GRADUATION BALL!!

That is right, everyone!

Time has arrived.

Curiosity won't kill the cat.

It is now.

You can all finally read about this very, very special, once-in-a-lifetime event, which I have mentioned so many times before, yet never truly discussed. You can finally read about my graduation ball, this impatiently awaited celebration, which I had been dreaming about every second night, which didn't go unmentioned for a single day, which ultimately did live up to my expectations and become an experience that will be etched into my memory until the moment of my death. Or at least that's the plan.

So, now that I've got that painful introduction off my chest, I shall first recount you all a little background information, so that you guys actually know what I am blabbering about. First things first: graduation ball is not the same as a prom, or even a Leaver's Ball, or a formal. As a matter of fact, it is not even called graduation ball in Hungarian (we just called it that at my former school, BIS), but "Szalagavató", which literally translates to "inauguration of ribbons". Why ribbons? In Hungary, it's a tradition for seniors to receive a ribbon, with the school's name and the year of graduation on it, which they then wear as a badge for the rest of the year. To help you visualize it, here is mine:

(taken with phone, don't lecture me on the overexposure)

Now, the ribbon pinning is meant to be the most important part of the ceremony, but at some point in history, an actual ball part - you know, with dancing et al - was added, and ever since, whenever high school students or their parents or anybody else thinks about grad ball, they think about the waltz. The waltz, which girls dance in wedding dresses, and guys dance dressed as penguins, to make it fair to everyone. Yep. You think that's all, though? Think again, as once again at a certain point in history, somebody decided that a single dance performance was not enough, so individual class dances are now performed as well.

Yep. That's right. It's kind of a huge deal. And I haven't even mentioned the after-party yet.

So how did all this mayhem materialize when it came to MY graduation ball? Well, my friends, the time has come for you to find out. Now, you shall see a timeline of events:

8:00 AM: Pulling my carry-on luggage behind me and holding a large, purple sack containing my beautiful dress, I hop into my grandpa's car and drive out of town, onto the motorway, leaving my wondrous capital city behind in order to find the very special sports arena with the cheap rent that is to be my home for the day. 

8:30 AM: I turn up. I lock the car and head inside, but only after dropping the contents of my bag in the parking lot and having to climb under a car to retrieve my phone charger. Why did I even bring a phone charger? Anyway, nothing unexpected has happened yet.

9:10 AM: This changing room is tiny. It's also really, really hot. I have a feeling that the school might have accidentally rented a sauna for us to change in.

9:30 AM: Dress rehearsal commences. My tutor and substitute tutor have baked us cake, and instead of pinning our ribbons, they hand us brownies! They are the sweetest, and I want to hug them. The teachers, not the food.

10:00 AM: Rehearsal of my speech. Everything's good, I am convinced that I will ace this. Little do I know what is waiting for me...

 ~~fast forward (a.k.a. I don't have a vague idea about what happened in these next couple of hours)~~

13:00 PM: Waltz rehearsal, stylishly late. These dancing shoes they gave me are murdering my feet. It's a slow and painful death. Also, all the girls are wearing their underskirts, and we look ridiculous. I am no way going to dance in these shoes. The skirt will hide my feet. How does that Patti Smith song go? "I'm dancing barefoot..."

1:30 PM: Let's take five! Let's take five! Now!

2:00 PM: Make-up session. I spent about $50 on this foundation, and I bought a separate brush for it. It better be good.

2:05 PM: Two possibilities: A) Estée Lauder foundation is crap and I wasted all my money. B) Estée Lauder foundation is good, only I don't know how to use it.

2:50 PM: Make-up done. Not even all the tears and sweat can ruin my look. Only my false eyelashes are falling off, but I've kindly asked the make-up artist lady to fix it for me. I should probably offer to pay for it, but I have no cash left thanks to...

3:00 PM: The hairdresser! She pulled half of my hair out the last time, but she is actually doing a decent job now. My hair looks like that of a normal person. I mean...kind of. Yeah, only kind of.

4:30 PM: I put the uniform on, but my head doesn't fit through and my hairpin gets caught in a thread and disaster follows...

5:00 PM: I phone my mom impatiently, and scream at her. They'll be late and all the good seats will be taken. And then they won't be able to take good pictures of me, which I then won't be able to upload to Facebook hang on my wall.

5:30 PM: People are arriving. People are weird. I'm starting to worry that someone else will have black lace on her dress as well. Because these are the things I worry about. Not the fact that I have to submit a university application the following day. That's right.

