Something Terrible Has Happened

At 3:55PM today I had my Grade 5 Viola exam. I’ll walk you through the horror that I just experienced.

At first glance, things weren’t so bad. I walked into the room where a nice little man said hello and asked me how my day was et cetera. All pleasant, welcoming stuff. But that I actually had to start playing, and the horror began.

Tambourin by Gossec. The beginning was horrible as always, but this one wasn’t actually too bad. My one complaint is that I didn’t magically fix the one bit that I always get wrong. However, I do feel that I’ve passed overall on this one.

Mozart. OH DEAR. Another horrible beginning, followed by a horrible middle and end. My nice low bit lacked the swoopy-ness that it usually had and my big moment that I love and always crescendo to was DISASTROUS. It makes me feel bad.

As usual, the Joplin was the best of my three pieces. Apart from one nasty bit where it all but fell apart, this one was good. I played it with some of the animation that I owe and there were ample dynamics so it was alright.

In hindsight my pieces were actually okay. Enough to pass by, at any rate. I think that I’m perhaps making things out to be worse than they are because of ONE REALLY HORRIBLE THING.

Scales next. I got a few simple ones and many were separate bows so everything was going grandly. But then…E MINOR ARPEGGIO, SLURRED BOWS.

My world came crashing down. It is well known to be the most evil arpeggio in the history of the universe. Plus, I had been learning E flat by accident up until today. Imagine by surprise.

Aural tests were good, I think. I sang whilst retaining my dignity, did some more singing with only one wrong note, as far as I could detect, and my clapping was some of the best you’ve ever seen. Unfortunately that’s where the good times end. He played me an extract from a piece and asked me the period. I told him, rather shakily, that it was romantic. Then he asked for a REASON. So I gingerly told him it was rather discordant.

Mortified.

After that he asked me about the key, but I had been listening for dynamics and musical nuances and he didn’t even ask for them. So I stuttered for an age then told him miserably that it was in two. I came out of the room feeling rather worse for wear.

Thank goodness it is all over. For another several months I have no music exams. It’s a blessing. And I have a MARVELOUS book to review but I think this entry is long enough without tacking on a 1’000 word paean.

Gatsby and Other Exciting Things

Despite Gatsby being the main reason for this blog entry, I’m going to leave him until last. It seems logical to start with how I’m writing to the blog. Well, I recently downloaded the newest version of MSN messenger that comes with this nifty thing called Windows Live Writer. Being a ‘writer’, I was intrigued. I downloaded it as part of my package and discovered that it was actually a program that allows me to write to my blog with ease! So if the internet’s broken or something I can just save all my junk here then post it when I get on. Fabulous.

I discovered a little while ago that when my brother tells me to shut the door he’s really telling me to get out of the room and don’t leave any trace of myself behind. That’s lovely.

It’s 10:17pm so I won’t ramble anymore. On to Gatsby.

I had high hopes for this one, which is perfectly normal because I choose all my books carefully. I think this was my second ‘classic’ novel so I was looking forward to it with perhaps more anxiety than my usual novel. I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed.

The book is narrated by Nick Buchanan (who followed the pattern of being the most boring protagonist possible), a young bondsman who has recently moved to New York State’s wealthy Long Island. His cousin, Daisy is a silly girl with an affluent background and a husband that doesn’t care about her. What I was struck by here is the airiness of their relationship, like two ships passing and acknowledging one another with with fleeting curiosity. It was, what are they called? A marriage of means.

So the novel began in an easy, uncaring way with characters that cared more about parties and dresses than feelings and relationships. The superficiality was beautiful. The parties, described sparingly with a dreamlike state of half-awareness of Nick’s part were so fantastically skin-deep.

