Goodbye, 2009

What a year 2009 was! In reflection, this probably was one of the better years so far in my life but it wasn't without its ups and downs. I've met many new people and made many new friends, entered my final year of high school (bittersweet, really), started this blog and came out to many friends and probably more importantly my mom. So how will I remember 2009? It'll probably be remembered as the year when I finally opened up to myself and others, and I like that.

Now, as 2010 is coming in a matter of hours, I should, as I do every year, make a list of resolutions. My top five for 2010 are...

1. Come out to all my friends before I leave High School
2. Organize all my books, binders and papers
3. Stop procrastinating until the last second on assignments
4. Become involved in some volunteering activity
5. Stay in contact with all my friends once we all go our separate ways

-and- (6. get an MSN and finally talk to Dzyan and everyone else)

I hope everyone will have a safe and Happy New Year and may 2010 be your best year yet!

JP

Finally!

After months of pain, late nights, and many cups of hot chocolate, I've finally finished all my college applications. 6/7 have been submitted online and the last will be put in the hands of the USPS tomorrow afternoon. This honestly feels great, like a mountain was taken off my shoulders, not even a boulder, a mountain.

My final list ended up being: (from south to north)

1. The College of William and Mary (Williamsburg)

2. University of Virginia (Charlottesville)

3. George Mason University (Fairfax)

4. Georgetown University (Washington, DC)

5. University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)

6. Columbia University (New York)

7. Harvard University (Cambridge)

Now my only challenges will be to keep myself from looking at my application essays in hindsight and to make sure I don't let Senioritis get too much of a hold on me and end up becoming lazy. The first challenge is going to be more difficult I expect, especially in the short term.

Well, I'm going to go celebrate with a bowl of cereal (I'm hungry lol)

Have a good one,

JP

一百.Cent.Ett Hundra.Ciento.εκατό

It's been a wild ride but a milestone has been reached - my hundredth post! From what started as a simple online account of the goings on of my life and my opinions on world events, this blog has grown into something way more. This blog and the people I have met and become friends with have been such a great help when things in my life got tough or just out of control. I even got to share some pretty noteworthy moments of my life with you guys like my coming out to my mom despite there being some initial difficulties with understanding why and how her one and only son was gay. But all in all, starting this blog was a great decision and one that is paying dividends at levels I never could have imagined.

The only nagging issue is a short hiccup about two months ago when I changed the location and url of my blog. Because of unforeseen issues beyond my control popping up, I had to move myself to a new location in the blogosphere; but with that move, I lost the majority of followers I had at that time. Despite still being listed, they still don't receive updates even two months on (Isn't the only remedy is to unsub and then resub?). While more of a nuisance than "red alert" problem, I still feel bad for suddenly "disappearing" without notice - especially people like southern, and Pierre who were some of my very first followers. (side note, Pierre recently celebrated a similar centennial, you should go pay him a visit)

In spite of all of this, 100 posts is something special for me. So here's to another hundred posts and hopefully more. You guys really are amazing! *cling cling*

All the best,

JP

P.S. - a special thanks to Dzyan, as he was my first true subscriber (and a sexy Mexican one at that)

Priceless

Wool Pea Coat - $50

"Clearance" Abercrombie and Fitch Button Down Shirt - $55

AE Jeans - $25

Seeing an elderly woman go up to and complement a gay couple about how cute they are together - Priceless

Maybe there is hope for society in this lifetime after all.

I hope you had a safe and memory filled Christmas!

JP

Merry Christmas!

The lights are dimmed, the fire, casting it's dancing light on the floor, is crackling away, and the tree, bedecked with glittering ornaments, is shinging bright. For sure, it's Christmastime.

I hope you're spending this Christmas with your family or with someone you deeply care about this year, and that you will have a lot of fun and memorable moments in the process.

