Umm...Oops?

So, after getting home two hours after school gets out, accidentally conking out and taking a ridiculously long nap, doing physics homework, eating, doing the dishes and reading two chapters of Beloved for English, i completely forgot to write a blog post. Though, in hindsight, if I had remembered, I probably would have just gone to sleep anyway, as by the time i did get to sleep last night it was past 2 am. Which is why I'm posting an entry today rather than yesterday.

Anyway, so Jonathan proposed the topic of make-up in his post last week, and so that's what I'm gonna talk about

I personally don't wear makeup, because it takes too long (even if it's only ten minutes -- in the morning every extra minute of sleep is a plus) and I don't find it necessary. I do own makeup, from years when I used to wear mascara to school, and also because I wear makeup to dances most of the time. On the rare chance that I do wear makeup it's usually eyeshadow, mascara, and eyeliner, possible foundation and concealer. The only thing I ever put on my lips is chapstick (or any other product whose sole function is to un-chap your lips). I generally use more eye makeup than anything else, because I like my eyes, and like drawing attention to them, but I tend to keep the makeup less dramatic.

In terms of what I find, aesthetically to be too much? When people are wearing makeup and I can't tell, it normally is helping in subtler way than fanciful makeup, such as brightening the skin, covering pimples, of lightening bags under the eyes. There's one girl in my grade who wears her makeup for essentially this purpose, so when she doesn't wear makeup it is really noticeable and she looks tired and sometimes sickly (though, this is also probably why she didn't putting it on to begin with). So I think that's a potential problem of wearing makeup consistently. When someone's makeup is dramatic to the point that it looks costume-y (like looking at someone wearing stage makeup up close) or like they're a different person, I generally find it unattractive. I also think that "too much" makeup can often look haphazard or cheap sometimes. But, ultimately, it's not my face and I don't really care.

Really, what I hate is the idea that people feel as though makeup is going to make them "prettier", or that people feel like they need to feel prettier period.  Even though makeup can often look really cool and artistic, and can often highlight nice facial features, I think most people look just as pretty, if not prettier without makeup than with makeup.

Recommendation: the 2010 film production of Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company. David Tennant and Patrick Stewart are amazing in it (I can't think of a time when I've been unimpressed by David Tennant, though). I would also suggest watching it with subtitles, because sometimes it's hard to catch exactly what's being said.

Where my stitches at?

So I had an absolutely brilliant topic to write about this week, but then I forgot it. Instead, I shall tell you about my knitting because I've been doing it a lot through my spring break and I'm really excited about it, and hopefully it turns out as good as whatever my other brilliant idea was.

I started knitting after I got my acceptance letter from my top choice college. I thought it would be a good way to relax after all the stress of the previous 3.5 years of high school and months of college applications, while still allowing me to be productive. My mom had done a bit of knitting in the past, so she taught me the basic knit stitch. Then I, like every other beginning knitter, made a scarf. It started out small, and I made a lot of mistakes. There were many times in the beginning when I would accidentally add stitches onto my work, and my scarf kept getting wider and wider.

After restarting a couple times, I finally got the hang of it. And then I was knitting all the time. I had several movie parties with friends over the break, and I knitted through all of them. After countless movies, Glee episodes, and Doctor Who episodes, I had a scarf that was probably about six feet long and thick enough to be a blanket. It's pretty much the coziest thing I own, and I am ridiculously proud of it.

Then I started working on a hat for my mom. However, the pattern I had required me to learn some new stitches and my mom was out of town, so I had to learn from the internet. If it weren't for knittinghelp.com, I probably never would have finished it. I also found knitting forums full of helpful people who were able to give me advice when I had no idea of what I was doing. Even with all of the amazing resources out there, I still struggled like a newb. About half of the stitches I made were wrong and it became a confusing labyrinth of yarn. Eventually I got the hang of it, but at that point I realized that some parts were such messes that they were just going to be random holes and knots and I would just have to deal. Eventually I finished that hat and it looked quite nice, as long as you ignore the mysteries at the bottom.

