Instructions on How to Wish you Were Here and Drinking My Tea

 
You are a small stem of chamomile
or rose hip on my neck,
Your fingers are tea bags after having
cooled down, tracing small lines of
imaginary water down my spine.

    The concert was really nice; we only stayed for two acts (Pink Spiders, I think they were called, and Cobra Starship). The first band was horrid to no end, and we were only really interested in Cobra anyway.
I would have stayed for 30 Seconds to Mars just to indulge my curiosity, but I wasn't planning on sitting through Head Automatica and another band (Men, Women, and Children or some name to that effect) for a glimpse of (big flashes of lightening and confetti) thy holy leader, Jared Leto. I don't even like him as an actor, let alone a psuedo Mallgoth Rocker.

    In any case, Angel Face or not, we all had a fun time and enjoyed watching the other teenagers make fools of themselves (I was dancing, I won't deny it). After Cobra played, we left Roseland Ballroom in search for a hookah bar, when we were promptly interrupted by the ID Gods, who apparently did not want us to enjoy anything before we had some legal proof of being over eighteen. I have to interject to say that I am a responsible person and tend not to do illegal things, but hookah is almost a teenage rite of passage, if not just a fun social activity. Anyway, we were going to head to the village to continue our search when I decided it'd be a better idea to head over to Hoboken, considering it's closer to home and not as full of, uh, bondage shops.
    So we ended up going to Johnny Rocket's (because I just can't get enough fried this and greasy that-- more trans fats, please!) and ordering some fries as a small dinner. We were going to go to a cafe after wards, but it was raining really hard by the time we came out and it was getting late, so we headed home.
    We had to wait about an hour or so for our PATH trains to come; we actually ended up getting on one and were gently informed by the conductor ("What, are you fuckin' retarted??") that they did not appreciate our presence while they were doing police testing.

To go off on a tangent:
    I hate to rant or anything, but I absolutely cannot stand it when older guys stare at me in subway stations. I tend not to wear revealing clothing or anything and I guess I should be flattered (next to trans fats, I hold subway perverts in the highest regard), but I AM SIXTEEN AND YOU ARE FIFTY TWO, PLEASE GO PURCHASE YOURSELF A PROSTITUTE. I always end up grabbing one of my male companion's arms and making them pretend to be my boyfriend (this has happened twice when we were going to concerts, once this past week and once in April during an Arctic Monkeys show... I was actually groped in Lincoln Center over the summer-- right in front of a couple of cops, actually, who just laughed when I informed them of what happened).
            
    I should really go read this James Baldwin piece for English (Notes of a Native Son). When Mr. Shallcross assigned us the essay, Eliav made the interesting comment of, "Isn't he an actor?" to which I promptly stuck my head in my hands and sighed. I love my generation.

    Also, I'm trying to get into Virginia Woolf, do any of you fans have recommendations?

Charline

We had to write an anecdote for English. It's not my favourite recent piece by far, but I suppose it provides some insight into my personality. (Everyone was a little surprised when I used "fuck" in the paper. It was amusing to hear the whispers of "Oh my God, did she just say that? Did she just use the f-word in an English assignment?")

Shindig

 

The first thing that struck me when I entered the basement wasn’t the pallid blue mattress piled with fried teenagers, or the nameless rapper spitting out lines about this “pimp fucking up that ho.” It wasn’t the couple having an endless make out session by the bar, or the curtain of smoke billowing from the black and mild sticking out of the host’s mouth. No, the first thing that struck me when I entered the basement was how much I didn’t actually want to be there.
           The whole day had been dedicated to preparation for my first “real party.” I was advised to eat a lot, so I gorged myself on cheese quesadillas and a disgustingly rich “like it” sized cup of Coldstone’s Birthday Cake Remix. I stopped short of the suggestion to drink olive oil, deciding that vomiting was endlessly preferable over downing two tablespoons of yellow-green fruit discharge.
            The second my foot left the stairs, a pair of arms wrapped themselves around my shoulders. Before I could register what was going on, a high-pitched voice squeaked my name into my ear.

“Charline!”

“Oh, hey, hi,” I wriggled out of the grip and turned around to face a pair of cabernet-colored eyes.

“I haven’t seen you since like, the morning!”

“Yeah, it’s uh, been a while,” I slid away and made my way over to the mattress; her gaze remained fixed on my previous position.

“Okay, bye!” she bid the stairs farewell and attained a position of intimacy with the floor. The rapper announced that “shit” had indeed gone down on the streets of Compton, and that some “bitch” would certainly get what was coming to her.

“Oh man, sick!” Someone came screaming out of the bathroom.

“What, what?” the host turned to him, the cigarette still hanging from the corner of his lips.

