Reading

The play turned out wonderfully, although I feel guilty for forgetting to say an important line during the second performance. But the entire cast were so exhausted that I have a feeling I can be forgiven.

Last night I finished reading Cecilia Galante's The Patron Saint of Butterflies. It is a very strange book. There was something that kept me at a distance from the entire story -- the characters, the setting, everything -- but at the same time, I was compelled the entire time I was reading it. It is just an extremely strange but fascinating novel.

And this morning I completed Huge by Sasha Paley. This one was a lot of fun; it doesn't have much moral to it, and is rather flighty, but I enjoyed it so much that I kind of wish I could begin once again and read it all the way through without remembering even a single chapter. You know how some books are ....

The Patron Saint of Butterflies and Huge are two extremely different novels, and I liked them both in very different ways.

Today I entered the library hoping to find Julie Halpern's Get Well Soon and take it home, since I read almost half of it in the library already, but someone had checked it out! I knew I shouldn't have left it on display with the New YA Books, for all the hungry teenage readers to see ....

~Emily

With a Yo Hi Ho Hi Ho

I am the Queen in my town's production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. My throat hurts from the Evil Laugh and all the screaming but I am definitely having a lot of fun. The directors insist that I "conserve" and "rest" my voice, as they claim to have chosen me for the role mainly for my speaking voice.



I love being told that people enjoy my speaking voice. I love nice speaking voices and to have one, I've often thought, would be such a great gift. I really feel so wonderful when I hear that people enjoy listening to my own voice.



(Amongst my very favorite speaking voices is that of Mr. Neil Gaiman, whose audiobooks are always worth listening to.)



I have never seen the entire Disney version of Snow White, having believed, up until the age of perhaps ten or eleven, that it was one of the scariest kids' movies out there. The queen absolutely terrified both me and my brother Benjamin, and we were living under the impression that all queens were evil.

I can't emphasize enough how wonderful it feels to be sitting in the library after a day of rehearsing.

The performance is on Saturday ... I am looking forward to it and just about have every solitary line memorized.

I am off to do nice, relaxing things now, like reading Philip Pullman's The Shadow in the North and customer reviews on Amazon.

~Emily

The Life of One Home-Schooled Teenager

This blog might be a good place to answer at least a few of the many questions I get about being home-schooled. What, it seems many people wish to know, is it like to be home-schooled?



Good. Bad. And many things in between.



I can't, of course, speak for every home-schooler out there. I know one home-schooling family who travel and enjoy themselves at leisure and learn about random things and involve very little paper; I know another whose children write reports and solve math problems throughout the entire week, including Saturday and Sunday. So I speak from my own experiences as a person who was in school for a while, and then was taught at home.



Upon hearing I'm home-schooled, many people ask questions. Some people are mildly curious about how much I enjoy it, and then let the subject drop; and others practically grab me by the arm and sit down to interview me about it.



I'll try to answer some of the questions I am most frequently asked.



Why are you home-schooled?



In February of fourth grade, my mother took me out of my elementary school, which, like most of the schools in my town at that time, was in certain turmoil. As a nine-year-old, I didn't observe nearly as much as she did, but I did know, from listening to reports on television, that many of the schools were overcrowded; and I deduced, from the mere fact that it was on the news, that my having to pick up the cafeteria floor by hand along with a handful of other students before going out to play as punishment for the high noise level during lunchtime, was not right.



One of my brothers, Benjamin, was in second grade at the time, and Jack was in kindergarten. William, who is now almost seven, has never been in school.



Home-schooling my mother felt she should at least try.



Is it hard to make friends?



Have you ever thought about how many ways there are to make friends? Camps, clubs, sports, events. Activity in the religious community. Talking to people on the beach or at the grocery store. No matter where you are in the schooling system, the amount of yourself that goes into society is your choice.



Many home-schoolers like the get-together sort of events that are sponsored by home-schooling associations (like Rhode Island's RIGHT and SOS) or home-schooling parents. These allow home-schooled kids and parents to meet somewhere and make friends with one another, or to catch up with old friends.



Don't forget that there are children and teens who are in school five days a week and find it difficult to make friends due to shyness.



Do you have a set curriculum?



My mother might be in the Top One Hundred Most Organized People on the Planet (no, there isn't really any such thing). It's not that she's a neat freak but that she really knows what she's doing when she puts things together for school work. So yes -- my brothers and I have schedules referring to what should be completed that week; mine tends to be organized by subject: which pages ought to be done in my math, language arts, and science books; what pages I should read in World History, etc.

Some people want to know whether I have assigned, or required, reading. No, not usually. I do so much reading on my own.

