16 Feb and 24 Mar 03

There were some fingerless gloves here by the computer, so I put them on, but the palms are leather so it's kind of hard to move my hands to type, so I took them back off.

So like, a couple days ago I was TOTALLY trying on prom dresses, right? Yeah. And like, the dressing room had one of those locks with the metal cylinder thing (cylinder is a funny word) in the little curved metal things that you push in and turn sideways... yeah. So like, I was going to open the door to show mum the dress I was wearing (it was sort of an orangey-golden-pink, very nice colour, but not at all good on me) and the lock got stuck, and I pulled it really hard, and it came out, and the non-blunt metal part SLAMMED into my left thumb and almost CHOPPED A LITTLE PIECE OF IT OFF. AAAAAH. For like, ten seconds I was just staring at it and it started to bleed and it bled a LOT and I was like, in shock or something. It didn't really HURT, and it was a really minor wound (the piece that would've got chopped was only a really tiny piece, like maybe the size of... ... I can't think of what it's the size of. Uh, a sprinkle. like a cake sprinkle.) but for some reason I reacted really badly-- not MENTALLY, but physically I started feeling sick and I spent like twenty minutes just sitting on the floor of the dressing room because I was dizzy and nauseated. It was funky, especially considering I'd given a pint of blood a week earlier with no trouble whatsoever.

MUSIC TIME. Hrr, I can't remember what song I'm on, and dumb stupid Winamp3 doesn't remember where you are on your playlist. There might be a patch for that by now, but I don't feel like checking. I'm going to say that I was on.... ..... Virtual Star Embryology. Yeah. That's what song I was on. (I'm sly.)

YEAH! I haven't written a journal entry in about seven years, so I'm writing one. I STARTED one a month or something ago, but I'm not going to add on to that thing now, so I'll just paste what I had there into this one at some point. Tetsuuuu.... gaku no.... kodomoooo.... SOSHITE ... [stop] SARANARU.... noooo! I must not.

Oh, I need to go get this thing. Okay so like, Scifi made the Children of Dune miniseries, and showed their Dune movie before it, and I was like Yay, so I taped them all. I watched the first hour or so of Dune, then left it taping while I played a video game, then watched the last hour or so of it, and then watched the first part of Children of Dune (this was last... uh, Sunday). I taped the second two parts but I haven't watched them yet, and I also still have to watch the middle part of Dune. But the POINT is that while I was watching it and making random sketches, I wrote down all the little observations I made about various things (a lot of it just being my opinions on the movies vs. the books themselves) and I want to SHARE THEM ALL with YOU. I wonder if anyone will actually read this, considering a large percentage of my readership (which consisted of about four people in the first place) have probably given up on my ever writing another entry again. Well, I'm going to go get the piece of paper now, and maybe I'll make a stop and have AN ADVENTURE before I get back, too, and YOU will never even KNOW unless I tell you! Oh! So small and insignificant! (By which I refer to YOU)

I RETURN. Okay, I scribbled these down AMONG a bunch of ugly sketches and I don't remember what order they came in, so I'll just put them here in whatever random order seems good to me; the actual comment I wrote will be in bold, followed by elaboration/explanation. ... also, please note that these are only little observations and opinions of mine, NOT some attempt to pinpoint every place where the movie is not like / inferior to the book. Unlike some people, I REALISE that there is a very large difference between literary and visual media, and it's simply not possible to make a movie or whatever that's EXACTLY like the book, nor would it necessarily be a good thing if such a movie were made. What makes for the best read doesn't always make for the best thing to watch, and vice versa. There ARE big differences, there HAVE to be, and that's OKAY. Now, on to my comments.

