No more stress! Huzzah! Wait...

I had the last final of the longest, hardest, most rewarding, most tearful semester ever today.  I AM  DONE.

This was taken during a low point in the semester when I went around half the day with my sweater  inside out, and then after realizing this, removing it, and putting it on right side out, I went around for the rest of the day with it buttoned very wrong. The arm is my boyfriend holding me so he could send a picture to my mom. They tell me they love me, but I'm beginning to wonder if that's really why I'm kept around.

Questions of the moment:

Okay, but what is anti-folk?

How long is too long in texting?

Why are bad words bad?  How did they get bad?

How is Yellowstone park's seismic health?  Last I read, one side of a lake was bulging ominously.

Where can I find the acrylic paint incantation that I need to be saying to make the actual painting process work?

Is there some complex facet of microevolution that I am overlooking, or is it actually as straightforward as it seems?

How do the French decide the gender of words?

What is the point of fake tanning?

Are my mechanical pencils magical?  What other explanation can there be for the whole "they never run out!" thing?

And the winner is... Uh...

So.  Remember the rather mortifying post, my dear blog, in which I listed the crushes of years past?  I added to the list when I turned 20 - but the 21 addition is long overdue.  Because I have a problem:  I don't have one this year.  I mean, I can come up with possibles, but there isn't an obvious choice - and that's the point.  I didn't even have to think when I listed the others, because when I went mad for them.  I didn't have to sit around going "I think I like so-and-so."  I just went mad.

But, here are the nominees.

1. Anthony Michael Hall, circa 1985

Appeal:  Funny. Awkward.
Problems:  He was probably shorter than me, definitely thinner, and I'm growing out of pathetic boys.  Thank heaven.

3. Adrien Brody

Appeal: Fantastic head.  I could look at his strange head all day.
Problems: He sounds like he's a method actor, which would be too weird.  What if he played a psycho murderer?  He might strangle or stab me.  And I think he might be too short.

4. Ian McShane in Sky West and Crooked.

Appeal: He was quite good-looking, and a gypsy, and (in the movie) falls in love with a nutcase, which makes my chances good.  And even though the film is way over the top, he still manages to be cool.
Problems:  Now he's, like, old.  And - this is a side question - why does he look so short now?  He seems about five foot in Pirates of the Caribbean, but normal-tall in this movie.  Did the man shrink?  Or did they just load him down with so much stuff - beads and hats and coats and things - in that last Pirates movie that it makes him look shorter than he really is?  I mean, he's gained a bit of weight (who hasn't? That's what I say), but how could it change the way you look on screen that much?

I've got a few more I could add, but it already feels like I'm stretching it here.  There's still a good many months till my 22nd birthday, but I'm getting worried.  What will I do if I don't have a defining 21-year-old crush to look back on when I'm old and drooling?

Sudden thought! Maybe I am becoming a mature, sensible, non-silly person and outgrowing film crushes!  What a strange idea.  It is going to take me some time to get used to this, I can tell you.

the real question is, will I ever write a post that is actually about something?

Hello!  It's been a while, hasn't it?

1. Okay, this house is so distracting.  I get almost nothing done.  The apartment was so depressing that you had to get out and do things and go the library all the time for the sake of your sanity.  Now I just sit on the deck and maybe play ukulele and wham-o! All the sudden it's eleven thirty and my teeth aren't even brushed for pete's sake!

2. There are a zillion things I would like to take pictures of in the yard and house and boast about on here, but it's eleven thirty and I'm too tired.

3. Again, this house is distracting.  I don't even want to watch movies anymore.  Or, if I do, I have to wait till it's really dark or the bugs are snacking on me rather too greedily.  I want to be outside all the time.

4. However, Cee and I went and saw Captain America the other day and shrieked for a bit afterwards.  I'm taking dad to see it this weekend, hopefully.  We can't pin down exactly why it was so enjoyable.  I think because the main guy wasn't a jerk.  In a lot of other hero movies the guy has to learn to be good.  You like him in spite of yourself because he's funny, but you know he's a turd.  Captain America was a nice, honorable guy from the get-go.

