It's General Conference time, once again! It's been a busier weekend than usual, though; I can usually keep things pretty chill during GC, so this is a little weird.
For one thing, I had KF between the Saturday sessions. Since we'd only gone on Tuesday this week, we thought it best to go on Saturday despite GC going on. To my and my dad's surprise, after class my teacher (I read a blog post about someone saying how cool kung fu is, and they mentioned the teacher is called "Shifu", which is basically the Chinese equivalent of "Sensei". That was when I realized Master Shifu in Kung Fu Panda is actually being called by his title, not his name. That was a bit of a mind break.) said that I was free to do a pretest to see if I'm ready to move up to a yellow belt. Though I felt kinda "AH!" I did it, and he said I did very well and counted it as the actual test and I passed!
I was worried about losing what I learned as a white belt, so fortunately and unfortunately, I was told that the tests from here on are accumulative, as you show what you did for your previous belts and the new material, not just the new material. That means I have more incentive to actually keep up on what I learned before. If I end up trying to reach a black belt, though, that's gonna mean a lot of review and practice.
My dad's been pushing for me to try to get a black belt before I go to college. I was just a bit against it because of the cost of the tests and new belts. He was like "Seriously? I don't care!" And, well, I was also a bit worried about rushing through it all too fast and losing some of it. Knowing I have to know all of it for the black belt helps a little, though.
I don't exactly like aiming for the black belt rather than just learning, but it probably would indeed be a good idea to have that before I go, so I guess we'll see what happens.
Well, one thing that can help with that semi-goal is that there's the possibility of graduating a semester early. I mean, I knew I technically could, before, since I don't have much to do left in high school. My counselor told me I could do that during Parent-Teacher Conferences this week, though, (since I was supposed to meet with the counselor too, being a senior,) and I'm seriously considering it. The main priority in choosing is whether Stanford will like more seeing that I graduate a little early, or that I spent my last semester doing pure college classes. It's a big possibility they'll like the former more, according to my English teacher, but we should still check with the admissions office there. Besides Stanford, though, we've been thinking of more advantages to finishing school early.
An obvious one is that I can start earning money, if I so desired, without worrying about my classes and homework. I'd also be able to put more time to my hobbies- writing, drums, KF (thus making my black belt easier to reach by putting more time into practice and learning new material), maybe even dancing- and I'd have more freedom to do volunteer work.
Though it's technically not as important, it's possible that we'd also be able to spend more time with Abuelita. It doesn't just have to be limited to the time frame allowed by Winter Break. My mom was really hoping we could be there for Abuelita's birthday on New Year's. it sounds so nice to spend more time with her, so it's another motivation to finish school early.
I hadn't wanted to graduate early since I wanted to do more concurrent classes while I had the chance, and I figured I wouldn't even have anything to do without school. I feel a lot better about doing that now, though.
I'd miss my friends, of course, and I would most likely not be able to finish my Creative Writing course, which I just barely started on. (Now that I think about it, I might not be able to do seminary anymore... I hope I'd be able to figure out how to finish without inconveniencing myself or my mom.) ...That's pretty much it, though.
Hopefully, we'll call Stanford sometime this week so that we can know which to do, but I'm increasingly liking the idea of early graduation.
Speaking of Stanford, we've gotten just a little further in completing my application. Besides possibly adjusting my graduation date and "Activities" page on the app, I only have to get my teacher recommendations and finish my essay. It appears I'll be using three teacher recommendations: one from my mentor, one from my English teacher, and one from my Physics professor. I hadn't thought about asking one of my college professors for a recommendation, since they've known me for even less time than the normal teachers, but the English teacher said I could try asking for one. He actually was like "Sure!" and wrote up a rough draft sort of thing for me to say if I like it. Though it's not the most detailed thing in the world, seeing as he's only known me a little over a month, it'll hopefully impress them that a college professor thought I was worth writing a recommendation for!
As for the essay... I have some ideas, but nothing is completely clicking as being the idea. Like, I've thought to talk about us moving, Mom and I living by ourselves for a while, and maybe just talking about when I told the counselor I wanted to go to Stanford. I feel like there's something there with these three topics, but I need to figure out what to do with them for a good essay. I tried just free-writing these on Friday for quite a while, but I feel like it didn't help much. Grr.
Free-writing, y u fail me?
So that was one of the other things I was doing on the weekend, and I also managed to get myself to do some of my physics homework last night and study a little my KF manual (seeing as I actually need to in order to get my next belt).
We had our first dress rehearsal this week for the dances we will perform soon. It appears that, since the only leather boots I own are the Batman ones from a few months ago, I will now be putting those to use. I hadn't put them on until when we practiced the dance this time around. They definitely needed to be broken in.
I'll have more of a chance to break them I tommorow, though, because I plan to wear them to school because I plan to dress as close to Ed as I can because IT'S FMA DAY TOMORROW!!! *confetti falls from the sky and one of the anime opening songs plays*
I had forgotten about the first time October 3rd rolled around until it was too late, and last year it landed on the same day as the Saturday Session of General Conference. (That definitely is part of why I remembered it this year too, plus having a calendar event ordering me to not forget 10.03.11!) But now, I have the opportunity to celebrate it at school! And do so with my friend who had been reading my FMA book set! She just barely finished the series last week, so she's all caught up and is an official fan, and we can party together! *kyah!!!*
SO~ I have plans to show my FMA pride off as much as possible. That means beating even the outfit I wore on the first day of school this year. I had worn my FMA shirt with red snake-skin-textured jeans and black everywhere else. This time, I will wear the shirt again, but this time with black jeans and the black boots, and I'm hoping to wear a red jacket, possibly taping a Flamel onto the back. (I have to check if my sister has a jacket suitable to the task, since I know I have no red jackets.) I will wear my pocket watch- of course- and wear my new bracelet with black, gray, gold, and white. I am considering painting with makeup a Flamel onto my arm or neck or something, if it would look okay. (I'd consider painting on Al's bloodseal, but I feel a little paranoid about fiction becoming reality in that case... Stupid, I know. And I guess maybe I could consider doing the Homunculus symbol of a dragon eating its own tail, but it makes less sense, since I'm supposedly trying to emulate Ed.) To top it all off, I will try to style my hair to be as close to his hairstyle as possible. I'm thinking it'll look a little weird to have a French braid (my hair's not long enough for a normal braid) with little pieces out in the front, considering I don't actually have bangs, but maybe I can figure out how to make them look close enough to bangs to pull it off.
