Brettia

Savor this, because it might be another month before the next one. I am not really sure what I want to talk about right now. I’m not as bad a blogger as I seem; I’m constantly planning new entries in my head - they just never end up getting written down. I often wish I had some way to just plug myself into my laptop and let it read my thoughts. (And let it be remembered henceforth that I was first to welcome our future sentient computer overlord.) I need some sort of light, low-tech, readily available recording device. I think it might be called a pencil and paper. One day I will remember to carry it around. But then again, the idea of hand writing something in the age of keyboards and word processors seems so painfully slow. Plus, my handwriting, once so perfectly formed and girly, has begun to devolve into a much more masculine scrawl. Now you see both why my ideas don’t usually make it to the database and just how completely disorganized this entry will be.

There is a girl walking around in my hallway and the nearby stairwell talking loudly on her cell phone. Normally I wouldn’t be one to eavesdrop, but when the talker shouts her conversation to the world I can’t help but listen in sometimes. Unfortunately, the girl is just spouting gob after gob of mind-numbing drivel. Probably her victim has already hung up and she’s just talking to herself at this point. (Wait, she just walked by again and I could hear a voice at the end of the line…I pity the poor soul having to listen to her.)

I have found that the level of maturity here is lower than I would’ve expected. Keep in mind that I can only contrast my experience here with my two months at Stanford, and maybe that’s a flawed comparison. At Stanford, most of the students in the summer program were between our junior and senior years, and plenty of juvenile things happened there: citrus fights, nutball matches, mattress parties, etc. However, kids’ actions were for the most part carefully controlled - they did childish things for fun sometimes, but they weren’t childish by nature. When you talked to someone individually and seriously, you found them to be responsible and intelligent, even if they didn’t act that way in social situations.

At Wisconsin, instead of high school students acting like adult college students, there are college students acting like childish high school students. The girl in the hallway (who after about 45 minutes has finally ended her call) is a classic example, talking about all kinds of random, insignificant social “events” (”this cute guy let me borrow his jacket!”) and sounding exactly like one of those brainless popular girls from high school. Similarly, many of the guys here seem to have no purpose in life beyond partying, drinking, and getting laid as much as possible. Whereas at Stanford the idiocy of high school was superseded by simple, joyful, intellectual camaraderie, at Wisconsin kids just do everything they couldn’t get away with (publicly) in high school. Everyone drinks fairly heavily - for some, the weekend starts Tuesday night; on average, it begins on Thursday. The hallway often smells like alcohol, sometimes with the scent of vomit or urine mixed in. The bathrooms and lounge can be worse. Academics are always second to partying, an annoying barrier to having a good time. Nerdiness or geekiness is looked down upon. At Stanford I told a number of people about my web design hobby, and most seemed to think it was cool or at least mildly interesting. Here, I’ve gotten enough dumb looks and blank stares that I generally don’t even bring it up. Not being from Wisconsin is looked down upon too (”coasties” generally cluster together in private dorms and get made fun of by the natives for their low tolerance for the cold). Originally I would mention that I’d graduated from Oconomowoc but also had ties to Arizona; now I just say I’m from Oconomowoc whether I really feel that I am or not.

Of course, there are exceptions. I’ve met some people (unsurprisingly, none from Wisconsin) who are much more intellectual and mature and less driven by alcohol and parties. There’re many shades of gray. I’m only describing things as I feel them from where I’m sitting in room 201 on the second floor of Witte Hall, tower A. From what I’ve heard, there can be a very different vibe depending on what dorm you live in or even what floor you’re on, and my dorm in particular has a reputation for craziness (”gettin’ shitty in Witte”). There were differences between the houses at Stanford too: Eucaliptolites were a little quirky and liked to goof around in weird, random ways; Granadans seemed a bit more rebellious; Ujamaa was rowdier; and so on. I might find next year that things are completely different.

Even so, the immaturity - and especially the culture of alcoholism - seems pervasive here. I sense it in the snippets of conversations I hear in the Southeast dorms’ central cafeteria. I can’t go into the Walgreens on State St. without hearing someone talking loudly about their drunken exploits the night before, or about how they can’t wait to start drinking “around 4:30, when class is over.” I see and meet ditzy girls like the one in the hallway all the time. Even some of the more levelheaded upperclassmen that I’ve met get taken in by it, though they certainly don’t seem to plan their lives around it like some of the kids in my dorm. It’s like Wisconsin’s party-school reputation (we’re #1 on the Princeton Review’s “Lots of Beer” ranking, and some years we’ve been high up on the “Party Schools” list) is an excuse to go crazy. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have a problem with partying - with or without beer - but it’s not my favorite activity either, and I tire of it quickly when I’m surrounded by it as I am here. To some kids Wisconsin would be a dream school - finally they can do everything they did in high school but always had to hide from their parents or teachers or the police. Here, authority is pretty loose, especially in dorms (RAs don’t care about the drinking and, in the rare event someone gets busted for it, they don’t really get punished), and kids get away with just about anything. At Stanford, anyone caught drinking or smoking was flown home immediately. That’s a pretty draconian policy, but not caring about it at all is similarly extreme.

Faced with the situation here, the logical question for me to ask is, “Are all colleges like this?” I would think not, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe college is all about being stupid and pushing one’s body to its limits by eating badly and ingesting illegal substances. And it’s all okay because I’m just a young adult learning about life through “experimentation.” Maybe being passionate about academics doesn’t matter, and I should just concentrate on socializing as much as possible and graduating…eventually. Maybe my problem is that I am too rigid, too reluctant to change myself and embrace the partying and the binge drinking and the shallowness.

I was never very sure about coming here. I knew this school’s reputation, I knew that it was huge, and I knew that it wouldn’t be quite like Stanford, though I hoped that it would at least be similar. I had the chance to go to Pomona and potentially have a much more Stanfordesque experience, but attending the school wasn’t really possible financially. Now I begin to wonder if I traded happiness for in-state tuition, some scholarship money, and a lenient transfer credit policy. I begin to wonder if by coming here I continued my rather mistake-prone tradition of ignoring my gut in favor of my mind. Hopefully by the end of the year I will feel better about my choice.

It reached 33 degrees outside today and I can’t believe how warm I felt.

Until next time (which could be quite a while, sorry)….

This entry is meant to introduce you to me. Being a self-centered person (not a good thing, I know, but at least I can admit it), this shouldn’t be a hard one to write. But I’m still hazy about who I am and who I want to be. I guess that’s something I’m supposed to figure out in the next four years or so. Maybe I’ll never be sure. For now, I’ll just talk about what I’m more sure about, saving the uncertainties for later posts.

First, the basics. I am an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Wisconsin, majoring (probably) in computer science. Along with computers, I like English, Spanish, linguistics, history, and philosophy. I hate math, but I’m still not too bad at it. I don’t have that many hobbies because I’m usually too busy to cultivate them, but I like reading, writing, listening to music (who doesn’t…), playing video games, developing websites and software, and watching football. I have two jobs right now. I work as a web developer for a small company in Phoenix whose website is too ugly to be worthy of linkage. One day we’ll get around to redesigning it. On the side, I am the webmaster for the ASM Student Elections Commission. We’re the group that plans and runs elections for the university’s student government, and I keep our single web page up-to-date. It sounds boring, but it’s a lot less stressful and more fun than my main job.

Now, some history. It is strange to say, but I’m not really from anywhere. I was born in Springfield, Missouri, and most of my extended family lives around there. My family moved from Springfield to Salt Lake City when I was eight. We only spent two years there, moving to Phoenix in 1999. After adjusting to the desert heat, I grew to love it there. I found a band of friends who were almost as geeky as me, and we hung out together all through middle school and the first year and a half of high school. In about 7th grade I made my first website, and in 8th grade my friends and I spent much of our spare time posting on an online forum I’d set up. We’d set aside some of those nerdy habits by high school, but the friendships remained tight - the summer before freshman year, my two best friends and I went to Europe together. As you can imagine, I was surprised and crestfallen when I learned in the fall of 2004 that we would be relocating to either Boise or Milwaukee by the end of the year. Eventually, my parents decided on Wisconsin.

At first, I tried to be positive. While I didn’t want to leave my friends or the life I had in Arizona, I figured that perhaps starting over wouldn’t be so bad. It wasn’t like Wisconsin was another country or anything. My optimism didn’t last very long. It snowed about a foot the first night we were here. I had to spend a miserable month cooped up at home because my school’s second semester didn’t start until the end of January. When school finally did start, I felt like both a ghost and an alien at the same time. Since the year was already half over and classes changed after each term, most people just assumed I’d been there all along and didn’t pay that much attention to me. If I mentioned that I’d just come from Arizona, I’d usually get a confused look that meant, “Why the heck would you want to move here then?”

