Prewriting

Our family is what my father would like to say as "broken." Each one of us is different in our own ways. We have my older brother P.J., who's the black sheep of the family and amazingly good at math (I think a perfect score on the ACT would prove that). My other older brother, Matt, is the good straight-A student and is on the Dean's List here at Ohio University. And my little brother, Danny, is the most outgoing of us all and really smart. Me, I am viewed as the outgoing, an "ok" student along with being the "artsy" one of the family.

I remember my Dad telling me at dinner one night, "Becky. What'd I tell you are the most important subjects in school?" This question as been droned upon me for years and knows the answer like a pop song, "Math and science?" He would just stare at me after he found out that I got a "C" in Trigonometry one quarter in my junior year of high school. You could say that I became the slacker one, but what amazes me more is how Matt would always be praised for his great grades and I find out later that he would copy his homework from someone else in school because he didn't have time to do it beforehand. I felt above him in that aspect, which made me feel a lot better. I was the band nerd who took the course so seriously, doing honor bands and solo and ensemble contest, because I knew that music is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So, you could say I just didn't try too hard in the subjects my parents loved, because I found no interest in them. I remember that very same year, we had the huge "Trig Project" as we all called it, and there were things we hadn't learned yet on it and it was a large portion of our grade that quarter. I had my partner, who happened to be one of my good friends by the name of Andrea, but she was just as bad at math as I was. I'm thinking "I have two brothers who are really good at math, so why don't I ask them? They know this and Matt took it just the year before."

I go to Matt's room, which is across the hall from me and ask for his help. He took the course a year ago and thought he was the best bet. He looks up at me as I ask him and he said "Sure. I'll see what I can do." Matt walks down the narrow hallway into the kitchen to the counter separating the kitchen from the dining room. After scanning the problems, he scribbles with the horribly cramped handwriting he has and kept erasing, jotting numbers and equations down, and erasing again. After only ten minutes, he gets angry and says, "I'm done. I don't remember how to do this." I was shocked; after all the times he said he could help me and my parents telling me that I should get help from him when needed, that it was just useless advice. Going down the stairs into P.J.'s room, was my last resort. His room was very dusty, messy, and cramped as he sat at a computer chair, playing World of Warcraft. I ask him if he could give me a minute and he's the loving brother, I think, and says "Ok. Let me see what you got here." This perfect-math-ACT-getter works so much harder as he looks over all the problems and writes on a notebook paper. P.J. sighed and gave me the project back in about a half an hour and says, "I'm sorry, but I could only get one problem." Honestly, I was glad that he could figure out one of the seventy-odd problems in the homework and thanked him. What I didn't look forward to though, later, is that I didn't get much done after that and asked all my friends for help and failed the "Trig Project"; this then left me with a "D" on my report card for trigonometry so my Dad was peeved. I can still imagine his face and him saying, "I'm very disappointed with you," which is the worst phrase that parents could ever say to you.

But honestly, I really tried to understand the "most important subjects" in school, but it wasn't useful. My brothers think I was babied, being the only girl, and not having to do everything that they had to do. My father didn't force me to take the ACT my sophomore year like he did with Matt and P.J., which upset Matt for some reason. My father understood by then that I was going to study music and didn't really need to worry about my ACT until I needed to apply to colleges. But my brothers thought differently, of course. Secretly though, I wish I could be as smart as P.J. and Matt are; I only got a 22 on my test and felt incredibly dumb compared to them (The second time I took the ACT, a boy threw up onto his test around winter time with the colds going around, and the proctors couldn't clean it up until break, and it happened only a couple chairs away from me. Paper towels do not help you forget it's still there).

About me being outgoing, I'm only outgoing to those I've known for a while, like my family and close friends. Moving around a lot when I was younger was a bit hard for me, and somehow made friends even though I looked like a nerd. My friend from home, Rachel, told me about when I first moved to Maplewood in the middle of fifth grade and how my rose tinted glasses made me look like a hippie, and they found that so humorous, that they started talking to me. I laughed when I heard this story the summer before coming to Ohio U, because we became really good friends somewhow. I can say more to my friends than I can do my family, but I don't think of myself as the outgoing, party type that Dan is of the family. Danny will tell you differently because my father would tell him he couldn't go somewhere with his friends and he would reply, "You let Becky go to the movies with her friends, why can't I go?" Danny always wanted to be the one to be more independent than my brothers and I, which would always get him in trouble. My father, Danny, and Matt have the same kind of temper: bad. I am much more calm and can bottle things up, which makes them more upset more than anything.

Matt was driving me home around midnight after we got the last book of the seventh year of Harry Potter and we were having a good time. I don't remember what really sparked it, but he got upset with me and started yelling at me. "I can't believe you. . . you are so stupid! All you think about is yourself," and a lot of other horrible remarks that I was trying to tune out at the time until he said, "Lisa thinks you're selfish too!" That really hit me hard; Lisa was our foreign exchange student we had my junior year because my father didn't want to have a male foreign exchange student because he was scared by his coworkers that he was "bringing a date for Becca" and that changed his mind immediately. Also, Matt started dating Lisa secretly for a few months and he was still with her at the time. She really loved the designated "Becky pieces" of pumpkin pie, they were so massive pieces. Anywho, I was upset because we were such good friends and I thought she thought well of me. And yet, I said nothing to him, which just made him more angry. Agreeing with him makes him angry also. Later, I find out that Lisa never said anything of the sort when I asked her on skype--using a computer and webcam to talk to someone--and Matt denied ever saying it. But I knew. . .

Being calm is something I'm really good at portraying, even with friends. Especially in high school, there is a lot of drama because you see the same people everyday, so life has to be spiced up a little bit. It's odd, because my friends would try to seek advice from me and a lot of the things that I write, as of now anyway, has been philosophical and "deep" as my friend Reilly had said. To my family, however, I'm not really viewed as philosophical or anything close to that. I usually find myself hardly saying anything at all when we have group discussions about politics or a related subject at the dinner table because I don't find it as important to me. I think the only "advice" I had ever given to my family was to Danny about a girl problem he was having; it was to see if this girl he was talking to really liked him or not. It didn't really matter because he didn't really accept my advice, but he appreciated that I tried, I suppose.

My family views me as the optomist, which I like to think I am sometimes. I can be a realist, don't get me wrong, but I like to look at the glass half full, as that overused saying goes.