tonight

The past two days were really rough for me until things got way better tonight. The ACT is tomorrow and I've been stressing insanely about that, and Thursday I had so much work to do and I was so exhausted I couldn't concentrate on any of it so I got nothing accomplished for the most past last night. Not to mention that my crippling loneliness is coming back in full swing now that it's getting closer to winter and I'm remembering why I hate having seasonal depression so much. My depression is already such a struggle for me and it just gets so much worse during the winter time. All day long I was just irate. Completely over it, basically. I did work all day long at school and when I got home I had even more to do. I took a solid nap though and that really helped to get me back on the right track. I did a little bit of AP Lit homework, and then at 7 pm Mary picked me up and we went out for a Night of Debauchery.

We enjoyed a lot of time together outside, and then we stopped in at work really quick to check the schedule and after that we ended up driving around for an hour with the windows down, blasting music. We were SO obnoxious but it felt good to not have any cares at all. Mary's mixed CD was an absolute disaster but it was some of the best music I've heard in awhile. I knew none of the words to the songs but I didn't care we just kept driving it felt so relaxing and so freeing. We ended up at a red light while some dance song was blaring, and we were dancing like idiots, and a semi-truck was next to us, and the dude in the passenger seat began jamming out with us and when we noticed we both absolutely LOST it. It was so funny, and we were on the road with them next to us for about a mile, until they eventually turned left, and were gone. We blew them lots of kisses.

My voice is going to be hoarse tomorrow from how much shouting Mary and I did tonight, that is for sure. I'm feeling very contented right now though, and relaxed. my apprehensions have melted away, and tonight while in the car, I just realized that I Do Not Care Anymore. I'm still my own first priority, but I'm not going to be concerned with how I'm perceived by others. I'll do as I please, honestly.

here is a pic I took out of a cute book in my latin class:

:)

"It is fitting that everyone has a dog greeting them when they return home!"

JUST GET A LOAD OF THAT AD + GERUND TO EXPRESS PURPOSE. DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE USES OF CUM + THE SUBJUNCTIVE. OH YEAH. 

A lot of people think Latin is a language filled with anger. I'm not saying they're wrong, but we sure can have a lot of fun with Latin too!!! 

i'm not spell or grammar checking this tonight I'm going to bed! 

x

Back to School, Unfortunately

After a somewhat relaxing one week off of school, I am back to the usual. The "usual" being sitting in a brick building for 8 hours a day trying not to fall asleep or cry. Such is the life of an average high school student.

My mom gave me a ride to school this morning, and we listened to some CD of hers, and she was explaining to me her favorite songs and it was all quite nice and relaxing. Trouble didn't strike until she pulled her car in front of the school. I carry a three-ring binder around school filled with all of my notebooks, papers, and folders. I only keep my computer and textbooks in my back pack. As I tried getting out of the car, I didn't quite have a tight hold on my binder, and it slipped out of my grip and flew apart on the asphalt. I hastily scrambled to gather all of my possessions  then I booked it into the school with as much grace as I could muster.

What a way to start off school again, huh? 

Is Spring Finally Here

Something was different when I walked into school today. Everyone was wearing bright colors, and I saw at least four or five teachers bringing in boxes of doughnuts for their homeroom.

Maybe it's because Spring is finally coming. 

A Serious Blog Post About A Silly Girl

I've been toying around for the idea of this blog post for a long time. And today, I finally sat myself down, started playing my favorite song, and decided to just write it out.

This post will primarily be for all three of you who read my blog that I don't know in real life. I'm not sure if my parents want me posting about this, but last I checked they don't read my blog, and besides, I'm writing this because I feel like I need to.  So, let's get it out there, shall we?

I'm gay.

Pretty much. This is something that I've struggled with in all my whopping sixteen years of life, and I'm finally starting to accept myself for who I am. While I am still trying to find a label I feel comfortable with, I have come very far in the past few months. I do not plan on going into the specifics of all this, but I do feel like I should say I've not turned into some huge lesbian, or something akin to that. I still feel attracted to guys on some level. I'm just working my way through the muck trying to figure out who exactly I am, and who exactly I want to be.

Growing up, I'd always felt different than others around me. I could never quite place my finger on what it was though, which led to many years of insecurity. Sixth and seventh grade were pretty bad in particular for me. I had very few friends, and I felt so incredibly alone. I would go to school early every morning, study hard in all my classes, then come home and do all my homework. What a dreadful life I lead for those two very studious years.

