Faster still than bees making honey.

I REFUSE to step out of the house this weekend, and annoyed more than a few friends because of it.
It’s 11:17AM on Saturday morning, and there’s always too much to do.

I have a maths test and a physics test next week that I need to prepare for.
While I’m fairly confident with trigonometry, I have no idea what I’m doing in physics.
All the explanations of vector forces, scalar euqations and motion time graphs went completely over my head.
I have a month’s worth of work to catch up on in two days if I hope to pass this test.

I have to write a eulogy to present to my public speaking class on Monday.
I didn’t want it to be morbid or generic, so I decided to write the eulogy for Barney the Dinosaur.
It’ll either be hilarious and earn me a great grade, or it’ll be stupid and a little embarrassing.
I need to put a more thought into this.

I need to finish reading 1984 this weekend for my Literature class.
I need to take notes and write down quotes with page references.
Afterwards, I have to answer about fifty questions on the book.
Assuming I can understand the themes and the coplex psychological issues.

The homework due next week for my history, health and english classes will be dutifully ignored.

On top of that, I need to start packing up my room in boxes.

Next Saturday I’m moving houses.
Of course, next Friday night I have a reunion party for the cast of my school production that’s sure to go into the early hours of the morning. That leaves me very little time to sleep before getting up again, packing everything into the cars and moving houses.
I’ve lived in five houses over the last seven years, so I’m no stranger to the moving process.
I won’t have time to get acquainted with my new home, however, since there’s another party to get to Saturday night, this time at a kareoke bar. Some crazy friends have decided to place a formal dress code on the event, which is a huge bother considering I don’t own any dresses.
On the off chance that I have to attend a formal event, I borrow something fancy from mum. Otherwise, I rarely vary from my baggy jeans and T-shirt combination.
So I need to make sure that I have something passable to wear, and make sure I pack it somewhere within easy reach.
While spending Saturday night singing kareoke with the girls sounds fantastic, I won’t be getting much sleep that night either, since I’ve agreed to attend the Melbourne University open day starting Sunday morning.
It’s not my first University choice, but it’s a possibility, so I’ll likely spend the day wandering around the campus with friends while trying to score some freebies.
I’m not expecting to arrive home till late, again, which means I’m going to be sleep deprived and grumpy come Monday morning.

OH, THE JOYS OF BEING FIFTEEN.

(Even though I’m whining about it, I really am looking forward to next weekend. Hopefully I can get the lousy schoolwork out of the way and enjoy it fully.)

The rest of my life.

Folks, I’ve finally done it. At the age of 15, I’ve managed to work out exactly what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life. As we all know, life always turns out exactly the way people plan, and holds no surprises.

I’m sure there’ll be no harm in my typing out my life-long ‘TO-DO’ list here, since there’s no chance that any of it could possibly go wrong.

4th August, 2009: Type up a blog detailing my life-plan.
15th August, 2009: Make VCE Subject selections for Year 11.
October 2009: Be accepted into all selected classes.
November 2009: Pass all end-of year exams with flying colours.
December 2009: Receive academic honours for semester achievements.
February 2010: Discover that all teachers for the year are really cool and give easy grades.
March 2010: Find that the work load is really easy to cope with.
June 2010: Get fantastic grades for mid-year exams.
Novemeber 2010: Get incredible grades for end of year exams.
December 2010: Receive academic honours for semester achievements.
February 2011: Discover that the work load has decreased for Senior Year.
March 2011: Join various groups and comitees and enjoy flourishing social and academic lives.
October 2011: Sit for my final VCE exams.
October 2011: Find that I received an ENTER score of 99.95, among the top 1% of the entire student population.
November 2011: Be offered various scholarships from universities.
Novemeber 2011: Sit for the UMAT. (Undergraduate Medical Admission Test)
Decemebr 2011: Discover I did brilliantly on the UMAT.
December 2011: Be called in for an interview by the medical department at Monash University.
December 2011: Wow the team at Monash with my brillance.
December 2011: Be offered a position in the medicine course, beating out hundreds of local, interstate and international candidates, approximately 500 of whom had a VCE enter score of greater than 99.

2012 – 2017: Do really well in the medicine course. Handle the work load with minimal stress. Have plenty of time for social interaction and leisure activities. Achieve Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (with Honours).

