Yes, I did say that. Just a moment ago, in fact.

SUPER DUPER apologies for not updating in almost a month. Been swamped with IAs and xperis and such. Anyway, on to the post:

Since Bro is a wrestler and I need CAS hours, I tutor the wrestling team for an hour after school two days a week. Not many of the wrestlers are IB kids, and in talking with them, I’ve discovered that IB kids and wrestlers speak completely different languages. I’m constantly expecting to get an answer characteristic of my IB friends only to be shocked when I am met with a completely different response.

Me: This is okay, but shouldn’t it be longer?
IB Kid: Yeah, this is just a rough draft. Do you think I should go into more detail in the second paragraph?
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

Me: I think you have your periods in the wrong places. I marked them in red.
IB Kid: Thanks!

Wrestler: *hysterical laughter*

Me: If you would just shut your mouth for a minute please!
IB Kid: You’re constructing a straw man fallacy; I’m just pointing that out!
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

Me: A word that rhymes with “work”? How about “shirk”?
IB Kid: Hmm, let’s fit that into my iambic pentameter.
Wrestler 1: What does that mean?
Wrestler 2: You know, like “shirk chicken”.

Me: See, that curvy part doesn’t come up high enough.
IB Kid: Wait, how again do you tell if it’s a sine or a cosine graph?
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

Me: That line has too many syllables.
IB Kid: Oh, yeah. Oops.
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID
Me: that doesn’t even make any sense.
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

Me: Okay, I’m leaving now.
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

Me: Are you surprised?

And then there’s the infamous rubber-band ball dialogue. I realize that my questions seem completely inane, but keep this in mind: I’m used to IB kids, who have conversations like this:

Me: What’s that?
Roi: It’s a rubber-band ball that I made since I was TAing for LAT for CAS because I don’t have a seventh hour, and she didn’t have grading for me to do because her freshmen are all doing presentations, and she had this box of rubber-bands because she bought them for her freshman to do a project that she decided not to have them do because their presentations are taking too long, so I made the rubber-band ball, see how high it bounces?

So, I was a little dumbstruck at Wrestler’s answers and trying to prompt him into my type of conversation during this exchange:

Me: What’s that?
Wrestler: A rubber-band ball.
Me: Where’d you get it?
Wrestler: I made it.
Me: Out of what?
Wrestler: .............rubber bands.
Me: Where’d you get them?
Wrestler: .....A box of rubber bands.
Me: ...Oh.

Which, of course, led to the surrounding wrestlers laughing at me, which led to the teacher supervisor asking what was going on, which led to me saying this:
“I was just asking Wrestler about his ball.”

Which, of course, led to a collective THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!!!

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.

IB Justice

We did a mock trial of the Rosenberg case in History class today. Here’s how things go down in court with IB kids at the wheel.

The bailiff, dressed in combat boots, a leather jacket, mirrored aviators and a cowboy hat, opened up and, we all rose for Honorable Judge Roi. She looked quite judge-like in a black robe HT had in his closet (which, contrary to her pre-trial anxiety, did not appear to be crawling with lice). The effect was lost when she got to the podium and proceeded to announce that she could not find “her paper”. The court reporter located it on the floor.

Prosecution called their first witness, who was sworn in on a copy of The Communist Manifesto that he would “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Mr. History Teacher.” A short recess was called when said witness refused to take the stand because there was “something funky on the seat” and a jury member came down to replace the offending chair. Judge Roi restored order by banging a - ball-peen hammer? what was that thing? – on HT’s Far Side daily calendar. She then threw out a perfectly legitimate hearsay objection (haha no bitterness here!)

I was a lawyer for the defense. My co-counselor Rubix and I prepared so well for some objections that we wowed (read: annoyed) the crowd with synchronized objections. My other co-counselor, Duckie’s Friend (he needs a new nickname) in Stealth’s shirt (two sizes too big), black basketball shorts, and a leg brace, was instrumental in, well, in distracting my clients from the fact that they’ve already been sentenced to death. But then he didn’t really have anything to do today.

Monday: Defense presents their case! DUN DUN DUNNNNN

Things I Learned In IB

Despite its best effort, IB is really educational! Here are a few things I have learned:

1.) Hindu = religion. Hindi = language.

2.) There is no Hindi birthday song.

3.) Most Hindus are vegetarians.

4.) If you offer a vegetarian chicken, they will not eat it.

5.) When trying to distinguish between American and Asian Indians, the clarification is not best made by saying "Indians with dots or Indians with feathers?" while pointing to your head.

6.) If you are male, it is less "gay" to have a Bollywood male movie star as your phone wallpaper than a Hollywood male movie star.

7.) "INDIA is in ASIA, people! Why is this so hard?"

8.) You WISH you were invited to wild Indian-only parties.

9.) You tried to copy something in the Hindi alphabet? You did it all wrong.

10.) Indians do not consider the Kama Sutra to be their greatest contribution to global stability.

11.) You cannot imitate an Indian accent. Don't even try.

