Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey

It has been a crazy weekend. I wish I'd had time to post on Friday night, but my family was busy planning for our trip to northern Wisconsin for my cousin's graduation. Friday was one of the weirdest days at school ever, ranking up there with the time the lights went out during lunch in seventh grade. It started fairly normally, besides being the last regular day of the school year. At lunch I played Catch Phrase with the "lunch bunch": Sonya, April, Ellen, Alexandra, and Sandra; the bunch also included Maya, who was a senior, and Emily Anderson, who didn't always come to lunch. Third hour's main development was Ms. Greene's discovery that I'm not signed up for Spanish next year, prompting a long lecture. I know that I'm pretty good at Spanish, which was her main argument--I got a third-place "Rosa Valdes Cruz" award this year, which is given to students who do well in the cultural contest and the National Spanish Exam--but I cannot stand another year like this one. Spanish easily was one of my least favorite classes, even worse than calculus, maybe, as far as the actual time in class went, because in calc I could talk or let my mind wander. I'll probably take Spanish classes in college, but I am done with Ms. Greene as a teacher.

Fourth hour: the insanity began. The class started with people talking about raging food fights and water balloon throwing in the halls, particularly the fact that Mr. Shaver had gotten knocked down and was being taken to the hospital, possibly with a broken leg. I was shocked, but then the class went on as usual, as we took notes from Critical Theory Today about how postcolonial criticism applies to The Great Gatsby (that sounds horribly boring, but I do enjoy studying Gatsby from all these different viewpoints). Suddenly, we started hearing a lot of yelling outside, and pretty soon we couldn't help but get out of our seats and go over to the windows to see what was going on. Mrs. Longhenry's class is on the second floor in the upper corner of the school, so we had a good view of everything. A huge crowd of students was running around in front of the school, waving posters and yelling. A few were banging on the windows. Several hall aides, police officers, and various staff members came out, and the students all ran out by the street. Eventually, they started marching around in a line, as Mrs. Wilson tried in vain to talk to them. A lockdown was announced, and after we finished our criticism notes, we just sat around, signing yearbooks and keeping an eye on the situation outside. Jenna, Allison, and I had to sneak out to use the bathroom. It turned out to be pretty fun.

We were released from class and told to go "quickly and peaceably" to our next class. (People kept saying that peaceable wasn't a word, and made fun of Mrs. Wilson, but I was pretty sure I'd seen it before, and confirmed my suspicion by consulting a dictionary during sixth hour.) Fifth hour was less than twenty minutes long; Mr. Stokes was our sub, and he ranted for a while about all kinds of things. He's a small, elfish man with a white beard and glasses, who always wears gray suits. He used to teach at Auburn, and now he subs a lot and coaches bowling. He has some strange idioms, like "You'll all come rushing up here like flies on dooky," and "That's about as cheerful as a bag full of dead babies." After fifth hour, I saw Laura and Ellen in the hall, and ended up talking to them for so long that I didn't have time to get to sixth hour. I was scared that I'd get in trouble if I was in the hall, and I knew that I wasn't going to be doing much during sixth hour, so I ducked into Mr. Longhenry's class and spent the hour there. It was...interesting. I can definitely see where Mr. L. gets all his complaints about the freshmen. Maybe they were especially bad, though, given the atmosphere of the day.

After school, I went outside to board the bus and go home, but the bus apparently wasn't there. Twice I walked toward the end of the line of buses and met people from my own bus coming the other way, shaking their heads worriedly. I probably should have checked for myself, but there was a fairly large group of kids from my bus, and so I knew it wasn't just me. The only problem: my sister was missing. All the buses pulled away and I was left standing there with Kat An, my neighbor and a member of the frosh-soph QB team this year, having no idea where Maureen was. I went inside to look for her or have her paged, and all of a sudden I started crying. All these people kept coming up to me--Mrs. Heisel, Ms. Floming, Mrs. Drummond--and trying to comfort me, saying things like, "She's a big girl; she'll take care of herself." I was really embarrassed. Mrs. Heisel had her paged twice, as Kat and I sat in the main office. Mr. Hurder came in and saw me and asked me what was wrong. He acted really annoyed, like, "Oh, no, her again." (I cried in his office when I got in trouble for the fake ID thing.) He informed me that bus 216 had been there and left. Kat and I went outside to wait, and soon bus 216 pulled up with about five people on it, including Maureen. I don't know why the driver left with so many people obviously missing; maybe he just figured that all of those people weren't riding the bus that day.

