last night i got around thirteen hours of sleep. definitely good except that i got thirteen hours of sleep because i thought i didn't have class first block today (first 95 min. of school). heh. i was wrong. see: the school musical is coming up, and so thursdays are devoted to rehearsal for the pit orchestra. i'm not in the pit orchestra, thanks to some rather hair-raising conversations/letters, so i've been excused. yesterday, my teacher decided that he wanted some of us to play at the decorator showcase - this fundraiser my school puts on for its financial aid program. the problem? the musical opens on the same night. which means he has six people to choose from out of thirteen, except one of those people is actually in the musical, and another one is, well, lousy beyond belief. (remember "a-co"? yeah, that's him.) so. that leaves the four of us. a quartet. one flute, one oboe, one clarinet, one cello, and we've got ourselves a little fake woodwind quartet here. so first he says that he wants to rehearse us during that period. then he says we don't have class tomorrow. what we're actually supposed to be hearing is, "nick, alon, you don't have class tomorrow, because you're not in my little quartet, but the rest of you please do come." except none of us do, not being, you know, telepathic and all. today, i get into school, 10 minutes before my health class starts, and my friend tells me: "jeremy, doc [my teacher] was looking for you and molly and bridget and jen... where were you?" oops. so i go into his office and basically lick boots and kiss ass for ten minutes, and i'm charmed and i've done enough of that in the past that he lets me off, because honestly we all didn't mean to. i warn everyone else that brownnosing is probably a good idea because he's halfway past irritated and, so, yes, not a good start to my day. god, alexander has a lovely dog. and i don't even like dogs. which makes me wonder if it's not just that i'm glad that the fact that alexander has to walk said dog meant that he passed by school today after civ let out. ah, civ. that was a story in itself, because we got to watch movie clips. my favorite was the '70s movie where tchaikovsky's lover was swinging off bells and shooting prospective brides' heads off with cannons. to the accompaniment of the 1812 Overture, conducted by a crowd-surfing, tickertape-wrapped Tchaikovsky. don't ever ever ever rent that movie or i may have to kill you. it took me a long time to get that music out of my head and a longer time yet to get the image of a blond man swinging on bells and collecting money in his pockets and shooting cannons at these poor brides out of my head. i will tell you later about having to teach my class what the phrases "model minority" and "New Jews" and "Sino-Japanese War" and "Rape of Nanking" carried with them, but i'm too tired to do that now, and quite frankly, i hope this isn't going to be the way of it for the entire class. i don't mind explaining but i wish i weren't the Authority on all things Asian and History and... part of this i think is the school i go to and that was my own choice. on the better side: i saw paul today. paul! still don't have his contact info, still can't "keep in touch" as he asked, but i don't think he meant me to when he wrote that in my yearbook, think that's just the thing that seniors say. but here's this: i'm finally on spring break. could not have come sooner. j. annoys me at the moment because of her question during our "teen health issues" class which had nothing to do with the subject at hand (could you bring up animal rights some other time, like when the nice man who has nothing to do with the research isn't telling us about what we know about the physiology of addiction in humans isn't speaking? luckily, he willfully misunderstood her question and went into the science of how we can extrapolate data from mouse brains to ours - not to say that i think animals should be slaughtered wholesale, not to say i don't think they have rights, bleargh, we'll get into this later) and then! the "discussion" we were having about events in israel! she said nothing about what she believed the entire time, only what her parents said and believed and had nothing to talk about when asked about herself. wish it were otherwise but it's so. i gave her a five-minute summary of the balfour declaration and the six-day war but i couldn't do it justice and it wouldn't have sunk in anyway. sigh. at least the rest of the people in our impromptu discussion group were more interesting, were better prepared, could be talked to (no i am not a snob what are you talking about but standards, there have got to be standards!) and we did have a wide range of opinion. so. spring break = happiness. catholic easter soon. will be back shortly. take care; good-bye. |
