Brettia

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!

The newspaper thing is improving a bit. I emailed some suggestions to my supervisor and much has been done to better edit articles. That’s great, but now I’m loaded with homework, so the issue’s been delayed a bit since our timeliness is basically contingent upon whether or not I am able to work on the layout. I gotta work on building up the team a bit…especially since I’ll be gone next year. Anyway, I’m pseudo-liveblogging tonight while I work on the paper. It’s coming along fairly well; most of the pages at least have stuff on them, but there’s a lot of tidying up left to do.

I’m listening to a station I made on Pandora, which you really should try if you haven’t discovered it yet. The song it’s playing right now kinda sucks…where’s that skip button…. Yeah, anyway, I’m working on the Sports and Clubs section right now, mainly because it’s been kinda crappy all year because no one seems to want to write articles for it this time around (last year it was one of the better sections). It’s looking a bit better in this issue though; we’ve got two good articles on FCCLA, a new club at my school. I went with the ever-awesome wrap-around text effect around the FCCLA logo, so that page looks fairly good, though there aren’t many pictures. Maybe I’ll flip it to the other side of the fold so that the other page in the section (which should have more photos) will be the primary page…hmm….

Okay, so now I’m on that other page…I think “Jerred’s Journal,” a soon-to-be monthly thingy about a student who’s training to be an Olympic skier will go at the bottom…in a nice box. Yes, boxes are always good. I think I’ll use a little journal image next to the main heading to set it off a bit more.

That looks pretty good…I just finally figured out how to do rounded corners in InDesign - there’s an option under Object -> Corner Effects… that will do them. Maybe I’ll round off some other things too…hmm…. Next up, the top half of this page.

That basically finishes this page off…just needs a picture for that big empty splotch in the middle of the chess article - that might be a problem, but we have timid freshman for these things…. I’m still not sure whether I like the rounded corners thing or not. It seems okay; it softens the somewhat harsh font choices…but it also kinda clashes with other, less curvy design elements. I guess this can be the “pilot issue” for that - er, feature. Onward!

Oh, one other thing…headlines. Few of our writers seem to be able to write good ones. I can’t blame them; after spending your academic career writing titles for papers and such in a certain way you wouldn’t be all that good at writing newspaper-style headlines unless you read the news often. But still…I tire quickly of writing them myself, mainly because sometimes the ones I come up with really aren’t very good, and secondly because writing a decent headline often requires me to read the whole article to get an idea of what it’s saying first. After a while I start to get exasperated and I begin playing around with them…one of last issue’s headlines was, “Sales from sugary snacks support sweet scholarships for some OHS seniors.” Yay for alliteration! Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone notices these things unless I point them out to them….

Yay, a chunk of a page in the Entertainment section. I’m thinking that due to a dearth of good entertainment articles I might have to divide this page between Entertainment and Sports and Clubs. Hmm…decisions, decisions. Yay for (almost) total editorial control!

Ugh, my music just turned crappy. Pandora hasn’t been trained very well on this station; I think I messed it up by thumbs-upping some songs that didn’t really fit that well. Back to iTunes, then.

Ugh again, someone submitted an article that just randomly started Microsoft-Works-ing all over the carpet. There’s WPS everywhere. All over the walls! Oh God…lead me to the magical Save dialog so that I can destroy this atrocity once and for all! *sighs contentedly* Much better…now it’s been happily converted to a Word document. Well, c’mon, at least it’s kind of an improvement. At least it’s not an oxymoron. Don’t bash Word, you know you use it too! Even you OpenOffice people - you know in your soul that it’s not as good! Don’t wave your Java-bloated semi-open-source office suitey goodness at me!

Well, it’s 12:30 and if I don’t shower and go to sleep now I’ll probably be dead in the morning, so I guess I’m finished for tonight. Above is the second half of that Entertainment / Sports and Clubs page. Not my favorite of all layouts, but it’ll work, I guess. Maybe tomorrow night I’ll blog some more about the other pages. Until then…peace out, homies. (Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. I know you’re just jealous because I’m so much more street than you are. I got skillz, baby.)

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.

I’m not really sure where to begin this one. It’s been about three weeks since the last time I blogged, and so much has happened since then that it’s hard to synthesize it all into something coherent. Last time I posted, I was in the middle of my seventh week at Stanford, and even though my spirits were somewhat dampened by the departure of one of our more beloved mentors, I (and everyone else, I think) still wanted to make sure that the summer ended on a good note. However, at the same time, finals loomed on the horizon, making everyone a little bit more intensely focused on their work than normal. It was all very weird…new mentors popped up to replace those who had left, and though they were cool, things weren’t the same. Meanwhile, the trips and activities were winding down, and there were new restrictions on where we went and when to make sure that we were spending most of our time preparing for finals. It wasn’t really the best way for us to end the short time we had together, but there were some good moments.

