It's a flannel day.

Today I woke up and decided I couldn't deal with things, so I stayed home. I finished a ton of homework, with the help of three caffeinated drinks, so I feel good about having a homework free weekend, now.

I just need a break so bad. I can't wait to be around lovely people, no homework, and fully devote myself to having a fun for three days in different city. When I think about it, I've rarely devoted myself to having fun since school started, even less so since I began work. I just want to stop feeling trapped by the organized box of obligations that my life has become.

I want to read books not for school, to socialize, to not be brain dead by second period, to get the recommended amount of sleep, to drink coffee because I enjoy it, not because I feel it necessary to survive the day.

I don't want to turn into a burnout. That happened last year (thankfully I recovered) but it can't happen this year, too.
Hearts,
-J-

Meh. A whole week of meh.

I got written up at work essentially for briefly being an asshole to one of the supervisors. Despite the fact that the report was vastly exaggerated to the events that actually happened, it caught me at a time when I was so stressed that it just slid right off me, humoring me more than anything. I did send the few texts to my friends to inform them that I'd been written up for being an asshole. I have a legal document saying that I'm an asshole. I think I need to reevaluate my life. The strange thing, after she wrote me up, I've genuinely gotten along with her better. How does that work?

There are three nights, a paper, a presentation and a novel between me and Halifax. I need to stop replacing sleep with coffee, that is a very bad habit, and my mind is ceasing to produce coherent thoughts.

I think something snapped inside of me, not yet senioritis (when 12th graders give up because of the sudden realization that high school ends soon) but something preceding that. A stage in my senior year where I stress out, get lots of things done, and hate 90% of everything I do for a few weeks.

All I want right now is a good night's sleep,

When people talk about "the real world," I think that they forget that many high school students are in fact not twiddling their thumbs, but go to school for six hours a day, got to work for another five, then go home to homework, with the occasional extracurricular activity thrown in. We seem to get a strangely small amount of recognition for what we put up with.
Hearts,
-J-

Bagels: the redeeming factor of my life.

This weekend there's a choir trip to Halifax and I don't think I've ever needed something bad. Choir trips are possibly the best things, as they include the majority of my favorite people and tend to have lots moments that later make noteworthy stories.

The last week has been so busy. I've buzzed from one thing to another a great deal, filling in the cracks with homework and the occasional bout of sleep and food. I've also resorting to collapsing in a state of exhaustion when I have a few minutes that allow me to do so.

I also have this thing at work where as soon as I clock in, I have a perpetually cheerful facade. It's exhausting but necessary to appease my ever watchful superiors who really just take themselves too damn seriously. That said, I manage to do things to piss them off, though I'm never quite sure because they're also masters of the perpetually cheerful facade. When I get out of acedemics, I feel like I have so much potential to fail in "the real world" that people keep passively mentioning. In both jobs I've ever had, I've been really good at pissing off my supervisors, which is probably one of the worst things I could ever do.

When I'm stressed and busy all the time my caffeine tolerance goes down. In the last few days, it's hit an all time low, from having an English paper for IB due today (but I'm not done yet because it's been the most painful paper to write of all time), a history presentation sometime in the next week, finishing a novel and doing a presentation about it, having choir things, and work (coincidentally at consistently inconvenient times). So basically, I'm wired, stressed and hating everything.

EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.

Except I bought seven bagels for $3 and that is very beautiful, though the apathetic cashier wasn't as enthused about the "Fill a bag for $3" bagel promotion as I was.
Love,
-J-

Realizations (that I'm a horrid human being)

The city bus that I take to co-op runs from the university across town to the mall, so I often run into friends that go to the university. Today, Missy happened to be on the bus, so we sat together and were slightly loud and obnoxious, as we are both prone to being, which just escalates when in close quarters with each other. The topic of a local band arose while she was debating aloud whether to go a coffee house tonight, as they were playing there, but we both came to the conclusion that they were vastly overrated and that the front man vaguely resembles a muppet. Our conversation moved on from that, but when I got off at my stop, out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone sitting behind me with unmistakably muppet like features. He looked back at me with a look of disdain, making all my hopes of perhaps our comments having escaped his ears disappear. Guys, I dropped an insult directly about a stranger on public transit, unknowingly while they were present. Oops. I am one of the world's biggest assholes. Maegan replied to this situation with the text "Now he knows he looks like a muppet. He'll never be able to unsee that."  Missy and I are currently planning the creation of buttons that say "World's biggest asshole" to give society a fair warning. Sometimes I think I'm not as much of an asshole as I think I am, but then something like this confirms it several times over.

