Senioritis and Existentialism

I never did expect the incredible level of sheer willpower needed for the second semester of senior year. I feel so mentally exhausted by menial schoolwork and I just wish that the next two months could simply disappear. AP exams are in a week, and I haven't even decided to start studying for all six of them. It's just so typically stupid of me to blindly trust in my own abilities and go beyond what I could handle. I mean, six APs? Nobody does that. It's ridiculously illogical. I can't even self-congratulate anymore, which is what I did for the past three quarters to keep myself going academically.

I've also discovered that at a time like this, when the near future is basically settled, my priority gets a fairly rough shuffle. I've about 1500 words due in a few hours, and I have around three hundred down. I can't even bother to care. It's like The Stranger all over again.

Jenny: The whole point about him is that he doesn't feel.

Tina: We still don't have to like him.

Jenny: Camus doesn't want you to like him. What he's trying to say is that feeling is bourgeois. Being engagée is bourgeois. His mother dies and he doesn't feel anything. He kills this Arab and he doesn't feel anything.

Tina: I wouldn't feel anything if my mother died. Does that make me an existentialist?

Jenny: No, that just makes you a cow.

Hattie: Une vache.

Camus usually makes me want to weep of stress. I first attempted to read The Stranger last summer and found it depressing and altogether unexciting (though one hardly reads his words for excitement in the first place). Then, recently, I picked up a copy of The Plague in its original language from my French teacher and attempted to school myself into advancing forty pages per day in preparation for the AP exam. As per usual, I'm atrociously behind schedule. 

Maybe I should give myself a few more months before attempting any such literature again. Right now, in the midst of all this academic fuss, it's hardly appropriate to read something that might plunge me deeper into neurosis. Just saying this makes me feel terribly "bourgeois", but then I don't give much of a damn for being disengagée anyways. Not for Camus' sake.

An Education

I got to skip school yesterday on the pretense of complications after oral surgery, and instead of finishing a mock AP Calculus exam of 100+ problems (worth a trite 1/5 point value of that), I watched An Education. The premise itself seems ironic enough already.

I might have been too thick for the message to come across to me in the end, for during the entire viewing I was thinking, "Jenny is what I should have been." Which is an English francophile schoolgirl in love with Pre-Raphaelite paintings (yes, I believe I should have been born English). I personally identify with her on multiple points, but in the end she is different enough from me so that the film cannot truly impact me fundamentally. 

There was a lot of smoking in the movie. I worry that once I hit eighteen, I'll become one-pack-per-day.

I'll tell people that this is me in front of the Notre Dame.

Given the choice, I would have done exactly what Jenny did, which was to become engaged to this suave and infinitely glamorous older man and drop my previous plans for the future. It's just that at this malleable age, everything in the grown-ups' world is absolutely irresistible. I constantly cave into the darker, materialistic side of my personality and I can't even muster up the courage to banish it. Heck, perhaps the reason that I am so slow to absorb the lesson of the film is my obsession with the beautiful period details of the sets and wardrobe. I'm a helpless romantic when it comes to 60s fashion and an anglophile at the same time.

Jenny: I want to read English.

Helen: Books?

Jenny: Sorry?

Helen: You want to read English books?

Jenny: Oh yes, reading English is just another way of saying...

Danny: I wouldn't worry, Jenny. You're wasting your breath.

Rosamund Pike (Helen), whom I've adored ever since Pride and Prejudice, provided priceless comic relief and foil. She's the typically gorgeous blonde with a vapid mind to match. Out of all the characters in the film Helen is perhaps the most likable, the kind of girl who has absolutely no idea what's right or wrong but who will provide you with a shoulder to cry on, no questions asked.

The suave motherfucker with his watch.

I suppose the film serves as a precaution of sorts. On the off-chance that a man looking like Peter Sarsgaard pulls up next to me in a gorgeous car, I'll be astute enough to say no to anything he might offer. I doubt it'll happen around my neighborhood, though. 

