school

Busy Busy Busy Bee

The last week has been crazy. I feel completely lost amongst the errands, orders, confirmations and packing that has to be done.

The next few days are going to be even worse. Tomorrow and Monday are going to be full-on packing days – going to college entails lots and lots [and lots] of packing. Tuesday early morning we fly to New York, arriving the same day in the afternoon. I’ve ordered my new mini laptop, I’ve ordered my new computer for the dorms, and more shopping will be done in New York. Saturday, August 29th is move-in day.

The next week or two are going to be crazy – chalk-full of outings, shopping, and once orientation week starts, lectures and registration processes. I’ll try to write as much as I can, but I can’t promise prompt or daily entries. This is too bad, because my stats are pretty pathetic as is, and I’ve been here a year. Still, hopefully once I get settles into a routine at Sarah Lawrence, I’ll be able to write properly, maybe even using my school-work and essays as entries or as ideas for what to write about.

For those who are interested, I already have my first course at SLC – this course is under the title of “First Year Studies” and the professor teaching me will be my Don, which is a kind of adviser. This class is for both semesters, and the one I got is this: Text and Theater. It’s a literature course that studies the texts of plays. The professor seems amazing so far [I received a very sweet email from him that he wrote everyone who will be in this class] and I’m excited.

I hope to be here as often as possible. I’ve been here almost a year, and I love my little blog.

Dora’s Birthday [Part I]

It was Dora’s birthday, and everything seemed to be going wrong.
When she woke up in the morning and walked to the bathroom, she stubbed her toe and it really hurt. Her mother tried to find some ice for it, but the ice-box was empty, and so she made Dora hold a cold can of beans on her toe instead. Dora pointed out, as she held the can, that it was leaking. Her mother said a bad word, apologized, and got a cloth and some soap to clean up the bean-juice from the floor.
Later, after Dora had had breakfast – with her toe still throbbing – her father came into the room and said “Happy birthday, Dora-Dear! Seven is huge.” He lifted her into the air and kissed both her cheeks. When he put her back down on the floor, though, she slipped on the wet area where her mother had washed and fell right down on her butt. That hurt too.
It was a school day, and Dora was looking forward to having everyone sing to her and lift her up on a chair. She skipped upstairs even though her behind still ached and her toe felt swollen. She was about to put on her favorite pair of red shoes with blue stripes on them, when she saw her dog, Brownie, look at her guiltily from the doorway. Dora knew that look. She peered into her shoes, and sure enough, Brownie had left a big puddle of puke in one of them. Dora yelled at Brownie, who got scared and ran away. She regretted it afterwards, but it was getting late, so she put on her second favorite pair of shoes [white with green polka-dots] and went downstairs where her parents were waiting to drive her to school. She stuck her tongue out at Brownie, who was sulking underneath the coffee-table, as she went out the front door.
At school, things seemed to be looking up; all her friends wished her a happy birthday, and Mrs. Peterson, the first grade teacher, smiled warmly and promised that Dora would get an extra chocolate chip cookie for dessert at lunch-time. But then, at lunch-time, the dessert wasn’t chocolate chip cookies after all – it was vanilla ice-cream, which Dora detested, so she didn’t end up getting any dessert at all.
When Dora got home from school, she found Brownie hiding under her bed. She lured her out with soft cooing noises and stroked her, saying she was a bad dog for puking in her shoe but she she loved her anyway. Then it was time for Dora to leave again with her parents. They were all going to Dora’s grandparents house for a nice dinner, a yummy cake, and what Dora was looking forward to most: presents!
Dora was sure things were finally going to go well now. After all, what more could go wrong? She’d had her toe hurting in her shoes all morning, her butt was still feeling very bumped from the fall, her shoes weren’t as comfy as the ones she really liked, and she hadn’t had anything sweet at all today! But now things would be fine, because things were always fine at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

A College Essay

Months ago, around September and October, my days were spent at work, studying to become a customer service rep, and at home, slaving away over essay after essay for the colleges I was applying to. I’ve been looking over them lately, and many are extremely similar since they were built over the same mold. Here is one, however, that I like because of its genuine explanation about why I’m so looking forward to college.