People in general were different - more family oriented, less open, very traditional. It wasn’t all bad; they were also not as materialistic or judgmental as Arizonans. My first eight months in Wisconsin were a dark and depressing time for me. I became very quiet and reserved, going entire days without uttering a word. I kept my grades up, even though my Wisconsin high school was significantly harder and I was continuing to take AP European History with my Arizona teacher via email. I made a few friends, but none were very close, and some of them I didn’t really like that much. I didn’t hang out with anyone. I didn’t understand the things that most Wisconsin kids are into, like hunting and hockey and ice fishing. For some reason, though my unhappiness was deep and sometimes a little dangerous, no one seemed to notice. I felt like a machine that did nothing but go to school and do homework, like an emotionless, thoughtless robot. I knew that I was as much a victim of my failure to adapt as I was a victim of an untimely move, but I didn’t know what to do to dig myself out of my hole.

Things began to look up in my junior year. I began the IB Diploma Programme, which is similar to AP but more comprehensive and with more meshing between courses. At first, not much changed. I was still quiet, and I still didn’t have any good friends. Then, in mid-October, I was tasked with writing a short essay on my definition of success. Instead of turning them in, the teacher surprised us by having us read our essays aloud in class. I was mortified. In Arizona, I was a bit of a teacher’s pet. I asked questions and gave answers all the time, and I enjoyed being smart. That disappeared after the move. I never wanted to say anything. And so the thought of putting my work out in the open for twenty other minds to appraise was terrifying. When my turn came, I somehow read my essay without stumbling too much, even though my heart was racing. There was a long pause after I’d finished and everyone’s eyes were on me. I was grateful when the teacher finally asked the next person to read. Later, I got the graded essay back with an A+ on the front and a comment on the back that said something like, “You are an excellent writer, and the whole class was hanging on your every word while you read this. Please share your thoughts in class more often.” I felt encouraged, but the damage of the previous year would take a while to undo.

The school year moved on, and I became the lead design editor of my school’s newspaper and a tutor in the writing center. I did a few things with my church’s youth group but never got too into it. Two other papers, an English one that my teacher copied and used as an example for everyone else and a history essay that I had to read in class, cemented me as one of the brightest in our little group of “IB kids.” But while I had the others’ respect, I didn’t really have their friendship. And though I was no longer so sad, I still wasn’t very happy. It was a transitional period.

In the summer of 2006, I spent two months taking classes at Stanford University. It was, without a doubt, the most incredible experience of my short life. It was eight weeks of near-complete freedom. I spent my weekends on day trips to San Francisco, Monterrey, Marin County, or Palo Alto, my weekdays programming games in Java or learning about word roots, and my nights goofing around in the dorm or throwing oranges at people or snuggling with girls (!) at mattress parties. I met my best friend at Stanford. For the first time in a long while, I felt alive. It was difficult to leave, and even more challenging to return to high school in the fall after having that little taste of college.

The first half of senior year was much like the year before. I was unhappy again, vexed by the huge difference between life at Stanford and real life in Wisconsin. School was harder than ever, and I had a bunch of IB exams in May to look forward to. My social life improved a little. I went to a couple of parties in December with two IB-kid friends, and I played Guitar Hero for the first time. I began eating lunch at school again, having abandoned the practice sophomore year as I lacked anyone to sit with. I finally had my driver’s license. I was reborn a little.

In May, it felt like all of my efforts during the previous two years came to a climax. I chose a college, spent three weeks skipping school in order to study for and take exams, and I put a huge amount of effort into making the final issue of the newspaper that I worked on the best of them all. Freedom came in June, and it was sweet. I went to some graduation parties, and a few party parties. I had a birthday party with my friends. My parents gave me a MacBook Pro. Things were looking up a little bit. I spend the second half of the summer in Arizona, since my family was moving back. I got to hang out with my old friends again, though Arizona no longer felt like home.

Fast forward a few months, and here I am, nearing the end of my first semester of college, feeling far away from and yet still similar to the timid Brett that left the desert for the hinterland three long years ago. I apologize for the crazy length of this entry, but now at least I won’t need to keep going over this stuff in future entries.

It feels so good to be blogging again.

It’s been an unbelievably long time since I last wrote anything substantial, and there’s so much to talk about. I’m not really sure where to begin. I wrote my last entry in which I covered what was going on in my life way back in January, and it would be an understatement to say that things are very different now from the way they were back then. I could try to remember things, go back and summarize it all, but truthfully, most of it doesn’t really matter all that much. However, I guess there are some more important events or changes that I should mention.

The most important one, of course, is the end of high school, and of the IB “experience.” I could feel things starting to draw to a close as early as the beginning of May, when the IB exams started. I had an exam every school day for two weeks, and all homework and assignments pretty much ceased. I skipped class many times in that period, sometimes so that I could do some last minute cramming, other times just so that I could lay around and not have to think about school for a few hours. I suppose I wasn’t really “skipping” anything, since I always had a parent call me out of school and usually the classes I missed were IB ones that were all but over anyway. My senior year was not nearly as glorious and enjoyable as everyone says it is supposed to be, so I guess maybe I was entitled to some laziness toward the end.

There is no question that my last school year was a difficult one. Taking IB Math HL was a huge mistake. The two other IB students in that class (it was combined with AP Calculus BC) had both had a semester of high-level math before that class. I had been denied that semester because of my tight course schedule, and originally I was going to take calculus at Stanford to make up for it. But my advisor at Stanford told me that it would be a waste to take math there just to prepare for a high school math course, as the credit I would earn at Stanford would be the same as the credit I would get for IB Math HL. In other words, I would be earning the credit twice. Not wanting to waste money, and wishing even less to pollute my wonderful pre-college experience at Stanford with the ugliness of calculus, I took a Greek and Latin word roots class instead. Compared to CS 106A, that class wasn’t really very exciting, but it did appeal to my love for languages. Unfortunately, when I started IB Math HL at the beginning of last year, I found myself woefully unprepared. Though I usually did all right on quizzes, I rarely scored higher than a B on a test, and sometimes I was lucky to get a C. I’m still not entirely sure what my problem was. Before that class, I had always done well in math, though I never really liked it. I guess the combination of ill-preparedness, increased workload in other classes, and apathy on my part was enough to doom me to failure. There were times when I really did want to learn the material, and I berated myself for my laziness. I spent a weekend or two doing nothing but math in an attempt to catch up. But nothing ever seemed to work, and I always felt like I was a half-step behind. Eventually the class was reminding me too much of IB Physics, in which my labs never seemed to be exactly right and my grade was always right on the edge of being a B+. It was frustrating, to say the least.

If the class was unpleasant, the IB Math HL exam was torturous. It was not just difficult because the problems were hard, but because in many cases I had never even seen the types of questions they were asking before. The class was three terms long, and the whole time we basically followed the AP Calculus BC curriculum. We did two IB math projects on the side, and we were supposed to be doing problems from the IB Math textbook every week or so (though we only got about halfway through the book). In the last term of the class, the teacher gave us some practice tests he’d found online, and it was then that we knew we were doomed. I say “we” because the other two IB Math students felt the same way I did. The main problem was that we simply hadn’t covered most of the IB Math curriculum. Unlike AP Calculus BC, IB Math is only about 30% calculus. The rest is a jumble of geometry and trigonometry (which would seem easy since I had already taken geometry and trigonometry classes, except that IB Math takes it to a whole other level), logic and reasoning, and a huge chunk of statistics and probability. So the exam was a completely horrendous experience. I left more than half of it blank, answered many questions with bullshit answers, and once I even gave an answer that had nothing to do with math, something like, “The probability of Sally sending text messages to her friends from 5:30 to 6:30 is zero, because her family eats dinner during that time period.” Even worse, the IB diploma criteria doesn’t allow for failing a higher-level class, even if taking that class as a higher-level one was an option (I could have done Math SL, but I was told it would be really easy). As far as I know, my grade is calculated using both my exam score and my scores on the math projects, so there is at least a tiny bit of hope that I will get the three out of seven necessary to still get my IB diploma. The scores aren’t released until July 6th, so I get to wait until then to see if my bullshitting was good enough or not.

The other exams really weren’t too terrible. Biology was perhaps the hardest, mainly because the second-semester teacher was disorganized and didn’t really make it through all of the material. I learned a lot from cramming the night before the test, though…so maybe that helped. In some ways the exam period was fun - I felt like I was in college: skipping class, going to late-night study groups, trying desperately to find and organize notes from years ago, etc. When I finally came back to school for the last two weeks after the exams were over, I was struck by how dumb high school seemed after that little ordeal. All the idiotic rules and immature drama…so pointless, so stupid. The final days were somewhat enjoyable, but somehow I still had a lot left to do. The last issue of the newspaper was scheduled to come out on the seniors’ last day, May 31, and I had to work on it almost non-stop for a week in order to get it finished. The toil was worthwhile, though - it was easily our most polished issue in the past two years, an achievement crowned by two distinguishing features: full-color printing and a two-page “Senior Destinations” spread where we put all the seniors’ names on a series of maps to illustrate where they planned on going to college. I got compliments on it from dozens of people, from classmates to friends’ parents to random kids in the hallway.

