How Far

How far can my teachers push me before I fall apart? How much can I do in one week, and come out the other end with my sanity and my grades still in tact? Its a test of my endurance, my homework doing speed, my mental strength, my determination, and my ability to survive with no sleep. Thanks to all the people who and looking out for me and making sure I get through the week (although most of them probably aren't reading this), and know that I will reciprocate when you need me. Its greatly appreciated. I understand that other people are under stress too, but it really, really puts me off when someone gives me the, "oh thats nothing, look at how much I have to do" line. Its a classic sign of unhealthy IBism. I don't see why bragging about how much work you have to do is so great. Its completely backwards and illogical. We really shouldn't be proud of our procrastination problems. And I should really shut up because I probably sound extraordinarily hypocritical. I can only hope that all my work will pay off, and IB will have actually been worth it. If not, sucks for me, there go two years of my social life and I'll just hope I can make up for them later.
Love, Sarah

Running

I ran a 5k today. At least, everyone told me it was a 5k, but it felt a lot shorter than that. I hadn't really been training, and I managed to run the whole thing while talking, and I had a really strong sprint to the finish. I didn't feel dead at the end, like I used to with 5ks. The race was untimed, so I don't know how fast I ran it, which would give me some hint to how far it was. I feel sort of accomplished, because about halfway through I felt like my legs were going to fall off, but, by the end, I was so pumped... its hard to feel like you worked really hard when you finish with a ton of energy left to burn. I guess my breakfast finally digested halfway through the 'race' and gave me a last boost of energy, but I felt great. Now I understand how my ex-twin was always so energized after running while the rest of us were wiped out, because thats how I felt today. I was seriously ready to get up and go run it again after I stretched. Whats even better is that the run/walk/bike (some people even unicycled the whole thing) was for cancer research, so it was win-win all around. But now I'm all sweaty and smell bad so I should probably go take a shower.
Love,
Sarah

October

Today was one of those cool, crisp, and clear October days that make the fall romanticize-able. In general, the fall is my least favorite season. It's got all that lousiness of going back to school, with all the waiting for snow and skiing, without the fun. Normally, the best things about autumn are apple pie and crispy leaves to step on and jump in (see pictures on facebook, or email me for them) and getting to wear sweaters without having to wear ski parkas and mittens (which are great when its freezing, but not until then). There are days like today breezy and chilly and bright, that follow frozen-hot nights, the combination of which is... perfect. Of course, you throw PSATs and losing your keys(which are ridiculously expensive to replace) in there, and suddenly things aren't quite as bright, but its like someone just put a little dimmer on the fluorescent light bulb. Things can't be too bright or they'll blind you and you'll never see anything for face value again. Thats why s*** happens.

Feelin' like a princess

Today Sarah is feeling like a princess. Not one of those silly princesses who gets locked in a tower and has to sit there embroidering and doing all manners of other silly things until Prince Charming comes to collect her. Actually, this fairy tale doesn't have anything to do with prince charming at the moment... my life is SO non-sequential. Anyway, Sarah feels like one of those princesses who is out there slaying dragons and totally kicking the evil wizard's butt. Let me explain. My life for the past month and a half has felt like a fairy tale. You know, the kind where all the princes and princesses and children of diplomats and other rich people in the fairy kingdom go to boarding school, the fairy tale that takes place in that tiny little village out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by huge mountains. The places where the streets get covered in leaves in the fall and you look forward to the weekend when you have time to scoop them all together and make a big pile somewhere and go jump in it (totally doing that on Saturday after PSATs!) The places where you go for a bike ride for the weekend and you can ride to a different fairy tale kingdom (aka France) and ride past all sorts of cool chateaus and such. Everything is so picturesque, well, everything except the amount of homework and lack of sleep and that sort of thing, but we can deal with that.
Unfortunately, I can no longer take pictures of the picturesqueness because my camera is relatively dead. Hopefully my new one will be here by the end of the week, before I go to Italy.
By the way, I finally got milk and sugar so I can have chai now. And I found this cereal that tastes just like Kix. yay! still waiting for Cinnamon LIFE to get here. I might have to bring back an entire suitcase of food when I come back after Christmas. Sorry, but I'm not going to pay CHF 1.20 (about $1) for a pack of Ramen. Thats just ridiculous. And I was going to write something about chocolate except I forgot what it was. Chocolate is amazing.
Love, Sarah

