I'm not alone!

However, I too have exams. I believe i shall take hiatus until further notice, since everybody else seems to have done the same. Be back ASAP. :)

Rushed Tuesday Edition

Oh my. It's been nearly a month since I blogged here o__o

...how did that happen!?

Well, lately I've been busy studying for all my AP tests and the normal omg-I'm-graduating-holy-frickity-frack business that comes along with the end of senior year. Prom is next week! I'm looking forward to it, but I've yet to buy a dress. Heh. I'm like the only one among my friends who hasn't.

Uhm, anyway. I'M SO SORRY for not posting ): This shall be fixed!

See you next week!

First post in a week?

This is looking bad. Oh dear.

Want to know what else is bad?
I was just logging on for a brief moment to say that i needed to study and couldn't post.

Perhaps we should start just blogging when we have something to say? Good plan? Email me?

Uni

I'm starting this blog on Sunday! That's how badly I feel about these past few weeks.
I am 100% home now though. I think.
Anyway, this week's post is going to be about university. This may sound a bit odd coming from a sophomore, but it's something i think about on occasion. This week is definitely one of those times. Recently, I visited Toronto to chill with some cousins (50 or 60 of them), and to see the city and surrounding area(s). One of the best parts of the trip was seeing UofToronto. I'm pretty sure it was perfect. There's a castle for christsake. The whole thing looks like it could be taken out of Harry Potter. Maybe on a smaller scale, but close. Whatever the case, it was pretty cool.
I hate to say it, but i'm excited for Uni. There's this draw to it that i think every teenager feels. The idea of spending all your time learning the things you love with intelligent people who share your interests and living on your own and answering to nothing. Pretty idyllic. What teenager wouldn't want that.

So that's what i've been thinking about.

Also, i've been thinking about some poetry. Specifically, ones by a woman named Sarah Kay.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl6P1ym5WvE

The video is at Bowery Poetry Club, where Sarah got her start. She's quite brilliant, and her poetry makes me think. Especially this one. It says so much about the bonds between siblings.

I think that's it for now. I hope everyone has a wonderful week!

Echo... echo... echo...

Hello? (hello... hello... hello...)

It seems like nobody is here. *looks around* Well, that's strange. I suppose... everyone's out and about having lives.

I've been doing BEDA this month on my personal blog. I considered VEDA, but I thought I'd be too busy to film and edit a video everyday for a month '~' Especially since I've got to work on a number of videos for contests. (Like this one, for Robyn Schneider's Knightley Academy series.)

Today's pretty exciting for me, the bookworm, because two of my favorite series are releasing books today. City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare and Where She Went by Gayle Forman. I just got an email saying that they shipped. At minimum it'll take 3 days to get here, but I don't have such faith in the postal service...

If you've been lurking around Twitterverse, or the youtubes, I'm sure you've taken notice at the sheer amount of Nerdfighters who are candidates for the NextUp program!? I've been really excited for everyone and voting everyday for so many! I'd list all of them... but there really are a lot of candidates, haha.

Here's wishing they do well!

Short post.

Hey guys. I'm sorry I've been so out of it these past couple of months. I meant to post an actual post today, but I ran into some family troubles. Again, sorry! I'll see you guys next week.

Just another Magic Monday

Excuses!
Last week I was in Hawaii on Monday. It was a band trip. While people were wondering where my post was, I was conveniently far away from cyberspace, chillin with some very nice people from my country, and several from Australia.
The thing about Americans is that we love to misrepresent ourselves. Individually, most of us are pretty average. We're not actually fat. Most of us don't eat at MickeyD's for dinner every night. In fact, I would be willing to guess that most Californians (at least the ones in Hawaii with me) eat much more tofu than McDonalds. Just saying.
However, when you get several hundred of us together, there tends to be a certain group dynamic. People are loud, and possibly a little outspoken.
Nonetheless, all of our group members seemed to make friends with people from other places, which was lovely to see. Now we're all desperate to take a trip to Australia.

A new love! (well, several, but this is the big one)
Pole Vaulting.
It rocks. It's been so long since I played any sort of sport that I forgot how nice being fit is. Also, vaulting itself is awesome. It's something I can tangibly improve upon. generally, improvements come more slowly than I like. But with this I can always see my improvements. More than that, I can feel them. I know I've done well when I have, and there's no uncertainty like there is with school work.

Matters of Business:
1. Everybody should vote for Will Grayson Will Grayson for that award thing. Hm. That was supposed to sound a lot better.
2. Maybe we should all communicate a little more outside of the posts...Maybe.

That's it for now, folks. Enjoy your week!

Oh...And next monday I'll be in Canada. I don't think there'll be a post. Sorry!!!!!!!!

