This Anachronistic Post from July

And there's also this anachronistic, never-before-seen post from July that I never finished and forgot to publish...

My Summer, in a Nutshell
by Layra A Sparks

My whirlwind of a summer started with the visa application process, with its fashionably late I-20 forms, unmentioned scholarships, unresponsive international student counselors, slow deliveries, worldwide technical glitches in the US visa system, rescheduled appointments, unconventional photo dimensions, automated phone systems, dads not keen on giving me bank statements, people attempting to enter the US embassy with pocket knives, and with crazy photo lab ladies telling me that they won't accept my visa photo because my ears aren't visible. That's right, my visa application was a succession of mini nervous breakdowns on my part, which were only tamed by the fact that my visa interviewer happened to be a USC alumna, and the interview she conducted lasted about two whole minutes and went as follows: "Which scholarship did you get? Are you going to do Thematic Option? Yes, I am a Trojan, fight on! I did TO, I loved it. You should get a pass for the football games. Which instrument are you going to play in the marching band? Silks, that's cool, well your visa has been approved." But before you start thinking everything went well after that, my visa was subsequently delivered to the crazy elderly lady next door. Interesting.

I didn't really have time to think about all this, though, because after getting my visa came the time for all the fun things that come with moving abroad to college - doctors appointments, blood tests, dental surgery, opening bank accounts abroad, getting health insurance sorted, yelling at employees of the National Tax and Customs Administration, buying plane tickets and wondering why one piece of extra check-in luggage costs $100 and why two pieces cost $400, saying goodbye to friends, and in midst of all this, getting a haircut that makes me look like a housewife from the 1950s.

And if that's not enough, my high school made national headlines when the government replaced its unanimously supported headteacher with a former teacher who left her graduating class, plagiarized her application and was appointed through nepotism. Now, as a person with a very strong sense of justice, I could not just let this happen without voicing my opinion, and no, posting a couple of semi-aggressive comments under articles doesn't count so when one of the teachers asked me to speak at a demonstration organized by some parents, I had to say yes. I had to do this for my school. I had to edit that badly written speech and make it into something more strongly worded, and I had to recite it in front of the media. That is right, you guys, I was on f!@#ing national television, with my name in published (or whatever you call that) and everything. Unfortunately, though, it was all pointless and the evil bitch is still reigning over my high school. Yeah, there's that. But we never give up.

Moving on. Just like last year, I took the train down to Sopron for the annual Volt festival, where - instead of the Arctic Monkeys - we saw Bastille this year. Well...it's not that it was bad, but it didn't quite live up to my expectations, and what probably hurt the most was that all the pictures I took turned out to be shit. I was so upset about the photos - and yes, taking photos is a huge part of concerts for me and please don't try to lecture me on how it takes away the joy of jumping up and down in a moshpit - that I couldn't enjoy the concert as much as I wanted to. I was also stuck in the third row, which meant that I was trampled on and pushed around half the time, but turned out to be extremely convenient when I got to HIGH FIVE DAN SMITH!!!!

Yep. I'm trying to finish this post in December and there's nothing else I can think of, so I'll just leave it here. Bye. 

PS. Sorry about the lack of photos, they're all on my other laptop. But check my twitter (@lillaspanyi), I have some there.

My First Semester at USC: Video Edition

Guys, it is with overwhelming exhilaration that I inform you: I am still alive.

I am still alive, I still go to USC, I'm still a Cinema major, I'm still in the marching band (oh wait! You guys didn't know that??? More on that later...), I'm still 5'7'', I still have curly hair (and it's still not purple), and I still love my little blog that nobody in the world reads.

What has changed, then, you might ask? Why haven't I posted anything since June? Well, let's see. I go to USC, I'm a Cinema major, I'm in the marching band, and nobody in the world reads my little blog. Also, I'm 5'7''. I'm sure that affects my writing somehow.

Yet if we look at the context of my previous posts, these are all just excuses. And yet while I admit that my first semester at USC had been an extremely wild ride, that's just another reason for me to write about it. Or, in this case, talk.

That is right guys. So much has happened over the past five months that there is no way I could write individual posts on everything, like, ain't nobody got time for that. So instead I decided to film a couple of videos in which I talk about everything that has happened, and try to be a bit more consistent my second semester.

