Eminently practical and yet appropriate as always.

My title tonight comes from the Sweeney Todd movie soundtrack, which I've been listening to nonstop since it was released.
I really, really want to see that movie.
I saw "Juno" this weekend. I seriously don't think I've ever been so entertained by dialogue in my life. Every single line made me laugh (I'm not even kidding).
I successfully located my ex-English teacher yesterday. It took me a long time to find the guy, but I eventually was able to pull his class schedule from the tangled BYU website. A select few of us are going to go visit him one of these days.
I'm writing from my pretty, new Mac laptop. I love it to death.

The research proposal I've been writing has been the best learning experience I've had in high school so far. And it isn't even an assignment. Go figure. Because of my work on this formal proposal, I've taught myself technical writing in APA format, learned to locate and interpret literature related to my subject, researched subtopics within the related literature when I realized I couldn't understand anything if I wasn't familiar with the vocabulary of the specialty...the list goes on and on.
This is what school should be like.
I find myself putting off the homework assignments I should be doing over the break because they now seem absolutely trivial compared with my little pet project.
Ironic.

You know what I've been thinking about lately?
Professions.

It's interesting to me that every profession attracts a certain type of person. Take, for example, the surgeon stereotype: arrogant, egotistical and easily irritated, but for good reason--they know they're the best, so they deserve to act like it. Or the nurse complex. I don't care where you work--if you're a nurse, you have this complex. If you've worked in a hospital, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Law attracts adversarial egotists with highly developed verbal skills, psychology draws pensive observers (or those who would seem so), and engineering appeals to the socially dysfunctional who feel more comfortable with integrals and matrices than human beings. Yes, I know these are stereotypes, but you have to admit that stereotypes are universally understood for a reason--because most of the time, they're right on.
Which leads me to a question I've focused on lately: which type does education attract?
Teaching is probably the most egotistical profession I can imagine. In what other career do you get paid for listening to yourself speak every day, expecting students to think your ideas matter, and making an analysis of how well the student will do in the future based on how well they listened to you? It's interesting.
I don't think I could ever stand teaching high school.

Contracts under law.

A successful high school party is extremely difficult to pull off.
This weekend, my friends and I beat the odds.
We had over eighty people come to our Ugly Sweater Christmas Party, and nearly everyone went all out to dress up.
It was wonderful. The Friendship's collective self-esteem and social status has risen exponentially.
Every group was represented in some way, so everyone had someone to talk to.
After the last people left, we were so overjoyed with our absolute success that we had a crazy dance party, just us girls, until 2:30 AM, and then collapsed on the floor, falling asleep all at once in a pile of blankets.
The Friendship is the tightest friend-group there is.
We're sisters.
Don't mess.

You know what I've been thinking about lately?
Lawsuits.

Patients sue doctors all the time. How far off is the day when a doctor can sue a patient for not following a treatment regime? I mean, we can sue people for not taking TB medication (and subsequently exposing a population), but if a patient can bring up a frivolous suit against a doctor, can't it work both ways?

Also, one area that really hasn't been touched yet is the student-teacher contract (though it isn't an actual document, in legal terminology it's implied, just like in the doctor-patient contract. A contract is basically an agreement between two parties in which each is expected to fulfill a specific responsibility to the other).
Can a student bring a suit against a teacher because he or she did not teach the student anything or use the student's time efffectively? In a breach of warranty suit (due to a breach in the student-teacher contract), a student would technically have legal standing to bring a case if he or she could argue that the teacher did not adequately fulfill his or her responsibilities to the student.
Or, take the converse: under the same criteria, can a teacher take a student to court for not doing his homework or coming to class?
Interesting.

In the context of suing McDonalds for making us fat or for the fact that coffee is indeed a hot beverage, these cases honestly do not sound so ridiculous.

I wish I were interested in going to law school, so I could capitalize on this.
Instead, though, I'll end up a doctor--someone who loves what she does, but has to live in fear of this kind of frivolous litigation.
It really isn't fair.

Azithromycin.

Azithromycin.
That's what's inside me right now, blocking the protein synthesis in the 50S ribosomes of the staphylococcus pneumoniae that have taken up residence inside my lungs.
I'll be better in five days.

The doctor was nice.
I quizzed him on microbes and related drugs.
He seemed a bit confused to hear me care so much, and gave me quite generic answers.
Oh well.

I had a good day today.
I'm really tired, but what else is new?
I should be doing homework instead of playing on the computer, but what else is new?
I guess that's the real question.
Nothing else is new.
You know what?
I really don't mind.