And then I went on to knit a pair of mittens. By that point, I'd gotten good enough that the only problem was that they were quite a bit too big for my little sister's tiny hands. SUCCESS! And now I'm working on fingerless gloves for a friend with a really neat spiraling pattern. I really like these gloves because even though they're a more complicated pattern, I don't have to knit fingers, which is quite nice. And now I'm so happy because I actually know what I'm doing and I think it shows. So I guess this all goes to show that practice really does make perfect. Also, the internet is an extremely helpful resource.

Anyway, my recomendation for this week is Flight of the Conchords. The show is hilarious and fantastic. It's two New Zealanders who are in a band that writes comedy songs, and they've moved to NYC to try and become popular. However, their agent is terrible and they only have one crazy fan. My summary probably sounds terrible, but it really is hilarious. If you can't watch the show, I suggest you at least listen to the songs. I've been listening to them all week, and they are pretty much all amazing.

A little of this, and a little of that.

Allright, so this week's topics has been very different, so I think I'll sum up my opinions etc. on these topics. And then I'll talk about something that I've done a lot today.

So I think I covered the topic school last week, so I'll skip that part. But good luck to find your college, Rebecca! (:

Now, music. So I like all kinds. I recently purchased Jamie Cullum and a Doctor Who Soundtrack. And I own a copy of all Muse albums. So I have a broad taste in music. But as of late, the only things I am listening to is wrock, trock and Youtube musicians.

Before I developed personal taste, I listened to - and liked Britney Spears and just pop music in general. Oh, and there was good 2 years of my life, where my "life's soundtrack" was Destiny's Child. It's safe to say, that I'm over that phase now.

I was quite suppressed musically as younger, since you weren't popular, if you didn't listen to specific musicians/bands or watched something called Popstars.

It's still like that. Most people likes Bruno Mars and Rihanna, and there's nothing wrong with that. I just want to hear music, that matters to me, I don't care if I'm the only girl in the world, with lips someone would kiss all day if I'd let him.

It's just - and this sounds A. frightening or B. insane, but I want to only listen to music that I care about, since life is too short to listen to stuff you just don't care about at all.

Now, clowns.

I think clowns are scary because of IT. I never saw it, I just know that I would be so freaked out scared, that I wouldn't be able to live properly for.. a very long time. I haven't even watched Paranormal Activity, but my friend told me about this (and I'm sorry, if you're easy scared and doesn't know this) scene, where something invisible under a bed throws a woman out of it and drags her down the staircase. So now, I'm not taking any chances with creepy stuff or having my feet anywhere else but under my duvet. Not even in the mornings.

But clowns. I dread clowns when I once in very rare time goes to the circus. I mean. I'm not scared of them, but there's something creepy about them. And reading Jonathan's view on clowns, I'm feeling a bit odd for ever laughing at them failing their tasks. Even though it's amusing, or supposed to be amusing, I don't know if it's right to do it.

And today. I have cleaned my room (almost impossible task) and then, because I recently received some books, ran out of space. So I emptied all the bookshelves and started reorganizing and arranging on priority, awesomeness and how-much-will-I-ever-need-this, and managed to throw away my Twilight series and a Destiny's Child cd (that's irony. Right there)

It looks, if I may say so, good now. All of my bed was filled with all my stuff, and it's a quite big bed. And it's 8 small shelves. So.. It wasn't very fun and I ended up moving my films three times before finding a place that I liked.

Oh, and I have a suggestion for a theme next week (or sometime else): opinion/view on make-up - how much/little? Why etc. - what do you think?

Anyway, I'll stop here, but with a Thursday Top 3:

1. Script Frenzy, which has turned out to be so much more fun than anticipated

2. Lost. An episode a day is awesome. Brilliant and sometimes terrifying show.

3. Chocolate Chip Cookies. <3

DFTBA (:

Clowns

First of all, sorry about not being able to post last week. My internet access has been limited and i was not able to write something up :(

Anyway I was going to write about something like school or movies are whatnot, but as I was walking home from school today I though to myself, 'you know what would be cool to write about? Clowns.' and so here I am.

I'm sure we have all seen clowns as they are ideally portrayed, with their giant multicoloured wigs and their face paint and goofy walks. I went to a circus when I was like 10, and I still remember seeing the clowns there and genuinely thinking that these guys were actually pretty amusing.

