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Saturday, May 26, 2001
anna graduates today. i went to hallmark to pick up a card for her and it hit me that we're all finally leaving high school. now, anna is one of my best friends and i've known her since first grade, so it's funny thinking back on all the things we've done and the times when graduating high school seemed so incomprehensibly far away. and now she's graduating and next week julie and i are, and then things will be different. very different.
i always thought that graduating high school and going to college would be scary, that i'd be lost and helpless. but it seems like i'm growing up at just the right time. i'm ready to leave. i won't be helpless because i'm not afraid to work, and i won't be lost because i have things that i love. i have places to go and things to do. and although i had fun in high school, it's time to go. the smell of the basement right now is the smell of cool cement in the summer, like back when julie and i played barbies down here, or my little ponies. it's smelled different since we finished the rooms down here, but now for some reason it smells like it used to. it's driving me crazy because it is such a contrast to the fact that i'm attending anna's graduation today. childhood and adulthood juxstaposed. being so sensitive to smell can be crazy sometimes. Friday, May 25, 2001
so, senior banquet was last night. i actually had fun. julie and i managed to get there over an hour early, so we drove around for a while and got soda at Cumby's and giggled a lot for no particular reason. after killing lots of time, we showed up at the banquet, and sat with jackie, patti, christina, and catharine. the music at the beginning of the evening was good, and the food was good. i signed a lot of yearbooks, and got a lot of signatures. some people wrote some really nice notes, backing up my theory that if you have something nice to say, you should say it, because it makes people feel warm and fuzzy.
after dinner when the dancing started, the music switched to rap crap. i actually spent seven minutes on the dance floor attempting to dance to the stuff, but then i gave up and sat down and chatted with julie for a while. towards the end of the evening they played some good songs, and i jumped up and danced. and then it was over. a better evening than i expected. this morning i went in to school again, because i had a chemistry project to finish up and pass in. at 8:30 we had graduation rehearsal, which was amusing. i have never seen anyone as obsessed as the director of guidance trying to get us all to stand up and sit down at the same time. it was kinda fun watching him spaz when we screwed up. anyway, while we were at graduation practice we heard about the 'prank', aka vandalism. some wonderful, wonderful members of our class apparently dug a large hole in the football field last night. i wish i could say it was funny, but it's just stupid. i mean, why? what's the point? we also got the long and involved lecture about prom safety. apparently my class made a mess of the junior prom last year (fortunately i wasn't there) and for that reason good ol' Peabs is going to be there with a Breathalyzer. oh goody. honestly i think it's a good idea. i'd rather not have people drinking themselves sick at my prom. ugh. the star-spangled rehearsal went well. prima donna left me alone, so it's all good. i just have to practice my phrasing some. which should be easier with the grandparents not here. oh yes, did i mention? i came home from banquet last night and the only one home was my sister. the grandparents had returned to their respective abodes. so i am appreciating the fact that i can now cook and do laundry for myself and use the computer without people hovering over me. bliss. after the star-spangled rehearsal i went to work on my chem project in the library. when i passed mr. cushing's room i was astounded. there was yellow paper on the walls, yellow decorations everywhere, yellow napkins and party hats. mr. cushing hates the color yellow, and the people in my history class last year threatened to yellow-ize his classroom for senior prank. i am so glad they followed through with that. it's nice that some pranks are still tasteful. i've heard tell of another prank as well, one that i missed. apparently some seniors put a large inflatable penis outside the cafeteria, or something like that. my sister claims that this was during 4th period, but we were in graduation practice 4th period, so i'm not sure what to make of that. after school i went to the shop for about an hour and did some filing. yawn. i hope they put me back in the shop soon. and, tonight is the junior prom. i'm just hoping that everyone comes home safe from that. for some reason proms make me nervous like that. ah well. Thursday, May 24, 2001
it's raining, but now it's a happy rain, the kind i like to dance in. not like last night, when the drops hit me like a slap across the face. it's been raining steadily all day. sometimes the sun peeks through, but the rain ignores it and just keeps falling. even so, i haven't seen any rainbows yet.
