Meg Dowell Writes

Winding Down

This past week has been….interesting.

The good news is, I finally got my character shoes! Which is really exciting, because I’ve never had character shoes before. The last time I wore any kind of dancing shoes at all was when I was five, engrossed in that ever-popular preschool/kindergarten phase called ballet. I’m not sure, honestly, why I quit. Maybe I shouldn’t even call it that; it was more like stopping. I don’t think I ever said to my mother, “Mommy, I’m quitting ballet.” I guess when sign-ups came around one fall, my name just didn’t get on the list.

I admire all of the people that do stick with it, though, and sometimes I wish I had. Watching ballet is really cool—especially professional ballet. My favorite ballet of all time is this one, which I saw every year around Christmas time from three years old until ten or eleven. I really miss going! I mean, I’ve seen it so many times, I know it from beginning to end. I used to have a pop-up book.

Another semi-important thing I managed to cross off my list this week was the application to Prairie State (yay!). It honestly took about ten minutes to fill out, check, and submit (maybe an extra three to find my social security number), which is kind of sad, in a way. But it really felt good to get it done! Now I have something to do when I finish high school in January. Right?

I’m almost done with all of the books that were stacked on my night stand. I have the one my mom’s friend let me borrow about a year or two ago (probably should think about getting that back soon…) and Pride and Prejudice, which I’m not completely sure I’m going to read yet, because we’re reading it in my English class this year. Maybe I’ll read it once before then, just so I can enjoy it once before I’m forced to analyze the heck out of it. I really hope we’ll get our own copies to keep. We don’t get to keep Hamlet, which makes me really sad.

I just finished working on a project for my creative writing class (actually, we turned them in yesterday). I wish I would have remembered to take a picture before I sent it off, because it was really cool. We had to choose a container that represented us somehow, and use the outside to display how other people perceived us. The inside was decorated with objects, pictures, and words describing how we really are, sometimes controdicting the things on the outside.

I chose a book for mine, since both reading and writing make up a good chunk of my life. I covered it with one of those stretchy textbook covers (it was green) and wrote things all over it in permanent marker, like “advocate of silence” (apparently I don’t talk very much in school) and “good girl” (and apparently I come off to strangers as being generally “good,” which isn’t too far off from the truth). The outside was kind of boring and ick, which was what it was supposed to be.

The inside was really fun to make. I cut the middle of the pages out so it made a sort of container and covered it with pink wrapping paper (i love pink). I glued all sorts of things to it, like a pen and a guitar pick. I had pictures of Gilmore Girls, a few indicating my tree-hugger status (still have to post about that, don’t I?), and I dotted it with little music notes. Music notes are fun to draw.

Since it’s a three-day weekend, I plan on getting my homework done this morning, after I continue working on self-editing my novel (still a pain, but necessary). All I have to do is read a Martin Luther King Jr. speech and identify some rhetorical devices. Not too hard, right? It shouldn’t take me long, and once I get it done, I’m free until Tuesday! How awesome is that?

We were supposed to have another Operation last night, but no one offered to host, so it didn’t happen. It kind of made me really amd (I’m still kind of upset), but what are you going to do? You can’t change people, or their minds, or what they do. And yelling doesn’t solve anything, either. I mean, when I get yelled at, I get angry at the person who’s yelling at me. So I try not to yell too much. Plus, it’s not good for your voice.