WHASSUP!!!???? :D
May 21, 2010
I’ve put together a couple (okay, WAY more than that) things (“sets”) on polyvore that I wouldn’t mind sharing.
(Made today.)
I think I made that yesterday? No, I think today.
Made today. I’m pretty sure.
That one I did make yesterday. The picture’s from the movie The Secret Garden which is one of those movies I would watch over and over again when I was littler. I have the book, but I’m not very far. I sort of lost it, too…
“Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones…” by DinosaurMuffin featuring Darcy Miro For Unholy Matrimony bracelets
Dream by DinosaurMuffin on Polyvore.com
(You’ve seen that one…)
ALIVE. by DinosaurMuffin on Polyvore.com
= me. by DinosaurMuffin featuring Marc Jacobs shoes
(That one was made to represent me.)
Look into this person’s irises; there are almost or exactly 50 pictures in varying sepia shades to make up the colour in her eyes. It took something like 3 hours…? I don’t know, this is an older one.
That one probably about the same time.
I don’t take credit for any of the individual pictures, photos, artwork in them, etc. because I’ve made them into a collage (type-thing) or whatever. It’s what polyvore is sort of about. (There are also tonnes of fashion sets on my polyvore account, but really, I didn’t think anyone would be interested in seeing them.) If you want to see more, (I skimmed over a couple of art sets and there are plenty of fashion sets) just click on DinosaurMuffin. (That’s my awesome username on polyvore. Way more a success at being random than brilliantbroccoli – my blog URL.)
I suppose a lot of drama has happened in my life this week but I don’t care enough to dwell on it anymore. I’ve written a little about it in my journal (I’m not done the journal entry) and that’s enough for me. What’s done is done and only for the better. Everybody makes mistakes and whatnot.
I got called down to the guidance councellor’s office (again) sometime (I think this week?) since a couple of my selected courses for next year have been cancelled since not enough people signed up.
Here’s what I was SUPPOSED to take (the ones that don’t have levels I can’t remember the levels of):
11 University English
11 University/College Math (they had me switch down from University last time I went into guidance)
11 Media Studies
11 Student Leadership (A Students’ Council only course, since it was basically getting course credit for being on the SC.)
11 Triology: Anthropology, Phsycology and whatever that third one is that escapes my mind at 11:43 PM on a Friday night.
11 University Physics
11 Physical Geography
11 University/College Art (highest level available seeing as I’m an artistic GENIUS. 😛 )
My backups were:
11 Drama
11 Art Store Course (I know that’s not the real name of the course, but it’s name escapes me right now and it’s more or less teaching you how to run a business in art: how to take inventory and such.)
BUT here’s the thing: the Media Studies got cancelled, much to my dismay. The Student Leadership course was cancelled aswell. The reason they called me down to have a chat instead of replacing those courses with both of my backups was because one of my backups was cancelled also. (Art Store was cancelled.)
So they switched me into Drama and I told them I’d do 11 (University?) World History from the 16th Century Onward. (Probably not the exact wording, but they’ve got something about it being from the 16th Century Onward in the title.) When we first were doing course selections, I remember panicking over which backups to sign up for, trying to decide between Art Store and World History. I’m really intrigued in history. The way I see it is that history is just like fictional stories you read or hear about, but it really happened and it happened, well, ages ago. And you could (or could’ve) met that person you’re reading about in that textbook or taking your picture by their statue. They were real and they lived life in the same world as you and I.
(I hope that makes any sense.)
Anyway, I’ve had a rough week with the exception of a school trip on Thursday to Toronto. We watched the play Romeo and Juliet at the Hart-something (Hartford?) Theatre on UOT campus. I absolutely adore how diverse Toronto is compared to my town. When I go walking in Toronto, you can see how different everyone is and realize that being different is normal in Toronto. You can be whoever the heck you want to be.
We were a half-hour late to the play (but somehow it didn’t start until we’d arrived) since our bus driver pulled the whole busload of anxious kids over at a rest stop (telling us not to get off the bus to go to Timmies’ or whatever) so he could have a little “smoke break.”
I said later about how unproffessional that was of him to an aquaintance. She told me I shouldn’t have such a negative view of people.
“I don’t have a negative view on people, just their actions sometimes bug me.”
“Hm. Food for thought.”
I took that as an invitation to keep talking. So I tried to (and failed) to explain my views on trust and mankind. (I don’t remember exactly what I said, but even I was confused by what I was saying, but it seemed she wanted to shoot down everything I was trying to say. It’s difficult to get someone who closes off their mind to other people’s opinions to understand. I have to admit, I am very stubborn when people try to change my views, but I still listen to them with an open mind and try my best to understand. Because understanding is the key to world peace. I wrote a very good explaination to why this is so last year in my geography class when we were working on spatial geography.)
