Birdy

AHHH OH MY GOD THIS IS SUCH AN AMAZING COVER! Beautiful cover. Seriously. It’s Bon Iver’s Skinny Love, covered by Birdy. Listen to it. Here it is. This isn’t the official music video, but I like this one more.
 

I don't know why it took me so long to realize that I could add embed stuff into posts rather than just using links... For some reason vimeo seems more embed-able than youtube. 

Don’t read what’s below until you listen to it. I don’t want to influence you too much before you listen to the song, even though I was all ecstatic above and have already caused you to have high-ish expectations. It’s kind of like stripped down but blurry. It’s not quite bare because of the glow-echoing sound, so I don’t want to say it’s like that. It’s just simple I guess. At first I thought the close face shot would be awkward, but now I really like it. It just seems honest because it’s continuously trained on her face, so any awkward pauses are recorded, and I bet the singer is slightly uncomfortable (er, I’d be) and it just seems so normal that her eyes would flit off to the sides during pauses. Her voice. Oh my god. Anyway, my favorite parts are 2:39(obviously) and 0:40(whenever her voice does that almost-faltering-sound as it goes up) and the beginning. 

 You should also listen to her cover of The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service. I might as well just emb(ed?) this one too:

Light, Grass, and Oceans

Once again, here I am writing a blog post while I should be working on my college applications. These college apps are really inspiring! Anyway, here are some awesome things I have seen recently:

• While walking to an art museum – saw amazingly long luxurious grass. The most beautiful grass I have ever seen. It grows in tufts and tumbles, thin and green, and immediately reminds you of the ocean, or short wavy hair. It looks like it should be moving but it’s still. I reached down to touch it and it is oddly rubbery. If you have ever reached down to pet grass, well, this would have been kind of disappointing(but it was kind of interesting, how rubbery it was)
• The trees by my house. They sound like the beach. I will explain later sometime.
• The light that escapes the blinds and curtains and hits the edge of the windowsill really sharply at 7am sometimes 
• Driving to school one morning – sun is shining with those streams of light, one hits some parked cars windshield(lots of dried water marks on the glass). Then we drive down more, and pass by a girl who has really long hair and some Pocahontas-like stuff in her hair. She is getting in or out of the car, and her hair swings and the sun passes through it in slow-mo while we drive by. Very cool. 

One day I will be brave enough to open all the blinds of the windows in my room at night. Then I will sleep(early). I expect to wake up to an explosion of light in the morning. You know, for some people, dreams wake them up. But more and more often for me, I wake up and then decide to go back to sleep hoping to continue my dream or have more dreams(even if it’s scary, I am more interested in what will happen next than I am afraid) and then wake up hours later. It used to be sad to wake up so often in the afternoons, and now it isn’t. Hmmm.

Morning Ramble

You know what I would love to do? I would love to finish watching the anime's I never finished watching. I would love to watch Anastasia and Moonrise Kingdom and The Social Network, Ruby Sparks, and Looper. I would love to read a Vonnegut book and Invisible Cities and Einstein's Dreams and the good books that Patty read from the Name That Book list, even if it means we will be a less dynamic Dynamic Duo. I would love to write a memoir to record my memories, and a receipt to record my thoughts. I'd like to write another blog post and take a better senior picture and pick a good quote. I would love to actually do NaNoWriMo since I remembered it was November and that NaNoWriMo happens now, you know, and I can do it since I remembered, but there's no time. There's no time because I have to write my college essays, and writing college essays prompts my mind into thinking of other fun productive things I could do(like writing a memoir). I would also like for my house to have some kind of snack other than chocolate covered peanuts and little crunchy crackers. I would love to spend hours studying for the quizzes and tests coming up in the next few weeks so that I feel like I am adequately prepared every time and that I've done all I could have possibly done for that test(even though I couldn't possibly have. It's impossible. Did you know that impossible itself actually says I'm Possible? This was in a quote by Audrey Hepburn, found while looking for a nice senior quote). I want to finish writing a letter. I want to bake something good. I want to peruse what my ideal afterlife setup would be; what kind of combination of possible afterlife's(there is so much to consider ahh!) would be possible and would make sense(hmm) and would be good for everyone? I want to just sleep and dream and keep dreaming the same dream if I want to. I want to decide, do I want time to stop when I am doing something productive, or when I am doing something unproductive(or maybe I mean fun)? I want to figure out what I want, exactly, when it comes to things that aren't possible. Like, do I want a little space in the sky, a spot on a cloud(the what-I-wish-clouds-felt-like kind), where time freezes and I get to just think and do nothing else, all by myself, or do I want it to be a separate world where other people on their personal clouds can wave to each other and talk as they wonder about things and collect their thoughts? And do I want to have a limited amount of time there every day to make sure I don't neglect normal life or do I want to trust myself to control the time I spend up there? I also want to chat with old friends because I know they are online too and I haven't talked to them in a long time but I know we're both busy. I would like to do stuff I used to like to do all the time, like play MMORPG's and make gifts and watch anime and play tag and upload lots of old photos. I can't remember what else I want now, although there are a lot of things that are wants that are ongoing throughout my life, I think.

That took about thirty minutes, which is fine. Now, back to writing my essay!
(Hey this turned out to be ok for a blog post! I actually got one of those things I wanted to do done! Ha!)

