| Area Youth feels: Contact me: Yahoo ID: narcissistic_etrend 06/29/2003 - 07/05/2003 07/06/2003 - 07/12/2003 07/13/2003 - 07/19/2003 07/20/2003 - 07/26/2003 07/27/2003 - 08/02/2003 08/03/2003 - 08/09/2003 08/10/2003 - 08/16/2003 08/17/2003 - 08/23/2003 08/24/2003 - 08/30/2003 08/31/2003 - 09/06/2003 09/07/2003 - 09/13/2003 09/14/2003 - 09/20/2003 09/21/2003 - 09/27/2003 09/28/2003 - 10/04/2003 10/05/2003 - 10/11/2003 10/12/2003 - 10/18/2003 10/19/2003 - 10/25/2003 10/26/2003 - 11/01/2003 11/02/2003 - 11/08/2003 11/09/2003 - 11/15/2003 11/16/2003 - 11/22/2003 11/23/2003 - 11/29/2003 11/30/2003 - 12/06/2003 12/07/2003 - 12/13/2003 12/14/2003 - 12/20/2003 12/21/2003 - 12/27/2003 01/04/2004 - 01/10/2004 01/11/2004 - 01/17/2004 01/18/2004 - 01/24/2004 01/25/2004 - 01/31/2004 02/01/2004 - 02/07/2004 02/08/2004 - 02/14/2004 02/15/2004 - 02/21/2004 02/22/2004 - 02/28/2004 02/29/2004 - 03/06/2004 03/07/2004 - 03/13/2004 03/14/2004 - 03/20/2004 03/21/2004 - 03/27/2004 03/28/2004 - 04/03/2004 04/04/2004 - 04/10/2004 04/11/2004 - 04/17/2004 04/18/2004 - 04/24/2004 Home
|
||
| Saturday,
June 28, 2003 Feed my ego I figured how to add a "comments" box after each post (Thanks, Katia!) You can say mean things if you want. But that would be mean. - declared by Liusia @ 2:26 AM I will play the role of a flood victim So, I'm in the play. This is slightly unusual, because I am, as you probably know, somewhat anti-organized school activity (aka, very lazy). We have rehearsal four times a week, in two hour blocks. This has the potential to be very boring, but it is not. The director has more animation than Pixar, and the play is severely, drastically weird. The director is named Sergei Somethingrussianovitch. (I'm so sorry. I can never remember patronymics.) He is assisted by a fellow actor, Anna. I have no idea if they are related or involved or what have you, but they usually communicate in a three step process: 1)one yells something, generally a directorial suggestion, at the other. 2)the other makes fun of the yeller's suggestion 3)the yeller says "pfff" and mutters something under his/her breath. Note: all of this is done in a hugely good-natured way. Sergei ends almost every sentence by repeating one of the words in English, and asking if we understand. Sometimes the English word was not actually in the sentence. e.g.: "Teper', vcadnik zhivyot! Horse! Ponyatno?" ("Now, the horseman is alive! Horse! Understood?") Okay, back to the flood victim thing. This play is a combination of Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman and selected Gogol short stories. For those of you that are not as dorky as I am, I'll explain why that's weird. The Bronze Horseman is a classic narrative poem about a gigantic flood that hit St. Petersburg in 1824. During the flood, this statue  comes to life and chases our poor hapless hero, Yevgeny, around the city. That is not the weird part, though. The weird part is that we're interspersing bits of Gogol, who redefines weird. (His most famous story may be The Nose, which is about a bureaucrat who loses his nose when it becomes sentient, detaches itself, grows to human size, and walks around the city. No one besides the bureaucrat realizes that the Nose is a nose.)  Right now we're working on the Horseman part. Everyone's involved in the Horseman scenes, and everyone will also have a role as a Gogol character. On Monday, we find out which Gogol weirdos we will play. It's all very avant-garde. Also, awesome. Today was also the first meeting of the Criminal Lexicography club. I learned several new and creative slang synonyms for the word "to kill." We also watched a fantastically melodramatic documentary about "banditizm." Okay, I haven't taken any pictures of campus yet, so I stole these from Middlebury College's Very Generic Website. I'll post pictures once I, you know, bother to take some. Campus:  I have decided that I don't like mountains. They loom. Every time I think I'm getting used to the looming, I turn a corner, and another mountain jumps out at me. A slo-mo playback-style diagram of where I live, indicating also the location of the scary mountains:  Also, here is a picture of Middlebury's Bicentennial Hall. With 7 stories, it's the tallest building in Vermont: 