5.  I don't know why, but when I see actors from, like, a Poirot TV movie or BBC mini-series on the big, big screen, I feel ridiculously proud and happy.  I whacked poor Cee in the arm twice during Captain America for Richard Armitage (the tooth-cruncher) and JJ Feild (the British guy in the bad-guy's-lair-demo-team).  I also sort of whispered in a very shrill voice, "Richard Armitage is going to be Thorin in The Hobbit! Augh! But doesn't he seem way tall?"  I know, I know, they'll make him look shorter.  But I just can't see it right now. He just is tall in my head.  JJ Feild I knew as Simon Doyle in Death on the Nile.   He was  good in that, actually.  Rather the way I always saw the character in my head.

6.  I stayed up till two watching Wives and Daughters the other night.  I am more than ever convinced that all British actors must all know each other.  I mean, just one example:  Keely Hawes (Cynthia Kirkpatrick) is married to Matthew MacFadyen.  They met through MI-5.  He played Mr. Darcy in the new Pride and Prejudice - along with Rosamund Pike and Tom Hollander, who were both in Wives and Daughters as well.  And remember that Poirot I talked about?  Well,  Barbara Flynn (Miss Browning of Wives and Daughters) was also in it with Emily Blunt, who was in The Young Victoria with Rupert Friend who dated Keira Knightley for forever.  And Keira Knightley was in Pride and Prejudice with both Rosamund Pike and Tom Hollander.  I mean!  And I've been talking about fairly obvious examples involving big-name people who do franchises and big-screen stuff.  Don't even get me started on the people who rotate through all the Masterpiece Theatre movies.  If the Masterpiece Theatre people don't exchange Christmas cards and go to each others' kids' birthday parties, I would eat a soft hat if I owned one.

7.  I am, obviously, the logic master of the world.  See #6 for proof, baby.

8. Also, I am great because I took the time to put all the movie titles in italics.

9. I need to go to bed.  Several times today I found myself trying to stuff my purse into the refrigerator.

10. Good night.

PROMISES, DECISIONS OR DECLARATIONS I HAVE RECENTLY MADE WHICH, IN HINDSIGHT, WERE PROBABLY NOT WISE

(This is a whine. You have been warned.)

1. Offering to teach British Lit to my poor, trusting little sister.  I've mentioned once or twice before that I am profoundly unqualified for the job.  Now that I've used up almost the entire summer watching Gaudy Night and Lady in the Water*, and am consequently scrambling to put everything together, the realization of how completely inadequate my feeble murmurs about Paradise Lost will actually be when compared to good, sound pieces of scholarship has sort of plopped on me in one large mass of despair, like the blob.   I'm telling myself that if I behave in a very confident, businesslike way, there's a good chance she won't notice that I don't actually know anything.  My college British lit teacher might have been a total moron - but he was so sure of himself, and wore such nice Oxford don hats that I accepted every word as gospel.  

2. Declaring that I will read (or at least finish) a book a day for a year. Only a true fool would do such a thing.

3. Giving up sugar and bread for a week.  I can't.  I'm addicted and I accept it, and now I would just like to get on with life and eat Nutella and toast, thank you.

4. I should never tell people I have nothing to do with myself.  Kelsey, LISTEN. DO NOT do this ever again.  When you do, people send you to ludicrously early doctor appointments and you find yourself taking care of small children.  I really don't understand why people trust me with their children or pets or anything they value.  I wear sweaters backwards on a regular basis.  This afternoon, for instance.

5. Vowing not to buy any more music until I have learned the words to all the songs I've already got - and also get very familiar with the instrumental ones as well.  This is going to be embarrassing, but:

990 - soundtracks

120 - jazz

155 - The Beatles

1,538 - everything else

Grand total: 2,803 songs

I probably know - and I mean really know - somewhere around a third of that amount.  Nobody on earth except maybe Karl Lagerfeld has an excuse not to know the music they own.  And it seems silly for even Lagerfeld to buy so much. 