Many people, myself included, have a very hard time enjoying elementary and high-school education in and of itself. This is especially true here in Israel, where many school years begin with a teachers’ strike because our schools don’t get the funding they need, and thus teachers aren’t getting paid what they should. This, in turn, leads to ever-fewer people choosing teaching as a profession, which means that the teachers we students get are often there because teaching was their last resort, or  because they once wanted to be teachers, but the years of working in a zero-respect job with hardly more than blank paychecks have made them bitter.
Another reason why many people don’t enjoy their high-school education is because we don’t really get to choose what to study. Certain things are forced upon us and then taught in such a way that leaves them joyless, the necessity of studying them rendering them dull.
I tried, as much as possible, to enjoy my studies to the fullest despite the way they were taught. I tried to make history come alive despite the droning quality of my teacher’s voice, tried to make literature exciting despite how it was hacked to pieces and dissected in class as if that was the only way to analyze it, tried to make the hours of grueling math homework on the weekends be cathartic and a source of pride rather than an unbearable chore. I succeeded, sometimes. But it’s hard to be enthusiastic about your studies when there’s little help or support from the school.
This is why I am so excited to be going to college in the United States, and also why I am reluctant to choose a major straight off. I’m so enthusiastic and willing to explore different subjects for a year or two before declaring my major, and I feel that this will rekindle my passion for learning new things. I do know that I might well end up majoring in English – but then again, perhaps I will major in Writing or Psychology or maybe even Drama. My interests are varied and as of now, I cannot choose which field I want to study exclusively.

Either-Or

Either…

A girl, a young woman really, will walk around the tree lined campus. It is a fairy-land, with gorgeous trees and small, squat buildings peeking around every bend in the twisting paths. The swing-set will be populated with the laughing, the confidant, the oh-so-cool older students. Her classes will be held in carpeted rooms with wooden panelling, in buildings with spiraling staircases and that smell of old wood. Her time will be spent in the tea house with the wood-burning fireplace, or at the small library or in the surrounding town’s adorable cafes. Ventures into the greatest of cities will be frequent and interesting. Her friends will be women, mostly, and her professors will know her by name, by writing style, by her very soul soon enough, as she will pour herself into the unrelenting and fascinating school-work.

Or…

A girl, a young woman really, will walk through the wide streets, entering campus and quad from the very streets of the suburb of the city. Her surroundings will be bustling rather than quiet, extremely collegiate and always full of students, both the young and the old, hurrying from one place to the other. Her classrooms will be small, but not quite so small, and she will learn to read the writings of conquerors and philosophers, of dictators and kings and mere professors of other times. She will be amongst a small group in a much larger place, and her outings will vary from visits to the cafes of 57th Street to tours of the grand theaters and museums. Her friends might be misfits like she’d been and perhaps not so intimidating.

Either… Or…

A girl, a yound woman really, sits and thinks and deliberates. She cannot decide. She must decide.

One Down, Six to Go

Tuesday, April 14th, I visited the first college on my tour: Occidental College in Eagle Rock, CA. I won’t go into too much detail, as I’ve already written about my love for the place in various notebooks that I’ve got around me on this trip, but suffice it to say that I was extremely impressed with the campus, the students, the dorms, the classes, basically everything.

I’ve been told that when I find the right college, I’ll just KNOW. I don’t know if that’s true, because I loved the first place I was at already, and I suspect I might be just as impressed with the others. We’re in Boston currently, and planning on visiting Boston University tomorrow. Even though we’ve only seen a tiny bit of the city today, I already like it – walkable, but big, trendy looking but some parts seem sweet and old-town-America.

So, as the title suggests, one down, six colleges to go.

Travel Plans

Whenever I hear an airplane buzz above my house these days, I turn my face to the sky and smile. Whenever I’m at work and have to answer customers’ questions about their purchases abroad, I smile as I read them the data. Whenever I look at the calendar and realize it’s the middle of March already, I skip over to April and smile some more. In two weeks to a month I will be on an airplane and I will be bored half to death on the long, long, long flight, but ultimately, the flight will end. I’ll get off the airplane and breath the (slightly) better airport air. I’ll walk to passport control, have my passport stamped, and then I’ll hear those words that they say every time my mom and I reach the US. They’ll say “Welcome home.”

I do love my home here. I do love my friends, and my tiny city, and Tel Aviv just a few minutes away with its beaches and cafes. I do love taking the ride up to cold Jerusalem, and I do love my time there with Sir B. F. I might sound as if I’m wild to begone from this mad country – that’s not entirely true. I just need a vacation. I wish I could take everyone I love with me, though.

I apologize for the very “bloggy” quality of this post – my mother and I are starting to plan dates, and so my mind is abuzz with the thoughts of open days in colleges and hotel prices and the fact that I’ll get to see New York for the first time ever. Plus, and almost more importantly than the college-scoping, I’ll get to go to BARNES AND NOBLES.

Oh yes. Book shopping and baggage-overweight -fees, here I come.

