Journal Entries
I'm off
Posted Jun 20, 2007
For 10 days this time, to a rural area of Canada with no Internet.
Just letting you know that's why I'm ignoring you, particularly if you're Leo and the New Yorker uni project, or if you are a contributor to 
. Hum. Anyway... I got a "new" computer, by which I mean an eight-year-old computer running Windows NT. I mean to install Solaris, but I need to buy some parts and wait for my Solaris DVDs to arrive (because I don't have the disk space for a 10 GB download on any of my computers), so until then I've been playing Spelling Jungle, my favourite game from when I was 6.
I've also decided that I have two new career options to explore: lighting technician at a rock concert or one of those people who catches criminals and terrorists and things online. I read an article about it in the paper and decided it was a pretty glamorous job.
Anyway, see you all on 29 June.
Discuss this Journal entry [14]
Latest reply: Jun 20, 2007
Je suis nerveuse
Posted May 6, 2007
I expect this will probably get yikesed pretty soon. So unlike everywhere else that I've said it, here I'm including a translation.
Avant je commence d'écrire cette note, je suis sûre que j'ai fait déjà beaucoup des erreurs.
Au lundi (en moins de 2 jours) je passerai l'examen AP du français. Je ne sais pas un mot de cette langue, et un ami a me dit comment dire celle phrase correctement. Au lundi je passerai un examen qu'évalue ma proficiencie avec cette langue -- je m'assoie (?) avec une dictionaire et je ne sais pas combien des erreurs je faisais. Si je reçevois un "2", ce serai un miracle.
Aussi je dois passer les examens de l'histoire americaine, de la biologie, de l'anglais. Le dernier est le seul examen qui je crois que je reussirai (ce n'est pas le mot correct...). J'étudiais l'histoire et j'ai connu peut-être une moitié des termes j'étudiais.
J'invente autant des mots.
À l'autre main (une traduction literale pour vous), j'ai gagné mon permis de conduire. Seulement j'espère qu'il est un présage bon regardant les deux semaines prochaines.
Before I begin to write this note, I'm sure that I've already made lots of mistakes.
On Monday (in less than two days) I will take the AP [Advanced Placement] French exam. I don't know a word of this language, and a friend told me how to say that phrase correctly. On Monday I will take an exam that evaluates my proficiency with this language - I am sitting with a dictionary and I don't know how many errors I've been making. If I receive a "2" [a "3" is a passing score] it will be a miracle.
I also have to take the American history, biology and English exams. The latter is the only exam that I think I'll pass. I was studying history and I knew perhaps half of the terms I was studying.
I'm inventing so many words.
On the other hand (a literal translation for you), I "won" (bad translation English-French there) my driver's license. I only hope that it's a good omen for the next two weeks [when I'm taking the exams].
Discuss this Journal entry [45]
Latest reply: May 6, 2007
Personal identity stuff
Posted Apr 28, 2007
h2g2, I find, tends to be the best place for explaining myself, both to myself and to the world. When one considers that the way I choose to figure out who I am is by writing about it, I honestly can't think of a better place than h2g2 - especially since here I'm at least partly divorced from the anchors of the "real world" and the people I deal with there.
On that note, I'd just like to explain that I wrote the entry A17692112, "Memories of My Head", about five months ago, in a user account I created specifically for that purpose. It is rawly written, exactly as I thought it in my head, with no attempt at structure. It is exactly how I felt shortly before the 26th of November, 2006, when it was written. It has not been revised since then.
Five months ago, I was very nervous about articulating anything sexual under my own name, something which has carried over into real life and my real-life blog, as well. I'd like to change that, and to change the aura of guilt and confession that has come to surround my sense of adolescent sexual exploration. Prompted slightly by a writing contest about sexual taboos on a sex-ed site for teenagers, I have now written A22159244, "Too Much Information". I hope it's a more realistic and mature expression of myself, five months along in a serious attempt to understand myself and the world into which I fit.
So where is all this going? Part of writing this journal entry is just to explain that I wrote the first entry, because I loathe being duplicitous or dishonest about myself and I don't like there to be any secrets. Part of it, though, is to invite comment. I am fully cognizant of the strangeness inherent in asking adults I've met over the internet to comment on my writings about my sexual identity - but I'm asking you to consider me not as a person, but as a writer, and I'm asking you this not as random adults, but as my friends (and not all of you are adults, anyway!).
Anyway, I just wanted to say, the same way I posted a journal a year ago when I decided I was bi, that this is who I am.
