In the six months since I moved to Wisconsin, I’ve blogged quite often compared to when I lived in Arizona. This really doesn’t make sense to me because I feel like I never have time to do anything, let alone write two-thousand word essays every week or so like I used to. Now, my blog entries are much shorter for two reasons: first, I have less to say on technical subjects than I do on the subject of myself, and second, I’m always trying avoid writing about anything too personal. I don’t know why I do this; my theory is that my more recent personal issues are so unnerving to me that I just don’t want to say anything about them. However, bottling all this up is never good, and I am thankful that I have Organon for venting my spleen. After so many weeks of silence, it’s time to finally write about me, candidly and hopefully without too much bloat.
I think the best way to start is to look at what I wrote on October 17, 2004, a few days after learning that I would be moving to Boise, Idaho. This was long before my mom had been offered a job with Kohl’s in Milwaukee, so at this point in time Idaho was all I was thinking about. When I originally wrote this, I thought afterward that maybe I was being overdramatic, that I was simply feeling pessimistic for no real reason. Now…I’m sorry to say that I was dead-on on most of my points.
It’s funny how, just when you feel secure and happy with life (for the most part), you get dealt some crushing blow that breaks it all apart….I need to vent.
When I first heard about this, my first thought was to take it in stride, be optimistic about it, hope that it would turn into a good thing. But after about a week or two, reality caught up, and I began to fear for my survival. To be metaphorical, moving is like this:
There is a sheet of construction paper that has been subdivided with a marker into several parts: Brett, school, friends, work. The move is symbolized by a clumsy toddler coming by and tearing off the Brett portion of the paper, chewing it up, and spitting it back out along with some drool. I am now in pieces. In Boise, I am pieced back together with duck tape. Unfortunately, duck tape is big and the pieces are small, but the wielder of said tape is insensitive and mean and has decided to simply wrap the Brett leftovers in a wad of tape formed into roughly the shape I was in before. And then I am joined with glue to a new piece of paper, with a different school, friends, and work on it.
What does all this mean? It means that, by moving, I am literally being torn apart. I don’t mean to be all dramatic with it, but it’s the truth. And after enduring the tearing and pain, I am pieced back together in the wrong order with too much adhesive. In other words, I will no longer be the same person I once was, and all the deep and thought-provoking things about myself will be gone, obscured by layers of tape. And then what will happen? To most people, moving probably isn’t that big of a deal, but this will not only change my life for the two years I’ll be in Boise before college - it will change my life for years, perhaps even decades to come. Why? Because I’ll be at another school, in another state, more than likely one that just isn’t as good as CSHS as far as AP and other advanced courses go. It is not only my present that is in jeopardy here, but also my future.
Now I have to ask myself, did this really happen, or did I just convince myself that it would and in doing so force a feeling of being torn apart and hastily reassembled on myself? I don’t really know. I’m definitely a different person from the one that tearfully hugged his Spanish teacher in the front office at Cactus Shadows and crossed the threshold at the gate without looking back. But I’m not so sure that the “deep and thought-provoking things about myself” are gone. I think the reverse occurred: everything that was superficial about me has been stripped away, and now I am just a raw Brett, a force waiting to be harnessed into a new life. It’s been six months, and I’m still waiting. I might still be waiting after twelve. But it took a long time to get into the flow in Arizona, too: I spent most of my first year there reading and pretty much ignoring everyone else around me. My only friends were two girls, Stephanie and Kayla. Kayla and I were incredibly similar in personality (or that’s how I remember it), and by the time I was in sixth grade I had at least a little bit of a crush on her. But she moved to Japan over the summer between sixth and seventh grades, and I never saw her again after that. I really hate moving…just the concept of it is terrible. Anyway, my point is that it took a long time before I had amassed a group of friends in Arizona, and there’s a good chance it’ll take at least as long here.
…After five years of living in Arizona, I had finally become completely and entirely an Arizonan. I love 110-degree heat and the feeling of walking into an oven on those days when a hot breeze stirs the dry air. I find cacti and sunsets beautiful. I don’t know how to ski or snowboard (though I went in Utah a few times). And in the last few years, I have discovered me. I am no longer just some random kid; I am Brett. I like programming, working with computers, reading and writing in both Spanish and English, learning about history and economics, multiplying matrices, speech and debate, going to movies with friends, playing video games, traveling, watching the stock market, drinking bottled water from the tap on my refrigerator, bread and cheese, my cat, most of my teachers….