2018: Become a Junior Doctor and enter the medical work force. Complete 12 month internship.
2019: Spend a year working in the public health system as a Resident. Find an intersting, high paying job with reasonable work hours.
2020: Complete postgraduate training. Receive full medical registration.
2021: Become a registrar at a vocational training program.
2024: Achieve a fellowship in Clinical Neurology.
2025: Receive Medicare provider number.
2026: Open successful private practice and help hundreds and hundreds of people. Daily.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. By the year 2026, at the age of 32, I will have successfully completed my education in the medical field, and will have risen in ranks enough to open my own private practice. Business will be booming, and I will live the remainder of my life secure; both financially, and in the konwledge that I’ve made a positive impact to the world by helping people.

Amid all this, I will have had an extremely active social life. I will have found my ideal partner in my years at university. By 2026, we’d be happily married and expecting our second child: a girl by the name of Kelsey who’ll grow up to be a veterinarian and have three kids of her own.

Thirty years later, in the year 2056, I’ll retire at the age of 62. I’ll spend my time focusing on friends and family; especially the many grandchildren. We’ll all live comfortably, thanks to the earnings made in the medical field by both myself and my husband, the internationally-acclaimed surgeon. While unable to continue helping people medically, we’ll donate heavily to various charitable, non-profit organisations.

In the year 2070, my husband and I will celebrate our 50-year wedding anniversary, surrounded by the hundreds of friends and family members we’d gained over a lifetime. We’ll look back and see nothing but fond memories.

*****

So, the reality of the situation: When I announced to some friends that I intended to enter the medicine course at Monash today, one of them quite literally laughed and informed me that I wouldn’t be able to do it. The impossibly high ENTER score requirement of 99 alone is enough to discourage most from even attempting it.

Taking on Chemistry, Biology, Psychology and Maths Methods in the same year will prove me to be masochistic. I’ll struggle. In all likelihood, my ENTER score will be somewhere between 90 and 95, ASSUMING I can motivate myself to maintain a decent study score for the next two years. It’s a great score, but not great enough. While I wouldn’t be able to enter the medicine course, I will have scored enough to enter the undergraduate course for science or biomedicine. After three years, I can transfer into the Graduate course for medicine, assuming I make it into the top 10% of my chosen undergraduate course (if I’m not mistaken).

If, miracle of miracles, I finally manage to get into medicine, I’ll spend years studying and living the life of a hermit. All the years of gruelling hard work will be worth it, though, when I finally become a registered doctor.

Once I find steady work at a hospital, I’ll devote years to helping as many people as I can for low pay and little recognition.
I’ll have bad days.
After I get into the swing of things, find that balance in my life and prioritise, I’ll find my work completely fulfilling.
I’ll have good days.

*****

I don’t know. I suppose that’s all I have to say today.
Maybe I’ll change my mind.
Maybe next week I’ll realise that I never wanted to be a doctor, after all.
Maybe my future lies in architecture.
Until then, though, this post pretty much covers it.

Goodnight, potatoes. I’ve got some thinking to do.

We All Fall Down.

“Mosquito repellents don’t repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito’s sensors so they don’t know you’re there.”

Yet another tidbit of insight, courtesy of the eternal wisdom of the internet.
Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t understood the fact correctly, but I find it fascinating that we can dull the senses of another creature to make ourselves effectively invisible to it. It reminded me of the Perception Filters from the “Sound of Drums” episode of Doctor Who (nerdy reference, let it pass).

Anyway, surprise surprise, I’ve neglected this blog for yet another month. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get back into the swing of things and start posting good sized blogs on a regular basis, as opposed to these sporadic attempts at summarizing large chunks of my life into online essays. On the plus side, I do have a genuine excuse for being so lazy with the updates. I’ve been really busy.

1. On the 22nd of June I started my week of work experience at my old primary school. It was brilliant. My timetable had me rotating around a lot of different teachers and year levels, so apart from the two or three teachers who used me to do administrative jobs like photocopying and filing that they didn’t want to do themselves, it was really fantastic. A few of the teachers remembered me, and strangely enough, one Grade 6 student claimed to remember me as well. The highlight of the week was spending one morning with the Prep class, where I taught an adorable little boy to recognise the letter ‘a’.

2. The work experience week lead directly into my school holidays. The first week was wonderfully relaxing. I went to a few birthday parties, tried to plan a sleepover but completely failed, and on one occassion had a few friends over from ten in the morning till seven in the afternoon.

3. During that week, my parents refurnished me and my brother’s bedrooms. We live in a relatively small house, and our rooms were quite congested. Mum decided to throw out the odd bits of furniture cramped against my walls and replaced it with one giant desk with enough shelves and storage space to hold every single one of my earthly posessions. I’m loving it. Dad then bought me an office chair to go with it, and spent more on it than anyone in their right mind would have.