In eighth grade I began to find my voice, which made things considerably different. I made more friends, I cut off ties from those who were not being nice to me. I thought I was gaining confidence, but really all I was doing was building up a mask. I was Hannah -the insanely happy and goofy girl- and that is far from what I felt like inside. I longed to know what was wrong with me, and to know why I felt so disconnected from everyone around me. I began to develop crushes, which I refused to acknowledge. I figured I was just not feeling well. But as I'm sure you know, feelings persist, and I just began to feel even worse about myself.

By the end of eighth grade my mask had been broken down to nothing. I hated myself, I hated life, and I hated the monotonous drone that it had taken on. I wanted to escape, to feel normal again, to feel like myself (a feeling I hadn't experienced in years). I started to have crippling anxiety attacks, which made me despise school and stress and life in general. It was all too much for me to handle. My relationship with my parents was strained, and I began keeping secrets from them. I would not use my computer in front of them, for fear that they would get upset with me (over what, I'm still not sure).

My anxiety stayed around, and by the time I began ninth grade, I wanted to die even more than ever before. I started this blog as a means of escape, but it didn't help much. I still felt like an outsider, I still hated myself, and I hated school. Every morning brought a new fight between my mother and I- me wanting to stay home and her refusing. It began to get so bad I started seeing a therapist to talk about what was stressing me out.

At first I didn't talk to my therapist about my fear that I might be gay. During the beginning of ninth grade I was still lying to myself. It took almost the entire year before I started to even consider the idea. It took me many months to figure out my feelings, and there were a lot of nights spent crying into my pillow. But it's been almost a year now and I'm finally at the point where I am comfortable enough with myself that I can talk about this.

I'm a sophomore now, and I feel more like myself than I have in a long while. I still have bad days. I still have days where I want to die. But it's not every day anymore. Once I figured out what was "different" about me, I began to feel much better. Not at first, necessarily. During the first few months I was a confused mess of emotions, but nowadays I am starting to feel like the version of me that I was always destined to be. 

Math Class Jerks

Since I have chosen not to be in an Honors math class this year, that means that I am in a class filled with juniors. Since I'm only a sophomore, it is a little bit frustrating having to deal with the lowest common denominator of the juniors. Most of them are huge, burly boys who obviously have some sort of inferiority complex. As far as I can tell, the main word in their vocabulary is "swagg". Perhaps they use it as some sort of mating call, and that is why they are constantly shouting it. We may never know.

Most days I can put up with these neanderthals, but today they took it too far. Every friday, we have "large group", which means that all the kids from my teacher's classes (so about 3 or 4 groups of classes) all sit in the auditorium at my school and we get lectured at about math. Large groups are unbearable as it is, but in the auditorium I was in there were spinning chairs so it was a thousand times worse. The scope of movement of the chairs is only about 180 degrees, so the kids like to lean back really far in the  chair and just swing from side to side. Since these chairs are so old, they squeak unbearably loudly.

Obviously, when you are sitting in a squeaky chair, you will respect your peers and not be an asshole and not make it purposely squeak, right? You would think this would be logical, but for about 5 of the dumbest juniors, they like to be jerks and ruin the class for everyone else. For weeks on end, every friday afternoon for 45 minutes, I get to listen to these boys squeak in their chairs, and then laugh as if it is the wittiest thing that has ever been done in the history of creation. They all do it, make eye contact, and giggle uncontrollably like 8 year old girls. I'm surprised no one peed themselves, because they were literally acting like children.

Today, I decided enough is enough. Since I sit right next to them, I said

"Hey, I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop doing that."

I used my "I mean business voice", and after one of the boys apologized to me, I thought it was all over with. I was wrong. Apparently my request that they act like the 17 year olds they are made them upset. They started to squeak their chairs louder than ever, and they were seriously shitting themselves over how "funny" they were being. I was shooting all of them dirty looks, and then I started to hear:

"What made carrot top mad?"

As if they have no idea what is making me angry.

They repeated this question to each other over and over for the last few minutes of the period. Since I am a redhead, they decided that the best way to punish me for expecting them to be courteous was to take a low blow. I was so upset. Not that their comments about my hair bothered me, but the fact that they had the audacity to think that their torments would actually mean something. I'm certain that right now they're all patting themselves on the back, telling themselves and others how they really laid it on me. That is what is upsetting to me. The fact that they are probably proud of themselves and their actions is what hurts more than their childish words.

