A Year in Review

Last year I posted a year in review on my MySpace blog. It was a nice way to recap the year and set some goals for the year ahead.

Last year's hopes and wishes: from a 2005 perspective In 2006, I will turn 18 and graduate high school. I hope to be accepted to either Stanford or UC Berkeley. I hope to strengthen bonds with my friends as well as generate new ones with new people, and even help reattach those broken threads. I hope to reach all of my goals and I will work hard to reach them.

Let us review my year month by month, similar to last year's blog.

January: I started the year off with some of my closest friends, watching movies and hanging out. At midnight I laid outside on a trampoline in the bitter cold discussing aspects of life with Kasey. In a weird way, my best memory of 2006 was also my first. It was finally 2006, the year I have been waiting for since middle school when I discovered I was part of the "Class of 2006". It was also the month of my 18th birthday, turning 18 was not anything like Hollywood leads us to think. Angie went off to college in Colorado which began the longest time I have been away from my sister.

February: Once again Valentine's day was nothing too exciting, but I did get to host the robotics media event. I became friends with the Wallaces at their Valentine's Day party in early February.

March: Traveled to Annapolis and Las Vegas with the robotics team and did very well with our robot. I became further and further behind in school due to the progressive symptoms of the highly contagious disease of senioritus. Finally spring break came and I got to take a brief vacation away from the ridiculous demands of high school. College acceptance letters started pouring in with acceptances from Long Beach, Irvine, Santa Cruz, San Diego and on the last day of March, Berkeley.

April: April Fool's Day was a big day, the robotics team won the second most prestigious award they could and I found out I got rejected from "the school across the bay". I had within that weekend pretty much sealed my fate for my next our years without even thinking too much about it. Within 48 hours of knowing I was accepted, I decided to attend Berkeley to do god knows what.

May: For the past four years of my life, May was almost monopolized by AP testing. This would be my last round of those dreaded tests. High school dwindled to only weeks where the good-byes inevitably began.

June: Happy graduation Benji! 13 years, from kindergarten to senior year in high school, it all came down to that very warm afternoon in early June. I got handed a diploma case as well as a mild sunburn from the hot June weather. The rest of my life had begun and I didn't know what to do and where to start, I just knew I had to enjoy the best summer of my life.

July: The 230th anniversary of our "great" nation. I spent it watching TV in a house that was far too warm for humans to tolerate. I went over to Kasey's house in the late evening and lit sparklers to feel patriotic. We sat on the grass remembering the memories from New Years. I attended my student orientation and went on vacation. My student orientation was two days long, but I only really needed to be there for about an hour of it. My vacation across the left coast of the United States with my family was great. I returned home and caught up with my friends before the last month at home began.

August: Angie went back to Colorado. At that point I have seen her everyday since May and kind of got used to seeing her again. The local high schools started again, this time without me. It was a weird feeling knowing that life at Lancaster High went on without me, but I knew I didn't really want to go back. I was still burnt out from the past four years. In my last month I said goodbye to the people I have gotten to know over the course of a lifetime. I shook many hands and hugged many bodies. My mom and little sister dropped me off in Berkeley with the essentials of my life that accumulated over the past 18 years in a few boxes that managed to fit in a midsize sedan. I spent a week waiting for classes to start and just getting used to my new environment. I also got hired at my current job at The Scholar's Workstation.

September: The Wallaces, Rene, Tyler, and Alan came up from Lancaster to visit me on Labor Day weekend. We toured San Francisco and spent just one more weekend together. School came into full swing with my first true college paper. I came home to Lancaster for a long weekend at the end of the month to help my mom move out of the house into a new one. My room was how I left it, even the smell and look were the same. When we moved it was like I was going away again and I had to pack up even more memories into boxes that I knew may never be unpacked.

October: Just a month filled with repetition. More assignments and a midterm. Time just kept flying by and before I knew it, it was Halloween.

