School Again, What A Surprise

Proper titling rules dictate that I should not capitalize the "A," but I am ignoring that for aesthetic purposes only. Anyway, after a long three-day weekend (yay for Columbus Day), I am back into the school routine. Which, thankfully, means reduced time for annoying college things, but unfortunately, also means increased time for schoolwork.

Since my morning was rather uneventful (we watched this "how to turn a sphere inside out" video and a few Old Spice commercials during communication time, but that was mostly it), I will skip right to French, where our teacher, who I shall now call Mme Pottery, spent most of the class showing us this music video (in French, of course) whose main ideas are "Why do we have to go to school and do all this work?" and "Oh, leave it to Charlemagne, he's to blame." Then we listened to this music video by the same singer who performed at the 1967 or 1965 Eurovision contest, and it's a song about a doll who complains that since she's so pretty she should be able to have so much, but she can't have boys falling in love with her. Or that was what I got out of it, anyway.

Great use of over an hour's worth of time.

I spent a good part of econ figuring out the tax graphs and how to draw producer and consumer burdens. Now I have the concepts down, so the graphs are easier. Yay! Unfortunately, we have a test on Monday, which means I will actually have to look over the practice test (it's quite a heavy bundle), and I am not looking forward to that.

I also spent a good part of my free convincing Yuma that math team was more important than frisbee. I'm not sure how well that went. But I did get to print out all the stuff I needed to print out (except the Naviance sheet), and then tomorrow morning I will have to schedule various meetings, but I think all is going well (so far). Clay took my computer (which reminds me, I hope he logged me off), so I got my envelopes written out and reformatted my lab, and Yuma and I folded paper airplanes according to that tutorial he found online, and we spent ten minutes or so throwing paper airplanes in the hallway. Archie, who was at the corner table, stared at us weirdly. When Clay came out, I finally managed to throw a successful, airborne, non-circling-back plane. I was really proud of myself.

Then I got all of my earlies letter envelopes settled, including seeing Tea and Kathrya multiple times in the process. After that, we (although Kathrya was just in it for the walk and the Gretchen-glomping time) went to math team, where everyone was already there. To our horrendous dismay, there was only one of the round 5 and 6 practice problems each left. Oh no! So we each took one and will now have to settle for next time.

Argon came over a while later and asked Tea about RSI. It was a long, rather drawn-out conversation, by the end of which we found ourselves all sitting on tables. Ms. Sherbert looked over at us and asked, "Are you guys practicing?"

Haha. I tried one of the geometry questions, but because I was too lazy to square numbers in my head, I didn't go further.

After math team, I went to the library, where I saw Zephy and Reese. Zephy was doing her physics homework (oh, utexas, how I loathe you so), and Reese was figuring out other people's chicken-scratch handwriting, because he got a huge list of rejects from his email list for tech club or something. So I sat down and tried to figure out said handwriting with him, and I think we got a couple of the emails (Reese's way of testing to see if the emails were valid was to send out an email with the subject line "test" and nothing else). We didn't get Superman though.

Pity.

Again With The Emails

This is significantly less interesting than the last time, but bears mentioning because I don't want to write my Cornell essay right now.

Anyway, after much consideration (or I think it's much consideration, anyway), and much disappointment after learning that we (mostly Tea) had stolen Dr. Cans for Science Bowl on the same day as Chess Club (the conversation between Sonny, Livny, and me on this topic is appendixed below), Sonny decided to resume Chess Club once again. He sent out an email earlier, with the following message:

Thanks for your interest in the Chess Club! We will be holding our first meeting Thursday, October 21 after school in room 1234. I hope to see you there. It will be fun, and there will be candy! If you are interested in the club, but Thursday is not convenient, please e-mail me and we can try to work around everyone's schedule. See you next week!

How delightful. I think that is also the first meeting (for new members) for Science Bowl. And since our room is in 1228, we'll be... an awkward two rooms away. So I emailed him (and everyone else, sort of accidentally) with the suggestion that he move the room to 1232, because then there will only be the chem office between the two rooms, and so they'll be connected (via the doors that lead from the office to the classrooms). Sonny agreed to that.

A few minutes later, Livny replied (to everyone):

Thursday is not convenient.

Well, there goes the rest of Sonny's plans. Maybe there still will be candy? Or maybe someone else will object that they're allergic to glucose and the club might as well just self-combust.

Appendix:

1) Conversation/Telling Sonny Dr. Cans is no longer a "full-time" advisor for Chess Club (or what I remember, anyway, since some parts of it is fuzzy):

Me: Hey, Sonny, so it just so happens that Tea and Gretchen and I and some other people have started this Science Bowl club, and we got Dr. Cans as our advisor—

Sonny: Uh-huh.

Me: And our schedules were such that it could only work out on Thursdays. So Chess Club might not have an advisor anymore.

Sonny: Wait, what?

Me: We're extremely sorry about that.

Sonny: But—but—

Livny: Don't worry about it. He'll be all right. I mean, it's only been his dream for who knows how long to start a chess club, and all you're doing is crushing all of his hopes. No big deal. He'll get over it.

Sonny: Wait, but—

Livny: Hey, look, just because you've wanted this for such a long time, and it's been the only thing you've ever thought about, and it's almost as important as your life, doesn't mean—obviously, Science Bowl is much more important.

