Brettia

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.

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.