The Prologue

Hallo!

That's what the flight attendant said to me when I first boarded Lufthansa's Boeing 747 almost exactly a month ago. The flight was to Frankfurt, and Lufthansa is a German airline, which meant that the entire flight crew was bilingual, with some level of accent. Up until that moment, I had never been on an airplane that big. I had never boarded a plane that would leave Boston and go east. I had never even been in the international terminal of Logan airport, but there I was, and I was getting ready to go further than I'd ever gone before. And that greeting was the moment I realized I was actually going to Europe.

I should probably back up. Several months ago, back in February, my grandma in Rhode Island emailed my parents with an idea she had had. She was the middle of her third month living alone after my grandpa passed away in December, and had been talking to some of her friends from the local chorus she had sung with for over thirty years. The chorus had taken three international trips in the past, the most recent one nineteen years ago, and was planning another one in July, for ten days in three different countries. My grandma stopped singing with them about five years ago, but still knew most of the members, and had a lot of people asking her if she was going to go. After looking over the destinations and what the group would be doing, she contacted my family and explained the situation. Then she asked me if I wanted to go. It would be a musical tour, she said, in great cities with amazing people. If we scheduled things accordingly, I could fly out to meet her and we could get back to Rhode Island the day before my parents and brother arrived from Oregon for our usual two-week trip to the east coast. And that's how I ended up going to Prague, Vienna and Budapest with the Chorus of Westerly.

For me, this was actually a dream come true. I had spent the majority of middle school talking endlessly about Europe, connecting castles and sights I planned to visit someday into all of my essays and projects. In seventh grade, I did a project where I planned out a dream trip to Europe, right down to the exact dollar. According to my itinerary, I "went" to France, Germany and Austria and saw some amazing things. I also learned a lot. I'm the kind of person (or maybe it's just me) who has an idea of what Ireland or France or whatever looks like in my head, and then sticks with it and pretends that I know what I'm talking about. I did tons of research for this project, and it became my dream to actually travel to Europe someday. I live in Oregon, 6,000 away from these places. For all I knew, the rest of the world didn't really exist and I lived in a bubble like The Truman Show or something. I needed to get out there and see it. When this opportunity came up, it was so surreal that I almost didn't believe it. The first miracle.

I told everyone I knew or thought would care, of course, and then everyone who asked me what I was doing during the summer. My best friend freaked out with me, after saying that it was "almost as good as Disney World," (her family's spring break trip) and that I would have to bring her back something. My violin and band teacher smiled knowingly, thinking of the rich musical history in all of the cities. I looked up the temperature for central Europe in the summer, panicked because I didn't have that many summer clothes, and went to Goodwill to stock up. I checked on my passport every day to make sure it was still there. I listened to recordings of meetings that were going on in Rhode Island so I would be up to speed on my information. Everyone told me that I was going to have the time of my life, and even though I was really nervous to be away from home for so long and go off to another country for the first time, I was extremely excited.

On July 9th, I said goodbye to my dad, brother, dog and the beautiful place where I live and drove with my mom to Portland so I could catch a red-eye flight to Boston. We stopped at my great- aunt and uncle's house in the city for dinner, and walked around the campus of Lewis and Clark College (I'm going to have to start thinking about that whole college thing at some point, and I guess that now is better than later). Around ten, we drove out to the airport, which was still pretty busy considering it was late at night, checked in, and went to wait at the gate, from where my plane would depart after midnight (gotta love those overnight flights.) Even though I've been on countless planes in my lifetime, most of them to Boston, I had never been on one alone, and never overnight, and was terrified out of my wits as we waited around with the rest of the people I would be stuck with in a metal tube for the next six hours. When it was time for me to board, I took a deep breath, hugged my mom goodbye, and walked down the walkway thingie, by myself in one of those things for the first time ever.

