Tonight

Was good for car spotting. Five Mini Coopers, one Smart Car, and one VW bus. Now, it wasn't good on other fronts, but we're trying to focus on the positive.

Goodness

One of those crazy reoccurring blog themes (the ones that are the entire reason you keep reading this drivel) is what makes something good. Not what makes people good or bad, because that's a completely different story, but what constitutes goodness or badness in creation. Machine guns? Guillotines? Books? Language? The internet? Slaughterhouse Five? Glow in the dark tape? Shakespere? Big Brother? Cars? Plays?
What makes them good or bad? Is it meaning behind them? Or social effects? Or is it sometimes a matter of who they help, what they allow to happen?
I just read another webpage with smaller type, and it was inlegibly blurry after a few seconds. I keep telling myself that my sight isn't that bad. if I say it enough, it'll be true.
Another thing I'm thinking about is dreams. I took a nap earlier today and rememberd my dream. Weirdness. But mostly, I was thinking of the other kind of drems, the kind you do or don't follow. I'm wondering what makes people choose to follow dreams and what makes dreams big or small, and mostly, I'm wondering what makes other people say what they say about people's dreams. Any ideas? Because I am curious. That is all.
We are all going.

This.

I like this blog, and I think you should like it too. I think this house is strange, but it's not the pinkness that makes it strange. I think it's the random flatness on the right side.
I'm thinking about inclusion and exclusion and what makes us who we are and how we define ourselves and what we think about ourselves and what we let other people think of us. Also, prom and how it relates to the general hi! school experience. And mirrored tables. And the fact that, until last night, I didn't know that the president of Poland had died or that there was this volcano situation happening in Iceland*. And I want to tell the people who live here that I like their house, but it would come out sounding like "Hey I kinda sorta totally love your house and would you mind if I move in with you I promise I don't take up too much space and I help out with chores please please please let me move in?" and that would be awkward to say.But really, how many people do you know who can rock the pink coffee table like that?
My life is really cool.
I need to write a bunch of historians notebook entries, do a packet, and do my French homework for tomorrow. Rawr.
* And the girl watched as another vital part of her identity threw itself into the wind. She wasn't saddened by this, but she realized that the despair would start to creep in later, when she was alone. For so long, she had been the aware one, the one who always knew these things, and now that part was gone forever.

Quote of the Month

"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."
Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler

Short.

I read this and I liked it, despite how I feel about the author's face. And you all know how I feel about his face, right?

Fiction Friday

Fiction Friday is not going to become a regular commitment, alight? It just have a lot of stories. Don't come to expect one every Friday, or I'll go crazy.

I watch people die. You're thinking that I'm either in the medical profession or I have some kind of crazy death fetish. Both are untrue. The reality is far less dramatic, something no one would bother to make a TV show about. I'm a janitor at a nursing home. The story of how I landed such a glamorous job is nearly as dramatic as the job itself. When I was a senior in high school, I got a part time job, and I've been here ever since. That's how large portions of my life have been decided, just doing the same old same old thing. It's comfortable that way.
Since I began working here, 53 residents have died, and that's just when I've been on the clock. The first time, I was alarmed. I was seventeen, and I'd never seen an actual dead person before, let alone been there when someone died. I was the only one who even reacted, apart from the people who remarked “Another one bites the dust” and cracked jokes about it. I was sad, and I realized that I had felt some personal connection to them. We'd never met, but I'd cleaned their room and the halls where they had been. It was weird, realizing that I was a tiny, obscure part of someone's life, and now that someone was dead. Sure, there were other people who I had the same non-relationship with, but they weren't dead. They weren't dead yet, I realized. That was the moment when my own mortality hit me like a bag of bricks. Before that, death had always been known, but it was abstract and distant from my life. Other people died. Former presidents and famous people died, but people around me, real people, they were invincible.
And this awakened a whole new world of questions for me. If I could die, what would happen to me when I did die? Would I go to heaven? Would I come back? Would it just be nothingness? I don't think I slept at all that night. I was too consumed by this concept of death and the question of what would happen to me afterwards to do anything but think. I knew I didn't believe in the whole fire and brimstone version of hell that I had heard somewhere. I wasn't religious, and I didn't see a reason to become religious if that's what it had to offer. Still, the idea of nothingness, that was something I couldn't handle in the least. Maybe I'm afraid, or maybe I just have the inability to conceptualize what it would be like to not exist. I can't imagine nothingness. Lack of imagination, yes, that's my real problem.
There is this one guy, Walter, who always talks to me when I pass him in the hall. He usually tells me what's happening in TV shows or about the big drama going on between other residents.
“Walter!”
“Aww, hello there. Funny seeing you again.”
“I'm here every day, Walter. What's new on the tube?” I'd always thought it was ridiculous when people refered to TV as the tube, but Walter started me on that phrase, and it stuck.
“Not a helluva lot. Too much of this reality show stuff. When did the general public” he put emphasis on those words “decide that they wanted to watch people eat bugs? Really now, makes me wonder what the world's coming to.”
I chuckle at his disapproval. “Walter, I've got a question for you.”
Before I finish speaking, he asks “Yeah? What kind of a question would that be?”
“It's a question for people who are much older and wiser than me. That's why I'm asking you.”
“I wouldn't consider myself wise, but we've got old covered, so ask away.”
“What happens to you when you die?”
He looked down wearily, and I realized that I shouldn't have asked it in that form. I expect him to ignore me and go back into his room. I start to turn away, and then he answers me. “Back when I was young and invincible, I didn't need anything. I didn't need a heaven or a hell or an afterlife of any kind. But now, as I've gotten older and seen people” he takes a deep breath “so many people leave this earth, I feel like I have to find something to believe in, you know? And so I looked into religions to see how they deal with the problem. And some of them have afterlives and such, all different kind of stuff.”
“I guess we all have different solutions.”
“And you know what I learned from all of that? I don't have a clue. None of us has a fucking clue at all, and it's not as though the dead are making much of an effort to tell us what it's like, are they?” He waved his hands at the last sentence.
“Thank you, Walter.” I whispered as I turned away, knowing exactly what would happen next.

