Other questiony things I should answer.

"Describe a mistake you made or a challenge you faced. How did you respond to that mistake or challenge, and what did you learn from your experience?"
I went back and forth on whether or not to post this one, because it really is quite personal. I wrote about a mistake, and since it wasn't all that long ago, and I wasn't all that young, I feel a little leery of sharing.
Understand that I am not a very touchy-feely type of person in real life. Large displays of affection generally make me feel embarassed. I cry all the time at books and movies, but I don't cry in real life all that often. I try, generally, to keep my moods in check. So sharing something, especially something I'm not proud of, is difficult at the best of times.
So anyway. I could have copped out of this, and wrote about how big of a mistake pretty much my entire sixth grade year was, since I decided it would be a good idea to become friends with the "popular" group of girls, and I was pretty much miserable for the first half of the year. But that would be making myself a victim, which feels wrong. It feels insincere. And as you'll all see, this entire story is about being honest.
So it was freshman year. I was in French class. We'd had to do some sort of group project, and I forget who I worked with, but it was definitely someone I knew reasonably well, which makes the entire thing that happened mildly less mortifying.
Anyway, so Madame is handing our scores back, and I notice that despite the fact that I scored one point lower than my partner in a category, I have the same score as her overall. Which meant Madame had added the points up wrong.
Now, not as any sort of justification, but have you ever had a teacher that drilled it into your head that if there's a mistake in your favor, you shouldn't tell them? Especially when it's a small mistake. Well, I had a teacher like that freshman year, and I'd had teachers like that before, and I wasn't sure if Madame was a teacher like that or not at that point in the year, so I guessed. Of course, I guessed wrong, and obviously my own desire not to lose a point played into all of this; still, that was part of my reasoning.
I would also like to acknowledge how stupid this whole thing was right here. I mean, it was a point. I have a feeling it wasn't even a point that would change what letter grade I got on the project - maybe make it an A minus instead of an A. The point (ha!) is, it wasn't worth lying about. But again: I was a freshman. I didn't understand how unimportant that point was. I was just starting out high school, and it had been told to me over and over how much harder high school was than junior high, so I treated it like every point was the one that would eventually get me into college or not.
So anyway. Madame asks if there's anything anyone would like to say, questions about scores, etc., which should have been my cue to speak up, but I didn't.
Somehow, she sensed this or something, because after making that announcement, while people are kind of chattering, she comes over and asks our table if there's anything wrong. And I can't lie to her when she asks that directly. So I tell her, in my bumbling and inadequate French what's wrong, and she goes, Oh, yep, that's a mistake, and then she holds up my paper and says to everyone, "Check, make sure your score adds up, Anri just found a mistake in hers." And then she looks at me over her glasses, and asks me in a low voice, "Were you going to tell me otherwise?" And what can I say? So she gives me this really disappointed look and walks over to mark the change.
I wanted to become invisible, right then and there. My partner had heard, and was looking at me, and I was turning bright red (fun fact: when I get embarassed, the tips of my ears get really how and turn red. It's weird). To top it all off, she comes back and returns it to me and says, "I'm feeling nice, think of it like a holiday bonus," and gives me the paper back - she didn't take away the point. But the look she gives me while she does it - I never, ever wanted to see that look again.
For the rest of the year, I thought Madame remembered and was judging me. I still sometimes think she does. And I know my partner remembered, at least for a time, because I do remember it being brought up after a little bit of time had gone by.
So yeah: mistake I made. What I learned? That old saying about honesty is true. Be honest. Always. Omission is a form of dishonesty. And never try to hide anything from Madame.
(Now that I think about it, this probably also qualifies as the most embarassing thing that's ever happened to me. So now I have an answer for that question, should it ever come up.)

