Yikes! Life in the real world: a giant game of Whac-A-Mole?!

The first day on the job is a bit like a game of Whac-A-Mole would be, if you had to play the hardest level imaginable and you'd never played before. So much information comes at you all at once, and there's so much to absorb that it's quite easy to get overwhelmed. I realized rather quickly that if I was going to be successful as an employee, I would have to do something a little different. So that night, I took home a menu and spent the next several days memorizing it. After that, I memorized the layout of the make-table (that's where we keep all of the toppings for the pizzas, and where we assemble them). I made myself a diagram, and wrote up a ton of notes. I think my coworkers were laughing at me. But I really want to do well in this job. If I have to do a little bit more than the average bear these first couple of months, just to get a feel for what it's like to actually have a job, that's not a bad thing is it?

New Car!

Hey everyone! It's been a great year. We moved into our brand new house on Hosmer Lake and it's so much closer to downtown and the school and everything. I graduated from Summit High School at last! Of to bigger and better things now,  I suppose.

This summer has been really wonderful. I had my Senior Piano Recital on Father's Day, and my whole family came from Hermiston and Portland, as well as a few friends from school. It was a really touching event, and a spectacular culmination of eleven years of musical study. Don't worry, though: I'll still play the piano every day.

I finally got a job, after what must have been nearly a hundred applications. I work right downtown, at Olde Towne Pizza, and I love it. It's great to be able to look forward to going to work every day.

Along with my new job, I finally have my own car, and soon, I'll have my driver's license and I com go anywhere I want! (Kind of...) It's really just because my parents are tired of picking me up from various locations around town at all hours of the night, and now that I work evenings... they decided it wasn't worth waiting any longer. Though, I'm not sure what they were waiting for in the first place...


I start college in the fall at COCC. I'll be staying at home, so it's not that big of a change, but the idea of being in college is a little frightening and exciting at the same time.

Luckily, there are still one or two of my friends who will be staying around town next year also, although the majority of us are off in our own directions. Hopefully, we'll all meet up again someday.

Manatee-Riding: Hoorah!

I discovered this the other day on my Facebook newsfeed.
If you need a laugh, this is such a ridiculously hilarious video.
Check out the facial expressions on the interviewer's face!
I kind of love The Daily Show.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

Yikes! SENIOR YEAR GOALS AND LAMENTATIONS

Hey there folks! Sorry I haven't posted in eons! I had a super boring summer and figured you'd probably appreciate it if I spared you the details of my every-day routines. (What I ate for breakfast and such.) I think the highlight of my summer was that for my birthday, I got the 2012 AP Stylebook. I was/am super happy about that. In late August, I had reconstructive jaw surgery. Oh boy, was that a trip. I had my jaws wired shut for 6 weeks. YIKES! Liquid diet. I think if I ever have to have soup again I might go nutters.

On a happier note, I am now thoroughly engrossed in my senior year of high school. What? When did that happen? It's scary to think about actually. It's already November of my senior year, so... seven months until graduation... YIKES! It's fun to see where everyone wants to go to school and finding out what they want to do with their lives. I'm learning new things about people I've known for ages.
That sounds super dramatic - "what they want to do with their lives" - almost like preparing for the end of an entire era. Which is, in all honesty, what we're doing, I suppose. Because once we start college, we've branched into a whole new world (que cheesy Disney song here) of social hierarchies and opportunities unlike anything we've been exposed to so far.

People keep telling me all the social drama stuff goes away in college. I hope so. Maybe people have matured by that age. But that's what I was told about high school too, and middle school before that. Maybe it just never goes away, and it's an innate element of human nature. If Herbert Spencer had it right, an the world does operate on a survival-of-the-fittest basis, then the "Queen Bee" mentality will exist forever. But I guess that's just the way life is sometimes.

I'd like to think that I'm past that part of my life now. The part where my temper gets in the way of what's really important to me. The part where I can't trust anyone because some little homunculus buried in my subconscious goes nutters. I like to think I've changed -- matured. That I'm not so scared of losing people that I can't form a functional bond with anyone. I hope I'm not as quick to anger, or quick to find fault with the people who are closest to me. I hope others can notice this as well, and that I'm not totally delusional, convincing myself that I've matured when I haven't.