I want to be better at making conversation.
I think that sometimes I'm just scared of people, as weird as that sounds.

You know that feeling, like the teacher is centering the whole lesson on you? The way they keep looking at you, asking your opinion, and watching for your approval so they can direct their comments to the way you react?
This is why I like my senior year.
I like being respected for the things I know.
Heaven knows I've worked long and hard enough to learn.

I also like winter clothing.
Coat, jacket and sweatshirt weather is exciting.
I can't wait to go skiing.

A little more credit.

If my life were music, it'd be piano music.
Soft keystrokes, loud at times, with whimsical keyboard sounds every so often.
Always keeping perfect time and steady rhythm; classical, not jazz.
Each chord seeming to make logical, perfect sense, but tinged with a growing awareness that maybe none of them do.
Steady progressions; up, then down.
You usually get what you expect, until something like this throws you.
Suddenly the music's too loud,
too soft,
too bright,
too dark,
too strange,
too scary,
too different,
and all you want to do is crush the life right out of it.
Smash the strings, burn the frame, shatter the keys.
You realize that maybe you've never understood it at all.
Maybe it's been successful in enticing you into its facade; light and airy, shallow and flushed,
Distracting you with the soft heat of a summer morning--
making you unaware of the bubbling, blistering burn.
And suddenly, for one tiny second, you really do see.
In the moment before the color leaves the flame, you expose depth and subtlety in each vibration, hushed vibrancy and shattered glass in each rhythmic chord, right before the music
stops.

Please.
Give me a little more credit.

It's personal.

Today, I interacted with the boy I like.
Then, I saw a play about a girl who falls in love.
Sometimes, I wonder what that entails.
I wonder how I'd react. I can see myself completely shutting off and running away, and at the same time I can see myself having a great time.
I guess I'll have to see.

Today, I tried to tutor a sophomore in geometry.
I met his mom, and we talked for a bit. She seemed nice, but her kid was a slacker. He just sat there in his tight jeans and Led Zeppelin shirt, arms crossed over his chest, eyes set into a fixed 'you're-not-going-to-teach-me-anything' stare.
He looked at me, a blonde senior girl in a colorful dress and heels, and probably thought I couldn't understand/relate to him whatsoever.
I looked at him and laughed, because in reality I've been exponentially more familiar with people who look the way he does than people who look the way I do.
Soon, his mom left, and we were alone. He took no initiative (typical), so I grabbed his math book and asked him to get out his notes. He said they were at home. I tried to help him, but as I pointed, sketched and explained angles and theorems and corrolaries, he just sat there, looking bored. I even told him what to write, but he just sat there.
You can't teach someone something they don't want to learn.

Now, THAT'S something I'm completely unfamiliar with.

I always want to learn.
I'm fascinated by anyone who can teach me anything.

Tell me something I don't know.

Literally.

Just imagine.

I haven't had much to say lately, I guess, but I feel like I should write just to keep up the tradition.
Tradition. Ha.

I'm changing my classes around at term. I'm incredibly excited.
I'll have AP World History now, and I'll be able to drop Sports Medicine.
OH, JOY AND RAPTURE.
Seriously.
My Sports Medicine class consists of the most annoying, inane drivel I've had the ever-so-concentrated patience to sit through without being taken away in a straightjacket.

For a taste of the torture, try not only forcibly removing your brain, but then pushing it through a fat, pink sieve where all the holes are filled with sharp little rocks. Next, douse the lacerated pieces in oil and set them on fire, preferably using an acetylene torch. When operating the torch, do not use protective gear. When satisfied (in other words, when your flesh has been thoroughly melted off), toss the burning, bleeding, oiled brain pieces with some mayonnaise to make what may vaguely remind you of a salad. Then, eat it, or (better) force someone else to. When you/they throw up, use whatever's left as face cream and go on an important date. Hide the car keys so your date has no way to get home. He will scream that you're out of your mind. You are then allowed to take this quite literally, because what is left of your mind is now cooling on what is left of your face.

Don't get me wrong-- it isn't the subject matter that's so terrible. Sports medicine could really be an interesting topic to study if we had a teacher who could string a halfway coherent sentence together and didn't misdefine medical terms, poorly manage his time, read straight from a lesson plan he obviously didn't write (because he can't pronounce/spell/use/define half the words) or otherwise demonstrate every single symptom of a severe concussion: vacant stare, spasmodic body movements, emotional state out of proportion to a situation, incoherent speech, stumped expression when asked to answer an obvious question...
Let me give you an example.