As the novel progressed these layers of padding simply fell away, leaving raw nerves that had been veiled by masks of careless smiles completely vulnerable. Daisy’s marriage all but dissolved in the eyes of the reader (though not literally because it was a marriage of means) as we discover that she is, in fact, in love with Jay Gatsby. Then there’s a terrible traffic accident and the climax of the novel is reached. After that, I believe it took a turn for the worst. With thirty pages to go and the transformation from superficial to raw complete, the book seemed to flutter between meanings. There were two shocking character deaths that I hardly comprehended because they were done without flair or emotion.

But then, as always, the novel ends with hypotheses and contemplation that set my heart soaring. Fitzgerald likened Gatsby, gazing upon Daisy’s house with long, wonder and feeling to the first settlers in America and everything was happy in literary world.

I’m now reading Grass for his Pillow by Lian Hearn for the second time. There is a third novel in this series that I never reached two years ago when I last read them, so I’m going over the first two again, then I’ll finish the series once and for all. After that, my library club novel – The Knife of Never Letting Go. It has a truly fascinating blurb. Then I imagine I’ll read something classic again. Thomas Hardy, mayhaps, as I’ve recently fallen in love with his poem “The Darkling Thrush”.

I’m going to bed now. Goodnight!

The Weekend of Friday 6th - Sunday 8th March

I got out of school at 3:25 as usual and walked down to the library for my monthly book club. It had actually been two months since we met so we were discussing Meg Rosoff's What I Was and the infamous...Twilight.

Despite this being the least eventful part of my weekend I plan to do a little mini-review of each novel :3

What I Was really set my heart pacing when I read the blurb. Young love, contemplation of life, and the seaside. It ticked all the boxes. That's why I think I was so disappointed by it. The protagonist, instead of being the confused, fantastically lovable little boy I wanted turned out to be cynical, supercilious and uncaring. But you can't blame our dear author for having a character that was mean, could you? No, but you can blame them for said character turning from sarcastic elitist to blubbering romantic in the space of a chapter. Oh, yes! He's fallen in love; it's perfectly justifiable. 

No. Characters do not change in three seconds flat, no matter how great their love. They EVOLVE. 

Anyway, I trudged through the next 120 pages hating the new hapless Hilary (male) as much as the old cynical beast. The book became rather hopeless after I discovered that Finn, the adventurous young boy that lives in a shack by the sea and doesn't belong to the government, was as interesting as cardboard. The author was trying to show us that he had never been in human contact and thus didn't know HOW to have emotions, and she succeeded. Like I said, cardboard.

But then something happened. Dear old Finn disappeared and Hilary stole his shack and became "one with nature." Oh, it was splendid. It was the romanticism of Hilary mixed with Finn's idyllic lifestyle for 60 pages of almost uninterrupted nature imagery and contemplation of life with some delightful metaphors thrown in. 

And then the book ended and I felt that it had somehow redeemed itself. Slightly. Though one quarter of the book being a good read is simply not enough.

Now on to Twilight. We all love this novel at first. "Oh, isn't Edward lovely?" "It's so romantic!" After time the positive thoughts of the book atrophy in your head and are usurped by dark, twisty one about how two-dimensional Bella is etc. We had such fun ripping this and its movie adaptation apart on Friday. Because no one likes Twilight anymore. 

That'll do for Twilight. I'm still exhausted from Friday.

Saturday morning brought an early rise to my friend David's house to shoot the rest of his movie. I played a chav (ignorant, brutish English teenagers) and it was tremendous fun. I found out last night that it's on Youtube so everybody go look at "My View on Chavs and how they Resemble Zombies". It will make you laugh or your money back. So I stayed there for a while and played make-up artist/cameraman then returned home. My friend Jonny came over and we didn't go into town like we had planned. So we played on the Wii and watched some TV online and stuff.

That night I had to go play the viola at the Ballymena Academy Old Pupils' Association Dinner for about half an hour. When I came out it was WET. Lightning danced about the sky and the cheerful cacophony from inside and given way to thunderous roars in the sky. It took about five seconds to get from the doorway to the car, but I got WET.

