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.

What Are The Chances (if all variables are independent)?

This morning, in homeroom, as we were getting out planners (completely black, which is boring, but that means colors will show up better in it), I took a seat near the front because there were only a few people there at the time. I waited in line, got everything I needed, and sat down to write my bio lab, when Lauretta walked in.

Apparently, her friend was sitting in front of me, because she took the chair next to mine and sat down. The two of them then went on lengthy discussions of colleges (while coloring in college names with fluorescent pens), including Washington University (the St. Louis one), where Lauretta wants to go. Or maybe it was one of the schools she wanted to go to. It’s kind of hard to pick up information when you’re not part of the conversation.

It was awkward, I suppose, but it was also really weird because our last homeroom (a week ago), I sat in the very back, and Lauretta still managed to sit next to me. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that she was doing this on purpose, but that can’t be because I can’t imagine why she’d do such a thing.

I did manage to finish most of my bio lab, and I finished everything I could do in physics, while the new-to-calculus people learned another month’s worth of calculus in 50 minutes (I also realized that most of the new-calc people were in my algebra class sophomore year, which is kind of neat). Then I started on my math packets (they’re going surprisingly well, considering they’re the harder rounds this time), and one of the questions mentioned a dilated triangle, and I had no idea what that was. I asked Bryant, and he didn’t know either. (He also incorrectly calculated 6^3/3, which was shocking. Perhaps he’s too stressed right now for some reason.)

Yuma searched online and found out that dilated triangles just mean that you multiply the coordinates by whatever the dilation constant is. I would provide a link, but he found it on his iPod, so I didn’t get to see the web address. I don’t get this whole dilation thing, and it sounds a lot like dialysis, which was what we were doing in bio today (shortened lab period). All sugary goodness.

During my free, Yuma and I tried to find other people with our frees, and failed miserably. So we played a round of go, in which I threw magnetic go pieces at the board and miraculously managed to attack some of Yuma’s pieces (even if I failed later), a round of connect-five (which I also lost), and then we walked down the art wing, where the lights were out for some reason, and it was nice and spooky. Then, at the end of the period, I saw Archie and Noah on the bridge, so I asked them, “Do you have a free right now?”

“Yes,” Archie said. “Why?”

“Well, I’m compiling a stalker list of a lot of people and their schedules, and I’m trying to figure the schedules out.”

That was probably not the best thing to say, but they weren’t really freaked out, and Archie supplied that he dropped period 2 physics (my physics class) for AP chem with Dr. Cans. I guess that’s why we didn’t see him in physics today. I never would have guessed (or realized, I suppose, until a few weeks later, which just goes to show how well I observe things).

Quand nous étions en classe d'anglais

Mario insisted on talking about math.

There are, of course, plenty of Mario stories I can tell from today's English class. In fact, being in Mario's English class may prove to be a unique experience altogether, but I digress. These stories start, obviously, with Mario's arrival into the classroom, fashionably late, with a cup of coffee in his hand.

Then, during self-introduction/name-a-book time, he said, "I really like the Redwall books. The mice books. It's about a lot of—rodents—and, uh, then there's the part where you get to read about rodents killing each other."

Or something to that effect. I forgot his exact words. I think everyone was busy laughing at him, anyway.

After the introduction round, Mr. Littney tried to recite everyone's name. He came to Mario and couldn't remember his name. Mario replied, "It's a plain vanilla name," which obviously helped. Then, Mr. Littney confused Mario with Lyle, which I am not sure how that happened, but luckily Lyle had arrived late with a pink note, so Mr. Littney just referred to the note.

During discussion time, we were talking about the Aciman article, and Archie said he felt cheated because the author eventually revealed that not all that he write about (even supposedly non-fiction and memoirs) is real. Mario sprung into a detailed discussion that can, to the best of my ability, be broken down into the following points:

• people fit into templates
• different people think in different ways
• these different ways can be described as a 3D space, where the real is on a line, and the not-so-real is on some plane
• of course, this 3D space is only an analogy, and analogies don't really work all the time

This soliloquy took around 5-10 minutes, and English class promptly ended soon afterwards. I would have gladly reminded him of real/imaginary/complex numbers in a Cartesian plane to further his analogy, but I'm not sure Mr. Littney could have stood any more Mario-talk for at least half an hour (if not more). He even started to half-interrupt near the end of Mario's soliloquy.

At lunch, I saw Argon (and I finally returned his number theory notes), Gretchen, Yuma (well, okay, so we had a free together), Tea, Nyx, and numerous other people (I remember Kathrya, but not who else was there). Yuma and I played a game of go, in which I lost miserably, and then Yuma played Nyx, in which she also lost miserably. And there really isn't any purpose to bringing these people up, I suppose, except to promote equality among the number-count it was a great day, complex multi problem included. Lovely day.