jasmines

"Pride is a very common failing I believe".

 So I admit, I just quoted Pride and Prejudice.  I've even gone so far as to dicuss the different aspects of the text and how it relates to modern day humor in public.  The things I have accomplished apart from this have been rather meek. 

 1. I hemmed a pair of tie-dye shorts that have been in my sock drawer for years, using my brand new sewing machine.  I was so productive that I gave myself a headache and dry throat from all the excess energy.

2. I google imaged the Amersterdam airport.  I have a feeling that this depletes brain cells.

3. I google imaged nice hair and found a marvelous picture.  The smokey-eyed girl in the picture is Alexis Bledel (remember her from that Pants movie that I watched once and promptly forgot about?) so obviously it has to be a lovely haircut.  My brain cells must be depleting out the ying by now.

4. Listened to Sandstorm.  Flashed back to school dances where everyone was doing the hokey little Sandstorm dance in a "ballroom" that reminded me of a refurbished gym.  

5. Paid 50 dollars for someone to stab my flesh with a needle. Annnnnnd I now have a belly button ring to show off my hawt bod when I go to Italy this summer. Or, you know, I could wear the one-peice I've been eyeing on Urban Outfitter's website and not live up to the MTV version of American girls.  But then how would I have any fun?

6. Did horribly on my Chemistry final. But honestly, diatomic molecules are no cause for celebration.

7. Maintained a steadfast diet of apple pie and chai. They rhyme too!

8. Discovered the greatest song ever created by two British men: The birds and the bees, by Patrick and Eugene. There is a banjo involved.

9. I lied when I said that all I ate was apple pie and chai. I also find myself feasting on Cheddar Bunnies and organic strawberry fruit roll-ups. You'd think that by now I'd have some sort of wart on my thumb from all the malnutrition, but my skin is oddly boil-free.

10. And the winner is.....I started rereading Pride and Prejudice for my English class (or "Pre-AP" as I fondly refer to it) and for some strange reason can actually understand the writing. Which is supposedly a good thing because there are more SAT words in P&P than any other book. Because the SATs control my life and my only chance of survival is to do well on them. So, who's planning the SAT party this year?

I really have it together. Have you ever experienced moving on with your life to only stumble on something or someone you were once well aquainted with....dare I say once dated, and realize that all you've been doing is ignoring how many weird and irrational things you've done over the years? Well now I sound like I'm old and scratching at a bee sting that reminded me of the Great Depression, but I hope you assume that by years I mean....three or four. I'm all full steam ahead, taking a class at a university, walking through 20 minutes of slush in four inch heeled boots to get to school because I don't care if I can't get a ride, I want to wear those shoes. But one tiny thing as stupid as finding the myspace of my horrid exboyfriend that I only dated because he was a friend of a friend who desperately wanted him to find a girlfriend (and you thought that might have been a warning sign. For someone with perfect vision, I'm pretty crap at seeing what's in front of me.) is enough to annoy me and halt my procrastinating. The horrors. Unfortunately, there is a creepy aspect to this. That when I read his blog ranting about how terrible Juno is (as IF, it made me want to stomp on his yellow messenger bag, in the wildly impossible scenerio where he isn't actually touching it) I could hear his voice in my head saying all of the arrogant and obsessive things that makes Juno a bad movie. And although everytime I see him in the hall and say hi, not because I want to but because I want to show how utterly mature I am compared to him, and he blatantly ignores me, somehow his high, mentally straining voice is still hammered into a place in my brain after 9 months. Ewwwwwwwwwww.

