Attention!

Argh, I seem to be a completely contradictory person, but I just can’t stand it! Attention, that is. Sometimes I crave it, I’m as much of an attention whore (albeit a subtler one) as Ms Mac accuses our Drama class of collectively being. But too much attention just drives me crazy, and I don’t really understand why. The constant dogging, the well-meaning(?) solicitude, yes I’m mainly referring to parents here... I hate it because it makes me feel obligated to give back in some way, when sometimes I just want to be left to my own devices. And by sometimes, I mean a lot of the time. And I guess it makes me feel guilty because they have no idea, and then sometimes I find myself thinking that they know exactly what they’re doing, but they know they can get away with it and still look like well-meaning individuals and... aaaah, raaaaant. But too much attention is worse than too little, because it makes me feel guilty as well as frustrated and trapped. Am I oversensitive? Perhaps, but maybe it’s just extremes that I hate. Isn’t that fair enough?

On a completely different note, yesterday I was reflecting upon how we’ve all changed since year 7. And I was really amazed to realise how much some people have matured, over the years. Some have become less judgmental, some are more cooperative and/or less oversensitive, some are just generally nicer to people. There were a lot of people I knew back in years 7 and 8, a lot of things that happened, a lot of attitudes that I didn’t like. And all of those things have changed so very much. Alongside myself, my actions and my attitudes, no doubt, although I’m not able to evaluate my persona with the same level of objectivity. I find it a bit disconcerting that I’m able to make such observations about my fellow classmates, I thought only mentors, parents and older siblings were capable of/prone to doing that. Still, it’s nice to see how our grade has panned out, so to speak.

You know what I want to find? Or... who I want to find, rather. A person in our grade who isn’t disliked by anyone else in the grade. And the sad thing is, I don’t think such a person exists. I find it so frustrating when people dislike each other for the pettiest of reasons... I think it was Cynthia who brought up the same point the other day. Who cares if someone likes to talk to a certain teacher, or hates a certain movie, or can’t play a certain game, or wears their hair a certain way... I can’t believe such intelligent people still think in those terms.

Oh, and I’d also be interested to find this supposedly *hooooot* student teacher, the tall one everyone is harping on about... bet he’s unintelligent or an arrogant jerk or something. :D

And social dancing is over! Funny thing is, it was quite horrible, but I have a feeling I’ll kinda miss it... just a little bit. Not necessarily the blundering around with guys who were basically as clueless as I was (not mentioning any names), but possibly the simpler Samba. There was something vaguely... exhilarating about madly flinging oneself around an inner circle of partners, stumbling through the sweaty frenzy of movements, the awkward, inappropriate and clearly contrived intimacy... something crazy, primal almost. It wasn’t sexual or anything like that, I guess it was just interesting. And exhausting.

And now, time for some horrid Maths homework!

Raaaant

You know what I really really want? Just to be able to sit down and lose myself in a book for 4 or 5 hours. Without having to worry about the time I’ll lose, time that would and should have been spent doing that homework or starting that assignment or revising for that exam or practising piano or...

Because yesterday, I realised that I can’t do that. No, I’m not talking about the physical plausibility of it, I did end up listening to about half of Angels and Demons (don’t judge me, you horrible judgemental people!). I’m talking about my mentality. As soon as I even began to consider the idea of just... dropping everything and reading, my mind’s knee-jerk reaction was to create a mental ‘to do’ list: piano practice, Maths and Eco homework, speech and drama, sponsorship letter writing, drama monologue... I’ll stop before I bore you all away from this webpage.

And it wasn’t as if I wanted to sleep, or lounge around and watch ditsy Aussie soaps on TV, or mindlessly play RPG computer games, I wanted to read a bloody novel! And my work mentality wouldn’t even let me do that in good conscience. God, what is our wonderful academic school doing to us? At what point does ‘persevere’ become ‘get a damn life and stop thinking about those stupid useless marks’? Unforgiving percentage points, denoting our value as academic assets to the world. Cold numbers that say nothing, nothing, nothing! About one’s honesty, loyalty, sense of justice.

And what do we even learn from it all? How to write out a memorised 1000 word essay in 40 minutes? How to cram facts, expel and then forget them? How to curtail expression, regulate creativity, observe conventions, do exactly as they say so they’ll give us our little pieces of paper with those meaningless numbers on them? What does school encourage, what does it foster within students, what do we learn? We don’t learn how to think, we learn what to think.