IB Word Games

I'm not entirely sure how I should go about explaining these. The short version is: We were bored.
Long version: My calc class is combined into AB and BC. Two classes, one teacher. IB kids find creative enough ways to get into trouble when the teacher is constantly paying attention - now imagine what it's like when you put together juniors and seniors who've know each other for years now, into a last-hour class, and add one overworked and distracted teacher. The lassiez-faire classroom management means that, well, lots of "stuff" goes down in calc class. It's the red-light district of IB classes. (Last year there was penny melting, mace spraying, hand-sanitizer burning, and general mischief and mayhem.) Now I don't mean for this blog to get Calc Teacher in trouble. It's not that she condones any of this or that she sucks at keeping us under control. We're just all nuts and she can only deal with one class for about 1/3 of the time (the other 2/3 spent with the other class or at her desk doing teacher stuff). And, to her credit, HS has really high math scores and to my knowledge there have been no fatalities as a direct result of her class.

Anyway, if the class is that self-determined when she's around, we're a million times worse when we have a sub. (I have a suspicion that her sub notes said something like "pass out worksheet, then duck and cover"). On the last sub day, we got bored translating words into as many languages as possible (I think our record was "water" - we got it in 17 different languages just from one classroom of IB kids) and noticed someone had already messed with the Objectives board. Every day CT writes "Obj.: I will" and then whatever we're doing. The board said:

Obj: I will do well on the test. We changed this to "I will do sucky. Welcome to the test." (the idea was to change as little as possible about the original sentence but change the meaning completely - here all we changed was the "l on" to "come to"). I like the ominous sound of it.

Obj: I will graph f, f' and f" We changed this to "I will graph fluffy fish". Then it was whimsically illustrated but my only photos of that have people's faces in them.
Obj: I i t t ti tit ti ...some comedian erased all the Calc AB objective to be nonsensical and presumably sexual (this was the origin of the "let's mess with the objectives board" because my friends and I felt it needed to be fixed). We managed to change it to "Objects will not rest until" but couldn't figure out a word that had "tit_ti". Frenchie commented that he was "pretty sure that some objects do rest until titti" and offered an example; we declined. Goa walked by (she was off doing her worksheet or something dumb) and said it was "substitution". We all felt dumb, then finished the sentenced with "institutionalization of sock".
The head and hand in the second photo belong to Rubix.

Blog Action Day

http://www.blogactionday.org/

Happy Blog Action Day!

This year's topic is the environment. I'm not going to try and relate this to IB by poking fun at how much paper our teachers use or anything like that. All I can really say about this issue is:

ARE YOU KIDDING ME, PEOPLE?

Why is the environment even an "issue" we're raising awareness for? It should not be, and I will tell you why.

IT SHOULD MATTER TO YOU ALREADY.

It's a travesty that they had to choose this as the topic for BAD. There are plenty of issues out there that do need attention from the public, but this should not be one.

Guess what?

YOU LIVE ON EARTH.

You drink water, you need medicine, you breathe air, you live in a house. There is no possible way you can twist this issue to be selfish and not care about it. But I want to drive an SUV! Would you like to be able to breathe in a year?

Here are a list of semi-understandable (not justified, per se, but that make sense) reasons not to be a huge activist for many causes:

You are not an orphan in Africa.

You are not a political prisoner.

You are not a member of a religion persecuted by your government.

You do not have cancer or AIDS.

You are not serving in Iraq.

You are not gay.

You are not mentally ill.

You are not a drug addict.

You are not a chicken, pig, or cow that somebody plans to eat.

Etc.

It's altruistic to be an activist for a cause that does not "directly" involve you. Now, I believe that as children of one God and members of the human race, we have a responsibility to take care of each other, and that every single one of us should be doing as much as they can to help every cause I listed and more. But I'm not here to be idealistic or judgmental. I'm here to say that if you don't care about the environment, you're an idiot in denial. It's not even selfish to not recycle or to litter or do other things that hurt the environment. True, it's selfish to buy Starbucks with money that could have gone to an African school, but in our humanity and our culture, nobody's saying it's wrong. What I cannot fathom, absolutely cannot fathom, is people not caring about the Earth.

There's activism in what's seen as the WWJD-hippy-love-protest-altruistic sense - and there's activism in the SAVE YOUR OWN BUTT sense. Don't shy away from being an environmentalist just because other forms of activism seem like too much effort. Running away from a fire is a good idea, even if most people who run all the time do a lot of training work. It's not that hard, really, and it's going to help you a lot more in the long run.

I'm not going to hit you with warnings or statistics. We all know the Earth is in trouble. Step up and do something.

People need to stop being pseudo-selfish idiots, and then maybe next year we can get to a cause that should be the source of an awareness day, like, oh, I don't know, advocacy for the mentally ill, or helping the lost and discouraged, or Ugandan children.

DO SOMETHING:

Greenpeace International

The Nature Conservancy

National Wildlife Federation

The Sierra Club

The Conservation Fund