The weekend before finals week, my roommate, two other Eucaliptolites, and I all went on one of the last organized trips of the summer, a trip up to San Francisco to see a Titanic exhibition. It turned out to be a little more than just a trip…among other things, we did the following:

1. Ate bagels in Palo Alto after missing our scheduled 9:30 AM CalTrain.
2. Saw lots of cool Titanic artifacts, a scale replica of the grand staircase, a model iceberg created by condensing water vapor out of the air and freezing it, and lots of information about the passengers.
3. Went downstairs to the PlayStation store (the exhibition was on the top floor of the Metreon, a downtown mall) and gawked at gory video games.
4. Almost ate lunch as a group at Denny’s, but then (thankfully) veered across the street to a slightly less greasy and slightly more expensive diner-like establishment.
5. Ordered ten-dollar hamburgers after being told by our lead mentor to keep our tabs under $10 (including drinks and such) because we felt the need to exact vengeance on her for her poor restaurant choice (especially in San Francisco).
6. Broke off from the group and went to a BART station, where we put the lowest amount of money possible on our tickets and went to Oakland “for the heck of it.” (We’d been told we had an hour before we had to be back at the San Francisco CalTrain station.)
7. Realized on the way back to San Francisco that we would have to run from the BART station to the CalTrain station (about two miles away) in order to make it.
8. Were delayed in the station when our tickets didn’t work because we had tried to cheat the system (leaving from and coming back to the same station != a free ride - let me assert right now that this was not my idea).
9. Had to chuckle silently while the mastermind of our foiled plan, Tim, tried (and failed miserably) to lie to the lady in the ticket window.
10. Escaped the BART station with no time left, walked a mile down Market St. before realizing that we were going to miss our CalTrain.
11. Called the mentor and told her we’d take the BART to Milbrae, where we could get on CalTrain and meet up with our group.
12. Walked 1.5 miles back up Market, passing the first BART station we saw because we didn’t want to encounter the ticket window lady again.
13. Took BART back the other direction (southwest) and then further southward, realizing about halfway to Milbrae that we weren’t going to catch the CalTrain there, either.
14. Got off BART at San Francisco International Airport, for no reason whatsoever.
15. Got back on BART and took it to Milbrae, the next station.
16. Waited there for the next CalTrain.
17. Got on that train and fell asleep, nearly resulting in an unscheduled “trip” to San Jose. (Luckily, we were awoken five minutes before our stop by the sound of people clapping; the engineer had announced over the PA system that there was someone on board who was celebrating a year of being cancer-free.)
18. Got off the train in Palo Alto and went to California Pizza Kitchen, where fellow Eucs and Cole awaited us for dinner. (Getting home three hours later than we were scheduled to worked out for us after all.)

And that was our big “adventure,” as Tim calls it. Later that night, he and Kyle (my roommate) wanted me to come with them to Walnut Creek, again on the BART, to see Kyle’s girlfriend, who was staying there for a few days at a church retreat. I declined, having ridden enough public transportation for one day. Dinner was great, with everyone in our little group of Eucalipto happiness in attendance. I got back to the dorm fairly late, just when other people were leaving their rooms all dressed up for a semi-formal being held in the dining hall. I found Garrett in his room and Linuxed happily for a while, and then two other Eucs, Bill and Khanh-anh (I know I misspelled it…sorry…) walked in with a copy of “The Shawshank Redemption” and asked if we wanted to go watch it somewhere.

Our lounge TV was occupied by a group of kids having an anti-semi-formal, so we decided to try to find a classroom somewhere that was still open where we could watch it on a bigger screen. After spending a few minutes throwing citruses (citri?) at each other outside the bookstore, we found one. I won’t say exactly where, or the exact circumstances by which we got in (it was 11:30 PM), only that the door was open and the lights were on…can you tell I’m not sure we should have been there? Anyway, we had to leave early to avoid breaking curfew, but it was great to watch the movie on such a huge screen after having to squint at people’s tiny laptop screens when watching previous movies.

After finishing the movie back at the dorm, it was about 2:00 AM - time for a mattress party. It was our last real Saturday before the end of the session, so it got pretty wild. At one point, Garrett was in a tree outside the window (after almost breaking our screen in order to get out the window and into the tree) waving at some girls in the room above us. Later on, I was holding on to Garrett’s feet so that Tim could suck his toes. Er…yeah…sometimes things happen at mattress parties that really can’t be explained later on. Anyone who saw the YouTube videos of the first one know exactly what I mean. (Tim was the raving drunk in those clips, by the way.)

Eventually our party was cut short by the girls upstairs, who came down to bitch at us at about three. I can understand being mad about our loudness on just about any other day, but it was the last Saturday night (well, Sunday morning, actually) of the session. Being the cuddly giant intellectual teddy bear made of awesome that I am (not a title I gave myself, I promise), I didn’t bitch back at them…I think maybe I should have.

The rest of the week wasn’t that interesting. I became increasingly worried about finals with each passing day, even though I had already calculated that I could get as low as a 75% on my CS final and still have an A in the class, and my roommate and I had been given an extra 5% boost on our final exam grades in word roots for placing second in a class tournament. There was a lot of other end-of-summer stuff to worry about as well, like picking up the random dishes and trash littering the floors of our rooms (some of the stuff in my room had been there for at least three weeks). The dining hall staff also threw us an end-of-summer banquet, where we ate good food and watched the current mentors be recognized for their great work in making our summer fun.

