Children pt. 2

I complained last time about how monstrous my little brother Ilyan is. I feel a little bad about only showing his bad side, so I'm compensating with this post about how nice he can be (when he feels like it).

My brother can be extremely, ridiculously sweet. When I was sick earlier this semester, my little brother would come home everyday with a picture he drew at school "for Nana, since she's really sick at home." He would come in with various stuffed animals and ask which one I wanted to make me feel better. I would insist that I didn't need any, since Nana herself had a plethora of things that would make her feel better, mainly in the form of Tylenol and a big bottle of water, but he still left a stuffed animal behind with me. Even after I recovered, when I tried to give it back, he resolutely said that in case I got sick again, I should keep it so I will get better sooner. So now my room has a resident stuffed giraffe.

When my mother fell ill over the summer while my father was out of town, leaving me to take care of the house, Ilyan was ridiculously cooperative. He would clean up after playing with his toys without me asking. He quietly watched TV while I made mac and cheese instead of running around pestering me to play with him as he usually would. When I accidentally spilled the cheese powder all over the counter, he helped me clean it up. Ilyan would usually either ignore the disaster scene or run right through it, making it worse.

During this time, Ilyan also did a lot of things that made me question his age, as he acted unusually mature. He seemed to know that Mommy was really not feeling well and went to peek in her room every couple of hours to make sure she was okay, and asked me to refill her mug with warm water every time we went up to check on her, regardless of how much water was in there. When my mother's friend came to relieve me of child duty by taking my brother out to the park, Ilyan reminded me to not forget his water bottle. On his own initiative, he promised to not play in the sand box because "then the sand gets in my shoes and Mommy and Nana need to take a looooong time to clean it up." I was surprised and touched that he remembered.

After our mother recovered, he was still in an angel for about a day before he decided nope, this is too hard and reverted to his usual demon state. Sigh.

Since he's got so many moments when he behaves like an absolute demon, whenever he behaves angelically I throw my guard up and subconsciously think, what's he planning now? Which speaks volumes about how he usually behaves. But he does have his sweet moments, and we may as well enjoy them before he becomes the usual screaming, whining monster.

Children

Some of you may know that I have a little brother named Ilyan. When he was two, he was an annoying little monster. When he was three, he was a terrible demon. Now he's four, and he's an absolute devil. But that's only when he's sleepy, hungry, or thirsty, which is thankfully no longer an hourly occurrence.  

My little brother is a creature that hates listening to reason, especially when he's in a bad mood. A couple weeks ago, Ilyan wanted to go to Curtis Orchard to pick apples and get apple donuts (which he actually hates, but gets them anyways). That particular day was a Saturday, but my father needed to go listen to a couple talks given by guest speakers at the university and my mother needed to finish writing a recommendation letter, so we had to tell Ilyan that he couldn't go to pick apples that day. We said we'd go tomorrow, but only if he followed instructions. Usually he would whine for a while, and try to convince us to take him that day before giving in. But that day, Ilyan was in bad mood since he didn't sleep well the night before. He started to repeat over and over, "But I wanna go~, but I wanna go~." I swear he said it at least fifty times before my father told the whining monster that he would take him to the park today instead, and temporarily made the whining stop. But not for long, since my father told him that he needed to go to the restroom quickly so they could get to the park early enough to stay and play. 

Ilyan hates going to the restroom. He'll hold it and hold it until he can't hold it anymore, then sprint to the bathroom. Sometimes he doesn't make it. My guess is that he wanted to play more and didn't want to take a break in his games to go potty, which evolved into a habit of constantly holding until the last minute. So my father trying to force Ilyan to go potty was like setting off the ticking time bomb, one that caused a case of extreme repetition rather than an explosion. This time, it was "But I don't wanna, but I don't wanna~" over and over again. Ilyan held off going to the bathroom for so long that he ended up not being able to go to the park at all. That put him in a really bad mood for the rest of the day. He didn't follow instructions, so my parents didn't take him to Curtis Orchard the next day, making him even more mad. (They felt bad for him so they took him the next weekend.) 

It's interesting when I tell friends stories like this, because they've only ever seen the shy, cute side of my little brother that he only shows when meeting new 'big kids.' A couple people are rather shocked that the sweet angel they saw come with my father to pick me up last week would be capable of such things. The rest, usually the ones that have younger siblings themselves, are completely understanding. Kids show their true demonic nature at home and magically become good angelic children outside when they meet unfamiliar people. Those little tricksters.

Seasons

I assume that I wasn't alone in frantically dragging out the sweaters the day after I wore a t-shirt earlier this week, and that I'm not the only one who thinks that it finally, finally, feels like fall.

Which is a little depressing, considering we were already halfway to the start of winter before the world decided that it would wake up and start making the weather suitable for jackets and apple cider.

