Late night ramblings...

This is just a quick one before I go to bed.

I spent all evening reading a book, and it was wonderful. But now I have to find some way to sleep in and still make it to school on time... hmm... Possibly Starbucks?! (ooh! Sounds like the best idea I've ever had!!)

I bought my halloween costume today, which I really only bought because we can wear costumes at school. I'm a Greek Goddess this year. Yay. (Egotistical? Nahhh...)

I haven't knit anything in like two weeks. This is why I started so early, so I could go through phases of it and not feel totally pressured come December...

Love yall! I'm going to bed now!!

OOOH... My friend Alycia thought of the best birthday party theme: a Masquerade. HOW EFFING GREAT IS THAT!?!? I think I'll do it!!

Pre-Post-Show Let Down

If that makes any sense...

It's over... and I cried.

A tradition we have at my school is to give the seniors in the production a farewell present (and mine were awesome:

The reason they gave us inner tubes is because there's one scene where we all run around the stage being fish, and the ducklings are all at the front of the stage "swimming" with inner tubes around their waist. On the sheet of paper, the funniest comment was from a guy named Sam. It said "Happy Birthday!" And at that, I just burst out laughing... it's SO like him to write something like that.

My flower haul...

So... pre-post-show let down. It hasn't quite hit me yet that I don't have rehearsals to go to every night, although it will (starting tomorrow, I'm sure). I'll have free time!! And guess what I'll do with it! Nothing of course! Although tomorrow I think I might go halloween-costume shopping with two of my friends. (DURING MY FREE TIME!)

I'm also thrilled about not having to preserve my voice. HOORAY! I CAN DRINK COFFEE AGAIN!!!

Well, I'm out, for now. I have homework to catch up on...

Opening Night

OPENING NIGHT

AHHHHHHHH!!!

(...Finally.)

A SCARF... NO WAY.

Today, this blog is brought to you by the letter H.

Words that start with H are:

Habit
Hell (Week)
Halloween
Halibot
Hrothgar
& Heffalump

Today, this blog is mostly out of habit. I have nothing real to say other than this:

I FINALLY GOT TO WEAR A SCARF BECAUSE IT'S FREEZING OUTSIDE!

AND IT'LL STAY COLD, TOO!!

WAHOO!!!!!!

Waiting...

Today was very long.

This week is going to be very long. I just know it. I'm not sure that people who don't perform know what kind of effort goes into putting together a production. In fact, I'm sure of that fact. All of the auditions and rehearsals and memorization take a lot of time.

Yall have to understand that when I'm complaining, I'm not miserable. In fact, I'm thrilled. I swear that I live for the few days a year that I perform, but complaining about it is probably the easiest way to make the world understand how tough it is.

But I digress (Barb, I channel thee.)

Today was very long. And a lot of smiling when I really didn't want to. Today is one of those days that I just don't want to feel any emotion, so I don't actually show any emotion. Our school had our open house today, and I gave a tour to a prospective family, who kept on saying "Wow, you seem to be very active at your school!" And I realized then that yes: I am very active at my school. I perform, I sing in the choir at mass every week, I'm an officer in two clubs, I'm the editor of the literary magazine, I'm active in a lot of after-school schpiels, and I love it. I love having things to do, and while it's not National Honor Society (which is totally overrated, I think) what I do, I do well.

So after I guided my prospective members around the campus (which somehow took an hour...)I hauled ass to rehearsal (not really... I drove the speed limit to rehearsal) where I promptly knit a foot of a scarf and then was more or less onstage for the other three and a half hours I was at rehearsal.

After this scene called The Blizzard, I went backstage and I laid down on the floor and was almost on the verge of falling asleep. And then I had to be back onstage for the finale.

If yall want to hear some stuff from Honk!, go to this site: http://www.stilesanddrewe.co.uk/honk/honk_the_music.htm

(I can't stop thinking about poultry!!)

SO EXCITED!!!

AHHHH I'M SO EXCITED!!

I just won a SIGNED COPY of one of my favorite author's books! The author is Gena Showalter, who is just HILARIOUS and an absolute page-turner. The book I won is part of the series of hers I haven't read yet, so I'm very happy to start it!

(AHHHHHHH!!!)

(Insert happy-dance here)

Breaking point... almost

Okay, I am quickly approaching breaking point.

I sneezed and musical notes came out.

In this picture all the highlighted bits are when I have rehearsal. You can see that, a while back, I had like... a day off.

