Easter and Grocery Store Revelations

Any holiday where you get to hunt around your house for eggs that are theoretically filled with chocolate is okay by me. The Easter Bunny didn't come to my house today though. What did happen is that I went to the farmers' market and sold Girl Guide cookies. I learned something in the farmers' market and now I am resolved to work in a grocery store.

I want to work in a grocery store for a couple reasons. Number 1 is to make money. I think I want to buy myself a cell phone for my birthday and this requires funds. Also, I owe my mom money for my computer and it's just a nice thing to have in general. Number 2 may surprise you, or it may not if you pay attention to who is bagging your groceries.

Hot guys work in grocery stores. Legions of them. I cannot even go into the grocery store for five minutes these days without seeing two guys of relative good lookingness. Obviously I need to get in on this which is why I am applying to work at the closest grocery stores.

Creepy Child Thoughts Revisited

(Alt. Title: What reading does to kids. Namely me, but perhaps...)

Just some odd thoughts for today, since no particularly intellectual ones are popping into my head at this very moment...

-- Not that I saw this in movies I watched when I was younger much, but when the bad guy/killer/whoever did that finger-across-the-neck sign, I used to get confused. (Or rather, start thinking about it in an overly rational way, leading to confusion.) Just slashing someone across the neck wouldn't necessarily cut their head clean off. Which was the only way I thought about fictional, not-of-natural-causes deaths for quite a while. Like, no one was *really* dead until they got their head sliced off. Preferably by guillotine or some other blade-type-thing. (Which would be in the opposite direction, not across the neck but straight down on top of it...) I have no idea how I formed this opinion, really. Which in retrospect, creeps me out.

On a related, macabre note, one random early-ish memory I have is that whenever we would pass the limestone quarry* I would think about how it would be funny if the car swerved off the road and into it, because then we'd all be stranded and have to eat limestone or become cannibals or something and die. There were always some plants and rainwater in the ditch the limestone had made, though, so the more I thought about this the cooler it seemed.**

--Roald Dahl still kicks ass. I spent the end of a very long power outage yesterday re-reading Matilda out of boredom; which is possibly why I'm thinking about the above notes again. (I tried to move things with my mind a lot. Quite a good use of time...) Lots of death and awesomely weird names of things and people and the overall message of "Adults, especially really old people, suck and are not meant to be trusted. It's fun and worthwhile for children to manipulate them, because children are good and pure and awesome." Yay. :-D

Moral of the story blog: Kiddies, DFTBA. Read, be a nerd, be as weird as you want*** Mix everything in your house into goo just to see what color it turns. Run into your closet and find Narnia. Eat tons of chocolate. Walk backwards. Stand in the rain. Do things people tell you not to, it's fun and it's how you learn.****


Footnotes:
* Which now has no limestone and is fenced off ominously.
** Ironic, considering I was very much an "indoor child"...
*** This is pretty much an example of how you'll turn out. Choose wisely. (I feel the need to add something like "*grins eerily*" here. So, *grins eerily*.)
**** Or at the very least, entertaining at the time...

I'm quitting homeschool

I want you all to be the first to know (second if you count Facebook, but I don't--third if you could Twitter) my big news. Drumroll...

I'm going to public school next year!*

Speaking of my future, I hate it when people ask me about my future. I'm fifteen years old for the next month and 9 days, thank you very much.

On Tuesday I went to Vancouver. I hate writing Vancouver. I've started to realize that I love it there. I don't know why exactly but it's a nice city. Anyway, so I went to see a grown up unschooler from Georgia talk about unschooling and it was really fascinating. I had a lot of stuff to say about this at the time. Let's see if I can bring back.

I need to stop calling myself a home schooler. I don't love the term unschooler either so I think I'm now an open sourced learner.

Last weekend I was at a camp and my sister ended up lying to people, saying she was going to university next year because it's easier to tell a simple lie that people understand than spend five minutes explaining how home schooling works.

You see, it's hard to explain something that has so many variables and differences. On one side of things you have the school at homers who are the easiest to explain. Some of them are Christian, some of them are not, but basically they do everything you do in school, only at home. On the other side of the spectrum, you have unschoolers who are the antischoolers, the people who have no formal schoolwork or lessons. They learn from life and are driven by curiosity and a thirst for knowledge.

