Benefits of Total Bedlam

It's a crazy time of year.

I'm almost done with high school. I still find this to be pretty unbelievable. I don't have too much time, though, to dwell on this mind-boggling fact, because I'm caught up in the chaos of finals week. The past four exams have led me into mental exhaustion; staying up till 4 AM last night also led me to feel slightly...insane. I've been walking around like a dazed lunatic for the past 48 hours or so.

I was amazed, however, as I was cranking out skillfully written (or cleverly BS'd...same thing, right?) in-class essays for my theology exam. Somehow, miraculously, even under the influence of only two and a half hours of anxious sleep, I was coming up with perfect words. It was like suddenly I knew how to write without even trying.

I therefore came to the conclusion that my writing ability is inversely proportionate to my sanity. When I experience mental calm, composure, and levelheadedness, I cannot write very easily, nor do I want to. But, on the other hand, when my head feels like it is going to crack in two, and when I can't seem to do anything but stumble through my day like a drunken idiot, I don't want to do anything but write. For some reason, when I feel like I've lost hold of all tangible logic, I am much more able to find the right words. They drop perfectly into my mind like missing puzzle pieces that while feeling okay, I can never seem to find.

So, I developed the following formula:

Brilliant, right?

What can I conclude from all of this? Well, I think that pure chaos is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. In fact, sometimes it is even kind of fun.

Fortunately (well kind of), my life (mainly because I lead it) is insane for a good majority of the time. Who needs sanity, anyways?

Where the hell is the sun??

Everything is so awful today.

I hate rainy days. There are few things in this life that I find more woeful a cold, achey, wet dark day. Days like this, I wake up and can tell it's gross outside before I even get out of bed to look out the window. The rain, dark and misery somehow seep into my bones and destroy my mental state from dawn till dusk.


Today was one of those days.

So what did I do? I moped around. A lot. I think my Mom thought I was dying. I wasn't. I wasn't even sick...just abnormally dejected. And I'm blaming the weather. This wretched weather combined with the stress of upcoming finals and all the worry about finishing the school yearbook has made for a very wearisome day.

I tried to get some stuff done. I have enough work to keep me mind-numbingly busy until I graduate. Unfortunately, it was unspeakably difficult to start doing anything. I just couldn't bring myself to focus. I couldn't bring myself to do much of anything at all besides drag myself worthlessly around the house.

I thought today was going to be a strong and productive study day. But instead of trying to memorize key terms for my civil law exams, I did this:

I tore apart my English books. What you see there is 2 1/2 books worth of notes. You'll notice that I'm a very organized person.
Ha ha.

I wish I could have done something more worthwhile today than create a colorful post-it explosion on my desk. It is cool...kind of pretty, actually. I'm just not sure that it's all that worthwhile in helping me avoid painful late-night finals cramming. I'm not sure that it's all that worthwhile...at all.

Well, maybe one of these days I will learn how to prioritize. Maybe someday I will create beautiful and beneficial things and actually do something good with my life. That day, however, will probably not involve any rain.

Randomness seems to be "in."

Writing for the sheer sake of doing so

I'm way too tired to write any kind of story...so here's a short and sporadic thought.

I think randomness has become some kind of unspoken fad among a lot of teenage girls. Check out their myspace "About Me"s. There are a startling amount of these self-descriptions that look a lot like this: "My name is Sarah, I'm 15 years old and I'm a freshman in high school. I loooooove mint chocolate chip ice cream. I have a lot of purple shirts. I got a puppy for my 12th birthday. My mousepad is pink. I love lip gloss. I hate girls who talk shit. If you don't like me, guess what, I don't care, that's your problem, not mine. I love the All-American Rejects. I have three freckles on my right knee. I am random! I have long blond hair, that I sometimes wear with a headband. I have the best friends in the whole entire world!!!! They are always there for me!!! I like gymnastics. I like pinepples on my pizza. I like tall boys with curly hair and bright blue eyes. I HATE cleaning. My little brother is a brat. I want to live in a mansion when I grow up."

The list can go on and on and on. I find it ridiculous that in spite of all the details they hold, long-winded paragraphs like this are so mind-numbingly boring and so blatantly lacking in even a resemblance of a coherent description. (Sorry. Got a little carried away with words there.) There seem to be a startling amount of people that know nothing more about themselves than the fact that they like pineapple pizza and pink mousepads.

My goodness, some teenagers are fascinating.

Cue the Wild Applause

Let's Give it Up for the Class of '08!