Yesterday I went shopping and bought a jacket that I thought was grey but later discovered was green. I still heart it and am wearing it as I type. I also got a pair of shorts that mock me because it is too cold outside to wear them. I bought a few bracelet-y things as well because I always wanted to have random junk to string around my wrist.

I had a sudden urge tonight to run. But I was with our elderly dog so it wasn't going to happen. Now I have a not so sudden urge to get up at 7:00am tomorrow and go for a brisk morning run. Unforunately I'm 90% sure it's dark so early in the morning and our shower is broken, which means I would be sticky in school. Unpleasant.

Oh! I read The Great Gatsby and was really looking forward to talking to myself about it. However this blog entry has gone on long enough and I'm about to run out of battery power. Goodbye, myself.

All These Changes That I'm Not Sure Happened

I'm sitting here, on my bed, wondering whether I should say everything, or nothing has changed. It's been months since I've written anything so my grammar is suitably horrible, but apart from that, life trundles on. (The old me would now lament how little my life has altered in a space of several months, but not this one!)

I've started watching Grey's Anatomy, which simply is just the best TV show on earth. I've also read a lot of books - notably Uglies by Scott Westerfield. Let's talk about that for a while, shall we?

I gingerly approached the section of my local library allocated to teenagers, knowing that I would find nothing but melodramatic, romantic trash and needlessly violent spy "novels". Turning my head to 90 degrees as I usually do when scanning books, I came across this very interesting find. It's about a futuristic society where everyone is born "ugly" (except for the "natural-born pretties" that set my heart a-twittering) and are then operated upon at the age of sixteen to become "pretty". Although the prose was lamentable, I could for once forgive the author and simply enjoy the story.

As usual, one character breaks the norm and decides she doesn't want to be pretty. However, the frighteningly awful totalitarian government doesn't like rebellion so they conscript our protagonist into finding the rebel, or she will never become pretty. 

It doesn't sound like the most terrible punishment in the world, but that's the magic of Uglies: you completely and utterly believe that this is the most horrid thing imaginable. I was wholly sucked into the world where aesthetics are the only thing that matter. There was such an urgency about the protagonist to turn pretty, that when she realized the beautiful people were only beautiful because her entire upbringing and enforced that hypothesis, I still just felt the need for everyone to turn pretty.

Then again, I'm vain.

Now onto the main theme of the novel. As you can guess, it's individualism. As the story progresses we find out more about what categorizes someone as 'ugly' or 'pretty'. Pretties are the absolute average of everything that only have very subtle differences to tell them apart. Uglies, on the other hand, are ourselves. It took me a while to figure that out, though I loved that the author didn't shout to the heavens the purpose of his novel. All of the uglies in the novel eventually become confident about their appearance and rebel against the government that forces them to conform. How lovely.

I think I'm making it sound like a very girly book. But it isn't. Despite its underwhelming writing I loved it because of its characters, its futuristic setting (did I mention that? The author just makes up devices) and its fantastic message for young people. It also talks about why we should recycle and stuff, which is a plus in my book.

I didn't mean to write that much about it. That makes it seem like I love it to bits when really I just enjoyed it. Although it should come with a warning sticker because for the first 100 pages I was convinced that image is everything and judged the poor students at my school. But then everything was uplifting and wonderful.

My surfing has progressed! I'm still not 'riding the face of the wave' (the man in the surf shop asked me that and I had to decipher its meaning on the spot, lest I look like a fool) but I'm getting up a lot faster and I want to start tackling drop-ins soon. I bought some new gear yesterday because my old stuff was either ripped or constricting the blood flow to my hands. There's a competition next weekend so I'm going to head up and watch how the pros do it. They sell little cups of tea at comps so it's all good :]

Also, I'm doing Drama for GSCE and it is the most awful thing imaginable. My essays are horrible, compliments from the teacher are like blood from a stone (a rather worn simile) and I have an OBSESSED friend that won't stop OBSESSING. 

I think that's it. I half-rejoined my role-playing website and look forward to starting some open RP and just going nuts. Haven't written since NOVEMBER.