The Joy of Line Dancing

My school has a tradition. Every year for the past who knows how many years in December we line dance. On transition day back in grade 8 I couldn't believe I would actually have to attend a high school with such a stupid tradition but last year along with almost everyone else I absolutely fell in love with it!! It's such a cool feeling to have 50 people in the gym all doing their own thing and dancing to their own beat but moving at the same time. That satisfying thunk of everyones left foot hitting the ground at the same time, with time to the music is just so wonderful. I loved it last year, and today was the day when we started again this year. We do it in PE, which makes this the one month I will actually enjoy PE out of the entire year. On Wednesday the grade 9s will be in with us and we supposedly have to teach them or something, because it will only be their second day of line dancing ever and I'm not really looking forward to it. But it's okay and they'll learn fast and most of them will pick up the love of it. You laugh when you mess up, and mostly it's just a ton of fun with your friends. May we dance forever!!!

A Fulfilling Saturday

This day was very busy, and extremely fulfilling. Everything I did gave me a happy warm feeling deep in the pit of my stomach, a feeling I have more and more these days. I volunteered at the pool this morning at the crack of 9am. I am currently a certified AWSI (assistant water safety instructor) so I'm basically a student-teacher for swimming lessons. I volunteered in the spring and summer (it was a requirement to pass the course) and now I'm just in for practice. I did today and I'll do next week and then a full lesson set in January. The kids are so cute!! Mostly I just help out the ones that need a little extra attention. One little girl wouldn't jump into the water unless I held her hands and when I caught her I had her under the armpits (gently of course) and she had this iron death grip on my hands. It's frightning how strong they are. Another boy wouldn't kick or breath under water. He'd kind of float and not move until he ran out of air and come up. I worked with him mostly in that class. I kept saying "kick your feet, push your tummy up, blow out all your bubbles" and he just wouldn't. But the instructor said he'd improved a lot from previous weeks, so that's good at least. My mom was a lifeguard and swimming teacher too in high school and university, and she once had a kid who just sat on the side and refused to get in the water. She worked with him and it took her 2 summers to get him in up to his neck, and years later he ended up working at a pool, so go figure.

After that, (like an hour after that) my mom and I ended up at the mall to do our shift at Santa's Anonymous. It's the third year we've done it, and we love it!! The same people as previous years had the shifts before and after us and the pick up and delivery guy is the same each time. What Santa's Anonymous is, is a Christmas gift gathering for kids that don't necessarily get Christmas gifts, that's happened for like 32 years here in Victoria. I think a radio station sponsors it. There's about four or five tables in various malls around the city and they each have a Christmas tree with paper bears that elementry school kids coloured and cut out (every year from kindergarten to grade 5 I coloured bears for it) and on the back of each bear is a code name for each kid, whether they are a boy or girl, their age, and what they want. The code names are to keep it anonymous. People come up to the tree, pick a bear with a gift they want to buy, sign it out with the people at the table (there's a number on the bear that matches the same number in the book, so we can find it) and then go and buy the gift and bring it back and hand it in and it goes to the workshop to get sorted and on its way to whoever it's for. It seems like it would be boring to sit behind a table for 2 hours and sign out bears and sign in gifts, but it's actually really fun.

After that we did some shopping, (we had to get Santa's Anonymous gifts for kids too) and this evening was my first carol band gig. In case I haven't mentioned already, carol band is a little band that my school has and every December we do various gigs around town playing easy, fun Christmas tunes. We've practiced a bunch of times at school and more then once I was the only flute player there, and unfortunately that was the case tonight. I'm good, but there's no way I'm powerful to be heard with as many saxophones and trumpets as we have, so the band director played the flute part (over my shoulder!!) on a piccolo trumpet. It did feel special though, to be the only long, shiny, horizontal instrument there. I love the flute!!

It was one of the busiest Saturdays I've had in a long time and one of the best. I love being busy, especially during the holiday season. Tidings of comfort and joy indeed!!

