New York to Chile

Just another update. I'm leaving for Chile tomorrow, to visit family. I haven't been in seven years, so it should be memorable, and I'm going to try and enjoy every second. And take photographs to post on this blog, of course. I'm predicting a good bit of culture shock, and a bit of actual shock because it's going to be cold. I'm applying for college, so that's fun (not) and exciting (admittedly). It just scares me, mostly. I've also been reading a lot, and writing songs maybe kind of. I watched The Virgin Suicides for the first time. I'm such a freaking teenage girl. Anyway, here are some mid-summer snapshots.

Washington Square Arch.

Favorite place in the United States.

Re-reading my favorite book.

Skater boi sighting at the marina.

Suburban vibez.

Besties and stuff.

Current mood:

early summer colors

A little early summer photo diary of pictures I've taken with my phone and edited accordingly.

I saw The Cripple of Inishmaan at the Cort Theatre and I'm really passionate about how spectacular Daniel Radcliffe was. Lovely little theatre, too.

Le Pain Quotidien, my favorite food chain EVER.

Fun ocean time with my brother at Cedar Beach.

Possibly the best rice pudding to enter my mouth in my lowly seventeen years. See also: unironic Maraschino cherry.

Being social.

A suburban tiki torch. (Should "tiki torch" be capitalized? Is there a patent holder clutching his heart somewhere, screaming, over the genericization of his trademark?)

PRETTY MUCH THE BEST TYPE OF PEN TO EVER EXIST. My friend bought me one in Flushing a year ago and I used the angelic writing utensil dry. I found another one in an art supply store this weekend. *cries*

Current mood:



Love,
Ana

journals

I thought I'd share some pages from my journal today. They don't make a lot of sense, but I think journals that do make a lot of sense are like the end products of paint-by-numbers sets; very pleasing on a shelf, but lacking in scope/passion/ART. I try to write at strange hours, when my mind can forget to care about conventions and judgements and the like. So yeah. Normally I would end this paragraph with some kind of apology but I'm trying not to do that so much.

P.S. I'm going to start ending my posts with a song or two that I'm currently f~e~e~l~i~n~g.

So, current mood:

summer and PLANS

My last day of classes was on Thursday. I have to say that I am wholly impressed with the amount of work I had to finish on Wednesday night, and with the conscious determination with which I put it all off until one in the morning on Wednesday night. But all that is (more or less) done now. Summer plans include: completing a psychology research project for the Intel Science Talent Search, even though I have no intention of being a psychologist or a researcher or a scientist, reading a lot of things (mainly Crime & Punishment, because that is one of those Books To Read Before You Die and, you know, I might die on my way to Starbucks later, so I better get on that), painting a lot of things, filling out college applications, and collecting a sizable vial of tears shed over college applications (scientific value to be determined). But I ALSO plan to be posting on this blog a lot more often. Cool? Cool. Just another update.

Love,

Ana

thinking about things

It's May and I haven't posted anything since March, so I have no right to assume that anyone will or should read this post. But I turned seventeen and started thinking too much and I felt I had to write about that. It's been two years since I could sing along to Taylor Swift's "Fifteen" without feeling that I couldn't, because it wasn't mine anymore. I got a Snapchat, and it's strange, how no one really cares that their conversations are so meaningless that they don't even deserve to EXIST for more than ten seconds. Then I was thinking about how I've always thought being a teenager was a faded-Polaroid-picture type of existence, a series of toothy instants. But it's not instants, it's hours behind infuriatingly ever-perching, wobbly desks and history textbooks from 1992. Even though there are Polaroids sometimes. I am thinking about what I want to major in when I go to college next year, how I tell people I want to major in Communications, because that sounds very practical and solicitous, when all I really want to do is major in English Literature and read nineteenth-century romances. I am thinking about how in one year I will be a legal adult. Or not thinking about it, because it terrifies me because I don't even know how to make spaghetti because I never thought I would need to know how to so soon. Just an update.

Love,
Ana

bitch

So a few months ago I saw this perfect slam poetry video:

I obviously I really want to ditch all this schoolwork right now and take a train to the Nuyorican. But I also can't stop thinking about the word "bitch" and about the ways in which women are compartmentalized by language. Of course here's the continually frustrating slut/prude dichotomy. But "bitch" really gets me. The word connotes a woman who is aggressive and ambitious and present, but the word is obviously used to degrade those wonderfully aggressive and ambitious and present women. If man is confident-seeming, he’s completing his God-given duty as a member of the “higher sex.” At the very least, he’s definitely not a bitch.

