It's Final

I'm a senior now.

Not senior as in senior citizen, though lately sitting at my desk all day with bad posture has been giving me neck problems. I mean high school senior. It's the final year for me, before my parents take their hands off my shoulders and I'm left with just my training wheels to keep from falling off the bike. It's the beginning of the year of endings.

At first, when I walked through the school at the end of August, I thought I ought to be depressed. One more year of excruciating torture upon the rack of public education, and then relief - only to be shipped off in a few more months to undergo the exquisite, privileged punishment of college? One more year of loitering aimlessly with a bunch of teenagers like me, and then watching most of them walk off the face of my world after graduation? One more year of carefree constraint, before - oh, I don't know - the ominous, inevitable, final, Cap and Gown?

I expected these thoughts to weigh on me for the rest of my high school days. I am terrified of endings, you see, almost as much as I am terrified of beginnings. I always feel like they have to be perfect.

But I wasn't depressed. Instead, plodding through paths jam-packed with both strangers and old friends, I felt a profound sense of warmth flood through me. There was a senior I'd known since freshman year, for instance. He'd had a growth spurt, and when he stood next to the WHS newcomers it became suddenly obvious how much he had changed. And then I passed the half-finished mural by the North Quad, and I thought to myself: Little guys have never known anything else. Not the washed-out Yosemite scenery buried beneath the paint; not the hours spent balancing on a rickety ladder with a paintbrush in hand, trying to figure out if the trumpet dude's head fits on his neck right. They've come into this school, and the first impression they ever had of this wall was the half-finished mural.

I'm a senior. I know things they don't. I'm at the top of the food chain, and I'm amazed that I managed to make it this far. Three years, and so much has happened - so many things I'd rather not repeat, but that I don't want to ever forget - so many things that made life worth loving. And I looked at the new kids and realized that, pretty soon, they're going to be where I am now. They're going to go through freshman year and sophomore year and junior year, and by the time they're seniors, they'll have changed. For better or for worse, nobody goes into high school and then comes out exactly the same. I can only pray that all these kids come out with both feet on the ground and head held high.

I was happy, ludicrous as that sounds, as I squeezed past all these young faces. They looked confused, sleepy, annoyed, and maybe a little scared. But if there's one thing they all had in common, it was a future. They're going to define what comes next in this place I've spent a third of my waking hours in for three years. Senior year isn't really an ending - I'll just be stepping off one chapter and into another. There will be plenty of others keeping the cycle going.

And I'm not done yet, either. I've still got a year before signing out of here, and I don't plan on letting it go to waste. I'll make the most of my last year in high school, enjoying the hell out of every day of my life - and that's final.

We All Have Our Battles

Six in the morning. The battle begins.

Victoria Wang is waist deep in a snake pit. She has no idea how she wound up in the snake pit, but she concludes, wisely, that she should get out before asking questions. She begins to run through her mind a list of possible escape routes.

The Ringing disturbs her thoughts. To compare the sound to a ringing bell would be mistaken; it is more like a braying donkey. She finds it impossible to ignore. So she grunts, rolls over, and slams her hand down. The Ringing subsides.

She returns to her previous position and begins to grapple with the stone walls of the snake pit. There are countless fangs brushing against her legs. Her thick clothes save her from the venom – for now – but they also make her movements sluggish. Time is of the essence. A rope appears in her hands, attached to a grappling hook, and she prepares to hurl it up and over the lip of the snake pit.

The Ringing returns. The grappling hook falls uselessly onto the writhing snake by her elbow. Scowling, she rolls over and smacks her hand down a second time. The Ringing leaves.

She spins the grappling hook around by the rope, then sends it flying. It soars gloriously up the mile-tall wall of the snake pit and latches onto the rim perfectly. She moves quickly now – the snakes’ fangs are about to penetrate her clothes. She wraps her hand around the rope and begins to scale the wall, walking vertically and using the rope as leverage. It is a long and strenuous process, but with a last burst of willpower she boosts herself up the final stretch and clambers over the rim - she's out - she's safe -

The Ringing is back with a vengeance. The sound is physically and psychologically painful. She sticks one leg out from covers, then the other, and both feet touch the carpet floor of her bedroom. It takes an excruciating amount of willpower to extricate herself from the tangled snake pit of her blankets. But she does, eventually, and hauls herself to the alarm clock. This time she sets it to Off, not Snooze. She rubs her eyes irritably, then stumbles to the bathroom to take care of morning unpleasantries.

Time for another day to begin.

The Return of the Princess of Laziness

I'm home.

Possibly one of the most depressing realizations I've had since I turned fourteen and I ran out of new things in life to angst about. I - aspiring novelist, college bound Asian, hobbyist musician - am staring at a computer screen and lounging on a queen-sized memory foam bed all day, fretting about my driving test in four days as I twirl my pen idly. The colors, the noise, the enthusiastic conversations about the nature of beauty and truth are now swept under the rug of Yesterday. I am home.

Really, I ought to get up and do things more. Take a walk. Build a card castle. Bake a cake. Now I understand the term "everyone needs a hobby." Even though my mind is finally free to frolic in the realm of my imagination, my body can't keep up - it gets so bored, sitting here. It gets in the way of my writing.

My writing, I hope, has improved. I have difficulty judging that, though - after all, it was only two months of learning, and I haven't gotten round to writing anything substantial since I got home last Friday. Besides, my personality often leads to inconsistent work: what I write tomorrow might be the best thing I've ever written; what I write in a month might be the worst. But after going to both EPGY and CSSSA I now know that only a small portion of the experience was geared toward cultivating actual technical skills. Most of it was about the process and the approach, and in these areas I am confident I have grown.

Writing scares me. Terrifies me. That's the main reason why I used to keep putting it off, procrastinating on projects until just before the deadline, then slapping together something crappy that I would sheepishly call "art". It's a weakness of mine, trying to hide from things that scare me. But the programs, CSSSA in particular, forced me to sit my ass down and just puke my guts out (metaphorically) no matter what prompt I was facing. The process of writing is not some mysterious beast with rainbow-colored wings. It's just writing. Ideas are gold nuggets, words are nothing but things that shape the gold into jewelry. Got something to say? Then say it! (EPGY had a rather more scholarly answer to writer's block: first becoming one with a character, and then simply letting the character carry the story, which leads to a very natural flow and more often than not surprises even the writer with a resounding conclusion.) Refinement and polishing can come later.

Of course, if you aren't double-checking every sentence in the first draft, the rewrite and revision process becomes much more important. EPGY had a pretty heavy emphasis on this. I wrote a character sketch that I had absolutely no intention to use as an actual story, but then I rewrote it and touched it up a little, and everybody loved it. (It's little Tito's story.) CSSSA's workshop model helped me learn a great deal about how to evaluate other people's work and how to take criticism myself. For long works especially - I used to nitpick like crazy when reading other people's novels-in-progress. Now I know that, for the moment, grammar and stylistic differences really aren't that important, and comparing someone else's writing to your own writing is the worst thing possible you could do. What's important is the big picture, and the integrity of that person's idea and voice. I really like that phrase, so I'll repeat it: integrity of the writer's idea and voice. It's the soul of the writer's work.

Okay, that's enough blabbing for now. I'll get off my ass and do something fun, like, oh I don't know, blowing up the kitchen. Now, where to find that cake recipe...