Highwaymen

I love the poetry in the Highwaymen's songs, so I'll be posting a few over the next couple of days.

Look here is that you I see
You sure seem down to me
Would you like to tell it to a friend
I can help if anyone can
You know I understand
Everyone gets crazy now and then

I know those empty nights get lonely
Sometimes you feel like you're the only one
To lose more then he wins
Guess these trouble times get scary
But that's just ordinary
Everyone gets crazy now and then

And who can say they've never stumbled
Never fallen to their knees
Your dreams like castles when they crumble
Well I know what you mean
And I know how hard it can seem

I get crazy just like you
Lost and lonely too
Like some old flag left flying in the wind
Time has taught me this for sure
Time is the only cure
All your blues will turn to gold again
Oh everyone gets crazy now and then

Masks

Our school publishes a biannual student poetry-short story collection called reflections. I've stopped buying it lately, because although the good artwork balances out the mostly mediocre poetry, I just couldn't stand seeing another 'mask poem'. I don't know why they're so damn popular, but it seems like every student at the school needs to write an emo poem about the mask they wear, dragging poor Mr. Dunbars work through hell and back. After having a nice chat with Layla about all this, the following lines came to me (I'm tempted to submit it under a pseudonym just to see what would become of it...) :

I wear the mask that grins and lies,
It lies to hide my awful eyes,
It grins to mask my pitted skin,
The sight of which kills lesser men.

I may look sad, I may look cold,
But if the mask were backwards-rolled,
I'd stand yet changeless before thee,
In dear-bought truth, the mask wears me.

Vocabulary Resolution

A list of words I'd like to resolve to use more often (or at least to use) this year:

Amarulence
Argent
Azuline
Azure
Bubulbicate
Celadon
Celeripedean
Celeste
Commandeer
Cosmogyral
Deloricate
Etaerio
Eternitarian
Fallaciloquence
Ianthine
Isabelline
Jacinthe
Mazarine
Myriander
Myrrh
Nepheliad
Nevermore
Oriole
Plegnic
Ponask
Riviation
Serendipity
Scrounge
Smaragdine
Solferino
Sorrel
Spigot
Stiricide
Tintinnabulate
Thural
Tropaean
Witticaster
Vermillion
Yelve
Zinnober

I happened to find one for you, too, Ary: Minoritetsbærerdiffusjonskoeffisientsmålingsapparatur

Taxi!

In Shakespeare, 8598 words (abaissiez, abash, abatements, abates, abbeys, ..., zo, zodiac, zodiacs, zone, zwaggered) are used only once

TAXI is spelled the same way in eleven languages, according to Dixon: English, French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, and Portuguese. Jeff Volgyi reports it is also spelled the same way in Hungarian. G. Strauss reports it is also spelled the same way in Romanian. However, Emerson Werneck says that in Portuguese, taxi is actually spelled táxi.

Emerson points out that SAUNA is spelled the same way in nine languages: Finnish, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, and Danish. Readers of this page have reported it is also spelled the same way in Lithuanian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, and Norwegian (although in Norwegian the word badstue is more commonly used). In Swedish, bastu, a short form of badstuga meaning (approximately) "bathing-hut," is more commonly used. [Juozas Rimas, Nikola Petrovic, Gabriel Ionita, Thor-Rune Fiskum, Andreas Engström].

Phil Smith writes, "Regarding the fact that 'sauna' is spelt the same in nine languages, in Japanese the word uses the katakana characters (used for words that have come into the language from other countries) and is spelt 'sa-u-na' too. This is unusual for katakana words, as they rarely match the original spelling, such as 'kamera', 'pasokon' (personal computer), 'apaato' (apartment) and 'sabiro' (suit, originating from the road name Saville Row in London, where tailors used to work)."

Dan Tilque has found that VETO is the same in at least 24 languages: Albanian, Azerbaijani, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, SerboCroatian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. In Hungarian it is spelled the same except for a diacritic. In Basque and Tagalog it's spelled 'beto' and in Polish it's 'weto'.

Jefferson B. Morris points out that www as an abbreviation for "World Wide Web" has 9 spoken syllables, whereas the term being abbreviated has only 3 or 4 spoken syllables. A similar occurrence is WWII for "World War II."

I wish I could post the link Im getting these from, but its too brilliant. I'll share tomorrow.

Semester Grades

Remember when I posted my possible, best case scenario grades? Well, I pulled through on all my exams and got all of them. Neat that my GPA can survive a C in Math, but sad realizing what it would have been otherwise...

