Too Lazy to Put A Title. There.

I have three posts in drafts but I really just wanted to take this video from YouTube and put it here instead of putting anything that I wrote myself.

Why? Because I'm bloody original, that's why. Oh, YEAH.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy6wo2wpT2k&feature=player_detailpage#t=140s

I first saw this movie in the fifth grade, and this is one of my favorite songs in West Side Story.

(Sorry, but the Jets win favorite song with this. I mean:

"Gee, Officer Krupke- krup you!"

and their rushing around and stupid voices are completely but appealingly insane.

"Hey, I got a social disease!"

Even a ten year old can appreciate that.)

I love it mostly because of Anita's singing. "You forget I'm in America!" and the way her voice deepens on "Everyone there will have moved here!"

Also, it is a fun song, but the material of it isn't entirely just fun.

Gods, I love old musicals. The acting is cheesy, but the music is usually better.

A Post by Itself

***I was going to put this little RageRant in my last post while I was editing it a bit, but then I realized that I would be interrupting the flow of the post even more than I usually do, by talking about hating school, then ranting about the administration, what a perfect example of inertia/stereotypically fat Americanism I am when I'm tired, Movie Thoughts, and weird weirdness. So I stuck my administrative rant here because I really wanted to put this on this bloggery blog that I attempt to maintain. If you like me, think of this as a bonus of me! If you don't like me, get out! We don't like you anyway. Right, guys? Guys?

Did you know my school lacks any sort of central cooling? This school. Is so freaking hot. ALL THE TIME BECAUSE THEY CANNOT FIND IT IN THEIR ADMINISTRATIVE HEARTS TO FIX THE SYSTEM. Yeah. They were going to fix it, but they spent the money on new turf for the soccer and football [that's American football, chaps] fields instead.

Why this is stupid: TURF affects people who play soccer and football. AND NO ONE ELSE. Absolutely no one else gives a damn about the turf except for people who play on it, and maybe the coaches. And that is about three teams (boys'/girls' soccer, boys' football), so maybe sixty, seventy people out of a thousand schoolgoers care about the turf.

While a central cooling system affects EVERYONE in the school. All melty, crabby, boiling one-thousand of us, including the sports teams. THEY also think it's too hot in the school, and I know some of them would be perfectly happy to be temperately comfortable during the school day at the sake of some new turf...next year.

This was a stupid decision.

As you can tell, I don't play sports. No. I am clumsy and vaguely uncoordinated, and I can hold my own in tennis, but in basically everything else, I am a mess. I'm not a Bella Swan, who can't even get out of her truck in the morning without almost being hit by a car, but let's suffice it to say I'm not athletic.

But I sing. I'm in the choir, and I love to sing, and I would do anything to keep singing and improving my voice enough to do more challenging music. I will do anything to keep at this, and these kinds of episodes with the turf tick me off.

Schools are cutting funding to the arts everywhere. Last year, when I was at a different school, our band/choir program was reduced to almost nothing. It very nearly got cut out completely, and it took major battling, pleading, compromising to keep it. This year, half the Drama Club couldn't go downstate to see a guy from our own school perform AT STATE (this is a bit of a big deal) on opening night.

Okay, granted, it was the week before finals, but the other school in our district (we synchronize almost everything with this school), that has finals at the same time was going- and they didn't even have a person performing! And if the football team made it to state the week before finals, would you let them go?

I am not dissing sports. I have tried out for sports teams (and not made them because of how awkwardly uncoordinated I am- SHAME) and I see how hard my more-athletic friends practice, how much time they give, how much they care. But why, why, why are athletics more important than the arts? What is so hard to understand about why people sing, play an instrument, act? What about people like me? I can't bloody well turn to volleyball if they cut music funding! This is what I have-singing. Why do some people feel like it is better to make us all fear dying of heatstroke in math class, or depriving us of something creative, than letting the sports team run on not-new turf for a year?

Another note: This is not strictly pertaining to my school. My school isn't bad about the music thing- we had new choir robes this year! But it does happen in places where I am not, and it's not good.

But the turf and the air conditioning.... that is strictly pertaining to my school. And I still don't agree with it. Rubbish.

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.

This is grea- no! It makes no sense!

I am ashamed to admit it, but I really like clothes. I like books and music plenty, but shopping for clothes gives you an immediate magic.

