Hex codes and half-priced Helvetica

Over the last few weeks, we have set foot into a new dimension of our yearbook experience:  page design.  The photography aspect has died down for the moment; at this time of year, there is no sports teams to capture, no school events that need coverage, and it is still too early for club pictures to be of any immediate concern, and we have taken advantage of this lull to finally delve into the realm of book layout that we have been neglecting thus far.  Jessica and I have had a few jobs behind the scenes prior to the grand opening of the yearbook editing website for the entire committee; I've already mentioned the page outline I made a month or two ago, and in addition to that, we've also had to select the colours and fonts to be used in the book.  The colour selection was fairly easy, but choosing the perfect fonts was a difficult decision.  You don't want too many or the book looks cluttered and disjointed, but with too few you don't really have any options to pick from.  We settled on five, and choosing those was no small decision.  Some were really neat, but they were a bit too crazy to be of any practical use, and others seemed too juvenile.  I should also mention that most of the options were essentially facsimiles of existing fonts, made 'completely different' by using a hip name to appeal to a teenage audience.

Case in point:  "Baby Maker"

We ended up going with "Coolvetica" (a shameless Helvetica clone), "Burning Facts" (having a sci-fi, digital clock-ish feel without being too out there), "Modern Art" (Agency FB meets Impact), "Ebony" (an innocent enough sans-serif), and "MacBeth" (a bit more ornate and perfect for graduation and more classy things like that).  We also got the default font, "Lynn" (it's definitely not Times New Roman at all).

A few days ago we had our first layout meeting.  Since I had the outline, I ended up having to organize the handing out of pages, making sure everybody had something to work on and no two people thought that they were in charge of the same page.  I ended up with a pretty eclectic array of pages to work on myself; I decided to do all the dividers so that they would be consistent, and since the software forces you to edit a two-page spread at a time and two people can't be working on the same two-page spread without a lot of technical blunders ensuing, I therefore became responsible for all the odds and ends that happened to be beside a divider:  Student council, best of the year survey, sports candids, and the runners up from the cover contest.  Jessica, Adrian, and I are also teaming up to make the IB page, seeing as we all have a vested interest in making sure it's awesome.

All in all, we managed to get most of the pages accounted for.  Someone is going to have to deal with all the staff, grad, and class pictures, but that won't be relevant until later.  There's also a few sports pages that have yet to be found a home, but as other pages get finished, I'm sure that someone will end up needing something more to work on.

I haven't got to spend a lot of time with the software yet, seeing as I was busy with organizational duties during our computer lab meeting, but from the bit I've got to play around with it so far it seems quite similar to what we used in junior high, although with a few changes.  It'll take a little bit for me to get used to the new format, but hopefully I'll be on my way to mastery in no time.

Let's see how far we've come

A reflection on my first quarter in IB CAS, to be submitted to my program coordinator. A general summary of my activities thus far are as follows, interwoven with an analysis of my experiences in attempting to reach the program's delineated outcomes.

The first and arguably most substantial of the activities with which I've become involved over this initial portion of the CAS program is yearbook. Last year the school yearbook suffered a notable dearth of student involvement, and upon the retirement of the previous yearbook coordinator last June, September began with no organization whatsoever on who would take responsibility for the 2012-2013 yearbook. Staff were unwilling to shoulder the burden of such a project on their own, and with no central body to organize it, the first few months of school passed with the issue altogether ignored. Throughout junior high school my friend Jessica and I thoroughly enjoyed participating in our school's yearbook committee, but the lack of opportunities for student involvement had left us disillusioned last year. Upon discovering that the book was now in limbo for this year, the pair of us created and submitted a proposal for the formation of a new yearbook committee, and after a time our proposal was ratified.

That is not to say that everything after that point was smooth sailing; on the contrary, I would say that this is the activity in which I have encountered the most obstacles. In any committee one will no doubt find many conflicting personalities, and dealing with the concerns and agendas of a multitude of different people has been without a doubt one of the most difficult and most educational experiences I've encountered thus far in CAS. I've learnt that, no matter how well formulated a plan and how passionately you desire to be able to follow it to its conclusion, when working with others, compromises and sacrifices are inevitable. Initially, our plan had been to make simply an IB yearbook, and it wasn't until that idea had been irrevocably vetoed that we even imagined concerning ourselves with this project. One of our biggest changes we wished to make to the previous yearbook format was to release the book at the end of June instead of the following September to enable yearbook signings, but despite heavy advocacy on our part, that plan was dismissed by school administration.

However, every failure presents a new opportunity, and being shut down in these fashions opened the doors to new possibilities and workarounds. Without being dissuaded from constructing an IB yearbook we would never have dreamed of taking on the entire school yearbook, and being forbade from changing the date of the books' release forced us to entertain new possibilities: we now plan to purchase signing pages that arrive in June and can be attached to the books after they arrive in September, enabling us to have the best of both worlds.

