catherinedidwhatwithahorse

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

I experience Blue Field Entoptic Phenomenon a lot, which basically means that, sometimes, when you look at a large blue field (like the sky), the red blood cells in your retina slow down behind white blood cells and create what are called “blue-sky sprites.” They just look like small glowing dots darting around in your vision, sometimes with dark trails behind them.

So anyway, now that I know what it is, I know that someday, it’s going to happen in a group of people, and I’ll say, “hey, it’s the blue-sky sprites,” and everyone around me will think I’m having hallucinations.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

So, I was pretty annoyed in Calculus today. I said to my teacher, "Hey, so no one ever told me that a radian is just an arc measure of the circle."

And he said, "Well, yeah. We don't tell you that because people don't understand what that means."

To which I replied, "But people don't know what a radian is."

So I was very annoyed because what the hell is our school system if the theory, for teaching math at least, is "Tell them exactly the information they need to have in order to solve the problems, but anything else and it's too much." I mean, honestly, maybe I'm having too much faith in my fellow teens, but if someone had ever just said, "You know, the radian is just the arc measure at that angle from the horizontal." I would have been like, "Oh, yes, that makes perfect sense as a thing to use and now I understand the conversions and how to use radians."

But no, I spent two years thinking, "What is this thing that I'm being told to use? I do not understand."

Pathetic, really.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

Something People Should Know About College Apps

The last English assignment juniors at my high school get is to pick a college essay prompt (from the personal statement of the Common App or UC app) and write the first draft of their college essay. Our junior teachers read it, make comments, and pass it on to the senior teacher, who reads it and makes comments. Then, we get passed back an essay on the first day of senior year that'll help us start our applications.

It's a good system.

So about six months ago, I wrote my first personal statement. It responded to the prompt about a problem I would like to solve, and I hated it when I read it the second time. I don't remember the second personal statement, but I hated it even when I was writing it, and it didn't get better later.

The problem was that I hated talking about myself and it showed through in my writing. In each essay, it sounded uncomfortable and rushed.

One day, I sat down, opened a new Grammarly doc, and started writing something about myself. I was thinking on the advice of my journalism teacher, but I can't remember what he told me anymore. I got very angry and started a new doc, this one was snarky and surprisingly good.

Then, I forgot what I was writing. I was thinking and purring it down on paper. Finally, I came up with something that I liked and I asked another teacher to read it and I revised and revised until I got to the point where I though, "This is perfect, this is something I want to submit." And I took a step back and I realized that it wasn't about me.

I have a really strong rhetorical voice and style, which is the consequence of being a columnist and loving to talk, and so I figured out that I didn't have to talk about myself to help the admissions people get to know me.

Don't be afraid to not write about yourself. If you would rather write about a pretty tree you saw once or your thoughts about politics, go ahead. I mean, when we make friends, we don't necessarily start off with, "One time, this thing happened to me," we start with, "I really like... you like it too?" Or something like that.

I wrote mine about how adults shouldn't criticize teenagers for using "Internet English" and argued that it should be a recognized dialect.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

I’m in this class at my school that’s all about how various books and plays have been adapted into movies. It’s a pretty cool class, but now it’s the end of the semester and we have this project where we take one of the books we’ve read and pick songs that would go in the soundtrack if we were to adapt it into a movie.

I really liked the project until I got to this one part. We’re supposed to make a CD case for it with the “liner notes” for the songs. We have to put all the lyrics for every song, the paragraph we wrote explaining how the lyrics connect to the story, in which specific scenes we would play the song, and why we would choose those scenes. 

And we lose points if the thing doesn’t fit into the case. 

I’m at four pages for the thing so far and I’m only on the second song, which basically means I’m going to have a 10 page novella stuck inside a CD case and my teacher is just going to have to deal with it. 

Of course, the really annoying part of the situation is that we also had to create a PowerPoint presentation with all the same information.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

Me: Yeah, I usually don't fill in my eyebrows because theyre uneven and you can't really tell until I darken them.

Every Other Girl: Oh, you just aren't doing it right.

Me: *fills in eyebrows* O wise one, please help me even out my eyebrows.

Other Girl: Yeah, just stop raising one of them.

Me: Yeah, I'm not.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

My sister hates my music taste and she often comments obnoxious things like that my music is disgusting, but she gets unnecessarily angry if we suggest that we don't like the music she listens to (even though everyone in the house hates it).

Even still, though, she occasionally makes really sweet comments about how she respects the way I listen to music. Like, once, she said, "I admire that you don't really like specific bands, you just like songs."

And then the other day, I was talking about adding a son to a particular Spotify playlist, and she said, "I love that you listen to what you want to listen to. Like, you have different playlists for what you want to listen to, but I just listen to everything at once."

