Mixed Feelings

I have news to share with those of you who know that I hate my Spanish teacher.

That ought to be everybody, since I never shut my mouth (or my... keyboard?) about how much I hate my Spanish teacher (a lot).

WELL.

In Spanish class, there was a project, which is still ongoing, but part of it was due Wednesday. For part of the project, we separated into groups and these groups were our 'family' when we were moving to a Spanish-speaking country. We each had a part to play in the family. (I was the ten-year-old girl!) And we had to write a thirty-entry diary from the character while they adjusted to life in their Spanish-speaking country. (We lived in Chile.)

I hated this project, not just because it was assigned by my Spanish teacher, whom I hate, but because it was simply annoying and time-consuming, and I had other things I wanted to do but couldn't, because of this wacko Spanish project assigned by my wacko Spanish teacher.

Using my logic (a logic which I find no one else uses or should use) I didn't end up finishing the project until the night before it was due, even though my Spanish teacher had given us two months to do it.

She handed back the diaries on Friday, and mine had quite a few disheartening blue marks all over it (on every single sentence I wrote except for ONE), but so did everyone. But ugh, I'm not supposed to get as many mistakes as everyone! *flips hair*

Anyway. *arranges hair back into normalcy*

SHE told the entire Spanish class (both of them) that she thought my writing was good. That I had the funniest diary she's ever read as a teacher and that she hopes I like writing in English, because 'there is definitely a writer in there' and that if I pursue it, I could go far.

I simply don't know what to think. Do I:

take the compliment because she is has read more books in her life and likes my writing and thinks I could get somewhere with it? Also, because I like compliments?

or do I

denounce the compliment because I hate her and everything she does and feel like my writing must be awful if she likes it? And I feel like my writing is crap anyway? And because bitterness is my thing?

Quote for Saturday, June 4, 2011:

"I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money."

-Pablo Picasso

(http://thinkexist.com/quotation/i-d_like_to_live_as_a_poor_man_with_lots_of_money/217843.html)

Muse for Today:

Why do people use so much more than they need? What makes us feel like we can do that?

Days until finals start: 6, including today.

Things I Do When I'm Tired

So yesterday, which was Friday (the 13th! AAAAAH) I was exhausted. This year has reminded me exactly how much I hate school. Also, it was just too bloody hot outside this whole week. It was my birthday on Wednesday! It was nice. But I would rather I hadn't gone to school at all this whole week, because I hate people and my school and being in school when it's hot.

I like that school is preparing me for later life, but apart from my World Studies class, I feel like I learn more from random Google searches about topics I'm actually interested in. I hate Trig, I learn nothing, basically at this point I am simply trying to keep out of summer school. Why do I have to learn something that is both useless for any sort of practical use and involves a lot of work that I am unwilling to undertake? WHAT IS THE POINT? Sometimes I just can't take it. I am so tired of 'learning' stuff I don't want to learn. AAARGH.

So I was tired. Clearly. And what did I do when I was tired? I ate an entire bag of pretzels and watched two and a quarter movies in a row. I saw Nowhere Boy and Flipped and part of The King's Speech, but despite my love for Helena Bonham Carter, by that time I started that film the time was almost midnight and I was part-zombie.

Nowhere Boy, if you don't know, is a film about John Lennon and the most important women of his childhood- his Aunt Mimi and his mother Julia. I was watching it partially for Thomas Brodie Sangster, who plays Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster and Paul McCartney in one? Excellence) and because I like the Beatles.

I forgot, though, that this isn't a movie about the Beatles- it's about John. So the film cut off right before they left for Hamburg, when they really started becoming a bigger sensation, and I didn't get all the music I so unwisely anticipated. I'm glad they didn't put anything after Hamburg in there, though. It would have lost the focus of the film. What made me quite like this movie was the mannerisms of the actors. John's evil, shaming sarcasm, the defiant way he holds his mouth, and the way Paul looks up through his eyelashes while he played guitar all reminded me of the old footage of the actual Beatles. They actors didn't really look a lot like them- they were like them.

Flipped was a lovely book. I liked that book a whole lot, and what was nice about the movie is that they took some of the diologue straight from the book. And they did the film in voiceover, telling the same story from both Bryce and Juli's perspectives. All they left out was a bit of character development, but the characters didn't look like I pictured them. I felt it was a good move to place the movie in the sixties, though. That sweet story might not have survived in the era of texting and Facebook. But it was worthwhile.

I haven't yet finished The King's Speech, but I reached the part where he swears dozens of the time, and I just thought it was funny. He's a prince, and he's trying so hard to keep his dignity with this commoner, and he just goes off. It's fairly hilarious.

Also, weird weirdness is weird: Just last week, one of my oldest friends (meaning I've known her for a long time. She's only a month older than me, so not agewise oldest) was reading Gone with the Wind. And then she asked me about Catcher in the Rye. I wrote about both of those in the space of a month. Coincidence? I don't even tell anyone I keep a blog.