Later, when I had my words together, I caught up with her when we were all walking back to the bus.
“I’m going to try to explain myself again if you don’t mind.”
She didn’t try to stop me, but still seemed reluctant.
“Do you know what unconditional love is?”
She mumbled something.
“Did you say ‘yup’ or ‘nope’?”
“No,” she replied.
“Okay, well you know how you love your family no matter-”
“No,” she interrupted.
“Well, can you imagine?”
A pause, and then, mostly mumbling, “Well, I can imagine, but-”
This time I interrupted her as she trailed off into unintelligible sounds again. “Well, what I’m trying to say is I have unconditional love for the entire human race.”
“I can’t understand that,” she muttered.
“I cannot hurt a single human being without feeling bad.”
“That I can understand.”
“… No matter what they’ve done to me or to someone else, I cannot not feel guilty about.”
“Well, I can’t say I agree with it-”
“Well, you know, all I ask for is an open mind. All I ask. You don’t have to agree with my views, you just have to respect them… I don’t have to agree with you at all but I have to respect you.” I should have added, ‘as a fellow human being’ at the end but I still think I got my message accross… in essence, at least.
We ate at a really good Thai food place that day and I tried dumplings for the first time in my life. They were FANTABULOUS. I LOVED them. It was really filling, too. I couldn’t finish it so I let my acquaintance eat some of the rest of my rice. Some of us had “ice cream” afterward when we were walking back to the place we were supposed to meet the teachers and the other students at a certain time. (You know those big blue freezer things in the corner stores with popsicles and Dibs and stuff in them? Well that was our “ice cream.” I had Dibs. It was a hot day so I enjoyed it.)
So yeah. That’s more or less what life’s been lately. I’d write more and more often but things have been kind of hectic lately… (and I’ve kind of been focussing too much time on Polyvore)
I haven’t been to a Students’ Council meeting in a while since I haven’t heard anything on the announcements about meetings in maybe a couple of weeks and neither the SC President or the teacher in charge has asked me in the halls, “Hey, [insert my SC nickname here which I’m leaving out because it’s derived from my last name], you coming to the meeting tonight/at lunch/today?”
They used to do that all the time.
The one time I waited outside of the Students’ Council room at lunch on a Monday (a couple weeks ago) the SC prez. came to the door and told me there was no meeting that day, but if I wanted to help cut out capes (yes, capes) to give away free for the upcoming Cape Day (yes, Cape Day) spirit day, I was welcome to.
So of course, I did. And I talked to people I wouldn’t normally, telling them how “All the cool kids wear capes!” I was so excited for Cape Day. I was going to get my Harry Potter fleece blankie and tie it around my neck. And then Cape Day finally came!
… and I forgot all about it until someone asked me where was my cape.
So upon suggestion of a friend I took my sweater off and tied it around my neck/shoulders by the sleeves. When the SC prez and a couple of her closer friends came around to count Spirit Day Participation, I asked them if I counted and one of them said, “Sure [insert my SC nickname which I am leaving out because it is derived from my last name]!” enthusiastically. We probably could’ve gotten a LOT more Spirit Day Participation points if more people knew that tying your sweater around your neck/shoulders could count.
But who really cares, anyway? We’re (somehow!?) ranking #6 on the “Home Form Cup Leaderboard” which hangs on the wall outside the SC room. (The “Home Form Cup” is where homeroom classes get points for spirit day participation and competitions for fund-raising or something else. We did a Winter Olympics thing while the actual Olympics was going on. I recall that the Accounting class beat a Gym class even though the majority of the events we cycled through were athletic events. I recall them getting cereal-box cardboard medals. The homeroom with the most points by the end of the semester gets a pizza party or a sub party or something of that nature.)
So. It’s 12:39 AM. I’ve been literally working on this blog entry non-stop since yesterday.
😛
Good night.
Alex Violet.
They pray at the city council meetings in my city.
April 20, 2010
You know how I’m the secretary for the Youth Advisory Council for my city? You know how that means I’ve got to type up “minutes” and e-mail them to the head dude in time for the next meeting?
Well, I don’t remember if I blogged about it (I probably didn’t) but the authorities on the YAC had made me two templates for writing minutes before they were satisfied with my work.
I have a meeting tomorrow right after school (not even kidding- school ends at 2:30 and I have to get home, grab my YAC binder + writing utensil and head to the city hall for 3:30) and as usual it’s 10:23 PM the night before and when I’m supposed to be finishing up minutes, I’m blogging.
