Summer School, Sunsets and... some... other... s word...

Hi.
It's probably been a while.


Today is the end of my second week of summer school. 


I didn't fail anything, by the way.
Oh, but I've already told you why I'm taking summer school -.-'
Yeah... so.... uh....


Pre-cal does suck, though.


Also, yesterday, I was handing in some work the teacher assigned us, and he said, "You're the artist, right?"

"I suppose"


"You're the one who's drawing all the time."


"I guess... yeah..."


So, this actually wasn't too significant, but it made me realize something.


When I was in fifth grade, I decided that I wanted to be a writer. Either that or fourth grade. Somewhere around there. I actually don't remember why I wanted to become a writer. I think it was a mix between someone telling me some crap I wrote was good, and my feeling that I was alone and misunderstood when all I wanted was for someone to listen to me.


So, yeah, I was so melodramatic and easily influenced, I somehow became good at writing.
Because I wasn't back then.
I'm not saying I'm good now, but I'm a lot better.


In any case, in elementary school, I was identified by most people as "Fox Lady" (cuz I was obsessed with foxes... no idea why @.@), "Grammar Nazi" or "The Writer." 


Because I wanted to be a writer, and that didn't seem to be common in my fifth grade classroom. 


Anyway, after I came here to Houston, I started to draw more than I wrote, and I eventually didn't suck, and now I'm usually identified as "That Short Asian Girl" or "The Artist" because I am short... and Asian (-.-') and because I carry a sketchbook around with me and I'm drawing all the time through class.


But, despite my gravitation to drawing, I've still considered myself a writer. In my head, I never thought that drawing was dominant to writing, even if I did draw more than I wrote.


So it really just gave me a bit of a strange feeling.
I'm a writer, but I draw more than I write.
But I'm still viewed as an artist to other people. Most people probably don't even know that I write, unless they've seen my name in the school magazine, which they probably have not. 


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Ooh!
I don't know if I mentioned this in my last post, but I've started to take Tae-Kwon-Do classes with my brother.
The first class really sucked because I was so out of shape, but now I can actually do three pushups! In a row!
(Don't judge)


So, uh...
It's actually really fun, and I really like getting to hit stuff. 
When my mother comes at the end of class to wait to pick my brother and me up, she watches and she told me once that I looked like I really wanted to hit someone.
And I kind of did.


And I'll probably be testing for my orange belt (I'm a white belt right now, of course) in a couple weeks. And then I'll probably have to get sparring equipment.
And sparring looks like fun! 
but then I saw someone get kicked in the back of the head (not hard, mind you) and now sparring kind of terrifies me. Cuz I get scared easily, because I'm probably a coward. 


Yesterday, there was another white belt a bit more advanced than me, and while we were doing kicking practice, he kicked the bag so hard, and it made a really, really loud sound. He moved the thing, like, two inches with every kick. It's really quite scary. Whereas I can barely get the thing to teeter a little bit. -.-'


Also, yesterday, I went to the orthodontist. Because I will be getting those Invisalign things. My teeth are a bit crooked, maybe because I bite myself when I'm stressed, and I thought I'd better have it fixed.


So, it turns out my wisdom teeth are impacted, so they'll need to be taken out, and that sounds really painful. Oh, and I'm missing a tooth!
It's not that the tooth fell out. 
Like, you have those flat front teeth on the front of the top row of teeth, right? Well, you're also supposed to have four on the bottom row. But I only have three. So it just never developed, and because of it, my bite's a bit.


The thing is, I'd been to a dentist just a week before, and no one said anything. 


And, they made molds of my teeth and took pictures for dental records. I might have small lips or something, because I had to pull reaaally hard on my mouth to get my molars to show. The lady taking the pictures had to help me, and she was pulling so hard, I would've fallen over if I hadn't been taking Tae-Kwon-Do and gotten some muscle in my legs. 


They needed to make four molds, two for each row. One set was for the invisalign thing. The first time, they put a crapload of pink stuff in a tray and I had to bite into it. There was so much, I kept gagging and nearly threw up. 


The second time, the stuff was purplish, and there was less of it, but it tasted awful. And it needed to be in there for two whole minutes! And I hadn't been doing too badly with the top row, until I moved my tongue and I started gagging again. Ugh, it was awful. 


Also, when my mother was talking to one of the ladies there, my brother came up, I guess, and  since he was thirteen, they thought he was my older brother.


But I'm fifteen, and almost a junior in high school!
Do I look like a twelve year old?
Rhetorical question, I think most of you don't know what I look like.
And yeah, I actually have a little bit of a baby face, plus I'm short, but I was wearing a frikking summer school shirt from my school! 