Don't believe what I'm saying? Allow me to provide an example of how full of themselves these boys are. Today as we were taking notes, my teacher was showing us an alternate way to solve a problem:

Teacher: "So, that is another way you can solve a matrix! Is anyone planning on doing it differently this evening?"

The Cretin: "YEAH, I'm gonna use a calculator!"

The Cretin turns to his friends for validation that he has done a job well done.

The Cretin : "That was a good one!" Cretin repeats this multiple times, certain that he has made a fool of the teacher for saying he would use a calculator, even though it was totally random and had nothing to do with what we're learning. He remained proud of his "wittiness" for the rest of class. 

See what I mean? This imbecile was freaking PROUD of himself for making a comment to the teacher in fromt of everyone, even though it was totally baseless and just made him look like an even bigger idiot than he already was. This is just another reason why I hate this boy and his friends.

Now, I am going to write an open letter to these half wits:

You idiots. Every day when I am forced to share a math class room with you, my hatred for you grows even more. All of you are the garden keepers who carefully tend to my hatred, providing the perfect environment so it'll grow up big and strong. Robert, I am not even going to leave out your name from this post because of how much anger you put into my day. You and your friends may think you're the clever ones, but when I am an adult who is successfully working in a job I enjoy, and you are the one who is working as a janitor, we'll see how cool it was to be an idiot in high school. 

THIS JUST IN

Recap of today.

Life was especially crazy today. I had a Spanish quiz (aced it), a math test (probably bombed it but it's anyone's guess at this point), and the last three periods of the day I had open.

First on the agenda is my Spanish quiz. Right now we're reading this story called Una Carta a Dios (A Letter to God). It's about a poor farming family whose harvest gets destroyed by hail, and the father (named Lencho), feels that his only hope is god, and decides to write the big man upstairs a lil' letter. Overall the story's been pretty good, but the phrase "la única esperanza: la ayuda de Dios" has been waaaayyy overused. We just read part three of the story, so the quiz was over the vocab and major events that happened. Very easy peasy lemon squeezy sort of stuff. Then came the difficulties. Along with learning the new vocab this chapter, we also learned about Appositions. In short, an apposition is a phrase that starts out with a noun, then a comma, then some words describing the noun, another comma, and finally some other info relating to the original noun. If we wanted two extra credit points on our quiz, we had to write two appositional phrases. I wrote: Mary, quien es ni mi madre ni mi amiga, es muy aburrida. I was quite pleased with myself, and was gearing up to write another, when I found out that the appositions had to be about characters from the story. Since Mary is someone I made up, I had to cross out my whole sentence, and the fact that I wrote in bright pink pen didn't help.

Second on the agenda is my math test. Since I'm sure most of you reading this know of my math-related woes, it shouldn't come as a surprise that this math test was difficult for me. Last year I was in an honors level math class, and since that was a complete train wreck, I chose to stick with the "regular" level math this year. My advanced algebra class has so far been much easier than geometry, but this unit we just finished up was a little bit difficult. If someone even asked me to describe what the unit was about, I don't think I'd be able to adequately explain it. It's something to do with graphing linear inequalities. Anyhow, the test was mildly disastrous, and I didn't finish in the required time. Luckily for me, my math teacher this year seems to actually have a soul (much unlike my one from last year), and she let me come in the following period and finish up the test. Thank god I was open the period following math class, otherwise I would have had to turn in an unfinished test, which is something that I have far too much experience with. I guess we'll have to see how this one plays out.

The third and final thing on my agenda is how I was open the last three periods of the day. Sure, in theory having 120 minutes of free time on a friday afternoon should be paradise. And most weeks, it is. But after I finished taking my test, I went down to the library and sat with some acquaintances. All was well, so I started doing some homework, and I plugged my headphones in to listen to music. See, I have this rather unsavory habit where I chew on my head phone cords. And up until today, I never thought twice about it. Unfortunately, for some reason today, I decided that chewing on head phone cords is fatal and that if I keep doing it I'm surely going to die. This spurred anxiety that lasted well throughout my afternoon and into the evening. It's funny how one little thing sets me off, then everything else just keeps piling on top of things.

But enough about me, how was your day? 

When I say hillshire you say farms.

Today has been really terrible, and it's only 8:30 in the am. I forgot my wallet at home, so I can't buy myself any food. The only good thing that's happened thus far is that I got my mom to write me a note to get me out of swimming class. That's why I'm writing this post right now, instead of taking a dip in the freezing water of my school's pool.

