01

Jun

Happiness, and Putting Off Burnoutism

 One week of actual classes, three major projects, a show, a facepainting gig, exams, an audition… and sweet, delicious, beautiful freedom.

 In case you didn’t pick up on it from my reclusive behavior on here, or my attitude in general, I am done. I feel like I caught senioritis, but seeing as I’m only finishing grade 11, that’s a bit inconvenient. Perhaps I’ll just call it spring fever instead, to keep from getting ahead of myself.

Alright, there’s a vent to be had here, but  I have had far too many fun, cool- or at the very least, mildly interesting and bemusing- things happen that I would rather talk about than give a vent that’s been covered time and time again on this blog any more space.

So, things.

  • I had a bunch of life plans. But then I decided to throw them out. Which is simultaneously frightening and liberating. Instead I now have a fall back plan (go live the life of an Indie film with Gabe), and a whole whack of decisions to make sometime next year.
  • I have three more IB projects and then I’m done for the year. The problem is that i have no motivation to do them at this point. I’m not sure where I’m going to find this motivation, since I’m starting to use phrases like “my pre-summer evolution into a burnout”, but hopefully I’ll find some hidden resources at the bottom of a frozen lemonade. Three more. That’s all. I can do this.
  • I’ve started not caring about stuff as much. I’m going to have to rein this in sometime (and by sometime I mean this weekend, so I can finish off those final bitter drops of IB), but for now it’s actually just a huge relief.
  • Summertime is here. I have things I want to do, friends I want to visit, media I want to consume, adventures I want to take. And in less than two weeks, I can.
  • I was introduced to King Charles, and now everything is right with the world. My ears are happy as can be.
  • I found my self esteem again. Oh, yeah, that’s right, I am smart and attractive! Balancing confidence with humbleness is a tricky proposition, but just for this moment I’ll veer to the side of cockiness. Because liking myself is something that has fallen to the wayside for the last…indeterminate, but long, amount of time. Now that it’s back, I quite enjoy it.

 Really, I can’t fully cover everything, even using the beautiful invention of bullet points. There have been a billion things that have happened since I last posted. One big thing was *Dramafest, which was extremely stressful, but at the same time, I am so very very proud of my fellow cast members, and our student directors, who pulled through. I made two big discoveries because of Dramafest. 1) I can make it through a double hell week, while sick, and I’ll only mostly hate myself and my friends (the hate passed, don’t worry) by the end of it. 2) When in doubt, clear your throat before coming on stage. Otherwise, if you are sick and full of phlegm, you risk sounding like Satan.

 The second big thing was TEC, which was pretty freaking incredible. Maybe a tiny sprinkling of life altering. Not changing persay, but a little altering, if I can throw phrases like that around at the mature and ripe old age of sixteen. TEC is a place where crazy Jesus stuff goes down, and it’s hard to accurately describe without making most of the people who read this blog think I’m slightly deranged. Suffice it to say, it was good, really helped heal my relationship with God, and gave me a lot more peace than I originally had before going. Also, I got to be of service to other people, which made me pretty happy. I like being useful.

 I’m so glad the school year is almost over. Overall, I’m happy, which due to all the stress I’ve put myself under, is more than I’ve been in a long time.

 Kaelen

*Speaking of which, shameless plug time!!! If you find yourself in need of a show to watch, please come check out our public showings of Yesterday the Children Were Dancing, and the student written play Juicy. Thursday night, SJHS mini theatre, shows starting at 7 pm. Tickets are five dollars at the door.

11 years ago Short URL Comments

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27

Sep

It’s Not Like I’m Going to Get Much Sleep Tonight Anyways

…So, I might as well blog and further ensure my sleep deprived state tomorrow.

Thursdays, as I’ve mentioned before (and by that I mean the post directly underneath this one) are always my busiest day of the week. This Thursday was particularly exemplary, including:

