Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

I caught the last half of The Colbert Report last night, and he had on the congressman from Georgia’s eighth district (Lynn Westmoreland, I believe). One of the first things he said was that the eighth was “a good conservative district” and “a good family district.” Okay, so I was already prepared for some humorous responses to Stephen’s questions. But when Stephen asked what could be cut to help ease the deficit and the congressman said, in either complete seriousness or it was the best acting I’ve ever seen, the department of education, I was shocked. Contrast that to lovely Dennis Kucinich, who sadly will probably never get most of his ideas passed let alone become president, who supports tuition-free higher education for kids in state schools. Can you even imagine free college? Wow.

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, Stephen brought up the congressman’s efforts to have the Ten Commandments put up in the House building and in the Senate. Stephen asked if he could think of any better place than a public building to put up the Ten Commandments (even my little brother thought immediately of a church), but the congressman said no, they were good things for people to see. And yet as important as they are to him, the congressman only managed to name three. As much as I’ve tried to forget my Christian upbringing, I still remember more than that: don’t take the lord’s name in vain, have no other gods, keep the sabbath holy, honor parents, don’t covent neighbor’s wife (and this excludes the three he named: don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t lie—I guess that counts as not bearing false witness).

I think I heard more people laugh during this “Better Know a District” than I have for almost anything else on The Colbert Report. I kind of hope that that congressman and his family weren’t watching last night.

Inspired, perhaps, by An Inconvenient Truth (and because I’m supposed to be an environmentalist) to become more knowledgeable about environmental issues, I started scanning the articles on truthout’s environmental page. I came across this article about the ads released prior to the “alarmist” film assuring people that green house gases are good.

Against backdrops of a park, a beach and a forest, one ad celebrates the benefits of greenhouse gas-producing fuels.

“The fuels that produce CO2 (carbon dioxide) have freed us from a world of back-breaking labor, lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love,” the ad runs. “Now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed - what would our lives be like then?”

I almost want to cry. No sensible person is trying to say that we should give up electriciy and return to walking around dark houses with candle lanterns and riding horses to the next farm to pick up some milk in the morning. We can have the same energy we have from the fuels that produce CO2 (nice way to avoid calling them greenhouse gases, because even that name sounds scary) without damaging the environment. Solar power seems an excellent choice considering that, according to another article, the world’s deserts are gradually becoming inhospitable. If people can’t live there, we might as well use the space to collect solar energy.

But I’m still far from knowing as much as I would need to to make an intelligent post. I only wanted to point out those ads, since they weren’t aired in the Philadelphia region. As much as I don’t want to think about it, I’m sure some people believed the ads and think that there are no alternate sources of power to rely on if we can’t use fossil fuels.

I really haven’t forgotten about this blog. Every now and then I feel bad for not updating in so long. The only problem is that there is absolutely nothing worth mentioning on a blog. (While the fact that Carli has abandoned us for the summer is important, I would imagine that anyone who would really care already knows.) What I’ve been doing since I got home, then, includes:

1. Sleeping either far too much or too little, depending on the night, just to keep my sleep-wake schedule on its toes.
2. Seeing people on occasion.
3. Not getting a job yet because I haven’t heard about financial information from Bryn Mawr and I have no experience.
4. Reading Naruto manga/awaiting the release and translation of chapter 310.
5. Getting my green belt, which is pretty exciting. Now I get to learn kata with kicks in them. On the other hand, though, I probably have to spar.
6. Attempting to learn the kanji taught to Japanese school children.
7. Playing FFVII with my little brother.

On the productive side, my room is almost clean. Also, I have been applying to jobs; I’d just much rather work at a bookstore, for example, than at a bank.

When I was looking at transfer colleges, Swarthmore topped the list, followed by Bryn Mawr and then Haverford. Swarthmore has a really nice campus and an Aikido club, and it’s terribly easy to travel between the college and my house; not to mention that it’s one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. But Swarthmore is impossibly hard to get into, so I pretty much counted on a rejection from them.

Bryn Mawr was the only college for which I had a tour and an interview over spring break, and I really loved the college after that. (One of the reasons I didn’t want a tour of Swarthmore after the Bryn Mawr tour was because I didn’t want to fall more in love with the school least likely to accept me.) Bryn Mawr is really neat: we get lanterns in our class color (red for 2009); the whole campus looks like a castle; and there’s a May Day celebration and a cloister with a fountain and a tradition—established by Katherine Hepburn—of skinny dipping. On top of that, most of the dorms are singles and a lot of them have fireplaces and window seats. So I got myself pretty excited to go to Bryn Mawr; my application for this college was best, too, because I wrote it over spring break and not from New York two nights before it was due.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’d been checking the mail every day waiting to hear from the colleges. Bryn Mawr was to mail on the 15th, and Swarthmore said they would notify by the 15th, so I figured I would hear from both colleges by this coming Wednesday. Yesterday Ricky and I were playing ddr when the phone rang and my mother called me to get it. Thinking it was a friend who wouldn’t mind waiting a moment for me to finish a song, I kept playing. But my mother gestured that it was important, so I got off the dance mat and on the phone with the woman in charge of transfer admissions who had interviewed me at Bryn Mawr. She called to say, first of all, that congratulations, I was accepted (yay!); and second, that they were having technical problems with the letters and would be sending them out Monday or Tuesday at the latest with the financial aid information. So I’m going to college!!! It’s such a cute little school that the admissions people call students to congratulate them. That would have taken weeks at NYU.

