Here Is To NaNoWriMo And Math Meet

Math meet today! The second math meet of the—do we call it a season?—started with me missing the last fifteen minutes of Middle East (which is such a boring class, although now I know what a caliph is, finally). I went downstairs and saw Tea and Gretchen coming the other way, and we all got on the bus (and eventually everyone else got on the bus as well).

Obviously, per math meet tradition, we talked about random things. I don't remember much of the conversation, because I was attempting to read the last 15+ pages of Metamorphosis on the bus, and then proceeded to get really nauseated. Not good. (Tybalt remarked that our bus ride was extremely bumpy—more so than usual—which I believe may have contributed to the cause.)

Off the bus (and into Spearheadville), we went into the cafeteria and were going to our usual table in the banished corner when some random girl said, "Is this the nerd conference?"

That comment aside, the pre-math-rounds-math-meet-time went really well. There was lots of food, lots of fun, and lots of hysteria in general, except I believe that either Gretchen or Tea may have better things to say about this because I was rather, uh... anyway.

I will comment on the rounds though. Round 3 was really straightforward, except I did 36 - 8 in my head and got 24. No idea how that happened. Round 5 was also okay except the last question, and we did not have to know sin 75, although I do know it rather well (for the time being) thanks to Bryant's wonderfully descriptive circle (read: circle with four dots). Round 6 was also okay, although I probably flunked out on the math because I got the second question wrong.

But I'm on B-team, so who cares?

Also, while going into round 3, I waited outside for a while with a bunch of Treeburg people who were extremely tall. In matching hoodies. Argon suggested that we really should get hoodies for math team. Uh-huh. Keep on dreaming, Argon.

This is the end of my math meet recount. Someone else pick up from here?

. . .

P.s.: The 2010 midterm election results are out! But they were close to expected, so not too much surprise there.

. . .

And, of course, I mentioned NaNoWriMo, and I have been seeing it around plenty of times, so I suppose I could take part in it too. Except mine will probably be NaReallyShortAndDisjointedNoWriHalfMo, if that makes any sense. I'm sure it did.

I was supposed to have an outline and notes jotted down before November began to give me a head start or something, but since I have my characters already (yay for recycling) and I only really write about one plot, that is not extremely necessary.

So this is the first edition of my ReallyShortAndDisjointedNovel. AlsoKnownAsALongShortStory. NotEdited.

Allie's All About Apathy (note the alliteration?)

In the morning, I came upon the cliff my brother used to call "Judgment's Edge."

Or, if he was feeling creative, he would call it, "The place where all the moping people come to mope and all the idiots come to make stupid poetry about things they'll never understand."

He was never a creative one. It was either plain and straightforward, or he did not bother with it. And I never  knew how he put up with the stories we learned as little kids, but something must have stuck, because he remembered Judgment's Edge from a book our mother had read to us back when she still read. The book was about a boy and his two sisters, that was all I remembered. A boy and his two sisters, just like my brother Ciel, and my sister Celeste, and me.

I am not named after the sky. I am not a skychild. But in the book, the older brother and sister loved their youngest sister. They adored her. And that is all I remember from the book, aside from the ledge they called Judgment's Edge, where the brother and sisters went to pray for their mother's health.

Back then, we did not have to pray for our mother's health. These days, I did not have to either. I wondered if I had ever prayed for her.

I knew Ciel never prayed. Skychildren did not pray. They performed miracles because they were children of the sky. The ones who could survive anything. But Ciel did not pray, not because he believed himself invincible, but because he thought it was pointless. Or maybe the idea of it was too complex, too reliant on a faith he did not possess.

Faith brought me to here, I knew. A faith Ciel never took part in. The same faith—or lack thereof—that created this world.

Anna Marie.

I was in Anna Marie now. Kaniol. A hundred thousand worlds away from Nephria.

I was on Judgment's Edge, looking down on the glistening rooftops of the buildings of Anna Marie. The tall, pointy tower of the Sovereign's Castle. The sprawling gardens Seria Deshen took so much pride in maintaining. The grand magnolias of the DiGrant's front lawn. The town square. The bell tower of the library. The winding Crescentia that flowed through the east end of the city and sparkled under the morning sun.

