such small things:
One of my grandmothers has this strange curse where, every time she goes to a new restaurant or bakery or whatever she orders the worst thing on the menu and ends up picking bits off of everybody else's dishes because her own is so unappealing. I seem to have inherited this trait a little bit. Last night I went with my roommate and her boyfriend and some of their friends to a chocolate bar in Asheville (I mean, it's basically a bar, but with chocolate rather than beer) and, attempting to be adventurous, I ordered xocolatl, which is very spicy, bitter hot chocolate and, it turns out, not all that delicious. I'd've rather had something sweet. In the end, I drank about a third of it, and then I had everyone else taste it, and then we started dumping almond milk and parts of other people's hot cocoa and liquid trufflles and tea into it to see whether we could improve the taste any, and when we couldn't, we dared S. and Q., who showed up late, to drink the resultant concoction. S. made a face and almost did a spit-take, while Q. was relatively unfazed: "Well, that doesn't taste very good."
S. has a glass eye, which I never noticed until last night. Then again, I'm not really a part of my roommate's group of friends; they're more people I see occasionally and get along reasonably well with. (In general, I'm a lot better at having casual acquaintances than I am at having friends. Real friends would require more sociability and more willingness to make myself vulnerable than I usually possess.) But I point this out because I like S.'s eye. It gives her kind of a perpetually winking look, and is a slightly different shade of blue-gray than her natural one. I think I said something to that effect, but I was a little afraid to because I thought it might be rude, or that maybe the eye was something she's really self-conscious about. She said she gets a lot of compliments on it, though, that most people seem to think it's cool that she has a glass eye. I was curious, then, as to whether she was born with one eye or lost her eye in an accident somewhere along the way from then to now. I figured that asking that would definitely overstep the boundaries of propriety, so I didn't.
I'm still growing my hair out, and am pleased because it is now the longest it's been since I was in the tenth grade. Which is not long, granted; it's just past the bottoms of my ears, slowly nearing chin-length, but I'm still terribly excited. (My roommate, who has and apparently has always had long, curly, gorgeous blonde hair that she spends about an hour an evening brushing, is incredulous that I've had short hair for most of my life.)
Excited!Fitz:
And this is from the side:
The color is a little off in these-- my hair's actually a very dark green, not black.
I have all this homework I really need to catch up on. Most of it isn't, theoretically, very complicated or hard. (I left off being an art major, and then a science major, and then an art major again, largely because it was much more difficult for me to make up work if I got behind because of a bout of depression or anxiety or the blues or that constant trembly-headachey feeling or whateveryouwanttocallit.) It's just that I keep falling and falling into weird states of mind that make it difficult for the homework to get done, but I keep telling myself that it will be okay, that I can catch up, that even if I flunk Appalachian History it won't be a disaster and even if I flunk the whole semester and have to do academic probation at Penn State and end up taking six years to graduate or something it won't be a disaster and even if I drop out entirely and become the stereotypical twentysomething loser who lives in her parents' basement it won't be a complete disaster. I mean, I don't really believe myself, but I keep saying it anyway. Last week, I read an entire chapter of a book and remembered none of it when there was a quiz. It was like someone had vacuumed the facts straight out through my ears. I get a little leeway, sometimes, because a lot of the professors believe that I am "gifted." Unfortunately, others are more tough on me because they assume that if I'm not "working to my potential," it must stem from laziness or apathy on my part. My secret is that I'm not particularly smart. I think I just notice things more than other people. Actually, I wish I were smart, when I'm not wishing I were more oblivious, oblivious enough that I wouldn't feel small and worried all the time. I follow intellectual people around like a dumb, eager puppy, when I can find them and they aren't assholes and they aren't just pretending to be smart by using big words and namedropping French philosophers or famous mathematicians. College is like that. People spend a lot of time pretending to be one kind of smart or another, one kind of cool or another. Even I do it, although in my case the pretending is more like a gag reflex. It's not conscious posturing so much as a survival mechanism. (Maybe it feels that way for the others, too?)
1. The Mistress Witch From McClure (The Mind That Knows Itself), Sufjan Stevens
2. Skeleton Song, Kate Nash
3. Thinking Amelia, Deb Talan
4. Subterranean Homesick Alien, Radiohead
5. Breakable, Ingrid Michaelson
6. I Must Belong Somewhere, Bright Eyes
7. The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out To Get Us, Sufjan Stevens
I also learned to weave this week, a very little bit. Hana taught me. I like Hana. I asked her how did she get started weaving, and she said that when she was twelve she bulit a simple loom in her bedroom based on a description in one of Tamora Pierce's Circle Of Magic books and went from there. I said, oh yeah, I read those books, too. My favorite character was always Briar, but I didn't become a gardener because of it. Less motivated than you, I guess. She said, here, push the other pedal down, you're getting mixed up. I did, and soon I had a slightly lopsided rainbow-colored coaster. If any of you would like a slightly lopsided rainbow-colored coaster for the Winter Holiday Of Your Choice, just let me know. I don't need one. I just made it for the making of. But I liked the weaving, and I might try again. The repetitive motions are very soothing, and they get into your hands and feet after a while so you don't even really have to keep count or contemplate the business of turning thread into cloth.