On the last Thursday of the summer, Kyle and I awoke at 10:15. On any other day, this would be no big deal, but today we had word roots at 10:00. Not only that, but we had missed class twice before and been warned that missing another one would result in some kind of consequences. To make things worse, our take-home final exam was going to be handed out that day. Opening my eyes and seeing the time on the clock on the floor in front of me gave me the worst feeling of dread I’d had in a long time. My stomach churned. My heart pounded. Inside, I was berating myself for not waking up when the alarm had gone off. Kyle looked equally unhappy. So we got up and walked as quickly as we could toward the classroom in our sleeping clothes (conveniently, the class was in a building all the way across campus), knowing that we’d be at least half an hour late. But someone smiled upon us that day, because we met some of our classmates returning early to the dorm, and they told us that there had been no real class; the instructor had just handed out the exams and let everyone go, sending exams for Kyle and myself along with someone who lived down our hall. I breathed a sigh of relief, but the bad feeling in the pit of my stomach lingered for the rest of the day, punishment for missing class that intolerable third time.

Resolving to do well on the final so as to not feel as guilty, I studied hard for word roots on Thursday and Friday and took the exam on Friday night. It was hard…painfully hard. There were lots of roots that we hadn’t studied in detail in class, and I found myself guessing often, even after spending the last 30 hours doing almost nothing but studying the lists of words and roots in the textbook. I decided as I emailed the instructor my answers that even with my 5% extra credit, I was depending heavily on a favorable curve for a good grade in the class. But at that point I had no time to worry about word roots - the CS final, a grueling three-hour written exam, awaited me at noon on Saturday. I wasn’t looking forward to it, even though I knew that there was absolutely no way I would bomb it with the amount of programming experience I have.

I got up early on Saturday and went over some random programming stuff like memory mapping and the String API, and when noon came and doomsday bells rang across the countryside I walked to the examination classroom with Garrett and Richie, a ‘Nadan (from Grenada, Eucalipto’s sister house). I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t worry, yet I did anyway. I’m just a dumbass that way. Once we had been let into the classroom, I sat down and waited a painful few minutes while the exams were passed out. Finally, we had our exams and were allowed to begin. I stared at the paper for a few moments, clearing my mind, and then I flipped to the first problem. It was time-consuming, but simple. So was the next. And the one after that. I skipped the few that I felt would take some real thinking, and plowed on through to the end of the exam, where a “problem” on the last page asked us to write what we thought our instructors’ high school yearbook “most likely to…”s were for one extra credit point. Then I went back and did the few difficult problems, tidied up some of my messier work, checked things over one last time, and turned my exam in a good 45 minutes early. I was amazed…after all the anxiousness leading up to the test, I had just utterly destroyed it. It was a good feeling.

Note: At this point I’m continuing this entry (begun on August 29th) a week later. Sorry for any inconsistencies that might arise from that.

Were I in high school, the completion of the last of my exams would have left me euphoric and ready for the semester to be over. At Stanford, the feeling was completely opposite. I had a strong and strange desire not to see or talk to anyone for a while, so I walked around campus doing some last-minute errands and taking pictures on a disposable camera. After about two hours, though, I just couldn’t handle being away from everyone anymore, so I went back to the dorm and got ready for a “small” dinner gathering planned by Tim for those of us Eucs who hadn’t left yet. About thirty of us walked slowly from Lagunita across campus to the P.F. Chang’s at Stanford Shopping Center, fearing that we might have some problems with getting everyone in and seated at the same time because the initial reservation had been made for only fifteen. Luckily, we had a great waiter who was happy to put most of us together at one huge table and another smaller group of us at another table nearby. The food was good and we had a lot of fun, especially once our beloved Cole had arrived. Still, the next morning loomed over us as we ate, and I couldn’t help but think of it as a kind of “Last Supper.” Several of the girls were fighting hard to keep from breaking down in tears.

After we had eaten, two Euc boys, Joon (from Jakarta) and Thomas (from Hong Kong; the fourth kid in our group at the Titanic exhibition) had to leave in order to catch their plane flight. They got a hug and a handshake from everyone, right in the middle of the restaurant with the waiters looking worriedly at the clot we had formed near the hostess’ desk. We could tell they didn’t like it, but no one cared at that point. Once Joon and Thomas had left, we gathered together some money and paid our bill, and then we broke off into smaller groups of 10-15 and started the long walk home. After a long and eventful journey, the fellowship was finally broken. And thus began a long and torturous night of tragic disappearances.</lotr>

Nothing really occurred that final night that is worth mentioning here. Some mattresses were pulled out into the hall, and people spent their last hours talking and goofing around in a subdued sort of way. I signed about three dozen yearbooks, or at least it felt that way, and got plenty of messages from other people about what a great “giant intellectual teddy bear made of awesome” I was (that was my nickname). Being the weird kid that I am, I wrote love poems to most of the guys on my floor, most of which I can’t repeat because they got pretty inappropriate. I found at Stanford that some people really appreciate my ability to write humorously (I know, it never manifests itself on this blog, sorry…). I once had to write a letter to my roommate for one of his classes at 1:30 in the morning - I was just tired enough to be almost insane but not so tired that I’d lost my ability to write, and it turned out to be really funny, according to the few who read it. I don’t know why that matters or why I’m writing about it; maybe I’ll post the letter here someday or maybe I’ll try harder to make my entries funny (gasp!) rather than just sad or serious most of the time. I dunno.