Piter= cool acccent, looks not good. This means that I thought Piter had a cool accent, but I didn't like the way he looked. (Ho ho ho.) But seriously, he's meant to be skinny-ish and effeminate with a hawkish nose, and instead he was like... jowly ... and he had a weird hat. Honestly, maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but I would have had a hard time separating the actors who played Hawat, Yueh, and Piter if they all stood in a line for me. =\ They didn't do enough with their characters for me to start to realise who they actually were, and there wasn't enough name-dropping to clear it up for me. I mean, of course I knew that Piter wasn't Yueh or Hawat because neither of them would be hanging out with the Baron giving him advice and stuff but just by LOOKS... AND, I couldn't tell the difference between Hawat and Yueh, and they DID sort of do the same kind of things in the first part of the movie. ON TO NEXT COMMENT.
Duncan = H-handsome
mm... hair
but don't like his voice Duncan had EXTREMELY good hair, and a RATHER appealing profile. His voice was kind of weird. Thick, I guess you might say. But not unpleasant enough to diminish my desire to watch scenes featuring him. Oot.
Irulan = is a petite brunette instead of a tall blonde. In the book, Irulan is tall and blonde. In the movie, she is petite and brunette. The end.
Kaitain, but the vowels as I imagined When I read about Kaitain in the prequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson (I know they must have mentioned it in the original series but I don't remember it), I always imagined it being said "ky-TANE" (long I, long A sounds), but I thought it was probably more likely to be either "ky-tyne" (both long I sounds) or "kay-tayne" (both long A). In the movie, they said "KY-tane."
Gurney = not ugly enough Gurney is supposed to be really ugly. The actor who played him may not exactly be winning any beauty contests, but I wouldn't describe him as ugly. I guess I can understand something like that, though, since if you're only READING about an ugly person you aren't forced to look at them.
The Voice Okay, the Voice is supposed to be a special usage of inflection and tone that compels whomever you're addressing to obey you-- it's sort of "mystical", but it's just normal talking with your tone, volume, inflection, etc. all tailored to your addressee. In the movie, they added a creepy undertone thing whenever someone spoke in Voice to make it magical or something. That annoyed me, but I ALSO do understand the need for something like that, since if some character just says "DO THIS" authoritatively and somebody obeys them for seemingly no reason, that's strange, but if they say "DO THIS" and there's a creepy undertone then you're like "oh, I get it." um. Yeah.
Cheney X) I imagined the name "Chani" being pronounced "Chonny" (if it must be put in some bastardised phonetic form, anyway) but they said "chay-nee" so that it sounds the same as the surname of our Esteemed Vice President. That sort of bothered me and amused me at the same time.
assassin guy = hot There was this assassin guy in it during the first part with longish black hair and a cloak. They only showed his face for like two seconds, but those were some extremely pleasant seconds, I tell you.
benny jesserit That's how most of the characters pronounced "bene gesserit," although a few actually pronounced an "eh" for the final sound of "bene." I guess it's really supposed to be said that way (minus the ee), but I always imagined it with a hard 'g'.
Yueh = Palpatine? Dr. Yueh looked a bit like Senator Palpatine (this was in one of the few scenes in which I was actually totally clear on who the actor on the screen was portraying). I thought I might go look it up later to see if it was the same guy, but I didn't, and I'm still not going to.
You don't have to climb up the worm. When Paul first used his Maker hooks to ride one of the sandworms, he put the hooks in and then used them to climb up the side of the worm. However, when riding a sandworm, you only hook them to open the ring segment, and the worm turns over by itself so that you sort of get raised up onto its back-- you don't have to climb up, because the worm turns on its own to keep sand from getting into the opened chink thing. Either they thought him climbing up would be more dramatic, or they didn't read carefully. Whatever. The director guy also referred to her as "Lady Jessica Atreides" in a thing and said that she was in love with her husband, when it's kind of a big deal that she is NOT married to Duke Atreides.. o_o Again, whatever.
WTF?! Is that really ugly guy Fenring?! Please let's not have him be Fenring. SICK, IT IS. (I really did write all that on the paper.) Yeah, uh, Fenring was incredibly uglier than I was anticipating, and he also wasn't short or weasel-looking as he's described in the book. He was just... ugly. I've always like Fenring, but he was so freaking ugly (not just UGLY, but like... unconventionally ugly) that I was like ehhhhr. Well, I still haven't seen TOO much of his stuff since they took away his part at the end and I didn't watch the middle section in which he might have done some stuff. But he was really ugly.
the muad'dib sucks. Little puppet. The muad'dib, kangaroo mouse, appeared in one scene that I saw and it was obviously a little low-quality puppet thing. That's all.
Paul not skinny enough. I know it's hard for any actor to avoid appearing water-fat, but Paul is really supposed to be extremely thin by the end of the story. He wasn't fat or anything, but he wasn't thin.
*SPOILER*I still think Yueh's circumstances of betrayal are dumb. Yeah, this is really a book-plot complaint, not anything about the movie, but I DO think it's stupid that they just needed to hold his wife ransom and that's all it takes to undo Imperial conditioning?? What, nobody who ever tried to turn a Suk doctor traitor ever THOUGHT of that before? So if it doesn't condition them so much that they won't resist doing it for a loved one, what exactly IS it conditioning them against, since that's NORMALLY the way people get other people to betray a third group of people in the first place? Like, just against taking money to do stuff? Aww, it just bothers me. I think it's dumb. Frank H. (or whoever actually wrote that one) should have come up with something better.*/SPOILER*
acting like the point of K.H. was to end the feud? B.G. didn't give a crap about the feud Mohiam says something in the movie to the effect that one of the main reasons they are breeding the Kwisatz Haderach is to end the feud between Atreides and Harkonnen; in reality, the Bene Gesserit honestly could not have cared even a tiny bit if anyone was feuding, as long as they still got the genetic couplings they wanted. I don't even think they viewed the fact that an Atreides-Harkonnen pairing might end the feud even as a fringe benefit. I mean, they REALLY didn't care, like, AT ALL.