Another uneventful Tuesday.

Spring Break has ended, and I am back in school again -sigh-

I haven't been able to fully keep up with the blog lately, and I feel like it'll be a while before I can again. I'm being swept by so many new things! Including housing applications, scholarships, school work.

I feel even more determined to work harder because I just received news that I've been denied FAFSA. My mom didn't take the news very well, but I've been very (strangely) apathetic about it. It's not like there aren't other sources of money to be found. It'll be okay. I hope anyway.

I haven't really got much else to share, except that I bought a new pencil box that I am quite fond of.

It's Alice in Wonderland!

Laaaate post of lateness.

I never thought that the first time I posted late would be when I wasn't even busy, LOL. I'm on Spring Break at the moment, and have been out of the house every single day since it started.

I'll backtrack to Wednesday, the Fine Arts Festival. It went very well! I sang, I danced, people applauded. It was a lot of fun! And my dance group is planning on doing something for Senior Spotlight too.

On Friday, we had Pi(e) day in calculus in honor of 3.14.
Mmm. Pie.

On Monday, I went to see Charlene Kaye in concert. My cousin is her manager, so I went half out of support. But Charlene is awesome, and I love her music regardless. She sang a lot of new things. I only knew Dress and Tie, which she sang last.

Tuesday, I saw Red Riding Hood. I wouldn't suggest it to anyone else. It wasn't very good. It was shot very well, sure, but I like plot > visuals.

Today I went to the rodeo with my cousins. It was exhausting, but exciting! We poked at animals, we ate fried everything, we rode rides. While we were looking at Elsie (the Borden cow) she started power peeing into her stall. It was awkward yet funny at the same time... I can at least say I've seen a large mammal urinate now.

And now I am way too tired to report anymore. Hope you guys are doing well!

Musical Musings

I just bought Nevermind the Furthermore by the Remus Lupins and I'm blown away once again. One of my favorite wrockers has always been Alex Carpenter, but after listening to the same songs of his for a while, I sometimes forget why I like it so much. He is just such a great musician. The lyrics are what get me. They are poetic in the way I want poems to be.

We've been doing poetry based on the Westward Expansion movement in history/english this week and I've been sitting there doodling, waiting for a poem that doesn't rhyme. Don't get me wrong, I love rhyming poems, when they're done well. I don't like when, especially a serious poem, doesn't rhyme right and ends up sounding trite and ridiculous. Poetry doesn't have to rhyme people, don't force it!

Back to the Remus Lupins, I'd listened to a couple of songs on Nevermind the Furthermore and I suddenly realized that there was a lot of rhyming involved. However, unlike my classmates, these songs managed to use rhymes in a natural way. Maybe the music helps things flow better, but I feel like rhyming is a potent tool. Use it well, it is powerful, use it badly you risk massacring your message.

I suppose that's my review of music that turned into a rant against my classmates and their lack of rhyming skillz. Have a good week everyone!

Quotes!

Sorry about last week guys, i've started pole vaulting, and i don't have a large amount of time on my hands.

Anyway, today I thought I would quote some of my favorite lines from books. Original right?

" When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you stopped suffering when they did". Looking for Alaska
"Death is the one thing that one should be absolutely sure of as it's happening." Everything is illuminated
"You shall love thy crooked neighbor with thy crooked heart" The collected works of WH Auden, VI
"Humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story" EiI
" This is fear, I have lost something important and I cannot find it, and I need it" L4A
"She always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway" EiI
"'You are dying', Brod said, because it was the truth, the all-consuming and unacknowledged truth, and she was tired of saying things that weren't the truth." EiI
"With hands raised to the heavens, to the men who aim the spotlight" EiI
"If her soul ever leaks, I want it to land on me" Getting the Girl
"With writing, we have second chances" EiI

Sorry for all the Safran Foer, that's just sort of how it turned out. There were more, but a lot of them were entire pages. For example, the entire book "the little prince" Should be put in this blog. The same is true for many other things. Night everybody!

Panicked Musings

I hate missing what I'm not paying attention to.

I mean in class that's kinda-sorta annoying, especially if the teacher calls on you or its on the test next week, but that's not what I'm talking about. I mean the big stuff, the kind of stuff that once you see it you start kicking yourself for not noticing it in the first place. It's like one of those mind illusions, you first see all the splotches, but as soon as it kicks into place that it's a familiar shape you can't stop seeing it and wonder how the heck you could have missed something so obvious:

I can't see the indiscriminate splotches anymore, all it is is a cow, even when I look for other, non-specific and non-defined shapes.