Prez Scholar App: Question 1

Actually it's Question 2, because the first question asks how my family or community has shaped my "personal development", and I can't handle that shit now. So instead, let's start this all off with the following:
"Discuss some creative work that illustrates the way you see the world and the way you see yourself in the world. The work may be a scientific theory, novel, film, poem, song, or other art form."
To begin with, I would like to draw your attention to the idea that a scientific theory is a "creative work", because it speaks volumes to the type of people who are filling this thing out that any of them would write a quarter of a page about why a scientific theory is similar to their worldview and themselves instead of talking about a film or a book or a poem or pretty much ANYTHING ELSE. I'm not even sure I can really think of any way that would work. I guess maybe you could talk about how insignificant you are?
(Okay, now that I'm thinking about it, there are actually some really cool routes you could go - like, how amazingly improbable it is that I exist, as I am, and how absolutely unique it is that I do, and how mind-blowing it is to think that every single person on earth is similarly unique and improbable. In fact, if I could find a way to relate that to a scientific theory that I actually understood, I would write about it. Which really only demonstrates how sadly suited I am to be doing this, because despite what I may tell myself about not being a complete nerd, I totally am.)
Anyway, so I chose the movie versions Eloise at Christmastime/Eloise at the Plaza (they're kind of the same, okay?) so, um, yeah. Here we go.
Growing up, I was a scared child. All my favorite characters - from Flounder in The Little Mermaid to Piglett in Winnie-the-Pooh - were worrywarts, nervous and unwillingly thrust into adventure. I always was a worrier - one time, after seeing an article about the Beltway sniper in Time Magazine, I sat in the middle of the floor of our dining room, afraid to stand up because then I could be shot through the windows. I lived over 500 miles away from the nearest shooting, but that was still too close for me.
I didn't grow up watching or reading Eloise, much as I love her now. In reality, I probably would have been horrified by her messiness and blatant disregard for rules as a child - as a rule-abiding youngster, any hint of anarchy was terrifying. Instead, I have come to love her for the way that she represents what I would love to be - happy, weird, and completely free to be myself. The last two things are especially important, as they make the first one possible. The unhappiest moments of my life have come when I've been most untrue to myself. This idea of being honest to yourself is present everywhere in these movies - the plots are completely based on it. Eloise is always unforgivingly herself, and in this way, always manages to carry on, no matter what happens.
These movies are expressions of joy. In the end, though the world has so much sadness in it, it is a truly miraculous place - similarly, no matter what bad things happen to Eloise or those she loves, there is always that happy ending. I believe in happy endings. I believe that if we keep trying, if we strive towards love and friendship, if we are honest with ourselves, if we look for joy everywhere we go, as Eloise does, we can reach those happy endings. We can look back on our lives with content.


Yeah, like I said. I'll be editing these things, I just find it really helpful to start them off here.
BAI!!

A warning, of sorts

I've noticed for a couple essays and journals that I've had to write recently that for some reason, I find it easier to think here. Maybe it's because I don't need my words to be perfect the first time around, so I can just write down ideas and jump from thought to thought. Whatever the reason, I have a number of essay-esque things I need to write for the Presidential Scholars Application -
(Did I mention I'm a candidate for that? It's cool, but, well, there are pros and cons...
Pro: only about 4000 students out of the millions that take the SAT become candidates.
Con: only 141 of those 4000 actually become Presidential Scholars.
Pro: if you get it, you get to fly to D.C. and meet Obama!
Con: there's no money involved; it's not a scholarship.
Additional con: there are five essays I need to write for it. Most of them are supposed to be about a paragraph long, but the mondo-gigantic one is supposed to be 10,800 characters long.
10,800 characters is approximately four times the length of my college essay. It is about six pages of double-spaced text. I honestly don't know if they expect me to use all that space, but holy shit.)
 - anyway, so I figured I'd write them on this blog, and then edit them for stuff like grammar and formality and language. I'll probably post them too, cause why not, so potentially expect some musing-y/personal blogs that are sort of boring in the near future.

This is how I think

A friend and I had to write a script for a video for Environmental Science for tomorrow, and this is what I ended up typing. I wrote it all in one go for the most part, starting off with what my partner and I had already worked out in class and then just continuing...a lot of the time I sidetracked myself and then went back and added an entire scene, and the Biblical thing at the end was just because I really, really wanted this whole thing to be like the Bible but with recycling, but we only have a minute and a half time limit, so. That was a long sentence. I don't know, I find it amusing. This is actually how I brainstorm too.

There's a second Hunger Games trailer.
Apparently Mayzie is gone.
That is all.