Okay, now I'm sleepy, probably because tonight my schedule went thus: Wine in the basement (with students and professors...this is the Russian school, after all), charades, hitting the Two Brothers bar in "town" with Marusya. We had a very nice waiter. He put way too much vodka in whatever it was that I was drinking. Also, he's from Wausau, and is going to UW in the fall. - declared by Liusia @ 1:37 AM Friday,
June 27, 2003
Arrr. Here there be pirates! My suitemate Katia has a website, and it is nifty. And there are pirates. Arrr. Jane - declared by Liusia @ 4:33 PM A Boring Story Told in Minute Detail Okay, I promised I'd Quicktopic post my travellog from my flight to Vermont. And I didn't do this, because it was Very Boring. But now that I have my own webspace I feel less guilty about posting it. And, you know, the order of the day is narcissism, so... 4:00 am: Aieee. Early. 5:30 am: Okay, seriously. I am not a security hazard. You do not need to open and rifle through all my carefully packed baggage, and you really, really do not need to pat me down. My belt set off the metal detector. My belt, you moron. You waved the little wand thingy, and it went off by my belt buckle. Perhaps I have cunningly concealed a weapon directly behind the belt buckle. Or maybe, James Bond style, I have turned my belt buckle into a weapon! That must be it. Here, you can keep the freakin' belt, just let me board my plane, please? 6:30 am: On the plane. I and the nice, kitchy-looking lady sitting beside me discuss matters of vital import, e.g., how early it is, whether they will serve breakfast. 7:00 am: Take off. Oh God Oh God I am going to die. 7:10 am: I didn't die. 7:30 am: Mmm, juice. But what on earth is a "biscoff?" I'm afraid to eat it. It looks like astronaut food. 
8:00 am: The stolidly handsome man with a southern accent behind me has a little baby and a little boy. The little boy is pretty little. I can't guess little kid ages, but he is old enough to talk coherently but not old enough for kindergarten, I'd estimate. The baby isn't cute, it's actually kind of alien-looking, but it doesn't cry, at least. Every once in a while it yells something in its alien language, which I will transliterate in latin characters here: "Gooaahg! Gooaahga!" Southern Man apologizes for the noisy baby. Kitch Lady coos at it. I, being less sweet and pleasant, reply, "Don't worry about it. At least he isn't screaming." Or kicking my seat. Confidential to the southern man: Please stop your little boy kicking my seat. Confidential to the little boy: Please stop kicking my seat. 8:10 am: Ooh, complimentary breath strips. We'll be the most dentally hygienic plane in the air. 10:25 am: Landing. Oooooh God I am going to die! 10:30 am: I didn't die. 10:35 am: We disembark in Atlanta. The sun is shining. The air is wet. Can the air be this wet without it actually precipitating? 11:40 am: The airport smells like armpit. 11:10 am: Boarding the plane again. 11:30 am: Takeoff. The girl behind me is muttering prayers to herself. Ha, sucker. I am cool like a Siberian breeze. Cold, even. Freezing. Why is the air conditioner on so high? 11:40 am: The girls behind me are not Southern; if their accents didn't say Midwest, the fact that they keep commenting things like, "Look at the guy waving the little light sticks in for the airplanes! I bet that's a fun job. But wait, I bet it'd be really cold in the winter. [Note: we are in Atlanta.] Oh, all the houses are so close together! This is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here, dontchaknow?" would. The prayerful girl has never flown before. She talks about how the houses look like a toy railroad set. What a neophyte. 11:45 am: Wait. Why am I acting like the Experienced Traveler? I've flown twice: when Liz and I went to Texas, and earlier this morning. Well, three times if you count that trip in the terrifying crop duster. Also, see: 7:00 am, 10:25 am. 12:30 pm: After several hundred pages of A Heartbreaking Tale of Staggering Genius, I am beginning to form distinctly Eggers-like observations on life. It's unnerving. The book is eating into my brain. 12:40 pm: I think I see a bayou! Or maybe, like, Everglades. No, it's definitely a bayou. I don't know what a bayou is, but if anything was ever a bayou, that is it. 12:50 pm: Landed. Disembark in Orlando. 