norbork

This week, next week, then the break. Thankfully.
I could type 'thank god', but I won't - I had a pretty long debate on Monday about that that I don't want to go into again because dogma makes my head hurt. Apparently the fact that I'm an atheist and not just non-religious is strange and weird and odd. Not that I'm one of those super-militant people or anything; my general philosophy is pretty much 'try not to be an asshole' and it seems to serve me well enough, but apparently it's not good enough? Good enough for who? I don't know. Don't really care. This isn't coherent, and I'm tired, and the whole thing was just really annoying and weird. It's not like I'm killing babies or anything; sheesh.

Decorated a gingerbread house for my physics class yesterday; now it's got a sine function with a tangent to the curve on the roof at a gumball. Couple of other things too, but most of them were boring and/or smudged. Wanted to throw some vectors in there and a couple of calculus things, but time and teacher both did not allow. Went to Goatstock, which was three and a half frigging hours. It's a concert our school puts on each year - random rock bands consisting of students and/or teachers play, tickets are five dollars, proceeds go to a charity that buys goats for villages in Africa. I have a giant purple and red bruise that sort of looks like Africa as my souvenir from the mosh pit. You'll be amused to note that it was technically my first one (mosh pit/concert, not bruise). I fail at cool.

Lots of tests. Tired. Exhausted, actually. Can't keep eyes open but have to because I should be studying.

Had a swim meet today and did pretty well. We got our swim team sweatshirts and they're pretty swanky. I was going to take photos of the meet - I even brought my camera - but my events were so closely spaced that I didn't really have time to do any of that. My parents actually came (this is the first time they've ever come to one of my sports things), which was interesting. My mother is particularly amused by the senior boys and the fact that I swim in the same lane as them. There was elbowing. She's terrible, honestly. 

The meet went really well - easier competition, way less stressful, got a brand new suit. Hurt all over for some reason, but popped a couple of Advils and toughed it out anyway (although once they started wearing off, I got pretty nasty; I'll admit). Placed first in 100m breast; third in 100m freestyle, got DQ'ed on my 100 IM and our relay... well, it didn't go too well. There were synchro people practicing in the other half of the pool, just like last year, and they are absolutely crazy. Tomorrow morning it's our last practice before the break; we're playing water polo in lieu of actual swimming.

Incoherent right now. Um, what else? Writing! Right. Yes. Need to be writing. Need to start writing again. I whine all the time about not having enough time, but truth be told, I could probably make the time if I tried hard enough - I just need something to write about. There's all these story ideas I have, my would-be NaNovel included, that are all pretty good but just kind of fail at having that solid, real-story feel to them like good story ideas do. Although maybe I'm expecting too much of random ideas; maybe I should just write and not wait for something to fly onto the page fully-formed? Maybe I just need something interesting to say. Hell, I don't know. I can't even make LJ entries interesting, though LJ's hardly the place to look if you're on a quest for interesting literature.

I want to see Body Worlds again. People who run that exhibition: come back to Toronto. Please. You guys were awesome and I got some really pretty sketches out of it (though the signing a waiver bit seemed a little excessive) that I need for school and the ROM is too pricey for a starving artist student who should be buying Christmas presents. Actually, screw it. Everybody's getting socks or cookies or socks in cookies or cookies in socks this year.

Alright, I'm getting rambly. Time for bed, assuming I can walk over to it. I'm much more inclined to just fall asleep in this chair.

They put in too much chlorine in the pool this morning. By 'too much' I'm not talking stingy eyes or dry hair or smelling like chlorine when you sweat the next day outside of the pool. No. That's normal. In fact, since I probably swallow about a liter of pool water at each practice and that chlorine is probably one of my favourite things to smell, when I say 'too much' you know I'm not kidding. I'm talking so much chlorine that the water was bitter, that my tongue started swelling up and made me have a very attractive gagging coughing fit where I did the whole flop-around-the-lane-ropes-with-bulging-eyes-and-wheezing thing, and that I was picking off white powder from my arms in chemistry this morning afterwards after showering and scrubbing.

All worth it, by and large, except for the fact that my beloved dark blue and black racing suit is now grayish white and floppy. I have a meet on Wednesday which that does not bode well for, but that's not the point. My swimsuit and my wristwatch are what got me through the summer, and even though I don't like attaching sentimental value to inanimate objects, this really sucks.  :(

On another note, we broke out the laptop at lunch today and watched the 1969 Dawn of the Dead (or part of it - we didn't finish it). I think that if this whole mad scientist thing doesn't work out, I want to be a redneck zombie hunter. They seem to have all the fun. 

Our condo isn't sold and we're already supposed to be moving in. This is pretty bad.

