Lesson: Learned

Over the weekend, I managed to get into my first (and hopefully last...) car accident. Granted, I'm not really sure it can be classified as a "car accident," because that implies two cars were involved--perhaps I should rephrase: this weekend, I crashed the car into the garage.

I was driving home from the library after a Calculus project meeting on Saturday morning, with my father in the passenger seat. I was tired, and after spending two hours calculating rainbow angles, my mind was wandering elsewhere. I drove us home without incident, but my concentration began to lag as I pulled into the garage, and I clipped the side of the garage with the right bumper--which in the larger scheme of things isn't that big of a deal, considering done that before with no lasting damage to car or garage done.

Then I hit the brakes--except they weren't the brakes. I had panicked because I was spacing out, and in my hurry, I'd hit the accelerator. I pressed it down as I would the brakes, which is much harder than I usually do on the accelerator, and the car, my father, and I went zooming straight into the back wall of the garage.

In reality, it probably took all of three seconds for the car to make contact with the shelf in front of us, but it felt like five minutes. My dad did a hybrid screech/scream for the entire time, but I didn't make a sound. We hit the shelves in front of us with an almighty crash.

When I finally hit the brakes and stopped the car, my dad couldn't get away fast enough. He leapt out of the car while I sat frozen, clutching the parking brake and afraid to take my feet off the brake. I couldn't believe that everything had gone so wrong so quickly.

I eventually got out of the car, and when my dad backed the car out of the garage, I was horrified to see what I had done --->

I couldn't decide whether I should laugh or cry. So I did both--especially when I smelled the burning plastic.

They had to tow the car away, and the insurance appraisal was not pretty--and the estimated cost didn't even include the damage to the hood because the appraiser was afraid the hood wouldn't close again if he opened it.

All in all, it wasn't a good experience, but I've decided to take what I can from it. First of all, I'm grateful that my error in judgement didn't take place on the road with another car and that no one was hurt. I'm also glad that a shelf was in the way and I didn't break our house.

I have no one but myself to blame for what happened, and I now know better than to dismiss my mother's nagging about remembering which one is the brake and which one is the accelerator. I know I should have been focusing, and that I shouldn't have assumed I was home safe just because I could see the garage. I'm going to be paying much more attention before blithely pushing a pedal down from now on, because really, it's scary how quickly things can go wrong.

Coffee Shop Etiquette: Part 2

All I was asking for was to optimize my calculus in peace. It had been a particularly bad day. I was running on three hours of sleep, it was a fitness day, we'd had a physics test that wasn't pretty, I'd tripped more than usual, and there was a calc test the next day. I was already on edge.

The only thing I wanted to do was get some coffee in my system, focus, and unwind in peace. Instead I had to listen to two hours of very screechy high school girls talking about someone they disliked--redundantly and not, as much as they tried, wittily. Granted, I was in a whiny mood too, but still--rule number 2, ladies, rule number 2. (Inside voices, for those of you who don't want to scroll to the last post).

Regardless, I have two more really basic coffee shop rules. These aren't rules, persay, because they're really not as important as 1) taking up a reasonable amount of space, and 2) being quiet. Rather, they're just nice things to do. Especially now that it's officially the holiday season :).

Buy something to drink.

Yeah, I know it seems obvious, but if you're going to enter a coffee shop and sit down for any amount of time, it's only polite to offer said coffee shop your patronage! I think of it as paying for the atmosphere--I can make coffee at home, but it's basically paying for a quiet place to work and people-watch. Plus, it's really hard not to feel guilty when you're sitting there drink-less. I once forgot my wallet and as a direct result, I didn't get a single productive thing done because I could feel the glares of the barista burning into the side of my head.

Ok. I'm realizing that most of my pet peeves about coffee shop behavior are all related to people being loud and annoying. I do also hate having to clean up after whoever had the table before me. If you're going to eat a scone, do try to eat it without crumbling half of it onto the table and then not cleaning it up. It's sort of gross.

With that being said...happy December everyone! It's the most wonderful time of the year! Fingers crossed that we have snow for Christmas! I find myself feeling jolly already.

Coffee Shop Etiquette

I spend a lot of time at coffee shops. As a result, I've had a lot of experience observing the comings and goings of coffee shop patrons. I've seen temper tantrums and public breakups (or possibly just a nasty couple-fight). I hate when people fail to grasp basic coffee shop etiquette. There are certain rules that should be observed inside a coffee shop for the sanity of everyone involved.

Rule #1: Don't take up more space than you need!

This. Is. So. Annoying.
 
