Today was the graduation rehearsal for all the seniors at school, and I showed up (late, as always) even though I won't be graduating on time anyway since I wanted a chance to hang out with people at school for one last time.

( One of the best lunches of my life. )

( The school administrators are jerks. )

Well, updating this journal thing again! Just me angsting about my life and future, but it's less depressing than the last entry so I think that's an improvement.

So, May 1st was the deadline to accept offers from colleges. I'd been putting off the decision until the last minute, though I only got accepted into one college, and that was McGill. I wanted to try to defer enrollment for a year in order to improve my study skills, since right now even when I like the coursework I don't get anything done until the last minute, and sometimes not even that, and then also to prove to myself I could make it living on my own while still having somewhere to turn if I failed. McGill is just such a good chance to learn and improve my skills that I didn't want to screw it up by going there mentally unprepared.

But I panicked last night since I couldn't find anything about McGill's policy on deferring enrollment, and their website said something about being able to retract their offer at any time after the deadline, so I just clicked "accept" and put in the deposit.

And now I'm panicking.

The thing is, I want to go to McGill - everyone who's heard of it either loves it or knows an alum who did, and though the engineering program is crazy hard and obsessive, it sounds like the Arts program isn't so bad, so I won't go completely insane. Plus it sounds like they have a really strong East Asian Studies department, and considering that I'm an international student the overall fees are really quite reasonable. Plus it's in Montreal, and how can Montreal not be awesome? I'm just afraid that I won't be adequate, I suppose. That and the fact that I'm making this decision with so little planning ahead of time. I'm supposed to have been figuring out this stuff for months, but I'm putting it off so much that I make a final decision within minutes.

And I don't want to abandon the few friends I've made here over the years - though a few, of course, will be leaving too - since I'm afraid that if I don't actually see people face-to-face, I don't have the persistence or personal strength to properly keep in touch. I might talk to them once in a while, but the same closeness isn't really there. That's how it's been previously with elementary and middle school friends, but now I have friends in high school that I'm close enough to that I feel like it'd be really painful if that happens. It's already happened with one friend I knew well in earlier years of high school - even though neither of us actually went anywhere, we just didn't have any classes or lunch in common and started talking less and now it feels like I don't know him at all and it hurts, almost. He wasn't even my best friend either, but we talked about serious shit, I guess, stuff that was close to my heart, and it feels so sad to now be friends on such a superficial level. I don't even know now whether our friendship was ever that close, since he doesn't even bother to do much more than say hello now, sometimes not even that. The thing is, he's not even snubbing me or anything, he just doesn't notice. And if growing apart is so painful for someone I was only barely good friends with, what about the people I'm actually close to now? I hate meeting someone I haven't seen in awhile, someone I was good friends with as a kid, and then find out that I really don't know them anymore, and now I'm going to have to do that even more than before.

And I don't know, I'm just afraid of so much change. I'm not the sort of person who actually keeps everything together. Just by amazing strokes of luck I manage to squeak by in class and in life, and I get the feeling that the same sort of half-assedness with which I go through life just isn't going to cut it now. And I don't know how to change.

And there's other more technical reasons why I'm worried that McGill might take back their acceptance, though I don't want to just post them on the internet because I'm paranoid like that. It's not anything terrible; it's just that I've heard of colleges checking prospective students' MySpace and Facebook pages and though my real name's not in this journal anywhere I just want to play it really safe. I don't know. My main strategy for dealing with all that shit right now is to avoid it until it goes away. It's working great so far.

And if I'm going right away, I feel like I should start trying to learn some French, even if it's an English-language school, just for going into the city. But then I also don't know if I should be trying to be improving my Chinese (which, frankly, sucks) in case I do get to go teach English at that Chinese summer camp in Chengdu, but then wouldn't that be a little pointless if that doesn't go through after all? I just heard from my Chinese teacher that the Chinese government will let us know whether they have enough interest in the program by May 20th, so I'm basically in limbo until then.

I'm extremely lucky I actually have these chances, but I'm just so worried now that I'm going to fuck them up.

Went to my old art teacher's funeral today. He died on Christmas Eve, but it really wasn't until the service started that it really hit me that he was dead. And I wouldn't see him again. I had him in elementary school, but then even though I went to the high school that he transferred to, I never took any of his classes. Even though I already knew he had brain cancer and was most likely going to die of it. I just thought Well, it's too bad I can't take any of his classes since I don't have any electives free. All I was thinking about was the credits and getting into a good college. I didn't even think about the fact that he was going to die, and if I wanted to see him again my best opportunity would be to do so now. I easily could've dropped one of those stupid math or science classes I didn't even care about and was just taking so that my course list would look all rigorous.

And now I only have the vaguest memories of him from elementary school. Most of my time there was pretty depressing, and I spent every free moment escaping reality so now the only memories I have are from the three or four times I was actually paying attention to the world around me. I remember him lecturing us on art and there was this amazing painting about this mutiny on a boat with all the mutineers hacking away with machetes (this was where I first learned what a machete was, and the main reason why I was so obsessed with them a couple years back), and he was talking about how all the angles in the painting made it have so much more action in it. I didn't really understand what he meant (and still don't exactly), but that was the moment where I first realized that there really was more to art than what I already understood, that it wasn't just smooth lines and attractive curves and appealing colors that made artwork good. That something could look hideous on the surface but was actually beautiful if you looked more deeply.