  • Getting up and going to school, which is in and of itself always a bit of a struggle, seeing as how it involves “getting out of bed”. In a stroke of “Kaelen is being a big girl” I actually got out of bed when my alarm went off, instead of rolling over and sleeping for an unspecified amount of time until the world looked friendlier.
  • A lunch that included a lot of “I don’t get why this is happening, people confuse me” in the most hilarious-to-my-friends way possible, and “final editing” a commentary that has been stressing me out since a week ago.
  • After school choir until five, where one of the songs we’re going to sing is just remarkably sassy, making me and Maegan feel like independent black women who don’t need no men. Also, we found out that choir is going on a two day trip to a nearby province that I’ve wanted to visit  forever but just never have. I’m actually pretty excited for this, despite how small the trip seems when you compare it with the week long tour of Boston they took last year. (which, sadly, I didn’t go on.)
  • Finally chilling with Tatyana for what may very well be the first time in forever (alright, I’ll admit to the crime of hyperbole, but it felt like that). Multiple extracurricular activities and partial IB do not for a social life make. We sat in my favorite (slightly sketchy) southend park, while I ate some rather underwhelming food court sushi.
  • Iact, where (seeing as we were bereft of both our leads) we played games that involved lying on each other’s stomachs and making noises (I swear, this is actually a theatre kid thing. I don’t make these up.) and something called “mafia” that was basically an interactive story told by Ben where the large majority of us ended up dying in inventive ways. Drowning in cake batter was quite possibly my favorite.
  • Lizz and I headed off to catch the last third of our high school’s coffee house. True to form, it mostly consisted of the talented music kids being talented and the awkwardly hilarious people doing awkwardly hilarious things. Julianne and I discovered that we had both brought mugs that had noses on them… one of those little things that slightly made my night.
  • Once I got home, I had to study for a french test. This went a lot faster than I thought it would, which either means that I’m going to have certain parts of my anatomy handed to me tomorrow during C Block or that core french is just really really really incredibly easy. To be honest, it’s probably the latter, which I’m not saying because I’m an egotistical little snob… but rather because Core French is quite possibly the birdiest of the bird courses, and one that I’m merely taking because you kinda need it to graduate.
  • Though this wasn’t on any to-do list, I am mildly annoyed enough to find it worth mentioning: after all the time and trouble I went through to edit that stupid commentary for what I thought was the last time, I went onto  my computer and realized that I need to redo all the quotation marks, because they aren’t in the correct font. As I have no Word program on my computer, this has to  wait until school tomorrow…Oh, joy. Just when I thought I was done with the beast, something too small to really matter but too annoying for my paranoid OCD to handle had to pop up.

At this point in the night, I mentally flipped a table and opened wordpress. Fast forward to me sitting here, trying to ignore the fact that I really need to start packing for the weekend, seeing as I’m leaving tomorrow after school (no time to go home in-between…cue me awkwardly trying to fit an overstuffed backpack into my locker come tomorrow morning). I’m going off for the weekend with my youth group, to what I believe has been best described as “Hippie Jesus Camp”. I’m looking forward to it for the whole “spiritually refreshing part”… and also because when a bunch of Christians get together to chaperone teenagers for a weekend the general philosophy seems to be “EAT LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF FOOD AND  MAYBE SOME SNACKS AND HOW ABOUT A LITTLE MORE FOOD”. I guess praising Jesus on an empty stomach just doesn’t fly.

No matter your theistic views, I hope your weekend is full of lots and lots and lots of snacking. Because snacking is always a good time.
Kaelen

12 years ago Short URL 1 Comment

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11

Aug

Today’s transitions shall be provided in the form of Llamas.

I’m coming to the point in the summer where I feel like I must shove as much as possible into my remaining time. To quote Calvin and Hobbes, “When you serious about having fun, its not much fun at all.” If  there was a male personification of the season of summer I would be their clingy and completely-smothering-as-per-all-all-the cliches girlfriend.

This being said, summer is not yet over, so please have a happy llama.

The last little bit of my life can more or less be described as “IACT IACT IACT THEATRE DRAMA IACT INTERACTION THEATRE THEATRE REHEARSAL SHOW THEATRE HISTORICAL SHOW THEATRE”. In addition to the short Saint John History Mystery show there is another, rather more serious short historical play that we have been putting together. It’s going to be shown in less than a week, and we still don’t have our full scripts. Needless to say, rehearsals have been a priority as of late.

An amusing side note in the midst of all this rehearsing is that, since everyone has for the most part (with the exception of yours truly, who was cast as the “mid Atlantic ocean, thus giving me an excuse to “swim” around stage to deliver my lines and make awkward mermaid jokes.) been cast as one land mass or another (Canada, New England, Britain, etc.) we are completely reveling in ALL the stereotypes.

I recently got a haircut, leaving me with a refreshingly short pixie. According to three separate hair dressers, I would be a good model for funky hair related stuff. Then again, the standards appear to be that you have to be skinny (thanks there, metabolism), have a certain face (thanks, DNA) and not care what sort of havoc they wreak on your head (thanks, lack of shame). In return I can only assume that you would get money or, at the very least, free hair cuts. Anyways, we’ll see come this fall whether that happens or not. In the meantime I’m enjoying the strange conversations that my new hair length brings about.

Me: Dad, look, when my hair is wet I can make Tintin bangs!

Dad: Um…okay then.

Me: And if I had enough gel I could totally do the stereotypical teenage lesbian fo-hawk!*

Dad:…that’s nice.

Me: I CAN STYLE IT LIKE DAVID TENNANT AS THE TENTH DOCTOR!