Thus ends my commentary on the Dune movie. On to my comments on the first installment of Children of Dune... ... of which there are only two. They are, in no particular order: New Duncan = also handsome. hair not as good. Nicer voice. and sucky guildsman. By these comments I mean that they did not use the same actor from the movie to play Duncan Idaho, but they chose another guy who was h-h-handsome. Like REALLY. Ohhh yeah. He might have been better-looking in the face and his speaking voice was better, but his hair wasn't as good and he didn't have as nice a profile IMHO, so I think both Duncans equal each other as far as hotness, and they are both hot enough to meet with my approval. As for the other comment, their little guildsman dude (the one in Dune was pretty cool with its skin wings) kind of sucked because, like the muad'dib, it was a little too obviously NOT real.

MY COMMENTS ARE NOW OVER.

Since my last entry was on Christmas Eve, I guess I should mention what I got for Christmas, because ... yeah. What? I don't know. My parents sort of went overboard. o_o()() After all I got for Christmas, I was halfway expecting not to get anything at all for my birthday XP Anyway, I got a PS2 (!!!), Kingdom Hearts, Kare Kano vol. 2, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (for GBA), and Super Mario Sunshine. My sister got Animal Crossing, and we ended up buying another copy of it so that we could play here at home while she plays in Austin... because.. SHE got her own GameCube XD()() AND a digital camera. That's what I mean about my parents going overboard. The thing was, AnJa asked for both a GCN and a digital camera, expecting that she might get one of them. They thought they would get her one, but they didn't know which one she would want more. They initially got her a GameCube... then they asked her which she would rather have, and she said a camera. But the thing was, the GameCube was BROKEN then, so we didn't have one at all, so they were like "h'm" and gave it to her early so we could play SSB Melee, since it was Christmas Break you know, and it's depressing if we can't play SSB Melee during one of the few times AnJa is home for an extended period of time. But since she'd said she would rather have the camera, they got that for her too. XD()() And then since they had gotten her two big things, they decided to get me a PS2 o_o. Even though I'd been planning to buy myself one for, like, ever. NOW I DON'T HAVE TO w00tw00t. So. Yeah.

I don't really want to write anything else right now, and I think I should just post what I have because if I put it off again waiting for myself to "finish" it might be another few months before I get anything posted at all. That said, I'll just paste the previous entry I started writing that was about All-State Choir. YOUR FUN TIME IS NOW!

Whoooo All-State was this weekend and I got back earlier today and I'm writing a journal entry NOW before I forget stuff? I don't know.