I had my last day of high school class today. I should be thrilled. I hate high school class. But in all honesty, I’m kind of sad. How in the hell can I be done with high school? I’ve spent four years at Arrupe Jesuit, and granted, a good amount of my time there has been pretty torturous, but even so, I’ve come to really love that place. In spite of all the bitchy friends, crappy math teachers, and crippling amounts of homework, it really breaks my heart to be leaving. I spent my whole freshman year there as an awkward and friendless misfit. Now I actually feel like I belong. I still hate it sometimes, but I’m at home there. I’m comfortable with the people. I no longer worry so much about the way I act around them, and I’m not obsessed with making people like me. My entire class of 55 kids has grown close enough over these past four years that most of us are pretty damn comfortable with each other. We know each other, and as my classmate Adrian said at our senior retreat, we’ve all got each others’ backs, and we all know that. At school, I’m happy just chillin’ anywhere at all—in the gym watching boys shoot hoops, in the lobby joking with whoever else might be there waiting for their Mom to pick them up, or on the bus laughing my ass off on the way to work. I love most of my classmates at and even some of the teachers. It’s so frightening and shocking to be leaving them all behind.

This isn’t to say that I’m not excited for my future…I am. It’s just that I know virtually nothing about it. I know I’m going to DU. And I plan on studying writing. But aside from that, I know absolutely nothing about what my life will become. I’m saying goodbye to almost everyone I know. I certainly hope to keep in touch with my closest friends, but there’s no way our relationships are going to be the same as they are now. We won’t be able to talk through math class or waste time in the computer lab anymore. We will no longer spend hours on the school bus together or laugh our asses off at lunch while picking at DJ the lunch lady’s infamous “tater tot casserole” or glorious “chocolate surprise.”

I don’t know how much I’ll miss high school…but I will definitely remember its high points. Today, for instance, we seniors were pretty excited that it was our last day of class. While the community aspect of school is fabulous, the academic part sucks. So we were pretty damn glad to know that we would never again have to sit through another treacherous 65 minutes of high school calculus.

In third period civics, the two social studies teachers I’ve had presented us with mix CDs…full of songs and sound clips from the past four years. Something about hearing the Neighborhood Map Machine theme song and a stuttering lawyer from the film My Cousin Vinny made me want to cry. High school seems so much more wonderful in retrospect than it does when you’re actually living through it. The past four years were at times a haze of exhaustion and angst, but I think that, overall, I really and truly loved my experience. I’ve turned into one of those people I never thought I would be – the kind of happy girl who loves high school.

Today, as I mentioned, seniors were very happy. In fact, we were ecstatic. We spent most of the day cheering. Literally. My classmates have become very fond of applause in the past few months. I like to think that this clapping obsession started when I won “The General’s Award” for volleyball. When our athletic director approached me at the beginning of a theology class to give me my award, my hyperactive class erupted into wild cheers, which continued for about 10 minutes. They even started excitedly chanting my name –- all for me having a good attitude on the volleyball team. When the cheering finally began to subside, Mr. Lovinguth the athletic director came back into our classroom with the letter that I’d also earned. The classroom exploded once again with whooping and screaming.

Most of us got detention that day.

Since then, Arrupe’s class of 2008 has been full of enthusiastic cheerers. A few days ago, as my civics teacher walked through the crowded cafeteria, senior Victor Soto loudly announced, “Mr. Dexter, everybody!!” The senior class cheered like we’d just won the lottery as Mr. Dexter humbly grinned and waved his way through the cafeteria.

So we like cheering. And we’ve gotten really good at it. We spent most of our lunch period today cheering for most of the teachers who walked by, except for the assistant principal who strutted through the cafeteria like he was expecting applause. We cheered through fifth and sixth periods. We cheered after school, whooping and screaming, “OH-EIGHT! OH-EIGHT! OH-EIGHT!” Some girls even paraded with our Dean of Students, running wildly through the hallways after the last bell.

Then seniors started going home, the insanity subsided, and I realized, Wow. I’m kind of sad. I’m just about done with high school. And I’m totally stunned.

Happy Birthday to Me

I turned 18 on Friday!

My parents gave me a Nikon D40 for a birthday present.
I love it. I got it the day before my family went up to the mountains for the weekend, so I really had some fun up there...


I don't know much about photography, but now that I've got the great camera, I've got to start learning!

Sucker for Romance Movies?

I watched The Notebook again tonight.

The first time I watched this, my heart was torn apart by what a beautiful romance it was. That was one or two years ago. I watched most of it again tonight, and while some parts still made me sigh, "aww...", most of what I thought was, God, that girl is ditzy.

But Ryan Gosling was still gorgeous.
Are beautiful guys like this the only reason I like TV?
Maybe.

I'm a little bothered by the fact that I didn't like The Notebook so much the second time around. Everyone likes The Notebook. It's the girly romance movie of the century. And I'm starting to think it's pretty stupid.