 I also somehow got myself invited to a New Year's Eve party held by someone who I barely know, solely because Missy was disappointed that I don't know the group of music kids from a neighboring town. At least I have at one interesting option for my New Year's Eve, now. I'd feel a little bad about abandoning the tradition of tenting out in a senior's hall in the sticks with youth group with copious amounts of midnight snacking, but hey, a party could be potentially more interesting and include fewer people that annoy me. Probably.

And those are the things that happened to me today: I publicly insulted people on city transit and got invited to a party that's a month and a half away that I probably won't attend unless I find myself utterly devoid of other options. I hope your day included fewer realizations that apologies in the form of balloons would be nice to give people than mine did.
Hearts,
-J-

No theme, just madness.

• Do any of you guys have a friend that you made from some passing event a while ago and who you run into about four or five times a year by simply finding them at the same place you currently happen to be, proceed to have a long winded conversation with them, and then forget that they exist until the next coincidental meeting? Or is that just me?
• I feel like I put a lot of energy into making myself do things quickly and somewhat mindlessly so that my mind doesn't start going in circles, over thinking and double guessing everything.
• I think that being a barista is over glamorized by people. But you need the memory of an elephant, a great deal of patience, to keep up for hours of a fast paced environment, willingness to lose a lot of self respect, the ability multitask like a boss and the realization the sometimes you will still be ready for a nap after four shots of espresso. On top of that, you're expected to be nice to people. I'm worked pretty hard and flash my share of haggard smiles at customers.
• I'm considering going on a movie watching binge because the library actually has a half decent collection and I'm movie illiterate beyond belief. I'm developing a system to thoroughly go through the movie collection and everything. The library is increasing my OCD exponentially, though it's yet to be too much of a problem. Any suggestions of movies I should watch?
• I have a paper due Monday about a book I read last April and haven't had time to reread. I'm not sure how to distribute my content, so I've come up with a system where I put square brackets around sections that I can expand by a few sentences if I come out below the word count. I feel like from the skills I've gotten from IB, I'll be fine with the workload in university. That's a comfort. But these words are being written slower than molasses going uphill in January.
• I also started writing my 1000 word autobiographical essay for my application for University of King's College's Journalism program. I've spent half an hour on it and already have 400 words. It's going a lot better than my English paper for Monday and applications aren't due until the end of March or something. This admissions essay is something I'm not going to let myself half-ass. It's going to be good, and probably also a plus that I can revise it for scholarship applications.
  
  Sufjan Steven's 58 track Christmas album, "Silver and Gold"
  Hearts,
  -J-

A collective list of reasons I want to punch owls.

This weekend was a terrible weekend. Not like an actually terrible weekend, but I feel really crappy at the tail end of it, now.

I woke up on Saturday at 6:30am because I needed to be at STU by 9am for their open house (because university and stuff). We managed to make the usual hour and a half drive in just over an hour, so we arrived on time and got registered. That was when my brother and my dad decided to leave me for an hour in a building that I've never been in before in a room full of several hundred high schoolers and their parents, of whom I was vaguely acquainted with about three, and tables with profs from all the different faculties of the university. I was very close to having a panic attack, having found the toxic situation involving both collecting information about university and crowds of complete strangers. After about half an hour, I had calmed myself down, talked to a dreadlocked hippie about a major legitimately called 'Great Books' because I was wandering around looking lost and overwhelmed and his table was empty. Most of the tables I wanted to go to were super crowded, and ventured to join the cluster of people around the journalism table and listened to an awkward kid with a nasally voice brag about the fact that he's been freelancing since he was fourteen, after which I avoided the crowded tables and went to the small outlying ones, like women/gender studies and sociology. Eventually things died down, people started leaving to go to other events, so after waiting out another kid who was talking about his intense love of The Odyssey to a Poly Sci prof who's eyes were glazing over, I finally got some good, relevant information. The afore mentioned Poly Sci prof introduced me to the head of the journalism department who made me feel that my life isn't going to be a failure. After that there were some other things, including a tour, and I believe that I could comfortably enjoy my university career there, but it's still my second choice.

Saturday evening I attempted the near impossible feat of getting across town by navigating around the Christmas parade that disrupts every area I had to pass. It took me an hour, but with phone maps and the Rent soundtrack, I did it. Who knew a Christmas parade could easily debilitate getting anywhere in a city of 80 000. I celebrated by breathing a sigh of relief, consuming four pieces of pizza, and ranting about the pretentious asshole kids at the STU open house who are probably going to have their egos bashed down to bearable levels once university actually starts. Since it was Margie's birthday party, we celebrated by watching Mamma Mia and enjoying every second of it to its full potential.

This morning I woke up at Margie's house and went to church early without coffee. I then made super mediocre coffee for the entire youth group before our skit. Then I had to leave early to get to work, before the potluck.

