I’m down to the last five days of my high school education.

Wow.

To be honest, I hadn’t really noticed until today. Up until now, I’d just continued to go through the motions of school: going to class, not going to class, doing the minimal amounts of homework associated with senior year… But now that the yearbooks have come out, and people have started asking me to sign them, I’m realizing how big this is: these next two weeks are the last during which I’m regularly going to see all these people. Some of them, people I’ve known since 3rd grade, when I was just a scared little 9-year-old, fresh from Minnesota. After this, everything’s going to change…

Tonight, Dessert Theatre 2008 opens. Tomorrow, it will close. My last production at Theatre CHS will be over - no more tech weeks, no more “dressing to the nines” on opening night. The lights will go down, the costumes put away, and the goodbyes said - and it will be over. Every Dessert Theatre closing night for the past three years, I’ve watched the seniors stand around, saying goodbye to the Black Box. Most crying. And I always think, “I don’t want to be that senior. I don’t want to say goodbye - I couldn’t handle that. I still have three years left here.

two years.

one.”

And now, there aren’t any more years left. I can’t just say, “There’s still next year. I don’t have to deal with it yet,” because this is it - I have to deal with it now. Now’s the time to say goodbye to all of these people - some old friends, others new - but all people I’ve realized I feel connected to on a level I didn’t image was possible. People that got me through the drama and trauma of high school life - who confided in me, and helped me through all those seemingly insurmountable roadblocks. People I’ve loved, people I’ve hated. People that mean the world to me. People.

I know I’m moving on to bigger and better things - goodness knows I’ll meet new friends, create new bonds. Grow even more into the person that I am. But these people around me now - they have guided me and shaped me more than I’ll ever truly realize. I don’t know how to thank them for that. There’s no way to thank them enough. I can’t even promise I’ll remember their names and faces ten years from now. But I know I’ll never forget what they meant.

So thank you, everyone. You won’t be forgotten.

So I’ve been putting off submitting my housing application for NYU - mainly because I hadn’t decided what dorm I wanted to live in yet. But I finally sat down today, and made my top five choices for residential halls:

Weinstein (or as my mom calls it, the “Jew Boy” dorm)
Hayden
Goddard
Rubin
Brittany

So, with this important step in my college preparatory process complete, I finally made my way over to the NYU Housing Application. Question 1: Gender Identity. “Please enter whether you would like to be assigned a room based on your legal gender, or a different gender with which you identify.” Easy enough. But in the drop-down list, there were only three options:

1. Female
2. Gender Identity Male
3. Gender Identity Female

“What, I can’t just be plain old male?” I ask. It’s then that I look up at the top of my application, and see this:

Apparently, NYU thinks I’m a girl. No joke. I suppose with thousands of incoming freshmen, something on someone’s application was bound to get messed up. But my gender??? *sigh* - I suppose I’m going to have to call someone about this…

I am getting so fed up with these internet filters. Youtube and MySpace have been blocked at Charlottesville High School for over a year now, but our dear friends in the school’s IT department have just recently decided to ban Facebook. And boy, is everone upset. You see, we often use laptops in classes at CHS - to work on powerpoints, do research; we even blogged in my 10th grade English class. Naturally, high schoolers spend about 70% of that time on sites other than those select few academic ones they’re supposed to be navigating.

Solution?

BLOCK FACEBOOK!!!! Hahaha! That will teach those little snot-faced teenagers a lesson. They will know the wrath that is the Charlottesville City School’s filtering capabilities!

Sure, they might stop visiting Facebook and start doing their work. More likely, they’ll find a way around the filter using knowledge no more complex than a simple subdomain switch, using the iPhone version of Facebook (which they didn’t bother to block), or even more likely just go back to playing Flash games all period (remember those?).

Not surprisingly, teachers are also upset about the ban (and they have less free time to find a way around it). Yes, teachers use Facebook for legitimate educational purpose. Same goes for YouTube. Ever heard of using video as a learning tool? But I suppose the IT department deluding themselves into thinking they’re actually preventing slackage among the students is more important than letting the teachers do their job innovatively.

I say all this in an only slightly off-topic response to Congressman Mark Kirk’s proposal to ban Second Life in all libraries and schools - a game he says is riddled with sex and is a breeding ground for online predators, endangering children. Ignoring the fact that only about 10 percent of predators meet their victims online, and maybe the goverment should focus on making the real world safer before obsessing over a statistically tiny minority of cases, this is just another example of conservative fanatics attacking what they deem unsanitary lifestyles (apparently Second Life has a fairly active “adult” second), using child safety as an excuse.