Though May 31 was the last day of classes, I still had to go to school the next day for a senior awards assembly, after which we had a barbecue and played ultimate frisbee. Finally, the four long years of high school had come to an end, and I couldn’t have been happier. Graduation came on the following Sunday, and my grandparents from Missouri as well as my grandma from Colorado visited and watched me receive my diploma. Since then, life has been pretty laid back (maybe a little too laid back) - I’ve worked on websites, watched a lot more TV than usual, gone to a few graduation parties, slept for nine hours almost every night, showered twice a day for no particular reason, and played an occasional video game, though I find them to be less and less entertaining lately.

I finally feel as if I have overcome the terrible lack of motivation or confidence that I suffered from after the move from Arizona. Since December, I’ve been to numerous small gatherings with some friends I met through the IB program, usually involving the game Guitar Hero, which I’m abnormally skilled at playing. While I’m still no social butterfly, I at least feel as if I have some semblance of a life outside of school again. I even find myself craving social interaction on days when my friends are busy and my IM buddy list gray and empty. While I still have a long way to go before I could call myself socially skilled, I’m not totally inept anymore, and it feels good. Something that hasn’t changed, though, is that I don’t require all that much to be happy with people. Some kids seem to only want to go to a party if it’s massive and alcohol is somehow involved, or they only want to hang out with people if there’s some fun activity planned (Six Flags, water-skiing, shopping, etc.). But I find myself not caring all the much about what I do with my friends…the important thing is just being together and enjoying each other’s company. Some nights we’ll just sit at someone’s house not really doing anything at all - talking or watching a movie or whatever. But sometimes those moments are better and more substantial than any wild party could ever be.

I don’t think there’s too much more left to talk about now…I guess I should mention that, for all my efforts to go elsewhere, I’m still going to college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Don’t get me wrong, Madison’s a great school, perhaps one of the best public universities in the country. It’s just not exactly my dream school. I applied to a lot of places, many of them probably out of my reach academically, and some of them surprised me by putting me on their waitlists or even offering me admission. Two schools that I didn’t even apply to sent me letters offering admission and a full-ride scholarship for being a National Merit Scholar. In the end, I had three options: Pomona College, UW-Madison, and the University of Texas at Dallas. I was surprised to be admitted to Pomona because less selective colleges had rejected me; Pomona only admits around 15% of applicants and, though few people have heard of it, it’s one of the top colleges in the country. UT-Dallas was one of the schools that offered me a full-ride, and their offer was tempting. I visited the campus over spring break, and I was pretty impressed by the experience. They have a large and growing computer science program and strong ties to local industry (North Texas, I guess, is sort of like a Silicon Valley for the Midwest), and they offered me enough money to cover basically all of my college-related expenses. However, I was worried about the strength of their non-computer-related programs, and I wasn’t really sure I wanted to live in Texas all that much. Also, though certain aspects of the campus were really nice, such as the student apartments (four students to a suite, only two students per bathroom, kitchenette, laundry room, swimming pools, etc.), it just didn’t seem like a traditional college campus to me. Many students commuted to campus, and it was located in the middle of a suburb where there were mostly houses and few shops or restaurants. I eventually decided that UT-Dallas just wasn’t right for me, though not without much deliberation. The more difficult decision was choosing between Pomona and UW-Madison. Really, there wasn’t really much of a choice - it was obvious that Pomona was better in almost every possible way. However, when I started looking at the financial aid package I had been offered, I found that accepting the admission offer was almost impossible. Even in the best case scenario, I would leave Pomona with about $50,000 in debt. So I basically chose Madison for lack of any other viable option.

Although things didn’t work out as I imagined they would, I’m still excited for college. Finally I will be completely on my own and free to do what I want. Madison is a really neat town, almost like a San Francisco or Denver but plopped in the middle of the Upper Midwest, and the UW campus is right next to the downtown area. I’ll also have the prospect of going home to Arizona over breaks to look forward to, as my family is in the process of moving back this summer. Though a year ago I was almost certain I wanted to study computer science and eventually become a software engineer, now I’m not so sure. While I love programming and building websites, I am somewhat different from the average programmer in that I enjoy writing code because of the language aspect of it, not the mathematical or logical aspects. I like reading and writing in English and Spanish about as much as I enjoy reading and writing PHP or Java or Ruby. And I’ve always loved history, too, probably because it is so closely tied to language and the interpretation and analysis of language from many different sources. And there is the more recent addition to my list of favorite subjects: philosophy. (Perhaps you see now why I was so enthralled by the prospect of going to a liberal arts college like Pomona even though I want to study computer science.) I think the best possible academic scenario for me would be some sort of double major in computer science and one of those other subjects. Hopefully I’ll also get a chance to work on few research projects of some kind, and maybe study abroad. Assuming that I get my IB diploma, I’ll have about 25-30 credits before I even start college, so I should have some extra time for such things. It does seem as if IB will at least count for something at Madison - most of the private colleges only take IB credits if your scores are near-perfect, so the diploma just helps you get admitted, but Madison seems to want to reward IB students pretty handsomely.

Before I post this I have one final, wonderful announcement to make: after many years of frustration and suffering on the Windows platform, I have made the switch and am now a proud owner of a MacBook Pro. I needed a laptop for college and Macs are finally not so horribly expensive as they once were, so I took the plunge. So far I’ve been pretty impressed, but I’ll save my experiences for another entry. Until next time…adios.

This is an entry I’ve been meaning to write for quite a while now. In the past year or so, I’ve gone from knowing nothing about what I think about anything to…well, still not really knowing what I think. I guess I’m kinda hoping that this entry will help me focus things more, but more than likely it really won’t. Oh well.

I suppose everything began with a book I read for English, one that I think I’ve mentioned already: Albert Camus’ The Stranger. It’s a weird story. Basically, the main character, Meursault, is this random, apathetic French Algerian who cares more about being with his girlfriend than mourning his mother’s recent death. He complains often about momentary issues (head, usually), but major problems don’t really seem to faze him at all. Eventually, he kills an Arab on the beach out of animal instinct and ends up in prison, where his views on life become plain as he awaits death. His main premise is that life isn’t worth living because it’s just a sequence of repetitive events that have already occurred numerous times for everyone else and sometimes oneself. He hangs on to this idea until his execution, even after a priest tries to convert him to a more Christian view of life and death, and when he is finally about to die, he says that he hopes that he provokes the crowd’s anger (perhaps because he regards them with so much contempt). Obviously, this was a pretty controversial book for a bunch of mostly conservative Midwestern kids to read. Many of my fellow IB students just rejected it outright, saying that Camus and Meursault were crazy and that no sane person would ever think that way. Strangely, though, I sort of thought the opposite. While I didn’t really agree with Meursault, I thought that he had a point. The book made me question things more, at least.

I remember feeling pretty insecure upon realizing that I was the only one who seemed to give Camus’ ideas (embodied in the philosophical idea of existentialism) much weight. I began to wonder if I really was drifting toward craziness and this was just the first step. Unfortunately, this became a pretty constant trend…most of the other kids would vehemently oppose a book or idea, and I would think, “Well, it makes sense to me.” I think I can explain this. For a long time now, I’ve thought that within a person there exists two different mindsets: the rational and the philosophical (these names are arbitrary; I have no idea if they fit correctly). We go about our day-to-day lives in the rational mindset, which helps us with everything from simple decisions to solving complex problems. Though the rational mindset is creative, it doesn’t really rock the metaphorical boat. It doesn’t come up with thoughts that violate our core beliefs - it just follows them blithely. For most people, it is easy to spend the bulk of their life in the rational mindset if their beliefs aren’t horribly strict or conflicting and they don’t suffer any major shocks to their values. But for those whose beliefs are still pretty up in the air (like me), it’s easy to get into the philosophical mindset, which can be far more dangerous than the rational one. The problem with the philosophical mindset is that it has the potential of coming to conclusions that could radically affect one’s behavior while in the rational mindset. This is what happened to Meursault. I think that most people know of the dangers of the philosophical mindset in some kind of subconscious manner, and this is why even people who spend more time in the philosophical mindset than others will usually try to stay away from it when they can. Most of us value order and normalcy, and putting ourselves fully into the philosophical mindset breaks that sometimes. This is especially true for more religious people who have strong faith in their beliefs - to question those beliefs by straying into the philosophical mindset would conflict directly with that faith. So, what I’m trying to say, I guess, is that since I spend more time in the philosophical mindset than most people due to my not-so-solid belief system, I have a greater tendency to accept ideas that seem irrational because I’m desperate enough to find the right belief to cling to that I’ll try to look for logic or meaning in just about anything. The other IB students, for the most part, are set enough in their beliefs that they usually seem to just ignore anything that conflicts with them. Then again, I’m not exactly vocal about my thoughts about this stuff…maybe they think about it more than I realize and they just keep it to themselves because of peer pressure.

