Brettia

Well, as you can see, I haven’t done much blogging lately. In truth, I have been blogging, but unfortunately most of what I have written ends up filed in the back of my notebook incomplete, ready to be finished when I have time (viz. never). It’s not that blogging has become a chore for me, but rather that I simply don’t have time for it. Even today, my third-to-last day before resuming the hellishness known as school, I still have homework that needs slaving over.

I hate the fact that there’s now a large hole in my blog spanning the last three months or so. I’ll try to do better, but I can’t promise anything. I’ve learned over the past semester that whenever I promise that I’ll do something I usually end up being too bogged down in IB badness to even think about honoring my pledge.

So what of IB, anyway? I wrote about it a little bit a long time ago, but that was mostly a first impression. Now that the eternal darkness has fallen completely, I think I can make a more accurate judgment of the program and what it’s doing to me.

When the IBO talks of how the program is holistic and all-encompassing, they mean it. IB will take over your life, no matter how hard you fight it. Your schedule is structured around IB-related work, such as school projects and CAS service duties. You find yourself doing things and volunteering for things without knowing why. Eventually, you drop into this robotlike “academic warrior” mode, in which you smite people with textbooks and develop a kind of “gradelust,” a trancelike state that you find yourself in most of the time. Determination and apathy combine to create this new plane of existence, in which every day is another battle against the assessments and random quizzes that fly at you and try to slice you wide open like a fish. It’s all about parrying attack after attack, even when it’s three in the morning and you’re tired and you hate yourself for being enough of a smart dumbass to ever get involved in IB in the first place.

But then, just when you feel ready to give up, ready to shout expletives at the world and beat a hole in your bedroom wall with your forehead, the stormclouds part and the sun shines through for only a brief moment, just long enough for you to regain your balance and plod onward, leaving that bedroom and its tempting wall behind. While relieved, you are at the same time furious. For had you been so run into the ground that you had finally given up, it would have ended for good. Instead, the suffering is only prolonged, and the cycle repeats itself, over and over again.

I hit a low point in my academic career sometime in mid-December. I was only doing some of my homework, I completely bombed the first trigonometry chapter in pre-calculus (along with the rest of my class), my writing ability was being hampered by a lack of sleep (about four hours per night, some weeks), physics was being idiotic, as usual, and I felt completely alone in my suffering.

But then came the eye of the storm. For one short weekend, I was able to rest and catch up on some work while going with my family to spend an early Christmas with my dad’s relatives in Missouri. I cannot express how badly I needed that break, although it hurt me as much as it helped me because of the two days of school I was missing. On the following Monday, my life continued to improve. In math, my grade was not so low after all because the scores from the Chapter of Darkness were curved. Then I spent some extra time preparing for the next test, netting me a record 103%. Physics was not too bad, though I still felt lost when it came to our latest unit, which was on sound waves. In Spanish, the ever-lovely and good Mrs. Mailander tried to ease our pain by letting us decorate her door and have a party later in the week. In history, we were given the task of coming up with a hypothetical scenario that would allow for a dictator like Hitler to come to power in the United States. I spun this pessimistic tale of a dystopian future and got a round of applause from my classmates for it. I continued to kick ass and take names in my newspaper class by using it as a study hall.

And in English, I finally recouped some of my lost discussion points (I’m not one to talk often). Also, because our latest paper was a detailed analysis essay and my class had not done well on that kind of paper the first time around, the three worthy essays that got perfect scores on the first paper (of which mine was one) were copied and handed out to everyone, meaning that all had the chance to behold my greatness (heh). I am now regarded as an oracle of truth by some of my classmates, a limitless repository of history facts to cross-reference against my teachers’ information and a “trophy partner” for peer-editing papers. The old feeling of being respected that I had at Cactus Shadows finally returned. After that came the news that my second analytical essay, which had to be written in the feminist lens this time, won me another perfect score. With that paper, I was afraid as I wrote it that I was completely off-base when it came to properly using the feminist lens. As it turned out, I wasn’t. It was all luck, I think.

I was happier than I’d been for months when that final week ended and Christmas break arrived. My last school day was a Thursday, so I spent the following Friday laying around and doing nothing useful, even though the mound of homework that I had accrued before the break nagged at me in the back of my mind. On Saturday, I helped my parents ready our house for the relatives from my mom’s family who are now visiting. Sunday was Christmas Day, and, though I didn’t feel nearly as excited about Christmas this year as I did in earlier years, I still got some good stuff:

• Civilization IV (PC video game that I’ll never have time to play after this week)
• Rome Total War Barbarian Invasion (an expansion pack to a PC video game that I’ll never have time to play after this week)
• Bulletproof Web Design, by Dan Cederholm
• Defensive Design for the Web, by 37signals
• An iTunes gift card for $25
• A new sound card to replace my crappy on-board sound (Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS)
• Some other stocking-stuffer stuff that isn’t really that important

I’d say I really didn’t do too bad this year, especially considering the fact that I still have more presents coming from the relatives who are here right now. I’ll end up having three different Christmases: one with my dad’s family on the 17th, another with my parents and brother on the 25th, and one more with my mom’s family today. So yeah, not bad at all.

One of the best Christmas gifts I’ve gotten so far was one that I hadn’t even expected: over 4000 songs copied legitimately from my uncle’s iPod. My uncle is only 31, so he actually had some rather good songs, many of which were from the same albums as songs that I had already bought a la carte from the iTunes Music Store. So now I’ve gone from a tiny collection of 400 songs taken from a few CDs and iTMS to about 4200 - more than my nano can hold. I still need to delete the crappy country and jazz songs, however, so hopefully I can get my library down to a more managable number of tracks by getting rid of those. My Windows partition actually ran out of disk space when I was copying the 15 GB of music, but I was able to free up some room by deleting a few Linux ISO images that I didn’t need anymore.

My next entry might not come for a week or so, but you can drool over my new blog design in the meantime. Hopefully that one will be a bit more focused as I won’t have to recap as much time as I did with this one.