seventeen

5/07/2013

Jesus, where do I even begin? This won't be a "3 things" because too much stuff happened for me to post it only in 3 categories. Well, I'll try to keep it in chronological order, at least?

The morning began with me waking up at an ungodly hour for choir (shut up, 6:45am is early for me). It took me a good ten seconds from when I woke up before I remembered "oh hey... it's my birthday today". Then, as with every morning, I briefly debated with myself on whether I would be late if I slept for another five minutes and almost gave in (which would've led to some disastrous consequences i.e. missing choir) but decided against it. Damn man, why is the world so dark at 7am? Seems to me that our good ol' sun is one lazy son of a bitch.

But I'm getting off track here. You don't care about my morning get up routine, you want to know about what exciting things happened on my birthday! And trust me, from my point of view, there was a LOT of exciting things that were happening to me! I should mention, however, that for the whole day, it barely even felt as if it was my birthday at all. Even with all the attention and all the presents and lovely things people did for me, I didn't feel any different as a barely-seventeen year old than how I felt as an almost-retired-sixteen year old. But I guess most people feel like this on their birthdays. Though I always forget by the following year....

At the end of choir, Saints sang me a perfectly tuned, beautifully harmonized rendition of happy birthday, and I awkwardly had to stand there, caught half in the process of packing my choir folder up. Humanity has made many breakthroughs in modern medicine, yet to this day, no one has come up with a solution to the pressing issue of "what the fuck am I supposed to do with myself when a group of people are singing happy birthday to me?!?".

Izzy B and Nee were waiting and hiding at the entrance of the PAC and ambushed me with balloons and presents, which was suuuuch a lovely surprise! Izzy had made me brownies (which are so fucking delicious oh my god how do people bake?!) and had made a card (see below). Renee got me an adorable pen, some of those novelty erasers, and a towel lollipop that I'm pretty sure isn't edible.

I walked to my locker, where I ran into Cathee, who then presented me with her fucking MINDBLOWING CARD

No guys I'm serious. THIS SHIT

BLEW

MY

MIND

DO YOU SEE IT? DO U SEE THE AMOUNT OF TIME AND EFFORT THAT CARD MUST'VE TAKEN??? I love Cathee so much omg what a GB ok can we all just give Cathee a big round of applause?!   PS on the bottom right corner of the 3rd photo (ie the back cover of the card) is a snapchat of me and Lachie (next to fat!vicky). Teehee.

Bell rang (BRRRRNNNGGGGG!! - onomatopaeia always brings life to a story) and we went to p1 which was Chem. Now, technically nothing significant related to my actual birthday happened in Chem, however, we did attempt a distillation of alcohol to make wine! Am I a nerd to say that it was super fun? I am, and I'M NOT EVEN ASHAMED OF IT. It took us a while to get the distillation kit parts together and then we nearly burned the lab down when the bunsen burner tipped over (NOT OUR FAULT), and our teacher was taking photos of us for our eventual graduation (on her phone lol). We all ran out of time towards the end but Faizah, Zavara, and I got like, one drop of alcohol produced and it tested positive with permanganate and we were SO STOKED!!!! WE MADE WINEEEEEEEEE!!!! Omg the technician came in and was like "lol getting drunk on the last day of school?" and I got SO confused because isn't that just such an odd thing to say..... and then I remembered that we were making wine hahahaha oops.

Second period bio was less exciting but at the end Mrs O randomly youtubed a "Happy Birthday" song and we were all like wtf hahahahahha. It wasn't even the original Happy Birthday song?? So alty. At Tutor Group time we had house meeting (unexciting) and then I ran into people doing a bake sale and convinced them to give me a free cookie because of my birthday haha oops abusing birthday power.

At morning tea I went to my locker and in it I found a present from Sophie!! She gave me some reeeeally nice skincare products which I am seriously hoping will work its magic on me! I didn't actually know who the present was from and I had to read the whole note before I realised it was Sophie (she signed it off with "van sexy" so I guess that's her official nickname now. Leavers shirt, perhaps?) 

At lunchtime I FINALLY got to unwrap my present from Cathee, Steph, Jo (Joey), and Cherry. Okay, lemme tell you a little bit about what I knew prior to my discovery of what the gift was. Joey had been complaining about how she had to carry this gift all the way from Newmarket, and how heavy it was. Multiple people told me "oh you're going to LOVE it".  Cathee reinforced how it wasn't something off my (very limited) wishlist when I asked her (multiple times). 

Thus, I concluded that all signs pointed to them getting me a life sized blow up doll of Jensen Ackles.

Just kidding. Not really.

Yeah, so I had a feeling that they got me what they got me, except Cathee threw me off a bit when she said it wasn't on my wishlist, and that it was fragile. I'll keep you casual readers from dying from suspense - they got me... DRUMROLL PLEASE.... A BOX SET OF A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE (AKA GAME OF THRONES) AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH *ETERNAL SCREAMING*

Yes, well. ASOIAF was on my wishlist, and books, as far as I'm concerned, aren't particularly fragile. I later found out that Cathee is a lying little deceiver (for good reason) and that the reason it was fragile was because one side of the box set was all covered in rows of sticky note messages left by people wishing me happy birthday!! ISN'T THAT JUST THE SWEETEST THING? I'm going to stick all the messages (and Cathee's card) up on my wall in my room!