Also on my list of icky things that have happened thus far today, the last 30 seconds of homeroom were extremely distressing. How can 30 seconds be distressing, you ask? Well, right after the bell rang I stood up and I noticed my fly was down. Rather than waiting until I was in the crowded hallway to fix my zipper and have no one notice, I decided to do it right that moment, and I'm fairly sure that my homeroom teacher and two other students saw. I guess on the list of embarrassing things that could have happened, this wasn't so bad. Even so, I'm still reeling from that crippling sort of embarrassment that attacks during situations like this.

How about you? How has your morning been so far?

P.S.- Matt IDK when you're going to read this, but I didn't get a chance to say that I think your haircut looks great! :D 

My Weekend Mission

Yesterday in my Honors Lit class, my teacher gave my class a mission for the weekend. He didn't call it a mission, but it sounds cooler that way, yeah?

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to sit outside on our front lawns for an hour over the weekend with no technology.

Sound easy? I think it will be, considering I have to visit with my grandparents for 2+ hours every week. Whenever I'm there we just sit in the living room and talk, and I know my parents would bury me alive if I used my cell phone, so I don't. Not that I get that many text messages anyhow. Usually anyone who is texting me is okay with waiting an extra hour or so for a response.

I plan on breaking out a lawn chair and sitting in my drive way on saturday evening. I might play Sweet'n'Sour. Sweet'n'Sour, for those who don't know, is a game where you wave at people walking by or passing in cars and if they wave back they're sweet, but if they aren't friendly back, they're sour. When I used to play this with my brother we'd keep track with chalk tally marks on the sidewalk.

I know a few of my blog readers have the same assignment as I do, so I know you'll be participating this weekend. But for any of you who aren't in my literature class, are you going to try this too? I think it'd be interesting to hear your experiences! 

La da dee.

There's close to 15 minutes left in the school day, and my throat feels like a little animal is scurrying all around inside of it, it's so itchy! All day it's been itching on and off, despite the fact that I took my allergy medicine this morning. I decided to blog to try and take my mind off the discomfort I'm in right now. I tried reading a book, but I couldn't concentrate. Luckily, I don't have much homework this weekend, so I can relax some.

In other news, Homecoming is tomorrow. Am I going? No. Do I wish I were? Well, sort of.

A lot of my friends are attending this year, and as much as I would love to go, I just do not have the money to buy a dress. I was going to ask my mom to take me dress shopping on Wednesday night, but my dog ended up having a medical emergency and we had to spend the evening at the veterinarian office (more about that escapade will come in a later post...). Basically, I don't have anything to wear, and my parents still don't know the dance is tomorrow. I think I might go to the football game tonight, just for shits and giggles.

I know that Lizzie is going, and my friend Anna, who recently moved away, will be stopping in tonight at the game. I really want to see her, so that is another thing spurring me towards going to the game.

STOP THE PRESSES.

Okay so I'm currently sitting in the school library and on the sides of the bookshelves are magazine racks and I glanced over at an issue of Mad and I looked at the title and I thought it said "ERECTION FROM HELL". After freaking out a little bit, I checked again, and as it would turn out it actually says "Election from Hell." Well, this certainly has been a long week, hasn't it?

BACK TO REGULARLY SCHEDULED POST.

I really want to go hang out with my friends tonight, which is unusual considering these past two weeks or so I've just wanted to be alone. I'm not sure why that is, but I'm hoping it'll pass soon, because being sad and alone isn't necessarily fun, even though when I try to hang out with friends I just get anxious. Go figure, huh?

Welp, it's six minutes until the final bell rings, so I suppose I should call this a wrap. Guess what? My throat doesn't itch anymore ;) 

Since my theme of the week seems to be making meaningless posts and then hastily deleting them, why not add another to the bunch?

This is actually something I've been wanting to write about for a long time, and as a blog reader, you probably had no idea it was going on. Considering the fact that I am very in touch with my blog, and treat it as an extension of myself, I take great care in keeping it in tip-top shape. In other words, I stare at my blog for hours and mull over how great/terrible it is. One thing I noticed about six months ago is this:

Now, before you get all angry at me for the shitty screen shot (you can click to enlarge it, yeesh), and how completely random this is, just bear with me so I can explain myself. If you'll notice there is a red arrow pointing to the third post in my list of "Most Popular Posts". This is a list of my posts that have gotten the most hits, and Blogger has ever so nicely compiled them for your viewing pleasure. This feature is really handy for most bloggers, because it will present their best work to newcomers to their blog. The bad news, for me at least, is that that is not really happening.