But don't get me wrong. I like warm weather, as it is a symbol for summer, a time when we're relatively worry-free, usually not needing to wake up before ten and being able to hang out with friends. Summer is a time when the weather is nice and warm and I don't need to wear layer after layer just to keep my body at a reasonable temperature.

Although I like summer, I absolutely love the season of fall. Which is a little strange, considering that I hate being cold and fall is when the temperature starts dropping. But all the vivid colors that appear on the trees really make up for the chilliness, and so do the squirrels. There are so many squirrels bustling about, darting up and down trees while preparing for winter in their own way. I think they're absolutely adorable. The trees prep for winter the same way every year, as do the squirrels. But this fall feels a little different, not because the trees are turning blue or anything like that. It's partly because the weather has been rather indecisive this year. It took a long time during the spring to decide when the weather would be warm enough for shorts. Once the school year rolled around again, we kept receiving false alarms for the start of autumn. I would start taking out my winter clothes and put warm weather things away for a day or two, then promptly switch them around again. This would happen multiple times a month, until I finally decided to keep a single pair of fall clothes out for the next chilly day instead of overturning my wardrobe every week. I got too accustomed to a September that felt like July, so once the temperature stopped coming above 75 degrees regularly, it felt very odd.

I think the other reason fall feels different this year is because we're all growing up. The people I remember as freshmen during my first year at Uni are seniors now, worrying about college applications. My classmates and I are experiencing the horrors of junior year as described to us earlier, starting to worry about the SAT and ACT and turning in school assignments on time. We're getting closer and closer to become adults and forced to become more independent so we can survive in the real world. When I realize that time is passing by so quickly, I sort of want to pause and rewind to summer so I don't need to think about all the tests, papers, and activities I need to complete by Monday. Thanks to the drastic increase in my to-do list since school started, I've started to associate the season of fall with stress. I see the little squirrels dashing around preparing for winter and I think, 'hey, they're more on task than I am. I should start studying for that Calc quiz.'

Now that it really is fall, I finally get to see the occasional splash of color here and there from a big ginkgo or a proud maple. But compared to last year, there are many trees that have yet to get with the program and stubbornly refuse to change color, as if they are loathe to let go of the long summer's warmth. And I don't blame them. I kind of want it to be summer again too.

Handprints

There are so many senior handprints decorating the halls of Uni. Sometimes, I just spend a free period scanning the walls, finding interesting and hidden ones. There are many beautiful handprints, especially among last year's graduating class. There are cute handprints, like the penguin and pikachu holding hands/paws/flippers near the senior alcove. There's a hidden pair on the ceiling of the little niche that leads to the girl's restroom on the first floor spelling 'Illuminati confirmed.'

One day, I noticed a big, bright red handprint near the north door. I'd seen it before, but it never really registered in my mind. I stared at it for a while. When I squinted, I could barely make out a handprint shape. Seems like that senior stuck his hand in a bucket of paint, slapped his paint-covered hand on the wall, and smeared it around. Since it was such a vivid red, with extra streaks on the outside of the 'handprint,' it almost looked like someone had recently bashed their head into the wall, then dipped their finger into their blood, wrote their name, and drew a smiley face.

(That was a little odd. Sorry.)

I wondered why this senior decided to make his handprint like that, in comparison to several of his buddies' handprints nearby, which were relatively neat and nice. Was he feeling lazy? Or did he deliberately make this his legacy? This senior's handprint left so much hidden information about him, forever memorialized in paint (well, forever until the paint chips off). In fact, each handprint tells a different story about their person. Several might say, "my owner likes art and making a big effort." Others say, "my owner did this to get it over with." Furthermore, most people wrote their names next to their handprint, which can also tell us much about their person. Several beautiful cursive names say, "my owner is neat." Some less elegantly written names say, "my owner's mind moves faster than their hands."

But who knows, perhaps that person with beautiful script and artistic handprint had the messiest locker in their class. Only if you knew them, would you understand the hidden clues they left. We're surrounded by these mysterious handprints everyday, so we don't think too much about them. But real people left these legacies behind, people that could be barely younger than your older sibling or years older than you parents. Chew on that for a little bit.

Sickness

I've noticed that something - or rather, many somethings - have been going around the school lately. Many people have caught a bug, causing trashcans to be filled with tissues and the awkward sounds of suppressed coughs in a silent classroom. I know this tends to happen at Uni a lot, since our students come (or are forced to come) to school when ill, but I feel like this time is slightly different, and it might be because I had the bug this time. I was one of those kids that went up to the front of the room to grab a tissue every five minutes and depleted an entire bag of foul tasting cough drops in two weeks.

