Who cares about meaningful blog entries anyway

Are you ready for a long and drawn-out story with nothing especially interesting about it? I sure hope so!

This past year, I took dance, taught by the talented Emily Olsen, for my rec credit. Not going to lie, I hated it at the beginning of the year; I was too terrible for words, and it was pretty much the bane of my existence. I couldn't follow anything, was generally uncoordinated, and could not for the life of me remember any of the steps to anything.

Fast forward to the middle of second semester, when we were a good way into the dance to Lady Gaga's Beautiful, Dirty, Rich, and I actually kind of enjoyed dance class. In my humble opinion, I had progressed a long way - I used to be unspeakably terrible, whereas now I was simply bad. Excellent.

By the end of the year, and especially in retrospect, I really enjoyed dancing! I was and am still very uncoordinated and generally bad at it, but it's a fun time and definitely something I'd like to do in the future, in college maybe I'd take dance-for-people-who-are-crap or something. It would be a fun time, I'm sure.

Switch to a different storyline; When I visited Danni in the idyllic and wonderful England earlier this summer, she gave me a super-awesome gift. It was a book she'd filled with interesting pictures, mostly about various fandoms. I love it to pieces and I am pretty sure it can cheer me up even when I am in the deepest pits of emo. One thing it had in it that I especially enjoyed was a page with two pictures of Gingivere, a character I'd made up back in ninth grade. Reminded of Gingi and in need of something to draw as practice for my independent study in 2D design (a nightmare that I will tell of later), I decided to do more drawing of her. Because I've been drawing her and her character is woefully underdeveloped, I thought it might be nice to give her a couple of hobbies. Figure skating and dance (ballet in particular) seemed good.

I've been doing research on both, and it makes me want to learn to do one or both of them~

I'm sure it's another strange phase, but that's fine. Right now (inspired by Gingivere) I have been stretching so that I am not quite so inflexible. Woooooooooop.

Why all the Asian comments?

Some of my blog post inexplicably have about 30 comments of people posting inane quotes or long messages in some incomprehensible Asian language. It looks like it's probably Chinese, but I'm not really all that sure.

Does anybody (I'm looking at you, Allie) know if there's any way to filter the silly comments or anything, or why I'm getting them?

In other news, I wish that Blogger had a more intuitive setup, so that I would get notifications or something if people did comment on here, and so I could add other blogs easily, and generally get around in a more organized fashion. Oh well.

I should make a post on here about my various adventures/lack of doing anything this summer, so that I can look back and remember what I did/did not accomplish in Summer 2010. Sadly, right now I am far too lazy to make such a large post, so alas, that will be saved for another day. Today, at least, I got back from Maggie's house after seeing Inception yesterday and generally catching up with two old friends. Good times. Today I have also been drawing.

And obsessing over Sara Bareilles. I absolutely LOVE her new song and the video for it, King of Anything. I've watched it probably 15 times today, both because it's excellent and because she is very pretty.

Sometimes people find this place...

...And it can be an unfortunate time.

This blog is really not nearly as embarrassing as I remember (though it's still pretty embarrassing), but still, when people from real life find it, I worry. Even when people from the internet find it, I worry! It's a wonder I have this at all. Perhaps if I'm so worried about it I should just delete it?

But I won't. I've decided that it's really best to just update this more so that more embarrassing posts get buried. And if I'm too lazy to update it, then people will just see my silly posts from a year ago! That's fine.

I feel like it's cheating or something to delete posts or to delete the whole journal, like... tearing pages out of a sketchbook. It's insincere, or something. Not that this is such srs bznz that I or anyone else should worry too much about being sincere.

Speaking of srs bznz/the idealism train/etc, I think I am going to watch The West Wing after dinner. And speaking of The West Wing, I need to respond to Danni's PM.

Dear World,

I feel as though I'm always talking to myself on these sort of blog things, because I think the only one who might read them are... Danni, are you out there? Allie, maybe? Hey. How's it going.

