mcollinknight

Dear Livejournal;

It is snowing right now. Actually, I believe the correct term is "slushing." Copious amounts. 15 cm by tomorrow morning - *sigh*.

Not only was my French workshop cancelled today, but my History prof cut his lecture short by one hour in order to beat the storm home - clearly, the universe wanted me to work on my essay, and was keen on providing me with a multitude of opportunities. I chose to laugh in the universe's general direction by... well, I don't actually remember what I did. It wasn't that productive.

Speaking of productive, anyone doing NaNoWriMo this year? I've wanted to do it for about a year and a half, but it's not going to happen this year - well, it is, but not in November. I'm doing it in December instead, since I will have oodles of free time - November has wayyyy too many scary essays in it. Which sucks, because part of the reason it would be so fun is because of the whole online/LJ support thing, but I'm not going to a) blow any of my first major essays of university or b) write a crappy novel because I'm not fully committed.

Funny Conversations Recently Overheard:
(1)
AWESOME POLITICS TA (APT): So the prof couldn't be here today -
CLASS: *poorly muffled cheer*
APT: But we were just going to watch a documentary anyway, so the plan is to watch that and by the end all hate America...
CLASS: She knows how things go down here. Welcome. You are one of us.
APT: Also I have your midterms. If anyone stampedes I fail you all.
(2)
COLLINE: Hey guys, how much jam would you potentially have to eat in order for it to be considered one "serving" of fruit?
BURDZ & LEAH: ...
COLLINE: Oh. That's right. I forgot: I've only known you for two months, I can't go asking questions like that, you don't know me -
BURDZ: Colline. How much jam have you eaten today?
LEAH: Can you please lecture her while I phone the health line?
COLLINE: You *do* know me. I'm so pleased.
(3)
GUY IN ARABIC CLASS: Miss, can we please listen to them sing the alphabet again?
ARABIC PROF: *face splits into huge grin*
COLLINE: I actually do not know which one of you wins the cute today.

I love ladyjaida's poetry. I mean, between the one called "Sometimes I Like To Imagine Edward Thomas And Robert Frost Were Lovers" and the wonder that is "Mirror," she's just so... amazing. I love it. I repeat snatches of it to myself all day. It's hilarious and profound (but not in the "look at me, I'm profound!" way, more just by accident) and since a lot of it deals with writing, being young & vaguely uncomfortable, school, and whatnot, it's incredibly relatable. *happy sigh*

ETA: Apparently LJ is incapable of making cuts if the text is both left-indented and right-indented. I really want the old style of LJ-cutting back, this new thing sucks HXC. So I'll just put it in a comment ;)

It is the end of the year. We're going through the motions: on Tuesday, all the SPAR members put brightly-coloured hand prints on one of the ceiling tiles. People are recycling their notes as they come out of exams. You know how else you can tell?

It's YEARBOOK TIME. Now, people always write really funny and sweet things in yearbooks: it's what you do. However, this year being our last, people have gone overboard. I usually collect signatures over the week, and then read them all at once on the last school bus ride. However, that didn't happen this year, and I read them while sitting in the hallway of the empty school, waiting for my audition to start. I was kind of overwhelmed. I'll put some of the best here, and see if it helps you know me any better:

Stay idealistic: it does more good than you know. Peace and love, my friend. --Raph

I just want to let you know what an incredible role model you are to so many people. You're the sweetest person ever and we're all going to miss you next year. -Stacey

Colline! I'm so happy that we did Brick-by-Brick together - such a good idea on your part and it really helped to make my year more memorable! Please please don't ever stop doing stuff like that and tell me - you have to - how the trip goes. Glad we became friends this year! --Ling

Your ambition and determination are admirable. Don't lose them! --Mistah Beavah

Colline! You are one of the most selfless people I know. The world is a better place because of you! Good luck. --Foghorn Shelby

Colline: you've done GREAT things for this school and you will carry that Greatness for life. --Brom

Colline! So I decided that if I did do highschool over again, someting different to do would be to hang out more with you (wow! rhymes). It was good though when we did!! I'm sure our paths will cross this summer, and likely other times too! Keep in touch, a bientot. --Osler

Colline, words cannot describe my love for you. I can only assure you that when I say "I fucking love you," it's really from the deepest depths of my heart. --Sam Diller

Colline, It's been great getting to know you this year, you're an amazing person. You're so dedicated to the things you do & it makes me optimistic. --Tea

