So I've been offered full scholarships from two of the best liberal arts schools in the country.
I'll let you know how I feel about this when I figure it out.
BUT. Fordham is out, BC is out (those cheap Jesuit bastards), and UNH was out a month ago. Unless I a) get into Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Harvard, or Tufts and b) get pretty damn good aid packages for them, I'm going south for the fall.
If I decide to leave the residents and Hartford in peace, I'm gonna scare me some Virginians. Remind me to leave the letter 'r' up here.
On a tangent, my friends keep noticing that I do, in fact, have an accent, and the other day I actually found myself talking about pahkin my cah. Woah. NH hasn't gotten to me so badly after all.
On another tangent, I got to go to a Quiz Bowl tournament today, which was AWESOME. I love geeky trivia stuff. I did really well, suprisingly, since I've been out of practice since the Pound of Feathers Incident, and overall our school took first because we just have cool people who run train on life, that sort of thing. The competition was fantastic. A sampling of my favorite questions: where is Old Ironsides docked (SNIPE for Boston); what is the meaning of the Latin root of these words: capital-- (he stopped there because I buzzed in with the answer "head); which two muscles are attached to the leg by the Achilles tendon ("gastonemius and soleus", which was totally fantastic and got me crazy looks from both teams); and what important federal document was signed by... (insert names of English sounding people here). I pulled the Mayflower Compact entirely out of my ass and got it right.
We call that a win.
L
3.27.2010
3.23.2010
Paene...
A week and a day from tomorrow.
So I thought the absolute horror that was last week would end with, you know, last week.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
So, excuse me if I skip the blogging for a little while. For one in my life... I'm really not in the mood to write. There's just too much to deal with and not enough words. Story of the universe, eh?
Wish me luck. I might be human again after Easter.
L
So I thought the absolute horror that was last week would end with, you know, last week.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
So, excuse me if I skip the blogging for a little while. For one in my life... I'm really not in the mood to write. There's just too much to deal with and not enough words. Story of the universe, eh?
Wish me luck. I might be human again after Easter.
L
3.17.2010
3.15.2010
16
Well, I did it. Let's just see if it sticks.
I think that a blog is a good way for the NLC to come back. This way we can just... keep in touch. No strings, no crazy effort needed, just a couple messages here and there so we know we're still alive. Therefore, I would like to welcome my fourth blog, the NLC 2.0, into the world. Unlike the others, this one isn't really mine; it's collaborative, and that's what I think I'll love about it.
Also, if April 1st wasn't already significant enough (since I'm getting all my letters back then), it became a little more important on Friday.
I am, as of the middle of last week, the class salutatorian, trailing the valedictorian by a fraction of a GPA point, and I have until the quarter ends, April 1st, 16 days away, to change that.
I don't know if I can do it. But I'm damn well going to try.
L
I think that a blog is a good way for the NLC to come back. This way we can just... keep in touch. No strings, no crazy effort needed, just a couple messages here and there so we know we're still alive. Therefore, I would like to welcome my fourth blog, the NLC 2.0, into the world. Unlike the others, this one isn't really mine; it's collaborative, and that's what I think I'll love about it.
Also, if April 1st wasn't already significant enough (since I'm getting all my letters back then), it became a little more important on Friday.
I am, as of the middle of last week, the class salutatorian, trailing the valedictorian by a fraction of a GPA point, and I have until the quarter ends, April 1st, 16 days away, to change that.
I don't know if I can do it. But I'm damn well going to try.
L
3.13.2010
Lauren Loves Airplanes
Here's how my week went.
I got to the airport on Tuesday morning and read some Steinbeck and got a bagel and got on a plane to LaGuardia and got to NY and read some Steinbeck and got on a plane to Roanoke and got to Virginia and waited for the shuttle to come and drove another hour up to Lexington.
Let me just say that I absolutely love flying, in all seriousness. Being in and around airplanes was one of the best parts of the trip--I considered running off to join the Air Force but decided against it because of all the money my family already dumped into applications.
So, I was in Virginia for Tuesday, Wednesday, and part of Thursday for the Johnson Scholarship Competition and Washington and Lee. A couple of years ago, some ridiculously loaded alumnus gave the university 100 million to set up this scholarship, and every year 40 of us reap the benefits. The school pays for about 180 seniors to fly down and stay in the dorms so that they can be interviewed and check out the vibe of the campus.
I liked it. I didn't love it. I got to sneak into the dress rehearsal of Chicago with the theatre majors and successfully avoided the massive party scene. Cool people were met. Good interviews were had. I went through four airplane takeoffs and loved every one of them. I got to hang around airports and people watch and relax a little bit. I started writing my speech. I went to school on Friday.
I had a free hour and a half Friday morning, so I decided to type up and learn my fragmented and mixed-up speech for that afternoon so I could read it to the panel and qualify for the actual contest. With an hour to go in my study, I completely scrapped it and wrote four entirely new pages and that's what I'm taking with me because, apart from the fact that I need to sink way more time into it this weekend and do some polishing, I really really like it. I'll put it up on SVe and probably facebook too.
