catcher in the rye

It's now two weeks, though it feels much longer, into 3rd term of year 11. Last Saturday was the much anticipated(?) school formal; a time to tan yourself into an Oompa Loompa and get drunk before 7pm at the pre-parties or in the limo.

Oh, I'll give the world a break, it wasn't a bad night. I enjoyed myself. There, I've said it. I actually enjoyed myself at a social event.

Pre-party was at Belle's house. Sorry, did I say house? I mean manor, or maybe even palace...



As you can see we were all very glamorous and sober with our little glasses of non-alcoholic punch.



I'll spare you all one photo of me (as I did go to the effort of going to the hairdressers and trying to do my make up) But ofcourse doing the whole shebang was all worth it. Ok, not entirely true, stressing about shoes was completely superfluous, as no one in the end took particular notice.



Haha, what a mature looking facade.









Some of us were given the honour of being driven to the venue in Caity's vintage Jaguar. Stupid me left my camera with Jayne who went in the other car..

And we arrive at the venue: Albert by the Lake. Two gorgeous girls below are Caity and Belle.



Considering we go to MLC, almost the most pretentious and expensive private girls' school in Melbourne, you'd think they'd serve better food. But that's MLC, full of surprises, full of mediocre communal cooking.



One girl out of the 10 on our table brought a date...you can't blame us for getting cosy with eachother =P



I have no idea who this guy is. That's Alyssa hiding though.



The music was nothing special and after dancing to it for too long, taking a break on the balcony was heavenly.






What a pretty backdrop! (ok, the subjects are fairly cute too)









And then it was 11 and the last song was played. It was "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne...more or less a message to the girls that if you've seen a cute guy, it's now or never: steal them from their date.

Looks like Jayne has had enough fun for the night. Little liar, she went out again afterwards and didn't go home 'till 5:30am O:



My feet were raw by then, so we went back to Belle's palace for a small after party. The nicest group of random people came and we had non-alcoholic fun. By then I was too tired to take photos, and as there were a few awkward moments between the less acquainted, my photo snapping would've been more than a little intrusive. After some rowdy bad singing(if one can call it that) on Singstar, most of the guests left and it was just Bernie, Gab and I who slept over at Belle's.

And it was downhill from there. I realised how little I had to look forward to now. And I realised how much I despised my life. My failure to be enthused in school, my social ineptness, my tendency to ridicule everything, my sarcasm, my lack of self control...my general inaptitude at being a teenager.

Maybe I am being melodramatic(or mellow dramatic). I'm trying too hard to be the catcher in the rye. And we all know what happens to kids like that, they end up mentally unstable in some institution.

Ok, I should write my Macbeth commentary, and immerse myself into thoughts which will be graded, and do some analysing which matters now.

~

strange sots, firing off, losing track, missing lots

I'm an impulsive person; always has been. I don't think about things until it's too late, which contradicts my current pattern of attending all these Uni open days, information nights, careers expos etcetera etcetera. No prospective future seems to fulfill all of my obscenely varied repertoire of interests. I joke that hopefully I wont live past 18 so that I don't ever have to make serious decisions and act mature.

urgh.

Sordid thoughts aside, I have had a pleasant week. Thursday night we stayed over at Michelle's house for pizza and movies. As I am an idiotically loyal friend, I waited 30 minutes in the dark cold streets for a pizza shop to open then place an order for a 'small garlic pizza' because I am unlucky enough to have a friend who doesn't eat any other pizza.

I later waited at the train station for 20 minutes at unease as I could feel my small garlic pizza getting colder and colder..












I am too chicken to take photos of people on the train directly, especially since my camera's shutters sound like a clap of thunder.



...but I guess that doesn't mean people on the train wont approach me and ask for a photo. After I agreed, this strange man put on his hood and raised this (rather suss) book in front of his face. "Terminate With Extreme Prejudice" - an euphemism for assassinate. And no, he wouldn't leave me alone, I don't really understand why homeless-looking strangers on the train find me so fascinating. Kim said they identified themself with me, heavens forbid. I now have an address to mail a print of my photo to. Really, if someone is interested, they are welcome to print out this photo and mail it to dear Steven of the Allamein train line. I will give you the address.



A while ago Gabby gave me a little dehydrated best friend as some kind of sick joke. I brought it to Mich's house so we could watch its hydration process. We forgot to.



A lot of bad movies, a solemn game of 'truth and no dares because it's 4am' and 3 hours of sleep later, we went on the train to go to a Melbourne Uni open day.

The first photo I take with my d70 every session I use it is always set under the wrong white balance. But you can see Mich and Yue in the reflection of my sunnies which Kim is wearing. Which is kind of nifty.



One white balance correction after! I catch Kim striking a terribly model like pose.



Poor Bernie is very tired. Very awww.



Kim is just too photogenic to sit opposite to on a train and not take undue amounts of photographs of.






It was a boring day, and I have had a boring weekend. I hate how fast holidays pass and how little of what I planned is accomplished.

Before I leave though, just let me give a quick taunt to Mr. Radcliffe, yes, Mr. Radcliffe, for he now looks like a twenty something under achiever old enough to be referred to as Mr.

Just look at this picture:


He is shorter than all of the female cast :( (the blonde on the left doesn't count because she isn't dressed up in heels) I don't know when the sweet little boy Daniel turned into a Mr. Radcliffe, but I do know that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was the worst HP movie yet(you can imagine my disappoint for I had infact been very eager about this film; so eager that I saw it the day it was released in Australia). It is sacrilege to the audience for them to cut off so much of Mr. Radcliffe's hair and revealing so much of his unsightly face. It is also sacrilege to cut off so much of the book. My favourite part of the movie was the ads and particularly the ad for "The Golden Compass". That movie is one of the few things exciting and motivating me in my life right now.

