The Aftermath

We had a pretty huge snowstorm yesterday - huge enough to force trees into half-bent positions and to close down the entire city.  A snow day for my darling siblings, too!  In the past, when I have had snow days, a friend from high school and I would meet up somewhere and we would cook.  Occasionally it was just chocolate-chip cookies, but more often we made things like maple-cream pie with shortbread crust or phyllo-dough-wrapped brie with rosemary chutney.  For us, at least, on a day when our lives weren't ruled by studying and the train schedule - I would often not get home until eight - the freedom to laze about, bake, and occasionally get a head-start on our bio homework was pretty incredible, so we took as much advantage as we could.
Yesterday, though, when I left the house for a walk at about nine, I was one of the only people out.  It was still snowing pretty hard, and the only vehicles on the street were ambulances and empty MBTA buses.  The streets were pretty smooth by then, but they were covered with a ton of snow and rather slippery.  It continued to snow for most of the day, but as time passed the sky lightened from the dark grey and the flakes got smaller and gentler.
Today the sky is blue and everything is covered in snow.  It's a little blinding and quite cold, but I can't wait to walk through all of this to get to Grand Rounds and Clinic today.  The spirea bush is lying almost flat on the ground and we have friends without power all over the city, but it is still beautiful.  I love snowstorms, even the aftermath.  Even if it means that running won't be an option for a couple of days.
Other East Coast people, did you get a bunch of snow, too?  Were you snowed in or without power or was it lovely?  We've had our first blizzard of 2011!

Birthday in review

Yesterday was my birthday!  Like I've said a million times now, I turned eighteen yesterday, and it was a wonderful, lazy Sunday.  My father made Eggs Benedict (my favourite!) for breakfast and we attempted the New York Times crossword together.  That night, my best friends and the family friend my parents jokingly call their foster daughter came over and we had an incredible meal of olive-encrusted chicken with fennel and tomato puree.  For dessert, instead of a cake, we made vanilla bean soufflé with ice-cream.
I am also now the proud owner of a whole bunch of books, including one that my little sister wrote for me, a shirt, a dress, a grey hat, a gorgeous scarf, and some other things (like chocolate and things to take to college and a woolen bag).  Thank you, Kuzu and Mike and Edo and family, for the wonderful birthday!  It was absolutely perfect!
Today, I went to the eye doctor to get a new prescription and found out that I had been wearing glasses and contacts that were far, far too weak.  I walked home admiring branches on trees and blades of grass.  Did any of you have that experience with leaves when you were kids and got glasses for the first time?  When you stuck your head out the window marvelling at the shape of leaves, how they weren't just gobs of greenery?  It was like that all over again.  I also now have lovely new glasses frames from Denmark.  How are you, though?

Today

Is my last day of being seventeen.  Tomorrow I will wake up and be a grownup.  Good lord.
Last night my darling brother and I went to see the Blue Flower at the ART.  I cried; he shushed me.  We have the perfect relationship.  But really, the play was incredible.  It starts in the Belle Époque and continues into 1955, and follows these four friends - two art students, a brilliant scientist, a cabaret singer... and then (spoilers) they all die.  Hence the crying, I guess.
Most of it took place in the Interwar period, partially in World War I, and it deals with this concept of a continent with severe PTSD.  They sing (oh yeah, it's a musical) about nightmares of gas masks under their beds, about the Weimar Republic where they planned to colour the grey and blood-soaked world of No Man's Land with new ideas and new forms of government.  They were going to get it all right this time.  Yeah.  That didn't go so well.
I love the history of WWI and the Interwar period.  I am convinced that this is because I like Virginia Woolf, but it just is heart-wrenching in a way that not much else is.  I remember reading All Quiet on the Western Front in maybe seventh grade, and then in Film last year we watched Kubrick's Paths of Glory - a film about French soldiers in the trenches.  Generally, WWI is glossed over in most history classes - in US history we spent exactly a day on WWI - but this play didn't gloss over much.  Tonight is its last night in Boston, but if you can manage to see it at some point, do so.  I promise you won't regret it.

Happy Wanderlust

Hi guys!  Happy Friday!  What are you doing this weekend?  Tonight I'm going to the Blue Flower (a play that's supposed to be absolutely excellent) and tomorrow we're having dinner with old family friends.  And then Sunday is my birthday!  I will be eighteen years old.  I have consistently been the youngest of all of my friends - the youngest in my grade, the youngest in choirs or theatre.... but now I'll be eighteen like the rest of them.  Well, some of them.
I also have this idea (silly, I know) that once I turn eighteen I'll actually be a grownup.  I mean, I'll be able to vote, which will be nice, but that's the only thing I can come up with that I really want to do now that I'm eighteen.  Maybe buy a lottery ticket and dream about where I could go with the money?  Sure, let's go with that.  What would be your fantasy trip around the world?