I've become disturbingly cynical. Or maybe just realistic. I don't know, but I kind of like it.

My Poor, Poor Face

Wow. It's been a while.

I'm clearly falling into the bad habit of starting every post like I just did--commenting on how long it's been since I've written.
I really should write more often. I like blogging. It's good for me to write with readers in mind--it keeps me from ranting too long about truly ridiculous things such as falling in love and my feelings.
That's right, I just called falling in love "ridiculous."
Why is it ridiculous?
Because I hate it.
Not only do I hate the angst that inevitably accompanies feelings of "falling in love," I hate to see my friends swimming in the madness of completely losing their minds over another human being.

I'm aware that I sound incredibly cynical, but I'm really not a fan of high school relationships. Granted, having someone to truly care is just about all I've wanted for the past four years, but expecting one person to be so perfect is nothing short of ludicrous. In high school, at least.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-humanity or asexual or anything. I just don't really like liking people to the point of mental warfare. That's how "falling in love" always seems to end up--in painful headaches and truckloads of angst.

This is one reason why I like blogging. I don't have to write about that awful gut-churning emotion that I've come to know as love. Instead, I get to recount cheerful regales of my terrible home or school life (Remember when I crashed my car?), or rant about how much I love my TV boyfriends. And it makes me laugh. Admittedly, I'm probably the only person who actually finds myself funny, but regardless, blogging is great for me because I get to write, I get to laugh, and for a period of time I get to avoid any drama or angst that is taking heavy residence in my life.

As an added plus, I imagine you, the enthralled reader (though I'm not quite sure you exist), being so highly entertained by my words and wit.

Ha ha. That last sentence made me laugh.

*****

So the last time I wrote was early March. It's been almost two months. Gosh, I'm so bad at this.

I guess I've been through quite a lot in the past two months. For starters, I survived an entire soccer season. In March, I submitted to a spontaneous and outrageously illogical decision to join the soccer team, and spent a lot of time after that cursing myself for attempting to play a sport I knew virtually nothing about. Needless to say, it was a pretty awkward season. I really loved it, a lot of the time, but I sure felt like a moron when I couldn't do such simple things as dribble a ball across the field. But somehow, I was a starting forward in almost every game. I don't know if the coaches gave me seniority because I'm graduating in June, but I must admit I felt very proud every time I heard them yelling, "Good, Major!" from the sidelines.

I'd have to say the highlight of my season was when I was brutally kicked in the face. My God, that was awesome. I was sprinting towards some burly defender who, when I was about five feet away from her, tried to boot the ball over my head. But she failed pretty badly at that, and as the ball collided with my nose and mouth at dizzying speed, my feet flew in the air and my back crashed onto the ground. Immediately after that, I attempted to spring back up and start running again, but that was really difficult, due to my inability to see anything and the way the world was spinning round and round around me.

"Lie down, Major!" a teammate yelled from what seemed like miles away. I lied on the ground and felt pretty dumb, sprawled out all alone in the middle of a soccer field. Where was the team who was supposed to surround me and hold my hand in my time of mortal injury? I sat up and put my head between my knees. There was my coach, walking slowly towards me from the sidelines. "She has a bloody nose," I heard someone exclaim from miles away in another direction. I swept my hand across my face. Nosebleed, indeed.

I made it back to the sidelines where I started laughing as tears dripped out of my eyes. "That hurt!" I announced to my teammates and coaches on the bench.

We lost that game, but something about getting kicked in the face made me feel like such a hero. It almost made up for my inability to actually play soccer.

Overall, it was pretty good season. But I was very relieved when it was finally over on Tuesday.

So that was soccer.
Now what else?

Well, this is where I'm going next year:
I made the college decision! And in September, I'm off to DU! It wasn't even a hard decision to make--I'm pretty sure this school's the best for me.
I won't be living on campus, which I'm a little worried about. I don't know how hard it will be to make friends, because socially, I kind of suck. It took 2 years for me to be comfortable with my high school friends. But gosh, I really don't know what to expect. It's still weird imagining myself as a college student. It's crazy how finally I seem to be growing up. I'm turning 18 next Friday. I'm graduating in June. I'll be in college in September. Unreal.

I'm worrying and thinking about this quite a lot, but I know all I can do is finish high school and just see what happens from there. It's certainly exciting, but pretty intimidating as well.

*****

Gosh, it's midnight already. I was going to go to bed early tonight. Then I got online and started doing this. It's funny how easy it is to fall asleep while doing math homework, but it's just as easy to stay up till 2 doing absolutely nothing on the internet.

But I do think this is worthwhile.

I would resolve to blog more often, but time and energy are really big issues for me right now. But I will try. I do enjoy this.

Until the future, my dear reader.