On the subject of dryland - I got the sheet today, and it's... well, it's intimidating. We're not going to be able to do it this week, but I'm going to go off and attempt some of it now. We'll see how it goes. Dryland, for the uninitiated, consists of (1) sprints (2) running up stairs (3) lots of pushups and jumps and crunches and (4) death and/or coma. See, I suck at all that stuff. I also suck at most things involving co-ordination. I'm really only good at getting from point A to point B in a reasonably speedy amount of time. Wish me luck.

On the subject of random inane nerdiness - I am reading Altered Carbon and lo, the first 23 pages of it seem pretty good. I am reserving judgement about it until after I read at least half of it (after all, it's kind of whoo-guns-y), but it's kind of nice to be reading a book that I'm liking straight off. The last one I picked up was a Lolita rip-off with three different points of view on every page. I tried to write a novel like that once. I'm really glad I didn't, because it gives me a headache.

In other news: when it is very windy and cold outside, there's a place near the corner store by my school where all the empty cans of Dr. Pepper go to die. They sat there while I stared at them for a little while and then all six or so of them rolled away pretty much in unison. Guess they didn't like me.

That's pretty much it.

Still alive, still kicking. This thing called 'life' is difficult and involves entirely too much back pain, lab reports, and painting.

Painting has been pretty interesting. We're doing oil self-portraits in class, which we were advised to approach in a logical, step-by-step, paint-by-numbers fashion. Result: you get a really lovely, heartbreakingly boring copy of a Myspaced, Photoshopped photo of you. So I decided to use a mirror, and then I discovered that I have no concept of colour theory whatsoever, so I ended up looking a little like Vincent, except alive and with an ear. Then I screwed it up, tried to fix it, restarted, went back to the original, nearly cut off my own ear, and then, with the urging of my art teacher, my nice, boring oil portrait began to look a little like this or this. I've got a backup, more or less traditionally-painted one, but it's not as ballsy as this one. By 'ballsy' I mean 'big glob of blue paint sticking out on my nose'. At least it's interesting.

First swim meet of the year on Friday at U of T - an invitational, so it didn't really matter that much, but still a little disappointing. It's always like that at meets - the events that I really care about are the ones I do worst in, and the races that I want to scratch and don't give a crap about are the ones I do well in.

So, to keep the jock talk short, here's a summary of the races I swam that you can skim over. 200m freestyle - fell apart on it, finished half a minute (in swimming, we call this a fucking eternity) slower than I should have.Just kind of fell apart after about 75m, on the third turn. Long races like the 200m you have to start out fresh, or else it just goes downhill very, very quickly. Felt like swimming through lead. 200 IM Relay (4x50) - swam my bit pretty well, but our team line-up was faulty (the girl who wanted to swim fly ended up being anchor - which she can't swim; the best swimmer ended up swimming fly, and the girl who should've been swimming my stroke ended up leading so it didn't really work). 100m free - did okay, placed fourth overall which is pretty good considering I can't do turns. Had to scratch 100m breast because it'd get in the way of the stupid 200m free; swam the 50m instead and placed second at it. I'd be happy, except the 50m breaststroke is kind of... well, it's wussy, even though going hard in breaststroke hurts a lot more than freestyle. It ain't your momma's water aerobics, that's for sure, but my ego's still hurting.

Funny thing about the meet: I didn't see any of the other West region schools there. Instead, we were facing schools like Michael Power and UTS, both of which have massive amounts of money that they devote to athletics. Our team has about 25 people, and we barely managed to get team sweatshirts this year (they're still in the mail), which we have to pay for entirely out of our own pockets. These other schools have about 40-70 people, all of whom are kitted out in sweatpants, shirts, jackets, caps, swimsuits or even fastsuits (read: the unitards that Olympians wear) in team colours, and personalized (!) with their names. We get to a meet, we don't really cheer, we do a half-assed warm-up and then quake in our proverbial boots. These people get to a meet and blow out your eardrums. However, according to one of the people on my relay team, our team is prettier. Great rallying cry - 'ESA! We're... not ugly!' It's okay, though. We start dryland Wednesday, and we've kicked our share of ass all the way to OFSAA, but deep down I'm still wishing that someone would buy me a fastsuit.

Met up with Dana (and Ruth and Tim and a whole bunch of cool people who I don't know) afterwards. Got lost somewhere on Lansdowne and Bathhurst in the snow, and was saved by some French Canadian girl with a cool weave and stiletto heel boots that you could hammer nails with. Went to the TGIO party - great to see everybody out there, and I wish I'd participated more. Better luck next year, right? (Wayne, I'm going to be whining at you for ages next time I see you for not coming. Brace yourself. :) )

I'm on the interwubs for more than an hour for the first time in this entire month. I miss everyone. Hope everything's going well.

( And now, a meme! )

I really wasn't kidding about crackdown month. It's actually even worse than I thought it would be.

A couple things have happened lately. In reverse order: went to a writing session at Roncesvalles, went to fake Prom at school (at lunchtime, everybody dressed up and we had cake and a punchbowl and a disco ball and bad eighties music), wrote just under 5000 words, started swim team (I now have a bruise on my forearm from Thursday's practice because one girl kept ramming me into the lane ropes during the IM drills) and started, for the thousandth time, that pesky oil portrait.