A Thirst For Knowledge

I’d like to be able to say that I posses such a thirst. No, that’s not right. I do thirst for knowledge and I do love to learn new things – but I need to have good teachers in order to be passionate about a new subject or idea that I study. Good teachers are fiercely hard to come by in today’s education system, and so oftentimes in high-school I was either bored out of my mind, or else I was just utterly disinterested even though I knew that I could, theoretically, care about the subject.

I have a good friend who I can’t help but be jealous of – she is one who truly possesses a thirst for knowledge. There was a time when she just read Wikipedia articles every day and jumped from subject to subject, just out of pure curiosity. She teachers herself French, and doggedly studies it, not letting herself get lazy and forget about it. She even managed to memorize an insane amount of information during an army course and somehow find it interesting even though much of it was dull lists of former-generals and ranking systems.

Hopefully, though, once I resume my studies, I’ll have better teacher. Ones who are actually passionate about their subject and about imparting knowledge to their students.

Teenager Sarah – Chapter 2

I first started playing guitar when I was 14. I started on a classical guitar like a good little girl, but convinced my parents eventually to get me a blue Fender-Stratocaster and a small amp. At first I was just enjoying playing, even though I wasn’t very good. I can do chords, I can do rhythm, but I’m not too good at solos. Rather, I’m not too good at doing anything fast with my left hand fingers.

When I turned 17, I started to realize that I’d been singing forever. Whenever I listened to music, I sang along. Whenever it was too quiet in the house, I would start singing my favorite songs. Granted, I couldn’t sing most of my favorite songs well- it’s pretty hard to imitate James Hetfield’s deep growling voice – but I still sang. I had never thought before how much I love it. I started to work on my voice on my own, training myself as well as I could.

With the realization that I love to sing came the thoughts of doing it for the rest of my life if I possibly could. The idea of forming a band came to me not long after. Hannah, my friend since we were 4 and had a terrific fight in the sandbox in nursery school, had started playing guitar around the same time I did. She surpassed me easily, and she was much more quick-fingered than I was, and she still is. At the time I started trying to form a band she was flirting with Mathew, a senior in our school. They never ended up dating, but she did find out that he played base and asked him if he was interested in starting a band. We hit it off right away. He was funny and intelligent and seemed to be genuinely serious about the whole idea. Next, we asked Steve to join us. Steve was a sort of on and off friend of ours at school. He was a bit of a snob and only hung out with his very particular group of people, but he liked the same music as Hannah and me, so our relationship started by complementing each other on whichever band t-shirt we were wearing at the time. We got to be casual friends with him. He was the only drummer we knew anyway, so Hannah and I just asked him. He didn’t sound enthusiastic at first, even though he agreed to join. Over the next few months he drifted away from his old group, and us band members became a tightly knit group of friends.

Lucy’s Diary, May 30th

May 30th, about 1AM, Windowsill in my room

Dear Diary,

I have just returned from the library, where it seems I will be spending most of the next few days. Not that I mind in the least, of course. For who do you think will be spending that time poring over books and old newspapers with me? If only you could see my blush in the darkness, you’d know the answer right away. R, of course!

Yes, he is out of the hospital – and quite a dramatic leave-taking that was. After having been told by his doctors that he was basically cured, he decided it would be a good idea to punch the doctor in the face – in front of me no less! – then take me by the hand and pull me out of the hospital with a triumphant shout of “RUN!” Diary, I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard in my life.

I know that we’re extremely far from being out of the woods – the Parazelli are after us, R agrees with me on that, and we know they’re not going to like our alliance and the fact that we can now pool our knowledge together about them. Still, things are looking up – R is out of the hospital and is actually staying at Pratt and Smith’s guest house, as a relation of mine would be entitled to.

Thank goodness Clarisse doesn’t know too much about the family to really know if he’s related to me or not. The P&S teachers have been suspicious about R, but they can’t exactly kick him out, especially when he puts on his charming-the-officials-face and becomes all smooth and suave and intellectual.

P&S is a girls’ school, as I’ve told you before, so of course every single one of the upper-class women here are now drooling over my “relative” as if he were the embodiment of a male Venus on earth. The obnoxious thing is that I can’t even be annoyed with them. I’m “related” to him, so he’s fair game for every flipping-her-hair-and-giggling female in this place.

Do you sense a slight change in me? I do too, Diary. I feel like I’m a bit more alive than I was. The fact that I have an ally and that we’re going to go after the psychopaths that killed my parents makes me feel like I have a purpose in life. I feel every nerve in my body singing with a vengeful longing for action – I feel like the Parazelli have finally met their match. Which is perfectly ridiculous, of course. What can R and me, a couple of normal people – and me only a teenager – do to an ancient cult?

