2:05 p.m. - 2002-08-24
An update from Nantucket!
I'm updating from Nantucket right now. We've had Internet access all along, which has been nice, but I'm never all alone in the house so I didn't want to write in here. Now, Mom and Lauren are out for a walk and Dad, Kelsey, and Alexa are biking into town (David and Alexis left on Wednesday), so it's just me.
We actually made incredible time on the way up here. We left at 4 AM, which kinda sucked, but that's ok. I slept a little in the car and then listened to my wonderful CTY music mixes. I think I posted the track listings in my last entry. CTY was three weeks ago, you know that? Yup, it ended three weeks ago yesterday. I am so, so glad I went back. It really made me feel good about myself. It made me feel like I was a good persun and worth something in the world, like I can make a difference. In the past few days, I've been writing letters to a whole bunch of CTYers and mailing them photos. So far, I wrote to Dakota, Rosie, Hannah, Taube, Pippa, Anthony, and Emily. I also wrote to Missy and Katie from school. If I don't have any mail when I get back to NY on Monday, I'm going to cry.
Nantucket is good. We've mostly had very very good weather. Lauren and I are sharing the big room again, with a big bed and a couch. Very nice. We've been going to bed super super late because we either read or watch movies on her laptop computer. So far we've watched "Moulin Rouge" (ohhhhh, I'd only seen the first half at Katie's going away party, but the whole movie is just amazing, I want to try to watch it again today), "Zoolander," "Center Stage" (again), "Meet the Parents" (again), "Shrek" (again), the extras on Harry Potter (they're so annoying to find! it took Lauren and I an hour to play that stupid game!), "Ever After" (again), "Loser," half of "The Mask," "10 Things I Hate About You" (again), "Office Space" (again), "Good Will Hunting" (again), "Boogie Nights," "Amelie" (again, I'd seen it last summer in France, but I understood soooo much more with subtitles!), "Chasing Amy," and last but absolutely not least, "THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RINGS"! We watched some of the extras too, but not all. Ahhhhh how I love that movie. I preordered the collector's box edition five-disk set that comes out on November 12th from amazon.com. I had $60 left over Chanukah money from amazon.com, and it cost $59.94, so it was PERFECT. I also ordered "253" by Geoff Ryman beecause "Was" was so interesting, "Lady Knight" by Tamora Pierce which comes out on Tuesday, and "The Waterboy" because that was the only DVD Kelsey and I could agree on; it was the reward for cleaning up the schoolroom that one time.
I haven't been reading as much as usual. Make that not at all. Really, when we're at home, I'm usually on the Internet, watching movies, listening to music, and playing cards. (David taught Alexa and I Rummy-500, and we're completely addicted.) At the beach, I'm usually just listening to music. While David and Alexis were here, we played "wiffleball" a lot too. David tried to teach us how to throw, catch, and hit the ball. We demonstrated how to drop, drop, and miss the ball.
But as for reading -- I'd been reading "Catch-22," which I liked a lot, it's really interesting. But I procrastinated and procrastinated reading "Tartuffe" for French class and now I really have to. I'm not allowed to watch movies until I do and I want to see "Moulin Rouge" again!! I read the play in English, but the French is SO hard, plus she gave us a huge stack of papers to read as well... grrrr.
Lauren turned 18 on the 18th. I had been completely uninspired for her birthday. Kelsey and I gave her a gift certificate to a bakery in Middlebury, which is waiting for her at home hopefully, and I gave her a pair of socks so she'd have something to open, and an I.O.U. for a music mix to listen to while she does Pilates. But nothing terribly creative. The weather wasn't great so we went out to the beach briefly, but mostly just hung out, I think Lauren felt badly we hadn't really done anything special. We went out for dinner though, that was good. Kelsey turned 13 the day afterward. She'd actually been born at 12:56; people tease Mom that she just didn't want two kids with the same birthday. :) I'd already given Kelsey the LOTR DVD, but I found her an even cuter pair of socks with dolphins on them. I'd also found the present that Alexa gave: the shooting script of the Matrix! I can't link it, but if you like the movie, you should check it out, it's a really cool book.
