Aurora X

I’m depressed because I got a 50 on my first world history quiz.

This is sad. If I’m depressed because of some silly history score that I can EASILY bring up because it’s only the first grade of the third grading quarter, I’m never going to make it past life.

Well, another part of the reason why I’m depressed is, despite my efforts to stay on top of things, I’m procrastinating on my world history homework, which I need to do not only to earn some more good grades but it’s also good practice for the test coming up on Friday.

But, then again, I have all of Sunday and Monday to do it (Monday’s Martin Luther King Day).

But I still have to start practicing some ballet and catch up on Chinese.

I’m so tired, though. I’ve had an average of about barely seven hours of sleep this entire week. And I really wish that Ms Barreto (My ballet teacher) would move my ballet classes back about an hour because I’m really tired of getting home at ten at night, the time when most of my friends (Asian and white) are already snoring in their beds.

And my mom should be happy! She really shouldn’t be complaining that my PSAT scores weren’t high (I got a 184/240, which is actually eighty-nine percent higher than the nation’s sophomore PSAT scores. Which is pretty sad, if a stressed-out freshman who took this in October can beat nearly ninety percent of all sophmores in this nation. But then again, this test is for high school juniors, so sophomores aren’t really worried about scoring high on the PSAT yet.) enough, when people like Alice made a C on her American Government midterm, and Jason cancelled all of his extracurricular so that he only has piano, when I’m balancing ballet, piano, art, and Chinese all at the same time.

I made all A’s on my midterms (to my great surprise) and all my quarter grades. In total last semester, I made twenty official A’s: Two overall A’s for each of my seven classes, and six A’s for my midterms (I exempted my Creative Writing exam because a) I could, b) I’d have to write a sonnet in class, and c) I didn’t want to come to school that day.).

My extracurricular teachers all say that I’m an exceptional student and talented, I’m beginning to recognize a lot more Chinese symbols than I originally thought I would, and I’m trying out for every single math competition in the Mu Alpha Thetha club I joined (Unlike some people).

So there, mom. See if you can find anyone to compare me to now. Hah.

Oh, who am I kidding? Of course mom is going to find someone else to compare me to. In fact, she’ll probably import someone from China for the sole reason of giving me someone to compete with.

No, no. I think that’s just the 50-in-World-History depression kicking in again.

But in any case, even though I’m improving my math competition scores greatly, my parents still think that it isn’t enough, and now I’m doing an hour of math every week with my art buddy Anna Chang.

And my mom just dug out the Chinese math workbooks we bought oh so long ago during the summer of third grade, and now she’s teaching me even more math.

I don’t know why they’re doing this, though. I’m pretty sure I’ve expressed a clear disinterest in the math subject, even though I’ve won numerous math awards and am passing the Algebra 2 class without doing anything more than the classwork and homework.

But then again, all the Asian teens I know are reinforcing their math skills because their parents are buying them workbooks and making them do extra math everyday, so I shouldn’t be complaining.

Or should I?

After all, if I didn’t have so much stuff going on (Math club, Relay for Life, and the extracurricular) outside of school, I wouldn’t be this exasperated by extra math.

I’m probably going to end up with stomach ulcers and crap like that from stressing out too much.

But really, if I weren’t born Asian in the first place, none of this would be a problem.

I’m expecting to start working on the ORB, our school’s annual literary magazine, soon, because it’s due out at the end of April. Lorne and I went around to various classes, informing all of the students and the teachers about the ORB and encouraging people to submit their writings and art to be published in the magazine.

I wonder why none of the classes we went to were IB classes. It seems like the ORB is prejudice against gifted people, but I guess that in the past, most of the ORB submissions were sent in by IB people, and so they’re trying to get the traditional students to join in as well.

But besides that, and having to write a lot of random stuff under pressure, I’m having a lot of fun with the Creative Writing people. From last semester’s class, there’s Brandy, A.K.A. Music and anime girl, Eric, the science fiction and fantasy addict, Melissa, the dragon-lover (She wrote her entire NaNo story on dragons) and friend of my eigth grade best friend, Shaina (Who went to Wharton High School, so I can’t see her anymore), Lorne, and Chris, the quiet giant who also acts like he’s a violent, emo guy.

