I went to a showcase that focused on women's performing/literary arts (there were poems, a short story, blah blah blah)––the best were the last two, my friend B. who lives in my dorm and who does awesome slam poetry, and a girl who did stand up comedy––and it was really, really enjoyable, but it made me miss performing like crazy.

I'm thinking I might expand on the religion forensics thing that got me into States junior year and maybe try to get it into our amateur theater? It's specifically for people who aren't in the arts conservatory, and . . . IDK how it works, but hopefully I can be like, hey, can I put on a, like, half-hour show? The events coordinator was my summer orientation leader, so it's less scary approaching her than it might be.

I don't know. I think I'm kind of funny. I could talk about, you know, adolescence and religion and politics and sexuality, and all that clichéd stuff. And call it . . . "pimples in mirror closer than they appear." Or something.



I'm officially in pit orchestra for Sweeney Todd! :D

Yesterday, I cracked my head on my bed frame. Today I fell up the stairs three times––this morning, in my dorm, spilling hot tea all over my hand and the stairs, once on my way to work, which is on the third floor of that building, and once again just now––and I tripped and fell almost completely flat on my face actually during work, which, wow, that was a really awesome moment. I tripped and almost fell twice on my walk home from work, which admittedly goes through a sketchy part of the city and thus has terrible sidewalks, but still.

I need some tea and a nap, I think. Oooh, and maybe some of The O.C. The left side of my head still hurts from yesterday.

I thwacked my left temple on my bed frame this morning. D:

I got all my classes––I had to switch to a different section for my Principles of Literary Study, but it was no big deal. I still don't have any classes on Monday. :D

Concert tonight! Unfortunately, recording is not allowed in the venue, so I'm afraid you will not be able to hear our collective genius unless someone surreptitiously brings a camera or something, but I'm pretty excited. My skirt has a flounce! I really like the music we're playing! The pianist for the Liszt piano concerto was teasing us/flirting with us during last practice, but especially with the conductor, which was lolarious. Someone needs to make a movie or something that includes how musicians flirt using their instruments, because they definitely do, and it's hard to describe to non-musicians––that you have fun, too, if you're not too uptight for your own good. Alas, being a classical musician means that there are a lot of people who do take themselves way too seriously, but that means it's all the better when you find someone else who's willing to find the light-hearted side of things. <3333

I had such a wonderful day today (well, yesterday). I don't know, I had a really, really great tutoring session that made me sure that yes, yes, this is what I want to do with my life, and then I had a French exam, which was a little bit of a downer but even so it wasn't bad, and somewhere a switch was flipped on, or off, or something, in me, and I actively want to touch people again for the first time in years and years and years.

I love it here. Education is absolutely what I want to do with my life, and English is what I want to do with my life, and French, man, let's not forget French, which I love from the bottom of my heart, and I'm getting the chance to do it all, and...I don't know. Today was a good day.

Registering for classes tonight! I'm, like, second-to-last because I have twelve credits lined up, but you needed twenty or more in order to register yesterday. Whatevs, I've been checking my schedule and my backup schedules obsessively to make sure they're still available.

On a separate note, thank you, saaski_moql, for your AMAZING AMAZING REC, because in between studying for my French exam and writing a paper, I've been rewarding myself for working every so often by reading some of it. It has all of my favorite things in it! Crazy people, hurt/comfort, true love, awkwardness, I LOVE IT. <333



Also, if all goes well, my final project for my dramatic lit class will not be a comicky comic, because I realized I want to write my final paper on Harlequin, and honestly it would be a little bit redundant if I did both. So instead what I want to do is write––I guess you could call it a really, really drastic treatment of Agamemnon and use those characters and a similar situation in a post-WWII setting. If that is the case, would anybody mind if I put it up here so you guys can act like a little bit of a peanut gallery?

Speaking of dramatic lit, oh my god, I found a piece of feminist literature that I legitimately enjoyed––Trifles, by Susan Glaspell. I didn't actually realize it was feminist literature until someone pointed it out to me, which may have had something to do with it. It is so understated and simple (not simplistic!) that it totally speaks to me. If you've talked to me about writing at all, you know I'm a little bit obsessed with removing the unnecessary, even though I'm not very good at doing that with my own writing, and this play is completely stripped down to its essential parts. I definitely see why people wouldn't like it, but if you think you would, you should try it out!