Alexa's going through a weird phrase right now. She's eleven, and the youngest, and I don't know why, but she's been acting so snobby and bitchy. Lauren said she was nearly going insane at camp, Alexa was very clingy and acted stuck-up and snotty to the other girls, coming in and talking about SAT scores and Johns Hopkins and using big vocabulary. Alexa keeps talking about what a good time she had and Lauren tells me that Alexa watched everything go on, didn't participate. I don't know what to think, but she's been driving everyone nuts here. When we play Rummy-500, she's so damn competitive and keeps accusing me of cheating and getting all uptight. If only I wasn't so addicted... I can't even describe what she's doing and how she's acting, but it's really, really bad. Alexis and David were getting seriously pissed off.
It's been nice to catch up with Lauren some. I told her about the last dance at CTY and she told me all about the guys at camp. She said she only hooked up with 2 1/2 though. But she told me about skinny-dipping and one guy's drunken 21st birthday celebration and just hanging out with all these hot foreign guys in their 20's. I think she had a VERY educational summer and will be extremely prepared for college, at least in the male frontier! David has certainly had no problem with that. He's still with Cassandra. When I got back from CTY, he wasn't home, he was in Boston. He joined us in Nantucket on the 12th, the day after us, and when he left on Wednesday, Cassandra picked him up in Hyannis (you take the ferry from Nantucket to Hyannis and then drive to wherever you're going). David told me I can try weed with him sometime if I want. I think I would. I think I'd be curious and I'd want to know what it's like and hey, it's so much better to try that with my older brother than at a crazy college party, right? But I don't know.
Wow, I'm good at jumping back and forth between subjects, aren't I? Lauren's guys to a whipped older brother to weed...
One night Dad, Lauren, Kelsey, Alexa, David (for part of it), and I played a hysterical game of Balderdash. I love that game, it's a Nantucket tradition, we play every year. I think Alexa won, but that's not what matters, none of us even try to win. What happens is one persun picks a card and chooses a word on it. They spell the word out for everyone (and these are WEIRD words, like "bibble" or "shaftsbury") and everyone makes up a definition for the word. We used to try to do serious definitions, but now we just do random and funny ones. The persun reads aloud all the definitions for the word, including the real one, and everyone else has to guess which one is true. These are real words, too! You get to move ahead if you guess for the true one or if someone guesses for yours. Did you know that "cran" means 750 herrings? A "dorking" is a chicken with five toes. As in, "You dorking!" (Well, maybe not. But that's ok.)
I haven't biked once, which I feel badly about, but I did go for one long walk and listened to David's The Starting Line cd. They're good, I think they're better than New Found Glory. But anyway I went to the same place that I had discovered last year, it looks like it comes from Avalon or Middle-Earth or Narnia or what-have-you, it's a beautiful little grove, and this year it had been desecrated, I was so upset... trash cans, cigarettes, empty beer cans... it was awful... I hate it when people do that...
Nantucket usually does a good job with garbage, though. You have to put it out in clear plastic bags so they can see that you're not throwing out something that should be recycled. Mom, Lauren, Kelsey, and I took our recycling to the Recycling Center once, and it was so much fun. We dumped all the plastic bottles and threw down all the glass bottles and then giggled as they broke and got rid of the newspaper and magazines and soda cans and then when we were done, we recycled the brown paper bags that we'd left everything in!
We've gone into town a few times. It's a nice town, small, cobblestone roads, very old-fashioned (there are ridiculously strict rules about how you can build here so they maintain that old-fashioned feel, there are no commercial stores like Starbucks, not like Martha's Vineyard where there's a shopping mall and a movie theater and shit) town, but after a few times, there isn't much to do! I bought my first thing of eyeshadow ever, ooooh, Lauren and I picked it out together, it's sparkly, Urban Decay, Midnight Cowboy. I bought a cute light blue bag, and Mom got me this awesome fleeccy jacket and an awesome beige shirt, I'm so happy I finally have something that matches my dark green pants! There's this one amazing little store that's going out of business, it sells incredible expensive miniatures, Lauren's dollhouse was furnished by them but mine wasn't, I was so jealous. Anyway... I went there and bought a miniature raccoon and squirrel for Katie because I'd never gotten her a going-away present... they're so CUTE! I was going to get a skunk too but they were really expensive and I was running out of money. Those were my purchases.
