2:05 p.m. - 2002-09-13
aren't I so productive?
Did you know that if you took a piece of regular paper and folded it in half 100 times, it would be 800 trillion times the distance between the earth and the sun? I learned that in my psych textbook. That class is so cool. I had guessed it would be maybe a mile or so thick.
Right, so I was talking about that with Kelsey, Alexa, and Dad at lunch, and the following conversation ensued:
Kelsey: "Wow, I would think it could be that thick if it was, like, the size of the entire United States."
Alexa: "Yeah! We should get a piece of paper and put it over the entire United States!"
Kelsey: "And then people could write on the bottom!"
Me: "Yeah, and if you accidentally walk into the edge, a paper cut will chop your head off!"
Mwahahahahaha.
Anyway.
Busy, busy, busy week.
On Tuesday I went out with Dad to pick up Thai food so I could read aloud my French sentences to him and practice prononciation. I don't even remember how it came up, but he started talking about teaching English, and then I was confused, and he had to remind me when he taught English. Damn, my parents led REALLY interesting lives!
So my dad's a senior in high school, and he applies to the current three top colleges in the country without visiting or anything (his parents weren't exactly the most involved in the world). He goes to the University of Chicago and hates it. I can't remember how many years he was there, he went to Sarah Lawrence College for at least a year too, anyway, I don't remember the number of years in each place. He spent his senior year of college in Paris, living in the Latin district, studying, and playing guitar on the subway.
After college, he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Cameroon. Two years STRAIGHT. Two years in Africa, without ever once leaving the country. Hard to imagine. That's where he taught English. He did a whole bunch of other stuff there too. Then he went to graduate school at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, part of Tufts. Then, he met Mom at Oxford when he was visiting a brother, and you can read what happened here.
Right, so that's my little bit of family history of the day. Away from the 1970's, back to last Tuesday.
Lisa had told me to call her after 8:30 PM, but it was busy and busy and busier, and I'd even made a point of memorizing those fifty vocab words that day! Grrr.
Sarah K. is apparently moving back to Charleston! She's so, so miserable at her new school in New Jersey, and she's moving back. She's going to stay with a friend and start a little late at her old school, and her parents and younger brother David can fly out to see her whenever possible, and vice versa. Isn't that an impossibly hard arrangement? I sent her an email, and I really hope that works out.
Wednesday -- well, obviously, Wednesday was September 11th, which is what my previous entry was about. I had my first Hebrew classes with Joanne. I got back home late from school (we had a messed-up schedule because of the assembly), so we only had about ten minutes, but that's okay. The problem is, the book that we're working from bombards you with so much vocabulary each lesson -- and there are so many lessons -- that it's too hard to keep up. She's looking for alternatives. She found a picture book that she thought would be fun to read, but it's too hard. Damn.
I had an unbelievably productive afternoon. I went upstairs and didn't come down for four hours, and I was working straight through! I finished reading the first two modules for psychology, I did half my week's worth of math (it's actually really good math! Maggie got me an awesome new textbook!), half my week's worth of global studies, I recorded my French tape, I did psychology homework, physics homework, and started outlining psychology. Oh, and I downloaded "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins." If you haven't, you should. It might say that it's by Radiohead, but it isn't really. I'm going to memorize it and then Jackie and I can skip into psych class singing it! Except I can't sing, but that's beside the point.
That night I finally got to talk to Lisa! What a shock! She thinks that it might make more sense for me to take the French SAT II rather than math IC, because I'm not good at math, and we'd have to work really hard on that and on improving my time, so I have to take a practice French SAT II this weekend and score it and see which one it's better to work for. Plus she wants me to memorize another fifty vocab words and call her on Monday night, and we'll have an hour session, and go over the tests that I took a week and a half ago. Wow, only a week and a half? It seems like forever!
Yesterday was a shitty, shitty day. After I got home from school, we had our first classes with Mrs. L. She's the woman who speaks Latin, French, Spanish, and I believe even some Hebrew, and possibly others. My first Spanish class in three years. Amazing, right? Damn, I've forgotten so much! I was so bored for two hours though, I was working together with Kelsey and Alexa, and they aren't as good with languages as I am, perhaps because I've studied French, but they never have been... anyway... they've forgotten everything, even though they actually did do some Spanish with Maggie last year. They don't know sentence construction, they don't know the simplest verbs, only know some scattered vocabulary. So she taught us the question words, which I already knew; showed us some verbs, which I already knew; and showed us how to conjugate the three types of verbs, which I already knew. Then she gave me a shitload of homework, which I did this morning because I had two frees in a row, but still, it was too much for a new teacher.
