Well hello there 2008. Rather–well hello there neglected blog. I noticed 2008 roll around, but when did it become almost a month since I last posted? Like always, a lot has been going on, and I’ve been a little too caught up in life to sit down and write things down. I’ve been terrible at keeping up with things pretty much all year, so I think, since it’s a new year, now would be a good time to wrap up everything I possibly can about 2007. Here goes.
Last year, when 2007 rolled around, I was a stressed out Stanford admit who had just finished half-assedly applying to MIT and was debating whether to study for finals or apply to Washington University in St. Louis. My parents had left me and my siblings at home for most of winter break so they could visit my grandfather, who has Parkinson’s and lives in a nursing home in Vancouver, Canada, while I finished college applications. So I submitted my MIT application, really more for my dad’s sake than mine, and switched focus to school.
As of the end of first semester, senior year, which didn’t end at my high school until the third week in January, I had the worst grades in my entire life. I’d been devoting all my time to my poetry II class, and was floundering in AP Calculus, AP Physics, American Government (out of sheer neglect; that class should’ve been easy), and Poetry II as well. The class was so much work, but for the most part I was struggling because I couldn’t manage my time well. I was pale, I hadn’t gone to dance in months, I’d been getting sick every other week, and I was bordering on depression. Finally, around the last week of classes in December, my guidance counselor, Mrs. Cali, called me out of poetry (my teacher doesn’t normally let people leave her class) and sat me down to have a talk. Now I can’t even remember what or how we talked about what was going on, but by the end of it I realized not only just how badly things were going without me realizing it, but also how many people cared enough about me to be worried. My parents had gone to the guidance office and talked to Mrs. Cali and the head guidance counselor (who they know from over ten years ago when she was my sister’s guidance counselor). Turns out they weren’t the only ones worried about me; my teachers (including my poetry teacher) had talked to Mrs. Cali, too, along with Ms. Hyde, the assistant principal of student activities who oversaw ASB (of which I was head commissioner). When I came out of the office that afternoon, I remembered all the friends who had asked me if I was okay, or if I needed to talk about anything.
After that meeting, I went back and forth on the decision whether or not to drop poetry, the one thing that I’d devoted so much of my time to, that I loved yet hated. For once, I really talked to a few people: Eric, who was always there to talk things through; Byron, my fellow poetry student who understood where I was coming from; Risa, who had been worried about me for ages and dropped off my homework when I was sick; and so many other people who just made the whole situation easier. That month or so made me realize two things:
1. Something I like doing a lot shouldn’t be such a painful thing to get through.
2. I have an amazing support network of friends.
In the end, I decided to drop poetry. Originally I was going to rejoin concert choir, but something in my self-isolationist brain didn’t want to deal with people, worry about person-to-person interactions that’d become part of the pain of poetry II’s groupie life. So I ran away. I TA-ed for my AP Chemistry teacher and spent fifth period grading labs, correcting homeworks, and preparing micropipette tips for AP Biology labs.
Second semester breezed by with a fair amount of misery and struggle, but I finally got a few things off the ground that I’d been trying to do for months. It was a time for new beginnings and looking to the future. I’d just gone through the college application process that’d made me re-examine myself, and it kind of made me realize what was missing. I looked at my essays and kind of thought, “Yeah, that’s me. But then again, this is also me, but what do I have to show for it?” So I started checking things off on THE SECOND SEMESTER LIST. Some things checked off:
- get my own domain
- write short stories for publishing
- hammer out a plot for the then-undeveloped The Jade League
The domain? Right here, Kethadros.net, launched in early May, 2007. Short stories? “The Lone Wolf Complex” and “Venture” (both completed in 2006 but submitted for publishing in 2007), “from The Journal of Erica Larelius” (completed in 2007 but maybe not so much a short story as a prologue to the rest of Erica and Derek’s story), and a smattering of unfinished shorts, including “Forgiven”, “The Saratoga Chronicles”, “A Guide to Personalities for the Science Lab-Oriented”, and “Fiction Boy.” (Since graduation, I’ve written significantly less, but I started the series “Letters — Laroche & Bennett”, “When One Captain Gets Sick…”, “Ephemeral”, and “Rainwalker”, all unfinished.) As far as The Jade League goes, the beginning has been rewritten a couple times, but the plot is mostly set, give or take some details, and I launched a subdomain for it back in September.