6:00 PM: People have arrived! Everyone is here! Yay! Yaaay! LET THE SHOW BEGIN!

6:15 PM: We emerge  on the basketball court on stage, triumphantly snake around for a minute, then take a seat. You guys, it's happening! It's real!

Tryin' so hard not to fall over.

6:40: PM It's time for our pinning! I think I'm about to get emotional...I think I'm about to start sobbing. I don't have any tissues with me. My name is called. My portrait appears on the screen. I take a deep breath, and step forward.

(I'm the one on the left if you couldn't tell...those three words are my name)

The moment the needle penetrates my collar...

6:50 PM: Time has come for my speech! It's OK. I'm not even worried. I've rehearsed it several times, and it went well. Who are we kidding, I even know it by heart! I begin speaking...I'm through three sentences, but then...am I sure this is coming next? I pause. I look at my transcript. I frantically search for the part where- I lost my line I- I- sh*t, I should probably speak on. Sh*t, I just messed up my speech. Dammit. It's all gone wrong. Breathe. Breathe. Continue.

Appearance: calm. Reality: panic & hysteria.

6:52 PM: I finish my speech and traumatized, I walk back to my class. They did not just stick their tongues out at me, did they? Horrible, horrible people. I love them.

7:00 PM: We stride out and prepare for our class dance, and this is when I lose track of time... In between changing and actually getting to perform, this guy from our class and I do a chicken dance along the corridor, at a certain point and for no apparent reason I declare my love for him, I get yelled at for deciding not to go to the after-party, and I realize that said guy is about to put me on his shoulders during the dance. Oh well...

Between 7 and 8 PM: Our class dance!!! The concept is convicts and lawyers, and no, it wasn't my idea. I wanted flappers and cops, and Charleston music. We are wearing stupid fake plastic glasses and I can't see a thing. The guys have stupid fake nylon tattoos and they don't look too comfortable either. I also don't think the shirts we're wearing are made for dancing. An arm raise is enough for this performance to turn inappropriate. Here's what's happening:

Yep. In retrospect it looks pretty cool, I must admit. After performing our dance two times, so that it's visible for both sides of the audience, we sit down and enjoy this little video about our five years at this school. I notice that I appear significantly few times in it. Oh well...

This is my only noticeable appearance in the video, and I look as if I had just come back from a jog. I know it's a USC hoodie, but still. 

About 8:30 PM: OK, so unbeknownst to us, our marvelous teachers have also prepared a dance performance. This night is getting better. The two teachers who actually have doctorates enter wearing lab coats and stethoscopes, and the rest of the staff shuffle in, all wrapped in towels and demonstrating convincing acting skills by playing ailing old people. Geronto-dance! Rad! But wait what...why are they undressing? I might not want to see this after all. What the-

Oh right. Cue ABBA music. Dressed for the seventies. I'm lovin' it. I told you I'm lovin' it.

9:00 PM: Time has come for what we've all been waiting for. The waltz. I'm suffocating. There is no air in the changing room, and my corset is compressing my ribs. At the dress salon, they told me I'm supposed to feel "delicate" in this. I don't, I feel more like a whale. The diameter of the dress is inversely proportional to the diameter of my corset. As one gets smaller, the other gets larger, and I must say that my corset is minuscule.

9:10 PM: I will let the pictures speak. 

(Also, if you're new to my blog, I booked that dress in April. Nobody books dresses in April. I loved that dress. Nobody had a dress like that. I have eternal love for that dress. That. Dress.)

9:30 PM + Meet and greet. I waltz with all of my family members and take pictures with all my friends and try to not step on my dress. That dress...It's gotten kind of busy and thousands of people are crammed on this poor basketball court and I can't find anybody I'm looking for and I keep bumping into people who demand photos with me, but that's OK. It's OK, because I'm crying a little bit, and I have an urge to hug everyone I see. I love these people, I do. And in a couple of months, we'll graduate and I'll probably never see them again. We just danced our goodbye waltz. We looked so beautiful tonight. We probably are, too. All the time. Only, we don't notice it. We're too young to notice...

A while ago, I wrote a song for graduation ball. It's really, really trite, and really, really unlike me, but for an occasion such as this one, that doesn't really matter. It was such an elating experience, dancing there in those swishy, sparkling ball gowns, proudly standing there as they pinned my ribbon, dancing with all the people I've grown to adore. Anyway, I digress. I once wrote this incredibly cheesy song, and it goes something like this:

"This is our night,

Then we'll have to let it all go
We'll have to fight

And not just go with the flow

We'll start our flight

And we'll learn how to cope

'Cause we've survived

And we're unstoppable now..."

