Step up, step back

Exams are almost over, and I'm considering my current life. I burned a few too many bridges a little too soon, and now I'm fending for myself in social situations. Surprisingly enough, this has actually opened me up to new opportunities. I've been spending time with people whose company I enjoy and venturing out of my (former? let's go with "usual") social circle, which is actually kind of gratifying. It's nice to know that I don't have to rely on anyone for social interaction; that is, I can leave my comfort zone with ease. I guess I'm not as socially anxious as I thought.

Things I Love: Part 47

I love bad things. Not things that are dangerous or crazy, but things that are bad. Bad movies, bad music... not bad clothes, but you get the idea. And my father can't comprehend my appreciation for the atrocious, especially when we're in the car and I suddenly decide to listen to the .38 Special.
I used to read a blog called Awesomely Bad Lyrics that no longer updates, and oh my goodness it was the funniest blog I've ever read. The guy that wrote it would post videos for songs like "Jessie's Girl" and "Hot Blooded" and then just tear the lyrics apart. It was nearly always brilliant (except for a few that were a little too crass for my taste, and one about "The Dolphin's Cry") and it got me into bands like Foreigner and Duran Duran. Last season when Glee did an episode about bad songs, it made me happy because they included some of my favorites.
My top five, desert island atrocious songs are:

1. "Cold As Ice," Foreigner
2. "Sister Christian," Night Ranger
3. "Notorious," Duran Duran
4. "Sunglasses At Night," Corey Hart
   
5. "Total Eclipse of the Heart," Bonnie Tyler
   

Slogging forward

I didn't think I could end a twelve-year friendship neatly, but this level of drama is getting ridiculous. It's like we hit the Angst Solstice. Good thing I'm spending the summer away from everybody who's making my life insane right now. I'm tempted to pick up and pack out right now.

Forward

I was walking down the street today, after walking my mother to her yoga class, wearing a summery skirt for the first time (because the stupid weather finally decided to correspond to the season) and thinking about Life. Specifically, my Life.

In two months, I'm going to sing a solo recital. I'm going to graduate high school. I'm going to the Adirondacks for my seriously excellent job as a prep cook at Unirondack.

In four months, I'm going to attend my dream school.

In one week, the exam season starts, but right now, that doesn't scare me. My future has never looked brighter! There is an avenue of possibilities opening before me, and while I'm nervous about IB and CCA exams and exhausted after slogging through friendship drama, I'm feeling optimistic about life right now.

Today, as I strolled Hipster Haven, enjoying my swishy peasant skirt and the warmth of the deepening evening, and later, while watching Glee (I don't know why I thought Lady Gaga was making a guest appearance, but when she didn't show up, I was disappointed), I kept thinking, "I'm so glad it's Friday. Wait-- It's Tuesday! I'm just not at dance!" It's nice to have an evening to yourself, and it's nice to be able to contemplate the future with a serene smile on your face as you wander down the trendy part of town, dressed nicely and feeling chipper.

To the future!

Inspired by the lovely K. Hendy

I made my decision. After visiting Bryn Mawr and deciding that it wasn't as good as Smith, I decided to go to Smith, and I am thrilled. Part of my excitement derives from the fact that I have wanted to go to Smith desperately, with all my heart, since I was about ten. (There was a period in there when I wanted to assert my independence from my sisters by going to Bryn Mawr, but fuck that noise. Smith is the most radical. In more than one sense of the word. What kind of women's college doesn't have openly gay girls? But I digress.) There's another part of me that's excited and happy because of what going to Smith means to everyone else.

I want to make it clear at the outset that I am not going to Smith to make anyone else happy. It's all me, baby. That said, both of my sisters went to Smith, and it's satisfying that we ended up there in different ways. Emily went Early Decision, Caroline was a transfer student, and I'm going Regular Decision, after a winding road involving obsession with BU, a brief infatuation with Bryn Mawr, and finally realizing the one I loved all along, Smith. It's like something out of Cynthia Heimel.

Anyway, now we have the trifecta. My whole family is delighted, and because I enjoy making people happy, that's nice. Since I made my decision on Monday, I've been considering what my Smith experience will be like. It'll be strange to not have ballet class every night, and because I was a Puritan in a past life, I dislike being idle, so I'll probably pick up some kind of new activity, but what?

Let's be frank. It's going to be something involving music, or theater, or musical theater. But to continue my story:

Today, Caroline called me to say that she thinks I should join crew because she's worried that I'll develop body image issues when I'm not dancing every day and start gaining weight.

It's an interesting idea, and not one I haven't considered. At the Bryn Mawr Open Campus Weekend, all of the rich girls wearing only Prada (and no, that's not an exaggeration) kept talking about the Freshman 15, and I realized: My metabolism is really fast because I dance like it's a part-time job, but in college, that will no longer be the case. Then what? My options are, as far as I can tell:

1. Pick up a dance minor so I can be in class regularly
2. Go to the gym a lot. (Downside: I will ruin this "dancer's body" I've been trying to develop for twelve years. This is actually not that accurate, because I'm the Betty Boop of ballerinas, so I will never have a dancer's body. But it still bugs me.)
3. Get a grip and not obsess about my goddamn weight.

