3:22 p.m. - 2002-09-05
back to school, and my weird memory
Back to school, back to school, to prove to Dada I'm not a fool. I've got my lunch bagged up and my shoes tied tight, I hope I don't get in a fight!
that's probably wrong, but I haven't seen Billy Madison in ages.
I spent all of Tuesday afternoon being Tartuffified, and finally finished the damn play. Wednesday was my first day of school: junior/senior year. Crunch year. Wohoo.
First period I had a free which Jackie had too, so we went to the library and started reading aloud "The Fellowship of the Ring." Hahahaha. We have more frees throughout the year together, so maybe she can teach me Elvish. I'd dearly love to answer my teachers in Elvish and get really strange looks as they ask "what language is that?" but don't want to admit that they don't know. Second period was AP Psych, new teacher. I think it'll be a good class, he seems nice and funny, and it's with Missy, Jackie, Sarah, Shriya, and Kris. (Kris gave me orange glowsticks.) We get to choose one of areas in the book to be Resident Advisor in. My first choice is Psychological Disorders, second is Learning, third is States of Consciousness. I do remember some of this from my psych course at CTY in 2000, but not that much, and anyway this is more detailed. Mr. K. says that we're going to be training guinea pigs, and doing module outlines every Friday, and taking hard quizzes, but that he'll give lots of extra credit. Third period was AP French. With the loss of Jason and Jordan, we're down to eight people. Mrs. H. started out the class by telling us the mistakes we made on our final essays back in June; I made lots of little mistakes apparently, including mixing up "un poste" and "une poste," one of which means a job and the other of which means a post office. I did not mean to say that I wanted to get a good post office where I could be happy.
The worst language mistake, though, happened when I was eating breakfast at Dad's fancy hotel in Paris the summer before last. An elegantly-dressed waiter came over to ask me if I had finished, and I responded "Je suis fini." I didn't realize that instead of saying "I've finished," I had actually said "I am finished," as in "I'm dying"! Whoops.
Anyway, fourth period I had a free with Missy and Pilar and Shriya and Kris and some other people. Then physics with Shriya, Missy, Kris and other people. Then lunch with zillions of people. Different people took over the cafeteria, and they put in more vending machines and another table-thingie, and no one but seniors are allowed to leave the campus anymore, and we have all the new 9th-graders, so the cafeteria is ridiculously crowded. Yeugh, I hate it. After lunch I had AP Chemistry with Jackie and a room full of seniors. Mrs. W. seems really nice if strict, but since it's in the afternoon I really can't take the class. I mean, going for a week seems kind of silly. I did want to keep Jackie company, but what if I got grades in that one week, that's ridiculous! Plus I don't really like staying all day, and we're starting out reviewing significant figures, which I already remember from last year. (The seniors all took chem two years ago, but Jackie and I and the only other junior in there, AJ, took it last year.)
I walked home at 1:45, which was strange compared to my usual 11:30. Talked to Mom and procrastinated for an hour, then got down to doing those SAT IIs for Lisa. I read a lot of the introductory info in the book first before I got bored, and then took writing. I wrote one of the shittiest essays ever about how people have always had a great passion for change. I do not think I can possibly convey the patheticity of this essay. I mean, even in French it wouldn't be a particularly good essay. Anyway, I did okay on the multiple choice part, I got 54 right, 5 wrong and left 1 blank. I did very badly on the math though, I only had time to do about half the exam, and ... yikes... that definitely needs to be a much higher grade. So I did those two tests until dinner, and then emailed Lisa and Ben.
At dinner Mom told me that Sarah K. is really unhappy in New Jersey, where they moved from South Carolina. After two days of school she feels out of place and miserable. She hates the cliques and she doesn't like the classes. The K. family is coming up for dinner on Saturday for Rosh Hashanah, but Mom said that Andy (Sarah's mom) thought it would be better if I called, so I called anyway, and we talked for twenty minutes. It was a bit awkward but whatever. Then I checked the answering machine and had messages from Hannah and Katie, yay! So I left Hannah a message of love and called Katie to find out how her first day of school at her new school had gone, but she wasn't there so I left her a message too. And I left a message for Lisa. Then I wrote a birthday card for David, who turns twenty today. Isn't that scary? By then it was nine o'clock, so I went downstairs and worked out and watched the beginning of "The Matrix Revisited." Then I curled up in bed with my psychology textbook -- yes, I'm a dork, I curl up in bed with a textbook. I basically just flipped through the whole book and picked the modules that seemed most interesting to me. Unfortunately, neuroscience, which makes up 14% of the AP, interests me least. I didn't like biology. I'm more interested in nature v. nurture (it's not nature vs. nurture, Mr. K. told us today; the proper abbreviation is "v."), and conditioning, and various disorders. At CTY, when I studied psychology, most of my guy friends (Zach, Rob, Josh, Raymond) were in the neuroscience class.