That's alright, though. I heard from a source named Michael Coyne that I'm always talking to myself. So it's alright.

At any rate, today is Christmas and I got the first season of The Big Bang Theory. I just watched the first disk... Oh how I love Sheldon. I love how Leonard is just as nerdy as Sheldon, but actually cares about fitting in with the world, and I love that Sheldon does not give two shits about what other people think, and he acts crazy weird and doesn't realize it or care. I guess that's supposed to be a disability or something. It's supposed to make him weird. Funny. I think it makes him absolutely positively wonderful and damn, I might be annoyed with him in real life... but get me a slightly toned down version and you have someone I would want to know forever. And probably would be rather attracted to. But probably that sort of person is not the sort of person that would be especially attracted. In general.

Wait. Scratch those "probably"'s.

Oh, nostalgia.

(Rationalization for teh emo: I'm allowed because I'm not like, uh, shouting this out over facebook as an attention seeking kid! I am an attention seeking kid, but here I can angst all I want but nobody will get too irritated with me because I don't have any base of people that will feel obliged to read it, as opposed to, say... a facebook status. Hah. Oh dear.)

Soda + Passion

I think the most interesting people are the people that are really, really interestED. Who have something they're really passionate about and genuinely think is awesome. Who think about things and aren't afraid to show that they love something that might be a little out of the ordinary.

I'm reminded of this because this video made me feel so nice.

Not everyone is interesting. It's just a fact, but anyone can show they are interested. Talk about what you love. Act on your interests.

Do it.

Where is the love?

(We're singing that a capella. It's going to be brilliant. I'm part of the trio that sings the "people killin', people dyin'... etc part after the rapping. The chorus. I'm psyched.)

I saw someone's status on facebook today that said "the greatest thing in life is to love and be loved in return".

Nice sentiment. Not sure I agree. Not like at my ripe old age of 16, I've had a great deal of experience with love, but from what I've experienced... "loving and being loved in return" is alright, but not the greatest thing in life by a long shot. Maybe I just don't know what the real feeling of that is like. Not to be too emo (like the person that responded to that status "mmm, too bad that hasn't happened yet for most of us"), I mean.

But really, the thing that makes me feel the best is loving unconditionally and (usually) unreciprocated. Perhaps the only person outside my family that I've really loved was absolutely, 100% unconditional and absolutely, 100% unreciprocated. That person is very far away now, and so I have been thrown into various undesireable situations... but I am being emo like I said I wouldn't and I'm digressing. Loving unconditionally, whether it's returned or not, feels wonderful in my experience. (Which again, is not that extensive, but.) People aside, I love knowledge and learning new things maybe more than anything else in the world. That's just something I give, not something that's returned.

I think maybe the greatest feeling on earth is just to love. That's all. Having that love be returned gives a reason for one to love more, maybe, so that's a plus, but it can also inspire further love that isn't as... real as it might be. Being loved in return can be awesome, I'm sure. Make sure the reaction doesn't stop. But it can also make that love... not real, maybe. Contrived. Not authentic. Something.

I don't know what I'm saying exactly, I'm not trying to make a clear rhetorical point here. I just think that the best feeling in the world is loving unconditionally.

Returned or not.

Boston! Rent, museums, and other craziness

So yesterday I got back from a whirlwind tour of (read: two day trip to) Boston, where I saw Rent, went to the Museum of Fine Arts, bought an awesome coat at Patagonia, and RAN INTO MS. EMMERICH AND MS. BAKER!

I will give the entire narrative for your reading pleasure. On Friday we (as in me and my family) left for Boston in the morning, and we got to the city around... two-ish. Once we got into the city it was a little bit confusing, because the navigation system in our car was a little bit confused and it was generally stressful trying to navigate around, but we got to our destination (which was the Museum of Fine Arts) eventually. I was afraid my brother (Michael) would be bored and therefore insufferable when we were in there, but it seems that he doesn't hate museums so much anymore, now that he has reached the ripe old age of 12.

