Since I have not updated in a long time, I have not had a good venty list for awhile either.

50 (I hope I make it that far...) Things I Hate About High School (so far)

1.  The way the bells ring.  It rings exactly four times, the first three are all wonderful and held out fully, and the fourth one chokes off in the middle.  It sounds metallic, and it once reminded me of a song, but I cannot for the life of me remember which one.

2.  The detachy locks that are so easy to misplace while scrambling in one's locker, or, in my case, accidentally lock the locker next to you and end up in a long, pleading conversation in the office to get your lock back.

3.  Homeroom- just its holding pen type atmosphere and that it's completely worthless.

4.  The way that half of the Important Announcements are on the morning announcements and half are on the TV monitor and there's no possible way to know and you end up having to check both.

5.  How I feel obligated to at least pretend to be friends with people who really piss me off.

6.  The sudden transition into science labs that usually involve me dropping and smashing test tubes or spilling ethyl alcohol all over my jeans.  What happened to the Phases Of The Moon-type labs we did in middle school?  You know, the ones with non-smashy non-spilly entities.  It's not easy being klutzy.

7.  The way my middle-aged english teacher knows more about pop culture than I do.  It's really freaky.

8.  How the only people that are ever really in the library are these scary thug-people who give me weird looks.

9.  Windows, as in the class.  I believe I've mentioned this one before.  Repeatedly.

10.  The student paper sucks.  Maybe I'm just bitter about never being assigned a real article, but there's practicallly nothing in there worth reading.  I used to read it all the time, but there's so much suckage.  No one cares about the article topics.  The writers don't, and the student body doesn't either.  I used to think that maybe I could write about something that someone actually was interested in someday after I got established.  But I've never been established and now I don't want to.  OK, so I'm bitter.  Whatever.

11.  Speaking of things that suck, look at the mouths of the horny beings slobbering one another right against my locker.  Nuff said.

12.  That perverted middle schooler who keeps looking down my shirt on the bus.

13.  Plastered is a fun word.  No revelance, I just had to say it. 

14.  The exponential function that is my decreasing IQ.  Look.  I just spelled "relevance" as "revelance" and even now I'm not entirely sure what the correct spelling is.

15.  Functions.  And anything else about algebra.

16.  My guidance counselor is a phoney.

17.  My health teacher is a phoney.

18.  I'm Holden Caulfield.  Whee!

19.  I'm skipping 19 because it's a prime number and it annoys me.  I skip all prime numbers.  Always. 

20.  I also enjoy inconsistency.

21.  The way people bitch unnecessarily about grades.  An unnamed friend considers a grade in the high 80s 'bombing' a test.  And always chooses to bitch about it to me, because my grades are relatively high and she thinks I'll sympathize with her.

22.  Nazi's stupid lies and assumptions about people.

23.  People who can sleep during class.  I am insanely jealous about them.

24.  Prepositions.

25.  The mock-gangstas.

26.  Actually, scratch that.  They're funny.  I will now call them mangstas. 

27.  Mangstas.  Hee.

28.  Band, which blows.  Get it?  Blows?  Ah, puns.

29.  Puns, which are the work of Satan.

30.  My history teacher's pronunciation of Jesus.  We did a unit on him in historical context and he always pronounced it like "Jee ZUS!"  Finger-quotes and everything.

31.  My health teacher's pronunciation of coupons.  She always pronounces it like "cyoo-pawns" ("pawns" with a Bostonian lilt) which is just ungodly.

32.  You know, thirty-two is five to the second power.  Which is almost like fifty, but not.  Oh, never mind.  That would be five to the second power.

33.  How I even get mixed up like this on algebra tests.

34.  Cafeteria food.  It's not that bad, but depressing.  Depressing enough that I've given up on lunch.

35.  Lunch is too short.

36.  Lunch is too long, because it drags on forever and I must pretend to enjoy being surrounded by people I hate.  1200 of them.

