StumbleUpon | victrolaism's blog posts

http://victrolaism.stumbleupon.com/review/30654780/

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:52:31 -0800

so i haven't updated in a while, i'm sorry. school is more demanding than it used to be (except for typing class, holy shit easiest 1.25 credits i will ever hope to earn), though i'm really glad to actually be challenged by school rather than bored. and i've resolved to read a lot more this year, which has detracted from my computer time a lot. so far i've read:

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Without Feathers - Woody Allen
Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach
The Portable Dorothy Parker - Dorothy Parker
Autobiography Of A Face - Lucy Grealy
Skinny Legs And All - Tom Robbins
The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry - Alan Kaufman (Editor)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe
Shopgirl - Steve Martin
Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss
The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
The Pleasure of My Company - Steve Martin
After Dark - Haruki Murakami
Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri
Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong - James W. Loewen
Prozac Nation - Elizabeth Wurtzel
Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Smashed - Koren Zailckas
Bagombo Snuff Box - Kurt Vonnegut

i'm pretty happy with the rate at which i'm reading. also, i've recently been excused from gym class for being a "safety hazard" (i don't have depth perception and am therefore embarrassingly bad at everything involving hitting, throwing or catching balls) so i now have a free study period that allows me to read even more. hooray for being a safety hazard!

here's some pretty stuff to look at/read:

^ aw, it's little devendra! if you don't know who devendra banhart is then please go immediately educate yourself.

http://victrolaism.stumbleupon.com/review/28685056/

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:21:48 -0800

i've decided that Promachoteuthis sulcus is my new favorite animal.

i want to feed it carrots!

http://victrolaism.stumbleupon.com/review/28510905/

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:24:30 -0800

my power's back on. i don't know why the hell it's back on, but it is, and it's pretty magical. i can't see any of the other houses on our street with lights on, so i'm not sure exactly what's going on. my family has some of the town's electric equipment in the ground in front of our house (where i live used to be a makeshift town dump) so that might explain why we have electricity before everyone else. we also have cable running, which i don't understand in the slightest, but it's nice to be able to use the internet at home.

the electricity went out on thursday at 10:30 p.m., and after spending the night at our house, my family went to friend x's house, who lives in worcester. sadly, the gods were not smiling on us that night. five hours after my family arrived, someone drove their car into a telephone pole, knocking out all the electricity on friend x's street. they live in worcester, the second largest city in massachusetts, and there's a lot of people there who don't have power there. their single-street problem is tiny in comparison to the larger ones that exist all over new england, so it might be days before they get power. again, i'm really fucking lucky to have power right now.

after spending friday night there, we spent saturday, sunday and most of monday at friend y's house, the aunt and uncle of friend x. they are amazing people. we had hot meals every day and strangely comfortable orange shag carpeting to sleep on. they offered to let my family to stay as long as needed, but we decided to go somewhere else, since we, unlike friend x, weren't related to them, and didn't feel like we should overstay our welcome.

on monday, tuesday and wednesday morning we stayed at friend z's house, who lives in the same town as us, so it was very convenient. those couple of days passed by quickly, and it's a good thing too, as i was beginning to feel a bit homesick.
it's unbelievable how terribly grating it can be to have to spend a week away from your home when you're only an hour away, having to completely change your routine to fit around other people's and have to exist solely on other people's charity. it might have just been because i was pmsing the entire damn time, but i enjoy solitude. i thrive on it. i crave solitude. and when i cannot acquire it, i become a mess. a strange, bumbling, strung-out, going-to-sleep-at-9-p.m.-because-then-at-least-i-can-be-alone mess.

on the other hand, having to spend so much time with other people taught me a lot about the incredibly capacity for kindness so many people have and the inanity of needing more than warmth, shelter and food. (and alone time.) if my family didn't have these three other families to rely on, we'd have to rough it out in our own house, which is what i suspect many families had to do, and they definitely, definitely had more problems than needing solitude. plus, having absolutely nothing to do gave me lots of time to read. i finished up girl with a pearl earring and slapstick, read letters to a young poet by candlelight (what a lovely experience), read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (which i plan on rereading, it's extremely hard to get through but what i did understand was completely mesmerizing), reread still life with woodpecker (which i can't find my copy of, damnit. it's a really nice copy, too) and began reading narcissus and goldmund (which i also can't find). it's astounding, what i can do when i don't have any distractions.

