I am so excited I could vomit

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    hey

    hey

    hey guess what

    guess what I just found out

    I just found out that my request to swap the order of my May Term spent studying Los Angeles (formerly supposed to be at the end of my sophomore year) and my two-or-three-week overseas immersion experience (supposed to be my junior year) was approved so now I'm doing my overseas trip at the end of my sophomore year and my May Term at the end of my junior year

     and if I had done my overseas thing my junior year I would have gone to the Caribbean but since I'm doing it next year instead, now

    I'm

    going

    to

    Israel.

This is me. Right now. Let's go.

I just like bullet lists ok

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Here is a list of things that are making me unhappy today:

• I got an hour less sleep than I intended to get.
• I have to write my first history paper by Wednesday and do not feel the least bit confident in my paper-writin' skills. I also have to pick a topic-person for my tribute speech for public speaking class and start working on that.
• I have to study math like crazy and it takes me too long to do.
• I need more time to do things in.
• I miss my mom.

    And here is a list of things that are making me happy today:

• I look nice. I've got on black shorts, a well-fitted red polo shirt and a skinny black necktie.
• I had the foresight to get two cookies at lunch. I'm always hungry after classes are done. I spent the whole of my last class thinking "there is a soft delicious chocolate chip cookie waiting for me in my messenger bag".
• Campus Beach Day is tomorrow. (Small school = we can get all of us onto a beach no problem.)
• Professor Mine Enemy was wearing a panda tie.
• Professor Mine Enemy had us do a quick quiz of five questions, but was six minutes late to class due to printer difficulties, leaving me just enough time to review the textbook chapter summaries. I got everything on the quiz right! (I'm homeschooled, okay, I've never had quizzes before, it's all new to me)
• I feel much less intimidated by Professor Mine Enemy today. Not only because of the endearing tie and the quiz success, but also this is because after class was done and I had got my books in order (one must always have one's bag ready to flee with whenever taking risks), I went up and asked him an intelligent question about a thing and he answered cheerfully and talked with me about it a bit and everything was ok. (He couldn't give me specific details on what I wanted to know about, but a general answer worked fine for me. The important bit was the encounter, not the knowledge.)
• I've signed up to join the ballroom dance club and our first meeting is this afternoon.
• This evening I'm going to go to see Laurie R King at a book signing for her latest Mary Russell mystery. (I have grown up on those books.) I am excited.

    Overall it could all be worse!

    (why am I blogging instead of studying why why why whyyy, because it helps me put things in order that's why, but I have so much to dooooo aaaagh)

Jeremevangelism

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Best Friend has recently seen "Sherlock". You know, the recent miniseries starrin' Benedict Cumberbatch.

    She was rather obsessed with it.

    She has, this evening, asked me if there were any good older Sherlock Holmes shows.

    "Like, before Sherlock?" I said.

    "Yeah, and before the bad one from 2009."

    "Oh, well, there're the Jeremy Brett ones, those are the best. And the other famous ones are the movies from the '40s that had Basil Rathbone, but Jeremy is better."

    "Cool. Can you show me one of those sometime?"

    WIN.

    She's gone home now and I don't think I'll see her over the weekend but that is ok, I will just decide which episode to show her.

    Yay! I get to expose another person to the holy light of Jeremy!

[UPDATE about a week later: She and I have now watched "The Solitary Cyclist" and "The Dancing Men" together. I believe she's enjoying the show very much. winnnnnn.]

nurrrrr. <3

                                                       

victory

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Last night was a historic, historic night.

    Historic.

    Eighteen years I have lived on the wrong side of a series of glass boxes.

    Eighteen years I have raged. Seethed. Screamed curses at the sky.

    Imagine a balloon, an ordinary red balloon. Imagine it being pumped up with pure frustration and hope until it cannot hold any more, and explodes, and falls down to the dirty supermarket floor, defeated, collapsed, aching with failure. A failure that is not its fault. A failure that is the fault of the useless metal claw within the glass box, which falls and stays and rises and clamps back unto itself halfway back up its fucking rise to the ceiling of the glass box.

    I am that balloon. I have seen all my hopes and desires sit within those glass boxes, unmoving, untouchable, mocking me with their loveliness. Mocking me with my failure. Saying, somebody else will succeed, I shall escape my prison, but you will not be the one to succeed, because you cannot succeed. You will never succeed. Never, never, never.

    Guess what, you little bitches?

    I have done it.

    I have seized one of your fellows from his rest atop a strangely green Tweety Bird and the head of that slut Betty Boop (wearing a Santa hat) and a friendly owl whose eyes were glazed with death and unintelligent love.

    I have claimed the soft orange fox, and his large, startled eyes could not be more appropriate within the context of last night.

    I have done it.

    I have beaten the claw machine.