Updates: March 2004
March 20, 2004 at 5:20 PM Eastern Standard Time
So, yeah, the giddiness. Everything
went alright, except for three things: MUSE Machine, the field trip, and
sleep. Sleep went in a manner other than alright because I slept in way,
way too much each morning and, consequently, I am now in the wrong biological
time zone. But that should be better by Monday. MUSE Machine was not
alright because it was viciously awful: the performance was by the opera,
which is exactly why the utter lack of operatic performance seemed a
smidge...wrong and bad. I am all cool with experiencing various cultures
and media and whatnot, but I am downright irked when, in the middle of my week
of ecstatic nonsense, admittedly mediocre artists highjack my afternoon and read
tons of Langston Hughes poetry to my school which is almost, but not quite,
entirely ethnically homogenous in the non-Langston Hughes way. How,
specifically, is this a problem, other than that it was an opera performance of
Langston Hughes poetry without the opera in the performance and was generally
done in a bad fashion? I mean, I really wouldn't have minded listening to
Hughes's entire collection of work if it was well read and it got me out of
class (-: Well, it was a problem because it was used to plug a cultural
theatre that one of the performers was opening. I spent money to join
MUSE, and I am subjected to this, a commercial? I cannot even connect with
cultural pride and all that because, as mentioned, by school is almost, but not
quite, entirely ethnically homogenous, so trying to sell a cultural center to me
is silly. But to do it during school? It made me pretty darn mad.
Not to be rude--only to be brutally honest--but the performance was shoddily
done, mediocrity abounded, the voices did not carry well at all, and these folks
had the nerve--after they literally sat on the edge of the stage for more than
half the performance and blabbed out extraordinarily off-topic anecdotes of
their lives (that no one listening, to my knowledge, could, or cared to
interrupt their week of giddy and try to, relate to)--to chastise us for being a
bad audience and doing what we have done at every other MUSE performance ever,
namely whispering pertinent comments to our neighbors and trying desperately to,
in the case of such miserable performances, pretend that we have some shred of
interest. Well, if you don't want people to comment, don't perform.
If you won't want people to fall asleep, which I presume was the major problem,
then don't be so miserably boring and uninteresting and wasteful. This,
however, was not as bad as last Thursday's guest speaker: the guy from
Survivor who fell into the fire. There was no point at all to blow a
grand on this guy and waste my precious public education time on him. He
jabbered about crap, eating bugs, and silly sociological interpretations.
He showed fake Survivor clips to try to entertain us, but we only laughed
so that we wouldn't cry. He was yapping about making good decisions one
moment, not doing drugs the next, the terrors of addiction following that, and
then he concluded by advising us to never quit anything. Aside from the
blatant contradiction of quitting drugs and never quitting anything, this would
have all been nice, but he stupefied everything down to an inferior level and
made abundant comments of a perversely stupid nature. He finished by
inviting us all to a Survivor Youth Rally at a local church in the
evening where we could eat bugs, engage in mock immunity challenges, and watch
cut clips from the show. There wasn't even a drug sweep during this!
What a waste. But the field trip. Wow. So, I get up to school
, get on the bus, and we go to hear Winston Churchill III speak at the Schuster
Center (nice, nice, nice facility; outright astonishing). His discussion
on the relationship among the European states and among Europe and the United
States and the pertinence of terrorism and economic issues to these topics was
fabulously enlightening. He made some wonderful points. It was a
very worthwhile lecture. So, we all, my AP Euro class and I, proceeded to
go to Uno's across the street for lunch. We had lots of food and lots of
dessert and watched lots of the NCAA tournament while sitting at the bar for two
and one-quarter hours. We got back to school in time to have one class
period. YAY!!!
March 16, 2004 at 12:45 PM Eastern Standard Time
This week is awesome. Monday was a full
day of school, which was awful, as it is third quarter and I am a senior and few
of my teachers care anymore and I certainly don't care anymore and so on.
But today...well, today we got about four inches of very heavy snow.
As in, I shoveled the driveway and throbbed afterwards. As in, for the
first time that I can remember, the National Weather Service issued a "Heavy
Snow Warning." As in, awesome snowball snow. As in, no school.
YAY!!! But how does a snow day make this week any different than, say, any
other week with a snow day? Well, it has to do with the Ohio Graduation
Test. The sophomore class had to take a pilot test when I was a Freshman
and when I was a Junior, causing--due to scheduling conflicts with one quarter
of the school taking a test--the administration to allow the other classes to
come in three hours late on two days of the week of the test. Guess what
is finally being administered for real for the first time this week? The
Ohio Graduation Test. So, today was supposed to be a three-hour
delay for me. But school is closed. So, instead, tomorrow is a
three-hour delay for me. Plus there is MUSE Machine in the afternoon,
which basically kills my afternoon classes. Thursday is the second OGT
three-hour delay day. Friday is a three-hour early dismissal day because
it is the last day of the quarter. I am giddy. Like a giddy senior
in high school who is in the middle of the biggest blow off week he's had in
thirteen years. In fourth grade, a winter storm shut school down for two
weeks after winter break was supposed to end, but in that case my giddiness was
limited because I had to get up every morning to see if school was still closed
and, well, I was stuck at home. This week, I will be at school a for a
smidgen, but the disorder will be so tremendous that productivity will not even
bother to show up. It's like a senior's nirvana. Oh, did I mention
that I actually have to go into school an hour early Thursday for a field trip
that won't end until school's almost over for the day? Well, I do.
Serious giddiness.