1:00 pm: Wow, the Orlando airport is really pretty. All marble pillars and skylights and real carpeting. And everyone is really tan. And why is this airport so small and quiet? Does Disneyworld, like, have its own airport? 1:05 pm: It probably does. 1:10-3:00 pm: More Heartbreaking. You know, I don't think I like David Eggers. But it would be hella fun to be his ward. 3:25 pm: Boarding and takeoff to Boston. This is the stupidest flight plan ever. I could have walked to Vermont faster than this. 3:45 pm: I have consumed more cranapple juice and pretzels today than in my entire previous life. 3:50 pm: But I am still hungry. I give in and eat the Biscoff. It's not bad. 4:00 pm: Ooh, in-flight movie. Wait...Becker? Becker?! I cannot believe that bad sitcoms are now airborne. 6:00 pm: So, I've been reading A Heartbreaking Tale for several hours now, and I suddenly realize that I am now thinking in an Eggersian stream-of-consciousness style, narrating my own life. Except my life is not exciting enough to narrate, so I'm "philosophizing" about whatever bad sit-com they're showing now. Something where all the women are sassy and the men are fat. One woman sasses what is probably her boyfriend/husband. I imagine he stays with her because he is fat and ugly, and while she may be aggressively sassy, at least her beauty legitimizes his existance. "After all, if my wife is so lovely, I can't be this fat and ugly, and it's not that stupid that I engaged in embarassing wacky hijinks in front of my boss, is it?" he thinks. 6:10 pm: GET OUT OF MY HEAD, EGGERS! I just want to watch the bad sit-com! 6:30 pm: Weren't we supposed to have landed by now? 6:45 pm: Oooh. Mountains. Wait, are those mountains? Are there mountains around Boston? Did I get on the wrong plane? Oooh, ocean. Wait. Why are we flying over the ocean? 6:50 pm: The ocean is the exact same color as the sky and there are no clouds and no land and I can't tell which way is up when I look out the window, and it's upsetting me. 6:55 pm: We're landing! But, there's no land! Aiieee aiieee aiieeeeeeeeeeeeee aiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... 7:00 pm: I'm never flying again. Who knew the airport was right by the seashore? 7:10 pm: Security check. Dude, I'm agitated because my next flight is scheduled to leave, oh, FIVE MINUTES AGO? You can stop going through my suitcase and asking me stupid questions now. No, I'm NOT upset because you asked to see my passport for the thousandth time and I am therefore afraid you'll realize it's illegitimate and I am here to blow up your shuttle plane to the exciting metropolis of Burlington! I'm UPSET because your incessant checking of my passport is making me LATE to my PLANE! If I were a terrorist, I'd be SUAVER than this! Also, I AM NOT SMUGGLING GOVERNMENT SECRETS IN MY COMPUTER, AND YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TURN IT ON! And that is a FINGERNAIL CLIPPERS! 7:20 pm: So, I run to the gate (beltless and shoeless) and where the rampy boarding thing should be, there is a hole. Upon further examination, there is also a ladder. Because I am very brave I climbed down the ladder, and found myself on the tarmack. A nice lady with a wavy flagy coney thing pointed me toward the "plane" to Burlington. It was more like a hanglider. It waited for me, because I was one of, like, three people scheduled to fly. Um, remember earlier when I mentioned that terrifying crop dusting ride I experienced as a child? I think this was worse. They don't have biscoff in crop dusters. 8:00 pm: Aaaaah. Ground. 8:10 pm: In the cab, on my way to the Fairfax hotel. I think the cabbie is speaking Vietnamese. The only things I can say in Vietnamese are "beer" and "home" (thanks, Liz.) I hope he understood where I wanted to go. 8:20 pm: I guess he didn't, because now I'm at the hotel, and they say they don't have a reservation in my name. 8:22 pm: I run out and catch him as he's pulling away. "Fairfax on SOUTH PARK STREET. Not Industrial Park drive. South...park....street?" 8:25 pm: I hope we are on our way to South Park Street. 