I'm Going To Wake Up At 5:00AM

Hahaha.

As if.

I have been telling myself those words for the past few nights, but doing so after staying up late reading Takaki (or Gatsby, for that matter) has proven to be ineffective.

Also, my French teacher today lamented the awful, dreadful, absolutely "wrong, wrong, wrong" act of ending a sentence with—gasp—a dangling preposition!

Never mind that according to Grammar Girl, it's the number one grammar myth. (The actual explanation is much more complicated than a simple, end-every-sentence-with-a-preposition-if-you-so-desire statement, but that's what external links are for. And the last preposition was used correctly.)

Other grammar myths include the much-feared "never split an infinitive" (also something my French teacher obsesses over) and "it's incorrect to answer 'How are you?' with 'I'm good.'" So really, the next time some grammar-amateur-freak tries to correct you by saying, "It's 'I'm well,' not 'I'm good.,'" rest assured that you are actually correct.

Of course, the fact that I am reading Grammar Girl instead of doing homework is probably not a good thing. I might have been able to get away with it if I were not doing my English homework, but we had an in-class essay today (with frozen-thawed muffins and coffee cake), so we did not have any homework. Such a pity.

In other news ("Extra—! Extra—! Hear all about it—!"), I was going to blog about math team yesterday, but I got sidetracked by my trip plannings, so I didn't have time to finish my post. Instead, I will take the lazy way out and simply highlight several important things that happened to me in the past few hours:

• Math team: as Gretchie already had already mentioned, so I will link you to her post instead (later).
• Calc test: half-horrible, half-not that bad. I got the same answer as Bryant for one question, but as the next bullet point shows, this may not be so reassuring after all. (In realms of math, however, I will trust Bryant over Dino.)
• Chem test: nightmare. I half-guessed on half the questions, and for the last question, Bryant got a different answer from Nyx and me, who got a different answer from Camel, who got a different answer from Boris, who got a different answer from... well, you get the drift.
• Tests in general: why have all the tests been squished into this week? I had a physics test today as well, which wasn't bad at all, but I compared answers with Michael, who refutes what I've written, so there is a potential (no pun intended) problem for at least one of us. This seems to happen a lot lately.
• National Honor Society: completely distracting. I listened to our principal talk for a while, thinking about how I would not fit in to the criteria for membership selection. The other half I spent staring at Dino's hair squinting at the board. (Also, Dino might have caught me staring at him several times, which might be either good or bad.)
• US: we (well, mostly our US teacher whom I have to find the nickname for) panicked when we realized that the REVISED edition of Takaki is drastically different from the original. Lots of "sexy" titles gone, and an entire introduction changed. Better than any revision I've ever done.
• xkcd: is every addicting, as I've found out lately. I'm on #600+ now, and I started with 100+ two days ago. Not good. Not good at all.

And of course, I am very, very sleepy and this is very, very late right now, I will go to bed and try (really, really hard) to wake up at 5:00AM tomorrow morning.

Man Girl: 0
Nature Sleep: 1+2+3+...+n+...

Let's Travel Around the World

All of a sudden, I want to plan a trip around the world. Really. Something that would take my mind off the mountain-load of homework I have create memories that I can keep for a lifetime.

As is with most of my plans, I lack the monetary support for such a project. Therefore, after much brainstorming, I have come up with an alternative.

A virtual tour.

Ha. How does that work? Well I'm not worrying about the details because I don't know them either right now. Just wait and watch as I unfold my trip and invite people along. If you want to add something, leave a comment and I'll incorporate it as well.

Anyway. Let's begin! (If you want to know what happened to me in my real life, scroll down to the end.)

Day -1 (or -2, or -3, depending on how long it takes us to prepare...)

Yay, I'm going on a trip! There's ME on the right (well, not really me, but a picture I drew of myself in ten minutes on paint, and took 20 minutes figuring out what font I should use). I am obviously such an important part of this trip, because this is MY trip.

Obviously.

Anyway, what else do I need to do?

Packing. Ugh. Not a fan of packing.

So what will I need?

I'll probably need a bag first, to put everything else I need inside. A small backpack will be nice. I don't want to have to carry around too much stuff, and having a small backpack will limit me and make me take only what I need to.

I'll also need a camera—what good is a trip without pictures? That means all the accessories as well: the cords, spare batteries, and of course, a laptop to upload my pictures as I go along.

(Haha. A laptop as an accessory.)

To the left is a randomly picked pink camera. It's one of the smallest images around, so it will have to do. I have pored over pages upon pages of Camera Catalogue, and have finally come up with the best camera for me!

While we're at it, here's my laptop as well:

Isn't it pretty? It's also huge, so I don't know how I'll cope with that, but I suppose since I'm doing this virtually anyway I'll live.

Now that I have all of my technology things out of the way (I should also get a phone, but I'll leave that for later), I can focus on other things. Such as what I should wear. But I am wearing that ugly grey I-don't-even-know-what up there, so that's crossed off. I'll just bring a blanket just in case. (No picture yet because they're not fitting because my camera picture is so huge.)

I'll also need a bottle of water, some snacks, my passport and other ID, some money, a book (see IRL below for which one I'm likely to bring), sunglasses, sun screen, bug spray, a flashlight, and an umbrella. I can't think of anything else now, so I'll leave it at that. I guess I could always buy what I need later, although I'll spend a night thinking about this more. Along with my calc test. What are you talking about? Calc doesn't exist in this trip—at least not yet.

So there! I'm almost all ready to go! I'll probably hop onto the nearest airport early tomorrow morning and start my journey at some random corner of the world. In fact, I should probably research where the airport is and where my first destination is located before I leave.

Maybe.

What happened IRL:

We did yoga in gym today. Yoga. MTV Yoga, because the Biggest Loser Yoga video didn't work, and kept on getting stuck at the "warm up" part, so we ditched that tape. Instead, we were told to "take a deep breath and relaaaaaaaax." While doing super-fast yoga moves that half the class can't keep up with.

In other news, I managed (with Dino's help) to fix up the Kyle program that Kyle—I mean, who else would name a program after himself?—wrote. Now, when you're prompted with a choice of either "yes" or "no," you actually get different answers. Too bad Kyle wasn't in class today, so I couldn't show it to him.

Also, in US, we started reading A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki! (Well, technically, everyone started reading it on Friday, but I wasn't there, and neither was Reese.) So Reese and I went to the shelf of brand new (or almost brand new) books and picked out what we believed were the shiniest ones. Reese was even more pickier than me. He delved into the bottom of the pile to pick out a book, then rejected it because "it had a piece of dust on it."