Tuxcapades!

These past few days have been CRAZY! Usually I'd just get up, go to school, go home, and sleep. This is the usual procedure of a high school student, mixed with maybe a couple "Go downtown and get a burger" or something once a week. However, this week has been... interesting to say the least.

Yesterday, I did the usual routine. However, today I'm to be going to this peer mediation conference during school so I had to get my homework, which is just a little tweak. I'm pretty okay with this because it's not a huge transition like traveling across the entire country twice to see a bunch of pretty colleges, but after school instead of going to rehearsal all of the mock pageant guys met up in the meeting room for a special trip: a tuxedo rental store. I've been to one a few months ago for my close friend's coming-of-age ceremony, but it was nowhere near in the scenario of an en masse 8-men-need-tuxes-within-a-week. While this is normally pretty simple because we have quite a few tuxedo places near our hometown, we had to drive somewhere a bit... far off. Try a city about 10 miles away. Even then, it's not bad. It is when you have two teenage drivers who have barely just held onto their licenses for a year and an elderly woman who has the attention span of a gopher. I don't have neither my license nor a car yet, so I was stuck going inside one of the teenagers' cars because the elderly woman for some reason didn't feel like having people in her car. Turns out I picked the right car at the last second- I was running late because I needed to snag the stuff from my locker at school on account that it was pouring out and I needed my fedora. We got to the tuxedo store within 20 minutes and were nearly all entirely fitted before the other shipment of guys came pouring in. The driver of the other car apparently sucks at driving and the person in the front seat giving directions apparently wasn't helping at all. After a series of phone calls filled with my being able to hear a bunch of

"FUCK! WHERE ARE WE?! I'M LOST, DAMMIT!"

"I DON'T KNOW! WHY DID YOU TAKE A LEFT?!"

"YOU TOLD ME TO TAKE A FUCKING LEFT!"
"I MEANT THE OTHER LEEEEFT!!!"

from a few feet away, the store manager staring at us with a smug look like, "You are so desperate for a tux for this stupid show I'm going to laugh at you from afar," and people running around outside getting soaked from the rain in a frantic attempt to find each other, the other people waltzed in like nothing happened. Except the driver, who is clearly miffed and complaining to his girlfriend about it. Everyone gets fitted, and finally the woman running the entire show comes waltzing in complaining about traffic and blaming every little puddle she saw. We stand around for a few minutes figuring out every little logistic, then the guy who drove the car I rode in on the way there decided to leave us for the other driver. Slogging into the back seat of a massive Ford Windstar, I proceed to go on the longest 10-mile trip I've ever encountered. Not even within three minutes the driver (C.S1.) was lost and driving in circles, the guy in the shotgun seat (C.Q.) isn't helping at all, the guy (C.S2.) I'm sitting next to is beating up the guy in front of him (E.C.), E.C. is making really bad sex jokes, and the guy in front of me (C.D.) is going completely music ADD on us. Ten minutes later, we are parked in front of a YMCA asking someone's parents for directions to our hometown, C.S.2 is pummeling the back of E.C.'s seat, C.D. is still music ADD, C.S.1 and C.Q. are bickering over directions while still on the phone with the parent, E.C. is running out of the car fake-crying, and I'm falling over laughing at all of this. The entire fiasco could be translated into this:

"Want a bad roman- DOO, DO DO DODO, DO DOO DO, DO DODO-"
"SHE TOLD ME TO TAKE A FUCKI-"

"SHE MEANT THE LEFT IN FRONT OF THAT ONE-"

"GET BACK IN HERE-"

"WAAAAAAAA-"

"GET YOUR ASS BACK IN THAT SEAT, BIT- *snicker*-BAHAHAHA-"

"DOO, DO DO DODO, DO DOO- I want you psycho, your vertical stick-"

This continued pretty much this way for the next fifteen minutes, with a couple stops in front of cop cars with people's seatbelts off writing the word "asshats" on the fogged-up windows, creepy parks in the middle of the city, and random restaurants. I'm next to passing out from laughter this entire time because for some reason I get really giggly when stuck in a car with guys, and by the time we actually see non-rundown buildings our conversations devolved into C.S.1 and C.Q. cheering for knowing the rest of the way home, C.D. still music ADD, and E.C., C.S.2 and I screaming stuff like little kids. That can be translated into this:

"WE CAN FIND THE REST OF OUR WAY HOME-"

"DAAAD I GOTTA GO POTTY!"