An Education is directed by Lone Scherfig. Screenplay by Nick Hornby based on Lynn Barber's autobiography. Starring Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Rosamund Pike, and Dominic Cooper. (The latter of the two I would totally know because I'm obsessed with BBC productions.) Screenshots from film_stills.

May all your Christmases be white

How cruel it is that someone like me should be living in Sunny California. Before I start sounding more and more like an ungrateful wretch, let me make clear that I think there is nothing intrinsically wrong with SoCal. More or less, there's something mentally wrong with me (as my mom suggested the other day) for preferring cold and ice over sun and warmth.

It's just that for the longest time, winter brought along so much more than just a tiny drop in the thermometer and some lukewarm holiday wishes. While living on the east coast, I looked forward to December every year because I loved how the cold intensified every aspect of Christmas. The holiday, as I knew it, absolutely had to have me shivering senseless so that I could run faster inside to a warm room with friends and hot chocolate. December here has me donning a light coat at the most, and I can't even put to use the beautiful white scarf my friend knitted for me.

So while I'm sitting here in dreadful ennui for the next two weeks, I'm searching through everything to bring back tidbits of what winter felt like.

Just like what Ella Fitzgerald has been singing in my head for the past week or so, may all your Christmases be white. For me, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, and that's as far as it will ever go this time around.

Ballet(omane)

My fifteen minutes with ballet happened in first and second grade. At that time, I went to a special elementary school in Shanghai that had an intense integrated dance program. My parents really wanted me to go there because they thought the physical exercises would strengthen my immune system and ward off my pneumonia.

Their plan did not turn out well. I kept on getting pneumonia annually until about age 10. Also, the instructors there told me I was too fat to keep on dancing (they wanted stick-skinny girls who will eventually be career dancers). My mother became really angry because she was making large donations to the dance program and they didn't even treat me like they wanted me to do well. She dropped me from the program at the end of second grade, and there goes my only experience (so far) with ballet.

In retrospect, I should've just told the instructors to f-off. I mean, sure, I was never cut out to be the next Anna Pavlova, but was it really necessary for you to call a seven-year-old fat? Besides, who says someone like me couldn't have kept on dancing? If they had any heart at all, they would have suggested me to continue at another, perhaps less intensive, ballet studio. Maybe by now, I would've been en pointe for several years already.

All that's irrelevant, though. What matters to me now is that my love for ballet has resurfaced. Recently, I have been looking up and reading about everything I can on this topic. I'm learning about ballet companies, dancers, choreographers, complete pieces... I even went to see the American Ballet Company perform at the OCPAC. It was Giselle, with Julie Kent and Jose Manuel Carreno in the leading roles.

It was a touching performance. By the end of the second act, I was sobbing silently in my seat and desperately trying to wipe away my tears as Prince Albert hopelessly left Giselle's grave at the break of dawn. I felt so stupid for crying, since no one around me showed a single drop of emotion, but the tragedy of it all really did shake me. Call me emotional, call me easily affected, it doesn't matter. From then on, ballet became something beautiful to me.

Recently, I've been seriously contemplating the idea of taking ballet lessons. Of course, it'll be the most beginner courses available and I might never get to go en pointe, but it'd be more than what I ever had. For now, I'm only a balletomane, a lover of ballet who ultimately cannot understand the art form on a deeper level. I want not only the capacity to enjoy Svetlana Zakahrova's performance of Swan Lake, but also the understanding of just exactly how difficult every move is and how practically nobody gets to that level of virtuosity. I want more, and there's no reason why it shouldn't work out this time around.

Intro

I keep my own private Xanga, but that's really for the kind of ranting that I'm sure no one cares for. I guess I'd like to also have a place where I could put on public view some of the things I like and the thoughts I have. I've no idea how successful this will be, since I usually get so sick of fashion blogs and their overall pretentiousness (including many of my own failed attempts). Hopefully this will be different, but then who knows.

I plan to inject my own brand of sentimentality into the posts because I feel like my super-sensitivity and attachment to everything I see is kind of comical (sometimes; other times it's just sad).

Anyways.