- Consistently printing images for my Concentrated Study
- Designing the lights/assistant stage managing for the musical, How to Succeed
- Finalizing the creative writing and art for my high school's literary magazine
- Laying out and distributing said magazine
- Improving on my creative writing, as well as writing much more prolifically
- Keeping up with French in light of my desire to be a French minor
- Eventually, applying for summer jobs
I am positive there are others. Immediate concerns involve creating jewelry and other products to sell at Art & Flea (this will garner a separate post), and readying my scholastic art submissions by this Friday. Because I am an artistic masochist and I adore making things hard for myself during the school week, I've decided to doodle an intricate border around a diptych of bff Sarah to give the images a ~*~*CUTESY EDGE*~*~.
I will share the final product eventually. Last year I submitted five pieces, two in the digital art category and three in the photography category, and won four awards, which was the most awards given to one student at the time. Two were gold keys, two were silver, and one gold key went on to win a silver key on the national level. I feel incredibly honored as well as pressured to create immaculate work to prove to myself that I did not reach my artistic peak as a sophomore. If this piece that I am working on does not win anything, I shan't fret; I am doing for my own artistic satisfaction, which brings me to my main point...
I've decided to truly put my time and energy into things that I am passionate about.
Today was my first and last day of trigonometry. My teacher, a zany bearded trig enthusiast, seemed so incredibly excited about triangles and sine and cosine* and tangents that his zeal was almost contagious. Almost, because when he started to explain the basic arithmetic of the class, a familiar fog slowly crept across the sloshing harbor of my mind and clouded any hope of immediate understanding of what the hell he was talking about.
I am extremely bad at math. Partially because I am innately better at crafting sentences than equations, and partially because equations disinterest me to the point of nausea. If I were to greatly improve in math and raise my C average to an A, I would have to spend at least two hours every day studying, and several days a week with a tutor, mortified and frustrated with my inability to do basic multiplication (once upon a time, I was a fourth grader who apparently missed the flash card boat).
So, I made the hasty but necessary decision to switch into Statistics, a much more useful class for me, especially if I decide to go into education at some point.
I really am disappointed that I don't get to spend time learning with this teacher who gets so freakin' pumped over sixty degree angles, but it will be better for me in the long run.
I want to focus on photography and writing and crafting and making things for other people. I'm tired of academics that I will not remember a month after school ends.
Now I will share with you a selection from my journal that is actually a coherent string of pleasant sentences:
Sometimes I feel like it's useless to write anything down. Adolescence comes in endless vicious cycles, periods of violent rebirth and destruction, like a great skeletal tree who will never be whole, not really. There will always be the trembling leaves in question, branches whose muscle memory foretell a great seasonal loss.. and when nothing but phantom limbs shaking on the cold bark remain, a girl cries into her pillow with bone-shuddering sobs and feels her self-worth disappear in a torpid breath of wind.
That is what we feel, and what we know.
I don't know if I will read this again, if something will happen to me and weeping parents will come, with coffee-spiked breath and eyes like soft bruises, inspecting my writings and drawings that spread inscrutably through both pages and time.
No, I don't think they will come; however unfair it feels, I will stay.
I tried writing a sestina but no stores or feelings came to mind. My six words were small, eye, find, drop, done, and sleep.
Everything seems to fall into earth, sickly warm like the edge of autumn or post-mortem. I bury dreams in decaying foliage, cover them up because no, they aren't there, they never existed.
Or at least, were never worth anything.
And even though I know I'm not alone, that legions of half-crazed teens are forced to learn without sleep and listen to parents screeching like judgmental rusty metal and watch a best friend walk away for good... well, it all feels like we're being prepared for a battle we can't win.
Or a battle that will never happen.
So, I'll write.
When everything hurts like a white hot iron of anxiety deep in my chest, and when existence is heavier than the world and I'm expected to cary it in my back pocket and move on. Even when things are dull, commonplace, and even when something happens enough to light a smile on the shadow of my face--
I'll write, and I will search for the stories that aren't happening here, but do exist, whether I can feel them now or not.
A sestina is a form of poetry involving six stanzas and six repeating words, popularized by Elizabeth Bishop, I believe. Read one by her here, and check out this one as well.
This bit of writing is quite angsty, I apologize, but I figure if I'm going to keep TEENAGE DAMNATION as my domain for a while I might as well share the darker stuff. But hey, there is a light turn at the end!
(I don't consider this koala-T writing by me in any shape or form, it's just important stuff, man).
THUS ENDS POST NUMBER FOUR?
••• Previously I misspelled sine as "sign," and I am NOT embarrassed maybe. This is further prove of my inability to retain mathematical knowledge of any sort (it's not like Mr. Trig Enthusiast explained how to spell out the abbreviations in the first place :P).
No comments:
Post a Comment