Speaking of CTY, Matt sent out the funniest email as a plea for help, pretending to be an abused child at his ski academy in Tahoe. He says that teachers hit them on the head with ski poles and throw them out the window, but that's ok because there are soft 20-foot snow drifts, although everyone gets frostbite. Then he complained about the effects of spandex suits on his testicles and how afraid he is that he's not going to be able to reproduce. It cracked me up, and he included his address for donations to the fund for these abused children, so I wrote to him today and mailed him some photos and a penny. mwahaha.
I had AP Psych first today, then three frees in a row. The seniors had an assembly during French, and I'm the only non-senior, so I went and talked to my guidance counselor and the scheduling guy and cancelled AP Chem, and then spent the rest of the period talking to Mrs. H.. Apparently her room was completely ransacked over the summer -- drawers open, papers all over the floor, magic markers drawn on the board, crumbled chalk -- which, needless to say, pissed her off. Another free. I tried to do some of my global studies reading. I got my computer account fixed. Another free, but this one was with Sarah and Amy and Kris and JP, so I didn't even bother with the reading. Physics. I'm already confused in the class.
Now for today's random self-analysis topic... memory! (Yes, if you feel the need to sing the song from "Cats," you may. I'll wait.)
I have such a weird memory. I remember the weirdest things. I don't remember dates for history, but I remember the day I got my braces on and off and what date we went to Sun Valley in 1998 and the birthdays of people I haven't spoken to in years. I remember the name of the woman who helped us at a jewelry store in Whistler four or five years ago, but not the names of most current politicians. If I study notes in my binder for a while, I'll remember what the page looks like. I won't always remember what it says, but I'll remember where the information was on the page. And sometimes I do remember what it says. During the CTY final exam-o'-death (the gameshow), one of the questions asked who came up with the innocent fat man scenario. Out of nowhere, I remembered that it was Kai Nielson, and I remembered where it was written on my page. I didn't even remember trying to memorize that. I don't have a photographic memory, though, I can't really describe it. And I remember images, where I was. Once I was walking through Saxon Woods with Dad and I looked up and saw the leaves framed against the bluest sky and it was so pretty that I thought to myself, CLICK, I'm going to remember that. And I still do. It was years ago, but I still remember what the leaves looked like against the sky. When I think about conversations I had at CTY, I can still imagine myself back there. I remember talking to Matt about skiing and ripping grass apart into the dust on the first full day of camp. I remember sitting outside on our last day in Brittany with Emma and Dimitri, eating some sort of chicken, and what the sun looked like on the white rocks, and how they hurt my feet when I walked on them. When I look at photographs that I'm in, I can remember being there. I can put myself back there. When I look at photographs that I took, I can remember taking them. When I look at a book, such as "Inside the Walls of Troy," I can remember where I was when I read it, and in that particular case, I can remember lying in bed and crying as I read it shortly after Uncle Henry died. I can remember where I was the first time I heard Eminem on the radio and when I heard that Aunt Clare died. I remember the spills, the things I've broken. Sometimes I think to myself, I want to remember this moment. I want to remember this sunset in Nantucket, I want to remember this study hall, I want to remember when the man who was checking out our groceries at Zabar's told me I looked like I came from a Degas painting. But most of the time I don't tell myself anything, and then when it's all over, I just remember it anyway. I've never been able to decide if I'm a visual learner or a kinesthetic learner or whatever they are, I don't even remember the differences now. I remember images and feelings, I remember walking home in the rain after the second dance at CTY 2000 and crying and wishing that lightning would strike me dead, I remember how the rain felt, I remember what I was wearing, I remember what song Rob and Kathy hooked up during (by "hooked up," I don't mean made out, though), and I tell myself all this in words but I still need the images. I need them both, images and words. I'm everywhere at once, I can close my eyes and put myself back into that picture of me when I was five playing with paper towel rolls that I made into binoculars, and let myself travel back to first grade watching cocoons break and form butterflies. I remember sitting in a chair waiting for my gymnastics class to start as Dad read me "The Silver Chair." I remember Dad reading me the entire Tolkien series, but I didn't remember anything that happened in the books.
Like I said, I have a WEIRD memory.
