Writing Announcement! + Halfway Done Highschool

"Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life." - Stephen King

I have never read Stephen King's works because the horror genre scares me a bit, and I have yet to traverse into those waters. (If you have good recommendations which are not too terrifying, please comment!) HOWEVER, I know that Stephen King was not happy without writing at least 2,000 words every single day. As a teenager who loves writing, but isn't the best at it, I want to get better, and so I'm following in Mr. King's footsteps and aiming to write 1,000 words every day until the end of the summer (I am starting this on July 8). This means that I have 56 days until September 2nd (the start of the school year) and about 55,882 words to go until then. Hopefully I can exceed this goal and maybe hit 75,000? Or maybe I'm getting my hopes up too much. I'm going to spread this work out across these few mediums:

1. My blog! Hello!
2. My journal 
3. A potential novel of mine
4. Many short stories or things I'll write based on prompts
5. I'm taking summer school, so I'll just be nice and add my physics lab reports or something here. 

You, my readers, will be accountable for my writing habits!! So please help me or send some encouragement along the way. This will also ensure I write more on my blog hahaha.

Note: I'll also try my best not to add in too many extra words in an attempt to reach my word count 😂😉

Sorry for this extremely long introduction. This blog post actually has another purpose, and that is to celebrate/mourn my halfway point in high school! I just finished grade 10 this year in the pre-IB program and it is:

1. Pretty scary
2. Pretty exciting

Throughout grade 9 and 10, there have been many memorable moments. I'll probably bore all of you by recounting every single math lesson I've sat through, so I'll just write something a bit nicer. 

Starting in Grade 9 was really stressful for me, but I'm glad that I knew a couple people which I could share the high school transition with. Definitely one of the greatest defining moments of Grade 9 was Mr. Jacob's science class. When I first walked into his class (he was my homeroom), I knew that guy was crazy!!!! He wore this ridiculous hat of a volcano and spent the entire first day talking about things none of us really knew. 

We also had a full semester assignment, which consisted of a report on a specific subject you were really interested in. Mine was green tea (I don't know why I chose it...) but even though I spent so much time on it beforehand, I still ended up crunching it at 11:00 p.m. before the due date! It was a stressful time, but the best part about events like that is that you can look back and laugh at it. Or you could learn your lesson to never procrastinate again, and I hope I've done more of that.

Grade 9 was really fun and I spent a lot of time laughing with friends, telling jokes, and being silly in geography class... (come on everyone does that). However, Grade 10 was a little more serious and a lot more challenging (hey, is that a bad thing?). Now, me and all my friends' lunch times were seperate so lunch was more sad and depressing at times when we missed the prescence of others, but what made up for it was the fun material in class!!

I felt like in Grade 9, everything that I learned was something that I could easily pick up, but Grade 10 was more thrilling and the subjects were just a lot better! So to all the grade 9s reading this, if you find your classes boring right now, don't worry, because Grade 10 is a lot better. It's harder for sure, but it's more fulfilling because you put your brain to work to process so much information and it's worth it! I really loved my World Religions course because it was interesting to learn the history behind the major religions (even if some things were wrong and I had to double check...)

In Grade 10, my DECA team also made it to ICDC, the international competition in Florida!! That was an experience I'd never forget (and now I kind of want to write an entire seperate post on that). The support from so many schools and even a collaboration with the City of Mississauga was mindblowing and I'm so proud of what we'd accomplished. Shoutout to Inez and Anny, the best teammates ever. You guys were amazing!

Looking to the future, I do feel more anxious because Grade 11 is basically the year where you have to lock everything in and finalize what you want to pursue after high school. I've heard many stories about sleepless nights over the IB program's rigorous routine, but that's a problem for September.

It's scary, but I'm doing my best, and I have faith that Our Lady will grant me the grace to follow God's will wherever He is leading me.

See you later, readers!