Don't you get sick of being around your family all the time?


Yes. The trick is to focus on whatever work needs to be done; and no, I am not very good at it. In fact, I have an astonishingly low tolerance for fingers drumming on the tabletop or feet kicking a chair leg.

Sometimes I take my work to the library (which can also be distracting since I know pretty much every single librarian, and we end up chatting).

Do you have homework?

No -- if we don't finish all of our work, we'll have to do it later. Occasionally we work well into the evening. Everything has to be completed eventually.

Again, people home-school for different reasons and in different ways. I know I must have missed some crucial topics on here, and if you have any questions about home-schooling, please ask in the comments -- I will happily respond!

~Emily

Bad Memories

I finished reading Padma Venkatraman's Climbing the Stairs -- it was magnificent. I think it's an important book. And last night I completed The Life History of a Star by Kelly Easton. Also wonderful; I think both books and their protagonists will stay with me for a long time.

The twentieth marked the three-year anniversary of my first trip to camp. It was a camp for children with juvenile diabetes. Complete overkill on any treatment, whether you were hyperglycemic (sugar too high) or hypoglycemic (sugar too low). These three days were filled with kickball under the raging sun, watching chubby spiders dance mere inches over your head in the cabins, beetles swimming in the toilet bowls, plastic mattresses stained with something that looked like rejected stomach contents, and frozen graham cracker-chocolate pudding-marashmallow sandwiches. To top it off, the girls in my cabin hated me.





"You know everybody talks about you behind your back?" a girl two years younger than I was asked me.





"No," I said. "Why?"





"Well ... when you talk, it makes the rest of us sound kinda retahded," she admitted.





(The Rhode Island accent, for those who have never heard it, sounds rather like a thinner, less refined version of the Boston accent.)





"Oh," I said. "Because I use big words?"





"Yeah," she replied.





"Ah."





"I thought you were gonna cry," said the other girl, looking disappointed.





I have to admit that I was the Hermione Granger of the cabin -- insecure enough to flaunt a broad vocabulary and refined grammatical skills. (But I can't possibly be the only one who couldn't bear to listen to, "She don' wanna be a junia counsela" and "I ain't, you ain't, he/she/it ain't". Can I?) Anyway, I am never going back to camp. Ever. This experience turned me off for life.





The only good part of camp was listening to the storyteller. I love storytellers. (Although this was around the campfire, and all but yours truly, who had a mouthful of steel, were enjoying chubby white marshmallows.)

~Emily

Rescuing Seneca Crane

According to Ms. Susan Runholt's Mystery Blog (http://susanrunholt.com/blog), the title of the second novel in her Kari and Lucas series will be Rescuing Seneca Crane. I am marvelously excited to read it. Read the first book in the series, The Mystery of the Third Lucretia, and you'll definitely have something to look forward to. I find it pretty hard to find a really wonderful book series, the kind that makes you want to get to the library as fast as possible so that you can pick up the next one; the kind with characters that will bring you feelings you just don't get every day; the kind of characters you care about so much that when something important happens to them -- like if they have a mental breakdown or a baby or something -- you'll have them in your mind and in your heart for several days.

(Something tells me Kari and Lucas won't get pregnant any time soon, though. It was merely an example.)

~Emily

In Rememberance of Zachary Taylor, 1784-1850

Today we mourn the twelfth president of the United States of America, General Zachary Taylor.

Well, we don't really mourn him; we remember him. He was not the most kindred spirit. In fact, I feel inclined to confess that we includes primarily me and my brother Benjamin. We remember Zachary Taylor because he is a distant cousin of ours. We also remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the anniversary of his death but we actually mourn him. (He also is our cousin, via one of the Mayflower families.)

Well, keep General Taylor in your thoughts. He died of poisonous cherries and iced milk. I wonder what iced milk tastes like?

(The truth is that I actually hate milk on its own and I doubt that this iced milk would appeal to me.)

~Emily

Kind of Tying Things Up After a Long Break

Well, that was a long break from blogging. I don't really have any excuse except that I've been tired, because my biological clock nudges me into staying up past one in the morning and still getting up on time to greet the day. It makes no sense. (Does anything make sense when you're fifteen?)

Our Independence Day was quiet. I take odd pleasure in listening to other people celebrate, though, and found myself engrossed in the raucousness coming from next door.

I am currently reading Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman. I'll have more to say when I'm further in but it is certainly very wonderful.

I am also absored in The Handy Religion Answer Book by John Renard and Inside Out by Nadia Shivack.

I hope all my readers had a happy Fourth of July and that no one is suffering from too much heat (it's hot here in RI).

~Emily