Latin 4 - H
Spanish 3 - A
German 1 - A
Honours World History - A
Honours English 2 - A
Honours Biology - B
Algebra 2 and Triganometry - C

Treading on Sacred Ground

I heard this song for the first time the other day, and its a decent song throughout, but the way the chorus is sung is... spine tingling. No real reason. :P

This ain't just some neon love come lately
Its a precious thing you don't know nothing about
We were joined in the eyes of the Lord, in the eyes of our hometown
Why don't you leave her alone
You're treading on sacred ground.

Schedule for Next Year

These are the classes I've signed up for next year; I hope I get into all the ones I want because I've played mean games with the district the last few years and now I need every credit I can get.

Honours English 3
Pre-Calculus
German 2
Spanish 4
AP Comparative Government and Politics
Honours Government
Honours Wainwrighting
Honours Chemistry 1 and 2
Business Management

Nasssty Ssstian.

Did you fall asleep during our text message conversation? I don't know if I should be happy or upset about that... :P Anyway, dirty rotten trick of you. Do take my advice, though... if Im going to be spending all this time typing out letters on my phone, I may as well use my brain a bit and get some practice, right? ;)

Research Paper

We were encouraged to pick a topic we cared about, but predictably half the class picked global warming and obesity anyway. Erin tried to pick New Orleans, which she was from and all, and Sara is so into politics she did alright too. I picked something I might be a little too interested in... Monolingualism of United States Students. I need to remind myself I have other classes and that just because I can look up such things under the guise of homework doesn't mean I should :P

I'm finding some interesting things, though. More later, I'm sure ;)

Will you hold my hand for her?

My friend Lauren is brilliant at Spanish, but doesn't like to talk in class. Fine and good, except it's twenty percent of her grade. As an attempt to get her to talk more last semester, I made a stick with a hand of cardboard covered in felt at the end of it that read "Yo quiero hablar!"

But this semester, we're in different hours. So I had to ask Sra. Rodriguez, "Will you hold my hand for her?"

(Apparently it's working!) ;D

Just The Way We Are

"We're compulsive spenders. We like to spend. We spend it before we get it. That's just the way we are. Thats the way Americans have always been. It's just the way we are."

- Mrs. Sachtleben, Honours History Teacher

Activity Bus

I rode the Activity Bus home yesterday. The following is a conversation I heard from about 3 rows back. They were quite loud.

"If you have sex with a girl, are you still a virgin?" - F1
"Well, actually, you have to kind of be, broken..." - F2
"Broken?" - F1
"Inside." - F2
"...." - F1
"Only for Girls." - M1
"But why?" - F2
"I was drunk! I didn't know!" - F1
"If someone gets drunk and kill someone, is it their fault?" - F2
"I dunno! But I didn't know! I was drunk!" - F1
"Some part of you wanted it. Some part of you wanted to experiance it." - F2
"But have you ever... with a guy?" - F1
"Yes!!!!" - F2
"I meant him!!!" - F1
"Yea." - M1

And So On.
Another bizarre mix of humility/naivete and nastiness...

Ven Pon meeting tomorrow!

Yay, we have a Ven Pon Creative Writing club tomorrow, and we had a great turnout last time, and even though Meghan probably wont show tomorrow due to the late notice, she seems interested in joining. W00t and all that that encompasses.

Ah, Ven Pon. If there was ever a tired old joke, there it is. And yet we have fixed it to our club, and so it will never die, only grow... well, thin. Yes, yes, like butter spead over too much bread. Damn that Tolkien. Ven Pon!

So it remains to be seen, whether it is an Elven Acronym, another word for Cojones, or Come Put as they say in La Clase de Español.

Mixed Metaphores

Mixed Metaphores (A.k.a. I put my foot in my mouth and jumped off the deep end), can be a nuisance. Unavoidable in everyday life, disgustingly common in amateur fiction, the funny pictures they cause can be forgiven the average man. But the writers of Time magazine? These people should know better... unless they were going for humour...

"Bill and his wife Melinda, another computer nerd turned poverty warrior, love facts and data with a tenderness most people reserve for their children, and Bono was hurling metrics across the table as fast as they could keep up."

To Be Fifteen

To be fifteen is to have a combination of freedom and carelessness that you will never experience again; it is the life of the infant prodigy and the infant mind to experiment with everything, for anything to be impressive and novel. Never again will life be so easy, or such trivial brilliance so profound.

Female Leaders

There have been a flood of female leaders being elected recently, with many others making headlines that are the first female head of states. I guess they're still really in the minority when you look at how many nations there are, but it seems like there are a lot all of a sudden. I just hope they're all competent leaders and not just following some sort of feminist trend :P

Spanish Exam

I needed an 89% or higher to keep my A, due to a participation grading system devised by El Diablo himself. When asked about the difficulty of the exam, Sra said only, "I've had A's"
However, I was probably one of the only people in the school to raise an A with the final. Although, 90 to 91 isn't that impressive, the idea of it sounds pretty nice. She said I got the highest grade in Spanish III. ^^ That's a relief. Funny though, I didn't spend a minute studying...