I think I went to bed around three in the morning that night, knowing that I’d need to be semi-functional the next day in order to get my room cleaned up before my aunt and uncle arrived to pick me up at 11:00. When I awoke, I found that about two-thirds of the kids on my floor were gone, and everyone else was either packing or crying in each other’s arms. It wasn’t really a great way to end the summer, but with people leaving every fifteen minutes or so that morning, no one really knew what to do other than feel sad. I finally escaped the overwhelming tearfulness (though I didn’t cry) around 11:30, and I remember vividly the feeling of walking out the main Lagunita entrance for the last time, wondering if I’d ever see the venerable old dorm again. I was followed by three Eucs, Ahmad, Lainey, and Lily. I could see the tears in Lainey and Lily’s eyes as they hugged their “teddy bear” for one last time, and when I broke free and shook Ahmad’s hand I could see that his eyes were red and bleary too. If my aunt and uncle hadn’t been waiting for me in the parking lot, I would have just broken down then and there and let the days of pent up stress and sadness roll forth in a flood of tears, but somehow I kept my composure.

Once I was in the car and speeding away from Lag toward Palo Alto, I had to keep fighting hard to hold the tears back as my aunt and uncle asked me about the experience and all that I had done while at Stanford - remembering it all so soon just made things worse. The day wasn’t completely bad, though; we went to a good Mexican restaurant in downtown Palo Alto and then back up to my aunt and uncle’s apartment in San Francisco to lay around and watch a movie. It was a strange time…after so many weeks of doing all kinds of things almost non-stop, now I just wanted to sit there on their couch and never move again. I didn’t want to think anymore.

Night finally came, and I lay awake for a long time on a waterbed in the guest room, unable to find a good position because of the way I sank down in the middle of it. Eventually, I couldn’t take the blankness in my mind anymore, and the memories of Stanford came rushing back in. I thought of everything, from the first day of apprehension and nervousness to that last supper at P.F. Chang’s, and I finally did let the tears fall. But after only about fifteen minutes, my reserve of emotion was tapped out, and the pessimism and depression retreated. I began to think of the whole experience in a happier light as I knew I should have all along (it was too difficult to think optimistically when back when everyone else was saying their tearful goodbyes), and in the morning, I felt rejuvenated and strangely ready to leave. Though I hadn’t looked forward to it, I knew this day would come.

My uncle dropped me off with my two suitcases at a BART station (those two large bags made riding the escalators really interesting) and I rode the train southward to the airport. Once there, I hopped on the tram to my terminal, went through the security checkpoint without any problems (amazingly), and, after about an hour of waiting around, got on the plane to fly back to Milwaukee. It was a fairly long flight, but my DS Lite proved useful, distracting me from the summer reading I knew I still needed to get done. I didn’t feel the same way I did last year when I went back to Arizona…I was attached to Stanford, but in a different way. I loved my Friends and my other friends, but what I missed most was just the feeling of being there. It was so different from Wisconsin, different from Arizona, even - different from anywhere I’d ever been. People there always seemed laid back, happy, smart, nice…they were simply fun to be around. And people cared. They cared about their future, about their schoolwork, about one another. There was none of the closed-minded dumbness that one sees often in Wisconsin, or the too-rich-for-their-own-good selfish arrogance that I noticed too often in kids from Arizona. Sure, there were a few bad apples in the Stanford crowd (the students who got sent home, none of which were from Euc), but not as many as in other places. Even though the whole experience had an almost unreal feel to it, probably because it was so carefully constructed and managed and planned out (unlike real life), an aura of fakeness that every once in a while would become obvious and remind me that the whole thing was more of a simulation than a real, uncontrolled taste of college life, I felt as if over the two months that I was there I had, for once, become a real person. My year-ago-self would never have believed that such a thing could happen in only eight weeks.

So whether or not I ever get to go to Stanford “for real,” at least I’ll still be able to remember that glorious summer before my senior year of high school, the best one of my short life, and know that I learned far more important things in those eight weeks than I ever will at my real college, even if that college is Stanford. I learned (or perhaps re-learned) how to be human: I began as a robot, a drone, and I left as a teddy bear…a giant, intellectual teddy bear, made of awesome.

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.

I’m pretty sure I’ve already talked before about how I’m not exactly excited about having to eventually leave Stanford, so in my usual fashion, I’ll write about it some more. I was in the lounge a few weeks ago talking with some people, and at one point or another the subject of going home came up. We all agreed that high school was going to suck after having had a taste of freedom this summer. Things like having to get a pass to walk between classes or being told we can’t wear coats when the heaters are turned off in the middle of winter because of a “safety risk” are going to feel incredibly stupid and unnecessary (not that they aren’t that way already…but it’ll feel worse, I guess). I’ve always kind of felt that high school was far too restricted because safety policies are geared toward keeping the most immature kids in check with barely any regard to the more mature ones, but until now I’ve never had a chance to experience what life might be like in the semi-real world. I’m kind of amazed that only a month ago I was actually afraid of coming here…now it seems that that fear was just a side-effect of being over-protected by a combination of an overbearing school administration (not just at OHS, but at every school I’ve been to) and my own instincts.