And there are a bunch of other students that I’ve never met before, but according to some of the senior Creative Writers, they’ve taken this class before, just in another year.

Yup. We’re quite the normal bunch.

I’m really, really tired.

Now I have to either write a hundred-page journal or type in a blog for Creative Writing II.

So, now there’s even more reason for me to update my blog more often.

Oh, yeah, and I switched back into Creative Writing II, even though I wasn’t suppose to have it this semester. I went from average homework load in IB, to HOMEWORK OVERLOAD.

Switching from Entis back to Mr. Mills for World History is tough. In Mr. Entis’s class, we practically do nothing but listen to him talk about “natural things”. In Mr. Mills, we’ve got a heck of a lot of pages to fill up in our World History notebooks. And those pages have to be relevant to World History, so you can’t just scribble some random history filler and call it a day.

And I come back to Creative Writing II, and I found out that I have a narrative poem due on Wednesday, and a “superb story, extraordinary essay, and perfect poem” due at the end of February.

I’m sorry, Mr. Stanton. I love literature and all, but my story, essay, and poem will not be worth anyone’s time. Especially now that I have all this crap homework to do.

Oh well. I’ll try to do well on updating my blog, I guess.

Apurva hacked into my flash drive over the weekend, because I left it in his car. He plugged it into his computer to “check who’s the owner,” but as soon as he saw that a few of my blog entries was on there, as well as my NaNoWriMo novel, he forgot all about what was his purpose for plugging it into his computer. I had put a password on my NaNo, so he went into a frenzy trying to hack into it. He even typed in, “I am a psycho woman” just to see if I was indeed psycho.

Then he called Jason and told him all about his findings. Jason called me to ask how to set a password on Word (Back then I hadn’t realized that my flash drive was gone), and probably how to take it off (I can’t quite remember what he asked for after that). Hah. My password was six random numbers. Have fun guessing that, you two.

But I didn’t encrypt my NaNo outline. Or blog entry (It was my last entry, and I put it on Word because I was going to print it, cut it out, and turn it into a little scroll for fun).

So Apurva attacked at how this one guy in my novel was called Cody, and there was this guy at my school called Cody Wei. I told him my novel Cody was in no way related to Mr. Wei, as I had first started the first draft of my novel in January, a good eight months before I even heard about Wei.

And then I told him that none of my characters are based off of anyone I know. Well, not CONSCIOUSLY, at least. Vatsal pointed out that the main character’s mentor sounded emo, which sounded a lot like Ryan Stanley. I sort of had to agree with that one, as the mentor was a bit emo, and she was a female (Ryan Stanley is technically a male, but the guys think they know better).

Sort of.

In the carpool, they attacked my blog entry. Apurva and Jason found out that they were mentioned in my blog entry (Well, of course. Apurva saved it onto his computer and emailed it to Jason), but Sean wasn’t. Sean didn’t say anything (As per usual), but I guess he was a bit disappointed. Then Apurva found out that Sean hadn’t read my entry yet, and decided to email it to him as well.

Damn you, Apurva.

I’m encrypting everything on my flash drive from now on. Boy, I’m sure thankful that there wasn’t anything too revealing in the entry that they read. Nothing like the “Moi friends” entry, or even all of the bashings and rantings I gave them in my journal entries.

Jason says that he needed more flash drives from different people. He won’t be getting anymore from me. And if he does manage to get his mitts on one, he’ll drive himself crazy trying to figure out the passwords.

My relationship with mom has gotten better. All I had to do was put more effort into Chinese, and help her out, like, the instant she calls for help. Oh, and snap at her less. Which is hard to do when you’re frustrated and all you want is to be left alone, but if you breathe correctly and use a lot of sheer mental will, you can be as calm as you want. Well, up to a certain point, of course…

DAY BLUE SEMESTER SUMMARY

BIOLOGY

I’m still struggling with trying to stay awake in class, but I’m doing better than before. We covered the fine details of photosynthesis and cells (All the stuff I remember touching in seventh grade, but more in-depth now that it’s high school, and the course is actually called Biology), listened to Mr. Ward’s stories about his farming childhood and how he was on an ace baseball team and got drunk once because he drank two-month old root beer (Which, of course, is impossible now because they took pretty much all of the potentially harmful alcohol out of root beer)…

But, unlike Ms Allen, he rambles on for only a little bit before returning to that day’s classwork, and the stuff that he talks about it actually RELAVANT to Biology. Like the root beer thing. It was totally appropriate to talk about that in class because we were studying alcoholic fermentation in cellular respiration.