So now that I'm slightly older and have a slightly broader view of the world, I want to understand why clowns are so entertaining and yet so creepy at the same time. Why little needs to be done for a jovial jester to become a horrid harlequin has always been a mystery to me.

So I thought back to when I had been at that circus. What had I like about the clowns? what made them funny? Well for starters they were performing slapstick and generally attempting to do something and failing in the most exaggerated way possible. Is the process of watching other people fail what makes us so amused by them? I thought about that in the context of modern television too, and I realized that the antics of these clowns, like silent film stars such as charlie chaplin, were so compelling because the characters were made to be cartoons. They get makeup put on their face to make them look almost alien and unlike any normal person. As characters they are removed from reality and completely 1 dimensional, so nobody could relate to them and therefore nobody felt their pain at failing to get up that ladder or to paint that wall correctly. By making these characters harmless and cartoony, people dont really feel any shame for them and as such can enjoy their misery to its fullest (but that still leaves the question fo why people enjoy others misery; schadenfreude perhaps?).

And I think this is why they can be so creepy. Because as we grow up and begin to think about these things (who are these people? why do they keep falling on that oil slick? do they have hopes and dreams as well?), we realize that these characters whom people have created are actually pretty irregular, almost crazy. The face-paint becomes more unnerving, the floppy movements and constant trying of the same thing becomes more of a sign of insanity, and we slowly realize that the concept of a clown is that of a highly disfunctional and mentally childish person.

The last thing that I think allows clowns to become so creepy to us is that they are fundamentally a part of childhood. Regardless of whether we've actually seen them, clowns are embedded into the consciousness of our society, and as such we feel for them nonetheless. It seems that we as a society hold our childhood a sacred, and that is why having it violated fears us so greatly. If you look at creepy and scary stories, a lot of them come from taking a childhood object and making it into a monster (eg gremlins, chuckie). It seems that the fact that we took comfort in those things as kids make it all the more scary when they turn out to be watching us as we sleep.

so yeah, just my thoughts. What do you guys think makes clowns so scary?

anyway my reccomendation for this week is adventuretime. Its this completely innocent and yet awesome in its enthusiasm show about two heroes who adventure and get into fun mishaps. Think spongebob but just better and more self-aware.

DFTBA :D

Music!

So to go in a completely different direction than Rebecca, I'm going to talk about music! It can be our theme, if that's okay with everyone. I'm extremely sorry if you're not into music, but I really wanted to blog about this. :)

I spend a lot of my time listening to music. I listen during study halls, homework, and just doing other things. I know that multitasking isn't very good, but some things are too boring to go without music. My mom usually has to yell at me every night, "It's nine o'clock! Turn off the music!" I definitely consider myself to be a music nerd.

One thing about my musical taste is that if I love a song/band, I become obsessed with it and can't stop listening to it/them over and over for days. Eventually, I find a new song/band to be infatuated with, and the old song is left in the dust. It really is sad. I think I'm getting better at it, though.

I'm really into alternative rock or pop punk/rock. I just started listening to a band called You, Me, and Everyone We Know. They are really good and I almost saw them at a concert on Saturday, but I missed them by about 2 minutes. I was so disappointed. I also saw the Ready Set, We Are The In Crowd, The Downtown Fiction, and All Star Weekend. It was amazing. Paramore and the Glamour Kills Tour (the one with the Ready Set, You, Me, and Everyone We Know, etc) are the only concerts I've been to, other than free, outdoor ones in my city. I really love going to concerts, so I hope I get a chance to go to some more!

Like a lot of people, I've had music phases. Because I was born in the 90's, I was a fan of the Backstreet Boys and Avril Lavigne when I was younger. (who didn't listen to a 90's boy band?) I also had a weird Shania Twain kick, too. I don't really know where that came from. After that, I really got into Paramore, and they kind of opened my eyes to the world of music. Lately, I've been into Angels and Airwaves, Anberlin, Box Car Racer, and blink-182. I like some YouTube musicians, like Hank and Charlie McDonnell, but I don't listen to them that much.

I don't know about you guys, but I really like having an actual, physical album, not just the songs off of iTunes. I like looking at the covers and the lyric books. People put so much time into thinking about their album cover. I do have an iPod, though. They are so handy!