What amazes me most about college life, at Stanford at least, is that people seem generally okay with being intelligent. In high school, popularity often seems to be tied directly to just how stupid one can act. Not so, here. Here, people group together in the lounge to study. They read books for fun. They have discussions about politics, business, current events, and so on. Music is rampant, yet mindless rap or pop songs are somewhat rare. People randomly play guitars, pianos, trumpets, and all sorts of instruments that I’ve never heard of at all hours of the day. It’s kind of difficult to describe the feeling of being here in one word, but terms like “eclectic” and “bohemian” come to mind. It makes me wonder if this is an aura that’s unique to Stanford or if all colleges feel this way.

It amazes me how quickly things can change here. When I wrote my last entry, I had made a lot of acquaintances but few real friends. People knew my name, but not me. It wasn’t really a bad thing; it was just earlier on in the summer and most people weren’t yet comfortable about being completely open and normal with each other. I wasn’t exactly helping my situation. After days of working on my Java version of Breakout for computer science, I lost several hours of work due to Eclipse’s lack of any undo function when deleting files, and somehow the act of redoing that work ballooned into two more days of grueling coding sessions in which I barely left the cluster. I wasn’t happy about having to do it, yet at the same time I told myself that if I truly wanted to be a programmer, I’d have to be passionate enough about it to want to code for hours on end, and somehow that kept me going. I knew in the back of my mind that I was relying on circular reasoning - not a very strong foundation - but I didn’t care all that much.

I finally turned my code in two days late (we get three extra days for situations like the one I was in), and then there was more homework to do for my other class, Greek and Latin word roots. It sucked. I got finished at around three in the morning, which ended up being slightly convenient because my mom responded almost immediately when I emailed her about some new headphones I wanted to buy. I happily collected her credit card information (over the phone) so I could order them off Amazon.com, thinking about what wonderful service I enjoyed from my parental units. I mean, a response from a qualified technician not based in India in under five minutes? Incredible! (I kid, I kid.) While on the phone, I reassured her that 3 AM was a fine time to go to bed and that I would never dream of “accidentally” sleeping through my alarm the next morning in order to get a few more hours of much-needed rest. Yet, seven hours later, that’s exactly what I did, except it really was an accident. It was one of those things where you bat dazedly at the alarm immediately after you wake up and somehow manage to turn it off completely, thinking that you’d get up after just a few more minutes, that there’s no way you’d fall back asleep again, and continuing to think these things until your eyelids finally droop closed and your breathing becomes regular and you awaken once more two hours later with your roommate snoring away above you. It was the first time I’d ever skipped class. Ever. Initially, I felt bad. I told a few people, wondering what the reaction would be. Would they recoil in horror at the lack of respect for my instructor and his class that I displayed by skipping it? Nope. Instead, they told me about X class that they had skipped and how it was “hella cool” that no one cared about whether they came or not. I love college.

Last Thursday was the day I missed class, so the only thing I had left that day was CS. It was some kind of highly boring lecture about string functions, covering material that I had mostly figured out on my own days before. The kid sitting next to me, a fellow gamer/geek named John who has recently achieved Friend status (50 relationship points, like in The Sims…hwada sofada!), fell asleep, and another recent Friend, Chris, (we noodle together), laughed with me at John’s expense until he woke up. The rest of the day was pretty boring…I don’t really remember now, but I think I slept some more, still trying to make up for lost sleep over the past week. Oh yeah, Thursday night was the night of the dreaded compsci midterm, which seemed like it would be incredibly difficult after taking the practice midterm but actually turned out (for me) to not be so bad. However, everyone else said it was horrible and they didn’t have nearly enough time, so now I’m thinking that I somehow zoned out and didn’t realize that I was failing as I took it. I’ll know by tomorrow whether or not I am worthy of continued existence.

Friday was a good day, but it was also hot. Like, way hotter than it should ever be in the Bay Area. I think the temperature broke 100 degrees every day over the weekend, and possibly on Monday too. There were blackouts in some areas because of overtaxed electrical systems (luckily, Stanford has its own power plant). I began to regret the fact that I hadn’t brought a fan since the dorm isn’t air-conditioned. Generally speaking, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. But it was made better by a neat little idea that my roommate and I had: the mattress party.

Mattress parties are very simple; anyone with a lot of mattresses can have one. Basically, we moved all of our furniture out of one of our rooms (remember, I was supposed to have a third roommate who never showed, so we have a two-room suite-thing) and into the other, and we pulled our three mattresses off the beds and put them on the floor in the cleared room. They only took up about two-thirds of the space, so we invited a few more people to donate their mattresses to our goal of covering the room with mattresses from wall to wall. It worked, and the three extra mattresses fit perfectly. Then, random people who had watched mattresses pass through the halls for about ten minutes came in and flopped down with their pillows, and it became a sleepover. A co-ed sleepover. *cue dramatic music*

We didn’t do anything too bad, though. At one point or another, a game of truth or dare was started, and poor Chris had to endure a rather embarrassing question from another Friend, Tim, who had gotten Chris to tell me and a few other people the answer in private a few days before. I laughed at him anyway, especially when he gave Tim that “I’m going to pull you apart with my bare hands” look that people get when they’re put in that sort of situation and they know exactly who has put them there.