Regular programming will now resume.
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Latest reply: Apr 28, 2007
I'm feeling pretty technically capable
Posted Apr 6, 2007
I'm proud to say that I'm writing this journal entry from Lynx (a text-only browser) on an ancient PC running FreeBSD, a Unix-based open-source operating system. I don't have a desktop environment yet because I'm not *that* clued in to technology... but I'm just proud I can do things from a command prompt. It's an underappreciated skill in today's world.
Anyway, just wanted to brag.
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Latest reply: Apr 6, 2007
Melodrama
Posted Mar 10, 2007
Warning: this is going to be a very long journal entry.
Yesterday and today, my school indoctrinated us against drinking and driving. We knew something like this was going to happen ahead of time, because we were having two special assembly periods allotted for it. But this is what happened.
Yesterday, we went out to the parking lot, where there was a re-enactment of a car crash caused by a drunk driver. I couldn't see or hear very well: I was in the next-to-last row, everyone was standing up in front of me and the mics weren't very loud. It was much better to talk to the people around me than to watch, as well-known students from my school pretended to be a drunk driver and the girls in the other car who were injured and killed. The local media — from the school newspaper to the local branch of Fox News — swarmed the scene, and then the entire emergency response crew of the city, seemingly, including two police cars, an ambulance, a fire truck and a fire department helicopter, arrived in the parking lot, as they made to extricate the "wounded" girls from their car. It was ridiculously overdone and really rather dull, as I couldn't even see anything. As I remarked to my friends, what if there had been a real emergency, but the entire fire department was in the school parking lot? All-round, we agreed it was a waste of time, and I said so in class and to my friends: the people who were most emotionally affected by the dramatization are the people who do not drink and who aren't likely to make the choice to abuse alcohol. The people who already do don't care, and wouldn't care about the assembly. What's more, it's not as if not drinking and driving is a conscious decision you can really make ahead of time: if you're drunk your judgement is impaired, and deciding to get into the car then is a spur-of-the-moment thing that won't necessarily be dissuaded by you suddenly remembering something that was scared into you at a school assembly.
And this is exactly what I said during English this morning. I argued that while this might have been seen as "positive" indoctrination, it was still indoctrination — scare tactics and overblown melodrama aren't the best way to make a difference, if it is even likely at all that a difference is made. And although I saw myself in the right, I was immediately jumped upon. There were all these girls who argued that "if it makes a difference to just one person, it's worth it." Did it even do that, I wonder? One girl, who's very involved in the school drama department, said that the demonstration was analogous to a stage show, and that if people were so much as talking about it, that's something. Perhaps this is precisely the problem: this issue shouldn't be a stage show. One boy said he found it unfortunate that they were trying to dramatize it instead of appealing to our reason, and then all the girls said that appealing to "everyone else's" reason won’t work, and that it's only my class of "gifted" students (essentially) who can be logical. Well, that's just as insulting to the other 2400 students at the school as it is to us.
I hate this, where I'm on the seemingly "insensitive" side, cause I don't want it to seem like I'm uncaring about what I certainly see as a pressing issue. But it does seem like it's being gone about in totally the wrong way. I talked to my history teacher, and he told me a story of a student he knew his first year at my school, who had gotten himself killed while in a car and drunk the night of graduation. He said — and I agreed — that instead of a re-enactment, we would do better to focus on real kids who had died, and to put their pictures up in the quad and eulogize them instead would have a more lasting effect. And I agreed.
Then in fourth period was probably the best part of the whole thing: a very well-edited video detailing the fictionalized story. The "dead" girls were certainly victimized ridiculously, but it was more "factually" (if this can at all be said to be factual) presented and well-done. But then — then was the weird part.
We all went to another assembly following the film, and then the thing started. I saw the kids who had been involved in the previous day's re-enactment, and I thought they were going to talk about their experiences and it would all be very dull and usual. Well, they did talk about their experiences — but not really the real ones. They were still in character. The kid, Eric, who had been the "drunk" one talked about being arrested, and being remorseful. One of the girls who was meant to be dead talked about being... well... dead, and being deprived of opportunities and not being able to say goodbye to her mother. Then her mother spoke, which was just creepy. She had written a praising letter to her "dead" daughter, eulogizing the girl who was really sitting right next to her. I must have commented on how weird this was to my friends sitting next to me at least five times. I just can't get over it still. She eulogized her dead daughter who was sitting right next to her. And crying, of course. So many people were crying — and this wasn't real. The father of one of the other "dead" girls spoke too, and then there were some more usual and actually probably better presentations, from a woman whose nephew had really been killed by a drunk driver, and the chief at the fire station, who told his experiences responding to such emergencies. But it was all very strange and very awkward, and then we went back to class. And I couldn't help thinking, what about the people who really die? Why aren't we hearing about them, instead of the people who... well, didn't?
