EPTSo first off I've been playing way more guitar. I forgot how much I actually love playing guitar, even if I end up playing random stuff some of the time. The process of learning songs can be quite frustrating and time consuming, but there are very few things that I enjoy more than finally learning a song that I love listening to. I don't have a ton of room to play guitar anymore, but I still love the time that I spend playing guitar and very few things make me happier than just sitting and playing guitar for an hour. I actually saved up for my guitar for such a long time (it look me like a year and a half to save up for it) and it was definitely worth every penny, even if I waited a long time to get it. For anyone that wants pics of it, here are some random google pics.
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![[image loading]](http://thumbnail.image.rakuten.co.jp/@0_mall/k-gakki/cabinet/eg2/gib_g/gib_lpst_fbgd_1.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.guitarsandeffects.com/guitarimages2006/gibson_lp_studio_fireburst_05/fireburst_gold_studio_002.jpg)
Playing an instrument is an awesome way to relax and relieve stress, highly recommend that anyone that has the time to pick up an instrument learn one. I play the cello and the guitar and, while I probably don't think I'll play the cello after high school, it's something that I definitely do not regret in the slightest. It's a great experience and I can't see any negatives to it, other than that you may get sucked into playing and lose hours of a day and just sit there wondering where they went.
Also, I got a Kindle kind of recently, like a few weeks after Christmas (go Amazon gift cards :D). It's awesome. I thought I'd hate it at first, but it's so convenient. I love the feeling of picking up a book and turning the page, but the Kindle is just really awesome. I have really sensitive eyes and the Kindle brightness adjustment is awesome. Great for a variety of settings and the dimming is really good on it. Doesn't bother my photosensitive eyes at all, and actually makes reading in the dark very easy. I actually have gotten more eyestrain from reading a regular paper book than I have from reading the Kindle. It makes getting books really fast and easy, even though going to a bookstore is a fun experience for a lot of people.
Kind of off topic, but I have been doing a decent amount of SAT prep (for you non-Americans, it's our major standardized test that gets factored in along with GPA, ethnicity, extra curricular activities, work experience, volunteering, etc. for getting into college/university). That shit is really expensive, to the point that I actually felt really bad about getting it. My parents aren't poor, but struggle our fair share. Anyone that's read my first blog (which I don't really recommend reading, it's mostly just incoherent ranting about how awful my life is; kind of pathetic looking back at it) might remember that I live with my mom's boyfriend, who used to have a job at a relatively big fortune 500 company making good money, around $150k a year or so. This was good for a while, but the economy hit my family kind of hard. My dad was unemployed for a while, my mom was unemployed for a while, and my mom's boyfriend, through his own poor choices, has been unemployed for over a year now. Things aren't looking very positive for his job search, but I guess we're all trying to stay optimistic. So things aren't great for us financially, and having an expensive commitment a few times a month is really hard on us.
But what made me feel really dumb was that for a while, I saw very little progress. Maybe I would get a few more questions right each time, but nothing substantial. I saw little to no progress, and I ended up feeling more and more like I wasted all of my family's money to no avail. But this past weekend, I actually felt better about the tutoring than ever before. I took a practice writing section and got basically a perfect score. Depending on what I would receive on the essay, I could have gotten anywhere from an 800, the highest score possible, to a 760+, a still respectable score. I still make a few dumb mistakes in math despite knowing how to do most of the problems, but I think I'm on the verge of doing really well overall. I improved a bit on the critical reading section, getting ~730-750 on a lot of the practice stuff I've done, with a lot of the questions I get wrong mostly being vocabulary (I've never heard the word soporific used in a sentence still to this day -_-).
What probably also contributed to my attitude towards my scores was that I felt like my entire family just expected me to do well. Most of my family thinks I'm more intelligent than average and, regardless of whether I am or am not, just assumed I would do very well on the test. I do relatively well compared to the national average, but it's still very tough to get into good universities in the US. I just wasn't doing as well as I felt I could have, but with the most recent results I am poised to do well enough to get into a lot of my top choices for colleges, despite my relatively typical average (~95.5 average unweighted at a very competitive private school, good enough to put me at around top 15-20% in a class of 420, along with taking 2 accelerated courses; my school doesn't offer AP, IB, or any kind of standardized curriculum. They just make up their own curriculum so I get screwed out of AP credit or doing well on most standardized tests).