I came home. I watched a movie. I went to bed and slept.
I got to the airport on Tuesday morning and read some Steinbeck and got a bagel and got on a plane to LaGuardia and got to NY and read some Steinbeck and got on a plane to Roanoke and got to Virginia and waited for the shuttle to come and drove another hour up to Lexington.
Let me just say that I absolutely love flying, in all seriousness. Being in and around airplanes was one of the best parts of the trip--I considered running off to join the Air Force but decided against it because of all the money my family already dumped into applications.
So, I was in Virginia for Tuesday, Wednesday, and part of Thursday for the Johnson Scholarship Competition and Washington and Lee. A couple of years ago, some ridiculously loaded alumnus gave the university 100 million to set up this scholarship, and every year 40 of us reap the benefits. The school pays for about 180 seniors to fly down and stay in the dorms so that they can be interviewed and check out the vibe of the campus.
I liked it. I didn't love it. I got to sneak into the dress rehearsal of Chicago with the theatre majors and successfully avoided the massive party scene. Cool people were met. Good interviews were had. I went through four airplane takeoffs and loved every one of them. I got to hang around airports and people watch and relax a little bit. I started writing my speech. I went to school on Friday.
I had a free hour and a half Friday morning, so I decided to type up and learn my fragmented and mixed-up speech for that afternoon so I could read it to the panel and qualify for the actual contest. With an hour to go in my study, I completely scrapped it and wrote four entirely new pages and that's what I'm taking with me because, apart from the fact that I need to sink way more time into it this weekend and do some polishing, I really really like it. I'll put it up on SVe and probably facebook too.
I came home. I watched a movie. I went to bed and slept.
L
PS: 19 days until April 1st.
3.04.2010
Speeching
I thought of a topic.
For junior English, we had to make a five minute speech according to some criteria, and then some of the juniors go on to a contest. I'm crashing the party.
I loved this contest because I love the art of rhetoric; I think speech-making is a really valuable method of communication that people can't utilize, and speaking a piece of writing out loud to an audience uses so many cool techniques that you can't put anywhere else. Sure, Patrick Henry's address to the House of Burgesses still reads incredibly well on paper 250 years later... But imagine what it must have been like to be in the audience. Novels can change lives, poems can change lives, music can change lives, but never in the same way a speech can. It can be so direct, so amazingly concise and pull directly at what the audience was thinking--it can change history in a minute. What else is that powerful? A bombing could, maybe, relegating a place and its people to a few sentences in a history book. I have no doubt in my mind that some speeches, in their time, affected the speaker's world in the same way a missile would have, even more so because the effects of words often last longer than a few scars on the earth.
Obviously, I don't have that kind of talent. If I did, I could actually develop something vaguely resembling interpersonal communication skills. I do, though, like writing something down to talk to people about, and this contest is a handy little chance to have fun with that.
Archimedes' principle, roughly, I think, states that the volume of an object can be measured by the amount of mass it displaces; the contours, shape, and capacity of an unknown object can be found by, rather than observing the space it does occupy, observing the space that it doesn't.
Isn't it the same with the human being? And, if so, shouldn't we grapple with things that are, by definition, larger than us so that we both change and define our limits and ourselves?
Wooaaah. Heavy speech stuff there. I can't wait to get crackin'.
L
For junior English, we had to make a five minute speech according to some criteria, and then some of the juniors go on to a contest. I'm crashing the party.
I loved this contest because I love the art of rhetoric; I think speech-making is a really valuable method of communication that people can't utilize, and speaking a piece of writing out loud to an audience uses so many cool techniques that you can't put anywhere else. Sure, Patrick Henry's address to the House of Burgesses still reads incredibly well on paper 250 years later... But imagine what it must have been like to be in the audience. Novels can change lives, poems can change lives, music can change lives, but never in the same way a speech can. It can be so direct, so amazingly concise and pull directly at what the audience was thinking--it can change history in a minute. What else is that powerful? A bombing could, maybe, relegating a place and its people to a few sentences in a history book. I have no doubt in my mind that some speeches, in their time, affected the speaker's world in the same way a missile would have, even more so because the effects of words often last longer than a few scars on the earth.
Obviously, I don't have that kind of talent. If I did, I could actually develop something vaguely resembling interpersonal communication skills. I do, though, like writing something down to talk to people about, and this contest is a handy little chance to have fun with that.
Archimedes' principle, roughly, I think, states that the volume of an object can be measured by the amount of mass it displaces; the contours, shape, and capacity of an unknown object can be found by, rather than observing the space it does occupy, observing the space that it doesn't.
Isn't it the same with the human being? And, if so, shouldn't we grapple with things that are, by definition, larger than us so that we both change and define our limits and ourselves?
Wooaaah. Heavy speech stuff there. I can't wait to get crackin'.
L
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