Through yearbook, I've interacted with numerous other people as well, in a more collaborative sense than the vetoing dynamic that comes with trying to sell a proposal to one's higher-ups. Sometimes, working with people on equal footing proves to be even more of a struggle. Some students on our committee desire to keep the book exactly the same as it has always been; others advocate radical changes. Some want a formal and professional book; others want it fun and 'not boring'. Balancing such viewpoints is a large task, particularly when you're in a position of relative authority yet are younger than some of the other committee members, who think that by virtue of their age they should get the last word. Nonetheless, Jessica and I have thus far proved fairly successful in incorporating the ideas of others and our own ideas, as well as keeping things moving and not getting too behind or stagnated. Most fall sports had almost finished their seasons by the time our proposal had been approved, but we still were able to act quickly and get everything photographed that was required, helped in no small part by Mr. Toms, our teacher supervisor. I personally designed the outline for the book, which proved to be no small task, and as a committee we even decided to create a cover contest to garner more student interest and involvement in the yearbook. All in all, thus far my experiences in yearbook have been both a learning experience and a relative success, and I anticipate this feeling will only continue as we get closer and closer to our final deadline and the unveiling of the product that we have been working so hard to provide for our school.

Out of all the CAS activities I've done, only two have reached their completion at this early stage of the program, and they therefore most definitely warrant some discussion. The first of the two was GISHWHES, a week-long experience I undertook along with an assortment of my classmates around Halloween. I was in a sense the leader of this project, and in that way I found it a bit more exhausting than it would have been had I merely played a part. I came across the event online, the offbeat acronym standing for “the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen”. It is an annual event embracing creativity and insanity; in teams of fifteen, one attempts to create the strange items from an oversized list, aiming to accumulate the greatest point total out of all the teams from all across the world. While for most of my teammates the event began when the list was released, my adventure started as soon as I first clicked on that link. My first challenge was to convince fourteen of my classmates to join forces with me, which wasn't as simple as it initially sounds. Some people didn't want to be involved, others were unsure, and the deadline for registration was fast approaching. With mere days prior to the cutoff only a handful of us were registered, and with so many people changing their mind from in to out to in again, I was finding keeping everyone organized hectic enough, and the activity was still yet to begin! There came a point where we realized that we weren't going to have enough people from our class to fill a fifteen-person team, and I eventually had to petition for members from the grade twelve class as well. It was a manic few days as I struggled to get everyone registered in time, but all was well that ended well.

If organization was key during the registration stage, it was even more so once the event began and we were faced with a list of over one hundred and fifty nigh-impossible tasks. I wouldn't have imagined an event so fueled by creativity would require such high levels of careful planning, but that it did. At this point in time we were caught in the thralls of IB, with tests and projects galore, and in the midst of this I was sitting in my room, attempting to create a stop motion film using Playmobil depicting the loading of Noah's ark; Cassy and Sawini were taking stuffed animals on field trips to the grocery store; Jessica was putting a wig on a carefully-carved Jack O'Lantern. We had so much else on our plate to juggle, yet we were taking time out of our precious schedule to engage in such insanity. I think that, above all, that was what struck me most in my GISHWHES experience. More than the organizational skills I was forced to hone, more than the unreal levels of teamwork required, it was this: what I was doing made no sense. I had a history test I could be stressing about, I had a thousand other things on my mind, but I was choosing to spend my precious evening coaxing plastic animals onto ramps made of jewelry containers. And why?

I think that it was in that moment, somewhere between the twentieth and the twenty-first time my first plastic peacock slid back down to the bottom of the ramp when I tried to set its partner down beside it, that I was pondering that question and was suddenly struck by the answer. In life; in the big picture; in ten years from now, the reason you're doing these things is for the experiences. When you're so focused on completing a task for a certain aim, often you can't see the forest for the trees, in a sense. You expect to get from A to B in accomplishing said objective; you often don't notice how the path from A to B can also give you insights into C and D and O. It's when you make time for the things that you have absolutely no time for that you learn the things you don't expect and not merely the objective B that you are planning to reach; to have a balanced life you kind of need to open yourself up to these sort of activities once and a while. I'm not much of an artist, and I'm also a bit more reserved than is required for most of your typical acts of insanity, so I suspected that improving in those two regards would be my B in GISHWHES. And it was, but even more than that I had the opportunity to bond with my classmates, improve my ability to keep everyone on task, and I became what I would consider just a slightly better rounded person. Sometimes you need to take a bit of a break from stressing out over pretty much everything to smell the roses (or dress them up in funny hats), and I'd say that's a pretty important life lesson.

The second of my completed activities was dodgeball, one of my two action activities thus far alongside playing provincial ringette. Dodgeball was a rather short season; our team was comprised of IB kids, and we're far from the school's top athletes, although we did manage to hold our own and do considerably better than the IB team did last year. I suppose there isn't too much to say about our brief dodgeball stint, but I would highlight three parts of the activity as most important towards the aims of the CAS program: teamwork, integrity, and magnanimity. Our team was comprised of students from both the grade eleven and twelve IB classes, and I therefore had the opportunity to get to know better some of the grade twelves that I had previously only known in passing. Working with students in my class is also always a great experience, but obviously much less exclusive to the dodgeball activity. Integrity is also something that dodgeball lends itself to quite well, and it is quite easy and consequence free to take either the high or the low roads. There is a referee, but with so many balls in the fray at one time, they very infrequently call someone out, and so it is therefore up to your own moral conscience whether after being hit to leave the playing field or act like it never happened. I won't pretend that the thought never crossed my mind when playing; nobody likes getting out, especially when you don't want to let your team down, but what really is the point of playing if you're going to cheat to get the upper hand? We may have lost some of our games, but we did so honestly and the ones we won were won of our own skill. Everybody in the tournament was quite magnanimous in victory, bringing me to my final point. Being both a gracious winner and a gracious loser is a very important skill to have, and it's hard not to feel respect for someone who, after defeating you in a close match, will come over and say without a note of smugness or haughtiness, “Thanks for the game! You guys played well.”

