Hello, I'm nervous. You?

Where to begin?
The beginning sounds nice.

It all started in the fall of 2010.....*flashback*
My good friend, Rogelio, (whom we will call Gello) had told me about his crazy idea about going to France. Me, being sardonic, ignored this and thought what a stupid thing to do. Skip a school year for months to live in France? Yeah, it sounded fun, but that wasn't the smartest move to pull off. He mentioned it two or three more times, before he explained to me what it was all about. He told me that he would go to school in France, that he would live with a french family, that he would be completely immersed by the culture a great way to learn the language, culture and to live a French life. Then he said "You're lucky though, If you want to go to Germany, there's a possibility for you to get a scholarship." And then BAM....just like that, I had the same stupid idea and shared the same wild dream.  

No, the scholarship was not what endorsed my liking of Germans. It was more of a growing process. There's a moment when you're a little kid, and you finally understand what something is, and what it's for. When I knew what a car was, I instantly had a favorite, a buggy Volkswagen. Of course, it was later that I learned it was a German car. From there it transformed to Porsche and soon Audi. And then it expanded, when I heard Tokio Hotel. I had no idea who they were, but I heard one of their songs in German and I thought whatever it was he was speaking was just so beautiful. So it took three minutes to know everything about them through wikipedia.

That's when my passion for German took full throttle. With their songs I learned a lot and googling and regoogling, I found busuu.com. Busuu is a language learning website that helped me excel in my German a lot. Of course, I couldn't find a way to thank Gello for introducing me to this crazy idea, so I gave him the website too, and to my great pleasure, he loved it (but for French).

So now, I had to tell my guidance councilor and my mom. I told my guidence councilor first and showed her the AFS website. She took it well, she thought I was making a bold move, she also wanted to speak with my mom about it. Sooooo, I had to tell my mom. I had plenty of mental visions of my mom calling me crazy, yelling at me, or just straight out saying no, so it was up to me to plan out this encounter carefully.  With much preparation and help from Gello I picked a calm Saturday to tell her.

She was playing solitaire on the computer and I opened up the conversation by telling her that I had become much more interested in Germany recently. She continued to play while I told her everything. She didn't speak and she didn't look at me either. I blabbed away and ended by asking, "Mom, do you want to see the website?" She was still looking at the computer screen when she said, "I won." She closed solitaire and opened firefox and said, "Show me the website." At that moment the biggest wave of relief swept over me.

Now it's February:
So far I've submitted two applications and on February 21st  I have to submit another. I have yet to renew my passport, and I have to get some paperwork for my doctor to sign. Recently....more like four days ago, I had my CBYX interview. I am extremely tense and nervous about my results, hence the title. The only reason why I'm nervous is because I really, really, REALLY, want to go to Germany. I feel that the response to the questions they asked me were nice. I don't think I sounded scripted and I didn't sound overly confident. I feel like I spoke to them in a normal tone, laughed a little, added my opinion, gave them honest responses and had a casual stance. But, I just don't know how well all that will pay off. To look on the bright side, my mom was extremely impressed by the results of studying abroad: independence and responsibility and has a more firm support of letting me go to Germany.

I sent my letters of recommendations in the mail (January 21st), which I believe I got really good one's from three of my favorite teachers who teach English and History (my favorite subjects). But that's not the problem, the problem is I don't know if they ever arrived. I live in New Jersey and I had to mail them to OREGON.

Additionally, a band that I belong to and I have auditioned to the school talent show and we have not been notified weather we made it or not. 

To top it all off, I am part of the Constitution Competition. A United States funded program which is part of my AP U.S. I History class curriculum. This competition basically requires you to know the Constitution inside out and to answer very complicated questions about it and to be able to know about as many current event issues as possible which could be related to the Constitution, and a bunch of other things. I'm going to Trenton in two days to face off all the other schools in New Jersey who are in the Competition as well. My classmates and I have made it a goal to get first place so we can move on to nationals and win this for my soon-to-retire history teacher.

In the words of Haley Williams "I can feel the pressure."