The post the arrow is pointing to is titled "Warning: This Post Contains Excess Amounts of Water Fountains". (I've chosen not to link you to this post because it does NOT need any more page views). Ever since March/April-ish that post has been in my list of most popular posts, and I have no idea why. That post is not funny, it probably doesn't make much sense to people who don't attend my school, and the title is really sucky. 

I'm just a little bit upset by this. At least it's not number one on the list anymore, because that was too much to deal with....

Edit 8/29/12: AS OF TODAY THIS WATER FOUNTAIN POST HAS PASSED UP A FAILED ADVENTURE IN BLOGGING AND IS NUMBER TWO ON THE LIST NOW HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN?!???

Ew

**9/3/13: This is pretty funny. The person I wrote about in this post I ended up dating. We're not anymore, so it's kind of interesting to see my reaction to them pre-dating**

Well, well, well, it would seem I am spending yet another open period at school sitting by myself in the library. For some reason the person who set up my schedule wanted to see me go through a large amount of emotional turmoil because I have NO friends in any of my opens. It's mind numbing sitting by myself for long periods of time, not to mention awkward. I usually just sort of chill and pretend like I'm too cool to care and that I'm not scared as hell.

You would have thought that I would have learned to deal with this by now, considering this is my second year of high school, but that is an incredibly wrong assumption. Even though I am a year older I am still as terrible at initiating conversation as ever. It's not that I don't like talking to people. I love it, really I do. The problem is approaching someone and saying "hello". I've grown accustomed to just talking to my friends and greeting them with a cheery "sup bitches" (even then, I only reserve this for people I know very well).

Right now I am plopped in the library at an individual study station (read: sitting at a desk facing a wall). There is a girl who I am acquainted with who is sitting no less than ten feet away from me, and I am too scared to approach her. Sure, I've sat with her before, mostly at social functions where our mutual friends would do the dirty work to keep the conversation going. I keep looking back to see if she notices who I am, but she's fixed on her computer, and she's sitting in an arm chair by herself so WHAT DO I DO? THE INNER CONFLICT IS ALREADY BUILDING UP.

I'm going to try and calm down and probably edit the shit out of this post then post it and by that point this moment in time will be long gone. I hope you, blog reader, have a ravishing day. 

Back To School

Yesterday was my final day of summer vacation. Considering it was such an emotional day for me, I refrained from blogging. I have a very strong connection with summer, and all of the hours I spend indoors plopped in front of the computer are well earned after a long school year. This summer in particular I was more of a shut-in than usual. Since most of my friends were living their exciting lives, and were on vacations in exotic places, I didn't have many people to hang out with. Lizzie, for one, was in Illinois the whole summer, so I didn't get to see her until just last week.

Meeting back up with Lizzie was quite the emotional experience, to say the least. Saying that I embraced her was an understatement. It's funny how even though we sent letters and emailed the whole summer, I didn't realize how much I'd missed her company until she was right there with me. We hung out as much as possible before school started, but before I knew it all of our days were up. We spent yesterday afternoon at the park, and we both almost died of heat stroke because of how hot it was. All in all, though, it was really fun!

Today, on the other hand, was not much fun at all. The only high point in my day was getting back my Mac book (our school issues us laptops each school year that we are allowed to take home with us and use 24/7). I got almost as emotional when I got my laptop back as when I saw Lizzie again. I'm just kidding of course... sort of.

Nah, I'm not actually that obsessed with my Mac. I think if I had to describe my relationship with it, I would say it's only mildly unhealthy. C'mon, I have a strong bond with this laptop, considering it is the very machine which I created Infinitely Pi on, as well as my Tumblr account!! Both of these are two things I hold dearly to me (well, tumblr not as much so). Every time I look at my computer, I'm reminded of many great memories of internet shenanigans. This bad boy helped me survive my freshman year of High School, which is something I never thought I'd ever be able to say.

Tomorrow is picture day, which is a day I have loathed since childhood, despite the fact that I love looking at myself. For some reason I always found it rather agitating trying to look absolutely perfect for the photo. I much prefer impromptu photo ops, since I always look more relaxed in those.

Take this for example:

This is probably one of my favorite picture of Lizzie and I. In case it wasn't obvious, I'm the dork on the right.

For some reason I can never pull off a smile like that during picture day. 

To wrap this up, just know one thing: I am completely unprepared for this school year, but I guess it's happening and it's gonna keep happening for the next nine or so months. Let's see where Infinitely Pi is then, shall we? 

EDIT: I forgot I added more onto this page today!