37.  How very confused I am that I hate these people and love them at the same time.

38.  The more I hate people at first, the more I love them after observation.

39.  How all the people I once thought I liked at first turn out to be shallow bitches.

40.  Sleep.  I hate sleeping at night.

41.  There is no escaping these people.

42.  I am reduced to a pathetic stalker in order to have some fuel for writing.

43.  How I am crazy when I am not writing.

44.  I know I will be a pathetic sellout of a writer if I ever do become one and that there is no point.

45.  That I take writing way too seriously.

46.  That I take myself way too seriously.

47.  That I can't be properly whiny without spewing pseudo-philosophical bullshit.

48.  That I care so much about getting exactly fifty, and have no freedom just to stop this.

49.  That I don't want to post this.

50.  That I'm going to post this anyway because I don't have the strength to leave it behind.

51.  Even more than that, I will be really fucking pissed if xanga deletes this.

52.  There's always a chance that xanga deletes something.  Which makes it all better in a way.

53.  I can leave things to chance.

54.  I'm over 50, because I never need to be exact.

55.  This is turning into a list of things I love.

56.  It has always been stuff I love.

57.  And just maybe I'm OK with all of this.

58.  And I don't need xanga anymore, and I'm leaving it all behind.  For good.

59.  Signing off:  whatever it is you may choose to call me.  Or no one at all.  Or friend.  Or stranger.  Or god.  Though the last one's nice.

Hopefully xanga won't delete my entry this time...  Stupid xanga.

Anyway, on saturday, I spent a wonderful, beautiful day in a wonderful, beautiful city with seven wonderful, beautiful people.  The city would be New York, of course, and the people are: Ari, Baruch, Jackie, Juliet, Nathalie, Sabrina, and Sudhana.  In alphabetical order, in case you didn't notice.  I might as well offer my own recap, if it's not deleted again:

-I go to New York via train with maternal unit.  I am *unfortunately* forced to sit next to a collegiate-looking male whom I will refer to as Hot Guy Anonymous in the next two sentences, which will be the only two sentences in which I will ever speak of him.  HGA was asleep most of the way, so he was fun staring material.  He did wake up once and talk to me, and here's our conversation:  HGA: "What station is this?"  Me: "Metropark.  It's in... New Jersey..."

-We arrive in New York twenty minutes late.  I attempt to find subway station with the use of Beenie's cryptic directions.  Maternal unit panics in about thirty seconds of being moderately lost around Penn Station, and hails a cab so she can pay ridiculous cab fare to get us to the Met.  Cab driver wears turban and spends entire drive talking to himself in some foreign language.

-We arrive at Met half an hour early.  Maternal unit coordinates meeting place, and goes off into the museum.  I run around the stairs chasing pigeons for half an hour.

-Juliet arrives at 11:58, and Sabrina at 11:59.  Eventually, we all congregate.  Jackie and I meet Suds and Baruch in person for the first time, and everyone else meets Juliet for the first time, except Sabrina, who is weirded out to learn that she and Juliet attend the same school.

-We all slowly drift away from the Met into Central Park, and drift around the park.  Jackie and I frolic on our first big rock of the day.

-We eventually end up drifting around West Side halfheartedly looking for a place to eat, and crossing the street at the wrong time and stuff.

-Beenie, Nathie, and I spot Senor Swanky's and realize that it is meant to be.  Of all the Mexican restaurants to acquire food poisoning for ridiculous prices, the one that is made for us is the one that professes itself to be a "Celebrity Hangout," has weird pictures of a fat Mexican man pasted onto celebrity bodies all over the wall, and an upstairs lounge with blacklights, poofy chairs, flourescent matchbooks, and very suspicious fumes. 

-We frolic on over and immediately tell the waitress to set a table for eight, while making fun of the place rather loudly and coaxing the rest of the group to come on over.

-Said group pretends not to know us until the waitress brings out the nachos.

-We dine on overpriced food.  A moment of hilarity occurs when waitress asks Baruch whether he wants his pina colada virgin or alcoholic.  Baruch thinks this over for a bit, until waitress informs him she'll need to see some ID.

-The combined efforts of Beenie and Ari save the group $4 on  the check.  Hooray.  Somehow, payment is very confusing to all of us.  How many CTYers does it take to pay a restaurant bill?

-Starbucks run afterward.  Sabrina, Nathie, and Baruch satisfy their cravings for frothy, sugar-laden caffeinated beverages.  It takes Beenie a very long time to get her order for some reason.