I've never really had body image issues, in part because my ballet teacher is a genius and never, ever tells us we have the wrong bodies unless girls want to go pro and their bodies can't handle that level of stress (hyperextending knees, etc.). But another part of that is, I think, because I've always been pretty svelte. If I suddenly gained a bunch of weight, how would I react? I'm guessing not favorably.

This is a source of concern. A bigger concern is the recent discovery that K doesn't like her body, and that is a lot more important than my own self-involved ramblings. You can tell a girl over and over that she's beautiful, but you can't make her believe it. I was honestly surprised when I read this post. But what can I do?

Here is why I love movies and TV shows from the sixties: Towards the end of the movie, every time, there is a point when everything falls apart and goes crazy. Often this involves car chases, people shouting at each other, then people kissing, seemingly at random, but held together seamlessly. The best times are when laws of physics are defied, like when Scooby-Doo uses trash can lids to fly or when the cop car is sliced tidily in half by concrete in the original Freaky Friday. (That might actually be from the seventies. Who cares?) And it's marvelous when, on an unpredictable pretext, all of the characters are brought together and it turns out that everything up to that point has been a sham. It's just marvelous! Especially since, in a lot of these movies, the actors playing bit parts overact to a hilarious degree, so their performances are really the cherry on top of the mayhem sundae.

And now, here's why I like 1950's thrillers (a genre that I have recently gotten into): First of all, they're easily heckled, and they're easy to heckle well. They're like the MST3K version of pasta salad: easy to make, and hard to make badly. (From the heckler's point of view. Sometimes the production values are quite high on these atrocious movies.) It Came From Outer Space was a little like the MST3K version of Manos: Hands of Fate in that I repeated the title a lot, with variations, but because there was more to work with, it was much funnier.

Second of all, it's amusing to watch the terrible special effects. The best terrible special effects are probably in Them!, a real classic about invading alien species. I won't spoil what the aliens are or what they look like, but I promise you that they are worth seeing.

Thirdly, speaking of Them!, you never know who might turn up in these dreadful movies. Them! has Edmund Gwenn, who was Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street! It was quite funny, because whenever the Edmund Gwenn character said anything at all during Them!, it relaxed me visibly. Even when he was talking about dynamite! The human mind is a strange thing. That Pavlov fella was onto something, I tell ya what.

Fourth, it's interesting to see where all these horror movie cliches come from, and

Fifth, I don't usually like horror movies because the trouble with having a visual mind is that unpleasant images are indelibly printed on my brain and they take a long time to shake. However, 1950s movies are suspenseful, but because they date so obviously and are always just this side of ridiculous, it's basically impossible to be actually scared by them, but they do give you a kind of rush. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the best thriller I've ever seen, a real classic, and although it was slow-moving to me because I actually knew what was going to happen, it was really great. Suspenseful, exciting, and scary, but not petrifying. Just frightening enough to give you a good scare, but not excessive at all. Really great. I cannot advocate that genre enough.

And she's back!

Hey, guys, sorry for the dry spell. My computer got a virus and was down for weeks. I know all of you were just devastated.

So, a couple weeks ago, my English class was about to start Death of A Salesman, and we were discussing the American dream. The "popular kids" or as I called them in seventh grade, "the conniving sluts" had apparently spent St. Patrick's Day drinking steadily from sunrise to God only knows when, and were massively hung over. This took the form of them all being in extremely bad tempers, so throughout this discussion, they vehemently denied the feasibility of the American dream.

"It's just not realistic," Bad Dye Job said.

"Yeah," said Bags Under Eyes. "Remember Econ last year? The poverty cycle? You can't break out of it. It perpetuates itself."

"It's all outdated propaganda," said the Girl Who Contradicts Everything I Say (remember her? It's been a while).

They continued in this vein even after a boy talked about his dad emigrating to America from Pakistan, finishing high school, going to college, and becoming an engineer. These kids absolutely refused to accept that people can build themselves up.

And they're wrong, of course. My family is an example of the American dream. My great-grandmother couldn't speak English. She emigrated to America from Poland. My grandma and great-aunt ate borsht for breakfast every day and grew up on the East Side, in a cluster of other Polish immigrants. They both talk all the time about taking Accounting courses in high school, going to work as secretaries, finding work anywhere they could, working to improve themselves.

When my great-uncle (my grandpa's brother) came over from Sicily, he didn't speak any English. He grabbed education anywhere he could get his hands on it and eventually owned his own store.

I am proud to have this family history. In the way of an upper-middle class white kid, it's pleasing to realize that my family became who they are today through hard work. Going to my school, I'm surrounded by an unpleasant sense of entitlement, which is something I try to avoid. It's profoundly irritating to listen to people talk about how they got into Geneseo, like that's hard. It is hard, assholes!

I believe that it's easier to distance oneself from one's roots in America. I am in love with my family's past. (Less so with my dad's side. It's not quite as interesting. Or if it's more interesting, nobody ever talks about it.) That's part of this city's appeal to me. It's broken-down, dirt broke, and freezing as hell, but I have deep roots here. And it allows me to connect with my past. I know where my grandma used to live and where she went to school, where my great-grandmother lived, and where she got married. My family built themselves up, and it's credible that we didn't leave this place in our dust. We stayed put, and now we're all giving back to the place that got us where we are.

American Dream. It's true, all you disbelieving, hung over bitches. Love it. Own it.