One week without you, thought I'd forget

1) My blog's ugly, and it makes me sad.  I wish web design were more my forte.
2) I kind of want a tumblr, but I think it would be narcissistic, even for me. Maybe I'll make a FuckYeah*InsertPersonHere* page, though I don't know what I'd make since this site (most useful web resource ever) told me that FuckYeahJodieFoster already existed. Ideas?
3) Rue McClanahan died? Sad...now Betty White's the only living Golden Girl. (I don't know if I mentioned how much I love Betty White here yet, but I do...Lately both she and Fannie Flagg have surpassed Charles Nelson Reilly in my ranking of favorite Match Game contestants. I know, unheard of.)

Anyways...

I used to love "Vacation" by the Go-Gos because it was in the Rugrats vacation special (where they go to Las Vegas and rescue the white "kitties" in the show...that must've been Harsher in Hindsight, post Roy Horn's tiger attack). The original played in the beginning and then Angelica butchered it later on:



(Sadly I couldn't find a video but here's the audio)

But now I like it because, well, I love the Go-Gos. If I could join any band, it would be them. Perfect balance of mall brat and rebel. And right about now the song says a lot. Gotta love Lyrical Dissonance (sorry for the second TV Tropes link...I should make a rule to only direct you all to that time sucker once per post...or just TropesRoll you without announcing it):

The counselors at the Girl Scout Camp, they say they're mighty fine, but when you go to meet them, they look like Frankenstein!

Hello, readers! To all my STL readers, I miss you like whoa and you all should come to Pennsylvania and play Yeah Dude with me right now.

So thus far, epic RENT night aside, my summer’s consisted of looking up animal hybrids on Wikipedia (check out the puma/leopard mix, the dwarf pumapard), checking my FormSpring which you all should ask me questions on, playing Treasure Isle on Facebook extensively and listening to more 4 Non Blondes than anyone should in a lifetime (Seriously, the “What’s Up” video is on demand and I’ve listened to it more than is healthy…it’s probably a good thing that I wasn’t the age I am now in the 90s, cause I’d be trying to emulate them like whoa.)

Anyways…it’s hard to believe I used to value sitting at home alone and learning about phantom big cats and whatnot more than anything in the world, cause I really can’t take much more of it right about now. Sure one day I’ll be able to wow someone with my knowledge of ligers and beefalo (which have apparently stunted buffalo conservation efforts like whoa), but it’s really not productive at all, and loses the fun value quite quickly.

But, yeah, even when I did genuinely enjoy sitting around doing nothing all the time, the highlight of the summer months was still the few weeks I'd go away to Girl Scout camp. For a total couch potato/only child, it was great to be around a big group of really awesome people spending time outside and doing really fun things...like the time I was in the travelers group (probably the best week at camp I had) when we went to the Delaware Water Gap (and they talked about the Shawnee tribe until shawnee didn't sound like a word anymore) and to Camelback Beach (I'm not a big water slide person, but I sure love wave pools...it's like being at the beach without the jellyfish and with a shitton of chemicals) on the 4th of July and spent the entire day imitating our British counselor's accents, because we thought they were the coolest ever (and we all felt really bad when we made "Ringo" (a girl scout camp counselor never reveals her real name...unless she does or you force it out of her...I got in trouble for telling people a counselor's name once) lost her belly button ring because we begged her to take it out and show us how it worked). (I'm on a roll with the run-ons and parentheticals today)...and the next year with my "Theater of the Mountains" group we went to see 42nd Street in town and it was...well, obviously a small town theater production (but hey, I just went and saw RENT at the Media theater and it was surprisingly awesome), but pretty fun.

I just tried to write a paragraph about how great camp was and ended up writing about how great not being at camp was. I promise we had fun on the campgrounds, too...we canoed (I was never a big canoing fan; your shoes got too muddy...I could deal with being grimy and having dirty clothes, but wet shoes are the one thing I really can't put up with for some reason), and funyaked (it's a little yellow floaty thing that you sat in the middle of, fwiw) (you could step into the funyak without getting completely soaked and for some reason the kayaking motion is much more fun than the canoeing one and you don't have to deal with sharing a boat with a slow paddler (though this one time I had to deal with a clingy campmate who made it her goal to link our funyaks together)).