My dearest Colline: you are lovely and beautiful and talented. You inspire me, as has your friendship. My fellow TREE HUGGER, we have done so much this year. We have been the change. I can't wait for our visits next year and our EPIC TRIP TO KENYA. Remember: Craig says he goes to Kenya every summer. Perhaps a little rendez-vous avec Craig. Oui. D'accord. I love you. Je t'aime. Je t'aime. Je t'aime. --Jolene

Colline! It was awesome getting to know you this year and working with you on SPAR! You've got an amazing heart and you're really driven in everything you do it seems. You're going to do great things for this world lol - you already have! Thanks so much for all your help and hard work! --Kate

Colline, I'm grateful to have gotten to know you, and I cherish you as a friend. There's something special about you; whether that's your dazzling wit or beautiful soul I have yet to decide. You're beautiful. Thank you for your friendship, and thank you for sharing your wonderful Colline. Safe journey. --Ratanadawong

This is the designated 'Ian Corner' :) I am glad to have met you this year as you are one of the few mature girls at this school. --that's what YOU think, Ian

There were many more, but these were my favourites :) Well, these and the poem about ears that Alannah wrote for me. I'm actually just so embarassed and pleased and proud that so many people - so many of my peers, so many of whom are awesome and incredible and inspiring in their own right - think so much of me.
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PS I am officially the First F**king Fairy in Midsummer! I'm so excited... this is going to be a wonderful summer. Robin is so incredibly awesome and nice (and really good with compliments *blushes*), and they wanted to give me Helena but just couldn't justify my missing 5 rehearsals - which I totally and completely get, and actually I would have been very uncomfortable taking the role knowing that. First Fairy is awesome, I'm just so... YAY!!!! I'm also the Helena understudy :):):)

Yesterday was so much fun! 40 of us descended upon the Big T.O. for "Spread the Word 2008," otherwise known as "The Writers Trip." Most of our school's Grade 12 Writer's Craft students printed several copies of our best work, stapled a bright yellow piece of paper explaining our mission to it, and scattered them in unlikely places around the city, hoping people would happen upon them, read them, and respond to the email address. Basically we were just trying to get feedback, though I'm pretty sure everyone just took it as "YAY free day in Toronto!! No school!!" which is also fine.

I love my friends. I don't think I ever forget that fact, but yesterday was just realisation after realisation of it. Our group consisted of: Ratanadawong, known throughout the day as "Tall Asian" or "Our school's only stab at diversity"; Jolene, who will be a Torontonian next year and was therefore ecstatic throughout the day; Jeremy, also a future (and past) Torontonian; Erica, whom I love and who is gorgeous and who sat on me multiple times; and Bromley, always good for a laugh.

Ratanadawong is the FUNNIEST PERSON OF LIFE. He makes me laugh so much... he's so inappropriate, and yet none of what he says ever manages to be offensive. I don't know how he does it, but he does. I thinking "I really shouldn't be laughing at this..." but I just can't help myself. It was fun, it was humid, we walked a lot and ate really good Japanese/Korean food (the best part of Canada's immigration and multicultural policies? WE HAVE THE BEST RESTAURANTS EVAR), and dispensed our writing throughout the city while reading each-other's. The best place we left them was either the taping extravaganza inside washroom stalls or when we wandered into the atrium of the Cardiac centre at Toronto General and left pieces in the waiting room. A good time all around, and now we just have to wait and see if anyone responds. 

( Picaturzzz... )
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Tomorrow is Prom. I have 3 more days left of High School, and I wrote my French Grammar Exam today.

I swear to goodness this is the last thing I will do before buckling down to work on my ISU essay for english - being blessed with an empty house, I have already sung the entirety of Avenue Q, which I do every time I am alone. Anyway, today Raph's dad got back from Italy, apparently, and brought European chocolate with him. Belgian chocolate. Cote d'Or chocolate. My favourite chocolate in the WORLD. Of course, all I had to do was smell it to be transported a year and an ocean ago. Then in English we wrote poems, and I thought about histories and colonies as the chocolate melted on my tongue. The following were produced:

Chocolate - Cote d'Or
Slivers shave off around my teeth - 
it's dark and heavy, an
effort
to snap, bitter and cool in hands, bitter and warm
in mouth. So much within.
This tastes like luxury.
  Belgian mornings, dark Belgian histories,
  dark Belgian secrets.
Congo drums beat on my tongue
    as I remember
                                    that spring.

