La dee dah

I would just like to post so that no one thinks I'm dead. This time of year is hectic.
I found out from five of my college so far: in at University of Wisconsin (that happened a while ago actually), in at Smith (they let me know early, I sort of flipped out), in at University of Washington (...though they never actually sent me an acceptance letter, they did send me financial aid, so...), in at Northwestern (with double legacy, so make of that what you will), and waitlisted at University of Chicago (which is pretty much cool, because that means I don't have to figure out the whole no-engineering-program-but-a-really-strong-economics-program-what-do-I-want-to-do-when-I-grow-up thing).
I got the National Merit Scholarship; $2,500, which isn't much, but you take what you can get.
This upcoming week I find out about everywhere else; to be honest, at this point, it just really isn't all that exciting. Too much build-up; I was ready for this news two months ago. Now I just want school to be OVER.
My ethnography is almost over - I just have two more sessions this week and then some interviews. Did I ever talk about that here? I talk about it so much in real life that I've forgotten...
Well, on the off chance that I haven't, it's essentially just an assignment for English that involves me joining a different subculture temporarily and studying them. And then I write a paper about it. So. I chose an arts high school semi-nearby - they have to audition, people come from all over the state. It's been kind of really interesting actually, and I'm really liking it. There was some initial drama involving getting enough hours and shit, but it's all worked out for the most part.
Let's see, what else is happening in my life...Ultimate has actually, legit started...grad parties are being planned (there was some minor drama with that too...)...oh and prom. Prom, prom, prom. People have started getting asked, even though it's not until May, and let me tell ya: it's more than a little depressing. Much as I may talk the talk of not caring, I do. Not overly so, but still; it'd be nice to get asked. It's okay, I've already resigned myself to some classic RomComs for that night.

The Band Went Down to Nashville

...and it was equal parts badness and goodness.
Badness:
-Two 18-hour overnight bus rides + staying up late cause I was with friends + early morning wake-ups both days we were in Nashville = total of 28 hours of sleep, tops, over the course of 5 days. I do not do well without sleep; the day after we got home, despite taking a nap and having a full night's rest the day before, I  had this horrible empty feeling and a splitting headache all day. It disappeared today, probably because I slept for 12 hours last night.
-Despite the fact that the trip was only four days long, we still managed to have some drama/conflict/annoyances. Yay.
-Though I love large crowds of people, I hate when all the people in the crowd are from the same place/are together - i.e., 250 students on a band trip together.
-The first day we were there, it poured all day.
-I think I lost our family's copy of Spirited Away.
-Nashville, while certainly not without its charms, was not as cool as New Orleans, which was absolutely beautiful.

Goodness:
-Travel is pretty much always good; it's just really nice to get away.
-I'm so happy I roomed with the people I did, because they were/are awesome. In general, the people I hung out with on this trip were great; the drama came from people I didn't spend much time with.
-I didn't feel the need to buy as much while in Nashville, so I spent a lot less than when we went to New Orleans.
-The final day in Nashville was much, much warmer, which made up for the first day.
-In fact, that final day in general was awesome. We got to see the choir perform at the Rhyland, the jazz band played at a restaurant where we ate, and I learned how to line dance.

One more thing

And also, I will be seeing The Hunger Games at the midnight premiere. I am extremely excited.

Colleges, Nashville, and general life updates.

I just looked through my web history on Google and it's like reliving the past three years - the school projects, the various life events. Also, it's terrifying.
I am sometimes really leery of the Internet. Like, it's really freaky how much shit is out there, logged and ready to be used - but at the same time, it's almost comforting. I will never really disappear. There's no way for me to be erased without a trace, because my entire life has been tracked. And for someone who is as nostalgic as I am, it's like a little trip down memory lane - the equivalent to going through my "special bins".
Anyway, that wasn't what I was going to discuss in this post originally. I was going to do small life updates.
1. I got into Smith! Yayy!! The letter had a cute little personalized message on it, which mentioned my essay, and it was kind of awesome. The best part was that it was a surprise because it came early. I really hope the rest of my letters come in like these last two have (got into UW-Madison too) - unexpectedly. I'm going to be a nervous wreck if I know the decisions are coming.
2. I will (hopefully) be shadowing soon at this performing arts school for an ethnography I have to write and research for CIS this semester. I'm super excited for it - like, I have been talking about it all the time, which I'm sure is kind of annoying, but whatever. I'm still not sure if it'll work out, but I'm crossing my fingers.
3.  I am going to Nashville in three/two and a half days! It's our bi-annual band trip, and there'll be another 18 hour bus ride, so it's both extremely exciting and extremely daunting. I still need to pack and gather supplies and stuff, so I'll be doing that over the next few days.
4. Related to Nashville, I made a scavenger hunt for my sections' page in the band booklet thing that'll be given to everyone, and as a part of that, I made Waldo out of clay. I also made the other characters from those books. I'm planning on hiding them in our hotel, and hopefully someone on the trip will find them. If not, I think I'm going to stick them in random places, and put little notes on them so that people will find them and email a gmail account I just created and then re-hide them, so there'll be like a giant Where's Waldo game kinda, and I really really want it to work, and be super cool, but I'm trying to be realistic.
So yes. That is what is happening right now with me. Now I have to go edit my Personal Literacy Narrative.

THE FINAL QUESTION

Yes, there are four total, but I modified an old college essay answer for one, so I didn't have to brainstorm on here.
It's time for the community/family/things about them that were important to my personal development! Yaaaaayyyy!
Can I real quick just point out bullshit this question is? Like, my family and my community have affected me in pretty much every single possible way you could think of. Nearly everything about my family has been important to my personal development, so yeah. Broadest question ever.

I can't decide if I want to talk about diversity or not. Like, it's sort of easy: my mom is Japanese, my grandmother is very obviously a first generation immigrant who still has difficulty speaking in English about 80% of the time; I went to an elementary school that was very diverse, had a strong focus on diversity, both racially (especially with regards to the whole MLK thing) and in other ways, namely that it was the designated school for disabled students, so we had a whole bunch of people in our classes with developmental/mental/physical disabilities. Moving to Minnesota, there's the whole Hmong/Somali aspect - so there's religion and smaller minorities.
At the same time, I feel like it's a little disingenuous. Like, in some ways my surroundings have been very diverse, but in many ways, they also haven't been. I'm not close friends with anything who isn't middle class and raised in America. Most of my classes don't have that many people who aren't white. Also, I've tried to write that response multiple times, and I just don't know where to start.

Unfortunately, I also can't come up with any other answers either. I could talk about how weird my family is, but that's hard to explain.
So um yeah, I just don't know what to do. That's pretty much all this post is about. I'll probably end up writing about diversity, but ugh. It's just so awkward.

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!!