What really happened was I’d begun minutes and decided to finally get around to Googling what real “minutes” are supposed to look like and found my city’s minutes. I scroll down a bit and the format is obviously different but not by much. (IRRELEVANT.)
Anyway, I come accross a heading that says “opening.” It’s got the expected stuff- O’ Canada, etc. And then all of a sudden it says something “prayer.”
I don’t know what to think of this.
I personally don’t object to it; we pray during ‘opening’ at pathfinder meetings, too. But before we begin that tradition each year, everyone is asked if they’re okay with that, or if they have any religious objections or whatever. So far no one’s objected to going along with the prayer, even though I know one of them doesn’t believe in God.
But I’m not sure your religion should affect your politics so much as to pray for each meeting. I mean, Canada is a place that is absolutely rich with various cultures and religion. (Maybe not SPECIFICALLY my town, but I still think it’s reasonably diverse.)
If your government can only represent those that have someone to pray to, then really, are they representing Canada, or are they representing their religion?
And not to mention what it looks like. Oh, yeah, “Our city’s terrible- even the polititians are praying we’ll get out of this mess.” or, “Our polititians are sinners, begging for forgiveness!” “This person thinks (s)he’ll look important if they ‘find God’.”
On the other hand again, don’t you have every right to pray before one of these meetings if you want to? (“I don’t have to agree with you, I just have to respect you.”) Maybe they give you the option to sit out. I don’t know; I’ve never been to one of these meetings.
I don’t attend church (or other place of worship) on a regular basis and I suppose I’m not really affiliated with any organized religion. I just think a lot and decide what I think I believe or what I think is probable. (I only do this because I wonder about things.)
But I still haven’t figured out how I completely feel about this whole praying-at-city-hall-meetings thing yet.
Or maybe this is one of those things I’ll never be able to figure out how I feel about it. I’m so used to being the type to have strong, definite opinions about something, and then this comes along…
ON A DIFFERENT NOTE: I sort of crashed our family computer so my mom and brother hooked the internet up to my laptop. And mid-terms are coming out soon and this is what I know I’ve got:
Academic English: 75% (Nearly 20% above class average)
Drama: 74% (12% above class average)
Art: 84% (2nd highest mark in the class- the only one higher is 88% by a girl who’s taken gr. 11 art last year and took gr. 10 art this year because it was the only class that wasn’t full)
History: 79% (Also significantly above class average, I’m pretty sure at least 10%. 1% above my best friend in this class who always brags about knowing so much about WWI because she’s “military family”. Also, I need 80% to be exempt from the exam and I have a test tomorrow.)
Alex Violet
THERE SHALL BE JUSTICE!!! And other stuff.
March 27, 2010
I would like to make a point of saying I began writing this entry Tuesday and it is terribly, terribly belated.
I wasn’t going to give you a blog entry today (I didn’t really have much of a creative drive today) but then I saw this song on YouTube and it Changed My Life. This girl is going somewhere, I’m telling you.
And listen to the lyrics. She said in the video description that she wrote it about the people in the world that were truly suffering, like the prisoners who are abused and aren’t given the right to a fair trial and things like that.
And I stand beside that message. Beside, not behind. Because if I stand behind it, I’m not doing anything but silently following along with it. If I stand beside it, I’m right there up front with it, setting my own pace with the same message. (Please say that makes sense to you. I told you I don’t have much creative drive today.)
If there’s anything I’ve learned at all from life is that everyone lives in their own world, they choose what they want to hear, they choose what they want to see and feel. Growing up in the town I have, I censored my thoughts and words and what I was willing to put up with.
And it was only until recently that I realized that all censoring does is hide from the truth.
So these days I try to walk into the day with an open mind. I listen to swear words without constantly interrupting with, “AHEM! School language!” If you censor your words, you are limiting your own sense of expression. If you censor other people’s words, they won’t ever tell you anything you’d like to maybe know.
In my drama class the other day we were talking about movies. (Where the Wild Things Are, in particular.) One girl was saying how she thought it was overall good, but some of it she maybe wouldn’t recommend for little kids to see. And then whe was saying the weird violent parts were a little more adult.
So I said that things like that truly happen to kids in real life. Maybe not the whisked-away-into-a-magical-world part, but the parts at home where the mother’s paying attention to her own life and the kid tries to get attention the only way he knows how: to bite her. And then she throws the kid off her and yells, crying, “YOU’RE OUT OF CONTROL!”
If it really happens, in REAL LIFE, to KIDS, and if real life isn’t censored, why should this movie be?
