9.30.2010

varying degrees of trouble with english

I went to Jo's with Hannah and John tonight. We were talking about one of John's friends whose English language skills could probably be described as sub-par.

John: So her facebook status... this one time... was... "I have so many shits in my head!"
Hannah and I: *death by laughter*
Me: All my friends, in America at least, are pretty good at english. But this one time my friend Sam facebookchatted me, and he was like, "don't you hate it when people don't use the subjunctive where they're supposed to?" and I was like "oh yeah, are you stalking Natasha too?"

Same concept, but not nearly as funny. Natasha had said something like "I wish it was the weekend."

By the way, can we talk for one moment about the term "sub-par"? Because the most common field in which to hear the term "par" used is golf, and when you're playing golf, being below the par (i.e. sub-par) is actually better. So why does "sub-par" mean bad? Why doesn't "super-par" mean bad?
I guess people are so used to "super" meaning "AWESOME! SUPERHEROES!" to think of "super par" as anything other than "exceptionally average"

Love always,
Clara

tswift, freud, and new songs

I've been meaning to download some more Mates of State (and what little Oh Land I can find. Apparently her new EP comes out next month, so I'm way ahead of the curve. What else is new?)
Anyway, just buying a few new songs is not how I work. So here's the lastest batch.

Apologies - Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
Rambling Man - Laura Marling
The Box - Johnny Flynn
Brown Trout Blues - Johnny Flynn
Inni mer syngur vitleysingur - Sigur Ros
Infinity - The xx
Sun of a Gun - Oh Land
True Love Will Find You In the End - Mates of State
My Only Offer - Mates of State

In the process, I stumbled upon this music video. I'll be real here: it gave me chills [OMG! TAYLOR SWIFT! LOVE! BOYS! OMG!]. At the same time though, it's incredibly cheesy and sort of weirded me out.
And then I figured out why.


It's so freudian. Like, he would have a field day with Taylor. She lacks the love of her father, so she seeks a surrogate in a guy her age, and then has some sons.
Maybe I'm taking my MCM class too seriously. I've been seeing sexual imagery everywhere these days. Do y'all realize how phallic the SciLi is? Do you have any idea?

Maybe I'm just a freak. That's always an option.

Love always,
Clara

9.28.2010

snap back to reality

I've been at college for a month, as of today.
Holy crap.
This seems like an apt time to think about impressions.

I was talking to David a while ago and he said something interesting. He'd just gotten to Princeton, and he said, "I guess I'd assumed that I'd show up to school, make a few great friends immediately, love all my classes, and never have any drama ever." It hadn't been the case.

Now, I won't say I made that assumption. Actually, before I got here, I was pretty sure (irrationally) that I wasn't going to find any friends at all.

So, neither of those assumptions were true. I've encountered dramas. Several times, mostly in my own head, which is the worst kind. I seem to have friends, and even Sam now understands what I meant when I said (around this time last year), "I'm not sure if I have friends, but I have good acquaintances who seem to enjoy my company, and I enjoy theirs as well".
And there have been times when I've wondered, "Why the hell am I taking Modern Culture and Media?" or nearly shouted at my econ section leader for not making sense.
Shit isn't necessarily easy, but it isn't horrible by any standard.

So reality is an interesting thing. My mom attributes this quote to Barack Obama: "Nothing is ever as good or as bad as you expect it to be" (Or something like that. I can't find it on the internet in less than 20 seconds, so it's not really worth investigating further). That pretty much describes it here.

That said, I'm exhausted right now, because Cameron decided it was necessary to come over and tell me my facebook status was irrelevant to him (no kidding), and obviously he can't handle me, so I had to handle that situation. Crazy kids these days.
... So I probably need to sleep or something.

Love always,
Clara

everything is gonna get lighter

Even if it never gets better!
Get Better - Mates of State

I just went to their concert. Talk about spur of the moment. Hannah M got sick and couldn't go, so John texted me and asked if I'd buy her ticket.
Um, obviously.

