Midyear Report

So I'm supposed to be filling out an official Midyear Report for UChicago, but I'm shirking my admitted student duty. On the other hand, I did submit an original prompt to possibly torture next year's UChicago applicants with. (zomgGrammarAlert: split infinitive AND ending sentence with preposition.) The essay that's supposed to result from that prompt will probably be sacrificed for Spectrum/Idiosync/Acadec writing instead. Pathetic times.

Notice how none of the above work is school-related. And guess why? Second semester senior. I'm excited for second semester even though first semester sucked in pretty much every single way possible. Honestly, junior year -- that proverbial year from hell -- has been infinitely better than senior year so far. Second semester has a lot of work to do for senior to catch up to junior. (This is possibly because senior has a mass, and thus inertia, far greater than that of junior, making acceleration difficult. Once it gets rolling however, senior can beat out any puny low-inertia junior -- hopefully.)

I've noticed how rarely I write about events in my life here. Partly, it's because I have no idea who reads, and I've realized people are ridiculously sensitive to what or how other people write. And then there is psychoanalysis bit: I'm loathe to record negative events (embarrassingly frequent), and I don't think I can write about events authentically. "Words, words, words"--such artifices of human thinking. This echoes something said in English today. So how has senior year been?

A Midyear Report:

Academics: Grade-wise, neither great nor terrible. Probably won't help my regular action apps, but I don't think they will really make a difference either. Class/teacher-wise, best ofmy high school experience. The quality and enthusiasm on the part of teachers are pretty consistent, though unfortunately I can't say the same about my own enthusiasm. Green is a flippin' exciting and understanding teacher, but I just don't find myself engrossed in the subject. Physics is made awesome by lab and McClung's cutesy-dutesy labs. Leavitt invests so much in her class I feel guilty everyday for my own slackoff-ness in French. Noeth's jokes can get tiresome but his occasional cluelessness is endearing so calc is bearable. English is actually rather inconsistent, dependent largely on Crick's mood.

ECs: This is starting to feel like a college app. For some reason, Idiosync and Spectrum aren't as fun as last year. I feel like my dedication to everything have somewhat deteriorated, which probably just speaks to my own laziness. Acadec is gearing up now, and I do want a free (not in economic terms though) trip to Hawaii, so I will muster my last defenses against laziness. Tutoring is fairly blah, and I think neither of us are too excited about bonding over math.

Movieland: What an abysmal showing this year. I really haven't seen or written anything except for a college-related essay about Brazil. The basement is currently too cold for prolonged periods of inhabitation, but come spring/summer, Netflix and projection will be more frequent companions. A couple more trips to the theater are also in order. I also haven't followed the Oscars at all this year. But...I found a recording of "Rescue Me" sung by Gael Garcia Bernal from the soundtrack of The Science of Sleep that has me incredibly excited. What's more exciting is that it's a rewrite of The Velvet Underground song "After Hours." I listened to it way too many times yesterday. "If you rescue me...I'll be your friend forever...."

Driving: Aren't I supposed to have a license by now? I haven't driven in 1.5 months and I think I drive worse than I did in the summer. iSuck.

RIP Spam 1.0. unRIP college apps.

Be-Lear-Guered

I have only a counterargument and conclusion left to write,
which means I might actually finish before midnight.

Look, I just wrote a poem. How productive am I.
Now I must write an essay. How unproductive am I.

Sigh. I must contrive to amuse myself. Funny they say AP English is hard; all that class has taught me to do is procrastinate and slack.

Matter Over Mind

Have you ever tried to think about nothing? That elusive Zen-like state of calmness. It never works because then you concentrate on not concentrating. But today, I stopped thinking. My mind literally went blank. Nothing. Nada. It stopped functioning. Just like that. My cold has sapped all energy out of me. I go around with a glazed look and gaze at things without recognition. Blargh. My eyes are glazing right now.

I look Superquiz today, which despite its intimidating name, went surprisingly well, resulting in an usually high score : study time ratio. (As opposed to English, whose score:study time ratio is depressingly low.) After literally zero study, I realized it was the least-prepared I've ever been for a test; I hadn't even made an attempt to study nor had I touched the packet since November. Strangely, I think I did better this time than on the first round. Pfft. This actually establishes a terrible precedent: any motivation to study for future tests is gone. (Not that there was much motivation before.)

