2009

So 2009 has started out as the best year of my life.  I have so many great things going on for me. Here’s a genera overview of my life in 2009:

1. I MADE MARIA IN MY SCHOOL’S PRODUCTION OF THE SOUND OF MUSIC!!!

2. I’m really making friends and loving meeting people in the play. I told one of my fellow choir girls, “I’m excited about acting wih my friends and making friends with the people I’m acting with.”

3. [Private]

4.  I don’t know if this is good or not, but I’m kind of adjusting to being an only child?  Yes, I still have those moments where I’m like, “Oh, I can’t wait to tell Deanna this!” or “I need her opinion on what to say to this guy ASAP!” and I can’t, but I’m kinda getting used to it.

5. For instance, she doesn’t know that I’m starting a music project with a guy I met at auditions for the musical. But she does now.  Because she’s read this.  ;]

7. I’ve really noticed an improvement in my singing, and especially my nerves. They’ve definitely curved. I still get nervous, but it’s pretty much my body flipping out; I can calm my mind pretty well.

8. The term is almost over. That means no more Chemistry after next Friday! And I get to start out fresh in AP History.

9. My goldfish still arent dead? I haven’t cleaned their tank since summer, probably, I feed them only once a day if I remember, they’re in my old room so I never see them. I’m the worst fish mama ever and they’re still alive. I bet it’s because they can’t help but love me so much.

10. I’ve recovered. Last year, I really had a “funk” going on. I was angry, constantly self-conscious, I had zero confidence (which was reflected in pretty much every part of my life), I had no friends at school, I freaked out over my grades (all A’s, but if it was an A- or a B, I would pretty much cry), I was depressed, my mom and I fought all the time.  I’m better! Like, 110%!  Like I said at the beginning of this post, this has started off being the best year of my life. I’ve been happy (when people ask how I am, I honestly answer “good”!) and confident, and I make friends all the time.   =]

11. I think I’ve figured out what I want to do with my life.  I really think musical theatre. I LOVE acting. I LOVE singing. So.. why not put them together?  All the other things on my list of possible career interests can be part time jobs, or jobs while I go around auditioning, or hobbies. 

12. Unfortunately, I have to leave for school now. Which means sitting through all my classes until rehearsal (after school). So school takes forever now, because I can’t wait to practice. 

What’s your 2009 been like so far?

Consider My Fingers Crossed.

Crossed for the next two days to pass quickly (Christmas break!).
Crossed for not failing my two tests on Friday (AP History and Honors Chem).
Crossed for  my brain to start functioning again (it’s stopped in anticipation of Christmas break).
Crossed for landing a good role in the Spring musical (the Sound of Music!).
Crossed for a good Winter (not like last year).
Crossed for my Christmas wishes (I’ve got quiet a few).
Crossed for a really great social life during break (Hayley Joy, Deanna, Neal, Danike, movies, cooking, Brent, shopping…).
Crossed for snow days (we haven’t had any yet this year!).
Crossed for my Christmas list (mostly consisting of a ceramic curling iron, gift cards, and books).
Crossed for a good Solo and Ensemble performance (even though it’s in January).
Crossed for raising my grades (Two A’s, but I need to get my two B’s up…).
Crossed for a chance to organize my school notebooks and binders ASAP (all my school stuff is in one three-subject notebook).
Crossed for my varsity jacket (it’s ready, but my mom wont’ give it to me until Christmas – because it’s not like I need a winter coat before then, before halfway through the winter, not like it’s seven degrees farenheit or anything).
Crossed that my mom will be happier this Winter (this time of year has been hard for everyone since her dad died).
Crossed that the people that I can’t get enough of couldn’t get enough of me (it has been improving…).
Crossed for crazy amounts of photo shoots over break (I swear, I’m so itchy for some.)

Crossed for being able to uncross them.

Maximum Capacity for Awesome!

       Last night was my high school’s first choir concert of the year!  It was also my frst performance with show choir. As nervous as I was, I rocked the concert! Oh, it was so much fun!  I performed two songs with my show choir, one with a select ensemble, one with the women’s ensemble, and four with the whole of Chorale.

       The ending piece was a medly of songs from the Lion King. One of my few complaints with that one is that no body had any energy. That morning, we were told to be moving around a little and smiling.  I mean it’s Lion King for goodness sake! Anyway, I told my dad about that at the afterglow.

          “Well, I saw several people moving; most of them were in the back row.”
          “Yeah! Because we’re tall! There’s more of us!      Maximum capacity for awesome!”

 

 

       I had a bigger group of people that came and saw me than ever before to any of my performances ever.

