Le maison de café sans un accordéon.

I went to the coffee house yesterday. It was pretty average and most of the people playing were improvising, but the music kids at my school often improvise in four part harmony. There were several real songs and a few others such as "Hey Guys Come On," an adaptation of "Bui Doi" from the musical. By 'adaptation' I mean they repeated the phrase "Hey Guys Come On" instead of using the lyrics from "Bui Doi," and keeping the intense harmonies. Another notable moment was the spontaneous, eight person rendition of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," during which we died of laughter when Adam got carried away with the strange noises/screams in the background. Adam also recited a poem about David, my school's self-professed most eligible bachelor, while David sat in a chair beside him. Their composure was a thoroughly impressive feat.

Sadly, no accordions or bassoons were present this coffee house. 

That said, I love my school. 
Love,
-J-

Days until choir trip to Boston: 1

The art of goofing off in libraries

I've spent the last two English classes in the public library, which I love, but in groups, my classmates have goofing off in libraries down to an art. I can get no work whatsoever done with them around, which probably isn't the best thing for my academic career.

I've been working on my annotated bibliography, five one-page summaries from five sources about books about books. It will probably cause me a lot of grief. My summarizing skills are rather rusty, practically non-existent, after the past year and a half of stretching out tiny bits of information to get to word counts. I've also had trouble using information only found in the source because I have the occasional urge to throw in a well worded snippet of complete BS. #woesofanIBkid

I chose the topic of Pride and Prejudice, simply because it is the one novel that no one else picked, there is plenty of information about it, and I'm not sick of it anymore because I read it over a year ago. I forgot how my mind doesn't fully comprehend Austen's writing style sometimes (ie: using a gazillion negatives in a sentence half the length of a page), but I eased into it again.

I was reading a chapter I was going to summarize and buried in the author's no nonsense approach to Pride and Prejudice was the line "In the early part of the story, Elizabeth would consider Darcy about as eligible as Varney the Vampire as a prospective marriage partner." Well, if Elizabeth married this Varney character, the book might have been less painful to read in 10th grade. 
Love,
-J-

Days until Boston: 2

Boston trip

 Six days until the choir trip. And I'm really pumped for two reasons: (1) I love choir people and (2) I love trips and the combination hopefully results in five days of ridiculously awesome times. The only other school trip I've been on was the Montreal trip in 8th grade and I had the grand total of one friend who hung out with me. So there's a lot of room for improvement.

Some of the lovely things planned include attending an improv show, the Blue Man Group, touring Harvard and seeing if it's all it's cracked up to be, a formal performance with some other choirs, several choir workshops with hardcore people, attending Shear Maddness and a diner cruise the last night. That, along with a bit of time to shop and explore, is going to make for a busy few days. We'll probably have time to kill in the evenings in the hotel, and considering the alleged anti-sleeping nature of my fellow choir people, I will limit myself to staying up until 12. The musical high has yet to fade and has developed into a pre-Boston high.

Also, I have a lovely group of people to hang around with, a good portion of the people I hung out with during musical.

Anybody ever been to Boston before? Random thoughts on Boston?
Love,
-J-

Days until Boston choir trip: 4
Unrelated link of the day: My country makes legit dinosaur coins . . . that glow in the dark

Let's get down to business. . .

To watch Mulan, followed by The #1 Ladies Detective Agency.

I'll just leave this here to make my Saturday nights feel more epic than they actually are.

Also, Lea Solonga, Mulan's singing voice, makes me drool. The music in the entire thing is just so good and for the most part, overlooked. 

Mushu and the grandmother are my spirit animals.
Love,
-J-