I'm desperately hoping that someone will recognize the stuff I'm wearing and appreciate my efforts, whether they know me or not. I haven't found any big FMA fans besides the friend borrowing my books (so proud of her, by the way), so it's a bit hopeless, but I wanna know where the other fans are at, you know? And make this whole dressing-up-for-Oct.-3rd to be worth it! But, well, in the end, it's to make me happy, even if other people are wondering what the heck is up with my outfit.
I'd kept putting off posting the flash fiction piece I'd mentioned in early September, since I was being a worry-wart about it not being good enough to post, but I finally got myself to do it late last Friday. If you look below the "About Me" section, you'll also find a short list of tags (though they're called "labels" in Blogger, apparently). I'd been wanting to make a list to access easily my songs and stuff for years, and finally found how to do it and, well, did it. I realized right then that I've barely posted anything by itself besides songs, so it would've been stupid to put a tag for "Short Stories" when I only have two. (That's what I think, anyway.) So, for now, those are in "Other Stuff", clumped in with my Spanish talk until I do a more careful search in all my past posts for any works I missed before and have posted more short stories in the future.
Ooh! Maybe I can make a goal to have that finished right around when I post my 200th post- that's right, we're almost to 200 posts!!!- so it's like "Yeah! New chapter in life! More organization! Celebration!" and all that jazz.
Well, I hope you like the story, and hopefully I post many more in the future!
Pretty much all that's left is to talk about what actually happened during General Conference. I noticed that, this time around, there was a lot of talk about repentance and that both faith and works are required to gain salvation. That second one seemed particularly interesting to me, since something happened during the very first session.
Okay, so I have tried to get myself to invite at least one or two friends to watch General Conference for the past few years. None of them have accepted, as far as I know, but I still want to extend the invitation. This time, I realized a little into the first session that I hadn't done that yet! I contemplated who to ask, and ultimately decided to quickly invite Scaehime and Lizzie through Hangouts. I didn't receive a reply until near the end of the session, but a discussion soon came out of that. Scae first said that she was too busy- pretty much all my friends say that- but then she paused when she realized I'd sent a link to lds.org, and was like "LDS as in Latter-Day Saints?" Right then, I had a feeling she was going to outright decline to look at GC because no one likes Mormons.
Instead, she said that she had once discussed the differences between her religion (unsure of specific denomination, but it's Christian) and mine, and had learned that we believed in both faith and action being required to gain salvation, while she believed in only faith being needed. So our discussion was just around that one basic doctrine. Nothing rude was said by either party, but it still felt tense, somehow. Even through just an IM chat.
At first, I could only think, "Really? Out of all the doctrines you are bothered about, it's only this? Not the modern prophets and revelation thing? Not Joseph Smith? Not even our past with polygamy?" I mean, that's what people usually think upon hearing the mention of Mormonism. It was amusing, in that aspect, since it almost felt like she was focusing on the wrong topic.
As the leaders continued to emphasize that part of our doctrine, though, the more I realized how important it is. It's one of the basic beliefs that is the foundation for many other principles taught in church. They've always stressed the fact that we actually have a lot more work to do beyond believing we'll be saved- we have to earn it. And we have to use the Atonement to repent for the times that we mess up because "no unclean thing can enter the kingdom of God" (that's how the scripture goes, right?). The same happened with the second Article of Faith- "We believe that man will be punished for his own sins, and not for Adam's transgression"- and the "Family Proclamation" stating marriage is only between a man and a woman. When I was first taught these things in Primary, I was like "Well, duh! Why would we pay for what Adam did? What other kind of marriage is there?" I hadn't understood why they told us these things, until just a few years ago I learned about the belief in the Original Sin and the LGBT+ community and allies pushing for same-sex marriage.
We were told over and over these things because there were many people outside the church who believed in the contrary. And now I'm realizing this yet again. (I remember hearing my World History teacher telling us about the differences between the Catholic and Protestant churches, since we had to learn about the Protestants separating from the Catholic Church to worship the way they wanted to in America. Actually near-debating over this very subject with someone, though, is making it more real that yes, people really learn this in their own churches.)
I'm now just wondering how that belief came about, anyway. I know Martin Luther had a part, but where did he come about the idea? Did he actually find a Bible verse that he used to "prove" this? Twisting it up into his own "interpretation" to make people believe it is true? I mean, I am not as familiar with the Bible as many other people, so I'm honestly wondering if that is the case. There's no way to ask Scae about this, though, without greatly offending her. She's gonna think I want to fight and argue over religion, which I don't want todo. I just want to know why she believes in that.
I may put together a summary of what was said throughout GC this weekend and put it into the next post. Until then, wish me luck on my FMA Day celebration, group project in Physics starting tomorrow (first college-level group project! So scared!), and college stuff! K bai!
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