For me, it's never truly Christmas until Darlene Love sings "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" on the Late Show; it may just be my favorite holiday song of all time along with "All I Want for Christmas is You" by Mariah Carey. I'd like to share it with you-



Merry Christmas

JP

Avatar

Great day. Let's start off with that. Today was a great day because I got to spend an entire day with some of my close friends that I rarely get to hang out with. Since we never really have time to hang out outside of school collectively, a group of friends and I decided to just clear an entire day and just have fun, and you know what, it worked. In the end it worked out to be a great day of ice skating (or ice shuffling in my case), lunch, dessert and then seeing Avatar.

At 11:30 we all met up at Reston town Center which is a large outdoor restaurant/semi high end shopping complex to go ice skating at the outdoor ice pavilion before it got too crowded. In total about 8 of us made it (out of 11 originally) and we set off to go rent some skates. To my dismay, they only had hockey skates for my shoe size which annoyed me since I can't skate with hockey skates at all because they have no spikes along the front of each skate, also combined with the fact that the skates were rather dull and slightly misaligned they made skating that much more difficult. When I got on the ice, I had a fun time trying to figure out how to move forward without falling flat onto my face but eventually ended up just shuffling along and eventually shakily gliding, luckily I wasn't the only one who had trouble, one of my other friends had trouble too. We ended up making chains of people as "insurance" which helped sorta and we got a few laughs when some of us "fell" but got saved mid-fall via the chain. To make things even better, there were some pretty cute guys there, and maybe I was hallucinating but there was only guy that I encountered a few times too many for it be be just coincidence if you get what I'm saying. By 1PM we left to go get lunch at Big Bowl which is a sorta Pan-Asian restaurant who had some pretty awesome chicken Pad Thai. We also exchanged secret santa gifts, my santa got me a pretty cool therapeutic cookbook which features recipes which feature heavily on supposedly curative herbs and the background histories on each which is perfect for the history-cooking nerd I am. Afterwards we still had about 45 minutes to kill so we decided to go to Cosi and order smores for all of us. So the way it works at Cosi is that they bring you a giant platter with a small gel-fueled burner in the middle surrounded by graham cracker, hersheys bars and giant marshmallows and skewers. Essentially uou roast your marshmallows yourself and build your smores on your own (pretty awesome). I ordered some hot chocolate to go along with that which was deliciously rich and choclolately. We left around 3:40 to go to the theater.

So, how good was Avatar, James Cameron's $237M sci-fi CG-breakthrough super film? Well, initially I was kinda suspicious as to how good it was actually going to be. Usually there is so much hype surrounding the film that it ends up being a disappointment when you actually see it and I was worried this is how it would turn out. Well, I am happy to report it wasn't in fact, it was very good, superb in fact in terms of visual amazingness. (Spoiler Alert!) Taking place in 2154 on a Earth-like planet (actually moon) where humans are trying to mine a mineral which supposedly would solve Earth's energy woes, it follows the tried and true story of human falls in love with alien being (aka forbidden love, cliché #1) and then helps save a "savage" race and planet from human capitalistic greed and destruction. Isn't this a not so subtle hint to the native american relocation/plight during westward expansion? Cameron did an amazing job with the setting of the movie, it was absolutely stunning and scarily realistic, I can only imagine how amazing it would have looked if we saw it in 3-D. The creatures and inhabitants of the planet were beautiful in an alien-way and the landscape was so realistic that I would have been fooled if it weren't for the floating mountains which reminded me of the islands of Halong Bay in Vietnam. The plot itself wasn't the best in the world, too many clichés in my opinion (I'll list later) but the visuals more than made up for it. The final battle scene was especially stunning. If you haven't seen the movie yet, i really suggest you do, in 3-D preferable, I can only imagine how good that would be for this movie.

Avatar is debatably one of the best movies of the year but there were a few too many clichés -

1. Human protagonist encounters a native for the first time, and it happens to be the chiefs daughter
2. Human outsider ends up as "the chosen one"
3. Human protagonist gets drawn into native cause, becomes leader of the natives in quest for liberation and/or to drive out invaders
4. Humans are destructive, greedy and view all alien civilizations as "savages"
5. The tribal chief dies
6. Nature holds the answer/cure to EVERYTHING
7. Main antagonist has some battle scar, usually cuts across the face as is here
8. Human protagonist loses trust of natives, but later regains it in some extreme fashion (such as magically wrangling a mystic bird like creature only 5 people in recorded native history have done)

Granted these might not all be clichés and just recurring themes in movies but there were some of these and some plot holes that didn't really detract from the movie.