And then my mother told me that one time when she was twenty, someone asked her if she was twelve. Mind you, she has a Masters in mathematics, and she went to college in Korea, so she was doing advanced calculus and statistics and shit, and some person thought she was twelve.
And even now, she could still pass for a high school student.
How is it even possible for a woman to age so slowly? Did she look like she was six in high school?






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I don't know if this is just because I'm a pessimist, but I've always liked sunsets better than sunrises.


With sunsets, you get these deep red, orangey-purple tones and they're so breathtaking. But sunrises are kinda pale, and not really that exciting. And they're kinda yellow, and the color's always made me think of... urine.


I think there's probably something wrong with me. 


So, uh, there's my ranting for the week. Have a wonderful weekend, blah, blah, blah, even though, since it's summer you guys probably don't care if it's the weekend because you probably don't have summer school. 


And there's my awkward exit!
(also, how many times have I said "so, uh..." in this post? D: )

What is the opposite of an ophthalmologist?

Whoo, it's been a while.
I promise to have that Zombies, Crayons and Tigers story by the end of the summer! I promise! And if not, may God smote me the very day junior year starts! (Though I'm starting to wonder if I should come back with "if only")


By 1 o'clock tomorrow, I will be free of school! Finally! YES! WITH ALL MY FINALS DONE AND (hopefully) PASSED! 


But. But, three days later, I have SUMMER SCHOOL.
No, no, I didn't fail anything. Remember, I'm Asian. We don't fail things, pshaw. So don't tell anyone about the ten-odd quizes/tests I may or may not have failed this year! (That's a joke /fake smile)
    Anyway, I'm taking Pre-Cal over the summer so that I can take Higher Level IB Calculus in my senior year, because I'm obviously just an idiot. I'm not good at math. I should do chemistry and do HL Biology. Only almost everyone after the (wonderful, wonderful) IB Diploma will probably do that... 


I'm also going to be doing Tae-Kwon-Do over the summer. Cuz I've been needing to up my Asianness lately. Naw, kidding. It's just my parents never let me in elementary school, for whatever reason, even though everyone else in my class seemed to have taken it, and it was just another instance of my total detachment from whatever society I was thrown into, and, whoo, look at that run-on sentence! 


So, I'll be spending all of June stuck at school in front of a computer to learn math. What fun.
     Cuz it's surely gonna get better from there.


Also, the first week of June, we're gonna go camping in the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. But there are no shower facilities at the area we booked, so it's only gonna be for a couple days. I think it'll be nice to be out of the city and in the crowds of tourists and gimmicky tourist-grabbing towns and mosquitoes and murky lakes and... Oh, wow...


But then the next two months will be wonderful! Like, the movies and summer and parties and junk food and beaches and swimming and romance and procrastination and boredom and starvation from staying up late until 3 to draw and spending about 85% of the time cooped up in the stale air in my room and the Houston heat and hurricanes and... and that awful, rushed week of back-to-school sales and struggling to read a 300-page novel I never picked up in two days and...
     Does thinking all this make me a pessimist? Because that's characterized every single summer vacation I've spent since starting middle school.


I'm sure you all can tell how stressed I am. I keep ranting. I mean, whoa, I'm always ranting, but it seems more forceful this time. Or maybe I'm just not used to blogging anymore. 
And the stress has nothing to do with exams. We're talking about your average Houston high school characterized by its placement in a middle class white area and a vast population of minority ethnicities and terrible grades, teachers and students even though the principal just loves to pretend the school's perfect, a haven for the wonderful, intelligent, talented and hard-working youths who for some reason decided to go to a no-name high school in a ridiculously douchey district in Texas that was built to sap every dreg of liveliness and brains from its jaded, American, easily-influenced population. The exams are just laughable.


(You know, I know you're not supposed to use run-ons, especially as much as I do, but when I write one that looks like a paragraph all on its own, I feel a bit proud, as if I've accomplished something. I, once an established grammar nazi, spat in the face of proper grammar! Because I can.)


Anyway, there was my millionth rant about my school. Well, probably not, since I'm not blogging enough to rant that much about anything. But if I were blogging regularly, I'm sure you'd all be so sick of all the insluts against my school that you'd feel bad for it.




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Look, white space! 
(Actually, with this layout, GRAY SPACE! God, my English teacher would want to throttle me for that XD)


Anyway, this kind of brings me to what I really wanted to rant about. 
Perhaps I'm too young to think this, but life is not turning out as I thought it would.