P.A.R.T.Y. Program

The first time I heard of the PARTY program a year ago I thought it sounded cool and fun. Mind you, at the time I was only in grade 9, and I just heard reference to it over the announcments. Then, a week ago they had an assembly for all the grade 10s and they explained to us what the party program really is. It sounds cool, but that's only until you find out what the acronym stands for: Prevent Alcohol and Risk Related Trauma in Youth. It's a program that explains to us the consequences of driving while texting/drunk/high etc. and making smart choices in life and death scenarios. They briefly explained it at the assembly, but today, I got to go to the hospital to partake in the program itself. All the grade 10s were split into 3 groups to go on 3 different days. I got to go on day 1.

We got to the hospital and they took us into a conference room and talked to us a bit about the program to start with and then gave us some info. The program began about 20 years or so ago in Ontario in the hope of preventing alcohol related and other forms of preventable death in youth. A trauma doctor talked to us for a few minutes about some of the kinds of accidents he sees in the ER and he showed us some slides of crash scenes: cars wrapped around telephone poles; dead, unconscious or critical victims in the cars; a deer shoved through a windshield, it was very graphic.

We were then split into five groups to go see different stations they had set up for us at different parts of the hospital. First my group met with our school liaison officer and she told us about some of the crash scenes she's been to, the drunk kids she's found (and whose not-to-thrilled parents she's called) people she's caught DUI. She told us to make smart choices; if you're going to drink at parties, don't leave your drink unattended, have a designated driver in your group of friends, leave with the same people you came with, don't get in a car with a driver whose been drinking etc. She's really fun and we laughed a lot at how she told her stories, but I think we all got how serious it was. She also had goggles that made you see things like you were drunk when you put them on.

Next we talked to a paramedic who showed us a destroyed car that had rolled through a ditch (teenager going too fast in their new car) and he had a few horror stories of his own of things he'd seen. He showed us the equipment they have (spine board, stretcher, neck brace, breath pump, intibation tubes) and how they would assess a crash scene and use each piece of equipment. If your conscious during all that, it really wouldn't be comfortable. Then he told us that many crashes like that are very traumatizing physically to the body (no kidding!) and can leave you with a permanent brain injury or dead. Brain damage would be worse in some cases. He also elaborated on the importance of a helmet. If it's destroyed but your brain isn't, it did it's job.

A trauma nurse showed us a fake car crash patient (the "victim" was a grade 12 student from our school) and how they treat them. She showed us all the machines and tubes they hook you up to and explained how it all works, but I can't remember all the details, just that it was very unpleasant. She also said not to switch ID with your friends, because when the parents come and look at the kid and realize it's not their child that raises two big questions: who is this kid so they can call their parents, and where is the kid of these parents? She also showed us how they get drugs out when you overdose: either they give you a bottle of liquid charcoal to swallow, or if you don't cooperate they force you to swallow it. Basically it's a super fast laxitive and out come the drugs.

We went to the morgue, but we didn't see any dead bodies (though I heard another group did by accident) and the nurse there told us the absolute worst part of her job is having to bring parents down to the morgue to identify their children. It doesn't feel real she said, and they just stand and cry because there's nothing else to do. She said it's better for them to say good-bye in the hospital than in the morgue. And when you die in a trauma room it's not like on TV, where it goes all dark and everyone comes and stands around for a few hours. In real life they pack the body up tubes still atatched and send it straight off to the morgue because they need the room for the next patient.

We also listened to the tragic stories of 2 people who have suffered with living with brain injuries. It was so sad!! Here they were, just normal people, healthy, happy, active, who hadn't been drinking or on the phone and had their seatbelts on, and became the victims of other peoples mistakes. It was heartbreaking to hear!! The last activity we did was to try buttoning a shirt without the use of your hands (hard!!) and to try writing with the paper facing you, but you had to look in a mirror while you wrote and it all came out backwards. I can't imagine living like that. At the end they showed us some short videos about simulated car crashes and my God it was hard to watch that!! I couldn't watch parts of them it was so terrible.