GIRL (ME) IN SPORTS MEDICINE
Day 1
Mr. XXXX: "Can anyone think of any uses for athletic tape?"
Girl: "Prophylaxis?"
Mr. XXXX (characteristic vacant stare): "Well, at least we know someone can read out of the book. What about 'prevention?'"
*Girl looks down. First of all, she does not have a book. She becomes very frustrated, partly because her pet peeve is gross incompetency, but mostly because prophylaxis happens to MEAN prevention.

Now, imagine variations on this same scenario (or the one described in detail above) occurring every other day for two full months.

Do you understand why I'm euphoric to transfer out of this class?!?
I'm also excited to join World History.
I love history.
I find it totally hilarious.
I'm finished blogging.

Something's up.

It’s been a couple days since I’ve written.
The SAT stole my weekend.

I’m still not sure what happened last night.
I woke up (or should I say, became conscious) twice, in my bathroom, at 3:30 and 4:30 AM, standing in the middle of the floor, staring at myself in the mirror.
Talk about creepy.
Apparently, I sleepwalk these days.
Apparently, I don’t sleep these days.
I almost passed out at the hospital this morning. I honestly had to excuse myself, walk out of the unit, and literally collapse until I could get myself together well enough to pass for “conscious.” I was able to make it back in, but my eyes kept closing and closing of their own accord while the neonatologist was discussing necrotizing enterocolitis.
I really couldn’t help it.
This is getting pretty bad.
The other day, my mom said she walked into my room at around 2 AM to check on me, and I was sitting in the middle of my floor, staring straight ahead.
I have no memory of that.
I think something might be seriously wrong.

I DON’T have panic attacks.
I’M NOT consumed by anxiety.
I DON’T stress out over everything.
I DO sleep at night.

I wish.

Why now?!? My school life is much easier than last year, my social life is going relatively well, my job and my internship are both fine—I don’t know what’s happening. At least nothing happened to me on the SAT. Though I did take my carotid pulse while I was waiting for everyone else to finish a section, and it was 24 beats above the high end of normal. Acute tachycardia’s a pretty crazy stress response for something like a test. At least my blood pressure didn’t drop. I hate that.
The thing is, though, I’m not a hypochondriac. Really. Right now, though, I know there’s something wrong, and it’s scaring me.

Help?

More about me than you wanted to know.

I don’t understand why the Bible caught on.
I don’t feel like expanding my views on that sentence.

We had the most disgusting Bible lesson in seminary today about gay sex and incest.
It was sickening (and we say Hollywood’s corrupt).
I understand that sick, gross things happen and have happened, but seriously, I don’t want to read about it with a room full of freshmen who need terms defined.

I cried in seminary today.
The teacher told us about his disturbed youth phase.
It reminded me of mine.
I felt like an idiot, and my makeup smeared all over.

The year I was 14 was my most traumatic so far.
Imagine paranoia as a constant, physical sickness. Imagine an all-consuming preoccupation with thinking someone’s going to FIND OUT, and fearing the consequences so much that you endanger your own life to protect a secret.
I lost many friends, in the most literal sense.
I think it’s also why I’m so messed up when it comes to guys.
I was insecure as a freshman girl. I turned to people who’d accept me no matter what, no matter who they were, no matter who I was. I found them, and it didn’t matter to me that they didn’t care about me, because I’d finally found boys who’d use my name when they talked to me.
I felt stereotypically hardcore.
I wore black, heavy eye makeup and streaked my hair pink.
That’s where it started.
Reality followed.
Every single boy I hung out with was into heavy drugs, and my life transformed into a constant cover-up. They’d come over stoned or drunk, and it fell to me to hide them from my parents and keep them from destructive behavior when they couldn’t control their actions.
One time, I had to physically fight to wrench a prescription bottle from one of my best guy friends because he had gotten into my friend's medicine cabinet and was taking pain pills, one after another.
I got hurt.
Nobody knew.
I made sure of that.
I was more involved than I’ll ever admit, even here on the Internet where nobody knows who I am.
I did some things I’ll never mention again.
I needed an experience, something to transcend what was here, because I realized that I’d never be satisfied, that even my beloved Equilibrium was a creation of my own mind.
It wasn’t real, and neither was I.
In reality, I was miserable, but I was so caught up in the cycle that I never dreamed of leaving it.

