Ulrich von Lichtenstein!

Artwork by Roy Lichtenstein
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I'm in a really good mood. Which is weird, considering how much stuff I still have to do before school ends. I have three more days of school, then exams! I have a final project in art due Wednesday (yikes) but it's going really well! I'm doing a dramatically shaded charcoal portrait of Jenny. She is positioned kind of like a Roy Lichtenstein girl, looking over her shoulder at the viewer. I am really excited about it. For the other part of the project, I'm probably doing a brightly colored acrylic painting of Blake. I figure it will represent both the bright and dark elements to their music... and relationship. Haha I love pretending that I know what's going on with them.

Random Thoughts:
-I hope I can go to Whispertown 2000 on Sunday.
-I can't wait for Rilo Kiley's rarities album to come out!
-I can't wait to see Jenny this summer! FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-I am glad I'm going home this weekend. I miss my family.
-I sat by a hilarious European named Vlad in Art History today.
-I got told that my animal look-alike was an English Spaniel. Not sure how I feel about this...
-I'm excited to get a job for the summer.
-I hope I can go to Virginia this summer at some point.

Anyway, I'll stop babbling. Here is a really cool remix of Midlake by Cassettes Won't Listen. Straight from CWL's twitter page!
Download: Midlake- Young Bride (Cassettes Won't Listen Remix)

Celebrate Good Times, Come On!

Woo! Spring break is from tonight to the 22nd! I am going to sleep and sleep and eat and eat. My grandmother is staying at the house, which will make sleeping arrangements rather cramped, but I don't care. And I had a good birthday! I had some nice lamb coconut kurma at a random Indian place for lunch, then delicious sushi (See above) for dinner (The one on the left is shaped like a dragon fly, with lemon wedges. So cute.) then cheesecake for dessert with my best friends. I got a gorgeous digital camera in my VERY favorite color (blue violet) and some soap shaped like an owl, and jewelry and other nice stuff. I love my grandma's gifts. They're always frivolous and wonderful. She gave me a giant paint brush made of goat hair and cow bone. Yeah.

I just found out Peter Bjorn and John are opening for Depeche Mode on their tour this year, and I really hope I can afford tickets! Also, Neko Case will be here in May at an outdoor theater, and you can pre-order a picnic basket for the night! I think that would be the funnest thing ever, eating a picnic and listening to Neko's out of this world voice.

I am pretty pleased with life, especially since this paper I've been dreading isn't due till the 24th now!

The Winds of Change

For the past couple of days, there have been howling winds. So forceful that I have struggled to remain upright while walking, and so loud that they roar over the noise of my iPod. I am a superstitious person, and I can't help feeling that they are the winds of change. That sounds cheesy I'm sure, but whatever. Over the weekend, I decided what to do with my life, broke up with my boyfriend, cleaned my room and my e-mail inbox, and discovered how to watercolor flesh tones, among other things.

I feel like I'm on a whole new track in life, and it feels good. I know what I want to do with my life! I'm going to major in Nursing. I think it's perfect for me. It involves science and medicine but not math, and I'd get to help people, and work wherever in the world I wanted to, and make enough money to support myself :)

Tomorrow is my birthday! I'll be nineteen years old. That is so weird to me. 19. I'm going to lunch with my dad and grandma, then going to dinner with my mom and sisters, then getting dessert with my best friends :) It will be a food-filled day. Haha. I feel happy right now. I am so so lucky to have a functional family that loves me and accepts me for who I am. I not only didn't appreciate them when I lived at home, but I was hostile to my parents all the time. I'm sure raising me wasn't easy, and I feel bad now haha. But I'm just feeling really blessed. I have great friends, great family, rilo kiley, and my art to fall back on during hard times. It feels so nice to have that insurance. Yay! :D

I finally saw Milk today. It was so beautiful and sad. I was already crying when Milk got shot but the candle scene completely undid me. It was so amazing how so many people got together to mourn him! I hope I do at least one great thing in my life. Here is a video of Milk's big rally speech.

Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl

Rilo Kiley: "Miami was pretty, before we were bitter, before we let our sadness litter the streets"

I wish I was younger. I'm almost 19 and I already wish I was younger. How am I going to feel when I'm 39? 56? 96? Assuming I live that long. I don't know what to be when I grow up or what to major in. At all. I guess that's me resisting the whole process.

I had more fun in high school than I do now. By far. It's not like I was a jock or popular and miss my glory days.. I just miss living with my family and letting other people absorb my consequences and make decisions for me. I know I have to grow up and step into my adult shoes one of these days, and I really hate it. My adolescence feels so long ago and my childhood feels even further, much more like a dream than anything.

I feel like since I've moved out, people don't care about me as much. There aren't best friends and siblings around to keep an eye on me and give me advice. I'm surrounded by strangers who don't even notice me, much less worry about my safety. I have to deal with everything on my own, and it's hard for me.

I guess it's just my ego being crushed :) I want people to

park that car
drop that phone
sleep on the floor
dream about me.

In an semi-related note, seeing BSS live was one of the more incredible experiences of my life.

Dead.

OH man. I am SO exhausted. Tired. Fatigued. Pooped. Beat. Dead. I just couldn't sleep last night. Again. I wish my circadian rhythms would stop resembling circus rhythms and just be normal. Oh well. I got a bunch of art supplies today, which was fun!!! I love my art class. And I love buying art supplies.
In other news, Kate and Leo should just get married already.

Suddenly Everything Has Changed

Warning: This post contains whining and elements of emo-ness.
It's weird how you can go from feeling so good one day to so bad the next! It really doesn't make sense. Am I just weird, or does this happen to everyone? I was super happy and bouncy yesterday, I loved my art class, I loved my cannibal class, I made friends, and nothing bothered me. But today, I just feel awful. I woke up feeling like I'd been run over, and the day only went downhill. Now I just feel antisocial and left out and worthless for not having more social skills and therefore friends. I feel ugly and like everything I say has been stupid. The Office isn't even as funny. I feel so bad for how rude Michael is to Toby. And Jim and Pam took WAY too long to get together. And I can't believe Dwight killed Angela's cat. I'm annoyed at this picture of The Office because why is Ryan the temp in there of all people? I'm also annoyed that when I typed in "The Office" on photobucket, all these dumb pictures of people's home offices came up. Why would anyone post pictures of their office on the internet? Like anyone wants to see that. It's like people who tell you too much information about their sexual lives. (Ahem, girl in history in 10th grade.) I'm just on a negative binge. Nothing helps. Blah. I'm a cranky-cakes.

Human Racing

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! - Charles Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities

I absolutely love this quote, not to mention this novel. I often think about how strange it is that there are SO many people in the world, so many that my mind can't even fathom the sheer numbers of them, and I will only know a tiny, tiny fraction of them.

I love people. I love our strange idiosyncrasies, our weird habits, our individual reactions to joy or disaster, and how everyone is vastly different from everyone else. Two people can look alike, even be identical, but their insides are still as different as night and day. Of course, everyone has similarities; there are just too many people for that not be. But I just think it is fascinating that there are millions and millions and MILLIONS of individual human beings living their lives on this earth. Everyone has their own beating heart, inflating lungs, blinking eyes, favorite breakfast food, private fears, sentimental memories, and preferred way of eating a taco, to name a few. Every person on this earth is worthwhile, and I agree with what Andy Warhol said: "I think everybody should like everybody".

One of the reasons I love being in cities so much is I love seeing the pure variety of people. Sometimes the place I live seems more like a loaf of Wonderbread than the "Great melting pot" America has been labeled as, so I love traveling and seeing cities for the new perspective it offers. Some people are short-tempered, some are spectacularly attractive, some are good with babies, some are shopaholics, some are great cooks, some lack any modicum of patience, and some are all of these things. But we are all people. We all came from the union of sperm and ovary. We all were born, and we will all die. We're all different, but we're also all the same. Like Depeche Mode said, "People are people." And I think that's beautiful.