let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

When I first moved to Kansas City right after my thirteenth birthday, my family started going to some homeschool gatherings. At one of them, I hit it off with a girl around my age named Grace, and invited her to my house for a sleepover. She told me at some point during that night that her older sister Ida had this uncanny knack for predicting fashion trends. If Ida wore something, she told me, everyone would be wearing it two years later.

I was excited about this. Had she done tests? How many times had it happened?

Grace didn't really know.

But if she hadn't tested it, how could she be sure?

Grace kind of shrugged. She was sure because right now everyone was wearing the jeans Ida had been wearing a couple of years ago.

No no no, I explained, that's not how being sure works. You have to write down what she's wearing now, then compare it to fashion trends in two years, and then you can really know for sure. But only if you track someone else who isn't a trendsetter and compare them. Here, look, let me graph a projection of the results if you're right. No, look.

...this, in retrospect, may be one reason I've always had difficulty finding people my own age with whom I could really connect.

He hates her. Not with the simple, childish loathing he has for Potter that is seamlessly absolute; neither with the subtle, vicious hatred for his father, who is as wonderful and terrible as God; no – his hatred of her burns hot, passionate, flickering and roaring, fed by nothing but disgust for her and all she is and consumed by the need to disobey and rebel from all he is by loving her.

macabresinclair wrote me some KICKASS Ginny/Draco love-hate! Go read!

So yeah, life has been okay. Yesterday I hung around downtown all day. In the hardware store, an old lady (like 80 years old, and about five feet tall) complimented my zipper pants. It was awesome. Then I think I made some Hispanic construction workers nervous by watching them cut open the street. I went to Bizarroworld, and Ground Zero (a skate store with way too much pink to be a skate store), and several bookstores, and a bunch of other places, and on the way back I stopped at the truffle shop. I got an apricot rum truffle, and the shop owner gave me an extra champagne one 'cause he's cool like that, and I stopped to watch this guy Brian teach his dad how to play chess. I played the dad after they were done, but Brian was hovering over his dad's shoulder telling him what to do and the shop owner Sonny was hovering over mine doing exactly the same thing, so really I wasn't the one who won.

Today I went to the old homeschool Park Day, and saw Catherine (along with the twins and Clara), Grace, Rain, and a bunch of other people I hadn't seen in forever. Rain dyed her hair blue-black and started wearing makeup, so I didn't recognize her at first. She's a lot cooler than I remember her being. We did bad things with Wite-Out, and talked about life. She might maybe possibly be moving to Kansas City, which is where her mom lived until age nine. I went with her to watch her ballet lesson (she looks awfully strange in ballet garb) then we hung around downtown again until eight-thirty, when the Davis Musical Theater Company's production of Evita started. We got in for free because there were reporters there and they wanted it to look like lots of people showed up. While we were waiting for the theater to open, this guy handed us flyers for a rock band performance at Cafe Roma. The bands were called The Cheese and Red Tape Apocalypse, so we decided to go check it out during the fifteen-minute intermission. We ran all the way to Cafe Roma, to find a guy with a harmonica singing about love. Clearly, this was not our destination, so we checked the other Roma (Espresso Roma) and found them messing with mikes and stuff. After about five minutes of sitting there, and random noises from the mikes, the band started playing. If you could call it "playing." It sounded like random VERY-high-decibel noise with whale-call imitations mixed in. We left pretty quickly, eardrums literally hurting and headaches forming in our brains, to find that we'd missed a crucial part of the musical. I didn't like the music much anyway, and I don't know the history behind it, but it was still a disappointment. I did get Rain's LJ name, though.

Also, my aunt just e-mailed me, offering to fly me out to New York for Blair's sixteenth birthday party in April. I'll call Mom tomorrow and check, but it should be cool- my class schedule is Tuesday-Thursday and the party's on a Saturday. Yay party!

In order to get an idea of how my friends view me, I would like everyone to go down this list and pick the one from each pair that you think describes me the best. Then copy this and post it in your own journal to see how your friends view you.

leader or follower
quiet or talkative
spontaneous or planned
dominant or submissive
logical or intuitive
social or loner
kinky or vanilla
cute or sophisticated
kitten or puppy
warm flannel sheets or sleek satin

Also, I've seen this link multiple places, and you need to go check it out too. I don't think I'm going to be able to resist writing something for it eventually, but right now I have studying to do. (Everyone ELSE'S finals are over... *whine whine bitch bitch*)

My first Glad Tidings performance is tonight! Tickets are ten dollars if you want to come and surprise me. Seven thirty tonight and tomorrow, Wornall Road Baptist Church in Brookside, doors to the sanctuary open at seven but you can go downstairs for cookies and coffee before that.

There is a spot in the city I live in where you can drive past a hospital, a funeral home, and a graveyard, one right after the other. Really puts a lot of trust in the hospital, doesn't it?