Yesterday I looked up the most popular search engine terms to find my blog (listed from predictable to wacko):

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life at ib

I guess that’s pretty accurate! Though whether there is a life or not is debatable…

.

waitingfornow.wordpress

Yay! Oh yeah, in case you’re wondering where I got ‘waiting for now‘ from…

.

ib resources

Typical. (there was also a slew of “ib notes for ______” searches)

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you lost the game

HA HA HA HA this made me laugh so hard.

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sleep

yeah, we’re all lacking it

.

bus misery

no longer bus misery now that the Canada Line’s right in front of my doorstep

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validity of hl maths (ibdp) colleges

…I haven’t the faintest idea what that is

.

car lane

…is where you drive cars .

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frustration on bike

never take your frustrations on your bike or they’ll fall apart when you’re riding in the middle of an intersection.

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things rick astley will never do

HA HA HA

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agent smith laughing

… O_O

Haikus are easy

But sometimes they don’t make sense

Refridgerator

- Threadless

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(Question: How do you know there are an infinite number of primes?)

Top prime’s divisors’

Product (plus one)’s factors are…

Q.E.D, bitches!

- xkcd

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on computers:

Program aborting:

Close all that you have worked on.

You ask far too much.

Yesterday it worked.

Today it is not working.

Windows is like that.

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Extended essay

It is the Thing of Death

No one hears your screams.

Why am I writing

bad haikus when I should be

doing you-know-what.

Turned on computer

Ended up on facebook

The cake is a lie.

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Reminds me of the haiku Justin/Jason had to do for Henry’s B-day party XD

Lesson of the Day: If you don’t first succeed, try, try again.

Even when faced with an evil doll machine that eats up all your money at amusement parks.

Try, try again…

…EVEN WHEN YOU’RE READY TO PULL YOUR HAIR OUT BECAUSE YOU’RE SO CLOSE!!

We spent $8 on this machine. New lesson of the day: Don’t be blinded by cute Mario Mushrooms. Have a nice day.

- Astrid

Shad. 25 days, 600 hours, 36 000 seconds.53 other shadlings, 15 Shad staff.

What can I say about it?

Just incredible.

MacShad ‘09. I’ll miss you guys like crazy.

DONE! DOUBLE DONE!

~Astrid

This is probably my last post until August or so. IB Year 1 officially ended Thursday and Shad awaits tomorrow.

I’m just stunned by how fast it all went, and yet I never thought Wednesday night (the night before Group 4 was due) would end. All those hours of work trying to make sense of impossible data produced 10 minutes of a boring presentation, and that’s it. IB Year 1 is done.

My first thought was – boy, that was anticlimatic. I’d foolishly expected some kind of countdown and throwing books into the air (see: Recess xD). Nope, just sleep-deprived, report-carded, and hectic about trying to finish EE when I come back in August.

I’m terribly thankful that I won’t have to dream about jellyfish anymore from the Group 4 Project, or typing “Casmurro” for the nth time, or juggling a laptop and an armful of textbooks, but I want one more day of school! One more June session, a boring session where we doodle stick figures, struggle to look interested, rant about EEs, sign heartfelt comments in yeabooks and collectively get excited for planned events coming up in July. It’s only been a year but it’s amazing how much everything has changed.

Bizarre.

Shad in four hours. Wake-up call at 4:00 AM, flight at 6, arrival at 2:30. MacShad, here I come!

Or here I come tiptoeing. Fact: I’m really scared of long going-away programs where I don’t know anyone.

I went to one going-away-program-where-I-didn’t-know-anyone in my entire life, and it didn’t go so well. It was Encounters with Canada, and if you know it, you would know that everyone who has gone there has raved about how amazing and fun and what a life-changing program it was. Not for me, no siree. I was hopelessly homesick as soon as the plane reached the Ottawa airport. Sometimes I seriously considered hiding in the washroom. Sleep was my only comfort. We had to sleep 10 hours every day, which was like heaven to me (I went in the middle of IB Hell Month; I got all of my month’s sleep from Encounters.) I was so glad to come back after a week even the make-up Chem test was preferable. Sad, I know.

Technological quote of the day:

Me [sees the list of Must-Have Items to bring to Shad and sees: "DO NOT BRING LAPTOPS". Later on: "Bring Notebooks".]

Me: “Hey, we can bring laptops!”

Idiot me.

I would write more but my mom’s yelling at me right now. Reasonable, considering how I have to wake up in four hours =/ Procrastination never ends. Gotta finish packing.

Oh and please email me your addresses! It would be nice to send postcards :) Don’t know how much computer time I get so long emails are probably out. They won’t let us bring laptops. I’m separated from my laptop for a month… *shudder*

Anyways, I hope you have an AMAZING summer! Don’t study too hard!

~Astrid

P.S. Tipho – somehow Internet’s failed on me but my blog lives on (who knows why) so I just wanted to say HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH THANKS YOU’RE AWESOME! I changed my mind about frying a certain Sims character =D Though I can’t see my ears.

I got sick of putting all the IB resources on my blog so I dumped it all into a new page, called “IB! Resources“. It’s bad enough that IB takes over our time, but I think it crosses the line if it starts taking over our blogs. I’m going to try to stop ranting about IB in this blog, or I’m going to turn into one of those robots.

-Astrid 8D

Sigh. It all sounds so perfect, right? Pack the few essentials and live by wandering from place to place. When I first learned how to bike, it seemed as if I had my ticket to freedom. Over the years I got bike bags, flashlights, helmets, and other unnecessary equipment to add to my dream that I could get away whenever I wanted.

So much for that dream.

How’s IB, you say? It’s like biking across an endless number of hills. You work so hard to reach the first hill, and when you do, you enjoy a fleeting moment of euphoria as you coast down the hill, and before you know it, there’s another hill waiting for you. And lots more.

We’re carrying more frustration and worry than we can handle.

Sooner or later we realize that we can’t handle constant frustration and fatigue without an inevitable crash.

We’re expected to handle everything, even in the most desperate circumstances.

It isn’t just about homework, procrastination, and a lack of time. We have lives, too (or at least we try to have one). We have relationships, family issues, and ambitions to take over the world, and balancing life and IB isn’t easy.

But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and (despite what the UBC grads said at our last Friday Session) future life might be a little easier for us after we go through the dark tunnels of IB.

And if it isn’t, there’s something to be said for laughing with amazing friends and planning for the stunning IB Talent Show, even during moments of stress and panic.

Obvious what the problem is, this time. Oh wait! I just committed a fatal ToK error! Oh, woe is me!

 

Thought this might entertain you – a Monty Python sketch on International Philosophy:

I find it amusing how “Sophocles” and “Socrates” are spelled.

While we’re at it… go watch some hilarious videos on rants about IB (and other subjects) ;)

 

Keeping track of the Panic-O-Meter:

Tok Word Count (of essay): 0

EE Proposal Word Count (of actual proposal): 0

World Lit Thesis Word Count (of actual thesis): 0

Number of things that are crossed off on my to-do list: 0

The result?

 

(It looks alot like the red button thingy in the IBO)

 

To end the post, here’s a memorable quotation from The Matrix (to be IB-related)… with a few omissions.

 

Ah, the Matrix. Happy ToK-ing, everyone.