As you can probably see, I really love music and I cannot live without it! Thanks for letting me talk about it for a while!

Recommendation: You, Me, and Everyone We Know! Just check them out! If you don't like them, that's fine! Every one's got their own tastes. Talk to ya later!

DFTBA :)

As Above, So Below

So, I really don't know if this post will able to fit nicely (or awkwardly, even) into a theme, because I figured I should talk a little bit about my "college tour" now that it's over and I am (finally) back home.

My mom, my sisters and I left Ohio on Monday morning (closer to the afternoon, really) to drive to Pennsylvania in order to visit Haverford and Swarthmore, and on Tuesday we went to visit Haverford.  Now, before the trip, I hadn't even considered most of the schools we visited, so I wasn't particularly excited to go to Haverford (not that I was unexcited). My mom had wanted to get to Haverford by a certain time, but between getting four people awake, dressed and fed, plus the time it took to drive from the motel we were staying at to the college (plus the time for my mom to get lost) we ended up being late, and missing the tour we had originally planned on taking. But, as it happened, we ended up being early to one of the info session. Haverford's admission's office had two seniors sitting there to talk to people waiting for the info sessions about the college.  I really liked this about Haverford, and it was nice to ask questions and get a sense of the school before going to the info session.

What I really liked about Haverford that I learned from those two seniors and the info session, was the colleges' Honor Code.  Haverford's Honor Code is built on the principle's of Concern, Respect and Truth/Trust and is reviewed by the student population each semester. Throughout my time at Haverford, I was constantly impressed (upon) about how much these principle's affected the community (a word that got used too many times to count). Students were comfortable leaving their laptops out in the library (I can't even trust that my bike will still be locked to a bike rack most of the time), tests and exams are self-scheduled (I mean, with some parameters, but still), and students aren't nervous to tell their neighbors (dormmates) that their music is too loud.

On Tuesday, the plan had initially been to visit Haverford for a tour and info session, eat, go to Swarthmore where we were planning on doing another tour or info session and me sitting in a class.  I actually had been looking forward to the Swarthmore part of the day, but the plan couldn't really go as planned, with us running (well, arriving) late. My mom suggested we leave Haverford after the info session, but I found Haverford so enthralling by that point that I really didn't want to leave. Our tour guide was another (very nice) senior, who managed to give a wonderful and engaging tour, despite the ridiculous number of people on the tour. And in the process I learned more about Haverford and grew to really like it (maybe even love it a bit), and by the end of the tour I was seriously considering applying there and could see myself liking it there.

The class I visited at Swarthmore was a bit lackluster, but I think (hope) that was the case because I had decided upon a class that happened to be showing a movie that day.  I left Swarthmore that day hoping that it would similarly (if not completely) engage me the next day when we went on the tour and to the info session as Haverford had. It didn't. Our tour guide didn't seem particularly well trained, the wait for the tour was boring (and included a movie documenting different Swarthmore students' experiences that screamed cheesy testimonial infomercial), and I felt as though Swarthmore was a bit full of itself. But, maybe that's just me.

So, Wednesday we were prepared to leave PA, stopping in Philadelphia to eat and visit the Poe museum there before we were on hour way to Massachusetts. That ride was supposed to be five hours long. It was eight in the end (my mom getting lost was a recurring theme on the trip).

On Thursday we visited the next college on our list: Smith. Smith is an all women college in Northampton, Massachusetts. I was looking forward to visiting Smith, but mostly because I thought it might be a bit of fun, I never really considered it as a school I might want to go to. I never really wanted to go to an all female school, maybe on some strange idea that doing so would mean I didn't see myself as "good enough" to compete with the boys at a coed school, or that only being surrounded by women (or mostly surrounded by women, anyway) would be boring. I kinda want to slap myself for those ideas now. I suppose the first thing I learned by visiting Smith was that it's really a place where strong, intelligent and probably largely independent women come, where they are able to grow without fear of feeling or being silenced and overshadowed by men. I guess this nuance was originally lost on me. Of course, there are going to be men at Smith, since it's a part of a five college consortium, which include three coed schools (as well as another women's college).

