Jumping up and down

BEST. HOUSE. EPISODE. EVER.

OH. MY. GOD.

More SAT fun...

Today we received the results of the SAT/ACT Combo Practice Test, administered by Kaplan, that we took way back on September 5th. Here's the breakdown:

SAT:
Math: 740
CR: 640 (FAIL)
Writing: 760
Total: 2140

ACT:
Math: 30
English: 33
Reading: 34
Science: 33
Composite: 33

I kind of freaked out when I first saw those scores, but then I realized that this was BEFORE I started studying.

But you know what really freaks me out? I got ALL the "Global/Detail" questions wrong. All of them. I still get those questions wrong on practice tests.

And I failed the essay. 4/6. Which means 8/12. Which is bad. But whatever. I wasn't trying very hard at the essay, since I had never done one before.

I'm thinking about taking it in December. Tennis is over, so I get home fairly early, and I still don't have to take gym, so I have lots of free time at school, so I do have the time to study. I worry about the stress levels, though--my trimester 1 finals are November 10, 13, and 18, and then I have a Model UN Conference from the 20th to the 23rd. But that would still give me two weeks for last-minute studying before the test.

Any advice? I have til next Wednesday if I don't want my parents to have to pay a $23 late fee. Agh. This is so complicated. Classmates, when are you taking them?

I've already decided that I'm taking them in a town that's not my town but is near my town, because that's where I took the Math Subject Test, so I know my way around and stuff. Not knowing anybody there is helpful, too, because I don't have to be self-conscious about my sweatpants and super-old t-shirt.

Blogging as a Stress-Reliever

I originally started this blog because I wanted writing about myself and my thoughts and just events in general to come easier. That's definitely happened. Initially, though, I was having to force myself to blog. It was like a homework assignment or a some obligation, something that I had to do. But as my blogging has become more frequent, I've found that the half an hour or so that it takes me to draft a post are really nice. I'm less stressed because of this blog, for so so so many reasons.

Giving myself the time to write and not think about school is such a blessing. I don't even know where to begin. Same thing with my bus ride in the morning. It's a time that I will not interrupt for work, under any circumstances. If I'm tired, I sleep. If I'm not, I listen to music. Either way, it takes the edge off the stress I'm getting from everywhere else. It's time for me to think, and blogging helps me focus my thoughts in ways that I never could before.

Blogging also helps me not get as annoyed at the idiotic things people do. If I'm angry about something or at someone, I can write a post about it, using the most defamatory language I can manage. During the day, I almost always have some sort of post brewing in my head. Yeah, I never actually publish those posts, but just getting the words out of me and into a place where they're preserved reminds me that six months after I write them, I'll have forgotten what made me so mad in the first place. (At least most of the time.)

Blogging's pretty cool. And to think I didn't start blogging until my friend (WHOSE BLOG HAS NOW DIED) did is pretty upsetting.

My mom has a new job.

You may already know that my dad stays home and takes care of my sister and me and does housework and cooks and stuff while my mom works. (Apparently it's because when I was born, my dad had just quit his job and was being a student teacher but then decided that he couldn't deal with kids at school plus kids at home. He may have just been teasing, though.)

So my mom has a new job. Anonymity would be totally blown if I told you exactly what it is (obviously). She's still working for the same place, and is now doing stuff related to the financial crisis. In theory, this is a temporary job, for six to eight weeks, but both of my parents say that if it goes well, it could very well become permanent. Her hours are horrible. She's leaving the house before I wake up at six a.m., and not getting home until eight or nine. On weekends, she's out of the house from eight or nine until about four.

The benefit of her keeping this job permanently is that she takes the train to get there, not her car. So I could have her car next year and drive to school!

Is it just me?

Did you ever think something or start to say something then be disgusted/sad/upset/angry you did?

I think really offensive things sometimes. And then I wonder if those things I'm thinking are really me. I just don't know sometimes.

Ahh.

Two teachers in a row were absent today, which gave me lots of time to work and procrastinate. Again, I seem to be keeping up fairly well with my workload this year. I was able to finish AP Chem, start thinking about my history essay, outline my answers for Model UN Specialized Committee apps, and figure out a way for my parents to visit all my teachers on back-to-school-night without walking for miles. I also played a few hands of bridge with the nerd crew :)

At tennis, I played first doubles and won in straight sets, 6-0, 6-1.

(That's a good thing, for you non tennis people.)

Tonight:

• History essay detailed outline and/or rough draft.
• MUN apps
• Continue to study for physiology test and figure out what to draw with the essay questions.

Plus, there's a rerun of House on at eight :)

Very unproductive

I slept until 12:30 yesterday, which basically ate up my time. I worked on my debate speech and finished my history reading and started prepping for the physiology test, but didn't finish prepping or finish the speech. On Friday, I worked on physics.