At the coffee shop I frequent, there are three individual couches, three two-person tables, five small round or square ones, and three four-person tables. There's also a grand total of four power outlets. One of them is at the entrance, so it's effectively useless because you can't plug anything in without tripping every customer that walks into the door. The three functional power outlets are next to the three big tables, which are usually occupied.

As a result, the three larger tables are the most in-demand areas of the coffee shop. I can't work with other people at an itty-bitty table, and if I have WebAssign to do, I need the power outlet to keep my laptop on for long enough (it's really old and has terrible battery life...).

If you're alone with a grand total of one book and a drink, you don't need to sit down next to one of the tables that everyone needs! I don't care how large you are. I don't care how spread out want to be. The regular tables are plenty spacious. You are annoying. And don't put your twenty million bags on top of the table and on the other chairs around you--someone else can use that space.

There's nothing more irritating than seeing someone with materials that don't take up much space and no laptop sitting at one of the nice tables surrounded by a fort of backpacks.

Rule #2: Inside voices, please.

The other day, I was struggling through a particularly confusing section of The Republic when a lady sat down at the table behind me. I thought nothing of it, but her friends began to join her, and as time passed, the noise level from behind me got louder and louder until I could hear every word of their conversation. And I didn't care at all to hear about the time Sally dressed up as a showerhead for Halloween.

A coffee shop is a perfect place to gather your friends to chat and catch up with each other, but not when your collective volume level starts to rival that of a lawnmower. There are people trying to work! Either a) be polite and talk in six-inch voices, or b) take it outside--there are lots of tables there too!
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Oh, there's more. Check back next time for Coffee Shop Etiquette: Part 2!

Never Ever Ever. Like, Ever.

Last Monday, I rolled out of bed and stumbled through my morning routine. As per usual, I yearned with every fiber of my being to be curled back up in bed. This is the time of day my recurring daydream of eating myself into a food coma and hibernating occurs most frequently. But not this day.

Five minutes later, I froze, toothbrush in hand. Perked up, even. "ALICE!" I screamed to my sister in the next room. "Today is the day! Red just came out!" She told me to go away. My mother yelled up the stairs to be quieter. Oops.

Red is Taylor Swift's latest album. I've been a devoted fan since her "Teardrops on my Guitar" days. Taylor just got it, and I thought she understood so well what it was like to be the shy and quiet one in middle school. That song spoke for preteen girls everywhere. Fast forward to 2012, and she's on her fourth best-selling album, has turned 22, and sometimes it seems like she's dated every single guy in Hollywood.

I was looking forward to Red almost as much as I am sleeping in next weekend (which is really saying something). I had to wait a couple of hours before the first songs were uploaded to Youtube, but I avidly listened to all of them as soon as I could get to them. And I was devastated to realize that all I had to say when I got through the album was ehh.

There aren't really any other words to describe it. Some of the songs have a lot of potential, but it's as if Swift stopped before she got there, allowing it all to degenerate into bubbly, girly, poppy music. Granted, Swift's songs are almost always about girly things, but I wish some of the songs weren't so trivial. The innocent he-broke-my-heart-and-now-I'm-singing-about-it theme is getting strange. The high-school relationship songs made sense when she was, you know, in high school, and it was even ok for a few years afterwards, but now, at 22, she's well into adulthood. I get that she has to keep her songs kid-friendly, but does she really have to be so juvenile about it?

Take, for example, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together." I want to bang my head on the steering wheel every time it comes on the radio. She uses more "likes" in 2 minutes than anyone should ever have to hear! I have similar feelings for most of the other songs.

There are a couple of songs that I do like on Red. My favorite song on the album is "The Lucky One," which is not about a boy, but instead about a girl who has to deal with overnight fame and being lost in the bright lights of Hollywood. I also liked her collaboration with Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody on "The Last Time."

No one is expecting Taylor Swift to start tackling life's biggest issues in her songs. Her songs have always been fluffy feel-better music for bad days, but I can't help but wish Red had just a tad more substance.

Don't You Look Pretty in Your Cool New Jeans

Here comes the boom of the end of the civilization and don't you look pretty in your cool new jeans.
Here comes what we get for a hundred years of privilege squandered and nothing done to educate our children or save our planet.
Here comes the cabriolet edition of capitalism and the end of an empire you were too conceited to even protect.
Here comes the rising tide. Here comes the Middle East. Here comes the weather. Here comes everybody.

-Robert Montgomery

I have an entire collection of emergency websites to visit when I run out of ways to procrastinate--my daily website rounds include iwastesomuchtime.com, dearblankpleaseblank.com, time.com--the usual. But sometimes they all fail me and I run out of ways to procrastinate. That's when I used to start getting desperate. But then one day, I discovered StumbleUpon, which is basically a procrastinator's heaven. 

StumbleUpon is a website that provides users with a new website based on the interests they indicated every time they click on the stumble button, and it helps users discover new websites. I've stumbled on a lot of cool things, but by far the favorite thing I have discovered is WORDS IN THE CITY AT NIGHT. It is a project in the United States and Europe by artist Robert Montgomery, who "hijacks" public advertising space to post his messages. He posts messages that are usually strongly worded denunciations of modern culture that mock its values and ideals. His work is, in his own words “an attempt to describe in public space what it feels like to live now.”

The words that he uses are so beautiful and powerful, and they have the sort of truth in them that makes me ache when I realize it. Much of his work points out the loneliness of the lives that people lead today. One of the most enduring phrases that has stayed with me is "and in all pictures now, even the famous people have begun to look lost and lonely."

Some of his work is available online at his website.

"Echoes of voices in the high towers, all wounds explained here, all knives bandaged, all empires arrested, all castles unbuilt, all hearts unbroken."

Leaving on a Jet Plane

The last couple of weeks all blur together in a whirlwind of late nights, homework, and denial of all the work I have to do. As I write this, I realize that I can't actually remember the last time I was really relaxed. Everything has been go, go, go, and life is just pretty stressful in general.

I recently met with the coordinator of the Rotary Youth Exchange program, and I've been thinking more and more about taking a gap year and learning about a new culture. The program sends students to a foreign country for a year to attend high school and live with several host families. I've talked with people whose kids have participated, and the common consensus is that a gap year in a different country is something that's definitely worth it.

My recent interest in the program is motivated by the part of me that wants to travel and see the world. Different cultures fascinate me because there is so much variance but also so much that everyone has in common around the world. I've spent most of my summers in Taiwan, and it's always a culture shock the first couple of weeks there, and the first couple of weeks back, and it always confuses me how I can be a part of both cultures--I can't reconcile the two: for me, Taiwan doesn't exist when I'm in the US, and vice versa. I want to see more ways that people live, and it'd be pretty cool to pick up a third language.

There's also another part of me that's not ready for college. I don't feel ready to face four more years of school, and I'm not particularly excited about it. I skipped a grade, so I have the good fortune of being able to take a gap year and still be the normal age for a college freshman. I don't know enough about myself or anything else, and I want to figure a little bit out before I settle down for four more years.

Mostly though, I want to get out of here. Packing up and just straight-up leaving is something I fantasize about in (usually physics) class. I'd leave all the college apps and fighting behind--I can't really do that, but taking a Rotary gap year seems like a perfectly viable alternative. I feel trapped--not the kind of trapped that going to college would get rid of, but trapped as in caged into the monotony of upper-middle class life in the US.

With all this in mind, I'm still not completely sure about doing Rotary, but it's something that makes me excited, and I'm giving it serious consideration.

An Introduction

When I'm running back from cross country practice, the world always seems ten times better than it does on the way there. Last week, as I jogged along the tree-lined streets of Urbana and delighted in the approaching conclusion of the day's run, I did a double take--there was definitely orange on that tree, and a dash of yellow on the one next to it--the leaves were changing color.

There is something wonderful about tumbling out of my blankets in the morning to a slightly chilly room that's the perfect temperature to keep me awake in the morning. People always say that time moves by sluggishly in the summer, but in fall, there seems to be always enough time to do everything. Time is roomier in the fall.

For me, fall has the best memories, and the best things always happen. Everything is clear and crisp and beautiful. My birthday is in October, as is Halloween. I love walking around Curtis Orchard picking out pumpkins and buying food, and I love the apple cider and doughnut afternoons that always follow a day spent there. Last year was the first year I didn't go trick-or-treating, and only because I had too much homework (and I'm not ashamed that I've trick-or-treated for 15 years!), and I still love looking at everyone in their ridiculous costumes bouncing around from door-to-door. The trees are shedding their leaves, but before they die for the year, they are at their most breathtaking.

Fall is the transition between sweltering heat and freezing cold, and lately I can relate. This is my senior year in high school, and between the homework, the running, the test-taking, and the college applications, I've barely had time to realize how close I am to the end, but also to the beginning. So many lasts are coming up this year--last cross-country race, last dances, last winter surprise party, last year living at home--and that makes me scared and sad. But at the same time there are so many firsts coming my way and I can't wait to see everything that is in store. This blog will be my chronicle of growing up and learning the important things.