Smith was similar to Haverford in many ways, they were both safe campuses (as in, they specified this on their tours, that the students never felt as though they were in danger), they both valued community and really worked to establish that with how they set up their housing situation, and they both had a sort of cozy, welcoming feel to them (to me at least). Smith had a prettier campus in my opinion though, and the town that it is situated in seemed a bit more inclusive and was large enough to have things to do, but small enough that it probably wouldn't seem overwhelming or scary to me if I went their (though I do like big cities, I just don't know how much I want to live in one). There were also fewer touring families at Smith, so I got a tour guide to myself, which was wonderful. My guide, Hope, really just walked next to me, taking me to various buildings, and talking to me about the school. I felt comfortable talking to her, like we were having a conversation rather than feeling like I was on a tour. I think it helped me to get a better sense of the school and atmosphere there (also, everyone [all the people we met, anyway] was super helpful and nice). I left Smith, extremely reluctant to leave Smith, and I was really longing to just enroll then and there. So, somehow, a college that I never considered I would ever be interested in, made it to the top of my list.

Which leads me to Friday, and our last visit, which was to Williams, which had been one of my top choice schools initially. I'm going to keep this one short, because this post is getting long (it's also getting late here). Essentially, I thought Williams was a really good school and it was a nice campus, but I thought that it was a place I wouldn't really fit in, let alone a place where I thought I could grow or have particularly good experiences in. So, while a school that I would have never originally considered jumped to the top, the school that had been close to the top for a long time fell to the bottom.

Sometime in the next couple weeks I will be (hopefully) going on a tour of Oberlin which is the school that I've wanted to go to for the majority of my life, to reevaluate it, and see how it compares to Smith and Haverford.

If you made it to the end of this post: here have a cookie. :)

Recommendation: If you don't read it already, I recommend the blog "Hyperbole and a Half". Because it is hilarious.

P.S. I f you hadn't already noticed, I really like post-scripts (and parenthetical asides [and sometimes, parenthetical asides within parenthetical asides]). have a great week everybody! :)

Internet Habits and Nerdy Excitement

Rebecca - I've heard a lot about TV tropes, but haven't really gotten around to checking it out. It sounds really interesting, though, so I'll probably look into it this weekend.
Susie - I definitely feel the same way about learning and teachers and math and science and literature. And I've only managed to watch about half of AVPM so far, and I forgot where I left off. It can be another thing for me to do this weekend!
Simone - Congrats on your new job, and feel better! And I definitely check teefury on a regular basis but never ever buy anything because I don't have a credit card and I don't feel like bothering my parents about it. It's a bit unfortunate. I do the same thing with ModCloth, which isn't a nerdy internet thing, but I just think they have some of the prettiest dresses ever.

I also have a fairly specific order I use my computer in. I start with Facebook and scroll through the news feed to see what people have been up to and respond to anything that needs responding. Then I check Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Cyanide and Happiness, and any other webcomics that I know have new comics. After that is Your Pants, especially the epic Doctor Who thread in there, and this is usually followed by YouTube. Then, I check up on anything else that I feel needs checking up on, and then I wander the interent. I end up spending quite a bit of my internet time on StumbleUpon, which you should definitely go to if you haven't heard of it before.

As for academic interests, I'm pretty much a science and math nerd. I'm still interested in reading, writing, history, art, music, and whatnot, but those interests aren't as big as my love for math and science. I just love how they can explain pretty much everything that happens in the universe. There are so many complex phenomena in the world, and science and math have explanations for almost all of them. And there are all these amazing things they can prove that are straight-up mind-boggling, like quantum mechanics, and they fascinate me to no end.

Speaking of my love of science, I'm pretty excited because the state competition for Science Olympiad is in two weeks. It's going to be so much fun. I love Science Olympiad, and I love all the people who do it with me. I have quite a bit of studying to do for it before then, but it's definitely worth it.

Recommendation for the week: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's another one of those things I kept hearing about and finally decided to check out tonight. I've only finished act 1 so far, but it's pretty fantastic at this point. It's all on YouTube, which makes it pretty convenient to watch.
Anyway, I'm off to finish watching that. DFTBA!