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That’s the theory, anyway.
In practice I haven’t noticed that much difference between us as Year 10s and us, two months later, as Year 11. There have been changes, certainly. But a great deal has stayed the same.
So, I thought for my first official post of the school year I’d discuss the theme of CHANGE. I was hoping to play David Bowie’s ‘Changes’ over the top to really prove my point, but unfortunately one of the things that hasn’t changed is my inability to work any kind of technology with any degree of competency. I’m fine with that, though, because I hate the song.
Anyway, this post is going to cover this exciting new stage in our lives. Which things are different, what hasn’t changed, all neatly set out under a series of headings. It’s the start of the year, after all. I’m one of those people who begins the year incredibly organised, books all in the right places, sheets tidily glued into the relevant books, small plastic turtle blu-tacked to the door of my locker (for those of you that I haven’t shown it to, yes, I have a turtle attached to my locker door. I think it’s trendy). Then, after about a month, things start to go downhill. I’ve a feeling it will be the same with this blog. Right now I’m feeling capable of knocking out about two regular posts a month, complete with pictures, headings, interesting Chaser clips you’ve probably seen but I’ve decided to show you again. And yet by this time next month I’ll struggling to get out so much as a couple hundred words with maybe a couple of unrelated graphics. It’s because of difficulties like this that I have established my groundbreaking timesaving BFTP project. More on that next time, however. For now, CHANGE, its effects and its repercussions.
UNIFORMS
One significant benefit of being a senior is that we get a new uniform. It’s not that much better, to be honest. We get white shirts and red skirts (but the boys wear grey shorts, not skirts. I’m glad I remembered to add this parenthesis in time, I was just re-reading the post quickly before clicking ‘Publish’. That could have been awkward). I actually quite liked the old, blue uniform – although the shirts are more comfortable, and it’s nice not having to wear the odd sack-like dresses any more. The important thing about this uniform is that it can be used to inspire RESPECT. Theoretically. Again, different in practice. The only real difference is that now we all feel more important. I thought it had worked on a group of Year 9s yesterday – they were definitely looking more respectful than when they were Year 8s and I was a Year 10 – but then I kind of screwed that up by walking into a pole. Less embarrassing than my whole injuring-the-backs-of-my-hands-after-chasing-Gwen-humming-the-theme-song-to-‘Whose-Line-Is-It-Anyway’ (an incident slightly less traumatic than the title is long), but still not pleasant. Also I now have a bruise on my forehead.
SUBJECTS
Ah, the joys of doing subjects you like instead of struggling away doing Geography, Physics, or PE. The pleasures of discovering that you have a double English that day, and no sciences, and then remembering that you’re not actually studying any sciences. The mind-blowing awesomeness of looking at your timetable and going ‘Yep, it’s a good day, no bad subjects’ – and then remembering that you ONLY study good subjects now and every day is a good day. Except days when you have assessment due. And man, are there a lot of those.
As an English double major, I’m currently studying Shakespeare, Ninteenth Century Literature, French, Hospitality, Specialist A Maths, and War in the Modern World (my History unit – it’s just on my timetable as ‘War’. My friends have long ago gotten tired of me saying ‘What have I got next? Oh, I’m going to war’).
Incidentally, bear with me over the following passages. Many of the paragraphs mention things that will only make sense to people in my classes. Otherwise just find me at school, and I’ll explain it to you.
Giuseppe, Lala, Kapish, and Hitler are all in my Ninteenth Century Literature class. We’re doing Ibsen. Yes. The other class get to do Oscar Wilde and we’re sudying Henrik Ibsen, that most famous of Norwegian playwrights.
It’s not that bad, honestly, it’s just that I really like Oscar Wilde. Still, I’ve shotgunned Dorian Gray for my oral (in the sense of having chosen him rather than of having sent him to a bloody and violent death). If you’re reading this, fellow-Oscar-Wilde-fan-in-my-class – and you probably don’t know who you are, from that description – it’s too late. Do The Importance of Being Earnest. Or the Ballad of Reading Gaol. Either that, or you’ll be cursed forever with the heinous crime of having broken the rule of shotgun. The choice is yours.
