Benchmark Postish?

...Largely for all you Wellesleyians with whom I've only recently become reacquainted...and anybody else who comes here, obviously. G'luck.

Post starts last Friday, too, by the way.

So...last night. Lots of stuff happened. The day wasn't that interesting; I suppose that I'll describe it in a bit, because that's what I do here, but meh.

So last night, I get home at...midnightish, we'll say, and, of course, come upstairs to my computer. Oh, look, Gtalk says that I have one new message...from Facebook...with Brad Fishkin having listed me as a friend!? Holy schnikes, *flips out*! Bajebus; I thought about it a while ago, but decided that I should wait until, say, I'm actually at Grinnell to look for all of my old Wellesley friends or whatever...but I guess that those of them who are about as wired as I are also more assertive than I--and my thanks for that. Jebus, looking through other people's friends at WHS, it's like...I haven't even heard some of these names in (literally) years, what with not having time to visit back and nobody here knowing them, but...I still remember many of them. I don't expect that they would really know how I am (especially most of the girls whom I remember--you know, the whole "hye look at me im in 7 grade lol" thing, and the whole "OMG GRL!" thing (although, please, let me recall correctly that middle school wasn't actually ever quite that bad), so I'm just hoping that I'll be double-counter-Facebook'd, or whatever--since I'm counter-Facebooking right now, after Brad found me.

But...well...Okay, once again, friggin' jebus, was/am I excited that I've made recontact with a bunch of these my old friends. It's kind of reassuring; pssht, they're almost positively not as elated as I am, since they'll only've heard back from one kid who left a handful of years ago, but for me...*sniff*...I'm rediscovering my childhood (/drama)!

Alright. But then, I realized, when you don't talk to a bunch of people for, you know, four or five years, stuff happens...and especially through high school at all, worlds change. So...what about mine? Well...I'll hit some big things, both for your and my sakes, starting with a bit ago. In no particularly order.

Back before high school, I'd never done any organized sport. I almost seriously considered cross country back at WMS, just because I was something of a runner, but...I didn't do it, partly because I was still too elitist to be willing to join anything in which I wouldn't be the best, but also just because that wasn't the kind of thing that I'd do then. I was a lot more into...vegetating, I suppose, between reading and computering--and video gaming *significantly* more, then, too. Video game...yeah, those were definitely big for me until about...maybe midway through my freshman year of high school. More like a bit of the way into my sophomore year, actually. I still enjoy them and everything (especially more indie games (*cough*), such as Gitaroo Man, Frequency, Rez, Katamari Damacy, etc.--at least in principle; and, I'll not deny it, especially DDR (between adrenaline and endorphins, I'm pretty much sure that I have a reason why, now, Betsy)), I just don't care as much anymore. Oh, another "amazing" and "revolutionary" game of any given sort? Meh. Okay. It's also going to be at least $50 for several months, after which point I'll have heard about all the good bits from people who care. Oh, and I don't have the time to spend on it. Among other reasons. Right; it' more PC games now, but only really Counter-Strike and Warcraft III, because those are what we play at our weekly LAN party.

...But that paragraph started about sports. So freshman year, then, I decided, mostly as an application-booster, but partly because the small handful of relatively good friends I'd developed (Pete Edberg, I guess, being the largest influence) were into it, to join cross country. So...first day of school, after it was out, I called home to see if that was okay...and it was. So I went and "ran", or, more appropriately, jogged a few hundred meters, walked a few more than that, jogged a while, walked, etc. I don't think it was until about 3/4 of the way through the season that I finally finished a bloody 5k without having to walk at all--and so I came home all beaming and ebullient. I think that my parents were pretty proud of me, too. It's not like I was able to beat a certain number of people (such as even, say, one) consistently, but...it was something, at least. Most importantly, though, cross country was probably when I started seeing how cool Greencastle people really are. I didn't get to know many of the team very well that year (that introversion/shyness thing), but it was enough to convince me to swim, too.