Before I go I would like to respond to Ethan's comment on my last post where he noted that I haven't been getting many comments on my posts. The whole purpose of me starting this blog was to serve as a way for me to share my thoughts, feelings, daily events and opinions - sort of an online journal. Whether people read or comment on my blog is not something I am terribly concerned about or anything I'm going to lose sleep over. Since the beginning I never had any expectation for my blog to be a hub of attention and commenting so whether people choose to comment or not is totally up to them and not something I concern myself with. Not to say I don't enjoy reading comments; I love them to be perfectly honest, it shows people are actually reading about what I've been recently thinking about, but that's not the focus of my blog. I admit I have neglected my blog as of late; my posts have been fewer and farther between and admittedly less interesting, especially with school and crew eating up all my time, but the purpose of my blog remains - it's a release for me. This blog somewhere I can share my thoughts anonymously and whether people read or choose to comment or not does not detract from this.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve! Have a Merry Christmas everyone.
(And yes, Merry CHRISTMAS, to hell with political correctness.)

All the best,

JP

An Epic Winter Tale

Do you remember going driving for the first time? Was it just a shopping trip to the supermarket with your parents, the time your older sibling snuck you out for a quick run without letting your parents know or for you adventurous few a full out joyride? (hopefully not). Well, while I'll save my first driving experience story for a later time and post, I did do something I felt was milestone-ish yesterday, and that would be legitimate winter driving.

Granted, it wasn't for anything that exciting, (heck, it's something that ranks near bottom on the exciting list), it still proved to be a day of excitement and in the end learning. I had to go pick up a friend to go to the library and work on a Government project and given the recent storm we had, anything that wasn't a main artery through the town is still covered in 3 inches of compacted snow and ice. Me and my Passat made it out of my neighborhood alright and the main road was okay apart form lanes being much narrower due to massive snow plow drifts along the side, the fun started when I pulled into her neighborhood. I was greeted by piles and piles of nasty grey-brown slush that I easily powered through but then I entered roads seemingly untouched by a plow or sand truck, heck, I could barely see the road. The neighborhood is really close by to my old elementary school and the roads are very hilly and by this point rutted by all the people who had tried to get out. I got down the main hill and entered the small road which leads to her house, the bumps made my car bump and slide a little form side to side and STC had to kick in a few times but I finally reached the final turn.

Now, if all the other roads ranked at about a 6 or so in terms of impassibility, this ranked as a 9. There was only one set of tire tracks leading down to her house at the end of the cul-de-sac. Obviously people were being smart enough to not venture out when the roads are doing their best to halt any progress. I made it down the hill okay but I realized the tizzy I was in by the time I reached the bottom (did I really just use the word "tizzy"!?). The hill was steep, or at least somewhat steep, I just drove down in a forward direction on a set of tire tracks with no where to even begin to turn without getting pitifully stuck, and my car was front wheel drive. After my friend got in, I tried the only thing I could possibly do, and that is reverse up a rather long slippery snow covered hill. I tried to follow the tire track and got about 1/3 of the way up when all progress stopped and a little yellow light on my dash started blinking. It was the traction control light and that meant I was stuck. First thought in my head - "Fuck, now what do I do" followed then by "well this is embarrassing" and finally by "okay, let's try his again". I repeated this process about 4 more times before I decided to start all the way over. further down the road my friends neighbor cleared off their driveway and a cable repair man told us to drive in, make a u turn and try going up the hill frontwards, so we did. This time around, we got a scare half way up but eventually, we got out of the hill of death.

