small things make a big difference

i haven't cried in awhile but i did last night over a boy just look at that.

not even sad tears. and i suppose it wasn't over him. i was mostly just mad at myself for rushing things and not letting things happen organically. For some reason i want to be in control of everything and so i try to force people i like to like me back and it never fucking works how have i not learned that already.

in less dramatic news i have creative writing today. i really like that class. i haven't been writing more per se, but i'm trying new things with my writing so i guess that's a plus. mondays are reading days so i have to bring a book to ~inspire~ me for next class when we write. I chose a book by Sandra Cisneros (not the house on mango street) i'll look up its title later when it's not buried in my book bag.

last night on facebook people i'm "friends" with were using homosexual slurs like it was nobody's business and so I said something about it and only one person took me seriously. it's kind of sad and discouraging to see stuff like that but w/e. i think i've reconnected with an old friend because of it though. he has apparently tried talking to those people about why using those words is not okay. he's pretty chill.

more updates to come, i suppose.

edit: i've had a panic at the disco song stuck in my head all weekend. this is troubling because i don't even really like patd. 

Small Revelations

I am wearing shorts today. I thought it was going to be nice outside, but it's just raining. I'm afraid that it will keep raining all day, and that it'll be pouring by the time school gets out. If tat is the case, I'm going to have to take off my shoes and hold them safely in my hoodie because I don't want to ruin them in the dirty water.

In other news, this morning in the car I had a mini revelation. It's not anything grand, and it's something that zillions of people already know, or already knew (in the case of all the people who are dead). For those of y'all who do not live in the good old U of A, you may not know that on our 25 cent coin there is the phrase E pluribus unum, which means 'out of many, one'.

"E" in Latin means 'out of' or 'away from'. If this word is used in a sentence, the word that something is coming out of has to be put into the ablative case. It's just how it is. And while in the car I realized that 'pluribus' is in the ablative case because 'ibus' is an ablative 3rd declension noun ending. And I had a huge nerd moment. Whether or not this makes sense to anyone else but me, I suppose that is not very importnat. At least I know I've actually learned something in Latin class.

UPDATE 5/13/13: As a matter of fact I did take off my shoes, and it was pouring freezing rain and my feet practically froze. On the ride home I wrapped my feet in my sweater. 

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. 

Carpe Diem!

At the request of Lizzie, I am writing a blog post today. Things have been terrible lately, but luckily I won a pencil in Latin class yesterday that says "Carpe Diem". I plan on carpe-ing the living hell out of my diem tomorrow. The reason I won the pencil is because in Latin class we play a game where we all sit on our desks, and take turns answering what a vocab word means when the teacher holds up the flashcard. If you answer incorrectly, you have to sit in your desk. Whoever is left sitting on their desk after she's gone through all the cards twice gets to choose from the prize bucket. Let it be known right now that my Latin teacher has the best prize bucket of any teacher I've ever had. She has temporary rainbow tattoos, pencils with semi-inspirational phrases written on them in Latin, and miniature rubber duckies. The greatest thing about the rubber duckies is that they're all dressed up in different little outfits, and one was actually in workout gear and had a little duckie sweatband on its head. Most. Adorable. Thing. Ever.

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!

I'm Returning to the Flaming Dungeons of High School

I just realized that tomorrow is August 1st. How did this happen? It seems like just yesterday I was lounging in my room trying to beat the June heat wave and gorging on mac n cheese (Easy Mac was my drug of choice this summer). What I find especially distressing about all of this is the fact that I will have to make a big decision about whether or not to use a back pack again this school year. Last year for a majority of second semester I had to roam the halls back pack-less. In a school where you're allowed to carry back packs, I was making a major fashion faux pas. It wasn't even my decision to get rid of my back pack, it was the doctor's orders! If you'll recall, I actually wrote an entire post about the trials and tribulations of being without a book bag, crappily illustrated and all. 

My back is actually much better than it was when I wrote that post (I'd really rather not go into my actual injury, mostly because the doctors still have no clue what's wrong). Even though I'm in much less pain, I don't know if I want to take the risk of the back pack again. I experience enough self loathing because of my back pain, and the decision to make myself more unlike everyone else by not carrying a back pack again would probably send me into another state of spiraling depression, much like the one I was in before I started this blog (okay, I probably shouldn't call it "spiraling depression", but I was not doing too well for a few months there).

If I do choose to go the route of the book bag, I do have one type of pack in mind. They're called Dakine back packs, and I heard from a girl, who I am no longer friends with, that they are just the best. I probably shouldn't trust her, considering by this point I have cut off most all ties with her, but she could be on to something. I was told that they come with a case for a laptop to slip into, and since I have to accept the school issued laptop, I could stick that in the book bag, and hold everything else! That is the best option I've come up with thus far. It would at least be better than carrying everything around like I used to. It actually made my upper back start hurting, because I was carrying an entire accordion folder plus a laptop. So I pretty much got to choose between lower back pain with a book bag, or upper back pain by lugging around all my school crap. I think that by getting one of these Dakine packs I could create a happy medium?