November: Before I knew it, there were six weeks left in the semester. More papers and a midterm and then I realized it was Thanksgiving and I got to go home again. This was when I finally realized I was going to see people I haven't seen since August, unfortunately Angie was not one of them. I did however get to reunite with Kasey and just talk about life, like we used to and we realized even though our lives were now 500 miles apart, they were still very similar and our friendship just as strong. It felt a little bit like it was summer again and that I didn't have a care in the world. Then reality hit and I knew I had to go back for my last three weeks of my first semester at the university.

December: It started with me just wanting finals to be over and wanting to take a break from dorm life and the stress of college. I came back just in time to celebrate the first night of Chanukah with my family. I still had to wait a week before my friends came back to hang out again. Angie was supposed to come back two days earlier than she did, but she was trapped in a blizzard in Denver for two says and our reunion was delayed. The last day of 2006 was spent with the same person as the first, very appropriate if I say so.

Review: Most definitely one of the most eventful years of my life. 18, graduation, college, life, and love. It was hard, it was surprising and it wasn't at all what I expected. On a five point scale, I give it a solid four.

How did I do?Well, I was vague to say the least. I did keep in touch with old friends and now that I am here in college (UC Berkeley) I of course made new friends. I did not get accepted to that school across the bay, but it was all for the better, who wants to spend five times as much money for an education just as adequate? Exactly.

Hopes and wishes for 2007: Well, we're one month into it, so I guess I have to shorten it a little. I hope to keep my relationships strong and let them grow. I look forward to seeing what they blossom into. I hope to live somewhere next semester that isn't the dorms. I want to maintain a good GPA and finally pick a major to work towards. Maybe I'll start a business or something and get rich and drop out of college like a few famous people I know. Or maybe I'll become a model and make money off of my *cough* perfect *cough* body.

Getting My Routine

I've been through two weeks of classes and I am still shifting my schedule. I guess technically this was the first full week of classes as last Monday was a holiday and this is the first week we actually attended discussion groups. I feel like it's taken two weeks to get classes started because we're just now going to discussion because each discussion also has a syllabus to accompany the syllabus in the lecture. The section syllabi suck though because they often include more work than what the professor asks of us. In lecture it's pretty much midterm, paper and final with reading to do in between. In some discussions though we have homework assignments and I mean assignments like back in high school. I'm talking worksheets that take 10 minutes to complete, but it's the most inconvenient 10 minutes of your weekend. Last semester I was spoiled by the dry classes which only had a few papers and exams. The only supplemental thing was reading and the occasional (monthly) homework assignment, I guess that's the price you pay for having interesting classes.

Other than that, I guess my semester is chugging right along. My roommate is out until 5:00 in the morning every night and missing his morning lectures which is kind of humorous to me and the other roommate is back to his gaming from afternoon to the wee hours of the morning. I wonder if it would be safe to say I was the most responsible one in my room? I mean my side is the cleanest and I actually make an effort to have a somewhat normal schedule.

The dorms are quite annoying though. If you recall from last semester I had a blog entitled "No More Summer Camp", what I realized now is that all year it's like freaking camp. The biggest reminder is the hall association which meets weekly to plan social events for the people in the dorms. While I guess I enjoy a sense of community, it is actually kind of annoying feeling like a child with events planned for us and a lot of them have little educational tie-ins like why not to drink alcohol. Maybe I just want to be left alone to do my own thing now that I have been here for half a year, I just want to live this and move out as soon as possible, I hate the dorms.

In the meantime I encourage all of my readers to get a dose of my sister's new blog, she can actually write.

Procrastination is like...

One day into my new semester and I learn something that took me three months last semester to learn. I am of course talking about new procrastination methods. Last semester, during a writing workshop my English instructor tells us he visits cuteoverload.com which distracts him for hours. Of course, instead of working on the paper he assigned, I visit the website and spend hours looking at the cute kittens, puppies, ducks, and whatever other animal makes your heart melt. I did manage to finish the assignment though and I pulled off an A in the class.

