It was during the summer of my junior year in high school when I was first introduced to the 'information super highway'. Besides checking e-mails, making friends, and playing internet games, I was amazed by what people had to show with their interest and ideas. So, after the registration process, my homepage was born.
The very first thing that I did was to put up a page about myself. It was nothing exciting but at least it contained some information about me. However, I was not planning to put any of my pictures on it. The reason for that perhaps is due to my shy personality, which I dislike being shown in front of people.
I added a guestbook and a link page because I wanted people to leave their comments and suggestions. A link page was made because I wanted people to go visit my friends' homepages. After the two new pages were added, I was at the end of my interest in working on my homepage. Ever since I was a child, I have had a very short attention span, and working on my homepage was not going to be an exception.
It was during that time when I received my AP computer science grade. It was at the end of the summer vacation during the same year in high school. After receiving the letter that informed me about my failure to gain college credits, I felt that I was not meant for any computer science related subjects. Since writing html was considered computer science related, thus I stopped working on my homepage for two months.
During those two months I did not think about or work on my homepage. Instead, I was thinking about changing my major and completely giving up computer science. During this period, I was in my first depression in my senior year.
I believe it was during the worst part of the depression, when I was interested in checking out my homepage. So I visited my homepage and to my surprise, a few people signed my guestbook and left messages about keeping up the work. While I was out of ideas for my future and too lazy to study, I went back to work on my homepage.
After fixing a couple of bugs and changing the music for my homepage, I decided to add a new section to it. I felt that music would make a fine addition to my homepage considering I have always been fascinated by it. With an objective decided, I worked harder on my homepage. For the next few weeks I had to organize the music files and put them into html. With that as my goal, I pretty much forgot about my worries and went on with my life.
Regaining direction in life, I decided to give going back to the way I was in my junior year a try. However, too much work had passed. There was also a slight chance that I could have passed all the courses since I was not the type of person that would study.
During Thanksgiving, I realized that there was no chance that I could pass all my APs. Thinking back on what I worked for from a lower classmen to a junior, a bad feeling came across me. I felt that I had been playing around and putting all my hard work from pervious years to waste. With that feeling of being kicked out of my AP classes, I developed a fear of the class.
I was informed after the Christmas break that I was dropped from two of my APs and barely passing the third one. That fear had kept me from trying to regain control in my study habits, and thus I went into my second depression in my senior year. With the feeling that I could never be as smart or as hard working I was in previous years, I knew that this time was worse than the last. As the situation grew worse, I once again went back to my homepage. I was going through my newly added music section when I came across an oldie.
The song was about how a person has to go through many obstacles in her life. With every single obstacle, she faced it and persevered. In her later years, she looks back and is proud for all she had done. I decided to follow the footsteps of the character even though I thought that I could never be as strong as she was. Though that was set in my mind, I decided to work as hard as I could. I soon realized that as long as I set my mind into doing a task, I could finish it and do a good job. By the end of the year, it did pay off. I passed the AP test for BC Calculus.
It was almost at the end of the school year when I realized that I was about a month away from graduating. While all my colleagues were happy that they were graduating and going on with their future, I was having a feeling of emptiness. Perhaps the feeling was a result from my friends not going to the same school as me, as well as the fact that I would be 200 miles away from home, and especially my parents for the very first time.
Having a chance to be away from your parents is great. However, it is hard to shoulder the responsibilities that your parents have taken care of all these years. Perhaps the idea that I had to take care of myself for the first time caused my fear. The feeling of emptiness is resulted from the lack of friends and the inability of making friends in a short time.
As in the previous depressions, the solution was my homepage. I went back to my homepage once again in an attempt to find something that could help me out. As a result, I added a joke section, a poetry section, and a section that will be a revolution to all the other homepages out there, which kept me busy for the last days of my high school career. This time, I was also interested in putting up pictures of myself for people to see. However, the pictures were only my baby pictures.
No matter what the situation was during any crisis in my life, I can always turn to my homepage in search for help. The thought that my homepage is a place where I can represent my feelings with no feedback and/or denial has made me choose it as a cure for my troubles.
March '99