I was in Treble Choir again this year; our clinician was called Dr. Snow. She is SUPER CUTE. She has the cutest blond haircut and she's all short and... cute. o_o() I think she was pretty good, but the clinician last year might have been better, I'm not sure. I *severely disliked* the accomanpist, because she kept... like, thinking she was assistant clinician or something and turning around and telling people stuff (in a really mean way) and like getting all mad and waving her arms if people kept singing when they weren't suposed to and junk like that. It's like, you're just here to play the piano for us, so don't even try to tell us stuff. She made me mad. (It wasn't so much that she was trying to give advice, but that she was mean and arrogant about it, like she thought it was her Right to do it or something?)

The Alto II section leader also angered me. The first night, she started off giving us a big speech about how she had "sacrificed" her whole convention for us, since because she was our section leader she wasn't going to be able to do any of the other convention stuff. Basically, she was like saying "you all need to be grateful and wonderful to me because boo hoo it's your fault that I can't have fun." It's like, wow, lady, NOBODY put a gun to your head and told you to be the Alto II section leader. It was YOUR CHOICE. Now, I'm all for agonising over options, but once you've picked one, REALISE that YOU PICKED IT and don't do all that whining. Also, don't whine to people about how it's their fault (indirectly) that you picked the Bad Choice or something. In case you didn't notice, none of US went up and asked you to be our section leader. Blargh. I didn't like her. She also FREAKING TAUGHT US A BUNCH OF STUFF WRONG. The point of the first-night sectional is to look at the new music and get so we can sing through it (notes and rhythms, you know), then in the rehearsals we fix stuff and make it, like, musical and stuff. Only in our sectional, they taught us TONNES of wrong stuff. Wrong notes in one song, wrong timing in two places of another song, wrong notes AND wrong timing in another song... and the thing is, if you learn it wrong the *first time*, it's extremely hard to get it right later even going over it many times. So the Altos seemed all retarded for the rest of the clinic and we kept getting all sorts of stuff wrong and I'm sure the other sections were like "dang, alto II's are stupid" but it was the SECTION LEADERS AAAARGH. (oh yeah, the alto I leader was there for some of it too and aided in the teaching of wrong stuff.)

Anyway, in addition to alto retardation, there were even more problems with the technicalities (by which I mean actual PITCHES and TIMING, of course) because Dr. Snow insisted that we have our program memorised for the concert. o_o()()() (Remember that four of our six songs, we had JUST gotten and never seen before and had two days to learn and everything.) Of course, if people aren't allowed to look at their music, and they don't have it perfectly memorised (and how COULD we have...? I ended up doing okay because I spent time studying over the music in my hotel during my night off, but a lot of people didn't do that...) there are going to be a lot of problems... since we're all musicians, there weren't problems with blatantly wrong notes and stuff since, for the most part, if some person happened to be singing a note that wasn't what they were meant to be singing, it was still in the chord and stuff. But it was ANNOYING and ANGERING that people were singing wrong stuff all over the place. Another reason people had trouble, I think, memorising stuff is that instead of being in sections, as choirs usually are (i.e. Soprano Is on stage right, then Soprano IIs, then Alto Is and Alto IIs on stage left, or something at least vaguely like that) we were in a mixed formation with quartets-- as a second alto, I had a first soprano on my left and a second soprano on my right, and a first alto somewhere nearby, but no second altos within easy reach. For that reason, it was hard for people to hear and know when they were singing something wrong (when you're in sections and everyone is singing something different from what you're singing, it's pretty obvious)... things like that. Of course, from what I could hear, about 70% of the altos were singing the things in those little Trouble Spots totally wrong, so if we'd been in a section everyone would have still been singing wrong.

ANNOYING.

Yes. I was annoyed by All-State this year. I was very peeved at the other people in it. My perfectionism is getting out of control when I look around at ALL-STATERS, for goodness sake, and think they seem lazy and stupid. (Not looking around and thinking I'm more talented and deserving than they are, mind you: just thinking that they're lazy and stupid and why can't they try harder and not be stupid about stuff.)

