This Post May Save School Property

For those of you who are too busy watching television in a lodge in the Alps, or getting a heavy tan that will look ridiculous with the rest of you, I'll just sum up this post with a brief description of my evening:

1. I watched Contact.
2. I sat on the couch and pondered some fundamental philosophical queries.
3. My sister and I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed.
4. In a fit of rage, I broke my sister's toothbrush.

Admittedly, there's a good deal that happened between #3 and #4, but the long and short of it is in those four steps. For you troopers who do not own a private island and are therefore reduced to reading my blog for entertainment, I'll expand on the above list.

Since y'all may or may not have seen the movie Contact, here's a short summary: Jodie Foster goes up in space and provokes some thoughts. Anyway, I thought it was durn good, and I felt very intellectual and mature after watching it. After basking in my enlightenment, I headed off to the bathroom to brush my teeth, dragging my sister with me. (I felt very noble doing this: as the older sister, I shouldered more responsibility for my actions and could therefore act as the keeper of the younger one's basic hygiene.)

As I was flossing, my sister made some comment to the effect of, "Ew." I, of course, was untouched by her disgust, as she wasn't even flossing, meaning that I was obviously more mature than she was. I fired off a witty retort illustrating this to her, which she didn't understand. So I clarified by saying, "I think you have an IQ of 20." She kicked me. I decided to be the martyr and just turn the other cheek. But when she started talking again, I thought, Screw martyrdom!, and chose instead to thwack her in the face with my used floss. She responded by flicking her froth-covered toothbrush at me, which backfired and resulted in her getting the majority of the saliva/toothpaste on her own face. We started laughing, and I sighed inside, thinking the fight was over. Then she charged at me with the toothbrush again. So I grabbed the toothbrush and pushed it away, just as she pushed it towards me. So the toothbrush broke.

I already have no idea why you'd care about any of this. I shouldn't have made it a blog post; I should've just written it down in my multi-purpose journal and laughed at it later. But sadly, this incident pissed me off pretty badly. Not because my parents blamed me when my sister whined that I had broken her toothbrush; not because part of my sleeve now smells like Crest; but because my self-glorifying ego has been deflated a little bit. I am not mature. I am not noble. I am most definitely not a martyr.

And guess what? Neither are any of you. Personally, I thought that my sister and I had grown out of the phase when we would let minor things escalate to become biting, breaking, etc. Obviously, we haven't. I'm two years away from being a legal adult, and I haven't achieved my vision of the "mature me." And I don't think I ever will, because as I realized tonight, maturity isn't being able to whisk away irrational thoughts before they even enter your brain. Maturity is beginning to feel some strong emotion, then taking a recess to analyze whether it serves any good purpose; and if it doesn't, shoving it away for later. ("Later" could mean at the gym tomorrow, when you take out the week's angers on a punching bag; or it could mean a few months later, when weeks of irritations explode in a seizure of insanity and you destroy school property.) And I ask you: does this really represent progress?

Does it really make us better people if we take our anger at meaningless things, our desire to indulge in bad habits, our need to cry when our hair looks like Barbarella's (you may or may not have experienced that one), and suppress it under the pretext of being "noble" or "grown-up"? I mean, sure, if I had been Mature Me, one less toothbrush would be broken right now; but in all likelihood my practicality would have contributed to my tearing up the Spanish final exam in four months. So where do I go from here? Just try harder than ever to contain my temper, and then bring a koosh ball to my Spanish final? Or simply say, "To hell with maturity!" and go around doing and saying whatever the hell I want?

No, no. Neither would work. The first one would just...no. And the second one would gain me 100 pounds and almost as many enemies. I guess that self-control does serve some middle-of-the-road purpose, and I'm not denying that it's been a great asset for many people. (The first three such people who come to mind were assassinated, but I'll not talk about that.) Sure, maturity's the only thing that allows us to get anything done, even though it does seem to wreak havok with our natural instincts. So, if nothing else, I'll think twice next time before likening it to nobility. Because nobility is totally a case-by-case thing.

If you're wondering, "Why the hell did I even read this? She's got no thought-provoking conclusion!" then I have two reasons for you:

1. My venting to you may well have saved you bodily harm, as it has probably postponed my next attack of pent-up rage until summer vacation.
2. While having no thesis, this post DOES have a valid theme. Which you said you wanted anyway. So if you want philosophical intrigue, go watch Contact.