Guys are called bitches when they display weakness – a stereotypically feminine characteristic. So I guess this is how society uses the word “bitch” as both a tool to put assertive women in their proverbial places and shit on girls as weak. But, really, if strong women are bitches, then I can only aspire to be the baddest bitch on the face of this twisted Earth.

On a lighter, less-ranty note, I'm going to be in some lovely Spanish cities over spring break on a school trip! It's my first time in Europe, so my parents are losing their minds. Planning on bringing my camera and pretending to be more cultured than I really am.

blog loving

Just a quick post to let y'all know that I am now officially on Bloglovin' so yay!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin 

- Ana <3

tips for avoiding awkward encounters

Well shit. It looks like you are in a public place accompanied by no less than three members of your immediate family and you see that really cool sometimes hi buddy that you kind of know from your English class last year. I am here to rescue you, and tell you how to avoid this girl. Not how to speak to her, though. God knows that's too advanced for me.

1. Keep your phone in an easily accessible pocket at all times. (If you don't have a phone, a watch will work just as well.) When you see this girl (likely wearing a Modern Vampires of the City tour tee and accompanied by a large group of tittering city-chic friends, the likes of which you've only dreamed about), pause mid-stride and develop a slight, half-exasperated, half-revelatory expression and "instinctively" reach for your phone/watch. Gee, it looks like you've forgotten to head to your appointment with your neighborhood psychiatrist. Gotta run! 

Bonus: you'll look like you have somewhere totally, like, ultra-important to be.

2. If you find yourself without a phone or watch, Plan B calls for a more visceral response. Upon sighting said acquaintance, duck into the nearest doorway/side street/storefront. Pace yourself though. You were clearly planning on going that way the whole time.

3. This is a last resort. Let's say you and this girl lock eyes. Ugh, eye contact. And it's one of those "I acknowledge your presence but I'm too far away to say hi or else there will be this mutually uncomfortable silence between the greeting and the actual physical meeting of bodies" moments. You will be forced to interact. The trick: squint. When you get to her, say, "Oh, hi Jackie! Oh God I couldn't even see you from back there; I'm completely blind without my glasses. Well, bye!" I may have overstepped my boundaries in giving advice about actual vocalization, but it will have to do.

In all seriousness, you can totally say hi and bye without it being "weird." Your acquaintance won't think much of it, and they probably feel the same way you do, anyways. That way you'll be "that nice girl/boy" instead of "wait, does that person even go to our school?"

Lots of love,

Ana

overcast and overworked

Hi guys,
I was poking around the very, very deep depths of my laptop and I found this terrifying story I wrote when I was thirteen about several mermaids who spend their lives battling wealth inequality in their seaside town. But I also found these photos from last winter and they felt relevant so here they are. All were taken at my high school (which is basically monochrome all the time, vibe-wise) with my lovely Canon AE-1.

I hope Janus is treating everybody well. SNOW DAY TOMORROW WOOT WOOT. 

- Ana <3

Girls

So Girls came back and I am falling in love all over again. Had I been born twenty years earlier, I would have been a Miranda. Right now I like to think of myself as a Hannah whose indoorsy little heart wishes desperately to be as cool as Jessa, but most people peg me as a Shoshanna. I think people criticize Girls as a modern rip-off of SATC, but who says Generation Y can't use it's own culturally relevant set of twenty-somethings? Because Hannah Horvath is in every way my spirit animal. I totally understand her when she wants something exciting/tragic to happen to her because it will finally and truly make her an Artist with a capital A. And I am all too familiar with her unfortunate encounters with the cottony sticks of evil marketed as Q-Tips (Pro tip: don’t use them.) And as ditsy as Shosh’s dialogue sounds compared to the carefully constructed and in-your-face metaphorically resonant monologues of female television drama protagonists, THAT IS HOW PEOPLE SPEAK. In response to criticism of Lena Dunham’s so-called white-washed, privileged background, I guess my response is this: there are no irrelevant lives. Lena is a creative and smart and funny young woman who writes what she knows, which is what we all should be doing. To quote Georgia O’Keeffe, “Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest."

Anyhow, here is a Very Important Review of the best Hannah lines of Season 3, Episode 2.

"I'm like unrelentingly itchy, is that road trip thing?"

"I'm just realizing this road trip is just not a metaphor. It just isn't."

"This rocking chair is so pointy. it's not giving me any room to express myself."

"But you know what Adam? I don't want to do it. And it's really liberating to say no to shit you hate."

"It made me remember what it was like in college when you'd say, 'Oh, meet me at the Free Palestine party' and then I find out you're over at the Israel house."