"DAAD I WANTED TO GO TO MCDONALDS!"

"DAAAD WHY IS MOM A FILTHY WHORE?!"

"DAAAAD!"

"DAAAAAAD!"
"ARE WE THERE YET?!"

"DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!!"
"I WANTED THE BLUE SHIRT NOT THE GREEN ONE!"
"I WANT A NINJA TURTLES LUNCHBOX!"
"NINJA TURTLES SUCK, I WANT A SPIDAMAN LUNCHBOX!"
"DAAD WHY IS UNCLE COMING OVER SO MUCH?!"

"DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!!"

"DOO, DO DO DODO, DO DOO DO, DO DODO-"

By the time we get to my house to drop me off, our trip has taken over an hour. I never anticipated a trip to a city 10 miles away could be such a hassle.

In honor of the DOO, DO DO DODO song, I present the song of the day to you:

Streamline by Newton!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BugFniXE1rc

So, we have 7 more rehearsals to get everything down before the mock beauty pageant next Friday. The directors right now are freaking out because most of us don't have pretty much anything ready. Really, all most of us have done is the scripts done, and we don't know them that well. The directors decided to spend most of the time for today's rehearsal lecturing us to get everything done. Well, one director (who's a senior at the school) decided to lecture us, the other director (who's been a teacher at the school since forever and has taken over the directing job for the pageant this year because the original director is on maternity leave) decided to sit around nodding and agreeing with everything the senior director said. While this would normally be a pretty decent idea, we missed about an hour out of a two hour rehearsal listening to this lecture. I'm all for them lecturing us, I actually encourage it! It's really the only way they can do a huge motivator to the cast without cancelling the stupid show, because anything else will really not work! They just beat the lecturing down on us to the point where beating a dead horse sounds like a fun pastime to start up! I'm just going to act all cheery despite how the two directors are rampaging around now, may as well be the happy person in the cast to save everyone an ulcer.

This week so far has been extremely uneventful. J.A. has proven to be an extremely uninteresting person, so I'm just going to not chase after him. For example, anything I try on him will just be shrugged off with a lazy smile and an "okay." While I could do something more like maybe climb on him and say something extremely sexy in his ear, we mainly see each other in our Chinese classroom. I'm not so sure what you think, but I consider that a pretty bad idea given that he and I are obviously extremely shy people by nature. I don't feel like causing someone to have a mental breakdown in the middle of class and someone else a nosebleed from seeing some guy straddling another guy. My school is not the best place to try that.

Also, all of my classes are pretty much finishing up the first section of their units, so I have many essays to write and quizzes to study for. I'm not that excited about it, BUT! My friend K.B. and I are both in chorus class! While already awesome, our class is putting on a cabaret in a few weeks based off of broadway songs, so K.B. and I are singing the Elephant Love Medley from Moulin Rouge! It works for both of us, because we love this song and I'm in the bass section while she's a soprano. In music terms, the bass section are the people who can sing the lowest out of the chorus and the sopranos are the people who can sing the highest. As you can imagine, basses are typically male while sopranos are typically female. I'm pretty excited about this, but I'm so not looking forward to the huge amounts of work I have to do nowadays.

For the song of the day, because I'm having a bitchload of trouble getting this clip ready for the mock beauty pageant, the song of the day is I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yTrBbHCMDk

Vacations are odd

The time I've spent back home has been...interesting. Ever since I got back from my college tour I've been stuck in this really odd mix between crazy amounts of action and sitting around blankly staring at my laptop. Not that I really mind, given that it's vacation, but I really just want to hang out with friends. Which is true in some respects, I'm spending at least a couple hours every day with one of my closest friends.

I posted this about a month ago, I'm in a major production done entirely by the junior class for my school. It's a mock beauty pageant with men as contestants and women as their sponsors. My friend A.H. is my sponsor and we're planning on using all of our acts to use tons of ironic humor and trashing eHarmony. I'm pretty excited for it! I've been meeting with A.H. constantly to go over the scripts and see what we want to do. Tons of work involved, I only hope that I make it all work within two weeks. Our show will be on March 5th.

