I've got my memories/always inside of me/but I can't go back/back to how it was

change. stupid, stupid, stupid, awful change. drat it. :(

this quarter has been great and not-so-great at the same time. a very bipolar quarter. I'm SOOOO GLAD it's almost over. my Shakespeare teacher was right - these plays literally do effect our lives, and finishing up with Lear and Titus Andronicus is kind of disturbing. it's like living in a nightmare sometimes....not for long, but long enough. I miss my Taming of the Shrew days. I thought things were sketchy then, but how innocent it all seems now.

I'm sick of the material in my classes. I liked Titus the first time I read it. now I seriously think I've lost my mind and a good chunk of my morals too, and I just want to get away from it all and take a long, cleansing break. get better. write something good. read something better.

I'm reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in my novels class. I think, so far, it averages about eight 4-letter words per page, most of them the f-word. yes. wonderful book, great choice for a writing class. what's not in "french" is in spanish, so I can't even understand the stuff that I might want to read. and if it's in actual English, it's talking about sex in some super-degrading, inappropriate way. If it were up to me, I'd never have gotten past the first page of this book.
and it's a freaking BESTSELLER.

the really disturbing thing to me is that, over this quarter, we've read six novels, starting with Persuasion and then moving on chronologically up to Oscar Wao (2008); and in each book the subject matter and the language just got worse and worse and worse and worse. it scares me that these are selections from our world over the past 200 years, and this is how bad it's gotten.

I'm thinking about writing a letter to my professor. seriously. I DON'T want my head filled with this stuff all day long. is this really the best example of modern lit he could come up with? does he not think it possible that maybe, just maybe, a few of his students don't want to read/write about sex and bad language and people doing horribly stupid things all day long? if it wasn't for the grade I now need to keep up, I'd.....
I don't know. but I'd do something, I'm pretty sure of it. :P



anyway, depressing, boring....I know, I know, blah blah blah. I wish I had something a little happier to write about. this week is going to be super-stressful. I have a piano lesson tomorrow and nothing at all prepared for it; spent the whole week working on Christmas stuff for the Celebration Dinner this Saturday. I'm really hoping my teacher isn't mad. I have a recital in a week and a half for my students....most of them aren't ready for it and neither am I. just got my worship music (for, you guessed it: this weekend). it's a week late and I don't see how I'll possibly have time to even look at the music between now and Saturday. practiced for a good three hours today and still didn't get through everything....just kind of stopped out of sheer exhaustion and it getting too late to play.



ok. let's not talk about that anymore, I'll just worry and it won't help a thing.

how was your Thanksgiving? mine was quite good. Thursday we went up to my grandparents' in West Seattle, where we helped with all the food and whatnot. my grandma's family came over from 2:00-3:00ish, when we started eating.
(as a note, I've never really cared much for my grandma's family. she's got two sisters and two brothers who are all extremely liberal and fanatical. they get it from their mom, who joined the communist party back in the war and is now a member of the 'Raging Grannies,' who are always and forever raging about something, be it the president or the environment or animal treatment or goodness-knows-what. my great-grandma is originally from Canada, and why on earth the whole family doesn't relocate there I haven't yet figured out. the whole eight years Bush was in office we couldn't get everyone together without hearing about how awful America was getting and how terrible the president was and how great Canada is. anyway, my aunt Karen is the oldest, and she's the most outspoken, liberal, and controlling of them all. and for goodness sake, somebody is always complaining about something. for the most part they've all got a lot of money, and everything is about comfort. drives me up the wall.)
so needless to say, I wasn't too thrilled about the gathering, though I love my grandparents. I love them a lot more when not surrounded by the rest of the family. =)
but overall it went fairly well. with Obama in office screwing up all their hopes and dreams, there was no talk of politics. only about half of the normal crowd actually showed up, so things were less crazy. wasn't as much drinking as usual, I think.....that or I've gotten used to half-drunk people, which is also possible. only two of my cousins (both in their twenties, and one of them I can actually carry a conversation with) were there, which made me more comfortable. usually I can avoid the adults well enough, and they don't pay attention to me, but it's the cousins I see every two years that I really dread.
I guess my family is a little odd. besides the Canadian-communist thing, and the numerous divorces/affairs, and the numerous vegetarians, some of these people are just going into really off-the-wall jobs. one of my cousins is going to school to get a masters in Librarian something-or-other, with a focus in Archiving. she's going to a Libraring School. ????
another cousin, with whom I've exchanged maybe ten words in my whole life (he had a bad case of shyness, anger management issues, and an afro in the earlier years when I knew him) is living somewhere in Canada going to school for something with linguistics. speaks French more than he speaks English. guess I'll see him at Christmas and New Year's, and mom wants me to talk to him.
"You should practice your French."
Yeah right. Talk about embarassing.
(what are we supposed to talk about anyway? sure, he's my cousin. I've found in life that I like my cousins less than almost anyone else I've ever met....that goes for all sides. there are one or two exceptions on all sides, but overall, I don't even know them because we never see each other, and when I do see them they aren't people I'd generally talk to.)
but I'm expected to carry on not only a civil, but a polite convesation. guess I'll do my best.
but in English, not French.



