Chaos.

I haven’t written in here for a year, but I thought that I should formally close of this blog. I’d delete it completely, but I can’t find a button to do so, and anyway, I don’t have the heart to erase the shadows of my sixteen year old self.

For all of you who knew me when I wrote this blog (or never really knew me IRL), I’d like to say this. I’ve changed. I’ve changed beyond belief over the last 12 months. I’m no longer the pretentious teenager immersed in the world of VCE; I’ve grown to understand a world beyond ambition. I’ve loved, I’ve worked several jobs simultaneously, I’ve lived by myself. I’ve somewhat undergone the transition from childhood to adulthood. I lost my drive, but I’ve gathered the strength to pull it back. I’m more mature for it. I don’t regret the mistakes I’ve made. In some ways, I needed them.

So, what actually happened since I last blogged? I somehow trudged my way through year 12, and surprisingly attained a mark far beyond what I ever thought was possible. I also realised that no one cares at all once you hit university. I played music, and I gained perspective about the trivial nature of high school politics. I’ve lived in a dorm, and experienced what it’s like to be surrounded by people constantly, and I wandered home in the middle of the night wearing summer clothes when it’s below 0. I’ve gone clubbing, had my first pina colada, and run into people who I didn’t want to see at 2am in the city after a night out. I’ve savoured the beauty of the world, and I’ve cried under a starry sky. I’ve tasted life.

At this point in time, the future is a cloud of uncertainty. I made a life changing decision a few weeks ago - a decision which will rip me out of my comfort zone and completely shift my perspective on the world. I’m scared. But I’m excited. I never expected to be in a position where I had to make this decision, and the thought of it was petrifying. I hope I’ve made the right choice.

So, in short, this is my farewell to this blog. Goodbye childhood, goodbye school. But hello world.

… involved me attending MYO whilst integrating mentally. Gosh, my life is sad. So very, very sad.

Anyway, I thought I’d give a quick run down of Easter training in my typical dot point form, just for my own memory. And yes, Andrew, I know that I don’t have a life, but if you’re reading this, honestly, it probably means that you don’t either.

• Segregation
• Chocolate easter eggs for dessert and breakfast
• Andrew’s weird breakfasts
• Ishraq hiding from photos
• The sudden urge to take many photos on the last day
• Our truth and dare game on the first night… Iris: “What’s your favourite colour?”
• Receiving our plane tickets
• Blazer fittings!
• The official photos. Getting rejected from photos. Then having a photo of my winding a bolt taken.
• Being told in the same sentence that APhO goes and doesn’t go to Canberra.
• Finding out for sure that all of us ARE going to Canberra.
• Late night team bonding
• Andrew and Bob singing
• Bob singing that awful Justin… thing song with Iris.
• The failed experimental and theory exams
• Destroying segregation
• SNAP!
• The theories about living liquids. And Tristan’s drawing.
• Chemistry people stealing buckets of icecream
• Quentin and Peter coming to crash for the night
• Cyril and the easter egg
• Not being able to think about buggerall terms again the same way.
• The bananas!
• Schrodinger wave equation T-Shirts
• Ishraq’s chocolate
• Olivia and her Ivy League success that soon became infamous (congratulations!!!!!!!!)
• A certain few words I said about musicians that didn’t please Lucy…
• Chowie crashing our house…
• Eavesdropping (girls, remember?)
• The official dinner
• Being rejected from the cook off
• The rel tutes

And more. What else should I add?

I rarely argue with my parents. Which is probably why I feel so crap right now.

OK, I know I’m in the wrong. We weren’t arguing as such; rather, I did something that disappointed them and they made it clear. They were angry and quite frankly, I was upset that they couldn’t try and understand my perspective.

It sounds trivial. As you’ve probably realised, I’m a bit of a science nerd, and last year my parents bought be a T-Shirt from America about Schrodinger’s Cat. They’d put a lot of thought into it (I’d wanted the shirt for years) and it wasn’t cheap.

Well, to cut a long story short, it went missing on summer camp. I don’t know whether it was misplaced, but all I do know is that after I picked up my clothes from the dryer, there was no aforementioned favourite shirt. I didn’t realise at first - I assumed that it’d simply be in another part of my room, but lo and behold, no shirt. At all.

