AP TEST?!?!?!

Not gonna lie, I kinda forgot about this blog for a while. With work and fall break, it totally slipped my mind. But now I’m back, trying to find things to write about, so I guess I’ll write about what we’re doing in class.

I am scared to death about the AP test because I’ve been hearing how hard it is compared to the AP Language test, which I passed with a 3. While passing the AP test isn’t that vital to my college future, as I am going to Community College, it still matters to me. It’s almost a source of pride to me, knowing that I passed one of the hardest high school tests, but in all honesty I’m actually really scared that I am not going to pass this year. Writing is my strong suite, what lowered my score last year was the multiple choice section.

I’m looking forward to the end of Hamlet so we can work more on multiple choice practice, because I really struggle in that area and it’s the hugest pain in my butt. I’ve been trying to get some multiple choice practice done on my own, but with my busy work and school schedule I hardly have any time to get anything extra done. I have faith in my writing skills and don’t see that as being an issue on the test, as that’s where I excelled in last year’s test. I'll be so proud of myself if I can pass this year with a 3, but I'll be super excited if I can get a 4 or above.

I’m usually always very excited about Halloween, it’s my favorite Holiday and time of year, but about a week ago, while shopping for Halloween costumes, I was extremely disturbed by what I was seeing. Over the years, costumes for women have gotten progressively more revealing, leaving less and less conservative options and over sexualizing even the most ridiculous things, such as food items and cartoon characters. While these things were never a huge issue to me, one costume in particular crosses a very inappropriate line with me. While browsing costumes online, I came across an “Anna Rexia” costume, depicting a girl in a skeleton dress with a tape measurer around her waist. As someone who’s battled eating disorders in the past and having seen friends and family hospitalized for such disorders, I was extremely offended. Not only was the girl in the image extremely thin, but the costume was also very overly sexy and revealing.  Eating disorders are not in any way glamorous or something to be poked fun at, given that anorexia is the third most prevalent disease among young girls age 12-25 and 95% of college age girls admit to dieting or restricting as a weight loss method, with 45% of them doing it on a regular basis.

Anorexia and eating disorders in general are categorized as mental illnesses and have the highest mortality rates of said illnesses. Roughly 20% of people suffering from anorexia will die prematurely from complications relating to their disease.

The glamorization and attitude towards eating disorders absolutely needs to change. Costumes such as these need to be taken down immediately as they are inappropriate and insensitive.

Fall Break

This blog is a little bit late, but I decided it would be more valuable to talk about how I stayed on track during break rather than just my plans for break. I got the week off work and spent my break in Tahoe for my best friend’s birthday, so trying to do anything revolving around school was going to be difficult anyway. In the blog I had originally wrote, my plans exceeded the possibilities of my situation. While I did take the drive up as an opportunity to read some Hamlet, I didn’t exactly work on memorizing my speech as I had planned, and given the fact I was in the mountains all week, I didn’t update my blog as much as I’d hoped. Having only Hamlet to read for the entire week did really help me though in that I have a better understanding of it now because I had to read it over and over. I’m proud of what I accomplished over break being that I firmly believe breaks during school are exactly that, breaks, and that school work needs to stay very far away from my vacation time. I had been extremely stressed with school and working 30-40 hours a week, and having a week off from both sourced of stress gave my body and mind a much needed rest. I firmly believe that had I involved anymore school work into my break, it would’ve taken away the serenity and not truly been a break.

Texting and Driving?

The other day while driving I was changing the music on my phone, which is attached to a dashboard mount on my car, making it street legal. As I reached to change the song for a split second, the middle-aged man on the road next to me shook his head and made a gesture at me that I was doing something wrong. This frustrates me completely because the finger is always being pointed at teens for texting and phone usage while driving, when in my experience it is not always that way. That same day as I was driving, I saw 6 people around 30 or 40 blatantly talking on their cell phones, with them held up to their ears and everything. I’ve been educated VERY thoroughly by my superiors not to use my phone while driving, and it seems that they are not following their own directions. I would say about 70% of the people I encounter driving like idiots are middle aged Caucasian people talking or texting on their phones, acting like they own the damn road.

My grandmother, a member of the city council and President of multiple HOA’s, is always running errands and on important phone calls, even in the car. She refuses to buy a Bluetooth headset because she “doesn’t like how it feels” and uses driving as an opportunity to make her important phone calls. Her entitlement and perceived right to break the law comes from the fact that she “has been driving longer than those ‘reckless teenagers’ just starting to drive”. It does not matter how long you have been driving or even how old you are, distractions are distractions and they put you in danger regardless. I am fed up with having the finger pointed at my generation, when everyone is at fault.

Ew

I spent the entire summer festering in self-doubt and persistently worrying about my senior year because honestly, leaving high schools scares the living hell out of me. For a 17 year old, I do have a lot of things going for me. I have a job, a car, I pay rent, and I almost entirely support myself, but besides that I have no direction and motivation whatsoever. I just want to be stagnant. The most difficult part of this year has been motivating myself to do school work and even think about capstone, graduation, and whatever. It’s all just so overwhelming and I hope for it to get better. Maybe I just haven’t gotten in the routine yet.