And if you were willing to hike up a humungo hill you'd get to ride horses, which was really fun even though everyone there knew way more about horses than I did and this one time I steered the horse too hard and the scary barn leader yelled at me...and then the horse tried to buck me off and she ran over and was like "Wow, you handle that horse so well!" and affirmed that statement after the thing decided to step on my foot as I was demounting it. 


Speaking of crazy animal experiences, there was the summer when the bears ran rampant. Over the counselors' radios, we'd hear them talk about "Code B's" all over camp, but they wouldn't tell us what a Code B was...we quickly hypothesized that we were dealing with a Code B(ear), and everyone got really excited, though I was a bit skeptic. This next story starts with something totally out of character for me...I'd joined Roadrunners, and we woke up at ungodly hours to go for runs (yeah, I know...I was with the lagging group in the back in case you hadn't assumed that). I was walking back to my tent with someone else in my unit when I stopped dead in my tracks...there was nobody else around...except for a baby bear eating a big rubber band. I calmly tapped my friend on the shoulder and was like, "Hey, what's that?". "What's what?" "The bear!" and she looked up and freaked...quietly freaked, since being loud around a baby bear...I mean the baby prolly couldn't do much, but where there's a baby animal there's a crazy mother (I got attacked by a mother goose last year, so I know). So we stood there until it ran away and then went to our counselor who reported it and everyone in the camp found out and there was a hoopla and everyone thought I was really cool. It was a triumph of sorts, I suppose. And then one time was one either inside or just outside the mess hall and they had to chase it away and we all watched from a distance and by then they couldn't pretend there weren't bear around it was really exciting. Who needs danger perception, anyway?

And all the nights we'd stay up singing (This one time a counselor came to our tent to give us our nightly option of a "handshake, hug, or ET touch" [we always took all 3] and we ended up singing "Thank You" by Dido with her so now that song reminds me of camp) and playing truth or dare and the "nervous game" (and somehow I got the repuation of being the prudish one...in a group of 12 year olds, mind you) and gossiping about other campers (During the travelers unit we ended up splitting up into 2 cliques...which were like the city people and the surburban ones, which seems really awful now, but at the time it was fun...I mean, everyone was in one and it's not like we were outright excluding everyone and the cool, urban kids liked me just fine even though I was from suburbia (which was good because I was with most of them in Theater of the Mountains so it would've been bad if they had recognized me as that girl from the rival clique) so its okay...right? Okay, fine...but I'm sure you weren't a nice person when you were 12, either)

But my favorite part of camp was also my least favorite, because it was the last night of each session, when we would have a campfire/singalong/talent show. We'd do the same skits every year (except when I was in the acting one, when we decided we needed a good skit so we did a good one, though I forget what it was...we also did a modern version of Cinderella which I narrated and when we raised/took down the flag some of the girls did a step routine...I meanwhile stood by the flag lamely and gave all the orders). But anyways...usually the skits were the Magic Blanket skit (in which people would through things over a blanket and they'd come back double in size until a skeptic spit on it and then got hit with a bucket of water) and the "and then I heard a knock, a knock, a knock, and I thought it was Cecilia, Cecilia, Cecilia!" one and "If I were not a camper, I wonder what I'd be, If I were not a camper, *insert counselors name here* is what I'd be! *Insert something the counselor said here*"...or, conversely, "A birdwatcher's what I'd be! Hark, a lark, sitting in the park! *Crack an egg over head, pretend it's bird shit, hilarity ensues*"

