Aurora X

Okay, screw the whole anonymous name thing. That isn’t going to work out for my blog. Especially with what little time I have. I mean, come on, updating about my new high school for the FIRST TIME in the seven days that I’ve been in school? Tells you something about my new life.

It’s crazy. Just homework, homework, homework, every single day. No wonder why everyone tells you that you don’t have a life when you go to an IB program school. Every single class I have gave me homework that I have to do every single day. Even in the car me and my friends can’t slack off. We dig out our mountain of textbooks and papers and do our homework while cruising through traffic.

I need a locker. Badly. They’ve already started selling ‘em, but I don’t know exactly WHERE they sell them. I’ll ask my homeroom teacher, Ms White, about that tomorrow. There’s no way I’m lugging around something equivalent to an anvil for the next four years.

I have to wake up at 5:50 AM every morning, and I don’t get back until, like, 3:45. It’s not nearly as bad as taking the bus, but still.

Besides that, my teachers are pretty good. But my classmates in French are loud and obnoxious. On Friday, they told my teacher that we already did the quiz on numbers ten through twenty, even though we really didn’t, but my teacher was all like, “Oh, really? Nevermind, then! Onto the next lesson!” which really upset me, because I needed that quiz grade. After all, I got a C on my first quiz.

Yes, I still have the entire quarter to bring that grade up, but I prefer having a stable A all through that time period.

I’ve gotta get back to studying. Wasted enough time blogging already.

Well, she’s totally fed up. Can’t say that I’m very sorry, though. I told her I hated Chinese. She should’ve expected me to slack off on my studies sooner or later.

Anyway, since I refused to study my Chinese, she cancelled my drawing class today. It’s the day before school starts, and all I want is ONE DAY without being lorded over by her and her perfection-is-everything attitude. I haven’t gotten that since the day summer started, which was almost three months ago. I didn’t even feel all that good during the out-of-town competition I went to because I was being humiliated in my master ballet classes by all of these anorexic, professional-like ballerinas.

I don’t feel that bad about losing the drawing class. I didn’t want to draw more basic shapes anyway.

And it’s not just my Chinese. It’s piano, too. Well, maybe I wouldn’t hate piano so much if mom would just lay off my back about practicing for competitions until my fingers are numb. And neither my dad nor my mom are very supportive about it. They just tell me to do my best, and if my best is making my music sound terrible because I’ve got a horrible case of the nerves, they yell at me about it and don’t even bother to tell me that I could always do better next time.

Which is why I hate piano competitions now. I’m definitely going to tell my piano teacher not to sign me up for anymore of those, otherwise I’ll end up hating music for the rest of my life.

Strange how your parents can have such a negative impact on you.

In art class, I had to draw and shade a wooden giraffe. And the wood was all polished and smooth, so there were a whole bunch of reflections and stuff, making it even harder to draw.

The basic shapes and outline weren’t bad. My art classmates have such a hard time drawing basic shapes, but it’s really quite easy. Just a few circles here, a few squares there, outline the entire thing, and BAM! You’ve got the exterior of your subject.

But I hate shading. Shading and coloring. They add so many more dimensions, but it takes so long. Plus, I use the traditional mediums like charcoal and graphite, so if you place one finger on your drawing, it smears the whole thing. Then you have to use the clay eraser and start over, and my eraser isn’t that good, so I just smear my drawing even more.

My friend, A (Not A.Z.), whom I was carpooling with, finished about twenty minutes before I did, so while I was still working on the body and bum of the giraffe, she was pacing around, urging me to finish as quickly as possible. So I had to rush the rest of my drawing, and so the legs and body looked less complete than the head and neck. In fact, the body and legs just kind of got smooshed together because I didn’t have time to make sure I darken some lines in so that you could tell the two apart. I couldn’t do anything about it, though. A was so impatient. Art takes time, Miss Hare.

I felt like taking all of the giraffe animal crackers and biting their heads off. Too bad the bowl of animal crackers my art teacher set down for us didn’t have any giraffes. I know because I rifled through the entire thing.

Overall, though, the giraffe wasn’t too frustrating to draw.

Next week, however, my teacher wants me to draw naked men and their muscles. Without the skin. In full charcoal. Now THAT’S going to be one irritating piece to draw. I’ve already saw the pictures. The men looked like they were on steroids, and they had, like, 500 bulging muscle sections in each arm. Good thing I don’t have to draw their you-know-what. Their massively huge thigh muscles pretty much covered that part.

And now my parents tell me that tomorrow I’m going to Chinese school to take art classes. My sketching teacher teaches there, so we don’t have to waste Thursday evening away driving to his house and back for drawing classes.

Yes, I have two drawing teachers: one on Saturday, and one on Sunday. Mrs. P is the one who teaches on Saturday (Which is today), and she lets us draw watercolor paintings and work with charcoal, graphite, etc. even though most of us don’t have basic outline sketching knowledge. However, lately, we’ve moved away from watercolors and sponge paintings and started sketching still life in black and white mediums.