So she didn't leave until 2:30, and then I had to do the fucking AP psych outline... it took forever! Hours and hours and hours, I lost track. Granted, I didn't work the whole time, I kept distracting myself by going online and talking to people and reading diaries, but it still took a ridiculously long time. Once that was over -- around 9 -- I had to fax an essay to Lisa, do French exercises, do physics homework (which I didn't get, there was a new formula, I had to get dad), and I didn't have time to study for the psych quiz. I went to bed at 11:30 and I'm still surprised I haven't gotten flak about that... because...
...MY BEDTIME IS 10:30! Can you believe that? A fifteen-year-old, a junior/senior in high school, has a bedtime... and not only that, but the bedtime is 10:30! I'm not even tired at 10:30! And my parents are absolute asses about it too. One day, I think it was Monday, I wanted to stay up until 11 and read my psych textbook. Unfortunately, bizarrely, but amusingly, I fell asleep with the textbook on top of me and the lights on. Yes, I realize that is pathetic. My dad came in at midnight and turned them off and moved the book.
But still. I mean, 10:30! This is going to have to change.
Also, yesterday, Laura and Lorenzo came over. Yes! They're the kinds of adults that, when I was younger, would have disproved my theory that Adults Are The Enemy. Really. There were a few exceptions to my Evil Adults Theory. All of my Language Arts teachers except for Emily (Jessica L., Holly, Jen, Carley); Kelvina, my first-grade teacher; Maggie; Chris; Marsha; Dena and Andrew; there were others but I can't think of them now. My ten-year-old self used to write poems about feeling like I didn't belong in the world and other depressing shit, now I don't remember, but I have them all in a binder somewhere, and I'd show them to Jen, who was then my Language Arts teacher. But mention anything of the sort to a parent? NEVER.
But, yes, Laura and Lorenzo -- they're the kind of adults who are just fun to be around. They listen to you. Plus, it's a bonus that they both like Lord of the Rings. When we went to their house last spring, they had the Alan Lee illustrated edition of LOTR... this is how we discovered it!
Lorenzo looks like a combination between Ferris Bueller and Elijah Wood. Surprisingly, I am the only one who has noticed this resemblance. Oh well, I delight in finding random LOTR references in EVERYTHING.
Laura is the college counselor at Fieldston, and Lauren and David both talked to her, and she's just so cool. I felt badly that I had to rush back to the schoolroom and work on my psych so I couldn't really talk to either of them, but still, it was good to see them. They went out for dinner with Mom and Dad.
Today is Friday the 13th, and nothing has happened. However, if Thursday had been the 13th, then something might have happened, because we all know that the world is going to end on a Thursday, so you should always have a towel with you!
Psych test wasn't too bad. We've started a new pronouns unit in French. Mrs. H. gave us sheets of rules from a rural one-room schoolhouse in Brittany in the late 1800s. These rules included things like "don't wipe the boards by spitting on them or by directly licking them." I don't know about you, but in my classroom we generally don't spit on the ground, put coins in our mouths, or put pens into our ears.
Two frees in a row. Did my French homework, finished the physics, did Spanish. Now I'm home, Mom and Alexa are in the city, and I'm procrastinating. Yay! I really shouldn't though, because I have practically no weekend, despite the extra day for Yom Kippur.
Tomorrow, Kelsey and Alexa have their first musical theater class. I took that class for eight sessions. You can read about the classes and the two performances last year ("Seussical" and "Barnum") in jessica5787. I'd been planning to stay for the whole class, but now I think I'm just going to go at the beginning (which means I have to get up at eight, wah wah) and say hi to Peter and George, and then I can work for the morning. Jackie's probably coming over in the afternoon to watch "The Matrix Revisited" and do Elvish braids and just hang out. Then in the evening we're going out for dinner in the city at a steakhouse; it's my cousin Scott's fifteenth birthday present. Sunday, Alexis and I are going to have Sibling Bonding Time, probably go see "Blue Crush." Monday, we're probably going to the ten o'clock Yom Kippur service. Once that's over, we have classes with Maggie, and then in the evening I have the one-hour session with Lisa.
Apologies for this entry, which is, I realize, boring as all hell. But I'll leave you with a wonderfully random bit of information.
Mel Brooks had a cameo in "Young Frankenstein"! He did the voice of a cat who was hit by a dart.