I offered Kat a ride home, since she had been so helpful, running around everywhere with me, and we sat down to wait for my mom. Pretty soon Emily showed up, having been in the chemistry room finishing up a lab, and it was fun sitting there talking to her and Kat for a while. I told them that I was, if not happy, at peace with the situation, because it's now an established rule: I have to cry on the last day of school. Freshman year it was the end of Dead Poets Society (when Todd stands up on his desk and says "O Captain, my Captain"); sophomore year we watched a film in U.S. History about all these young men getting killed in Vietnam, and besides that I was losing a lot of good friends--Melanie, Hillary, Bandy, etc.--to graduation. In fact, as I was leaving school just before the whole bus/missing Maureen fiasco, I was thinking to myself that I had not cried that day, that I should have.

When we arrived home, after dropping Kat off, my day brightened with the sight of a red minivan parked in the driveway. Okay, so it's not a party van, and I have to share it with Maureen, and my parents will probably make me do grocery shopping for them (my mom's been threatening that since I was eight or nine). But it's basically mine: I have a car now. Just have to get that license...

On Saturday morning, my mom, sister, and I got up at five-thirty to drive to the small town of Hammond, Wisconsin, home to my uncle Steve, aunt Joanne, and cousins Mark and Jeff, a drive of about five hours. Mark graduated from high school as valedictorian, so of course we had to go. Actually, we didn't even see him graduate; that was on Friday night. My sister and I basically sat in their kitchen for five hours, watching 200 people we don't know come in and out and serve themselves beef sandwiches and strawberry Jello. Like I said, it's a small town, so everybody goes to everybody's graduation parties, plus my aunt and uncle teach at the high school, so a lot of teachers came. Later that night was better; my cousins from the Chicago area came. They're in their twenties, so I generally get along with them better than I do with the older crowd. We ordered pizza and sat around talking until midnight. My mom's side of the family is extremely loud; there's always about four conversations going on, and an average of three traditional family arguments will come up at least once during the course of a day spent with them. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the story of "the cow game." My family occasionally plays it, too; when you're driving in the middle of nowhere, it's sort of a way to pass the time. Each person counts the cows they see on their side of the car; a white horse or a cemetery on that side kills all the cows. Whoever has the most cows at the end of the trip wins. Cheap entertainment, I guess. Anyway, my mom always tells the story of how she had the most cows, and her sister claimed she saw a white horse, but really it was white with brown spots. This apparently still rankles, although it probably happened when my mom was six or seven, and now she's 44.

My aunts love to embarrass my sister and I, too, as in hinting loudly that we thought some of Mark's friends were cute, while the friends were still within earshot, or proudly introducing me to some hot senior guy as "a member of the State Scholastic Bowl team." As my mom sympathized later, I might as well have a sign over my head, flashing "NERD." I don't mind being associated with the quiz bowl team at Auburn, where the only people I care about are pretty focused on academics and are proud or at least respectful of academic competitions and accomplishments. But if I'm being introduced to an unfamiliar guy, even a smart one, that's not the kind of thing I want to be hailed as. He kind of glanced at me and said, "Oh," in a condescending way, and then hurried from the room. Yeah...

I do love my family, though, and I enjoyed the weekend. I am always glad to get home, although today, Memorial Day, hasn't been too relaxing. Being gone the last two days has meant a lot of work today, especially on calculus and world history. My only goal is to get a C in calc. I want to do well on everything else, but as calc is my first final of the week, and it's the one that matters most based on my current grade in the class, that's all I really care about right now.

I'm Looking Through You

Today was the seniors' last day; the year is very nearly over. It seems to have gone very fast. For me it has been a pretty good year overall. I got my first D on a report card, stood up to Ms. Greene in quiz bowl, survived the word paper, made a lot of new friends, asked two guys out and was rejected by both, got asked to prom, was introduced to Joni Mitchell, R.E.M., the Wallflowers, Josh Ritter, and probably some others I'm forgetting, made it through two Longhenry classes...it's been crazy, but maybe no more than usual.

