June 2005

Haha! Now only three more left!

June 13, 2005 – 11:39 am
Filed under School
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Slap me on the back, pat me on the shoulder! I totally passed my literature oral and it was not that hard! I was freaking out all of yesterday worrying about it (and maybe studying a little bit). I was drunk on adrenaline from all the times I thought of my exam and it exploded inside of my body. I couldn’t even eat breakfast this morning. I tried, but I just ended up spitting it out of my mouth because my body would not take it. I ended up pacing back and forth in the kitchen, trying to burn off all of my nervous energy.

When I got to school, I waited outside of my literature teacher’s room while going over notes and reviewing stories. I also was waving a paper fan furiously at my face, not just to cool down, but to take away my pre-exam jitters. My heart kept thumping every time I saw somebody that might have been my literature teacher walking towards the class room. She didn’t come until maybe twenty minutes later, though, so I had some time to look over the short stories and poems we had read over the school year.

When my teacher got to the class room, I went inside and sat down. She told me that she wasn’t quite ready, so I kept reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark.” There were a few stories that I really did not want to be stuck with when I had to go and pick from a stack of envelopes. They included Young Goodman Brown, anything from Othello, and the poems I hadn’t really had time to dissect at home. Probably Young Goodman Brown, especially, because I hadn’t really understood parts of it when we did read it in class.

My teacher asked me whether I wanted something to drink and to water her plants before we got started on the exam. After all that was done, I headed, scared to death, over to the pile of envelopes on her desk. I picked out the most protuberant one of the pile and yanked it out. I stuck my hand inside and withdrew the paper.

Now, I didn’t really know what to think when my teacher told the class that everybody always got the one piece that they did not want at all. Upon opening my envelope, however, I now know that my teacher is either capable of predicting the future, or is just really good at guessing. In my hands was an excerpt from Young Goodman Brown.

“How does the author define the characters using imagery, symbolism, and other stylistic devices, yadah, yadah, yadah, etc.”

I told my teacher that this was not quite the one I was hoping to get as I sat down. Inside, I was thinking, Oh, God, what am I going todo?! I had twenty minutes to read, annotate, and write notes about the story. I was surprised at how, after reading it, easily I was able to pick ideas and and pieces of the story that would apply to my exam. I ended up with two pages of notes and the story somewhat highlighted and annotated.

I started my tape and started talking. I think I messed up a few times, at least with my vocabulary. It’s horribly limited. I kept pausing for ten seconds at a time to try and think of words to use and ended up sound like, “So, he uh… he…. well, um…. he did, no, wait…. he uh…. okay, um…. yeah.” I guess I did pretty well besides stumbling on words a few times. The fifteen minutes were up before I knew it.

I looked up and my teacher had a big smile on her face. She said that she was very impressed and that I should probably speak up more in class and share my ideas. I took at “Hoorah! You-made-it-through-the-exam!” sucker from her desk and left. I had butterflies in my stomach still, but they were good butterflies.

Anticip-a-a-tion.

June 9, 2005 – 2:05 pm
Filed under School, Thoughts, Weather
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I failed my Spanish exam. At least I’m pretty certain that I did. And seriously, I am not exaggerating at all. I mean, I’m not particularly surprised about it or anything. I think that’s what happens if you don’t pay attention or study all year. You fail. But it’s not a mandatory class. So…. whatever. But I’m still kind of down about leaving nine answers blank on today’s part of the test. I probably got most of the ones I did answer wrong, anyway. I was trying to hold onto my exam paper for as long as possible so the teacher wouldn’t pick up my paper and review it on the spot like he was doing for some of the other kids.

On top of being totally sucky at Spanish, I kind of want to move to Antarctica right now because it’s so effing hot out. I have my air conditioner on in my room and it still feels hot. And, what, it’s only like eighty degrees outside! Okay, eighty is kind of hot, but in the summer, it can go all the way up to ninety. NINETY. It was like seventy degrees and I felt like I was dying.

They really should just cancel school for the next few days. The first reason would be the heat. The evil, hot, painful, sweaty, clothes-sticking-to-your-body, insanely uncomfortable heat. The second reason is that I just don’t have the will to do any more school work. My brain has reached its capacity. My body has reached its capacity. I want to just chill out, study a smidgen for my exams and BE DONE WITH IT. — Really, if you know of any places that are of a moderate temperature all year long, I would so want to move there right now. Winter is too cold and summer is too hot.