All of these things became a part of me not in Springfield, Missouri, not in Salt Lake City, but here [in Arizona]. I have spent the most important five years of my life thus far in the same house on the same street with the same kids. And I have come to like it, more so than I thought I did until the threat of moving became a possibility. I think the biggest psychological impact of the threat of moving is not the challenges it will pose once I’m in Boise, but rather the feeling of disconnection that has plagued me since first hearing about it. So soon after having my summer of unhappy thoughts, after which I finally found meaning again, that meaning has been swept away once more. No, I won’t descend back into melancholia, but the sudden feeling of separation, of aloofness, is almost unbearable. What is the point of trying to improve my existence in Arizona if I know that it will all be gone in a few months’ time? I would almost rather move on a moment’s notice than have to somehow go on with it looming above me every waking moment.
The strangest thing about my love for Arizona is that I really don’t know why I liked it there so much. I’m not exactly an outdoor person, so I only had to deal with the “110-degree heat” during those short periods when I was walking home from the bus stop or changing classes. I really didn’t have a social life there, but I was so busy that I didn’t need one. Debate, homework, the CSHS website, and whatever else I was dealing with at the time kept me from having very many free weekends last semester. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure if I liked being so busy, or if I liked the things that I was busy doing. Debate was fun, but it was also a lot of work (and I can get really nervous about speaking in front of other people). I grew increasingly unhappy with my classes, to the point that AP Euro was really the only thing that kept me coming to school every day. Looking back, I’m not at all sure why I worked so hard on the school website when it was constantly stressing me out because the decisions I made with it were constantly under attack. I guess it was because I thought that no one else would do it if I let it go, and though they did end up finding a good replacement for me, I really was the only one interested during the year or so that I worked on it. None of this sounds like it should have made me happy, but I was, nonetheless. Now I realize that I wasn’t happy because I was doing things that I wanted to - I was happy because I was with people that I liked to be with: Jim, Tyler, Dylan, Mr. Trapani (though he was a little weird, it was hard not to like him), Mrs. Nasr, Mrs. Cheeseman-Meyer, all the kids in my AP Euro class, and so on. This was something that I overlooked back when I first learned I was moving; I was more worried about having to stop doing what I was doing in Arizona than I was about never seeing my friends again.
Not having friends has taken its toll on me in Wisconsin. My friends in Arizona and I rarely had time to do anything fun together - we mainly just talked before school and during class when we could. Even that little bit of contact, however, meant a lot more to me than I realized. Now, I can go a whole day without saying a word to anyone, not because I don’t want to, but because I’m afraid to. I feel like the kids here have no need for me, like I’m offending them by just being there and taking up a desk in class. There’s only one high school and one middle school in this district, and it’s a small one. Most of the kids here have lived in the same house all their lives, and they’ve all known each other since middle school, at least. They all have their own groups of friends, their own hobbies, their own agendas. Nowhere in their lives is there room for an outsider like me. They know me as that quiet kid from California or wherever who never eats lunch because he can’t bear to sit alone every day. At least maybe I’ll get into better shape now that I’m on an 1800-calorie diet with a daily 30-minute walk for exercise (hey, it beats not exercising at all).
I don’t want to get all angst-ridden with it, but I suppose I have a good excuse. Some kids get so caught up in their social lives that they tear themselves apart trying to be popular and cool, but I was torn apart involuntarily. And I’m only making it worse by not telling anyone about it, mainly because there’s a good chance I’d be seeing a psychologist if anyone knew about the thoughts that run through my head sometimes. I’m not sure if you could call me unstable because outwardly I am the picture of sanity. If someone really watched me they could probably tell, especially if they had watched me during the first month or so that I moved here. Every day in class I watched happy teenagers talking with their friends, laughing, having a good time. And every day, at least twice, I could feel my eyes welling up with tears of pain. I always blinked them back, but sometimes I felt as if I could have cried openly and no one would have noticed. Even the most gigantic people can be invisible when no one cares to see them.