Food, Derivatives, Restrictions

Sarah got back to her dorm after school and immediately changed into her warm fuzzy fleece pants and warm fuzzy hoodie and warm fuzzy socks and ate her way through one apple, two Balisto bars, three cookies, and four squares of chocolate (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, anyone?). Then she drank a mug of soup. Back to Balisto bars: if you've never had one of the purple ones, I pity you. If you don't even know what they are, I pity you even more. And then, after switching back into first person, I went through half a pack of kleenex, two cough drops, and a whole bunch of water. I am so glad I don't have an activity today.
Anyway... Calculus. It confuses me, although it would have made physics last year a whole lot easier. I can tell I'm going to have a love/hate relationship with derivatives.
I'm looking forward to this weekend, when I have another bike trip. But that means I probably have to do homework Friday night instead of passing it doing other much more interesting and fun things. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to get a restriction, then I wouldn't have a choice of what to do Friday night--be a good girl or a fun girl? And, as studies have shown, choices don't always make us happy (http://anjamerret.com/?p=285, thanks to someone for the article!) But anyway, if I was going to get a restriction, I would want to get it doing something really nifty. Having a messy room wouldn't cut it. So, what's the worst thing someone here can do and get off with just a Friday night? (and just for your information, I'm not being serious, because I know theres someone who will read this and think I've turned into a delinquent!)

Homework: society's definitition of perfect

Why don't we spend time in classes being more productive and do less for homework? Teachers (or one specifically) spends half a class period almost every day complaining about how they keep cancelling school days and how much of the year has gone by and how much we still have to cover. Just shut up and teach it already!!
And then we get these huge projects and essays and such . . . I'm too young to have this much work. Why can't childhood just be all the fun and games its supposed to be? Yeah, I may be only two years from college, where I "get kicked out of the house and have to fend for myself," but didn't I essentially do that to myself two years early by opting to go to boarding school? I guess it would be a little presumptuous to ask for the freedoms of living away from home without the responsibilities too. So yeah, I know I'll always have homework. ALWAYS. It never ends, even after college and you get a "real" job, or any job for that matter, whether its bumming as a ski instructor for a few years or traveling the world as a journalist, or doing research for something scientific, or I don't know what else. Theres always more work that has to be done.
So why not live our lives? Why do all the work all the time if, in the end, it only makes us more stressed, more tired, less lively? What if, on my deathbed, I look back at life and realize that I never lived my life because I spent the whole thing working? I am so afraid, SOOOO afraid, of dying with that regret, or any regrets really. I'm afraid I'll run out of my youth and innocence too soon, that things will go too fast, and before I know it I'll be all grown up wondering where my adolescence went. Sweet Sixteen, its supposed to be SWEET. In many, many ways it is sweet, but in others, its a LOT of work. I just don't want to be thirty, wishing I could go back and re-live sixteen. Or sixty, looking back on thirty. Theres a time in life for hard work, but now isn't it. Work hard now, and you fall into the trap of working hard your whole life. Work your ass off to get good grades in high school to get into the perfect university, where you work your ass off to get into the best graduate schools, where you work your ass off to get an amazing job, where you work your ass off to get ahead, but by the time you get to the point where it all pays off, haven't you missed out on everything along the way? Maybe its just the procrastinator in me shining through, saying screw around now and work later, but theres the other half of me that is stuck to society's ideas of perfection. You know, the perfect 4.0 student, involved in everything, smart, funny, athletic, attractive, social, studious, the one who gets into Harvard/ Yale/ Princeton, grows up to be a doctor or a lawyer, charitable . . .and then I realize that this is who I've tried to turn myself into, totally unintentionally. Or subconsciously. In some ways it was intentional. I've always prided myself on being unique, an individualist, a non-conformist, but then I look again, and whaddayaknow, I'm doing exactly what society wants me to. What happens when I die, and realize that I never knew who I really was? I mean, I think I know parts of who I am, but I probably just know the parts of who I've made myself become. Is that really me?? How do I know? How do I figure out who's behind the mask?

I'm Seeing Stars

The stars here are brighter. Maybe they just seem brighter because life is so good, but I'm convinced that the milky way shines out much more clearly than it does at home, and the stars twinkle more, and the satellites are easier to spot. Maybe we just had a perfectly clear night last night, and the moon is nearly new, so it wasn't blocking out the stars, but we were close to my dorm, where there were lots of lights on, so the stars should have seemed dimmer. Maybe, just maybe, the brightness of the stars doesn't have that much to do with light pollution, and its just a perception. Maybe it's who we're with, what we're doing, and our emotions that are reflected in the brightness of the stars. Obviously theres still the pollution stuff going on, but I think we see the world around us in relation to what we're feeling, so when life is amazing everything seems a lot brighter and we can appreciate the beauty of our surroundings more. Or maybe I still can't accept that this is reality and I'm feeling kind of dazed and seeing those kind of stars you see when you hit your head really hard and are dazed and confused.