The truth-or-daring got pretty loud at about three in the morning, so loud, supposedly, that a mentor opened the door and started yelling at us that he could hear us from out in the courtyard (a few hundred feet away through several walls). What made his tirade hilarious to all present was the fact that another mentor, Cole, the coolest of them all, was sitting the whole time in a corner of the room where the other mentor couldn’t see him. I could see Cole easily, and we looked at each other and the look on his face was enough to almost put me over the edge (pretend that wasn’t a run-on sentence, I’m in the middle of a story here). When the mentor was done and had shut the door, everyone immediately burst into fits of laughter. Unfortunately, we let go a little bit too early, and the door opened again seconds later with the furious mentor telling us that the party was over; everyone had to leave. That time, however, Cole showed himself and smoothed things over, so the party was allowed to last a little while longer before everyone fell asleep.

The next was another long, lazy, hot day, and most of us just kind of laid around, trying to stay cool. The computer cluster, usually deserted and considered a place where only the computerless people would go, became a cool place to be in more ways than one (ha ha, bad pun). It’s the only air-conditioned room in the Eucalipto part of the dorm complex, so at one point there was probably close to thirty people in there. It was kind of inconvenient for people like me who actually depend upon the cluster in order to work, and I was extremely annoyed when people with laptops started taking the network cables from the university desktops and using them for their own Internet connections, but it was also kind of nice to have people in there for once. At the same time, though, there’s such a thing as being in there too long…one kid slept there in a mess of food trash on the floor, and a few others have been in there for days, as far as I know, leaving only to sleep a few hours in their own rooms. I kept having to find reasons to abandon my homework in order to get away from them - I think I took a few more trips to the Jamba Juice at the student union than were necessary.

Saturday night was a Mix-n-Match dance party hosted by my house, and I went with a half-assed costume made out of my bed quilt. I ended up only staying there for about half an hour; I got sidetracked by another Friend, Garrett, who I was with in Monterey. Garrett happens to be interested in Linux and programming like I am, and he had the idea that we should try to create our own programmer’s Linux distro. I suggested that we base it off Gentoo, and at the moment that’s about as far as our plans have gotten. I started the bootstrapping process on his Core Duo laptop (which should make compiling extremely fast, I hope) that night, and we’re going to work on it again this weekend. We want it to be fast, light, small and runnable off of a USB drive on any computer, similar to SLAX or Knoppix. I dunno if the project will come to anything, but the fact that there’s another person who even knows what Linux is living right down the hall from me is awesome. Like I said, I love college.

Once the party had ended, at about one in the morning, Kyle (my roommate) and I decided to have a Mattress Party Redux, but with less people so it wouldn’t be quite as hot in our room. We all flopped down on the mattresses and were unsure of what we were going to do when who else but Tim staggers into the room, pretending (we hope) to be drunk. I thought he would do some quick drunken antics to be funny and then we’d resume whatever we were originally going to do at our little party, but instead he kept us rolling on the floor with laughter for a good two hours. Some videos of it ended up on YouTube…I’d recommend that you watch them, but not when anyone with sensitive ears is listening. If you don’t think it’s funny…well, maybe you just had to be there. I dunno how he kept it up for two full hours…it was a truly amazing comedic feat.

The next day, Sunday, was perhaps the hottest day of the weekend, and I ended up journeying to Jamba Juice to get about a gallon of pure smoothie goodness for my roommate and his girlfriend. They had already begun to melt during the ten minute walk from the student union to the dorm, but they were still somewhat cold…and so…good…peenya colada es mi amor. The reason I was at the student union in the first place was to receive my second round of homework grades for CS, and I found I’d done well on the second (very simple) assignment: check-pluses in both categories again. I’ve recently learned that a check-plus is closer to an A than an A-, which makes me happier, though I still want to get one of those elusive plus grades sometime this summer. Breakout might get it for functionality…I added everything I could think of, from a scoring system based on events to a powerup system to a brick counter to improved ball physics. The code wasn’t as clean as usual, though, and I employed some less-than-acceptable techniques in order to use global variables, but maybe I’ll get by with at least a plus/check-plus anyway. My section leader (who grades my homework assignments) works at Google, therefore he must be a good guy. As it turns out, it was a good idea to go to section on those nights when I doubted its usefulness.

The rest of Sunday was sort of subdued because people were thinking about and preparing for the week ahead, which for some hasn’t been a nice one. Midterms are falling all over the place for many of us, though some of the tests have been worse than others. Benne and Josh, two nearly-identical brothers from Chicago known as “the twins,” probably had the worst lot of all; their statistics test had questions on it that were so difficult and so cutting-edge that the answers could only be found in graduate-level term papers published within the last two or three years. Somehow, though, they got the second- and sixth- highest grades in their class (in which they are the only high school students) which to me is unbelievable. I wish my work/study ethic was as good as theirs…though it’s not as bad as it was last year now that I’m studying subjects that I’m truly interested in.

That basically brings us to Monday and today, which were basically just regular school days devoid of anything particularly interesting. I did manage to noodle with Chris twice in that period - I learned how to use chopsticks to eat my Ramen instead of slurping it up with a spoon and getting it everywhere. Meanwhile, I’ve begun reading a book by Stephen King called The Gunslinger, part of a sci-fi/fantasy series that was recommended to me by John. So far I’d recommend it, but it’s kind of on the weird side.

