islanded in a stream of stars

Singing Simon and Garfunkel songs in funny accents can do wonders for one's mood. Seriously, try "Bridge Over Troubled Water" with a generic Eastern European accent and you'll hear what I mean. Then again, singing very "American" songs with any sort of heavy accent has a peculiar effect. "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" is a perfect examle.

Today's concert was better than I thought it would be, considering that I didn't actually warm up or really know any of the songs we were performing! It's rather sad to think that this senior class has the last performers of the Majestic Britain Trip. I'm really keen on Sophia's idea of getting a day pass for the bus or the train and getting off at random stations to sing the old Britain Trip songs just like that time at the Bayswater tube station in London. Who's up for a round of "Nobby 'All?"

(Speaking of Sophia, you have gotten me hooked on "The Lonely Goatherd!" It's your fault, I tell you! Not that I mind listening to the Sound of Music, but it's really hard to get it un-stuck from my head.)

I just received the biggest "Look at how diverse we are!" pamphlet from a university yet. I'm all for multiculturalism and celebration of all kinds of diversity, but do you really need thirty 11x17 sheets of paper to do so? I do appreciate the effort, but Asians aren't exactly underrepresented in higher education.

Did I mention that insurance stuff is looking much happier at the moment and the ants haven't come back to invade today?

It's in! My first college app is officially in!

Edit: I lied. It'll probably be another half hour at this rate (it's 11:09 according to my computer clock) with all of this stupid wavering in indecision about trying to figure out how I can submit it to Scripps without dong so to Harvard or Wellesley while still being able to edit the common app main essay. At this rate I'm not going to be able to submit any college apps and I will become a hermit in the Sierra Nevadas and die of hypothermia.

I still have to finish my heroine essay on Wide Sargasso Sea where our merry protagonist is drowning in insanity for most of my paper. Oh, that. And then I need to finish making my Halloween costume.

I think I just had my first dream about college apps.

They're inescapable!

The funeral was this Saturday. I have no idea what to say.

Ellie has gone off to HK to renew her passport and deal with some of the aftermath, so I now have the slightly depressing distinction of being the only able-bodied person (and only driver) in the house.

What continues to surprise me about grief is its continued ability to suffocate all emotions with it. Somehow you manage to function perfectly while your emotions slip into a coma. The day's experiences slide off like beads of water on wax; no mood lingers and merely mirrors those of the people around you.

If I haven't said so already, Joan Didion's essay on grief published in the New York Times magazine two Sundays ago is possibly the most brilliant thing I've read in weeks.

Somehow by the end of tonight I'm going to finish my French absurdist play for my French seminar. That requires me to figure out what the hell I am going to write in English, and then afterwards translate my ideas. Err, right.

Somehow that's going to happen. And somehow tomorrow I'll find the time to do that Italian project Powerpoint that I should've turned in last Friday except that my computer account will neither let me save nor print anything. And then I need to study for my AP Euro test.

Luckily I didn't screw up my Columbia interview today; actually, I'm surprised that he said that I did a reasonably decent job and that I will probably get in (although I don't believe that last part at all). My interviewer was...interesting, possibly what one might call a reverse racist? He puzzles me.

I still exist. I think so, at least, and that's what counts, right?

Two weeks ago I was in LA looking at colleges and visiting a lot of lovely relatives. They are attempting to bribe me into staying into California for university by promising to get me a car. My grand uncle jokingly promised to get me a Ferrari if I go to Stanford. Not that I'd want a sports car considering how unwilling I am to speed. I ended up being really impressed by the two universities that I originally had labelled "eh-probably not for me" and really disliked the university that has the "best" reputation. Perhaps it was because I was chased by a clerical workers' protest there, but I've finally managed to eliminate one school on my list. I also have my graduation dress because Ellie was freaking out about "waiting until the last minute" to find one although I still have a good year until I graduate. I liked LA as a city much more than I had thought I would; I can really picture myself living there for several years.

The day before I flew out to Boston and Sophia and her dad picked me up. I got to meet all of her relatives (I swear we must have been sisters in a past life, because our families are awfully similar), and then we stayed up talking until 3 in the morning about feminism and philosophy and all sorts of other nifty things. We went swimming and took a soak in the hotel hot tub before coming out.