-Ahaneen

THE JULIA POST

I've come to the recent conclusion that I actually TRY to fail at certain things, to save myself from...hell, I don't know. These things include playing soccer in P.E., holding down a bar chord on a steel-stringed guitar for more than 10 seconds, and, of course, posting on this blog. Meaning that if you all want me to post more, then either give me money to go see a therapist about this failing problem, or...threaten my loved ones. Maybe just hold up a puppy and say "Wandor/Wando/Wado/'Do, if you do not post, this puppy will die."

Anyway, this post is a long time coming: the Julia Post. I don't know when I actually promised my dear friend Julia to write a post dedicated to her, but I did, and I don't regret it. And as the first order of business, I have a message for Julia: since I know you don't like people's names being put up on blogs for privacy's sake, your name will only be up here for a few days, after which time I'll change it to the best name I find in the comments. And then this sentence (and the one preceding it) will disappear.

But how to do a Julia Post? After much puzzling, I decided that the best way to do it would be to brainstorm a list of things that come to mind when I think of Julia, and then write a short rambling for each. Which means that the rest of this post will make as much sense as the phrase "Stupidfresh!" I have ordered the most coherent things first in the list, and then it descends slowly into madness.

1. "Beans"
   Beans, beans, what is there to say about beans? The best thing about that word is that you can tack on any other word, like "lame" or "fun" or "cool," and the resulting phrase will make absolutely no sense to a regular, thinking person; but will be perfectly understandable to the poetically flexible brain of a spazoid. Meaning that we no longer need online questionnaires or heart-wrenching betrayals to show us who our true friends are: simply slip the phrase "awesome beans" into your first conversation with someone, and a true friend will, at least, not look at you like you're a moron; and at best will reply with "Jokes!!"


2. "Julia" by The Beatles
   This song proves that John Lennon was a genius. Why? Because half the guitar chords in it are ones that he probably made up while thinking he was a walrus; and the other half are perfectly normal chords that, when sprinkled in with the others, sound equally wacky. In addition, the key that I play it in requires me to sing either really high or really low. Which is not John Lennon's fault, technically; if I were to play it in the key he wrote it in, I would not have this problem. But I would also have to use a capo. And capos scare me.


3. English Class
   Tell me a joke. Tell me a joke. Tell me a joke.
   That should have made sense to all those who are in Ms. Aegerter's 8th period English class, but to those who aren't...there was an episode in which Ms. Aegerter left the room for a few minutes, leaving us to work silently, and Kate decided to fill that silence by saying "tell me a joke" every ten seconds.
   Don't even ask.


4. Tall People
   Ever notice that a person's height is relative? Sometimes I'll have known someone for a long time, and become such good friends with them that I don't realize how much shorter they are than I am. (Except for, you know, the really short people.) Or I'll have met someone during their "tiny" stage, and then suddenly one day we'll stand back to back and they're TALLER than me. That always makes me happy inside. I've also noticed that different people "wear" their height differently...for example, Julia is a tall person who doesn't try to mask it. Me, I'm more of a sloucher.


5. Beanie Babies
   I'm going to rush through this one because it makes me sad to think of stuffed animals. I've got about a hundred, but I like having my room relatively neat so I kinda put them all in a closet. And now they're probably dusty and have worms. I should come up with some kind of rota so that three or four animals at a time can emerge from the darkness and occupy my bucket chair. Yes, that would work nicely.


6. Double Frees
   It seems like double frees were a lot more fun last year. Probably because I was more of a spaz then, and spent less time staring at my Google homepage and more time hiding in trash cans. Trash cans, and rain dancing, and hiding under the stage in the auditorium. And now...Youtube. I also didn't realize last year how lucky I was to have a double free after Assembly. Having to wake up from a PowerPoint-induced stupor and then trudge off to class makes my insides go cannabalistic every time.


7. Friendly Dogs
   My neck hurts. I say this because I have nothing to say about friendly dogs. Well, other than sometimes they sniff your crotch (WHY?), and sometimes they have saggy faces. Sometimes they stink like rotten meat. Sometimes they just sag like a heavy load. Fortunately, I've never seen one explode.
   





8. Pool
   Pool is a very fun game, even though I've only played it once, and even though more than half the fun of playing it isn't the game at all. It's that it's pool. True, I am an American adolescent girl who will probably die without having smoked a single doobie, but whenever I play pool I feel like I should be in a dark musty pub holding a tankard of beer, puffing on a pipe, and speaking in a Cockney accent. And who can hate that feeling? (The only weird thing is that Billy Boyd tends to pop up among my other hallucinations. And he's Scottish, for Godsake.)

Anyhoo, in keeping with the randomness of this post, I have attached an arbitrary picture to each of the items on the list. I love you, Julia.

But now I have to go. My office is on fire.