“Man, someone threw up in the bathroom.”

“Oh, fuck! Who the fuck threw up in the fucking bathroom?” Everyone replied with mumbles of innocence. I took a swig from the misnamed “Hard Lemonade” that had been shoved into my hands (it would have been more accurately labeled as “yesterday’s toilet brush extract”) and shook my head. I started up the stairs and by the time the last “ho” was getting “beat down,” I was already sitting on the curb.

            “Hey, you okay?” One of my more sober friends followed me out the door and came up to me, “I’m sorry about this.”

“No, no, it’s alright. It was… an interesting experience,” I laughed. The front door creaked open and a thin silhouette appeared in the doorway.

“I have to pee,” the silhouette admitted, “Do I smell like throw up? I was in the bathroom.”

My friend turned to her, “Go pee, the bathroom’s right there.” The silhouette stumbled over her foot.

“Go, help her, I’ll be okay,” I smiled.

“You sure?”

            “Yeah, yeah, don’t worry about it. We’ll talk tomorrow,” I stood up and gave her a hug, and she disappeared through the door with the silhouette in tow. As I waited for my father to drive up with the car, I thought about what had happened. At first I was a little angry with myself for letting the opportunity to be a real teenager slip away from me, but then I realized that, as corny as this sounds, being a “real teenager” doesn’t have to mean sitting outside of convenience stores and smoking blunts in basements. Being a teenager means being unsure and uncomfortable with life, it’s about discovering yourself and losing yourself again at least twice a week. It’s about finding your true calling in aluminum can making one day and deciding to become an astrophysicist the next. Being a teenager isn’t about age, it’s a state of mind.
            (Okay, and maybe a little partying.)

    I'm going into the city with a couple of friends tomorrow, I hope that the weather is good! I've had a lot of work lately, between everything that I have to do for school and filling out college scholarship applications.
Speaking of school, I've decided that unless I fall deeply in love with physics this year and want to take AP physics, I'm going to stop taking science next year. AP science takes up a lot of time in my schedule, and I would really like to do an independent study in Play Writing and Production (Mrs. Chomko, the dramatics teacher and my favourite faculty member, promised to be my mentor and instructor in the independent study). I'm going to be writing a full length play for production as my Gifted and Talented project this year (I was going to put out an art zine but I feel like every sixteen-year-old girl and their mother is doing that these days and that I wouldn't be able to put enough of an original spin on it for it to succeed like N.E.E.T. and other zines did).
    I am also going to be aiming to write a 50,000 word novel in December, considering it's National Novel Writing Month. The NaNoWriMo "competition" gives you a month to finish the novel. There's no prize at the end besides the satisfaction of having an almost complete work. The good thing about not offering monetary prizes is that I won't have to freak out over whether or not what I write at that point is good- the website itself says that it is to encourage freewriting and make the atmosphere of writing more relaxed. I figure if there's anything good in what I write, i'll edit it and polish it up so that I can hopefully have a final version of a complete novel by next year.

Life Goal 01: Become a Published Author

    I got a lead in the school's production of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite- I'll be playing Norma Hubley, the mother-of-the-bride. It's the main role of Act III (along with Ray Hubley, I suppose), which is sort of weird considering I tried out for the smallest part of the show- the distraught bride, Mimsey. Originally I wasn't going to audition at all, but decided that I might as well have a small part in addition to doing costumes. But yeah, yesterday I went to 9th period a little early and Mrs. Chomko (we all call her by a shortened version of her maiden name- Slesch) told me that my audition was one of the best.
  
  In any case, i'm excited to start rehearsal, even though I almost always play either the mother role or the comic role- or both, in the case of Suite and my second play Once Upon a Mattress (I was Queen Aggrivain- best role ever, honestly; I've never gotten so many compliments in my entire life).

    I have to read Hemingway's "masterpiece" A Farewell to Arms. I'm sure many of you will disagree, but it's so repetitive and annoying that it really makes me want to cut my own arms off. I'm only on page fourteen, though (I have to read up to 160 by Monday- that'll be fun), so I'm sure it'll get better. Well, not so much sure as really hoping.

    I have to get back to writing about what I want to get out of a college education so that I can be rejected for $1000 dollars.

    Oh, and a big shana tova to all of my Jewish buddies. :)

(We were driving home from my uncle and aunt's house last night and my parents had drank a little [not to the point of even being tipsy, bust still] so I volunteered to drive. It was my first time driving at night and I had to go through Route 9, the Garden State Parkway, and Route 22 [a.k.a. the highway next to my house that has been named the most dangerous road in the United States], not to mention in heels. It was pretty scary, but I did a good job. :))

p.s. Does anyone know how I can post images without the borders around them? Thanks!