I didn’t tell my parents. Now they’re furious that I didn’t do anything about it and that I lied to them about why I didn’t “feel like” wearing it.

Part of me says whatever. It’s just a simple t-shirt, so why stress?

But it represents so much more. It symbolises my psychological need for approval and esteem from my parents, as well as my phobia that they’ll overreact and be upset.

You know, the hardest thing is hurting their feelings.

Je n’en ai aucune idee.

I have a need - a compulsive, inexplicable urge - to write. I have to somehow divulge the vortexes of emotion swirling within my mind. I don’t have a choice. I have to.

But what are they, these feelings? Self doubt? Confusion? Fear? Stress? Sadness? A cocktail of the lot?

It’d be a whole lot easier if I understood what they were in the first place.

My chemistry teacher just sent around an email asking us to do checkpoints, revise organics, start past exams (I think?) and file our notes.

Is it just me, or have we not actually started organics at all?

Sooo, I’m going to post about what I’ve done since school finished.

Thursday:

• First 10 chapters of Knight doing the challenge questions in a failed attempt to cram before the UMEP test.
• UMEP. With the aforementioned test.

Friday:

• Went to L’s birthday thing; had a brief skim over conics.

Saturday:

• MYO rehearsal
• Nuclear Physics
• Went to the PGYO Concert
• Went out afterwards

Sunday:

• A bit more Nuclear
• Chemistry. A lot of Chemistry.

Monday:

• Went into DFO with my family
• Some of the maths notes

Tuesday:

• Had my x-rays and a number of appointments
• Finished the maths notes
• Did a bit of Knight and went through some explanations. Realised that I’d forgotten everything in the process.

Wednesday:

• French Essay
• Specialist Maths trigonometry and complex numbers
• Worked on English oral

Yeah, my life is boring.

I want to be six again.

Back in the days when we:

• Were called Map and Barbara
• Made up our own language
• Laughed cruelly at a kid for not being able to spell cat. Mean, but still…
• Pokemon Cards
• The Secret Seven
• Psychotic
• Land-dragon

And more.

Let’s go back to good ole ‘99.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Tag 10 other “Book Nerds”, plus me so I can see what you read! Sometimes you have to cut and paste this in parts.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen —- X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien —- X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte —-X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling —- X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee —-X
6 The Bible —- X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte —- X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell —-X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman —- X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens —-

TOTAL = 9


11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott — X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy —- X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller —-
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare —- half x… I read part of it, but it was in a volume called that?
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier —- X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien—-X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk —-
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger—-
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger —-
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot —-

TOTAL = 4.5


21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell —-
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald —-
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens —-
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy —- X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams —-X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh —-
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky —-X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck —-
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll—- X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame —-X

TOTAL = 5

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy —- X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens —-
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis —-X
34 Emma - Jane Austen —- X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen —-
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis —-X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein —- X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis D Bernieres —-
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden —-X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne —-X

TOTAL = 7

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell —-X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown —-X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez —-
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving—
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins—-
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery —-X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy—-
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood—-X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding —-
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan —-

TOTAL = 4

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel —-
52 Dune - Frank Herbert—-
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons —-
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen—- X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth —- X
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon —-
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens —-
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley —- (no… I got it for a speech night prize last year but I MUST read it soon!)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon —- X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez —-

TOTAL = 3

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck —-
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov —-
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt —- X
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold—-
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas —-X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac——
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy——
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding —- X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie —-
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville —-X

TOTAL = 4

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens—-
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker——
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett —- X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson—
75 Ulysses - James Joyce —-
76 The Inferno – Dante—-
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome—-
78 Germinal - Emile Zola—-
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray—-
80 Possession - AS Byatt—-

TOTAL = 1

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens —-X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell—-
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker—-
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro—- X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert —- X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry —-
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White —- X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom —-
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—-
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton—- X

TOTAL = 4

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad —-
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery —- X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks—-
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams—-
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole—-
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute —-
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas —-
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare —X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl—- X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo —-X

TOTAL = 4

GRAND TOTAL: 45.5

Not great, but meh. I need to read more!