My zoned-outness extended into Acadec as well:
Jyoti/Yi: Number 19 doesn't make sense. Was that the question thrown out?
Crick: Yea, 19 is a terrible question. It's just screwed up. (Okay, maybe he was more articulate , but my mind isn't recording on such high cognitive levels.)
Me: What's wrong with number 19? It makes perfect sense!!! OF COURSE WINTER SOLSTICE IS CLOSEST TO THE END OF WINTER. GEEZ!
So in King Lear, the most foolish person is actually the wisest. Maybe that's the case here? And no one else realizes my brilliant logic? Yea right. Sigh. And then I tried to make Sue correct my test even though she hadn't taken Superquiz yet.

I need sleep. Good luck getting any this weekend. The next 7 days will be hellish.

To Do for Weekend of January 20

• 2 days of Calc - in my supreme ditizness, I didn't realize there was a back to the assignment sheet
• 2 days of physics
• Catapult
• French Project: write and finish art, memorize presentation
• King Lear recitation
  
• KING LEAR PAPER.
  
• 1 week worth of Euro homework
• Senior Sem advertisement
• Figure something out about Yale
• FAFSA, CSS profile, taxes and crap
  
• Angela's Ashes
  

To <3 or Not to <3

Despite that message at the end of the last post, I still haven't touched math. Procrastination is a way of life.

During math class today, I half-listened to Noeth while cramming Chinese music for Acadec. I know a little of both subjects and not enough of either. Alas, the period afterwards, I sojourned all the way to the red wing to seek out Crick for the music test. He was chatting with former students (yet again), and I got plaintively waved off to somewhere "quiet," which suited me perfectly fine.

I skimmed through the music test while skimming through my daily internet perusals: email and Slate in the computer lab. (Evidently, Chinese music is too boring to occupy my entire brain.) Steff walks in and starts doodling differentials onto my test. As we assess the aesthetic appeal of various terrorists and actresses, I remember I have to turn in the test to Crick next period and get back to work on it. There, I see Steff has scrawled, "I <3 CRICK."

Sigh. I <3 Steff.

Paris. Berlin. Mexico City.

Hunkered down with Youtube and DVD for some lovely and romanticized traveling this weekend.

First destination was Paris via Youtube. Upon learning that the long-anticipated portmanteau film Paris je t'aime was bootlegged on youtube, my hot little criminal hands sought then out immediately. So yes, watching a 5 in screen surrounded by white space and ads is not the optimal viewing experience, but shame on US distributors for not putting it out in theaters or DVD. (Especially when this French movie has so many American directors and stars.) I haven't gotten around to watching them all -- it seems 6 years of French study has been for naught -- though I have been so far duly amused and touched.
Maybe it's just my short attention span, but I adore short films and short stories. It is a difficult art to capture something momentous in only a few minutes or a few pages. Brevity is the soul of wit, no? When done well, a short film is the perfect capsule of a sentiment. When done badly, it just seems very pedestrian. From the segments I've seen so far, Paris je t'aime is a mix of both. My favorite are by Tom Twyker and Alexander Payne (not, interestingly, my favorites directors at all): Fauborg Saint-Denis and 14e arrondissement. Least favorites are by Christopher Doyle and Wes Craven, the former tries unsuccessfully for Chinese-French punnage and the latter is just unsuccessful despite invoking the spirit of Oscar Wilde.

Sunday night, I turned my gaze eastward and backwards in time to 1980s Berlin. Wings of Desire was recommended to me by my UChicago interviewer, and since I recently received a nice email from her, I decided I needed to watch it now. But Wings of Desire is not an urgent movie. It languishes, it longs, it lingers. From its soaring aerial views to the cool black and white , it's a poetic meditation. I actually liked it quite a lot, but I need to rewatch it in a less detached frame of mind. I love the title Wings of Desire because it's haunting, and the same can be said about the film, but I need to let it "haunt" me more. The ending however, just totally lost me; I thought it was terrible and stopped listening.
By the way, on top of sharpening my French, I need to learn German too. The angels in Wings of Desire hear snippets of thoughts that are never translated in the subtitles--how infuriating! The opening lines of the film are echoing in my mind right now. Whoever said German was an angry language never heard enough German.