My next presentation dealing with philosophy was about Friedrich Nietzsche and how his ideas relate to The Stranger and existentialism. I basically found that Nietzsche’s ideas, especially the ideas of nihilism and eternal recurrence, make up much of the foundations of modern existentialism. Nihilism is the concept that life is pointless and that you therefore reject the real world and physical existence (like Meursault). Interestingly, Nietzsche felt that modern Christianity was a nihilistic religion because of how it has drifted from its original roots to the point that doctrine often matters more than core spiritual beliefs. This is what prompted Nietzsche to make the famous, “God is dead,” statement. He didn’t mean that God or religion was really dead - only that the true God had been killed by Christianity over the millennia and replaced with something else. I actually kind of agree with Nietzsche on this…I sometimes wonder why it always feels like Christians dictate their religion at other people (and themselves), in many cases forcing them to conform to a certain moral code, instead of just teaching a way of being as is done in some other religions (Buddhism, I think). It was in this presentation that I really began to self-awaken to philosophy and just how complex it could be. I read some small parts of Nietzsche’s works, and I was amazed at how many -isms and horribly complex logical constructs there were. It’s not exactly what you’d call leisure reading. But it was interesting nonetheless, and it made me interested in studying philosophy when TOK rolled around later on in the year.

But before TOK I had one last English presentation to give, and this one was by far the scariest. In this presentation, we were tasked with coming up with a metaphor to describe our personal philosophy of life. We had to make a display showcasing our metaphor and philosophy, and we had to present our beliefs to our peers in one-on-one mini-presentations. This assignment, one that I would probably welcome now, did not go well for me ten months ago. I was utterly mortified at the idea of revealing my much more radical philosophy to my fellow students because I valued their respect highly and I feared that I would lose it by having ideas that were so obviously, completely opposed to theirs. I procrastinated a lot on getting my display done and organizing my thoughts. I was up until 4 AM the night before I had to present, tearing myself apart inside over what I did and did not want to say. When I got up at 6:30 to get ready for school, I was a nervous wreck, still overcome by fear and emotion and in no way ready to present my crappy display and explain my corny metaphor (”Life is like a gory video game”). It was not a good moment, as moments go. Eventually I just decided to say what was on my board as convincingly as I could, though by the time I had to present I was starting to stop believing in my own philosophy. I guess you could say I was caving in to peer pressure, but the pressure came more from inside than out. I don’t want to give the wrong idea about my fellow IB kids - they’re friendly, intelligent, good people, all of whom I have a lot of respect for for various reasons. They weren’t pressuring me to be more in-line with their philosophies on purpose. I was pushing myself in that direction because I feared being abnormal, especially after a year of not exactly being in the greatest of spirits most of the time. Having pulled through the dark days, I was desperate to not ruin my chances of having good friends (Friends) again.

I won’t give a play-by-play of my presentation (which I gave twice to two different people), but it certainly wasn’t one of my better ones. It wasn’t so much that my ideas didn’t make sense, but rather that my delivery was ruining them. I kept trying to think of how they were being perceived by my tiny audience, and those thoughts in the background made it difficult to stay focused. I improved hugely, though, the third time, when I had to present to my teacher so that I could be graded (more on effort and logic, not on what my ideas were specifically). It helped that the teacher was my favorite of all my junior-year teachers, and I also thought her to be less religious than my peers from what she had said in some of our class discussions. So I relaxed and gave a decent presentation, and suddenly all of the ideas that made up my philosophy made sense again. It was a weird day.

A few days later, I received my grade (an A-) and the two peer evaluation sheets that my “audience” had filled out after listening to my presentation. They were not positive. Actually, they were pretty harsh, even more so than I had expected. I wasn’t very happy about this, and my arrogant self immediately thought that they were reacting more to the content of my presentation than the quality of it. The rest of my self quickly shut down that idiotic idea before it could cause me to do or say anything stupid, thankfully. My teacher’s comments, however, were much nicer. I remember she said something like, “Some of the conclusions you made were things that I didn’t figure out until I was in my mid-20s.” This was high praise, even coming from a teacher that liked me already. So I came out of this whole episode with a bit of a firmer foundation upon which to build my philosophical ideas, but still not a whole lot of strong conviction about what I had come up with. My teacher’s reinforcement of what I had said, though - that boosted my confidence considerably.

I suppose you’re wondering exactly what I did say that seemed so horribly radical, what exactly it was that my teacher seemed to agree with, etc. Rather than start in on that right now, though, I’ll continue with the story of my philosophical progression. Bear with me; I’m almost done. TOK started in the fourth quarter of that year, about a month after the personal philosophy presentations. I was excited about it, both because of my recent forays into philosophical thinking and because I had heard it described as one of the best IB classes I would take. Unfortunately…the first term was a bit of a letdown. It wasn’t all bad, though, and the concepts we went over were important in the second term (the first quarter of this year), when our discussions got a lot more interesting. One of the first things we talked about was the idea (given to us by the IB gods, I guess) that K = JTB - that knowledge is a justified, true belief. I’m not sure that I agree with this completely, but that concept isn’t nearly as important as some of the ideas that it stirred within me that came out in my daily journal entries. (We were required to journal each day on thoughts from the class, but this requirement sorta evaporated about two weeks into the term.)

In my very first entry, I talked about knowledge, beliefs, the relativity of truth, and a concept that I called “collective knowledge.” I began with an interesting and new (for me) idea: that “underlying all things are key fundamental truths.” Most of these fundamental truths are so impossibly complex that they are beyond human comprehension - however, just because we don’t understand them doesn’t mean that they’re not out there. When humans come up with a “truth,” they rarely come up with a fundamental truth, and even if they do, they can never prove that the truth that they have arrived at is really the be-all-end-all exactly-right explanation for a phenomenon. So basically, anything that humans hold as true is in fact just human perception of a fundamental truth that may have further intricacies that we haven’t discovered yet. This theory appears to be held up by the way that science has progressed over the past half-millennium: we keep arriving at new theories that often become accepted as the “true” explanation for something, yet eventually all of these theories end up being overturned or modified or replaced by something else. You can see this particularly well illustrated in the development of models of the atom. Elementary school students are still taught the simpler Bohr model, which showed electrons orbiting a nucleus in concentric rings or “shells,” yet those of us who have had higher-level science classes know that shells are actually much less defined and that figuring out exactly where an electron is within a shell is almost impossible. (I don’t claim to know my physics very well, so I might be a little off there, but you get the idea.) Mankind, in its insatiable desire for increased order, reason, and stability, seeks greater knowledge in order to ward off uncertainty (explanations based upon faith or other principles that aren’t logically substantiated). This concept is important in understanding some of my later conclusions.

The second idea that I mentioned in my first journal entry was the concept that “all facts are simply collectively-held opinions.” Each individual has his or her personal beliefs about what is true, and those beliefs are blended into a society’s idea of common sense, things that everyone should know as truth. Common sense forms one part of the larger “collective knowledge,” which is a broader collection of a society’s most commonly held beliefs on what is true. To become a part of the collective knowledge, an idea simply has to gain traction to the point where it eventually becomes impossible not to accept. Historically, it has never been easy for an idea to go from a thought in someone’s mind to being generally accepted, but the amount of time it takes has become shorter as communication has become faster and people have become more numerous, to the point where collective knowledge almost seems to change too quickly. In the past, it has always been the role of religion to check the power of science and intellectualism by freezing a snapshot of collective knowledge at a certain moment and requiring followers to believe in that older perception of the world even when it started to become out-of-date. This was not necessarily a bad thing - it is similar to the way that software is released today. Software gets packaged and prepared and feature-frozen into a release - a version of the application that users can depend on to work well and be at least somewhat backwards-compatible with older versions. Users willing to live closer to the bleeding edge can upgrade more often to beta or alpha releases, which are often less stable and more prone to causing problems. If we think of religion as a software company, the human perception of the world as a piece of software, and mankind as one giant user, then this metaphor makes sense. In earlier days, mankind would upgrade its software only when forced to. Later, after the Protestant Reformation, new ideas came up faster and mankind upgraded in a way similar to how people upgrade today - not too often, but often enough that there is progress. Now, however, our upgrade speed is getting a little scary. We’re past using beta and alpha releases now - many of us have advanced to using highly unstable, daily snapshots of the latest philosophical software, code that is supposed to be only used by developers (philosophers) and not the general public. Today, new scientific and technological breakthroughs are coming so fast that the influx of new knowledge is becoming hard for society to comprehend. Some have even elected to stick with older, stabler versions of our philosophical software, waiting to see which snapshot becomes a final release. Unfortunately, now that religion has retreated in a major way from the huge role that it used to play in our lives, there might never be another final release.