So me and my friend went to the library and got our work done all fine and dandy and we were going to go to lunch afterwards but her parents were a little cranky so that plan was axed. When i wen to go drop her off again, i decided to not go down that final hill again and my friend agreed and said she would just walk the final leg to her house. After that, I went to Baja Fresh to get some lunch and headed home, completing my first winter driving experience.

So, what did we learn?
1. We need more snow plows to clear off the roads
2. AWD really is necessary sometimes
3. Drive slowly
4. New Englanders and Mid-Westerners must be part eskimo to be able to endure this weather four times over every winter.

Happy Holidays!

JP

Fuck Yeah!!!

Because of the recent snow storm school's closed all week, meaning Winter Break is now officially two weeks long :D

wooo! and to all my readers, have a very happy and safe Christmas Holiday and a prosperous New Year! (don't get too carried away y'hear)

JP

Let it Snow, Let is Snow, Let it Snow

Mother nature has really outdone herself this winter as the region is expected to get quite a hefty amount of snow! With snow reaching an unprecedented 12-24 inches by the time this storm is all done, this could turn out to be one of the greatest snowfalls ever received this early in December! See as i will likely be stuck at home all day tomorrow I'll take the time to work on finishing up college essays and applications (boo!) but also take time to appreciate the beauty of the falling snow.

My ideal winter snow day would involve me, a cute guy, a crackling fireplace and lots of snuggling, but then again this is still during the school year so unfortunately this will have to be postponed to a later date.

I'm contemplating going out on Sunday and see if people will be willing to pay me to shovel their walkways. I don't know what to charge, but my coach recommended this to us as a way to get some good exercise and also make some cash in the mean time.

Overall this week has been a good, albeit exhausting one. I haven't gone to bed before 2:30AM this week which means I've been getting 4 or less hours of sleep each night (I know, shame on me) but teachers are really piling on the last minute tests and grades before winter break begins next week. Today for example i had a physics lab due, a physics test, Calc test and a 2k test. Last night i didn't end up going to sleep until about 3 (homework, studying, procrastination skills) and I was worried about both my tests today because I didn't feel like I understood anything, especially in calc where we essentially got notes and terribly vague instruction. Surprisingly, I found the physics test pretty easy and I was able to answer all the questions on the calc test. Hopefully I did everything correctly in the end. So after all the school tests were all said in done, all that was left was the 2k.

Now today was "Carnivore Day" in journalism which made my prospects of a successful 2k seem limited at best. Carnivore Day is pretty much a day where everyone brings in some food for a meat-based extravaganza - chili, hot dogs, chips, soda and baked goods galore. Not a vegetable in sight. It is usually recommended that you eat well before a 2k so you don't get bogged down because your body is trying to digest heavy and unhealthy food, but I find it terribly hard to resist a good, delicious artery clogging lunch when it is set up buffet style before me. So I enjoyed and immediately felt in trouble when I was sleepy soon after. Since it has been about two weeks since our last 2k, I hoped to cut ten seconds off my time, whether that was possible was questionable in my mind but I went in with high hopes and Lady Gaga blasting from my headphones. So, the result of all my worrying, poor food choices and fantastic music? 15 seconds chopped off from my last 2k time bitches! I'm only 10 seconds off my PR time so I really hope I can keep this track of progress for the rest of conditioning.

Have a nice weekend!

JP

Georgetown Interview: Postgame Analysis

So I think the interview went pretty well. It took place at a Starbucks in the area so it was pretty casual. My interviewer asked stuff about my family, my course load, extracurriculars and the like and I didn't freeze up on any of the questions! I did notice she had a notepad where she wrote my name down but never actually took any notes in the end, lol. She was a really nice person and just recently graduated from Georgetown so it was nice talking to someone who was only so much older than I was. So overall it was a really comfortable and fun experience, hopefully this will bode well for me in the end :)

Just one more step towards college land

All the best,

JP

Georgetown Interview

Ahhhhhhh!!!!! Tomorrow is my Georgetown Univeristy admissions interview and I'm so nervous! All undergraduate applicants have to go through an interview with an alumnus of the University so I really hope I'll make a good first impression. I'm meeting my interviewer at a local Starbucks at 5 tomorrow and the interview itself should about 30 to 45 minutes. They're supposed ot be generally casual in atmosphere but like most people have, i'm dressing up a little (khakis, button down and the like) to make myself a little more professional and appear more dedicated and interested. One of my friends has already done her interview and gave me a few tips and said the interviewers are really nice and you should just be comfortable and yourself around them.

