damn it I lost the bet.

now I owe Sarah Tang lunch. :x oh well.

what'd Connie bet on?

(actually where IS Connie. :O haven't seen her at ALL for the past two days.)

Sometimes you bump into the most unexpected people at the most unexpected times. ._____.

You know what's really annoying? When you're waiting for a left turn across a street with many lanes, and there's a big gap between the next two cars coming (on diff lanes), but the first car is going really, really slow, so by the time it passes you no longer have enough time to turn.

And, of course, behind the second car there's an unending stream of cars that make you wait another 3 minutes.

Ms. Sutton got pissed during rehearsal today and walked off. Most of us were rather glad to get off early. Perhaps if she weren't pissed all the time, half the time for no discernible reason (or, even when there is a legit reason, way overreacting and way exaggerating until everyone feels overwhelmingly that SHE is in the wrong and WE are in the right), she would have had more impact.

It made me think of Mrs. Kim canceling Cello Congress on us, and how the world just ended then. Right there. Poof and it was gone and we just sat there and couldn't believe it. And then I think about everyone crying and promising her we'll do it and do it right if we get a second chance, and how we meant every word of it and how everyone wanted to make things right so bad because we would regret it for the rest of our lives if we didn't. Then I think about Ms. Sutton with her airs and her yelling and her tantrums and her big, blasted ego and I just want to laugh because she does not know how to retain respect. She's like a spoiled kid that never grew up because no one ever bothered to put her in her place, and now she's 60 and it's too late and she's just going to go on living like that, and, what the hell - she makes herself miserable. She just doesn't see it, she can't see it because she is incapable of comprehending in any way that she is wrong. It makes me sad, in a way. Why? Can't she see how much happier she would be if she didn't insist on acting this way? But it's rooted in her nature now. 60 years does that to a person.

When I honestly think about it, the best teachers I've had aren't the ones that yell and chide and reprimand. They are the kind of teacher that, when you're doing badly, don't even say anything. They just maybe give you a look, and you can tell they're disappointed, but then they shake their head and go on doing the best they can with what you've got, and then oh BOY do you feel bad inside. And you go home and you work like crazy so you won't disappoint your teacher the next time, and on those occasional days when the corners of their eyes crinkle in a smile and they give you a rare compliment, gosh, you're so happy you're almost fit to bursting.

I think what Ms. Sutton doesn't understand is that repetition takes the worth out of some things. That's just how it is.

What the hell is this supposed to mean?

Judith Sutton to Mara, me
show details 4:18 PM (30 minutes ago)

Reply

I have checked your schedules and no ap's seem to exist for you...I have something that really needs doing regarding the Shakespeare projects...Mara knows what it is as she was supposed to do it today.,.,and let me down...now I have freshmen coming in right after school to put the board up...I need this all done at lunch...I need the 2 of you to get together and do this thing....Mara talk to Adela beforehand so she knows what she's doing and with the two of you working together...you'll be able to pull this one out of the bag.

xo
jls

I repeat, in case you missed it: "no ap's seem to exist for you..."

WHAT. WHAT WHAT. WHAT DOES SHE MEAN. WHAT IS SHE TALKING ABOUT. HOW CAN SHE SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT TWO DAYS BEFORE APS, WHAT THE BLOODY HELL DOES SHE MEAN GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHALSDJFLJGHDSLJGLA;SJLGFJA;DSFJAS

Okay so basically I nearly died of a heart attack and had to drive all the way to school and naggle the one counselor I could find (the office is technically closed) as much as I could until she found my name on the AP listings before I could stop running around in agitated circles and spouting gibberish.

Overreaction much?

I DON'T CARE. T__________T

Mutanabbi presentations started today.

Went fairly well. A news person from Saratoga/Los Gatos came to interview us. oO;; I felt sort of guilty because I have this sneaking suspicion (alright, not really sneaking) that our presentation's pretty dry. I mean, how do you get the point across? How do you make people care? It's really, really hard to make people care, especially when you just stand up there and talk at them. =/

On second note, we're covering 1st period tomorrow.

T____T I hate presenting first period. This means through all of April I'm not going to be able to get up late on block days...

eh well maybe it'll help me settle into a fixed wake-up time. That would be useful.

mmmmm the past couple of days? Sort of a jumble.

Went dress shopping with mom on Wednesday. Not, ironically, for prom, but for cello congress, officially known as:

J'adore Cello
16 Cellists, 1 Night

but which everyone calls cello congress anyway. yup.

