The Fault in Our Stars

Dear Amy
There are a few parts to this blog post. Some of it is funny and some of it is serious and some if it is John Green.

The Relatively Funny Part:
So you showed me some songs the other day that I would like to think changed my definition of beat-tastic. I've found that I have become sick of the simple boom-clap-boom-clap that rules american pop as the singer wails about 'oh no she left me again' or 'oh yes we're gonna party tonight' or 'oh yes I love that girl' or 'oh i cheated but when I'm rich I'll give you material things to make you feel better about it, so please don't leave me.'

And I'm not saying that a lot of K-pop isn't boom-clap-boom-clap, but not knowing what they're saying really helps. I'm not the kind of person to listen to a song because I relate to it. The only song I've ever listened to because I related to it is Sexy and I Know It.

So what I'm saying is I can respect a song more when I'm not thinking, "oh my GOSH, I've heard these lyrics a billion times. 'somebody to love,' are you kidding me?"

I can definitely rock out more to a song when I'm not thinking, "oops he just cussed, oops he just cussed again." I don't listen to songs because I like what they're saying, I listen to them because I like the way the way they make me feel.

I don't know if this is how it is for you, Amy, but when I listen to an incredibly beat-tastic song for the first minute or thirty seconds of the song I'm just thinking, "wow. wow. wow. wow." and then I'm literally thinking about nothing but dancing. I feel like I need to express the way the song makes me feel and the only way for me to do that is not in words, but it movement.

So there are two songs that I listened to yesterday where I had the exact same thought process listening to them. The songs were "Love Ya" by SS501 and "Keep Your Head Down" by TVXQ. (also Digital Bounce, but that was a few days ago) Heres what I was thinking:
Someone needs to be doing acrobatics right now.


And here's what that means: almost nothing I can do can express how extremely and incredibly awesome this makes me feel.

The Serious Part:

I wait a lot to listen to k-pop and dance. The main reason I'm waiting is because I'm doing school. This semester I've kind of realized how hard school can be, and I don't mean challenging. I mean hard to make myself do without having some kind of breakdown because I can't stand how uninspiring and futile it is. Nothing that I want to obtain I am getting through school. Math mainly just makes me feel stupid, as I try to get my mind around concepts that are too confusing for me to understand, and therefore to profitless for me to care about.
In History I relearn things that I've learned a billion times, maybe in hopes that, for the kind of things you usually forget, "this time it will stick," and for things that you already know, "this time it will be drilled so hard into your adolescent brain that the foundation will shatter and you'll forget the difference between 'what actually happened,' and 'what my textbook thought I thought happened.'"
I'm still doing handwriting, since mom still wants to shape the kind of human I already am. Handwriting is just one of those things, you know?
I guess I'm just now realizing that the real challenge in school is not "remembering things just long enough to get a b on the test" but "remember to care enough to actually get a b on the test."

John Green:

Probably part of the reason I came to that conclusion is not because I'm a teenager and the I play the devils advocate and I have to disagree with everything everyone tells me, especially my parents; but because I'm reading a book about a girl with cancer and whenever it acknowledged that she was not going to school and just sleeping a lot and not really doing anything, I found myself thinking, "Doesn't she need to do something, so she can....you know...know how to do stuff when she grows up?" and then I realized two things:
1. She has cancer, and things like school and productiveness and doing-things-now-so-she-can-know-how-to-do-things-in-the-future, are not really relevant to her.
2. Do I really think that the only reason I do school and anything I don't want to so that I can do it later in life when my parents aren't around doing it for me?

And therein, I suppose, lies the problem. I guess I'm just now realizing that I'm just doing school to do school, not to learn about the Vietnam War and not to learn about distributing and factoring.

But on a happier note, I am reading a pretty incredible book by John Green called The Fault in Our Stars. Its funny and it makes you think about things, obviously. It also brings back my fear of having cancer. I'm really scared of getting cancer. I don't think its that irrational either.

But the book has some pretty incredible quotes, my favorite of which, I will leave you with:
"Look, let me just say it: he was hot. a nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy....well."

-Michelle