I'm also currently partaking in a few other ongoing projects: provincial ringette, as was previously mentioned, as well as writing for the school paper, and participating in a daily 750 words challenge to improve my writing skills. With regards to 750 Words, I've been finding it to provide an interesting perspective into myself in addition to increasing my writing proficiency; by writing a minimum of 750 words for the past twenty four days my total is over twenty two thousand, and upon forcing myself to write such an amount in such a stream of consciousness way I often start exploring thoughts, opinions, and ideas that I had never previously considered. Although I've been doing this exercise for less than a month I'm already seeing a marked improvement in my writing speed and quality, and I truly think that this experience is helping me gain a greater understanding of self.

It's hard to imagine three quarters still remain of the CAS program; it seems as if I have made such large strides already, and I'm excited to see how my current activities progress in the months and years to come, as well as whatever new projects I pick up along the way.

Hot off the press (well, lukewarm)

It's been a while since my last update on the newspaper front, and that means two issues of the Rural Reader have come and gone.  In November I was responsible for writing a review of Reached, the final book in a series that I've been a fan of since the first installment hit shelves back in 2010.  The novel was released right during exam time and my article was due immediately afterwards, so I was under a bit of a time crunch to get it read and reviewed, but it proved to be a good diversion and provided me with a welcome break from studying.  In December I interviewed Ms. Riggs, asking her questions about what she's read, is currently reading, and will read.  It was a less labour-intensive article on my part, but our deadline in December was rather short-notice due to us wanting to have the paper released before Christmas break, and I felt like it was a nice change of pace from the types of articles I'd done in the past.  This month I'm getting back into the reviewing game; actually, it'll be a quite similar situation to back in November.  I'm writing a review on Shades of Earth, the final novel in Beth Revis's Across the Universe trilogy (another series I started reading when the first book was released two years ago), and I'm going to be in the same boat this time:  the novel comes out tomorrow, and my article is due this Friday, so I'll be pressed for time to get it read and reviewed while keeping up on my schoolwork and the upcoming exams.  Still, I've been a little slacking on the reading front as of late, so it'll be good to back into the literary swing of things.

New year, more CAS

I've been ringing in the new year with a brand-spanking-new CAS activity, and I really think this one is going to be a great personal challenge:  it's called 750 Words.  I read about it -- as I seem to do with everything -- online.  It's an initiative to write 750 words on any topic, once a day, every day, and it comes in the form of 750words.com.  It keeps track of your postings -- you can go back and read any of your previous entries, although they are completely private from the rest of the world -- and it even tells you some pretty neat statistics, both about any given entry, and about all your entries in general.  For example, each day it will analyze your word choice and tell you what were your biggest emotions and concerns were in the text, such as upset, death, relationships, affectionate, money, and so on.  It also tells you the mindset the entry was written in based on four spectra:  introvert/extrovert, positive/negative, certain/uncertain, and thinking/feeling.  It tells you if you primarily wrote about the past/present/future, about sight/touch/hearing, about I/us/you/them; it even lists the words you used most frequently in the entry.

This is my chart from today, showing the words per minute I typed at throughout the entry.  The green dot represents the moment when I reached the daily goal of 750 words, and the green line represents the number of words in the entry at any given point in time.

As you can tell from the above photograph, you get badges added to your page to keep track of your streak.  I am entered in the monthly challenge for January, so I am attempting to keep that streak going throughout the entire month, and then continue it into February.

So, what do I hope to gain from all of this?  I always have loved writing, but I never seem to have the time or occasion to do much of it.  750 words is a really carefully thought out amount; it's not so long as to be like a novel, but it is not something you can just whip off in a few minutes on whatever topic.  You need to make a conscious effort to sit down, set aside twenty to thirty minutes, find a prompt, and just write continuously, and it is so very different from any other writing experience.  In the school newspaper, you're writing to convey information; same with school assignments.  This type of writing can be stories, reflections, journal entries, thoughts... I've actually been quite surprised with what I've written about so far.  Because of the length entailed and the stream-of-consciousness nature of continuous writing, it ends up going in directions I didn't expect, and I'm learning some things about myself and some opinions I hold that I never really noticed before.

I've found that writing every day is not easy.  Since it requires that conscious effort, it's not really something that can just become habit.  You've got to focus and push yourself to do it each day, but I really think this will improve my writing skills, and also help me understand myself and my motivations just a little bit better.

I focus quite a bit in my writing on the sensation of touch more so than sight or hearing; my writing contains a lot of "us" as opposed to "them" or "you" or "I".  I use 31% more conjunctions than the average person.

I can tell that 750 Words is going to be a very rich activity, and while it is definitely a commitment, it is one that I am prepared to make.

Out not with a bang but a whimper

It seems like it has been ages since my last blog post, but I guess that is what the Christmas season does to you.  Everything gets so busy, but even though I haven't posted in a while, I've still made quite a bit of progress on the CAS front.  I guess the most pressing CAS update is a review of our dodgeball season... we lost our last match, winning one game and losing two.  It was a disappointing defeat, but we played quite hard and made them work for the win.  All in all, I think dodgeball was an enjoyable and interesting choice for an action activity.  I now know why they have two separate divisions for girls and guys... Aid and Pat rocked, although us girls weren't too shabby ourselves.