TTYL,

Ana

a playlist for Hermione Jean Granger

Music for studying dark magic, hanging in the common room with Ron and Harry, being an ambitious young woman, and twirling in pink dresses when nobody's looking.

The brightest witch of her age. from anaisabel13 on 8tracks Radio.

Paper Forest - In The Afterglow of Rapture - Emmy the Great
Beth/Rest (Rare Book Room) - Bon Iver
Arabesque No. 1 - Claude Debussy
Optimistic - Radiohead
She Will - Savages
Stand on the Horizon - Franz Ferdinand
Heaven in the Afternoon - Belle & Sebastian
Aha! - Imogen Heap
There Is A Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths
Don't Panic - Coldplay
(Nice Dream) - Radiohead
O Children - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
This Is The Night - The Weird Sisters
Young Blood - Birdy
Leaving Hogwarts - John Williams

Hopefully this brightens a dreary day for someone. I know Harry Potter will always cheer me up, especially Hermione. She's been a really important female role model in my life, especially as a scrawny, graceless bookworm in elementary school. I think she showed me that being "nerdy" is a trait to be valued, and I'm grateful for that. And for J.K. Rowling, of course. If you like Harry Potter, I suggest you check out wizard rock; it's a completely legitimate genre of music, I swear. I suggest "The Bravest Man I Ever Knew," by the Ministry of Magic. (Bring on the tears.)

Until next time,
Ana

early success

Something that I think about way too often is how little I've accomplished. I know, I know, I'm fricking 16 years old. Believe me, I make myself aware of that every single day. I am a typical teenage girl times about two thousand percent, in most ways. But there are some outstanding kids out there. I mean, like, spectacularly outstanding. And accomplished. Malala Yousafzai, Tavi Gevinson of Rookie,  LORDE, a slew of award-winning young actors and actresses. They are making literal headlines and advancing VERY IMPORTANT CAUSES. (See: TIME magazine's list of the 16 most influential teens of 2013.)And I'm sitting here next to a couple granola bar wrappers. I know my frustration sounds silly. Those are exceptions. But there is something about desperately wanting to be exceptional like that that produces a very real feeling of anxiety in me, because all I can think of is how easy becoming something and staying something (something being, like, a cultural presence) will be for them. How they will have the world's university admissions committees kneeling at their feet it that's the path they choose to take. Relatively speaking.

Here's Tavi Gevinson on the cover of Bullett, looking like a bad-ass Gwyneth Paltrow circa 1995.

But then again relativity is everything. Sure, I'm a smidgen of dust on the windshield of the world compared to Lorde, but I guess I'm not too terribly off if you put me in a (figurative) pool with every high schooler out there.

And of course, I'm not discounting the fact that all of these remarkable prodigies that I'm thinking about worked extremely hard/did impossibly brave things/basically did God's work on Earth to get where they are. Work that I haven't done (sigh). And obviously I admire them so so so much. I would flip shit if I met Malala or Tavi or Lorde. But the thing is, it's not just them. There are hundreds of potential Harvard applicants out there waiting in the wings with their volunteer trips to Zimbabwe and their own incorporated software companies. And yeah, I know, anything is possible. But what scares me is that I don't think that kind of precocious success is possible for me. Wow, I sound impossibly vain. It's just a national tragedy that I'm not the most amazing person in the world. Sorry about that guys.

So yeah, this is kind of a ridiculous thing to be apprehensive about. I guess I've read enough Malcolm Gladwell to know that. 

But it's there, ya know? And isn't that kind of what teenagerdom is? Being told that the things you're worried about won't really matter in the long run? Question marks???? 

Well, this is thoroughly long/unappealing first post. I need to go listen to some fifties doo-wop to cheer myself up. Something more cheerful next time, I promise, with a maraschino cherry on top. This has been a public service announcement.

- Ana

introductions

Introductions are always uncomfortable. Only the most effervescent souls can get their true personalities across during first meetings. All the rest of us can do is try. Well, here goes. I'm Ana. Hopefully you haven't met me irl. If you have, then, well, hi. If you haven't, I'm just a 16-year-old girl trying to find a place in this world. (See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDw2Q3uiWq8 ) Feminist, fangirl, Faustian.This is going to be a place for my thoughts, I guess? Expect posts ridden with teenage angst/song lyrics/links to articles by winsome geniuses who can express my own thoughts better than I can. I'm just getting started, but see you soon? Comments are welcome! (I just used one of the three exclamation points I'm allowing myself during the entirety of my writing career. FEEL THE ENTHUSIASM.)