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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and my summer at Stanford is no exception. Though we still have over a week left before going home on August 20, a feeling of depression lingers in the air already. No one, in my house at least, is looking forward to returning home, though we all miss our home towns whether we like to admit it or not.

This foreboding aura settled upon us much earlier than one might expect because of a terrible and seemingly impossible event that occurred last week. As I mentioned before, each house has four mentors who are current Stanford students that are supposed to act as counselors for kids on their floor. In recent weeks, however, these “counselors” have become more like friends, older brothers and sisters who we looked up to and could hang out with whenever we felt like it without it feeling awkward. For the guys in my house, Eucalipto, the mentor who did the most to help us and befriend us was a guy named Cole, a sophomore originally from Phoenix. Almost everyone on my floor can think of some incident where we needed something and Cole was there to help, or some happy moment that only happened because Cole was there. We spent a lot of late nights watching unedited, unrated movies and the World Cup soccer games in his room. Considering that most college kids would probably hate to have “little” high schoolers hanging around all the time, Cole’s awesomeness toward us was amazing.

Last week wasn’t the best one ever. The weekend before, I had gone on one of my favorite trips so far, a sailing trip on a schooner on San Francisco Bay. Unfortunately, that goodness didn’t last. There was a CS assignment due that Thursday that I had to really work hard to finish on time, and my tiredness because of that assignment caused me to sleep through one of my word roots classes again on Tuesday. Though the instructor still didn’t really care that my roommate and I hadn’t come, he told us that we couldn’t miss any more classes. So Wednesday night, with a can’t-miss word roots class looming in the morning, I took the intelligent route and pulled an all-nighter. Mostly, I was just playing the open-source game Tremulous with some friends on the computers in our cluster, but I somehow finished the homework in that time, too.

At about four in the morning, the unthinkable happened. A random person walked in and asked if we had heard about the mentors. We said that we hadn’t, and so they explained that some of the mentors had been caught drinking at a party held in our dining hall weeks ago and that those mentors would be forced to move out by 5:00 PM on Friday. Worse, it wasn’t just a few mentors that were being kicked out; ten out of the 23 mentors residing at Lagunita would be leaving. And to top it all off, two of those ten mentors were from Eucalipto: Cole, and a mentor from the girls’ floor named Rose. I was shocked, to say the least. I thought that maybe I was so tired that I had begun to hallucinate, or that I had fallen asleep somewhere and this was all just a really bad dream. But it was all true, and I didn’t know what to think.

I still felt kind of numb when I went to breakfast with my fellow Tremulous players at about 7:30. We ate normally, and then I went and crashed in my room for an hour or so before word roots. By the time I got to class with my roommate, only a few minutes late, the numbness had been replaced with exhaustion, and I was reminded of why I had sworn to myself after last year’s three all-nighters that I’d never let my schoolwork get to the point where I had to pull one ever again. This time, though, I just felt stupid, because this all-nighter wasn’t caused by anything; it was a choice, and a bad one. I came really, really close to falling asleep in word roots, but thankfully we played a game where we make up new words using prefixes, roots, and suffixes that we’ve learned over the summer. Having to actually talk and write things was enough to keep me from nodding off.

When I got back to Lag for lunch, I couldn’t sleep because some documentation for my CS homework beckoned. I finished it just in time to submit it electronically before the deadline and walk quickly to lecture to turn in the paper copy. That was one of the most painful classes I’ve ever sat through; I was nodding off every 30 seconds, much to the amusement of a friend sitting next to me. At the very end, I actually went to sleep for about three seconds, and somehow that was long enough to have a short dream in which one of the CS instructors was in a darkened room carrying a chocolate birthday cake with lit candles toward me. It was kind of weird.

