Happy Mother's Day!

Have a wonderful Mother's Day, everybody. Go hug your mother, call her up, or just say "I love you". She deserves it.

I didn't appreciated my parents as much as I ought to have when I was younger, because I figured it was just fun to have kids. After being a babysitter, and being exhausted after each job, I have so much more understanding for how hard it must me. Mothers do the running- after- of- children, cooking, cleaning, playing, and shuttling 27/4, and WITHOUT PAY. Not to mention that they gave birth to you in the first place. Wow. Eighteen years of dedication right there, just with a little bundle of joy, who stays around the house for almost two decades. We all take our mothers for granted, and never realize that hard work that they put in every day. And there's really no such thing as a sick day.

When I used to complain that there was never a Kid's Day, my mom would assure me that every day is Kid's Day. I thought that was dumb, but now I see that it's true. Kids are so carefree, so blissfully ignorant, that every day is like a day off for them (us), no matter how much school or practicing or whatever is added in. Half the things my mom told me when I was younger that I thought was complete rubbish is probably something that I'd say to a kid nowadays. So that's the key word for today...again. Perspective!

Waiting

I feel like I'm just waiting.

It's as though my whole life so far is building up to something great, the thing that I've been anticipating for. I always seem to have something to look forward to, but I have no idea what it is. Under my subconscious, hidden beneath layers of thoughts and events, the answer might be lying somewhere, but at the moment it's as tangible as the moon. I guess it makes a good reason to live, though.

The name of this blog literally translates to "to live the life" in Spanish, which is pretty much the same thing as the saying "living life" in English. When I set it up, that's what I wanted to talk about-life. There's no one thing that I could cover, and if I could, it would bore both me and you immediately. Pretty much, I appointed myself to analyze life and everything that I come across, and try to either figure it out or confuse it further, getting lost in the strands of information, like a mess of tangled yarn. But if I'm living life, and writing about it every day or every other day, what about the things that make no sense? What about the future, which nobody can tell?

Not knowing what you're waiting for is such a wonderful thing, though. You have no idea what lie in store for you, but it's certain to be fantastic, since you're traveling along a path unknown to others, with the routes that may come along only applying to and affecting you. Maybe I'll graduate high school with honors. Maybe I'll learn how to speak Finnish. Maybe I'll survive a giant earthquake (or not). I don't see how anyone could be so sick and tired of life that it has no interest anymore. Sure, I feel tired sometimes and just want to sleep for a week, but at least there's still the hidden surprise and suspense of not knowing what happens next. Older people who think that they have no time to do anything with their remaining time are wrong-there's always time for something else. The more you do, the more you discover...maybe you'll eventually find out what you've been waiting for your entire life. Sorry to be so cheesy, but live life to its fullest, and never let yourself believe that you won't be able to have reach great potential you deserve.

Recognizing My Faults

Ever since I was eight, I've been part of a website that really shaped my life. In trush, I joined for the magazine, which empowers girls and helps them feel positive, but I've met the most amazing girls ever on this site, and learned so much from them. They're different than my real life friends, but in good ways. I know I can turn to them and talk about things my schoolmates don't care about, and I've even had some friendships turn to real ones, where I know the girl (I wrote about it a while ago). Now I can say that she's one of my best friends.

That aside, the point of this entire program was to keep things positive, and inspire inner beauty, etc. The problem is that I know that I have faults, but I don't really want to complain about them there. Instead, I'll come right out and put them here. Everybody has faults, I know that. Everyone has somehing that they should fix, and everybody's a bit vain sometimes. What I'm about to write isn't a rant on life, it's my self constructive criticism. There are so many things that I know I do that I should improve on, but either I can't figure the right way out, or I have no time to try and fix it. Some of them are just the way that I am.

-I bow way too close to the fingerboard sometimes. This drives me insane when I see other people do it, but it's natural for my arm to move that way, and I can't think about that and a long run of sixteenth notes that span on two strings in second position at the same time. My wrist won't bend at the right angle when I want it to (not a right angle, the correct angle), and it frustrates me. A lot.

-I procrastinate. I'm sure that everyone suffers from this in one way or another, but I will get this idea in my head sometimes that I have more time than I really do, and I can do something later. When that time comes, I realize that I really don't have enough time, and I don't really want to be doing this anyway. While I'm putting it off, it's just tugging in the back of my brain. It's so much better to finish a long day at dance knowing that you can go home and not worry about work than it is to know you have to write a paper when you get home, but I keep on doing this to myself.

