Skirting the Mundane

Hmm. Well, what's going on in my life?
Interesting question. The answer is, basically, nothing. Or rather, so much stuff that I've just given up taking note of it. In terms of upheaval, it's an embarrassment of riches around here: Dad's lost his job and started McClay Ecoscience (a consulting firm... please call him for all your entomological consulting needs), I'm going away to university so Elise will be an only child, and there's something about the social scene... I'm having another of those not-fitting-in kinds of days.

"Everything is Illuminated" is kind of a crap book (I just DON'T CARE how many UKRAINIAN VILLAGER WOMEN your great-great-great-grandfather gave blow jobs to starting when he was TWELVE, I really don't!) but there is a great passage in it about a girl named Brod, who keeps a list of all the different kinds of sadness she has felt. She gets up to about six hundred, and when you think about each sadness, you realize that either you've felt it or you feel sort of melancholy because you haven't felt it. These days I'm having sort of a... nostalgia for things that never were, or at least that never were for me. My current sadness might be called the "sadness of no happily-ever-after". I just don't know where I'm going and it's not all laid out in storybook form. The next few months are going to be hellish, and this is just sort of the deep breath before the plunge.

Mostly I just hate chemistry, though. This is not a crisis by any means.

What the fuck. I have just spent forty-five minutes on one fucking chemistry problem and I can't do it because the quadratic formula has decided not to apply and to give me unreal number results and I just don't get it and we were NOT taught to do this in class and the question seems so simple but I just can't do it and I've got this system set up with algebra equations, at my Dad's recommendation, but it's not working and I can't do it and why don't I just drop chemistry because it's the thing I hate most in the entire fucking world.

Fuck.

I may have a job at the pet store. That is, I may if they ever call me back, and my hesitance to just call them back is making me think that maybe I don't really want this job anyway (see April 6th entry for how many different ways I will hate myself if I let this get away...).

Here's an interesting bit of news, some fallout from Tom's Germany trip, as it were. It would seem that our dear Thomas cannot show his face at school for three days, because he is suspended, because he was drinking. Not to the point of blastedness I'm sure, but... wow. He, John, Chris B., Nicole, and Steph are pretty much out. Maybe some other people too. There are two possibilities for my thoughts on this, the first being that Tom & co are incredibly stupid, the second being that the admin is incredibly stupid. I'm tending toward the first one (honestly. This is the second time people have been drinking on a school trip, and the first time anyone did it they got suspended too!) but I can't really get too angry. They'll do what they want to do and if they think they absolutely *have* to drink a Jagermeister because they're in Deutschland, then so be it. They knew what was expected of them and knew what would happen if they failed to comply. So, faced with that sanguine behaviour, what can we do but be sanguine in kind? They all know it was stupid. Tom's more concerned about not being allowed to play the show at Wye Hall this Friday than about anything else. His parents are probably going to go a little insane, but I don't know them well enough to say how insane.

So that's the daily excitement. Yesterday's was failing a chem assignment, in case anyone's interested. I know I'm not.

Sigh. Happy Easter, I suppose. Are holidays always supposed to be depressing? Let's make a list of minor annoyances in my life:
1) My cherished mum is going ballistic over chores and various tiny things around the house, because she's going away tomorrow and Dad's job is ending on the 15th or 16th.
2) My pants don't fit. Stop telling me I'm thin because the scale doesn't lie and if it doesn't lie than neither should anyone else.
3) I'm never going to study for AP exams. Why? Because I'm lazy.

Hmm. Some less-good news here: My financial aid package from Cornell won't hardly cover nothing. Also, I am infected with Okie-speech from reading 200 pages of "The Grapes of Wrath" in one day (see previous sentence). I done gone stir-bug crazy.

Carleton has called like four times and they are giving me lots of money. They want to looove me, they want to hooold me, etc.

My comment buttons appear to have returned. What is going on?

What the hell? My shout-out button got eaten again. Jessica's blog is experiencing technical difficulties. But it annoys me because every time I put the shout-outs back up, the ones that I had before get deleted. So now I'll be missing that whole Gibb's Free Energy/ sea turtle exchange that was so wonderful.

Hey la, hey la, my boyfriend's back! He looks absolutely dreadful, poor kid. Eight hours worth of jet lag will do that to a person. It's really very brave of him to come to school at all. His eyes are all bloodshot and he looks, basically, like he's going to die, but he's here and I got to see him so now I'll shut up about missing him and go back to just talking about him all the time like usual, okay? Okay.

GUESS WHAT. I got some excellent mail yesterday, including a big package telling me that I've been accepted to Cornell. So, if the financial aid package I get is any good, I could be Ivy League-bound! Strange part is I'm not even that excited... no, scratch that, I'm tremendously excited. I still don't have a job, though.