Dodgeball superstars, right here

We were both gracious winners and losers, and I think we represented IB well towards the rest of the school.  We worked really well as a team, and I believe that this whole dodgeball ordeal has brought us closer together not just within our class, but with the grade twelves as well.  We may not have ended the dodgeball season with a bang, but we improved a lot from where the IB team was last year, and I can't wait to continue the tradition in 2013!

Swimming in post-its

Things with yearbook have been moving along steadily.  We've decided to hold an art competition to find the perfect cover for our yearbook, a plan that has been approved by administration, so we'll be getting that underway soon.  Other of our ideas were vetoed by the higher-ups; we wanted to make a Facebook group where students could submit their pictures for yearbook use -- carefully moderated, of course -- but unfortunately it was deemed against school policy.  I've been taking some photographs myself lately, both of Movember and Spirit Week, but my current greatest undertaking is creating a comprehensive layout for the book.  Six pieces of paper, eighty-eight small boxes, sticky notes galore, rulers, pens, last year's book, calculators... I quickly found making an outline is no small matter.  It also involved much more math than I'd anticipated; our school has decreased in student population substantially since last year, but with the help of my trusty GDC I was able to determine how many pages I would need for both grad and student photos -- down two of each from last year.  I tried to leave us as much leeway as possible for unknowns that may spring up later in the year, with one extra page for clubs and one-and-a-half extra events pages, and also to give some groups that are usually under-represented in the yearbook a little coverage, such as a split page for drama/art, an IB page, and a full page for student council near the beginning instead of just an entry in the clubs section, not to mention a page for our yearbook committee at the very end.  I tried to deliver on my promise of more fun content as well, with a page reserved for a best of 2012/2013 survey, sports candids, general candids, a page both for chem free and for chem free awards instead of just one split, a page for the runners-up from our cover contest, an extra fun page for either confessionals, imagine-ifs, or whatever other sort of quirky thing we decided to run, plus I still found room to include all the vitals from last year.  Our next committee meeting is tomorrow at lunch, and hopefully everyone will be happy with what I've come up with.  I know we have a few people on the committee who love to hate change, but with any luck they'll like this layout just as much as I do.

IB victorious

Today marked the Dodgeball debut of IB Dodgin, and we had very large shoes to fill:  last year the IB team lost their first game in thirty seconds.  With such high expectations on ourselves, the nine of us were determined to lose with a shred of dignity.  We didn't.  Instead, we won.  It was a great team effort, and when Morgan hit their last player, we all flooded in from the sidelines, high-fiving and hugging her like we had just won the championship instead of the first game in a round-robin best-of-three match.  The grade twelve team we played against were determined to not lose to a bunch of IB nerds, and they came at us in the second game with a vengeance.  Patrick was a star, and we won again.  We had not only lasted longer than our predecessors, we had won our first match.  I'd love to stop the chronicle there, since our second match of the day involved us getting creamed by the grade eleven athlete preps, but we still put up a good fight.  They were really nice about it too, congratulating us on our previous win after the game, and we were all still ecstatic from raising the bar for future IB generations.  I really felt closer to the grade twelves too, becoming fire-forged teammates with Natalie and Megan, and anything done with my grade eleven classmates is always tons of fun.  Our next game is on Tuesday against a team that supposedly we should have a close game against, and if we win that match, we'll make it into the finals.  Go IB!

Breaking bones and boundaries

Alliterative titles aside, hopefully there won't be any fractures in our near future, but you never know in the world of Dodge.  Our mild-mannered squad of IB nerds have thrown our hat in the dodgeball ring in the name of becoming more involved in our school (and for CAS), and who knows where this (potentially ill-advised) decision will take us.  Dodgeball is kind of a big deal at our school; aside from the biannual musical, I'd say the annual tournament is the most hyped event.  I didn't even consider participating last year; I'd played dodgeball before in gym classes, of course, but I'd never really thought much else of it.  I'm decent enough for phys ed, but playing in a competitive tournament like this is going to be a new experience entirely.  We do have a few secret weapons up our sleeves:  since there is no co-ed league, somehow we managed to talk the coordinators into letting our team play in the girls' category despite having a few boys, and also we're quite likely to be underestimated due to our aforementioned mild-mannered-nerdiness.  Or maybe appropriately estimated, but we do have quite a few athletes on our team (myself included), so perhaps we will have some sort of element of surprise.  In any case, it'll be a great opportunity to bond with our class, the grade twelves, and a few of the Pre-IBs, as well as interact with the school at large, and it will definitely be a step outside my comfort zone.  Our first game is on Thursday; later updates as events unfold.

