Get your lazy butts on deck and grab those pails–NOW BAIL!!!

Yo. Just popping in here so that my online friends don’t worry about me. No, I’m not hospitalized (yet), I don’t have cancer, etc. I’m just too darn lazy to update because I have so much crap to do (Wow, isn’t that overused?).

I’m now the new treasurer of my grade level, and my first job is… SELL CLASS T-SHIRTS! Woohoo, what an intellectually stimulating activity!

(Note the heavy sarcasm, peoples. Come on, I know you can tell.)

Oh, and another reason why I didn’t update: ‘CAUSE THERE’S NOTHING TO UPDATE ABOUT. That’s right, no drama (Majorly, at least), no incentive to rant, nothing out of the ordinary.

But there is the US’s most frequent recession. I can’t believe our economy is nose-diving straight into a depression, possibly one that could rival that of the Great Depression. I mean, yesterday, within thirty minutes, the DOW (or whatever it’s called) went down from 520 to over 800 points, which is still not as big as the drop after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went out of business and the government decided to devise a $700 billion dollar bailout plan (coming out of OUR POCKETS), but who can deny that THIS IS NOT GOOD?

Oh, and from what my carpool’s head told me, the bailout plan shot up to $820 billion, and the damage done would take up to TWO TRILLION DOLLARS to repair. I think the only cost bigger than this would be our government’s national debt.

See, none of this would’ve happened if the government had more oversight over the CEOs of the mortgage banks. But noooo, the big businesses have toooo many regulations already, so why should those lying politicians interfere any further?

Uh-huh. Yeah.

 

Schedule (Or timetable, whatever you want to call it)

I might be treasurer of my sophomore class. Yays! More stuff for college.

I never did post my new schedule, did I? Okay, well, here it is:

Red Day (A.K.A. Day 1)

Block 1: Chemistry with Dr. Patel

Block 2: Study Hall (Or ‘Free’) with Mr. Mills (My American Government/World History teacher last year!)

Block 3: Trigonometry with Ms Petkova

Block 4: First Half: AP Environmental Science, Second Half: AP Statistics

Blue Day (A.K.A. Day 2)

Block 1: AP European History with Ms Cubano

Block 2: English II with Ms Dickerson

Block 3: French II with Ms Chestnut (Same as last year… unfortunately)

Block 4: Same as Red Day

At home, I’m taking AP Macroeconomics, which I constantly forget to do, resulting in my temporary suspension for not submitting enough assignments (!!! I WAS AHEAD BY, LIKE, TWO WEEKS!!! GIMME A BREAK!), and I’m worried about the final exam, which is suppose to be a practice AP exam, which I KNOW I’m not prepared for.

My new schedule is pretty balanced. Except for that Study Hall every-other-day thing. It’s inconvenient, because the classes I don’t have much homework in are on the days I have Study Hall, so I still have to finish the majority of my homework at home.

And my ballet classes are still from 8-9:30 PM, and somehow I never make it to bed before 11:30.

But at least my body is getting used to six hours a night. I’m not getting sick from sleep deprivation anymore, yay!

 

China + Cacti + AP + School

From the China Blog on the Time magazine website:

“But in all the discussion of the car ban there are some positive signs. People care about Beijing’s air quality and are looking for ways to improve it. While continuing the car ban isn’t a long-term fix, it might not be so hard to get people behind further improving mass transit, which unlike a car ban could actually make getting around easier.”

Um. Okay, if you say so. But I’d like to point out one little detail: THE MASS TRANSITS ARE ALREADY CROWDED ENOUGH AS IT IS.

And I think that I personally have a voice in this, because my combined vacation time in China over the years probably adds up to about half a year, and I know that the buses are about as crowded as a New York subway station in morning rush hour. The Chinese subways aren’t any better, although I did come across a couple of stations that didn’t have a whole lot of people in them.

Okay, so they aren’t as bad as the Japanese city stations, where policemen lurk around to actually push people in subways that already have passengers pretty much sitting on top of one another (See Youtube for more info). But did you see what Beijing mass transportation was like during the Olympics, when most cars had to be reluctantly parked in front of the high-rise apartments? The buses looked like they were about to explode from all of the people inside. It was like the only possible way for riders to exit was through the windows or something, because the doorways were completely blocked with people. And if that’s what the buses are like, I don’t even want to know how crowded the subways were. It’s not like the government can build more subways to accomodate, either, because there’s already a sub around every corner, and if there were anymore, entire blocks would probably start sinking into the ground. Or they would meet their fate with a giant wrecking ball, as most run-down homes and street stores did during the games.

