I don't wanna grow up...

My sister is obsessive. Painfully so, in fact. She watched one documentary, decided she wanted to become a Marine Biologist, and has since researched colleges and requirements for the programs and already begun having a panic attack about how much work it will be. My sister, by the way, is thirteen.

This makes me feel guilty. This makes me feel like, perhaps, I should go about researching college requirements and where I want to go beyond the vague idea I have always had. After all I'm 16 and college, with all its requirements, is beginning to loom over me. Inevitably this will all end in a panic attack (because I'm already tired, stressed, and in pain--on a side note, I just had oral surgery to remove a benign tumor in my gums that was formed by inflammation in my gums that was caused by a bone spur on my jaw, and they also took out that bit of my jaw, and there is now a giant goddamn hole in my mouth that is slowly healing. That was last week, and while I'm off the vicodin I'm still sleepy and downing motrin by the fist full, and trying to get back to regular life is Not Working Well, and I hate everything and need a nap.)

But it's something that needs to get done. In fact, I need to start taking community college classes in the fall semester to finish highschool with any sort of passable education. Where I will find time for this with any possibility of continuing to have a life I do not know. Oh lovely science and higher maths, you bitches, I am not looking forward to you.

I'm off to research college :(

The Musings of the Sickly

I feel the need to post something. Not because, at this moment, anything particularly interesting is happening, but because I just feel the need to put something down in words. That's not to say that nothing interesting has been happening--it most certainly has been!--just that right now I am laid up, high on Vicodin, after having oral surgery. And there is nothing that can make the world interesting when your jaw is aching and you can't focus your eyes for an extended period of time.

Of course, this gives me time to catch up on my blog and book reading, and maybe write a bit. All of these things have sadly been falling by the wayside of late, as I have been running from pillar to post doing all sorts of crazy things (learning to bellydance! watching my sister learn parkour! taking horseback riding lessons! volunteering at The Grace Foundation of Northern California, which is a truly lovely place, and helping school some of their horses! hanging out with friends! taking pictures of dead cows ! getting in shape for the summer! trying to fit some family time in there somewhere!). Such is Unschooling life.

Several times recently I have been asked 'how do you fit school work in between everything else you're doing?' (mostly by kids I know who go to school, and envy all the time I have to run about doing things while they sit in class rooms). The answer to those questions is: I don't 'fit schoolwork in' anywhere. Living my life is 'schoolwork', and yes, occasionally I have to break out the math textbook (which I really need to catch up on in preparation for taking a community college math course next year), but that's part of my life too. One of my friends, who is a homeschooling mom and also the mother of three of my friends (yes, shocking, children can be friends with parents!) put it best in a conversation I had with her awhile ago. She said that the word school really has no place in the description of what we're doing, we're learning by living our lives. I wish I could remember her exact words, because they were much more eloquent than that, but it gets the point across.

I agree with her to an extent. School is not a word I associate with what I'm doing at the moment. School is a word I associate with institutionalized education, with spending the majority of my time being force fed useless information, with discomfort and lack of personal expression. None of that has anything to do with the way I am currently living my life. I'm learning useful things, I'm re-learning how to be a functional member of society (and the ways in which I don't want to be what is thought of as a normal, functional member of society), I'm comfortable with my life, I'm capable of expressing myself through words and humor and physical appearance in ways that would not be thought of as 'acceptable' within a school environment. I'm not sitting in front of textbooks, learning the same thing everyone else in the country is expected to learn, and not really processing any of it.

So School is not what I am doing. School, really, has no place in a description of my life. And my life is how I am learning. Un-schooling is not really a full or positive description of that, but seeing as it's the best one we have I'll continue to use it to find people like me, and to explain myself to people who don't understand it.


I hope this is a coherent expression of my thoughts, though I certainly didn't start writing with the intention of going off on this tangent. I guess I'll have to check back when I'm sobered up and no longer in pain.