Silver linings

My ringette team participated in our first tournament of the season this weekend, playing against other provincial teams in the Maritime region. The tournament takes place every year in Miramichi (about three hours away from home), and let's just say our record in past years has not been stellar. We usually come fourth.. out of four teams. In any case, I left history class a few minutes early on Friday, hopped in the car, and drove straight to Miramichi, getting there just in time for our first game at 7:05. We worked hard, but we lost by the entire seven goal spread (in ringette, only up to a seven-goal difference is put up on the scoreboard, and at that point it goes into running time. If the team with less points scores, another of the leading team's points will be displayed on the scoreboard. If that goal causes it to become less than a seven goal spread, the game returns to stopped time). As much of a humiliating defeat our first game was, that team was the hardest in the tournament, and we remained optimistic that we could make a comeback. And that we did. The next day we defeated our opponents by the full seven goal spread, and I even scored the first goal of the game on a great cross-crease pass from my forward partner. I got a few assists too, although my biggest role was in forechecking. After that high, we went into our second game of the day too cocky. By ten minutes in the score was 3-0 for our opponents, and we just didn't seem to be able to pick up our passes. We were starting to get a bit panicked, but then I returned the favour from the previous game and shot my partner a nice cross-crease, and she scored, making it 3-1. Then our team scored again. And again. And again, and we were in the lead. The game wasn't as solid as our first that day, but even after that rocky start we managed to scrape up a 12-7 win (yours truly didn't get any goals, but she did end up in the box for a four-minute double penalty. Oops). With our 2-1 record we made it to the championship game against our heated adversary: the team we were creamed by in our first game. We all were super pumped up before the game, sitting in the dressing room, listening to "300 Violin Orchestra" and our coach's pre-game spiel. We were ready to take them on, ready to turn the tables and claim victory. The game started, and they scored. Again. And again. And again. And for our part, we got penalty after penalty and poor call after poor call. The refs, in all seriousness and with not an ounce of hyperbole, patted some of the opposing team on the head and gave them high fives after they scored. At one point we had three girls in the box, and the referee gave the ring to the other team when it should have been ours, and when our coach tried to talk to him, he said that he would only speak to a captain. Our coach pointed out that the ref had already put all our captains in the penalty box (on bogus calls, I might add), and the ref shrugged and said, "Well, that's too bad". Suffice to say, this is not the story of how the underdogs overcame adversity, defeated the cocky, obnoxious favourites, and won the day. This story ends with us creamed 1-25 (although, thanks to the seven-goal spread, the marginally less humiliating 1-8 was the official score). I guess that's how the underdog/favourite story usually ends when you're not in the running for the best picture Oscar.  While it's not easy to tell from my bellyaching, the tournament went phenomenally for us.  Our team won the silver medal, something I don't think a team from here has ever done before in this tournament.  I personally have been improving a lot; being sixteen years old in a U-19 provincial tournament and competing against the best first year university players isn't exactly the easiest situation to be in, but we still came out second-to-one. We'll see this team again at Nationals, and others that are just as tough, but we are going to work hard, improve, (maybe with a rock-fueled training montage), and by the time this season is over we'll be the odds-defeating underdogs Hollywood has been training us since birth to be.

CAS keeps right on trucking

Exam period has just wrapped up, so recently time for CAS activities has been tight, and time for blogging about them even more so. Still, even if exams have put a slight damper on my regular posting, I've still had a lot of action (and creativity and service) going on lately on the CAS front. I'll save my progress reports on newspaper and ringette for later posts, and dedicate this one to the latest developments with our yearbook committee. Administration has completely vetoed our hopes of getting the book released in June. It's immensely frustrating, since it is difficult to change things and make the book better when we're supposed to be in control yet someone else is holding the reins, but I guess this is one thing I will just have to let go. It really took a toll on my and Jessica's spirits, though; we'd really hoped to be able to move past an outdated tradition and start a new chapter. But, we can't dwell. If we do dwell on this issue, then we won't get anything done. I just hope we won't have to bend our vision even further to jump through these political hoops. In terms of actual, positive progress, we've formed a yearbook committee, which is great. There is one boy on it that was part of the old committee and keeps insisting that the way they used to do things is the 'proper' way to make a yearbook, and there are a couple of grade twelves who think that their seniority means they should get to call all the shots, but despite such issues I think the committee is quite strong and we'll be able to get a lot done. Jess and I have already taken some pictures of the field hockey team and gotten team lists from the sports coordinators, and we're currently looking into getting a list of all upcoming school events to make a yearbook calendar. Getting photos is currently our top priority, since layout can be done at any point, but you can't take photos of an event retroactively. Still, I'm hoping to be able to have a good discussion with the committee about layout next meeting, with ideas for pages and content that we can get the school involved with and make the yearbook full of memories and uniqueness. We've decided to potentially hold an art contest to select a cover for the book, and Adrian is taking charge of creating a social media page for students to submit their photos for yearbook consideration, so overall I can already feel our changes taking shape. We plan on getting inserts for the book that people can get signed at the end of the year, so we don't have to give up our signing-books dream entirely, so that's also a plus. My next steps are to create the yearbook calendar I mentioned previously, and also take photographs for Movember and Spirit Week, so all in all things on the yearbook front feel altogether quite manageable. There have been some speedbumps, sure, and there's bound to be more, but for now I think we've got things under control.