Day one of the Spring semester: my LGBT professor starts lecturing on what the class is about (in case you don't know it's the history of alternative sexual identities in the United States) he pulls out a quote from isitnormal.com and discusses how the website works. People submit stories and readers rate it on how normal it is, ranging from staring at other boys in the locker room to the frequency of going to the bathroom in a given period. Of course the next time I can access the Internet I pull open the website and spend a good deal of the early evening reading a variety of stories and rating their normality. Thank God for the Internet, She most definitely blessed us with that.

Other than that, my classes this semester look promising. They seem to be a lot more satisfying than the somewhat dry schedule of last semester. I am taking LGBT 20AC, English 95, Environmental Science and Policy Management 191 (upper division) and Nutritional Science and Toxicology 10. I dropped linear algebra so I could take environmental science, I didn't need the math for GE or for my major (which I am pretty sure will not be math related).

One week down, sixteen to go.

Back in Berkeley

Four months after the most difficult semester of my life I was allowed one month of an almost stress-free break. This was the best break in recent history. I also rediscovered some of the best people I have the honor of knowing.

My sister, Angie, after battling a killer blizzard in Denver managed to make it home for two weeks. I haven't seen her since the beginning of August and we had a much needed brother-sister reunion. It felt as though we hadn't been apart and everything kind of went back to how it was, it was awesome.

Some of my best laughing times were with Janet & Will. We discussed the experiences of the first semester of college and the possibility of where Janet may attend law school (Boalt maybe?). I enjoyed the little time I spent with them, but every moment was enjoyable.

One of the most pleasant surprises was seeing Katie. In high school I didn't have the pleasure of hanging out with Katie outside of school as much as I would have liked to. I ask myself now, "why the heck didn't I hang out with her more?" I still owe her an ice cream cone however, when I see her again, I will pay her back.

I spent all but a few days with Kasey and have gotten closer to him than I could have ever imagined. We did everything from shopping in Valencia to taking a stroll in the park. My favorite memories of the break were spent with him. New Year movie night, countless Starbucks visits and staying up late just to talk. I know my break was meaningful because of you. I owe you more than you will know. You have given me so much happiness these past few weeks. I really hope he can make it up to Berkeley to visit in February.

No Snow, Still a Good Winter

Sunday. I go back up to Berkeley in less than a week to start my new semester. This has been one of the most relaxing breaks I can remember. I feel well rested and I am ready to start the new challenges that lie ahead. School challenges and the challenges of being away from the people I have come even closer to these past few weeks. It feels similar to leaving after high school again, the only difference is I am leaving after a month, not 18 years. I feel prepared and I know what to expect the next few months. It isn't all new like it was before, last time I was nervous and excited, now I am just excited. I built a life for me up in Berkeley, surrounded by good, intelligent people.I look forward to resuming everything up there.

However there is a part of me that wants to stay. I like what I have here, I am happy, a happy that I have never felt ever before. I am going to miss you, but you should already know this. Still have five more days, let's make them the best of the break.

19 years old in ten days.

Good-bye 2006. Hello New Promises

I have recently been informed that I have "frequent" readers. Frequent being the operative word as I do not post all that frequently. I realize it's not very fair to those of you that do read my posts. I should be more respectful to my readers. The truth is, there is a lot going on in my life, this is not an excuse, this is a statement. Plenty of stuff I could and would love to share with the rest of the world, not because I am the most interesting person, but because in my mind it's worth sharing. I let you into my life and have not done my best to keep you here, thank you to those of you that stuck around, you're great.

Since my last post we have entered a new year, 2007. It was time to say good-bye to 2006, it was and still will be my year. High school graduation, starting my new life in a new city to further my education and discovering new things about myself. 2007 will be a good year too, I entered it in a most memorable way, celebrating the change of the calendar with Kasey. I try not to make New Year's resolutions, but if I had one for 2007 it would be to embrace every day as a new adventure and a goal to accomplish. Today's goal: post a blog.

Also this is a new year for the blog, I would like to take this time to announce I got a brand new camera as a holiday present to myself. I will post more pictures to help you see what I see everyday.


The Family Photo/01.05.07