Brettia

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.