Maybe, if I have matured,  I can use that maturity to avoid the perils of social antics and the dramatic spotlight of involvement in the issues of others. My hope for this last year of high school is that I can work toward reparation of past losses, even if those losses can not be entirely replaced. My ultimate goal is to exit high school with insight and understanding far beyond that with which I entered three years ago, and if I'm lucky, maybe I'll make some lifelong friends as well.

Tygh Valley 2012

AP Extremely Tired of School!!!

Is it summer yet? Ugh. We just got another AP Extreme project. This time, it's answering the question of what makes us human. I think I might go nuts. There are so many ways to answer that question and so very few of them are solid and inarguable. GROWLSNARLSNUFFLESNORT! At least I'm working with a partner this time. Honestly, I didn't expect to be working with anyone half helpful, but as it turns out, I must have gotten lucky this time. We're only a week in, though, so it might just be the "novelty" effect at work. Oh well, we'll see.

I'm sick! I think I have a cold, but normally I don't get THIS sick from a cold . . . Ughs! Oh well. Richard said he might come visit me this weekend, so maybe I'll be able to convince myself to get nice and healthy before too long. In any case, I appreciate the willingness to visit me in my isolated hermithood while I live in Sunriver. It looks like it's going to be a long, lonely summer though. Alas. . .

Lessons from a While Ago...

Here we are--or here I am, at least-- at the end of Junior year. And what a year it has been. I think I've learned more this year, both socially and academically than almost any other year I can remember. Maybe at some point, we stop learning new things and just relearn what we already know in a different way. If that's the case, I hope I have a long time before I reach that point, because I know theres a lot more learning for me to do. Someday, I hope I can remember all the lessons this time in my life taught me, and I can teach those lessons to others. But if there is anything I have learned this year about the nature of the human condition, it's that some lessons aren't meant to be taught. They're meant to be learned. That is to say, no matter how many times someone else tries to teach you something, or warn you about trusting someone, or keep you safe from yourself, it won't make sense until you've experienced that lesson for yourself. Whether by trusting someone who betrays your trust, or loving someone who breaks your heart, or making decisions that only serve to bring you down; some things, you have to find out on your own.

Notes on Honor and Loyalty

Antony claims that Brutus was an honorable man. Which is true, however, Antony fails to stipulate the difference between honor and loyalty. Where one fails, the other often does not, and therefore the defective value is allowed to be forgotten. But the difference, though subtle, is significant. I once knew a girl who thought that honor was the most important thing she had. Honor and loyalty. She never realized that sometimes the two must be separated until it nearly cost her the life of someone she loved very much. And then she discovered that honor, what is "right" or the "good" thing to do, may not be the best thing to do, and often it is the worst thing to do. Loyalty has no grey lines. Unlike honor, loyalty bears no question and no reservations toward gender or race or age. Loyalty is unconditional, and uncomplicated. Honor comes from loyalty, but loyalty is not born from honor.
Honor causes a person to tell a lie to someone they love in order to protect them. Loyalty causes a person to tell the truth, to face the heartbreak of the person they love, and be there to pick up the pieces after everything's fallen apart.
I suppose that's all I wanted really. Someone to be there for me and hold me when I couldn't handle the pain of living with a thousand truths that weren't my own, someone to tell me I am a good person who believed it and wanted to make me believe it. Someone who wasn't just going through the motions in order to keep me happy. Someone to help me superglue the bits of my heart back together after they'd been torn apart again.
A relationship is only ever one-sided. Perception is only ever one sided unless you can impose you're way of thinking into the minds of other people, which is in fact, posible, but only the lowest people try to convince people who are happy in a relationship to be unhappy in it. In any case, for the same reason that blue to me is a different color than blue to you or anyone else (because of the way you physically perceive the color), a relationship is only ever what it is to one person. Even if two people agree on what they feel for one another, they're agreeing on two different things.
This really wasn't the point of my attempt to write this down. I might try again later tonight. I apologize if reading this makes you feel like pulling my fingernails off with a pair of rusty tweezers.

People are dumb. Males are dumb. Humans as a species were the greatest evolutionary mistake ever made. Lies are worse than murder. Betrayal is worse than murder. Are betrayal and lies the same? I suppose in essence they are. Both involve the destruction of a bond between two people. Both involve a heartbreaking deception. Both involve someone feeling as though their soul were being cut into tiny bits and another person walking away without a backward glance. Both usually involve a loved one or a friend. Because what use is betraying someone who doesn't care about you? What benefit comes from lying to someone who doesn't trust you?

Just a thought.

These are the best ever!!!