R says that he is supposed to be meeting a contact here, and that it might be a teacher at the school. That has to be our best lead for now, and I hope R manages to follow up on that during the next few days.

As for me? Well, putting my hormones to the side for now, I’m going to try my damndest to find out if this school has or has ever had any sort of connection with either my parents or the Parazelli.

Wish me luck, both with my research and with keeping my hands to myself,

I am your faithful,

Lucy

Lucy’s Diary, May 25th

To be able to understand much of what is in here, you might want to, or need to, read the installment that precedes it in Alex’s blog. Here is the link: http://crystalgeek.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/journal-part-v/

May 25th, sometime after midnight, Pratt and Smith, under the covers in my room

Dearest Diary,

If my handwriting seems shaky, it’s because you’re currently nestled on my knees, which are also trying to hold the flashlight steady under the covers as I write. The girls yelled at me for having the light on when I came in here, hours after curfew of course [but the school understands and accepts this because of my needing to stay at the hospital every day]. As the library is closed, I have no choice but to huddle under my blankets and write in this most uncomfortable of situations. Forgive me for the discomfort I’m causing you, dear friend.

I’m oddly calm. I shouldn’t be calm, but I am. I suppose you’d like to know why I shouldn’t be calm, and I will indeed confide in you, but I don’t know how much I should, or can, or am allowed to write about this subjects that have recently been exposed to me.

Firstly, Micheal’s name isn’t Micheal. I’m not sure what his real name is, but he has told me to refer to him as R. and so I shall call him from now on. So R. is on the mend – he’s feeling much better, his bruises are slowly fading, and he should be released from the hospital in a day or two, a circumstance which will be difficult for me, because I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to see of him after he’s released. Miss Flynn believes that he really is a relative of mine, so I suppose she’ll let him visit me after study hours, and perhaps on our mornings off on Sundays I’ll be able to visit him wherever he’s staying right now.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m sure you want to know why I’m so certain that I have to keep seeing him. Well, let me share a bit of the secret then. I suppose, though, that I should start much farther back than what R. has told me tonight. I haven’t told him what I’m about to confide in you, Diary, and I’m not sure I should confide this in him, but I’ll think about it and see.

My parents died four years ago. Gruesomely, you may say. It was a car crash, and the media made out that Dad had been drunk and went off road, but it’s not true. The police told me right at first – before changing their story – that there had been a big truck coming towards them very fast [they could tell by the skid marks apparently] and that it seemed as if Dad had swerved so as to avoid the truck. There was a huge pool of oil right there, and the car slid and Mom and Dad went flying over the railing with the car into the field below where the car crashed upside down. You may wonder at my writing all this down this way. I haven’t repeated or talked of how they died for four years – at first, I tried convincing everyone that this was the true story, and I had to repeat it over and over and over again to get people to believe that Dad wasn’t drunk, but it was no use. The papers said it was a drunk-driving accident, and I gave up trying to tell people it wasn’t true. Since then, I’ve never talked about it.

Mom’s cousin, Clarisse, took me in. She’s the witch, the monster, the utter abomination of the human soul who is my legal guardian and it is she who sent me here, to Pratt and Smith. It is she to whom I now owe many thanks, though she’ll never hear me utter them.

If Clarisse hadn’t sent me here, I never would have met R. If I’d never have met R, I never would have found out that someone else besides my parents knew about the Parazelli, or suspected the existence of this group anyway. And now that I have met R, now that I know someone who has suffered a loss like mine at the hands of this foul group – because I know that Dad never drank when he drove, and I know that he and Mom had been dragging me around from college town to college town all of my childhood because they were trying to research and prove the existence of this most evil of cults, the Parazelli, who believe in bloodshed and evil as others believe in angels and beauty – now that I’ve met R and know he believes in them too, I finally have a way to avenge my parents. I finally have a way to continue their research, continue their work, and make them proud of me, their only, rather unruly, daughter.

Forgive me for getting your pages wet, my dearest confidante, my Diary, but I can’t help it. I don’t know whether it’s fear or relief I’m feeling right now, but I do know that I cannot part with R now – I mustn’t let him get too far away, and I have to get him to let me help, in whatever way I can.

Diary, my eyes are itching with the combination of my tears and tiredness. I shall leave you to your thoughts now, and hope you will not disapprove of my risking everything for this silly thing we humans call revenge.

I must speak with R. tomorrow. I simply must.

Good night, Diary, I hope your pages rest easily even with the heavy burden of knowledge I have put down in them tonight.

Yours, as ever,

Lucy