All these things we've done

Midnight last night the GISHWHES timer struck zero, but that wasn't the end for us.  I mentioned before that I'd written a letter to the editor in an attempt to satisfy item 13, "An op-ed piece published in a local paper about how "petty, vindictive birds are stealing from the elderly!"", and that Adrian had submitted it for me.  Well, nothing really came of it, and I figured that the newspaper had saw through my pretty prose to the absurdity that it most obviously was.  This morning, I opened the paper to find this:

It may have been too late to submit it for points, but, well... it ended our GISHWHES chronicle with a bang, alright.  Moving on to some of these other things that myself and the rest of the ibsasscats have thrown together over these past few days of GISHWHES:

Item 6:  If your child were a prodigy artist and had a marker and you were deep asleep and they were inspired to "beautify" your face, what would the result be?

Item 69:  You and a friend must take at least 50 of your stuffed animals/dolls on a field trip to a grocery store. All of the stuffed animals/dolls must EITHER be attached to your clothing or in a grocery cart or both.

Item 53:  Carve a Jill O'Lantern! Carve a pumpkin to look like a feminized Misha Collins. Bonus points for realism.

Item 149:  Draw or paint a picture of Miss Jean Louis riding a school bus like a horse as it flies off a cliff into a volcano. There can be no passengers and she must have a dialogue bubble above her head that says something she would definitely say at this moment.

Item 54:  Elmo Gone Wrong. What would a Tickle-Me-Elmo look like if it had a serious crystal meth problem?

Item 37:  A screen cap of a chat thread on Misha Collins' IMDB page. The thread must be started by a user with your team's name and must pose an unusual question about Misha's personal life, such as, "Is it true that Misha Collins eats nothing but the hearts of human babies?" Or "Why doesn't Misha have any fingers?"

Item 146:  Make a children's doll from items found in your refrigerator or pantry. Go ahead and really creep us out with this one.

Item 5:  Let's see what Twister would look like with 13 people. Each person must be wearing only one color of clothing, i.e. all yellow, or all red and no two people can be wearing the same color clothing.

Item 22:  We've all heard of a "flea circus". What do "flea strip clubs" look like?

Item 83:  You holding a picture of you holding a picture of you holding a picture of you holding a picture of you holding a picture of an apple. You must have a gold frame suspended around your head.

Item 148:  A picture of you and a loved one kissing. Here's the catch though - you must have at least 11 food items between your lips and the lips of your loved one.

Item 14:  A person in a business suit with a leather briefcase jumping into leaf pile.

Item 78:  A one-page GISHWHES comic strip involving a rhinoceros, a tangerine, and an appendectomy.

Item 150:  It's Medieval Battle Time! Huzzah! You and a friend or loved one, dress up in your best battle gear/armory comprised entirely of kitchen ware. You can be wearing nothing else. Strike dueling poses.

Item 98:  A dog taking a human for a walk. Human must be on all fours and have a collar around their neck and the dog must have the leash in his mouth.

Item 51:  How long was Miss Jean Louis's "kale binge"? One might find the answer on one of our social media platforms.

Item 10:  Find an object that was manufactured the day and year you were born in city or town of your birth. Prove it. (Note: the "object" in question cannot be you or your twin.)

Item 35:  Draw or paint a portrait of Misha Collins and the Queen of England, both dressed in Steampunk, riding on a single stallion.

And we didn't just have to take pictures; we had to make videos, too!

 

Item 100: In mime, depict one of the following phrases: a) "The pen is mightier than the sword." b) "You're the bees knees!" c) "Holkyn kolkyn!"

Item 140:  A stop-motion film depicting the two by two loading of Noah's arc and the ensuing flood.

There were a few other videos done to which I don't have links:  Item 129, "One of you pulling up to a fast food restaurant drive-thru to order a meal, but instead of ordering a meal, you are only allowed to make sheep noises into the intercom. Must clearly hear the person on the other end of the intercom" and Item 119, "Recite "The Raven" to a crow", but this is the majority of the zaniness we engaged in over the past few days.  My principal contributions were writing item 13, organizing and participating in item 5, making item 37, and the two videos shown here, items 100 and 140, were both my doing.  I'm actually ridiculously proud of my videos.  I don't know... just having created something in this way makes me feel giddily happy.

So, what did I learn during the course of this event?

• Our local newspaper has exceptionally low quality standards.
• All it takes to be able to raid the school drama department is to ask for the key.
• Together we can accomplish so much more than we could ever imagine doing alone.
• All neighbours deserve to be rescued from their homework for a dramatic sword/pen duel.
• Perfect planning is impossible, especially in a group; what's important is how you improvise.
• Sometimes circumstances don't play by your schedule.
• There's always time for the things for which you have absolutely no time.
• A good instrumental track improves any video.
• Like Murphy's Law says, anything that can go wrong, will.
• When placing plastic animals on inclined planes, don't overestimate the force of friction.
• There's people all over the world who see things in the same insane way I do.
• Creativity is craziness. It's having fun, it's that feeling of insane pride you get when you make something that is completely and pointlessly yours.  It's dreaming up intricate, precise concepts and then it's making plans up on the fly and fixing things as you go.  It's your grandiose outlines and your wild, illogical ideas, your best laid schemes of mice and men.  I'm not very artistic:  I can't draw or paint or sketch, but that doesn't mean I'm not creative.  I can write and I can do, I can edit films and come up with zany ideas and set them to music, I can find things and fix things and organize things...  creativity is so much more than just being able to draw pretty pictures, and GISHWHES celebrates true creativity in all its insane, imperfect glory.

So, that was my experience with GISHWHES.  It was strange, it was embarrassing, it was off the wall, and I'd do it all again in a heartbeat.  It was a great opportunity to bond as a class and to do things I would never have considered doing otherwise.