 

       And today, I actually kind of understood my chemistry class. And I got a lot done in AP English. I’m writing an essay on The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.  If you haven’t read it yet, I highly reccomend it. Anyway, while we were in the computer lab, I recieved a carnation-gram for sweetest day!! ME.  I’ve never recieved a flower from anyone in my school!  😀                   ……Okay, so it was from one of my good friends, but nevertheless, it made my day!  Besides, she’s kind of one of those people where I’m surprised that she chose to pay to have a flower sent to me of all people, me of all her other friends. (Yes, I know that sentence could have been executed much better, but I couldn’t figure out a better way to phrase it. I’m saving all my powers of perfect sentence structure for my essay)

 

 

Thing to smile about #16:  FINALLY getting the time, chance, and reason to write a real post again!

9-15-08

 

       All things considered, today has turned out to be really great! Well, kind of.  I feel really good today.  I got a lot of reading done in choir (shh!).  Right now I’m reading The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve read it about… a fourth of the way through (if that) about three of four times, but this time I’m farther into the book than I’ve gotten previously and I’m excited.

       In second hour, Intro to Statistics, we had a test. I asked for the date of today to write at he top. “It’s the fifteenth,” some one told me. At first, I wrote it without a thought. Then I realized:  Tomorrow’s my birthday!  I can’t believe it slipped my mind!

       Anyway, I feel pretty good about the test. I’ll be knocked off my feet if I get 100% or even 99%, but I think I did pretty well. The test made that class period feel really short. And I managed to sneak a Quaker Oats bar. (And I so almost spelled “Quaker” as “quacker”.)  I hope no one’s allergic to peanuts in that class….

       In Honors Chemistry, we got the test we took on Friday back. I got eight wrong out of fifty-five total questions. Sounds okay, right? It’s an 85%. I left class last Friday feeling really good about it!  GR.   But I did get moved to the front which will, hopefully, help me do better on the next test.  And what I hate the most is that this test is the first I ever checked my answers for! You know how you’re always told that “if you finish your test early, you should go over your answers again and check them before turning it in”? I’ve never done that! Friday was the first time I ever actually went over the answers for each problem.

       Forth hour was pretty fun. We read Alice Watson’s essay, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self,” for most of the time and my teacher read some excerpts from a journals we turned in on Friday, including an entry about hunting and a twelve-point buck with a “wide rack.” Yeah, the whole class burst out laughing but my teacher couldn’t figure it out.

 

       Dear Reader, I love you and I think you are the cat’s pajamas.

 

       Yeah, that was Izzy’s reaction, too. I told her that after reading it in my book. I showed her that line and she found just as much amusement as I did. I decided to steal her planner and write this newly discovered phrase all over the pages. It’s not uncommon for us to do that (last week, she screwed me over by writing “I just lost the game” on several pages). So I wrote all over it. On dates that are important to me and holidays and in the weekends. 

“Izzy, I think you are the cat’s pajamas!”
“You are THE cats pajamas!!”
“Cat + Pajamas = IZ!”
I even drew a picture of a cat and of pajamas.  

       Later in class, I took her planner again. I flipped through the pages to this week. My birthday is tomorrow and I was gonna write it in there. But, wait. I already wrote something about it in that week.  I flipped to the front…

       It wasn’t her planner. It wasn’t any one’s who was in the class. It was a guy I know of and really, really, really can’t stand. J.G. He is (I haven’t seen him around lately, though) a tall, rather large boy with a chubby face who took choir in eighth grade to have a blow-off class. The last I knew of him, he was immature, obnoxious, disrespectful, annoying, and just drove me up a wall!  But he left his planner in a class before mine, and now will find a humorous, nonsensical phrase repeated numerous times to some one he doesn’t know, anonymously.

       And, as evidenced by this nice, lenghty-ish post of actual writing, I had TIME! I had absolutely NO homework! None! Zilch!   Yay!

 

———-

 

       And I just got back from a surprise birthday party thrown for me! I’m so glad I didn’t have any homework at all today. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. It was very, very fun. Although, I must admit, very emotionally draining. There were people there from several different groups of mine. My drama group, and old drama group, kids I met through my mom, my ex boyfriend (but current best friend – still. Yay), and my sister and her boyfriend. The thing is, I act differently around each group. Well, no, not differently. But I have different walls still standing with each different person and there were people that intimidated me, not matter how much I didn’t show it.

       It was an emotionally draining night, filled with more than its fair share of embarrassing moments that caused me to want to crawl under a rock until I could turn back time, laughing, awkwardness, and – naturally – surprises. All in all, though, a good night.

 

 

 

     Thing to smile about #11: Having a birthday party for the first time since I turned ten.

Twitter Deprived.

     Because I am not allowed to use my phone during school, I’ve been extremely Twitter deprived. And I came up with a solution, however, I feel pathetic for admitting this. 

     I labeled a page in my notebook “tweets,” and I wrote what I would tweet, had I access to my phone.  I don’t want to upload a billion tweets on Twitter because some of them are long, and there’s waaay too many to do at once.  Plus, they can also be viewed as my copping out and just blogging bullet highlights of my day.  So here goes:

 

– I think it’s amazing that some girls can sit and slouch and still be skinny and have a good figure.