I've been sick for almost three weeks now. I've been getting better, but each time I think I'll be free of feeling like my head is stuffed with cotton balls, I come down with something new. A stomach bug. A cold. Both at the same time at one point, which was not fun. The latest is a combo of the cold that was going away and the fever + chills + generally feeling crappy symptoms my little brother was showing over the weekend.

Although I do think that last combo was inevitable (babysitting my sick brother when I wasn't completely recovered was not good for either of us), I think most of my earlier sicknesses could have been avoided. How? By not going to school. At school, there are other kids that I could get sick from and also infect. In the Japanese 4 class, we have eight people. At one point, four of us were sick, and we all happened to sit on the same side of the room. We joked that we were being isolated on the 'sick side.' Most of us regained our health, but not before Person A of the 'sick side' got my hacking cough and I got a perpetually sprinting nose from Person B of the 'sick side.' Then people on the supposed 'healthy' side began getting ill, and the whole joke caved in on itself. It's not fun anymore when everyone's trying to learn about complex Japanese greetings and groan and joke around about the many mistakes we made due to our ignorance on last year's Japan Trip, when people are passing the tissue box back and forth, back and forth, putting their germs on the box which will transfer to whoever touches the box next.

I admit that I am feeling a bit mad at the other sick people at Uni that went to school and happened to infect me, causing me to feel miserable for so long, but then again, I'm one of the sick and have definitely done my fair share of infecting and spreading the misery. To avoid more sad and sick people, I would like to make a general observation and ask a favor. As Uni students, we tend to be perpetually tired, since we stress ourselves with homework and ridiculous amounts of extracurriculars. We already lack sleep, but sickness causes us to feel more tired, which causes us to have lower productivity in doing anything, which causes more loss of sleep, which makes us even more lethargic, and so on. You're not doing your body any good by doing that, so at least skip soccer practice and the violin lesson or whatever and sleep. Your body and your peers will thank you. So, please stay home when you're sick. I bet that you've all thought at some point that 'it's just a cold, I'm fine, I need to go take that math test today,'  but no. Stay home, hydrate, and sleep. 

I've been told advice like this many times before and disregarded it. I finally took the advice to rest yesterday, and I wish I listened earlier. After sleeping much of the afternoon yesterday and most of today, I'm feeling much better. The perpetually sprinting nose has slowed to a walk, my hacking cough is mostly gone, and it feels like at least some of the cotton balls have been removed from my head. I was actually able to write most of this without having to take breaks because my brain wasn't functioning and my fingers felt like lead. I do hate missing school, as I did today and yesterday, since it causes so much work to pile up. But I feel so much better, because I know I can get things done much quicker than I have these last couple of weeks. It'll be high productivity from now on!

(Well, at least for a while, until I get sick again. As a Uni student, it's inevitable. Wahoo.)

Waiting

In life, one of the worst things that we have to do is wait. Pain and dying are worse, but waiting is a close second. Waiting in line to buy your lunch when you feel like your stomach is going to turn inside out from hunger, waiting in convenient care feeling miserable while surrounded by other miserable people, waiting for that stupid bell to ring already to you can make a mad dash to the bathroom right after class ends. But sometimes there are those waits that take weeks, months even, that seem to enjoy purposefully disturbing your sleep and your life. As a constantly stressed person who heavily relies on sleep to function as a human being, I dislike waiting, whether it's for a short or long time.

One of those painfully long waits just ended for me. The cause of that particular wait was a cast list. I dance with the Champaign Urbana Ballet, and every winter we dance the Nutcracker. We had our yearly auditions for the Nutcracker on the Saturday of August, but the cast list was not posted until yesterday. It was nearly three weeks in between audition and posting. That wait is always nerve-wracking, but since this year there was a longer gap than usual between auditions and posting, the wait was nearly unbearable for me.

In the first week or so of the wait, I found myself not thinking about the list too much (only every couple of hours or so). It was easier to put it out of my mind, I suppose, when the day of the posting was rather far away. But towards the end of the three weeks, as the suspense rose, I found myself constantly thinking about it. It got to a point that I had to actively try to think of something else to push the recurring thoughts to the back of my head, but they always came forward sooner or later. 'I wonder who's going to be Rose Queen this year? Well, this person did a really good job at the audition and is also pretty good at partnering. Oh, but that person would be great as Ice Fairy too! I wonder who else...'

Then that day, posting day, finally came. We were told the cast list would be up on the company website by 5pm, but I, along with many other fellow dancers, started checking the day before. We would anxiously check between classes and reload the website, disappointed every time it showed no link to the cast list. When we passed by each other in the halls, we would greet each other with a disappointed face and a 'nope, still not up.' During our free periods and lunch, we would check almost obsessively. Take the last bite of the apple and check for the cast list. So the limit of f(x) equals 4.5, check the work, then check for the cast list.