5. Also vowing that I will not check out any more library books until I've read all the un-read books I own.  Why did I even buy some of this stuff?  It all looks very nice and learned on the shelves, but they must change in transit - because when I've got them off the shelves and open, they've magically become boring. 

There are more, trust me.  But now I'm going to go do something fun.  Take a bath or read Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human.  Woof.  

(*You can probably guess which one I liked more.  I did admire Bryce Dallas Howard's blonde eyelashes, but I think I've watched Gaudy Night at least four times now.  I really am trying to give that M. Night guy a chance, but all the films I've seen have been let-downs.  I'm contemplating giving The Village a view.  The only thing is, I am a huge chicken.  To give you an idea of the level of wimpy-ness I have sunk to - I have to close my eyes when Gollum comes onscreen in Lord of the Rings. So will The Village scare me completely out of my mind? What about Signs or the Haley Joel Osment one, for that matter? It's hard to want to risk it when happier things are out and about.)

JOBS I'VE WANTED

In a sort of time order.

Astronaut
Cowgirl (this didn't last long)
Various film characters (Mowgli, Peter Pan, the girl cat in Aristocats, etc.)
Singer
Lost child (i.e., as in Hatchet or My Side of the Mountain)
Adventurer
Ballet Dancer
Actress
Interior Designer
Gene Kelly
Hairstylist (didn't last long - I couldn't touch other people's heads)
Writer
Expatriate
Detective
Fashion designer
Lady's Maid
Hanger-on in a famous person's entourage/a famous person's best friend
Archaeologist (of castles in France)
Typographer
Make-up artist
Personal assistant to someone interesting
Lucy Eyelesbarrow
News reporter
Poet
Something in geography or environmental biology
Actress
Travel writer
Graphic Designer
Leslie Caron
Band member
Radio DJ (of a cool station)
Loafer/person of leisure

And now... to be honest, I have no idea.

TEN THINGS I THINK YOU, MY DEAR BLOG, WOULD BE INTERESTED IN. I DON'T KNOW THAT, IF I WERE YOU AND YOU WERE ME, I WOULD BE INTERESTED, BUT THAT'S LIFE.

1.  I am slightly in love with Wade Johnston and Anthony Michael Hall (circa 1985) at the moment.  At least they're not dead.  Wade Johnston probably has a slight lead on Anthony Michael Hall.  Because he plays ukulele.  And is not twenty-two years older than me.

2. I have five Agatha Christie books left.  Five, heaven help me! Possibly four.  What the heck will I do when I've read them all?  I've re-read most of them already, so that's not a solution.  Read books  I haven't read already?  Expand my horizons?  Read books on the dumb list I've made?
Well, that's a stupid suggestion.

3. I would like to learn harmonica.

4. The only mildly illegal thing I think I have ever done is trespass.   One time, at about ten at night, the cat got out and I climbed into the neighbor's backyard to catch the bugger.   And I think I might have ridden in the back of someone's truck once.
But you know what?  I don't feel that I have not-lived because I've never done anything illegal.  I feel I've not lived because I've never been to England.  I'm quite content to abide the law.

5.  I wish I was prettier.  But there's really no point getting in a twist about it.

6.   Have you ever noticed that almost all female singers (I mean, like, people who make albums and go on tours and lead moderately successful musical lives) are good - but a huge percentage of popular male singers are not?  I wonder why bad-ness is okay with guys.  I suppose because it's just endearing.

7.  I don't like flip flops.  At all.  I know they're comfortable, but they just look silly.  On me, at least.  They rob me of the molecule of dignity I have.

8.  I am getting an English degree.  Did I probably already mention this?  It's just a strange thought.  ("major in YouTube."  That's a little quote by Wade Johnston, there.  Yeah.  Don't judge me.  I was on his channel for like half an hour today.  I love the YouTube people.   The whole little funny pack of them. Pomplamoose is on there, did you know that?  I bought one of their albums on itunes a month or so ago, and then today, wham-o! There they were singing songs with my best friend Wade!  How fun is that?  Isn't fun fun?)

