Happy Birthday to Me!
It be mah burthdae. Ahm feeftein yars oald. Er att leezt ah weel bee att fyve oh nyne ptoonyte.
It’s kind of weird how you look forward to your birthday with great anticipation for the first ten years or so of your life, but then after that, it’s just another day. Sure, you get gifts and people are nice to you like always, but I guess it just gets old after a while. The 15th really isn’t one of those super important birthdays like 0, 1-10, 13, 16, 18, 21, 30, 40, etc., anyway. I don’t get any new privileges, no laws are different for me now, I’m not changing schools (hopefully), I’m not free…the only thing this birthday really gets me is the ability to look back over the past year since my last birthday and sort of reflect on all that has happened.
And a busy year it has been. In only twelve months time, a new Harry Potter book was released (I only note this because it came out on my birthday last year, which was kind of cool), I went to Europe with my old 6th/7th grade math teacher and my two best friends (one of which is now somewhat estranged, though I don’t have anything against him). Before that, I went to Colorado for several weeks, and I successfully neglected my AP World History summer homework. Then high school started, and though I had a bit of a rocky start (problems getting textbooks, registration, etc., because of the Europe trip), everything had improved by September or so, and I settled in for the ride.
Halloween came, and we (my friends and I) had a Almond Joy/Mounds war at Dylan’s house which spilled into the neighborhood streets. After being pelted numerous times, we played video games (Mario Party) and watched Conan. November was accompanied by cooler weather and harder assignments, and not much happened then. Some of my dad’s family came out from Missouri for Thanksgiving, and it was then that I missed the only day of school that I was absent for that year, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving weekend. Thanksgiving dinner was good as usual, and we had fun with my aunt and uncle and the two cousins, Riley (11) and Nate (2). I’m not sure that they had the best time, since there seemed to be some tension in the air sometimes, probably caused by the difference in lifestyle and activities and climate between Missouri and Arizona.
With Thanksgiving was also the end of my first year of PHP programming, in which I went from not knowing a variable from a constant to a near mastery of the syntax of the language. Beginning in December, I wrote a nearly complete blogging system that got butchered and pulled apart later when I started messing around with its internals. Christmas came and went, and I don’t remember it being a particularly good one (I got lots of clothes). I went to Colorado again for the latter half of Christmas vacation, and then the new semester began and it was back to work.
By this time all the teachers expected students to be familiar enough with the workings of the class and with the methods of testing and such, and the workload was increased again slightly. We started doing chemistry in biology, which was a welcome change as the class was beginning to descend to the lowest depths that it had been at all year. Spanish just piled on the projects, and we were introduced to the horror known as communication cards, where we have to speak in Spanish on a particular subject to the teacher to earn signatures. Honors English became a bit more interesting and fast-paced, and it was at this time that the idea was first suggested for me to move to an independent study English course.
February was a blur, and the first quarter of the second semester ended in mid-March. This was also about the time that Tyler was exiled from my little ring of friends, and I let it happen, though I wasn’t particularly happy about it. At the end of March was spring break, and the second weekend of spring break was when I finally conquered my fear of roller coasters and ended up riding Goliath, the highest (and possibly fastest) coaster in the world, three or four times. The only problem with that particular ride was that you felt like you were going to be decapitated as the train entered a tunnel at the bottom of the longest drop (about 250 feet).
April rolled around, and the end was in sight. I worked harder than I ever had until April 29th, when one of my better presentations kicked major butt in world history. After that, it was all downhill from there, and I could feel summer calling me. But before summer cam finals, and, though I wasn’t worried about them, I knew that my grades on those tests wouldn’t be great, since I never do very well on them. And then….it was like being in a crowded, loud room and having everything suddenly fall silent. School was over. There was no more homework, no more tests, not for 86 days. It was silent euphoria.
After getting over this, I started working for CSHS on the website. I found the work enjoyable, but by some strange combination of events, I was suddenly depressed beyond all reason, and everything I wrote was full of despair and unhappiness. An email from a friend’s father shook me out of my depression, though all it was was a simple link to a Wikipedia article on melancholia. After that, I was fine, but still recovering somewhat. The recent redesign of Organon reinforced the fact that I did indeed have skill in building and designing websites and that if clients couldn’t accept or grasp my higher level of expertise, it wasn’t my fault.
Then, disaster struck when my mom got in a car accident. Thankfully, no one was injured, but both cars involved (my mom’s 2003 Toyota Sequoia SUV and the other driver’s 2004 Toyota 4Runner) were badly damaged. We still don’t have the Sequoia back from the shop, but it sure will be nice when we do, because it sucks to have to cram ourselves into my dad’s Jeep whenever we go anywhere.
And that brings us to today, June 21st, 2004, the first day of summer, Father’s Day (some years), and the end day of the Gemini period as far as the zodiac goes. Though I’m technically half and half, I’d much rather be Gemini than Cancer, so Gemini it is.
So what’s coming up? What does the near future hold for me? I’ll be gone for two weeks in Colorado and Montana for my uncle’s wedding (he’s a Denver stock broker), and then it’ll be crunch time to get all my summer work done by August 16th. Then there’ll be school, and Jim and I have already agreed that we’re both going to be dead and buried by the end of this school year, as bad as our work loads are going to be. But what else do we have to do, anyway? We’ve also agreed that we have four years of government-funded education to exploit at our will, so we might as well work as hard as we can and get as much out of it as possible.
2004-2005 will also be the year of the new CSHS website, which will hopefully be much better than the current one. I posted a vision on our group site a while ago, and who knows if it will come to anything, but maybe it will. I’m also working on learning to use Linux (specifically Fedora Core 2), and I want to learn Python to help me with PHP (the languages are similar but also very different).
As far as birthday plans go, I don’t have much going on. I went to see The Terminal with Jim yesterday at the Harkins Cine Capri, which isn’t as great as it’s made out to be. The movie, however, was better than I could have hoped, and Tom Hanks did a great job with Krakozhian Viktor Navorski’s Eastern European accent. Tonight we’re having over our pastor, his wife, and their three kids (they’re moving in a few days), and we’re having lasagna. It’s almost as if it isn’t my birthday at all, but, as I said before: I really don’t mind.