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.