Recently, a lot of my friends have been getting their first college acceptance letters. I know one of my friends got accepted to UPenn, another person I know got into Cornell and one is getting recruited to Stanford for crew. It's so annoying realizing that I will have ot wait until April to hear back from any of my colleges >.<. I really hope I haven't overreached in the schools I'm applying to but I'm really nervous about this whole process and the stress it's adding to the already busy senior year.

Well, I'm going to try and get another one of my application essays done before I go to bed. I'm also trying to calm myself for tomorrow, hopefully I won't be too nervous and everything will go well.

je peux le faire.

-JP

Houston's First Openly Gay Mayor

***Annise Parker, Houston's First openly gay mayor***

This just recently came out on the news wires but Houston, Texas elected its first openly gay mayor! Annise Parker won with about 54% of the votes, defeating her opponent, Gene Locke.

After Locke conceded defeat, Parker told reporters -

"This election has changed the world for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community. Just as it is about transforming the lives of all Houstonians for the better, and that's what my administration will be about,"

During her campaign, her opponent received support from anti-gay groups who sent out pamphlets to voters which condemned Parker for being a lesbian. Fortunately, her opponent distanced himself from these groups though I have a feeling the link unfortunately remained in the eyes of many.

Parker is now the mayor of the United States's fourth largest city. I'm really happy for Parker's win in this election. While Houston is predominately democratic, it will be interesting to see what kind of impact this will ultimately have on a larger scale. Hopefully this foreshadows steps forward for the gay community, especially in lieu of recent national and international events like Uganda's "Kill the Gays" bill.

Read more! **or else ;)**

Houstons First Gay Mayor

Uganda's "Kill the Gays" Bill

In speaking about politicians, does anyone else think Representative Aaron Schock of Illinois is smokin? We just began a Congress project in government and he was my group's choice for "freshman member"

All the best,

JP

New Car!

2010 Lexus ES350, but in white

As you probably figured from my lack of posts since Monday, I've been really busy lately with school, crew, college applications and other stuff. This has been such a stressful month so far and it will only get worse until I finally submit all my applications and get this massive boulder off my back ;_; I really can't wait until winter break.

This past week has been dull for the most part, I had a few test and quizzes as always but my Macbeth Acts I and II test today was a surprise partner test which was really helpful. In Journalism, we're planning to print our December issue very soon and for this issue we have made so far about $1,300 worth of ads which is a great improvement over the $900 or so we made in out first issue, the only issue is that in the past week or so we got another page worth of ads and when the amount of space was originally allotted, it did not take into account the number of ads we would have and now we are short about one and a half pages. oops.

Exciting news, after talking about it for over a year and a half and dozens of visits to car dealers and going on dozens of test drives, we finally have our new car in our garage! My dad picked up our white 2010 Lexus ES350 from the dealer today. We got it fully loaded and in the end got some stuff we didn't really need. The car does have stuff we wanted like Navigation, backup camera and rear sunshade but also some frivolous things. Since we didn't want to wait 5 weeks for a custom order from Japan, we compromised and had one already in the US and made do with the random add-ons. The car has a rear deck lid lip spoiler which is subtle but kinda weird for this kind of car and it also has a rear bumper applique which was a $310 option the dealer just tossed in for free in the end. We had it shipped over from North Carolina and it got it for over $4,000 under MSRP so that was good.

So things are admittedly kind of a boring right now but I just wanted to check in. I'll probably do a legitimate post tomorrow so until then take it easy.

Christmas Countdown - 13 days!

-JP

E-Relationships DON'T Work

Question: Will a relationship with someone you meet online and know only exclusively through the Internet ever work out?