I knew all of this already. I've heard stories and watched to news so I knew it all happened on a more or less regular basis but this just reinstated it all for me. It was actually scary and that's the whole point. When I learn to drive I will never text or talk on the phone even a hands-free, I will never be brought home drunker then Hell by the cops, I'll never take drugs of any sort (prescription meds. exempt) and I will never get in a car with someone who's been drinking. My life's just not worth the risk. I have a bright, wonderful future ahead of me and I'm not about to screw it up now.

A Day of Accomplishments

Well. Tuesday. It always messes me up when we get days of in the middle of the week, or at the beginning or the end. You can tell by that how often I miss school, skipping, sick or otherwise. Well, I'm almost finished my second sewing project (hobo bag) and it doesn't suck too badly. I went after school to pick up my ugly blue toque and scarf for when our little Carol Band starts performing this Saturday. We do more and more performances in the leadup to Christmas break and it's quite busy. I missed socials today because a doctor from UBC and UVic (he works at both) came to talk to us about cancer info and research. You had to get permission from whatever teacher you had that block in order to go, something I had no trouble in achieving. It was informative and interesting and I'm glad I went (cancer tragically runs in my family) but it was also long and I had a hard time focussing completely. And in missing socials I missed writing the paragraph they did in class today, so at 3:40 (after the long wait for carol band stuff, 35 minutes after the day ended) I had to go up and write it. And I took so long (I'm very detailed with socials and writing) that my teacher asked me if I was writing her a novel or something. And then I had to wait for my mom to come and get me which took longer than I expected (true, today was a day I was supposed to walk and you have to give her credit for that, but it was cold and dark.) Anyway, that was my busy, long Tuesday. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

Quiet Monday

It rained most of the day again today. I didn't have school (Pro-D day) so I slept late, did some laundry and dishes, cleaned my room, and watched about four episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My aunt came for a visit two summers ago and left the entire series on our computer, and I am HOOKED on it!!! I am in season 5 of 7, and I just hit the point where Buffy's mom died. I don't think she's really dead though. I mean, lots of characters die in this show, but her mom died of natural causes and everyone else was brutally murdered by a vampire or demon. Oh well. We'll see how it all unfolds. It's just a show right? But it got me thinking about life. The older I get the more aware I get of how often people do die, and you just never can tell when it'll happen. Even if you're ready, you're never really ready right? Not if it's someone you really and truly loved. I'm always saying how my life is boring and I wish something would happen, but not anything bad. I don't want anything bad to happen ever. In my mind, TV ought to stay in it's televised state, not invade real life. Anyway, after babbling about that I'll just conclude by saying that was how I spent my Monday off. Back to school tomorrow. And in the mean time, I have to change the wash.

A Rainy Week

Though it went by really fast, this week was another long and rainy one. It didn't rain every day, Wednesday morning was beautiful, and so was Friday afternoon, but the other days it rained solid and heavy all week and never really got bright. I had two tests to write on Friday; (chemistry in science, conflicts in the Red River Valley for socials) so I spent the better part of this week studying. I think I did all right on both. Not much to say about Monday; cold, dark, wet and rainy. Tuesday the french immersion and flex (flexible studies) grade 10s from my school got to go to Science World in Vancouver for the day. We met at the ferry at SIX-THIRTY AM!!!! and caught the seven over. It was fun, better than spending the day at school, but science world is a lot smaller than I remember it being, and once we'd done a loop through all the exhibits and gone to the OMNImax (I still prefer Imax) there wasn't a whole lot left to do. It's a good thing we went on Tuesday though, because Wednesday the rain and wind cancelled all evening sailings out of Vancouver, and I think Victoria and probably Salt Spring Island too. Not much excitment Wednesday or Thursday; cold, wet, rainy, much like Monday. Friday there was a light drizzle when I walked to school in the morning and afterschool was beautiful and sunny, and even though it's mid-November it was actually to warm for my jacket on the way home. Yesterday I... okay fine slept for most of the day, then Mom and I ran some errands, did some Christmas shopping and watched the Santa Clause parade go down Government St. It's much shorter than the Victoria Day parade in May, which is actually nice, because it was very cold, but it wasn't raining which was nice. There was so much rain this week that Duncan and Cowichan (about two hours or so north of Victoria) were completely flooded out. The Cowichan River and another river (name forgotten) burst their banks. It was all over the news, which is no surprise, there was a lot of damage done. That's way too close to home for comfort for me. I think they drained most of the water out of the city, but there's more rain to come and it'll take a long time to fix all the damage done. Here, it's not raining now, but it poured last night and was accompanied by a howling wind. It looks like it'll rain again later. But, that's why they call it the Wet West Coast isn't it?

