Junior year kicks up a notch. Or kicks my crotch. However you wanna say it.

My English teacher wasn't here today, thank goodness.....! Her class is just SO INTENSE, you cannot believe it. It's incredible. Even though she wasn't here today, we were still in her presense. Read "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne and "analyze the hell out of it", like my friend's mom would say. Read it we did, all 10 pgs of it in 12-pt Times New Roman. Analyze it I can't.

Okay. I admit it. I ended up Googling for the analyzing/symbolism.

I tried. I really did. But all that stuff about consorting with the Devil didn't really stick in place until I read it online.

So anyway, I have to do an annotated bibliography that's due on Thursday. The idea is fairly simple, but it's going to take me several hours to do just one, and I have to do two of them. The basic idea is, you comb through a bunch of analytical essays about a certain "classic" book assigned for reading by your half-mad English teacher. The essays are uberlong and all written by scholars, so good luck with understanding what the heck they are saying. After you're done, you want to start off your annotated bibliography with an MLA citation of the article, and right after that you dive in with a summary of what the scholar was doing in the essay, which should be one paragraph. In the second one, you write about what kinds of theses the essay could support and for what use students can put it to.

See, it sounds very simple, but I'm positive in real life it's harder than that. I'm about to find out very soon.....

Junior Year

I haven't been blogging for a very long time...anyway...

Junior year...well, I don't know what to say about this school year. It's drastically different, in ways I can't even explain. But I'll try my best, and because of time reasons, I'll have to condense it:

• English Honors, Spanish 5 Honors and perhaps Biology Honors promise to be very tough subjects, especially English. Normally I don't have a huge problem with English, but I can't analyze. "Find 4 examples of satire in Babbitt." Um. I can't find any, I understand the plot when I'm reading, not the satire underneath......you see, readers, I'm going to be analyzing so much this year that my brain will start leaking out my ears or something similarly gross.
  
• My History class=20 people. Math=TWELVE people. These two classes are TINY for my school. There are 400 people in my grade alone. Naturally, because the classes are usually twice this size, nobody talks in those classes. I never understand that, personally.
• Choir class during school is a salve to me. The boy that I like is in that class, plus plenty of friends, so it's a real cool-downer.
  
• Is it normal that on the first weekend after school begins, your only homework is to read Obama's recent speech on education and comment on it in a blog?

Anyway, that's all I can think of right now off the top of my head. More to come later, perhaps..

Oh! The drama teacher in my school who's running the fall play and spring musical (I'm doing both this year) mentioned a PHANTOM OF THE OPERA field trip. Holy COW. Oh Em Jee. This is like a dream come true!!

Only thing is, after a major argument with my mom last night, this trip is probably out of the picture. She's not allowing me to go on the annual chorus trip, this year to Canada.

We'll see how it works out.

Creativity is flowing freely again....

Well, I've been pretty busy creating icons and computer wallpapers as of late. Most of these are Phantom-of-the-Opera related. Take a look (click to view in full size):

 

 

 

I'm very old-school, so I do the bulk of the work in Microsoft Paint and use the program GIMP for embellishing, like that red supernova in the wallpaper directly above this. Aren't they purdy? 

Anyway, tomorrow is the surprise birthday party for my friend. She loves Marilyn Manson's music to death. I have two of his songs on my iPod, but generally he's a *tad* too extreme for me (for those who've never heard of him, he's either gothic rock, industrial, metal...along those lines). But I took some time off my own Phantom obsession to create a computer wallpaper for her. The lyrics are from his song "Coma White":

 

Birthday friend and I were doing a Google Image search because she wanted to change her laptop wallpaper to a Marilyn Manson pic. At the time I had absolutely no idea who he was. Well, I did, but a very minimal idea; I was a little creeped by his gothic persona. However, we did manage to find this absolutely beautiful black-and-white picture of him performing, which is the same picture in the lower right corner.

Party's tomorrow....I made her two CD's full of New Age and symphonic metal and a few other things. The food will be awesome...We're meeting at a Japanese restaurant.


If you'd like to see more of my wallpapers, click here: http://s446.photobucket.com/albums/qq184/liveforlife2494/Phantom%20of%20the%20Opera/Made%20by%20liveforlife2494/Wallpapers/

12:47 pm

I have maybe 8 days until school kicks back in again, which is sad...I would have appreciated 2 more weeks at least. But lots of European countries have even less summer vacation (and therefore their education is loads better) than we do, so that's great in its own way.

Guzzling down those yogurt drinks from the Asian Supermarket like there's no tomorrow....my eyes have been INCREDIBLY itchy lately. And I'm also periodically dodging centimeter-long ants that seem to be magnetically attracted to my desktop computer.

Update

I guess I should really keep doing thebloggingthing =D

Actually, not a whole lot is happening, other than I'm dreading school. NOT because of work and tests and all that, but because I STILL have to finish my summer reading books! Cr*****p... Babbitt and Bartleby the Schrivener. Yewww. Usually I don't have a problem with reading, but if I'm required to, I get annoyed >.< Sooo jealous of my friend Edbert....HE doesn't have to do any summer reading!!

Phantom pic of the day. Whee!


Random off-camera Emmy Rossum during The Final Lair scene.

Summer Love

Nah, maybe not. I'm not a huge Justin Timberlake fan. Anyhoo, I've been on vacation on the West Coast for a while, going back the 17th of July and then 2 days-ish and I'm going to Asia for a month. If someone wants to advise me on how to survive the reading of Babbitt, which is very slow and potentially boring, feel free to drop a comment. >.<

Thinking about Phantom vids. Might make attempts with the songs "I Don't Care" by Apolyptica, and a few others.

Hmm. Can't get "The Siren" by Nightwish out of my head. Kinda funky but a great song.

Up and Coming

I finally finished my "Last Song I'm Wasting on You" vid. Anybody care to see? Here ya go:



[Listening to "Leave Out All The Rest" by Linkin Park....Just realized it fits with Michael Jackson. RIP]

Up and Coming Phantom of the Opera videos:

Fanmade movie trailer to the 2004 movie
"Slow Me Down" by Emmy Rossum (Christine Daae in the movie)
"Cursum Perficio" by Enya [<- This will take a while... >.<]
"Dead Boy's Poem" by Nightwish (Highly recommended band!)
"Anything You Can Do" from Annie Get Your Gun

Listening to: "Eye of the Tiger" (Rocky theme song)
Reading: Thirteen Reasons Why
Mood: Wishing the day were a little longer.
Thinking of: Phantom of the Opera music vids.