ok, back to Thanksgiving. we ate too much, sat around talking, tried not to fall asleep. ate dessert when we could actually eat any more.....the family stayed way too late, drank a little too much wine. watched some football.....I made frequent trips downstairs (maybe a dozen or so more than were strictly necessary) to check on the dog and cats.
at long last, everyone had gone, and we settled in for the night. Friday was our holiday baking day (me, mom, and grandma), and so we were staying the night. actually, I was staying the whole weeked, and mom and day were staying through Saturday.
we watched a movie, I think, and then all went off to bed. had to be well-rested, as baking day is a long and exhausting event, though extreme fun. so, Friday we spent in the kitchen, covered in flour, baking five different kinds of cookies (in addition to the four varieties that we had baked the week before), eating cookie dough, setting timers and washing the mixing bowl out for the four hundredth time, adding whole eggs to things instead of just the yolks by mistake (don't try this, it doesn't work!), getting flour over everything no matter how gradually it was added, and pausing only for a quick lunch break - Thanksgiving dinner leftovers. at the end of the day, when we finally turned off the oven and finished bagging the last of the cookies, we went out to an Indian restaurant for dinner, as nobody was up to cooking. that night we watched the Princess Bride together before bed.

Saturday morning we women did our Christmas shopping! (we're not brave enough to do Black Friday shopping, so we go on Saturday when a lot of the sales are still on but the lines are seriously diminished.) we went up to Bellevue (where, by the way, everything is more expensive) and hit Sears, Marshall's, Starbucks, the Sprint store (like my whole family has Blackberries now and none of us know how to use them....my grandma has one and I've decided that people of a certain age should just be banned from having them), and Fred Meyer. find good stuff in odd places, I guess. spent a lot of time and money in Marshall's and Fred Meyer, where my grandma bought a whole bunch of clothes for both me and my mom, which we can't have until Christmas. I'm willing to wait though, because there are some really cute clothes waiting for me which I couldn't have bought for myself. :) My mom's excited too.

we came back to their house in the afternoon and my mom left pretty soon after that. dad had left that morning, to return home and put up the Christmas lights! we bummed around for the afternoon, kind of exhausted; ate leftovers for dinner and read for awhile. around 7:00 my grandpa and I were both sitting on the couch, brain-fried, exhaustified, and staring at the TV like something magical would appear on it.
"want to watch something?"
"sure. what?"
"I don't know."
"Netflix on-demand!"
so we spent about half an hour narrowing down a genre, and another half hour finding a movie (exaggeration added), and finally settled on My Best Friend's Wedding, which I had only seen once, edited, a long time ago, and which my grandparents had never seen. we watched it together, my grandparents both stayed awake for the entire thing (this has honestly NEVER happened before), and we all really enjoyed it. went to bed and researched backpacks for my Europe trip, because.....

Sunday morning we headed to REI. basically, my whole Christmas/birthday wish list is stuff I'm gonna need for Europe. so we went to look at backpacks, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, shoes, and goodness-knows-what-else. my grandpa rides his bicycle a lot so he knows REI well, and my grandma is just an absolute shopper at heart and almost can't resist buying something if she sees "Sale" or "Clearance" (especially this latter one). and they both are picky and like quality (aka expensive) stuff, so REI is just great for them.
long story short, I found an amazing backpack, which I'm getting for my birthday (yay!!!! SUPER excited). the gal helping me was just about my height, same body shape, and knew what she was talking about when it came to backpacks. then she brought us over to the sleeping bag section and delivered us to Peter, the nice older gentlemen who spent a good half hour helping me try on sleeping bags. no joke. took my shoes off and got on a table thing, and tried on about half a dozen different ones before deciding one one which ought to keep even me warm in an English summer. I'm getting this for Christmas. :D

looked at shoes for about 15-20 minutes, but I was worn out, and my ultimate nemesis is shoe shopping, and since I've got a year and a half till I leave I decided shoes could wait. not to mention, we were hungry. so we collected and went home to lunch, after which I packed up all my stuff and was returned back to my own house.

where, two hours later (after severely over-cooking a pizza and some curly fries), six girls from my class joined me to work out costumes and rehearse our presentation for class on Thursday. stayed till 10:00, and I finally got to bed, thoroughly worn out. long weekend. fun, but long.

so, not looking forward to this week. but I'll get through it (I think with a little help from Starbucks, maybe). though the weekend will be CRAZY, I'm really looking forward to it. Monday's a study day....I'll just sleep through it. :P