Still not sure how to introduce each of these entries,
"Diarrhea is wet" - John Malkovich
I'll get the hang of them soon enough. I thought this entry should be more about myself since I feel that it is easier to relate to something if you can understand where it is coming from. I am in grade 10 in a regular high school in a small city of 100,000 in south eastern Ontario. I'm about 1 hour away from Toronto. Before you close this page thinking "Eh, regular high school whiny kid", I am more interesting than just that. I'll start from my childhood (which I'm still kind of in, haha). I am the second child in my family, I have an older brother who is 8 years older than me. Both my parents worked at the same place and they make more than enough money. In grade 3, there is a secret test to search for intellectually advanced kids for all kids. I remember how the teacher attempted to hide its purpose, I probably should have noticed something then. "Alright class, today we're going to all write this big 8 page test that will take all day. It's not for any class, just a fun test! Alright, everyone take a chocolate bar and let's start!" Oh how we were all duped by sweets. Anyways, I was identified as "gifted" and the following year, I was going to be placed in the program. The program would put all the gifted kids in the same class from grade 4-8 and keep them segregated from normal kids. I didn't really understand this but once again, free food was given at the orientation so automatically it was a good thing. The change wasn't too noticeable except that I would have the same class for every subject for the next 4 years. It was good because we were "entitled" so we could get away with a lot more.
In grade 6, I remember one day at home, my brother asking my mom if "she had told me yet". I instantly was curious and asked. It turned out that my dad had the choice to relocate to Shanghai, China and work as expats for 2 years. His mission was to set up a new firm there and expand the business to China. Little kids never like change so I was initially against it. Everyday, I would ask him what were the odds that it was happening, completely unaware that it was all his choice. It started out at 10%, then it increased by 5 every day until I knew we were going. We went there in the summer between grade 6 and 7 to scout out a school for me, and a house for my family. The school we picked was The Shanghai American School Pudong Campus, which is an international school. This meant that the school was extremely rich and was separated from regular society. The curriculum was all American, everything was in English and overall, it was like attending a prestigious American School. The Pudong Campus has the middle school merged with the high school so the facilities were god like compared to my small public school in Ontario. I'm sure I'll write more about it in later entries since this has been the highlight of my life thus far so I'll blot out the details.
To sum it up, I completely changed during the stay in China even though it was for only 2 years. It was Pokemon evolution time pretty much. There will likely be an entry dedicated to my experience there and it'll be a fun one to write and read for sure. So now, I was all big boy mode and I came back to my city in the summer between grade 8 and 9. It was very hard adjusting back to a small city from one of the biggest and most urbanized mega cities in the world. And that change made me miss and value the experience that I had. So now I am back in the small city going to high school. A lot of my friends are those that I made while I was in the gifted program and a lot are ones I made in the past 2 years. Since I am in a small city, the people who go the my high school knew a lot of each other before in high school whereas I was pretty much starting from scratch. It was tough but it's all kewl now.
Sorry for the long post, had to give a little background to myself.
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