Rebellion would feel so good, but not many brave it. We rant and rave and rage about the injustice, the pointlessness of it all, and then we settle down and meekly accept our rewards, spoils of the feast we crave. Content to snap at the morsels offered us.

Aah the poetry, gotta love it.

If I were to treat someone a certain way, does it logically follow that there’s a reason for that treatment? Perhaps not a valid reason, or a reason that’s readily clear to everyone else, but a reason nonetheless. And if that were to be dealt with, would the (less than respectful) treatment cease? Or are people irrational enough for that not to be the case, do we simply act upon unrelated whims? Is the rationalisation of everything merely an attempt to justify unwarranted actions? I really don’t know, how I wish I did.

So much for inwardly swearing not to neglect this thing! Hehehe I haven’t even been studying terribly much, (not as much as I planned to anyway), so I have no excuse.

Study groups are the awesomest invention ever. Study sessions over MSN are particularly useful, as they’re amusing (IM conversations involving 6 people generally are) and beneficial. A lot more engaging than just reading over notes a billion times, anyway.
Sneha was awesome and tested everyone (I.e. Niro, Kausthub, Durga, Aaron, Sean and me) on essentially everything we’ve learnt in Science over the past two years, or everything we’re supposed to have learnt, anyway. As you can imagine, it took many hours. Not least because we spent half the time repeating one another, arguing and chatting inanely. Kausthub then distilled the conversation into usable notes and emailed them around, he and Aaron offered up some History notes, Sneha gave us all Geo notes and I critiqued three people’s English essays. Which, (perhaps embarrassingly), I found fun. The cooperation, enjoyment and most of all the sense of camaraderie were all really lovely, and as Kausthub put it, why did we not have these convos before!

For those (very few) people who read this, would you classify Baulko a public school? I certainly wouldn’t call it private, but it’s not your typical comprehensive. I don’t know. I was having an argument with a friend’s Mum the other day (yes, I know, bit odd), over public schooling. She was basically putting public schools down, making all these defamatory assertions about the calibre of their populace etc. Yeah, sex, drugs and alcohol. To justify herself, she said that she realises not all public school kids indulge in that sort of behaviour, but she wouldn’t trust her kids not to get caught up by the peer pressure and whatnot. Because, she stated, 13 to 17 year olds aren’t mature or experienced enough to have good judgement. Which then led to an argument about age discrimination/prejudice, I still insist that maturity often has little to do with age. Those sorts of generalisations annoy me greatly, the blatant discrimination of today. Anyway...

*Returns from a major nosebleed* I think I’ll post this, now.

Social Experiment

After school today, I received a lecture from my mother. What about? My screwy work ethic, of course. What else? My shocking time skills, laziness and general ineptitude. How much was true? Probably close on to every word. Would’ve made me angry on any other day, but I guess I was too tired to be angry today. I’ve spent the past few days, weeks, months, basically shunning everyone and everything, sleep included, for my work. The reward? A screaming parent, of course. I just sort of sat there. Feeling... a bit upset, and a bit empty. It’s getting to the point where I don’t really listen anymore, don’t care. It’s easier to tune out. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?

So anyway, I was thinking. If I suddenly started to hit the books, really hard, what would my mother’s reaction be? If I studied for 12 hours a day, every day during the holidays, never talked to anyone, never went out or socialised, what would she say? Would she praise me? No doubt, for the first few days. But would she see the deleterious long-term effects, or would she be too caught up by the intoxicating prospect of seeing me attain “decent” marks for everything? The results of would be fascinating, and telling. Do I have the stamina to try it, I wonder?

Graduation assembly! Completely unrelated, I know. The musical performances rocked, as per usual, and speeches of outgoing captains were very entertaining. Oddly enough though, the one thing I remember with clarity has absolutely nothing to do with the farewell itself.

So somehow or other, Kenneth got his hands on an assembly programme. Didn’t quite hear the full story, but everyone got really really excited about it. Inordinately so! So much so that they were all demanding to see the programme and whatnot, and of course he said no. Obvious solution? Snatch it off him, pass it around, ignore his requests to have it returned.

I’m not too sure why I found it quite so distressing. It was a stupid assembly programme, had little significance to us. But the only reason people completely disregarded him was because... well, because he’s Kenneth. You know what the crucial difference between him and me is? He’s a loser, I’m a blind loser. Being a jerk to someone who has a disability is socially unacceptable. Go figure.