4. All of this refurnishing was the first step of our family’s moving process. We’ve been renting this house for four years, but recently our ladnlord informed us that he would like to come back and live here again. We have till September to find another house and move out. We’ve been searching for houses for a very, very long time now and my parents are starting to worry since we’re having trouble finding decent houses in the area within our price range.

5. The second week of my school holidays was devoted entirely to ‘Urinetown: the Musical’; the school production we’ve been rehearsing since March. The cast members were required at school from 10AM – 4PM for four days, and on the fifth day we were expected to stay at school for twelve hours in order to rehearse each song with the full band. The week was surprisingly fun, and we managed to work out all the little glitches in the show.

6. I spent my final day of vacation at a friend’s sweet sixteenth. It was a heores and villains themed party, and I went dressed as Sarah Jane (another Doctor who reference, forgive me). We played a few party games, but for the most part we just hung out and had a good time. It was lots of fun.

7. Rather than joining all my classmates for school on Monday, us Urinetown cast members had the first two days of school off for rehearsals. We spent Monday throwing together our costumes, fine-tuning make-up, etc. We came back to school at six in the afternoon for a full run through of the show, for the first time with all our costumes and the tech crew working the lights. It took some time to smooth out the technical difficulties, and we didn’t leave until eleven at night.

8. Tuesday, again, was devoted entirely to Urinetown. We had our matinee performance for the Year Sevens during the day, which was honestly quite discouraging. They didn’t laugh at many jokes, and were a generally unresponsive audience. To be fair, though, twelve year olds are hardly the target demographic with regard to this musical and they did seem to enjoy the parts they understood. After talking over everything we needed to improve based on the matinee performance, we went home for a quick break and came back to school again and performed our opening show. It went really, really well. The feedback was great, and the energy onstage was fantastic.

9. I decided to go to school on Wednesday, since there were a lot of friends I wanted to catch up with. Well, that, and my timetable for Wednesday lets me off at 12.45 so I wouldn’t have to spend TOO much time at school. Of course, Wednesday happened to be the 15th of July, also known as the day Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince came to theatres near you. A few friends and I ran down to the cinemas after school, and made it just in time to see the 1.15 showing of the movie. The movie in itself was good and a huge step up from the last one, but being the Harry Potter geek that I am, it was a bit dissapointing and didn’t really feel like Harry Potter. After the movie, I headed back to school for our second night performing Urinetown. Again, all went really well.

10. I skipped school on Thursday, and only left the house in the afternoon for our third performance. The audience was fracking brilliant. They were LOUD, which is just what we were after. I endured a full day of school on Friday, ignoring comments about the enormous bags under my eyes and went back to school again in the afternoon, now fully used to go-to-school-at-8AM-and-leave-at-11PM routine. On Friday night, the audience was packed, as expected. We made more mistakes than we’d ever made before, with people forgetting lines and the band making mistakes that cut off entire bits of dialogue and threw the actors off completely, but we covered up the mistakes so well that the audience didn’t notice a thing.

11. Saturday night, the cast all agreed to meet up at school early since it was our closing night and we wanted to spend more time together. After our director walked around filming our stupid (read: hilarious) comments and conversations,we went out and performed. The audience was packed again, and the show ran without a hitch. We were all visibly tired and starting to lose our voices, but it was great and the audience loved it. After the show was finished, us castmembers completely surprised everyone else by holding an improptu presentation where we thanked our director, musical director, choreographer, costumers, tech crew and all else involved by giving them presents and a spotlight. We then performed one of our favourite songs one last time, more for our own benefit than for the audience.

12. After packing everything away, returning costumes, removing makeup and tearing apart the set by stealing whatever props we wanted, we all headed down to the after-party at one of the cast’s houses. It was a little strange. The cast of this show are, for the most part, kids from around the school who would probably never, ever, get together under normal circumstances. We’re all from different year levels, and usually run in completely different circles. The show forced us together though, and I’m honestly glad it did since they’re all great people. Just a little too loose with the alcohol for my liking.

So at around midnight, we started the party singing and dancing and all was well. By 1AM, people were well and drunk. Thanks to my self-imposed lifelong vow of sobriety and complete contempt for cigarettes, I stayed indoors with a few people in what we called the “sobre corner” while everyone outside smoked and drank. The cast member whose house we were in, G, is a girl who’s been in my year level for four years now. Before Urinetown, we’d never really talked, but we’d always been aware of each other through mutual friends. I’ve gotten to know her over the year though, and she’s a fantastic person but seeing her drunk was really something else. After skipping up to me, hugging me and telling me that she loved me, she offered to show us all her mother’s wedding pictures then ran away to find them without being the least bit concerned that we didn’t follow.