It was beautiful. I wished I knew why Ciel wanted to leave here so badly.

To be continued next time I have something interesting to say.

The Long-Awaited Math Team Runoffs (Again)

There are so many little froshies at math team this year! I don’t know how long they’ll last (I’m hoping they’ll stick it out until at least states roll around), but it’s still very exciting. They’re so itty-bitty-small and semi-adorable! I don’t know their personality, so I can’t say completely adorable though.

Other than that, we had our expected run-offs. I did rounds 3, 5, and 6, as expected, and I have at least 10 points. Well, at least I passed! And since I’m doing harder rounds this year, that is a vast improvement. I attribute this to the lack of algebra. Algebra is weird (no matter what you say, Tea). Geometry is awesome.

Argon and I had a talk about how we never talk anymore, except during math team. This is an extremely sad situation. I need to remedy that pronto. On the other hand, I am seeing much more of Joss (who thinks he will be on the C team by himself), most likely because we share econ together and he is often with Reese, who I am trying to see more of as well. The end of HUSH has done horrors for keeping up with my sophomore/now-junior friends.

I do have some reservations about our “goal of the year,” which is, as always, “beat Treeburg.” Without Irving, this may get harder, but who knows? Maybe Treeburg has lost three of their really mathy people, and so we have a better shot this year.

But enough about math team. I’m sure next Wednesday will be even more exciting, so I’ll leave this for now. Oh, and, I now know how Mr. Booth got his nickname, thanks to ScriptShadow (my newest blog obsession that reviews movie scripts).

Interesting things of today:

• We did the coffee filter drag force lab today in physics! Really exciting, except for the fact that it's really hard to measure motion when the coffee filter is really light and drifty. Ali wanted Bryant to be in her group (less work for all those involved except Bryant), but Bryant flipped a coin (or maybe he flipped a coin in his calculator, not sure) and decided to go with Dan's group instead. Emmeline had a free before physics, so she made a really cool data chart and it was so exciting to fill it in (not so exciting to drop a coffee filter 45 times though).
• In bio we killed algae! Okay, so we left three bottles of algae alive (but two are wrapped up in foil and mesh, so I'm not sure how long they'll live either), but the last bottle we fixed with sulfates and all those cool chemicals that fix oxygen and burns the hand and so obviously have destroyed the poor little algae cells.
• For French, we went downstairs to listen to the violin guy (Alexander something? I forgot) in the library. As I was listening (and turning away when the sounds got too screeching), I spotted Mario. He now sports a very, very ugly hairstyle. As I was telling Gretchen, it seems that haircuts work opposite for girls and guys. For girls, haircuts usually mean prettier. For guys, they usually mean uglier. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe they need to train haircutters (that's not a word, I know) to learn better boy-hair styles.
• In econ, Mr. Wollen wasn't here, and Yuma, Joss and I drew on the whiteboard, creating quite an (xkcd-inspired) adventure. With chess pieces falling from the sky, nuclear clouds, and lots of angels with big, bouncy heads. There was also an integral composed of smiley faces, flowers, double-square-roots, and brains. Julie got a picture of that one on her phone.

And uninteresting things? All that work I've got to do, plus I'm reading Suicide Note right now, and it's 1905 pages long (almost twice as long as GWTW), so that will most likely take me a while (I'm also taking notes, and I don't have a lot of time to spare, so it's definitely taking me a long time to even read the first 20+ pages, when the first 10 or so pages are the table of contents).

SATs

Are both boring and looooooooooooooooooong. And I am so glad they're over. And now I have to study for stat and calc. (And I know my second grade teacher always said, "Don't start a sentence with 'and,'" but I'm using them anyway.)

So I will be boring today and not have anything important to say. For anyone who was looking forward to a math meet story/transcript, the basic story can be distilled down to this string of words:

Bus ride there—>word games—>Providence mall w/ Apple store and expensive, fatty food—>arriving at the place—>actually doing the problems—>trailing Treeburg by two points—>team round—>still trailing Treeburg by two points—>bus ride back—>Micro won't stop talking—>Mario... uh, let's stop here. Yeah.