I am a very reliable person in that I will always think I can totally handle something, push it out of my mind, and only when thinking about whatever it is that's supposedly not a big deal do I realize that it is indeed a life-changing thing and I begin to hyperventilate, which is actually quite funny to watch as I pretend to be nonchalant as I bolt to the nearest bathroom to splash cold water on my face in hopes of reviving what little dignity I have left.  Which is usually none.  Knowing full well that this very June I will be boarding a plane to go across the Atlantic to a certain country for an entire year, I really didn't understand why my mother's alarming friends thought what I had decided to do was so awe-inspiring and independent.  I thought that spending a year learning German for attending school in Switzerland wouldn't be a big deal, and having my major at that school be Spanish was a natural choice.  Sometimes I wonder what my parents fed me as a small child.  Finally, the fog around my head has lifted and I noticed that hey, it's kind of difficult to learn two languages at the same time.  I mean, I've already taken Spanish for three years, but German is a new thing, and my school doesn't offer classes so I had to find a tutor.  Next semester I'm taking a German college class in a desperate attempt to be fluent by summer.  It's not that I don't get the language, since my family is brimming with heritage and I can trace one line of my family back to the 14th century or something.  My pronounciation is apparently fabulous.  But it's the grammar...all the extras that English doesn't have, that keeps me nailed to the ground with a throbbing headache and stolen shoes.  I feel like such a lazy American, flirting with the idea of trilinguality, but not giving it all the effort it takes.  It's hard to apply myself so that it's possible for me to spend a year with my grandparents in their tiny apartment in a city I love but have no idea how to function in without the huge tourist-eyes and nearby parent.  I am in love with my ancestors' country, but the one time I was alone in a train station I got that jello-leg sensation that one often gets when they're four years old and lost in a department store. (Luckily every educated person in Europe knows about 15 languages so it wasn't hard to scout out an English-speaker to aid me.) 

 And as much as I despise sharing a house with certain members of my family, it's going to be like getting a tooth pulled every day being away from them.  Their nagging and misunderstanding is a comfort.  I also have to leave behind the cat I've had since I was two, which I know doesn't sound that big, but I don't know how much longer he's going to live and I'm the only real cat person in my family, so I don't know how well he'll be treated.  While most kids were fawning over stuffed animals to help them fall into their dreams, I shoved mine off the bed and hunted around the silent house in a very chalant, three-year-old manner for my cat.  He's old now and whines for no particular reason, but it doesn't bother me much. 

But I suppose I'm just facing what most people experience in going off to college a few years early.  I'm going to be abroad my junior year, but my dad said that graduating from an American school is important, so I can't stay another year.  I'll probably want to by then.  I've never been homesick when I've gone on visits, and I always get extremely pissed off when I return home.  The smell of the stairwell in my grandparent's apartment building has been etched into my brain since I was a few months old.  The air of Switzerland is different than America's, more full and swollen.  I miss it like I do friends when they go off on vacation for a month.  I really don't understand why my parents decided to start a family in a tiny town full of people that believed that because I had no specific religion, my father had to come into my 2nd grade class and talk to my peers about it, than in Europe.  I still remember the day my father did that, seeing him walk through the doors to the gym, where my class was thwaking sporting equipment around, in a buisness suit and wearing that smirking scorpio-swiss-boy smile he's never been able to shake.                   

Hey, guess what, I can make a difference!  I realized this a few hours ago, in my world religions class, inbetween hating being grounded and dreaming about far-off places with hopefully less faux fur-lined hoodies.  Our class was studying Judiasm, and we had just read a short overview of some of the most important components of the magnificent religion, and chosen the sentence that we thought was most important.  Then we were told to "form groups", which is code for "find out how different you really are" because there were three huge groups of people that had chosen the same sentence (or changed theirs in order to be with their friends), a few smaller groups, and then three individuals.  I was one of them.  Standing out is not something I enjoy.  During class I like sitting, eating chocolate chip muffins, and sharing my honest opinion without having any sort of giant, sweat-inducing spotlight shone on me.  Unfortunately, I had to tell the class in detail why I thought "not being forgiven for actions" was more important than "saying blessings at meal-time".  It's not that I'd rather plunge my head into a vat of eels than give a presentation in front of the class, because I'm fine with that, but I just can't stand that look I get from the empty-headed people in the front row, that lunch is in forty-five minutes and I'm hungry enough to consume that tasty-looking human blabbing on about Hindu symbols look.  But after sharing my opinion, Jewish-beliefs-wise, the teacher asked us to consider changing our opinion due to what our classmates had said, and if we did, would we please write it down on the top of the paper before passing it in.  Twenty minutes later, I was passing my teacher's desk when she told me that I had persuaded another student to change their opinion, meaning that because of me, a fellow student now shared my opinion.  Feeling accomplished, I returned to my seat in the back of the class and began to record a Red-related strange dream I'd had, about not being able to find my essay in the book when I was supposed to read it for a whole bunch of people.  The next period I watched The Pianist, which is almost as scary as Schindler's List, but with the benefit of amazing piano (hence the title, in case you were wondering), so my good mood was slightly ruined, but since watching horrible movies about the Holocaust (hmm, I had a very Judaism-centered day, now that I reflect with a dash of focus) makes me incredibly sad but aware of how lucky I am, I ended up feeling sort of brooding-happy.  Anyway, that was my day, how was yours?    