It was a good feeling, having that much control over my life again. I still struggled with Physics (less so with Calculus) and put the semester of American Government behind me and did very well in Economics. College admission decisions arrived in the mail, and it started hitting us that we’d be leaving behind these people that we’d come to love. So social activity became a bigger deal–more get togethers, more drama, more gossip; I hated that and remembered why I’d dropped off the social map in the first place.
I’d gone back to dance, too, although 2007 had its trials there, too. I had blazed through rehearsals at the end of 2006 to perform in the winter recital. I ended up dropping out of my favorite jazz piece, for which I’d missed a rehearsal while I was sick, but I performed my first piece on pointe (disaster, since I wasn’t in shape for it, but it was a milestone anyway). Come 2007, we spent most rehearsals working on our competition pieces for the Hawaii International Dance Festival in July, plus added rehearsals for my teacher’s company performance in April. Last year’s company performance was my favorite of the ones I’d danced in–to me it was a perfect mix of modern and Chinese dance, blending culture and meaning in it that finally made sense to me. On the other hand, I sprained my ankle trying to do a turn on pointe in January, and re-sprained it two days before we left for the Hawaii competition (see archived entries on that competition for details). The toughest thing this past year, though, as far as dance goes, was after the Hawaii competition, I stopped dancing. My parents and I argued over it a lot, but they told me I had to stop clinging to the past there, and find new avenues at Stanford. So I did, but I really don’t like the Chinese dance group here, dance classes don’t fit in my schedule, and I miss having an amazing teachers and choreographers like Bih-Tau and Jeaninne.
Anyway, I survived second semester and high school. I feel like by the end of things, I had a grip on things but at the same time I’d become cynical and lazy–only the things that really really mattered to me stayed interesting, and vice versa. (This will make sense later when I talk about this past quarter.) I never blogged about graduation, but yeah… graduation was surreal. Coming from my town, it’s just kind of assumed that you’ll graduate, so it’s not a huge milestone to pass or anything. It felt like it should’ve been a big deal, but it wasn’t so much. I feel like it never hit me that my friends and I would grow apart in the fall, because at that point it just felt like, well I’ll see them all summer…
I spent the summer traveling around. I blogged from my aunt’s house in Vancouver, Canada. The main point of the trip was to visit my grandpa, but I spent a lot of time with my cousins, catching up. These past few years, with my siblings and cousins getting older and having jobs instead of school, I feel like we’ve all been drifting our separate ways. It’s weird being the youngest in the extended family–now that I’m finally in college, my cousin is married, my other cousin is getting married next summer, two of my cousins have PhDs, one cousin has an MBA, my sister’s well on her way in the music business, and one of my cousins has a child whose age gap between me and her is the same as the gap between me and my sister. Weird. Everyone has their own stuff to do, and I just want to get to know them the way they got to know each other when I was too young to understand. In the meantime, my grandpa’s Parkinson’s has gotten worse in the past year; when we visited three years ago, he was still fine, had long conversations with us and argued with my dad about paying the check at dinner. At his 90th birthday party later that year, he was still the life of the party, cracking jokes and making fun of his kids. Now he doesn’t always recognize my dad, even though he visits once a month. He thinks the caretakers are stealing things from him, and his once brilliant mind for economics and numbers can’t even figure out what four plus three is equal to. It’s a sobering thing to see the deterioration of the human mind. Some part of this experience makes me want to follow my cousin’s footsteps and study neuroscience and clinical biology to study Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. But right now it’s still early; I have too many barriers to cross, and the way Stanford’s undergraduate biology major is set up, I have to wade through a year of chemistry before starting biology core. In the meantime I keep feeling like I’m losing sight of that end goal.
After Canada, I left for Hawaii, which is actually pretty well-documented in this blog. I always get a feeling of inferiority when I go to dance competitions. My technical training wasn’t that great, and I don’t have the ideal dancer’s body either, so competitions turn into an extended period of self critique and trying to resolve to change, but finally this year I kind of accepted who I am and used my other accomplishments to make myself feel better than those crazy hardcore dancers there. I mean honestly, I think it’s pretty impressive how much random crap I did during high school and still excelled at.
