Before I go to Sleep

I had so much fun in Ellicott City and bought this bag:

partly with the money Courtney/Courtney’s mom gave me for my birthday (!!!) and partly with my own money. It’s made from recycled fish feed bags and is from a fantastic place called Ten Thousand Villages. There’s a website called tenthousandvillages.com, if you want to check it out. This was in Baltimore, where we went once we were done in Ellicott City.

I was planning on making a nice long post tonight, and I even jotted down things to mention during the day, but not long after I got home I worked myself up and ended up crying on and off for almost an hour. This was contributed to mostly by the huge amoung of stress I’ve been under lately. My math grade’s really been getting to me, and so has the prospect of taking the AP Euro test. I guess I let all of that and everything else, really, bottle up inside me tightened carefully, except the cork unexpectedly came undone. Eventually, I calmed down, but not without a lot of nose-running and tissues and red-rimmed eyes. Real crying isn’t as pretty as the movies make it out to be.

Tomorrow I’m going to watch two episodes of The Office, The Stepford Wives (it came in the mail today) and the new episodes of Dollhouse and Lie to Me. I guess I’ll have to start a new knitting project tomorrow, then, to keep my hands occupied and therefore keep myself from biting my nails incessantly.

(I was just about to copy this into a Ning post… I forgot that BEDA was over)

Oh yeah, and before I forget, Courtney’s mother remembered to put batteries in her camera.

Another thing I might as well mention–I finished reading When you are Engulfed in Flames today. Now I just need to finish A Girl Named Zippy and then I’ll be homefree and ready for some more books!

Something else definitely worth mentioning: my parents apparently exchanged the tape recorder today, and they presented me with the new one, which is somehow (I thought it impossible) infinitely better than the original. It has real little tapes and everything! They also gave me an awesome shirt that looks like this:

As you can see, the crying rage was just a freak incident. I’m not going crazy or anything, and now I’m as perfectly happy as ever. Or, as Courtney’s mother would say (much to Courtney’s dismay), “I’m just fabulous.”

BEDA Installment Thirty: Different than Usual, eh? How so?

A heads up: expect LOTS and LOTS of unnecessary captilzation today, MUCH more than usual.

For some reason, today seems different. Even though BEDA isn’t officially over (and it will NEVER be officially over, though technically, it will be…), I feel like things have changed. I feel like, post-BEDA, I have MORPHED into something different, even though I haven’t changed much at all. I’m not going to say anything else sappy, but I must say this has all definitely been a positive (and UPLIFTING) experience. I am grateful to the people I’ve met and the people I’ve learned more about, whose lives I’ve been rooting around in for a month now.

Today my parents gave me four more books that came in the mail for my birthday! These include The Superior Person’s Book of Words, The Superior Person’s Second Book of Weird and Wondrous Words, The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate, and The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate. I feel like my parents give me more credit than I deserve, all because of my love of words. With these newfound books, I feel like I am SUPERIOR and HIGHLY SELECTIVE and, above all, EXTRAORDINARILY LITERATE.

For the last little while I became EXTREMELY stressed out, mostly due to not doing my math homework until just now, and I NEVER wait to do my math homework. I always do it right after I get home from school, and so doing it this late was a STRANGE and STRESSFUL time. It wasn’t even that much, much less work than usual, but it still scared the bejeebers out of me. For a moment there, I felt like I was going to be expelled from high school, all because of a little math assignment. I NEVER forget to do my homework. I pride myself on NEVER having not turned in homework (double negative, but you get the point).

This afternoon I went to Rachel’s house where her, Kaitlyn, and I attempted to have an AP Euro study session. Of course, we ended up going to the playground and playing Uno and running away from the sound of gunshots when the police showed up near the playground (it wasn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds) where we were swinging and halfheartedly studying.

This morning Daniel gave me crumb cake for my birthday. IT IS SO GOOD. Daniel is a fabulous baker.

All day today, really, I’ve been fooling around with my camera. I LOVE IT IN EVERY WAY.

Tomorrow is the day Courtney and I are going to Ellicott City! I am PUMPED for this triparoonski. While there, I will be LESS THAN FIVE MILES away from one of my BEDA buddies, Sophie. THAT IS MARVELOUS, wouldn’t you say?

In other news, something strange happened today during fourth block. I was sitting in the auditorium in front of some guys from my guitar class (we were waiting for a teacher to come into the auditorium who was winning some sort of award) when one of these guys tapped my on the shoulder. Not sarcastically or rudely at all, strangely, he asked me if it was true that I make all my own clothes. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or not, so I simply said, “no,” and then he badgered his friend next to him, saying he had once told him this false statement. The friend kept denying ever having said anything about it. The first guy then proceeded to ask me if I had made SOME of my clothes, to which I said, “not really,” although I have made a few skirts that I wear pretty often. I didn’t feel like going into a lengthy explanation on how, TECHNICALLY, I made the skirts, and, also technically, I make hats and stuff, so I just replied, “not really,” and then sat very still as nearly the entire row behind me collaborated on finding words on the back of my shirt, which was this shirt I have that has a word search covering the whole thing.

Well, good night now! I hope you all have the best end of the evening and end of BEDA ever, and continue to enlighten me in the future.

Question Thirty: What book is currently cloest to where you are?