Before I was about to unwrap the present, Nicole said she was going to film my reaction, to which I responded "nah, don't bother, I never have very entertaining reactions to things like this!". Cathee convinced her to film anyway, and boy am I glad she did. If you guys haven't seen the video, click here for the facebook link of it. Not gonna lie, they really made me eat my prior words. I DEFINITELY reacted! I ripped off a piece of newspaper and under it I saw an upside down "and fire" and you can literally see my moment of realisation where I put two and two together and complete the rest of the sentence "a song of ice and fire" and immediately start screaming and ripping the rest of the newspaper off. This fucked up the sticky notes at the top a little bit (i.e. why it was fragile) but Cathee managed to save it. And then once it was all unwrapped I just sat there and screamed because I OWN THE ASOIAF SERIES OH MY GODDDDDDDDDD I'M SO EXCITED TO READ IT ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!! I COULDN'T STOP SCREAMING?!!!?!?!? 

After lunch we had a little debate over alternative medicine in TOK, where I was for alternative medicine and Nadia was against it. It's interesting because even though I really am not into Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) at home (my mum is a qualified practitioner of all the shit eg acupuncture, moxabustion, cupping, etc) whenever there's a debate about alternative medicine, I always argue FOR the use of alternative medicine. I mean, I have all this background knowledge of it because of all that my mum's explained to me, and I almost  feel as if it's my duty to defend the honour of what she studies/practices! Everyone gave really positive feedback about the debate which was really nice!

I had a free period for my last period of the term, and said a goodbye and gave a hug to our head-librarian (don't think that's the right title) Mrs M who's leaving. Cathee then came home with me because we were going out to dinner later. Nothing exciting happened at my house because nothing exciting ever happens at my house. Some stressful shit with one of the tickets occurred where the girl I had sold one of my tickets to no longer wanted it anymore, and I needed to find another person to go as a replacement. Funny how things work out in the end though... When we went to pick up Sueyeon to go to the restaurant, I saw Angela's silhouette in the darkness. Angela lives right in front of Sueyeon's place, and she was outside in the middle of bringing groceries into the house when I saw her and started yelling her name from my dark, tinted car. After much confusion and screaming (mainly from me) I convinced her to take the extra ticket and ended up sorting all the shit out, yay!!! 

We got to dinner (on time, I might add!) and this place, Da Vinci, that Lizzi suggested, ended up not being the restaurant that Lizzi had went to hahahaha. The people who came to dinner were Cathee, Sueyeon, Lizzi, Steph, Samai, and Mei. Samai and Cathee couldn't stay for Stage Challenge afterwards, but the rest of us had to get to the show which started at 7pm, meaning that we were in such a rush because the restaurant didn't open until 6pm. Basically we were shoving down food and ordered the fastest to prepare on the menu (pizza and pasta - damn I wanted to try their lamb, sigh). The waitress got my order wrong, but I think it may have been because of my shoddy pronunciation that confused her. 

At the start of dinner, Lizzi presented me with her and Jade's present which was... GASP, a COUNTRY ROAD BAG!!!!! I was sooooo stoked omg, I can now be part of the club of stereotypical St Cuths girls! All I need now is a macpac! The one they got me is an aqua blue which is adorable and will probably be incredibly ostentatious, especially if I plan on using it outside of school! OMG the funniest thing is, my brother bought me a country road bag, and called me in the middle of dinner telling me to check my snapchat. The photo he sent me was of the selection of country road bags and he was like "which one?". At this point, I had already gotten Lizzi and Jade's bag and I was like aww shit! He had already bought the bag, so he needed to return it, and I think he decided to get a harddrive instead for us to share.

At the end of dinner, our waitress was taking her sweet time calculating each individual's money and change required, and Lizzi looked like she was going to explode from impatience. By then it was already past 6:50 and it would take us 10 minutes to get to Aotea Square, which meant we were already a little late, ah non! Couple that with the ridiculously steep hills in certain parts of Auckland City, and my heels, and you've got a damn stressful journey!

When we got to stage challenge (over 5 minutes late?), it was still the opening address so we didn't miss out on anything at all! I'll just highlight some of the show. There was a really creepy but incredibly cool one by Massey which I really liked, and they got 1st in Raw division. St Cuths managed to get every award for excellence except for soundtrack, including Set!! What!!!! Okay, I'm allowed to criticise Set because I was part of Set, and although the couple of pieces of set (the rock walls) that we actually managed to make were pretty cool, I'm incredibly surprised we were included in the awards! At first, I didn't realise that lots of schools could win a prize for excellence in set, and I thought that it only went to one school. So, when I watched EGGS' performance, and saw their INCREDIBLE set  - no, seriously, it was fucking amazing - I nearly cried from our lacklustre rock walls and white sheets :( 

In the end, we got 3rd place, which wasn't fantastic, but I think a lot of people were happy with it because we bet EGGs - they didn't even get a placing!! IT'S CRAZY!! EGGs did Marilyn Monroe and it completely knocked my socks off into another galaxy! They had this amazing duet near the end and I was like, THIS close from crying at the raw emotion and talent, honestly. Like, don't get me wrong, ours was good too. However I think our theme kind of failed us in that there wasn't a clear plot or storyline, and so all the dances felt quite random. Our theme was a girl's journey into her imagination, where she is trapped somehow symbolically (within her mind, within her living conditions, who knows?). The bit where the dancers came out of the rock walls made everyone go WOAH!!! And the human centipedes and acrobatics of the creature dance was mean!!

We met up with Joanna at the end who first attacked me and ran me into some other family (lol) and then hugged Sueyeon and was clinging off her and wouldn't get off and omg I felt so bad because Sueyeon HATES to be hugged, like, she doesn't let anyone hug her, and she looked like she wanted to throw up when Joey was hugging her hahahahah 

So, my seventeenth birthday was very fun, and I felt super special, all thanks to my wonderful friends. I love birthdays! I mean, I carried around 6 balloons all day and an A3 card plastered with pictures of my face! I FELT SO LOVED MAN. IT'S GOOD TO FEEL LOVED :)