The rest of this week won’t be too exciting, but this weekend two or three more mattress parties are planned. I have no idea what we’ll do, but maybe we can get Tim drunk for real just to see if he really acts the way he did this past weekend when he’s wasted. (Or not, because none of us would ever dream of breaking the behavior code…probably.) There’s also a trip planned to go sailing on the bay that I’m signed up for. Also, I’m continuing my work on planning and writing low-level code for Gabo (the newspaper organization project), work that could pay off literally because of a new project I’ve been given from my Arizona-based web development employer which will probably use the same libraries I’m working on for Gabo. Gabo and the new project will both be a lot of work, but as both could be equally lucrative (one in terms of connections / reputation / recogition and the other in terms of monetary compensation), I’m hoping I can reuse as much code as possible and get both done sometime early this fall. I’m bursting to write about all the cool APIs I’ve been working on integrating into Sangre, but I’m sure you’ll hear all about it eventually. Anyway, it’s midnight and I still need to do some word roots unhappiness. I still love college, and Friends are nice too. I miss Wisconsin…and yet at the same time I never want to go back.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I was away from Stanford for most of the first half of this past weekend, first in Palo Alto with my grandparents and then in Monterey as a part of a summer college trip. My busy weekend was made complete yesterday, when I spent the day in Marin County (where the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge is located) with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle.

I got up early (easier said than done as I had been up extremely late the night before) and walked to the CalTrain station, and then I somehow managed to buy a ticket, get on the train, and ride it to San Francisco all by myself (I know you’re proud). I met my family at the San Francisco station and then rode with them across the Golden Gate Bridge and into the somewhat mountainous region to the north of San Francisco. The road was windy, barely clinging to the mountainside at times, and it reminded me of driving in the mountains back in Arizona or Colorado or Utah. We ended up at Muir Woods, a little national monument that tries to protect one of the few remaining redwood forests in this area of California. We hiked around for a few hours, enjoying the peacefulness of the small creek running through the bottom of the valley and commenting on the trees’ incredible circumferences.

Afterward, we left Muir Woods for Muir Beach, where we relaxed for a while on the sand and rocks near the crashing surf. Then we all began to feel the hunger that stems from spending half a day walking around, so we drove to Sausalito and had lunch at a nice seafood restaurant there. I had some excellent halibut with pesto garlic mashed potatoes. After eating, we grabbed some ice cream at a little store down the road (can you tell by now that my family spoils me whenever I see them) and waited around a bit for a ferry to reach the harbor so that we could get back to San Francisco. Once on the ferry, my grandpa took some really nice-looking pictures of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge (the fog had conveniently cleared for him). The ferry was exceptionally fast, taking only about half an hour to go from Sausalito to San Francisco’s ferry terminal. After reaching San Francisco, we walked to my uncle and aunt’s apartment south of the Financial District and sat around for a little while, watching a movie and talking. Finally, it was time for me to return to Stanford and back to my normal life as a student (my metaphorical homework pile was starting to get high). Rather than ride CalTrain, I was driven back so that I could take with me a nice camping chair (the chairs in my room are terribly uncomfortable).

When I got back, tired and ready to sleep a normal number of hours for the first time in several days, I somehow got sucked into watching the unrated version of The 40-Year-Old Virgin (don’t forget, parental units, if you happen to see this, I refused to watch such morally reprehensible trash). When I got back to my room at about 11:00, I found about seven people in there talking with my roommate. Garret, the same kid who I was with in Monterey, amused us by prodding random things with his “long, hard wood” (it was a board from one of the beds), and some innocent stories (full of innuendo, of course) were told. I was surprised by the fact that the three girls present seemed to laugh at the overt sexual references just as much as the boys did.

Eventually, everyone cleared out, leaving me to crash on my mattress (now located in a hole beneath my roommate’s bed) and sleep a lovely nine hours. Unfortunately, sleeping that long cost me both breakfast and lunch, but at least I didn’t miss CS, which was at 1:15. Class today was a bit better than usual, the subject being the char primitive data type and its uses, as well as a quick introduction to the String object. After class, I went back to the computer cluster at my dorm and remained shut in there for the next four hours, working to finish my version of the “Breakout” game for CS. I had some really annoying bugs that had to be worked through (usually not faults in my logic, but rather issues that came up because of differences between how Java works and how PHP works), but I managed to fix them, improve my physics calculations hugely (from four vertices per collision check to 22), and add some extra features (sounds when the ball collides, etc.), all while firming up the core architecture that my code is built upon. It might have been my most productive day since I got here, but that didn’t keep me from feeling tired (and incredibly hungry) by the time dinner rolled around.

Unfortunately, I had to miss dinner too - I had to meet with my CS section leader at 6:55 to go over the code I wrote for my first assignment and find out what my grade was. He seemed impressed and gave me a check-plus for both functionality and style, which was about what I had expected (equivalent roughly to a B+ or A-, yo creo) because the first assignment left little room for being creative or adding on extra features.