I finally stumbled back into my room at about 2:15, literally falling onto my mattress (which is still conveniently located on the floor). I slept deeply for four and a half hours, getting up only because I had to go to my CS discussion section at 7:00. After that, because I had missed lunch and dinner, I went by a Mexican restaurant at the student union and got a massive burrito, which I carried back to Lag and ate in Cole’s room while he and Rose talked about random things with some of the other kids from my floor. Eventually, I wandered back down the hall to our lounge, where some of the girls were preparing a “banquet” for our fallen heroes. I helped put up some balloons, a small offering of bowls of candy was placed on an altar-like table in the middle of the room, and Eucs began to gather. Once everyone was there, Cole and Rose stood on a raised area of the lounge where there’s a piano and a kitchenette with all of their “kids” standing around them in a rough circle. A few people gave little speeches about things that Cole or Rose had done for them or experiences that they had had because of Cole or Rose’s work, and the sadness in the air was replaced by some of the joy of remembering happier moments earlier in the summer. Then, we presented them with our parting gifts: a longboard (skateboard) paid for and signed by all of the Eucalipto guys for Cole, and a gift certificate to a Palo Alto clothing store for Rose from the girls. You could tell at that point that even the ever-cool Cole was getting a little worked up, especially when he and Rose gave their little speeches of appreciation and thanks for a great summer while apologizing for the behavior that had caused them to be kicked out. At that point, though, we didn’t care about the apologies; we had had six weeks to discover how great our mentors were, and we weren’t going to let one incident change what we thought of them. The “banquet” ended with all of us getting into a circle and singing “Lean on Me” while the song played in the background. Even with two weeks left, it felt like the summer had ended already.

The next day, Friday, I slept a lot and in the afternoon went out to the parking lot to hang out with Cole for one last time with a bunch of other people while he packed his stuff into his car. All sorts of random things happened, such as making a circle of people environmentalist-style around his car so that he couldn’t leave. We decided that we would meet Cole that night at a pizza restaurant in Palo Alto, just to show that even if he wasn’t our mentor anymore, he was still our friend and always would be. The pizza wasn’t that great (you could literally have wrung it out like a washcloth and gotten about a pint of liquid grease out of it), but it was fun just being there with all my Friends and Cole and Rose. When I got back to Lag, we had a subdued mattress party and ended up going to sleep at a more normal 3 AM.

The weekend was really nothing special; I went on a trip to NASA’s Ames Research Center which turned out to not be so great, but a Friend was there, so it wasn’t so bad. (If you haven’t caught on by now, Friend = someone I really know and like, and friend = just someone I sort of hang out with sometimes.) I bought some freeze-dried ice cream and immediately regretted it once I had bitten off a chunk; it tastes like what regular ice cream might taste like if you left it to melt and become lukewarm in a bowl and then drank it like chocolate milk. Saturday night was more fun, though: my Friend and I set up a Tremulous server on his dual-core laptop and invited five or six other Eucs to join our game. It was pretty fun, though I kept getting pwned badly. If you ever see a server on the Internet list named “Stanford” between now and August 20, that’s probably us, so join in and have some fun with random people you don’t know.

So far, this week hasn’t been incredibly eventful. The return to high school looms ever closer, so I’m getting more and more worried about finishing my summer homework on time. I haven’t really done much of anything as far as extended essay research goes, and I still have some books to read for English and TOK and some chapters to study for math. On top of that is web development work for my Arizona-based client (for whom most of my work is done) and continuing work on some of the hardest programming for Sangre and Gabo so that my newspaper management thingy will hopefully be ready in time to be live for the second issue. I also should be working on college applications (especially for a certain school that has a name starting with “S”) and such, but it’s been difficult to think about that with everything else that’s been going on. And I obviously want to get As in all of my classes, so I still have a lot of homework and quizzes to work on in between the other crapola. Next week will be especially horrible because of finals on the last two days of the session, so it’s quite possible that I won’t find time to write again until after I get back to Wisconsin. I hope that doesn’t happen, but you know how bad I can be about posting in a timely manner.

At this point I could go on and on about how much it will suck to leave Stanford, explaining exactly why and to what magnitude the suckiness will extend, but unfortunately some word roots homework is staring angrily at me. I’m sure I’ll be full of complaininess in the next entry, especially if I don’t write it until I get home. Until then…bye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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