I got to work and saw that the crowd wasn't that bad. Then I walked out of the back room and saw a line of ten people through the door. The funny thing was, there was consistently a line of ten people through the entire shift. Five hours of non-stop crazy. We ran out of eggnog and Missy had to go to the grocery store, leaving only two of us for half an hour. We had 10+ drinks lined up at any given time for hours. I had to punch in order after order, which involves a reasonable amount of concentration and juggling punching in orders/payment/marking cups/getting tea and coffee/getting food, all with speed and efficiency to keep the line moving. I had one fifteen minute break in that entire time, when I had planned to get something to eat, but the chaos didn't allow me to get anything to eat or drink. On the way home, I bought a box of cheesy bread and ate the entire thing by myself. The shift had made me feel so shitty that I feel no regrets over that decision. Stress+not having time to eat=later unashamed eating of crap. My family stared at me over the table with sadness in their eyes, thinking that they will have to watch my stressed descent into gluttony and obesity.

Now I look forward to a week of writing my entire World Lit. paper draft (a literary paper for IB consisting of 1200-1500 words), a history presentation, finish a novel, plus whatever other homework comes up, and hopefully maintaining my sanity to a degree that allows me to get out of bed in the morning. I hate looking ahead and realizing there's a small, inevitable circle of hell waiting. Imminent IB breakdown? I think perhaps.
Hearts,
-J-

Pondering

Sometimes there's a moment where life stops feeling like a repeating circle of events and I feel the tangible passing of time.

Today was one of those days. This morning, a small selection of choir went to the local veteran's home for their Remembrance day service. The veterans sat in the front rows in their uniforms, many in wheel chairs and hooked up to oxygen, sporting either looks of either deep reverence or dementia-induced confusion. There was one man in the front row who insisted on standing for the last post and the moment of silence, despite that he needed a nurse to support him.

When we weren't up front singing, we stood in the hallway as there were no empty chairs to be found. I looked at the rows of black and white pictures of different military units, mostly WWII era. Pictures of young people who now are sitting in wheel chairs or have passed on of old age, or who never made it home in the first place. Everything suddenly felt very real, like a layer had been removed between me and the events of the past. That these people were personally affected by these events of the past that feel so distant to me.

I had a sudden awareness of the nature of passing time. The realization that these people who were part of and witnessed a huge event in history are getting very advanced in age and in the next few decades they will become a detached piece of history. The realization that someday, I and my peers will be the oldest people in a room. That someday I will have faded into history, to have my world summed up into small black print in a text book for people who are also destined to eventually survive only in small black print. So maybe my original circle theory holds true to this, too.

That's something to ponder.
Hearts,
-J-

"The Great Laugh of Mankind."

This week has had running themes of comfortable contentness. But after last week, I feel pretty content with most things. Last week included an awful lot of self loathing for no particular reason.

This week was just really nice. I mean, I didn't have an existential crisis at youth group on Wednesday for the first time since September. I didn't get drastically behind on school work. I had more of a social life than I've had in a few weeks. I fell asleep to the song "Out Of Egypt, Into The Great Laugh Of Mankind, And I Shake The Dirt From My Sandals As I Run", my summer nap time anthem (and damn straight my summer was so eventful that I had a nap time anthem).

On Wednesday, I went to a university fair and, since I actually knew what information I was looking for, I found out some useful things that websites don't give me. It was also a good opportunity to compare and contrast the different schools. Walking up to one table and having them describe the Journalism program, then going directly to another table a few down and asking them the same questions was quite useful to me. I'm currently more pumped than scared about next year.

Yesterday there was a coffee house at school. As with every single coffee house ever at my school, it was a mixture of insanity, humour and talent, in vastly varying proportions in the different acts. It opened with two scrawny (not necessarily 100% sober) hipsters kind of freestyle rapping for a grand total of eight minutes, then going up again under a different band name and playing punk rock. Eventually one guy was laying on the floor, shredding on his guitar (no one does Thursdays quite as hard as they do). Other notable moments include when I bugged Alan to read Body of a Woman by Pablo Neruda, which he did, in an intense pause filled style befitting William Shatner, while nature sounds were played on the keyboard behind him. Halfway through he had thoroughly re-noticed the extent of the explicitness found in that poem and rocketed through the rest of it. Hysterical laughter happened, especially when he suggestively raised his eyebrows for a few parts. On top of that, there was the usual assortment of music from talented people singing irritating music (*coughmultipleSimplePlansongs*) to untalented people singing good music and everything in between. There's this one guy from another school who always performs and severely needs to be picked up by Disney at some point (i.e., he's fifteen, has blonde highlights and a significant tween fan base).

Today was the performing debut of this year's choir at my school's (early) Remembrance day ceremony. I was very happy with how we did - it reminded me of why I like choir and why it's worthy of my time for an hour and a half every week. It's also a plus that I got to see all the choir boys in suits and bow ties. They were (for the most part) really adorable.The choir boys in suits and bow ties probably falls on to the list of the most adorable things I've ever seen, right under "Miniature yorkies in sweaters."

