"To the Looking-Glass world it was Alice that said "I've a sceptre in hand, I've a crown on my head.Let the Looking-Glass creatures, whatever they beCome and dine with the Red Queen, the White Queen, and me!"'
"Then fill up the glasses with treacle and ink,Or anything else that is pleasant to drink: Mix sand with the cider, and wool with the wine--And welcome Queen Alice with ninety-times-nine!"
"Then fill up the glasses with treacle and ink,Or anything else that is pleasant to drink: Mix sand with the cider, and wool with the wine--And welcome Queen Alice with ninety-times-nine!"
-Through The Looking Glass
"I am used to going out at 3 AM and doing something stupid"
- Watchmen Poster
"Journalist: So are you a mod or a rocker?
Ringo: I'm a Mocker."
- A Hard Day's Night
Yeah, Well I'm a Mocker too. I'm also highly adept at finding myself in the most idioic situations at the strangest hours of the night. I swear, I don't sleep (unless I'm at school, apparently), I'm like a vampire, or a martian (Will the real Martian please stand up?)...or something.
At the moment, I'm pretty Freaking bored out of my skull (candy). I SHOULD be asleep by now, being past 1 in the morning on a Friday (happy early TGIF, everyone! Champagne and party hats all around), but I'm stuck taking notes for my stupid ISU for English class, the one my english teacher (the artist formerly known as my grade nine french teacher) told us on Tuesday was due Friday, after previously letting us believe we had a long time before we even needed to start our books.
Mine, being Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, making every other sentance I write sound all feminazi-ish, and making me cringe thousands of times at the way women in the early fifties had to live, and how rare it was that the protagonist was going to university, and escaped from her small town (Go Del!), Fast forward to 2009, and I'm rejoicing, even though I've been trying to get away since I could crawl (but then my grand escape plans included Disneyland and Mister Roger's Neighbourhood- like Stewie and Jolly Farm!) and It was pretty much asumbed I'd go to university. Sadly no one is surprised by my grand relvation of becoming a writer, and studying Journalism, a breakthough that felt so earth shattering to me, but was probably brought on by too much Rory Gilmore, Sabrina Spellman, And Becky Bloomwood as I was growing up. (sidenote: Del's mother, is pretty much a description of my own mother, the one who, upon hearing that the town Santa Claus parade had rejected my work's application to be in it, as too controversal, remarked; "You Really Are My Daughter!")
The deadline was a very rude wake up call (like my bitch of an alarm clock, only redeemed by the idea that, it's called a Dream Machine) literally as I was half asleep had had to be nudged awake by my friend sitting beside me (the girl who will save the world one day, I swear), and figurativly as I'm still all triumphant (or "riding on my laurels", as the teacher, who I refuse to call anything but Madame, phrased it) at being the only one in the class (including the genius kid everyone's intimidated by, the one who into full philosophical discussions on Proust when you're just trying to copy his classnotes) to get my topic proposal accepted on the first try.
Actually come to think of it, In that respect, the academic faction of my scatterbrain life, I've actually been pretty good this week. I got ninties on my medival history test (I would not be setting my sights on a writting career if I couldn't without fail, pull of the trip of writting a test essay that sounds intelligent and insightful, but is actually just me rehashing everything I can remember of the unit, even if it has no relation to the essay topic), and my several editted down analysis of the third canto of the Inferno, the one in which I said writing the Divine Comedy was cathartic and purging for Dante (ooh scandal)
And my Writer's Craft teacher, actually liked my weirdly off kilter Sci-fi-esque story about techno -saboutage, candy as a drug, time travel, and stolen identies, Infleunced by reading Rant, watching that episode of the Sid and Nancy episode of the Simpsons (on a side note, my parent's affectionate nicknames for each other are Sid {Vicious} and Laura {Petrie} of Dick Van Dyke which I will always remember for being censored in that episode of Family Guy, and being The beep Van beep show) where they used chocolate for heroin and called everything Bollocks.
Nevermind them.
I was so sure she'd look at it and say What The Hell? Which is what i would do if I was a teacher and the girl in the front row of my class, who makes makes worthless attempts at livening up her bland uniform with a new brightly coloured purse or necklace every single day, handed me a story with such a weird convoluted plot.
In the end she said it reminded her of Fahrenheit 451, to which I said Dystopia!
Hells yeah!
(because really Utopia is one of those things, that'd be more fun to live than write about. If we actually lived in a Utopia, we'd probavly stop writting as we'd one write about distanced conflicts in the past that had no effect on our new lives, and would just depress us all, or make us suspicious of some sort of canabalistic plot (To Serve Man....It's a cookbook!) or go extreme like that episode of Charmed where the world got to good and they started shooting people for trafic violations or cutting peoples tongues out for swearing.
Seriously how do I get away with this stuff?
I'm almost waiting for someone to call me out on it, or expose me as a fake. The brain police, they'd have some sort of chant, and spent their weekends playing dungeons and dragons and planning out Watchmen cosplay. Not that I actually condemn geekiness, because to be honest I think I'm just supressing my inner geek, and denying her an argygle sweater vest, and glen plaid Knee length shorts, to wear with her tight retro Batman shirt. One day, When I'm acceptably thin again (but not scarily thin and sick like last time), and have a boyfriend who will most likely be some sort of fanboy and who will have to get used to being made the counterpart in my escapades, I'll probably fit some excuse to be all Fangirl, and try to copy the outfit from BTAS: Harley's Holiday, which will clearly border on indeceny or will showcase my klutziness on rollerblades (because really I'm bad enough on flat surfaces), but really, the entire plot of the episode is about Harl's klutz tendencies, and childishness...so, no problems there.