To be honest, I was probably the least-well-versed in Mates of State canon, among John, Benny, Leela, and myself. But Get Better was essentially the song that got me through this fall, and it holds a special place in my musical consciousness.

The opener was really cool too. Nanna Øland (known as Oh Land) had been a ballerina, but an injury sort of killed that plan, so she went into music instead. She's from Copenhagen, and her mother was a great Dane.
This caused much amusement.

I have so much work to finish tomorrow morning though. Not looking forward to that. Not at all.

... Worth it.

Love always,
Clara

9.26.2010

lazy sunday

The thing about Sundays is that I spent five hours working today. And I don't have that much to blog about.
I did sign up for the P.E. membership (Hey dad, you'll see that on your credit card, figure you wouldn't mind) so I could go to a spinning class with Alex. That was fun.
They do kickboxing on tuesday nights. I might try to pop over after my Modern Culture and Media screening. We shall see. I'd love to learn to kick ass.

Anyway, the point of this is that I really don't have much to say about today. Here are some pictures, because I'm lazy.








Um... yeah. Go sports!

Love always,
Clara

9.25.2010

foooootballllll

This weekend is homecoming. Who knew?
To be fair, homecoming in college is very different from homecoming in high school. Here, there are classy-looking alumni all over the place, and no one cares what dress you're wearing, although they might be wondering why you're wearing a dress to begin with. We're yankees, and we don't do the sundresses-and-pearls-to-football-games thing.
Obviously.

Anyway, we had our homecoming football game tonight and I'd say it was pretty awesome. I ran around with some Jameson kids beforehand, but (rather rudely; I apologize) peaced out to see where John was sitting. His seats were better.
Getting there was an adventure though. He'd texted me that he was sitting in front of two shady characters with whom I'd had enough contact to recognize. So I was making my way across the stadium, and I see these two sitting down and assume that John is nearby. It was a fair assumption. So I'm looking around that area, and not seeing him at all, but I keep using these two guys as a reference point, so I'm basically staring at them, standing awkwardly in the aisle, and I know they see me, and they're likely wondering why I'm staring at them and typing furiously into my phone.
I imagine I looked creepy as a mofo.

So finally I see John somewhere else entirely and make my way over there and I have to explain to him why these two people now think I'm a total freak.
Not that they didn't already, actually.
Whatever.

We beat Harvard though! And we had clever cheers! I like sports. I don't like playing sports, but I enjoy watching them. I feel like every time I try to play a sport, the sport tries to entice me... and then shuts me down. I've just been hurt too many times. I know to keep my distance.
I'm horribly cynical these days.

That's not entirely true. Neither is anything Alex tells you about little children. For the record.

Love always,
Clara

9.24.2010

i just wanna dance

For the record, I totally understand international trade, so it was totally okay that I was on facebook chat during Economics this morning.
Cameron and I were discussing weekend plans.
Cameron
i wanna dance
Me
right now?
Cameron
nuh uh
lol
later tonight
Me
hahaha
Cameron
i wanna dance right now, but later tonight
lol
Me
i want to dance. in econ. right now.
econ always makes me want to dance
Cameron
that's wonderful
you should get up and do it
Me
i might dance on my way out
like ellen degeneres
Love always,
Clara

"you guys, i just had a vision"

So last night around nine, I decided to start doing my homework. At maybe 9:15, there was a knock on my door.
Behold, John White!
There goes any chance of doing work.

Elsewhere in the universe, someone had decided that it would be funny to put spare mattresses up against Ivy's door, which means my hallway now has some random mattresses lying around.
We took advantage of this.

Building a fort didn't work, so we eneded up just jumping on the mattresses for like, half an hour. Cardio!
I took lots of pictures.

Me: People are going to see these and be like, "How drunk were you?" and I'm going to be like "Oh, I was sober. That was a thursday."