Then, I got an idea.
While everyone else fried their brains, I started to do what I do best—research.
I became an illicit mini-doctor.
People came to me for advice that could ultimately concern whether they lived or died.
At 14, this was both extremely dangerous and extremely exciting.
I used to be so good that I could watch a stoned kid for a few minutes and tell you what he was on, how long ago he’d taken it, what it was doing to his body right at that moment, how long it would take before it’d be out of his system enough to pass a drug test, what best to do to hide it until then, and what to do to ease the “comedown.”
I memorized narcotic chemical structures and perused medical studies on the computer after my parents were asleep, applying the concepts to my own ready-made “control group” of druggies and using the results to form conclusions on which to base my advice.
I could tell my friends which amounts of which drugs (prescription, illegal, or both) would combine well together and which would be too harmful to even try.
I gave mini-lectures on alcohol poisoning (acute alcohol intoxication) and what to do when (not if) it happened. I made them promise to call 911 if a friend’ respirations fell below 13 per minute, but I don’t think they listened.
At least no one died.
At least, not physically.
Drugs suck out your soul and replace it with the burnt ashes of the person you used to be.

Don’t do drugs.

Appeal

I watched House tonight.
I love House.
Mostly, I love him because he can get away with being a caustic jerk.
I find it surprisingly endearing.
That's another thing about me. I admire strange things about people.
For example, what I call "deserved arrogance" is a definite turn-on. When a guy is exceptionally good at something (whether it's school, athletics, music, etc.) and he knows it, I think it's totally attractive. The catch is, traditionally defined complacency and overconfidence really get on my nerves. For me to be sufficiently intrigued, a boy has to know his limits, as well as his strengths; what makes him interesting is the fact that he knows his limits are much higher than everyone else's.

I wish I was more precise in speech. Since I generally keep my thoughts to myself, I sometimes struggle to say what I mean in conversations that aren't between people I already have a relationship of trust with. For example, in class, I have lately found myself mixing up my sounds and words when answering or asking questions because I know that once I open my mouth, the pressure's on-- there are forty others in the room scrutinizing everything I say, magnifying my words a thousand times to find the slightest flaw. And pressure really does get to me these days. I'm serious. I haven't had any kind of trouble with anxiety until this year, but it's really kicked in all of a sudden. I had an anxiety attack and honestly was unable to breathe at work the other day after my fifth hour of homework. I didn't even know anxiety could induce an asthma attack (and I don't even have asthma!), but I looked it up, and Wikipedia says it can. I've also had an attack during class, in the middle of a test. Everything tensed up, my brain literally froze in place, I started to hyperventilate, and my hands started to physically shake. I couldn't concentrate on anything but the time and how little of it I had left. It was the strangest feeling because it was completely new to me. I've never experienced anything even remotely like this before; it felt like my thoughts were going through a high speed blender or something. Of course, I stressed about the test all week long (as if I need more cortisol in my bloodstream), but it ended up being all right (94%). The whole experience honestly frightened me, though. I don't understand why all this anxiety is building up now. It's my senior year. Apparently, my limbic system just wouldn't feel complete without throwing one heck of a graduation party.

Plus, I have a crush on a neonatologist.
Awkward, I know.
He's relatively young (30s?), endearingly intelligent, and has a sweet accent.
I can't believe I'm putting this out there. XD

Implosion vs. explosion.

I was listening to two kids argue philosophic theology this weekend.
There’s nothing I enjoy more than watching an intellectual argument.
Blood vessels dilate, the intensity of the subject matter nearly induces pupil mydriasis, and it’s almost like the impulses that make up pure thought are visible as each person tries to prove the ultimate supremacy of their own ideas.
Nobody wins, of course, because there’s no arbitrary entity with the authority to say, “You’re right, and you’re wrong.” Except God, but I guess that’s where argument begins in the first place, and that’s how it’s doomed to end. It’s all up in the air, maybe even more so than before the conflict started.

I don’t usually argue with anyone.
I’d rather listen than talk, because I value a chance at observation over anything I’ve got to “prove” (which, as we’ve just covered, would ultimately get me nowhere).
It’s not that I don’t have ideas or beliefs that I’m passionate about (far from it), it’s just that unlike most people, I’m my own little AP Bio example. Forcing my random, rapidly firing thoughts inward, I increase the entropy of my total consciousness, but decrease the entropy of the universe because they’re all going inside of me and not out into the open to collide with the thoughts and ideas of others.
To satisfy the second law of thermodynamics, I think I am eventually doomed to implode.
Of course, I’m familiar with a kid who is pretty much my polar opposite in this area, and sometimes I think he might EXplode.
He’s so vocal that whenever he has a thought/idea/problem/comment/conflict, everyone has to know about it.
I think this must be lonely.
Everything you said would be released out into the open, beyond your limited sphere of control, and you’d burn your fingers trying to clutch the white-hot wisps of radical thought that were once yours as they ultimately escaped you. You and the world would stand as helpless spectators while mutations of the same idea contradicted themselves, zooming around in directionless frustration as they tried to hit something—somewhere—that resonates with the pure frequency of truth, which might not even really exist.