Lauren's friend Rachel from way back in kindergarten came to visit for a day, and I slept in Kelsey's room for the night on the trundle bed, and Alexa slept on Mom and Dad's couch. Rachel and her family go to Martha's Vineyard at the same time as us, so she took the ferry over.
I've gotten really tan, I'd been sunburnt a little (mostly my knees) but it's okay now... I also have serious highlights in my hair, it looks dyed. Oh well.
The worst part of the trip? I have fucking poison ivy! I don't know how I got it -- there's some up in the dunes, and Kelsey threw her boogie board in it by accident, but SHE doesn't have poison ivy! It's so weird. A week ago I got these three huge awful bumps on my right knee, and then the day later I had much smaller bumps, some on my right elbow and some on my left thigh... then a WEEK LATER, I wake up in the morning and I have dots all over my hands... over the course of the day it spreads all over my arms and a little onto my back... Dad took me to the clinic, and they prescribed some medicine, I took 12 pills yesterday and then 11 today and 10 tomorrow and on and on until I run out, hopefully it'll clear up, the doctor said that it should at least stop it from spreading. It really was spreading like crazy, I mean even today I discovered new spots, I have poison ivy in my BIKINI AREA! (Which, by the way, even though you didn't want to know, I shaved for the first time just before I left for Nantucket. Now, I'm not allowed to shave at all, because I could spread the ivy. I think I'm growing a forest on my legs, and I've just said bye-bye to tanktops.) IT ITCHES IT ITCHES IT ITCHES SO BADLY... and it's put me in a really bitchy mood... haha, I'm an itchy bitch... but yuck... I'm going insane!
It's raining today. We wanted one last perfect beach day but that's not going to happen. We're in the middle of a cloud, it's damp and the keyboard is sticking and I feel like I'm growing mold. Maybe I'm moldy, not just poison-ivy-y? Eh. Mom told us that we had to get SOME form of exercise, a walk or a bike ride or something. So Kelsey and I went outside and played catch for 45 minutes, lots of fun, we were hysterically hyper. Oooh, I like that phrase.
Tomorrow it's supposed to be yucky too. Then on Monday we go home. Our ferry is at 10 AM, and the Juice Bar opens at 10 AM, which SUCKS! That's the best ice cream in the entire fucking world. No kidding. Their chocolate milkshakes? To DIE for. It's a tradition to get chocolate milkshakes on the ferry on the way back, damnit! Maybe we can get them tomorrow and freeze them? Except we don't have any room in the freezer! Damn. It's also a tradition that when we pass the lighthouse, we all run to the side of the boat and look out and throw pennies in the water and make wishes... and the wishes are always "I wish we can come back next year"... and so far it's always happened... we've been coming here every August for more than ten years! Kelsey was practically born here, Mom went into labor and they took a jet plane back to NY and she gave birth at home. Kelsey's second birthday was the day of Hurricane Bob, August 19, 1991. We say that we have three homes: our real home in NY, Nantucket, and Park City (Utah). My other home is CTY, but that's a different story.
Mom and Dad told Lauren that she's completely grounded at home next week until she's packed for Middlebury. No CVS runs, no Starbucks runs, no going out with friends, no NOTHING until she's packed! I think we're all going up to Vermont that weekend to get her settled in at Middlebury. Hopefully, David will be back from Boston by the time we're home, because he has to get ready for Bates as well. School starts on the 4th. I have to read "Tartuffe" by then, plus we need to make a school supplies run.