And for now, I'll just leave those here. Oh, and just a few notes of warning: a lot of these were filmed over different time periods, so that is a thing. Also, editing is super rough and the videos are supposed to be HD but for some reason the resolution really sucks? I don't know why...iMovie is weird and I'm too broke for anything else right now. And also, I'm super-boring in person, sorry about that.

ALSO: You might want to watch them on YouTube, because Blogger sucks and it doesn't like videos.

Love you all.

Video #1 - Traveling from Budapest to USC. And some awful color correction.

Video #2 - Band Camp and My First Month at USC, I believe. And me looking awful.

Video #3 - MARCHING BAAAND.

Video #4 - School Life at USC and Such.

Video #5 - Life in LA and Me Failing to Focus the Camera

That is all for now.

This Blog Has NOT Been Abandoned

USC Class of 2019

I've been rewriting this post for the past three months. It just never sounds quite right, it's either too lengthy or too choppy, or I feel like I'm bragging or I go off on tangents, so for this reason, I've decided to keep it short and sweet.

I am more than proud to announce that I am officially a member of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts Class of 2019!

I am in the 17.5% of students accepted to USC and in the 4% of students accepted to SCA. I am one of the 75 people accepted to major in Critical Studies. I am also one of the approx. 100 Trustee Scholars this year, meaning that I get a full-tuition scholarship for my four years at USC. And, additionally, I am also one of the 200 students who has been accepted to the Thematic Option Honors Program.

It has happened, and even though all of this might seem surreal, or even impossible, it has, and I'm so grateful for every single person who has helped me get here!

It's all about getting ready now (be on the lookout for posts on that), but I'm doing good. My visa has been approved, my plane ticket has been purchased, and although I still don't know how I'll be shipping 15 pairs of shoes, my rollerblades, and a memory foam pillow, I'm all set. More or less anyway.

So, introducing my new way to bid farewell to you all,

Fight On, Trojans!

Also, if you guys would like to know more about USC, the application process, and why I ended up choosing it, leave a comment below!

--

PS. Just FYI, my other options in the US were Kenyon College and the University of Pennsylvania, and although it was a tough choice with Penn, I decided that USC would be the best place to study film.

Late June Update: Birthday Fail, Finishing High School and Weekend Getaway

It has come to my attention that there are people who actually read this blog. Real people, living and breathing human beings. People who actually care to read about my boring life or maybe have nothing better to do, but it doesn't matter either way. Because when there are people willing to read, I'll have to give them (or, well, YOU) something to read, meaning that I have a good excuse to write a new post! So here goes...

Where did we leave it? Oh yes...

1) My Birthday

My mom and I decided to start the day with English breakfast - yes, I miss living in England that much - at my favorite restaurant. As it usually is, however, they'd run out of sausages and the rest of my sausageless breakfast was ice cold and my toast had fossilized in the making, so it didn't quite live up to my expectations, and you guys, I'd been dreaming of that breakfast for years. And although it might not seem that bad as of now, this was just a foreshadowing of the impending disaster.

Me and da food.

I don't know when taking photos of food became my thing, but at least it looked good.

After subtly wrapping my toast into a napkin, we took off to see the Sziget Eye, a rip-off of the London Eye in central Budapest and a best alternative I found to a theme park, since the theme park in this city has been notoriously closed down, with all its rides taken to the wasteland and melted into tramway tracks (I'm not even kidding, Budapest looks like a bombing site because of all the tramway extensions). Though based on my experience the last time I was there, it was all for the best. We bought two overpriced tickets, politely smiled when they mistook us for tourists, and living up to that, took photos we will never look at again, of the city we see every single day. After that, we had overpriced ice cream, my mom went home, I met up with one of my friends, and we went to Starbucks to study for our finals.

Moi.

I guess since I won't look at the photos, you guys could. Sorry for the bad colors, taken through glass and I couldn't bother with editing...

Boring Ferris wheel.

And thank goodness we did, because while we were peacefully sipping our vanilla frappuccinos on the leather couches, a F%*!@&G HUGE hailstorm had hit Budapest. And it hit it hard. There was pebble-sized ice everywhere. The streets were flooded. The wind was tearing out umbrellas from people's hands. Everyone was frantically searching for shelter. It was the apocalypse. After waiting half an hour in the tram stop for the storm to die down, however, I decided that I was either walking home or freezing on the spot, so I took off my platform sandals and walked (swam?) home barefoot. Yay.  (and this is where I plug in a Skins reference) 

And that's it for my 19th birthday.