Dad:…

It’s been a pretty long while since I last blogged,  so to summarize at least the last couple of days in bullet point:

  • Wearing all black for theatre, while performing outside on a hot day, moving around, going to rehearsal in a stuffy room and then walking around some more.  I felt like a puddle of goo by the end of it.
  • Playing the most surreal game of Jenga in my life.
  • Drinking what was basically sugar-water with chunks of aloe vera in it. It was simultaneously extremely weird and wonderfully delicious.
  • Coming to the realization that I actually un-ironically enjoy Death Metal. Must be the teenager in  me coming out.

On that note…

Goodbye!

Goodnight!

Enjoy what remains of your summer!

-Kaelen

*No offense to those who sport fo-hawks, teenage lesbians, or teenage lesbians sporting fo-hawks.

12 years ago Short URL 1 Comment

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19

Jul

Summer so far, amongst other things.

 I sat down to write a post about summer, what I’ve been up to and so on and so forth. Fifteen minutes in I realized that I had just typed up three excellent paragraphs that would serve very well for the body of an essay entitled:

Summer Worries;

An Inside Look at the Inability to Relax With Specific Emphasis on the Education System.

 …I think it would behoove all involved at this moment (most certainly including yours truly) to step back, laugh at me, and move on with enjoying summer. Worrying about school in the middle of summer vacation…can I get a “#IBkidproblems” over here?

 That being said, summer is going well if we ignore my natural tendencies to always find something to stress about.I’m beginning to believe that my spirit animal is Mrs Bennet on steroids, which aside from the ability to make Pride and Prejudice references at will, really isn’t that great of a claim to fame.

 Since summer is approximately half way over (the event that spurred my sudden freak fest) I figure I may as well go over my summer to-do list and see how well things have gone so far. Granted, I realize that the fact that I have a summer to-do list (a lie, I actually have multiple, but this is my virtual one) is slightly ridiculous, much less the fact that I am semi-meticulously attempting to keep track of ticking things off on it.

So then, starting from the top, here goes.

1-Frolic in the grass with gusto on multiple occasions. This has actually happened, and quite often at that. I was fairly sure it would, as me and my friends are the sort of people who A) like to sit in sunbeam warmed grass and B) are often too broke to hang out in Java Moose. (This makes us sound like hippies…much as I love hippies my friends are generally more along the pretentiously hipster side of spectrum, God bless their little record hugging, skinny jeans bedecked hearts.)Image

2-Catch up with the show ‘Community’. This I have completely and utterly failed at, although in my defense this is only because I did this before summer started while I should have been studying for exams. Community is now taking a break, leaving me with nothing to catch up to…however, twenty four hours and the Lord Of The Rings trilogy (extended editions all) spent with Murgles later I feel that my TV fix may be somewhat satiated for the time being.

3-Try  my hand at drawing for a stop motion short. Absolutely nada has happened on this front. Might help if I started with some small steps, like, oh I don’t know, buying batteries for camera so it actually turns on.

4-Either get a part time job or volunteer like crazy and build up a resume for next year. Sadly I’m only wanted at the library for an hour at a time (although that doesn’t stop me from spending prodigious amounts of time there while not volunteering. So far this summer my record has been five visits in under forty eight hours.) to do things like shelve books and write blog posts for their teen blog,  but no matter how small an amount of time spent I can still revel in this new acquisition for my resume. Other things I have been reveling in are the large piles of books that are fighting for the prime position on my bedside table. To say my room has been overtaken wouldn’t be straying too far into exaggeration…

I’ve also been volunteering at I-act, where I suddenly have gained an in-depth understanding for the meaning of “improv” when having to do a series of scenes (already quadruple cast for our group of eight people) with just over half of your people there.  We’re performing scenes excerpted from the first play I did when I joined Iact, “Saint John History Mystery”, which brings back some rather funny memories, to say the least. Theater,  you wacky creature, how I love you so.

A very small portion of an already small (but awesome) group of drama geeks.

5-Stay in touch with people over the summer. Although my annoying super powers of procrastination have kicked in at some points (the all to0 well known “I’ll return that facetime/phonecall/message later” disease) I’m actually quite pleasantly surprised by how much my (generally withered and loner) social life has been busy with cool people.

6-Start writing more for myself again. This has indeed been happening;’ letters,  journals, sketchbooks, the rough first chapters of novels started with friends, and so on. The wonderful feeling that “I don’t have to use a sanctioned format for this!!!” is extremely enjoyable.

7-Expand my vocabulary. If the amount of books read has anything to do with an ability to suavely insert words of multiple  syllables into your everyday speech I would assume that I’m set…

8-Spend plenty of time in my hammock with a craft project and happy music. This has indeed been happening…although it does often happen that the “craft project” is replaced with a book (understandable) or facebook (“to err is human…”). Happy music though is something that I have to spare…David Bowie, Rent, Sufjan Stevens, The Tallest Man On Earth and Animal Collective are a strange but wonderful mixture.

How is your summer going so far,  fair denizen of the interwebs?

Kaelen

12 years ago Short URL 2 Comments

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