I left the party at 2AM, since the conversation was dragging down and I really didn’t feel like staying up any later than necessary purely to spend time with a houseful of drunk people. If they’d passed around the vodka a little less, I don’t think I would have minded sticking around, because they’re all otherwise sensible and hilarious people.

13. Anyway, it’s now 2PM on Sunday, and I’mtyping all this up as I eat a chocolate muffin for breakfast. I’ve had a good night’s sleep for the first time in a fortnight, refuse to step out of the house for any reason and intend to spend what’s left of this wonderful day catching up on a month’s work of homework I’ve used Urinetown as an excuse to ignore.

I’m finding it really weird that Urinetown is over, though. I devoted five months of my life to the show and I’m now at a loss. I don’t know what to do with myself. I have all this spare time on my hands. It doesn’t help that the cast members will probably never get together again, since a lot of them will be off to university and TAFE soon enough.

As our director said, though, the show will live on; both in our hearts and in DVD format.

That’s all from me. Goodnight, bubs.

First day of school.

Yes, I did a quick google image search to spice up this blog. Don’t judge me.

The first day of school came around again. It was actually really awesome seeing friends again after that two month break.
The mind-numbingly dull “Hellowelcometoseniorschooldon’tscrewitup” speech aside, it was a great day. Mainly because we were allowed to leave at 12.45, but catching up with everyone was an important factor as well.

This morning, I realised that I’ve definitely grown very comfortable in this school over the last few years. There wasn’t even a hint of that back-to-school dread I used to experience. I can walk through the campus and recognise most of the faces I see. The teachers stop to have a chat. The younger kids look up at us with that delicious hint of fear in their eyes.

School definitely gets better as you get older.

On a different note: I’m done blogging daily. I think I made it to 101 consecutive blog posts and frankly, I got fed up with it. The ‘whenever I feel like’ approach suits me a lot better.

75. The Office

I spent the day watching the entire second season of The Office with my brother.
The US version, that is.
It’s flippin’ brilliant.

74. Eveready Super Heavy Duty.

Today was my school’s Presentation Night.
There’s music and announcements and awards are presented.
I won two awards for being a school leader.

It wasn’t enough incentive for me to go.

I’m kind of glad I didn’t.

73. Eepah #2

Not up to typing much today, either.

72. Eepah.

I don’t feel like typing today.

32. Wow.

I just spent a few hours mindlessly playing games on kongregate.com. It was ridiculous, and now I’m eager to just go to sleep.

Just thought I ought to make the obligatory blog post before the day ends.

28. In which I cleverly avoid mentioning the election.

I think we all know that today is a very historical day.

That’s right folks, this 28th post marks the four week anniversary of my daily-blogging-social-experiment. Which I find quite remarkable, because I didn’t think I’d stick with it so long.

In order to avoid mentioning the thing that I mentioned that I wouldn’t mention, I’m going to send you to a story written by username tangledweb on deviant art: Click!

Here’s a quick excerpt:

January 2009, Washington DC: The State of the Union Address

“My fellow Americans,”

Barack Obama briefly pauses, hands gripping the sides of a podium bearing the seal of the President of the United States of America.  He thoughtfully considers the expansive audience before him – the United States Congress, invited dignitaries, and dozens of cameras streaming live multimedia to hundreds of millions of viewers spanning the entire globe.  Fully cognizant of this historic moment, the new American leader looks over his shoulder to acknowledge Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.  Appearing to stifle a guffaw, Obama’s narrow shoulders begin to shake, eventually giving surrender and rearing his head back with raucous laughter.  He turns back to again face the broader audience, slouches to the side, and grabs the microphone in hand.

“GOTCHA!” Barack grins, pointing to the camera, “Man, I didn’t know how long I’d keep y’all peeps fooled.”  The president poses for the press corps, throws his arms up in the air, hands forming the letter ‘C.’  “I’m straight gangsta, from the Chicago hood.  Cut that ‘Hail to the Chief’ noise off, play something that’s got some bass to it.”

For the record, I didn’t write it. I just happened to come across it, and thought it was brilliant. It’s short, easy to read and fully worth the time.

So because I’m feeling far too lazy to write anything today, I’d much rather you follow the link and read the rest of this hugely entertaining prose.