Good Girl Gone Bad

This post will be short, though I'd like to come back and examine this topic further later. I have been constantly amazed this year by the number of my good friends who are girls that have started engaging in "sketchy" activities of various sorts. (Note: this applies to guys too, but I've noticed it more in my friends who are girls) Also, it seems that many of these girls fake an innocence to the outside world, yet secretly are proud of what they're doing and who they've become. Now maybe the fault lies with society that creates a double standard, or with parents who push their children to the edge of rebellion; maybe all teenagers are like this and I'm just naive, but still I notice a recurring theme of "good girls gone bad". Some can hide it well; others can't, but beneath it all beats the same desire to break the mold Country Day has told them that they fit, to rebel against the instruments or sports or art activities their parents signed them up for when they were six, and to assert their independence through bad-assness (I know that it's not a real word, but its appropriate here to capture the scope of both dubious morality and secret pride). I could list specific examples, but for the sake of privacy I won't, though my argument does seem a bit flat without them. And so I wonder, as we grow up, do some of us seek to assert independence through a secret rebellion (most parents/adults don't know the girls engage in the behavoirs that they do); and if the rebellion is secret, is it really rebellion at all or actually a submission to the will of adult society that says that girls must be innocent and to teenage society that praises edginess?

Finding an Internship Part I

So I've spent the better part of the last hour trying to find an interesting (and local) internship for this summer; unfortunately, I'm not having much luck. I want to work either for an ibank, a law firm, or a museum (random I know, but I love art), so if anyone knows of a good one please let me know. This will be further updated once I have a better idea on the process to get an internship, but my overall goal is to do this as much on my own as I can because frankly I'll need to learn how to find a job/internship at some point in the coming years. Also, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, but how does one put together a resume? Do I include my high school transcript? What activities and awards should I put, or should I list all of them (a frightening proposition)?

Grr....

It's Beginning to Get To Me

So lately I have been told that I need to blog more about gossip/my own personal life and less about random intellectual thoughts I write down when I have time/don't want to do a Model UN paper, but I like my blog even if I have no readers, and even though it's a bit dry, I feel like it's an accurate reflection of what I'm thinking. That is to say: this is my own place to really be intellectual about those issues that matter to me because most of the people I talk to don't care about the same things that matter to me, and I don't want to bore them. I feel like our personal lives are the mainstays of our conversations, and while this can be nice, I'm ready - to paraphrase Hollister - to be in college where no one talks about drama. Or am I? What if I suddenly find conversations on new topics boring, what if I can't keep up, what if I *gasp* end up missing high school? But that's a risk that I'm willing to take; I believe that there is nothing worse than being fixated in the past; we must look ahead to the future, to that glorious day when we can look back and say "yes, this is who I am, and I'm proud of what I've become, and more importantly, where I still have yet to go."

Wow that sounded really cliche (need accent mark), but oh well. I want to go read my new Pynchon now. Also, found a great new tapas place tonight so that was exciting!

And tonight I reaffirmed what I already knew - newsboy caps weren't cool in the twenties, and they're not cool now. However, Dashboard Confessional has become cool again - good for them.

Finally, blog's title stolen from Snow Patrol:
"And it's beginning to get to me
That I know more of the stars and sea
Than I do of what's in your head"

Blah...

Things that piss you off when sick:

1. The people that shop at Dean and Deluca.
2. The people that work at Dean and Deluca.
3. Dean and Deluca
4. Expensive cars in ugly colors
5. 3 dollar coffee (it's a small!)
6. Homework

Oh the Times! Oh the Customs!

Over the past few months a disturbing and world-shattering fact has been brought to my attention, rocking my naive soul, and destroying much of the faith I had had in my peers. This fact is that a lot of people cheat. As a member of the Honor Council and as a pretty intuitive person, I knew that people cheated, but I could never imagine the extent to which cheating appears to be prevalent in American society: I had friends at Governor's School, supposedly the home of our academically most talented, admit to cheating, I've overheard students at my school outright talk about cheating, and I've had friends tell me that "everybody cheats". Everybody does not cheat. But, beneath the obvious issues inherent in a person willing to cheat lies problems in American society, especially Middle and Upper-Middle class American society.
Something is wrong when American children feel that they have to cheat to succeed; something is wrong when Yale students admit to taking attention-enhancing drugs in order to handle their workload; something is wrong when even our best and brightest, people I met at Governor's School, approach cheating as just another fact of life. I do not cheat and I have stellar grades, but even if I didn't, I would never cheat. And I would never cheat for one very simple reason: CHEATING IS WRONG. Period.
But let's approach this problem from a more "entire woods" instead of "individual tree" angle. Something must be desperately wrong with our society if cheating is an understood, albeit rarely discussed, fact of life in modern American high school. I think I know what that wrong is - and it is our materialistic culture that has taken to defining success in dollars, car options, technology, labels, and square footage. Our culture says that one is only valued if one can afford these things, and the way to afford these things is to make a lot of money by getting a good job by going to an Ivy League school by making good grades. It doesn't expressly say cheat to get there, but it doesn't say don't cheat. Furthermore, it doesn't leave room for the student who just isn't that bright, nor does it recognize other paths to success. Indeed, the majority of its advice on integrity seems to be that of don't get caught. I could list a thousand examples of what I have written above, but I'm tired, and by no means do I mean to impugn capitalism as the cause of all of society's woes (though I'm starting to think it just may be), but I really just want to make my readers think - the next time you start to cheat, think: is this really what I've been reduced to?

taylor