2) My chess game with Sonny during Club Rush:

After a good fifteen minutes or so, I have lost all of my pieces except a couple pawns, a bishop, and a king. Sonny has a few pawns, two rooks, and a king. He is on offense, with his rooks ready to kill my bishop and even threaten my king.

In the next five minutes (with much foot-stomping on my part because he just won't hurry up and I had to go print out stuff for English soon), we both have the same number of pawns on the board, and a king each. And nothing else.

Spring Cleaning

Well, my parents don't believe in spring cleaning, so I didn't have to physically clean out anything (we did wash the car today though). However, I decided to clean out my inbox, because lately Daily Writing Tips, College Board, Dictionary.com, Braingle, and Assorted Other Colleges have decided to spam me (more like, I signed up for their newsletters and whatnot and didn't realize the consequences of my actions). Since I had well over a thousand unread messages, and plenty more that I had already read, I created a few more labels and started sorting and archiving my mail.

With a good two or three hours spent, I've finally organized everything. Right now, my inbox status stands as follows (for anyone who's not interested, I don't have much else to say today, so you can basically skip this post):

(Also note, I have my email set in French, but I got lazy translation-wise and so all labels are in English.)

Boîte de réception: 9
Consists of odd items such as the email from Paperclip's resident dietician asking me to send her the completed version of my research paper, SHP applications that I have long abandoned (because my dad thinks it's not worthwhile, whatever that means), an email from Zephy saying I owe her $1.25 for the town bus fare, and several emails from QuestBridge, but I'm not sure what they are or what they want me to do (something I shall have to check out later).

Braingle: 390
My "Quiz of the Day" and "Teaser of the Day" supplier. I have 147 of those that I haven't read, which is strange, because they come in pairs and I read them in pairs, but perhaps I skipped a quiz one day because half of them are movie quizzes and I have a very limited movie knowledge database.

Cappex.com: 61
Registered an account there about the same time I registered an account for College Confidential, which reminds me, I haven't visited either lately. But CC is very depressing (especially all those amazing Ivy-wannabes who keep asking, "Am I going to get in???"—I would be surprised if you didn't get in), and I don't quite remember why I checked out Cappex in the first place.

CBoard: 251
"College Board" was too long to fit in one line without those annoying ellipsis (which, according to TheSage, can also be spelled "eclipsis"), so I dubbed it "CBoard" instead. Anyway, since I have around 195 of them I haven't read yet, that basically means I haven't been doing any of those "The Official SAT Question of the Day" for more than half a year now.

Clubs/Competitions/Confirmation: 139
Three separate labels, but each not significant enough to have its own block of text. This is where all those bike/chess club notices (including Livny's chess mafia email), Moody's half-completed papers, and subscription/sign-up confirmation emails reside.

College Promo: 649
The main reason why I was cleaning out my email in the first place (because everything else I can just filter out by sender and automatically apply labels). Twenty three of them come from University of New Haven, which I am definitely not applying to because it would be a waste of effort for both of us. The rest come from an assortment of colleges, including nine from WPI, several from this Monica person from Hamilton College, and plenty more that I have definitely seen duplicates of. Also, the more I ignore them, the more they send me emails (as evidenced by the few colleges I responded to have not sent me any emails ever since).

DWT: 214
Daily Writing Tips is amazing in many ways. I subscribed to their "newsletter" to learn new grammar rules and such, but they have so much more than that. For example, Friday's email included twenty book titles that were inspired by Shakespeare's plays (including the lines they came from) and the second installment of their poetry contest.

Facebook: 667
If any label could beat "College Promo" by now, it would be Facebook. I just remembered (right now) that I had set all Facebook messages to auto-archive, which is why I haven't seen anything whenever people write on my wall or send me messages as of late.

Fiction: 12
My Fanfiction.net and Wordpress.com account emails. I haven't posted anything on there, so this label has been much neglected.

Friends: 110
As the label says, all those emails from my friends that don't belong anywhere else. Half of them are 100+ replies between Stella and me. Half of those emails consist of links that Stella was trying to make me visit (mostly audio/video files) and me responding that I don't have any headphones on hand.

Misc: 20
All the weird stuff that I was too lazy to make an individual label for. Most of Google's emails/alerts/reminders somehow mysteriously (or not) ended up here. I've also got a few emails from Photobucket (which is a word, but spellcheck is not).

School: 68
All those SnapGrades messages in Turkish that Mr. Coffee sent everyone in his classes are here. Last-minute emails I sent myself with homework attachments are also here, and I've got an email or two from Mrs. Tallchief regarding my research paper. Oh, the nightmares. At least that's over now.

Word of the Day: 273
I thought I would expand my vocab by reading and memorizing one word each day. Seeing as I have 170 of those I haven't opened yet, you can see how well that plan went. I do remember learning "misanthrope" from an old WofD email, and emollient (which reminded me of Molly Weasley), and aquiline (a word that later showed up as a vocab word in my sophomore English class).

I feel so accomplished. Well, I also did a practice test for calc, and got a 70% on the multiple choice and 90% on free-response (I can't believe I got the Taylor series one), so I'm hoping for a five on the test. (It's also sad that I can get most of the AB questions right but BC is just that much harder, mostly because there's much less time.)