This blog is basically a bitch-a-thon, you've noticed that right? Whenever I'm enjoying myself I'm too busy enjoying myself to post. And then when I am definitely not enjoying myself and/or am putting off doing my chemistry homework I blather morosely on, causing Bev deep concern for my mental wellbeing. To which I reply, "what wellbeing?" If I can complain I'm okay... actually there's a quote from some Sartre story about that. I'll look it up and post it later.

Block's almost over. I have to think of some good things quickly or I'll go to musical theatre all depressing.
Good Things In my Life:
1. I have wonderful friends who care about me, e.g. Bev.
2. I just helped run a moderately successful AGP
3. I'm not hideously deformed.

The bell just rang, gotta go.

YARRR! Well, I'm back from AGP (and have not yet had time to check my e-mail, so if you're waiting on a reply from me, you can just keep waiting). It was... I don't know. People told me it was lots of fun, well-run, etc. We lost two girls, and that's been bothering me. Laura and Jeanne and Bev and Malory rationalized it away -- the girls left because they needed babysitting in order to make friends and wear the right damn uniform, and babysitting wasn't our job. This does make sense, I'll admit, but it's far too instinctive for me to find a good reason to blame myself. I could have tried harder to sit with different people at meals and talk to everyone, to deal more kindly with uniform infractions, especially to take Mal down a notch in caucus (she is an aggressive force, love her though we do), to notice that the two girls who left weren't enjoying themselves and were intimidated. Leader of the Opposition was basically an eighteen-hour-a-day job but I could have spent those eighteen hours better. I don't think it was the executive committee's job to make everyone be friends, but I could have been more responsive to the people I was supposed to be leading. I know AGP isn't for everyone, but it should at least be for everyone who bothers to come.

And now a list of people who have died over the past three months:
1. Colleen's grandfather
2. Someone at the Baseline/Hwy 21 intersection, near my house
3. Jessica Hutton from AGP's grandfather
4. Two of our aging family friends
5. Laura's grandmother
6. Marissa's grandmother
7. Several of my fish. Fish are people too.
And our school's grade 12 counsellor has just had a heart attack, but should survive. What is the deal?

I've been trying to get a job, once again to no avail. Katie dropped off an application at the pet store, same as I did, and of course they were falling all over themselves to hire her but don't seem to want me. Is seventeen officially too late to apply for a job without having any employment history? Am I going to be unemployed for the rest of my life because I was lazy and stupid and waited too long? If so, is that fair? Katie has offered to put in a good word for me, because she's looking at another job lifeguarding. It pisses me off that I can't seem to do this on my own. I am not stupid. I am not necessarily undeserving. All I am is underemployed. Everything seems to come so easily to some people, while I'm perfectly content (sort of) to take the path of least resistance and then complain about it later while pretending my failure doesn't matter. I hate needing help from other people. There seems to be no business in town that will overlook my faults (e.g. being busy, never having had a formal job) long enough to give me a chance to damn well get some work experience. I can't get a job because I've never had a job and I DAMN WELL KNOW I'm good enough to work at STAPLES, for Chrissakes. Fuck. I hate being too lazy to do anything properly or get anywhere and I'm always questioning my wants and the necessity of doing, you know, anything and then settling for second-best. So naturally I must blame others for my own failings. The path of least resistance is easier than killing myself to get something, but then I have to deal with not having whatever it is I could have gone after.

On the scholarship front, my mother is saying, "don't you think it's a little late to apply for things now, Jessica?" NO! IT'S NOT. If there are scholarships out there then I should bloody well apply for them NOW because I've been too fucking lazy to do anything about them for the past YEAR. It's not like there's some kind of Scholarship Season where you do ALL your applications, is there? Well, it's possible there is and I just missed it -- spent some time on the Internet, watched a little television, shoved a few more kilos of food down my throat and then went to sleep. FUCK. I'm so frustrated, it's like I'm just wasting all my time and there's nothing I can do to break out of this inertia. And all this is going on with a mere two core subjects and musical theatre. Can you imagine if I had a full course load like... oh, like Katie for instance? I'd be a wreck. I'd probably have bought a revolver and/or the farm by now.

Over the past few months I seem to have been suffering from an unwillingness to feel that anything is purely enjoyable. There's a cloud to every silver lining and I never go totally hysterical and succumb to... badness in extremis... but I do have regrets about almost everything.
Yay. The cheeriness. Die, forces opposing me. Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch!
On a more positive note, I'm learning to drive a standard. I don't totally suck, I guess, but I haven't actually driven our little Honda Civic outside the church parking lot yet.
Hee! I'm in the library and Mr. Hicks just said something about Stalin. WHO DIED ALONE, WITH HIS MOUSTACHE!
Tom is getting back from Germany Wednesday. He had bettah. I miss him.
Colleen is off at her grandfather's funeral and will be back in school Thursday. She had bettah. I miss my spare-block buddy.