Well, when I first woke up this morning, I wasn't the happiest. Daylight savings no es bueno. Even more deprived of sleep than usual, I hit the snooze button probably three or four times, successfully waking up twenty minutes later than planned. I hurried as much as I could in my zombie like state through my shower in an attempt to make up for time
I walked into the building right in time for the five minute warning bell to ring, better than my usual attendance record. (A/N: I arrived after my mom had screamed "NOBODY BEELEEVEZ YEW, FOOCHA!" and was trying not to laugh when I walked in.) Ah, Honors English. Usually my favorite subject, this year the bane of my existance. We sit in class, do pointless worksheets, and have "Opinion discussions" which consist of us being told that the only opinion to be had is hers, and us eventually giving up the fight against it. Today this discussion was on a bit of the book we've been reading, Man's Search for Meaning. Now, when she announced that we would be reading this book, I was excited to say the least. It was written by Viktor E Frankl, a psychiatrist and victim of the Nazi concentration camps. I love psychiatry (it's the field of study I hope to go into, it's my dream career) and I find WWII fascinating, so this seemed like a perfect book for me. This was short lived, as I soon realized Mrs Dart would crush all my personal opinions with her own. Today this assumption was proven to be correct.
Example. Today we had a discussion up to the required reading for this class period, to page 29 (which I went ahead of). He says "For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring abou tit. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run-- in the long run, I say!-- success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it." and that was the basis of our discussion. Now, we have all learned that Mrs Dart cannot be made happy, unless we all have exactly her opinion and take everything as literally as possible. But, being an honors class, the students have generally split into groups. First, those who agree with everything she says with passion, find all reasons available that her opinion is the correct opinion. In essence, suck up. Second, those who defend their positions to the death, those who sit and argue with her, and still never win because she is the teacher, and her opinion will be the correct opinion. And lastly, the group I place myself in, those who rarely speak at all because they've learned they'll never win.
Today though, I did speak. Not much, mind you, but I did try to expand on Brandon's thought which she essentially shot down. I don't remember exactly what he said, but I thoroughly agreed with everything mentioned, and she rejected because "You don't think you could do that by working hard and helping others?" No, that isn't what he was saying. He was saying you can't completely forget success in some situations, not that you shouldn't do those things, that you don't need to, that it wouldn't help. He said something about separate happiness, and I tried to add onto that with what I had been thinking. Basically that there are different kinds of success, defined by different people as different things. In this quote, he literally says, and exaggerates, the phrase "in the long run." What he's saying is that you can't step on other people to get what you want, forget about it, do good in the world and work diligently in all you do, focus in on your work, then you'll get the sort of success gained at the end of one's life, self fulfillment in a way. But there's also short term success, say getting A's in all your classes. You can't just forget about success and do service to others and expect to get a good math grade. You need to have that success in mind, and yes, still work diligently with others in mind, but forgetting about happiness and success won't necissarily make it come to you in this case.
Anyway. After English, I walk out into the hall where Ben and Aaron are waiting, as we all walk in the same direction, today Ben was recording us again. We walk down the hall adjacent to it, and Aaron breaks off first, then Ben, and I walk out to the seminary building. I pretty much walk past every building to get to the other side of the school, and I usually get into class literally right as the bell rings. Not that I'm jumping with joy at getting to seminary on time, but I try not to be completely late, even if he doesn't take role until about half way through class. This is just the way Brother Raleigh is. We walk through the "barrier to spirituality" he has on his doorway (this is a cardboard cutout of a stone arch) and he welcomes us to class. He usually asks me if I'm doing magically, as this is how I always answer when people ask how I am. I simply tell him I am not doing magically today, because daylight savings is of the devil. I pretty much sit and text for about the first fifteen minutes of class because the announcements are playing, and Brother Raleigh is talking about some family event or other, and I would rather carry on the conversation I was having with Hana while walking from building to building. After he makes me put my phone away (reasons unknown, we didn't start class until we only had half an hour left) he asks what I did over the weekend. I tell him I beat small children with a JUKAFROOOOCK and keep reading my book through all the confusion as to what a JUKAFROCK is and if they need to call child services.
The kid sitting to my left has some sort of mental retardation and rambles on about Final Fantasy characters as Brother Raleigh tries to make him be respectful of the spirit, and the person he's interrogating today. Every time someone does the devotional, he asks them questions such as "What qualities do you want in a future spouse?" and "What is your greatest fear?" Fortunately I haven't had to answer these yet. I don't know who I want to marry, I'm not interested in marriage at this age, I haven't even started dating. Kay thanks, bye. We finally start class and it's about the "bad guys" in our lives. I took almost nothing from this lesson other than the fact that both the Wicked Witch of the West and Darth Mall have bad makeup jobs. And that elmo is somehow melting and I shouldn't throw grass at Nate. I have truly been enlightened.