2. Finishing High School

Part 1 - Finals: Ugh. If you didn't know already, in Hungary, school leaving exams have two parts: one written and one speaking test. Our class had three days to do the speaking tests, with thirteen people - including me - on the first one. And since with a very faulty reasoning they declared that the best come last, I was the very last person taking the exam that day, meaning that I was in school from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., frantically trying to revise everything I'd learnt in five years and thus probably annoying the poor parents who volunteered to make sandwiches. Soz mom.

When it was finally my turn, I had to draw two envelopes, and both of them ended up being the number 14, which is my lucky number so I thought I was all set. And, I mean, partly I was right, but although I did do well in Literature and History - my analysis of post-modernism in contemporary Hungarian short stories and my explanation of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was spot-on - I completely bombed Grammar and Linguistics, as I could not say a word on the types of compound words. My teacher kept saying that "I must be tired" because "I knew it on the test". Just for the record, we were never tested on compound words.

But I guess her confusion with what she had and hadn't taught only worked for my advantage here, as I got almost maximum points. As I found out, the lowest percentage I got for a leaving exams is 90% (History writing was a b*tch), which is a crazy good percentage, especially since our marvelous government (notice the irony) made leaving tests extremely difficult this year, so that no one will get into university and everyone will have to do horrible menial tasks allowing them no time to think and thus creating a mob so easily influenced by demagogic promises, political rant over.

Fraaaahndz after we got our certificates (high school diplomas?) and an unsolicited copy of the Constitution of Hungary.

More fraaaahndz.

Me leaving the school building for the last time ever, holding my 6" 

shoes that I couldn't walk home in.

Part 2 - Senior banquet: Basically a huge and fancy dinner, which marked the last time we spent together as a high school class. That's it really, there's not much to say about it. It was held at an all-you-can-eat cafeteria. Some people were overdressed (ahem, me), some people were underdressed (ahem, Zsolt and his Bermuda shorts). I wish it had been more memorable, but it just wasn't. It was the last couple of hours we ever spent together as a class - and of course I cried, but as we all know I always cry - and it was quite underwhelming and anticlimactic.

I had no good photos of the banquet, so here's a rare selfie you guys never wanted to see. And yes, that's my bra strap.

3. Weekend Getaway

My dad decided that for the last time before I leave to the US of A, we should spend some quality time together with his family, and determined that the best place for that would be Győr, a city northwest Hungary. It was meant to be two days of water parks and hot tubs, but yet again - as it always is - that didn't happen. Instead, we spent our time walking around town, eating bad pizza wrapped in blankets, playing squash without knowing the rules or how to even use the equipment, and taking photos of potato bug statues in the middle of nowhere. And midst all that, even a random dog started following us around. FUNFUNFUN

This is how you abuse the "Exaggerated colors" filter on your camera.

That moon there is why I should have taken my tripod with me.

Potato bug statue. #sointeresting

My dad, verbatim: "Lilla already wasted an entire roll of film on the storks."

A church and power lines and the "Exaggerated colors' filter.

18 Things...

On the evening of June 8, 2009, the day before my 13th birthday, I started a little tradition. I wrote a little overview on my past year, and entwined it with my outlook on the next year. Then, to finish it off, I wrote a list of 12 things I did at 12. This was a pretty simplistic list, including buying my first pair of heels and falling in love for the first time, but it since it reflected my 12-year-old personality so much, and - let's admit it - was a pretty good idea, I decided to continue with it.

Although I consider the little reflection of my 18th year a little too personal to post, here is the list of things I did at 18:

18 things I did at 18:

1. Go to a music festival (two actually!)
2. See the Arctic Monkeys live
3. Get a drastic haircut (5" is pretty drastic for me...)
4. Get the ear piercings I'd wanted for the past 8 years (I was a hard-core 10-year-old) and get a disapproving stare from my mom every second day
5. Take the night bus for the first time (lol)
6. Have a graduation ball (a.k.a. prom)
7. Write and give several speeches (prom/graduation)
8. Have my senior portrait taken
9. Come up with an idea for our class tableau!
10. Create a YouTube channel (no videos yet, hey, gotta leave something for next year)
11. Write my best film analysis yet, on Holy Motors
12. Apply to university
13. Get accepted to my two top choice universities! (And six others)
14. AND get a full-tuition scholarship to USC!!
15. Travel to Los Angeles
16. Take final exams
17. Graduate high school (AND get the 'Student of the Year' award!)
18. So, erm, it's not what you think, I promise, but I'd like to keep the last one private ;)

There you have it! I know this is a forced, silly and repetitive list, but it's not that easy to think of 18 things that were unique to one year of my life. I think there are some pretty big things on there, which I'm incredibly proud of, and the rest, well, life is about the little things they say...

