My College Years

9/29/16

   Just a heads up, I do wander a bit off topic in this entry.

   I feel like today was an overall OK day. Since my only class doesn't start until 1:30 pm, I go to work in the mornings. I'm still trying to get used to the 'waking up early in the morning' thing. For some reason, after this summer, it was so hard to fix my sleeping schedule. Not hard in the way where I stayed up later than I wanted to and then I'd mess up my whole system, it was just hard waking up earlier and earlier each day. Before I got to work today, I read, and after work I went home and read some more before school. Then when I got home I read even more. I find it funny that I didn't really read all that much over the summer even though I had all the time in the world to do so, and now when I have school and homework and generally less free time, I want to read.

   Our college classes don't get out on the hour/half hour. They get out at xx:20 or xx:50. So instead of trying to get to school a certain amount of time before class, I leave the house at a certain time to make sure I get to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays by 12:50 pm. At that time, classes just let out and people are leaving school, which makes it easier to get a spot. But on my way to school today, there was a long line on one of the back roads I take. There's usually no traffic like this unless it's the morning when people are on their way to work. I just brush it off and wait in traffic. Well, I'm in the line which barely moves the whole time I'm in it and wonder what the heck is going on. Finally I reach the traffic light and am able to look around the building that was blocking my view, and I see that the arms near the train tracks are down and the lights are flashing. But there's no train. I had been sitting in traffic for nearly 10 minutes only to find out that we couldn't go any further because they were stuck! Luckily I was able to turn around and avoid the tracks. I got to school around 1:00 pm, and I still didn't really have trouble finding a spot. I've heard several people complain how it took them 30-40 minutes to find a spot, and I have had no trouble. Granted, on Mondays and Wednesdays, I get there a little after 8 am, so not a whole lot of people are there, so I can have basically any spot I want. But on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I get there close to 1 pm, so it's a lot harder to get a spot since that's one of the busiest times of the day. And yet it hasn't taken me more than 5 or 6 minutes to find a spot. Maybe I've just been extremely lucky?

  Today I had my TTh (Tuesday/Thursday) class, the CG class. We got into groups to do a little activity about 'soft' and 'hard' skills. In my group, three out of the four of us went to the same high school. I happened to be wearing my Letterman jacket and the girl from another school wanted to verify which school I went to. When I told her that her assumption was right, she told me that she went to our rival school. My friend happened to be in the same group with me, so when he overheard that, he gave her a joking glare. I then pointed out that the three of us went to the same school, and my friend told her that she was out numbered. I feel like, despite going to rival schools, we might become friends later on.

   Now I'm going to rant about my old rival school. I feel like some "rival schools" are just for fun, and maybe they'll poke fun at one another, but they'll still be civil and respectful towards each other.

   Not our rival school.

   I'm going to make a comparison between our schools: my school was like Canada, and our rival school was like Russia or North Korea (pick your poison). Last year, I made it into our chamber choir, and we had the opportunity to sing the national anthem with our rival school's chamber choir (if you don't know, the chamber choir is usually the highest level choir at the school). So, since it was an away game for us, we all gathered into their choir room and waited for everyone to arrive. At the beginning, I thought it was going to be fun! Since one of the boys in our choir was a mascot, he was in his costume. Well it just so happened that our rival school's mascot was in the other room, so we did like a mini photo shoot for the two of them. Whoever was in the other suit seemed friendly, unlike everyone else.

   We all learned the same version of the national anthem, so after everyone arrived, we ran through it a few times so there wouldn't be any surprises, and then we waited for the game to start. While we were waiting, we decided that it would be a good idea if we sang some of our songs for them and vice versa. They sang first, and they sounded pretty good, I won't lie! So naturally we clapped and complimented them after they were done. So then we sang one of our songs to them, and almost immediately they were disrespectful. They giggled at us, ignored us, and what have you. One girl opened Snapchat up and recorded herself, with us in the background singing, and she was shaking her head and rolling her eyes. When we finished our song, it was some of the weakest applause I have ever heard. And that's not all!

   We always make t-shirts for our football games, and we'll have different "outs" for each game. For example: neon-out, camo-out, white-out, black-out, pink-out, tie-dye-out, etc... I forget which "out" it was at the rival game, I think it was neon. Anyway, usually our shirts just have our school logo on the front. This time, it had our logo on the front and on the back we combined our logo with their logo and it said "TT We Are One" (both of our school logos are some sort of T). Cute right? Well, they had a camo-out, and their shirts said something along the lines of "Beat the Tigers Down!" (our mascot is a tiger). That by itself wouldn't really affect someone. Unless you heard about what they did at their pep assembly.

   A normal pep assembly, at least for us, is some goofy little skit to get us excited for the game, and we'll usually chant and go through cheers, and have the cheerleaders get us hyped. I remember at this pep assembly, we did our chant that we do every time we win a game, except we changed a few words. It's like an echo: "I! I! I believe! I believe! I believe that! I believe that! I believe that we will win! I believe that we will win! I believe that we will win!" But their pep assembly went too far with the whole rivalry thing. I know that there was more than just this one thing that happened at the assembly, but they took a giant stuffed tiger, tied something around it's neck, and hung it from one of the basketball hoops! I just want to know how the teachers reacted to this because OMG.

   Sorry that most of this wasn't about college, but when the girl said she came from our rival school it made me reminisce. I miss all of my underclassmen friends, and I can't wait to see them at the next choir concert mid-October! I'm counting down the days!

- A

(P.S., if you have the opportunity to join choir, band, or whatever. JOIN IT! It's not just some class with some people. I felt like the people that were in choir were like my family. It was my second family that consisted of 70 people in one class alone! I can't wait to see my little choir nerds again c; )