So I don’t know if Beijingers care that much to sacrifice more of their thin veil of personal space to keep the air clean. And I thought that the bloggers would feel the same, too, because most of them live in Beijing, after all. They should know what the state of mass transit is in the heart of the capital.

Cactus Thieves Running Amok

Friday, Aug. 29, 2008 By HILARY HYLTON

They look sturdy, even hostile, but cactus plants in the southwestern United States and Mexico are under attack. According to wildlife conservationists, cactuses are being dug up and smuggled away at an alarming rate by over-zealous collectors looking for rare species and “narco-tourists” mining the desert for the small, psychotropic peyote plant.

I think I about died from laughter. It’s not a funny story, but when I get a mental image of old Western cowboys running across the desert, uprooting cactuses, and then fleeing back to their little shacks holding the plants like precious babies, I can’t help but giggle. It’s too silly.

Sophomore year is supposedly the easiest out of all four years of IB high school. If that’s the case, then my motivation for losing my procrastinating habits will hit rock-bottom, because the less work I have, the more I feel like lazing around.

Of course, since I’ll be taking four AP exams in May, I shouldn’t really slack off. ‘Cause from what I heard, AP exams are hard. Especially if you’ve got either: a) an online teacher, so you basically have to teach yourself, or b) a brand-new AP teacher that doesn’t teach. At all.

In both cases, you’re on your own.

Which means I’m burnt toast.

Why didn’t I get into Law Studies?! I wanted to take that course soooo bad! But nooooo, they put me in AP Environmental Science instead. The boring class, where all we do is copy Powerpoints or do worksheets and I feel like my chances of scoring at least a three on the exam is slipping away day by day.

Oh, and did I mention that walking into traditional AP classes was awkward? Nothing against the people, and I’m blaming myself for this because I should be used to traditional electives since I took that Creative Writing class in ninth grade, but IB and traditional students are so segregated that if you put us in the same room, it’s definitely going to be tensive for the first few classes. All the trads are thinking, “Oh God, there’s those nerdy IB kids,” while we IBers are going, “They’re gonna shoot me” or something.

Okay, fine, most IB students don’t think that. But we’re kinda… apprehensive about approaching regular students. And this is going to make me a hypocrite, but we’ve really gotta open up to the rest of the school.

Well, it’s not really hypocritical in my case, because I had no trouble fitting in with the Creative Writing class. In fact, one guy even developed a certain… affection for me during my second semester as a ninth-grader. See? I totally belong with them!

… Fine, I don’t. Make me look hypocritical.

But there is one AP class I do like: AP Euro. Everyone keeps saying that my teacher, Ms Cubano, is a slave-driver, but she actually teaches, and I’m actually awake during her class.

Yeah, you can tell how interested kids are by counting how many pairs of eyes are actually open.

I totally love AP European History. Well, that’s probably because I haven’t had my first test yet, but I did have a quiz, and do you know how relieved I was to find out that it wasn’t as detail-grinding as Mr. Mills’s World History quizzes? To pass last semester, you’d have to have memorized the entire book, word for word. And I’m (mostly) not kidding. All of the people in that class who managed to grab onto that precious ‘A’ confessed that they spent hours and hours memorizing the textbook. Like I did. If you asked us what was the second paragraph of the ninth chapter in the World History textbook, we’d probably have given you an exact answer, plus thrown in a small analysis just for the heck of it. But now, we’re back to a normal course where comprehending the main ideas of each chapter is prime and memorizing word-for-word is for idiots. Yay!

 

Blog Templates + Olympics + Dirty School

Played around with changing blog templates. Wasn’t successful. Most can say I’m not a computer person. They’re right.

I’ve also looked at other blogging sites to see if their templates are a little bit less, erm, difficult to change, because I have a thing about using other people’s templates. Sure, they’re free to the world and they could care less about who uses it, but even from my art you can see that I don’t like using other people’s work. For instance, I’m very, very picky about using references for drawing poses and stuff, because I’d much rather try to draw from a picture I have in my mind.

But I’m hopeless, because even though I took a Web Design class back in the seventh grade, I still don’t have a moderate understanding of HTML or CSS or this new Blogger thing, which happens to be XML.

*Bangs over-crammed head on keyboard*

And I really shouldn’t be updating my blog, because I’ve got a 3-minute French oral on French culture to compose, and I remember hardly anything from French I. But whatever, I’ll make this quick if I can.

Jessie pointed out that removing all politics from the Olympics is impossible, which I understand. And I didn’t think at the time of my post that the Olympics is the only chance some protesters have of gaining attention from the general public, although I was aware of that, too. So, I realize that having a pure Olympic event is not feasible, but I think it would be ideal. I’m already ecstatic that NBC, America’s main Olympic channel, isn’t reporting about protestors that may be lurking outside the stadium areas while they’re doing their all-day Olympic coverage.