All through this tough period, the voice inside of me kept telling me to be strong and get through it. Sometimes I was harsh with myself, thinking that I was being weak and that there was no reason to be sad over somthing that I could not change or reverse. This is the same harsh voice that likes to tell me I’m a dumbass at least four times each day, sometimes with good reason. My own conscience is a harsh master, and it puts more stress on me than any teacher or parent or friend ever could. This is the same tough, insensitive voice that it always pushing me to work harder in school, the voice that tells me that 94% on a test isn’t good enough, that I need to do better if I want to keep my A and not fall to an A-. Even when this voice speaks the truth, I don’t want to listen to it. In my entire life I have never had a true enemy, though there have been kids that I disliked. I’m not the kind of person who hates people - I learned from Ender’s Game that hatred can only breed obsession and sadness. But even though I don’t hate any one person, I find it all too easy to hate myself. I hate my tendency to procrastinate, I hate that I’m overweight to the point where it becomes unhealthy in the long run, I hate that I can’t seem to write this entry without my eyes welling up with tears, I hate that I’m not good at any sports or outdoor hobbies, I hate that I can never seem to stick to anything, whether it be a club or a coding project or a new hobby, I hate that I have put off getting a learner’s permit for five months because I have no need to drive anywhere, and I hate that the person that I have become since leaving Arizona is a worse one than the person that left Cactus Shadows for the last time without looking back on that pleasant December afternoon. And worst of all, I hate that I’m not trying to change: most of my effort right now just goes toward getting up each morning.
I even hate hating the things I hate. I’m so preoccupied with not liking myself or my life that I can’t seem to get anything done, and it’s been hurting me academically. In Arizona, I could spin out a wonderful five-page paper in a night, and even after two weeks of procrastination it would still earn an A or higher. Some of my teachers, namely my English teacher, Mrs. Kulinski, and my AP Euro teacher, Mrs. Cheeseman-Meyer, thought that I was so good at what I did that I needed to be challenged further with independed study work. I really am not trying to come off as arrogant - this was just how it was, most of the time. At the end of the last semester, I had the highest grade or second-highest percentage grade in all my classes. Even with debate and the literary magazine and Key Club to keep me busy (though litmag and Key Club didn’t require much to stay involved in them), I somehow managed this, and it surprised even me when I realized it. Then came the shocking news that I had scored highest in my graduating class on the PSAT and PLAN tests, both of which are pre-tests for the SAT and ACT, respectively. Suffice to say, I was at the top of my game, though I really didn’t know how I had gotten there or why my grades were higher than those of other kids who seemed way, way, smarter than me.
Wisconsin has been completely different. Teachers expect much more of their students, so much that the high standard that I had set for myself in Arizona is only slightly above average here. I still get As, but they’re not quite as high as they used to be. My papers suck, to say the least, due to my inability to focus and articulate properly what I want to say. And I sometimes don’t do my homework, just because I don’t feel like it or because the topic we’re covering in the class at the time is so difficult for me that I don’t even want to tackle it. Some people would wonder why I consider this a bad thing: why should I be unhappy if my grades are still good? It’s a bad thing because in Arizona, my soul was in my work. When I wrote something, it was good because I had put everything I could into it, perfecting and tuning it until it was as good as I could possibly make it. Even when I procrastinated and left an assignment until the day before it was due, I still gave it my all when I actually got around to doing it. Now I just don’t care. My soul stayed behind in Arizona, and I can’t blame it. Whatever thin sliver of incentive to keep going I had in Arizona is completely gone now. One reason for this is that I’ve started to wonder why I try so hard when it seems like I’d be better off concentrating on something else, anything else. The other reason is that I am no longer the best academically anymore. I knew that some day this would happen, but I have to admit I was getting comfortable with my lofty position that I managed to hold for almost six years in Arizona. Part of me wants to tell myself that it was really nothing to be proud of, that I should allow myself to drop a few tenths of a GPA point so that I can finally be free of school for a while. But the other part wants to cling to memories of the way things used to be, telling me that there’s no reason that I can’t be the best here if I work hard enough.
I really don’t understand why schools do so much to try and encourage their students to work hard, yet they seem to have nothing to say to those few students who follow their advice and “succeed.” I think it’s because it isn’t supposed to happen. Both in Arizona and in Wisconsin, schools seem to care more about getting the average students to perform at the baseline standard set by the state government than they care about helping the students who, against all odds, excel in all their classes and beat the system. This has begun to change lately because of the IB program, and I’m thankful for that. I hope that IB will be enough to make me like school again, but I have to wonder if the damage that has been done is too great for it to ever be completely repaired.
Well, I’ve said all I wanted to say. If I forgot anything, it probably wasn’t important enough to write about, anyway. Now you get to judge me on what I wrote and tell me in your comments if you think I’m as much of an arrogant dumbass as my conscience tells me that I am.
Plastique Vermacelli.
[PLAW-steek ver-MA-shell-EE]