What I’m trying to say is don’t be afraid to speak your mind, don’t be afraid to be yourself.
STAND OUT.
It isn’t always a bad thing.
Watch this video, too. It’s from the movie I Could Never Be Your Woman. And yes, that’s the girl from the City of Ember movie, one of my favourite books although the movie wasn’t quite as interesting. (Saoirse Ronan is a really good actress though.)
-NOW THIS IS STUFF I DIDN’T WRITE AGES AGO-
On a different note, do you want to know some wicked good news? All-time goodness?
THIS.
These are screenshots of the stats for my blog. If you don’t understand, it’s just a graph of how many people saw my blog on which days.
The good news is that I’ve broken a couple of personal bests- by a LONG SHOT. You see, my previous most-amount-of-page-views-in-one-month record was 52. That was back in June, the summer, when I had more time to write entries, and it was my first month at blogging.
This week alone I got 124 page views. The month’s page views are 184.
Maybe your blog gets a super-duper amount of page-views more, but you are not me. And me, I am incredibly happy with the page views I’ve got. Well, more and more and more couldn’t hurt, but what I’m trying to say is I am proud of every single one of those page views. I earned them all. 🙂
I am taking a first-aid course this weekend and it’s going pretty well.
But I suppose once he (the instructor) got talking about panic attacks and breathing problems I went pale because everything he was describing sounds disturbingly familiar. I just didn’t realize I had so many troubles with breathing until now. I’ve dealt with a lot of depression in my life and psychological trauma (shootings happening in my neighbourhood, being bullied non-stop through most of my elementary school career, and then in grade 6 I went through a very emotional disturbed state with all the bullying that I would Not remove my massive puffy blue winter coat indoors as a psychological shield, living through one attempted murder against me when I was as young as eleven, having to see a guidance counselor the year after… sorry for rambling) but when they explained it in that Charlie Bartlett movie it didn’t seem like the same issues I’d ever had.
But no, according to this first-aid instructor, I’d gone through this several times before. Like when I’d wake up in the middle of the night back when I was going through that grade 6 rough patch.
One time, I remember, a summer after grade 6 or in a closer-to-now year, I had a panic attack in one of the wee hours of the night when I was spending the night at my grandparents’ with my brother there too. I woke Mathew up first, explaining to him what I felt: cold sweat, difficult to breathe; and he suggested at first that it was nothing. And then I kept pestering him about it and he said to go tell Gramma if it was that big of a problem. So Mathew came with me and we told Gramma and she got me some hot chocolate and had me wear her fuzzy socks. I got to have a good talk with her and she explained she thought it was hormones/puberty. We had a bit of a conversation and Mathew went back to bed before me. Hot chocolate, fuzzy socks and talking to Gramma made everything better. (Buddy, you helped too.)
I guess stresses are definitely a part of growing up. Panic attacks just mean you’ve taken it to the extreme and should probably do something about it…
I’m glad I was at my grandparents’ when that happened because my mom would’ve thought I was being paranoid (as I often was those days- I don’t blame her) and gotten mad at me for waking her up. Once again- I don’t blame her. When you’ve just woken up out of a really good sleep I can see how you wouldn’t want to be disturbed. One time at pathfinder camp a girl woke me up in the middle of the night during a wicked rainstorm because she needed a buddy to walk to the outhouse with her. I told her to go pee on the tree or something. She did. I felt bad and apologized.
I think Gramma was on the computer or something before Mathew and I interrupted her. Lately I notice she emails us at awkward hours like 5-something AM. But I suppose when you’re retired you can sleep whenever you want. I can’t stay up that late because I once stayed up ‘til sunrise without noticing until the sun was out and had a panic attack. When I’m retired I think I might get up early and go to sleep early. Because dawns are more beautiful than sunsets, in my opinion. Not that I like it when I’m walking to the bus-stop in half-darkness. But you know, it’s nice and exciting if you’re waking up early for a field trip or something, then the dawning comes up like poetry to gives you a giant “GOOD MORNING!” and the feeling that something great is going to happen, and that every inch higher the sun rises is one more inch closer to your destination/field trip. Sorry, got rambling again.
But I’ve learned quite a bit of first-aid and by the end of tomorrow I’ll be certified to Save Someone’s Life. YAYA!
+ I saw How to Train Your Dragon yesterday night and it is my NEW FAVOURITE!!! 😀
SO yeah, life is awesomazing right now.
Grade 6 was brutal but I’m in Grade 10 now and I’m alright,
Alex Violet
Alex
The Insanely Awesomazing Life of Alex. 