You could say that.

Do you ever get that strange sinking feeling out of nowhere? And then you start questioning things, and then you get in that state. Not sad, but not happy, and not excited or angsty or anything that I know how to describe. It's almost separate from feelings. I remember when I was little, I would always think about death when I went swimming. It's weird, isn't it? But this is the slightly more adult version of that, that uncertainty that makes you want to draw into yourself and hide and be completely alone with your own thoughts.
I wonder what it would be like to be able to shut off your brain, or even to be able to think of one thing at a time. It would be calm, and that would be strange.
I don't want to go back to school.
Why do we bother to do anything? I get some gratification from doing some things, but why do we do other things? Are they entertaining? Is there something in our minds that tricks us into being entertained when we're really not?
Maybe I just don't understand the nature of goals and achievement.

I brought my camera

And as you know, that means it's picture time.Every time I go to the eye doctor, I try on a lot of frames.Last year, someone asked me if I had decided on a pair of frames yet, which led to this awkward moment where I explained that I was just playing dress up.If we're already posting pictures, why not put some other things up? For instance,the excitingly patterned Easter bonnet that I decorated. On a completely unrelated note, there was a small child at the eye doctor's office who was singing Lady GaGa. It made my day.And a public service announcement.

Yay happy fun time

That's a slightly ridiculous title, but I believe that I refered to a time when I had to wait for about two hours and read my APUSH book today as "Yay happy fun APUS reading time" If you can muster a childish voice, you have an approximate idea of what it was like. And then, when I declared what I was planning to do after writing this, it was something like "Yay happy fun APUS reading time...in bed" I'm a really cool person. Promise.
I visited a college possibility today, and I really liked it. I know that college visits are supposed to make you like the school, but I liked it a lot more than the other two schools I've visited. The facilities have been renovated recently, and they have a big furniture collection, and they have a wood shop that's open to everyone and they recently bought the old art museum and are going to show student work there and use it as class space. Also, printmaking. Siriously. It's pretty exciting. And after we looked at the school, we drove around the city with my cousin and saw a house designed by someone* very exciting.
I have a slight urge to mention Harry Potter right now. So, I would like you to realize that the only adults who can really handle deaths of people close to them are the Weaslys. Also, I wish that I could read the Malfoy/Nott conversation. Also, I think Harry Potter was kind of the perfect combination of the right book at the right time with the right promotion. Also, I'm thinking about names a bit and how all of my characters just have random names pulled out of the blue. Maybe this should be changed.
Also**, I like these lights. This isn't terribly relevant to your life, but you can like pretty lights too. I advocate pretty lights for everyone.
*Frank! Lloyd! Wright! Frank! Lloyd! Wright!
**Someone's been using the word "also" far too much. This might be unhealthy.

What?

This is like...Woah. It's weird and crazy, but there's a part of me that wonders if it's possible to replicate that feeling of utter confusion.

Yeah, I'm a winner

I have some family visiting for Easter. Tonight, after dinner, my second cousins and their mother were looking through an issue of Vogue*. There was an article about Alexander McQueen and how sad it was that he died. One of my cousins asked when he died. I said he died a couple months ago (wikipedia says February 11th) and one of my cousins asked how he died. Another cousin said that he probably died from a drug overdose or something of the like. I said he committed suicide.
Why do I know more about this guy than they do? I read this article yesterday, but I had heard about him before that. I'm not a clothes person. I wear some variety of the jeans and t-shirt/tank top/hoodie combo the vast majority of the time.
All in all, I think I'll just say that I'm a... extremely well informed person. And that I have a very deep interest in fashion.
Samantha: 1 Cousins: 0

*I believe this also explains the two issues of Vogue that have randomly appeared in my house. They might have left them here.