Now I have long, vastly unbooked long weekend, a significant amount of tasty marked out food from work, a bit of a caffeine buzz (actually, I think that my 5pm espresso is wearing off) and a cozy sweatshirt proclaiming in large letters on the right sleeve that I graduate in 2013.
Hearts,
-J-

I'll drown my annoyance in free tea, now.

Yesterday night was just *keyboard smash*.

I usually start my shifts pretty good. I know what's going on, I can get it all done. Then I get overwhelmed, especially since customers have picked up all of the sudden and all the usual cleaning has to be completed just the same. Also, all my shifts lately have been with the person who trained me, so she takes everything I do wrong a little personally. Her manner reminds me a bit of my 10th grade English teacher who wrote fairly harsh criticisms on my papers, followed by a rather condescending smiley face. Yesterday, she told me I needed to be nicer to customers because I don't come off as friendly enough (earlier this week at the library, I was told the same thing but I was ok with it). I'm taking this more personally than I should.

Also, every single person that works at my store is female and there is usually one shift manager and one barista working at one time. Therefore, there is an obvious hierarchy and some unnecessary politics. It's kind of hard not to take things personally, which somewhere in the midst of several years of IB classes I thought I'd learned not to do. But I guess school has never required me to be friendly and observe social niceties under supervision. At work, they're moving on from seeing me as that new girl who hasn't figured everything out yet to my personality flaws of being an asshole sometimes (see previous post). I can't wait until I've been there long enough to not be under the same constant scrutiny. The ever present hierarchies are terrible and remind me too much of my previous summer student job at the church.

I know that I'm not the nicest person. I asked my dad about it and he replied,"You're not hostile. You...ah...speak your mind." So I'm really bad at social niceties. I'm at this weird point where I need to think before I speak because I'll probably offend people that I don't want to offend because people just have a lot of feelings and insecurities, dammit.

Then when I got home at 10 (after taking way too long to sweep because glitter was everywhere from the Christmas decorations) and wore plaid on plaid out of my pointed rebellion against social conventions. Then I realized that ranting to people with bigger problems than yours makes you feel a little more content with your life, but super worried for other people. There was a lengthy, civil conversation about religion between me and one of my atheist friends. Then weird conversations happened. That lasted until 2am.

Now I really don't want to go work for six hours on a Saturday night with people who may or may not judge me as being completely unsuitable for interacting with people. I'm so bad at being employed. I just want to crawl into my introverted little haven, or utilize the healing powers of laying on Tatyana's floor while watching a bad 80's movie. That would be nice. This responsibility thing is shitty sometimes.
Hearts,
-J-

Reasons I'm Kind of an Ass Sometimes: An Incomplete List

1. I hate hypocrisy so I acknowledge when I'm a hypocrite, then attempt to justify it.
2. I play mind games with people sometimes when I'm bored and get way too much joy out of it.
3. I usually show up to everything exactly on time or slightly late.
4. I demand a source whenever people tell me slightly sketchy/unbelievable fact and actually expect one.
5. I ruin the things people love by telling them the faults in them.
6. I'm really grumpy when I'm hungry/exhausted.
7. I accidentally whine without feeling particularly annoyed anything.
8. I state the truth whether people want it or not.
9. I occasionally force my opinions on impressionable people, usually about things that don't matter.
10. I use text speak ironically.
11. I say YOLO ironically.
12. I do too many things ironically and unintentionally judge people who do the same things unironically.
13. I probably sound super condescending sometimes, completely unintentionally.
14. I refuse to take on almost any responsibility at youth group, for selfish reasons.
15. I'm really loud when I shouldn't be. 
16. I make people justify themselves when I really shouldn't.
17. I avoid elderly people at all costs, the sole reason being that I'm scared they'll judge me.
18. I judge people who order complex drinks at work.
19. I usually visibly lose interest when people begin talking about their love life.
20. I'm more biased against people for stupid things than I should be. 
21. I get angry every time this kid in my English class reads aloud or does a presentation because he does this really irritating throat clearing thing every thirty seconds.
22. I'm annoyed by any debate involving religion and will either immediately admit defeat or walk away.
23. I show up uninvited.
24. I ask questions to which I already know the answer. 
25. My goal at work is simply to be better than the worst barista there.
26. I'm annoyingly cynical about nearly everything.
27. I ignore social niceties more than is apparently acceptable. 
28. I'm worried I'm becoming really self absorbed and am doing absolutely nothing about it.
29. I'm making a list of reasons I'm kind of an ass sometimes and still feel narcissistic.

Hearts,
-J-