I digressed a bit there - that chunk about religion wasn’t in my original entry, but it did come up a few times later on in other writings for that class. The final major part of my first journal entry (and the last thing that I’ll talk about tonight since I’m getting tired) was about mankind’s tendencies. (Let me note quickly that when I make these broad generalizations about mankind and religion and such, I know that there are exceptions. All of this is only my perspective…for all I know it could be completely wrong.) Let’s go back to the idea of the fundamental truths. For quite a long time, humans were unable to grasp them, and so we came up with the concept of faith and applied it to beliefs that usually only half-explained phenomena they meant to describe. I find it interesting that we humans have such a strange tendency (compared to other animals) to need to find reasons and explanations for everything that happens to us. When a reason doesn’t exist, we invent one to use as a placeholder until we can find a better one, and we have faith in its truth to mask our uncertainty. This faith is often reinforced by our inherently chaotic world and universe, in which the infinite number of reactions and events occuring all at once is bound to produce strange, inexplicable anomalies that become known as “acts of God” or of some other higher being. Sometimes, no other explanation is found (though, of course, due to humans’ natural imperfection, not having an explanation doesn’t mean that there isn’t one waiting to be found), but usually, we come up with a more rational reason for a phenomenon eventually.

What I think that my analysis of faith above shows is that the only way to understand ourselves is to study ourselves from the most objective perspective possible. We have to zoom out and look at ourselves as we would tiny bacteria wiggling around on a dirt clod. Unfortunately, in doing this we’re trying to examine something (our own minds) objectively that we ourselves are stuck inside. Our conclusions, therefore, are always subject to our specimens, making them impossible to verify exactly. So I guess there really is no truth when it comes to self-analysis - we can only come as close as we possibly can. Personally, I feel that my philosophy has taken me closer than anything else I’ve ever believed in has. I think that I have begun to remove some of the subjectivity involved in examining the human mind by trying to accept some of the things that many are unable to deal with, such as the idea that, in a chaotic world, things really do sometimes occur without any discernible reason. The key word there is “discernible” - there might be a reason, but it’s so infinitely complex that it is beyond our limited ability to comprehend it. Even when faced with the incredible challenges of coming up with valid reasons for some of the most complex phenomena, however, we still strive to move forward. As maybe you’ve inferred from my entry so far, I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the traditional Christian sense. However, if there’s anything that makes me think that there must be some kind of higher power out there, it’s that tendency of mankind that I described before: the desire for order, normalcy, and reasoned explanations for the unknown. Unlike every other being we have so far discovered, we strive to create structure from chaos. We’re different - perhaps God is what made us that way.

I’ll talk about all of this more in the future. For now, I always appreciate any comments you have, whether or not you agree with me. *falls into bed*

This entry was frickin’ long!

Ugh. Today I feel…well, I dunno. I’m in one of those moods where there are lots of things that I could be doing, but none that really interest or excite me. I just kinda want to sit back, put iTunes in Party Shuffle mode, close my eyes, and think about nothing. Nothing. It seems like such an easy concept to frame in one’s mind, yet I can’t ever focus on it. For every second of restful blankness there are five more of wonderings and worries. Rather than respond to my frantic pressings of the “mute” button, my mind just wants to remain stuck in perpetual fast-forward.

It’s not so much that I wish that I had more time to just relax, but rather that I look at all the things that I do in my life and wonder why none of them have a whole lot of meaning to me anymore. And I’m baffled by the idea that so many things can be so full of purpose yet lacking in meaning. School, for example, has almost completely lost my interest. English classes feel mechanical and uninspiring and are a far cry from the Pawlowski English classes of last year. History lectures are sometimes interesting but rarely fun. Citizenship classes cover interesting material but teach it with easy, boring assignments. And calculus has taken its place at the top of my list of banes of my existence. Spanish classes are a lone standout, but I still feel hindered by having to take a less advanced class than I could handle (because of IB requirements).

Last year, though I didn’t like some classes, I usually cared enough about them to try and do well. Now…I just feel apathetic. And it shows: I get more sleep than I did last year (though still not very much), mainly because if it gets late and I haven’t finished my homework yet, I just don’t do it. I used to get up early and finish things or do homework during class so that it would still be done eventually. But lately I don’t even do that. Even worse, I find myself spending a lot more time doing useless stuff like doodling in class when I should be taking notes or reading websites when I should be doing homework. My way of gauging how much I like a class is to look through my notes and see how many pages are covered in random scribblings. My biology notebook from freshman year had such drawings on more than half of its pages (I abhorred that class). My English notes from last year didn’t have a single one. My calculus notes this year have dozens. I don’t even like to draw.

Whenever I start to drift away from my studies to read an article online or play a video game or whatever, I always wonder why I do useless things like that when I could be doing something that I truly enjoy or that has real meaning for me (like, say, blogging). I think it’s because neutral things like doodling and reading websites feel like empty, excusable distractions. Blogging or writing code or reading a book would be much better, but they represent a conscious change in activity. Instead of being distracted from my work, I’m doing something else entirely. I dunno why my mind still seems to consider a two-hour game of Civilization 4 as a “distraction,” but things like that still fall into that category.

One of the few things that’s both meaningful and purposeful is my work on my school newspaper, but I’m becoming disillusioned with that as well. When I signed up as a member of the design editing team last year, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. When I put together an entire issue in a weekend (during which I also went to Six Flags and a Chiefs game) because no one else had done any work on it, I thought I was just doing what anyone in my situation would have done. When I continued to put ten to fifteen hours of work, and sometimes more, into each and every issue after that, I kept convincing myself that I didn’t have a choice, that I had committed myself to this effort and I had to see it through. Each time I wondered a little bit more why I was the only one who seemed to feel that way, but the writing and photography and editing improved ever-so-slightly in each issue, so I just pushed those thoughts aside. This year has been different, however. There are less writers and therefore less decent articles to publish. Our best photographer graduated, and though the replacement is nearly as good, he has a tendency to randomly not submit any pictures for an issue. There doesn’t seem to be any concentrated editing effort, and articles get sent to me for placement and formatting with simple typos and grammar errors. I know I shouldn’t expect perfection, but these problems are still maddening. I have the sense that my heart simply isn’t in it anymore, and it shows just like my apathy about my classes: the first two issues missed their original publication dates by an average of nine days, and the current issue looks like it might be late too. Last year, we didn’t miss a single date.

When I look at various parts of my life individually, I wonder why I’m stalling out on them. I think, “Well, I’ve had to deal with worse circumstances - I need to just plow onward like I’ve always done.” And truthfully, none of my problems alone seem bad enough to warrant my reactions to them: not doing homework, slacking off on newspaper work, etc. But altogether, they contribute to the overall feeling of being slowly worn down, eroded away like a mountain that was once full of fire and rumbling and shot upward toward the limitless sky but is now cool, quiet, and eaten away by wind and water, the tectonic plates motionless underneath. My first thought upon recognizing my slow decline into meaninglessness is that I just need to redouble my efforts. Just keep redoubling, I think, and I’ll pull through. Just keep going; it doesn’t matter where I end up - at least I’ll be finished.

For the end of all things is indeed nigh, but I wonder whether the outcome I’m hoping for is worth the effort. So I’ll get an extra piece of paper when I graduate for doing IB, but what will that paper mean? It won’t mean success. In my usual arrogance I’ve never once thought that I might not get my IB diploma, so it won’t be a reward for two years of impossible effort. I will have simply done what I always expected that I would do. So I guess it won’t really mean much of anything. Sure, it will be a useful thing to have, but not meaningful.

Now, all I do is look forward. I’m lucky in that I know I’ll be going to college somewhere, although I still don’t know where I’ll specfically be yet. Life will be better then, or so I am told. My experiences over the summer should be proof that college will be far better than high school, but I am ever the skeptic. I hope so…it would be nice to have something to live for again.

The robot-to-human-transformation obviously never happened.

I am a terrible blogger. It’s been five weeks since the last entry! Sure, I have many excuses, but you’d think that at one point or another over that lengthy and busy period I’d be able to sit down for an hour and hammer out an entry. As I always say, I can’t promise that the next entry won’t be another five weeks down the line, but I’ll try to do better in the future. Somehow my posting average is still once per 4.8 days, meaning that I had way too much time on my hands back when I began this blog just before starting high school.