The Meaning of Life

When I was younger, I never understood why people wanted to know the meaning of life so much. I thought it was a stupid question – we lived our life, plain and simple. Why did it matter what our purpose on this earth was?
I can acknowledge, now, that it is a question worth seeking an answer for, though I don't by any means claim to know what that answer might be. What I do know, is that what the novels we read in CIS this year have done – what good books and stories everywhere do – is attempt to provide an answer, of sorts, for us. The very first myths were creation stories, told to explain how we came to be and give us some sort of insight into what it means to be human. Stories provide us with a reason for our existence and push us to seek an explanation for what humanity is. They ask us to wonder at what, exactly, our purpose in life should be, and how we should seek to fulfill it.
Part of the reason Never Let Me Go is so truly tragic is because we see ourselves in the characters’ lives: our own missed opportunities and confusion about life. At first, these characters may appear to have more of a sense of their place in the universe than we do: they have an ostensible reason for their lives, one that seems to make sense. They live and die to save others. But this is really the original question, disguised as a new one: why are these human lives worth more than their clones? What makes us human, and why is being human so important?
The answer to this question cannot be expressed simply, and many of these novels reflect this idea. Instead, it must be approached sideways, in a roundabout way, through stories. Many of the novels focus on the idea that the world is made up of grays, a mix of black and white. The most obvious example is Going After Cacciato, but it is a theme that returns, over and over. In the end, it all comes back to what I says to Coyote in Green Grass, Running Water: “There are no truths…only stories.” There are many, many stories; enough stories for every person, so that every person can build their own truth. In the end, everyone needs to decide for themselves what their “raison d’être” is. We all must find our own personal reason to live, and stories are there to show us how.
To do this, they must not only make us question our own humanity, but must also remind us of it. Some of these books moved me to tears, others to laughter; nearly all of them have led to some sort of love. And in the end, what could be more human than these emotions, love especially? It is love, in all its forms, that I find to be the most compelling argument for our humanity. One of the most important lessons these books have to teach us is how fragile life is, and thus, how important it is to find and hold onto love.
We will all die, and just because our time frame is less obvious than that of the characters in Never Let Me Go doesn’t mean it is any less concrete. Whether you believe in fate or chance, destiny or choice, death has no escape. This is not a reason to despair. “The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again…You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t,” (God of Small Things); we all know the ending to life is death, but what matters is not the destination, but the journey. We may live to be one hundred; we may die before we are thirty. The point of life is not how long you can go on breathing, but what you do while you are breathing. “We are only ever given just so much. But it is always, all we need,” (I Wrote This For You). Our time may be short, but if we use it to live life as fully as we can, it is as long as we could ever need. And because we may not be here very long, it is even more important to seize love when it comes around and express it when we feel it.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: “I had never told her how much I loved her. She was my sister. We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary… Here is the point I’ve been trying to tell you, Oskar. It’s always necessary,”. When I read those words, I wondered: how often do I tell my parents I love them? What about my sister? I watched a video recently, and the man in it talked about how hard we all find it to say "I love you"; to parents, even more to siblings, and probably worst for friends. How do you tell a friend you love them, even if you do? How do you show it? We all forget how miraculous life is, how easily it can be taken away, and we all forget how easily everything can change: “It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that,” (Never Let Me Go). It’s easy to let love go, to assume that there will be another chance for us, but that’s never guaranteed. Death, which features in every book we read, is the only constant of life, and if we want love and meaning in our life, we have to make an effort. We cannot allow life to pass us by. Even more importantly, we cannot be like the many people in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close who shut themselves off from the world in an effort to escape from pain and death. “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age,” (Dubliners). Better to risk death or pain, like Michael Furey, than to live on, without pain, yes, but also without true happiness.
(And if to be "human" is to love, what does this mean for animals? What about elephants, which, as Oskar pointed out, will gather around a recording of a dead elephant - a dead friend? What about the stories of dogs who wait for their masters to come home - stories like Hachi? Who are we to say that these animals cannot love, and how does this affect our treatment of them?)
Love is just one meaning of life though. In A Mercy, Florens finds happiness in freedom and independence, as do most of the women and men in Green Grass Running Water. The meaning of life, different for every person, can be found in stories, if one looks hard enough. It can be rooted in love, in the stories which reveal the truth of that love more than any final paper ever could. Or it can be rooted in something else. There are more than enough stories to go around.

(I have pretty much been using this blog for updates on shit I watch, and I feel like that is unfair (unfair to who, exactly, I have no idea, but whatevs), so I proudly present, above, the English paper I wrote about the meaning of life. Sort of. I edited the bits that were filler and/or boring and/or referenced the novels we read too much, and added in some stuff - for example, I obviously didn't turn in a final paper that had a paragraph in parentheses. I actually like this version more than the one I turned in - yet another instance where I probably should've written it, then gone back and edited, instead of doing it all in one go)

I have seen the future

And it is hell.

Or, you know, the next four months will be at least.
I have moved from one CIS to another, but this new one promises to be both harder and potentially much less interesting. In Econ, we have some sort of big project due nearly every week for the rest of the year. I don't even want to discuss or think about math. There's an enviro project, which we are supposed to start this week, and which looks to be more work than I ever wanted to put into that class. Independent gym looks like it's actually gotten harder since last year (I knew I should've done this sooner...), despite the fact that the woman running it seems to be completely incompetent. And I have no idea how to go about getting my tech credit figured out.
Fucking fucky fuck fucks.
French and band are my sole respites.

/whining