I thought that I wouldn't miss the seniors much. I told April on the bus this morning that I don't like any of them very much as people. And when I'm thinking of Baylie, Beth, Jorian, Zack Beach, and various others, that's true. But I will miss Andrew Raridon being cheerful in newspaper. I'll miss Louisa in Spanish. I'll miss Ritzi, Cristal, and Maia (whom I group together because of their status as former Key Club officers). I'll miss Will drawing woodchucks on his pad of paper and making me laugh during quiz bowl matches. I'll miss Brittany Foreman and Arthur Surratt bickering. I'll miss Kelly Rockwell being Kelly Rockwell. And even the people I don't especially like have become a part of my life. Some of them I've known since I was in first or second grade; some I've only known since the beginning of high school, but that's still three years. Today I saw Ellie in the hallway and she kind of smiled distractedly and said hi, and all of a sudden I was tearing up as I walked away, not for Ellie alone but just because of all of the people I've gotten to know so well.

On the other hand, the class of '05 graduated can mean only one thing: the class of '06, of which I am a part, is up next. We'll be seniors next year; in one year, we'll be graduating. It seems so short a time put that way, but I know there's months of applying to colleges, slogging through snow on the way to school (I hate winter), senioritis, finals, and a lot of other annoyances to be endured before I'll be able to don a cap and gown and shuffle across a stage for my diploma. (Speaking of which, I have a not-irrational fear of tripping over my gown and going flying at graduation. Well, maybe not flying, but stumbling and making a fool of myself. I'll try to be careful to lift my gown up when I walk up there, and to wear sensible shoes that won't slip off at inconvenient times.)

I've been really happy because I finally, after about six months, put new strings on my guitar. I can't really play the guitar, except for a few riffs (the main part of "Smoke on the Water," the beginning of "Sweet Home Alabama," parts of Third Day's "Consuming Fire," "Dust in the Wind," etc.) But there's a nice feeling that comes from messing around with the guitar; it adds to my once-desired persona of hippie and still-desired one of someone with artistic talent.

One of my favorite things to do is to go to the library and check out a huge stack of books. There's just endless possibilities in an unread stack of books. They all seem so nice and shiny. I checked out a big stack for the summer from the Auburn library the other day. Unfortunately, the stack has already dwindled by one and a half, and it's not even officially summer yet. Oh, well. The Cherry Valley library will always be there.

Birthday

My birthday (I'm seventeen now) was actually yesterday, but I didn't have time to post because of the Spanish Honor Society induction. I was the secretary this past year (I was the only one nominated when we had elections at the beginning of the year), so I had to stand up and do stuff during the ceremony. I was embarrassed because I started giggling during what should have been a solemn moment. The inductees were supposed to come up one at a time and light a small candle from the bigger, central candle, and Valerie O'Brien tried to light her candle from the wrong end. I don't think anyone was offended, though. Except Ms. Greene, but she tends to be overly serious about things. At the National Honor Society induction, she got all huffy when Kelly Rockwell was being kind of silly.

Anyway, my birthday was very good. My mom, sister, and I had to get hepatitis A shots because of our planned trip to Italy this summer (apparently you're supposed to get them when you leave the country). We got up early and went to the county health department for that, and then we went to McDonalds for breakfast. I'm not a fan of McDonalds at all, but they have delicious hotcakes. The only thing I like there is the breakfast. My mom drove us to school, and the rest of the day was pretty good. I'd rather not go to school on my birthday, but at least I didn't have any tests or anything. There's a tradition at Auburn of people pinning money to your shirt when it's your birthday, so I made $6.25 (Maya gave me a quarter). Not bad...