When I was in elementary school, from about fourth or fifth grade, I saw high-schoolers (actually, middle schoolers, but they may as well have been high schoolers to my puny four-foot self) and they seemed so happy and free. No on could wait to be out of the oppressive chains of elementary school and into the warm, welcoming fields of high school, where we could run free like the animals we were and just be happy. Of course, I wasn't quite as eager to slip easily into middle school. I may have had nightmares about it, I don't know. But, from fourth to sixth grade, I cried so much at school. The crybaby. That was my characteristic in elementary school. Asian wasn't it, as I wasn't the only one. Smart wasn't, cuz there was this one ass who kept beating me. But I was the only one in the entirely school, it seemed, to cry at some very light, if cruel emotional prodding. 


So I saw these middle schoolers, and I saw the move up to high school and talk about college. They looked so cool and calm and grown up and strong. I thought that by the time I was sixteen, I wouldn't cry anymore. All the pettiness and stupidity of these, these children would go away. I could use big words and be understood instead of made fun of. People would be nice to me and not use small, crass insults to try to cause emotional trauma. Elementary school was difficult because I was a child surrounded by children, and children are hard to deal with. By the time I was 16, I would have found myself and people I could really trust and things would start to look up. High school would be the beginning of a wonderful life of wonderfulness. 


Bullsh*t. 


High school is like an elementary school with taller, stupider children and more beatings and sex and drugs. High school is like elementary school without teachers who like kids, without class lessons being interesting for more than five minutes, without recesses and without kind nurses who will f***ing help you when you look sick, instead of insisting you march right back up the stair and across the school when you're clearly two inches away from throwing up. (That's happened to me.) 


Basically, high school is a shitty elementary school. I'm stuck with the stupid cliques of elementary school, only it's harder to move between. I'm stuck with the petty, petty insults, which seem to have grown exponentially in idiocy each year. 


The only difference is that I don't cry at school anymore. There's still the pettiness and the cliques and that quiet, suffering frustration characteristic of the Hemingway Code Hero. There's still the naive hope that college will be awesome! And then we're gonna have jobs, which is gonna suck, but we'll be able to drink (legally)! And that won't suck! We'll have those basic rights those stupid school systems took away from us. There are so many calls for freedoms flitting through the halls, it makes me wonder why there was never an actual rebellion. 


There are still the "we're not kids!" echoing the "I can't do this by myself!" mixing with the "I've got it all figured out, so can it, adults!" 


I wasn't even that miserable in elementary school. But I didn't have a good life, either. I was closer to being happy than I am, but I saw the illusion of greater happiness before, and that was all I yearned for. But now that I realize that, I am miserable. 


And my father thought like this, too. He told me, when he was 20, everything in life confused him. He thought, by the time he was forty, it would all make sense. But nothing became clearer. He just got used to the confusion. 


In elementary school, I just wanted to not be miserable. I thought that when I was 16, the misery would go away and I could start to live awesomely, that it would be the beginning of all my miseries slipping away. 


And I think I'm going to be miserable through the rest of high school. I'll probably be miserable for the rest of my life.
Sure, I'll be miserable through high school. Of course I will. I can see it. But I am terrified of college and what comes after graduating. I don't want to be miserable after. But it's the only outcome I can see.


So my dad asked me where I see myself at 32. 
Hopefully, by the time I'm in my early thirties, I will have made some money off of some kind of writing thing, whether it be journalist or whatever, and I'll be able to start writing full-time. Maybe in a few years, I'll have a bestseller after two or three tries, but probably nothing big. Some years and more novels later, maybe I'll even have a major best-seller, and maybe they'll make a movie out of it. From there, my life will be wonderful. I'll have huge piles of money lying around a huge house. I'll have a huge library with a piano in it for whatever reason. I'll have a fountain that pours wine that I can bring out at parties.


And, while we're at it, I'll also have a pet unicorn named Franky who shits out some kind of super-efficient fuel resource and world hunger and war and poverty will have been eliminated from the world. 




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I'm sorry if this is just terrible ranting to you. 
I actually am not quite sure if I should publish this, but I want to rant to somebody, and then you guys can leave some kind of optimistic comment to make me feel better for exactly 26 minutes. Plus I need to keep up the illusion that I still write this blog! Cuz I totally do! 


Speaking of, the one time I felt smarter than that ass who kept beating me in elementary school was when I asked him what the opposite of "optimist" was and he thought I was saying "eye-doctor." 


Aah, good times. 


Oh! Here's an assignment for you!




What is the opposite of an ophthalmologist?