Answer: 99.99999% of the time, no.

Once upon a time there was a girl named Julia. Now Julia had gotten involved in some RP (role play, nothing kinky, just like fantasy world stuff) online and here she met a man who went by the name of Seth. While she never had met Seth in real life, or even knew where he was in this world of ours, she fell madly in love with him. For weeks, she was obsessed with this mysterious individual who talked with the smoothness of velvet which was then massaged with baby oil. For weeks her friends tried their hardest to convince her that this was unhealthy for her, physically and mentally but this persisted. One day however, the floor collapsed and Julia came back to her friends for help. For weeks, one of her friends talked to her for hours about why she must end this drug-like addiction to a man for which she doesn't know the whereabouts of or even his real name or face for that matter. Only after complete disconnection from this indivudal did Julia eventually become free of this scumbag which plagued her thoughts and robbed her of emotional life for much too long.

This was about a year and a half ago and a thoroughly true story. Julia did really meet a person named Seth online and for the longest time had her mind stolen from her as a result, enamored by his words. We, her friends, all hoped she would not make the same mistake again but today I found out she has once again fallen into this trap.

While less mysterious in comparison to Seth, a new boy, by the name of Matt from Nova Scotia has electronically captured the heart of Julia. The conversation between me and Julia started out innocently enough. "If a boy never starts the conversation does it mean he's not interested?" she asked, "No" i replied, "it could just mean he's shy." As the conversation progressed I began to become increasingly suspicious of what's going on. When I finally ask her why, she responds with she met another guy online who she had fallen badly in love with, claiming he's "soooo much better than Seth". It turns out they met over the summer also through RP via Twitter. Fortunately she had realized where she was heading and tried to limit conversation with him herself, but once again she cannot rid her mind of Matt. I dosed my advice once again that she has to realize that the fact that he's far away, a college senior and someone you only know virtually equates to something that will only harm her in the long run, a fact not taken willingly and with much protest. While the conversation sorta just fizzled out soon after, I hope she got the point of my message.

personally, I think E-Relationships, and especially long distance E-relationships, will only lead to trouble. Sure there are stories of people finding each other through the Internet, eventually meeting each other and end up having quintuplets with each other but just how realistic is that?

Given that I haven't ever actually been in a relationship, maybe my friends shouldn't all be coming to me for relationship advice, (funny, really) but sometimes friends really do need to guide friends back into line when things get out of hand.


Bad Relationship? I've got the remedy! (or at least a really good bowl of soup to take your mind off it)


All the best,

JP

Thanks, Mother Nature

A quick snapshot of my backyard this morning, read on to clarify

Once again I'm posting at 1AM, this seems to be becoming a habit of mine, posting late in the night. Well, last night was my friend's surprise 16th birthday party which actually turned out to be quite fun. My friend Nat thought she was going to go help out at a senior living community's annual Holiday Party at the local golf clubhouse but in reality, it was 40 of her friends plus her family ambushing her.

I left practice an hour early so I could send two people home and pick up some dry cleaning (it was semi-formal) before the party, but because of traffic, I didn't get to take a shower like I wanted to. I ended up just wiping myself down with a hot moist towel which worked in a pinch. I didn't have time for dinner either so when I got there, me and the other 6 crew kids were all starving half to death. Finally, when she arrived, everything got into full swing and food was brought out (cue angel chorus). There was dancing and the like but most of the people there were juniors and the only seniors there were me and some other people from the crew team, but we had fun. As always, the DJ though could have been better, he sucked at transitioning songs and he didn't listen to 3/4 of the requests which was annoying. Nat had a great time though, she got a tiara and a really nice *pink* cake. It was a pretty good cake but the frosting was sickeningly sweet and rich. The final song turned out to be "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz which was kinda odd mood-wise but we all got a nice good-bye hug circle going.