The same thing happened with my friend. She pushed me away this past week in a hurtful and abrupt way. As implied by the word abrupt, I didn't expect it. Then I do what I always do which is to start to analyze things to death. I'm great with that with life's problems, yet literary analysis just doesn't seem like my forte, that's a conversation for another day. So I started thinking, stressing and analyzing, going over our friendship, trying to see what I missed. It vaguely came to me over the course of two days. I stopped seeing the splotches and started to see the cow, or more accurately, the elephant in the room. Now I've got an elephant, and I need to figure out how to guide an elephant to safety. Did I mention I'm the mouse in this equation?

I know this is sort of vague, but I want to respect her privacy. 


Also, sorry about missing last week. I don't even know what happened.


-Emily

Tuesday Quick Post!

My dad just asked me if I wanted to eat, and I'm too nervous and anxious and terrified to stomach anything so I said no. Tonight's dress rehearsals for the Fine Arts Festival and I am totally not ready ;_; and the show is TOMORROW.

Anyway, I'm just leaving you with a spiffy video I just encountered. (Why yes, I do love stopmotion <3.)

Age of Information

The other day for dinner, we had some shrimp fried rice. I went to grab some orange juice, but when I turned around my mom slapped the drink out of my hands.

HER: No! That's bad!
ME: !?!?!?!
HER: Orange juice and shrimp is BAD! It makes poison!
ME: ...Mommy, where is the science in that?
HER: I read about it! Someone died from orange juice and shrimp!
ME: But how?
HER: The orange juice and shrimp have a chemical reaction and --
ME: Your stomach has chemical reactions all the time and you don't die from them
HER: -- and made a poison and KILLED PEOPLE.

Following this, I promptly googled "orange juice and shrimp" to see what would came up.

First I found a forum that told this story about a woman who ate a Vitamin C tablet before eating some shrimp. Somehow the Vitamin C reacted with chemicals on the shrimp to create the poison As which caused her to bleed out of her eyes.

I happened upon an article next, which said that the eye-bleedy woman story was a HOAX and COMPLETELY made up. Not only that, but it was an email that began circulating way back in 2001! I had been suspicious that this was some sort of strange house wife gossip, and when I asked my mom if she read this in an email she refused to admit it... only confirming my thoughts.

It's times like these I really see the disparity between generations. My mom, still relying on email for communication, immediately believed the forwarded message from a friend. My initial reaction was a raised eyebrow and a google search.

I wonder if that makes me more resourceful or more cynical than she is.

In the end, I still didn't get my orange juice D:

Congrats to Natalie Portman and Colin Firth.

I've learned a lot this past week.
I learned that a community can do great things in short amounts of time.
On Wednesday, we held a candlelight vigil for the two boys who died. It was one of the most beautiful things i've ever seen. Over a thousand people came to celebrate their lives.
One of the boys' family needed help paying for a funeral and burial expenses. People at school raised over 11,000.
It's nice to know that even in the face of unspeakable tragedy, everyone pulls together like that. There was so much love all over.
Another thing was the power of empathy.
I didn't know the boys too well, and neither did a lot of people.
Even so, looking at their memorials in the quad was heartbreaking.
sitting next to their prom dates in class was awful.
At the same time, it was empathy for others that led to the vigil and the funeral and the overwhelming sense of community this past week. For that I am grateful.

Rachel, I'm very sorry about what is happening in your school. I know this must be a very difficult time in your community and I wish you all the best in this time.

Ellen, I can totally relate to your library/librarian story! If you have a study, the library at our school is not hard to use, however if you need to use it before or afterschool it's a nightmare. Our head librarian seems to hate sentient life. Our computers don't log you in for twenty plus minutes, so if you need to print a paper before class expect to be late by about twenty minutes before the computer can complete the complicated tasks of logging on, connecting to the internet, logging into my email and opening the document, which for some reason, the computer feels it must install Microsoft word Every. Single. Time! I really hope my printer doesn't break because with my first period teacher if you walk into class five minutes late, your paper is late. Also if you aren't in class you have to email the paper by 8:10 am. This just makes me uneasy like I understand the reasoning here, but if I'm really violently puking or deal with a family emergency I'm not going to stop and suddenly go, "Let me email Franklin my paper now!" I'm wondering what if I am in the emergency room or something like that and can't email the paper until like the next day, is he going to bring down his overlording grade power and stamp late on the paper any way? Really I just hope I don't run into that situation.

This week is a fairly good week for me because I am off on February break. This brings back a lot of nostalgia because last year's February break was spent going through all the old vlogbrothers videos. However this vacation I am doing something significantly less fun, which is cleaning my room. It's been a disaster since practically last summer and I'm trying to finally get it in working order. I'm tantilizingly close and am trying to finish before I sleep even if that means being up til four in the morning. My theory is that it is not a proper vacation if I don't wack out my sleep schedule!