-Great, my old, antique necklace is leaving gross dirt or something on my tank top.

-The girl who drives me CRAZY in my second and third our class got a mullet.

-I feel really dumb. I was just the last one to finish the pop quiz in Intro to Stats. I know I got something wrong. I looked at one I had a difficult time on off of some one else’s sheet (the teacher had stacked the papers together near my desk) and I totally messed up the order of operation.

-Self conscious. 

-Ugh. Chemistry is next.

-Note to self: bring food to eat in 3rd hour, especially Wednesdays, since we don’t have lunch. Heck, I could bring a whole mean and eat it in there.

-I like the name “Gina Lynn,” but I don’t want to use “Lynn” or “Marie” as middle names for my future kids because that’s so common.

-Chemistry is thankfully better than it was yesterday. I like my teacher better today, I actually understand what we’re doing, and it’s… almost enjoyable. My teacher seems much more happy and comfortable actually teaching, as opposed to lecturing and going over rules and such.

– I just lost the game (again).

-I love hot dogs.

-I forgot how beautiful some girls are at public school. Especially in my AP English class.

-Crazy girl asked to borrow my notes. I feel so smart!

-I’m going to prove my chem teacher wrong by getting great grades and sitting in the back.

-Because everyone talked and no one paid attention during Channel One announcements, my AP English teacher made everyone write a one-page (at least), single-spaced “journal entry” on everything they learned from watching Channel One.                                                                     Owned.

-I’m on a “your face” rampage today.

-The first song we learned in Show Choir is “Hakuna Matata.”

-I had  half a year-old chocolate bar for lunch.

-I think we should have late start + abbreviated classes everyday, not just Wednesday.

-“I can’t read the words on this map! The words are too tiny!”
  “Well, I’m sorry the world is too big for your happiness and comfort.

-My water is smarter than your water. 

 

     In show choir, we all played the “ten fingers” game, where everyone puts up ten fingers, and one-by-one, around the circle, everyone says something they’ve never done. If anyone else in the circle has, they put one finger down. The goal is to get everyone else to have no fingers left.   One of the guys got down to negative eleven.

     So, the second day of school ended up really good. Even though I liked my hair better yesterday.  =]

 

Thing to smile about #5:  Driving past places that have their sprinklers going when it’s pouring down rain.

 

 

An Upperclassman Now!

I’m home after the first day of school! I’m back to public school full time. Again. It started off really well because, even though I had to wake up at 5:30, I had a stupid good hair day! Just to clarify, that means my hair looked so good, it was stupid. And I was on the radio while I was doing my make up! I called in and the topic was “what are you looking forward to about school, and what are you dreading about it?”

My answer?  I’m looking forward to utilizing my new wardrobe! But I was dreading the fact that you don’t find out which lunch you have until third hour. I’m always so worried that I’ll go to my third hour class and it’ll be empty and locked. Okay, that’d mean that I have A lunch. So after that, I would go upstairs to lunch. By then, the lines would be horribly long and it’d take forever for me to get food. Then I’d stand on my toes in the cafeteria, looking very much like the first day of school, trying to find some one I know. By the time I do (if I do), I’ll have ten or fifteen minutes left. It’d all be downhill from there. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, but I’ll get to that later.

My mom drove me to school this morning (not for moral support, but to save me the embarrassment of holding a giant poster for AP English for a while at the bus stop and having to carry and protect it around with me through bus conditions, of which I had no idea what to expect). We listened to Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz in the car on the way there.

My first hour is Chorale, which was nice because I’ve been in it for two years now already and it was comfortable to start off with that. Hopefully this year will go by much more smoothly than last year. Before the first concert, (our first actual performance was a funeral because) a boy named Tim, a bass in choir, died. Our Winter concert was moved to a nearby middle school because of a bomb threat at the high school – we learned that they were shutting down the whole building AFTER we had set up the entire bake sale. The next concert was enjoyably interrupted by the fire alarm going haywire in the middle of one of our songs. The last concert was the only one that went as expected.

My choir director is big on making sure we understand rules. This year, my school is actually enforcing the cell phone and dress code policies (now they’re not just taking our phones for the day, they’re keeping them until the next Monday). She went through our handbooks and skimmed over and lectured about different things.

One rule that she pointed out is “pornography or other inappropriate display may not be used to decorate the lockers.” After the initial giggling of the class, a sweet girl named Molly shouted out, “What!?”   Now, Molly is a really sweet girl. She’s adorable and naive and loves Disney, musicals, taking pictures, and the Jonas Brothers.   It. Was. Hilarious. When she reacted like that. Of course, she meant it as, “What? People actually do that?” But it sounded as if she was miffed because they don’t allow lockers to be decorated with porn, and everyone knew how she meant it and how it sounded. Believe me, it was a lot funnier if you were there and especially if you know Molly.