Mr. Fischer wasn't at school, so I got to go to Ms. Floming's room for sixth hour. I love her class; they're like a sitcom or something. Ms. Floming just adds to it with her cute/whiny demeanor. Two boys were having a contest to see who could get the most people to give them hugs, so I had to give one of them an "air hug." This very strange boy, Thomas Ventimiglia, started talking to me for no reason. They were filling out this interest survey, which everyone had to fill out in English classes, and one of the choices for a career was "funeral director." I mentioned that I'd read somewhere that Angelina Jolie wanted to be a funeral director, and Thomas was like, "Huh. It's always the weird ones." I just started laughing. One kid, whose name is Theodore but who goes by Bo, got in an argument with Ms. Floming, and argued, "You're just jealous because you're not named after a Huxtable!" As it turns out, he's named after Theo on The Cosby Show. Who names their children after characters on The Cosby Show? Have you ever watched The Cosby Show? No one on it can act. It's like Leave It to Beaver for black people, only not really, because they all act like white people.

I decided that I'm going to make for myself a large and definitive notebook with everything that I need to remember, that I can always have handy. Like the difference between "continual" and "continuous." I looked it up once, but I never remember. It's probably not a hugely important thing to know in everyday use, because most people use them interchangeably, but then I can use the right one and feel good about myself.

The Night Before

The following is something I scribbled in a notebook the other night in bed before going to sleep, with the intention of making it into a blog post as soon as possible. Because so much has happened since, though, I couldn't make it the whole post, so I'll just insert it here.

"I get so disgusted with myself sometimes for always acting like I'm the center of the universe. I just finished reading She Said Yes, about Cassie Bernall, a girl who was killed in the Columbine school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, after replying 'Yes' when the gunmen asked if she believed in God. And it's definitely made me think, but the first coherent thought I had after closing the book was something about a guy I know from Colorado that I kind of had a crush on, making a ridiculous connection between the two. Like, yeah, everything relates back to me and my latest obsession with some cute guy.

"I need to focus on morality, on defining what that means in my life, not just the letter of the law in the Catholic Church or Kohlberg's theory of moral development. The problem is that I can't come up with anything that doesn't include vagues phrases like 'what's right' and 'the greater good.' The problem, actually, with any basic set of rules, including America's justice system, is that almost everything is case-sensitive. It feels like it should be as simple as 'rob a store; go to jail,' but then you start coming up with all sorts of legitimate-sounding justifications: what if the robber's wife is sick and needs the drug he steals? Like in the Heinz dilemma, which we talked about in English. And the problem with trying to handle things case by case is that people expect for guidelines to be set, and in some ways guidelines need to be set for the system to work at all. Otherwise it would just be judges and juries acting purely based on emotions and prejudices...which already happens anyway...I don't know.

"In some ways, it's easy to see how I could be doing better, in what specific ways. Example number one: Amanda Moredock. I am so patronizing, so charitable-acting when I talk to her. Who am I to say that I'm better than her, with my superficial persona of intelligence? The same goes for some other people. And my constant maligning of Ms. Greene's character. Sure, she's insensitive and downriight mean to my friends, like Emily, Imran, Will, and Patrick. But that gives me no right to openly mock her or secretly join in making fun of her weight or her disability.

"The main thing I need to do is just realize that I can be flexible, that everything doesn't alwaus have to bow to my will."

Okay, that was a few nights ago, and I still agree with most of what I wrote, although I don't feel so furious with myself as I did then. As I mentioned, a lot's happened since then. Thursday night was this week's crazy night; my mom's pre-graduation Baccalaurate Mass (she graduated from nursing school) was at 4:30, and then at 6:30 I had to be at Auburn for the National Honor Society induction and awards night. My grandparents came for the Mass, so there was the usual round of "So, what colleges are you thinking about?" Actually, I've been answering that question all week: on Tuesday night at a church dinner for Sunday School teachers, on Thursday night with all the parents of my friends and classmates, and for the past few nights with different relatives here for the graduation. I always mumble something about how I'm not really sure yet. I haven't told any of my extended family about my intended major of film studies, or combination of film studies and journalism or some such thing. It doesn't sound like a real major, I guess.

Anyway, last night my mom graduated (summa cum laude, by the way) from nursing school. After the ceremony, we (my parents, sister, both sets of grandparents, my aunt, my cousin and his girlfriend) went out to Franchesco's for supper. I like Italian food a lot, but I am never going to be able to eat it in front of everyone because of the inevitability of getting sauce down my front. Not a lot, but definitely noticeable. The same thing happened at the end-of-the-year Quiz Bowl banquet a couple of weeks ago. Also, I always seem to have some embarrassing flaw in my clothing or something that I'm only informed of after walking around with it the whole night; on Thursday at the NHS deal, Ms. Greene had to inform me that my slip was showing (it was quite embarrassing). I always feel sloppy or awkward or something.

