You should’ve seen my face last week when I found out that I got an A on my World History test. And when I found out that I managed to pull my F up to a 94.9 overall, just in time for the third quarter progress reports.

Yeah. Apparently, World History quizzes don’t matter anymore. You can fail all of them and still get an A, as long as you score well on the test and did your World History notebook correctly. Because, after all, they were worth WAAAAY more points than the quizzes.

My little brother, Jerry, can babble a few phrases. “Baba”, or father, was his first official phrase (“Ge-ge”, or brother, didn’t really count, because that’s what all babies say). Then came “Jia-jia!”, which I guess is baby talk for “Jie-jie”, the Chinese phrase for sister. And then came “Mama” (I’m sure you can figure out what that meant), and then “Nai-nai”, or grandma. So, now he knows the family names of everyone in my immediate family!

Of course, he still has to figure out just who is “jia-jia” and all. I’ve been called jia-jia a few times, but most of the time, it was ge-ge or mama. Well, the mama can be reasonable, seeing as how I spend more time with Jerry than my mom does.

And Jerry doesn’t like regular toys either. He prefers Tupperware! Yes, those little plastic containers that are very environmentally and economically efficient. And some environmentalists even take them to Chinese restaurants to store their leftovers in instead of having to kill more trees and put them in paper containers (Mrs. Hodges, my eigth grade history teacher, was one of them).

But Jerry doesn’t know any of that. He just knows that Tupperware is good for biting, chewing, and drooling on. And when you try to take it away from him, he throws a baby-sized tantrum.

With all the squealing and shrieking he does, he sounds exactly like my mom. Even my dad and grandma think so. Jerry, you aren’t starting life on the right path here…

 

YEEEEESSSS! THIS CRUEL SEMESTER IS OVAAAAH!

I got sidetracked with the whole updating about school thing. Too much stuff going on during school. And even though it’s winter break, I still have a few holiday assignments (Why are the teachers so cruel?), such as figuring out how to raise fifty dollars for the Relay for Life thing (Otherwise I’d have wasted ten dollars with the registration fee) by January 11, and prepare an oral for the Greek myth, Icarus and Daedalus.

But I won’t worry about that now. I’ll bathe in the glory of having finished all of my semester exams and surviving so many boot camp mornings (Wake up at six in the morning, get shoved in a vehicle with a bunch of pessimists, a.k.a. Sean, Apurva, and Jason).

ENGLISH

Frankly, I don’t think we’ve done much in English besides discuss stuff that’s been happening in the books we were reading (To Kill A Mockingbird and A Tale of Two Cities) and listen to Mrs. Allen ramble on and on about random things. We now know a whole bunch about her personal life, including her romantic life with her husband and what happens when she takes medicative drugs for her recent dental operation (“… and when I sat up, I swear I saw the refridgerator move… Then my sister came, and I was like, ‘Who are you?’ and she went, ‘Your sister’, and I went, ‘Which sister?’”).

And now Sean, Jason, and Apurva have no more respect for Mrs. Allen because of her ongoing blabbing and habit of not teaching us anything about English, but I think they’re just being too hasty in their judgment. I mean, honestly, which of the previous English teachers that we had ever really taught us English? None!

Well, maybe with the exception of Ms Pullara, who actually taught us some decent grammar in sixth grade.

But no one else. All the other English teachers pretty much did what Mrs. Allen did–drone on and on about random things, and maybe once in awhile tell us something related to English.

We did a lot of writing work, but they were mostly paragraphs and prewriting. We didn’t do a single essay in English, which is pretty astonishing, because we did them all the time back in eigth grade. Plus, my eigth grade Language Arts teacher, Ms Brown, said my writing was pretty darn good, too. I couldn’t believe I went from the top writer in the class to the lowly basics: paragraph structure.

And no offense, but paragraphs written in the topic-sentence-followed-by-support-and-examples with the basic transitions are a bit boring. I don’t know how Mrs. Allen can sit through so many rigidly structured paragraphs in one night. That’s one quality of teachers I admire: Being able to put up with repetition. They can put up with grading the same homework day after day, and repeating the same curriculum year after year…

But point is, we sunk from amateur essayists to elementary paragraph writers. And I write a lot more coherent, quality essays in American Government than in English. Heck, I do more writing in American Government than probably any other course (Besides maybe IS, but I haven’t counted all of the essays we did in that class).

Oh, and we also did a project on literary gifts. I was pretty darn proud of my Tale of Two Cities French Revolution scene, but already, the clay figures I made were knocked down and broken apart by stupid people who don’t know how to keep their hands off of fragile-looking projects. I mean, seriously, did my little two-inch clay people look like it was meant to be touched? No!

Good thing Mrs. Allen graded my project already.

Note to self: Never use a hot glue gun on clay. Not only will the clay figures fall apart too easily, but you’ll get too many finger burns whilst hotgluing.

AMERICAN GOVERNMENT

Mr. Mills is persistant in his belief that we can teach ourselves the entire course with only the textbook and a corresponding CD. If that’s so, then WHY IS HALF THE CLASS FAILING?!

Well, not me. I’ve managed to earn A’s for both quarters of this semester and on the semester exam.

But I mean the other people. True, part of the reason why they’re failing is because they don’t read the textbook at all and pretty much just blaze through the chapter homeworks and tests as quick as a they can, but I’m spending three freakin’ hours reading each chapter, and maybe another hour doing the homework! I mean, since we IB kids are always short on time, perhaps Mr. Mills should consider condensing the course a little bit for us? Yeah, I appreciate how he’s lecturing us on Government stuff during class just for the sake of teaching us things that aren’t on the test, and he sometimes goes over homework questions during class.

