The Difference between Time and Boarding School Time

It's huge. Ever since I've gotten here, I have started walking faster, talking faster and eating faster. For every single thing you do, you only have a set time to do it, like eat a meal or walk to class or something like that. And even if you don't have somewhere to be or something to do, you do things faster, just out of habit, because free time has started getting so valuable, since there's so much less of it.

On R-Cans and D-cats

Ok, so this school is supposed to be all about letting people speak their minds and not be afraid to voice their opinions, which is completely not true. At all. They do this, first of all, by being completely liberal (politically). The religion part, they do a pretty good job about because that would be pretty bad where you have thid whole thing about being a cultural melting pot where you have people from all around the world coming to share their love of learning or whatever, and you don't embrace their religious differences. Sure they let you take your personal religious holidays off to worship and whatnot, but I like how they don't force everybody to do it, like some of the camps I have been to do. But back to the political thing. Last week or something, some of the dorms let everybody gather in the common room to watch the presidential debates, and the same thing happened the other nigt for the vice-presidential ones. (The weird thing is, some dorms didn't allow the kids to watch them because the debates were during study periods, but you'd think they'd let you watch at least the debates, what with all this being educational and all.) So anywho, that's what happened, and since basically everyone here is Democratic, (BIG change from my old town, where most people were Republican) is was mostly a big Slam-McCain/Palin party and I think that is very much against our school ideals because, even though I personally am not an R-can, if I was, (and I'm sure there was at least one in that room) I doubt I would ever admit it in that crowd. They even have a Democrats Unite Club (or whatever its called) but they sure don't have anything like that for Republicans. All I'm saying is, I know admissions can't help it if almost all the people they admit is Democratic, since there's no way they would even know in the first place (it's probably illegal or something to ask that on an application), but it just made me feel as if that's one thing the school is not doing a very great job of, in terms of making people comfortable to speak their minds. Politics is always a very touchy subject. Like, this place has people from all over the world, right? Well, I bet at least one person from all these foreign students comes from a Communist country. If that person were me, I totally wouldn't admit that though. Ever. Actually, that makes me wonder, you know how they have tariffs and things on imports coming from other countries like Cuba, or sugar from Brazil and stuff? Can they do that with students?

On Self-Awareness

High school really makes me remeber how much I loved 8th grade. It occurred to me that whenever you look back on how you were when you were younger, you always think about how naive you used to be. Except, when you're actually that age, you always think about how much more mature you are. For instance, in 8th grade, I may have looked back on myself in 7th and thought "Wow, I've really grown a lot since then." But with that feeling is kind of the obvious but unconscious feeling that you can't get any more aware or mature or knowledgeable about the world than you are right now. You only ever see that when you're all grown up and looking at it in hindsight. In 5th grade, I think I can correctly say I was an oblivious 5th grader. But when I was actually in 5th grade, it was impossible for me to actually be aware that I was oblivious, so i obvoiusly didn't think I was. I can only tell once I have grown out of my obliviousness and am looking at it in hindsight. The same thing probably goes for all kinds of characteristics, like stupidity or ignorance, since when you're stupid or ignorant, you can't possibly know more that you do, so you don't necessarily think you're stupid or ignorant. It's only once you've grown out of that stupidity or ignorance that you realize that's actually what you were. Like for me, I had not a clue about all things political. But now that I actually know some stuff about how our nation is run, partly through school, partly through peers, and partly through the presidential campaign going on, I can appreciate how much I didn't know before.
Therefore, now that I have it established that you can't really be aware of the fact that you are stupid, oblivious, ignorant, or anything like that, (this reminds me of that like "you'll learn things you never knew you never knew" in The Colors of the Wind in Pocahontas) you could take it a step further and say that anyone who admits that they're stupid, ignorant, etc. is probably just not very confident, because you couldn't necessarily know that you are unless people tell you. By my experience, this is, in fact, the case. For instance, take this school I am going to. It's supposedly incredibly good. There's this one girl here who is totally crushed now because she feels like she's not good enough compared to everybody else, because now she's surrounded by geniuses, the best of the best, the cream of the crop. Well, guess what? Now she's gone from being the best of the best to the lowest of the low, and you can just imagine how incredibly devastating that must be. And of course, now she's always saying how stupid she is and stuff like that. Well, there's a lot of stuff to say about that. First is, everything is relative. Back when she was at the top, she felt smart, and able, and confident. And now that has all gone down drastically. And so by saying she's stupid, of course she isn't really, it's just a confidence thing, which goes back to my other point that people who are really stupid, ignorant, etc. never really know it, and if people do admit that about themselves, in most cases it's probably not a stupidity thing at all, it's just a confidence thing, and, like I said, confidence is relative. It's just like being in the Olympics. You may be the best runner or rower or swimmer (etc.) out there for miles, but you go to the Olympics and you get last place in whatever it is you are doing and you get crushed. It's basically the same thing. It just depends on if you think of it as the worst of the best or just the mediocre of the majority, because when you compare yourself with, say 99% of the people out there, you are terriffic. But we can't all be Phelpses and geniuses and medal-winners. Someone needs to be in the audience to clap. But you know, I think, when you look at it that way, most people are thrilled to just be in the Olympics, so this gives me high hopes for humanity. Relatively speaking, of course.