’tis a gift to be simple

I’ve found that just a bit of order can make mundane things like waking up on Thanksgiving and making tea and watching the parade with children and doughnuts a whole lot more enjoyable. I’m finding it hilarious that I am returning to the things I originally shunned when I became a teenager. When I turned thirteen I think I suddenly thought things were going to change. Now I think I care even less about appearances and what people think. I always felt like I should always be growing more aware of my appearance and of what people think of me, but I don’t. I just put up on old pink, flowered canopy for my bed. It’s fabulous. My room is clean and flowered and colorful and there is tons of tea in our cabinets and if my Dad wasn’t such a Scrooge, I think I would be perfectly content this holiday.

I got tons of new books I don’t know where to begin. Here’s a list of what I am reading or about to read:

• Candor by Pam Bachorz
• The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls by Morton Thomas
• Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
• The Book of Lost Things by John Connelly
• The Price of Honor by Jan Goodwin
• The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart
• Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi
• Men and Women by Margaret Mead
• God Among the Shakers by Suzanne Skees

Alas, the list is even longer than I thought. That’s not even counting the books on my shelves that I haven’t yet read. I guess I will have to read a lot this holiday season!

 

It’s officially Christmas time! I have just loaded my ipod with tons of appropriate music. I’m excited!

romanticisms

You complete me. You saw me when I was invisible. You had me at hello. I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her. I love you, most ardently. We’ll always have Paris. You jump, I jump Jack. Kiss me.  Kiss me as if it were the last time. The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.

Aaaaas yooooou wiiiiiish.

I don’t have time to blog but I am anyway. Next week is my birthday and I want to eat India food and paint my hands with henna and watch old movies. Pride and Prejudice is a definite must, probably Casablanca as well. AND I also really want to see An Education, a movie with Peter Saarsgard and Carey Mulligan, but it isn’t out anywhere. Hrmmmmph.

I’ve always picked up from subtle insinuation that most people think Woody Allen is obnoxious. I don’t know if this is true, but I think he’s fabulous.

My life is exploding right now in a not so good way. I think I may possibly have it under control but I don’t know. Check back at a future date for a consensus on that.

twisted Sainthood…

The dreams of twisted and mutilated Saints have returned to my nightly adventures. It sounds freaky, philosophical and religious, but it’s really just my brain freaking out about my skeletal alignment. Somehow my spine and pelvis have twisted around again and my legs are different lengths and that makes my hips hurt and puts stones along my back and coaxes my scapula to reattach from the rest of me. I’m sixteen for goodness’ sake! I hate to think of how hunch-backed, achy and creaky I will be in 70 or 80 years…

I have officially filled up every shelf space for books in my room. I have three full bookcases, one bookcase with a shelf removed so I can stuff them all into the stacks, two other wall shelves filled, and a few piles overflowing onto other non-book areas of the room. HOW WILL I BE ABLE TO TAKE THEM ALL TO COLLEGE WITH ME?!

edna st. vincent millay

(I wish I had something to say! I love autumn so much…trying to enjoy it!) I love this poem:

Heart, have no pity on this house of bone:

Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy.

No man holds mortgage on it; it is your own;

To give, to sell at auction, to destroy.

When you are blind to moonlight on the bed,

When you are deaf to gravel on the pane,

Shall quavering caution from this house instead

Cluck forth at summer mischief in the lane?

All that delightful youth forbears to spend

Molestful age inherits, and the ground

Will have us; therefore, while we’re young, my friend —

The Latin’s vulgar, but the advice is sound.

Youth, have no pity; leave no farthing here

For age to invest in compromise and fear.

poetry day.

Thick, hot, spicy Indian soup that reminds me of a different place, far, far away. Somewhere over the rainbow where cameras talk and the hot crusted earth reminds you of the danger of romantics.  Where love seems real and cities still have magic and a favorite band blaring through the open windows of a beat-up old truck can remind you that the world is still beautiful. The things I’ve heard– I still don’t believe them. Because you still have magic, and you’re the only one left.

Siamese located left of pole on wall.  Take your anorexics and broken marriages far away from me. That is perfection.

[Insert obligatory change of seasons post here.]

I love seasons changing. Suddenly your wardrobe shifts and your days feel different and you have intense desires to eat nothing but soup. You suddenly want to drink way more tea and cocoa than should be allowed and write long thoughtful novels and shut yourself in your room with an imaginary fireplace.

I’m home alone right now, and the chilly late September air is blowing in through the window, turning me from a sock-hater to a sock-lover. I’m curled up under a sleeping bag, simultaneously working on a paper, a creative writing thing, and watching Gilmore Girls. (Do I even need to write that down anymore? I’m always watching Gilmore Girls. It’s pathetic, but it’s better than drugs, I guess.) The air is brisk enough to seep through my sweater but not potent enough to get to my toes under the layers of socks and sleeping bags. I can’t wait. CAN’T WAIT. Next week begins my absolute favorite month of the year. It always passes by too quickly, like a car driving by so fast you can’t catch what was written on it’s bright pink bumper sticker.