Danielle and I both like Mr. Ward. She says he’s like a good ol’ grandfather-like person, which I completely agree with. The other reason why I like him (Besides the fact that he actually teaches us) is that he’s both intelligent AND fun at the same time, which isn’t uncommon for me, because I hang out with thirteen-year-old geniuses (*cough* Jason *cough*) all the time, but he’s a TEACHER. And he’s OLD. Well, he claims he’s thirty and extremely buff under his dress shirts and trousers, but that’s like, the worst, most obvious lie ever.

I somehow always break down physically during his class. On the first couple weeks of school, I had a cold and a cough. Mr. Ward told the class to be careful and not catch the “Zoey disease”. Then, my neck snapped and I had to go to the nurse because I couldn’t move it. Then my nose started bleeding for no particular reason (Mr. Ward said it was the dry weather that caused one of the veins in my nose to break) in the middle of the class. Oh, and there was the stye in the corner of my eye, which nobody noticed until MR. WARD POINTED IT OUT.

It doesn’t help that I have another stye now, on the top lid of my left eye. And guess what Wikipedia said?

“While a stye is technically a pimple and can be popped, doing so is not recommended without technical expertise[5] due to their proximity to the eye.”

I HAVE A FREAKIN’ HUGE PIMPLE OVER MY LEFT EYE?!

Oh well. At least it said that the bruising can be helped with a warm cloth (Like all pimples!), so I’ll try that later.

Anyway, Danielle even pointed out that I contract pretty much every minor physical condition during Biology. And no one else does.

INQUIRY SKILLS (IS)

Ms Smith hates me. There’s no other explanation for why I’m afraid of her and why she picks on me in class. Well, everyone’s afraid of her, but I’m one of the few that actually have a REASON to be fearful

The upper classmen say that IS can be like an extra study hall period, but I don’t get how anyone could sneak in a little homework here and there when Ms Smith is constantly watching our backs and barking at us all the time.

And after I mistakenly called Sven Alkalaj a Muslim when he was really a Jew (Stupid, STUPID me for not looking at my notes and seeing that his ancestors were all great members of Sephardic Jewry), she snapped at me during my oral presentation on Mr. Alkalaj and for the rest of class, plus during all of the next IS class. She called on me to answer about, oh, every other question, when I’m sure I made it pretty clear that I was doing what I was suppose to do by writing down a lot of notes on the presentations.

Surprisingly enough, she gave me a 9.5 out of 10 for my oral, with only .5 off for the not-knowing-that-Sven-was-a-Jew part. But combined with my essay, a horrible 8.5/10, I barely managed to scrape an A for that assignment. I didn’t think my essay deserved that low of a score, but eh, as long as I get an A on my semester transcript for IS, I’m happy.

We watched a great lot of disturbing videos on the Holocaust (Including the Academy award-winner “Genocide”, the segment of Oprah Winfrey’s show on her and Eli Wiesel taking a trip to Auschwitz, where Eli Wiesel was imprisoned during WW2, and the memories of this one woman who was forced to go on a death march, like thousands of other Holocaust prisoners), which I could’ve avoided because Ms Smith said the other option was to go to the library and work on another assignment, but when I finally realized just how sweet of an alternative that was… ’twas too late. I was scarred for life.

So, for the remainder of the semester, I put up with the rest of the video because, well, how much worse can it get when you’re already mentally scarred?

Then I heard from Apurva that we were watching more disturbing videos for the second semester, which will be about Model UN and Civil Rights. I didn’t see how that would be particularly disturbing… unless Ms Smith plans on launching into the whole Darfur thing as a sub-topic for Model UN.

I will run if we go into more genocide studies.