8:45 pm: Yay! South Park! (something I thought I'd never say.) He gave me a free ride, and I'm pretty sure he told me this was his first day as a cabbie. Oi. 10:00 pm: Showered, fed and watching CSI on the crappy motel TV. They are showing an episode about someone being murdered in a hotel. Suddenly, travelling alone seems like a significantly dumber idea. I check to make sure the door and windows are locked, and I compile this travellog, following through on the tradition Jess began. Unfortunately there are no Fishy Crime Scenes in my narrative. Tomorrow...Middlebury. < sarcasm>Yra, Greyhound.< /sarcasm>  Thanks a lot, you smug hearing-impaired bastard! - declared by Liusia @ 2:06 PM Things that are cool: the north pole snow ice ice cream ice cream sandwiches penguins (when at the north pole) tater tots (when still frozen) oh, my God, I wish I had an air conditioner - declared by Liusia @ 12:22 PM Thursday,
June 26, 2003
Stupid archive function I'm posting this so I can see whether it works or not. thrill to the sounds of this: it does. Go me and - declared by Liusia @ 10:31 PM I guess you are supposed to put things like this in a blog Okay. Well. It's freakin' hot here. I'm not talking "oi me I must sit on the stoop and drink something fruity with an umbrella in it" hot, I'm talking ridiculously hot. Like, Sahara desert hot. Like, that stupid planet with the moisture farms in Starwars hot. Like THE FACE OF THE SUN hot. Except with humidity, dammit. Now you're thinking: she put that there because, lacking anything interesting to say, she elected to talk about the weather. NOT SO! I put that there as a warning. Warning: HEATSTROKE AFFECTED BRAIN AHEAD. Be advised that if you continue reading, you are liable to see stupid things. I found a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban...in Russian! It's better than chocolate! (Not better than finding a copy of Order of the Phoenix in Russian, but hey...) Anyway, I'm only on the first chapter, but I've already learned several important new words, such as: -"Glasses" -"Wizard" -"Witchcraft" -Terms for various things that an owl does -"git" -"to be burnt at the stake" We had the first meeting of the Dead Russian Poets Society today. It's great. The professor is interesting, and he refers to the meetings as "seances." Meaning, of course, that we are communing with the dead (Russian) poets. We read two poems about FOUL PLAY. (Also, I should say that there was no standing on of desks, Jessica.) It is nifty to live here, because I am learning every second of the day, which is the way life should be. On the other hand, I am learning every second of the day, and sometimes I just want to watch Buffy and eat popcorn and be stupid. My brain is tired. Here is an uplifting poem by Pushkin: Yesli dzhizn' tebya obmanyet, Nye pyechal'cya, nye syerdic'! V dyen' unuiniya smiric': Dyen' vyesyel'ya, vyer', nastanyet. Serdtsye v budutshyem dzhvyot; Nastoyatshyeye unuilo, Vcyo mgnovyenno, vcyo proidyot; Shto proidyot, to budet milo. Bad translation by me with the help of mr. textbook footnote: If life should decieve you, Don't be tearful, don't be angered! Reconcile yourself to the day of despair: Believe this: the day of joy will come. The heart lives in the future; The present is cheerless: Everything is fleeting, everything is passing; That which passes, becomes a-okay." Okay, maybe that wasn't very uplifting. Also, I took some liberty with the last line. Pushkin:  He was kind of weird looking. And not rich. But he still got all the ladies. Now that is uplifting. Here is a special bonus poem for Jessica (corbies=crows, by the way): The Twa Corbies (from "Minstrelry of the Scottish Border") As I was walking all alane, I heard twa corbies making a mane; The tane unto the other say, 'Where sall we gang and dine to-day?' In behint yon auld fail dyke, I wot there lies a new slain knight; And naebody kens that he lies there, But his hawk, his honnd, and lady fair. His hound is to the hunting gane, His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, His lady 'a ta'en another mate, So we may mak our dinner sweet. Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane, And I'll pike out his bonny blue een; Wi'ae lock o his gowden hair We'll theek our nest when it grows bare. 'Mony a one for him makes mane, But nane sall ken where his is gane; Oer his white banes, when they are bare, The wind sail blaw for evennair. - declared by Liusia @ 9:58 PM |