Eager to leave this classroom, I practically run to the lunch room, the one or two minutes extra giving me advantage in the line that always seems to replenish itself. I have several choices for lunch. First, the "snack line" which has things such as pizza, chicken sandwiches, and burritos. Second, the "daily special line" which has whatever thing they feel like making; fried chicken, chili, spaghetti. People complain about this food, but I find it preferable over ALA's lunches, suprisingly. Anyway, the last option is the "fast grab line", which is exactly what it sounds like. You move up and there's a table with fruits like oranges and bananas which are free to take, then you move to the actual food. There are small triangle shaped pizza boxes, each holding one peice of pizza. There are also sandwiches which are pretty much bread with turkey on them, and they give you chips. I like to take these not as a sandwich, but to eat the meat and put butter on the bread. Then, my favorite option, there are teriyaki bowl like containers. They have rice and chicken which flavors alternate between things like sweet and sour and orange chicken. These are my personal favorite, and it seems the student body agrees with me, as you have to be one of the first people there to even get to one. I used my early arrival to take one of these, and sat down at my table. This is pretty much your ordinary lunch scene. Sit with some friends at your normal table, talk about random things that no one will remember in the morning, do random dances. Though our table does have a few weird exceptions. Such as, when you have a fortune cookie (these come with the lunch I got), you have to let everyone on the table read it, then finish eating your cookie before you read it, otherwise it won't come true. I have no idea how this started actually, we just kind of do it. Leads for some interesting experiences when friends that don't usually eat with us sit there. You hand it to them, and their first impulse is to read it out loud, but of course, we all freak out and insist that "LORAINE CAN'T HEAR IT YET, SHE ISN'T DONE WITH HER COOKIE!" The faces are amusing.
After finishing my lunch, I suggest to Morgan and Susanna that we go to Sensei's room, as we have Japanese next, and who doesn't want to be in Sensei's room? We go, and there are the usual people already there; Hebi-senpai, Tako-hime, Kaeru-kun, etc. I run into the room singing Do You Hear the People Sing from Les Miserables, and sensei blames me for getting it stuck in his head for the rest of the day. We go in and see Hebi-sama watching Princess Mononoke on his iPod, so we all gather around and watch. (Don't ask me why we call him by sama, we don't know either. It just kinda started one day. DON'T QUESTION IT.) Then Neko-chan and Mushii-kun come in and glomp us. Mushii got a haircut because he's planning on going into the military, and I hardly recognize him every time he hugs me now, and I always think some strange person is attackign me and screaming "MEME-CHAN!" He use to have long hair, and it looked really cute around his face, and now he hardly has any, and it makes him look more masculine, which I'm not used to. I'm used to the Mushii who squeals with me about Baby the Stars Shine Bright dresses and Ouran High School Host Club. Anyway, that had nothing to do with anything. So I was frightened by the random army man assaulting me with hugs, then we started class by Neko yelling at us to come to Japanese club after school today, because apparently she's the only one that cares and she's spending her own money, and because she's just Neko-senpai.
We do listening exercises that tell us to "use our best knowlege and imagination to answer the questions." We answer whether Dan's mom is an oisha-san or a shufu (the prostitute jokes run thick here) and whether Ann is American or Korean. After multiple people attempt to steal my paper and grab the answers, we turn them in and practice on these pictures on a piece of paper that sensei somehow thinks are flash cards. They're the same pictures from the text books, and I must say, they're pretty amusing. We pretty much talk and point, "Byouin wa doko desu ka?" "Byouin wa koko desu." "Hai." and so on. We start off doing this, but after a while it gets so redundant, we just kind of start talking without even realizing it. Suddenly I look over and Seth and Kent are having an arm wrestling tournament of sorts, and sensei tells him he wants to show them Japanese arm wrestling. He has Seth face his palm towards himself this time, and the point is for him to touch his fist to his shoulder, while sensei tries to pull his arm down to the table. So they're both pulling as hard as they can, and suddenly, sensei lets go and Seth pretty much punches himself in the face. It was just about the best moment ever. (Apparently he used this on Japanese people too, and called it Irish wrestling or something... But he did it to an armwrestling champion, so the guy almost knocked himself out, haha.) After this whole episode, we pretty much watched Castle in the Sky for the rest of the period "practicing our listening." AKA, we finished early.
I argued with Hebi-senpai about Tonari no Totoro as I walked to my next class, American Sign Language 2. In this class, we are fully emmersed in the language, there is no talking, and he signs the entire period. If we don't understand something, we have to infer or ask for a fingerspelling.
Okay, this has been sitting here for a couple days now. I kind of forgot about it, so... I'm posting it.
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