That was so long ago, I can barely remember it. Sigh... those were the good ole' days...

I am so tired...

Books, books, books...

Okay, so I just realized something. Not exactly something profound, but it'll keep popping up at random moments until I get it down.

At random moments I will remember scenes from books that I've only read once. And don't care about at all. And then I have to go dig the book up again and reread it just to figure out what made me remember it in the first place. When I didn't even really like it all that much in the first place.

You'd think I would remember the books I loved. Like my favorite part in Return of the King when Sam, at the very end of the story after farewelling his best friend Frodo and Gandalf, the wizard whose fireworks he'd always loved, just pauses and says "Well, I'm back." I think that those words might just be the most profound I've ever read. He's just been to hell and back and lived a legend... but once everything calms down and returns to "normal", life goes on.

Or in one of my favorite books, The Key (by Marianne Curley) when the character offhandedly says after a meteor shower caused by two sibling immortals fighting "What did they do... play universe ping-pong?"

Or even in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone when Dumbledore looks into the Mirror of Erised and says that he can see himself holding a pair of hand-knit socks.

Those are the moments that I should remember at random moments during the day, that when they pop into my head make me smile or something.

Instead I get this:

I can see in my head the house (and it's driveway) where the character Darci (in Jude Devereaux's book Forever) figures out the key part of whatever mystery they're trying to solve. This house tends to pop into my head frequently.

I'll remember the character Circenn Brodie (in Karen Marie Moning's Highlander's Touch... Which isn't even my favorite of the series in any way, shape or form... it's kinda dull, actually) pacing in his secret study in his castle and thinking about his father.

I remember the pompous jerk of a character in one of the Jo Beverly books (can't remember which) who just bothers me because he won't see sense. At all. (grr.)

Or in The Giver when Jonas says to his teacher "I'm starving!" and his teacher retorts "No you are not. You are just hungry. You will never be starving." I mean, you'd think I'd remember something cool from that book, like when he first sees red, or when he gets his first memory (or however that works. I read it in eighth grade... I can't remember.)

They're good books and all, but usually they're those "one-timers" which you read and then give (back) to Half-Price books.

(I should reorganize my little book shelf...)

Okay, mind. If you've got any sense at all, please start thinking of good books.

Christmas Scarf 3/7

Thanks to Legolas again for modeling:

Voila! Feathery and fabulous! This is scarf 3/7. I cast on the next one during rehearsal and have about 3 inches so far. Most of this lovely blue scarf came from rehearsals (toldja so) and physics and philosophy classes. Hooplah!

I am right on my way to actually making the christmas deadline this year!

(perhaps one scarf will be a hat....)

Today was a good day. Classes were pointless and we went on a Senior Service Outing in the morning while the sophomores and juniors took the PSAT (hahaha). I went to this place that coordinates "help the homeless" type stuff and organized an office of theirs. Then we went to the County Line, got free lunch, AND we got to wear jeans. Therefore, today was a good day.

Not much else to say asides from that.

9 days until the musical!!!

Temperature...

It's really hot in my room right now.

But not outside!

(!!!!!)

(in honor of this strange contradiction, I have put on Temperature by Sean Paul)

Know what that means.... It's almost scarf time!

(About bloody time. It's nearly my birthday. Which means it's nearly time for fall to start and me to wear scarves...)

11 days until the musical.......

Reporting in...

I haven't much to report... other than the fact that I'm exhausted.

So, just out of curiosity... if you've hired a babysitter to put your kid to bed and head out to dinner at about 7ish... How on earth does it take until midnight to get back to your house? Is there something (other than, say, a movie) that parents go out and do just to prolong their time away and rack up the charges for the babysitter? Perhaps go clubbing? (haha, I just can't see it...)

Not that I'm (really) complaining... I just made like $20 more than I expected to, but seriously. 5 hours for dinner?

I don't get it.

I'm going to crash... right... now.

Re BEING HOME BEFORE 6:30!!!

Get this:

I. AM HOME. BEFORE 6:30.

Because, guess what.

I DON'T HAVE REHARSAL TODAY!!!

I CAN WATCH TV!

I CAN READ A BOOK!

I CAN WRITE THAT PAPER I WAS SUPPOSED TO TURN IN TODAY!

I CAN GO SEE MY FATHER FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TWO WEEKS!

I CAN PRACTICE PIANO!

I CAN KNIT!

I CAN PRACTICE MY LINES! (Haha. Just kidding)

I CAN TAKE A NAP!