It kind of got skipped over in this blog, but I did go to France this summer. I did take a lot of photos, many of them generic tourist photos of landmarks and cool things, which is mostly why I didn’t post them up here. Being in a foreign country is very exhilarating, but for the record, I would not go on another trip like that with a friend’s parents. I’m hoping my sister and I can spend a month in Paris or southern France sometime, which would be really cool since we both speak a fair amount of French (me more than her) and have a similar set of things we want to see. Traveling instead of summer school or getting a job was a nice break from everything, too. It let me take a breather and finally get just bored enough with myself to want to go to school and see something new, which is exactly what I got when I came to Stanford.
Stanford has been genuinely fantastic this past quarter. I’ve made so many new friends, gotten to experience so many things that just were not possible in the small town I came from. My dorm, as evidenced by past entries, is a close community, and as pathetic as it sounds, it feels really good to be somewhere where you feel like you belong. Living with friends is so different from just seeing friends at school; it’s easier to maintain relationships and you always get the feeling that people are looking out for you.
Admittedly, I was a little isolationist at the beginning of first quarter, choosing instead to hole myself up in my room and study. I did rather fantastically those first few weeks, but then I got a social life, and studying wasn’t as focused as before. The problem was, I had four classes that were super interesting and engaging, and one class that wasn’t. And it showed. I got a C+ in Biostatistics. The other classes were fine, although I probably could’ve done better with my Introduction to Humanities essays. So, my new goal for 2008 is stellar academics to balance out last quarter’s not-so-fantastic performance. This goes back to what I was saying about my last semester in high school: only the things that really really mattered to me stayed interesting, and vice versa. I really didn’t care much about biostatistics because it wasn’t that interesting to me, so I kind of muffled the alarm bells that should’ve told me WHOA you need to work on stats. Instead I just kind of let things fall apart until the final, when I tried to pull everything back on track. My parents found it alarmingly like what happened last year with poetry, but I think it’s completely different. I loved poetry, and wouldn’t ask for help because I was forcing it to work so I could do something I really wanted to. With stats, I really don’t know what happened. I should’ve dropped the class or withdrawn, but for some reason even I don’t understand, I didn’t.
I’ve come to know that I don’t know very much about myself. I don’t know why I do some things, I don’t understand what goes on in my mind that makes me unhappy sometimes, or what makes me really enjoy something like sitting in the lakebed when it’s freezing cold. But some things I do know about myself, and I’ve come to learn a few in the past year.
One is that I like having my own side projects. It helps me take a break from academics to be working on something completely different, even if that something else is ridiculously labor-intensive or mind-sucking. It makes sense right now that I’ve been feeling bored; at the end of last year I wrapped up a few projects and now I’m groping around looking for new ones. Here are the ones that I finished last year:
- Project Formalities: cooking a fancy dinner for my friends; I want to do this again, but not as hostess, just as cook, with maybe a sous-chef recruited from my friends.
- The Jade League subdomain: I set a deadline for myself to get this done, and it involved some graphics-wrestling and photoshop/HTML, but not a tough one to finish.
- The Game v. Saratoga: a puzzle-scavenger hunt race through my hometown; involved creating a bunch of puzzles and organizing the logistics behind them. Mind-boggling to hold that all in my brain without any collaboration, and not being able to ask anyone about it because they were all playing.
- Benefit Concert: organized a benefit concert in my hometown. Involved a lot of emailing back and forth with students and staff from my high school, as well as the performer’s people. I liked saying, “I’ll have my people talk to your people,” although I didn’t get to do that very often.
- Fallen Finch conversion: (still in progress but mostly done) I’m coding a WordPress theme to use for the Fallen Finch subdomain and make it a lot easier for the other authors to post.
Now that this is one gigantic entry that doesn’t even have that much profound reflection or anything, I should really wrap this up. But first, some things I’ve been doing NOW, in 2008:
- playing chess (and losing, but I’m determined to keep practicing)
- photography (haven’t done nearly enough of that lately; I’m planning on going on a photo hunt on some weekend)
- writing (The Jade League, but things are going slowly…)
And with that, I must go to the post office because I haven’t done much today besides write this blog entry.