After a hemisphere change, I found myself in a rambunctious Mexico City. Sólo con tu parejga is a exuberant sex farce that manages to take on a rather serious topic: AIDs. Tomas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho -- creepy priest of Bad Education!) is a serial womanizer who gets a bitter pill when one of his conquests decides to take revenge. I adore the cover art - inventive, loopy, and rife with phallic symbols - sums up the film perfectly.

Now I am off to the utterly unlovely and unromantic Mathland.

Drunken Nerds

Four successive posts UChicago-related. Hmm, I begin to sense a pattern. Anyways, bits and pieces from fellow Chicago applicants assembled from around the Internet.

On why Chicago students drink so much:
The smarter you get, the more depressing you realize the world is. The more depressed you get, the more you drink. (paraphrased)

So, bar jokes:


Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks "Something for you, sir?" Descartes replies "I think not," and vanishes.

A neutron walks into a bar and asks for a beer, which the bartender gives him, and then walks away.
The neutron calls after him, "Hey, how much does this beer cost." The bartender replies, "For you, no charge!"

C, E flat, and G walked into a bar. "I'm sorry," the bartender said, "We don't serve to minors." So E flat left and C and G split a fifth between them.

Essay 1: Claustrophilia

In his book Having Everything Right: Essays of Place, Kim Stafford describes the Kwakiutl tribe of British Columbia assigning place-names based on the natural characteristics of a location, the events that took place there, or the feelings that the site instilled. "Where Salmon Gather," "Sound of Dripping Water," and "Where Dzo'noq!wa Cried Out Oh," were among the names the Kwakiutl people assigned to their surroundings. He'lade, translating to "Place Having Everything Right," was of particular meaning, as it was the name universally given to exceptional locations. What is your he'lade?

I’ve never understood claustrophobia because I have the opposite condition: claustrophilia. Small spaces are my he’lades. The walls encircle me like hugs, and I curl up in my own warmth. It is comfortable and comforting. There is no room for a big scary monster to hide behind my back, and I can inspect every inch of the floor for creepy crawlies. As I press my chin into the groove between my folded knees, I feel good. It’s as simple as that.

Small spaces are common, but they are not created equally. You can find them anywhere: under a table, behind a door, between shelves. But the conditions that create small spaces also make them uninhabitable: too dark, too inaccessible, or even too small. The perfect space is hard to come by, but I happen to have one in my bedroom.

Between my bed and the wall, there is a strip of land that is the exact width of my hips. Holiday feasting usually makes the squeeze snugger, but fat is fortunately squishable so I still manage to fit in. On one side, I have the white blankness of a wall—a potential canvas if inspiration strikes. On the opposite side is the narrow ledge between the mattress and bed frame, where I’ve improvised a shelf perfect for hiding pencils, socks, and midnight snacks. A nightstand makes up the third side, and a clock and lamp sit atop as reminders of the outside world. The groove of my neck fits perfectly on the top of the nightstand, but the handles of its shelves dig into my spine. I’ve gotten used to it, though future spine problems may be blamed on those handles.

Usually, a book or magazine rests on my knees when I sit there. If it’s a school assignment, my left hand splays the book open and my right wields a pencil ready to discern its meaning. More often, I am peering at the glossy pages of a magazine, either reading about Baghdad or the latest misadventures of Sienna Miller. Its floppy pages stay put on my knees, so both of my hands are instead devoted to stuffing food into my mouth. Compressed in that little space between the bed and wall, I have learned two hundred years of European history as well as the intimate details of Miller’s relationships. As thus, I have enjoyed the company of both John Law of pre-French Revolution infamy and Jude Law of Nannygate infamy in that inter-furniture space.

In three dimensions, this place is tiny, but other dimensions exist too, and they can be boundless.

An Immodest Proposal

Apathy and indolence are an especially passive combo. When these two traits are found together in a single person, especially one who is suffering from a severe case of senioritis, it can defeat even the most well-intentioned motivations. Basically, I don't feel like doing anything.