Today while I was out, a letter came from Swarthmore. My stepfather told my mother that it wasn’t a small letter (rejection), but it wasn’t a large letter (admission) either; it was kind of in-between. So my mother told him to open it (without my permission—isn’t that breaking some federal law?), and it was indeed neither a rejection nor a letter of acceptance. I got wait-listed. But isn’t that so awesome? Swarthmore College says I’m qualified, and the person who wrote the letter (who actually bothered to use my nickname in the address) seemed genuinely sorry that there weren’t enough spaces right now. The letter-writer even hoped that I had other options to pursue. Nearly 5000 kids applied for freshman class, and nearly 200 were trying to get in as transfers, so I understand that I didn’t get one of the coveted positions; I’m just amazed that they didn’t actually reject me.

So it looks like I’m going to Bryn Mawr. Or, at least, I’d better be after I dragged my mother and Stephen and Dave all around the campus in the lovely rainy weather today to look at the school and buy lots of shirts and pens and mugs, etc. in the bookstore. Luckily, the shop was open, and we were even able to get inside the buildings. It’s possibly because today was graduation (I swear I thought the website said it was the 20th). I think I’m still going to keep my name on the list for Swarthmore, though. They may just want to give me a free ride after wait-listing me, and I don’t know if I could really pass that up. I haven’t actually heard about money from Bryn Mawr yet, and I haven’t heard anything from Haverford, but they’d have to give me a lot of money for me to choose them over Bryn Mawr. The thing is, though, if I go to Bryn Mawr I can do all the cool traditions that they have and still take part in Swarthmore’s Aikido club and enjoy their campus (as well as my own). If I went to either of the other schools, I wouldn’t get to live in a castle or dress up in white and dance around May poles or any of the cool things that Bryn Mawr kids do.

Mood: V. happy

Edit: Amusingly enough, Haverford rejected my application for admission. It’s okay; I didn’t really want to go there anyway. They sent out an email on Tuesday, and I thought maybe they were emailing rejections rather than wasting the paper to send out all of the bad news letters. Apparently, though, they were just emailing as a rough draft; a physical letter came with the mail on Wednesday, along with my acceptance package from Bryn Mawr (complete with temporary tattoo). It’s still very funny that Swarthmore would accept me if they had room while the so-thought safety school would not. The only problem is that if I want to learn Japanese, I’ll have to take courses at Haverford.

I’ve spent the last five or six hours cleaning my room (I work best when I stay up all night), and I decided to be really thorough. So, I took down the crate from the top of my closet and began to sort the junk from the stuff that could be donated. When I go on these cleaning sprees, I often come across old notebooks in which I wrote very many silly things. I usually enjoy reading whatever childish poem I’d composed years before or old journal entries about disagreements with parents as well as checking my handwriting to see if it changed at all. I guess I can look at what I wrote and think that I’ve really matured since then.

This, however, was not the case last night. In reading essays that I wrote even just one year ago, I am usually upset by the unharmonious grammatical structure of overly-complicated sentences; errors are always appalling. And those are essays written in 11th grade. What I have come to determine is that I must have been illiterate as a middle schooler. That’s why I’m not pleased to have become more grammatically-correct and knowledgeable since then; there had to be some improvement or I never should have deserved to graduate high school. There was one pretty much unforgivable mistake that I am far too ashamed to describe here, but other than that everything seemed on par for an average, uninterested unperson (kids below high school level = unpersons). Some of what I wrote took me a minute to process—I am no longer accustomed to reading “l8r” and “b4″ (that one really shocked me) in real sentences.

I was also a very silly girl back then, far too concerned with being liked by certain people. I think I wrote in pink, too. And to top it all off, I discovered a (to my credit, never used) Backstreet Boys calendar at the bottom of the crate. It wasn’t even a practical calendar with boxes in which to write things, only lines across the bottom with numbers.

I realized after a few pages of the horriffic writing that I was clearly terrible with English back than and that, for my sanity, I should just stop reading and assume it didn’t get any worse. But no, once I started I had to explore all of my past. I survived and am ecstatic that I starting caring about English. I basically owe my life to Christina, without whose influence I shudder to think what would have become of me. (Thanks, Pookie!) At least I can give Stevie a proper foundation in grammar.

About two weekends ago it was Earth Day, and I didn’t even remember until I was using Google in the late afternoon and noticed that the logo was decorated with solar panels and wind turbines. I thought, “That’s neat,” and then, “Oh, crap, it’s Earth Day, isn’t it?” It had been raining all day, though, so it’s not like I could have done very much to celebrate. I’m just disappointed in the fact that I didn’t even remember, also in my lack of environmental action since then to make up for having forgotten.