I CAN BAKE A CAKE!

I CAN TAKE OVER THE WORLD!

I CAN HOST AN IMPROMPTU PARTY!

I CAN DO MY GOVERNMENT HOMEWORK BEFORE 11:45PM!

I CAN LEARN TO CROCHET!

I CAN PICK UP EMBROIDERY!

I CAN SALSA DANCE!

I CAN...

Perhaps I'll just watch tv...

On sexy cars, scarves and... something else

(I just needed another word to start with 's')



My friends and I were walking to our cars today after rehearsal and we saw this black car that was just the blackest car I've ever seen. A very sleek (and sexy, as Alycia said) car, to tell the truth. So, true to form, we had to take a picture in front of the sexy black car.




So, just to show yall how much time I have to knit during school and rehearsal, here is a picture of my scarf which I cast on this morning.

I'm sure that if my mother were reading this, she would say, "And yet you don't have time to do your homework or apply to college." Au contraire, madre. First of all, I can't do homework during class because it's extremely obvious to the teacher, but knitting is perfectly fine. Second of all, I love to knit and I dislike homework. And lastly, I TOTALLY ALMOST FINISHED MY APPLICATION TO TLU TODAY.

(TRIUMPH!!!!)

16 days until opening night.

VICTORY...

Victory 1/3: I rocked at being part of the Honk! chorus today in rehearsal, since that's all I am in Act I.

Victory 2/3: I totally did (all of) my homework and turned it in (on time) today.

Victory 3/3: I finished christmas scarf 2/1000 today!!! (for once, I was grateful for the super-long rehearsal)

Because my brother would not model, the duty fell to Legolas.

Thank you, Legolas, for being such a lovely model.

My next scarf endeavor:

The picture isn't fabulous but you get the idea. Feathery and teal.

Just another step

I took a college tour today of TLU. Overall, it looks like a great university which I would be able to slip into and make a great college experience for myself.

Want to know what doesn't please me?

The fact that I could slip in anywhere. Even my mom told me today, "Stef, I can see you going anywhere. To UT or Baylor or even here. Wherever you decide, you'll succeed." Isn't something about a campus supposed to just call out to me? Isn't something supposed to just say "Stefanie. You are home now." That didn't happen today, but I don't know if my College-Fit-Into-Ness Sensors were functioning properly today.

I'm one of those people who is very shy and uncomfortable until I experience something. I will sink into the shadows and do everything possible not to draw attention to myself. But after I experience that first shock of being part of something new, only then will I start to open up and be myself. I think that's why I didn't have a very good day today. And it was exhausting. I nearly fell asleep on the way home today.

College = daunting.

(18 days until opening night)

Random thoughts

So I was thinking... I have a lot of things to say, but I can never flesh them out to make it something I could blog about. So here is a list of stuff that's on my mind or I just think about.

1) I made some knitting needles yesterday and most of them turned out great. Except that I need to somehow make them smoother with maybe a better grade of sandpaper or something.

2) There are a lot of loopholes in our government.

3) I started a new scarf on friday (well... thursday night. But I only knit a few rows that night) and it's already up to my waist. It alternates between a creme and a green color and it takes me half an hour to knit one block. If I've done 4 and a half blocks so far, that's taken me two hours and fifteen minutes. If I spend my car trip tomorrow knitting, I can finish it by tomorrow night. Will I? No, of course not.

4) I spend so much time in rehearsal/thinking about the musical/practicing outside of rehearsal that I pretty much have Honk! coming out the wazoo. You'd think I would get a break every once and a while. Countdown to opening night: 19 days.

5) Because of the musical I have to limit my caffeine intake because caffeine affects your voice like it does the rest of your body: a quick jolt of happy goodness and then a crash. That's bad. B... b... but... I l...love coffee!

6) I watched Pan's Labyrinth last night on HBOD. It was really good but very creepy. At the same time, the twisted, writer-y part of me is going "TAKE NOTES, THIS IS GENIOUS." I'm one of those people who can write all I want about twisted and awfully creepy things, but when I see it on the big screen, I don't enjoy it as much. Most of the time however, I don't write about that kind of stuff. I just love getting visible reactions out of audience. Possibly the most fulfilling feeling I've ever gotten is written a story that made my friend cry.

7) I'm going on a college visit tomorrow, and I'm kinda scared.

8) It's a poultry tale of folk down on the farm!