I remember being in Lego League and he and my mum walked by laughing one time and this annoying kid whistled after they'd gone past and Abbey and I were all like "Shut up!" and I was all, "Dude, that's my stepmom," and he's all like, "So?" and Abbey said, "Anyways, Mr. Wald's gay." I don't know if I had already known he was gay at this point or if it was the time he brought his boyfriend/partner/whatever (I hate the English language) into the art room after school to help with prom decorations. But now that I think about it, he was just about the only openly gay male person I knew before high school after my uncles in New York. I must be lying, but I honestly can't think of any others. That's really weird.

But I remember I admired his room the most out of all the places in the school. It was surreal, it was magical. Everything was covered in flecks of paint, and there were paintings and wooden sticks and broken televisions and everything strewn about. The smell (mostly paint, with other things I couldn't identify mixed in) was amazing. The only room that ever intrigued me more was our pathetic little gym that was maybe the size of two typical English classrooms, since there was an office built into it that didn't reach the ceiling of the rest of the room, and there was a little crawlspace between the ceiling of the office and the ceiling of the gym that the nerf balls always disappeared into. I wanted to go up there and make it our private clubhouse. I thought of running away and holing myself up there until I found a better place to run to. That wasn't a very well-thought-out plan, though, since it involved me still going to school and my mum was working at the school I attended. I thought of running away a lot in elementary school.

Once I did actually crawl up into that crawlspace, on a day my friends and I were staying after school until my mum was done with work because I was having a birthday sleepover thing that day. We moved all these weird rectangle things around until they made a kind of makeshift staircase and I crawled up to where it was, but then it was depressingly dusty and I got shocked by some stray electrical thingy and gave up on my secret clubhouse plan. Then, right after that, we all went into Mr. Wald's room to pet his new rabbit, the store-bought one whose manners weren't nearly as good as those of the beautiful wild one whose name I can't recall. It bit me on the stomach, and we all went to Mr. Wald asking, hypothetically, a person would do if they hadn't been as careful with his rabbit as he'd asked them to be and they'd gotten bitten by it, and he asked "Oh, did any of you get bit?" and Mia said "No, it's purely hypothetical!" in such a way that I was sure we'd been caught but he didn't challenge us and simply told us that such a person should clean the bite carefully with soap and water, so we all went scrambling to the bathroom as fast as we could.

I remember a little of his voice, how he spoke so loudly, so passionately. I remember helping him spray-paint some things silver for one of the high school prom decorations, and it was the first time anyone had ever let me use spray paint. He told me about a time when he was a kid that he had put two cans of spray-paint on his barbecue grill to try to get to the little ball inside, and they completely exploded and it was a miracle he hadn't died that day. I think he might've even found the little ball, too.

These are my only real memories of Mr. Wald, besides the time he told us he was going to install security cameras in his room since we were such terrible kids (and that was more than true) and his advice that odd numbers of things were more interesting and more beautiful than even ones. I didn't appreciate him while he was here, and now he's gone. Every time someone dies, I realize all the ways I didn't get to know them.

---- And I'm deleting everything I posted here in the middle because it's a bunch of emo whining about what a loser I am and how I suck. ----

But I'm still stuck in these stupid habits that I developed back in elementary school when I didn't know what the hell the world was about, and now they don't even have the tiny shred of relevancy they used to have. At other times when I thought about it I'd just say, "Well, I'll just make up for it later somehow" but in this case I can't. And it sucks.

In a dream, anyway. See, my dad was taking care of this big bunch of spider eggs, and only I had figured out that they were evil. I knew he wouldn't believe me if I just told him so outright, so I planned to rescue him at the moment they hatched & proved their evilness, just before the mother spider squirted him with free-will-depleting venom. Unfortunately, on the day of the hatching, Mama Spider announced the release of a revolutionary new cell phone which would take place inside her lair. I couldn't find my dad among all the famous people hanging around everywhere, but I spied Nino leaning against a column, looking all cool and nonchalant. I was all like, "Ninomiya-san! Akuma desu! Hayate, hayate!" (I meant hayaku, but he got the gist of it anyway.) So while the rest of the citizens of  Japan/America/England were walking around like Cybermen with spiders in their ears, Nino and I were blissfully spider-free.

Then the next night I dreamed that The Sarah Jane Adventures were smuttier than Torchwood, David Bowie decided to join Sauron's army and become a Ringwraith, and the Simpsons' mayor proposed on Springfield TV to his young German boyfriend named Hans. During the whole dream, I was just sitting at my computer, thinking, "Man, I really need to catch up on my TV-watching. I don't remember any of this at all."

I'm not quite sure what I'm doing here on LiveJournal... Cujo kinda dragged me here... not that I dislike it... it is a good chance for me to overcome my shyness of others. Although if it weren't for Arashi I doubt I would have joined...

I once had a LiveJournal many years ago... I believe I wrote in it twice. I don't remember what my username was at that point.

I also had a FictionPress.net account which I never kept up with... I actually wrote a story to post on it but I never had the balls to actually put it up there.

I'm sorry, strangers, for being so inhospitable in this first LJ post. I haven't properly explained who Cujo is, what Arashi is, etc... this post is mostly for myself, so I can tell myself, "Yes, I have actually posted on this LiveJournal."

I don't know anything of interest I could post about here... maybe I could host philosophical debates with myself? That would be entertaining.