Fiction Friday

Yeah, it's the second part of the story from last week. Are you excited yet? Mmhmm.


I don't know why I want you to care about me any more. I don't know why thoughts of you can't leave me alone.
I end up somewhere without remembering how I got there.
“Do you need help with something?” They ask me because I look distant and disconnected. I try to respond and say that I'm fine, but my mouth isn't working, isn't forming words that I learned to make long ago and all that comes out is a vague sound. I still feel as though I'm not in my body, but that I am without a body at all. I'm floating around in the air, peering into everyone's brains and understanding exactly how they see the world, but I haven't the slightest idea how I see it.
You're here. You don't even see me, but you still invade my thoughts. I'm not okay with that. I want you to go home and leave me alone, just for once.
“Hey.”
I ignore you , hoping that you'll think I'm someone else and stop talking to me.
You don't. “I haven't seen you in weeks! How are you?”
I look under your eyes, unable to make eye contact. “I'm okay. How are you?” My voice is shaking uncontrollably.
“Oh, same as ever.” You touch my shoulder, and I can't breathe. “Listen, have you seen anybody else recently? It's almost like they're hiding from me or something, you know?”
“I, uhh, haven't seen them. Haven't seen anybody, really.” You think I'm lying, but I'm telling you the truth.
“Oh. I wish that we were still spending time with them.”
“You should, you should call them or something.” I'm panicing, I need to get out of this situation.
And of course, you see this. “Are you still all distraught about what happened? It wasn't your fault, you know. It wasn't any of our faults. It just happened.”
I shake your hand off of me. I can't handle having you touch me like that any more. “It was our fault. It was all our faults. We all hat the chance to stop it, and none of us did.”
“What's done is done. We can't change it by regretting everything that happened.”
“But you're trying to deny it.”
You should say something, anything. You have to make a case for yourself, but you don't.
“He died, and we could all have saved him.”
You turn around and leave. You've left me alone, just like I wanted.
Thinking back to the beginning, it feels like I was a different person, or, at the very least, I thought differently than I do now. I didn't think then, I really didn't. I did what people told me to do, I let them influence me more than I should have. I needed to please them, I needed that external validation. And now, in a sharp break with tradition, I've built walls. I've gotten good at it, and that's why I'm messed up now. Because I ignore things far too much, and that means I have a problem. I'm not supposed to be so cold. I'm supposed to feel things more, but I don't want to. It's difficult and it's annoying and it's a huge waste of time.
I need to get rid of this, I need to cut out the part of my brain that holds memories, memories of everything that we did, and get it out of my head so that I can just be free for once.
I remember the screams, and I hear them, sometimes. That, I think, is why I can't handle this. I can't handle any of this, and I just want out. I wanted it then, and I still want it now.
Gosh, it sounds like I want to kill myself. I don't, I swear. I just want to take a short break, a nap, if you will. Just a month or so, and then I'll be ready to jump back into all of this again. I feel as though I'm bargaining with the universe, and the universe always seems to win. The thirteen year old inside me is outraged at this injustice, and I think the current me is a little outraged too.

It's April and I am full. Of ANGST.

So. It's April now, if you're curious. I didn't participate in any April fools jokes, because I felt it would better contribute to the teenage angst and apathy that I write about on my blog.
Such is my life.
I made a mad power grab at school today, and this has contributed to me feeling more and more that I don't fit in here. It's not the fault of this town, I just think that we have very different values and would be much better suited to be far apart. I never wanted to be part of their social contract, and they didn't particularly want me to be a part of their social contract.
There is a question bouncing around my mind, and it's probably bouncing around your mind too. Am I really expecting to fit in anywhere? The way I'm talking, it's like I expect there to be some kind of utopia waiting for me, where there's people who value the same things I value, whatever they are. I'm starting to think that the utopia doesn't exist, and that maybe, everything I've been imagining isn't there. It's just non-existent, and the idea exists purely to disappoint people like me.
This sounds terribly depressive, but it feels like the light at the end of the tunnel is fading, and maybe I will end up with the trappings of life.
That idea makes me want to puke.
And, on a slightly more uplifting note, I've been thinking about characters. We're reading A Streetcar Named Desire in English, and the characters are all characters. That was slightly redundant, but it's true. They all have the molds that they fit into, and they're very stuck in them. Blanche is the fading southern belle who loves to creep on people, Stanley is the bestial one, and Stella is the sort of weak little one. They all fit into one role, and it works. I do not know how to write like that. And also, I do not know what makes this play good. I think it's kind of boring, and hard to follow, but that's true (in my opinion, to some extent) of plays in general. The exception, of course, was Death of a Salesman. That was good, and I'm not sure why.
Moral of the story: I am full of angst, and I need a mold to fit into because I'm not sure of myself. Also, I need to get off of this nostalgia for the future kick that I've been on for the past year.