-Juliet departs to write a term paper or something.

-Central Park.  All of us except Beenie and me set up camp on a nice rock.  We go off and bother people.  Meanwhile, Baruch talks to some hardcore pogo stickers.  Of our exploits, I can only say that dogs are stupid, people are gullible, children are easily bewildered, and we attract way too many foreigners.

-Ari considers it a running gag to keep calling my cell phone for no particular reason.

-We return to the rock.  We missed out on some origami and a cute young child bothering a sleeping woman.  However, we do see the tail end of some guy getting arrested.

-By the way, never use a Central Park bathroom.  Ever.  Pee in the bushes, if you must.

-We leave some hot pink post-it notes all over the place, all of which are one or more of the following: crude, graphic, bewildering, poetic, random, strange.  I recently discovered that the pad of post-its ended up in my purse.

-We migrate from food vendor to food vendor, and eventually end up near the Met.  We stall for time while I take a few last pictures, and we have a non-swastika tummy lie, and stuff various blades of grass into Ari's hood.

-Ari and Nathalie go off, but the rest of us have about forty minutes left.

-We wander around the East Side, looking for food. 

-We end up at this pizzeria, and I am the first to order.  I decide on my slice of expensive pizza, and while the Italian man behind the counter is slicing, he tells me it will cost $3.50 (Jesus!).  I explain that I will pay with my credit card.  Italian man explains that the place can't process credit cards, and it's "Only $3.50!  Only $3.50!  Pay cash!"  I don't have enough cash left and he gestures at Baruch, Suds, Sabrina, and Jackie, saying "Borrow from your friends!  Your friends!"  I try to tell him that I really don't want to, and say never mind on the pizza.  He starts spazzing, saying over and over "What can I do for you?  What can I DO for YOU?"  We quietly walk away and find another pizzeria across the street.

-Suds leaves for Grand Central.  Those remaining go into the pizzeria.  Baruch and Jackie buy some greasy Italian food, and Sabrina and I sit with them, and we talk about nothing in particular. 

-On the way back, Baruch aces power skipping after only a brief tutorial from Jackie.  It's quite impressive, with his long legs and everything.  Personally, I fail miserably.

-Back to the met.  We all split up.

The end.

Currently Reading Slaughterhouse-Five By Kurt Vonnegut see related

The last entry was a bit... premature.  Parakeet is currently alive and well and never shuts up, but anyway...

You see, I usually take it down to the basement to let it fly around instead of leaving it in its cage all day (I'm using it because I'm not completely sure of its gender.  And its name is constantly changing, too.).  So I tell my sister to close all the doors in the basement before I take it down, but she didn't bother to close this one closet door.

So Julie starts watching TV while I'm supervising the parakeet, and she asks to hold it and pet it for awhile, so I hunt it down and give it to her.  Eventually, she does something to frighten it, and it goes flying off into this closet that she left open.  However, this particular closet has an opening in the ceiling that leads into this sort of slatted gap between the basement ceiling and the ground floor.  Of course, the parakeet flies right into this opening (which goes straight back to the other wall.  It doesn't make any sounds, and it doesn't respond to calling, tempting with millet, or prodding with a pool cue.  It's not heard from for several hours.  So we assumed that it either crashed into a wall and broke its neck, suffocated in the dusty air (parakeets have sensitive lungs), got fried on the fluorescent light, or swallowed some of the rat poison scattered in the area. 

Paternal unit takes the plastic screen off of the fluorescent light and leaves all closets open in hopes that parakeet, if still alive, will find its way out.  Of course, later that night, it flies out while paternal unit is watching basketball game, and it is recaged and everyone is happy.  Judging by the volume of its chirping, it suffered no permanent lung damage.

I finally purchased Coldplay CD of Nazi-Spite at Borders the other night.  After much deliberation, I've decided on A Rush of Blood to the Head, or as I call it, A Rush of Spite to the Wallet.  Good stuff, even though I have In My Place stuck in my head.  The odd thing is, its price sticker said it cost 18.99, and I also bought a book that cost 7.50, but the cashier rang up the total as 10.94, with tax and everything.  But I'm not one to complain...

Ah, what the hell.  Might as well play with xangazon once again.