1:59 p.m. - 2002-03-20
What's YOUR Hebrew name?
The new teacher comes to the school.
THE TEACHER: "Hello, students."
THE STUDENTS: "Hello."
THE TEACHER: "What is your Hebrew name?"
ABRAHAM: "My name is Avraham."
THE TEACHER: "Who was Avraham?"
AVRAHAM: "He was the father of the Hebrew nation/people. He was the first Hebrew."
THE TEACHER: "Correct. What is your name?"
SARAH: "My name is Sarah."
THE TEACHER: "Who was Sarah? Who knows?"
DAVID: "I know. Sarah was the wife of Abraham, she was the mother of the Hebrew nation/people." (Show-off, give Sarah a chance to answer!)
THE TEACHER: "Very good. What is your name?"
DAVID: "My name is David." (bet you didn't see that coming) "David was King of Israel. I love this name."
THE TEACHER: "Why?"
DAVID: "Because David was a good and clever king, also he wrote nice songs."
RUTH: "David's name is also nice in English."
THE TEACHER: "What is your name?"
RUTH: "My name is Ruth."
THE TEACHER: "That is also a pretty name."
SOLOMON: "A pretty name and a pretty student." (Awwww! Or, it could mean a nice name and a nice student, but this way is more interesting)
THE TEACHER: "What is your name?"
NAOMI: "My name is Naomi. We are twins."
THE TEACHER: "Ruth and Naomi. Like Ruth and Naomi in the Bible."
SOLOMON: "Yes. They are nice/pretty, like Ruth and Naomi, and they are clever/wise like Ruth and Naomi. Ruth loves Naomi, and Naomi loves Ruth." (How cute!)
THE TEACHER: "What is your name?"
SOLOMON: "My name is Shlomo, like the King Solomon in the Bible. He was very wise/clever."
THE TEACHER: "You are also wise/clever."
SOLOMON: "Thank you, sir, thank you."
How enthralling.
One of the things that annoys me about Hebrew is that (well, I'll spell out the Hebrew sounds into English) "eesh" means man and "eesha" means woman. Nothing wrong with that. But "eesha" also means wife, while the word for husband is the same word as the word for master!
I'm very interested in languages. When I read James Finn Garner's "Politically Correct Fairy Tales," I started to spell "person" with a "u," thus "persun." Why? Because "person" means "per" every "son," and of course we can't have that. "Perdaughter" is the same problem, only in reverse, and "perchild" just sounds stupid. So Garner came up with the neutral "persun," which is pronounced the same and doesn't offend either gender. Then I decided that ninth-graders are "freshpeople." I didn't go so far as to call a woman a "wopersun," but I do occasionally to annoy my sisters. Haha. I think the book's out of print, but if you're into PCness you should try to find a copy. I think it's quite funny.
Anyway, so I left off on Friday. I can't remember what I did for the rest of the day. Oh yeah, mostly homework. I was so proud of my productivity. I finished the essay questions for global, caught up on the Spanish, and wrote the story with the paragraph from "Hitchhiker's Guide." Keep in mind that I usually leave everything until Sunday. So I was happy about that. I didn't have Marsha, but Kelsey and Alexa had music, and they went to Borders. Mom got me a big beautiful Monet book which I had asked for last time, since it was only $10, but she had inexplicably refused. Strange. Anyway I have it now and it's very pretty and I can't wait to look through it some more.
Saturday we didn't have musical theater. Kelsey and Alexa went to see "Ice Age" and invited me, but I thought it looked incredibly stupid so I didn't go. Sometimes stupid movies can be funny -- "Chicken Run" was cute the first time around -- but this just looked stupid. (And then there are movies which are stupid and try to be funny, or sexist and try to be funny, and fail miserably. Case in point: "Galaxy Quest." I thought that was the stupidest movie EVER, and so incredibly sexist. Yes, they used the sexism to be funny, but it WASN'T funny, it was just sexist. Now, compare that to Mel Brooks' "Spaceballs," which is also very sexist, but it's FUNNY in its sexism.)
After that little tangent, back to Saturday. Dad and I went to Hickory & Tweed to check out my boots. They had really been hurting, not my shins (shin pain is usual), but lower down. So we exchanged them for a new pair, Technica's, which I hope will work better. The guy who was helping us was really nice (and cute!), and he told us about this other boot, which they're now sold-out of, which women love. My feet aren't really growing, so if these boots are good, we might consider buying them at the end of the season, or we can look into that special women's boot. After the boots, we stopped by Schultz's to see what was left. Schultz's is tradition; we go there every time we go up to H&T, and lots of other times too. They have the best apple cider and donuts in the WORLD. But they're closing! :( We went to see what was left, and they're definitely closed, but it looks like they're storing stuff; there are huge boxes of apples. Hmmm. I'll definitely miss that place.