And if the pageant isn't anymore crazy on my schedule, I have to create a bunch of projects for all of my classes! For my Chinese class I have to create a family tree and for Chorus I have to create a poster about the songs I find inspirational and why. You'd probably wonder why my Chinese project is going to be easy but strangely enough it isn't. My family has a very extensive history of people getting divorced, remarried and having more kids on both sides. This wasn't bad at first until my dad decided it would be a great idea to marry someone from rural Finland. Because of that, the amount of members in my family literally doubled. That's only the people I know of when it comes to my immediate family. When my step-mom was counting off the people in her immediate family she got up to 50 before she lost count. I am seriously disturbed by that. Fortunately, my teacher decided to give me a break and chop off my step-family because she knows how extensively my family travels. I still have to learn all of these characters to do my family tree, half of which she hasn't taught us before vacation began. I tried asking J.A. if she taught the class anything on Friday (I was already in Chicago then), he had no idea what to do either and we decided together we're all going to fail.

I think I'm going to play it nicely with these projects...

Men are intriguing

So I just got home. I absolutely loved UW and Seattle, they're now my top choice for colleges. And I just talked to J.A.

As in that kid in my Chinese class that I've had a crush on for a while. It was in one of my previous posts, I think...

So I've been trying for a while to talk to him on facebook, but he's been so damn elusive. I log on and try to say a word but before I even ask a question he immediately logs off. For a while I was wondering if he blocked me on the facebook chat or not. But today I finally caught him. I had no idea what to say because all of my previous ideas were time-based (I.E. "What's the best way to ask someone to be their valentine?? I'm so lost..." or "What did we need to do for Chinese? I was in Chicago on Friday." and etc.) so I did the thing that any person with common sense would do:

Say something in a language he couldn't possibly know and play it off as a mistake. I chose Finnish for this encounter. Here's how it went down:

hei, henkilion syntymapäivää!

11:45J.A.

hello

11:45Alex

whoa shit sorry mt

that was meant for my cousin in finland

11:46J.A.

ok

that makes a bit more sense

11:46Alex

was starting to say, i dont think you know finnish haha

11:46J.A.

i wish i did

well i gg bye

11:46Alex

cyas

So right now I'm texting K.D. absolutely raving. My heart is slowing down but it feels incredible. I haven't chased after a guy like this in a long time, it feels fucking great!

College tours are interesting...

I'm in Seattle right now. While not such a big deal and all, I've only been to the west coast once ever which turned out to be SoCal. Given my ridiculously east coast mentality, I fully expected flying around and not saying a word to anyone.

So this week's pretty much been comprised of stupid annoyances and getting ready for college touring.

I've been strongly thinking about all of my friendships with people for the past while, as I usually do so I know that everything's okay between my friends and I from my P.O.V. My friendship with J.T. popped up. Now, this was the guy that I've been convinced that I've loved for two years now, and every once in a while we have our little fallouts because he can't crawl enough out of his little hole to say "hi" to his friends every once in a while. So, I've been thinking about my friendship with him and I realized that with the exception of like one message I've been the one who's been reaching towards him for the past year. I think about what I'm supposed to do for a little while, because he can be extremely sensitive about having his flaws pointed out. By Tuesday I pretty much put a middle finger to mulling things over and send a message saying "Okay, you aren't reaching out for me nearly enough to make me happy. I get you're in college, but seriously. All I want was a little text saying 'hi' every once in a while. I'm leaving the next message up to you because I'm sick of having to maintain our relationship so much." This is in context. I also specifically state in the message that he needs to think this over for a while lest I get really pissed off. Not even an hour later I get a call from him where he pretty much screams at me for 10 minutes about how dare I send a message like that to him and he's sick of everyone from our town sending this shit to him and we have no idea what he's been through in the past month and I need to stop doing this, pretty much coming to the conclusion of "You better not do this again or else I'm out of his life." Pretty much every time I have tried to sort out a problem with him he starts screaming at me and spewing out threats of chopping me out of his life. Now he's talking about how he's decided to cut me some slack the last couple years because I have all these problems but he's just tired of me saying this over and over. He's now letting me figure out what I want for the friendship because now he doesn't care one way or another. Given by how much of an asshole he just proved himself to be, it's needless to say I don't plan on ever calling him back because whatever form of love I had for him has just been demolished.