The best thing for me in the past few days is that, upon the request of Brad Fischer (a QB friend from Winnebago), I asked Emily to borrow a CD called Hello Starling, by Josh Ritter. I have no idea who that is, but his music (kind of a quiet folk-rocky style) is wonderful. I've listened to the same two songs, "Bright Smile" and "Wings," about ten times each since Thursday.

Magical Mystery Tour

I'm too lazy to find Beatles songs that actually correspond to my moods anymore, so lately I've just been taking whatever song I heard that morning on "Breakfast With The Beatles," a regular feature at around 8:30 on the oldies station my bus driver listens to, if it's one I rather like.

I'm to the point where I just want the school year to end. I could care less by now about most of my classes. World history has gotten better since the AP test, though, as I'd predicted; earlier this week we watched Dr. Strangelove (which was hilarious and quite quotable: "Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!") and for the next few days we're going to do absolutely nothing (actually, we're supposed to be working on a project, but no one's worked on any group project in that class all year; there's no reason to expect any of us to start now). English is good because we're doing The Great Gatsby, which I like, but that also involves taking a lot of notes at home out of a book we got about literary criticism, and it's tedious. Everything else is the same it's been all year, mostly boring with some good points.

This week, my main focus has been Thursday and Friday, when I have a lot of stuff to do involving my mom's graduation from nursing school, as well as an awards ceremony/National Honor Society induction. (Speaking of days of the week, lately whenever I say the word "Tuesday," I hold up two fingers. I tend to hold up fingers whenever I'm talking about numbers five or lower, and I guess it's just my reaction to do so even when I'm not actually talking about a number. Today I did it during quiz bowl practice, and Ryan Salberg ridiculed me, saying, "What's that for?" and holding up four fingers. And he's right; I don't do anything with the word "for," or "too/to," for that matter, so why should Tuesday be special? I'm just weird, I guess.) Anyway, all these ceremonies and things involve dressing up (that also includes a First Communion this Saturday and next week's Spanish Honor Society induction, which I guess I have to go to, seeing as I'm the secretary through no fault of my own; I was the only one nominated), which I rather like when I'm comfortable in the clothes and don't have to do it too often.

Lately my dad's been going crazy with renting movies from the library. Every time he comes home he brings a new stack. In the past week or so I've seen Wimbledon (with Kirsten Dunst and Paul Bettany, a bit cheesy but good), Adventures in Babysitting (the most hilariously '80s movie I've ever seen, I think), Simon and Garfunkel: The Concert in Central Park (sigh; very nice), The Triplets of Belleville (extremely odd but wickedly funny in satirizing Americans), and Raising Helen (quite horrible, except for this random Indian woman who kept running around with a baseball bat, which was just funny), and we have Matchstick Men, Being John Malkovich, Mystic River, Kate and Leopold, and Holes left to go. We have this DVD recorder, so he just makes DVDs and stores them away for, presumably, boring summer days. I told Ellen that we had a bunch of movies, so she invited herself over last Friday night to watch one; April and Sonya ended up coming, too. As it turned out, we ended up watching Waiting for Guffman, which I'd already had, but none of them had seen; I think they enjoyed it. This Friday's out because of my mom's graduation, but I should establish a regular Friday night film showing, or something. When we've done it before (last year on various nights we watched The Breakfast Club and Bend It Like Beckham), it's always been nice to just hang out with people.

One week until my birthday...I'm not sure what, if anything, I have planned. Hopefully, listening to my hypothetically brand-new Garden State soundtrack CD.

I Saw Her Standing There

Today I went back to the ol' routine after two days of AP tests followed by ISS. It was all right; I kind of understand calculus now, Spanish is still fairly mind-numbing but bearable, and on the whole everything should be easier now that there are only a few more weeks until school's out.