Another reason that those parts in which the altos were having trouble remained largely unresolved was Dr. Snow's way of handling it-- she would have us go over just that part until we sang it right, and then move on. Now, normally that would be pretty good, only what she would do is go over, really, *JUST* that part-- if we were having trouble with measures 15-18, we'd only sing 15-18. She didn't have us go over how to get into it or out of it, so a lot of the time (most of the time), when those parts actually showed up in the music, they weren't done right because we hadn't practised singing them correctly in CONTEXT. It doesn't help very much if we can sing 15-18 perfectly, but we can't sing 10-23, ya know?

We had a song in the Moravian dialect of Lappish (I'd never even HEARD of Moravians before! It was crazy!) called "Hoj, Hura, Hoj" that was like a sheep herder mountain yelling song. It was a pretty cool song, only a good many of our problems were in that one because she took us off the score before we could logically have gotten it into our brains. =\ So everyone forgot the words and mumbled stuff-- and the thing is, if everyone is forgetting and mumbling, they should go BACK to the score until they know it a little better, but Dr. Snow was like "NO SCORES" so we just KEPT singing it mumbly and that doesn't help you to learn music ;P By the concert we knew it somewhat better, but that was because of people looking at it on their own, which, honestly, I don't think you should really have to do at All-State, considering that you don't have very much free time and you spend 8 to 11 hours per day in rehearsal. But what I was originally going to say about Hoj Hura Hoj was that there was a little diction guide to pronouncing the words in the back, and IT SUCKED. It was the WORST pronunciation guide I have EEEEVERRRR seen. It was inconsistent and stupid. Half the time they'd use a "j" when they meant a "y" sound, but the other half they'd use a "y," so bah. And also, for initial consonant sounds that were combinations of sounds that you're supposed to say all at once, they would split it all up so it looked dumb and would have sounded stupid if we'd even had time to say all that, which we didn't. Like, there was one word that was meant to be said like "zdjestiny," but the guide said "zuh-duh-jestiny." THE ZDJE is ALL ON ONE SYLLABLE. You are NOT SUPPOSED TO SAY ZUH DUH JESTINY. And because it was written that way, the alto section leaders (here they are again) taught that to us also, even though you can't logically sing that anyway, so nobody could sing "Kravarzhe zdjestiny volava..." because they were trying to say Zuh Duh Jestiny instead of Zdjestiny.

ANGER!

Despite the fact that it annoyed and angered me a lot, I still didn't have a bad time. I think it was pretty good. It's just that... yeah. A lot of my unhappiness with it stemmed from the fact that not only did I NOT make Mixed Choir, I failed to make Mixed Choir SPECTACULARLY.

Okay, gotta start a new paragraph to adequately Angst it Up.

The Mixed Choir clinician this year was Z. Randall Stroope. He writes wonderful, beautiful music; he was the Treble choir clinician one year that Angela was in it, and she LOVED him, and everyone in it LOVED him, and if you mention his name to anyone who might possibly know they talk about how GREAT he is, and AnJa seriously considered going to the University of Nebraska JUST because HE was the choir director there, because he is REALLY COOL and AWESOME. And the Mixed Choir MUSIC this year-- (well, Dr. Stroope picked it out)-- was... magnificent. The music two years ago was great, last year's was er baddish. But this year's... it was just stunning. It was lovely and gorgeous and I can't even describe how much I loved it. I wanted to sing that music as much as I've ever wanted ANYTHING. And I thought I could make Mixed Choir. I really did. I mean, last year I'd gotten 7th chair at region, then 4th chair at pre-Area, and then 6th chair at Area.... and this year I had 4th at Region and 2nd at pre-Area, so I just thought it was reasonable for me to think I could move up to at least fourth chair at Area and make Mixed. Well, it wasn't because I got 12th chair at Area. I moved DOWN SIX CHAIRS from last year. People are supposed to BETTER the next year. It was just... it was bad. I was really, sincerely devastated. I mean... I had a goal, and I worked really hard, and I thought I could do it, but... I couldn't. And I didn't even mess up in my audition, so I couldn't blame it on anything... I just.. the judges just didn't like my voice. At all. I even got a perfect score on sight-reading, so it makes the fact that I did SO BADLY overall even worse. They hated my voice THAT MUCH. I mean, I got 12th out of 15. And yes I know that even making it that far is wonderful and everyone at that level is so good and blah blah blah. That knowledge doesn't make you feel ANY better when you're actually in the position.

