29 XI 2002 - 20:59 - huojitien

So because ich bin ein braves Kind I have cleaned out my room and generally done half the work of switching rooms with my second sister, the other half being done as I sleep by little house-elves who may or may not bear a curious likeness to my mother.

Now, I like to think that I'm not bad for a teenager. You can see more than 95% of the floor space in my room that is not already taken up by big pieces of furniture. (Big, of course, means that I can lift only one end at a time. Or a bookshelf.) However, I am also a bit of a pack rat, and as a result, many of my drawers have a variety of things stuck into them, including but not limited to old receipts, plastic bags from foreign countries (I can tell because of the shop's name), and stories I wrote-drew when I was six (sadly, I have not learned to draw any better than I did then.) In fact -- this made me happy -- I found a note from a bookstore I go to relatively often that allows me to get $11.98 worth of books as long as I do it before 15 December. So there are good things about clearing out my desks.

However I am also expected to throw out a good deal of what I kept, and this makes me quite unhappy. For some reason the process of going through everything, sorting it, and throwing half out (or recycling it in the case of paper because I am sort of a conscientious global citizen, when I remember) puts death strongly in my mind and I cannot take more than a very limited amount of sorting-cleaning in a day or else I get surly and depressed. When I'm cleaning on my own I can control this and I stop before I reach that point. With people helping and watching me, I'm driven far beyond this point and perhaps even up the wall, one might say.

I don't know how this happened. I seem to have a view of this whole sort-toss process very different from the one my mother has but although I can see where she's coming from and accomodate her up to a point, she has no such reciprocal ability, which just makes me pissy and generally a sort of bad person to be around for a couple of days. Add to this that we've been working on the switch for two days now and my mood is murder.

Which really doesn't help when I haven't been practicing enough. I felt for a while as if the orchestra concert might have been a valid excuse but it's not easy to explain about two weeks of barely touching the instrument with a lame excuse like that, especially when the three-hour rehearsal isn't on every night. I had (let's not deny it now) a crap lesson and now it's back to work work work... I think often I must be a terrible disappointment to someone, considering how much I lack of self-motivation. It disgusts me at times...

Thanksgiving, however, is not one of those times. I'm not going to go through a list of what I'm thankful for, because that would be silly and because I like carrying it around in my head, but when the list is floating around in your head it's hard to feel as if any problems you might be having are really all that important. No turkey for me; the family (sine sororibus) went out to eat huo-guo (Chinese communal stewing? I forget the correct English equivalent) and I did have to deal with shrieking children behind me (five of them and they really should have been old enough to know better because one of them expressed dismay at turning 23 yes, they should have known better than to shriek, I think) but in the wash of food it was all right, somehow.

Time to go read up on the Dioscuri and the merits of inhumation vs. cremation; see you all later.