Blizzards
Entry posted by Emanick
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These constant snowstorms are driving me mad. I'm trapped in an inhuman equation that is essentially meaningless, and yet the only option available to me is to take it completely seriously. Physics, literature, statistics, government and politics, photography, precalculus and impressing the vice president of the Dartmouth Lawyer's Association are all on my agenda, and it's really getting absurd. It doesn't help that I'm waging a losing battle against a longtime fetish of mine that I've traced some of my relationship problems back to. To add to my issues, my social life is peaking right now - DURING EXAMS - but that might just be keeping me sane, so I probably shouldn't complain.
I'm rabidly anticipating the end of exams, because they're the last thing Dartmouth and Colby will see before they make their admissions decisions regarding me. I would have had them over by now, but the last midterm exam has been pushed back until Tuesday because of two snow days. All I've had so far is Photography I on Wednesday (which was a joke, yet may have gotten me kicked off the high honor roll if I'm unlucky), and AP Literature and Composition/AP Statistics on Thursday. Today was yet another snow day, which our city was virtually the last in the state to announce. (My physics study partner was literally refreshing our school's home page every three seconds, but he gave up at half past ten.) So now I have AP Government and Politics and Honors Physics to anticipate on Monday, and I no longer have time to cram for them at the last minute because if school isn't canceled on Tuesday, I'll have Honors Pre-Calc on that morning. Then in the evening I'll have my interview with the aforementioned vice president, and then an end will be made of this hellish semester.
I'm sliding down a slippery slope into cynicism. For my photography exam, I basically wrote down three paragraphs of aesthetic garbage on the importance of art in the schools and the unique qualities of a photo I took. They will probably be judged the best in the class, and given full credit - that's what generally happens to my writing in art classes, even the stuff that literally reads as if I was high when I wrote it. Then I tried to give an above-and-beyond presentation on the plight of a kid imprisoned in a laboratory in Siberia for my PhotoStory, the other part of my exam, in support of a charity called Socks for Siberia. I printed out color packets about the charity and handed them out to everyone, then started telling my story, but I interrupted myself halfway through, telling the class that my story was ridiculous and to forget all about. (I was telling it really badly, and the technical difficulties were proving significant.) I still went beyond anyone else and got some great pictures, so I'll probably ace the "exam," but if I'm unlucky, this will hurt my grade and I'll drop down to a B+, losing me my first spot on the high honor roll since fifth grade.
AP Literature was ridiculous. I wrote a page and a half about a twelve-line poem by Anna Akhmatova, then two pages about the lifestyle encouraged by Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon - both were fine pieces of writing that I had few misgivings about, but the middle of the second essay was damaged by my utter loss of morale during my composition of it. This was because by the time I got to it, my teacher had graded the absurd multiple choice questions we were required to answer, and I'd gotten one more wrong than I could afford to, making it physically impossible for me to get an A in the class. (I had a 92.92 in the class and needed to maintain a 92.5 for an A; the seventh and final question I got wrong dropped me from a maximum of 92.54 to a max of 92.24.) NONE OF THE MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS IN AP LITERATURE MAKE SENSE. I've answered about 150 sample questions, and some of the answers the College Board gives as "correct" are flat-out wrong. Every single one of the answers to one of the samples on my exam was wrong, so I marked the one which seemed most likely to be correct - obviously, it was wrong, though if the College Board was sane this wouldn't be a problem. Anyway, the point is that I lost my chance for a straight A, and consequently Dartmouth will see that I can't maintain an A in either of the fields I plan to major in - because the AP Statistics exam I probably aced afterwards can only bring me up to an A-.
Do I sound crazy and nitpicky? Yeah, that's probably because I am. My philosophy of late has been to put my all into admissions success, because once I've done everything I can - which I will have, at the conclusion of my Dartmouth interview - I can step out of the rat race 100%. (Sure, I'll still have to work hard, but there will be no external pressure, which has been the problem in the college process all along.) I haven't been doing wonderfully, either, what with my lousy time management and everything. I've read my devotionals every day, but aside from a sharp feeling that I'm entirely missing what I should be doing in life, I have no idea what to change in my life. My parents have no influence on me any more, so I make all my own decisions and invariably choose safe, conservative things to do with my time that help few people, except my soulless grades.
I want to love people. I want to become closer to God. But whenever I'm not working - which is actually most of the time, as my study habits are terrible - I tend to mindlessly ramble off into magazines or the Internet, and reflect on nothings that, at the end of the day, don't really matter. I'm getting sucked up into six different kinds of rat races and have to slap myself awake again every few minutes. I'm fighting that fetish that's ruining my relationships and undermining my thoughts, and I'm losing ground every week. Don't get me wrong, I have a good life in itself - even I recognize that - but it's going to go to waste unless I do something about it, and I have no idea what that something is. Love is a gift, and I'm turning it into some sort of calculus formula. I haven't taken calculus yet.
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