Stay tuned for another year of craziness, everyone!

I love you all!

Study Leave and Other Lies

Have any of you seen that episode of Skins in which the college director abolishes study leave and forces all Year 13 students to revise "on the premises, 9 'till 4:30, no excuses, no exceptions". Well, that might be the kind of intervention I need now.

I'm not even kidding. The one month between the written and speaking exams - a.k.a. study leave - is intended to, you know, give us time to study, but for the exception of the first day - which I spent writing things to post on here - I have done absolutely nothing productive. Seriously, I've thought about everything I've done these past weeks, and this is all I could come up with:

1. I re-watched the entire first generation of Skins. Twice
2. I started watching the third generation of Skins, because why not give it a chance? But mostly because of Alex Arnold.
3. I obsessed over Alex Arnold. 
4. I went to an indie-music themed party, almost froze to death on the street as it started two hours late, and ended the night in a way that can be best described by Katy Perry's first hit single. 
5. I attempted to sort out the mess that USC created by failing to put my scholarship on my visa application form, but that issue is still very much ongoing. And it's causing me sleepless nights.
6. Tumblr.
7. This blog.

Yep. That's it really. I might have briefly gathered my thoughts on The Odyssey and the electoral system of Hungary, but it clearly hasn't been enough. My speaking exams start on the 16th, and I don't know a thing. And neither does anyone else in my class, apparently, because everyone else I've spoken to has been going to the beach, partying 24/7, feeding kittens and doing pretty much anything else to procrastinate. And that gets me wondering whether study leave is even worth it?

Because study leave is a lie. It gives you a false sense of comfort. It implies that you'll get to relax a little before the rest of your exams. It implies that you'll have plenty of time to study and catch up with what you failed to learn before. You put all your hopes in study leave, but then it lets you down by ending so quickly, and it is on your last night of your pseudo-freedom that you realize how little you've actually done...

And I'm not saying I don't study before exams, because I do. A lot. I pull all-nighters and drink five coffees a day and don't let myself get distracted, and guess what? It works. But then once I'm done, I enter a kind of state in which I am too tired to do anything and simply lie on my bed for days on end thinking about completely pointless things. And that's OK, because after an incredibly stressful period, it is alright to be really tired and exhausted. It's a normal post-exam state.

With exams coming in two waves, however, I'm an a post-exam state in a pseudo-post-exam period, as although I'm done with one half of the exams, I still have the second half left. And I should study, but I can't, because this is not what I'm used to. And I should return to the material that I've been cramming for weeks but what I've already forgotten, and learn it all again. And I wonder why this couldn't all be done in one go. Because then I wouldn't feel so guilty about procrastinating while writing posts such as this one right now...

So I Graduated!

There were so many great pictures of me, that I decided to choose the worst.

You guys...

on April 30, 2015, I actually GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL! I mean, technically, I still had all my finals left, but that's just a minor and insignificant detail, because what even depends on those? I mean, apart from our future...

Graduation invites

So graduation in Hungary is a little different from graduation everywhere else in the world, and by that, I don't just mean the absence of caps & gowns. Want to know how it all went down? Continue reading, guys!

Exhausted juniors get up at five in the morning to arrive at school before we do, and decorate the building with flowers they secretly chopped off their neighbors' well-kept lilac bushes or even potentially off their own very lilac bushes, as lilacs are the flowers traditionally used for graduation. This is not too much of a fun activity, believe me. Last year, we forgot to bring scissors and therefore were cutting flowers with a razor blade. By the end we were so exhausted, that we were just tackily sticking flower stems on the walls with Sellotape. Yep. This year, based on what I saw, something similar must have happened, but I didn't really care because the amazing scent of flowers and the general look of the school left me quite touched.

My class and our beautifully decorated classroom.

So many flowers. And you guys, those bows actually had our names on them!

Us seniors only had to arrive at half past nine, as we had one last class with our tutor in our actually beautifully decorated classroom. She adorably started crying midst her speech (!!), which also made me cry of course, so there went all my make-up. She also gave each of us a little goodbye present, we took a couple of group photos, and after that our parents arrived to give us our flowers. It was also then that we received our "tarisznya-s", which are little fabric bags with our year of graduation on it. Traditionally, tarisznya-s contain a biscuit, a small bag of salt, a coin ( a 2 Ft coin in our case, which is not even used anymore) and a card with the name of every graduating senior on it.

