6 Books, Budgets, and a Narcoleptic

As you can see by the title, recently, my school life has been revolving around my huge English project, the recent NJ budget cuts, and my insane lack of sleep (as I'm sure many of you can relate). My project basically entails reading a high level world lit novel every week for six weeks, then doing a project on each novel. My six books are: The House on Mango Street, Les Mis, Night, The Good Earth, Dr. Zhivago, and Bridge Over the River Kwai. So far, I'm only on Dr. Z, and I must say that The Good Earth has been my favorite thus far. My project grades have been good, and the best part is I havent been redlined yet! (Redlining means you have to revise it or drop down to a B). However, this all comes with a price: my sleep and my sanity. My life literally revolves around these books now, and sometimes, the stress is just too much. For example, for Les Mis, I locked myself in a basement and read for 4 hours straight. Luckily, I'm in the home stretch with two books to go, so hopefully life will be forgiving. As for the budget crisis, I have literally lost my after school life. No more Sci Club, ESCAPE club, Academic Challenge...but luckily my fav club Key Club was reinstated, so that;s good news. And with my huge loss of clubs, I will likely be joining Debate next year, since I love to debate and do Model UN. At the last board meeting, I spoke on behalf of Sci Club, so hopefully I made somewhat of a difference. We shall see what happens....

All of this has seriously been taking a toll on my health though. I fall asleep so much that it looks like I have narcolepsy or something. Literally, yesterday, my mom dropped some clothes on my bedroom floor, and I fell asleep while trying to pick them up. I somehow need to fix this, because it is severely hurting my math grades, for some odd reason. But I don't want to bore you with my problems, so that's all I'm going to rant about.

Johns Hopkins Model UN and DCON

Wow, so I haven't posted in a while, and I've missed a lot of stuff since my last post in like January, so here is a long overdue post about JHUMUNC and DCON.

Well, JHUMUNC was, to say the least, an interesting conference, and my fellow delegates can vouch for me when I say that. I thought it would be cool if I shared some fun(ny) stories about my experience there. But before that, I just wanted to give some background.

JHUMUNC is a 3 day model UN conference for high schoolers hosted by Johns Hopkins University. The topics were really cool and challenging, and committee was really fun and engaging. I was in NATO, which was a total blast, but I'll get to that later.

First off, I roomed with some of my good friends, so that wasn't a problem. There was plenty of snack foods, a late curfew, and mostly freedom to leave the hotel and go to Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Food at Inner Harbor was awesome, because we had choices to eat at Hard Rock Cafe, Chipotle, UNO, and many other places. However, Baltimore isn't exactly the safest place out there, so we had some "encounters" with shady people and a couple of rap battles. In committee, we had a lot of fired up debate, and we even tracked and blew up Osama! In the end, I won Honorable Mention, which was great. So overall, I really got to bond with my fellow delegates, make new friends, snag an award, and really have a blast.

Now on to DCON. DCON is Key Club's New Jersey District Convention, where all the Key Clubs in NJ meet to share ideas and do workshops. Mostly, I just had a party. First off, my room with Aaron and Tanay was huge, and everyone wanted to hang out there. We all had a blast, and for anyone that is involved in a Key Club, you should definitely go there. One downside was the food, because it was pretty bad, but we did get to visit King of Prussia mall to get Taco Bell! Anyway, I dont want to ramble, so just check out DCON one year if you get a chance.