IB Thankful For:

Not your typical list but hey, we take whatever we can get in IB.

~Not doing dissections the day before Thanksgiving

~A Calculus test the day before the long weekend (no homework!)

~G-2 Pens that let you see how much ink you’re using – the only thing anymore that gives me a sense of accomplishment

~Freshman brothers to bring things to school that you/your friends forgot

~The school grading system crash in first quarter that allows “It’s probably the computer – let me talk to [Teacher] on Monday” as an excuse for every bad grade

~IB Juniors to remind us that there was a time when we felt hopeful and driven too

~Teachers like PT who help us navigate the bureaucracy by copying IB paper, hitting us over the head with things like CEGM and Ethics guidelines, and generally being on our side

~Wikipedia’s endless link-chain that allows us to entertain ourselves while still feeling/appearing productive

~ IB workdays – the closest thing we get to having a social life

~Lockers halfway across campus that force us to get fresh air and exercise

~And all of you wonderful beautiful people who read this! Happy Thanksgiving!

In IB, Cigars Are Never Really Cigars

IB kids just think differently than the rest of the population. We have “higher level critical thinking skills”. What that really means is that we can use metaphor to relate almost every concept to sex.
In LA, every book can be summarized in one short sentence containing the word “bang”.
“Oedipus killed his dad and banged his mom.”
“Hamlet basically wanted to bang his mom, but he also wanted to bang Ophelia, but then everyone died.”
“Emily killed her husband and kept him around to bang. Necrophilia ftw.”
“Kurtz lived in this weird hut with skulls and a random black lady he liked to bang.”

Biology… you know what? I’m not going to bother. Here’s a picture of the “enzyme lock-and-key model”. Go crazy.

In Spanish today, Roi and I were having trouble translating a sentence. It sounded like it said “Nobody in the class got done” or “Nobody in the class did anybody”. We asked Sna to translate, and she told us it meant “Nobody in the class did it”. Well, the idea had already been planted, so Roi and I cracked up at the translation. In front of the whole class. I think we’ve almost blown our cover as fourteen-year-old boys in disguise.

TOK opens up a lot of open-ended discussion. We close off those ends by talking about SEX. Our discussion on the privacy of perception hinged on the example of “two people having…the same… experience… at the same time… together… but not really… feeling the same thing… together.” An introductory activity on perception using inkblots led one of us to blurt that one of the inkblots looked like “a giant penis with a hole in it.” Apparently when we’re talking about perception, the easiest conclusion to draw is that we perceive SEX in just about everything.

Psychology is almost too easy. So Roi and I took it to the next level. Think about this for a minute:
1.) Freud got a lot of his theories from psychoanalyzing himself.
2.) Freud came up with the theory of phallic symbols.
3.) Freud originally wanted to research the reproductive systems of eels.
4.) Freud started a club of men who sat around and smoked cigars together.
Conclusion: Freud liked men, including Carl Jung, who split with him not over “theories” but when he got tired of being a booty call.

IB Dysfunctional Diversity

IB kids are a pretty diverse bunch and we all take it in stride. Of course, for IB kids, the definition of “stride” is something along the lines of “skip-hop-crawl-stumble-halt-sprint”. So when I say we take our diversity in stride, what I really mean is that we have forged an obscene, tolerant, offensive, and loving bond based on it. Like I mentioned earlier, IB kids are close enough and intelligent enough to come up with plenty of in-jokes and labels that seem terribly off-color to an uninitiated regular but are everyday banter to us.

~Like the time Stealth and a friend made a ton of paper airplanes and threw them at a Japanese girl on Pearl Harbor Day, asking her “how do you like it?”
~Or the claim that our IB class has “two real Jews” made by combining the four “half-Jews”.
~We’ve known each other for 4+ years and yet we all continually mix up the names of two of the Indian boys (who are referred to collectively as “The Indians”). We also can’t get straight the similar names of a girl from Afghanistan and Goa.
~The “matching factor”, which means that the entire class is going to insist that people will make a good couple if they are both the same color.
~People who’ve known each other for 4+ years being shocked every time a black girl says she is Jewish.
~Constant harassment of one kid for rides, paper, gum, etc. because he is “loaded”.
~Insistence after the mock trial that I become an on-call lawyer for one of the Indian boys because “he’s brown and could get arrested any minute!”
~We have a girl who’s a real big feminist, so Stealth enjoys making posters for class presentations about how women belong in the kitchen. The boys will also ask each other ~“Hey, you know what’s a great joke? Women’s rights.” Once I edited her paper and she had stapled the pages all messed up so I wrote “as a woman, you should have better secretarial skills! These pages are all out of order!” She was going to harm me, so I told her Stealth told me to write it.
~“Of course Rubix is brilliant. He’s Asian.”
~“How do you have a C in [class]? [Teacher] is [ethnicity] and so are you!”
But then again, it’s not all one-sided. I learned the hard way that if an Indian kid tells you something in Hindi to go say to the other Indian kids, it’s probably not “Can I borrow some paper please?”