Other awesome thing I'm doing this weekend is I'm working at the Real Food Summit in Boston:

My friend Muller is in that video and I only found that just now when I was Googling for a link to show you guys (like this one) but basically 300-500 people will be there and I'm going to do some workshops and possible a skit in front of all those people and it's going to be awesome!
Anyhoo, I hope everyone's week gets even better tomorrow, because I think we can always use a little more awesome.
-Emily

Death And Dying

I think today's post is going to be short. Just a warning.

Two boys at school died Saturday. They drowned.
it's so awful. They were two of the nicest people in the school.
They were best friends. I never saw one without the other.
Today at school was so awful. The entire place was just in shock.

Sorry I didn't post yesterday. I wasn't feeling like being on the computer much.

Playlist Tuesday

I love how my top25 most played on iTunes is actually a really accurate representation of what music I have on my iPod: Glee, musicals, youtube/internet artists, JPop... and Maggie Stiefvater.

Though I'm not sure why the first two songs have so many more listens than the others LOL. Almost twice as much as the third song.

I don't really know what this says about me as a person, though. Uh... that I listen to anything with great lyrics and a catchy beat?

I see you drivin' round town with the guy I love and I'm like... forget you! (Oo--oo-ooh!)

SHUFFLE!

Don't unplug me or or or just shut me out, please just love me with with your steel heart!

And that was a "I don't know what to blog about Tuesday" with Sandy! So. Uhm. Uh. WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DO YOU GUYS LIKE? Does it look like my playlist XP?

See you guys next week!

*Ding Ding!* Debate Time!

Update: My grandmother is doing better but she's still in the hospital while they try and find a medicine that will help with her dizziness, however we hope to have her home soon.

So topic of the day: Voting

In class right now we're studying the Civil Rights movement, today's planned discussion revolved around some of the ways voting was limited like the poll tax and literacy tests in order to vote. The talk started to morph into what if we had some sort of test like that for today's elections. One very vocal kid in our class was saying that we have to get rid of arbitrary votes and there should be some sort of test to see if you understand what is going on in the election. We had a fairly heated debate for the rest of class which boiled down to this: If you are an idiot you shouldn't be able to vote. My side of this is that everyone should be allowed to vote, regardless of your intelligence or knowledge of the issues.

I've been tossing these questions and debates around in my head all day, I knew that straight from the beginning something made me distinctly uncomfortable about the argument. I know that nothing like this was likely to happen and that our voting system isn't going to change but there was still something uncomfortable about the whole thing. What I realized is that I was seeing the beginnings of discrimination in my classroom. We've been talking about racism all week in class and how we're all trying not to have this preconceived ideas about people yet still do. We've talked about how we're always working to get rid of these biases. However today I saw a classroom full of elitists who thought that they knew better and that this was how things should be run. I saw how racism and prejudice could get started.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with the concept of group think. If you're not, it's basically how ideas spread through a group. There are a few different ways it works like during the witch trials when people would really and truly believe that someone was a witch because so-and-so had seen them do such-and-such soon everyone is convinced of the validity of the statement. It made me squirm to be in class today because in some ways that is what was going on. It seems perfectly sensible that we shouldn't have arbitrary votes if we want a valid election, however when you think about it, what counts as arbitrary? How do you test for that? By the end of class our teacher was saying to everyone, "You're an idiot, you can't vote!" I don't think it is possible for anyone to define what qualifies you to vote, beyond your age. Intelligence, race, religion, hair color and shoe size should not limit the democratic process; everyone should be able to vote.

I truly hope that history is not doomed to repeat itself and that we are making more progress in eliminating prejudice rather than creating it.

DFTBA

*somersaults in*

Emily, I wish you and your family luck. I am so sorry to hear about that.


I suppose my thoughts don't matter post Valentines Day, but here I go. I agree with Ellen and Rachel. A lot of my friends were bashing V-day, but I think it's a pretty harmless day. It's marketing/media that makes it seem like a couples only event. When really, it's just a day to spread more love, love, love.

Today was the Economics Fair! Where my partner and I debuted our thingrings. They sold out in the first ten minutes of the fair, which was TOTALLY AWESOME! There were a couple of people who came by after it sold out frowning that they missed out. The only downside is that we could've charged so much more for them if we'd known they'd be so popular! Even so, we ended up with a $71 profit, so I guess that wasn't too bad :D !

Now I have the Fine Arts Festival to look forward to! Auditions were rescheduled, so I'm having them tomorrow... which means I should really be preparing now! My posts will probably become shorter and shorter as the day comes nearer and nearer...

Hope you guys have an awesome week!