the senior banquet is tonight, and it looks like more of my friends will be there than at the prom. which is not good, because i'm not really a prom type of person, and the only thing that would make it fun would be having a lot of my friends there. ah well. tonight, anyway, should be fun. last night, as i mentioned, was the band concert. we put in a great performance. right before the chorus started performing , mr. h out of nowhere told me to turn pages for the accompanist. i wasn't particularly good at it, but i wasn't too bad either, and mrs. niles warned me about the weird page turn where there's a D.S. al Coda so you have to flip back a page and then skip ahead two. eep. but i did it right, and the whole page-turning thing was a neat experience. winter ensemble went well too. we flew through birdland without any trouble, and though we screwed up some parts of chameleon, paul held us together till the end, anyway, so we probably sounded fine (as long as no one was grimacing too much). after that we watched the colorguard routines, which were really good. then some incidents, then to friendly's briefly, then me driving around alone having a nervous breakdown of some variety, which i'm sure you've heard enough about already. as you can probably tell, it was all resolved today anyway, so i feel a bit better, if not completely sure of myself. ah well. i'm getting sick of hanging around the school when i don't need to be there. when i'm doing something i'm fine, but when there's nothing to do i get restless. i need to be busy, always. fortunately that problem should be solved fairly soon since there's a big pile of band music that was just collected that i need to take care of. and starting monday i'll only be in school in the mornings, so it's all good. tomorrow there's graduation rehearsal, then star spangled banner practice. the seniors in the chorus (plus other chorus members as needed to cover parts) always sing the national anthem at graduation. i asked mr. h if i could do it too, since i do sing even though chorus wouldn't fit into my schedule. he agreed, but i'm somewhat concerned that i might be getting some crap from the prima donna of the chorus about it. she's into having her own exclusive clique do everything. furthermore, everyone else singing knows the piece, and i don't (i know the melody obviously, but i've never sung it before). so i'm scared that if i screw up i'll get killed. gah. and these people have never heard me sing before, so they'll get their first impressions from how i do tomorrow. eep. yipes. it didn't even sound that bad until i put it that way. congratulations, amanda. you've just freaked yourself out. *applause* till tomorrow.
before i rant, a few notes: i commented out my blogvoices code until their problems are taken care of, as recommended. also, the quotes from last weekend have been added to the quotes page for your amusement. and i posted a new poem, finally: "Oversensitized". read it.
now, in other news... *sigh* if you have no expectations, you're never disappointed. perhaps that's why i'm generally a pessimist. i lack the strength to handle disappointment. or something. now, i won't go so far as to say that my life is a dark and bitter pit of disappointment, but sometimes it's enough to make me wish i didn't hope for anything, so that things wouldn't hurt so much when i was let down. the problem, i think, is that it doesn't take much to ruin my expectations. little things can do it. everything ruined by one small incident. perhaps it's because i'm an idealist. i don't know. either way, the smallest problems can make me feel as though the wind's been knocked out of me. sick to my stomach, can't breathe, and unable to focus on anything else. it's tiring, it's frustrating, and it's unrealistic. not to mention painful, to myself and others. i often wonder why people put up with me. and that very thought indicates that i'm descending into self-loathing again, something i thought i'd gotten past. maybe not. today as i walked through the mud in my concert band dress and sandals, the rain mixed with my tears and i wondered whether i needed help. even now that i have some perspective on the situation and i realize that i'm overreacting, i still feel sick. do other people feel like this? if i were someone else would this have bothered me? i don't have any answers, but for once i think i could use some. am i 'normal'? there are enough mental health problems in the family that i could have inherited. or maybe i'm just using that as an excuse for not facing my problems. a cop-out. to feel is both a blessing and a curse. a blessing and a curse, a blessing and a curse, a blessing and a curse... Hello, darkness, my old friend. Wednesday, May 23, 2001
band concert tonight. my last one with this band. already.
i'm technically out of school, though i'm still showing up. mr. h needed help setting up for the concert today, so i helped him with that, and got some library stuff filed. i'll probably keep showing up to school in the mornings until all the music is filed. in the afternoons i'll be at the shop. in a way, this is what i wish school could have been like. i don't mind showing up when all i'm doing is band work. i suppose if i hadn't taken such a heavy courseload most of the year would have been like that. at any rate, watching the chorus rehearse today, i realized that although there are a lot of things that i'm in a hurry to leave behind, there are some things i don't want to lose just yet. perhaps NOW is the best time of all, because i still have all the things i love, my friends and activities and the niche i've found for myself here, yet i can deal with all the crap because i know that soon i won't have to put up with it anymore. yesterday was academic awards night, and i got an award in english. i knew i was getting an award, but i didn't know which one it was (for some reason they like it to be a surprise). i didn't think it was going to be english since i didn't get along all that well with my teacher this year. but apparently she does think pretty highly of me, because she nominated me for the award, and sure enough i got it. english is a tricky award to get, because they can only give out five, and every student in the school takes english. so, i was pretty thrilled. as mr. casabian stood there and read off ms. burton's summary of what i'd done in english, i started to realize just how much i'd accomplished even though it seems like most of high school was spent in the band room. so, things are winding down for this year, and i'm trying to savor what's left for me. i'm hanging on to any moment that i have left, so that someday i won't think i hurried it all away. there will be enough summer without me rushing it to arrive, and i'll get to colgate soon enough without racing blindly through these days. Here's to goodbye Tuesday, May 22, 2001
okay. so. new hampshire.