Then John and Hannah and Genevieve and I sat on the floor for a bit, and I painted my nails, and we talked about Pretty Little Liars.

And then we went to Jo's. They have music playing at Jo's most of the time. Alejandro came on.

John: You guys, I just had a vision of us performing a dance routine to this song right here. We had professional backup dancers. Clara, they were lifting you and you had enigmatic looks on your face. Hannah and I were writhing on the floor... sexily.
Hannah: That was all happening in your head? Good. Let's keep it there.

I plan to have a more hollywood-movie type college experience this weekend, but it's all off to a good start.

Love always,
Clara

9.22.2010

strange correspondence

I've been emailing with my parents. It's more efficient than calling.

They're both very strange people, and had very different reactions to the news that I had been ill.
Mom
I am glad you made the call on your throat- just make sure you get seen! Throat Coat is my fav. I used to drink it before the show (right after a big mug of Thinko Tea!) It gives you a sexy voice.

Dad
I am glad to hear you are healing. You are probably surrounded by more germs than at any time since St. Paul's [preschool]. The great Plague of 1918 (which killed your great-grandfather's wife and son, thank God, lest we not exist) was mostly spread by housing WWI soldiers in massive barracks, each sleeping 12 inches from the next guy. Whoosh, they carried it across the world.
No further comment. This says it all.

Love always,
Clara

don't you just hate that?

I went to Jo's with John and Hannah last night. We had a number of interesting conversations.

John got a salad. He made it himself.

Me: I can't do that. It's too much stress. I always get a pre-designed salad. If they put an ingredient in and I don't like it, I can blame them. But what if I design it, and I don't like it? It's all on me! What does that say about me... as a person?
Hannah: That's deep. Salads, man... Salads.

Hannah and I are probably the last two people on earth who haven't seen Inception. We're going to go see it at some point. We invited John to come along.

John: I didn't think it was that good. I mean, it was a good movie, but I'd give it like, four out of five stars. . . You know what I don't like? When they make the beginning of a movie intentionally confusing. It's like, rubbing it in your face that you don't know what's going on.

About fifteen minutes later, we were walking back having some conversation (that I can't remember), and, out of the blue--

John: Don't you hate it when old people fart?
Hannah and I: ... What?
John: That will make sense in the context of what I'm about to tell you...
Me: You're doing just what Inception did! You hypocrite!

I feel like my retelling of these conversations do not do them justice.
I hate it when funny things happen but you had to be there, because one of my favorite things is trying to convey these funny things to other people.
Damn.

Love always,
Clara

9.21.2010

don't think that i'm pushing you away...

... when you're the one that I've held closest
-Crystallized, The XX

I just bought tickets to The XX in Boston on October 3rd. Also, cheap bus tickets to and from boston that night. John and I are making a concert trip.
This is happening.
And I am so excited.

It all started when I ran into John on the way back from the campus store. I had to buy tomato soup. (Or, I wanted to buy tomato soup, because it was too late to go to the ratty, and having some tomato soup on hand is always a good idea. Strictly speaking, it wasn't absolutely necessary.) He suggested that we discuss linguistics later. I agreed.
So about three hours later I stopped into his room with my laptop and we discussed consonant clusters and such.

Me: I had these as tense vowels in the high and mid tongue positions.
John: I think they're just regular tense vowels though.
Me: Oh, you're right! Sorry, I don't know why I'm so anal about tongue positions. I mean... What?
John and I: [hysterics]

Clearly he and I focus really well.
Anyway, we got on to talking about music, and we both love the XX, and they're playing in Boston, and tickets weren't too expensive, so we went ahead and bought some. The plan is to leave Providence around 6, get to Boston around 7, go to the show at 7:30, leave Boston at 11, and be back in Providence by 12 so that we can be in bed in time for class the next morning.

It's going to be epic. Between this and my journey to DC for the rally at the end of October, I'm developing quite an itinerary.