Yesterday was my day in ISS. I had been hoping to have Mr. Hamlett as the overseer (he was my sixth-grade English teacher), but he wasn't there; instead I had a woman, who seemed nice enough but didn't say much. April, who had ISS the day before, said that Mr. Hamlett talked the whole time. There are two "assignments" everyone has to do: write out the rules and write an essay about why you're in ISS and what you can do to avoid coming back, or some such thing. The first half of the day was pretty boring; everyone was quiet, and I didn't have much to do. Later, teachers sent work for me to do, like Spanish. I love doing mindless worksheets, at least when I don't have anything better to do. After lunch, things loosened up a bit. Everyone was like, "You must be so smart!" to me, just because I have glasses, I think. I pretty much look like the stereotypical "nerd." At lunch, this one kid was tossing an orange up in the air the whole time, and then, right after the bell rang for the end of lunch, he peeled it. The lady yelled at him, saying that he couldn't eat it, and after a prolonged argument, he had to throw it away. Two hours of mostly silence later, he said into the void: "Man, I sure miss that orange." I burst out laughing. In second and fifth hour, we had bathroom breaks; we walked down the hall in a big group. During second hour, I was embarrassed that someone in AP bio would see me, but I found out that they were dissecting crayfish yesterday. So, actually, it was a very good day to miss, because Brian'n'Chris gave me all the answers on the crayfish worksheets, so I got the points without having to mess with what was undoubtedly disgusting.

Today, when I walked in the school building, I had my ID on, facing out, but the hall aide called me back after I was halfway down the hall to look closely at it and make sure it was mine. I laughed it off then, but as the day went on I grew more angry about the incident. I don't know what I'm going to do. Does it count as "harassment"? I thought about going in a different door, but April said I shouldn't let them bother me, and it's true that I don't want to inconvenience myself by walking around to the other side of the school because of one annoying hall aide (it's always the same one). I saw her again at lunch; Sonya and I were (supposedly) helping Mrs. Flowers sell flowers and candles for Book Club. When we walked past the hall aide, who was guarding the doors to the cafeteria, she asked me where I was going (calling me by name) and yelled at me not to walk past a set of doors. I'm so thankful that the year is almost over; otherwise, I don't think I could put up with this.

The other main incident of today was that I got asked to prom. Okay, so maybe this was kind of my secret dream, but not really the way it happened. I was hurrying along the hall after school, a bit worried because I was running late and didn't want to miss the bus. Andrew Raridon saw me and said, "Hey, Colleen, can I talk to you for a minute?" I told him I had to catch the bus, and he put his arm around me, pulled me to the side, and said, "Well, I have to talk to you right now." I had no idea what could be going on. "Do you want to go to prom?" he asked me. I stammered, "I don't know..." He continued, "Do you want to go to prom with Brandon Hamilton?" Brandon Hamilton writes for the newspaper, mostly short articles about stars and planets; he's extremely quiet, and I kind of doubt that I've ever spoken two words to him, or vice versa. He seems nice enough, but I really don't know him. I stammered something again, and Andrew said, "Do you want to think about it? Your face is really red right now." I said, "Sure." As I walked away to go to my locker, Sapna came up to me and asked, "Did he just ask you to prom?", to which I responded, "No; he asked me for one of his friends..." Sapna seemed really excited for me, as did April when I told her on the bus, but I'm not sure if I'm going to go. I can't dance; I'm not a big fan of the senior class; as aforementioned, I really don't know Brandon, or even Andrew, that well. It would be kind of cool to go to prom, but I just don't know.

Just one more day to get through till the weekend...I have a world history test tomorrow, which I think is insane, three days after the AP test. I am sick of studying for history. I don't really get to sleep late this weekend, though; I have the SAT on Saturday. I don't know whether I should study. I didn't at all for the ACT, either time I took it (on a Saturday and at school as part of the PSAE), but the jury's still out on how I did, so it might be good to at least do a practice test on the College Board website.

Getting Better

The day I have been waiting for has finally come. I am finished with my AP tests (the advantages of having both my tests in the first two days of testing), my mom is done with nursing school (not officially graduated yet, and she still has this state test to take before she can get a job, but all her studying and stressing is at least temporarily on hold), and I can sit back and relax. A bit. Calculus and bio are still around, of course, and there's that little fly on the windshield called Spanish, but for the most part I'm not doing too badly. And although I'm not exactly pleased about my ISS tomorrow, it couldn't have come at a better time: it means I have absolutely nothing to do tonight, because I'll have plenty of time to get my homework done tomorrow.