FRENCH

Everyone keeps saying how Mrs. Chestnut doesn’t teach us anything. What I think is that if they just stop TALKING to each other during class, maybe they’ll think differently. I rarely ever study French at home, and I’m acing most of my quizzes. Hmm. Why do you think I’m doing so well when I’ve never touched French before in my life? Oh! I know! Maybe, just maybe, (le gasp) Mrs. Chestnut is actually teaching? And I’m actually THINKING during class instead of babbling incessantly with my friends?

Of course, sometimes I can’t listen because Eric Li (Who, by the way, is in NO WAY related to me) keeps on stabbing me in the back with his pencils and gunning his feet on my chair, and I have to turn around to tell him to either stop or he’s going to find himself on the ground with a French textbook lying on his head.

Eric isn’t all that annoying, though. He can be nice when he wants to be. Even when he’s taking apart all of my mechanical pencils and pens behind my back and complaining that I should buy writing utensils that come in more than three pieces.

CREATIVE WRITING

Erm. The people in this class are… rather special. But all of them are cool. I mean, they all like good literature and writing (Some even like drawing! Yay!), and they’re all active participaters in the class (Well, except for this one kid, who I suspect got into this class because there was no other elective for him to join).

Plus, they’re funny. Especially the guys. This class reminded me of the good, funny times I had in eigth grade.

And now I miss middle school and all of its good times.

Besides writing a bunch of short stories about murder and bunnies, we participated in NaNoWriMo (I clocked in at 11:45 PM on November 30 with my 50,000 words), which half the class failed in because they couldn’t reach the 30,000 word goal that Mr. Stanton set for everyone.

And there was this one day where I came to class and discovered that we were left alone with no teacher or substitute. Elise immediately rushed up to Mr. Stanton’s chair and declared that she was the boss now because Mr. Stanton told her that whenever he’s not around, she would be in charge.

Elise and Mr. Stanton have a close bond because Elise is the reigning champion of our county’s annual Poetry Slam, and Mr. Stanton is always giving her booklets and tips on writing.

But anyway, Elise took the boss thing way too far, because when this one other girl (Whose name I keep forgetting) went to the classroom computer to put on some music for all of us, she thought that music girl was stabbing her in the back by trying to run everything in the class instead. They started arguing and BSing each other in front of everyone, and all us quiet students were watching in amusement, thinking how stupid and immature these two girls could be.

Although music girl was immature, there was no other description to describe the state that Elise was in, except that she was acting pretty much like a bossy five-year-old who was throwing a tantrum because she couldn’t get her way. Really, she even spewed out the, “I will not tolerate this bullshit because I’m just too respected, [Insert name of music girl].”

How immature could you get? Danielle said it was cowardly, which I sort of agree on, but I thought it was mostly child-like. Elise even pulled Lorne (Who she is so OBIVOUSLY crushing on, because she’s practically throwing herself onto Lorne) outside and barked at him about how the class was “disrespecting her” when most of us weren’t out of our seats for the entire class period.

It was pretty hilarious, though, because Aaron gave us the signal to settle down so we could hear what Elise was ranting about, and Elise was clearly throwing a tantrum towards Lorne, who was just respectfully abiding by the norms of the classroom and minding his own business. Even though we all wanted to hear more of their conversation, we couldn’t help but burst out laughing, because it was just too precious!

Elise apologized later, claiming that the crisis that was going on in her life were clearly affecting her actions. Music girl apologized, too, and the two of them reconciled.

Oh wait! Now I remember music girl’s name! It was Brandy!

SEMESTER EXAMS

I aced the math exam with flying colors, and got A’s on everything except for IS and English, which I have no clue what my grades are because I haven’t received them yet. And I have to say, for someone who claims that they’re on top of things 24/7, not being able to grade an exam by Friday when we took the test on Tuesday is pretty sad, Ms Smith. Mrs. Allen has a reason not to tell us our grades because we took her exam on Friday, the last day of school.

But she said that she would call anyone if they made a D or lower on the exam.

I haven’t gotten a phone call, so I’m hoping that I scraped at least a B on the English exam. That would give me my A in English on my semester transcript.