Yeah, that song is even worse than I remembered.

*Note: Most of these pictures were taken by my family members, but some were taken by the relatives of my friends. I've done my best to separate the photos based on their sources, but it's gotten a bit mixed up. I'd like to thank everybody who took the time to take pictures, and I'll always be grateful for all the effort put into taking them. 

September Is Sad + I Watched Boyhood

I was originally going to title this post more inventively. Think along the lines of 'September Is Originally the Seventh Month, So Let's Pretend It's July' or 'No Wonder September and Sadness Alliterate'.

However, I am currently midst a writer's block, it's 10 PM, and let's not once again forget that September is a sad, depressing month that sucks the creativity out of you like an overfunctioning vacuum cleaner.

Please do not be offended by my subsequent bluntness.

So, where do we start? Oh yes, the first day of school. Not much to say there, the incoming 9th graders had distressingly short skirts, but you know what they say? The younger you are, the shorter the skirts get. Or something like that. But who am I to judge?

Which leads me to my second point. Recently, I decided that I no longer want my closet to be made up of black pants and matching black tank tops, with occasional metallic spikes thrown in. That's why, on a whim, I decided to go shopping, which turned out perfectly, except now everybody's like:
"Where did you get those over-the-knee socks?"
"Wow, do you think floppy hats would look good on me to?"
"My gosh, I should wear skirts more often, too!"
"Did that tragus piercing hurt?" (Oh yeah, I got a tragus piercing over the summer, along with some others. After 8 years, my mom couldn't stop me)
So no, I don't follow fashion. Fashion follows me, apparently.

Anyway, what else? I've finished my CommonApp essay about five minutes ago. The struggle was real. I'm still not entirely convinced that it can be submitted. I mean, I absolutely love how it turned out, but it reads more like a contemplative short story than an essay on how great I am. Yeah, we'll see about that.

Oh, and then there's graduation ball. So, I've been waiting for this since I was 15. I've got a beautiful dress. I've carefully considered whom I'd like to invite. I created a Pinterest just to find hairstyle ideas. I watched 34 make-up tutorials and spent more than I'll admit on make-up. And it's all falling apart. Why?

• The music. We'll be dancing to this song, which just about sets the mood for a lap dance. Had I known we were to dance to this, I'd have ditched the ballgown and gone straight for the latex bikini. Honestly, I was a strong advocate for this and this song, but you can't convince the mob.
• The class dance. We're basically doing aerobics. And we'll have to dress as lawyers. Again, I had a great idea for a Charleston dance, but again the crowd wasn't impressed. I mean, they liked it but that's as far as it went. Now I have to kiss my flapper fantasies goodbye.
• Thirdly, nobody seems to consider the fact that parents and grandparents and teachers are invited to this thing, who are now going to watch their beloved grandchildren and kids and students shake their asses to screeching music, in miniskirts. 'Cause that what we'll be dancing in. Oh well...

On another note, I watched Boyhood. I don't know why this is news, but I did, and I was pretty impressed. It was just what I had expected really, it wasn't better nor worse. I'm not sure if it really deserves all the hype around it, but it's a solid film. I'll probably review it on my tumblr, but for now I'll just say that what I liked the most is how it isn't like a film at all. If you've read Syd Field's screenwriting book, you'll know how a film has 3 acts, and two plot points. Well this didn't, and that's what made it so realistic - there was no obvious plot, it's just bits and pieces of somebody's life. It's also set in real time, with music (and an Obama campaign, which might have been my favorite scene!) indicating what year it is, and that's simply genius! And-

Oh, yeah, did I mention how once I start analyzing a film, I can't stop? If not, I'm mentioning it now. Intervention has been called, so I won't continue. Find the review on my tumblr. Though it might take a while till I post it...my posting has been so sporadic there recently that it's become the haunted house of the Internet...

 I also went to the Bristol open day, but I've just noticed that I haven't posted about my time in Paris yet either, and that was a year ago. So yes, you might read about me visiting Skins filming locations next September.

Quick photo before watching Boyhood. And no, I haven't kept to wearing black. My tights were turquoise, for the record.