Moving onto happier pastures, on Thursday I flew out to Chicago with my mom. She's never been to Chicago before so after our college tour we went out to Chinatown for some lunch. We ended up eating at this fabulous restaurant called Great Taste and drinking some bubble tea. We've quickly came to the conclusion that bubble tea is great but you get sick of drinking it after a while. After that we hit up the Hershey's factory which was incredible. They didn't show the process of making the chocolate but there was this massive funnel in the middle of the store that if you pull a bunch of levers and spin wheels the candy will come flying down the funnels and into your bucket of sugar. It was amazing! We then went onto the Skydeck and got an incredible view of the Midwest. I'm not kidding when I say Midwest; the view from the top floor enables you to see into four different states on a clear day. It was clear enough there that we were able to see Michigan from across the great lake! The Skydeck is the top floor of the Sears Tower (Now called the Willis Tower, as if Bruce decided to name the tower after himself.) which means that even with one of the fastest elevators in the world traveling up those 1000+ feet takes about a minute for a full trip. There's also this thing called the Skydeck Ledge where you go to the Skydeck and there's these little niches in the walls where you will walk out and find yourself in a glass box outside of the tower. As in, you look down at your feet and see the streets below. It's a huge hit now, and I tried going on. About one foot into the box I nearly collapsed screaming and had to huddle back on the carpet floor. I've had this crippling fear of heights ever since I was a little kid because my siblings would dangle me over the edges of high places and let go for a second before snatching me back up. Even though I knew they'd never truly let me fall, it still really instilled this huge sense that if I look over the edge of something I will actually fall. I have trouble looking over the railings in two-story malls it's that bad now.

So now I'm in Seattle. I absolutely love it here; there's coffee shops everywhere, the culture here is extremely liberal and happy and relaxing, there's a gorgeous blend of city and nature. It's just a fabulous place to go. I think my quote of the week is when my mom and I are walking on UW campus and this man runs up to us in a panic. Our initial reaction as introverted east coast people is to tense up, to which he responds, "Don't worry. I'm gay." As if that completely settles any worries. Turns out he's a janitor at the university. The fact that he was able to run up and pretty much announce to the world that he goes for men without any fear completely settles any worries I have about going to college here. I think this is my top choice.

Because this is such a long post, here's a little prettiness for you: THE SONG OF THE DAY IS "Nevermore" by Afro Celt Sound System!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfUmS4IM6P8

Family Meetings Confuse Me...

So here I am, now at my dad's house. It's pretty much in the middle of nowhere (Like it takes half an hour to get to the nearest shopping center. Not city, just little plaza place.) so I tend to spend quality splurge time here given that I rarely eat anything substantial or sleep at all when I'm at my mom's house. I don't mean that in a "My mom's house is so crazy, I can't eat or sleep there" way, it's just that my mom and I tend to forget about eating and sleeping together until like 11 at night where we just look up at each other and are like, "Did you have dinner?" "I dunno, did you have lunch?" "...I'm not sure..." then completely forget about the conversation for another hour.

But I digress...

So today I decided to crawl out of bed around 11 after some random helicopters decided to have a sexy party outside my house. I spent a few hours lounging around the house rereading The Child Thief by Brom when my brother Dale decided to call saying he and his girlfriend are coming over for dinner.

Now, this is my brother who has been the family slut for the past decade, who has barely kept a girlfriend for over a month at a time and has sworn off girlfriends for the past 3 and a half years. All of a sudden in November he just popped out of the woodwork bursting with joy screaming, "I GOT A GIRLFRIEND!!!" This is my reaction:

So we had dinner together. It was painfully obvious that she wasn't acting her true personality in front of my dad and stepmom, but no one seemed to care. I think that my parents were so happy to see that my brother has a girlfriend that they really don't care by how bad an actor she is. She knew that I knew, so she really didn't say a word to me. Oddly enough, by the end she hugged me and said she hoped to see me again. My immediate reaction was: "Yeah, uh huh. We're meeting someplace else so I can see who you really are." So, when I was talking to my dad and stepmom they were asking me what I thought of her and I was like "I haven't... made a full first impression yet." trying not to talk about how she was totally faking that personality. I mean, she probably has a real sweet side to her that she can whip out, but I know that isn't what she's usually like once you get to really know her. Maybe I'm just being overprotective of my brother?

