It's too long, ignore it - drama and weddings

I have been doing drama since October last year, with two lunchtimes per week - barely a double. Therefore, our practical devised piece left much to be desired but there reached a point where we just had to go ahead and do the damn thing. It took the whole day of rehearsal, therefore I haven't been to any lessons and have been thinking back and realising that none of us informed our subject teachers where the hell we were all day. Oops.

It started out on a suitably surreal note, as Becca and Yusra started to practise slapping each other and I went outside to practise my lines. I paced up and down outside the window of ML4, holding a blanket (the red one off my bed) and mumbling to myself, and Mme Mistry was inside the room looking out at me in frank bemusement. Every so often she'd look up, give me a what-the-fuck? glare, and return to teaching. It didn't help that she could overhear the slapping from the corridor outside.

In the morning, we were depressed about it, because it was too short and we were all slightly pissed off about having to do it at all. But no, we slowed down and lengthened it, and I was in a fairly good mood. Therefore, when Ella's group needed help, I leapt into the breach. Their play involved a murder inquiry (ours involved weddings, for some reason) and they needed a corpse. During the blackout and change in scene, Ella and I ran onstage, moved a table, I got on and tucked my legs underneath me, she threw over the sheet, the lights went up and the play went merrily along its way, only with me trying not to breathe. It was a truly bizarre perspective to view the play from, as I could see them all through the weave of the sheet, and could hear Ella behind me, sobbing (grieving mother, natch).

Our own play was less dramatic, but more inexplicable with more opportunity for things to go wrong, but we were the only group to actually know our lines and along with Caroline's and Libby's, we were one of the two groups picked to do our play in front of the moderator. There turned out to be two moderators, in fact. One to moderate Mr Dunne and the other to moderate the first moderator. All quite surreal, but the play did go off quite well and I'm now glad it's over.

I missed general day-to-day goings-on, though - cucharita told me that the LJ block is getting worse. The .cgi proxy we were using is now blocked as well, and weirdly, so is cucharita's journal and friends page (sexy_saba and I are also paid users and can still get onto our journals). I wasn't there for any of this, though - although I did get to see emerald_embers and write in her book.

More has happened, apart from just what happened today, and I may as well scribble on. My mashi, that is, maternal aunt, has been in touch. She is, as some of you folk may know, unmarried, and has been so for much too long, or so they say. The entire family have been after her to get married since the day I was born (so proving my mother had finally settled down with a family). Seeing as I'm sixteen now, it's been an uphill struggle. But she's now apparently engaged, getting married in the last week of June. As I'd never heard of the guy before now, I was understandably a little shocked.

But there's problems. I had plans for the summer, after my exams are over, that is - I was going to America for three weeks, a week in San Francisco, two weeks in Indianpolis, and I was going to do nothing, hang around, read and write, and enjoy myself. This plan was changed, some time ago. My mother marched in and changed it. She informed me she was coming along, she was shortening it to two weeks, and of course I wouldn't mind, I'd be delighted, wouldn't I? I couldn't very well say one of the reasons I was going was to get away from you and be able to breathe for three weeks, could I? I said, weakly, "Of course you can come," and spent the next month getting used to the idea of not getting away from my mother for an entire fortnight.

But now.... Mashi. "You must come for my wedding, you must!" And yes, it is her wedding, and she wants me there, and I'm aware that what I'm about to say is horrifically and horrible selfish and I should just shut up now, but I probably won't.

And I haven't, I'm continuing with this... well, in a nutshell, I don't want to go. My mother's already going ahead with cancelling all our previous plans, so the best I can hope for is just to stay here, but even that seems less and less likely. The point is, I hate weddings. Most of all I hate Indian weddings. They last for four whole days, four days of constant chaos and mess and hungama, four days of no sleep, of running around all over the place, and I just know she's going to be a fussy and perfectionist bride because she's a fussy and perfectionist person. Everything is going to have to be perfect. And the worst thing? It's in June. June. I can't cope, I really can't. Temperatures in the shade will be soaring above forty degrees Celsius, and I will just die. It takes a temperature of half that to make me cranky, and once it reaches that point I will faint. I faint constantly in heat like that, and I also get very, very depressed. I'll be a goddamn pain in the arse, because as well as being a misfit, stranger-in-a-strange-land, I'll be a complete emotional wreck.

So I don't want to go. And my mother will make me.
And if she doesn't, Mashi will. "Iona, sweetie, you must come, you must."
And I must.
But I can't help but feel like my exams are ending only for me to endure yet another month of hell, only on a grander scale.