I still have to do my lit reading and do some Latin and finish my speech and work on physiology. And I left my stuff for my history essay and AP Chem at school, so I can't put off physiology or lit to work on them...

And on top of everything, I have a splitting headache.

I bought my first suit today, for Model UN and Debate.

My mom came home from a trip to Philadelphia at about two. Since I was still in my pajamas (I'm in love with sweatpants), I showered and dressed and we left around three.

First ,we went to Macy's. I tried an an Anne Klein jacket that fit well and looked good, but I was between sizes in the pants (gah!). Everything else they had either didn't fit or looked too old or was just ugly. And seriously? About the fit thing? The number system we currently have DOES NOT WORK. If a jacket fits perfectly around the hips and shoulders and arms and is the right length but is too huge around the chest, what are you supposed to do?? Gain five pounds? Seriously.

So then we went to Lord and Taylor. Fail. I only tried on one thing. It looked terrible and was super expensive. We stopped in at Nordstrom, which again was superexpensive.

(I find it funny how my parents aren't changing anything about the way we live and spend money. If anything, they're spending more. Last time the stock market went down a lot, a couple months ago, my dad went out and bought a big-screen TV and all the paraphernalia that goes with it. This time, my mom bought about three new outfits and told me that I should ignore the price when looking at clothes, because I'll get a lot of use out of whatever we buy. My family is so weird.)

We were walking through the mall to check out Express when we passed by The Limited. My mom said "Well, it doesn't look like they'll have anything, but let's give it a try". We bought the first thing I tried on. I am now in love with that store. I like that they separate their pants by cut and rise--it saves me from having to try on a pair of pants that I would have to wear way too high.

I looked for a picture online, but neither the suit nor the jacket was on their website. The pants are just simple black dress pants. The jacket is just a classic black style--two buttons, little pockets, fitted around the ribs (does that make sense? Around the ribs?). Just a very conservative, simple, standard suit.

happy :)

Also, this site is amazing. Turn on the sound and clack everywhere:

http://palinaspresident.us

I have the day "off"

No school! The teachers ave meetings! And best of all, my sister has school!!

Last year, I was talking to a teacher about half-days and days like these. He told me that he liked to imagine students sleeping in and going out for lunch or brunch, then spending the afternoon relaxing with a good book.

Ha.

Here's what's on the agenda for this weekend:

• Practice test.
• Prepare for physiology test. (I would tell you more about how hard this is going to be, but it's google-able. Sorry.)
• Study for physics.
• Finish writing debate speech.
• Do Lit reading.
• Do Bio reading.
• Start history essay.
• Do history reading.
  
• Tennis?

Bad afternoon.

Too frustrated to write.

Score

One of the questions I got wrong yesterday was a bubbling-in mistake.

:D

Wow

I'm still failing critical reading, but I did much better in math and writing:

PSAT Practice Test (from College Board):
CR: 740 x.x
M: 800
W: 800

I think this "improvement" is a function of the type of questions--Barron's is ridiculously hard. I think it was getting me more scared than I needed to be.

Anyway, at least I'm good for the PSAT on Wednesday :)

About Sleep

I agree, my sleep habits are totally screwy. Ever since I was a baby, I've had trouble sleeping. My parents blame it on my pediatrician, who told them to wake me up EVERY TWO HOURS to feed me so that I would gain weight. I think another part of it is that my dad has the same natural sleep cycle that I do--genetically, I may just not be an early person. During the summer, we go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time.

I get up at sixish and go to school. I'm fairly alert until around lunchtime, when the hunger kicks in and I'm a bit more tired. I eat lunch and then I feel fine. I get tired again about an hour and a half before going to tennis. Then I go to tennis, where, once again, I'm happy and awake and active.

If I played at tennis, I'm awake through dinner until about eleven. On those days, I can get into bed and fall asleep within an hour fairly easily.

If I didn't play, my brain shuts down earlier. My personal non-scientific theory about why this occurs is that since I love tennis, it's like the equivalent of ice cream to my brain. It makes me happy and cheers me up. The problem is that then my body is ridiculously jumpy until about twelve-thirty. If I go to bed before then, I toss and turn and fidget for hours. (I think my record is about four hours of jumping around. That night, I finally gave in, and got up and did some crunches or something. Worked like a charm.)

I think that this happens because I'm not getting nearly as much physical activity as I used to. During the summer and early in the tennis season, I would be playing tennis for an absolute minimum of two hours a day. So now, my body thinks it needs to be awake--my metabolism has adjusted to make that amount of energy which I now don't need, since I mostly just watch.

I've been meaning to make some exercise plan for days I don't play, and I think that the sleep issue may force me to find time to run or play paddle tennis or at least force myself through some core work.