October 19, 2011

How's that for a great title? (Haha). Hey, the first issue of the Eye Of The Storm came out! I'm not sure if I've told you that already. Anyway, I got the front page place I wanted! I'm a junior editor in the next issue! Yay, me!!! Homecoming football game is this Friday, so good luck team! (Insert school spirit here). It happens to be Spirit Week at Summit, and unfortunately we seem to be rather on the shallow end in terms of spirit. The question has been raised "does Summit know how to have school spirit?" I think it does. I think we just need to find something, one common thing that makes us all so happy or so angry we can't stand it, and then we'll have enough spirit to move molehills! (Woops, I think I meant mountains... didn't I?)

Anyway, Homecoming game means Homecoming Dance. Of course! More on that after the fact, because currently, just contemplating it makes me so excited and nervous that I start shaking and missspelling things and using words like "things" etcetera... Even just then, I had to type that sentence three times and delete various words several times in order to spell correctly and articulate my meaning in a coherent fashion. And yet still somehow, "misspelling" managed to receive three s'es. Ugh. Anyway, that's Rae's World In Brief for now. More on What's News in a few days after the world has settled down a bit.

Second Week in October

First school newspaper came out. I love that. It makes me feel like I'm a part of something. A community within Summit that is its own family. I loved seeing people carrying a copy around, seeing people reading it, and hearing them talk about it. I loved the way people would ask me if I had seen this article or that, and I would just smile and nod. And humor their enthusiasm, as though I hadn't read through the article with a fine toothed comb in the editing and refining of the paper. It's like that one bundle of paper can draw the whole school together, if only for a few moments.
Alas, it seems a few moments is not enough. Summit played Bend High last night in a football match that we were sure we would win. Unfortunately, when student's egos get away from them, things tend to go wrong. 40-0, not in our favor. But on the bright side, at least that wasn't the Homecoming game. And just as a side-note, no matter what happens, the band always wins.

First week in October

Wow. Already a month into Junior year. There were two college-fair type things this week. A college visitation on Monday, and an actual fair on Thursday. But were quite informative. I feel a little weird about the fact that I actually like sitting in a stuffy room with a bunch of other snot-nosed teenagers listening to someone try to convince us to attend their college. The visitation was half the day, so I got out of science, and third period (open) and almost out of fourth period too.
On the day of the fair, school started late, and the freshman and sophomores were taking their ACT Plan and Explore tests. The bus scheduled to take us to Redmond (where the college fair was held) wouldn't be at the school until 8:50. Many people simply slept in, but my friends and I did not. In the spare time between 7:30 when we got to school and when the bus arrived, Max Dunkelberg and I went to breakfast at the Sage Cafe across the street from Summit.
A college fair is an experience quite unlike any other I have known, except maybe the videos of Saturday Markets in Singapore from the 1800's. There were so many people, it was difficult to tell where I was in relation to anything else. The colleges were represented by booths set up in long rows, and the milling chaos between the rows was the necessary highway to the other side. It's the type of thing where one has to have a plan before they enter, or they could get trampled within seconds.

Friday, there's a football game against Bend High. If Summit wins, it will be the fifth win in a row. Best of luck.

Busy busy bees!!!

Lots of stuff going on right now! Summit News Staff presents the first issue of the 2011-2012 school year paper, the football team has a game against Bend High School on Friday, (lots of pressure there, not going to even attempt to be polite about it). Also, Homecoming draws ever nearer. I had an awesome time at lunch today playing Scrabble with Cheezits with Max Dunkelberg. I am positive I spelled cheezit incorrectly, but at this point, it doesn't really matter much.
Poor Mr. McDonald is ill!!! He evidently has water in his ear (although how that correlates to being ill, I have no idea.)
We made videos in AP Language and Composition. I think people liked mine, but I can't really tell from everyone's reactions. Part of that might be the fact that I went first. I like to set the bar really high. (It's just one of those things...)
I'm boycotting events in large groups of unnecessary people. This means most group events, but alas, I am a solitary creature at heart. (I'm sure there's a reference to some great piece of Literature in there somewhere, but I can't quite remember what it might have been.)
What else... too much for me to think of right now. Although I will doubtlessly be writing frantically sometime next week as well. Does once a week seem like enough? I feel like every day might start to get a bit monotonous....

PS: Two college fairs this week! Woot! I'm attending both of them like the good little word nerd that I am. Tee Hee!!!