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.