IB Finished!

On the agenda for today: a State of CI Address, and then our previously scheduled post.

Obviously a blog about the insanity of the IB program will quickly run out of material once I leave the program, which I did at about 9:00 Thursday morning. But I’m not shutting this down, just closing down the chapter of CI that dealt exclusively with my IB life. I will continue to post here, but it will be a much more broad, random selection of my writings – funny anecdotes about random things, essays I feel like writing, short stories, my photography, and maybe the occasional excerpt of the novel I’m working on or another comic-by-the-hour day. Hopefully by expanding the range of topics here I can keep to a weekly update schedule.

You all have noticed that almost all the stories that involve me enjoying life also involve Roi (Retard on Ice). Roi is my very best friend and without her I would shrivel up like a Tolkien-reading raisin and die. Recently, as the reality of leaving has truly begun to sink in, I’ve noticed more and more the subtle little ways Roi helps me cope with the reality everyone else takes for granted. She can give directions to my house, translate whatever comes out of my mouth into normal-speak for anyone else listening, always say the right thing when I am upset, read my mind, and generally be there for me in whatever way I need. Roi is amazing.

Roi, this is for you. I know declaring it on an obscure internet blog named after an obscure poem by someone who stuck her head in an oven isn’t the most conventionally solid way to tell someone how much they mean to you, but this is what I know best, and I can’t afford much else. Thank you so much for never being afraid to verbally backhand me with the fact that I was being irrational but doing it so gently that it never stung. Thank you so much for being patient with my ramblings and inanities and complete inability to comprehend much beyond my own mind or part my own hair. Thank you for being my translator from Sal-speak to Normalese, for protecting me, for humoring me, for everything.

Thank you for spying on HT with me, for smuggling potatoes on the way to the zoo, for not killing us in your car on Valentine’s day, for looking ridiculous in photographs, for brainstorming the best expression with which to respond to a marriage proposal, for parking pointlessly, being my novia/madre joven homosexual, making copies at Kinko’s with me, enduring the Saturday Night from Hell, preventing me from committing hari-kari in Spanish, stealing anti-alcoholism posters, and creating so many other in-jokes with me that nobody else could keep up.

There are a lot of things I regret about IB. It blew. You would definitely be within your rights to stab me in my sleep for "recommending" it to you in the first place. But after all the screw-overs, Spanish class, Psych IAs, bio-room breakups, etc., the fact that it brought us together (and apart, and together) made it all worth it. 

To the rest of you: Thank you as well. My fellow IB kids have helped me grow and change in so many ways - my first kiss, my finding God, my first relationship, my forgetting of Elvish, my realization that "this is REAL". Here's to all of us - here's to ASU and UofA and NAU and Concordia and Goucher and IIT and Whitworth and Berkeley. Here's to nutty Bulgarians, traitorous Jews on trial, broken chairs, cancelled IAs, dangerous Group 4s, and so many other memories I can't list here. I adore and will deeply miss all of you (and I hope I can stay interesting enough on this thing to warrant you sticking with it and staying in touch.)

Class of '08, we are now the Class of '12! Congrats.