Also I made up a joke! This is a rare thing, but it's good enough to share, although it doesn't start with a question. It doesn't even follow the format of  typical joke, where you say something, the other person says I don't know, you say something, and then the other person says ...ohhh. Anyway here it is, now that I've made such a big deal out of it that it'll be a letdown once you get it:
A glue stick is a pun in itself.

Alright, bye till next time(which will be hopefully but possibly doubtfully soon)!

Eurydice

Today I heard the most beautiful song.

So this evening I went to one of our school plays to see the play, Eurydice. I was super excited because I had wanted to see one of our school plays all year and had never gotten the chance to. Plus, everyone was kind of raving about it(but usually people rave about all of the plays so I couldn't tell if this one was especially good). Anyway, I went to see it, and the play was amazing. The sound effects, the music, the cast, the stage mechanics, the lighting, the timing- everything was so perfect together! There were some really sad moments too..

After the play, I was a little sad because I knew that I would never get to see that play ever again, in those circumstances. That cast is not going to do that play again, and those effects and that stage are not going to be the same in a different Eurydice play. That's the sad thing about plays.. I can't replay them over and over again whenever I want like I can with movies. With movies, almost everything stays the same. But with plays, it just happens like that once. It makes it special and sad(I need more adjectives for this) at the same time. Anyway, in one of the scenes, there was this song that began playing, and it was kind of surprising because I didn't expect them to use songs for some reason. The only lyrics I caught were, "a house built out of stone", so I memorized it and hoped that when I got home, I'd be able to search it up. And I found it! It made me so happy to hear those first two notes because I instantly recognized that that was the song. So luckily I was able to kind of keep at least one part of the play the same. The rest of it is in memory, so that song will be like a memory refresher for what it was like to watch that show today! The artist or band of the song is called The Cinematic Orchestra. Anyway, then I listened to some of the other songs by The Cinematic Orchestra, and some of those are incredibly beautiful too.

Here are the links to my two favorite pieces:

To Build a Home by The Cinematic Orchestra - the one from the play. Ok, so you may not love this song as much as I do since the moment in the play with this song just made me love this song ten times more. It's like when you watch a movie and a certain song comes on and suddenly that combination makes you love both more than you ever could have if you had seen each separately.

Arrival of the Birds by The Cinematic Orchestra - the other one. It is also lovely. I find both of these songs to be really sad in a nice way.

Ok, so these songs remind me of Peter Pan for some reason. I love that movie. I'm talking about the one with real people by the way, not the animated version, as I've never seen that and actually doubt that it can surpass the real-people-in-it movie. I love the soundtrack and the story. Especially the fairy dance song! Anyway, I think the reason these songs remind me of Peter Pan is because the soundtrack of that movie and the music from the play both remind me of adventures! And the sublime! And it's epic and it goes up and down and mellows out and builds up. I think the tune of the songs are what I want my life to be like. That sounds kind of sad.. And I don't actually want my life to be that tumultuous. I think I'd just like to have an adventure with a plotline like the melody of these songs. It just sounds like it'd be so much fun.. I think my aim in life is to not have a boring life! I think that's kind of the aim that everyone has, really though, even if it isn't really specified. So if you were to pick a song to represent kind of your life-plotline or life emotional-plotline or the kind of life-plotline you'd like to experience, what would it be?

Also, the play Eurydice is pronounced like yer-RID-ih-see. I always pronounce things wrong so I thought it was yer-RID-iss or YER-rid-ice, but the correct pronunciation sounds a lot more impressive. :D 

Happy Belated New Year's! o_o

Wow, I looked through some of my old blog posts and there's this certain point where I start to write extremely long posts. I mean, I've noticed that lately I've had a lot of long posts, but I hadn't realized that my old posts were really that short. How did I stay so brief? Maybe they were shorter because the time between posts was shorter and because many of them were describing links and music and games.

Anyway, happy belated new year! I'm not really sure what New Year's resolutions I have. Hmm.. The same as every year, I guess!

1. Get good grades
2. Be happy
3. Make new friends
4. Learn to project
5. Do less thinking before speaking
6. Don't hesitate
7. Figure out what you enjoy doing the most
8. Get into a good college
9. Do well on the SAT
10. Stop procrastinating
11. Go up to at least 5 people and say hello

Ok. I guess I shouldn't have so many resolutions because it'll be hard to keep up with them, but most of these are obvious or constantly in my head, so really the only ones I need to remember are #5, 6, and 11.

About resolution #7, that's pretty much what I must do in the next 24 hours, because I must write an artist statement for school and pick a concept to focus on. For the rest of the semester. It's so difficult to figure out what I am most passionate about/what I most enjoy doing. Isn't that weird? I always wonder whether I will eventually get really bored of what I choose.

Ooh, and the poll! I was making a list of words that I like or that inspire me and among the words I listed are the ones that are in the most recent poll. I noticed as I composed my giant word list that a lot of the words were beige or sandy colored, with some grey lavender and light slate blue-like colored words every once in a while. This was caused either by the meaning of the words, or the sound of them, or just by the letters. So I am curious what colors everyone else sees in these words? Maybe none of them are the right color for you, but just pick the one closest to grey lavender, so that I can get some results :D Or you could comment on the colors... which would be even more informative! Anyway, I am interesting in seeing what the results will be.

Ok, bye!


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Oh that's right, I am also attempting a take-a-photo-every-day thing this year! So at the end of the year I will have 366 photos recording my daily life. 


Finishing that will be my 12th resolution for the year! :D