Oh, and I just want to point out that with this thing about two Chinese gymnasts that could possibly be 14 (two years younger than the minimum age for competing in the gymnastics) when their Feb. 2008 passports said that they were definitely fifteen, I saw an online podium training of their team, and I must say, they looked really young. I mean, I probably look fifty years older than those gymnasts did, and they were wearing makeup.

And plus, from a country whose government tried to cover up Tiananmen and SARS, what do you really expect?

But I absolutely LOVED the opening ceremoney. LOVED LOVED HEART LOVED HEART HEART. My dad thought it sucked, especially the last torch-lighting bit, but my mom and I both thought that it rocked. My art teacher said that it was a bit much, that if it had been a little simpler, it would’ve been perfect, but he, too, loved it.

I was pretty impressed that the Chinese government spent three hundred million dollars on such an opening (See? Even more reason not to ruin the Olympics. Oh, but there’s probably people out there who are concerned that the entire thing was produced by sweatshop labor). Although, if I were to critisize it, I would say that the colors on the giant LED screen was a bit much, like when Lang Lang was playing the piano with that little girl. They were glowing green and purple and red and purple and green, and it was like the hallucination period of the 80’s or whatever.

Oh, and I really think they should’ve picked a better singer than Sarah Breckman. The Chinese guy they picked was excellent, because quite contrary to what my dad says (“He’s fat. And he’s ugly.”), he’s got a beautiful voice, probably the best one in China. But Sarah has a seriously high-pitched voice, and it took me several verses before I distinguished what language she was singing in (“Did she say you and me? I think she said you and me. Oh wait, now she’s singing Chinese again. Right?”). I was thinking of someone more along the lines of Kelly Clarkson, although I know that if we had put the pop idol up on that huge globe, it would’ve been a little degrading to the “China: From Ancient History to Modern Times” and “Save the Children and Their Future” themes they displayed.

I really like the raising of the blocks they did. You know, those hundreds of little blocks with the Chinese words on them that were pounding out waves and ripples and the Chinese word for peace and harmony? Especially in the end, when they revealed that the entire act was powered by people.

Oh, and I would so wear those Tang dynasty costumes to prom or whatever dance my school hosts. Although, I would probably ask myself many times whether or not such beautiful dresses belong in a local hotel, where most of our dances take place because my school is just too dirty.

Speaking of which, did you know that King High hasn’t been remodeled since the 1930’s or 40’s when it was first built? It looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since then, either. Going into the bathrooms is like going into a Level 3 Biohazard lab. And they almost always flood by the time the dismissal bell rings. It’s gross and ew and absolutely detestable, but if you really gotta go, you just have to suck it up. It’s not like you can sneak into the boy’s bathroom and hope that it’s better. Because they probably aren’t any better, what with students that’re secretly smoking pot in there.

And there was this whole toilet paper fiasco. It would’ve been like the bathrooms in China, if it weren’t for the paper towel dispensers next to the sinks. The bathrooms in China never have toilet paper or soap. Sometimes the bathrooms in king lack either as well. It’s horrid. When I was finally fed up with the school’s lack of supplies (Not the janitors’ laziness, because they’re already doing enough to keep the ancient school as tidy as it can be), I started toting around my own roll of toilet paper. I would’ve started carrying those little bottles of hand sanitizer as well, but I knew my mom would go berserk once she finds them in the bathroom (I can already imagine her — “ARE YOU CRAZY?! WHY DID YOU SPEND ALMOST TWENTY DOLLARS ON THESE STUPID THINGS?! IF YOUR SCHOOL IS THAT DIRTY, CARRY AROUND A BAR OF SOAP! BECAUSE SOAP IS CHEAP AND AFFORDABLE FOR OUR FAMILY, SINCE WE’RE ONLY ON A SIX-DIGIT SALARY!”).

But back to the Olympics, you wouldn’t believe how crazy I was when I saw Phelps at the 400m finals yesterday night. I was like, “GOLD BETTER COME OUT OF YOUR EYES, PHELPS!” and my friends were accusing me of having a secret crush on him. Uh-huh. Whatever. I only cheer him on once every four years, and particularly this year because he’s on a quest to become history’s greatest Olympian. Hey, maybe he’ll pull a Dara Torres and compete in the next four Olympics, too.

Okay. Back to my French oral. I don’t have any news to report, since I only read Times when I’m bored at the lab or at the library. Maybe I should get a magazine subscription or something.

 

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.