I just arrived at Harvard yesterday with Sophia and have been wandering around pretty much since. I have extraordinarily good luck with roommates. Danielle and I have similar habits (i.e. staying up until insane hours of the morning) and seem to share the same sort of philosophical beliefs and a lot of the same interests, so I'm terribly glad about that. Yet our experiences are different enough so that we don't run out of things to talk about. Our room is pretty nice; we each have our own bedroom and a common area with desks as well as a window seat. Sophia is probably going to become our unofficial third roommate as her rooming situation didn't work out as well. Our dorm, Matthews, is pretty big; I have no idea who the others in the nearby rooms on my floor are. I ended up showering at 2:30 this morning to avoid a bathroom crunch and woke up at an embarassingly late hour as a result of my strange sleeping schedule. I just hope that I won't continue to be semi jetlagged and an insomniac so I can get to class (intro to journalism) tomorrow. I'm nervous about my classes but also excited to actually start since this weird lulling freedom to do as I please still feels rather foreign to me.

I have lots of letters to send out, so if you're not staying at home this summer then please give me your mailing address as I've probably already written you a letter.

As soon as I manage to get my laptop, Karen, hooked up to an internet connection I'll resume pestering all of you with comments and posts. Sorry if I'm terribly confused about what's been going on in people's lives lately. Be seeing you!

I should not be allowed to get away with studying for only 25 minutes for an AP exam. The exam ended up taking four and a half hours of my time and left me somewhat brain dead afterwards. You can only stare at grammar and verb tenses for so long until you can't remember how to conjugate any regular in the present tense. Generally it was pretty easy though. Most of the delays came from bureaucratic pettiness; approximately every twenty minutes there's some new form to sign and more identification numbers to scribble down to protect the contents of the test or whatever. Goodness gracious, the French AP exam isn't exactly the treasure of Sierra Madre! I'm not allowed to talk anything relating to the multiple choice section other than the basic format for the rest of my life. Not only did that eat up a lot of time, but the recording equipment in the language lab was having issues. Apparently nobody's ever thought of keeping equipment that's a little older that non-IT professionally trained people can use; our proctor was totally bewildered.

I just had to find out that I didn't have to actually show up to any of my classes this morning. Three different people assured me that AP exams on Monday afternoons don't let you have the morning off because you have the entire weekend to study; nobody bothered to tell me otherwise. I only discovered that I could've actually studied for something else in the middle of biology, at which point I didn't see the point in leaving the middle of class as afterwards I would have to start my calculus placement exam the next period. It ended up being that my math teacher was called for jury duty later in the afternoon so we had a normal class homework review day that I could've quite happily skipped. To add insult to injury, I also discovered that I didn't have to show up in uniform, either.

I still have to read an entire play for tomorrow, and I can't seem to find that rather handy leftover piece I was going to submit to CrWr. Urgh. This is going to be a long haul tonight. I swear that I've fallen asleep unknowingly sometime this evening because I'm more pressed for time than usual. That also might be because I got home late due to the unprecedented length of the French AP.

I seem to have reached the point where I'm swearing at Karen (my laptop) in languages I don't really know. I am currently assuming that sleep deprivation and pent up grumpiness has made me slightly crazy in the process.

Generic Stress Girl is my new heroine.

Urgh...I think my newly discovered narcolepsy is really getting to me today. I'm feeling really disoriented and dizzy and sorta fuzzy on time. Where oh where did it all go, and where have I put all of my stuff?

Or maybe I'm just being even more forgetful than usual, and my forgetfulness is being compounded by jet lag and sleep deprivation.

And what is with the California University of Pennsylvania (yes, you heard that right) sending me junk mail? And I thought St. Kitts Medical University was sketchy.

Worst opening line in a piece of college ad mail:

"Suddenly you're thinking about college."

No kidding, Poirot. Needless to say it went into the trash bin, and I've completely ruled out St. Mary's College of In-the-Middle-of-Nowhere, California.

And on a more cheery note: Yay for February Break! Surprisingly I actually got quite a bit of work done and binged on watching good movies and TV. Tee hee! And I'm near broke now, but I got the DM/SA Megaset and am having a marathon of sorts. Happy happy joy joy!

And huzzah for Mancini! I got two soundtracks of his while at my favorite Borders on Earth, the store in Union Square. the Pink Panther is even better than I remember it to be, though the record producers had the bad taste to translate most of "It Had Better Be Tonight" into English. Gah! I was really tempted to bash out my eardrums after listening to the super-cheesy translated lyrics. Why oh why couldn't they have left it in Italian so that it sounds exotic and beautiful? The barbarians! Peter Sellers's liner notes, though, are the funniest I've ever read.