Shattered Glass

WHOA!! 85% Cocoa is pushing my chocolate tolerance a bit. It's got the amazingly rich Cocoa taste, but it is SUPER bitter. I can't even eat one square of it. *sigh. In general, the darker the better though. I think around 60% is just right, maybe up to 70%. After that stuff though, Milk chocolate tastes like straight sugar.
Anyway, back to what I was ORIGINALLY going to write about before I took a huge bite of really, really dark chocolate...
Today was a string of embarrassing moments in the cafeteria. At lunch, I turned around w/ my tray and ran into Meghan, and my cup went flying and shattered on the floor. It happens almost once a day to someone, so I figure if I do it once at the beginning of the year it won't happen again later. It was hilarious though, it landed on the ground and I swear I saw half the cup bounce up OVER the table and land on the other side. Regardless, there was glass everywhere, on the table (thankfully nobody was sitting there anymore), on the chairs, on the floor. We were laughing really hard after the initial shock though. And then, tonight at dinner, I corrected Sam's knowledge on a particular subject that she found particularly interesting (if you don't get it, read the post from September 25, and if you still don't get it you probably aren't supposed to). Anyway, Sam totally dropped her fork and jumped up and screamed "No, you didn't!!" or "You aren't" or something like that really, really loudly. The whole cafeteria just stopped... and while Sam was rolling on the floor in shock, probably laughing, I was laughing so hard AT HER that I was almost crying. It was hilarious. Awful and embarrassing, but hilarious.
But theres finally something in my life that is making me happier than I've been in a long time (four months, and then before that, a full year), so I feel sort of impervius to things like accidentally drawing negative attention to myself. My happy little bubble is a lot tougher than some shards of shattered glass. I don't think that even the wall of reality could pop it right now- reality is just being too good to me. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to get so lucky. I have great friends, awesome people in my life who really make me feel good about myself and make me feel like I matter, I live in one of the most beautiful places in the world with incredible opportunities, not even the quality of the cafeteria food and the lack of a chai place can bring me down.
Oh, and if anyone is looking for a really amazing dare, I've got one up my sleeve, so don't hesitate to ask! (random, sorry, but that's why this blog used to be called "the random ramblings of my life")
On other random notes, today in English we read a really short excerpt of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. They are so satiric its amazing, and certain people who I know read my blog would probably really enjoy them. (cough*emily*colin*john*kelsey*cough)
So, have fun reading really politically incorrect bedtime stories and do your homework and go to bed! Wait, thats me thats supposed to be doing homework, not you. Oops.
Love,
Sarah

Fire and Ice

I'll start with fire. We had a fire drill at 9:30pm. The last one was at 6:30 am and it was raining, so I grabbed my ski parka not knowing how cold it would be, and went outside in my pjs with everyone else. It was warm out (just warm enough I didn't get cold because I was thinking warm and fuzzy thoughts about warm and fuzzy things that kept me warm and fuzzy, but cold enough that most of the girls in the dorm froze), and the stars were super bright and it made me get lost in thought. Why do firedrills always do that? Make me get lost in thought, I mean...

And now for ice. My ski area has pictures of snow coverage on the whole mountain. They open in one month, and for the first time in I don't know how many years, I won't be able to ski it opening weekend, or on Thanksgiving, or hike Tucker, and Spaulding might not even be open by the time I leave from winter break, and then I'll also miss sunsation and closing day. It came as a shock to me to see pictures of Copper and realizing that I won't see it for another two and a half months. Of course, by that point the bowls might be open, which would be awesome... but the first day of the season has always been special for me, and to not get to celebrate it at Copper this year will be... different. Of course, I'm loving the fact that this winter I will be able to ski all day Saturday and Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and from what I heard today, I may even be able to get in a run or two on Wednesday mornings instead of sleeping in. So, skiing four, maybe five days a week. D***, that means I'm going to need to buy more ski socks, a boot dryer, learn how to wax and tune my skis, and figure out how to get my homework done when I'm supposed to do it.