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

Why I Listen to Film Scores All the Time

I was on my way to school and realized I had forgotten something, so I ran back inside and started searching my room frantically. All the while, "The Dream is Collapsing" from the Inception score was playing.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

I'm so stressed out right now that I can't even remember what day it is. I was singing kid songs to cheer myself up and I started singing If You're Happy and You Know It, but instead of saying "clap your hands," I said "crap your hands," and everyone around me started asking if I was okay.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

So, I want everyone to know this.

TV and movies really don't depict our teenage experience accurately. We get support from random people online, and a good majority of us who experience mental illness suffer more from the stress that school and life in general puts on us than from bullying (which is what we're told is causing most of our mental problems - I'm looking at you, 13 Reasons Why).

After months, I finally listened to the soundtrack of Heathers: The Musical again, saw because Spotify just recently got the full album.

If you haven't heard it, I strongly suggest you listen to it. It's a short musical and you can probably listen to it in less than two hours. The original movie, as always, is highly recommended (especially if you want to understand the plot while listening just to the music).

In the past, when I listened to it, I mostly focused on the discrepancies from the movie to the show, but since I'm taking a class on adaptation and because I hadn't heard the show in so long, I thought more about those discrepancies and what they mean.

The original movie came out in 1989 and the musical debuted in the 2000s or 2010s, which means that they were written for completely different generations.

When I listened to it, I realized that Heathers: The Musical, though still set in 1989, is trying to speak to our generation. Just listen to Seventeen or Seventeen (Reprise). Even though Veronica is talking about not killing people, what she's saying is that we shouldn't have to worry about life and death as teenagers, we should be worried about making it to college, breaking the rules, just being teemagers.

This ended up being longer than I wanted, but, seriously, it's the most relatable depiction of the teenage experience than anything I've seen so far.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

My favorite thing in the world is that the day I took the SAT, College Board sent me am email asking me to fill out a survey about my experience. Since I'm always trying to help people, I decided to take the survey.

One of the sections was aboutt why I chose to take the SAT and I had to rank all the possible reasons they had given me and one of them was "Because my friends were taking it." Like, adults think we're so susceptible to peer pressure that we'd rather take the most stressful test in the United states education system than just go, "Nah, man, I don't think so." Like, what the heck, right?

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

Today I freaked out a girl in a Kohl's because we were in the shoe department and I was standing in the middle of the aisle in a depressed stupor kid of thing just thinking about how much I hate shopping and buying new things and whatnot, and she was sitting on the floor trying on a pair of shoes and she looked at me and asked if I needed to get past her, and I said, "No, I'm just standing here...in the middle of this aisle...for no reason." And she gave me a really weird look and just goes, "Uh, okay..." and then I moved because she wouldn't stop staring at me.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

Random Guy in a Store: Mom?

My mother, who has three daughters and no sons: Yeah?

Me:

My mom:

Me: Mom, what the hell?

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

my teacher said to pick two short stories (of the six that we’ve read) and write a 1000 word paper comparing and contrasting them, so I decided to compare and contrast “The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D. H. Lawrence and “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka on the basis that they both focus on bedrooms. This is literature everybody, and I am going to be so proud of this paper.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

Honestly, I have no wrath inside me. I'm just one giant passive aggressive monster.

For example, my sister and I share a very thin wall and I tend to keep my bedroom door open a lot because I am just an open person. But my sister likes to listen to things at an unreasonable volume (by unreasonable, I mean the highest possible volume).

Every time she does it, I think to myself, "Someday, I am just going to play something she hates all the way up just to give her a taste of her own medicine." But I never do because I'm not a wrathful person and listening to myself doing that would just annoy me more than it annoys her.

So instead I bottle it up and write about it on Tumblr.

By the way, right now, she is watching anime, and speaking to the screen, "You bitch, why did you do that to her? So rude." Etc, etc.

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

Me: Hi, Chris.

Chris: I'm fine. How are you?

Me: What an efficient conversational technique. We should all try this. Just eliminate the usual formalities and go straight for the meat of the conversation.

Chris: What?

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

if you ever think that you’ve done something stupid while drunk, just remember that, in the Bible, after Lot and his daughters escaped Sodom his daughters were worried about carrying on the bloodline so TWO NIGHTS IN A ROW they got Lot drunk and tricked him into sleeping with them and both daughters got pregnant.

no matter how drunk you get, you will never be so drunk that two nights in a row you get one of your children pregnant

[catherinedidwhatwithahorse]

In movies when they're kissing and the girl pulls away and the guy says, "Did I do something wrong?"