After I got on the plane, things didn't seem as bad. I got an aisle seat, which was nice, and Jet Blue provides nice televisions, which I didn't actually watch, but were a nice amenity. I tried to fall asleep, which made the long flight go back a lot faster, and when I woke up, it was light outside and we were descending into Boston. I was born outside of Boston and lived there for the first six years of my life, but I had never been there without the rest of my family, and it was actually terribly exciting. I followed the signs (#1 rule of the airport, according to everyone who told me about traveling alone) down to baggage claim, where I met up with my 20-year-old cousin, a student at Tufts University who's living in Boston and working as an engineer intern. After retrieving my bag, we made our way to the train station via public transportation, and then took a detour through Chinatown and the financial district so that she could drop off a box for work that had been haunting her for the past twenty-four hours (it's a long story). We made it back to the train station about fifteen minutes before my train arrived, and she told me everything I would need to know about railway travel. Fifteen minutes later, I was on a train to Rhode Island, so that my grandma could pick me up, and the while thinking "Ha ha ha, I'm doing this more or less ALONE!"

Nothing too exciting happened after that. That is, until the big trip started. My grandma got me from the train station and we spent the next day and a half sorting out foreign money, dropping off plants at the neighbor's house, reading up on the countries we'd be going to, and running errands. I knew my perspective on the world was going to change in a few days, and in a way it kind of already had. Either way, I couldn't wait. Those days in suspense, wondering what the future would bring, were like I was Maria von Trapp leaving the abbey for the first time and singing about confidence. Except the US was my abbey, and Europe was the von Trapp's estate.

Here's my dresser in Rhode Island with some random essentials, and then all of the money I had, in different currencies.

I'll continue in the next post with the day we left and onwards to Prague.

More about the Chorus: http://www.chorusofwesterly.org/site/PageServer?pagename=deploymenthome

A Very Potter Birthday

I really am back now. I mean it. Rereading everything I wrote on here in eighth grade, I realized how much of that I had forgotten, and how things looked through my eyes back then. I shouldn't put all of my faith into a computer to save my memories, but it's a good place for them to be, and a place where other people can read them. The title of this blog means "living the life." If my life became a book, it would basically be about nothing, just another lifetime out of billions. But it's a story, no matter how monotonous or ridiculous, and I should probably write it down. When I die, my life will eventually fade into oblivion, like everyone else's, but it's writing that keeps history alive and real. I'm not trying to insinuate that my story will be the one that future archaeologists look at to figure out how people lived way back in the 21st century, but if I've learned anything from writing, it's that it keeps ideas and stories alive. I feel really bad that I didn't really document my freshman year at all, but I'll try to keep up with my sophomore year as best as I can. I won't make any more promises or excuses, but I think I owe it to myself to try to stick with this goal. If I did it once, I can do it again.

Anyway, now that whole thing's out of the way, I can focus on the cool stuff. Shortly following this post will be an amazing, fantastical post I promised a lot of people I would write, and I'm actually pretty curious as to how it will turn out. It's possibly it will take me a few days to finish, and I might end up putting it up in chunks so it's easier to follow, but it will be there soon.

I was in Rhode Island last week, and found myself once again celebrating Harry Potter's birthday by making sure we stopped at Stop & Shop when we were in town, pestering my family for decorating ideas, finally deciding on one and then taking forever to carry it out, and making sure that everyone in the house recognized the Boy Who Lived's special day. And J.K. Rowling's, for that matter. And Joey Richter's (he played Ron in A Very Potter Musical). In the end, I decided on making the cake yellow like a snitch, and then fashioned two cardboard wings covered in aluminum foil to stick out of them. Last year I made the cake Hagrid brought Harry in the first book, and this year I made the cake that Mrs. Weasley made Harry in the last book, so I guess that next year I'll just have to use my imagination.

Most of the credit actually goes to my grandma, who understands how her kitchen works and is much better at baking than I am. Here's the cake before I frosted it.