Oh, by the way, the song of the day is "You Don't Dream in Cryo" from the Avatar soundtrack, composed by James Horner.

Past couple weeks in review

All of this can be summed up in one word: Agh. Not anything like AAAAAAGH or OMFG AAGH!!! or even the daring AGHROPOLIS, it's just: agh.

I could safely say that however nice these past few weeks have been, they've also been slow and aggravating.

So, cue about a week ago. We just finished the ridiculous raffle for some really dull sport action pictures (Like, not signed or anything. It's just a little picture of a guy with a baseball bat.) which barely got anyone buying at all, we're now into the new semester, and guess what our beloved GSA leader Z.S. decides to pull out of nowhere? CANDY GRAMS FOR VALENTINE'S DAY! D'OH BOY! Not really. Because I'm one of the few people who actually bothers considering themselves a GSA member nowadays, I got roped in against my will. That means: I stand around for fourty minutes watching people eat everyday while I almost get purposely ignored! And not even a week into the new semester! And best yet: I HAVE TO DO THIS FOR ANOTHER WEEK! OH BOY!!!

Not really.

But so far I'm absolutely loving this semester. I have all of my best classes now; Global Religions, Humanities, and Chinese! I also have Ceramics and Chorus but they are not my forte at all, I enjoy them nontheless.

Global Religions is taught by one of the chillest teachers in the high school, which means that within a week from now the entire class is going to devolve into everyone sitting around bickering with each other because we don't even have textbooks as very few people last semester has turned theirs in. It's at the beginning of the day and I have a few friends in the class. We all tend to sit there blankly trying not to fall asleep. It's awesome.

Chinese II is amusing so far. I've been the teacher assistant for the Chinese teacher for two semesters and I have actually taken Chinese I the semester for that, which means that I walk into the classroom at the first day of the semester and I know who everyone is already as I've pretty much taken Chinese I three times in a row. I know that if I TA for Chinese 1 more time I will have a mental breakdown, but it was so worth it. I walk into the classroom and there's this guy who looks so much like Rob DenBleyker from Cyanide and Happiness it's ridiculous.

So this is Rob, pretty much the personification of absolute sexiness crammed into one physical body. He also has an ass that could make porn stars weep. The kid in my Chinese class pretty much looks like Rob but a 16-year-old version with light brown hair and glasses.

It's quite scary, actually. He sits across the classroom from me and pretty much sits there with a look on his face like "I'm bored." So come Monday. It's the third day in the class and I'm already having to control my actions around him. My Chinese teacher decides it would be a great idea to have us go throughout the class and find five new friends. Half the class immediately pounds over to my side of the classroom because that's where all the cool kids are, most of the girls huddle up in a little corner, and hot guy is just sitting there quietly with a few other guys. I go over to escape the chances of a panic attack and then we start putting our Chinese names on a sheet of paper for the other person. That's the qualification of having a friend apparently, learning our made-up names. eHarmony would be flopping over in excitement over this... So come Wednesday, we have to finalize these things. I go over there because apparently we also have to figure out what the other person likes and doesn't like (one thing for each minimum), then he looks at me with a huge smile and starts talking about how he is going to say that I don't like cars (which I don't, actually. They bore me.) because that's one of the few hobbies he knows in Chinese. I agree that I don't like cars, and I walk off with his info just when the bell rings slightly disturbed about how he smiled at me.

Come TODAY, I have to meet up with him so we can introduce each other to someone. I'm completely congested right now and still kind of drowzy from the nyquil I took last night (I never react well to medication) so I look like I'm absolutely stoned. He asks me a question about something I don't remember, and I just stare at him blankly and manage to summon up a really slow "...Wuuuuuuuuuut?" He seems to not have thought anything about it, but internally I was trying to figure out the equation (Head + Desk = ?)

I'm just not gonna say anything about it later on...