READ something by Francesca Lia Block, if you haven’t. I think she’s brilliant.

Number of pages of Russian literature read this year: 370

Episode of Gilmore Girls (on my re-watch of the whole series): 3. 12

love, Princess B.

That’s All She Wrote.

My life right now:

-School school school school

-Anthropology work that isn’t required just ’cause I like it.

-Gilmore Girls and Bones re-runs

- Balsamic Vinegar (some things never change…)

-DANCE (holyfreakingcow ouch. Spent half of last week on the couch with heat packs, ice packs and tubes of IcyHot.)

-My writing bones are itching but I have no time…can’t wait for NANOWRIMO!

-HatP’s concert this weekend with Haley and HPA people and Caroline!

P.S. A whole post on how Wrock concerts are the closest thing I’ve had to a religious experience in my life later this week.

P.P.S. New Bones tomorrow!

Atonement: Part I

There she lies, atoned

greedy snakes swallow whole

the fruit of her palm.

Wrap coils around her flesh

and wring her like a bloodied cloth.

Each time she unsticks

her twisted body,

hip from rib, breast from bone,

the tear down her side

reveals a juice like warm sickly sunshine.

Snakes slither, poison ivy

murdered by mud

the virgin mary bleeds no more.

“Dead Souls and a really big globe.”

As my second week of “college” is finishing up, I have come to a verdict: I love it!

Beyond my brilliant classes, waking up at a normal hour (as in 8 am, not 5!) helps to keep my sleep schedule normal. Unlike high school, nobody is dozing off in college classes! Also, getting home relatively early is great, because I always have a good amount of my day left to work on school work, extra-curricular stuff, and etc.

Anthropology, Government and Politics, and Russian Lit are all fantastic, and certainly my favorite courses. I’m also taking a gym/health class for my High School requirments, and a Freshman Seminar thing which is pretty average. RUSSIAN LITERATURE makes my brain on fire. Everyday it is like some miraculous discussion where my mind gets sucked out and replaced with a hungry, hungry sponge. And my teacher has these perfect googly-eyed Professor glasses…you almost have to laugh at the perfection! I’m enjoying Dead Souls, and can’t wait to get started on my POSHLOST paper!

The work is perfect…it’s like all the best parts of learning, without the busy work and silly hand-in things, tweaked just to my level of intelligence. I can’t wait to go to college for real next year!

I should really stop putting Wellesley paraphenalia on my notebooks and walls. I keep imagining myself there next year. I keep saying  in my head, “Next year, when I’m at Wellesley…” What if I don’t get in? What if by some miracle I get into Harvard or something and have to choose? I don’t know what I would do. And no matter how qualified my family thinks I am, there is no guarantee of my admission there. SIGH.

P.S. Been watching too much Gilmore Girls as usual. I’m just starting the 3rd season in my complete series re-watch (for the 3rd time.) It’s one of those things that makes you want to do work though. Like a visual motivater.

Number of pages of Russian Literature read this year: 164

Death, Melancholy and Chichikov

Last Friday, “…we headed to Beacon to visit Eric and Cath and Owen, which is always fun, but again, bittersweet. I felt like I was saying goodbye to two people, when only one was actually leaving in the near future.”

I felt like I was saying goodbye to two people because I was.  The next day I was asked how Eric was and told people he looked fine, considering the circumstances. A few hours after that, my dad told me he had passed away the day before. I was shocked, and spent a few hours under my blankets in shock. I was so out of it, I didn’t even realize when Haley came to visit me. I was starting school the next day, and Kara had already left for college, and everything was all wrong.

I still can’t say I’m okay, because nothing feels concrete to me. After initially hearing the news and being upset, I knew I had to go back into normal Brenna mode to deal with the oncoming stress truck I was about to be hit with by school and dance starting up. There’s going to be a memorial service, but there was no public funeral, no wake, no burial. And since it wasn’t put before my very eyes in that concrete way, I still cannot fully believe it.

I plowed through the next week, working too much and drowning myself in my schoolwork. These distractions were accidental, but useful ways not to think about death. I hate death. Hate it. Not only because I don’t want to see someone go, but because I hate seeing all those sad, pathetic humans the dead leave behind. We are the only creature on the planet that forsees our mortality, and yet after millions of years, we still haven’t found a way to better handle the crushing sadness it brings. So when I found myself wiping away tears one early morning at work in reaction to a PBS special about children without access to education, I knew it wasn’t completely in response to an young Iranian girl’s desire to learn. (Although it was really depressing to watch after a mind-blowing first week of classes.)

Let’s stop being depressing though. I have far more urgent matters to deal with such as the atrocious state of my hair, my imminent first day of dance (during which I will inevitably get upset over my lack of flexibility,) and keeping up with Chichikov and Manilov and all the other crazy Russian names in Dead Souls.

P.S.  I got super excited when I learned we were reading Dead Souls in Russian Lit, because as any Gilmore Girls aficianado will know, it is the novel Rory was reading before she goes to watch the Brady Bunch Variety Show with Lorelai the morning she got her Harvard Application in the 3rd season.

Number of pages of Russian Literature read this year: 69