I didn't do much work for the rest of the day. I finished reading "Magic Steps" and then read "Stone Magic." Dad ordered "Cold Fire," yay! We went out for dinner with Dr. Joan to Kang Suh, one of my all-time favorite restaurants in the world (the others are Zoom, in Park City, and Moona's Grille, which was in Nantucket, but shut down, wah wah). Actually, I guess Zoom is my top favorite, because it has good appetizers, entrees and desserts. But Kang Suh just has MEAT, they bring it to you raw (which is kind of yucky), but you grill it on the table and then eat it hot, it is SO good. So yeah. Zoom's the best. Sure you needed to know that :)
We gave Dr. Joan an early birthday present, which was a big Olympics sweatshirt. I still haven't given Katie her birthday present, and I need to go get something for Jackie. Her birthday was the 10th, and I think she had a party last weekend, but I know she couldn't invite many people. She had told me about it the week before but I didn't want to ask again because that would have been EXTREMELY awkward. Besides, I didn't want to miss dinner at Kang Suh! :) I think I know what I'll get her, for lack of a better idea. Alexa had bought this really cute little hobbithole keychain at A.I. Friedman, an art supplies store, and when you open up the door and peer through there's the image of Gandalf! She says they also have keychains of Sting and the One Ring. So I was going to go get her the hobbithole and Sting. The problem is, the only place A.I. Friedman is near is the ceramics studio, but he just moved, so we're not near there anymore! Oh well, I guess it'll just be a late present.
When we got home, I tried to do math but failed, and then at 10:15 just as I was about to go to bed Lauren told me that she was going to go paint her nails and they needed time to dry and did I want to go watch a little bit of a movie with her. So we watched 45 minutes of "Shakespeare in Love."
I couldn't make myself focus very well on Sunday. I read some of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which I like a lot, I marked some passages which I want to quote in here but I'll do that later. I finished my Spanish homework, and tried again to do math, failed again. I took some notes for the journalism profile of Maggie, and I studied for a French quiz. Aunt Dale and Scott came over later. They brought an early birthday present for Alexa. It's a really neat digital camera, very small, you can fit it in a coat pocket for skiing, which is why they gave it to her early. Then I got Scott to fix my stereo. Actually, it didn't really need fixing, I just needed to read the directions, but that's okay, he's a lot easier to deal with when he feels helpful. It's supposed to be able to play three CDs (obviously not simultaneously), but it wouldn't switch to different CDs, it wouldn't even acknowledge that there were CDs in thsoe slots. Anyway it's fixed now. It's not as good of a stereo as Lauren's, which can play five CDs and automatically goes from one to the other, but that's ok. It really is. She's older than me and that's her right. What pisses me off is when a younger sibling gets something way better or way earlier than me. I mean, Alexa's stereo was better than mine (it had a remote control). Her camera was better, Kelsey and Alexa got high heels and pierced ears MUCH earlier than I was allowed to, I had to beg to be allowed to wear jeans other than regular straight-cut. They don't even acknowledge all the fighting Lauren and I had to do for them. At least I realize some of the things that are easier for me after Lauren. Lauren was the one who was royally screwed; David certainly didn't make things easier. After he rebelled his ass off, Mom and Dad were much more protective with the rest of us.
The big thing that happened on Sunday was Lauren's Date. She hadn't really gone on a date since sophomore year, so this was a big thing. When she toured Cornell with Mom, she met this Hot Guy named Ian, and they exchanged email addresses, and stayed in touch. I think he lives in California. He was accepted early to Cornell. Anyway he and a friend (who's 6'5" and cute, according to Lauren) were going to be in the city and Lauren got permission to meet him there, which is a big deal coming from my parents. So I spent about an hour in Lauren's room helping her get ready and then after she left cleaning up her room, which was an agreement with Mom (not clean, she can't go; well, it was cleaned, just not by her!). They walked around SoHo and just hung out for a couple hours. She said it was "fun but not thrilling." She got Kelsey, Alexa, and I each two bracelets, the kind of sparkly ones shaped like itsy diamonds. Mine are pinky purple, Kelsey's are blue and Alexa's are I don't remember. Oh yeah. They're cute.
Sunday night, I taped "The Mists of Avalon." I missed like the first three minutes but that's okay. So I'll watch it in stages while I work out, probably.