Anyway: just updating to let you know I'm alive.

All knowledge is contained within the intarwubs, right?

I'm trying to prod my mother into learning to swim properly. Now, she's the Crazy Yoga Mom (TM) and everything, but our family's got a bad track record as far as hearts and lungs and things are concerned, and I figure it can't hurt. Our pool's open, and I'm trying to teach her freestyle and stuff, but the fact is that I'm still teaching myself proper swim form since I never stuck with swimming lessons long enough to get serious about it until now. In fact, I'm thinking of signing up for some lessons myself so that I can do this stuff properly, once and for all. I don't glide through the water; I muscle my way through it. I can't do turns. My backstroke is atrocious. I'm fast, but that doesn't mean very much - and the last thing I want to do is teach her how to do everything wrong.

All this is a roundabout way of saying: anybody know any good swimming lessons or programs that a) aren't entry level b) don't have any prerequisite levels c) are in Etobicoke and d) aren't geared towards little kids? Do those even exist?

... *crickets*

It's been a long, busy week, which is why I've been neglecting this whole blogging thing. In fact, I probably shouldn't even be typing this - or watching TV, which I'm simultaneously doing - but instead doing the 10357309510351 things that need to be done.

My school's having a PA day, though, which is my main excuse for being lazy.

So here's what I did this week, because I know you all love to hear about the little mundane details of a fifteen-year-old's daily life easily summarized in chronological and numerical order.

1. West Region Swimming Championships - this was on Monday. My relay team got a bronze medal, which is interesting because everybody on the original team scratched so the team was entirely made up of last-minute substitutes. ("Hey, you! You swim free? Okay, you're with us. Yeah, they're marshalling now. What do you mean, you have to go pee? Come back here! Hey! Where are you going?"). But it's still a medal; I'm not complaining.
2. Selling roses for debate club for two days, which is much more humiliating and tedious than it sounds - making deliveries to people who don't bother to show up to class is like a CIA training exercise, or something.
3. Math geekiness - Waterloo math test on Tuesday. PLAR deadline in one month, six days. I think I want to cry.
4. I totally kick ass at floor hockey. That, or I suck, but either way, my entire gym class yells at me when I play. (Apparently, I hit too hard.)
5. We had to do a freewrite during history class, which is the first time I've written anything since January. I want that sheet back, now - I wrote this whole thing about a German pilot falling from his plane in a dogfight in the battle of Britain, and while historically and technically inaccurate, it's proof that I can still write things that don't suck. (It's not even overly wordy!)

Other than that, things have been pretty quiet. I have a few things to emo over, but I don't feel like it - mainly, the fact that a girl I used to know ages ago is moving to my city, my school, and possibly my apartment building. Not only that, she wants to take the same courses as me, be in the same sports as me,  have the same hobbies as me, and pretty much be every other characteristic of my life that has previously belonged to me. Despite living a city away for years, and despite only wanting to talk to me about her problems when we do get to talk, I'm considered her best and oldest friend (and also, occasionally, a jealous bitch who copies her). The weird thing is I'm not even sure that I care. I'm just annoyed, and not even because of her, but because I don't want to have to deal with all this high school friendship crap. I just want to do my work, go home, sleep - this whole popularity contest thing, this whole going out and getting totally shit-faced thing, this whole friends-forever-since-we-were-kids-there-for-each-other thing just seems incredibly boring. It's almost as if the whole concept of 'friend' is, to the people that I know at least, is synonymous to 'emotional crutch I can lean all over whenever my mommy doesn't buy me an iPod'.

But a Semagic screen isn't a shrink, so therefore I shouldn't be rambling to it as if it is one.

Speaking of shrinks, though, my history teacher has this on her desk and I covet it.

So yesterday my swim team coach called.

Swim team season ends March the 1st. That's six practices and one meet left; six ninety-minute sets of swimming laps at some godawful hour of the morning, and one meet where you freeze on these concrete bleachers for about four hours, waiting to be marshalled for your forty seconds or so of glory. Which is to say that I'll miss it. I did find out what I'm swimming at Regionals, which are on Monday, by the way, but I'm blocking that out of my mind right now. I absolutely do not want to be there and I do not want to swim. Not even if you drag me out of bed by the hair and throw me in the pool. I can think of thirty better things to do on a Monday morning than being at Regionals, and one of them is sinking.

Oh well.

I did some yoga and some running today, which confirmed two things that I already knew; a) there are steel I-beams more flexible than me and b) if you haven't run for a month and a half, and then decide to try and run really really fast through two and a half miles, you are an idiot. Then I did homework, and that was all I did other than watching Goodbye Lenin and Stripes last night, proving that not only am I an inflexible idiot, I am an inflexible idiot who has no social life. Whoo!