So we'd sing some silly songs...they were the songs that I'd sing all through the school years to get funny looks from people, so it was pretty sweet to go to camp and burst out in a silly song and simply have those around me join in ("Baby shark, do do do do do do do"..."There's a hole in the bucket, dear Eliza, dear Eliza!"..."Oh I had a little chickie and it wouldn't lay an egg so I rubbed hot water up and down its legs! Oh, the little chickie hollered and the little chickie begged...and the little Chickie laid a hard-boiled egg!" and the "Just a boy and a girl in a little canoe..." song which ended with a girl paddling a canoe and the boy that she kicked out of the boat swimming all around...in the same misandric vein, the song that started with a girl sitting 'neath the lilacs and playing a guitar and then she meets a guy smoking a cigar and she dies and he becomes a douchebag and then he is killed by her tombstone and the moral of this song, according to the counselors, was "never tell lies", but we always sang "never trust guys!" 


Oh, girl scout camp...

If you're still with me after that last paragraph, then thanks for putting up with my ramblings...so after alternating between silly skits and silly songs we'd calm down and sing some more solemn songs, like "On My Honor" which was full of sappy, heartwarming Girl Scout-y values, "Red Balloon" and "Spider's Web", which was one of my favorites:





My other favorite was "Linger", which IIRC I got up and attempted to sing at my high school's last meeting for worship before graduation and prolly embarrassed myself like whoa...but anyways, there are lots of versions of it, I believe, but ours went:


I want to linger
A little longer
A little longer here with you
it's such a perfect night, 
it doesn't seem quite right
that it should be my last with you
and come September
we'll all remember
and as the years go by
I'll think of you and sigh
this is goodnight and not goodbye

And everyone would get all sappy and sentimental and give big hugs and we'd link hands and sing Taps and there would be a phantom trumpet playing it from the activities lodge (I don't know who the player was, still) And then the next day would be come, and it would be over...until the next year.


The last year I went things sort of fell apart, at least with my group of friends...drama, people getting in trouble for cigarettes and stuff, a giant foodfight, and then I didn't go back because everyone decided not to go back, either...Sad, sad...but at least it was fun for the time being! And it's so aweosme to meet someone else who went to Girl Scout camp and to compare experiences and campfire songs. So...if you're reading this and went to camp...what songs did you sing?

P.S. Go here for lots of great camp songs!

P.P.S. Sorry for the wonky fonts...I don't know what happened.

You touched my hand, I played it cool...

Hmmm, classes are over; I don't know how I feel about it. In every one we rushed through the last few weeks of the syllabus and then the professors were like "kthxbai" and now everything seems so incomplete, inside and out of class.

It's not an end, because I'll come back to school and things won't necessarily be the way they are now (and I hate it when things change while you're away and you're not around to contribute/control it/watch it happen…gah, I’m like the only one not sticking around. I wish I were around for all the group bonding that's going to be happening), but likely they will be very similar (except for people going abroad and graduating, which makes me sad).

It's not a beginning of something new, because I'll go home and things will be exactly how I left them, which is partly comforting and partly confining.

Just a disruption from what's been the norm, and I'm sure going back to school after the summer will be equally as disruptive, just like it was last summer. I feel like I have 2 very separate lives, and whenever I have to switch from one to the other, it’s so jarring, even if I wouldn’t trade either life for anything.


Ends of summers, ends of semesters, ends of everything...they always seem so rushed/sudden, which sucks because I look at beginnings of these things as infinite, like I have all the time in the world, and then all of a sudden it's like "nope, sorry". And then I turn into this sappy sad-sack. Like at the end of each semester I start to miss not only the beginning of the semester when everything was new and excitng, but the ends of semesters past, for some reason. And since nobody wants to hang around with a blubbering sentimentalist I guess I’ll save all that for here, when people can click the little X on the top of their browser at any time if I get obnoxious.