-When I hold out my arms in second position, it looks okay when I'm facing the mirrors, but it looks horrible from the side. I honestly don't know what I'm doing wrong. I've gotten a lot better at using my wrists and looking at my hands, but it still looks wrong, I'm worried that I'm not a solid enough dancer, and that my moves don't connect. I probably worry more than I should.

-I compare myself to people too much. I'm sure that if I were homeschooled and had no one else to compare scores with, I'd be happier with standardized tests and other grades, but all I can do now is think about what my other friends got. It's true that we're all pretty smart, but that just calls for more competition. I wish my mind wouldn't work that way, but I worry too much about what other people will think of me, even though they probably aren't thinking about me at all.

-I hate criticism.

Now some things I have improved on: (I really don't want to add to the previous list that I talk about myself too much, so I'll try not to sound self-centered).

-I've gotten a lot better at talking to adults, and other kids. When I went to an orchestra rehearsal with a bunch of kids a didn't know, I commented on someone's Doctor Who shirt, introduced myself to some other musicians, and tried to not be as shy as I used to be. I'll talk on the phone more now, and ask employees for instructions or directions at the store.

-I've gotten a better sound at the violin, even though I can't keep the darn bow near the bridge. My sound is bigger, and I've gotten a lot better at vibrato, which is nice.

-I honestly don't care about the hardships of middle school health anymore. The first few days of the unit were are little awkward, and I had to tell myself that I needed to be mature. Now, a week later, it's actually a really interesting class, considering my 23-year-old math teacher is teaching it, and even she has trouble being mature sometimes. I'm just happy that I can handle it now, and am not embarrassed by every little thing.

So, what about you? What are some things you need to work on, and other tihngs that you have fixed? I'd love to hear them, and if you want to, let me know (via comment or whatever). Sorry if I bore you with a long analysis of my life.


Also, I just finished My Sister's Keeper yesterday, and I'm thinking of writing a review on it. Maybe.We'll see.

Staring Off Into Space

Sometimes, without even noticing it, I'll suddenly snap out of it, and realize that for the past few minutes, I've been staring at a random spot that nobody else can see, so deep in thought that I don't notice anything around me.

I do this a lot, actually. It's one of those things that you can't think about and do, but it happens when you least expect it, and suddenly you realize that you just missed an entire conversation, or a set of instructions given to you by your teacher. Inside my head, there's a whole other world, like a parallel universe, that I go and live in for a while, just thinking to myself. Life moves so fast, and sometimes we need a break to sit there and go over it slowly, even if it does mean missing an entire three minutes in which you could be learning, listening, or watching. It's not sleep, or dreams, which you can't always control. That's your subconscious, the darkest, deepest pits of your mind, only accessible in the dead of night, when you really close your eyes and succumb to the day. This is just skimming the top of that, giving you a break from life, and letting your mind take it where it wants to. When I was younger and trying to go to sleep, I would close my eyes and think of something, and then think of the next thing that popped into my head, like watching shapes morph in front of my eyes. While this might seem crazy to some of you, my dance teacher did the same thing a few years ago, having us start motions and then keep on going, turning it into whatever we thought of next. Apparently some little kids did this in school for writing and called it a brain-throw-up. I call it thinking.

If you're watching somebody stare off into space, if looks that he or she is asleep, dead to the world. As everyone knows, Gandalf sleeps with his eyes open, and of course it's possible that we're all really wizards and have short naps in the middle of the day, while it looks like we're really awake. If you do see anyone deep in thought, just spacing out, do not, do not, wave your hand in front of her face. That is the worst thing that can ever happen, worse than being woken up at the crack of dawn by an air horn in your ear. I have friends who will do that while I'm reading a book, because apparently I was reading so intently that they thought I was just lost in thought. Again.

I rather like that term, though. Lost in thought. It's more mysterious than lost in space, which either makes me think of the show or that robot from Futurama literally floating around in space. It's more specific than lost in time, which is like a penny that sits on the sidewalk for decades and never gets used. Thoughts are like a black hole, infinite and all unexplored. When you think about it (thinking again), you're the only one, in the entire world, who knows what you think. Just in that round part of your body near that top, in that mushy organ, you can have stories, emotions, conversations, knowledge, and images hidden, waiting to be uncovered, but only by you. Am I the only one who finds that fascinating? Of course, with all of the writing I've been doing on here lately, I've kind of appointed myself to analyze every aspect of life I can think about. Just doing this can lead you on all sorts of roads in your own head, trying to figure things out and meeting dead ends, or tying knots. I've probably created numerous paradoxes by accident, or discovered them, just trying to find the answers. See what I mean about being deep in thought? It's like an abyss, and we can never reach the end. It will only get deeper.