"The reason consumerism is alive and well in America is because of people like you, FRAS."

-Everyone who has ever heard me talk about buying things

It's an instant kind of judgement that isn't quite imitable, shopping for clothes. Shopping for books is calm, organized, systematic. Shopping for music is a drawn-out process where I end up buying nothing because I cannot commit to anything. Shopping for food is one where I just feel tempted to toss some pudding and fifteen packets of gum into the cart and call it a week. (I wonder why I don't do the shopping at my house...) Shopping for shoes is basically a wimpy battle: 1) I want these shoes. 2) Walk out of the store buying shoes that are infinitely cheaper but ultimately worse than the shoes I wanted. Shopping for clothes is the calmest frenzy. It's an organized tornado of efficient but looping shoppery.

Did you know that this was the very first music video ever shown on MTV when it launched back on August 1 of 1981?

• Look how far music videos have come in 20 years, as far as technology is concerned! (I mean, plastic tube? Odd bodysuit woman? Shaky camera work? [I'm not really sure if the shaky camera work was intentional or not, actually.]) Look at how MTV has destroyed itself by not playing music anymore and instead inflating the egos of tanned morons who don't have talent but want to be famous anyway? Ha! I am so full of whimsy!
• I find it funny that a song called Video Killed the Radio Star was the first music video on a channel about music videos. Killing the radio star, one music video at a time. And MTV had to rub it in everyone's faces. Good job, MTV. You used to have a sense of irony.
• Also, I enjoy the "Oh-wha-oh-wa" women in the background. I always pretend to be them.
• It strikes me that this song actually makes no sense on its own, and the video clears up nothing.
• Why did you meet the children? What were you doing in an abandoned studio with the Radio Star? How in the name of alfalfa do you even know this Radio Star? It's not like you ran into her shopping for bread. Even if you did, you wouldn't recognize the Radio Star. The Radio Star didn't go on video. And you were the first/last WHAT? Dear Buggles, what are you trying to tell me?
• And in the video, I assumed the blond kid was you. I assumed the Radio Star was the woman in a bodysuit. So why did the blond kid morph into the Radio Star?
• Heh. Turns out I hate this song.

Quote for Saturday, May 7, 2011:

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

-Oscar Wilde

(http://thinkexist.com/quotation/quotation_is_a_serviceable_substitute_for/180217.html)

And so it is.

Muse for a Day:

Songs that tell stories.

Not songs that are about a girl, or a goat, or a garbage truck (while I do love a good toe-tapping garbage truck song), but songs that go through a little plotline in a melodic way. Such as the album Tommy by The Who, which tells a whole dysfunctional story about a boy named Tommy who unwittingly makes himself deaf, dumb, and blind but becomes such a master at pinball that he manages to start his own cult. Freaky, but interesting. Or Catsongs by Tom Milsom, three songs all about a cat named Livia who dies and how the family deals with it. (Also, Catsongs is hilarious in its own right. Catsongs III, when Livia responds, makes me laugh even now.)

What BEDA Taught Me

Even though there were two days when I didn't post, I found that doing BEDA helped me. Usually, I'm pretty resistant to blogging. I feel like there's nothing to say, and I don't care, so why am I doing this for myself? And then I end up on a hiatus from November to March, when I never was much of a poster (meaning person who posts- I never was a poster on a wall, to my knowledge. I could be, somewhere, maybe. I could also be in the background of some person's picture. I could be in hundreds of pictures, and I would never know it. And they would never know me) in the first place.

Although it doesn't seem like it, BEDA got easier as April dawdled along. I grew to actually like posting stuff, and starting to think about what I should write about. It became a ritual. It actually became fun, and if I want to pursue some kind of a career in writing, I need to become better at it, and more dedicated to writing quality on a regular basis.

So BEDA is practice, and I'll try to write like I did during BEDA (minus the "God life is so boring this is stupid I hate everything it's hot outside ooh, ice cream" posts that cropped up all too frequently...) the rest of the year. And depending on what my life is like in a couple of months, I might even try BEDAugust.

But now we're onto May! School is drawing to a close, my birthday is coming up, and it's utterly gorgeous outside. Life has potential.

Quote for Sunday, May 1, 2011:

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.

-Winston Churchill

(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Churchill,_Winston)

Muse for Today:

Bow ties. And not just because there was Doctor Who last night.