My other teacher, who teaches on Sundays at the Chinese school, teaches basic sketching, so basic that we started from basic 3D shapes like cubes and spheres. That’s how all artists start out, but I’ve been drawing those shapes the whole entire summer. I’m pretty sure I’m ready for something else now, especially since in Ms. P’s class I’ve finished drawing a bunch of animals and am moving on to people art (See above about masculine guy).

Two more days until school starts. I can’t wait to go back to school (because staying at home is so boring), but I’m not exactly looking forward to waking up at 5:45 AM. School starts at 7:20 AM, but six and seven is rush hour, so we gotta leave home before 6:30.

I have only one word to describe my high school’s Open House: INSANITY.

I’m not kidding. EVERY SINGLE NEW FRESHMAN THERE WAS LOST. The school’s big, and it has so many rooms. I don’t know how many times I circled around the school, going from class to class, and/or trying to find someone who can tell me where my next class is.

And after all that hard work, we (Meaning me and my friends who’re in IB, which I’ll explain later) found out that the schedules we had for Open House were only valid for that day only, and that we may not have the same classes or teachers when we finally start school.

And I already made two acquaintances! This seriously SUCKS!

Well, I kind of already knew that our Open House schedule wasn’t our final schedule, since mine didn’t have Algebra II Honors, which is a course that ALL IB STUDENTS MUST TAKE IN THEIR FRESHMAN YEAR. Shows how screwed up the school’s system is, not placing me in one of the required courses.

Thankfully, they’re going to give us new and hopefully correct schedules Monday, when we officially start school. I just hope that I don’t get any bad teachers. And if things go my way, I’ll meet those two acquaintances again. They seem like really nice folks. One was even my dad’s co-worker’s daughter.

Okay, as for what IB exactly is, it stands for International Baccalaureate. It’s a program for academically gifted students, and is generally known as the level above AP (Advanced Placement). Supposedly, you’ll stand out from the rest during college application time if you go to the IB program.

And now that I’ve been to IB Open House, I’m pretty sure that it won’t be easy. We have eight classes, spanned out over two days. The first day is known as Red Day, and the second as Blue Day, which has entirely different courses than Red Day. That means that on each day, we have four courses. Most of them are an hour and a half long. Or somewhere around that time. But they seem to give out a lot of homework, and we’ve gotta do a fixed amount of oral presentations, foreign compositions, etc. every quarter. Oh, and did I mention that each class is an HOUR AND A HALF LONG?

Okay, so I totally survived two-hour math classes four times a week during the summer. But still. These classes are only a half hour shorter. And a half hour isn’t a lot of time, if you’re not procrastinating.

IB students also have a seperate lunch period than the “traditional students,” or students who take the regular, non-IB courses at my high school.

Besides all of the class-finding insanity, I did have a good time chatting with my friends, who I haven’t seen in THREE MONTHS.

Can’t wait for school to start!

Well, due to the fact that my current ballet school takes thirty minutes to drive to (and thirty minutes to drive FROM), we tried out a new ballet school that’s super close to our home. It only takes five minutes to drive from our house to the studios. I need the extra time because the classes I’m taking in my high school give a ton of homework, and all the students who took them before complain and whine about having to stay up all night, every night, finishing homework. Although my piano teacher did pry into their personal business and find that most of the students spend a lot of time IMing their friends WHILE they’re working on homework. But I digress.

Unlike my current ballet school, which is rented from a rec center, this one built its OWN studio, with its own front desk and everything. No rent to pay. They built everything entirely from sratch. And the studios were really nice, too. Lots of sunshine, and good floors for turning en pointe or whatever. The students in my tryout class were extremely friendly to me, but that’s probably because most of them were like, eight and know nothing about teenage welcoming (Cold stares, averted eyes, etc.). Yet.

And the studios had SPEAKERS. No traditional pianist, no boombox on a turntable, but wall-ceiling speakers. And the teacher used a sound system control pad!

The class itself was a bit easy. But they said they didn’t want to overwhelm me by trying me out in the highest level, and I’m not complaining. I saw the people in the highest ballet class, and they were like, CLONES. Well, their dance movements were. Not their looks.

So they bumped me up to the second-to-last level instead, because I did nicely in the tryout class, but I didn’t have the technique and skills necessary for the final level.

But my smile was turned upside down almost immediately following the financial discussion. The basic tuition, plus registration, costume rental, and recital tickets, equals two thousand dollars per ten month session! And I’m only taking lessons three times a week! At my current ballet school, the same amount of classes and hours would only cost half as much.

But then there’s the whole time and tight schedules that you have to factor in, so we’re waiting until we know exactly what our full schedules will be before we decide whether to stay with my current ballet school or go with the new one. My dad teaches at the local college, and his classes are at night, which pretty much coincides with my ballet classes. And the two classes going on at the same time = insanity. With the driving and timing, at least.

So, what’ll it be? The new ballet school, or the old one? According to my dad, we’ll figure that out tomorrow.

I have a freakishly sore throat that makes water taste bad. It’s horrible.