Anyway, I'll see if I can get something coherent put together after the calc test.

(P.S.: I've had my first search-engined visit—all the way from France!)

"80, that's definitely a solid B." (Math Adventures—Part IV)

Continued from last time, where we had just finished round one and were going on to round two, but since this has been drawn out for so, so long, I will effectively condense round two and round three (during which Mario and Tybalt tried to find what room Argon and I were in, but failed because they didn't turn around and see me), and this latest edition will begin as Argon, Micro, Dino and I were all back in the cafeteria (basically after round four, so Mario and Tybalt have gone off to do round five).

"How are we doing now?"

"Round two was brutal. We got six points—Treeburg got twenty."

"There's no way Treeburg got twenty points," Dino said, standing up to go over to the score-projector. We followed him and confirmed this sad reality, and then came back to our table again.

"So, there goes 159," Micro said.

"159?" Dino asked, feigning confusion (I was pretty sure he was feigning, because he went on to ask "confusedly" what 162 was, when he was the person who first brought it up).

"Hey, Micro," I said. "Take 162 and multiply it by 0.8 on your calculator."

Micro punched in some numbers and said, "129.6."

"Okay, that's our new goal. 130."

"Why?" Argon asked. "What's 130?"

"That will give us a solid B."

"That's not a solid B," Dino said. "That's a low B."

"80 is definitely a solid B. In the grand scheme of grade-keeping, it doesn't matter what's added to the B at the end."

"Whatever." Dino chose to go back to explaining cos x as a Taylor polynomial to Argon, then added the two together to form the Taylor polynomial of e. After some fiddling and manipulation of numbers, he circles the final result—a degenerate Euler's formula, without the one or zero.

"Whatever," Dino said again as I pointed out his lack of zeros.

"I get how you derived it," Argo said, "but I don't understand how you can take something to the i power. I mean, what does that mean? How do you do it?"

"Well," Dino said. "It just is. You don't ask 'how.'"

Skimming over more trivial events (Micro, Argon, and I testing out more suspicious gelatin-marshmallow candy flavors, Mario claiming that we may still have a chance against Treeburg after seeing their dismal round four scores, and Bryant wondering if he should sneak in a TI-89—not allowed, but unlikely that the proctors would see the difference between that and a TI-84, which is allowed—for the team round questions), this final installment of Math Adventures sees us about to hear who the winners for the state match are. Half the schools (those who figured they would never make top three anyway) had already left, but of course we were not concerned about them. All we cared about was whether we had defeated Treeburg or not.

"And now, in second place for the large schools—"

"If we win," Dino said, "I am going to scream."

"—Paperclip High School!"

Well, so much for hearing him scream. Since the next part(s) is boring, I shall fast forward it. Basically people got their trophies (if any), got on the bus, made lots of noise, Ms. Sherbert asked "all the Paperclip kids to count off and see if everyone's here," to which Mario responded, rather immediately despite his poor view in the back, that yes, we were all here, and then we got back to school. As you can probably see, I have kind of forgotten all the details.

Nevertheless. There is math team tomorrow. The adventures continue!

(UPDATE: Our team made it to the top twelve in the Moody's challenge! YAY! We get a scholarship prize of $1500, which I have no idea how it's going to be even given to us, but nonetheless, top twelve! That is so amazing. As a side note, I am surprised that the Mario-Irving-Owen-Tybalt-Bryant team did not do as well as ours (although they made honorable mention), seeing as their paper seemed much more mathematically based, and ours lacked a conclusion. Perhaps we were so amazing that they overlooked those minor details.

Or so I'd like to believe.)

Math Is Definitely A Sport

I am not much of a sports player (seeing as every sport I play—except maybe for KanJam, which I believe I am quite an expert at because I can aim a frisbee into the tiny slot on those KanJam cans—can be described with the words, "flailing arms everywhere and horrible hand-eye coordination"), so I do not know what a real sports team is like, at least among the players themselves. I cannot claim that solving complex geometry problems is the same as scoring a goal in lacrosse (which I still have no idea how it's played, but I'll probably ask soon).