Now this is where you come in, dear reader. Yes, you! I know that a lot of you who read this never comment, and I suppose I'm okay with that. But I would LOVE AND APPRECIATE any input I can get at this point. So if you're a regular commenter or not, I would be so grateful if you could give me any ideas.

School starts in less than a month, I need to figure this out fast. 

5 More Days

There is almost less than a week of school left.

(source)

Sometimes I sit back and wonder why it isn't summer vacation yet. I keep referring to this gif every time I feel like I'm not going to make it to the end of the school year. 

Edit: Somedays I look at my blog and wonder why I don't have more followers. Then I go back and reread all of my posts and my question is answered. I don't know why but I just really like the idea of having a lot of followers. Oftentimes I get really discouraged, at which point I refer to this again:

Somehow Mordecai is able to support me in even my darkest hour. 

School Is Weird

Yesterday at school was bizarre. Around fifth period I was in Biology, and we had a substitute. This wasn't really what made it odd, because my teacher is a track coach and is often gone because of track meets. We ended up working on a lab, and the sub didn't really strike me as unordinary in any way. He was a little on the tall side, curly brown hair, beard stubble, glasses, etc. Right after the bell rang to end class, he went and stood by the door of the classroom, waiting for the next class of students to arrive. As I exited the classroom, I considered telling him to have a nice day, just to prove that I can be a nice person like that. Right as I was about to say something, the substitute violently broke wind. I kid you not, this was the type of fart that rumbled through the air. I whipped around and looked at him, surprised, and he was looking around to see if anyone noticed. I quickly turned around and dashed off to Economics, a little bit confused, and also giggling uncontrollably.

Once I arrived to Economics, I realized that I had to give a presentation, which I was completely and utterly unprepared for. Not only was my computer dead, but the keynote presentation my partners and I half heartedly whipped together was C+ quality at best*. My friend and fellow group member Josalyn lent me her charger, and by the time class started my battery was charged to 11%. My teacher, being the malicious tyrant he is, decided to make my group present first. I took a deep breath and strutted up to the front of the classroom, hissing instructions to my partners about which slides I wanted them to read. Then we started, and we tried our hardest to give a riveting presentation about famous economist Sir William Arthur Lewis. Once we clicked past the last slide, I thought we were done and could return to our seats, but my teacher had other plans. He kept us standing up there, and asked us multiple questions about our economist, none of which we had the answers for. Despite being able to think on my feet in situations like this, I was at a complete loss. What made it even worse was my teacher was sitting in a student desk and munching on a Little Debbie cookie treat, and he looked so ridiculous I couldn't focus because it took all I had to keep from laughing. Luckily for me, my computer flashed it's "running on reserve battery power" pop up message, and my teacher said we could go back to our seats. Saved by the bell, was my initial reaction to this, until I realized it wasn't really a bell.

This was all really distressing yesterday, and I am so grateful that there are only 8 days of school left. I can't wait till summer.

P.S.- McCormick with corn rows.

*Edit 6/24/12: Guys I just thought I would let you know we ended up getting an A on that project. I have absolutely no idea how because I literally bullshitted my way through that entire presentation.

Cut Class Not Frogs

I always thought that frog dissections were only things that happened on television. It never occurred to me that I might actually have to perform one at some point in my life. Unfortunately, my Biology class is on our dissection unit, and we have to dissect frogs. The smell in our classroom this entire week has been absolutely putrid. Just imagine the smell of hundreds of dead frogs mingled with preservative and shame.

The worst part is that we had to write our name along with our partner's names on a piece of tape and wrap it around one of the frog's legs so we could identify which is ours later. Each day that we're done working on our frogs we have to put them back into a Ziplock bag. I think this wouldn't be that bad if everyone didn't have to put all the frogs in the same bag. The sight of 15 dead frogs in a big plastic bag is just gut wrenching. There are so many frogs in the bag that it won't even close, and random frog limbs are poking out all over the place. What made it even worse was this morning (first period, no less), my teacher opened up a drawer and inside there were about 10 other bags filled with dead frogs. I nearly lost my breakfast. I don't know how many more days we're going to have to work on these frogs, but I hope to God that tomorrow is the last day.

I haven't actually had to touch the frog yet, which I am extremely thankful for. I chose two lab partners that were both extremely enthusiastic about dead amphibians, which has helped considerably in my mission to not lay a finger on the dead frog. One of them was gone this morning, leaving only me and my friend Ben. The problem today was that Ben jammed one of his thumbs and he has to have a brace-thing on his hand, so he couldn't use that hand to dissect. And since he was missing the use of one hand and my other partner was gone, I actually had to be an active participant in the dissection today. Of course today was the day that we had to make an incision on the frog's leg and then tear it's skin off. Don't ask me why we had to do that, because I have no answer except my Biology teacher made me. (Note: I still didn't touch it, I made Ben do it all because I'm a terrible person who gets squeamish too easily).

If we are truly done with the dissection tomorrow, I will be the happiest girl in the world. My only other worry at this point is if we're going to have to do a Lab Practical Exam, and do part of a dissection for a grade. If that's the case, I'm probably going to fail.

Unrelated Side Note: Still no news on my Geometry test. I'm getting scared now that it's still not graded. I go to Geometry next period so hopefully I'll find out my grade then, fingers crossed! :3