Random shout out to my high school: man, you chewed me up and spit me out, but the transition to the college workload and exams and stuff has been so smooth that I can only thank you for the academic rigor. Now, some of the rest of it I could have done without, but that wasn't completely your fault. <333

THE BEST PAPER IN THE ENTIRE WORLD

( Biology Rewritten, or, four pages of Adriana being an asshole. )

I HATE WOMEN'S STUDIES I WANT TO GNASH IT APART WITH MY TEEEEEEEEEEEETH

The best paragraph I have ever written ever:

In her article, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” Emily Martin posits that the modern understanding of the human reproductive system is, while biologically based, unfairly informed by ingrained cultural misogynistic biases. Scientific language, she argues, has degraded the woman’s part of the reproductive cycle to a “productive enterprise,” without appreciating it for its subtleties in the same way that a man’s reproductive system is appreciated. However, Martin goes beyond condemning textbooks’ descriptions of human reproduction and begins, if rather indirectly, condemning the reproductive system itself––a purely biological construct which cannot be controlled by any non-evolutionary means, never mind a single social culture. It is her enthusiasm for her topic that ruins the article, turning it from a interesting treatise on the sexism inherent in current scientific language into an overreaching farce.


*facepalm*

P.S. I HATE THIS ASSIGNMENT

I want stories about crazy people (the dangerous kind of crazy like Hallelujah & Co. is preferable, but I'll take any kind of crazy, on a scale of 1 to River Tam). Anybody know any good ones? Maybe one crazy person? Maybe everybody's crazy? Original, fanfic, whatevs whatevs?


Got my concert clothes. I feel thinner than I have been in the past. Not thin, obvs, but like I'm not a complete failure. I LIKE THIS FEELING.

I like my men like I like my coffee.


LOLZLOLZLOLZ GET IT?


*facepalm*


NaNo is going so fast! Maybe now that I've finished one long story, I feel like I can do it again? Whatever, I've written over a thousand words already this morning, but I've got longer to go than I thought I did––I need another 6,000 by the end of the day to be comfortable. I don't know whether I can pull it off, but I can try!

ARGHGRRRRGGHGHGH GIRL


In good news, I figured out what I want my final Dramatic Lit paper to be about. (In brief, how and why Harlequin became as popular as he did and why he still is, particularly focusing on the political and social background of the countries in which he made his grand entrance, from commedia dell'arte and through his modern successors, like the Joker. Oh, man, apparently I am already in academic sentence mode. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.) There's going to be so much research, man, but I'm pretty excited to write it.


--
*Look at that! Look at that! That's right I got a B on my bio test!

Goin' onna bear hunt to a party? We'll see how it goes. I'm going in the company of people I trust and I guess I can leave if I feel the need to, so everything should be okay.

I have no party clothes at ALL. What you see is what you get, man. Jeans + tee-shirt + sweater + absolutely no make-up, that's where it's at.


ETA: It was in walking distance from my dorm, so I danced for an hour and a half and I left when I wanted to with a friend and it was a good experience! Still not anything I'd do on a regular basis, but it was okay.

I GOT A B ON MY SECOND FAKE BIO EXAM

Our professor told us this morning that about 35% of the class got a B or above, and he had only just posted grades before the class started so of course I didn't know mine yet, and I was completely convinced I was going to fail but I DIDN'T and as long as I get a B (or an A lolz) on the final I am OKAY.

I need to go eat some delicious food but mmmmmmmmmmmmm I'm so happy.

Operation: Drink Water Instead of Eat Unnecessarily is a success so far!


ETA:

( Schedule v2.0, because the English course I wanted got all taken up by pesky upperclassmen. )

Which brings my classes to

*Math for Dummies, i.e., Liberal Arts Majors
lolz Euler circuits

*the sane prose half of Principles of Literary Study
A course every prospective English major must take; supposed to be taken as a sophomore, but, credit-wise, I will be a sophomore next semester, and the only prereq is the writing course I placed out of. So. IDK.