Another event I completely ignored was May Day. Last year I wanted to celebrate May Day as a socialist (from the Second International), and although I didn’t do anything, I at least remembered it. At Bryn Mawr they celebrate the pagan May Day. I think they’d have every reason to not let me in if they discovered that I made no attempt to celebrate.

A while ago I went to a rather fancy movie theater in New York to see The White Countess. I’m pretty sure it was during the previews for that film that I saw one for Joyeux Noël, a French film about the Christmas Truce of the first year of World War I. It seemed interesting and like something I would naturally enjoy, so I waited and kept an eye out for the release date. I was never able to find a theater playing it, though, and several months later, I couldn’t find a copy of it or DVD release dates anywhere. While it seems somewhat okay to download anime, it feels a bit more illegal to download other films, but since I couldn’t find it I decided to try downloading. I finally found one online, and after hours and hours spent in downloading I realized that there were no subtitles. Now the people in the movie understand English, French, and German, but I would find it pretty impressive if someone could understand all three languages well enough to be able to watch the whole film (it was about equally split between the three languages). Needless to say, I could have watched the movie, but I wouldn’t know what was going on for two thirds of the time.

So I tried to download another file, and that took over a day, but this one came with subtitles. Yay! Except the time at the bottom of the player said it was only 56 minutes long, and IMDB marks its runtime at 116 minutes. I was disappointed that I would have to see the “abridged” version, but it was still better than nothing. Yet, the film was not even halfway over and I had thought I’d been watching it for at least half an hour. I didn’t really pay this any mind at the time, but when I returned to it later I thought that the seconds were ticking slowly. I investigated and discovered that for every 10 minutes that passed on my watch, the film’s clock only noted the passage of six minutes. The title of the post is a line in the film; it seems they were trying to make the viewers understand the meaning. The problem is, though, that there is still a discrepancy between the real movie time and the IMDB data.

¡Adios, Nueva York!
I checked out of my dorm late Wednesday evening, meaning I can no longer call myself a New Yorker. I have two finals on the 9th of May, and then my first year of college is finished, and I hopefully won’t have to go back to New York (except to use my two free passes to MoMA—is anyone interested in going with me?). But there are still 32 days until I’ll have heard from all of my transfer colleges (meaning I’m anxiously awaiting the mail every day).

Finals
On Thursday morning I had my World Cultures: Chinese and Japanese Traditions final with Ricky and my Lit Interp final. They decided to make the WC final on the last day of class rather than on Reading Day, something about which I was very pleased, since I don’t have enough train tickets to travel to and from New York one more day than I thought I had to and because you’re not allowed to have finals on Reading Day; they let us arrive at 7:30 rather than at 8 so we could have extra time. Anyway, the amazing thing is that I filled a Blue Book! During the midterm in my AmFic class last semester, for which we only had an hour and fifteen minutes, some of the students requested second Blue Books. I think I filled half of my first book during that exam. After about an hour and a half of writing in WC, though, I went up and got my second book. I’m pretty pleased. [Edit: I know that’s the same thing I said about those boys and their grammatical correction. Sorry.

One more thing: The final did not prove to be very difficult. We read five works and had to answer one of two essay questions for each one. They were all pretty reasonable—comparing some of the plays of one collection, examining characters’ actions, ect. One of the books we had to read was Soseki’s And then, a novel that deals with this guy Daisuke and his friend Hiraoka and Hiraoka’s wife, Michiyo. One of the essay topics for that book was “Write the main narrative as seen from Michiyo’s perspective.” What kind of essay is that?! It didn’t even require that we think about the book, only that we know the plot. And telling it from her point of view made it even easier than simply summarizing since she didn’t know all of the side stories with Daisuke’s family. Needless to say, I chose that one.]

Where’s Tabby?
This morning around 6:30 my mother came in my room to say that we left the back door open last night and the cat (Tabby) was missing. My mother said she’d looked around outside and couldn’t find her and didn’t hear her meowing, so she really believed my cat was dead. My step-father heard, and he and I got ready quickly and went to help look for the cat. By the time I got to the basement, however, they had found Tabby. She had hidden under my neighbor’s car and very luckily was neither run-over nor stolen. Tabby enjoyed a very early breakfast and lots of attention this morning.

My father ordered some wine from Australia, but since the company is not allowed to ship in to Pennsylvania, he had to send the bottles to my dorm. I’m fairly certain he didn’t have to put his date of birth on the order form or promise to send them a copy of his driver’s license, so theoretically anyone could order wine from this company. I had worried about getting it from the front desk of my dorm, thinking that it would require that someone over 21 pick it up, but I tried anyway. The guy at the front desk signed it right over to me, completely disregarding the “ADULT SIGNATURE REQUIRED—MIN 21″ notice on the packing label. So much for the drinking age.