_________________________

In a rather funny bit of friend gossip, my friend Kevin has developed some sort of man crush on Taylor Lautner of Twilight/New Moon fame. On Friday he asked me "Is it gay for me to like New Moon and the Twilight series?" to which I responded "No, I've read all the books and seen the movies." This then developed into a three person coversation between him, me and another girl in our journalism class and into how hot Taylor is and how he had made so many people "change teams" in the whole Vampire-Werewolf debate. Later during crew practice I asked him what the whole thing was about in journalism and he just said he had been really obsessed with Taylor Lautner since seeing New Moon, to which I responded "Well, he is really hot and has the body of a god" and he said back "He is really hot, and I'm secure enough with myself to say that." Anyways, I find this whole episode kinda funny, I never really expected this from him, and combined with the fact that he likes Lady Gaga, Kesha, Taylor Lautner and to an extent Twilight (though he claims to never have read the books, something I question a little) and that he's not afraid to get touchy with people makes him quite an interesting person...

________________________

Today, here in the DC area, we got our first legit snowfall. I measured about 3 inches outside our front door but some nearby areas got over 5 inches! It might not sound like much to some people, especially those who live further north, but that's a lot of snow for this area and surprisingly early in the season at that. Maybe this will finally be a good snow year. I ended up just working on an English project, French and college essays all day, boo, no fun. Tomorrow is going to be sunny though which means most of the snow and ice will likely melt away, but maybe, ever so slight the chance that some ice will remain that we might just get a delayed start on Monday. *fingers crossed*

I hope everyone has enjoyed their weekend so far.

Take care, and all the best,

JP

Surprise!

Just got back from a surprise sweet sixteen birthday party for one of my friends. Exhausted, but I had a great time. The DJ though, as always, could have been better. I'll post more details tomorrow.

Also, my 2K went relatively well. I didn't reach my absolute goal, but I kept it under 8 minutes which was my secondary goal. I felt that I could have pushed harder at the end so I'll do that next round. At least now I know what my limits are and can now push myself to, and even beyond them in the future.

Bye :)

JP

2000 Meters

I'm so nervous right now! God, I've been dreading December 2nd for two weeks now and now, the dreaded day is mere hours away.

So why am I so anxious? It's because tomorrow I have my very first 2000 meter test of the season for crew. If you're involved in crew or know someone who is, you've probably have heard people talking about 2Ks and their 2K times and maybe you don't know too much as to what it actually is. A 2K test is the standard test for rowers in order to measure performance, strength and endurance. As the name implies, it's a 2000m piece that is done on an erg. Your goal is to find a 500m split that you can hold for about 1750 meters and then you sprint at the very end to get your overall time as low as possible. A 2k usually lasts under 8 minutes for guys and 9 minutes for girls but those are probably the most draining and painful 8 minutes any rower will experience short of being in an actual race.

Because the 2k measures performance, it can ultimately decide your seat in a boat and which boat you are placed in (1st or 2nd etc), so your goal is to get your time to be lower than everyone else's. Of course there are those who are absolute beasts, but you're competing against everyone else on the team to fight for the best spots. It's so competitive it makes my mind and body hurt just thinking about it. >.<. Just tough it out. just. tough. it. out. *sigh*

College Application update:
-Teacher recommendation stuff finally all handed out :D
-There are still supplemental essays to write (probably will finish this weekend, hopefully)
-SAT scores sent out
-Dues for two schools paid, five more to go

With everything being so busy and hectic, the only thing that's keeping me going is Christmas break which is rolling 'round pretty soon. We haven't decorated the outside of the house yet but hopefully we will soon. I put some lights up in my room though and the tree is up and decorated (well, to be honest, it's kinda up all year since we're too lazy to take it down lol). Well, hopefully things will ease up a little and everything smooth out soon. Also, I just downloaded "Alejandro" and "Dance in the Dark" from Lady Gaga's new album The Fame Monster and my god they're good, especially along with "Bad Romance" and "Telephone" Lady Gaga is my total obsession music wise right now if you couldn't tell lol.

Go listen! - Dance in the Dark

I hope you have a great week!

wish me luck :)

JP