Brettia

So although I really don’t have time for it, I’m writing today in the interest of preventing this blog from becoming too stale. It’s amazingly sunny and warm outside this afternoon - 34 degrees. T-shirt weather, I think. Of course, as always, it will be short-lived; tomorrow and Tuesday we’re set to get five inches of snow. Wonderful.

It’s been two weeks now since my two-part “bandwidth saga,” and I’ve really been enjoying my new freedom. My seven-day usage total peaked around 30 GB and has now backed down to around 20 GB. It really is nice to not have to check the bandwidth meter every other minute to make sure I’m not in danger of getting dialupped.

The main reason for my silence recently is that I’m in the middle of midterm season, which looks like it will extend through the whole semester since the exams are so spread out that it takes nearly three weeks to get through them all. My classes this semester are definitely harder than they were last semester, though I guess that isn’t saying much since last semester’s were so easy. The hardest (and least interesting) by far is Math 240, a required course for CS that talks about logic and the math behind sets and trees and such. Though I understand that it could be beneficial to have a mathematical understanding of various CS concepts, I really can’t see myself applying that knowledge very often.

For example, last week we talked about algorithms and big-O notation, both of which I had plenty of experience with in my data structures class last semester. The professor went over some common searching and sorting algorithms, writing them in some crazy Pascalish pseudocode. (Pascal, seriously, in 2008?) Then, in talking about big-O notation, which is used to express the complexity of an algorithm, he proceeded to talk about the exact definition of big-O notation, and how you can prove that a polynomial is O(whatever), and so on. I guess this would be cool if I had any liking for math whatsoever, but mostly it just seemed confusing. Big-O notation is a simple concept. If you had the following code:

<?php

function loop($message, $times) {

    for($i = 0; $i < $times; $i++) {

        echo $message;

    }

}

?>

You would say that the function loop is O(N). N represents the problem size, which in simple cases is dependent on one variable but can sometimes be dependent on two or more. The function contains two major statements, the for loop and the echo statement, which prints the contents of a variable to the browser. The echo statement occurs in what is called “constant time”, or O(1), meaning that no matter what the value of $message is, the statement will take the same time to execute. The for loop, however, is not constant because the number of loops varies depending on what $times is set to. So the problem size N of the function is controlled by $times ($message doesn’t matter), and the function is O(N) because the for loop only contains constant-time statements. O(N * 1) is still O(N). If the for loop had contained another loop of some kind, also dependent on $times, the function would be O(N²). If the inner loop were dependent on something other than $times, the function would be O(N*M).

Going back to the Math 240 lecture, if you have a polynomial time function g = 2N² + 8N + 1, representing it with big-O notation is easy. You drop all terms except the highest-degree one (2N²), and then drop that term’s coefficient. So the function g is O(N²). In Math 240 though, we take it further and prove exactly why that function is O(N²) using the definition of big-O notation. It’s rather abstract and confusing, and I really have no idea when I’ll need to know it in the real world. So far, this has been one of my problems with the CS program here in general. It feels very traditional, very by-the-book. You take classes like Math 240 because that’s just what CS majors do, not necessarily because there is much reason for it. It isn’t completely bad; it just feels like the curriculum is a little out of sync with what is really going on in the software world. You learn Java and C++, there is only one web programming course to take, software engineering concepts don’t seem to be taught much at all (or at least not officially). And yet people wonder why CS grads are often so woefully inadequate when they become software engineers….

The problem is that computer science is a massive and ever-expanding field. There really is no other field that is experiencing the kind of growth that CS has had for the past thirty years or so. And because of all this growth, it really doesn’t make much sense to have one giant umbrella CS major anymore. Instead, universities should have a separate school for computer science, where you could major in software engineering or computer graphics or assembly-language programming or whatever. At the very least, CS majors should be allowed to concentrate in one area. Trying to teach everyone everything just doesn’t make sense anymore.

Some would respond that the point of a college education isn’t to train you for a job - college is supposed to be more about abstract, foundational things that prepare you to be better in the long run. This may work for business or history, but in computer science even the basic things change pretty rapidly. In the past five years, we’ve seen a shift to multi-core processors able to run many instructions at once and superpowerful GPUs capable of doing far more than just generating 3D graphics. Programming either of these requires a very different manner of thinking that isn’t being taught today, and understanding them in an abstract, low-level way won’t be enough.