Wars
In Belgium, it rains.
Swollen hills and fields turn blue now
From lack of war. Rain calls to mind the
 muddy trenches.
    Once, so small, so dainty and homely,
like a wife you've known forever who takes your
beatings and then
curtseys
in return.
    They used to fight battles of Golden Spurs and Waterloo lions and Great Wars of mud and
gas and trampled flimsy forgotten fences here.
       Now, it just
     rains.

Yesterday the Mothership handed me a CD and said it was all my "old" files: computer files from what I called 'The White Computer,' or 'The Mitsubishi' (I'm not joking, it was! Although my dad likes to argue and say it was a Toyota. But that's a rather long story and besides the point). This is the computer I had when I was 12-16. It was a big honking huge white thing that made chugging noises, with scarcely anything on it but Word and Solitaire. And that was all I needed.

As I was looking at the CD and saving any files I wanted, I got kind of overwhelmed. I used to write a lot. Instead of fondly thinking about what a precocious child I was, it made me sad. Because I don't write that much any more. Not the way I used to. I don't write stories any more. I do my LJ thing, and I do school assignments, and I do Christmas cards when the Mothership bugs me. That's it.

However, it's not for lack of trying. All last summer, when I was bored and depressed, I kept thinking I should write something..., and I had some half-baked idea for a large writing project that never even got underway. Somewhere along the lines, I lost - not the desire, but the will to write. I'll get distracted by the internet, or I'll play 84 games of mind-numbing Spider Solitaire, or I'll stare at the screen for 15 seconds of intense frustration before flipping to something else. I was reading all the little stories I wrote yesterday thinking, Where did this person go? Why did I stop doing this? When did my attention span and my willpower become so short? Am I still a writer?

Sure, most of them were cutesy little horse stories and whatnot, but I found a parody crackpiece I wrote in Grade 8 called "Little Red Chewing Gum," and I was laughing, going This kid's hysterical! How did she come up with this? I want to be that writer again.

I had some good times with that computer. I remember Sunday afternoons, listening to the Vinyl Cafe and Wiretap, and The Sunday Edition on CBC and playing Egyptian Majohnngh, or putting a Gordon Lightfoot CD on my boombox in the corner and plugging away at my 76-page magnum opus, which sadly contained a distressing amount of swords, and wasn't on the CD. That was my writing corner. Those were my writing days. I wrote a lot last semester, but that was Writer's Craft class, and those were all first-person, non-fiction pieces. They don't count. I want to write again, but I don't have time. I write best at night, but I can't function on no sleep. I have daydreams a mile a minute, but I can never summon the energy to put pen to paper. I've been trying to write my Faux Russian Epic in an effort to put words down, any words at all. I'm repressing my Inner Editor and just trying to go until I get into a rhythm. I've become very self-critical, and can't write something knowing it's bad.

It's true: I don't have time. I keep saying I'll write something this summer, and I hope it's true, but I don't want writing to be something I shove in the margins, and only get to when all my other options have been exhausted. However, neither do I want to make it my primary focus or my career. I just want to have it be some intrinsic part of me, something I couldn't let go of if I tried. I thought that about horses once, and look what happened. I let go. I let go, I moved on, and I don't see myself going back anytime soon. I'm undamaged by it - I suppose I would miss it if I ever thought about it. I don't want writing to be that expendable to me. I want that little crazy girl back.

This year, what with the approximately 3174 New Years Memes I did, I forgot to do my LJ Birthday Post: I have had this LJ for over two years now (actual birthday was December 23rd). I didn't have the energy to do the whole introspective, "why I write," "what I use LJ for," "how I am a social-outcast-turned-Life-of-the-Party" post, because, frankly, that's boring and pathetic and I could never pull it off again.

This evening, however, I experienced a strange coincidence that, I think, chronicles my LJ experience in full. Because I'm not really in LJ for the "blogging," truth be told. I'm here because of a group of writers I love. But I advance the point: the tale, told in an odd style (I think originally I was going for Classic Play Manuscript/Overwrought Opera Dialogue, but that kind of went off the rails and just degenerated from there), is below the cut.