Incidentally we're performing 4/5, for anyone who wants to come. $20 atm, they're figuring out whether or not there's a student discount, in any case most of you (who aren't overseas or across half the continent somewhere) I can invite separately, so that's that.

I think finding a dress for cello playing is harder than for prom. For one thing, you're playing cello. So it has to be at least floor length, or you wear at your own peril. And then it's got to be elastic enough for you to spread your legs, no qi-pao style things.

In any case, we took care of everything in less than two hours, the only delay being that excellent crepe place at VF's (the one near the pretzel stand).

mmmmmmmmmmmmmm crepes. I'd recommend strawberries and cream or peaches and cream, but NOT nutella, anything (any crepe) with nutella is a bit overbearingly sweet.

So. Apparently the kid I'm tutoring piano with has taken a liking to me but not Jessica, and throws tantrums when she comes but not when I come.

... I am touched. After a fashion. but that's not very nice of him. :O

Everyone in poetry is going crazy. Sutton and I worse than most because Sutton's, well, Sutton (she's crazy to begin with), and I am leading the Mutanabbi panel. But I have found a most excellent remedy to this problem! Let everything in the world amuse you (I was notorious for my twisted sense of humor anyways) and it can no longer hurt you. As long as you don't let amusement extend into hysteria.

SO. The more important point of this post?

I am killing off IM. And facebook. The latter not through deactivation (which never works =.=) but blocked through host file. Also any other sites that distract (excepting winterbells :3) through host file.

LJ is... LJ. I do not have the heart to destroy my LJ. :x

But I do need the extra time, because with cello congress rehearsals coming up and poetry panel organizing/touring coming up, there's no way I will survive without these... protective measures. :O

In other news, last night was prom. Which I did not attend. Though ironically I could have, because the cello congress dress, which they said would come in a week and tried to get us to pay 20$ more for overnight delivery, came overnight anyway. LAWL.

The Viscomte de Bragelonne is grinding to a very slow start. I don't think I'll finish it any time soon. I might not even finish it April. So sad. :(

Villanelles are hard to write.

On a completely unrelated note, I've forgotten almost all of my elvish. I don't even remember the most basic words, like sky, or tree, or snow (... losse? something that began with an l edit 0722 pm: losse is snow. I have retained one word. so proud of myself!). I ought to pick it up again when I have time, just for the hell of it. Maybe learn Sindarin this time, too.

I have no idea why that suddenly popped into my head, but it did.

Meanwhile, still reading Twenty Years After and Screwtape Letters. I must admit the former's going a lot faster than the latter, and I think I might finish Man in the Iron Mask before Screwtape Letters as well, if it comes to that. >>; I just don't find the latter as funny as all the recommendations say it is. Maybe it's because I live in such a cynical family that I'm impervious to cynicism. Who knows.

School... is dull. Not much to be said of it.

The bench just outside the music building is a great place to sun yourself in, if you come from the over-air-conditioned history building and are freezing to death. Unfortunately, it is made of unpolished wood. That is to say, it splinters. Copiously.

And I was wearing thin sweatpants today.

FUN EH?! *cue maniacal laughter*

(I think I am in a rather melancholy mood right now as I just finished a chapter which concluded with some of Anne of Austria's reflections on the degeneration of France. And her choice in lovers.)

Another sleepless night ahead...

Today was a v. eventful day. Lots happened all at once.

First, there was school. That wasn't all that interesting.

After school, the things began to happen. First, Joe Pei (izzat how you spell his last name?) stole my keys. Actually Vincent stole them, and then Joe Pei took them, and then I walked out of the Stats class (I was visiting them) without my keys under this air of confidence that my keys would magically find their way back to me. Foreshadowing, I suppose. Cockiness is bad. Should've knocked on wood...

My keys did find their way back to me, in the form of Vincent and Lilith, who dragged me to the library where Joe gave me back my keys. So all was well.

Walked to the bus stop with Lilith, got Starbucks yadda yadda, walked back with Vince and had random bouts of following people to random classrooms (mostly just following Andy) and, funny thing, the once-mighty Go club has now diminished to three people, THREE PEOPLE can you believe that, ahahahahahaha anyway.

Went home, first thing I see is a letter! From Debra! yay~

Second thing, my email. 8 emails. 6 of them are from the same person. The very latest one had only two words. It read:

call me.