Monday (March 18th). Happy birthday to Karen, who I haven't talked to in over a year. We went to summer camp together for two years, one of the years when Emma was staying with us. What was funny was that same summer her mom, Mirna, was working in my dad's office, and we didn't figure out the coincidence for a while... She was fun but we just lost touch. Anyway. I had the French quiz on our writing packet, which was more difficult than the previous ones (because she made it), but it was still not hard, I got a 96. Mr. Cole wasn't there for chemistry, and we had a double lab period, but we had a fucking sub! :( I REALLY would have liked to have gone home early, I had so much to do. She showed us a video about equilibrium, which no one watched, and let us out 20 minutes early. It was freezing and rainy outside, but I figured my parents would be pissed if I called -- plus Mom wasn't at home, she was with Sam, the chef at the Japanese restaurant who will be catering for Kelsey's Bat Mitzvah, looking at tents and equipment and stuff -- so I didn't and just walked home. Then I got in trouble for not calling... argh. Well, not in trouble, but "you could have gotten sick!" I can't win.
Since I wasn't able to figure out the math, I decided the best approach was to go right up to her and say, "I was very frustrated with the math, I think there's something I'm not getting, can you just take a couple minutes and show me what I'm doing wrong and then I'll work on them while you finish up with Kelsey and Alexa?" So I did, and she wasn't mad at me, especially since I did a good job on the global studies. The problem was, when she was explaining, I couldn't keep my eyes open. It was terrible!
Then I interviewed her for my journalism profile. We don't have a functional tape recorder, so Kelsey videotaped it. I didn't think it was a particularly interesting interview, she didn't tell me any anecdotes that I could use as a cute lead, it'll mostly be just hard facts, which aren't as good for a feature piece. Hmph. She had to go so we only talked for about twenty minutes, then I had to type up the interview, which was over three pages and took an hour and a half because I had to keep rewinding and re-listening. Argh. Once that was done, I spent the rest of the day studying for a French test on the subjunctive.
The thing about the subjunctive is that since we don't use it as much in English, it's hard to learn in French. Why does "il est probable" use the indicative, but "il est improbable" use the subjunctive? Why does "apres que" (after) use the indicative, but "avant que" (before) use the subjunctive? It doesn't make sense to me. So I studied really hard, went through a bunch of different reference books to see what they had to say. Oh yeah. As usual I totally over-did it, because she didn't include three-fourths of the stuff that had been in the chapter. It was a pretty easy test, only twenty questions, and it could have been so much harder. So I was pretty happy about that.
And I'm on Tuesday. Tuesday was Farhaad's birthday, from CTY 2000. He was cool. I'll never forget when he played Kathy and I this song, now I'm blanking out on who sings it, and at the end they sing in falsetto, "Va-giiiii-na! Va-giiiiii-na!" It was great. I haven't talked to him in a while so maybe I'll email him today. It was also Jaci's birthday, from school, which I only found out today. (And today was Julie's birthday, which I ALSO only found out today. Eh. I felt stupid.)
I showed the transcript of my interview with Maggie to Ms. M, and she was SO enthusiastic it was kind of scary. I got a first paragraph, a lead, which needs some tightening, but at least I have SOMETHING. I'll try to work more on it today. And I need to start on the Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings editorial. Eh.
After school yesterday, Mom picked me up and we all went to the local mall. She's sick, has some sort of flu, which is very unusual for her. Oh, sure, she gets allergies a lot, and headaches, and backaches, and armaches (a snowboarder crashed into her and broke her arm two years ago; a snowboarder crashed into me and broke my nose a few years ago, this is why we started skiing at a mountain which doesn't allow snowboarders-- Deer VALLEY!). But she doesn't often get really sick. So she's been feeling pretty crummy and didn't want to stay long at the mall, but there were some things she had to do. She got some stuff at Crate & Barrell. We looked at two pairs of Nine West sandals, but she didn't like the ones I liked, so we ended up not getting any. I exchanged a tank top she got me for a bigger size and got two new short-sleeved shirts, oh yeah. I now have six or seven short-sleeved shirts which fit. Oh well. It's a start. I looked at three different stores for the keychains for Jackie, but couldn't find them, which was a pain in the ass. She also went to some of the stores there like Sephora to check prices. They're making a list of the prices of everything that was stolen so they can file the insurance claim. We did some other stuff too but I don't remember. Then she went to go get a bowl of miso soup and dropped us off to get ice cream. When she didn't return we investigated at the restaurant. She had run into this girl Megan and her mom. Megan was in my chorus class my first year, when Lauren was in it with me, and Mom knew her mom because her mom did a lot of work with the music school (where Kelsey and Alexa now take flute and piano lessons, respectively). Anyway Megan's older sibling is at Brown so Mom got her email address. Hmmm.