French, too, is good. I’ve actually got a French exchange student living with me at the moment. I won’t write any more about her as (a) it might technically be a breach of privacy, (b) most of you will meet her on Monday anyway and (c) I don’t know the French for ‘What blog nickname do you want?’.
Hosipitality, as is true for any subject in which the majority of assessment is down to you cooking things in class and then eating them, is FULLY AWESOME. Ness is in my class. We made cheese-and-bacon muffins. It was fun. That is to say, I burnt myself three times (once on a piece of bacon and twice on the hot water tap, which, considering I’m a Senior, I should have learnt how to use by now), dripped oil all over the bench, and then found a piece of bacon behind my ear. Still no idea why it was there (I don’t remember touching my ear . . .) or how it managed not to fall off. I suppose it will always remain a mystery. Anyway, the muffins were fantastic.
The only less good thing about food is that we’re supposed to wear proper button-up white jackets, checked trousers, and flat chef’s hats while cooking, which, while being impractical, makes us all look like prats. We even have to wear a checked necktie while out in public. Oh, yes. Because the addition of the necktie will make us so much less ridiculous.
I’m not even going to begin to talk about Maths. Chinny and Gwen are terrific. Peanut and I sit together and try to figure out how we’ve managed to get different answers using the same working (sadly, this happens a lot. Even more sadly, she’s usually right).
And, finally, War. I have Mr W as a teacher.
Earlier this week, a fly was trapped in our classroom. For some reason it seemed irrationally attracted to Mr W, persisting in returning to him whenever it got bored of trying to fly into the ceiling fan. This was evidently quite annoying to Mr W. At least, I assume so, as he’d occasionally stop talking to growl at the fly. Anyway, at one point the fly went farther than it had tried to do before and flew right in front of him. Mr W pulled a sword out of his bag, hacked vainly in the fly’s direction, then calmly put it away and continued his lecture. He may have missed the fly, but he’d evidently taught it a lesson, as it didn’t go near him again.
Just today, Giuseppe joined my history class. Mr W was on top form. He pretended to be a Trappist monk, put on some music to make himself feel more like he was in a monastery, started telling us about John Stuart Mill, got distracted and recited three verses of Monty Python’s ‘Philosopher’s Drinking Song’ (and got the last line wrong, by the way. I’m kind of a big Monty Python person), told us who would be first against the wall when the revolution came, spoke some indecipherable German, and then bounced across the room. If I hadn’t known that Giuseppe had already had plenty of experience with his classes, I might have been concerned for her. As it is I think she’ll get by.
NB: This is a picture from 'Sanctum', a new film about caving (thus making it relevant to the heading), which Andrew Hansen is in. He wasn't actually in this scene. So I photoshopped him in.
AREA
As Senior Students, we are now located in the Senior School area. This is a good thing for some people. Marie-Clare, for instance. Ness. Brandine. Vyvyan.
For the rest of us, unfortunately, that means we now have our lockers in . . .
. . . THE CAVE
Which is, as you should be able to tell from the writing, not a good thing.
The Cave is part of the Year 11 locker area. I can’t tell you what the exact dimensions are, but it’s pretty small. It’s also u-shaped. I’m near the back in the middle of the U. Aviator is directly opposite me (hence why he found it so easy to figure out my locker combination), Mercedes is in one of the corners, and Lala is right at the back.
It’s hard to decide the worst part of the Cave. The way it gets hotter the further back you go would definitely be a contender. Or maybe the way people leave their lunch on top of their lockers and forget to take it off again, despite the fact that the top of the lockers are sloped and it’s theoretically impossible for anything to stay there. But if I had to pick the absolute most terrible thing about that area, then it would be the crowdedness.
It’s especially noticeable after school. Everyone’s crammed together, desperate to get to their bus on time, trying to put books in their bag without treading on the person below them, trying to move out while the people opposite them are nearly pressed against the and there are other people, trying to get out or get to their own lockers, and shoving in all directions . . .