My schedule for school next year isn't working out, which pisses me off. The school added a whole bunch of new AP's next year (Statistics, Psychology, Government & Politics, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics) in order to raise their rankings, and they're really pressuring everyone to take these classes. They have a lot of new teachers which are only part-time and teach in the morning. I think that's the deal for the economics and government & politics classes, but I'm not quite sure. They moved the AP sciences into the afternoon. This is a problem for me. I can only GO in the morning! It's impossible to schedule all my homeschool classes after 2:30, and because of the stupid 6-day rotating schedule, 7th period could be at 12:15 or 1:00 or 1:45... so I can't take AP Chemistry. I guess I'll be going home at 11:30 every day, unless a lot of cool people have lunch in which case some days maybe I can stay until 12:15. I'm taking AP French, AP Psychology, and honors physics. I still have a study hall every single fucking day, so I think I'll probably have to do volunteer service again... oh, please don't give me the fucking volunteer service to the guidance office award instead of French... that would SUCK... and then I'll have a free 4 days out of the 6-day cycle when I don't have physics lab. Oh, please, let some good people be in psychology and physics with me... I could take Journalism 2 and then only have one free out of the six-day cycle (plus the one free every single day), but I don't WANT to take Journalism 2. It IS a new teacher, but Ms. M. completely turned me off to that whole style of writing. Journalism is writing for deadlines. If you don't have deadlines, what's the point?
Speaking of journalism, one other thing I read here was every single issue of time from June 30 thru when I left for Nantucket. I was very proud of myself. There were some interesting stories, one cover story was on vegetarianism, and I think the current cover story is on bipolar disorder, which would be REALLY interesting and relevant with Allison's current situation. Speaking of which, she seems to be doing fine at Dartmouth, which is an absolute blessing. She liked her two classes, and she's actually home right now, I think. We're going to meet them at their house for dinner on Monday night, which means that if we go to Woodbury Commons (huge outlets) on the drive back, we can't spend hours there. Scott went to CTY first session in LA and then to a sort of science-y archery camp or something and now he's at ski camp, but he's coming home tomorrow, so we'll see him too.
Mom and Lauren are back from their walk, so I'm going to finish this up. Anyway, there isn't much else to say.
But I feel like I've missed out on you guys this summer. How are there now 55 LOTR sisters? The site (lotrsisters.diaryland.com) is amazing! I want so much to be a part of it. How have there become so many i-am-lotrpeople: i-am-gollum, i-am-eowyn (HEY! *I* AM EOWYN!), i-am-faramir, i-am-aragorn... this is going to take me forever to check everyone out. I don't think I can catch up on everyone's archives, so like I said in the previous entry, I'll be picking them based on most interesting titles! :)
I'm going to go read "Tartuffe" so that I have a prayer of watching "Moulin Rouge" again.
P.S. Do you know what I just realized? I've been on diaryland for a year now! I just went and read some of my oldest entries on jessica5787.diaryland.com -- it's locked, but your password for dernhelm should work there too, let me know if it doesn't. Anyway, wow, what a depressing introduction... I guess I was still really screwed up after the antisocial hellish three weeks at CTY, and I hadn't started getting into shape yet, and I hadn't even started seriously talking to Marsha, my psychologist. I think I'm a lot better. I really do. I still get depressed a lot and I know that someday I'll have to stop losing myself in daydreams. But I can make it through this year, it's my last year at high school, then I'm going to graduate and have an awesome gap year, intern, travel, educate myself in a much more educational way than taking tests. I can make it through to CTY next summer. I have my CTYers to talk to online and my wonderful LOTR sisters and the crowd of people I can hang out with at home (minus Katie, boo-hoo) and my CTY music and the good feeling about life I got from "Rent" and my books and this year I'm going to learn to love writing again. I mean it. Last year I didn't do much writing for myself besides in here. I did the fiction tutorial, but I rushed to meet every single deadline and needed Dad's help coming up with topics. I did writing for Carley, but not much. I did writing and editing for Judy, but I didn't want to get persunal. I want to do more me writing. I want to go back to poetry, back to stories. I want to have some real stuff to post (http://fanfiction.net/profile.php?userid=205472). I miss writing. Writing and dreaming will keep me sane this year. I can do it.
