Brettia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.