(oh and I accidently stumbled upon this german video, with someone playing Hitler, subtitled so that he's complaining in this whole 4 minute rant about the Watchmen movie, and asking all non-fanboys to leave the room. Pretty hardcore! How do people come up with this stuff?)
Somehow, I got labelled as one of the smart kids, which is really strange as I'm actually quite stupid. Or maybe I'm smart, if you're spelling it SMRT or dancing while you burn your high school dipolma (that's a word I can't even spell).
Some of the reasons why they might get the (false) impression that I'm in any way intelligent:
a) I wear glasses, cool red plastic Miu Miu ones, I actually bought in England (funny store there... basically me breaking my old ones while I was shopping on Oxford street)
b)I have read a lot, which itself has three causes: 1. My parents have huge library and always encouraged me and my sister, (both named after Jane Austen heroines) to read (only I really got the message), and now as I'm in a habit of sneaking their worn classics or beat stuff to my room, and then absorbing it into my own collection, and often find the books full of underlines or margin notes (although ones that had to do with the book. If i was writing the margin notes, they'd be random pens). 2. I have a huge imagination, that had to be channeled somewhere before it drove everyone near me crazy ( Like in Through The Looking Glass, where Alice is playing with her sister and decides she will be the dog, her sister the bone, or her sister will be the knight, and she'll be everyone else, We actually have homemovies of me and my sister playing Cinderella, wherein I got to play everyone else, and she was the prince (because her Prince was boring! He's not Prince Eric or Philip, He's not the beast, he doesn't even have a name!), and 3. I was bullied alot in elementary school, and turned to books to fill my recesses (actually I should thank those jerks for getting me into my first choice school early decision-so last laugh=Mine!).
c) I know a lot of big words, although I usually use them improperly, or can't spell them, and usually decide to pronouce them however I feel they should sound. Because big words intimdate people. And people like to pretend they know what your talking about.
d) I have a habit of using oddly english/adult phrasing, probably because I credit myconcept of the english language to Shakespeare plays, so when we finally got to study them in high school, and everyone was complaining about what the hell it all meant, and grousing about all the doths and thous, it was like my second language. (I'm actually pretty good at reading the girl parts in the plays, particularily Desdemona, as I read the lines fast and without the awkward pauses or stumbling that everyone else seems to get. Reading from Oedipus Rex, is a different story, as i learned yesturday when Madame made me read Iokaste's (the Queen) lines, and my voice would only come out chirpy and ingenue-ish (like I was trying to imatate Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz), when I'm supposed to be a scared old(ish), woman in a tradgedy).
e) And lastly, because I have a strange habit of writting a lot (which you've probably got by now, if you've stuck around, this long that is). But I can't help that! I love to write, it just comes so naturally, like a posession, that won't let me go until I've written whatever it is. It's like how in history class, we were talking about how Michelangelo was so obsessed with his work, that it because his life, that it became part of him, until whatever work was finished. The clear difference, being that Michelangelo actually finished his pieces, rather than letting scraps of sculptures (or in my case, poems and manuscripts) littered around his room, along with the empty diet coke cans, and the thousands of pairs of shoes he forgot he had (and also he made ART, and is remembered and respected for it. I doubt I'd ever get that).
Somehow, as I'm supposed to be the smart, thoughtful, social concious and religious girl (all of which are utter lies, except maybe thoughtful...but that's on a good day...maybe), they gave me all these awards at academic awards night, which is the humiliating night (on a thursday, as is every single event held at BR) where the call out award winners' names and put a spotlight on them as they awkwardly stumble up to the stage and trip over their own feet on the way down (...not that that happened to me of me, of couse), but at least they give you programs that say who gets what, at the beginning so you have time dread them calling your name. This year, they decided to be overly sadistic, and print huge posters of the major award winners, with their school photos the size of a page of notebook paper and put them on display in the trophy case.
My horrible picture which I planned never to show anyone, my dark roots on golden blond hair, my weirdly pale and plastic looking face and that lone strand of my one length hair in front of my eyes.
Eww.
You'll be happy to know, I've since dyed my hair a dark brown, cut it and got bangs, and am feeling much better, thank you.
Somehow I can never take a good school photo, no matter how much I try, or practise in front of my mirror, in between singing along to Spring Awakening in my hairbrush, it never seems to help at all. It's like some weird curse. I tremble to think what my grad photo must look like! Maybe I'll pull an Oedipus, and gouged out my eyes so I won't have to. Or I could be less horribly dramatic and Pretend, I've gone blind, and then everyone would be all sympathetic and tell me how pretty I was, even if I had my hair in a lackluster bun, or if I have a strange cut in the corner of my mouth that looks like the begining off a Chelsea grin, and hurts when I try to smile.
I cringe whenever I walk by that hall, with my picture, announcing in big letters that I'm smart, so people I've never even met, expect me to be all organized and on top of things, in other words, expecting me to do all the work on group projects (soooo not happening. I'm the slacker one, I called it first).
Which is sad, because that hall used to be fun as I could look at my name on all the plaques, and think, Suckers!
New Word/Portmaneau of The Day:
Awkweird
(clearly Awkward+Weird, or if you want a synoym,
Catcher Davis.
G'nite.
Don't do anything I would do.
Also I'm Extremely pleased to report that, as of today both my real name and This Pen name get several hits on Google !
Cool. I exist