Me: I need to figure out cheap transportation to Princeton. I'm going down for the football game.
John: Who are they playing?
Me: ... Brown?
John: Oh! Do you know anything about our football team?
Me: Well, they play football... what else do I need to know? We're playing Harvard next weekend...
John: Oh yeah, my Harvard friend is coming down.
Me: Nice. I don't have any harvard friends. All my friends are far too interesting to go to Harvard.
John: Yeah, she's not very interesting...

I really need to make some tea and go to bed. Dan and Cameron aren't getting their kettle back any time soon. For real.

Love always,
Clara

9.19.2010

life without speaking

I have laryngitis! This blog post will be the most communication I've done with the outside world all day!
Oh my god I feel so free!

Seriously, I haven't been able to speak all day. I was mostly fine yesterday (although my voice did sound a little weird) and I feel totally ok. I wasn't feeling well earlier in the week, but my voice was alright, and now I feel great, and my voice is gone?
I do not know what to make of this.

At the moment though, I'm making tea. Hannah gave me a couple bags of her Throat Coat, because she is an incredible human being, so that's brewing at the moment. It'll be my second cup of tea today.
I'm a mess.

I hate not being able to speak, too. It has been pointed out to me that I talk a lot. (It has also been pointed out to me that I tend to use needlessly long sentence constructions. Perhaps there is a connection?).
What am I if I can't communicate?

Web MD was utterly unhelpful. It basically said, "stop talking so much."
Thanks.

Well, I'm mute.
And I'm hating it.
So I'm going to watch TV or something and mope.

Love always,
Clara

9.17.2010

clara beyer, gym rat

That's a gross overstatement. I'm that kid who does 45 minutes on the elliptical and nothing else.
But still.
I've been going to the gym, voluntarily, maybe twice a week. On a fairly regular basis.
And, more shocking, I've been enjoying it. I get excited. I've got a workout mix on my ipod.
Who am I? What has this new person done with the normal Clara that everyone had gotten used to?

I have a theory regarding this.

An interesting fact that I had not truly acknowledged is that in college, you're rarely alone. There are always people. So when I'm working out, although other people are in the room, I've got my headphones in and I'm in my own head. (Basically going to the gym is a better way to fulfill my antisocial desires than, for example, wandering around Keeney at two AM on a saturday night, singing songs to myself. That would be an example of "coping badly")

It sort of serves the same purpose as driving around with Zola. I actually plan to have some kind of commute when I enter the working world, because I need 20 minutes here and there to sit in my car or on the tram or something and just chill out.
I don't commute anywhere here (which is great) so I need some kind of designated-not-thinking-or-being-around-other-people-period.

Also, only some people will know what I mean by this, but I feel like I have a lot more energy lately. Not in terms of sleep - I'm definitely not getting enough of that - but in terms of like... vitality. Or something. I don't know.

The reason I bring all of this up is that I just got back from the gym, actually, and it was intense because my evil ipod decided to only play fast songs from my workout mix until like, the very end. I was sprinting like crazy.
So essentially, I'm all hyped up on brain chemicals. No complaints here.

Love always,
Clara

9.16.2010

i am not a robot

Dan: I'm the most rational. I'm all logic. Binary. 1s and 0s. If someday you're thinking, "wow, Dan can do the Robot really well..."
Me: I know the secret.

Now all of you do too.

I feel like every time I try to go to the Blue Room to study and eat and get things done, life gets in the way, and I can't really complain, because I love life, but I also love being prepared for class
(Maybe that's an overstatement. More accurate would be that I don't love not being prepared for class).
(I also don't love staying up late to finish said work.)

Someone on the lower quad of Keeney was playing The Decemberists really loudly tonight. I'm a fan. If they were pumping techno on a thursday, I'd be annoyed. But super-loud-folk-music is perfect for a chill thursday evening, drinking peppermint tea and listening to the rain and not being sure whether you should close your window, because it's not like the rain is coming in that much.

Anyway, that's been my life these days.