Spring is quickly becoming my favorite season. I like fall, too, but it leads to something a bit more unpleasant. That being months of freezing weather, a monotonous wardrobe, and days and days of hopeless depression. At least with spring, you have something to look forward to.

I guess I’m just a middle season kind of person. Maybe it’s because with either spring or fall, you have something to look forward to, or something you’re expecting to happen. When summer or winter come around, what you’ve been waiting for is there and it’s usually not as good as you’d hoped. There is something about anticipation that’s better than the actual thing itself. Spring and fall are seasons of change. In the summer and winter, the change has happened. Plus, they’re not so hot that you want to rip off all your clothes and throw desks out of windows.

Super Annoying and Terrible

June 7, 2005 – 1:50 pm
Filed under As It Happened
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The SATs were ridiculous. I mean, really, split them into two separate days! Don’t make us sit for FOUR AND A HALF hours in a hot classroom. Don’t make us solve horrible math problems over and over again, just when we think it’s over! Even though the SAT was fairly easy in its questions, it was made very difficult because time constraints and the fact that there were like TEN sections. I think it was probably the most irritating exam I’ve ever taken.

I woke up on Saturday, the morning of the SAT, relatively early and got ready relatively fast. I was out the door on time and we swung by Mary’s house to bring her over to Nardin for the exam. When Mary came out of her house holding her SAT ticket, I remembered that I had forgotten mine. We all got into the car and had to drive back to my house. I called my father and told him to be waiting outside of the house with my ticket. So, I went home, got the ticket, hooray! Okay. We drive off. When we’re about two blocks from the house, Mary asks me if I have remembered my photo I.D.

Crap.

We rush back to the house, I dash inside, go upstairs, and get my school ID. I rush back out and we head off for the exam. Since we got out of the house originally at a pretty safe time, we were still early by the time we got to Nardin. When we get inside, Mary and I go into the cafeteria and see a bunch of people standing up and talking.

“Do you think these are all Nardin kids?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Mary says. “They’re all talking to each other. I don’t know any of these people.”

We go to a cafeteria table and sit down. We are sitting for a few minutes before we realize that the group of people spread out by the cafeteria wall is not just a standing group of people. It is a line waiting to be checked in to the SAT. We stand up and walk over. We are in line for about ten minutes or so before we get our room assignments. We sit back down.

Finally, a woman tells us that we can go upstairs into the classroom we have been assigned to. We go upstairs, go into the classroom, get into desks, get our SATs, whatever, whatever.

The first part is the writing task. I think that out of all of them, this one was the most easy, even though we only got twenty minutes to write an essay. The task was to talk about which philosophy we agreed with: that in order to be successful, you must trash your past and move forward in life, or that in order to succeed, you must embrace your past and learn from your mistakes, etc. I chose the second one and wrote an essay with various examples, the largest of which was about a bank robber.

A bank robber walks into a bank with a gun and holds it up. He asks for all of the banks money. The man does not realize that somebody has used their cell phone to call the police. Within a minute, the police are at the scene and the arrest the man and put him in prison for ten years. When the man’s prison time is up, he is released and put back into the world. Now. The bank robber can do two things. He can live under the first philosophy and go rob a bank in the exact same fashion, or he can learn from his mistakes and make a better plan. He could rob a bank that is less public and not in such close proximity to a police station.

Yeah, that was my essay. In retrospect, I think that perhaps saying that in learning from his mistakes, the man decided to not rob any more banks would probably have been the better answer, but I thought my response was at least humorous. The next parts were all dull and incredibly tedious, consisting of either english skills, reading skills, or math skills. I’d would have to say that my math skills sucked. I still don’t think I did too badly, though.

On one of our breaks, I told Mary that I had left some of my answers blank. She told me not to do that as leaving them blank would lose us points. She said that if we at least answered them, we would get one fourth of a point. Being incredibly tired and confused, at the time, I thought this statement was completely logical. However, after the test was over and I was at home, I was chatting with somebody who told me that for a blank answer, you get no points, whereas with an incorrect answer you get NEGATIVE one fourth of a point. Oh, bother.

It seemed that some of the other people were a little nervous about the exam as well. A girl sitting close to me got a pretty bad case of the hiccups towards the end, and I felt kind of bad for her.

When the exam was finally over, I got up, feeling a little dizzy after being seater for such a long time, and walked out into the fresh air. I called my home and my sister told me that I would have to walk home because my father had taken the car. Mary bought a piñata at a yard sale. The end.