Last Spring, I spent reading week...lo and behold, reading! But I wasn't reading for, say, my optional Psych final (which I only really took because I was sticking around for a Fleetwood Mac concert anyway)...I think I was scrambling to finish as many books in the Tales of the City series (one of the things that got me excited for going back to school last fall was being able to finish the series. STFU) and this book from Nylon on female musicians and their style. And a few days I wandered around campus by myself and climbed/sat in/under trees and listened to cheesy 70s pop music (I don't know why I associate springtime with the songs from VH1's 40 Most Sensational Soft Rock Songs...I think that song about there being a warm wind blowing and stars out and really wanting to see someone tonight has something to do with it. Oh, and that "Summer Breeze" song...I think the artists behind those 2 songs were related, actually...ANYWAYS)

If you'd like to humor me, or need new fodder for making fun of me, here you go:

I'd Really Love to See You Tonight by England Dan & John Ford Coley @ Yahoo! Video

What was I talking about before I revealed my awful taste in music? Oh, right...I'd love to repeat the whole wandering by myself and listening to England Dan and John Ford Coley, except (a) I kind of don't appreciate solitude the way I did a year ago, and (b) (more importantly) I think my iPod, Angel, is lost forever. Maybe next year, with a new iPod (I hate how every Birthday/Christmas present I’ve gotten recently has been a replacement for something I’ve lost or broken…this is why I shouldn’t have nice things), I can finally try to relive it, but it'll be with a different iPod (and not my beloved Angel the 30 GB video model), and probably a new musical guilty pleasure.


Just goes to show that you can never really recreate a moment. Which sometimes is great, when you're back in a place/situation/what have you and you'd love to start over there, and recreate yourself and your life in that setting, but other times sucks, when dealing with a perfect moment that you'd love to get back. How sad is it that listening to bad music while sitting in a tree is considered one of the more perfect moments of my life?


Anyways, now I'm thinking of yet another Fleetwood Mac song...I first heard "Seven Wonders" about this time last year...I'd just gotten back home for summer break, and the night before I'd seen FM in St. Louis, as referenced above. I was on a Stevie kick and was wishing that I could've stayed in that concert venue forever and ever with the diehard classic rock fans and the middle-aged ladies in lacy black dresses carrying tambourines. I went to my room and unpacked my bags and looked around my room and had no idea what to do with myself, so I put the Stevie channel of Last.FM radio on and this came on. I'd heard of the song, but had never actually heard it. I thought it was a gorgeous song, and even though it wasn't written by Stevie (she got songwriting credit just because she changed a line from “You touched my hand, all the way down the line” down to “all the way down to Emmeline” after mishearing it. Wut.) it had "her" written all over it:



Fleetwood Mac - Seven Wonders @ Yahoo! Video

Summer 2009 has been the best summer of my life so far (whenever I get sad about leaving school now I think back to how much fun it was), and that song makes me think of it. I listened to the song on the flight to Italy (along with “Babooshka” by Kate Bush…but I don’t think that song was at all indicative of my life then or now. And the video’s just plain creepy)

Kate Bush - Babooshka @ Yahoo! Video

But, yeah, "Seven Wonders" sort of captured what I thought of Capri as I ran down a steep and winding path to get as close to the clear-blue water as possible. I remember thinking that there couldn’t possibly be a place prettier than this, and I have yet to find one. So now the song makes me think of lots of near-perfect moments of the past year, in all sorts of contexts, moments I’ve yet to top, moments I’d love to get back, but if I don’t, at least I have the memories of those certain places at certain times and under certain circumstances. And if I never live to match the beauty of any given situation again (which I probably will…I mean I really do have all the time in the world as far as I’m concerned), at least I’ll know that such moments are possible, and I guess that’s comforting.


Oh, and I like how when I tag/label these posts I can use the same tags for pretty much every one. Sort of defeats the purpose of the labels, and shows how damn repetitive I am.

Wow, I haven’t written in a while. Part writer’s block, part schoolwork, part having something vaguely resembling a social life. You know what they (by “they” I mean Talullah Bankhead) say…it’s the good girls that keep diaries; the bad girls don’t have the time.

Yeah, I’m not fooling myself, either.

