi civilian casualties are acceptable; they're not. It's terrible that those people were killed. But it's my belief that when the Iraqi people have a taste of true freedom, they will prefer a new existence to the tyranny of the old days.

Ok, rereading what I wrote, that probably seems really strong and grrr men suck because they don't read minds. It's not like that....entirely....I know greg loves me, and I know that he probably tries to think of interesting things, but I just can't help but wish that after all this time he would just understand the kind of thing that I'm thinking of. I just don't want to feel as though he doesn't really know me enough to understand where I'm coming from.

It's thirteen days now, till the trip to the Southwest. I'm excited. It also means i have so much stuff to finish before then, especially my research paper and greg's anniversary present. I've been working on it almost every day, and it's about half-way done, but i have to make out a schedule so i'll have everything i need for it in time. A friend of mine observed that whatever greg does is going to have to be pretty damned special to merit all the effort that i've put into this thing--which is a lot. But it's like I'm trying not to put my hopes too high. I know he'll try, of course, but in the unfortunate event that it turns out to be, shall we say, less than stellar, I don't want to have had a thousand romantic notions and then find myself utterly disappointed. Those aren't fun times. And it's not like i expect him to do something along the lines of what I am, because I just love doing things like this, and I'm perfectly willing to spend a long time with it, and he's, well, a guy. At the same time, someone tried to tell me that this is just the way things are, that men aren't any good at this whole romantic thing, and that's such crap. This person's basic message was: you better just deal with it, because it doesn't get any better. Hm, then how is it that I see a lot of the guys around me doing really cool things? Example: on scott and marianne's anniversary, scott decorated her locker with balloons and ribbons and this gigantic heartshaped collage he had made of the two of them. Now, this is scott, the big class clown who delights in making dumb jokes and laughing like a monkey with his little chimp friend, and it was seriously the sweetest thing i had ever seen him do. So i don't believe that this is a general fault of the gender. I can't help it if i want something that required imagination or inspiration or just something beyond what can be purchased in a store! See, now I'm getting all worked up. And i really need to go start my homework, so this rant is officially over.

Happy anniversary to Rae-J! That means it's one month and one day until ours, so I need to get cracking on greg's present. I also need to consider what I'd like, since i can't just put greg out there on his own and expect him to come up with something. that doesn't work out so well. still it sucks that i can think of so many romantic things that he could put together or make on his own, but once i tell him what to do, they're not romantic anymore. then it's just pointless. and i could tell him some material object that would please me, but what i'll still really want is something that he just thought of on his own, like "wow, wouldn't michelle love it if i did this?". is that strange, that i could tell someone what i want in terms of a gift-gift, but still expect that they will divine that the material thing is not what i'm really after and act accordingly? there's women for you. greg told me that his mom just hands his dad a list of things that she wants. my mom always did that too, and my dad would buy her whatever perfume or something else she wanted, but he always made things, i don't know, special. his cards to her were always really sweet, and he'd draw pictures for her, and call her his kitten, and the perfume itself never seemed as thoughtful to me as everything that surrounded it. So it happens that i can think of a million romantic things i'd love for him to do, but nothing stands out in my mind for him to buy...

A long talk in HILL about the war today. Probably one of the better class days, in my opinion; there weren't that many of us there, and there were no ad hominem arguments from certain highly conservative parties against more liberal parties.

Once again, the news seems to be so very far away, happening thousands of miles apart from our little school. Walking down the hallway this morning there was no indication in the laughing countenances of those who passed that they were conscious of the implications of this morning. The war has begun, not in the brilliant blaze of munitions that our administration promised, but with a smaller yet still decisive salvo against the Iraqis. No doubt the conflict will be brief, and hopefully bloody, but I hardly forsee an easy road ahead.