(followed by a phone number)

(also followed by the unspoken threat, "OR ELSE")

So I dialed the number as instructed, and the phone goes: riiiiing! riiiiiing! riiiiiiiiiin- click

VOICE: You little brat!
ADELA: Hi, Ms. Sutton.

After that it was down to business. So I had to drive to Ms. Sutton's house to turn in a poem if I didn't want it cut, and NO WAY was I cutting it I'd just cleared it after two months of grueling work and fighting. So. I drove there. And she corrected my poem. And I drove home.

And I drove to Japanese and took a test, and was late.

Everything's connected. I wouldn't've been late if I hadn't driven to Sutton's house so late, I wouldn't've been late getting to her house if I hadn't gone home late, I wouldn't've gone home late if I hadn't been chatting with Vincent and Andy and people, and I wouldn't've been chatting with Vincent and Andy and people if I hadn't hung around with Vincent and Lilith after school, which all originates from Joe Pei stealing my keys and me being confident enough to not fight him for it and expect them to magically return to me.

So, the grand conclusion to my tale?

At 8:30 when Japanese ended, I walked out w/Karen and Younghwan and we'd gone all the way down to the parking lot when I realized--

I didn't have my keys.

Went back to the Japanese room, nearly turned my bag inside-out, backtracked everywhere, even poked my head into the bathroom; my keys had disappeared!

Karma.

In the end Younghwan was nice enough to give me a ride home after he got HIS keys (we had to wait around for a friend of his to finish class =.=) and then a ride back to De Anza again, so I could get my car and drive home (with spare keys, y'see), and now I am home with a lot of time wasted and no keys - well, I have my spare, I suppose, but the real loss in that was my CTY lanyard. The blue one! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhh. T____T

And homework awaits. So does dinner. Long night tonight.


In non-key happier news, secret santa stuff in orchestra. You have no idea, I seriously couldn't think of anything last night, and today when I got the slip again (I get to do it for both periods of orchestra! yay) I was sorely tempted to write, y'know, I want LOVE. or I want HAPPINESS~~~~ or something of the like. And y'know, as stupid as that is for a secret Santa, if an interesting person got ahold of it, maybe interesting things would come of it. It's better than I want ANYTHING, which someone actually wrote...

man. veteran's day weekend. still can't sleep in a single day for the sake of our panel. :(

but I actually do want to do well on this panel. And it's pretty fun. We came up with these hilarious ideas of rainclouds and raincoats and umbrellas and candles that we plan to implement, and our theme (Melancholy :3) is awesome, and it'll all be plenty fun, just- lots of work. XD;

I feel like I'm living and breathing poetry (the class, not actual poetry). Go there in the morning, work on stuff for 2+ hours, come home, (insert random extracurricular activities here), come home again, live on gmail (our primary means of communication), and go workworkwork on panel stuff. I mean there's other stuff interspersed, but it feels like. like: poetry, hw, poetry, dance, poetry, guzheng, poetry, read a book, poetry, eat, poetry, sleep, poetry, etc. And tomorrow's going to be morning for panel, probably couple hours spent doing not-very-important-tasks-that-Sutton-considers-important for the blissful sake of 8 points extra credit every hour, and then go home and work more on poetry stuff.

but I don't know, I'm actually feeling passing civil towards all the work right now. Probably because there's no school tomorrow AND no japanese AND (primarily), I had a good piano lesson (YES! SCORE! YESYESYES!) on Friday and a decent cello lesson on Saturday and a pretty good guzheng lesson today. You have no idea how much these lessons affect my mood. I don't even think they do, sometimes, but they do. .____.;; they really do.

/amused

So from what I gathered from J-room visits with Jesse/other random people last year, and random visits this year, and in general just what I've gathered from past impressions is that a lot of random people hang out in the J-room and talk and stuff, but the actual journalism students do have a bunch of work to do and stay late to do it and just. lots of work! and you know, deadline night and stuff.

So, today! Adela is chatting with people who pester her about Homecoming pictures, so she slips off with a friend who's going to the J-room, and hang out there a bit. Being so, she popped her head in on the people in the back on the computers, whom she had always assumed were diligently working.

They were diligently working. Sorta.

ADELA: hey, whatcha up to?
FRIEND: Oh, this, this, and this... /shows newspaper stuff
ADELA: mmmm I see.