now that i've written more than is probably necessary, i'm going to go make some tea and keep thinking of how stupidly, inordinately lucky i am to finally have a home with working lights and water and a heating system and the fact that some people won't have electricity for another week and how absolutely insane i would go if i was in their position, which brings me back to point a, and it repeats. hopefully new england will be up and running again soon.

http://victrolaism.stumbleupon.com/review/27493137/

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:46:09 -0800

i am so tired right now it's kind of ridiculous. four cups of tea + melatonin = no sleep. i have poor judgment and i kind of tend to go overboard on tea on non-school nights because i can't have caffeine during the week - if i drink it in the morning it makes my anxiety so much worse, and if i drink it in the evening i'll never go to bed.
so yeah, i binge on tea.
party hard.

i just finished this book:

and it pretty much kicked my ass. it's 514 pages of awesome and it was the first book i've read in a while that made me really think. dickens has been taking over my life at the moment, and i am beginning to hate symbolism. sometimes it can be interesting, granted, but for the most part, i just really, really hate it and i'm not quite sure why. i guess it's like all of those ridiculous people who think every character in every book who has some sort of a relationship, however platonic, with another character of the same gender is gay. i think that's just reading into things way too fucking much and people should learn to appreciate a book without having to pick apart every single little detail under a microscope. then again, i'm not exactly extremely versed in literature and symbolism and so on, so maybe i've just been underexposed to the finer points of literary critique.

anyways, here's some pretty stuff to look at.

http://victrolaism.stumbleupon.com/review/26496014/

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:19:09 -0700

i spent the last hour doing this. i think that, despite school, i have way too much time on my hands.
it was pretty easy, though, since i keep a complete list of the books that i own on my computer.
in alphabetical order.
which will soon be arranged by author.

Freud Inventory Test Results

Oral (dependence) |||||||||| 33%
Anal (self control) |||||||||||||||||||| 86%
Phallic (sexuality) |||| 20%
Latency (learning) |||||||||||||| 60%
Genital (productivity) |||||||||| 33%

yeah why is that not surprising. :(

p.s. lol freudian theory.

http://victrolaism.stumbleupon.com/review/25903823/

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:36:29 -0700

attn: i've decided to not accept or reject the six or so friend requests i have sitting in my queue at the moment because i fear that some of you might be confusing the "friend" feature with the "subscribe" feature. being "friends" with someone used to mean you were both subscribed to one another, but now it seems to be more of a "hey, i know you, let's be ~friends~" sort of thing.

if i was wrong in assuming you were misinformed, wait a week or so and i'll accept.

http://victrolaism.stumbleupon.com/review/25112336/

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:47:17 -0700

so i started high school three days ago, and things have been going pretty well. other than a few incidents caused by my incredibly all-encompassing aloofness, it has been a pleasant experience. my latin teacher is amazing, i love my english class and my history teacher is pretty intense, but in a good way. also, we're going to be reading beowulf, the iliad and the odyssey. i'm excited!

and since su has been all political articles and no fun lately, here's some pictures.

http://victrolaism.stumbleupon.com/review/24415061/

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:45:17 -0700

this is where i was for a week:

this is what my bedroom looked like:

this is what kept me relatively sane:

also, because i am extremely graceful, i have burnt two of my primary typing fingers. eheh.

i'll find something amusing to update about in a bit.

http://victrolaism.stumbleupon.com/review/22732638/

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:47:53 -0700

so i haven't really been updating frequently as of late. i'm sorry about that. i just recently graduated (!) from 8th grade, which is quite a relief. going to the same school for nine years is a bit much, i think.

as for summer plans, i'm going off to maryland in july, hopefully finding some sort of summer job (i'm not betting on it, though) and reading lord of the flies as well as a bunch of other non-required novels for freshman english (which is, by the way, the only honors class i'm taking). additionally, i'm going to be updating more often, since i have a lot more free time. cheers to that.

and so this post isn't completely pointless, here are some lovely works of art i've come across:

^ i am pretty much in love with the royal art lodge.

http://victrolaism.stumbleupon.com/review/21971709/

Thu, 29 May 2008 18:13:05 -0700

this was actually my yearbook quote, punctuation (or lack thereof) and all. (: