March 31, 2004
Floating Metaphors for Life
Like every other high school senior unsure where the fall will be spent, my head is swimming.
In addition to Syracuse and Smith (see the last entry if you want more details), I got accepted into Barnard and Emerson. As expected, I was rejected outright from Georgetown and waitlisted at Northwestern. It is really all for the best and I think I was attracted to the schools for the wrong reasons.
PLUS I have already done the whole Northwestern thing, even if it was only for a summer. I want something new, I want to spend four years in a place almost entirely alien to me, but in an exciting and not-too-scary way.
My political radicalism class is annoying me because the grading is so haphazard. I think I am finally finished with group projects in that class, so I can rejoice. If there is another group project, I do not think I can be stopped from collecting all of my anti-group project research and stacking it on my teacher's desk.
Today in my Lit class we talked about how the boat in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead can be seen as a metaphor for life. Then someone else said something hideous about how high school can be a metaphor for life, that life is like high school. Kara and I both offered to die at that moment.
Though I fear I will be ironic in twenty years, my life will not be group projects.
I realized when I walked back into my school on Monday how unhealthy and unhappy the school makes me. For whatever reason, probably my own fucked-up insecurities, I am not comfortable with myself there most of the time. I could feel the tension growing in my shoulders until I carried bricks above my blades. I constantly invent smart-aleck retorts to almost any criticism I could receive, along with a lot of criticism that I will probably never hear because it would be cruel.
Not so much healthy, huh? But I do it all the time. If my gift for dialogue is truly a gift, it is probably because I rehearse and invent conversations at a furiously unnecessary rate. It ranges from fantasy to scathing, but hopefully this kind of mental exercise produces more brain cells than neuroses for the stimulation.
One of my teachers showed a bit of mean-streak yesterday. I think he recovered today, but I found the whole thing unsettling and feared that some kind of confrontation (private) would be necessary for me to feel right with myself. It gave me deja vu for sophomore year when I confronted my English teacher about declaring what my religion stands for.
Now and again I can be one fiesty half-Irish Catholic.
Any opinion on what I should do in the future, college-wise, would be appreciated. I may not follow the advice but I like collecting the input.
Love,
Mandy