Why Not to Start Your Research Paper on the Day Before it's Due.

1. You find yourself needing to write five pages of solid work, of which you barely have one page.

2. You find your fellow classmates needing to write five pages of solid work, of which none of them barely have ten pages combined. In a class of twenty.

3. You find yourself waking up really, really early to finish off said five pages.

4. You find your fellow classmates not waking up really, really early and not finishing off said five pages.

5. You find yourself weeks behind on another blog entry.

6. You find your fellow classmates... wait, you don't know if your fellow classmates have blogs.

Well, now that I know why I should totally not procrastinate on my research paper, and why I should totally plan it out ahead and totally write it long before it's due, will I actually do it?

Well...

No.

I'll probably, at most, just think about it for a very, very long time. And I doubt I'll even think about it for such a long time. Other, more exciting things, are always around.

Like the AMC results.

I talked to Argon, who religiously checks the AMC website and can apparently glean off information that I myself cannot find (a.k.a. the cutoff scores), and he told me that the 12A cutoffs were 88.5. So, if the 12B cutoffs are the same, I have room to make two "oops-I-bubbled-it-wrong-again" mistakes, and exactly two.

The downside to that?

Dino would also make it, what with his guessing not-so-strategy.

I know it sounds mean, but I really do not think Dino deserves to make it to AIME's. But I searched around Google and I've heard that quite a number of people got over 100, so I am not sure about these cutoffs. Also, apparently, many people who take 12B have also taken 12A and take the second one because they didn't do so well on the first one, and are thus more prepared for the second one.

Who knows?

All I can say is, I am 95% confident that Argon was one of the pitifully few who actually did practice problems on the AMC site.

I know for me, personally, I forgot the AMC even existed until the day before, when Nyx conveniently reminded me. But that's just me.

Of course, I'm also really, really excited for Moody's.

Rumor on the street claims this year's topic is going to be about healthcare, namely what is the best way to tackle the healthcare problem while minimizing government (or better known as tax) money, maximizing savings for the average person, and possibly avoiding political attacks.

You know, such things as, "It's socialism, and if this is passed in Congress then I'm going to move to Canada!"

Well, no, you're not. Because, if anything, Canada is much more socialist than the US, even with the addition of a universal healthcare system. Moving to Canada will help your case in no way whatsoever. You might as well say you're moving to China.

Which actually might help, as China's barely starting (if any) a socialist system, and as for now, there isn't even a property tax.

But I digress again.

Regardless of whether the rumor's true, I'll be looking into the healthcare system for the next few days. And if it is true, and some other topic such as when is the best time to end the war in Iraq/Afghanistan or how to end our reliance on foreign oil is not chosen or even how to make sure colleges don't spam your inbox with the same emails, then I'm sure we will be prepared plenty.

Of course, I would also be pleasantly surprised if they asked us to design a work calender to maximize worker productivity, with an emphasis on more breaks. I'm not picky at all.

I will be bringing my calc textbook, my precalc textbook, my algebra textbook, my photocopied version of the geometry textbook, my stat textbook, my dad's weird math textbooks in Chinese, my AP review books, and other assortments of random things. You know, calculators, pencils, graph paper, shiny erasers, and so forth.

I think the fact that I've been writing research papers and US reflections for the past few weeks has greatly hindered my natural tendency to write in lists instead of separate, cohesive thoughts, and thus I am expressing myself excessively in this post.

Oh well. Moody's is coming up, and that means fourteen hours of, as Jimmy nicely put it, "insanity." I do believe this reminds me to also bring nice, soft, cushiony pillows, as our school's chairs are most uncomfortable (although the tables are, according to Tea, better than some other schools' tables). I would not be able to stand another fourteen hours of sitting on the ground with only my coat as a soft thing to buffer the pain. I wouldn't even have Joss as a pillow anymore.

So yeah. Pillows, food, writing utensils, and more food.

What more math could there be?

Oh, being on A team for the math meet, finally, after a two month hiatus. Not that I minded B team too much, but I would have liked a chance to see if I could rank comparably with the other people in our grade, and missing a chunk of points because your score wasn't counted does skew the results somewhat.

However, I find it amazing Tybalt did not do better than me. He had been, after all, beating me in my rounds ever since... he started doing them as well. Maybe he had been distracted. That could explain the slightly lower AMC score as well.

Does that mean, since Bryant also scored worse than last year, that he is also distracted? By what? Or whom?

Oh, such mysteries in this world.