travelled up on friday night. kate and i have weird conversations when we're tired. one of them involved smog as a symbol for hate. another compared the subconscious to a prairie dog: usually stays buried, but every now and then pops up and looks around. yeah. got there around midnight. 'there' is bridgewater, nh, population 300. when we got into bristol (the nearest town of decent size, as far as i could tell) it reminded me eerily of downtown lee, ma. and when we got to 'the barn' (their house used to be one) the smell of the place reminded me of my grandparents' house in becket, ma. odd, that. they showed me around the house, which was full of wood of different shades-- a beautiful place, though the bathroom had been taken over by spiders. i got to stay in a little room with bunk beds and a little window that you could look out from the top bunk. mrs. roza told me that that window had a nice view of the stream. this was only hours after i had complained to April-Lyn that we don't have streams around here. i was quite thrilled. probably overly so. :-p anyway, we had some pizza and were in bed by one, i think. the next morning i woke up and looked out the window. i saw a sort of greenish blur. so i grabbed my glasses and looked again, and there was the stream, looking quite picturesque. i got up and dressed and such and found that kate's parents had left to do the yardsales. kate was asleep, so i entertained myself with a book for a few hours. at 11 i got bored and decided to go for a bit of a hike, figuring kate would be awake when i returned. the woods were reasonably thick on either side of the stream, and there were enough rocks in the stream that it seemed more sensible to just walk up the stream itself instead of trying to make a path through the underbrush. realistically i could have taken the dirt road, since it pretty much follows the stream up the hill, but of course that would have been too obvious. there were a lot of bugs, which didn't bother me too much except for the spiderwebs i kept walking through. i hate the sensation that you get when you walk through a spiderweb. after a while i started waving my hands in the air in front of me to try to get rid of any potential spiderwebs. i doubt that it helped all that much, and i'm sure i looked spectacularly silly pawing the air for no apparent reason like a deranged cat. but anyway, i followed the stream a good ways up the hill, and went back down to the house at noon. my feet weren't even wet. kate was still asleep, so i harassed her until she got up, and since her parents were off with the car we walked down the street to a small restaurant that allegedly serves breakfast. it wasn't then, at any rate, though that could have been because it was after noon. so we went to the convenience store next door and got bagels and went to the bridgewater elementary school's playground to eat them. it was a pathetic playground; all made of staticky plastic and painted metal; nothing like the wood-and-silver playgrounds i remember from elementary school. but it had swings. and the swings made it worth it. after we played and ate, we walked back to the house. the afternoon we went to meredith to see shrek, which was actually pretty good. i was amused by the pink female dragon (though i would have liked her better if she didn't have big overdone lips). only problem with the movie was the ill-mannered children running up and down the aisles. kate and i both have a very low tolerance for children, and whenever they renewed their antics we groaned in unison. (by the end of the weekend we were doing everything in unison. too much time together, apparently.) then to ben and jerry's, where we talked to chipmunks while eating our ice cream, and then a quick stop at Bobby's Girl diner, which is the neatest place. so very fifties, it's cool. on the way home we picked up videos: the breakfast club, little women, pi, and reservoir dogs. eclectic tastes, no? bed after one in the morning. when we woke up on sunday we got ahold of the car to go to Gilly's for breakfast, then went back and hung around on the beach of the lake. there i got asymmetrically sunburned due to the fact that my braid saved one shoulder from the sun. when we could get the car again, we went to Bobby's Girl for lunch, then went on a fruitless search for a non-crappy playground. when this failed, we went to bridgewater elementary and used that playground again. we brought the radio out of the car and listened to fastball while swinging on the swings. i wish those moments could have lasted forever, because i was so carelessly happy. as i swung on the swing and closed my eyes so i could see the sun's red behind my eyelids and sang raucously along with "the way", i wondered what on earth college students would think of someone who could get drunk off of sunlight and music and rootbeer floats. who needs alcohol when you can fly? after that kate drove around the lake for lack of anything better to do, and we played loud techno music and stuff. upon returning to the house we were forced to hang around with Angela, the girl next door, a teenybopper wiccan kate-wannabe. i hope she grows out of it. a little while later we went to hike some trails in some audobon-society preserve type thing. then back to the house for dinner, then packing up the car, then on the road again. kate drove the first part of the trip, but once we were back in mass. her father drove. on the way back we were bored to the point that we started making shadow puppets and talking about the subconscious and perceptions of reality again. and then we were back home, and all four grandparents were still there, and i had homework to do and stuff. back to reality. without that brief vacation from this house i'm sure i would have gone insane. and not in that good way either. :-p Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold Monday, May 21, 2001
yeah, i'm back from new hampshire. there are so many things i want to say right now, all kinds of things that i want to share, but i'm just too tired. tomorrow. tomorrow i'll give you-all a big long story about angry chipmunks and the prairie-dogging behavior of the subconscious and the uber-plural. until then, though, you'll just have to wonder what the hell i'm talking about.
the physics project is done. sleep now.  |