However, math is most definitely a sport in its own right. It's competitive, we have a team, and we have matches and rivals and most of all, there are different levels of competitions.

In fact, our rivals in math are pretty similar to our rivals in, say, soccer or football.

Anyway, I promised earlier that I would blog about the state math meet, and so, after much homework-tackling and procrastination, here it is, a transcript of (nearly) everything that happened.

When I handed in my permission form on Monday, Ms. Sherbert told me that we would have a dismissal at one. I went on the website that night and checked the schedule (because I only have end-of-class times memorized by the minute hand, not the hour hand), and realized that I would still technically have to go to period 5, my calc class. But everyone was going to be taking a test that I had already taken anyway, so I figured that I wouldn't need to stay. That was what I told Argon (who has half of period 5 free, lucky him) during lunch, and he agreed to come with me upstairs to see Mrs. James and tell her that I was "skipping."

We made it halfway there when we saw Micro wandering down the hall in the opposite direction.

"We have the entire period off, right?" Micro asked as we approached him.

"Well," Argon said, "our dismissal's at one, so you still have to go to period 5."

"Oh, well, I have Spanish, so I'm skipping."

For students who supposedly represented some of the "brightest of Paperclip High," as Mr. Stone said the other day before AIME (while Tybalt stood on a swivel chair trying to dismount a projector, and Mr. Stone commented on what a shame it would be if Tybalt fell off and hit his head), we sure love going to class.

Micro followed my entourage (which expanded from one person to two) upstairs as we debated the world language department. Once we got to the calc classroom, I slipped in and explained the situation to Mrs. James.

"Where is Dino?" Mrs. James asked. "You guys have half an hour. He could have squeezed in part of the test today. Oh, he's such a slacker."

Later on, as we wandered the halls some more, Argon said, "I feel kind of bad for feeling sorry for everyone who's stuck in class while we're out here."

We had just walked past the ASR room, and I suggested that we go back and say hi to Tea and Mario, but this notion was dismissed as soon as we saw Mr. Fisher.

"Hey, Mr. Fisher," said Argon, who had had him for bio last year. Mr. Fisher nodded hi to Argon and I, and then spotted Micro.

"Where were you yesterday? Were you skipping?"

"No," Micro said. "I was sick yesterday."

"Sure you were. You were skipping yesterday, and you're skipping now."

We then made our way to the library, where I spotted Irving, Tybalt, Bryant and Dino sitting at a table together. Looks like everyone (except Mario, who, according to Tea, was in ASR, and Argon, who actually had a free) decided to skip.

After half an hour of basically doing nothing (I printed out all of my US documents, but that was about it), we re-congregated at the front door, where another school was already there waiting. I could not figure out what school it was, although it may have been the high school from the town next to ours. The bus still had not arrived yet, so we loitered in the lobby.

"Dino," I said, turning to him. "Mrs. James said that you're a slacker for not taking the test today."

"Oh, yeah," Tybalt agreed. I'm not sure how he knows this information, as he was in the library for the entire time, but perhaps he has superpowers I am not aware of.

"Come on," Dino said. "Cut me some slack. I'm not going to take half the test today and then take the rest on Thursday. I have a research paper due."

"So do I," I said. "And I took mine already."

"Yeah, well, English is your first language." Right. That made a lot of sense.

"No, it's not," I said.

"Yes, it is. It's not mine."

"What do you speak then?" Bryant asked. "Robot?"

The bus came at this time, so all discussions about Dino's robot status ended. Micro headed the line to go on the bus, which was already filled with people from other schools (I spotted Treeburg's red sweatshirt), and sat down in a random row. Argon sat next to him, and I sat across from Argon. Since there wasn't enough space left for the rest of them to sit together, Mario led the rest of them towards the middle of the bus.