This is intellectual torture.
No one can escape it, but I can contain it.

I’d rather implode than explode.

Intro to Equilibrium.

First of all, I need to give credit where credit is due.
"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia" --E. L. Doctorow.

He's right, you know.
It makes a perfect title for a blog probably no one else will read.
I don't care.
Putting text on a screen makes me feel like someone's listening.

I like to write.
Ever since I was a little kid, I've always been writing something. I used to write fiction, before I figured out that the reason it always sucked was because I really don't understand other people. This pseudomisanthropic bias had an annoying way of distorting any character I tried to breathe a believable life into. I'd valiantly try and create a persona other than my own, and ended up failing dismally because I didn't care what these people "thought" or "said." It was all me, and I couldn't get away from me, no matter how hard I tried to use "somebody else" as a paper human shield.

I think this led to my OCD destructive phase.
I still retain some of these tendencies. I don't think many of you have ever experienced anything like it.
Imagine having an insatiable need to destroy your thoughts.
As a child, I couldn't control this.
There were just so many of them-- firing all together, hyperactively bouncing around and colliding with each other inside my cramped cranium that I didn't think I could take it anymore.
So I started to destroy things.
The main goal was to leave no evidence.
I'd furiously scribble my thoughts (always in pen) onto an innocent piece of (always lined) paper for pages and pages, not stopping until I felt my mind was at some exhausted kind of Equilibrium. I was never satisfied, just satiated for the moment, like drawing vial after vial of thick, crimson blood from a polycythemic.
Then came the destruction.
I would painstakingly rip the papers, line by tiny line, across and then down. I would then pick up every tiny scrap and make sure every illegible letter was torn exactly in half. If I thought the letter I'd ripped was still readable, I would rip it into thirds or sometimes fourths. Sifting through the minute scraps would take hours, but when I was finished, I'd knew I'd feel Equilibrium, the epitome of my ten-year-old existence. I was left with a mound of minuscule paper pieces, each containing a straight line that used to be part of a letter. A curve might give something away, so if I suspected anything, I'd rip it again. I was too much of an egotist to realize that there would be no one on this earth who would care enough about what I thought to spend enough time piecing the scraps together so they could decipher the hated words my shrieking mind had bled onto a piece of notebook paper.
This meticulous tearing process wasn't enough for me, though. I wanted destruction.
I'd scoop up every one of the tiny pieces of paper and put them into a Ziploc bag. Then, I'd fill the bag with water, making sure every line of ink on every little scrap had run, allowing for complete and utter dissolution. After this, I’d throw the Ziploc into the big garbage can outside, making sure it was shaken to the very bottom so no one would see it.
The things I thought, the things I wrote were worse than blaspheme to the rational part of my intelligent brain.
This was destruction.
This was Equilibrium.
This was me when I was ten.

Soon, though, this wasn't enough.
I took to stealing lighters from my parents' "secret" hiding spot above the fireplace to burn the pieces before I soaked them.
I took to burning other things, too.
I took to sewing the burned, soaked pieces inside carefully manufactured slits in my stuffed animals (dental floss makes for a strong, unnoticeable thread that's easy to get your hands on, if you're curious).
Soon, though, this wasn't enough.
I needed something more.
When I was eleven, I decided I wanted to kill myself.
I was very methodical about the whole process.
I remember weighing my options and logically coming to the conclusion that it was not worth it.
Not even Equilibrium was enough to keep me around.
I bought a jumprope and learned to tie a perfect hangman's knot.

I'm not destructive any more.

I am OCD, though, in a way. Every letter I write on a piece of paper must be closed. There can be no breaks in the lines for my letters, and if there are, I pick up on it immediately and something in the back of my brain goes absolutely haywire. I honestly cannot concentrate on anything else but A BREAK, A BREAK, A BREAK, and I have to go back and examine every single letter I've written to find it. When I find it, I must close it in and make the new line flow perfectly with the old one. I will sometimes spend precious note-taking minutes concentrating on one tiny letter because I can't make it absolutely perfect. Sometimes the lines don't agree. Sometimes they overlap. All of this is abominable. I can't move on until I'm satiated.

This feels good. I've almost reached Equilibrium just getting this out there.
Expect to hear more whenever my thoughts start to overflow, because I don't tear/burn/drown/kill things anymore.
It's just not socially acceptable.
Then again, neither am I.