(Pointless Post on my) Cinderella Fantasies

Remember how much I was looking forward to attending university next year? Well, that isn't going happen. Sob. Things didn't work out the way I planned, and it looks like I'm stuck here for another year. Which isn't the point of my post, however, since staying here for another year means that one of my lifelong (well, more like 3-year long, but we need the dramatic effect) dreams can come true. I can have a graduation ball!

As someone who has been looking at graduation dresses since the age of 15, this is outright amazing. I mean, even the final piece of my AS Art coursework centered around a girl in a graduation dress! Although, she was lying dead in a bathtub, and was supposed to symbolize the loss of artistic value in the world, but that's beside the point. Because we have to look at where the idea was coming from.

Anyway, today I went to select my waltz dress! Which is basically a wedding dress. I've been looking at these beauties for the past three years, I've selected six, narrowed my list down to three, decided those weren't good enough, quickly made a new list last Friday, narrowed my choices down to two, and off I was to try them on!

And - oh my Gosh! Oh. My. Gosh. Oh. My. G- you get the point. Traditionally white, one of the dresses I selected had black lace on it, and it was beautiful.  I was surrounded by 400 dresses, but that one was the only one I wanted to see. Total coup de foudre! It was beautiful, and I was constantly repeating how beautiful it was to everyone I met, like the American photographer in 'Holy Motors'. Except that the subject here was not a sewer-dwelling leprechaun who eats flowers and fingers alike. Yeah, so I tried it on, it turned out that it was a bit short but I remained intransigent about my choice, so they brought in about ten people who attempted to figure out what to do, when I quietly suggested that I could change my shoes. Quelle surprise, it worked.

It worked, and now it's booked for November 29th and this was a completely pointless post, unless you know me really well and know how much I am absolutely obsessed with the idea graduation balls, and how I'd even written a song and rented a dress for a grad ball I was ultimately banned from. But that's a different story...

And for those who'd like to see my Cinderella dress:

Hah, got you! If you actually believed that, I'll come and haunt you in your dreams, bearing a giant fish as my weapon. Though that WAS my actual Cinderella dress back in 2007 (PLUS: cameo by half a pair of hiking boots belonging to my former physics teacher). My 2014 version is, however:

P.S. For those people interested in pictures of me as an MC at last year's grad ball, I'm sorry but I only found ones on which I'm A) missing a head, or B) the size of an antling (a baby ant, it's a thing, you guys!).

P.S. II If you're wondering about why I use words such as intransigent, SAT words are still making my life miserable.

Graduation Ball

Last night, our school held the annual graduation ball, during which the graduating classes each perform separate dances, as well as one together - the grad ball waltz (where girls wear dresses that look like wedding dresses, according to - basically everyone). Before that, though, every senior student receives a ribbon with the schools name and the years they attended the school printed on it. This year, these ribbons were covered in cellophane, apparently on purpose.

Unfortunately (quite a bit unfortunate) my class isn't graduating yet, since we're a five-year class, so I didn't get to dance. However, I did get to MC! That's right. I was one of the MCs. Yay! Wow! Although here we call them the conférerncier and the conférencière. Except they don't know how to spell that. So they simply write "konferanszié". I know.

See, being the Master of Ceremonies was quite important for me. I didn't get to graduate with my former class last year and I won't get to graduate with my current class next year. Although I wanted to, I didn't get to dance this year. When our tutor told us that an MC was needed, my hand shot up like a space rocket, and from then on, it was all about being the one who gets selected, which included going to various German competitions to win over our German-teaching vice-principal. Yeah, I mean a fair share of nepotism was also included, but we don't really talk about that...this is show biz after all, innit?

So when I was there, I got to know the other MC (who, in the words of the drama teacher, looks good at least) and was told to work on the "screenplay". Now, that was hell. I got to write our lines, but it made me question my choice of career several times (I want to be a screenwriter, but you already knew that). Especially since they kept changing everything ten times a day, and I think the final version was called GRAD BALL 23.0. But hey, at least I didn't have to say those painfully cringeworthy pre-written lines out loud.

Anyway, after some disastrous rehearsals, including a 4 hour one yesterday morning, we were there. At 6 PM. In front of the microphone. Talking in front of hundreds of people. And I was reminded of why I used to want to be an actor. And I loved it. (Until I almost cried during the waltz. But I didn't so that doesn't count. Oh, and until my bracelet got stuck in my lace dress and tore it. That wasn't one of the best moments of my life.)

I don't have any photos yet, but I will and then I'll update! Promise!