I think I'm mostly on the unschooler side of things which is the side that's difficult to explain. So maybe I've lied before and said I go to the local high school. Is there anything wrong with that?

I love whatever you call how I learn, though. And maybe I'm a little worried about what I'm going to do in the future but only when ignorant future focused goons bring it up. I know I like to write and I know I want to be happy. Isn't that enough?

On a side note, my script is going quite well thus far. Apart from the fact that I'm feeling a bit like an angsty wounded artist who lashes out easily and hurts other peoples' feelings today, I'm pretty good. I'm going to post another blog on my other blog after this with my script so far and I'd love to know what you think. :) www.accordingtoalex1.blogspot.com

*SPOILER ALERT: APRIL FOOLS! I never could appreciate the whole 'it's over at 12pm' rule. A day like April Fools' CANNOT have rules. So there.

Kittens! (and More About KRAZY KOLLEGE)

**Yes, I will purposefully murder the spelling of words that would otherwise start with a C simply for the sake of alliteration. Your point?**


So, this commercial. It can only be described as trippy. That's pretty much the bottom line of that. Weirdly... plain weird. Psychedelic even. Good job, cat-food marketing department. Maybe it's because I don't own a cat, but I do not understand this at all. Alice in Wonderland-esque? But for cats? The use of mind-altering substances is questionable, but the message gets across, yes? Cat eats food. Food acts as a magical portal into vibrant world of extremely colorful hallucinations*

Yay.

In other news, I am quite enjoying today, having gotten up early** of my own accord, done nothing mindfully or physically strenuous, and am looking forward to several more days of essentially the same thing. Spring/Easter Break w00t.*** As a comment to Vita's post, all I have to say is that I feel really terrible when the subject of colleges is brought up, because I kind-of-sort-of know what I want to major in, not what the entire rest of my academic life is going to be including the exact college I want to get into. Nor do I know like FER SURE that one test taken in November of freshman year will determine whether Harvard will REJECT ME FOR LIFE OOOOH NOOO. (Or the more favorable opposite of that.) Seriously. On the day the results of said test were given out (with a list thing of colleges we could possibly get into based on our scores) a few people in my counselor-group were IN TEARS. WTF? Chill. These are smart, extra-curicular-participating people. You are not going to die.

Footnotes!

*Are there any other kinds of hallucinations? Black and white hallucinations?
** Er, 8:30
***It can't really be called Easter Break, what with being a religious holiday not everyone celebrates, but the administration conveniently arranges it around the week of Easter. For obvious reasons. I live in a very, very predominately Christian suburb that makes sad, sad attempts at diversity/awareness etc. A bit of an aside (maybe I'm just being cynical, maybe I'm just trying to prove a point. I'll let you decide):

Near Winter Break, I was talking to a girl in my Spanish class. I said "winter break", she got confused and corrected me,
"You mean Christmas Break?"
*similar point about different religions and so on*
"Oh, that doesn't matter. Like, the entire world is Christian anyway."
"...?"
"I mean, like the highest percentage of the world is Christian. *Almost* everyone."
"I'm pretty sure it's Hinduism. Or Islam. The population of India is higher than the US, even though the US has a high percentage of Christians..."
".....?"



Want more kittens? :)

Zoo Life

My mom says that I didn't like the zoo when I was little. She says it was probably because there was too much walking involved. I think it was probably a combination of that and the fact that to my five year old mind, there was little payoff for all the effort. You stare at a bored and confined animal for a couple of minutes and then you leave. What's the point?

Ten years later, I simultaneously love and hate the zoo, or rather the whole idea of a zoo. It's genuinely interesting to see wild animals up close; I would never have the opportunity elsewhere. Still, it seems somewhat cruel to lock up those wild animals in a space that is one hundredth, or maybe one thousandth, of where they would live if they were in the wild. Sure, they get a good diet and health care (isn't it funny how animals get better health care than people?), but how much does that mean when you're basically a prisoner? I'd rather take my chances in the real world than be guaranteed food and medical care in a jail. One on hand, it's an intensely euphoric moment to realize that a lion is only 30 feet away from you. It's equally depressing to realize that that lion ought to be three thousand miles away from you.

Also: did anyone else not know who Ricky Martin was before today? Does anyone else fail to understand why people are so excited about the fact that he's gay? So are 100 million other people. How exciting.