But still.

So, since he doesn’t really teach anything “important” during class, the people sitting around me find that it’s much more amusing to talk to me instead, even though part of the time I’m trying to listen to him, and the other part of the time I’m completing homework. And every once in awhile I find myself trying people like George Bush (For my AMGOV notebook) and the characters in my novel.

Plus, I can’t even hear half the stuff they’re trying to whisper to me.

And then sometimes I’m forced to twist Shreenath’s arm because he’s stretching them out obnoxiously and for no good reason. This I only do when Mr. Mills is off in his own world with his computer.

ALGEBRA 2

I sit with Apurva, Jason, and Diana (Who, by the way, has moved on from liking Jason to Apurva, and now from Apurva to Sean, even though she has sworn a few months ago that there would be no way she would crush on Sean) in this class, so you can imagine just how little I listen to the teacher in this class. I listen part of the time, so that when Dr. Emil calls on me to answer a question, I wouldn’t be like, “Ummm… what was question again?” like some people are half the time.

But mostly we four just talk whenever we get a chance to talk, pass notes to each other, and do that day’s math homework in class. It’s been a pretty easy semester in Algebra 2.

And now I’m really happy about Algebra 2, because I just got a perfect score on my math exam, while Jason, the alleged math king, received a 94 because he forgot to check for extraneous roots.

JERRY

Teehee. I love my baby brother. Even though he’s a spoiled brat who just won’t put up with the fact that he’s not going to be held in someone’s arms 24/7, he’s pretty amusing. For one, he throws a baby-sized tantrum quite frequently. Especially when he can’t get what he wants within, oh, a nice, long, space of two seconds.

And he can crawl a little bit now, too. Well, more like getting up on all four and falling flat on his face, then repeating the process over and over, but still. He’s moving! Yay!

Then, in a couple of days, he’ll be crawling around and destroying stuff, and we’d have to watch him every single minute. Oh. Maybe it isn’t such a good thing that he’s crawling.

Oh well.

Jerry can do Indian yells, too. It’s so hilarious. It can come out “awawa” or “ababa” or something completely different, but in the cute baby voice of his, he’s got the whole family listening.

On the disgusting side, his face turns red whenever my family’s eating dinner. There’s only two reasons why his face is turning red: 1) He’s about to cry, or 2) He’s… um… exerting a lot of force into his diaper. He never cries during dinner, so whenever his face turns red, my mom and dad turn around and start laughing. And then, while Grandma’s wheeling Jerry away, they make me shut my mouth about it for the rest of dinner because they don’t want to lose their appetites. Even though they were clearly laughing and thinking about it not to much earlier.

 

What’s with baby and their feet?

Muehehehe. My baby brother loves to eat his feet, just like me when I was a baby! Of course, half the time my parents put socks on my feet so I couldn’t eat them, but nonetheless, I still attempted to get at them. It’s amazing how much flexibility babies have. They can put their feet in their mouth sitting upright without any problem.

He loves eating spaghetti, too, just like me! He gets impatient whenever my mom’s spooning and mashing his spaghetti for him. He’s like, “Hurry up, old woman! I want my spaghetti NOW!” except, he doesn’t say it, of course. He just starts crying.

 

Baby Supermodel + Other Things

I’m bored. So now I’m updating in my blog, even though I said I won’t until August 20th. I shouldn’t be bored. I’ve got a 100,000+ word work-out novel to finish and several art projects to do. Not to mention more Chinese studying. And piano. And a math review.

But, as always, I don’t feel like doing that stuff. So I’m updating in my blog instead. And now that my friend Jess has so cleverly discovered my blog, I feel more motivated to update in the summer.

Which brings me to the whole reason behind making this blog. I thought that it would just be easier if my new high school friends ever wondered about my personal life, I could direct them to this blog and run away before they could ask me who the heck are the people I’m blabbing about here, and whether I had crushes on ‘em, hate them, or whatever. Plus, word might get around (Even though I’d specifically tell my friends NOT to give away my blog address, but I haven’t met anyone who can keep secrets like that), and more people will read my blog, and my English teacher might give me extra credit for it (Although, from what I’ve heard, my English teacher is supposedly really nice).

But then again, if the people I’m ranting and raving about find out about this and get all mad at me ’cause I called them an egghead or wahtever, that wouldn’t turn out very nice. At all.

But I’m not worried about that yet!

Yesterday, my parents and Grandma spent the entire afternoon taking pictures of my baby brother. They dressed him in, like, five different outfits. AT LEAST. Poor thing had clothes jerked on and off him all afternoon.

But we did get some pretty nice pictures. Like family pictures, which we haven’t gotten the chance to take ever since he was born, which was back in May. And there’s a picture of him with adult-sized sunglasses on, and a picture of his teeny little foot (It looks like a swan. I swear.), and a picture of him swimming (the “water” was a green bath towel). And a bunch of other really great pictures.

He behaved so well, too! Didn’t cry once during the entire time, which is quite remarkable, because he was tossed from one pair of arms to the next and squeezed into all these different outfits. Plus, we took HOURS taking the pictures, and we all thought that he would’ve gotten hungry and started crying at some point.

But nooooo. He was perfectly civilized the whole entire time. He deserves a round of applause. *Claps*