*Bad(ass) Orchestra
Apparently you can get private lessons if you take it as a class?

*Apocalypse!!!!!! Seminar
IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD MAN THE END OF THE WORRRRRLD

*that one class where you learn about crazy people and stuff
Gennn Psychhhh

*Creative Writing
3 hours on a Saturday. SWEET.

*Français
light of my life
<333333

18 credits! Not bad, right?

So it looks like this might be my course schedule next semester:

( Laid out in picture and everything. )

IDK MAN IDK

I have a terrible headache. I'm pretty sure it's a combination of too much caffeine over the past couple days––luckily, I'm over the crazy, now––and too much eyestrain; small fonts and a lot of computer makes my head feel like it's going to explode. There's this one book I'm reading for dramatic lit that's called Chirologia, followed in the same volume by Chironomia, and it's really cool, but the way the book is set up is that it's basically photocopies from the original; every page is reproduced in its original form. The book was published in 1644, which is awesome...except it was published in 1644. SO DIFFICULT TO READ.

I am also a little sick of reading so much academic writing. Too many words on top of too many words does not a perfect article make. SRSLY GUYS, try a period now and again! I promise, they won't hurt you if you have more than three periods per page.

So Cally, the main protagonist of my NaNoWriMo novel? She just got almost all of her hair pulled out, to the point where it probably won't grow back.

HOW DO THESE THINGS HAPPEN I ASK YOU?

This is going to make me sound kind of like a jerk. Well, okay, I kind of am a jerk. That's why. Whatevs, whatevs.


So, you guys, my fellow interwebbers, you guys are awesome writers. I mean, you're awesome in general, but writing is what got me on the internet in the first place, and most of you I met because of online fiction––whether original or fanfic––so it's something we've all got in common. I admire everyone here!

The thing is, I wish I could find someone in real life who is both as interested in writing as I am and––this is what makes me a jerk, I realize––as, you know, as good at it.

Now, I am hardly an excellent writer, but I'm proud of my writing. It's decent, in my opinion. I do not know anyone in real life (whose writing I've seen) who is better at writing than I am; I know maybe one person on par with me. That's one reason I want to take a creative writing course next semester, so I can get someone to critique my writing! I very rarely share what I write to real life people, especially my non-essay writing. Every time I do manage to brave it out, people either do not offer useful criticism or they object to my writing style, which is not something I'm going to change to appease someone else.

I don't know. NaNoWriMo aside, I try pretty hard to make my writing as subtle and elegant and interesting as possible. I want to meet someone who does the same thing.


The other side to this is that I have friends who think they are god's gift to writing. If they ask me to read their prose or poetry––especially poetry, oh my god––I don't know what to tell them. With poetry, I tend to say looks good, I guess, poetry just isn't really my thing, which is true enough. And prose is hard to truly screw up, but people from high school I know tend to expect superficial criticism and lots and lots of praise. How do I tell them look, this sounds like a middle-schooler wrote it? How am I supposed to say this wording is terribly awkward, this verb is wrong, you need to do this and this and this and then it will be okay to read?

I wouldn't say it that meanly, obviously. But sometimes I want to, especially with people who I feel like are on the verge of being really good. :(

So, hopefully, if all goes well, next semester I will be taking:

*Restoration and 18th Century Drama
Because I love my dramatic lit professor and this is the next cycle of classes he's teaching.

*Intermediate French (part 2)
Because it's French!

*Creative Writing
So I can get my heart torn out every week as everyone tells me I'm terrible.

*Gen Psych
Because I'mma be a high school teacher?

*Topics in Math for Liberal Arts majors
'Cause that's what I am, and because it's basically senior year math––which I loved––again.

*Apocalypse Now, which is about religion and the end of time and that kind of stuff!
...Because I'm ME, man.

You guys I did not even REALIZE there is SO MUCH MYTHOLOGY GOING ON THIS STORY that snuck in without me noticing!!!!!!!!!

ALL IS WELL ON THE LAPTOP FRONT



Thank god, oh my god.