Random Quote

"I've never seen so many people with brown hair in my life!"

-Jutta, a student from Germany, upon seeing our Cafeteria at West High.

Football...

All they care about in Camdenton is football. We met a few boys, and after the formalities of names were exchanged, the first question asked was, "Do you play football?"

We blinked. "We're girls..." We explained patiently.

They shrugged. "Our sister's on the team."

What followed was hours of Tackle Football (2 vs 2), Dodgeball, Chase the fool dog, and Smear the Queer. It was disgusting how much my sister liked to be tackled... :P

How many Methenys...

How many Methenys does it take to change a lightbulb? I dunno, but it only takes Miranda to break the lamp and plunge half the house into darkness trying. The family was less than thrilled, but its hardly my fault that while I thought I was untwisting an extremely stubborn bulb I was actually tighting a short length of wire beyond its frail endurance... while it was plugged in...

Skål!

I've been working on saying Skål with my sister, but so far I've had trouble getting the eye contact part down. For instance, my book stipulates that eye contact should be maintained until both glasses are resting on the table, but in airplanes the 'table' is built into the armrest and rather small, so it takes a bit of coordination to get both cups on it at once. Good thing all I ordered was water...

The Lake of the Ozarks (In Winter)

The lake of the Ozarks has more shoreline than the whole eastern coast of the United States of America. It's twists and turns extend through a surprisingly small network of hills to create a form thats similar to an eastern dragon.

Our lakehouse is on the dragons tail, just where the river begins to turn into lake. So the waters always moving, barely, and never entirely freezes over. Sometimes it's ice to the very center of the channel, but so thin in the middle that boats can be and are routinely forced through it. When this happens, all the ice ripples and buckles in its wake, forming little sheets of ice about an inch and a half thick at the very shore.

Great fun can be had with this ice; tear a huge sheet off the water, break it into fist sized chunks, and hurl it over the surface of the water. It slides, and oftentimes splinters before it does, sending 2 dozen shards of ice dashing across the lake and sparkling in the sun.

Like a Viagra Thing?

I opened up one of my sisters 'young adult' novels. This is what I read:

"And I kissed her on the neck, and then something happened. A very grown-up thing."
"Like a Viagra thing?"
He nodded.

What age group are they writing for, honestly? The period of time in which you know much about Viagra and you still call things grown-up things lasts about a monthe...

Snorkeling

The beauty of being an American who wishes she were European is that you can enjoy yourself in either crowd; being raised to the former and aspiring towards the latter. Both groups were in plentiful supply on the snorkeling excursion I went on over Winter Break.

I practiced my German with Alßa (sp?) He was originally from Holland but living in Germany. I wouldn't have, but Melissa threatened to ask him to talk to me if I didn't do so myself, so as she began to I went over and said, "Stimmt nicht. Meine Schwester ist wannsinnig."

He was a nice guy, and interesting especially in how he destested the obscene quantity of ice in American Drinks; A custom which, oddly enough, has moved to the Dutch owned Netherlande Antilles. Half the people on the boat spoke Dutch, another half English, and the few who spoke German or Spanish remained so elusive that this was the only one I found. Ah well, might've been worse.

My sister found the tacky Americans for me. She had two middle aged couples firmly convinced that we were the daughters they never had. On the bus ride back, all were drunks save Melissa (I think...), and I, and so we tried to sing together. Unfortunately we had vastly different tastes in music and no one could find a song we all knew until...

Bye bye Miss American Pie, I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry, Them good ol' boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye Singing "This'll be the day that I die, This'll be the day that I die."

The Newlyweds up front filled in the rest of the verses, and when we got to the hotel the 9 of us went up to the beautiful piano in the lobby and started singing it out. Everyone was scared out of their wits, but 3 generations of Tacky Americans kept singing what should be the national anthem instead of that Star Spangled Shite.

Then the strangest thing happened... not everyone, no, many were still cowering in fear, but a few employees, a few natives, a few foreigneers, started poking their heads from whatever hole they normally kept too and clapping and singing with us. So it wasn't quite pride, but for a few moments I was filled with a sort of happiness.

Starting Tomorrow

Starting Tomorrow after school are both half days and intense studying, so while I can be on in the very early afternoon (3-4 hours earlier than usual), I can't be on all that much, and almost not at all in the later evening. :P

D-Day Latin and German

Okay, so they'll be the jokes of my finals week, but whats scary is that Im actually considering studying a little, little bit for Latin. Why? Because H's are borderline by default... o.O

Spartacus

My Latin teacher got a fish. It's name is Spartacus, and it fills me alternatively with Inspiration and Despair.