Happy National Nerd Day!

May the fourth be with you! (Ha, ha).

My high school is holding Nerdapalooza (an opportunity for geeks to get together and eat pizza and play video games and wear their giant belt buckles), the Dalek Empire is rising, and Darth Vader says he is Luke's father. (Why couldn't Voldemort be Harry Potter's father? Or evil uncle? Or Dumbledore's long lost son? That would be cool).

Oh, and DFTBA. :)

Double Posting Day, and All of My Doctor Who Encounters Today

Happy double posting day! I feel bad that I haven't really been writing anything recently, like I said I would (well, I told myself that I would), so to make up for it, I will compile a random list of the strange, strange things that happened in my life today, that have something to do with Doctor Who. Just to clarify, my mind automatically relates everything with Doctor Who, and I make references in about every other sentence, so this is even more strange. I'm actually thinking of building a shrine in my room, just for the heck of it, because I have a TARDIS beach towel and no place to put it yet, but that's more of a summer project. Be prepared for updates, though.

So.

-Since it's always hat day on Friday at my school, my classmate decided to wear his old fashioned gas mask to school. Great idea. The moment I walked into Spanish in first period, I almost collapsed with fear, because honestly, who would actually wear one of those to school? Also, he sits next to me in math, and thought it would be really funny if he sneaked up behind me and said "are you my mummy?" Not funny.

-My mom emailed her friends, or her friends emailed her or something, about the book the Stone Angel, and I saw it when she left it up on the computer. Enough said.

-When we had a presentation today about courtroom judges, the presenter started talking about statues, and then pictures of statues.

-When we were marching today, one of the commands, the one to stop, contains the sound of drums. Good luck for me keeping a straight face tomorrow.

Ha ha! Don't blink.

The Week in Review

I started out this week happy that I wasn't going to school on Monday. Of course, Monday was one of the longest days of my life, and seemed more like a weekend than an actual weekday, so when I really started school on Tuesday, I felt like I wanted to crawl into a hole and sleep there for a few months. Some weeks seem like eternity, and others breeze by without a hitch. If I were to graph this one, though, it would be a bell curve: I started out with a wonderful attitude,  went on to sport a melancholy, exhausted feeling, and then ended again, today, actually wanting to go to school again. How's that for a roller coaster?

I learned so much on Monday, though. Orch dorks are the best people in the world, no doubt, and a day with about fifty of them is the next best thing. Who would have thought that there were so many of them in Oregon? It was absolute heaven to look around and see a girl with a bass clef, a treble clef, and a viola clef on the back of her sweatshirt, to meet a bass clarinetist obsessed with the Phantom of the Opera, and to talk to cellists with perfect pitch, who can tell any song by the first three measures. I also realized that, while playing, I wasn't even thinking about the music anymore. It was just natural, ingrained into my brain. The violin was an extension of my arm, much like how a pointe shoes just becomes a normal shoe after a while.

To tell you the truth, I don't even remember what happened exactly on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. We had a band competition on Wednesday, I read a few books, the sun came out, random people starting talking about my writing, I went to dance...after a while, my life kind of blends together, into one big day, even though I'm exhausted at the end of each one. During band the other day, I caught a glimpse of the score for Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony peeking out from underneath the tottering pile of scores on the conductor's stand. When I thought about it, I vaguely remembered it, but couldn't for the life of me think of whether we played it last year or this one. According to my friend, we played it this year, but intermediate band is all one big year to me. Seventh grade seems like another life, but I can't distinguish between the two.

It's weird, though. When I look at it one way, I feel like this year has gone by really fast, and I can't possibly be going to high school in a few months. But when I think of a particular event that happened this year, I can't believe how long ago it was. It's been wonderful, but I wish it would go on forever. When I hear seniors start talking about how hard these last few weeks are, I can only think about myself (of course), and how soon I'll be in their place. It isn't that soon, I know, but I do remember when they were my age, and the biggest kids I knew. When my teacher says that we're going to be "outta here soon", and how we need to get our graduating pictures taken, it's kind of terrifying. High school seems nice...but I don't want to go.


Happiness has struck yet again today, though. The sun rose into the sky and actually stayed there, I finished all of my assignments, aced two tests, and got to march in band again. Tomorrow will be the parade, during the hottest day of the year, no less (80 degrees Fahrenheit!), and that will be another wonderful thing done. And then it's dance again on Sunday...

It's just a little segment, but each week feels like a life.