Anyhow, um…I have a reserve of blog topics, thanks to my lovely facebook friends, but my internet is being silly so I’ll just go off-book here…um…

The school year’s coming to a close, and, for the first time since like 3rd grade…shockingly, surprisingly, absolutely unheard of…I kind of don’t want the year to end. I don’t know…minus a few months sophomore year’s been the best year of my life, and I feel like those first months or so at the beginning of each semester when I just wanted nothing more than to be home and cuddling with my cat have changed me like whoa…begrudgingly for the best, I guess…I don’t know, I hate change and the beginning of each semester has made me deal with it. Like I said, thanks to all that I’m a vaguely social person now…by “vaguely social”, I mean, not a crazy cat lady cuddling with Rainbow Flower (every time I mention my cat by name I get judged harshly…I’m sort for being a little hippie child) because I’m afraid to live. Don’t get me wrong, it’ll be great to go home and see everyone, and I feel like I make much more sense in the context of “home” and the people there than I do here, but I kind of like how little sense my life has made lately…sorting things out gives me something to do and it’s probably helping me grow as a person and feel-good blah blah. Ah well, a little bit of stasis might do me some good before I go completely off the wall. And I’m sure once I come home to Wawa and water ice and day trips down the shore (Damn, I hope the dynamic of the Jersey Shore hasn’t been thrown off by Snooki and the Situation and all them) I’ll be excited to be there for a while. And I promise this blog and I will be BFFs by the end of the summer, so stay tuned.

I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about astrology yet! I feel like that, and harp seals, are all I ramble about in real life, so why don’t I do it here? I’ll write a more in-depth astrology entry later, but for now I’ll be self-centered and focus on Cancer, the best sign ever, despite its unfortunate name. So let’s talk about some common Cancerian traits, and how I fit them disgustingly well. You might’ve heard me say that Cancer is the most pathetic sign of the Zodiac. I don’t mean “pathetic” with a negative connotation (okay, maybe a little…I can be a be a total sad sack, I’ll admit it), I just mean it’s a sign that runs purely on pathos. I’m not a very logical person. Check. What else…some key words from Astrology-Insight.com…emotional, caring, family, intuitive, imaginative…oh wait, forceful and direct, that’s not me…Oh, but Cancer has a heart of emotions but will only reveal their feelings gradually….they have a special need for permanence in a relationship and are not interested in mere flirtations…protective…possessive…old-fashioned (which I sort of deplore and sort of love about myself)…have a hard time forgiving/letting go…inferiority complex and easily offended…nostalgic...Oh, and this…

“Cancerians sometimes experience trouble deciding between the ambitious, tough and outgoing side of their nature and the somewhat sensitive, inward looking part of themselves.”

I’ll just leave it at that.

And I know that Cancers like food and being at home and the arts and food and…

Part of me really doesn’t want to believe in Astrology. Like, why would the alignment of a bunch of balls of gas light-years away determine anything about anyone? And horoscopes never come true in my experience. But then I read the description of a Cancer and it’s me nearly to a tee. And I know a perfect Scorpio and a perfect Pisces and a perfect Taurus and…I mean, maybe it’s a coincidence, probably it’s a coincidence. I probably read an astrology book one day and then went “Hey, I’m intuitive, sensitive and caring! So I can be as clingy, conflict avoidant, constantly changing, and passive-aggressive as I want and just blame it on my sign, too!”

But, like I said, one day I’d like to learn how to read star charts so I can write horoscopes (maybe this blog will be a horoscope column some day) and see what %age of them are pure BS. I bet it’s a lot of them. And, don’t worry, I’m not gonna be like “Hey, you’re everything I want but you’re an air or fire sign so I’ll never give you a chance la di da!”

Okay, I need to sleep…I’m sure there’s still a shitton to write about but that’ll happen later. But I shall leave an assignment for you all…Go to this site: http://www.astrology-insight.com/cancer.htm

And tell me that sounds exactly like me. And then find your own sign and leave a comment below (with your name if you’d truly like to appease me) saying what sounds and doesn’t sound like your sign. Kthx?