The cool thing is that we all think it’s funny and none of it is out of malice. The other cool thing is that we stay really far away from the real racism we heard around us, which where we live is mostly directed towards Hispanics and Muslims.

IN OTHER NEWS:
I pressed the [submit] button on my college application to my dream college, Haverford! Scariest moment of my life. Wish me luck!

Me: Frenchie, your backpack looks all misshapen.
Frenchie: That’s because of the stuff that I just put in it.
Me: …I know that. I’m not an idiot.

Frenchie: Then how come you said something so obvious? “Your backpack looks like it has stuff in it.” /“That’s because it does!”/ “Well duh, I’m not dumb!” That’s the conversation we just had.

WGA Strike

Alright, so, I promised myself that since I use every other aspect of my life and my writing as a soapbox, I would use this to entertain you guys and keep my opinions to... well, everywhere else. And you'll all notice that I didn't post anything during NAMI's week.

But this is important; and it's also relevant to this blog because:

~this is the beginning of my writing-for-people-to-actually-read career.

~as IB kids, we know a lot about intellectual property and wanting to get credit for our hard work, as well as the consequences of plaigarism. In fact, when I was deciding whether or not I wanted to jump into this big program, the biggest "whoah, what?" factor was the IB agreement that whatever I wrote for my Extended Essay and other send-it-to-IB-stuff became theirs.

So, without further ado:

The Hollywood writers are on strike. And honestly you guys, don't let the word "Hollywood" fool you. These are not actors wanting to make another three billion dollars per movie. If you watch the short informational video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ55Ir2jCxk you'll see that this is a truly worthy cause.

Here http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/ is the "unofficial grassroots blog" of the strike, and if you spend some time on it you can watch a videos of The Office and Grey's Anatomy cast members and writers picketing and being hilarious, and you can also see photos of Scrubs, Desperate Housewives, and more cast members and writers picketing. More videos here: http://www.youtube.com/wgaamerica

Okay, so what can we do about it? This is also where IB comes in. Most of us love our TV shows (Roi - Desperate Housewives, Meg - Grey's Anatomy, Me - Scrubs/The Office) but our crazy schedules don't allow for watching them on tv, so we watch them online or on DVD.

Oops?

I, for one, am refusing to watch TV online until this gets resolved. Maybe if the networks start losing the ad revenue from these "promos" (ha!) they'll see how important that money is (not only to them!) and that the people are behind this movement. Also, the United Hollywood blog has a petition we can sign and will soon be letting us know how we as viewers can make our feelings known to the networks.

Misery Loves Company

An IA is an Internal Assessment – something you work your butt off, your teacher grades, the IBO gnomes audit, and then they take your firstborn child away. That’s how they get new IBO gnomes. Most IB kids don’t have firstborn children, so the IBO gnomes take our scores instead.

Anyway, Internal Assessments. Last year we were doing them for Psych and PT went over the ethical rules three million times. The IBO’s ethical rules regarding animals are stricter than PETA, which sucks because our original idea was to light hamsters on fire and throw them at people. Come to think of it, we probably would have gotten a better grade with that. (Are you sensing some bitterness on my part regarding IAs?) But their guidelines about people are basically YOU CANNOT STRESS THEM OUT ON PURPOSE. YOU CANNOT STRESS THEM OUT ON ACCIDENT. YOU CANNOT STRESS THEM OUT.
At the time, when PT was making sure she had said this to us every minute of every class period we were working on our IAs, I thought it was silly. Why would we stress people out on purpose?

Now, I realize, there’s a reason IB is so worried about it. Apparently sleep deprivation, high stress levels and four years in IB have a negative effect on the psyche. (Who knew?) And by now, we’re the psychological Hannibal Lectors of high school. We’ve suffered and we want everyone else to feel the crushing pain of a stress-maxed all nighter.

How did I come up with this theory? We’re working on another IA in bio about heart rates. My partner and I, despite both having been in Psych last year and getting the IB rules drilled into our heads hundreds of times, decided we wanted to test the effects of stress on heart rate. And not just any stress. We wanted to make lists of faked “stats” about college admissions, one with horribly stressful stats (90% of college students are unhappy with their dorm room, 80% are not at their first choice college, etc.) and another one with the same stats only reversed. We planned to ‘debrief’ the participants afterwards and tell them the stats were made up. But when we asked whether it was “ethical”, PT asked us if we were pod people replacing kids who had actually been in her class. Well, she didn’t actually ask that. But her face said it all.
The thing is, we knew it was completely unethical from the start. It was only a fantasy. Which leads me to two conclusions:

1.) Subconsciously, we’re sadists who want to see regulars endure the same stress we do
2.) Subconsciously, we’re masochists who wanted to get a zero on that IA, thus denying ourselves our diplomas.

Good evening, Clarice.