So then I swam--along with about 75% (realistic approximation) of my friends (from here) both then and now. Petey, Zach Grammel, William Dory, Mark Jedele, etc. etc. were the important people then; Betsy Lorton, Jamie Grivas, and Jeanette Jones have been the important people more recently. And, of course, when about 90% of your friends have swum at one point or another on a competitive team, and all of them have enjoyed it, it's not too hard to believe them. *And*, of course, when you have a super swimmer on your team as well as several back-ups for each event, guaranteeing a nearly perfect season every year, it's not too hard to hang around supportive and social people all of the time. Of course, there are always going to be less cool people, but I can typically deal with them easily enough even if they're clingy or whatever.

...And track my freshman year kind of sucked, even though we had several super athletes. It was just too big, impersonal, and generally misdirected; everything was about beating other people, not making good times; setting up the best relay, not balancing for fun and points toward lettering; doing the events that the coach thinks you can do, not the events that you know you can do or have always wanted to try. At least, for everyone but the top one or two in each event, I guess. Meh.

Ultimate, though...right. I guess that between seventh and eighth grade was the first time that I attended CTY--Johns Hopkins University's Cener for Talented Youth. You know, self-paced math (what I did) for seven hours a day, five days a week, right? Broken up into segments, of course, and with excursions in random stuff, such as topology, number theory, Rubik's cubing (friggin', 41ish seconds is my record from lunch once--everybody, including the principal, who happened to be around, came and watched, as I discovered on successful completion. To great surprise), and much more interesting stuff. Transfinite numbers, once, too; good thing I actually learned what was happening when we were doing that a few semesters ago in Theory in Discrete. But...CTY is also where I learned of Ultimate. My conventional-swear-word-abstinence does not allow for easy explanation (or exclamation) of how much I'm into Ultimate. Well...if six hours a night is a very respectable average for a week for me, and my Wednesday night is looking like a four hour one, then I'll still turn up and try out for a pick-up game; that's one way to put it. If I've been unable to speak, a little dizzy all day, and slightly nauseous, I'll still try to go out. If I've terribly bruised/sprained my big toe that I can't swim fully well, and I've had a ridiculously difficult practice, and there's a meet the next day, I'll still go out. If you drop the hypothetical qualities of those sentences, then you've only gained truth values.

That's about the most significant stuff for sports. Academics? Less interesting, but probably no less notable. Of course, this is my junior year and I'm off to college after it's done, sans diploma. I've taken...all sorts of classes: my school's honors junior English, honors senior English, and done some of the coursework for AP English, all this year; calcs II and III at DePauw University, a 200-level theory in discrete math course, and another analysis class this semester (the entire course was building, from the ground up (nearly literally--from defining natural numbers, integers, reals, functions, and continuity all the way through differentiability and Riemann integrability, culminating in, yesterday, proving the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (prof. writes last line of proof, then, "That's it. The course is over!"))); introductions to Latin poetry and prose, then a 400-level Roman Historians course, all at DePauw; several semesters of Chinese back in eighth/ninth grade, at DePauw; and an interesting philosophy course by the simple title of "logic", also at DePauw, right now. My high school stuff, honestly...AP bio's probably my most interesting class right now, with the Englishes in close seconds or so. Nothing, I'm afraid, terribly noteworthy in general; all sorts of specifics, but, you know, most of those are only worth mentioning if either you were there for it or you know the teacher. (Sorry.)

Right...summers? Well, CTY thrice, once in NY, once at JHU itself, Baltimore, and once in LA, CA, respectively. Ultimate all three times, of course. Last year, then, I spent about a month in Taiwan teaching English to youngsters, mostly, and tutoring another couple of kids my age or slightly older. It was cool; I certainly did not earn as much money as I might have staying in the country and working, but, you know, I certainly experienced at least one or two things (/litotes) that I wouldn't've around here.

'Kay, so now it's Tuesday, and I'm coming back to writing this after three days...Sorry, but I tend to get busy and forget about things. My bad.

Anyways...I've lost track of my trail of memories and it'll take me a bit to get back after it. Well, I guess that I'll just cut this off here and say, "C'est la vie--pour moi," although I rather doubt that that works out, not having taken any French ever. Meh. Maybe, some time after a few finals are over, I'll come back and write a part two or something to this massive wall o' Notepad code/text. But then, I say that all the time, so instead, I'll just go study math now.