Circle of Life

The way I see it, everyone in our lives is connected to us. It is almost as if we are all standing in a giant circle, the Circle of Life...

Obviously not everyone in the circle is connected to each other, but they are all connected to us. We are all the centres of our own circle. You could almost imagine that everyone is standing in an actual gigantic circle, hand in hand. As time goes on the circle can grow as people come into our lives and then shrink back as people leave our lives. That's the natural way of life; friends, family, neighbours, colleagues they all come into our lives, and then sometimes they slowly and naturally fade out again, and the circle can accomodate that.

But when someone leaves in a horrendous way before we're ready for it to happen, like if someone dies, or leaves in another way and breaks our hearts, it's as if they've been ripped out of the circle and they leave behind a gaping hole that can never again be filled. True, as time goes on we move on and we heal and accept, but the hole will always stay there forever. When the next person comes along they get their own space in the circle and the old hole stays empty. If you are picturing an actual circle of people hand in hand, you could imagine that with time and healing they reconnect, maybe throw a rope in between them to stay together, but the hole is still there.

My point in all this, is you can never replace someone who's gone like that. You can move in with your life and you should, we all should it's what's healthy and normal, but those we've lost can never be replaced.

So love the ones in your circle. Appreciate everyone in it and treat each day with rich care and love because you never know what can happen.


Life=Love Love your family, love your friends, love yourself

Reflecting on a Long Week

I had plenty of time to blog this week. I don't really have a good reason for why I didn't and I hate to make excuses. So instead, now that I've gotten to the end of this long week I'll reflect on it and sum it up all at once. Wednesday of course, we got the day off, given that it was Remembrance Day. Tuesday we had a wonderful assembly for it, just like we do every year. The senior band played a few pieces, including Oh Canada, and the stories they told, the detail, it was incredible, and so real. Scarily real. I think it's so valuable to celebrate and remember those who died fighting so that we could live in peace and freedom here, and those still fighting today. I doubt there is a person on the planet who isn't related to or hasn't known someone who's died in war, or fought in one. It is so tragic, and hopefully with time, we can improve upon that and maybe see world peace.

I am constantly up to my ears in band these days. There was a time, not all that very long ago when I would say to people "I understand you're busy" when I wanted their help on something and I got that it would take a while for them to get around to me. Now, all of a sudden, I'm the one with no time. I've got three lunch hours taken by band, three after schools and one before school. I'm going to start volunteering at the pool soon (one step ever closer to me becoming a lifeguard) and I've suddenly gotten my flair for writing back, full of inspiration for my stories and I thought it would be a waste not to use that gift when it came, since I've been lacking writing inspiration for the past few months.

I went to my friends 16th birthday party last night. She had 39 people over and another 21 on her guest list who didn't show up. I'm scraped to even know that many people in my life never mind to invite to a party!! She had so many different groups of friends, so most people knew a small handful of people there and no one else. It was fun though. There was food and dancing and movies and we socialized and mingled and her friends are actually really nice people. It makes me think of my friends, how much we've changed since we started high school a year and a half ago and how much we will continue to change as high school continues. But I will try my best to stay in touch with all of them. When good people come into your life, it's good to hang onto them.

The more of 2009 that slips away, the more I think about what a good year it was. I've grown so much in my thoughts, my views, me feelings and reactions towards various things, everything. I feel happier, stronger, more confident and capable than I have before in my life, and that, I'm sure is a clear sign that I am growing up. And it feels great.