The bus ride itself was rather uneventful, either because I didn't sit anywhere near Mario (and his gossip central), because I sat in front of Treeburg, who were all playing Pokémon loudly for some reason, or because I had lots of work for US that I had to do and I didn't want to be too overburdened. Probably a combination of all three. I did manage to get Argon to promise that he will trim down his backpack by the end of spring break ("You'll be really surprised at the results," or so I've been told), and highlight several documents (except the one that had "centrifugal" forces, which I rejected to the bottom of the pile because centrifugal forces do not exist and is obviously false).

Ladies and gentlemen, we will be right back after I sleep for the night, finish my EOQR, my essays (note the plural) and review for my finals the commercials! Stay tuned to find out what happens next!


(A.k.a.: I am tired now and will go sleep, but I've already written half of this, so I might as well post it now and then be lazy and write the rest later.)

Things Aren't Always What They Seem

So, why does everyone seem to think that I am dating Vincent? (And yes, I am applying the "two people equates everyone" rule here.) I mean, yes, we're together a lot, and perhaps we have an over-propensity for hugging each other, but it's not any more than he hugs Amanda, and unless we have a polygamy relationship going on that I am not aware of, I really don't think I give off "dating" vibes.

Not that I would know what those are.

Anyway, in English class today, our desks were arranged weirdly due to tests, so we chose our own seats. Dora came over, sat in the desk next to mine, and turned to whisper to me,

"Are you and Vincent dating?"

Almost as awkward as when Argon asked me, "Are you in love with me?" Which was a huge miscommunication, probably on my part, as I drew a picture of a caged heart (because I really like to draw hearts and I got tired of drawing them with wings), and gave it to him after class one day.

Bryant was behind us at the time (hopefully a safe distance away). He didn't say anything, and I do hope he did not hear anything. I wasn't particularly articulate at the time.

Regardless, in an attempt to rebuff the whole I'm-dating-Vincent rumors, because they are utterly not true, I told her, "I like someone else anyway."

Okay, perhaps that was the wrong way to end this discussion, as it had an adverse effect.

"Really? Who is it?"

After seeing that I would not tell her straight out (because, really, I never do), she tried at guessing by asking questions.

"Is he in our grade? How tall is he? Is he skinny?"

Not that it matters anyway, since he'll probably never like me back well, it just won't matter. I like keeping my secrets at times. Although, keeping them for too long does get quite tiring and troublesome, as I've decided lately.

So I indulged a little. He's in our grade, he's taller than me (as most guys are, it seems, big shock there), and he's not skinny, I don't think. I think that cuts down 85% of the guys at our school.

He is also smart, as Dora figured out. Why this automatically makes Bryant the first choice, I do not know. Okay, okay, I do know. Still.

But he's eliminated in the "he's not skinny" round anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter either.

(I drew a picture of Bryant in physics yesterday, and showed it to Nyx and Camel, and they said that he was still not skinny enough, despite the near stick-like arms I drew on him. But he's on track, not wrestling, so he should fare fine in life.)

Luckily (for me), the bell rang at that time, so I did not have to divulge too much information. I stammered my way through the last question ("what color is his hair?"), and went to get my stat and calc book for Moody's on Sunday. I saw Tea in the hallway, talking with Angela, I think, about something.

"--they really ate it?" Tea was saying.

"Yeah, why? Should they not have?"

After much confusion and lots of explaining from Tea, I finally managed to piece together a coherent sentence. Treeburg actually ate my pudding!

And they actually said it tasted decent. I feel like I should flaunt this in Owen's face, as he was so unsupportive of my pudding. Although, I'm not sure if this will become a "Treeburg has weird tastes" evidence. Because, uh, it was butterscotch. A huge plate full of wobbling, brownish butterscotch pudding.

I wouldn't eat it unless my life depended upon it.

As Tea and I walked out, I saw Vincent again. We talked for a bit, and then as we approached his bus, we hugged again. Now that I think of it, he is a) in our grade, b) taller than me, and c) relatively not skinny, as compared to the likes of Bryant and such. But he's ruled out in the hair color round.

Life's coincidental like that, I suppose. My story of how Dino's apparently attached to fuzzy, grey baby bunnies pales in comparison.