So last night I snuck out of my house with my friend, and we ran across town (our town is small enough that you can walk pretty much anywhere, but big enough that if you go down dark streets, you should be ready to dive into a bush.) and I managed to stab the bone right below my eye with a twig as I fell into a large shrubbery with my friend to remain unseen by a passing car.  We are really that cool.  It was a few hours past curfew, the police were circling (because they don't actually have anything to do but bust teenagers out for a night time stroll) and we were doing the whole dressed-darkly, pretending-not-to-be-mortally-afraid-of-every-guy-we-passed-on-the-sidewalk thing, and it's really quite the exercise.  We were walking down a main road when a drunken vehicle turned onto the street, so we ran like a leopard infected with rabies was chasing us and hid in the crevices of a pentagon-shaped house.  After doing this kind of procedure for half an hour, we got to our other friend's house.  I should stop now and explain about my other friend.  She is paranoid about everything, thinks her sister is a nark yet told her and her friend where she was going and kept telling me how much "fun" she was having.  So we're patrolling the neighborhoods hoodlum-style, and her mom calls and tells her to come home.  So me and friend #1 head off to my end of town.  This morning my dad got a call from my 2nd friend's mom...so I was busted.  But my dad is so amazing that he hasn't gotten angry(mostly because I confessed at the drop of a pin) and my mom's away for a few days so the slaughter will not start until Monday.  Now I have to go watch the Bourne Supremacy, so I'll sign off.  Or something equally proffesional. 

I am finally going to move out of this horrible neighborhood I've lived in for a year.  It's not horrible in the high-crime, dead-babies-in-dumpsters way, but it's possibly almost as bad.  Like all the houses look the same.  And this is no illusion.  All the houses on my street are based on the same house plan.  The colors vary from "grey" to "darker grey".  One home has a bit of red, which personally impressed me very much, because here I was thinking no one had souls in this place.  The only reason we moved here in the first place was because a) it had enough bedrooms (we need four) b) there's a built-in pool and hot tub in what should be our backyard.(But if you walk out there about 20 other houses have a view of you, so doing ANYTHING there's the chance that 40 beady eyes will be watching.  Also there is no grass, only cement and bark chips.  Which completely defeats the purpose of a backyard, but whatever.  The pool did come in handy last summer, and by handy I mean it got yummy boys into swim trunks.)  and c) they let us rent it AND have all our pets move in.  That's about it.  Why do we become so foolishly daft about house matters?  I mean, maybe we don't want to live next door to someone who has exactly the same house as us. 

There are a few things I have realized over the past few months that I wish to share with the world in general, given the world in general happens to read my blog and not doze off from consuming the abundance of holiday food. 

First thing:  Drinking expired condensed milk in your chai will not lead to happiness.  In fact, it will lead to an entire afternoon spent lying in bed in the fetal position wishing that you were literate enough to read the date on the can.

Second thing:  If you write something really embarrassing about a certain boyfriend and send it to the best editor ever, it might get published.  Which means you will get a ticket to NYC and a shiny new reason not to ever talk to your ex-boyfriend again.

Third thing:  The best time to run into the one teacher you told about being published, who in turn invited you to join the school newspaper staff a year early is not on a plane home while hallucinating on minimal sleep.  But if this does happen, just act natural, and don't let him see you drooling as you fitfully sleep through two hours of turbulence.  And as soon as you "deplane" (as they so logically call it in airline lingo) run for the hills.  Because teachers are scary as hell outside school.

Fourth thing:  If you recognize the creepy-flexible guy doing some sort of martial-art in the park, walk in the opposite direction because he is most definitly the guy who does acid and hung out with your old friend from sixth grade who now dates 26-year-old drug dealers.

Fifth thing:  If you're stuck in a foreign country's train station without a cell phone or knowledge of how to speak the local language fluently, learn this phrase in the language and then use it when addressing a random person you find on the first train to stop: Do you speak English?  If they say yes, thank your god of choice, because now you will not have to become a hobo living next to a (very European) dumpster for the rest of your life.