The fact that Saddam Hussein would rather martyr his entire country than lose power and lose face is an indication not only of this man's resolve, but also his utter lack of regard for human life. Beyond the fact that he unleashed chemical and biological weapons on the Iranian people, or that he used them on the Kurds in his own country, or that he's murdered thousands of Iraqi dissidents including his own daughters' husbands, how can anyone stand a man who would choose the path of defiance and death rather than humbling himself to save his people, not to mention his own life? He must either truly believe he can win this war, which, judging from the massive force arrayed against him is unlikely, or he truly doesn't care about anyone at all, and wants to go out in a blaze of gunfire. He would rather see his nation drowned in blood and unleash a jihad than surrender his sacred person.
PS. Saddam Hussein's idol is Joseph Stalin, the man who murdered about 8 million of his own citizens, the majority for no reason at all. Anyone who is unconvinced by history books that Stalin was a more ruthless and evil man than Hitler should read The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The brutality, the oppression, the utterly random cruelty of this man's reign is abominable, and yet largely unrecorded in textbooks. So much of what he did was not perpetrated in any war, nor did he focus on specific ethnic groups. He was an equal-opportunity killer.

A long talk in HILL about the war today. Probably one of the better class days, in my opinion; there weren't that many of us there, and there were no ad hominem arguments from certain highly conservative parties against more liberal parties.

Once again, the news seems to be so very far away, happening thousands of miles apart from our little school. Walking down the hallway this morning there was no indication in the laughing countenances of those who passed that they were conscious of the implications of this morning. The war has begun, not in the brilliant blaze of munitions that our administration promised, but with a smaller yet still decisive salvo against the Iraqis. No doubt the conflict will be brief, and hopefully bloody, but I hardly forsee an easy road ahead.

The fact that Saddam Hussein would rather martyr his entire country than lose power and lose face is an indication not only of this man's resolve, but also his utter lack of regard for human life. Beyond the fact that he unleashed chemical and biological weapons on the Iranian people, or that he used them on the Kurds in his own country, or that he's murdered thousands of Iraqi dissidents including his own daughters' husbands, how can anyone stand a man who would choose the path of defiance and death rather than humbling himself to save his people, not to mention his own life? He must either truly believe he can win this war, which, judging from the massive force arrayed against him is unlikely, or he truly doesn't care about anyone at all, and wants to go out in a blaze of gunfire. He would rather see his nation drowned in blood and unleash a jihad than surrender his sacred person.
PS. Saddam Hussein's idol is Joseph Stalin, the man who murdered about 8 million of his own citizens, the majority for no reason at all. Anyone who is unconvinced by history books that Stalin was a more ruthless and evil man than Hitler should read The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The brutality, the oppression, the utterly random cruelty of this man's reign is abominable, and yet largely unrecorded in textbooks. So much of what he did was not perpetrated in any war, nor did he focus on specific ethnic groups. He was an equal-opportunity killer.

Lordy. I got stuck tutoring another freshman again. In grammar, again. The guidance counselors assume that because I write well and because I'm called an editor for Voices that I actually know and can pass along the incredibly complex and annoying rules of grammar. I can't! St.Gabe's taught me almost nothing about grammar; my freshman teacher, Mrs. Hennessey, God rest her soul because she looked old enough to be dead even if she wasn't, taught us nothing but how to diagram sentences, endlessly. That helps you not at all in life. Who can remember what part of speech gets the arrow or the spaceship or the table? Who cares? I learned grammar the hands-on way, so to speak. I read, and I read, and I read, and the proper way to write just sort of sank in until I could easily tell what was correct and incorrect. That doesn't mean I remember any of the rules, or the tenses, or the different kinds of clauses, etc. So what am I supposed to tell this freshman girl, who was very frightened looking and said barely a word? The last girl they tried to have me tutor, this annoying girl named Tijuana, actively hated the fact that she was being forced into tutoring. We were both annoyed at giving up our frees, and she blatantly didn't care what exercise i was trying to have her do, so we eventually stopped. Oh and there was heather gostyla, whom i was supposed to tutor in geometry. I'm a senior--that was freshman year! She knew half the theorems and corollaries better than I did. It was pointless.

Senior day yesterday wasn't so bad. We built doghouses, did some yoga, and finished the day with a very interesting Mass with father Moran. It wasn't a big mass, there were only about twenty of us who stopped our activities and went, and instead of a homily, we sat in the chapel discussing what we regretted about high school, what we'd learned, and how we were going to apply those things to our future lives. Very interesting. Even though I don't find the whole truth--the Truth--in religious ceremonies, Mass can be comforting if you're in the presence of someone who believes so very fervently, and is so very affecting in his speech as Father Moran. There is no formalism, that detested shortcoming of priests, in his celebration. To listen to him, and to really think about some of those Biblical passages, can lead you to appreciate the good ideas that people have had and shared over the course of two thousand years. Do I agree completely? No, even less with the Church today than with the Bible itself. Yet it all has some grain of truth, some basic precept of existence as good human beings which we need to dig around and find underneath all the blather. Truth is hard to find, but it's worth looking for.