Hopefully I will be proven wrong and I will graduate with a great understanding of computers and software engineering, well prepared for the advancements to come. But, just as with the University of Wisconsin in general, I feel uncertain.

I got an email today from the Division of University Housing:

Dear University Housing Resident,

Recent upgrades to our ResNet infrastructure allow us to remove the quota that limited your bandwidth use, effective Monday, February 11, 2008. Students using ResNet are no longer subject to bandwidth caps, and any previous warnings or violations for exceeding bandwidth will be restored to normal speed.

We are pleased that this change will provide you even better service. This increased access will be helpful to you when using legal online video streaming services that have recently become available, such as NetFlix online delivery of paid movie rentals.

(…)

Best wishes,

Sathish Gopalrao
Director of Information Technology, Division of University Housing

Problem solved. Pretty strange that I should get that email only two days after writing about how annoying the bandwidth cap was. Woo!

At Wisconsin, students in university housing are connected to the Internet using a service called ResNet. Generally it is blazing fast: 18 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. For comparison, decent residential DSL service is usually about 3 Mbps down and 768 Kbps up. This means that in a perfect world I could download an MP3 in about two seconds or a DVD in around an hour. (Of course, most websites are on 100 Mbps connections shared with a bunch of other sites, so real speeds are maybe half that.) That’s pretty awesome, though Internet users in Japan or South Korea would probably laugh at the idea that 18 Mbps is fast in the United States.

One thing that is not awesome, however, is that I am given all this glorious bandwidth with a few caveats. If I exceed 10 GB in any 7-day period, my bandwidth usage gets limited. Severely. It becomes dial-up. I have to turn images off so that pages load faster. Streaming audio and video is impossible. I can’t Skype with my boss in Arizona. I can’t realistically load more than one page at a time in my browser. It’s crippling, and it sucks. The limits come off after a few days of frustration and pain, and then I realize just how different the Internet is with a broadband connection.

Why have a bandwidth cap like this? I would guess that about 50% of ResNet users never come close to exceeding the cap. Things like Facebook, the iTunes Store, and the occasional YouTube video consume next to nothing. Another 25% might use more than 5 GB in a week every once in a while. You could call these people power users, knowledgable users, but not exactly hard-core users. Another 20% are in the category I’m in: they’re deeply interested in technology and the Internet, and always on the hunt for high-bandwidth content (and I don’t necessarily mean illegal stuff - even tech-unsavvy students have discovered the awesome HD episodes of LOST on ABC’s website). Along with using Skype, the iTunes Store, ABC.com, YouTube, and NFL SuperCast (last semester), I download Linux distros from time to time, new software or updates to installed apps, and large files related to my job. There is probably no day in which I use less than 500 MB of bandwidth. Multiply that by seven days, and I’m up to 3.5 GB of bandwidth per week no matter what. In a heavy-traffic week I might hit 15 GB.

But that is nothing compared to the final 5%’s bandwidth needs, the users who work with scientific data or produce video or download a lot of movies and music over BitTorrent. The majority of these people are probably abusing the network, and the bandwidth caps are in place because of them. At Case Western Reserve University, which my friend Garrett Singer attends, it was found in 2006 that 34 students were consuming 73% of the bandwidth allocated to all students living in residence halls on campus. That’s pretty insane, and it’s no wonder Wisconsin uses caps to thwart these kinds of users.

However, 10 GB is too low. According to the ResNet bandwidth usage policy, 10 GB is “a very large amount of data.” It was a very large amount of data. Two years ago 10 GB would’ve be fine. But online video has exploded over that period, as has VoIP calling (sometimes with video). Considering that the 18 Mbps connection speed is a tad excessive currently, it doesn’t seem like it would be such a big deal to lower the speed a bit and increase the cap to 20-25 GB. Then, people in the power user group would have more than enough bandwidth (you could sit on your computer for every waking hour and download 200 MB each hour continuously without breaking 25 GB).

As it is, the cap is annoying and inconvenient, but not impossible to work with. You can reset your usage total twice each semester (I used both resets and got throttled once last semester), and with time you get skilled at keeping yourself just under the cap. I cannot imagine what it would’ve been like last year though, when the cap was at 5 GB. I would’ve died.

Feesh.

Update: Two days after posting this I learned that the bandwidth quotas had been removed! Crazy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This 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.)

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.