Also also: Did you know that John Green went to Kenyon College? This makes me want to go there at least ten times more. This also makes me feel like there's a bigger chance of me being extremely disappointed if I don't get in, which is quite likely (they accept 440 students per year. JESUS).

Related: are you guys starting to get sort of, how should I say, freaked out about applying to college? I was never too concerned about it in middle school or even last year but when I hear people talking about how they've known they wanted to go to XYZ college since they were ten years old, I get nervous. Maybe it's because I go to a school that has an IB program and some of those parents are on the pushy side (i.e. THEY ARE REALLY PUSHY). I don't know, I just feel like I should have been more concerned with college when I was younger, even though the logical part of my brain is saying "that is bullshit; people who have not yet hit teenagerdom should not be in any way concerned with which college they will attend." Look at Rory from Gilmore Girls. She wanted to go to Harvard her WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE, and did she go there? NO. She voluntarily CHOSE Yale instead. And while I don't even want to go to an Ivy League college (even if I had a chance of getting in - which I don't - I wouldn't want to), it goes to show that things change and everyone should CHILL THE FUCK OUT accordingly.

I am tired and sleepy

Yes, it is possible to be both tired and sleepy without being redundant. My body is tired from waking up at 7:30 for the past SEVEN DAYS (!!!!!!) and from tramping around Vancouver today* and my mind is tired from functioning early in the morning for the past seven days.

I have to go right now and shower because tomorrow is my last early morning but I will definitely probably edit this tomorrow. Look forward to my commentary on how eating breakfast at 7:45 sucks.

*seriously, Vancouver is practically my home. I just wrote mom instead of home. That's how sleepy I am... I learned in my writing class today that ellipses are overused. Suckas...

EDIT:

The second I'm finished this, I am going to do some school. You know what that means...? Lunchtime.

I was quite confused when I saw Rena's* tweet about how she was following suit by not blogging because I swore I wrote a blog on Thursday and I had. Apparently, I didn't post it, which shows you just how tired I was at the end of the week.

So I've been a TA for Japanese students... I kind of wrote this on Thursday. But anyway, I've been getting up at 7:30 and getting on the bus and then being at school for seven hours. I have a couple issues with being at school for seven hours.

1. Having to wake up before I actually would like to.
2. Having to eat breakfast at 7:45 and not being able to eat lunch until 12pm.
3. Having to sit at a table for most of seven hours.

I don't even know how you school children do that. EVERY weekday of your life from age five to eighteen. No wonder everyone loves summer so much. I feel really spoiled as a home schooler now.

Anyway, enough about that. I missed what I'm sure was an awesome slam poetry show last night which reminded me that Rachel made a video for our collab channel LivingroomNinjas on Friday where she read a poem by Shayne Koyczan and all of this led me to want to tell you to listen to this poem now.

So hi. I've seen Shayne, who performed at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, once and that was at the Vancouver Readers and Writers Festival. He performed a couple pieces all of which were stupendous but one of which stuck with me especially and that one was Stop Signs. It was a beautiful poem and funny too and listening to it gives me shivers. I know it's long (seven minutes--ah!) but I think it's worth listening too and I really hope that you do.

Here's some linkage. Seriously, you have to listen to this poem.

The thing about slam is that it's not read on a page poetry. Whatever idea of poetry you may hold, slam is different. It's still poetry but it's spoken word, meant to be expressive and told, not flat on a piece of paper. If you ever have an opportunity to see it, you should. It's amazing.

I'm out. Listen to Stop Signs and think about how awesome it would be to have someone around who just wanted to be around you forever and make you happy which is what I think about when I read about how much Quentin loves Margo in Paper Towns.

A few quotes in case you don't listen to it:

"I’m willing to pay interest on the penny for your thoughts
Mortgage my mind finance an expedition that
would find me a better way to get to know you"

"I wanna give you a lump of coal for Christmas
and tell you, in a million years it's gonna be a diamond

and will you wait for me til then?"

"And I admit it, I’m committed.

Everything I’ve done I did it to make you smile

Cos it’s been the largest part of a long while
Since I had someone do that for me."

*I can't keep myself from pronouncing your name Ree-na even after I learned that it's Ren-a. It is Ren-a, right?