I almost wish that I could erase the big red “28” in the upper right-hand corner of my chemistry whiteboard. If all of the countdowns went away and people stopped telling me how soon AP exams, finals, and summer vacation are, I’m sure that I’d gain some of my focus back. I haven’t become a slob yet, but I do know that I’ve temporarily surrendered my ability to give the extra push when it comes to schoolwork.

It’s apparent that I’ve reached a rut when filling out paperwork for my summer job trumps studying at the moment, and doing homework feels like torture when I know that my little sister’s in the next room over watching Pirates of the Caribbean.

I still like school, and I obviously want to do well on all of my tests, but I’ve found it increasingly easy to slide back into a complacent state of mind, which isn’t good for this situation. Although I know that I should be relaxed and accepting in nearly every other aspect of life, I need that slight tinge of anxiety with school to stop myself from trying to wing everything. And as incredibly ecstatic as I am that summer is fast approaching, knowing that it is has slowed me down.

One of the perks of being a senior at my school (Carondelet) is that, once school resumes after spring break, we get free dress until the end of the year. Although the idea of choosing your outfit probably does not seem so attractive to the majority of the population, this is a big deal for the all-female students in my grade. In my case, I have been wearing a uniform since Kindergarten. I never thought that selecting what clothes to wear everyday would be such a challenge. On the first morning of free dress, for example, I woke up at my usual time and was almost late to my first period class since I had gone through about 27 outfit changes. Believe it or not, I actually miss my uniform. It was so easy just throwing on the standardized plaid skirt and navy-blue sweatshirt. My school calls the senior free dress a privilege but, for me at least, it is more of a burden. Some advocates of free dress in schools say that allowing kids to choose their own clothing gives them an opportunity to express themselves and be individuals. In my opinion, however, uniforms encourage students to express themselves in ways beyond their physical appearance.

This week in English class, we read an article about the cultural implications of Shea Stadium’s rebirth as Citipark, the new home of the New York Mets. It was primarily meant to provide us with practice for writing more words in a smaller amount of time, in preparation for the looming four-hour brain fry that the College Board has christened the AP Exam. I found my looping and crossing pen inadequate of putting down new insights, since the author had entirely summated something my mind’s been kicking around for a long time: that the United States has become and will continue to develop into a “sell-out” brand nation.

It’s in the commercial impulses that drag people to Kohl’s at four in the morning the day after Thanksgiving to kick off their ‘celebrations’ of Christmas. It’s in how I’ve taken to naming my clothes and shoes by their brand name rather than their description or color. It’s just easier to tag things by their maker or respective corporation, because that way everybody instantly knows what you’re talking about, and can probably rattle off a jingle or two to accompany it.

I can’t blame anybody for accepting money, sponsorships, or endorsement deals from large corporations, because it comes as substantial funding at a time when the little guy can hardly compete with the international hotshot. But even after you introduce one corporate sponsor, it ends the days of what this article refers to as ‘mom-and-pop’ businesses, because with the entrance of even one company, all the small businesses have to compete. Competition can lead to an economic downfall which can only be remedied by “selling out”. Feeding the vicious cycle, this incidentally promotes a reliance on brand-name dollars to bail out small businesses, further diminishing the “indies” of the business world.

Honestly, I possess just about as many qualifications to talk about the business world as my cat does to predict the 2008 Olympic swimming outcomes, but it just seems sad that there’s no end in sight to endless advertising bombardments, and that a way of business life seems to have fallen by the wayside.

“Danielle, are you a little stressed out?” my friend asks me.

Well, I think to myself, I have my AP English and AP German tests coming up in a few weeks. Prom is a few weeks after that. What will I wear? Will I have a date? Should I go if I do not have a date? Then, I have a championship swim meet on May 17 where I will be swimming the 500 free and the 100 back. I have three SAT subject tests to take on June 7. My ACT is a week later. My teachers are piling on the homework. All I have time for right now is school and swimming. I do not understand pre-calculus at all; it is more of a foreign language to me than German is! I keep telling myself, Junior year is almost over, just two more months to go … Will I survive?

“Just a tad,” I replied. – Danielle Douvikas

At the risk of turning my contributions to the blog into a movie review site, I’ve got another movie to gush about this week: Do the Right Thing. I saw it in my school’s film club last Friday, and it’s stuck with me long enough to still be bouncing around my head nearly a week later. I’d be proud of myself to claim that I enjoyed the movie entirely for its gritty, realistic take on reality in Bed-Stuy, or its groundbreaking stance on racial prejudice. But I have to admit that part of it was the ease that Spike Lee gives the viewers to relate to the movie, through all of the more familiar components of the film.

Do the Right Thing follows a black pizza-delivery worker, Mookie, dealing with heightening tensions within his neighborhood in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. It’s the hottest day of the year, and short tempers fuse with long sun rays to create trouble among Mookie’s black friend, Buggin’ Out (I’m not joking, that’s his name); Sal, the Italian-American owner of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria; the Korean owners of a fruit and vegetable stand; Radio Raheem, a man devoted to his boom-box; and the entire neighborhood at large.

More so than the Japanese samurai films or Russian war dramas we’ve watched, Do the Right Thing has some sort of brilliant mechanism that sucked me into the movie (I’ll take a film class and learn the more technical term later). The opening hip-hop anthem (Chuck D’s “Fight the Power”), the familiar faces who got their start from Lee’s project (from John Turturro to Martin Lawrence), and the 80’s-colorful get-ups all make the movie hit closer to home than foreign films from bygone eras.

Again, I wish that I had the film vocabulary to adequately describe the traffic jam of emotions that coursed through me as the film progressed: anger colliding with frustration, flipping over despair, broadsiding laughter. It’s impossible to explain much more thoroughly than that without spoiling the ending. All I can leave you with is a double-whammy warning.

1) Don’t watch Do the Right Thing if your ears are sensitive to the more vulgar words in the dictionary. According to IMDb.com, Spike Lee incorporated the f-bomb approximately 240 times, making for a rate of two per minute.

2) If you’re someone like me who gawks at history textbook pictures of policemen power-hosing civil rights protests, prepare yourself mentally for Spike Lee’s full depiction of racial tension without the box-office niceties.

I was pretty excited to watch The New World, thinking that it might compensate for falling behind in my spring break study program to stay on track for the upcoming AP U.S. History test. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Although the premise is that The New World describes the original Jamestown settlement, Pocahontas, John Smith, John Rolfe, and all that jazz, my mother and I agreed that it ended up feeling more like a two and a half hour perfume ad. In place of the Anglo-Powhatan wars or the smallpox epidemic, my family and I were bombarded with breathy, cryptic voice-overs and a multitude of shots of Pocahontas and one of the Johns strolling through a wheat meadow together. The movie deserves credit for having some beautiful scenes and looking pretty, but so do some calendars.

The oddest part of the movie though, is that I felt compelled to keep watching. I haven’t decided if it was in hope that the next scene would turn the movie into what I had expected, or if the cinematography and faux-insightful reflections and montages really commanded that much of my attention for so long.

I suppose it was a fairly entertaining movie, but I keep finding myself trying to push it out of the back of my head for fear that some error in the dialogue will corrupt what I do remember from that time period.