And here it is after the snitch transformation, which my mom actually did most of because she's a lot better at cake decorating than I am. Really, all I did for this project was pick out the design, mix the cake batter and frosting and make the wings. I didn't even remember to light candles.

YAY! I think Harry Potter would be pleased. At least, I hope he would be pleased. Maybe I'll get a magical sign.

Revamp! (kind of)

In a sudden burst of inspiration, I've decided to become a blogger again. I guess I was just looking through my old posts and realized that since I'm not very good about keeping a regular journal with actual writing rather than random thoughts, there's not really any other way I'm going to remember what went through my head when I was fifteen years old. And I love to write. I really, really do. So I'm extremely sorry that I haven't posted anything for four months.

I'm going to try to post as much as I can, but I think my life is a whole lot busier than it was a year ago. I'm currently in the midst of rehearsals for a dance performance at the end of May, I picked up the viola as a third instrument, I'm in a pit orchestra for an original musical at the end of June, and I'm actually nearing the end of my first year of high school (!). I don't have a lot of time to write, but I'm going to try my hardest.

I guess I should probably give you a small synopsis of my life right now. In January, I played in the pit orchestra for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I finished watching Sherlock and decided that I love psychology and want to be an anthropologist or something. I played with a coastal chamber orchestra for their winter series, and borrowed a viola to start fooling around with. I turned fifteen in March, on a road trip to Utah, where I saw a lot of amazing, famous rocks. My grandma asked me if I wanted to go to Europe with her and her chorus this summer, I said yes, and I can't wait. Tomorrow I'm going to play with a youth orchestra from Salem when they come to the coast for a mini-tour type thing. I love the musical theater group Starkid (they rose to fame after performing A Very Potter Musical, and just keep getting better). And last weekend I spent two glorious days with my wonderful friend who I never get to see in person. We tiptoed through the tulips, discussed the meaning of life and convinced ourselves that we were going to see the Hound of Baskerville on a dark forest trail (well, I did), and I had the chance to see one of the best youth orchestras in the country in a camerata rehearsal, not to mention a stellar Kenji Bunch concert. So I guess that just describes me right now, in a nutshell.

The point is, I guess, that I'm generally very happy with life right now. :) I'll try to post as much as I can.

December

It's December! This very important and hectic month means a lot of things, to me and to the rest of the world (but in different ways). Here are some of them:


*A busy calender. This isn't so much my physical calendar as my mental calender. I have so many dates for things stuck in my head; rehearsals, gig type things, due dates, breaks, dance recital things, babysitting jobs...it's ridiculous. This is the month where I live in constant fear that I'm going to wake up one morning and realize that I forgot to do something incredibly important, or that I have something to do that I haven't studied or practiced for. Usually that's when I wake up. But not in December. 

*When I find out my PSAT scores. I'll admit that I didn't really take the PSAT that seriously leading up to it, but I did do the practice booklet, and I think that I gave it a pretty good shot. I'm taking it next year anyway, and even that is just a practice for the SAT, but I'm still kind of terrified about what I'll hear. When I left that room after those three grueling hours in October,  December seemed a long way away. Not it's staring me in the face. I'll get that call to the IB room any day now. Any day...

*When the heat comes on. I hate it when cars get too hot, because I hate stuffy places and not being able to breathe. I also hate it when our house's heater is on too much, or when the fire in the wood stove make the house so warm that we have to open the windows. Last weekend I spent the night at my friend's house after going to see The Day of the Doctor and we slept next to the fire in her living room. It was incredibly hot all night long. It's not that I don't like heat, though; I just don't like excessive heat.

*The play comes together, and there is much rejoicing (yaaayyy). That means that I get to spend not only every Saturday, but eventually every day at the performing arts center, rehearsing, doing what I love. You may think that being in a pit, just as the background music for the main attraction, night after night, isn't very exciting, but it really is.