As one of my favourite books ends, "May God forgive me for this and all these things I've done".

My name in print

This is a little bit late, but I've been having some scanner trouble and I wasn't able to upload the pictures.  Anyway, a few weeks ago the first issue of the newspaper was released, and both my articles made it to print!

For the next issue I'm doing a book review on Reached, which, as you can see above, is released on November 13.  It's during exam time and I'll only have a few days to read the book and write my review before the deadline, but I'm sure I'll be able to make everything turn out a-okay!

GISHWHES: Day One

One of the rules of GISHWHES is that you can't post any of your pictures on social media until after the event is over, so that means I can't share our items thus far in this blog post.  Never fret, though; in six days I'll be posting them to my heart's content.  Our team meeting was today at lunch, and we have a pretty good tentative plan of who is doing what.  Everybody was really enthusiastic, and I'm pretty optimistic that we'll be able to get a bunch of items over the next few days.  My contributions so far are completing task 37 (A screen cap of a chat thread on Misha Collins' IMDB page. The thread must be started by a user with your team's name and must pose an unusual question about Misha's personal life, such as, "Is it true that Misha Collins eats nothing but the hearts of human babies?" Or "Why doesn't Misha have any fingers?").  It was actually more difficult than expected; on IMDB you can't just pick a username; it's automatically your email address.  So I had to make a new email, and I had to confirm the account by getting a texted pin, although I don't own a cell phone so I had to find one to borrow.  This was all at seven this morning while I was supposed to be getting ready for school, so I'm pretty proud that I managed to get it done all through trial and error.  In the morning I also sent a message to a friend of mine who's involved with a lot of music related things to see if he could help us with item 126 (Get an orchestra in a symphony hall with at least 25 instruments to play "Carry On My Wayward Son").  It most likely won't work out, but I promised him cookies and Halloween candy, so we'll see.  After school I also wrote a letter to the local newspaper in an attempt to fulfill task 13 (An op-ed piece published in a local paper about how "petty, vindictive birds are stealing from the elderly!"), and Adrian submitted it for me.  It's actually fairly strongly written and I managed to make it seem hardly absurd at all, so I have my fingers crossed that it'll get published.  Patrick, Jessica, Sarah, and Aaron all completed tasks as well:  task 54 (Elmo Gone Wrong. What would a Tickle-Me-Elmo look like if it had a serious crystal meth problem?), task 51 (How long was Miss Jean Louis's "kale binge"? One might find the answer on one of our social media platforms), task 98 (A dog taking a human for a walk. Human must be on all fours and have a collar around their neck and the dog must have the leash in his mouth), and task 22 (We've all heard of a "flea circus". What do "flea strip clubs" look like?) respectively.  I was very busy tonight studying for my physics exam and chemistry test that are both tomorrow, so I hope that later this week I'll be able to get more things done for GISHWHES.  A personal goal of mine is task 140 (A stop-motion film depicting the two by two loading of Noah's arc and the ensuing flood), but there are so many other cool options that I'm dying to do!

And another thing...

Woah, two posts in one day?!  Slow down, hotshot.  I considered leaving this until tomorrow, but it's already a few days old, and tomorrow I'll likely be reporting on day one of GISHWHES.  I had my final tryout for provincial ringette on Saturday, and I made the team!  I also took about two whole minutes to get the ring in the net during a shooting competition, but that's beside the point.  In any case, I've managed to make the first hurdle, and I can't wait to meet the next few challenges that I'll face in the coming weeks and over the coming season.  Our first provincial outing will likely be the Miramichi tournament late next month, although I will have a house league tournament prior to that.  Speaking of house, teams have also been picked in that division.  My team is fair; not stacked or anything, but solid enough and hopefully it'll be a good year.  I'll be playing center (joy of joys), which is going to be an immense challenge due to my firm status as a member of the endurance-impaired.  Skating from one end of the ice to the next and back again for an entire shift has never really been my forte, especially when you throw scoring, checking, and thinking into the mix.  The higher you set the bar, the more you get to grow, so I guess that'll be my mantra this season while I'm dying of asphyxia.