Finally, 3:50 pm. The last bell rang, and I nervously whipped out my phone to reload the page for the nth time that day when I noticed I had a little notification of a text. I briefly glanced at it, expecting it to be something from my parents about when ballet would end that day. All I saw was 'spoiler alert' and 'cavalry,' but since cavalry was a role in the Nutcracker and the only thing that could be spoiled for me were my roles, I jammed my eyes shut and unlocked my phone to make that stupid little notification go away. I wanted to see my roles straight from the cast list. It's always more satisfying that way, ending the wait with your own hands.

The phone unlocked right to the webpage where the link would come up, since that was the last (and pretty much only) thing I had used my phone for that day. I reloaded the page, waited impatiently, then got more impatient when it wouldn't load. I shouldered my backpack and headed out of the classroom, heading towards the lockers of a couple other dancers, all the while staring at my blank screen and willing it to finish loading faster.

Before I even got remotely close to my friends' lockers, I ran into them. They were already exclaiming congratulations, and I had to tell them to 'please hold up my stupid webpage won't load oh it loaded oh crap where's the list I can't find it oh never mind I found it argh it's not loading again...ah. It loaded.'

That entire time, since I saw the 'spoiler alert' message, I felt that stomach-dropping feeling of anticipation mixed with fear and excitement. It's a little bit like what you feel at the top of the roller coaster ride, when the coaster is moving extremely slowly, when you know in seconds you're going to be hurtling down a hill at high speed. In this case, the long wait would be over in seconds, and I subconsciously realized that I could go about my life and sleep well again, not lying awake wondering which friend will get which role.

My friends had their phones out as well, all scrolling through the list. Other Uni dancers trickled by to join us, all exclaiming congratulations and crowding in the middle of the hallway. Our mini party dispersed after a group hug, big smiles on everyone's faces.

The wait was over. The cast list was out, congratulations were in order for everyone else at the studio, and rehearsals would begin soon, but never soon enough. And so I wait again, this time for the beginning of rehearsals. Then the next wait would be for performances. Then the next cast list, and so on.

In the future, it seems that I have a lot of waiting in store for me. But so does everyone else. School, like ballet, is also a serious of waits, although many times the wait is filled with more dread than anticipation, especially for tests and essays. But those are little waits, the short, easier waits. There's also many long waits in store for the near future, such as waiting for your SAT/ACT score to come out and waiting for that college letter to arrive. Since our lives could be seen as just a series of waits, little and big, I suppose I should relax a little, take each new event at its own pace, and keep on waiting.

Matsuri

Last Sunday, Japan House hosted a matsuri (which translates to 'festival') to celebrate 'food, drink, arts and Asian culture.' This is their third year hosting this festival, and each year more and more people come. I had volunteered last year and was confused for most of it, but it was super fun, so this year I volunteered again. I thought that I would be slightly less confused this time around, but hings had been changed and added from last year, including the layout of the festival, so I ended up floundering about for an hour or so before finally getting the hang of things. This year, I volunteered for the entire festival, plus a little longer before the official start and after to clean up, so it added up to about six hours. I was exhausted by the end, but with the aid of caffeine from my generous friend, chairs, and the general excitement that tends to emanate from a good festival, I was able to make it to the end.

I assigned to the ticket booth tent right outside of Japan House, which was fortunately within hearing distance of the main performance tent. Various strains of music would float over the lake to our ears as we faced masses of people asking questions and buying tickets. People would usually come to us in waves, so we would have minutes of being able to listen peacefully and sip water, to a half hour of chatter and trying to help three groups at once. It was a tiring place to be, but we were able to see and interact with many kinds of people. The most notable of which would be the guy in the full body Spiderman costume. Last year, that person (I'm assuming he was the same) wore the Spiderman costume with a blonde wig done up in pigtails that went down to his waist. This year, the costume was paired with a short, spiky blonde wig with a green heart headband. I've been wondering if he was advertising the cosplay tent, or if he was a visitor that just showed up in costume because he wanted to. Either way, he's done at least two things: make himself an attraction wherever he went in the festival and earn not just a little respect from many of us volunteers for his dedication in wearing his costume, as I'm fairly certain he wore it for the entire festival both this year and last year. It wasn't cool on those days either.

This year, the visitors to Matsuri were more diverse than usual. I had to help more than a couple people who did not speak English very well figure out how our ticket system worked and heard around half the conversations taking place in a language other than English. I saw people of all shapes and sizes; there was a little girl who barely reached above my knee dressed in a fluffy pink yukata (a summer kimono) and a guy who looked to be about seven feet tall playing with his kids (well, that's the estimated height from me, a rather short person). It's always great to see so many different kinds of people being able to mingle in one place, especially when there have been some recent events (which I will not get into on this blog) which would have made it difficult to host this sort of cultural event. It's especially great that it is in such an accessible place for us, in our little home of Champaign-Urbana.