9. I got two of my new textbooks the other day.  They are dull.  Why am I always disappointed, every semester, to learn this inevitable fact yet again?  Textbooks are boring, Kelsey.  They just are.  They will never not be.

10.  And, last and least, I would like to do something to my hair.  I am incapable of leaving it in it's natural state.  It is asking to be died, fried, chopped or in some other way destroyed.  Wa ha ha ha.

Mere Christianity

Hard to choose a quote from a book so infinitely quotable.

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."


C.S. Lewis is the probably the best writer (particularly theological or philosophical) I have ever read.  I don't like when writers feel they have to dumb-down ideas when they try to explain them, and I dislike even more when they show off their superior intellect by needlessly complicating things with weird sentence structure or words that sound learned.  C.S. Lewis gives the full picture in stunningly simple terms (he makes writing clearly seem so effortless!), and yet you feel the full force of his intelligence behind it. Even in the Narnia books, it never feels like he's trying too hard.  
Now that I think about it, seeming effortlessness is my favorite literary style.  Bill Bryson writes "choke-on-your-coffee funny" books, but it never seems like he's trying too hard.  And then when I try to write something in the same style I realize how ridiculously difficult it actually is.  And then I say what the heck, toss down my pencil, pick up I'm a Stranger Here Myself and vow to leave writing to people who can actually do it.

And on we march through the reading list.  Finished The Hobbit today. I wish it had taken longer.

As all things come to an end, even this story, a day came at last when they were in sight of the country where Bilbo had been born and bred, where the shapes of the land and of the trees were as well known to him as his hands and toes. Coming to a rise he could see his own Hill in the distance, and he stopped suddenly and said:

Roads go ever ever on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea;

Over snow by winter sown,

And through the merry flowers of June,

Over grass and over stone,

And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,

Yet feet that wandering have gone

Turn at last to home afar.

Eyes that fire and sword have seen

And horror in the halls of stone

Look at last on meadows green

And trees and hills they long have known. 

Gandalf looked at him. 'My dear Bilbo!' he said, 'Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.

At the Back of the North Wind.

When he knew he was coming awake, he would sometimes try hard to keep hold of the words of what seemed a new song, one he had not heard before—a song in which the words and the music somehow appeared to be all one; but even when he thought he had got them well fixed in his mind, ever as he came awaker—as he would say—one line faded away out of it, and then another, and then another, till at last there was nothing left but some lovely picture of water or grass or daisies, or something else very common, but with all the commonness polished off it, and the lovely soul of it, which people so seldom see, and, alas! yet seldomer believe in, shining out.

"Could it be all dreaming, do you think, sir?" he asked anxiously.

"I daren't say, Diamond," I answered. "But at least there is one thing you may be sure of, that there is a still better love than that of the wonderful being you call North Wind. Even if she be a dream, the dream of such a beautiful creature could not come to you by chance."

Care to read it yourself? Project Gutenberg is so nice.

"Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing"

"This day was only the first of many similar ones for the emancipated Mole, each of them longer and full of interest as the ripening summer moved onward. He learnt to swim and to row, and entered into the joy of running water; and with his ear to the reed-stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them."

live list: go to the beach

So, guess what blog?  We are moving in less than three weeks.  Mum, Dad, Cee and me.  Hey, that rhymes.

Cee decided to go to the beach with a friend (it was their farewell weekend), and I went as well.

It was not exactly the sort of beach trip I meant in my live list, for one reason.

It was freezing.  Like, fuh-reeeeeezing. I had on a pullover and a Columbia jacket and I still had to go sit in the car after a bit.

I don't care if people sleep outside in Iowa when it's fifteen below - if you're a born and bred California kid, anything near 60 is arctic. 

However, as I declared I would not do in my list, I did not lug a ton of junk. 

The way, for instance, our neighbors did:

Mum and I brought two chairs, two water bottles, and four magazines.  And that was it. 

