Eye On The Birdie – Post #17 Compare And Contrast

Big news! I re-entered the public school system after six years of being homeschooled! It has been exhausting and stressful. Also, I have an inhumane amount of homework, so this is going to be a short post about what’s new in my life and two recent high school practice. (Oh yeah, high school golf has started again too.) Here goes! The very first thing I learned in high school is that I hate assemblies. They are way too loud and crowded and repetitive. But… I made a friend in my Human Geography class. That’s about all that happened the first day. The only significant thing that happened on the second day was that I got a lot of English homework. Or, at least, I thought I got a lot of homework in English. Turns out that was nothing! Since then, I have “passed” all my pretests (they’re not graded), made two friends in Theater, found a group of friends to eat lunch with, made one friend who is in Child Development and Physical Science, had a seating rearrangement in Human Geography that means I can’t talk to my friend anymore, learned that I can’t try out for anything in Theater because of my golf schedule, and somehow lost my friend in Child Development and Physical Science. Also, did I mention that there’s a lot of English homework? …And that’s really everything that I find in my head at the moment. Last Friday I went to a high school golf practice. It turned out that I was too stressed and tired to golf well or deal with not golfing well. (Frankly, I might have been miserable even if I got all birdies. As it was, I got one bogey and that was my best score.) I was (and still am) not used to loud noises, huge crowds, no one to talk to the majority of the time, and schedules. The cumulative stress had reached oh-well-it’s-past-critical-screw-it-all levels, and there was no gleam of positivity in my mind. It is off that gleam that I start my mind tricks. Without it, I don’t have a chance of coming back after a bad shot. The next Tuesday, I attended another practice at the Country Club. Having just started a new week, I was (somewhat) well rested and a little more confident after getting great grades the first week. At that practice, I went out to play a scramble with another member of the girls’ golf team against our coach. I had already warmed up, and hit a great drive off the first hole. This, of course, meant my capacity to hit well went nowhere but up. We managed to get a par and two bogeys, and by the last hole we played, we were leading the coach by two. Then, we got stuck in a bunker and ended with a double bogey. Meanwhile, our coach got his first birdie of the day and beat us by one. Did this upset me? No! I was flying so high as to be almost giddy, and anyway, being beaten by your coach isn’t unusual. I mean, if you beat your coach on a regular basis, I kind of question if you should have a coach. This illustrates how differently my game goes depending on how calm and rested I am. This post is also meant to illustrate that if you are unhappy in the first place, it might be next to impossible to have any of my tricks work. To pull them off, you have to have some positivity to build off of. Now, I’d love to write more, but I have to do my English homework. If I’m quick, I could be done in two-and-a-half hours!   -Birdie