Gossamer

My Deepest Apologies

What is this? Can it be that I'm still alive? Happy day, I am. I apologize for vanishing. It was remarkably poor taste for me to do so. To inspire my return, I've made everything prettier.

Thank you Lizzie for your concern :) Forgive me, all, for abandoning my blog and yours.

Now I shall write a long-ass entry. Prepare yourselves, friends!

Why did I vanish?

Have I been busy with school, as I am such a diligent, hard-working student that I would always put my work before the temptations of the Internet? Good heavens, no. In fact, my laziness is the very reason I haven't written in so long: once I realized it was easier to not write than to write, my motivations for writing seemed remarkably less. I haven't been writing much creatively, either. What have I been doing? Well, there's this:

Unfinished, if that wasn't clear by the giant empty space in the middle.

Yes, for the past week or so, I've spent my time making countless geometric images on Paint. That does not, however, account for a month of absence. What else have I been doing? By this point, I'm not sure myself. Saying that everything is hazy sounds a bit serious, but between the soul-crushing boredom, the constant listlessness that school inspires, and school itself, I cannot honestly account for where my time has gone or why I've done nothing productive during it. Productivity is for people who go to good colleges squares! Everyone who works at McDonald's knows that!

I wish I had more to catch you up on. Certainly things have happened that I would've written of if I had been writing then, things which now seem trivial. For instance, the third Model UN conference came and went. I didn't do very well, and there was no one there who piqued my interest, so now it seems pointless to even mention it. The fourth and final conference is on the 31st. I'm representing Spain for Cloning, which interests me because it's not the usual MUN topic. Maybe Sam will be there...? :)

But if I'm going to start talking about boys, I ought to devote an entire new section to it. Look at me, being organized! Today, I even organized the list of the twelve pages of homework I have to do this weekend. I digress.

Affairs of the Heart

Two of my best friends currently have boyfriends. Kim is very happy with Evan, and Joy is very happy with Andrew, and I am very happy for both of them (though Andrew occasionally calls me a cockblock :P). I do not have a boyfriend (otherwise I would've blogged sooner), but I'm, you know, okay with that.

I have a silly crush on a guy in my math class. His name is Mike, though we call him Mo--except for Maia, who calls him Kiwi. Yes, we still employ juvenile nicknames so that our crushes don't know we're talking about them. How else can you do it?

Anyway, I like Mike (and also assonance). I don't know him very well, so I'm not, like, obsessed with the guy, but he seems like a cool person. Also he's attractive. My goodness. I could just stare at the boy's face (that's not remotely weird or anything). And, um, his last name is fantastic, though obviously I won't be sharing it here.

This, of course, means that I'm over Weslie. I don't think I'd mind getting to know my Favorite Sour Asian a bit more, but that ship sailed after I didn't speak to him for half a year--also because he's a bit too much of a dick to justify to myself any longer. Ah well! 'Tis better to have loved and lost, etc.

Feedz me compluhmensss

You may not have noticed the obnoxiously long poem I wrote and posted the other night. You should read it and tell me what you think! Part of the reason that I'm blogging now is because I'm writing more overall, including the poem and my latest story, Gossamer. Care for an excerpt? Too bad if you don't; I'm feeding you one anyway!

I stayed awake, staring into the dreamy shadow of my ceiling, till the morning light disrupted my despair, and my happiness evaporated in the heat of day. I blinked against the rising pink, the glorious eternal gold of the sun at morn, the light which at once consumed the vestiges of darkness before I could realize it was gone. Morning came swiftly to assuage the weary soul of nighttime, and I remembered my dream, my guilty dream of stolen memories, the smile of Jude, the voice of Jonas, the cold and gray of Olivia Beach. Let them rest, I thought. Let my memories rest, let them burn away in sunlight, but let the night be my indulgence, let them flood back and kiss my waiting lips, let them speak to me in the voices of the damned and of the dead, let the sea rise around my feet and the sea wind push his hair from his face and reveal that word which haunted my living breath as if it were all of these things that I remembered, all of these things that I loved and yearned for under the cover of darkness. Let this be, I thought, let this be. Let the dead rest, but let this be.

In the full bloom of morning I wandered through a garden which grew and choked the ground around my home. The soil was good here, but the garden untended, untouched except for sunlight, and pale flowers twined around each other’s necks in a foul spectacle. Grass encroached on the garden path, though not enough years had passed for the stone to be entirely overtaken. This garden was a murder scene, a violent brawl of beauty, seeping through the fertile ground into a bloody ugly show. Too many flowers contested with too many weeds, too many dead leaves, too many spiders and bees and flies, too much sickly grass pushing thin shoots between the lovely buds, till at last the flowers, overcome by the violence, rose again as a tyrant themselves, their purity corrupted, their beauty destroyed by oppression. This was my home, this belligerent garden, the abandoned widow’s walk, the empty rooms which suppressed the memory of what was once full.