Sparks

It rained a lot today. There were quite a few sunny breaks, and the sun was pretty much fully down by 4:30. Another sign of fall. But all in all I found it was a good day. It wasn't really cold and actually quite pretty on my walk home from school. I had PE this morning, but we didn't have to go outside which is always a bonus, and it was the only time we have to do it this week because Wednesday's a holiday!! Carol band started at lunch today. It's a small band that plays very easy Christmas music during the holiday season every day. We practice in November and then perform in December. We play at the big light up and Saanich Hall and the Legislature, both of which are great to be a part of, and then at a bunch of seniors centers around the city. They enjoy listening no matter what we play. I started a hobo bag last week in sewing class and today when I started sewing it together I made a mistake right away and sewed it inside out. Mesure twice, cut once. That doesn't really apply here, but you get the idea. And a highlight of the day, was in science this morning. Our teacher did an experiment for us: sodium (VERY REACTIVE METAL) in water. It fizzled around in crazy circles for a few seconds before exploding, much like what happens when sparks pop in a fireplace. It was so cool, and we all screamed when it happened. I think we all need a few more sparks like that to brighten up our days. They reminded me of people running in frantic panicked circles before the pressure gets to much and they burst in all directions. It's something to bear in mind the next time you feel stressed. fizzle...fizzle...fizzle...POW!!! Wouldn't that be interesting to see a human do!

(*I feel I should explain the pictures. The top left one is actually baryum not sodium, and the bottom left one is rubidium. But they look close enough to the untrained-to-chemistry eye)

Story Sides

In most situations, I can see both sides of an argument. If person A is mad at person B, and I'm listening to person A gripe and complain about it, and then I hear person B's side of it, I can look at the info I've got and I can see that in a way, they're both right. This is the case in most situations, unless it directly affects me, then of course I'm right and everyone else is wrong (and in all fairness, who isn't like that?) I've learned a lot in fifteen years, and one thing I've seen proven and repeated over and over, is people in general (and I'll admit, myself included) are not great at communicating. It could be thinking something over and over in your head and not telling anyone, or not listening when someone is telling you why they're unhappy or just keeping all your feelings and emotions bottled up inside until you just can't hold it in anymore and it all comes exploding out. It could also be on a project where information is just unclearly passed on so other people don't do what you think they said they'd do. I've seen all of these examples played out over and over in my life, and sometimes it's enough to make me scream. It leads to heatache, anger, tears and frustration and what does it fix? Nothing!! Poor communication is just a collosal waste of time and it doesn't fix anything. The world would be a lot easier if people shared what they were feeling, their thoughts and opinions, and let the little stuff go. If you're not happy about something, fix it! Find a way to work around it don't dwell over it, or be mad at people for unneccesarilly long over it. People can only teach what they know. If someone grows up not properly understanding how to share they will teach that to their children and the cycle can only go down from there. All I'm saying, is to make it easier on everyone and to make the world run a little smoother if only in this one small way, everyone should try and share how they're feeling. Communicate rather than isolate. That is, in my mind anyway, a worthwhile message.

November

People start wearing poppies on their shirts, the clocks are turned back, it's cold all day and dark at 5pm. No two ways about it, it's November. I once thought of it as the most miserable month of the whole year, but now I've got a happy view on life. Today, and yesterday too in fact it was cold, I could see my breath in the morning and afternoon, and the last of the leaves are starting to fall, but it's not raining, and it's really pretty. And it's not unbearably cold. It's not yet winter here. I just know that this year it'll be a bad one for being being sick, goodness knows fall has been bad enough already, but I'm optimistically hoping that the fact that I never get sick will continue to serve me well. And there will be ice, I know, but hopefully not a lot of snow (people here CAN'T drive well in snow and it's no fun to walk in) And time has been going so fast this year that I just know spring will be back before we know it. Until it does, I will not be befallen by winter blues. It's all smiles and happy from here on out!!