I still have a hard time getting over this idea that in less than a year I’ll be gone from high school for good. Even with the upheaval that occurred during my sophomore year, the past four years have still been a fairly stable, somewhat happy time for me, and stepping into the unknown of college and adulthood remains a bit intimidating, even after the glorious weeks I spent at Stanford. In case you didn’t notice while reading my long and whiny lamentations about my sorry life after moving here, I don’t really like change all that much once I’m content with my current situation, though it seems like I usually handle them well (with the move to Wisconsin being the one glaring exception). Thankfully, I’m rapidly losing the few things I once liked about high school, so by the time June rolls around I’m sure I’ll be itching to leave.

It could be the senioritis getting to me, but I feel as if I’m getting progressively stupider. I feel sluggish, out-of-practice, over-the-hill, washed-up, et cetera. The weird thing about it, though, is that I don’t feel burned-out, like I feared I might be toward the end of last year. I’ve actually been working harder in school this year than I did last year, usually. But for some reason, my hard work no longer seems to yield the excellent results that it once did. I guess it kind of began in the last week of the last school year, when I turned in a rough draft of an English paper that was more than a little bit rough. It was incomplete, badly organized, and it basically sucked. I felt ashamed to put my name on it and submit it to a teacher who I’d never had before and who would probably use this piece of writing to gauge my abilities in anticipation of having me as a student this year. But I was so exhausted from all the other end-of-year crap that I’d been through, I just couldn’t put forth any more effort to make it better. So I turned in my crap and didn’t really think about it for the next three months. During that time, I enjoyed the breath of fresh air that was the first few weeks of summer after a harrowing school year, went to Stanford and had more fun in eight weeks than I’d had in the past two years, and neglected my summer homework. When I came back down to earth, I read most of my required summer reading and started school again, figuring that things would quickly return to the way that they were last year. I got my crappy paper back on the first or second day with a tape on which the teacher had recorded his comments - I still haven’t listened to it yet.

I was right about the “returning to last year’s horribleness” thing. About three weeks into this term, I was already staying up until two, three, even five or six in the morning in order to finish all my homework, work-work, and newspaper-design-work. The first time I was faced with a long night like that, I thought, “Well, I did it most of last year - what’s to keep me from doing it again this year? I can handle it.” And so I pulled the near-all-nighter - several of them, actually, in rapid succession - and when things returned to normal I realized that there was no way that I could keep doing that. I can barely express in words the feelings that those weeks would spawn, feelings whose sharpness had been dullened by months of sleeping eight or ten hours a night. Sometimes I’d walk around in a robotic stupor, other times I’d feel sort of “high” and abnormally happy, but usually all I felt was a kind of muted anger at myself mixed with deep frustration with the circumstances that had led me to lose so much sleep. Always it was accompanied with a sharp increase in morbid thoughts and random joking utterances about suicide. Looking back, I’m not so sure it was always a joke.

I don’t think it was the momentary dark mood that made me so depressed and unhappy during that week and during similar weeks and months last year. I think it was the idea that this was rapidly becoming more regular than irregular and that there wasn’t much hope of it ever coming to an end. But, as of about a week ago, I’m done. I’m tired of sacrificing my health (physical, spiritual, and especially mental) for a few silly markings on a piece of paper. I’m not saying this from the point of view of someone who has always struggled to get good grades and has now decided to give up - I’ve been to the top, and I stood there unchallenged for a good six years. From fourth grade through tenth, in every class I was a member of, there seemed to be no one who could surpass my grades across the board in all classes. There were several who came close: back in seventh grade I remember a girl who tried to beat me in social studies and English with grades of 114% and 110%, respectively. (The teacher gave extra credit liberally.) I came back with a 124% in social studies and a 114% in English. I can’t believe I was ever proud of that.

I also can’t believe that I earned such sky-high grades in middle school and yet never was I offered a place in an accelerated program, nor was I advised to skip a grade. (That’s Arizona public education, for you.) Though I probably never would have wanted to do something that would tear me away from my friends back then, I wonder now if I wouldn’t have been much better off if I had been challenged to my fullest earlier on. I think I got lazy after a while. I began to expect that I could always get As with only a little bit of work. Sadly, that expectation wasn’t challenged until the first semester of my sophomore year when I took AP European History. Until then, even honors classes in which I was getting extra individual instruction (English) weren’t really challenging me. I would often jokingly complain to my friends that an essay that I’d turned in was a complete piece of crap, yet the teacher had still given it an A+. Back then, I didn’t think much of it. But now, I see just how bad that was for me. The problem, I think, was that my work was always judged either against the baseline standard or against the work of my peers. So when I turned something in that truly blew both standards away (sorry for the lack of modesty, here), the teacher would scrawl their 100% on the cover and hand it back with few comments other than “Great Job!” or “Nice work!” What I needed, however, was a real assessment of how good my work was, according to a college-level standard that I could never hope to meet in 9th and 10th grade. I needed to fail.

But, although one or two papers got less-than-stellar grades (an A-, oh no!) in AP European History, and I began to see that my writing was far from perfect, I never got that crushing F that would have jolted me out of my arrogance and put me in my place. Then came Wisconsin, with its top-ranked education system. Suddenly, I had to work for my grades. Not so much in English or social studies or other liberal artsy subjects, but definitely in math and science. In chemistry and physics, I struggled to keep an A- for pretty much the duration of both classes. I was better in math, yet not as perfect as I once was. I could feel a slow slippage beginning to take place. I got into the IB program, and everything became tougher. I still had my enviable grades, but I had to spend more and more time on school in order to keep them. School wasn’t the only thing I did (I had to have other activities in order to get CAS hours for my IB diploma), but it was close to it.

Now we come to this year, my final year, the one in which I’m supposed to shirk some schoolwork and actually have some fun or do what I want to do every once in a while. Yet it’s also looking as if it could be the hardest thus far. I feel like suddenly the classes that I once liked have become tiresome and difficult, and the classes that I’ve always hated or felt neutral toward are slowly killing me. In English, I now have to pay attention to literary devices rather than basing my ideas strictly around symbolism or historical analysis. In history, we beat our topics to death early and barely cover the events that occur toward the end of the time periods we study. We spent a good two weeks on both the causes of the Mexican Revolution and the causes of World War I, yet in neither did we talk much about what actually happened during each conflict, nor did we cover their effects on their respective countries or (most importantly) their impact on the US. Even worse, I’ve studied both topics in depth in earlier courses. In Spanish, I’ve become almost incapable of speaking anything coherent, though my writing continues to improve. In TOK, my presentations never seem to pass muster because I still have a lot of contempt for all the semi-idiotic TOK jargon that we’re supposed to incorporate. And then there’s calculus…ah yes, dear calculus. In my dumb arrogance I thought that I could handle the jump from pre-calculus to AP Calculus BC (IB Math HL), one that I had to make because of changes in the curriculum for IB Math SL. The result? A difficult-to-move B in the class and Cs on both of the tests we’ve taken so far. Cs! Twice! In a row! Part of me screams, “This is not me! I am not a C student! What the hell is wrong with me?” I have no idea what my problem is, but I really don’t care that much about fixing it this time around. I’ll put in all the effort that I can, but I’m tired of feeling crappy about getting a bad grade even when I know that I’ve done all that I could to learn the material.

In the past my mantra has always been, “Try your hardest and be content with the result, no matter what it may be. Feel happy in the knowledge that you did all that you could.” It was a stupid mantra for a long time, though, because I never really had to be worry about anything beyond the first comma. In school, the result was always good. Now, though, I really have to come to terms with it. I have to look at it a second time and realize that I’ve finally reached a stage where the whole thing applies. In the past, I could base my happiness with my work on the result because it was nearly always positive. But now, I’m taking a page from the IB gods’ book. It’s not the end result that matters, in most cases. It’s the effort that goes into it, the process that achieves the result, however good or bad it may be. The IB diploma program is similar: they care more that you accepted the challenge and did your best to meet it than whether or not you excelled in the program. The standards for actually obtaining a diploma are surprisingly low considering the rigor of the program’s courses. Sure, failure, or Cs in calculus, or teetering A-s in physics and chemistry, is never pleasant. But can it really be called a failure when you’ve done everything in your power to try to make it a success?

Well, I’d better stop. A history paper beckons. Until recently, I hated doing papers or preparing for presentations. I didn’t really dislike the assignments themselves, just the act of doing them. But when the grade is out of the picture, I feel inspired to try harder, for my own benefit. It’s strange that a system that would appear to spur students into working harder and learning more can have such an opposite effect on me. I think I actually want to write this thing. I want to make it good. I want to be a student again, not a machine.

The robot to human transformation is nearly complete.