( Sneachta in Manhattan, and C'est pas juste: Coincidence? I think not. ) - Jaden. A tall teenage girl with blonde pixie hair, who uses expressive hand motions and wears classy scarves.
mcollinknight - Colline. A not-tall teenage girl who comes into school on snow days and likes to randomly blurt French phrases.
ladyjaida - Jaida. A young writer in New York, at Columbia and Barnard. Trying to learn Japanese while writing stories about Harry Potter's father's romantic escapades.
mistful - Maya (or, as she is now known, Sarah Rees-Brennan). A tall, red-haired Irish maiden living and writing in New York for a year, who falls into snowbanks under the influence of lemonade.
pubrants - Kristin Nelson. An agent who represents Sarah Rees-Brennan and listens to truly awful Christmas music.
alg - Anna Louise Genoese. An editor from New York, who apparently wears the same converse shoes she wore in college.
... with cameos made by the shoebox_project and the Stalking Binoculars.

One day, during a French class spent in the library, Colline is beckoned by Jaden. Forsaking their homework (listening to a CBC podcast by the name of C'est La Vie), both are drawn and tempted to something Previously Unknown: Fanfic. The sky rumbles. Thunder threatens. Purple kittens frolic in the grass. Something Has Changed. The Internet, previously viewed by these two young girls as being "Only For Pr0n," has revealed something of Much Hilarity and Good Times - The Shoebox_Project.

...A few weeks later...
The radio has spoken to Colline and informed her that - alas! egad! what horror! - the buses are not running. Undaunted, our heroine forges her way (traipses, more like) into the school library, whereupon, called by the siren song of Shoebox, she is coerced into joining Livejournal.

(Oh, what tangled webs we weave.)

She is soon well and truly mired, aided by her kind and suffering Jaden. But the drug has taken ahold, and there will be no turning back. Antidote, there is none.

Colline has taken like a natural, and has now fully embraced the Way of the Internet: to wit, stalking and lurking  which she does, most intrepidly, at the journal of ladyjaida, where an obsession has taken hold. Soon, however, Colline begins to wonder about the people on the periphery of Jaida's journal. A lip is chewed. A link is clicked. This link takes her to a new journal (and a new level of stalking. The Stalking Binoculars are polished), presided over by one Maya.

Oooh. Shiny.

Colline is entranced once more. Maya, it is soon revealed, is part of a group of YA writers who live in New York City YA writers (including, but not limited to: Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, Jaida Jones, Danielle Bennet, and Maya herself). However, the time comes when Maya moves back to the UK. Further intrigue conspires when she writes a book, and thus is in search of an agent. The agent she chooses is one Kristin Nelson of pubrants. Of course, never being one to fall off the bandwagon halfway through a desert, Colline stalks that, too.

Colline reads much information from the Bowels and Filing Cabinets of the Publishing World (much like Narnia, she imagines, only with more emphasis on semicolons than on William Moseley's admittedly pretty face). Nelson has been blogging for a long time, and Colline must jog (the Stalking Binoculars flying up to hit her in the face every once in a while) to keep up. She trawls through back entries, and stumbles upon some neat posts. A blog is mentioned - nay, recommended! - written by one New York Editor, Anna Genoese. Colline reads those too (forsaking any kind of life in the process), and is astonished to happen upon a post made on December 22nd, 2007. Coincidentally, one day before the birthday of her own dear LJ. What makes this post so special, you ask?

During this post, alg makes mention of CBC podcasts, and in particular, "My other favorite podcast series is C'est la vie, which is about the lives of French Canadians, and it has a tiny little five minute section called Word of the Week! Every week I learn a new word in québécois. Then I pretentiously use it in conversation, and toss off phrases like, "C'est pas juste!"" The exact same homework that was prescribed in that school library two years ago, when our heroines were first given their taste of the Nectar & Ambrosia.

Colline sits still for a few moment, looking at the screen, while absurd Celtic music plays in the background. For, you see, 'Circle of Life,' would probably be more apt. It has all come around; Colline hopes that some divine and dark secret of the universe will be revealed to her at this incredibly karmic moment. However, nothing but "I would like some yogurt right now," comes to mind. The LJ curtain does not close, but stays open late into the night to the fervent typing of Lithuanians.</div>
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Anyway, LJ seems to me to be one big grand circle, if one of fraying rope. I've had lots of good times, especially with my discovery of the New York YA Fantasy Writers, who I idolize to a level that should be considered both complimentary and extremely alarming. Soon it may begin to violate state laws, and THEN, dear readers, will The Fun gegin.

It's been grand. If nothing else, the gangsta shakespeare was worth it. Happy Belated Birthday, LJ.

I was all set to come on and write a happy entry, and now I'm close to crying (I always seem to be crying over the holidays, don't I?) I read Things Edmund Doesn't Know by ladyjaida and now I'm rather upset.

Not because it tanked.

But rather because it didn't.

Does that make any sense at all?