Quote for Saturday, May 14, 2011:

Is nowhere full of geniuses, sir? Because then I probably do belong there.

-Nowhere Boy (2010)

(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1266029/quotes)

Muse for Today:

I didn't always hate school.

Gone With the Wind

I wrote this and wanted to put it on here, but I seriously couldn't be bothered editing it to make coherent sense. It was written in a stream of consciousness, so some ideas may be more stupid than others.

Also, the formatting on this post is kind of wonky, but there's nothing I could do to fix that...

**Also, I seriously spoil Gone With the Wind for you, so read at will.**

I finished Gone with the Wind, the epically long novel by Margaret Mitchell.

I stormed around for about an hour because, Good Lord, that book is 1037 pages long, and that was it? That was the ending? I was whipped along on some challenging, somewhat romantic ride through the American South during the Civil War, was forced to endure the continuing oblivious nature of Scarlett O’Hara (or Hamilton or Kennedy or Butler, I don’t really know), the sweet stupidity of Melanie Wilkes, the doomed and senseless ‘love’ between Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes, and the odd, unfathomable charisma of Rhett Butler…and in the end, what does that writer do? Lovely Melanie dies, clueless, trusting and pure to the bitter end; Rhett disintegrates because he never got Scarlett and lost his daughter-version of Scarlett in Bonnie and ceases to be the selfish rascal that made me like him in the first place; and Scarlett realizes the truths that I have known the whole freaking time, and ultimately fails to get Rhett. She was so blind for so long that she lost him! In the name of God! What kind of a moron is she?

And it (meaning the fist-clenching idiocy of it all) doesn’t even end there! Scarlett stands in the dining room at the end of the book, alone, freshly rejected by Rhett and in pure realization that she never loved Ashley in the first place, and she says to herself that she’ll think about all the drama of the evening later, because she simply can’t bear to think of it all now.

What in the bloody name of pomegranates? Why do you think this bothers me so much? Because this is what she has been doing for more than one-thousand pages, and it’s sort of wearing at this point. For all that she hates Ashley’s tendency to live in dreams and not look at what was in front of him, Scarlett is amazingly good at this too. She always says that she’ll ‘think about it later’, and then she never does! The problem gets shoved to the back of everything and ultimately ends up corroding the framework of her life. Thinking about it later is why it was ultimately better that Rhett and Melanie had Ashley buy the mill from Scarlett. Johnnie Gallagher was mistreating the convicts so badly, and she just wanted to ‘think about it later.’ Well, she never did. And Ashley got the mill, and he was fully willing to hire freed slaves and pay their wages instead of the cheap convict labor Scarlett so loved.

So this darling little adage of hers really doesn’t seem to do much good, and yet that’s how the book ends. With her thinking about how to win Rhett back ‘another day.’

The way she goes, she might never do that.

But I railed and I complained, and then I started thinking.

Honestly—I hate this ending. This is the longest book I have ever read in my life, and that was one of the most disappointing endings ever written, I think. But it makes sense. I don’t have to like it, but it makes sense.

I was born and bred on Disney and fairytales, and that was my childhood, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. I like that I had a sheltered portion of my life where I thought that everything could be okay, that everybody got a happy ending. But I’ve grown up since then. I’m not foolish enough to say I’ve grown up completely, but yes, I’ve grown up. And maybe this was Margaret Mitchell’s way of telling girls like me that we don’t always get a happy ending. Scarlett was indeed the belle of the county, and she was charming and lovely and that’s what princesses are like. In a way, to so many characters, Scarlett was a princess. But she spent so much of her life pining after something she didn’t understand, something that wasn’t even real, that she failed to appreciate what she did have, which was the love of a guy like Rhett Butler. She was selfish and greedy and stupid and cunning and far too human to be a princess.

In a fairy tale, maybe there’d be some second chance. Maybe Rhett wouldn’t have exhausted all of his love for Scarlett and they could have lived happily ever after, the end. But life doesn’t always have second chances. Not every fool gets second chances if she’s exhausted every resource, every chance thrown her way. And that’s always been a faint truth lingering in the back of my head, but this ending—this horrible, awful, maddeningly unsatisfying ending—really drove the point home. Not everyone always wins. It’s a simple, difficult truth.

I can appreciate it, but I don’t have to like it. I can still like my fairytale endings, because they belong in fairytales. I just need to start growing up and differentiating what happens in real life and what rarely ever does.

But rarely—rarely does a naïve soul like Melanie love a brazen, hard person like Scarlett and not even realize that there is no love back. Rarely is a person so loved and ignorant of that love it as Scarlett was to Rhett Butler. Rarely have I loathed and failed to understand a person, even just a character, as I have loathed and failed to understand the selfish, scheming Scarlett. She was a moron. She trampled people to get her way, she alienated people, she taunted them, used them, clung to them when they were up and kicked them when they were down. She’s no princess, but I guess that might’ve been the point.