It’s been three weeks now since I left Stanford, and I wish I could lie and say that I don’t miss it at all, that nothing reminds me of it and I’ve been trying hard to forget that I was ever there. I wish I hadn’t eaten of the forbidden fruit and cast myself out of sheltered childhood, the Garden of Eden. And yet…I know that I would never have forgiven myself had I not gone, and now I can barely get over the fact that I had to come back. But, unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and it’s not as if the past few weeks have been uneventful.

The first few days after returning home were strange. I felt as if I’d woken up from a dream only to realize that I preferred the dream reality over the one into which I had awoken. It was a shocked, dazed feeling, a numbness that kept me depressed even though I felt I had come to terms with the idea of coming home and continuing normal life. In a vain attempt to distract myself from the emptiness within me, I played video games. A lot of them. For a long time…hours and hours on end. And when not gaming I generally sat around and did nothing productive. It kind of sucked.

Making things worse was the anxiety stemming from my parents’ pressure on me to hurry up and get my stupid driver’s license already. Originally, I was going to be able to take the test before I went to Stanford, but that fell through, so after a few nervous and error-filled practice runs with my dad and my driving instructor, I drove with my mom to the Watertown DMV early in the morning on my first Friday home. I was nervous; way too nervous. I guess after all the delays and classes and behind-the-wheels and other annoyances, I wanted to just get my license and be done with it all. When it was finally time for the road test, I had calmed myself considerably by deciding that I would consider the test a success as long as I met my personal goal of not hitting anything. If I failed, I could always take it again, but hitting something would be…bad. So I got behind the wheel with this in mind, drove the nice test lady around for a while, made a bunch of dumb mistakes that I rarely make while actually driving and not just performing for someone else, and passed the test without too many points off.

And so I was happy. Except it was a weird kind of happiness, a sort of socially in-bred happiness that you only feel because you know you’re supposed to feel it. Because, truthfully, for me, the disadvantages of being able to drive still outweigh the benefits. I know driving is a life skill and a key part of becoming an adult and something that I will be glad to be able to do in the future, but right now, I don’t really care for it at all. In order to have a nice piece of plastic in my pocket with my name and picture on it and a semi-nice hunk of metal in front of the house with a key to turn it on, I have to pay $100/month (gas + 1/2 insurance) and be my younger brother’s personal chauffeur as well as my parents’ official errand-runner. In return, I have been granted the ability to cart myself to and from school (to the detriment of the environment) and drive anywhere I please, within reason. To some (especially adults reading this who probably think I’m whining over nothing), this probably sounds like a sweet deal. To me, it sounds like I’m doing a lot for something that I won’t get much out of in the short term. In the week since I’ve started driving regularly, I’ve never driven anywhere but school. I haven’t even gotten gas, mainly because at my atrocious 15 miles per gallon I can drive to and from school every day until the end of January without having to refill my tank. This driving pattern might change once I start having to do more things for my parents and family, but right now it doesn’t seem likely that there will be any destinations to which I’ll want to drive anytime soon. (I have no Friends in Wisconsin, remember, only friends.) I feel like someone has just joyfully announced that I’ve worked hard and finally earned the right to be sold into indentured servitude, and I can only grin and shake their hand unless I want to appear ungrateful. Sure, that’s overdoing it, but don’t forget my tendency toward the dramatic.

One would think that getting my license would be enough “excitement” for a week or so, but a few other important events occurred as well. Over the following weekend, I was able to find out my score on the IB Physics SL exam online. I don’t remember ever writing about it, but this test was death incarnate. I probably left at least a quarter of it blank, and about half of the parts that I did fill in felt like crappy, “pulling random stuff out of the air” kinds of answers. I figured that I would be lucky to get a four (the passing grade, with the highest being a seven), but that I was more likely to end up with a two, which you get just for writing your name on the front of the test, supposedly. I was about ready to jump through the window and drown myself in the nearby lake by the time I had finished. Most ironically, all this hellishness occurred at a church (the Official IBO-Approved Off-Site Testing Center™), in which the IB gods should have been powerless to act because of their being at-odds with the God god. Anyway, I learned that I didn’t really do that bad at all (surprise, surprise?), and I’d somehow managed to get a five. It was still kind of amazing anyway, especially because neither of the other two students who took the exam did better than I did, which I didn’t expect.

On the second Monday after returning from Stanford (August 28th, to put things in perspective), I got to go to work with my dad so that I could attend a meeting of IB students from my high school concerning our extended essays. I didn’t get that much out of the meeting, other than that other IB kids have a very different opinion of TOK than OHS IB kids, but I’ll mention that and the whole drama that unfolded in TOK last term in another entry. I also got to read an older extended essay on a history topic that had gotten a B, and I was kind of surprised that an essay as not-really-that-great as that one had gotten such a high grade. Right now I’m more worried about finishing my research and formulating a good in-depth thesis question than I am about the quality of my final product; for me the hardest part of writing an essay is always the process of choosing a good thesis and writing an introduction that will set a good tone for the rest of the paper, which is why entries on Organon rarely have any real thesis or structure. But then again, I don’t even have to have a draft finished until late October, so I guess I’m not that anxious about it (yet). So the meeting was kind of unnecessary, but I got some great Mexican food out of it later on when my dad and I went out for lunch.

I spent the remainder of that second week working almost non-stop for my esteemed Arizona-based employer. I got assigned to a rather important (and well-paying) job, but with that came multiple Skype calls of two hours or more (the record was four hours) during which we discussed things and I fixed bugs that my employer caught. (Calling him my employer seems awkward, but “boss” is worse.) In the back of my mind lurked the creeping worry over whether or not I would finish my summer reading on time will so many other things going on, but I had a long family trip over Labor Day to look forward to during which I figured I could get most of it done.

This trip was to my grandparents’ house in Colorado, where we would pick up my brother (who had been staying there for several weeks) and my uncle’s car, soon to be my car, and drive them home. The few days that we spent not traveling were fun and filled with games of basketball and horseshoes, but the long drive home came all too soon. My mom flew back to Chicago from Denver, so she was spared the 20 hours and 1200 miles of horrific prairie, but unfortunately I was unable to escape it. I read most of the way, driving only once for a roughly 200-mile stretch in Nebraska. This was my first prolonged experience with driving on a freeway, and it was a little on the scary side. I also managed to navigate pouring rain, construction slowdowns, and semi-heavy urban traffic without too much difficulty. I didn’t die.

We got home in the afternoon on Labor Day, the day before school started, and I spent most of the night reading and getting ready for the next day. In the morning, I rose groggily at 6:30 in the morning and drove to school for the first time. This was also the first time I had driven alone, which I found is much easier than driving with my ever-judging parents and sibling. The school wasn’t hugely different from the way it was last year, except for some new paint and a lot of new freshmen to trod over accidentally (I swear, I can’t walk anywhere anymore without stepping on one; they’re always annoyingly underfoot). I went and saw my beloved Ms. Pawlowski, my old IB English teacher, and we talked a bit about Stanford. Then I spent 45 minutes twiddling my thumbs in a study hall before my first real class, IB English. The new teacher was Mr. Meyers, a somewhat weird but exceedingly funny man who was the supervisor for the Writing Center tutoring program last year. His sarcastic brand of humor produces awkwardness sometimes, but it’s really funny once you’re used to it.

The second “new” teacher was for IB History of the Americas, someone who wasn’t really new to me because he’s also my extended essay supervisor. As a teacher, he’s not bad, but he seems a little on the boring side compared to some I’ve had. Luckily, I don’t need a wacky teacher to make history exciting for me. With the first two teachers, we (”we” being myself and the other IB kids) had expected a change of instructors, but the teacher of our third class, IB Spanish, came as a surprise. Instead of the sorta-okay-but-nice Mrs. Mailander, we had the really-great-and-nice-but-tough Mrs. Chaussée, who I had as a junior. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to stay for all of Spanish because I got randomly summoned to the front office. When I was first given the note, I figured that it probably had something to do with my schedule or some other first-day business, but it turned out that I was way off. My counselor smiled a bit wider than normal at me as I came into his office, which I was unable to interpret as good or bad. It turned out to be good: the school had been recently notified that I was a National Merit Semi-Finalist, the only one from my graduating class. According to the counselor, OHS had a semi-finalist last year, but usually there’s only one every two to three years, so this was kind of a big deal to the administration people, who seem to be watching my every move lately. Obviously, I was elated at this news; it kind of made my day/week. My parents were as well - relatives were notified, congratulations were given, etc. I have about a 90% chance (according to the information packet) of becoming a National Merit Finalist (it’s all contingent on my grades, an essay about myself, and a recommendation from a teacher), which then makes me a stronger candidate for scholarships, such as a $2500 grant from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation and other random monies from corporations and universities who decide that they like me. It’s a good award to get.