After the meeting, I grabbed a box of Pop Tarts at the student union’s convenience store and inhaled two of them once I had gotten back to the dorm. Luckily, I just recently heard that we’re going to have In-N-Out burgers at our house meeting in about an hour, so I won’t have to go hungry for much longer.

Bleeg, this was a crappy entry, sorry. This will be a busy week for me (lots of CS and word roots homework tonight, a CS contest entry due in a week, and a CS midterm on Thursday night), so my next one might not come until early next week. *returns metaphorical nose to metaphorical grindstone*

Update: In-N-Out burgers are awesome. And Eclipse desperately needs to either move deleted files to the Recycle Bin or have an undelete feature; I just lost four hours of work.

Well, now it’s been two weeks since my last entry about what I’ve been doing at Stanford. I’ve thought a lot about writing in the past few days, but things always come up and each entry takes at least an hour usually and I just didn’t have the time. Now, I still don’t really have the time, but I’ll continue with my usual habit of writing when I shouldn’t be just because that’s what I’ve always done. Yeah.

Anyway, my weekdays aren’t all that interesting as they’re filled mostly with just eating, sleeping, going to class, and being a “hall whore” (or if you prefer, one who lacks the desire to sleep in one’s own room and instead camps out in a random hallway with some friends in a kind of hobo sleepover). Most of the fun and important things happen over the weekend, which here is from Thursday afternoon to early Monday morning because most of us don’t have classes on Friday. Last weekend (which, conveniently, occurred just after the fourth of July, when I last wrote about life at Stanford), I didn’t do much of anything on Friday, choosing instead to work on Sangre/Gabo. On the next day I got up early and went on another day trip to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2, which I thought was a pretty good movie with the exception of the cliffhanger at the end. I didn’t know beforehand that they were going to stretch the story out into a third movie, so I came expecting a conclusion and was a bit put off when there wasn’t one.

By the evening after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean 2, I had slept about four hours on average over the past few days, and I “accidentally” slept in the next morning and missed the trip to the art museum in San Francisco. I can’t say I was really all that sad about it, as I’m not really that interested in art in general and I like artwork with historical meaning more than the modern art I would have seen had I gone. Instead, I spent my Sunday sleeping and finishing up a CS homework assignment that was due the next day. As you can probably tell, it wasn’t nearly as eventful a weekend as the first and second ones.

Last week was slow in terms of actual things occurring but somewhat stressful due to a new CS homework assignment that I had to work on, which was to program the game “Breakout” in Java. This proved more difficult for me than I had thought it would. So far, we’ve gone over a lot in the class, but not really any programming concepts that I don’t utilize already in my PHP programming. (However, this is not to say that I haven’t gotten anything out of the class - the level of sophistication in my code has increased substantially, and I’ve worked out most of the nuances of the Java language and gotten over the fact that it’s strongly typed, a big difference from PHP.) The problem is that the class is meant to teach both experienced programmers and people who have never programmed before, and we’re kind of expected to stay within certain bounds of sophistication and complexity that novice programmers don’t cross very often. For the first two assignments, one of which was in the extremely limited Karel language, I was a good little boy and didn’t stray too far from what the rest of the flock was supposed to be doing, mainly because I was explicitly told not to and the assignments themselves were too simple to allow for much innovation. But on this third one, which is due on Tuesday, the limits were removed completely and I was set free to do whatever I wanted within the constraints of the Java language. At first, I just concentrated on the core functionality. I programmed a working version that did almost everything that the assignment had asked for, but then I realized that the code was fast becoming difficult to read or maintain because I had attempted to write the entire game as a single class. This was what we were supposed to do, but unless I stuck with the bare minimum feature set, it wasn’t going to prove to be a scalable method. So I wrote up another of other classes that the main game class (BreakoutGame) would use to run the game. There was one to manage the ball, one to manage the paddle, one for the bricks, one for game messages, one to represent a turn, et cetera. As I wrote the code, I found myself employing methodologies that I had snubbed or been too lazy to employ in the past, such as Top-Down Design, heavy object orientation, component-based design, and others. And each time I wrote a section, if I finished it and found it lacking, I’d rewrite it again. Some parts have been rewritten three or four times, yet the core logic of the code is basically the same. But now I have a much better platform to build off of, allowing me to add some nice new features in the hope of earning the coveted ++ grade on the assignment. We’ll see if that happens or not (there’s still a lot of work to be done), but I’ve learned a lot from all of the refactoring I’ve done. I think I can now write Java almost as easily as I can write PHP.

So Monday marked the beginning of a long week, in which I spent way more time than I wanted to working on homework for my Latin word roots class (as you may have noticed, I’m really just in this for the programming - I want to figure out if I really want to be a software engineer or not as soon as I can because it will probably impact what college I choose to go to). On Monday night there was a little meeting at the student union about the college admissions process and financial aid, and I left feeling slightly more optimistic about my ability to afford going to Stanford were I able to get in (they cover 100% of students’ demonstrated financial need). Tuesday night featured a group photo (yay?) on the steps of the Cantor Art Museum and a meeting with the Spanish Club at the student union, where we ate nachos and had a debate (en español, de acurso) about whether or not the SAT was a good thing for students. Wednesday night was the first Book Club meeting, where