In a lot of ways, senior year has been kick ass awesome. I have great teachers, great classes, and a group of friends I am very lucky to have. But in many, many ways, senior year has been shitty like hell. I don't mean personally...but there has been a lot of anger and tragedy flying around me that I can't ignore. Hopefully, the latter half will pick up.

So before this post totally devolves into emo ranting, here is the real purpose this post: to somehow motivate myself out of wasting time online. During one of those time-sucking periods of internet surfing today, I found a thread of archived U Chicago essay prompts. (This has nothing to do with college, I swear.) The prompts were, as promised, uncommon. Uncommon in that the writing they inspire are not college-essay like at all. It struck me that these prompts were great for expository writing.

So in a typically masochistic decision, I have assigned myself to write one essay a week. Maybe essay is the wrong word; it'll really just a passage inspired by a prompt or answering the prompt. Partly, I feel guilty shirking the responsibility of writing a really U Chicago essay, which I must remedy to ever consider myself a legit Chicago student. Also, I need to start updating again, in less ranty and hopefully more interesting fashion. First course of action: resuscitating that Frankenstein essay...

Last Gasp on College Apps

My last, disjointed thoughts on the beast that has dominated my life over the last four years. I promise: after this, no more discussion of colleges until April.

The Caltech supp has boxes for AMC 10 and AMC 12 scores, as if they're required tests like SATs. Well, since is Caltech, they probably are required tests. Hehe, I can't believe there are people smart and hardcore enough to go there from our school. I think I sit in a bastion of genius, but then I walk into physics class and sense quite the opposite.

Rice Cinema actually sounds pretty snazzy (not quite Doc Films worthy but I didn't expect that), and the people at Rice seem so much more down to earth. They're actually believable students, not precocious teenagers all posing to be the next Nietzsche. I will steel myself for the possibility of spending the next four years of my life in Texas. If this really happens, I will laugh, laugh, laugh.

Yale is boring, elitist, and located in a ghetto. Their attitude on admissions is so condescending. I want my application fee back. *raspberry*

Despite the time I have spent disenchanting myself of U Chicago, I still think it has the coolest emblem. Their spiffy phoenix can rip apart the stuffy shields of the Ivies any day. Why don't they call their sports teams the Phoenixes rather than the boring Maroons? And pictures like these always make me <3 UChic again.


I'm actually pretty happy with all of my "match" schools, and am loathing/apathetic to all my reaches.

In other news, I'm eating a chocolate mint flavored candy cane. Need to ask Avanti where they bought the Asha lollipops because they're yummilicious.

New Year Resolutions

There are three hours left of this first day of 2007, and I am not spending them doing homework no matter how urgent the assignment. (Well, now that college apps are done, nothing really feels urgent.) So according to tradition, New Year resolutions in semi-relevant order. This is the first time I've done them in a while.

• Get to know more people.
• Get closer to my friends.
• Exercise once in a while. Exercising fingers on the keyboard does not count.
• Watch some fabo-awesome movies. Preferably in theatres.
• Be less lazy in everything.
  
• Do a thorough cleaning of my room, including all the spaces under my bed and in the closet that have not seen daylight in at least 6 years.
  
• Make a smart decision about college that I won't regret.
  
• Do some crazy things that I hopefully won't regret.
• Be more engaged.
  
• Get out of New England.
  
• Don't leave trash/dirty dishes around my house.
• Learn to use a sewing machine and make some clothes.
• Learn to knit and crochet.
• Learn to cook. (I feel a housewife trend.)
• Don't let any friendships wither away.
  
• Read all of the books I bought. (Sadly, this is an entire shelf.)
  
• Make sure my brother turns out okay.
  
• Get an official job.
• Do things I sincerely enjoy.
• Travel.
• Never go on collegeconfidential.com again.
  
• Get my writing up to speed.
• Eat like a girl and not a pig.
  
• Seek passion.
  

I'm going to have to be extra efficient and motivated to get all that stuff done. But, I don't want to start this year on a negative note, so no self-doubting allowed.

This year's holidays did not feel holidayish at all. I feel no festive spirit endowing me with glee. No annual spirit of renewal. Not even relief that my college apps are done. I almost feel kind of numb. Hmm, okay, no negativity right? I'm going to sleep now. Five hours earlier than I have in the past week.