As for the tests, I feel pretty good about them, though I probably shouldn't say much on the Internet (technically you're not supposed to say anything about the essays for a few days, and you can NEVER say anything about the multiple choice, though of course everyone walks out the door of the testing room and starts talking about it). I accidentally wrote one of the English essays in the wrong space, and had to copy it over, so then I was panicking and hurrying on my last one, which made it come out a little weird. I referred to Ramen noodles and Robin Hood, and used the phrase "peachy keen." Some of the sample essays we read in class were a little crazy, though, and it's good to have some kind of personal voice in there, I think. Hey, Mrs. Longhenry gave me a 9 on an essay in which I talked about Tootsie Roll Pops and bluegrass music, so maybe I'm okay. World history was easier than I expected. There were several on the multiple choice that I wasn't quite sure about, but very few, if any, that I just had no idea on. I thought I'd die on the essays, but the DBQ was pretty easy as far as DBQs go, and the two free-response ones were about things I actually knew about. One was almost exactly like an essay I'd written for a Longhenry test, so I was feeling pretty good. I at least didn't completely bomb.

The best part about the tests (besides getting out of school, of course) was the break time. There was a lot of cameraderie between people both days, and everyone was joking around and stuff. The first day, I made some comment to Joslin and Patrick that "evil AP spies were going to come charging out of the underbrush" if we talked about the multiple choice questions, and they said that at that moment, someone behind me stuck their head around a corner and looked around. I kept hearing them telling other people that story. Today, at the world history test, Andrew and Matt gave each other piggy back rides up and down the hall, and Tyler and Will attempted to steal swiveling chairs from an adjoining classroom to use on the second half of the test until Matt sat down in one and turned; the chair gave a loud, horrible screech, and the guys quickly scrapped that plan. I enjoyed hanging out with Sapna, Jenny, and Lindsey Claeyssen before and during the test. In freshman year I thought Lindsey was mean, but she's really funny, and not in a mean way, either. I'm not really sure where I got that impression.

I need to start compiling a master list of funny quotes from teachers and things I've overheard. Once, at summer camp when I was eleven or twelve, I overheard a kid yell, "Ketchup is the condiment of the devil!" A girl on my bus, Melissa, has said some crazy things over the last several months; sometimes she's just annoying, like when she rambles on endlessly and at top volume about EVERY PET SHE'S EVER HAD, but she has said, "I would not let you go out with my sister. She uses whips and chains... She's a dom-in-ay-trix," and "I just don't think people should kill a little lamb just so they can have their pork chops." No, pork does not come from lambs. Sorry, Melissa.

For the past few days, I've been studying like crazy for these AP tests, so tonight I definitely plan to be as lazy as possible. I do have my piano lesson (sigh), but maybe I'll watch some of The Triplets of Belleville, which my dad rented from the library, if there's time, or else just read or something. It is quite nice not to have the burden of these tests hanging over me, and pretty soon junior year--which has been kind of crazy, but generally in a good way--will be behind me as well.

Misery

After a pretty easy and uneventful two days of testing, my arrival back at school on Friday was rather disastrous. As I approached the school, I realized that I didn't have my ID. I turned to April, panicked; she gave me her last year's ID. Everything just happened so fast. I now see how stupid it was of me to try to use April's ID; the hall aides are especially malevolent with me after the editorial I wrote for the school paper, and I had money. I should have just bought a temporary ID; the hall aides would have taunted me, but that would have been bearable.

Instead, I got written up for "false identification." I was called out of first hour, world history (a class that had already been going badly because of my realization that I had completely forgotten about the DBQ that was due), to go to Mr. Hurder's office, where he lectured me about trying to see things from the hall aides' point of view and so on. I fully accept responsibility for the false ID thing; I'm not going to like ISS on Wednesday, but I can handle it. It did make me mad, though, that the referral called me "rude and argumentative." I seriously wasn't, I don't think. I know what being argumentative is; I can do argumentative. Asking questions is not being argumentative (although Mr. Hurder said, "If someone asks you to do something, you do it. You don't ask questions." What am I supposed to do? I can't just blindly follow the orders of these people!). It was kind of funny when Mr. Hurder tried to schedule an ISS session for me. ("Monday." "Oh, I have the AP English test that day." "Tuesday, then." "Um, I have AP world history." He got a tad peeved at that point. "Well, what day do you not have a test?" [me in tears] "Sorry...")