I was a little bit disappointed because I have two favorite things to see in museums; the Impressionists and Japanese woodblock prints. The latter were being moved, I think, so we didn't get to see them. The Impressionist pieces were fantastic, though. I got into that room and saw one thing I recognized immediately; Renoir's Dance at Bougival. Two of my sending school's English teachers, Ms. Moriarty and Mr. McLean, had posters of that painting in their rooms. In 9th grade English, Ms. Moriarty would talk about that painting every other class, connecting it to our conversation somehow. I think I found it annoying at the time, because I didn't... appreciate how brilliant and fantastic she was, and also because the print of the painting looks ok, but not wonderful. In person it's a fantastic painting; the woman's dress is a lot... pinker, and you can see the colors in it (to create what you see as a white dress. :D) and it's really great.

I actually bought a poster of that painting, so I can hang it in my room at school and weep every time I see it because I have crappy English classes now. I kid, kind of, but I really do miss English at Orono. Not only was it less work, I learned a LOT more. I learned to love learning and making connections, and I learned how to really read and think about what I'm reading. None of that at MSSM. Just analysis, which seems similar on the surface, but is really... quite different. At MSSM, it's more like the teacher has some specific meaning figured out for the text we read, and we have to try to figure it out, whereas in 9th grade, we just wrote down what we noticed, or connections we made, as we read, and then had authentic discussions in class. Every class ended up having the same(-ish) discussions, getting to the heart of what we were reading and the meaning that the author intended, just like in MSSM English, but the conversations weren't contrived, and so in addition to the necessary information about the reading, we got all these wonderful tangents and information that was connected to the text in unexpected ways. I learned how to connect and think. In AP Comp I learned how to clockwatch. But I digress, I got the poster of Dance at Bougival to emulate Ms. Moriarty and Mr. McLean. Maybe one day I can be brilliant like them.

Anyway. The next day we wandered around Newbury Street a little bit, going into shops and whatnot. I bought a kickass trenchcoat at Patagonia, and went into Anthropologie... I wish I was incredibly, filthy rich so I could buy tons of things from that store. It is such a cool place and they have so much cool stuff. The store in person is even better than the website! I mean, obviously, but still, it was great.

After shopping a bit and eating lunch, we saw Rent, which was SO, SO GOOD. I love Anthony Rapp so, so, so much now, it was incredibly cool to see him in person on stage, especially because he looked and sounded exactly like he did in the movie. The stage production of Rent was a lot better than the movie, too, I think. The movie seems very plotless to me, almost like they made a movie around the songs. The songs definitely help tell the story, too, but there's too little story in the movie for my taste, or at least, it doesn't come through as much as in the play. Maybe it was that I already kind of knew the story for Rent before seeing the play, but the stage production seemed to have a much more cohesive story than the movie. The characters were better balanced, too. In the movie, I hated Mimi, especially her relationship with Roger (I thought it was kind of forced, or.. something), but in the play it was good and made sense. I also thought Maureen was really annoying in the movie, but in the play, again, though her character was the same, somehow everything was more balanced and I liked her a lot more. In fact, I liked almost all the characters more in the play, just because it was better balanced. I kind of want to get the DVD of the last Broadway production, now.

Of course, I loved Mark in the movie of Rent and I loved him in the play. My favorite character in both places, but in the play... he is so good. Have I mentioned I love Anthony Rapp?

After Rent I was pretty excited, but also looking forward to going home. It was very hot outside and we were walking back to the parking lot, down Boylston Street, when I hear a familiar voice...

"Elizabeth Coyne?!"
"MISS EMMERICH?!?!"

She was with Ms. Baker, they were in the Boston area for Mr. McCartney's wedding, and we just happened to run into them. We chatted for a little bit, I told Ms. Baker I got a 4 on the AP exam (which I was rather happy about), and we went on our merry ways. One of the most bizarre experiences of my life.

All in all, it was a SUPER SPECIAL AWESOME trip.