You see, it's not an extroardinarily bright organism, which I suppose is all for the better. I wouldn't like to be overly ambitious and curious either if I was stuck in a tank the size of a piece of conventional tupperware. It's one of those fish that was bred to have those large, bulging eyes, and that mass was quite obviously gained at the expense of its fins, which look merely like stumps of fins, tissue thin and just as flimsy.

The fish sits in its tank all day; a small tank, filled with rather large plants at the center. Ah yes, so there it sits, and every few seconds it gives a shrug-like flap of its fins to try to stay afloat, and then slowly it starts to sink, and then bobs back up... all day long, until something amazing happens. Every once in a while, you can almost see it get an idea, like it wants to go somewhere. The other side of a leaf, usually. And so it sets out all determined, and tries to go over it, tries to go under it; usually tries to go through the damn thing a couple of times, and then finds a little opening near the stem.

Triumphantly Spartacus emerges... and then, quite curiously, it is indeed on the other side of the leaf, and the bobbing commences.

Alas, the reason for my despair is clear, but as soon as it fades away it is replaced by a sort of joy, for after all I am not Spartacus, I am human, and the world is my fish bowl, and I have not yet tired of it.

Unnatural

Today has been unseasonably warm and sunny. It's nine at night, and I was just out barefoot and barely even cool. I suppose its nice to have a day where you can be outside easily and all, but I'm not sure I like them. Theyre just kind of creepy. And everyone starts thinking and complaining about Global Warming, too.

D-Day Biology

My First Final, Biology, is tomorrow. I will spend all day studying everything from gallbladders to the adrenal glands to passive and active cell transport. Wish me luck! :D

Nothing is Certain

Going into Finals, I realise that nothing is truly certain. Almost all of my grades are borderline, for better or for worse, and now only time will tell... ><

Babysitting Tonight

At last! More Cash! :D

But it means that tomorrow will really be my studying day... o.O

It's funny... I've gone from being uber worried by my grades to accepting the C in Math... and once I did that, I realised that with only that exception my grades are actually going to be quite good. I even have the possibility of getting A's in History and English. :D

Hannibal: Enemy of Rome

Is officially the years best project. It's perfect. :D I added finishing touches and burned it. Now to turn it in and watch the golden H dance around on my Report Card and try to hide the C in Math...

An Annoyance

As I slave away on my honours Latin project, I get called downstairs for dinner. It's pork chops, my least favourite food possibly of all time. I try it; it's nasty and full of gristle. My mom tells me to cut the gristle out. I do so. Everyone acts annoyed like not only am I picky, but like it's personally hurting them. My dad begins to tell one of his really long stories about how he learned to season things.

"It's easy to season things." I say. "You just throw a ton of Garlic on it."

"Could you be any more annoying?" He asks.

"What am I doing that's so annoying?"

"Complaining and sulking."

"I'm not sulking," I explain. "I'm just not beaming."

I ask to be excused. They ask me if thats all I plan to eat all evening. I answer yes and they all laugh that I'll sneak down and get more food. Then they ask me what's wrong.

What the hell do they think is wrong? Finals are next week, I have the last projects of the year to finish up tonight, my worst classes are the only ones they care about, and if I don't score well my life may as well be over. And I'm supposed to spring down to dinner?

This is a higher expectation than any they have for my grade card....

Postcard

I got my postcard from Stian today. ^^

Well, that's the good news. The bad news is that my mom has been practically studying it. It's creepy. o.O

Sorry to All

Who have experianced the side effects of my patheticness over the last 1-2 monthes.

Borders

Borders maketh mine life complete.

Purchases of the Day:

Hannibal - A huge paperback published in like the 1800's about Hannibal and the Punic Wars and Roman Warfare, in order of increasing generality.

Teach Yourself German!: To match my Teach Yourself Norwegian! I suppose, but its two times the width and moved a hell of a lot slower considering its the same company.

Maison Ikkoku 3-4: So I now have Maison Ikkoku 1-6

Ranma 12-14: So I now have Ranma 1-16

Fruits Basket 12: So I now have Fruits Basket 1-12

Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency: Gotta love this one. Now I can call an airline and make reservations in Latin. Comes in handy when you least expect it.

New Years Resolutions

Last August, I was at the top of my game. Everything was going well. Grades, writing, friends, etc... Now the only of the above thats still on track is friends, and its not any better, just... still there :P So what the heck happened? I don't think I shifted my priorities, or SOMETHING would have improved, right? I have to say, it has to be just laziness. So thats my resolution. I have to get back on top and stop being pathetic.