*Band concerts. Actually, just concerts of any kind. Time to straighten your bow tie, put on your pointe shoes, and tighten your bow, because everything having to do with the performing arts explodes into action in December. Parents want to see their kids in their activities during the holidays, as a sort of halfway checking point to find out how they're doing; you know, like fine arts conferences. It's all very festive, though, and very fun. There's also usually a lot of food involved, which is why people suddenly get the stomach flu before the holidays, or complain that they gained ten pounds.

*Frost. It doesn't snow on the Oregon coast, it frosts. And hails. I don't even think that "frosts" is a verb, but it might as well be. I can't tell you how many times in the past eight years that I've woken up and thought that it had snowed, only to find out that it was really just a stupid thin layer of ice crystals, or, even worse, millions of little ice balls pelting to the ground. The church on the street over, which I can see from my bedroom window, has a whitish roof, and it's tricked me so many times. It's not fair.

*"Decem" means "ten" in Latin, which means that December used to be the Roman's tenth month. It also means that the Tenth Doctor is returning (as in Vale Decem). I for one was very impressed with the Doctor Who 50th anniversary, but now I'm sad again because there's no Ten in the future to look forward to.

*The days are also slowly creeping towards saying goodbye to Eleven. SADNESS.


I am intentionally NOT mentioning Christmas in this post (except for this part), because even though it's awesome, that's an awful lot of hype for a holiday 24 days away. Nobody starts celebrating Thanksgiving on the first of November, so why should they celebrate Christmas a month early? Part of the beauty of that holiday is the fact that it's only twenty-four short hours long, and you have to make the most of it. Having a month to "prepare" (actually subtly celebrate) is like cheating.

Have a good December. I'll be back. 

Voices and Expressing Pain

In English class we're getting ready to read The Color Purple, which apparently has quite a bit of pain and suffering in it, so, to get us ready, our teacher had us write about painful experiences we had had and read them aloud to the class. When we finished with that, she gave us two prompts to write about in our journals: why is the voice in writing so important, and, if we finished with that, why do we write about pain? This is what I wrote:


A song cannot be sung without a voice, and words cannot be spoken. A world without voices would be silent and dismal, but the same power spreads to the second dimension, where words on paper are nothing without life in them.

With an obvious voice in a piece, the words can speak to the reader just as clearly as if the author was standing right there. The characters and events become alive, and one can lose him or herself inside of the story. An eighty-year-old can spell out the lines of a four-year-old girl, and a teenager can describe the thoughts of a middle aged parent. The sentences turn familiar and understandable, and everything becomes so incredibly real. An author can spell words in a way that invokes accent, and can distinguish between character styles just with a few mere changes in the way letters are formed and arranged. He or she who has the power to play so many different parts just with a pen is the real magician of this world. 


For pain (which I honestly don't write/think about a lot):

If thoughts and feelings about pain weren't shared, every single human would be ready to burst, burning with the endless and torturous memories of their experiences. But we write and talk, and we realize that we are not alone in anguish.



I like to write.

Procrastination

Hmmm, let's see if she can go an entire month without posting anything! She used to post every day, didn't she?!

The Ballerina

In my dance studio, we have a girl who is the ballerina.

She waltzed in last year in the early spring, fresh from southern California. I was in pit orchestra at the time, and was missing a few classes because of shows, and I heard from my other dancer friends that we had acquired an amazing new dancer over the weekend. Nobody knew how old she was. Nobody even knew her last name. But she said that she had been dancing for thirteen years, and, based on her perfect turns and natural grace, it looked like she had been doing it for twenty.

In my several years of dancing, there have been some wonderful dancers who kind of led the way, trailing scores of hopeful ballerinas behind them. When I was seven and just starting, it felt like there were so many older girls, with their prim buns and tight leotards and shiny pointe shoes that just dazzled on the rosin-smeared marley. It's true that there are a lot less now than there used to be, but it just seemed so amazing when I was younger. It's not like we're hardcore Russian ballerinas or anything. I live an extremely artsy community, actually, and the standard uniform of a dancer was commonly replaced by ripped tights and loose shirts (as much as they could get away with without my teacher getting annoyed), and dreadlocks and messy braids instead of buns.