My friend Meghan Bonney showed me an interesting quote from an Ani DiFranco song: "On cold toast, butter melts out of habit." I don't know why it struck me....but I thought it was clever.

Well, an interesting thing happened in school today. While Sara and I were meandering down the hallway, Fitz stopped us as usual and began cacklnig with laughter over some new juicy gossip that he'd gained about yours truly. This happened yesterday afternoon too, so I figured it was the same tired game, but this time it was something altogether different. Apparently he'd recieved secondhand information from a girl in his AP Gov class that Meghan and I were seen making out in a mall. With each other, should anyone need such a clarification. Obviously, anyone who knows us would realize instantly that that's so not true, because cmon, she's my best friend, that's just nasty. So while I was annoyed that suddenly people had decided to start spreading rumors about me, I took it as more of a joke. Meghan was extremely upset by it, though, which made me upset. I mean, my friendship with jackie sophomore year earned me the rumor title of "lesbian". I'm not bothered by it anymore, and even though someone said that's just because im going out with greg, it's not true. Having a boyfriend doesn't suddenly magically protect you from insults; I simply choose to not care, and to see the funny side of it. How crazy is that, anyway? Meghan doesn't understand why anyone would make up somethign like that about us, which is rather mean, and then tell someone like Fitz who cant keep his mouth shut to save his life. Of course there is the possibility that seeing me and meghan make out is actually some guy's wet dream, so he made up a story to make it sound more plausible. fitz actually suggested that i tell my "piece" (which now means boyfriend instead of gun, apparently) about it, since he'd probably be ecstatic. I never thought i would have to hear the word "three-way" coming out of Fitz' mouth, especially not in relation to moi. Ewwww. He also thought this "piece"'s name was Chris, for some reason. Anyway, people are stupid, and meghan and i so aren't lesbians. I guess the saying is "We're straight but not narrow."

Tonight it's like eight girls and a hotel suite! Sweet! (hahaha yay for homophones!) And a basketball game before that, so we get to ogle some hot guys (unfortunately, our guys aren't playing farmington, so no jason abromidas or whatever his name was mrow) and then....some even more interesting entertainment.

Things I Hate About High School


People telling me what time of day I’m allowed to eat.
Hall passes
Eight continuous periods of class a day.
Learning things I don’t care about.
CSAs
Math class.
Going up to the board in math class
Not knowing the answers in math class
Anything related to math class.
People trying to convince me that math class is beneficial.
Uniforms.
Mr. Callahan.
Detentions (or the threat of detentions)
The disgusting lack of hygiene on the part of fellow students.
Bathrooms (see above)
The cafeteria
The cafeteria workers and their crazy rules
Traffic jams in the parking lot
Traffic jams in the hallway
Groups of shrieky youngsters.
Being shushed in the library.
The administration.
Morning prayer.
Morning announcements.
The Pledge of Allegiance.
Assemblies.
The PA system and that godforsaken clicking it makes when it’s off.
Crushing amounts of homework on a nightly basis.
Fire drills.
Gym class.
Standardized tests
Guidance counselors
People discussing their sexual behaviors in raised voices in the hallway.
The sexual behaviors of teenagers
People constantly bragging about illegal activities.
Seeing people sneaking cigarettes.
Having classes with morons.
Seeing the same building, without end, for four years.
The word “leadership”.
Everything that anyone has ever claimed will “prepare us for college”.
Doing everything in hopes of getting into a nice college.
Worrying about getting into colleges.
Not getting into colleges.
Having to commute between home and school
Rampant PDA
Observing young love
Having less time to spend with individual people because you see all of them, every day
The shocking lack of tampons in the bathrooms
Short vacations
....And everything else that I've possibly forgotten, but I still detest.

Would you believe this started out in spanish class as a list of everything I'll miss about high school? Yeah. I only wrote down like three things. Then I realized that I pretty much hated everything else. I want out! Three months could be a lifetime.

Jen's back. It's like the Amityville Horror. The house is possessed by a malovolent, destructive spirit, and I'm trapped.