"Be My Escape"

Well here goes my first post for the New Year, and the first one in a while. ><

Just as a heads up this one's gonna be a tad personal, just so I can get some stuff off my 

chest. Also I don't need much sympathy either, since I feel like a bunch of this is my fault.^^

Where did it all start? 

I honestly didn't' realize it before I started high school, but it's like there's this cycle of people phasing out of my life. Ever since 4th Grade, all the way up to even now, I've made a good friend at school that I would do homework with, chat with during lunch, come over and play every few weeks, maybe even talk about some personal matters. The only problem though, is that every year practically that persons has to move on with their lives in one way or another. Don't get me wrong I still keep in contact with these people, but it was never as good as it was before. For example a friend skipped grades and then essentially gets phased out, or I get to know some good friends and then they had to attend a different high school. Maybe this is just part of growing up and becoming an adult, figuring how to move on in life. Maybe this just proves that I'm still a kid right now.

Well this leads me to where I am right now, making me who I am today.

Maybe this feels a little blown up in proportion to me because of all of these teenage hormones and such, but as of now there feels as if there's an empty void in my life.

I think it started around 7th grade when I got my first teacher that didn't really like me. This is when I stopped being a straight A+ student. Along with this I didn't really pay much attention in Latin IA so this would later come and haunt me, and academically I started going into a downward spiral.

Stating sometime midway through 8th grade year is when I got sick. For while it was on and off with my stomach pains, and I would even use these as excuses to skip school. Due to this and taking 2 high school level classes in middle school, I fell quite behind and started getting B's and lower on assignments. Before I go on any further, let me explain really quickly where this whole "moving on" factor comes into play.

Having been decent friends for about 3 years, I was confident that Andrew and I would stay good friends throughout middle school and from high school on as well. When the news got to me that he was skipping grades early in the first 9 weeks on 7th grade, I was shocked. I couldn't stop him, and I even tried poking fun at him for trying to skip, because I honestly didn't want him to leave me. Alas, my efforts were in vain, and I couldn't stop him from moving up to 8th grade after the first grading period. He was still in my Algebra 1 class, but things never really were the same again, and eventually contact with him became very minimal, and that role of a close school friend was left empty again.



Fast forward to 8th grade year, I'd made some great friends that year, not at my school though, but through an online podcast community about Starcraft 2. I guess I sorta used this to fill my void of Andrew, and it was both a blessing and curse. On the up side I'd finally found a community of friends to play games with, since before the only real people I had to play the games I'd been interested in was my best friend Andrew K. With this, as well as the new gaming PC I'd built for my CGS application project, I started getting into PC gaming, and sometimes I wish I hadn't.

We would have community game nights, and we still do, where we'd part up and play some team Starcraft games, maybe play a Steam game, even League of Legends. Today I'm glad that I met such great friends online, that are even nicer than most people I actually know. Shout out to Ramon, Dave, Chad, Jamie, Alejandro, Reid, and everybody else that I love from Starcast <3 <3 <3. I'm happy for all the laughs we've shared, the random stuff we've talked about, and even some tears that were shed. ^^

The problem with this is that not all of us lived in the time zone, so sometimes I'd stay downstairs and continue to play after bedtime, sometimes even up to 2 or 3 AM in the morning. This caused me lose a bunch of sleep, and started effecting my grades and health. After long nights, sometimes I'd use the excuse of having my stomach hurt in the morning so I could skip my first period class and get some more sleep. Even while in school I'd ask to go to the nurse, or just plain out fall asleep in class, which got my teachers even madder at me. I became known as the kid who would fall asleep in class, and that also kinda hurt more than I thought it would. With the upcoming CGS application interviews and such, I didn't know how I'd even make it in anymore.

Luckily in my 8th grade year I'd also made some great friends as well (shout out to Bryce and Sean) who I still talk. Without them and some other friends, I honestly don't think I could have made it out of that year.



Fast forward a little farther to the end of the year and I'd somehow made it into CGS with my undeserving grades and laziness. I was pretty shocked honestly, as I'd given maybe 60% effort into applying due to all the other craziness that had happened that year. My fellow piers had also been in shock, as they were quite surprised that I'd somehow crawled in. This was great, however the "friend factor" plays in again, and none of my friends that I talked to actually applied, so looks like I'm gonna need to make some new ones next year. With all this news buzzing around, of course there was trash talk towards me saying that I didn't deserve that spot, and that the others who didn't make it should have got it. This of course brought me down a little, but I honestly couldn't disagree with them, but that never really got me to down because of another big factor that still plays into my life today (refer to my previous post).


Well now here we are today at present day time 1:48 AM Est with Brandon Ma.


With all these events happening, parents arguing, arguing with parents, people coming and going and coming into my life, growing up, and more craziness to come...has made me who I am now.

Maybe this is why my personality has changed from quiet good-two-shoes to loudmouthed, lazy, smart-ass Brandon in class. Is this what I needed to do to fill the void? Become a little more outgoing? I honestly don't know, since what little close friends I have actually know how I behave around them. I guess you could describe my current situation with these two songs:

"I'm sorry for the person I became

 I'm sorry that it took so long for me to change 

I'm ready to be sure I never become that way again 

Cause who I am hates who I've been."

"And I've been housing all this doubt,

and insecurity and I've been locked inside that house,

and I've been dying to get out,

and that might be the death of me,

and even though there's no way of knowing where I go"

So yeah, if you just listen to those two songs you can pretty much get the gist of my life right now. No, I'm not trying to sound super mopey and "Oh, life sucks so hard can it get any worse?". What I honestly want is a friend throughout high school that I can rely on, spend time with, fall back on, someone that I can trust. Maybe my expectations are just a tad to high and I should live with what I've got, but I really don't want to do that.

Luckily I know that I still hopefully got a while to go before I leave this lil' planet of ours, so I shouldn't worry too much about the what-if's, could-have's, and everything else that could have happened, and instead focus down what's in front of me and start waking up from these doldrums.

"Of course we do! The tomorrow that we're trying to grab for ourselves... is not the tomorrow that you've set out for us! It's the tomorrow that we choose for ourselves: a tomorrow that we choose out of all the infinite universes."

-Simon the Digger

No matter what comes up in the future, whether I'm doing it all alone or with some friends, I'll keep pressin' on, cause that's the kind of person I am. Giving up so easily isn't so fun anyways. And as my philosophy goes, "If life isn't fun then you're doing something wrong". So it's time to start pickin' up those grades and getting on the right track instead of running away over and over and over again, and man-up to face my problems!

Well what am I doing here then? I should go catch some "ZZzzzzzzZzzz's" and kick this plan into overdrive! Let's go buddy!

---Brandon

P.S
I wish writing essays for English came this naturally ><