Perhaps, like Kuzu and her brothers, we would like to go to Iceland to see the Northern Lights....

(from here)

And it looks like the end of the world...

(from here)

Perhaps, like Mum, we would go to India, where the colours are neverending...

(from here)

And where mountains touch the tip of the sky...

(from here)

Or perhaps somewhere entirely different?  Where would you like to go?

2010, five days late

Sometimes I want for us too look at this in some other perspective than our own.  I want to say "this is the world."  I want us to perhaps look back on the year as the New York Times did on Sunday, with their different short editorials for every month.  The Haiti earthquake.  The Winter Olympics in Vancouver.  The Cheonan Incident in Korea.  The British election.  The attack on the Gaza flotilla.  The World Cup in South Africa.  Floods in Pakistan, Sarkozy expelling the Roma, the drug war in Mexico.  The Chilean miners, China's Zhang, Saudi Arabia on Wikileaks.  Some of these, I am ashamed to say, I had to look up to remember.  Because for me, this past year was way different than that.  

The way I remember it, I submitted in my college applications, and turned seventeen.  The Haiti earthquake happened, and turned my universe upside down.  I baked for bake sales, organized benefit concerts with my brother, wrote a ten-page paper for AP Biology.  Then it was the Winter Olympics, never-ending assignments, an independent senior thesis on the Cordoban Caliphate with one of my favourite teachers.  Skiing with my family in March.  Hearing back from colleges in April and deciding wear to go for an excruciating month of visits and make-up work for missed classes, hanging out with my best friends.  Graduating from high school in May in a white dress and a French braid down my back, with my best friend and my grandfather in the audience with the rest of my family.  Feeling so proud that I though my heart would rip open.

My brother and my father and I watched the world cup in June together.  We crowded into sports bars with tons of people for big games - US vs England, the day Cote d'Ivoire lost - and sat practically by ourselves for others - France vs Mexico, for example.  I visited my family in Tennessee and prepared to go to Switzerland for the summer.  I made pavlova for a friend who stayed over until four in the morning to watch movies.  In July, we left for Switzerland and I broke up with my boyfriend.  We hiked in the Alps, ate cheese.  My bother and I screamed when Spain won the World Cup.  In August, Caleb and I shared five days in Paris together, visiting the "very 1920s polar bear" at the Musée d'Orsay and the Botticelli at the Louvre.  I spent a week on holiday at the beach with my family, and another camping in Acadia.  And then my gap year really began.  

In September, I started taking a class at the Harvard Extension school and doing volunteer work.  I started this blog in October, and played music with my brother and his friends, walked my sister home from school.  I visited my best friend at college.  The Chilean miners came out alive.  In November, I celebrated my brother's birthday and Thanksgiving, and December was Christmastime.  Mass on Christmas Eve, making sheep cookies, getting dressed up.  Being with my family.

So, that was my 2010.  2011 holds wonderful things in store - everyday runs (my New Year's resolution), a move to Paris and classes at the Sorbonne, the possibility of Africa, and college across the country in the fall.  What does the new year hold in store for you?

A home away from home

From trivago.co.uk

Over the weekend, we found our apartment for when we will go to live in Paris!  It took us forever, but the place is beautiful and really quite big - big enough for five people to live in comfortably.  All I know is that it's near the Jardin du Luxembourg and it has a piano and fireplaces, though they probably don't work.

I'm having visions of fires in my bedroom on cold nights, of my brother's Chopin nocturnes floating out over the city, of long runs in the park on mornings when barely anyone is up, though perhaps you can't really wear leggings and a windbreaker outside in super-glamourous Paris, even in the very early mornings.  I'm so excited!  Does anyone have any advice for what to take - or leave behind?  Advice for what we should do in the six months we live there?  Please let me know!

Happy New Year!

I know I'm a day late, but I hope the new year holds an awful lot in store for you - it definitely does for me!
In this coming year I will live in Paris, perfect my French (which, it must be said, isn't really up to par), keep working for (and do actual work for) PIH, turn eighteen, hopefully learn how to drive, go to college - it's going to be a hell of a year, it seems!
What are your plans for 2011?  Was this past year a good one?  Are you excited?