9) Please forgive number 8. I will try to curb my desire to burst into song from now on.

10) Lists like these tend to follow a thought pattern.

11) I'm really mad at the book I just finished because the STORY ISN'T FINISHED YET. Did I just spend $10 on a day's worth of reading and I STILL HAVE TO WAIT ANOTHER SIX MONTHS TO CONTINUE READING?!

12) I just checked my list of poems that I've stored. I have... ahem... 118 on my hard drive. That's spanning from 2004 until now.

13) That makes it an average of approx 30 per year. But... um... probably 80 of them are from the year 2006.

14) Perhaps 90.

15) I really enjoy getting the "Damn I'm Good" moments. It tells me that most of the time I'm a pretty modest person. And it gives me some confidence.

16) My foot's asleep... Actually, come to think of it, I should be asleep right now.

Goodnight all.

Show and tell

So I finally used up all the film on a camera I borrowed.... here are some of the pictures. :) (a few of them turned out weird like the first one, but I plan on photoshopping them at some point...)

I am NOT getting sick

It's just allergies.

I swear.

(this is my mantra...)

Musical is in three weeks.

Three day weekend = Sleep, Rehearsal, College visit (to TLU) and visiting my dad.

I'm tired and can't really explain myself much further than that.

Responsibility

So I have all sorts of responsiblities right now... and while it's stressful and it's hard to find that much time to work out details, I really love what I'm doing.

For instance, I'm the editor of our school's Lit Mag. As editor, I set meeting times and contests and I run the club meetings and stuff. I get to send emails en masse and I get to bother people about submissions. It feels good...

I'm also on our schools Library Student Advisory Council, which serves as a median between the student body and the administration. I'm the president. :) The reason LSAC exists is because we're building a new library at school. I wrote a letter today to all of the people we'd like on our LSAC board. It feels so good to be involved in something that I could leave behind. Same with the Lit Mag, actually. I get to leave behind my Lit Mag legacy. :)

(I just had another Damn I'm Good moment. I got distracted and I read some short stories of mine that I wrote a while ago... Do you want to know the truth? Most of the time I don't know if I'm a good writer or not.)

Last year, before I started blogging, I was in a play called Our Town, which if you haven't heard of it is a play by Thornton Wilder. The whole play isn't meant to entertain, it's meant to inform. It's three acts: Daily Life, Marriage, and Death. The main character, Emily ends up marrying George, a longtime friend, and then she dies in childbirth in the third act (hope I'm not ruining it terribly...) but while I was reading it I realized: My life is so different from Emily's. I won't marry my nextdoor neighbor and longtime friend, I won't die in childbirth (odds do point to survival these days...) and my life isn't quaint. But what I found the most striking was, in the second act, my friend Alycia (who played Emily's mother) confronts herself in an aside before Emily is married, saying "I should have told her more, but I just couldn't." (referring, of course to the whole wedding night shabang.) I mean, Emily has graduated from high school, is probably about 19 or 20 now, and she knows about as much about her body as I knew when I was in fourth or fifth grade. I don't know why, but that just hit me hard last year.

Am I rambling? I don't know.

(tee hee hee... my foots asleep. I could probably break my toe and I wouldn't feel it.....)

Balance

So Blogger. Today is a much better day for balance. Today I have successfully balanced: College and piano.

(Lmao. Do you like my amazing photo alteration skills?) I have also successfully balanced homework with musical rehearsals.

I have also balanced sleep with reading.

Lastly, I have balanced the United States' budget and an elephant.

(Um... what?)

The point is, I'm feeling a lot better today about everything. I find it extraordinary and kind of weird that from day to day I (and frankly, everyone) can go from one extreme emotion to the other. Nobody feels the same all the time every day, and if you do, there's probably something wrong with you. (Or severely right. Teach me!!) But don't you think that the variant of emotions makes everyday life that much more interesting?

Rehearsing

I don't know if I've griped enough about my rehearsal schedule yet, but here it goes:

I have thirteen hours of rehearsal THIS WEEK.

JUST this ONE week.

UNA SEMANA.

(At this point in the blog, I collapse.)

I don't know if anyone reading this blog remembers what it was like to be a senior. Right now, in my spare time I either A) Do homework B) Apply for college C) Attend reharsals D) Practice Piano E) Eat F) Sleep

Spare time! Not even designated time. Forget reading books or knitting socks...

I've just been practicing my songs and my throat hurts right now. So I have tea. Tea makes everything better. Yaaaay...