Then we had classes with Carley. She burned me "All Killer No Filler" by Sum 41, which is good because I really am getting sick of all my CD's. Our new assignment is to create a 'zine on a certain topic and include all kinds of stuff, from ads to recipes to editorials. Alexa decided to do hers on aristocratic pineapples, which is an EXTREMELY long story. I needed an interview for last year's issue of the F-H News, and I couldn't count on Judy EVER finishing it (a good thing, since she didn't until two months after it was completed and published), so she pretended to be an aristocratic pineapple named Axela from the planet of Chiakakka and we just had a plain bizarre interview. Yeah. It was weird. Kelsey's is on Evil Platypuses (Platypi?). I wrote some stuff for her, which was lots of fun. I was an evil platypus named P. Latta Puss and Carley wrote letters to me for advice and then I wrote back evil responses. Heh. I love that kind of stuff. Carley's my creative outlet. My 'zine will probably be on "Lord of the Rings," of course, but she says I don't have to get started until I get back from Utah, so that's good.
Then today, wohoo. I studied chem in volunteer service because Mrs. B wasn't there. In French we're watching a video which we started yesterday (oops). It's about Asterix and Obelix (no clue how to spell them) and Caesar. I have no idea what's going on, but that's okay. They did have a disgusting fight with dead fish, which was, as Kelsey says, utterly "pukifying." Yuck. I talked to Mrs. M about my digital media project, and she gave me some suggestions for what to do to make it more cut-and-pasted, and I did some, but then the computer froze and I lost them. Damn. I'd like to finish it tomorrow and then choose what images I want for the new project. We need to find three images that go together and then make them into sort of a series of commemorative stamps. There are other things you need to do -- such as, you can't work directly on the scanned layer, for some strange reason, that's going to be HARD. Eh. I had thought about maybe using the covers from Gregory Maguire's three books, "Wicked," "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister," and "Lost," but very few people would understand the connections between the Wicked Witch of the West, Cinderella and Jack the Ripper.
We had mentoring program, and we watched more of "Almost Famous." I can't wait to see what happens when he sees his mom again... The chemistry test was pretty easy, I thought -- a few questions were from Lauren's test -- and then he put an impossible extra-help question on the board. It was fun trying to solve it, but then I got frustrated because I couldn't. No one got it, but it was funny hearing Molly complain to Mr. Cole about how it was sooooo unfair. She really annoys me. I hope she doesn't take AP Chem next year. I stayed for lunch so Missy and I could do chem, which we didn't end up doing, but oh well. I lent her Lauren's test. I am so happy I have all of Lauren's old notes and stuff. He re-uses questions a lot, so I love studying her old tests.
I have a youth group temple meeting at five, which was basically planned to force us to stay for the sandwich brigade at six. That SUCKS. We're also dividing up parts for the service; I mentioned that the conclave is going to be at our temple, and we have to do a Friday night service (April 19th), and I think we're required to have parts. If I can, though, I'd like to get out of it. I would be SO terrified and nervous. Anyway I won't be home until after seven, which is a pain in the ass because I'm usually able to get a lot of work done on Wednesdays. Eh. I wanted to start on my chemistry outlines for the chapters on acids and bases, but I don't think I'll get to it. So I'm going to work on the journalism profile, catch up on Spanish (twenty minutes), and work on the editorial. And think about images for my digital media project. Those are my goals. If I can, I'd like to start on math or global, but I'm definitely not counting on it.
Oh, you know what's kind of funny? This Friday, my planner says: "Day 4 [Double Chem Lab], French test on writing packet, Due date for first draft of Lord of the Rings vs Harry Potter editorial, due date for journalism profile, appointment with Marsha [psychologist]." That amuses me. It's going to be a CRAZY day, I've done very little to none of my packing, and we're leaving the house around four on Saturday morning. We have the 7 AM flight. The nice thing is then we get there in time for a late lunch, but still. I think we're skiing on Sunday (YES!), and Mom made dinner reservations, which I'm very happy about, but I hope we don't miss the Oscars. I don't usually watch award shows, but "Lord of the Rings" has thirteen nominations, SOOOOOO...
I'm just kind of feeling swamped right now.
Mom and Dad have been talking about getting a new computer. There was a special deal that ended last night, so that's not going to happen for another two months. :( The thing is, though, they would make us sign a contract NO COMPUTER GAMES, NO INTERNET during the school day, and really punish us if we did. It's true that Kelsey and Alexa's work have been slipping, and I certainly procrastinate a lot more with the Internet, but what the fuck? I'm the one who tries to keep Kelsey and Alexa on track, when they used to go to Neopets and now to fan fiction, and I resent that I'm being screwed because the quality of their work with Maggie has gone down. That pisses me off. I think I'm going to lock my old diary (jessica5787) sometime soon, in case we have someone come in and take a look at the computers. I always clear the Internet history, but does the computer automatically save a list of websites you've been to anyway? Does anyone know?
I marked a bunch of passages from "Hitchhiker's Guide" I want to quote, but I've got to get to work, so I'll do it later.
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Jessica