Gossamer is basically about a girl named Maria who falls in love with two guys, Jonas and Jude. There's a plot, but I haven't worked it out yet. One or both of them die. I don't feel bad telling you that, because you find out in the first sentence that someone dies, and it's pretty clear from there on that it's either Jonas or Jude.

What I enjoy about this story is the little thought-trains that the narrator goes off on. She's a little less poetic as a teenager, which is what she is for the majority of the story (the excerpt is years after the events of the novel). It's fun to write her descriptions of things, although when I don't get it right, I tend to scrap everything I just wrote and start over.

I wondered if he mentioned me, if I had made an impression on him. I imagined their conversation later, perhaps when the others had gone off. They lounged around the park, Jonas on the bench, the other one sitting on the top of it, with his feet on the seat. The friend laughed at some joke that Jonas has made, and then said, abruptly, if he had seen the girl on Main Street. When Jonas hadn’t, the friend laughed and told him I was hot. Yes, that must be what he thought of me, when he looked me up and down and caught my eyes. He knew nothing more of me than that I was hot. Jonas asked what I looked like, disinterested, for he was far too pure to care if his crass friend found yet another girl attractive. The friend hesitated, struggling to recall my features and my form through the haze of his memory, unable to remember more than the basics—tall, dark hair, that body, I imagined in his voice. I didn’t know his voice, but I imagined it anyway, teasing, low-toned, sometimes gruff. He would speak fluidly, sometimes making his words unclear as he flowed from one to the next, letters, words, and sentences forming a river of thought that poured from his mouth unabridged. Sometimes, a trickle, when he felt perverse; other times a waterfall, harsh, strong, his voice and his words overpowering, his anger absolute and irrepressible. He had a voice which would be heard by everyone or by just the person he wanted it to be heard by.

I was described in this voice. He rolled over what features he could remember—tall, dark hair, that body—as water rolls over rocks, and he wore them away, eroding my figure with the vulgarity of his tone, smoothing over my flaws with exaggeration that his tongue was prone to. It was a voice of overpowering force, which made me into a figure quite unlike myself. He said last, his tone amused, his vocal torrent subsiding, that I had a weird expression on my face.

It's called 'Gossamer' because, to be honest, the name sounded nice. Though I don't see it directly playing into the story, I'm sure at some point it will be brought up in conversation and I can justify using a random, mildly pretentious word to title my story :)

Spring is in the Air

It was so delightfully warm on Wednesday and Thursday that I wore a dress to school on both days. I decided to just embrace that I'm never going to wear shorts to school, and do some online browsing for some nice spring dresses before I finally haul my ass to the mall and drop some dough. I realized that, once again, I have a strange fondness for floral. I know it's spring and all, but I've always had this thing against floral...at least until it gets warm and sunny outside.

Things I want to invest in before it gets nice out: a casual dress which isn't shapeless or black, sandals, at least two skirts (I only have three, and they're, like, all I wear in the spring), and some nice light shirts. I'm being overwhelmed by loveliness just thinking about it.

Spring also means that school is on the decline. School is out in just over three months! Our scheduling for next year should be occurring soon. Once again I intend to take all Honors and AP, and I think I may take both physics and chemistry if I can. The schedule is changing next year, which may mean I won't be able to double up on science, which would be a shame, because if I'm going to struggle through one year of chemistry I might as well struggle through two and get college credit for it. If I can't double up, then I'll just take physics. See, in the new schedule, we would have to lab out for science during study hall, music, or gym, as opposed to any elective as it is now. Whatever the merits of the new schedule may be, I think it's silly to restrict the number of classes a student can take in that way. Also, I really love science :(

Speaking of chemistry, I just can't seem to get the hang of it this year. On the last test we took, though, I got 100! I could not even believe it! My highest test grade after that is an 80! Everyone else did well, too, but usually on the tests that everyone does well on, I still do poorly. I actually hung it on the fridge, I was so happy. It brought my grade up five points. I'm still happy just thinking about it.

The Work I Should Be Doing Instead of This

I made a handy-dandy list.

• Genetic Disease Brochure (approx. two pages)
• Stylistic Devices in Rebecca (two pages)
• Secondary Character Narrative (two-three pages)
• Court Opinions (four pages)

And only half of that is overdue work!

I want to do the biology brochure tonight, and get a start on the second thing, the stylistic devices pseudo-essay. The more complex things I'm going to tackle tomorrow, when I absolutely cannot justify procrastination.

Right at this moment, however, I'm going to go play senseless computer games. Farewell! When shall I write again? Probably tomorrow, when I desperate for distraction from all the homework I have.