Later that afternoon, in biology class, we learned even more. My bio teacher is the sponsor of the Students Against Drunk Driving club, and she told us that there was more that we didn't see, because Eric was actually taken to the police station and booked, and the dead girls were actually put in body bags and taken to the hospital and pronounced dead in front of their parents, and then were taken away. They spent the night at a camp in the mountains and my bio teacher chaperoned them there, but they didn't see their parents until the assembly this morning, and for all intents and purposes they were treated as dead.
It's terrifying. Not because I'm so concerned that this will happen to me or I'm so worried about incidents of drunk driving. Yeah, they're terrible, but I'm more disturbed by the fact that our emotions are being manipulated for a fake cause like this. It's sensationalism, the same sensationalism that makes reality television shows about accidents and murders and whatnot, the same sensationalism that Americans (and, I'm sure, people of other nationalities too) watch because they enjoy having their emotions toyed with. I'm the first person to admit that raw, emotional films and books and television programs (not reality tv, but the really well-done drama) can be very powerful. But not like this, and not without my consent.
In "life skills" programs over the years at school, they've talked about mostly two things. With the exception of the odd tutorial about how to put a condom on a banana, they teach us about substance abuse and they teach us about self-esteem and how to avoid depression. And is it right to teach about one at the expense of another? Is it right to scare kids about substance abuse by asking them to pretend to be dead? There are already enough teenagers who are actually dead, thank you very much, and many of them of their own volition. How many other emotionally impressionable young people do we want to encourage to volunteer to kick the bucket, whether for a story or for real? How can they conscionably do that to us, and to them, the "victims"?
And is all this, all this emotional tearing at heartstrings, going to do anything? Of course not. They made some people cry, sure, but that's hardly an accomplishment. How many of those of us who weren't crying came away with the notion that we should always have a designated driver? How many of us had an idea of practical ways to solve a tragic problem, and how many of us were just disgusted with a melodramatic and sensationalized waste of time? Because in the end, that's all that these two days of shock therapy were.
I told my mom my story and she told me the only new thing about drinking situations that I learned today, and in fact it was something that they've never told us in school. Mom told me that in her experience, students aren't getting drunk out of their minds every weekend because it's a recreational activity. They're doing it out of desperation because they have nothing else to do, no other way to live their lives. It's not the highlight of their weekend, it's a way to get through it. Yes, I know everyone has their reasons. But maybe these should be explored. Eric "killed" two girls and "wounded" one yesterday. But why? Did anyone ever ask that question these past two days? To be honest, I can't remember hearing it. Did anyone ever consider that Eric was depressed, that he was lonely, that he went to the fictional party because he could think of no other way to deal with his fictional problems than to drown them in drink? Maybe Eric really has problems, outside of this fantasy TV world of car crashes and deaths. But no one's ever going to know that, including maybe Eric himself, because it's not as if school exactly encourages us to talk about our problems. It's not as if guidance counselors are exactly people you can talk to. They're people who order your class schedule and people you're sent to if you screw up really bad in class. It's not as if the health teacher or the administration or any of these other figures are exactly approachable. If you have no friends and you hate your parents and there's nothing you can think but that your life sucks, you're not going to act rationally. You're not going to remember your public-school scare tactics about substance abuse, you're not going to remember the stuffed lion you won for a drug resistance program essay contest, you're not going to remember what driver's ed told you, what health class told you, what your school told you when they killed two girls to make a point. You're going to take that bottle of beer or wine or brandy or vodka and you're going to drink it, if you're that desperate. Maybe we should think about that.
In the end, isn't it a bit odd to think that what I'm proposing is radical? But it is. Talking to students instead of scaring them is a strange thing in my public high school, and I expect it is in many others' too. But until the people who run schools and their communities get over their fear of talking to the adolescents they baby-sit and actually consider interacting with them and (shock of shocks) educating them, it's never going to happen. And a problem that has been around since the advent of the automobile will (shock of shocks) never be solved.
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Latest reply: Mar 10, 2007
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