I once wrote fairly often about feeling that my life didn’t have much of a direction, that I was in school for no real reason except because it was all I knew how to do and all I really cared about. I talked a lot about how I just wanted some kind of concrete goal to shoot for, a proverbial candlestick over which to proverbially jump. After Stanford, it became obvious to me that my primary goal in life was now to get into Stanford, or at least into a similarly good college where I could be happy. Now that I’ve been nmsfed, it seems that the golden equation is now: acceptance at Stanford + National Merit Scholar award = ticket to Heaven (the über-indulgence). Or something like that.

Must sleep now, school tomorrow. Will write more soon. Then may start using pronouns again. Maybe.

BTW: The title refers to the Barenaked Ladies song “One Week.” I know it’s a stupid title. Sorry. Also: el blog is now just over 250,000 words long. Yay for statistics.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and my summer at Stanford is no exception. Though we still have over a week left before going home on August 20, a feeling of depression lingers in the air already. No one, in my house at least, is looking forward to returning home, though we all miss our home towns whether we like to admit it or not.

This foreboding aura settled upon us much earlier than one might expect because of a terrible and seemingly impossible event that occurred last week. As I mentioned before, each house has four mentors who are current Stanford students that are supposed to act as counselors for kids on their floor. In recent weeks, however, these “counselors” have become more like friends, older brothers and sisters who we looked up to and could hang out with whenever we felt like it without it feeling awkward. For the guys in my house, Eucalipto, the mentor who did the most to help us and befriend us was a guy named Cole, a sophomore originally from Phoenix. Almost everyone on my floor can think of some incident where we needed something and Cole was there to help, or some happy moment that only happened because Cole was there. We spent a lot of late nights watching unedited, unrated movies and the World Cup soccer games in his room. Considering that most college kids would probably hate to have “little” high schoolers hanging around all the time, Cole’s awesomeness toward us was amazing.

Last week wasn’t the best one ever. The weekend before, I had gone on one of my favorite trips so far, a sailing trip on a schooner on San Francisco Bay. Unfortunately, that goodness didn’t last. There was a CS assignment due that Thursday that I had to really work hard to finish on time, and my tiredness because of that assignment caused me to sleep through one of my word roots classes again on Tuesday. Though the instructor still didn’t really care that my roommate and I hadn’t come, he told us that we couldn’t miss any more classes. So Wednesday night, with a can’t-miss word roots class looming in the morning, I took the intelligent route and pulled an all-nighter. Mostly, I was just playing the open-source game Tremulous with some friends on the computers in our cluster, but I somehow finished the homework in that time, too.

At about four in the morning, the unthinkable happened. A random person walked in and asked if we had heard about the mentors. We said that we hadn’t, and so they explained that some of the mentors had been caught drinking at a party held in our dining hall weeks ago and that those mentors would be forced to move out by 5:00 PM on Friday. Worse, it wasn’t just a few mentors that were being kicked out; ten out of the 23 mentors residing at Lagunita would be leaving. And to top it all off, two of those ten mentors were from Eucalipto: Cole, and a mentor from the girls’ floor named Rose. I was shocked, to say the least. I thought that maybe I was so tired that I had begun to hallucinate, or that I had fallen asleep somewhere and this was all just a really bad dream. But it was all true, and I didn’t know what to think.

I still felt kind of numb when I went to breakfast with my fellow Tremulous players at about 7:30. We ate normally, and then I went and crashed in my room for an hour or so before word roots. By the time I got to class with my roommate, only a few minutes late, the numbness had been replaced with exhaustion, and I was reminded of why I had sworn to myself after last year’s three all-nighters that I’d never let my schoolwork get to the point where I had to pull one ever again. This time, though, I just felt stupid, because this all-nighter wasn’t caused by anything; it was a choice, and a bad one. I came really, really close to falling asleep in word roots, but thankfully we played a game where we make up new words using prefixes, roots, and suffixes that we’ve learned over the summer. Having to actually talk and write things was enough to keep me from nodding off.

When I got back to Lag for lunch, I couldn’t sleep because some documentation for my CS homework beckoned. I finished it just in time to submit it electronically before the deadline and walk quickly to lecture to turn in the paper copy. That was one of the most painful classes I’ve ever sat through; I was nodding off every 30 seconds, much to the amusement of a friend sitting next to me. At the very end, I actually went to sleep for about three seconds, and somehow that was long enough to have a short dream in which one of the CS instructors was in a darkened room carrying a chocolate birthday cake with lit candles toward me. It was kind of weird.

I finally stumbled back into my room at about 2:15, literally falling onto my mattress (which is still conveniently located on the floor). I slept deeply for four and a half hours, getting up only because I had to go to my CS discussion section at 7:00. After that, because I had missed lunch and dinner, I went by a Mexican restaurant at the student union and got a massive burrito, which I carried back to Lag and ate in Cole’s room while he and Rose talked about random things with some of the other kids from my floor. Eventually, I wandered back down the hall to our lounge, where some of the girls were preparing a “banquet” for our fallen heroes. I helped put up some balloons, a small offering of bowls of candy was placed on an altar-like table in the middle of the room, and Eucs began to gather. Once everyone was there, Cole and Rose stood on a raised area of the lounge where there’s a piano and a kitchenette with all of their “kids” standing around them in a rough circle. A few people gave little speeches about things that Cole or Rose had done for them or experiences that they had had because of Cole or Rose’s work, and the sadness in the air was replaced by some of the joy of remembering happier moments earlier in the summer. Then, we presented them with our parting gifts: a longboard (skateboard) paid for and signed by all of the Eucalipto guys for Cole, and a gift certificate to a Palo Alto clothing store for Rose from the girls. You could tell at that point that even the ever-cool Cole was getting a little worked up, especially when he and Rose gave their little speeches of appreciation and thanks for a great summer while apologizing for the behavior that had caused them to be kicked out. At that point, though, we didn’t care about the apologies; we had had six weeks to discover how great our mentors were, and we weren’t going to let one incident change what we thought of them. The “banquet” ended with all of us getting into a circle and singing “Lean on Me” while the song played in the background. Even with two weeks left, it felt like the summer had ended already.

The next day, Friday, I slept a lot and in the afternoon went out to the parking lot to hang out with Cole for one last time with a bunch of other people while he packed his stuff into his car. All sorts of random things happened, such as making a circle of people environmentalist-style around his car so that he couldn’t leave. We decided that we would meet Cole that night at a pizza restaurant in Palo Alto, just to show that even if he wasn’t our mentor anymore, he was still our friend and always would be. The pizza wasn’t that great (you could literally have wrung it out like a washcloth and gotten about a pint of liquid grease out of it), but it was fun just being there with all my Friends and Cole and Rose. When I got back to Lag, we had a subdued mattress party and ended up going to sleep at a more normal 3 AM.

The weekend was really nothing special; I went on a trip to NASA’s Ames Research Center which turned out to not be so great, but a Friend was there, so it wasn’t so bad. (If you haven’t caught on by now, Friend = someone I really know and like, and friend = just someone I sort of hang out with sometimes.) I bought some freeze-dried ice cream and immediately regretted it once I had bitten off a chunk; it tastes like what regular ice cream might taste like if you left it to melt and become lukewarm in a bowl and then drank it like chocolate milk. Saturday night was more fun, though: my Friend and I set up a Tremulous server on his dual-core laptop and invited five or six other Eucs to join our game. It was pretty fun, though I kept getting pwned badly. If you ever see a server on the Internet list named “Stanford” between now and August 20, that’s probably us, so join in and have some fun with random people you don’t know.

So far, this week hasn’t been incredibly eventful. The return to high school looms ever closer, so I’m getting more and more worried about finishing my summer homework on time. I haven’t really done much of anything as far as extended essay research goes, and I still have some books to read for English and TOK and some chapters to study for math. On top of that is web development work for my Arizona-based client (for whom most of my work is done) and continuing work on some of the hardest programming for Sangre and Gabo so that my newspaper management thingy will hopefully be ready in time to be live for the second issue. I also should be working on college applications (especially for a certain school that has a name starting with “S”) and such, but it’s been difficult to think about that with everything else that’s been going on. And I obviously want to get As in all of my classes, so I still have a lot of homework and quizzes to work on in between the other crapola. Next week will be especially horrible because of finals on the last two days of the session, so it’s quite possible that I won’t find time to write again until after I get back to Wisconsin. I hope that doesn’t happen, but you know how bad I can be about posting in a timely manner.

At this point I could go on and on about how much it will suck to leave Stanford, explaining exactly why and to what magnitude the suckiness will extend, but unfortunately some word roots homework is staring angrily at me. I’m sure I’ll be full of complaininess in the next entry, especially if I don’t write it until I get home. Until then…bye.