So I've been feeling worse about my singing lately. Mr. Dowhy is having me sing soprano pieces instead of low voices because, in his words, I've hit a "plateau" in my low voice. Translation: I haven't shown any improvement or change in like a year and we've been working on the same stuff all that time and even now I still can't do it, so I think he's just trying stuff desperately to get me to not SUCK. YES I KNOW I DON'T REALLY SUCK IF I MADE ALL-STATE CHOIR. I still suck to myself. And Dowhy doesn't take me to NATS, because I'm not good enough. Argh. Argh.

I don't think I should have written all this out, because now I'm sad and depressed again.

Technically, 12th chair isn't really making it anyway. It's second alternate. I ended up getting to go because two of the girls who auditioned and made it were going to be in New York that week performing with their school choir for some thing, and they just wanted to audition to see if they could make it. A lot of people were annoyed at them for that, but I understand it and I probably would have done the same thing. Still, it felt... I don't know. It was humiliating that I got the lowest chair I could have possibly gotten aside from not getting anything at all, then moved up to the last possible chair in the actual choir because two people dropped. I mean... I didn't REALLY make it. I don't know. I was just humiliated. Nobody besides me really sees it that way, but that doesn't matter because that's how I see it... I would have preferred not to make it all. I mean, sure, I would have done worse overall... but I wouldn't feel like "well, since the people who are actually GOOD don't want to go, why don't you just tag along."

I feel like such an arrogant, egotistical freak that this upset me so much. But it just... it meant SO MUCH to me. I can't explain how much it meant to me. I just thought I could do it and I couldn't. I felt like I'd failed myself so much.

Even though I truly, honestly, completely did not want to go, I ended up going anyway because of my SECOND defining emotional force (the first being perfectionism-inferiority complex standards for myself): guilt. This was the one part where I WAS annoyed with the girls who auditioned even though they knew they couldn't go. That meant both of the alternates kind of HAD to go, because there IS no third alternate. If for any reason one of us hadn't gone, the choir would have been a person short (because replacements for girls in a certain area have to come from the alternates in that area). That wouldn't have been that big a deal, but... I just felt... I felt like that would be too selfish and how if I were the girl who had made 13th chair, I would then hate me. So I went. Because I felt guilty. I always feel guilty, about everything. The cycle of Me is 1) I fail myself because I was aiming for something unrealistic; 2) I feel depressed and useless; 3) I feel guilty about feeling depressed and useless.

And if I hadn't gone, everyone would have been disappointed in me... and think I was a stuck-up jerk who was pouting because I won't settle for anything other than number one. And hell, they would have been right, but I'm too much of a FREAK to feel comfortable with them knowing that.

I just feel like I'm not good enough at anything.

*/END PREVIOUSLY STARTED INCOMPLETE JOURNAL ENTRY.* Wow, I didn't remember that it ended like that. Haw haw XD I guess that's why I stopped writing it, cos I got depressed and closed out. <3 I guess another month of distance made the difference of me NOT being all freakish and upset about it. Also, shortly after that, I decided to honestly STOP apologising for how I feel-- and to really try to stop feeling guilty for retarded reasons. If I feel in a certain way, I *feel* that way, whether or not I can justify it in some arbitrary set of Correct Feelings values. I felt depressed and useless, and that's JUST how I felt. As soon as I stopped beating myself up over just FEELING that way, I started feeling better. Feelings are. They don't go away because you decide they're wrong. That's just how things are, and accepting it makes life nicer. (I'm feeling super philosophical because a) that's what Annie said [basically] in a recent issue of UXM and I thought it was cool, and b) I just had a heart to heart with my mom.) HOORAY I post this now.

(x-1, x) (-infinity, infinity) (x, x+1)