The most embarrassing part was returning to world history with a tearstained face and being asked about my ordeal. The whole class supported me, but I felt bad for disrupting the period on such a crucial day (the AP test is this coming Tuesday, so Mr. Longhenry was really hurrying to get through the material). I told the class that I was "rude and argumentative," and Will laughed out loud for a long time. I don't know if that means that it's funny that a person like me would be rude and argumentative, or if it's funny that anyone would be written up for such a crime. I can't believe I bawled in front of Beth Wilson, Kristen Ott, Matt Strong, Ellie Kiefer... it's painful to think about.

Actually, aside from having a bad headache from crying, the rest of the day wasn't too bad. I got an A on my word paper (Aashesh got higher than me, and it was annoying that he bragged about it, but I was actually really happy for him; I'd pretty much expected him to get a C or D, after reading the paper the night before it was due). I made some stupid mistakes, but overall, I'm just glad the whole ordeal's over. I survived the word paper. I can say that now. I managed to finish the DBQ sixth hour and turn it in, and Mr. L. wasn't mad (I think my crying in first hour had something to do with that). I don't understand what's going on in calculus at all, but that's a fairly normal occurrence. I think I can make it through the rest of the year. Everyone was being really nice to me, which was kind of embarrassing, but not bad. Sapna told me she would make brownies for me; I don't know if she'll actually do that, but it was a nice gesture. Also, my mom told me that my sister's softball coach--whom I don't even know--overheard the hall aides talking about me in the teacher's lounge, and that it was inappropriate; she plans to take the issue to Mr. Hurder. I know that I broke the rules, so I doubt that it will get me out of ISS, but I hope that the hall aides experience some retribution. They obviously haven't taken my article to heart and tried to be more polite and/or sympathetic; when I was caught with the fake ID, they (the same two women from before) kept yelling, "Write that in the newspaper! Write that!"

Then, that evening, I went to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Sonya and April, which was very funny and, while not exactly true to the books, preserved a lot of the funny little quips and good British humor that makes the books good. Alan Rickman, who I like from Galaxy Quest and the Harry Potter films, was hilarious as the depressed robot Marvin, and the guy who plays Guy in Galaxy Quest was pretty funny as Zaphod Beeblebrox, the egomaniacal president of the galaxy. The Vogons were mind-numbingly bureaucratic, and the scene where the computer, Deep Thought, pronounces that the answer to "life, the universe, and everything" is "forty-two" was very nice. I was very glad to have a good movie to go see with friends to take my mind off of the events of the morning.

April told me on the way home that Mrs. Longhenry told the class that April and I are at a "stage three" of Kohlberg's theory of moral development, which we learned about earlier this year, that we think that the rules are just a game. It made me mad, and embarrassed. I feel like I've been trying all year to impress Mrs. Longhenry, and every time I do something good--get a high score on an essay or a test, or write a good article for the paper--I turn right around and embarrass myself by failing a highlannotating assignment or getting suspended for trying to use a fake ID. But maybe I really am at a low moral stage. Sometimes I feel like the only reason I follow the rules and everything is because I fear punishment, and also maybe because of my "good little girl" persona.

This weekend I've mainly been studying for the AP world history test, although my sister and I did go garage sale-ing yesterday. My best acquisition: the soundtrack of Forrest Gump, a 2-disc-long compilation of some really good songs from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. It prompted me to make a compilation CD of my own, something I've been meaning to do for a while to take care of the four or five CDs on which I mainly listen to three or four songs only. I used six or seven from the Forrest Gump CD, including "Blowin' in the Wind" (Joan Baez), "California Dreamin'," "San Francisco," and "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head." They make me very happy, and I'm starting to get over the whole ID thing, although my stomach still aches with embarrassment and anxiety whenever I think about having to face my world history classmates tonight at the review session at Barnes and Noble.