Erm...this is the card. I guess you can imagine what biscuits and salt look like. The 2 Ft coin? It looks like this.

My class, 13. C <3

Oh, and our top secret tableau - the one I needed my senior portrait for - was also displayed in our classroom. And if you didn't know already, it's based off "Lunch atop a Skyscraper", and it was my idea, because who else is obsessed with New York and old photography? And if you didn't know what tableaux (tableaus? It's French...) are for, well they're hung up in the halls once a class has graduated.

Here it is! Our tableau!
(Though in the end they decided to choose the B&W version, because certain people believe they look better on that one. Delusional.)

Aaaand...you can also see my disastrous senior portrait finally. Sorry about the reflections, I don't have a digital copy yet.

Once all the parents were herded out of the building kindly asked to leave, we started the part of graduation, from which the whole thing actually got its name (graduation in Hungarian is "ballagás", literally translated to "ambling"): strolling through the school. With our bouquets in our left hands, and our right hands on the shoulder of the person in front of us, we started walking down the halls. I guess we were also supposed to sing graduation songs, but a CD took care of that. As we made our way out into the schoolyard, we went into a couple of classrooms, the cafeteria (where we got free pizza sticks!!!) and the gym (where we had to walk down the balance beam).

Leaving our classroom

Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball...

The gym.

More walking.

And even more walking.

Finally leaving the school building.

After taking our seats in the schoolyard, the ceremony begun. Erm...I'll admit I didn't really pay attention, but there was some off-key singing done by the choir, someone read a poem, and about half of the graduating seniors got books for one reason or another, with me being one of them as I got the BEST AWARD OF ALL AWARDS. You guys, for the second time in a row, I got the Student of the Year award, which is, like, better than being valedictorian. It basically makes you the coolest person in the school, because it's a school-wide award (so I'm not just the best out of graduating seniors). I already got this award last year and I didn't know I could get it twice, but that just makes it even cooler. I mean...people didn't really care that much, the guy who got a book for playing guitar in the school band got louder applause (probably because I was screaming his name, though...) but I don't care. It also means that my good friend and greatest enemy Adam can only be the second in the competition. Ha! Because it was always the two of us competing against each other. But now it's over. I won! Ha!

Also NOTE: never take me 100% seriously guys, I'm not trying to show off, and if you knew me as well as I know my self, you'd also know that I really didn't deserve this award. And that Adam would have. (BTW, my prize was a certificate and book on art in the middle ages. Last year it was a book on art in Tuscany. I see a pattern.)

The flagpole, on which the graduating classes tie a ribbon. Ours was not too pretty. It was made in the cemetery, out of ribbon usually meant for wreaths. Just FYI.

Getting my award.

Showing off my superior intelligence

The other super cool thing that happened was that I gave a speech! Again! Except that unlike last time, I didn't mess it up! And people actually loved it! Even though I wrote it the night before! Yep. And even though I mentioned the fact that back in junior year, we tried to determine how strictly our German teacher would be grading us that day by what color shirt she was wearing! And our German teacher also happens to be our vice-principal! And she didn't even disapprove!

The only negative happening was that my balloon burst while cheering for my friend Erik, so I couldn't let it go...and I know that I saved some poor birds with that, but it still broke my heart a tiny bit because...because what if that's the universe trying to communicate something?? What is the world is telling me not to soar? Not to fly away to America? Not to inadvertently poison pigeons?

Let it gooooo, let it goooooooooo

Off they go! (except mine)

In all seriousness, though, my graduation from high school was a bittersweet, once-in-a-lifetime, heartbreaking but amazing day in my life, and I am so thankful for everyone who came & supported me and brought me flowers, and I'm even more thankful for my entire class and all my teachers for these awesome five years. I couldn't have been more wrong back in 2010, when I thought I would hate this place. I loved it, and I always will.

More pictures:

ME (and a concerned Petra behind me)

More me, because good hair day, that's why

Adam there behind me isn't too pleased

And even more me.

Me and my sister and my cousin who's also my sister.

Mommy & Daddy :)

Math class gang. We are badass.

There we sat in the sun.

Photo credit: Mom, Dad, Luca & Luca's mom. Thank you!