Dancers are some of the most interesting people in the world, next to orch dorks, in my opinion. There are so many different kinds, each with a different story to tell, but we all have one thing in common, and we can all tell those stories through dancing (or music). There are people who immerse themselves in song and just move along with a flow of energy, and there are those who carefully count beats and focus on technicalities, making every turn and fouetté perfect. (Actually, perfect is a funny word. They don't achieve it, necessarily, but to someone else it might appear perfect, while to the dancer him or herself it's far from it. Either way, they're mostly always striving towards that intangible concept of perfection). And then there are those of us who dance just for enjoyment, just to have fun while leaping through the air, to have that feeling of being in control (or out of control), and to be able to sweat buckets and still feel happy about it.

I used to love watching ballerinas. Whether it was onstage or in books, they always seemed so beautiful to me, and so amazingly ethereal. When I was finally going to get my first pair of pointe shoes at age eleven, I couldn't stop talking to my cousin about it. It was something I had literally dreamed about for years, and it was unthinkable that it was actually going to happen. Finally my cousin, who is six months younger than me, said, "Why do you even care so much? They're just shoes". With her being a competitive swimmer,  I racked my brains for something to compare it to in her sport, but I couldn't think of anything. What a non-dance doesn't really grasp, I guess, is that these shoes are a rite of passage. Not every girl has a a ballerina dream, but a lot of young dancers do, and pointe shoes, being on TOE, are like a gateway to becoming one for real. Your work becomes a lot more demanding, and you're serious about what you do. And it's a wonderful feeling to actually be on your toes, spinning around the stage, the lights streaking and blurring in front of your eyes, hearing that beautiful clunking sound beneath you. I took a year of beginning pointe in fifth grade, a year before I actually got the shoes, and I couldn't wait every week to get to that class, just so I could stare at the shoes and the perfectly angled feet inside of them, wishing that they were mine. It really was a dream that came true, only a dream with blisters and tendonitis threats.

I wrote this last Thursday, after living through a torturous P.E. class with idiots who think that football makes them the strongest and coolest people in the world.


  I laugh at those people who say that dance isn't hard at all, because in truth, we work almost harder than them at times. I'm sure that the snobby volleyball girls would stop laughing as soon as they started trying the stretches and bar work, their smirks replaced by grimaces. I'm sure that the supposedly strong football boys would think twice about snickering after an intense hour, sweat pouring and showing through their clothes. I'm positive that my mom couldn't get through an entire class of even the easiest work, and would stop telling me that dance isn't considered an aerobic activity that requires lots of work. It's not looking pretty that makes my muscles ache for days, or gets me blisters on my feet. I didn't suddenly become flexible just by putting my hair up and wearing satin shoes. I spend several hours almost every day at the studio, and I'm proud of what I do. So be quiet, hypocrites.

I know it's kind of narcissistic to agree with myself like this, but hear, hear! We work hard at what we do, and there's so much work behind the prettiness. Yes, it was my dream when I was small, and it still is my dream, but now I know the truth of it, and, if anything, that makes me enjoy it and appreciate it even more so.

Last year, before my pointe dance, I was standing backstage with a two other dancers my age. Wearing our tutus-the only tutu I've worn in dance in the past five years-and covered in sparkles and silver glitter (we were supposed to be stars), we watched as this ballerina girl, who is so good that she's now an assistant teacher, chassé and leap and piqué around the stage, looking just amazing with all those years of serious ballet training. She was like an alien dancer to us, who had always worked with contemporary styles rather than Russian form, and we were just enthralled. She made me realize that no matter how many other dreams I have or have had, dance has and will always be one of them.