It's not easy being in charge

There's only approximately five hours remaining until the start of GISHWHES, and might I say I can't wait.  Nonetheless, it's been a lot of work so far for something that hasn't even begun, especially since we aren't the event's organizers; as the de facto team leader, I've found that organizing a group can be just as daunting a task as organizing an event itself.  I'm not exactly sure how all the problems and speed bumps became my responsibility, but I guess if you want an idea to come to fruition, you've got the put the effort in yourself.  First of all, getting a team together wasn't as easy a task as it first appeared.  Fifteen kids in the class, fifteen spots on the team seemed like mathematics at its most basic, but of course things weren't that easy.  When I asked the class who wanted to join the team, everyone said yes except for Kathleen, and everyone was supposed to register over the long weekend a few weeks ago.  By the Monday, only three people had registered:  Jessica, Adrian, and myself.  In addition, Ferdie decided he didn't want to participate after all, although Kathleen decided she did want to be involved so we still had a net membership of fourteen.  Little by little I managed to goad more people into remembering to register (likely annoying everyone in the process), and Mr. Broderick agreed to both be our teacher supervisor, and also register for our team to fill the remaining position.  However, things still weren't kosher.  A few days later Sue and Sarah followed Ferdie's lead in deciding that GISHWHES wasn't the thing for them, and our team was once again short, this time by two members (and to make matters worse, only six of us were registered by this point).  So with the help of Jessica I turned to the grade 12 class for help, and Aaron and my brother Michael immediately volunteered.  I was hesitant to allow my brother to join the team, as it felt like he just wanted to ride along for some easy CAS instead of actually participating, but I was pressured into letting him join lest looking like a complete jerk.  Sarah (a different one this time) was also interested, so I told her to put her name down and we could probably find her a spot.  Afterwards I went to talk to Mr. Broderick, who hadn't yet registered, and told him that he didn't have to, since we found another student (Sarah) to take the final position.  By the next day we had in theory a full team of fifteen and eleven people registered, so all the chaos seemed to be over.  As you can probably guess, it wasn't.  Michael bailed, even after he had assured me he'd be committed, and our team was once again left one member short.  I went back to the grade twelve class since there seemed to have been quite a bit of interest the first time and I believed I'd be able to find someone who wanted to participate.  I was right on both counts:  the class was full of people who wanted to be a part of GISHWHES.  So much so that they had decided to make their own team.  If Michael hadn't hogged that spot I would have gotten one of them on our team the first time I was there, but I'm not bitter.  Not at all.  Anyway, we went back to Mr. Broderick and asked him sheepishly if he would in fact register (it was especially awkward since we had originally told him not to register, then we told him to, then we told him not to, and here we were telling him to again), but he agreed, and over the course of the next few days our final team members registered and our team was full, just a mere 48 hours shy of the registration deadline.  Since then things have gone a bit smoother, although I've had to organize a meeting for tomorrow and talk to teachers to make sure the date was clear of other IB activities (our IB coordinator was planning a working lunch), and I've had to field everyone's questions, comments, and concerns, although I don't mind doing that at all.  Anything that fosters excitement for GISHWHES is fine by me, and hopefully everyone will be motivated over the event and I won't have to poke and prod people to participate.  I'm so excited for the hunt, and I hope everyone else is too!

Happy new yearbook

When I entered high school last year, I quickly became quite disillusioned about the yearbook committee.  Yearbook was one of my favourite extracurriculars throughout junior high, and for good reason.  It was a giant part of the school -- pretty much every student bought one.  The yearbook was fun and amazing and made by the students, creative and memorable and representative of our student identity.  After three years of such an amazing system, I wasn't prepared for the underwhelming flatness of our high school yearbook.  Its only theme is red and white -- our school colours, and every page has pretty much a cookie cutter layout.  A few of my friends and I went to the information meeting for the committee last year, and we were essentially told that the yearbook was not a place for creative thought.  If you're on the committee, you take the pictures you're told to take and you stick them in the place you're told to put them.  That's it, that's all.  We decided to not join the committee after that; it was obviously not the thing for us, but those weren't the only quibbles we had with the yearbook.  You see, unlike with our previous experiences, the yearbook covers up until the very end of the year, saturated heavily with end of year activities such as prom and graduation.  This, while fine in itself, has one unfortunate implication:  you don't get to sign yearbooks.  Throughout junior high, this was the source of so much excitement for students.  Flipping through the crisp new yearbooks when they arrive in June, finding the pictures of yourself and your friends, and most importantly, writing messages in the yearbooks of everyone you know.  That's where the appeal of a yearbook lies, through my experience.  Those are the memories: your and your friends' haphazard scrawls, not just the pictures and text on glossy paper (although those are important too).  As I said, in Intermediate the majority of students bought their yearbook.  Here, in high school, where yearbooks should really matter, only about a hundred are sold out of a student population of 1100.  Yes, the yearbook might miss out on pictures of prom and names of award winners, but those people have their own pictures and their own certificates and plaques to remember these events.  But signing yearbooks; those memories are totally unique.  This is a pretty long preamble for something in which very little has happened as of yet.  In any case, this year the previous yearbook coordinator retired, and no teacher has been willing to fill the position.  Jessica and I saw this as our chance.  We emailed the principal our proposal outlining our plan to create a new yearbook committee and begin a whole new epoch in our school's yearbook history.  The book would be made by the students, for the students, fueled by student input and student creativity.  The principal approved our proposal, except for one thing.  For the past forty years the yearbook has been released in the September of the following year, not in June when they can be signed, and to change that we'd have to get proof that this is what the students want; she is trepidatious in believing that swapping prom and awards pages for the ability to sign yearbooks is a fair trade.  We'll have to get the student body to vote, but I sincerely hope that we'll be able to make this work.  Signing yearbooks are so quintessential; I can't imagine graduating from high school without it.  But I'm getting away from the CAS activity at hand.  Long story short, Jess and I are attempting to conquer the organizational commitment so many teachers and staff have shied away from:  running the school yearbook.  With the help of our trusty teacher supervisor Mr. Toms and a committee of students that we have yet to interview, we shall succeed in making the school yearbook a product heralded from every corner of our school, something purchased, treasured, and signed by every student, and with input from the same.  We shall... stay after school tomorrow to take pictures of the field hockey championship, since nobody has taken any pictures of any school sports or activities throughout any of September or October.  Running the yearbook will be a daunting, time-consuming task, but I know we can do it!