Really, I amaze myself everytime I write a blog entry by having so much to say about absolutely nothing.

toe cleavage

"Oh you don't like toe cleavage?" is exactly what the shop attendant asked me when I told her that the shoes unfortunately couldn't cover all of my toes. So now I know, there is apparently a name for showing the base of your toes and according to the shop attendant it is "very hot".

I am disliking this influx of foot fetishes. I was watching Ugly Betty last night, as you do, and apparently Bradford has a foot fetish aswell. When the show first came out I remember people gossiped that it might be the next Sex and the City. Ironically(or should it be un-ironically?) Sex and the City also dappled in foot fetishes *gasp* I think Ugly Betty is trying too hard with the foot fetishes, though SATC is a hard act to follow.

Anyway, back from that tangent, I ended up buying the "toe cleavage" shoes afterall because they were purple, suede and uberly high; perfect for me and my formal dress. Oh, and there's another silly advantage......My formal dress is high necked and black, so very prim and proper, and dare I say, morbid. But with the added "very hot" feature of my shoes, my outfit will at least display some form of cleavage, even if it's in the phalanges form. That is about as promiscuous as I get.





PS: I developed some photos yesterday but Jayne is scanning them for me as it has been possibly years since I last caught site of my scanner.

rain

It's been raining incessantly since the holidays began. Rain, well deserved rain. What our parched water catchments have been dieing for. Me? I love the rain. It's nature's ambient music and synonymous to a mug of hot chocolate and a good movie.

I've been getting around most of this week; formal shopping, birthdays, cake baking, shoe shopping, heck, even badminton. No work done though. I think my nerves deserve a rest. True, I didn't do much studying during the term, but I did do a lot of worrying over how I was going to get by without ever picking up a book. Now I can do nothing and feel no guilt. This hiatus is to me what the rain is to the water catchments...I am well deserving of it. I say this much too shamelessly.

"Procrastination is a sign of the well organised; by procrastinating I always know what I have planned for tomorrow" whoever said this gets a rowdy round of applause from me.

I would post photos of what I've been up to, but I've mostly been shooting with film. I finally finished the roll today and will process them asap. Today I took my D70 and went for a walk by myself around dusk.














The problem now is what to do when it stops raining.

I do not like holidays

Holidays have began but I'm no longer naive enough to be excited. Once term starts again the work will only get harder, and even when I finish high school entirely, it'll just mean life as a whole will get harder. No, I am not happy that holidays are here.

Friday:

It's Kim's birthday today but as she's gone on a road trip to advocate "Make Poverty History" we brought her a supermarket cake to school as a surprise on Friday. Though, our surprise didn't work as we forgot that she wasn't going to be at school until after lunchtime.. In a fit of rage we ate the cake, plastic lid and all and recorded it to spite Kim.








Saturday Day:

We went out for a movie as it was Eric's birthday. At first we were seeing "The Life of Others" but me and Oliver's powers of persuasion succumbed the others and we saw "The Science of Sleep" instead. And what a wise decision that was indeed, the main character in the movie spoke Espanol, Francais and heavily sexually accented English; was artsy; a bit 'good' kind of crazy AND admittedly cute. OH how we swooned...



Emo child.



Gabby reminded me of the up coming formal. Fuck. She dragged us, sorry, led us around shopping and she found a beautiful black satin Alannah Hill dress. Unfortunately, I am neither as tall as nor as thin as Gabby so it's going to take me a lot longer than 30 minutes to find a dress that flatters and hides most of my body. And, I have no money. There are simply a lot more urgent and worthwhile things I can buy than a dress which I will wear once.

Saturday Night to Early Sunday Morning:

I went to a gig later that night but due to bad planning I was left at Flinders St station by myself for nearly 2 hours waiting for a different group of friends. Dark, cold, rainy, surrounded by emos, one could say I was almost a bit emo myself. I decided to burn time in a magazine shop and wondered how I hadn't discovered this cheap thrill earlier.

Eventually people came and we had Japanese for dinner because we are chic. Actually, what we were doing to the udon in attempt to share was far from chic...oh well. My eel was good at least(yes I am mature enough to eat eel).

It was "The Basics" gig but there were some other bands and comedy acts. First band to play was "Little Red" and they were the best after "The Basics". We all wanted to take the drummer in "Little Red" home, he was that cute. In a not-very-attractive-but-goofy way. Kim has been trying to get me to go to one of "The Basics" gigs for a year now, and after finally hearing them I'm curious as to why I didn't take an earlier interest.









Not great concert photos but I was too lazy to find a good spot and the other photographers with 1m long lenses were a bit intimidating. Apparently, size matter when it comes to lenses. It's kind of phallic..


I don't know what I'm doing for the rest of my two week break. Buying formal dress and shoes will have to fit in there somewhere. And I'll probably spend a lot of time being arty as I recently found out that the expected number of pieces for my final portfolio is double what I had thought. Shitz.

I've done nothing today but sleep and later we're going to this Szechuan restaurant for dinner which means I'll enjoy the food, but will suffer from abdominal pains similar to those of stomach ulcers tomorrow. Which means I wont get anything done tomorrow either. Damn, I do not like holidays very much, really, at all.