Aviator has decided to remedy this by putting up signs saying ‘ONLY TRAVEL CLOCKWISE AROUND THIS AREA’, with helpful arrows for people who own digital watches. That’s the general gist of the sign, anyway. The actual one had a distinctly more Communist flavour to it. It said something like:
EVERYONE MUST MOVE CLOCKWISE AROUND THE CAVE
EVERYONE HERE IS EQUAL AND HAPPY
BUT IF PEOPLE DO NOT DO THIS, THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES
To be honest, it hasn’t proved that effective so far – although it’s fun going around anticlockwise just to annoy him – but there’s always time.
VENDING MACHINES
The vending machines are certainly an important change in our lives, maybe even above subjects. Whether a good one or a bad one, I’m not sure. I’ll let you decide.
I haven’t bought a single drink for myself yet out of the vending machines. Gwen bought me one when I gave her a pastry we made in Hospitality. Phoenix bought me one after I jinxed her (we both said ‘Who needs a visa, I’ve got a pink slip,’ at the same time. It’s a long, complicated, and pointless story). Regarding these two stories alone, the vending machines might seem like creations of good. Not so, though. They are also harbingers of evil.
Gwen has recently been getting annoyed at Eggleston and Falcon for drinking bottled water. They, however, claim that it tastes better. Some kind of deciding factor was needed. So we had a competition. We gave them each three bottles: one containing bottled water, one with tap, and one with filtered rain water that Gwen had taken out of her tank. Sadly, they both managed to get the bottled water right, although they screwed up over the tap/rainwater conundrum. I think it’s a combination of the school’s water system’s and the vending machine’s fault. The water system’s, because I’m sure regular water doesn’t taste as metallic as the stuff we got out of the bubbler. And the vending machine’s for working as a machine/fridge. We did try to warm the bottled water up in the hand dryers in the bathroom to make it closer to room temperature but it didn’t work. There was still a temperature difference.
Anyway, we now have to buy them drinks. It’s all right, though, as Gwen has her revenge planned. Sadly I can’t say what it is as we’re still in a crucial stage of planning. However, it’s going to be epic.
All of this isn’t even mentioning the Peanut Effect. Whenever Peanut – or Peanut’s money – go anywhere near one of said vending machines, things break. We don’t know why. All we know is that while any of us can purchase something from the machine and rely on it working, if somewhat erratically, it’s not the same for Peanut. I mean, yesterday Mercedes and I tried putting a 10-yen piece in the machine to see what would happen. It rolled out of one and got temporarily stuck in the other. Yet the next time we checked – today, I think – it was fixed. We can get away with this kind of thing, and yet if Peanut tried the same thing the machine would probably die. I believe that Phoenix is currently conducting a social study about this bizarre phenomenon, among others. Be assured that as soon as she delivers her thesis on the Peanut Effect to me I’ll publish it on my blog, as the surrogate website for the University of Uttoxetercamfordbridgedam.
Somebody else I had to buy a drink for recently (today) was Aviator. In hindsight, it was a bad move to bet him that he couldn’t find out my locker combination by the end of the week. Especially as he now knows my locker combination AND has achieved victory over me. Not an ideal scenario.
PEOPLE
Many people I know – formerly friends and colleagues – have undergone dramatic change during the migration from Year 10 to Senior School. Some haven’t changed at all. Gwen, for example, is still her anti-bottled-water environment-saving self. Aside from Peanut’s disastrous effects on vending machines, everything about her seems essentially the same. Giuseppe, too. Therefore I’ve restricted myself to discussing the people who seem most changed by this new environment.Aviator has lost his braces and acquired glasses. He thinks they make him look like a Harvard professor. Ariane thinks he looks like Harry Potter. I think he looks like somebody’s grandmother. Who knows. Maybe the real answer is in some creepy combination of all three.
Seeing as Marie-Clare is now in the same area of the school as 25, I would have expected her to be slightly more excited. As is, she just seems vaguely embarrassed whenever I point him out to her. At first I was wondering if she really had undergone some major form of change, in which she doesn’t obsess over people she has never talked to, never even met, and who she has little to no chance of ever getting with.