Sixth thing:  Cell phones are dumb.  Also they will give us all tumors the size of puppies.(and I don't mean the .03 oz-type breed of puppy that looks more like a skinned and roasted rat than anything else.  I'm talking saint bernard)

This is the end of my bottomeless wisdom, I hope you learned something new.  Ciao. 

I have watched way too many TV shows to be considered healthy, but I have found something amazing in Degrassi(it goes there).  Degrassi is unique: it disgusts AND interests me, like watching someone fall off a cliff.  You can't bear to watch it because it's the single most horrible thing you've ever experienced, but your animal instinct forces you to stand there, losing oxygen from lack of breathing, and see the person fall to their death.  Or at least fall to their spinal fracture.  In any case, every time I start watching Degrassi, I find that I am instantly transported to a world where testicular cancer, date rape, counceling, pregnancy scares, panic attacks and shootings can all coexist happily within the walls of a few episodes.  Gay boys see their boyfriends go off to Switzerland to pursue mysterious hockey careers, good religious girls go crazy with a few drinks and immediatly end up suicidal and full of remorse, and that one kid in a wheel chair gets deep with his feelings (again).  It's basically the best thing ever. 

Have you ever read your livejournal from two years ago and suddenly gotten really confused because you realize that yourself two years ago was a really horrid person?  I just logged onto my old livejournal (I switched to myspace long ago, I suppose because it's easier to have an obsession with a larger website, not that I have an obsession with myspace or anything) and it turns out I was kind of an alpha-***.  I hated my height (because I was about 2 inches taller than every guy I liked at the time.  I figure that it was a blessing in disguise because the guys have gotten so much hotter since their pubescent middle school days.  Not to bash middle school, but, if my livejournal proves anything, it's that 6-8th grade is a terrible, terrible time.  At least it was for me and everyone else I talk to these days.  The beauty is that my friends and I can sit around creating general chaos and be like "back in the day, when we were all much shorter and had considerable amounts of lunch meat, school sucked."  And because I happen to think that my high school is the coolest thing since FRIENDS (and I mean that most sincerely, having had an adolescent love for that show that included blowing off any chance at a social life for many Friday nights to watch it on DVD with a pint of ice cream and my cat.  Seriously, it was like I was a 60-year-old cat lady with a fiendish fear of society, but better.), I can pull the whole my-school-wins-at-life thing without feeling guilty and buying a box of band-aids for my breaking heart, or something less potentially awkward. 

 To continue(as one often does in blog-type things), I had no idea how spotty my memory of middle school is.  Obviously I remember the back-stabbing, the lonely angst(complete with angry diary entries with definitly more than forty-seven utilized IQ points), the mindless schoolwork and bad hair-dye jobs, but I forgot what it was like to spend days on end going to school feeling completely incompetent, like the world had created a "let's crush Jasmine because her hair looks suspiciously hamster-like" club and I was left to suffer.  Of course, if I would have opened my eyes I might have noticed how nobody was staring at my imaginary flaws, but hey, I'm just glad that phase was two years ago instead of now.  It's really nice to have jeans that fit (because it's ridiculously hard to buy clothes that look decent when you have low self esteem) and it's as good as tiramisu to know that I have a group of friends that have been there for me for two years now. (HA!)  Anyway, I'm just pleased that I was able to stop being so horribly mistaken about my worth as a person, and now have a budding shoe fetish that I really enjoy.  Life is sweet for the bitterly unprepared!

Blogging is fun.  Do you know what is not fun?  My cat is stalking me, there is not normal (and by normal I mean not coconut milk) ice cream in my freezer, and the five hours of homework ahead of me don't shine quite as brightly as the newest episode of Desperate Housewives just a click away.  Oh, and Brothers and Sisters is also available.  That's only three hours, plus the fifteen minutes it takes me to talk myself into procrastinating.  Yes, I have to talk myself into procrastination.  And then I procrastinate about completely procrastinating.  Meaning I'll half-heartedly open my books and get out a sheet of notebook paper, title it with my name and date, and then sit there silently contemplating my options.  How cool is my life?  My suitcase isn't unpacked, I gave away all my amazing NYC stuff to my family in a fit of generosity, and my life is suddenly angst-free.  It's so boring to be angst-free.  I might have to start doing something actually productive, which would not be amusing at all.