what are the people like? any new friends?
okay so i have no friends. haha no i'm kidding, but it's kind of hard to make friends. sometimes, i feel like it's not cause i can't be friends with them because i'm unsocial or terrible in some way, but because i don't really feel like exerting the effort. slash i don't really want to? i don't know. i mean, there aren't any particular people that i think are so insanely awesome that i want to get to know them better, and i have a perfectly fantastic set of friends back home. i mean, there are people i talk to. i hang out at school with two other girls who came in in september with me, and they're nice. but they're not like people i would confide in, tell stories to, etc. but they're great, it's nice to have people in the same boat as you - plus they're actually very nice people. so that's good. and then i know this one girl from new york because our moms are like. super tight, but we're not really "friends"...i mean, we talk and stuff, but she's more of like. the fashionista-bitchy type. not really. i dunno. just not really like me. there. and like, since school's already in the second trimester, everyone has kinda already established friendships that are hard to "infiltrate" if you don't really try. and i really don't think i'm trying. oh well. i'm sure i'll probably fall out of my "i don't need friends" phase, plus the kids on badminton are really nice. it's annoying though cause they're all in classes 4-6, and i'm in 2, and 1-3 rarely ever have classes with 4-6. eh.
oh a weird thing about clubs (...basically anything extracurricular, including teams) are really intense. i'm gonna do badminton, because i was too scared of the intense japanese volleyball players - plus badminton's not as hardcore as all the other ones. but i was also watching dance, and it looked really fun, because it was like hip-hop and stuff. well no. the BOYS' dance team was. i wish i were a boy. ahah. anyway. yeah but it's funny because in japan, there's like a really respected "hierarchy" in high schools (which only have three grades) - obviously, the seniors are at the top, then juniors, then sophomores (who are basically freshmen). so during practices and stuff, all the younger ones call the older kids "senpai" which means basically like "my senior", and if you play with someone older, if you screw up, you're always like "ahh i'm so sorry!" except way more politely and formally because. japanese people are just polite. i dunno i can't explain the expressions people use, but it kind of scares me because i mess up a lot.
what i really realized when i got here was how incredibly small our brearley world is. i mean, i know pretty much everyone in the entire SCHOOL. here, i don't even know everyone in my grade. and people are so similar at brearley, so it's kind of refreshing to see how enormously different people can be. i mean, a lot of these kids grew up in 4, 5 different places, so i guess it's hard not to have something really unusual or unique about you. i also realized how brearley education is simultaneously so great and so sucky. wow that was terrible and blunt phrasing. but really. during summer school, we had placement tests, and it was just like. fjddfkja;kfaaaaaack. i've been so well brearley-trained that non-brearley tests are like. a shock to the system. i know exactly what's on, say, a brearley history test: fill-in-the-blanks, ids, pairs, and an essay, usually in that order. i know what stuff teachers want us to focus on, what keywords they want us to write, all that jazz. it's pretty simple, if you've grown up being taught that way. but that's only in brearley world. once you get out, everything's so different. and you've been so brearleyfied that anything "different" is terrifying. or it is for me, at least. so in that sense, it's sucky. but the great part is: brearley really teaches you to think, analyze, interpret. over here, in class, teachers rarely call on you if you're not raising your hand. if no one's raising their hand, they keep talking by themselves. it's basically like a lecture - and while i enjoy lectures because i'm not really the sharing-in-class type, it gets kind of lonely after a while. and the thing is, it doesn't matter if people don't say anything here, because if you read the textbook and memorize the facts written in it, you'll be totally fine. tests are totally from the textbook. but at brearley, you seriously cannot do that. even if you read what you're supposed to, you get to class and find out that's basically just the background info. and through class discussions, brearley teaches you the material you need to know, which is made up mostly of interpretations and analytical stuff. sooo ehhh. you can't have everything, i guess.
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