Love always,
Clara

9.15.2010

undecided

I'm mad conflicted at the moment. One part of me wants to go out, because this week is seriously dragging and there's definitely some kind of party happening (for heaven's sake, it's a wednesday. Of course there's a party happening.)
The other part of me feels lazy, overfilled with grilled cheese and soup, and probably sick. And that part of me wants to curl up in sweatpants and watch Law and Order and be in bed before midnight.

At the moment, I'm not sure which faction is going to win.

In the meantime, I've had a music downloading moment.

Hoppipolla - Sigur Ros
Animal Arithmetic - Jonsi
The Con - Tegan and Sara
Saturday - Rachael Cantu
Boy With a Coin - Iron & Wine
Without You - Junip
Two Wooden Spoons - This Is the Kit
In Every Direction - Junip

I feel like my music tastes have changed so much over the past couple years, and yet stayed the same in a lot of ways. When I first started this blog, I was just discovering Iron & Wine. Can you imagine?

Love always,
Clara

9.14.2010

bewildering

I made the radical decision to take Intro to Modern Culture and Media Pass/Fail yesterday. Here's why:

"Or even when signs are studied from a social viewpoint, only the traits that attach language to the other social institutions -- those that are more or less voluntary -- are emphasized; as a result, the goal is by-passed and the specific characteristics of semiological systems in general and of language in particular are completely ignored."

Try to understand that sentence on first-read.
Anyone who can give me a summary in the comments gets... some trail mix. Because that's what I have in my dorm room.

Love always,
Clara

the bird is the word


So right now I'm excited because twitter used a Freelance Whales song in their new-format-unveil video.
Can I just talk about twitter for a second?
I am a little bit obsessed with it. The twitter app on my phone was broken for a little while back there, and it made me so sad. Let me tell you why-
  1. Remembering things. A lot of times something funny happens, I tweet about it so that I remember to mention it on the blog later.
  2. Communicating with my awesome twitter-buds. This is also useful when I have a twitter-based nervous breakdown and people who know me in real life ask whither my mind has gone.
  3. Showcasing my brilliant iPhone photography. Ish.
  4. Drunk tweets.
  5. Stalking people on their own terms. On twitter, people are sort of asking to be stalked, but they're the ones feeding the information in, so I think it's okay.
  6. A reminder that Justin Bieber is still relevant in many parts of the world. Actually wait, I'd rather not have that all over my home page, thanks.
Anyway. All of yall should join twitter. It's phenomenal.
Also, listen to Freelance Whales.

That's all for tonight. Maybe I'll give you more authoritarian demands tomorrow. We'll see.

Love always,
Clara

9.13.2010

all over the place

I have been busy basically all day. I can never decide whether I love that feeling or hate it. It's like working out - exhausting while you're at it, but pretty awesome when you're done.
I'm basically done now. The only thing left on the agenda is to watch Gossip Girl, which isn't exactly the most stressful of my daily activities.

Let me recount this for you.

On monday and wednesday mornings, I have three classes in a row- 9 AM Economics, 10 AM Philosophy, and 11 AM Modern Culture and Media. Somehow last night it didn't fully occur to me that it was a sunday and that I should probably go to bed before 2 AM, so getting up was an adventure in itself. I decided that I absolutely without question needed coffee this morning.
Now, the coffee in the Ratty is questionable at best, and the Blue Room always has this ridiculous line, so I decided I would utilize an oft-forgotten resource: the Campus Market. I'd seen coffee maker machines there, so it seemed like a safe way to avoid the morning rush and still get my fix.
So I show up, and I'm the only one there, because literally no one goes to this place. And I'm in this weird brain-dead state, just blinking at the coffee machines, trying to figure out how to persuade them into giving me the caffeine that I so desperately need. And finally I just ask the guy at the desk how they work.
So he comes over, and blinks at them too, and says, "Oh, I guess they're not working right now."

At this point, I died.