ADELA: and you?
FRIEND2: Oh, header stuff for the website.
FRIEND3: I'm web editor! but I don't know any html!
ADELA: .... /applause

FRIEND4: Hey guys! /sits down next to them
ADELA: Hey there!
FRIEND4'S MOUSE: [rapidly] click! click click! clickety click!
COMPUTER SCREEN: Hello and Welcome to Mangaworld, where we have scanlations of-
FRIEND4'S MOUSE: click click!
COMPUTER SCREEN: -Prince of Tennis! Here you go.
FRIEND4: /stares rapturously at manga on screen
ADELA: ...

FRIEND3: Yeah, you know, screw this.
FRIEND3'S MOUSE: clickety click!
COMPUTER SCREEN: Now downloading zip file of Mahou Sensei Negima.
FRIEND3: C'mon now. You can download faster than that.
ADELA: ... ... ...

No wonder they're always "working" in the J-room and take so long to finish their "work." XD

Also, it's sort of interesting to observe people in their different respective "groups" and how they overlap. For example, there's the Vincent-Lilith-Gabrielle-people group, then there's the Yang-Clara-Christine-etc-etc-senior-lunch-group, which Vincent is also a part of, but then Clara's also in the Marvin-John-Michael-etc-J-room group, and Michael's also in the Stephen-Erisa-Take-Japanese-group, and he's also in the orchestra group, which I'm just going to pile together because everyone loves everyone in Saratoga Orchestra! (right? right? riiiight?) Not to mention the Stephanie-Vivian-Gabrielle lunch group, which Vincent is also a part of because he jumps lunches like I do, and Erisa's in it too, and I dunno. It's just so interesting to watch the alliances, the groups, from sort of an outsider's point of view. Because I mean I'm sure the people in, say, the Japanese group might know/be sort of friends w/some people in the J-room group, but more like friendly acquaintances, or just well, the groups wouldn't merge. Y'know what I mean? Except for where Michael is, they're separate. The Vincent/Stephanie/Vivian/people group is a little more different, that's just sort of the same group with no clear boundaries. I mean coz I'm not really in any of them. I'm friends on a personal level with a bunch of people in these groups, and so I float amongst all of them, and sometimes I go to things with them and sometimes I don't, but I'm really more like- well, you guys know our chatgroup. I'd be more like Mai! No offense to Mai, but she sort of floats in and out and isn't exactly a member, yet is.

mmmm like... I'm not solidly in any of these groups, but I'm good friends with Yang and Lilith and Teri and a lot of the people there, so I eat lunch with the senior lunch group sometimes, and sometimes with Stephanie and Vincent and Gabrielle, and sometimes with random orchestra people, and even sometimes with the Ashley-Lisa-JeffYoung-Grant group or Felicia-and-her-choir-friends group, and of course my freshmen year lunch group which has actually changed somewhat and now evolved to include Angela Hwang and Karen Hao, but I'm not really in that anymore either coz I eat lunch with them about once every two weeks, and I'm not solidly in... anything.

...except the chatgroup. ♥

yeah, I dunno. Just like, seeing Clara at lunch, then with the J-room people... or Michael with the J-room people in the J-room, then laughing with the Japanese group 10 mins later in the front parking lot... it just made me sort of think. I got that feeling where everything spiderwebs connections to each other, and the whole world seems so complicated and intricate and just the way things overlap and connect except, step back to see it from a grander view and... yeah. weird feeling.

It was the feeling I got the day that was- well, so.

Long time ago:

SISTER: /walks in with big silly grin on her face
KIDDIE ADELA: ?
SISTER: Oh, my friend wrote a really funny poem. Some ode to a pillow.
KIDDIE ADELA: ah.

Years later:

MR RECTOR: Hello, I am your new English teacher!
CLASS: Hello, Mr. E. Rector. /males snigger at the "erector" joke

Few days after that:

ADELA: Yeah, his name is Eric Rector.
SISTER: Oh, Eric! I know him, he was in my poetry class!
ADELA: ...!
SISTER: He wrote a funny poem about a pillow once.
ADELA: !!!! /THUNDERBOLT TO THE BRAIN

'twas like /ZIIIING the whole world is connected omfg.

yeah. that feeling. minus the thunderbolt realization. :)

(also, sorry about the name spamming, but using friend1friend2friend3 for something like that is too hard to keep track ><

...also, I forgot about the 7th-period-plus-some-band-people-afterschool-rant group, which you could say I'm a part of (fairly solidly), but that group by itself is sorta unstable/shaky in foundation to begin with.)