That was until I remembered that she was just in love with Mark Zuckerberg. Compared to the 6.9-billion-dollar-man, all other romances probably seem trifling.
The greatest change I’ve noticed has been in Phoenix. Until recently – since Year 8, in fact – Phoenix has insisted in contacting us with emails and emails only, never speaking to us, hanging out with different people, and even going so far as to attend a different school. In a different country.
Now, however, she’s once again happy to speak to us and hang out with us. Yes, we have wrenched her safely out of the hands of the Americans. Luckily she still has her Australian accent as otherwise it might have been an impossible job.
NEW STUDENTS
(also known under their scientific name of ‘PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T HEARD THE ELF JOKE YET’)
That’s another big change. Now, when I see unknown faces in my locker area, it doesn’t just mean that I’ve forgotten somebody in my year level. Sometimes it does – my memory is reserved for important things, like obscure British comedians and Andrew Hansen’s birthday, not people I see every day – but more commonly, it just means they’re new to the school.
What this also means is that I have a lot of new names to learn. There’s one boy who I’m convinced looks exactly like a Dylan, so much so that I told Vyvyan this was his name. It turns out that he’s actually called something entirely different, but I still think he looks enough like a Dylan to merit calling him that on my blog. Although it could theoretically get tricky not to confuse him with Bob Dylan. Still, I’ll work something out.
There are a number of new students in the Senior School, but one has been unluckier than most. Yes, one poor undefended student has joined our group. I bet she didn’t know what she was getting into.
I have dubbed her Mercedes, and she’s spent the last week and a half witnessing my friends (and me) at our best. Whether it’s Giuseppe, Aviator, and Bob Dylan wondering what they’d do if they met their doppelganger; Phoenix and I discussing our new plan of setting up a kindergarten especially for people who want their children to be wine tasters; me pretending I can speak semaphore; me claiming to have spent the weekend in the West Indies with a giant turtle; if I was in her position, I’m not sure I would have stuck around. However, she has, which is good because she’s nice and we like her and it’s good to have someone less mental around. Just in case.
BLOG-RELATED THREATS
As the end of the old year slides smoothly over to the beginning of the new one, I’m having to make some important life decisions. What university I want to go to (University of Sydney or bust). What career I want (I’m going to be a journalist). And whether I want to keep going with my blog.
Year 10 was, relatively speaking, fairly chilled. There was plenty of time to fit school work, netball, free time, and blog writing time into the week. But with Senior School I not only have about five times as much work to do, given the amount of extra commitment I’ve taken on, I have much less time to do it in. Frees help. But then again, I share a free line with Brandine, Vyvyan, and Spoon. Frees don’t really help.
So, do I really have time to keep a blog running?
On the one hand, I hate doing this. I hate the fact that I’ve stayed up until midnight typing, that I’ve now spent so long staring at the words I’m typing ‘hoswe’ instead of ‘how’ and ‘totwthe’ instead of ‘the’ and just not realising it until I go back and proofread. I hate that I’m doing this instead of doing one of my many assignments, when in reality this post is about four times as long as the assignment has to be and has taken just as much work.
On the other hand, however, I wouldn’t still be doing this if I didn’t like it. Don’t worry, I’m definitely keeping the blog up. I didn’t even want to be a journalist until I realised how much I enjoyed writing this. I just wanted to temporarily worry some of you (MARIE-CLARE. MARIE-CLARE) so, perhaps, you’d stop threatening me. It would be nice.
If I don’t put this post up by Monday, apparently, Marie-Clare is going to slap me. I’m tempted not to do it until then to see if she follows through. I’m worried she might, though. I mean, it’s unusual to have a realistic threat made. Normally Marie-Clare and Aviator just warn me that if I (a) don’t write or (b) write anything they don’t like they’ll burn my house down. That’s assuming that they wouldn’t actually burn my house down, of course – I wouldn’t put it past Aviator, but as he hasn’t actually done it yet, I’ll assume he’s relatively safe.
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