So I stumble out of there with a Snapple tea (maybe there's some caffeine in there? I had too much pride to go for the 9AM red bull) and a little bag of Welch's fruit snacks. And I sit there for a moment vowing never to go back to this cursed market again, unless I really feel like buying a microwavable vegan burrito. Which might happen, actually.

Anyway, so then I had my three-class whirlwind, which was no more or less insane than usual. I wandered into the Ratty alone for lunch, which is inherently dangerous, but ran into this kid who I can only assume is in my unit, whose name I must have learned at some point. The problem is that we've hung out too much for me to ask his name now. Hopefully it will come to me, or I'll hear someone refer to him in the third person.

After lunch was my one break, during which I bought a couple posters for the room and finished my econ homework. Then I had econ section at 3, which I had expected to last an hour, but the TA seemed baffled by all of these faces looking at him expecting him to say something, so we all just handed in our homework and left after fifteen minutes of awkward silence.

Then another short break, then my unit had some kind of gathering including Meeting St. Cookies, so I had to check that out, but I also had to leave early because I was planning on going over to the Women's Center to phone-bank for Theresa Tanzi, who's running for State Representative in Rhode Island. I let it slip that I did my first phone banking when I was twelve. That's always a fun story to tell.

(It was 2003, I was in sixth grade, and Howard Dean was running for the Democratic nomination. Dad's idea of family time with the daughters often involved bringing us to work with him, but at least at the Dean headquarters I could make myself useful. The uncontested highlight was our Iowa caucus slumber party, which was also the first time I've ever stayed up all night. Dad was supposed to bring me home at some point, but I wanted to stay and Mom wasn't there to make me go home. We called people all night, adjusting our phone lists to the time zones. I called people in Hawaii. This has been a very long parenthetical.)

We had pizza there, and I learned about the Students for Choice group, which sounds pretty interesting. Then I had to peace out and get my mail and go to the Blog Daily Herald information session, because I'm a blogger at heart and need to take my inner monologue a little more public. That was a fun time, and now I'm back in my room blogging and trying to write an article for the BlogDH, and (un)surprisingly one is far easier than the other.

And in 24 minutes, Gossip Girl will be on.
Hell yes.

I'm going to sleep well tonight. That's all I have to say.

Love always,
Clara

9.12.2010

it's for the u.s. census

Me: MCM readings make no sense.
Dan: MCM readings make few senses.
Me: No, they make no sense. Zero senses.
Dan: They make one or two senses.
Cameron: Like the census bureau?

I'm trying to do work in Dan and Cameron's room right now. Clearly that's going well, considering the fact that I'm blogging right now.
Someone somewhere is watching a bit of a documentary on the Antikythera Mechanism, a sort of ancient clock that is very clever.

Narrator: The Antikythera Mechanism would be an incredible discovery, even if it were less clever than it is.

This narrator thought that this is a very good joke.

Today has been slightly more productive than yesterday. My life still isn't sorted out, but it's looking sunnier.

Love always,
Clara

i shouldn't be so hard on myself.

Me: You are a better man than I
David: you are worse at being a man only bc you have lady parts, don't be so hard on yourself.

Sorry I've been M.I.A. for the past few days. College keeps you busy.
I'm not sure why they do that, actually.

Also, basically all I did yesterday was sleep and eat until about 8:30. So that wasn't much to blog about.

I've been listening to music and doing work and catching up on sleep and such. I took a bunch of pretty sweet pictures last night, so I'll throw those onto facebook later today I think, and if any are super-crazy-cool, I'll post them up here as well.

Last night was a weird sort of wild-goose-chase, looking for parties. We did find parties, but I kept getting restless and antsy and I couldn't stay still for too long, so I kept bouncing around to different places and driving myself crazy with wanderlust and discontent.
Not the ideal way to spend a Saturday night.
I wasn't in the right mood, I guess.

Now I'm texting David and doing work and trying to sort out my life.
We'll just see how that goes.

Love always,
Clara