If you want to protect children, Mr. Kirk, do something useful and work on actually protecting them in their physical environment. This effort to ban Second Life isn’t going to stop kids from using the site. Nor will it protect them.

The auditions have been held, the songs sung, the necessary facebook group created, and the castlist posted. [Sort of.]

Over the past month or so, the production team for High School Musical at Live Arts has been working hard holding auditions, designing, casting, and reading those god-forsaken 100 pages of script more times than anyone thought possible. And tonight we’re finally going to start the next phase - all the cast members are meeting for the first time in a sort of pre-rehearsal.

But admittedly, the hardest part of getting through these first few weeks of production (alongside of my AP exams, which are still going on, by the way) is how I have to do it all without coffee. I know, crazy, right? But you see, after my experiences during Mother Courage, I figured it was time to pull the curtain on my coffee drinking days; at least until college :P. A teenager getting to the point of three cups a day is pretty disgusting. Hot chocolate’s been a pretty good substitute…

Now, speaking of High School Musical, I know what you’re going to say:

“That’s so lame!”
“Why is Live Arts doing a crappy kids musical?”
“That music makes me want to strangle small animals.”

I felt the same way before I got involved. And I’ll admit, I finally watched the movie a few weeks ago, and absolutely hated it. But the stage version’s better - especially Live Arts-style. I just wish I could have convinced more people to audition. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with the people that were cast. But I think we still technically had less males audition than there were male roles… See, upper-elementary schoolers were all-for auditions; so were college kids. The former are legitimately allowed to like the movie - the latter are old enough for it to be cool to like kids movies. Unfortunately, high schoolers (what we needed) are all at that awkward stage where they’re so insecure about themselves that they wouldn’t dream of acting in a musical that could jeopardize whatever “coolness” they possess. Snap.

Oh, and you can all pretend like you’re not going to go see the show, but we know you’ll be there in the back row.

We know.

I’ve been waiting for Moby’s new album since Hotel came out over three years ago, and I finally got my wish today. So here’s my (somewhat haphazard) review of Moby’s Last Night:

It seems like every single anticipatory review of Last Night mentioned the fact that it’s “more dance-oriented” than Moby’s previous work. That Moby somehow found a “new voice” in this album. Honestly, I think that’s crap. I’d still call this an “electronic” album, with a heavier emphasis on the bass line, making it border on the Dance category. Actually, I think Last Night was more of a return to the almost obsessively alternative Moby from a decade ago. With heavily sampled vocals (which come close to seeming improvised), songs like “Everyday It’s 1989″ and “Live For Tomorrow” could have almost come off of his 2002 album 18 (see, “One of These Mornings” and “Sunday (The Day Before My Birthday)”).

Something that intrigued me about Last Night was it’s concept: Moby wanted to recreate the experience of a night in NYC - all the different events and emotions you can go through in 8 short hours. Part of this involved recreating the vast array of experiences, possible. However, Moby seems to have lost a bit of his commitment to the vividly varying melodies which made Hotel such a pleasure to listen to straight through, opting instead for the repetitive electronic drum beat which lost its appeal about fifteen minutes in. Even after listening to it all afternoon, I’m having trouble distinguishing the last 8 or 9 tracks - they simply sound too similar.

Admittedly, Last Night has some nice attributes, thanks to Moby’s unashamed loyalty to his somewhat unconventional musical style. Most pop artists use vocals as the center-piece of the song, whereas dance artists use their beats and stutters as the frontmen. But Moby has created a marriage of the two camps, in many ways using vocals as simply another instrument in his orchestra - a pleasing style, which unfortunately requires some getting used to. The distinguishable lyrics to “The Stars,” for example, consist simply of “I see the stars,” repeated several dozens times. If you’re looking for a sing-along track, you’ll find very few in Last Night.

Yet some of my favorite tracks were simply the ones that broke outside the boundaries of most music I hear on the radio. The simple yet beautiful melody of “Ooh Yeah,” the purely instrumental “Mothers of the Night” (which says more without words than most songs do with vocals), and even the powerful, angry, and hurt monologue from “Disco Lies” (I felt like I was in a gay club in 1982) were all memorable and can easily get stuck in your head.

All things considered, I was a little disappointed in Last Night. I became a bit too fond of signing along with 2005’s Hotel, and the beat-intensive dance album Moby’s created here just doesn’t lend itself to that style of rocking out. But, taken for what it is (a dance album on the slightly more innovative side of the spectrum), Moby has created another work of art for his genre. Just don’t be surprised if you find yourself reaching for that “skip track” button every once in a while to escape the slight monotony.