The main problem with going to the beach in California (besides that fact that it's usually cold) is that if you live in, say, El Cajon, you have to drive forty minutes to get anywhere. Not to mention parking. Because of this, people feel they have to spend the whole day at the beach when they bother to go.  So you drag coolers and towels and clean clothes and snacks and shovels and boogie boards and skim boards and wetsuits and hats and sunscreen and sweatshirts and books and, if you're really serious about your beach time, a tent or awning.  

In Croatia, we walked for five minutes, took a book and a towel, swam for half an hour, and went home.

Okay, rant over. 

Yet, even though it was cold (did I tell you that the weather was frigid?) and a little sprinkly, it was still restful.  Just nice. And the coldness sort of suited my mood.  Also, I might have been sorrier to leave California if my last beach trip was on an unusually gorgeous day.  Because, honestly? Cold is the norm.

(P.S. I don't usually wear tennis shoes to the beach.  I'm not that hopeless.)

(P.P.S.  I am also a tiny bit grateful that California beaches are freezing.  According to my geography teacher, the cold current keeps hurricanes away from us.  Why wasn't I told this ten years ago?  I would have shrieked a lot less when trying to get into the water.)

Live list: wear perfume

I bought my first bottle of good perfume with money I earned working over Christmas, and, even though it was expensive, I've never regretted the purchase. 

Which for me , is surprising.  But wearing good perfume makes me feel polished and pretty, even when I'm actually nothing of the sort.  Wearing Mary Kay perfume never made me feel grown up or mysterious or anything remotely resembling sophisticated.  But this does. 

Please excuse the green paint (not mold, thank you) on my hand.  Which sort of defeats the whole purpose of wearing perfume and puts my classy level at zero.  But I don't care.  I'm wearing nice perfume.

live list: a golden afternoon, indeed

So, this morning, I intended to wander around on the hill behind our house and pick some flowers - check something off my live list.  I put on my adventure boots (or, ugly brown horse boots as mummy calls them), pulled on the first clothes I could find, and convinced my sister to come with me.  I did pick a few flowers, but after a while we just wandered and sat. I wanted to do a charming themed post, but I'm too lazy. It's a lazy, lovely day.

Cee is in love with this blog.

We stuck flowers in her hair. We wished there were daisies  to make a daisy chain out of. We wished we knew how to make daisy chains.

In spite of the road just below, and the houses surrounding, and the power lines in the background, it was rather perfect. 

I think I can check off the flower-picking from my list.  We got the essence of what I wanted, even without taking the flowers home. If that makes sense.

Just a bit of silliness, really. 

Walden

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

"By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break in and steal.  It is a fool's life, as they will find out when they get to the end of it, if not before."

Henry David Thoreau

Inspired by this fantastic blog (and I mean inspired.  This is the most inspiring blog I have ever run across.  And I've done some blog stalking in my time, let me tell you.), I am writing a live list.  I always say things like, "oh, I have to do that before I die" - now it's officially time to write all those things down. Or at least all the ones I can remember.

Watch a sunrise from a field (preferably a field in England)
Mess about in a boat
Walk through a cool wood.
Embrace my inner nerd and go to a renaissance faire
Paint a watercolor and give it to my mum 
Find a becoming hat that will fit my giant head - Victory! After literally cramming every semi-attractive hat within reach onto my melon of a head, I finally found one that fits at forever 21 in the men's section! You have no idea how triumphant I feel.
See some Shakespeare - Hamlet at the rep and Twelfth Night at the Old Globe.  Both incredible.
Fly a kite (possibly a homemade one?)
go to the beach - without the fuss.  No lugging stuff,stuff, stuff
wear perfume every day
plant a garden
teach the dog to stay
Sew something
learn to like tea
pick a wildflower bouquet
wear a dress to school. 
Send a letter
learn to knit
learn a language
learn to comfortably use the metric system and European shoe sizing. (I am a 40)
train myself to stand up straight, like Audrey Hepburn
learn to pick a lock

"One of the wonderful books of the world" - The Wind in The Willows

Chapter One

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gaveled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, 'Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

'This is fine!' he said to himself. 'This is better than whitewashing!' The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow...

Pen and watercolor is too lovely.