The last thing I want to post I'll put in spoilers, because it's not really related to any of this.
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I felt really, really bad about myself twice, very recently. Not in a depressed way, in a way that made me actually consider what I was doing with my life.
The first thing was that I realized that I was pretty unappreciative of what my mom had actually given up for me to have all of the opportunities I do. I go to an expensive private school and, regardless of whether I want to or not, it offers a good education. I get a great network of alumni with lots of potential job opportunities for after I finish college. It's cheap compared to most private schools, but for my family it's not easy. It costs ~$8k a year for tuition, not counting my textbooks, any trips/events I go to, lunch, my clothes, etc. My grandparents help pay my dad's portion of the tuition, but it's not easy for either of them.
Even something like that aside, I realized that I didn't appreciate simple stuff; my mom making lunch for me every day, her driving me to school and picking me up if I had to stay late for a club, even getting me copies of each textbook so that I don't have to carry around 5 textbooks back and forth each day. This dawned on me when I was at lunch one day. A kid that I knew as a pretty good track athlete sat down at his table next to mine, and said grace before he ate. No one else saw it, and I don't think he realized that I saw him say it (not that it would've mattered). I don't think that it changes anything in terms of whether you have to say grace before you eat to thank God for your food, but just the conscious act of thanking something for your food means that you realize that you're lucky to be eating it and not everyone is that fortunate. I reflected on that for a moment, kind of disappointed that I went through my life each day without even a quick thought to as what it would be like if I didn't have something as simple as the food I was eating.
The other time I felt pretty about myself and, specifically, how I was treating others, was when I was reading 1984. In the book, one of the characters basically reminisces about how in the past he was incredibly selfish and caused his mother and sister to run away from him by stealing their food. As hungry as he was, his sister was dying from starvation and probably needed it more, but he still greedily demanded the food. I realized that I had been really mean to my mom in regards to moving in with her boyfriend. Before I had considered that she had probably done it for the best of everyone and that she thought it would give us a better life, but I was too wrapped up in my own selfish motives to really understand and appreciate it.
The first thing was that I realized that I was pretty unappreciative of what my mom had actually given up for me to have all of the opportunities I do. I go to an expensive private school and, regardless of whether I want to or not, it offers a good education. I get a great network of alumni with lots of potential job opportunities for after I finish college. It's cheap compared to most private schools, but for my family it's not easy. It costs ~$8k a year for tuition, not counting my textbooks, any trips/events I go to, lunch, my clothes, etc. My grandparents help pay my dad's portion of the tuition, but it's not easy for either of them.
Even something like that aside, I realized that I didn't appreciate simple stuff; my mom making lunch for me every day, her driving me to school and picking me up if I had to stay late for a club, even getting me copies of each textbook so that I don't have to carry around 5 textbooks back and forth each day. This dawned on me when I was at lunch one day. A kid that I knew as a pretty good track athlete sat down at his table next to mine, and said grace before he ate. No one else saw it, and I don't think he realized that I saw him say it (not that it would've mattered). I don't think that it changes anything in terms of whether you have to say grace before you eat to thank God for your food, but just the conscious act of thanking something for your food means that you realize that you're lucky to be eating it and not everyone is that fortunate. I reflected on that for a moment, kind of disappointed that I went through my life each day without even a quick thought to as what it would be like if I didn't have something as simple as the food I was eating.
The other time I felt pretty about myself and, specifically, how I was treating others, was when I was reading 1984. In the book, one of the characters basically reminisces about how in the past he was incredibly selfish and caused his mother and sister to run away from him by stealing their food. As hungry as he was, his sister was dying from starvation and probably needed it more, but he still greedily demanded the food. I realized that I had been really mean to my mom in regards to moving in with her boyfriend. Before I had considered that she had probably done it for the best of everyone and that she thought it would give us a better life, but I was too wrapped up in my own selfish motives to really understand and appreciate it.
This is way longer than I expected, lol.