This should help. But it might not. Because, quite frankly, it's one hundred percent true that teenagers genuinely aren't meant to go to bed at ten p.m. Yeah, I can do my best to work around that. But I've tried so many things that supposedly help sleeping--dim lights and warm drinks before bed, soothing music, avoiding my computer, not eating any sugar (that one was hard, let me tell you.). None of them worked.

I've been having a bit of an issue lately with one of my friends as well as my mother lecturing me constantly about the amount I sleep. I think the worst thing that was said to me was "Since you're so tired, you don't know that you're tired! Sleep!!!!!"

Gee, thanks. I think it should go without saying that a) I definitely know my body way better than either of them do and b) unless I'm doing something that legitimately inconveniences them, it's absolutely none of their business.

I've been really upset by this for the past couple of days (don't even get me started on this), for two main reasons. First, I am a very private person. I don't like it when people tell other people anything I said, even if it was completely innocuous. (I have a half-written post about how much it sucks to be as shy as I am. I'm sort of fifty-fifty on whether or not I'll post it, because some of the stuff in their is rather personal. I may do an abridged version, because I think that my shyness is probably the most important part of me that needs to be understood) Second, I'm finding myself completely incapable of making my mom and my friend stop without resorting to walking away or yelling.

The ending to the post is horrible because I got sidetracked reading about immunology (have I written about how much I loooovvvve my physiology class??). Sorry.

Good news.

Did much better on improving sentence errors today. I'm still missing some stuff with verb and pronoun agreements, but it's getting better--26/30 on a practice set today!

Wesleyan

My dad and I visited Wesleyan today. I'm not sure if it's just my mind these day,s but I was very neutral about it. They don't have any programs that jump out at me.

Back to work:

• Chemistry
• SAT Writing
• SAT Critical Reading
• Flashcards
  

SAT-ing

Soo not fun.

I started studying for real last weekend. I had NO CLUE how hard this stuff was going to be. I went through the diagnostic test I took a while ago and decided that I really needed work on critical reading (not counting the sentence completions) and the identifying sentence errors part of the writing. The math section's results were more sporadic--I think I'll hold off studying math until after I take another practice test, and take more time on each section (I would get bored and just move on once I finished).

The biggest thing all of this has shown me is that I really am a poor test-taker. I'll do a set of practice questions, and afterwards, when I go over the answers, I won't believe some of the questions I got wrong. And, as you know, my school is full of geniuses who can't believe that I would bother studying for this simple test.

The first time someone asked me why I was studying , I firmly said "I'm a poor test-taker," and the kid left me alone. Then two people came close to laughing at me when they saw the giant book I was carrying around because "I didn't need to study". Finally, in homeroom, a kid was telling me about how he got a 780 on the critical reading on the PSATs last year. I had first period free, and I just wanted to curl up and cry. Who says something like that? I can understand pride, but to volunteer your score and boast about it is totally uneccessary.

My highest ever score on a subsection was a 730 on critical reading on the PSATs last year. I scored a combined 2090 on the diagnostic--a whopping ten points improvement. And went down by 20 points each on math and CR.

Some of the answers in the book I actually disagree with. I'm averaging less than a fifty percent on the questions I can reduce down to two choices.

The SATs don't care how smart you are, how well you can read things and understand them, how much math you know, or how well you can focus under pressure. All it cares about is how long you can sit in a room with twenty other stressed-out teenagers and not become a basket case.

I don't want to take them. I'm terrified.

November is too soon. December worries me because it's right after the end of the trimester and a Model UN conference. January is during a Model UN conference. My gut tells me that March is too late.

A lot of people are waiting until March or even May. But I just want to get it over with. And I don't know what to do.

So all of you guys who laugh as I study for this test, fuck off. This is really, really hard for me. But I'm going to beat it. I'm going to work ten times as hard as you and probably score lower than you, but I will have accomplished something. I will have actually done something that helped me do better than I would have otherwise.

Don't give me lectures on how to study, don't say "Oh, those questions are easy!" and then proceed to give me tips that I know and I've tried and just don't work, don't act like I'm being sarcastic, and don't try to help.

I had a horrible day today, and all of my anger and frustration and desire right now is going to be slammed into studying. Whenever I lose my focus, I will think about today. Because my road to a high score is unpaved and uphill. Yours apparently has a sidewalk. In the long term, my road is more worth taking. I'll get more out of it.

Good day.

My first class was canceled, so I had free until 11:40, during which time I did SAT prep. (I got one more question right on critical reading! That brings my projected score to like a...710? 720? The funny thing is, I totally own the sentence completions. I did fifty and only got three wrong, all of which were ones that I guessed on. So it's not that I think I'm sure about something and then turn out to be wrong, but I know most of the material.

I played second doubles at my match today and won. I think the match deserves a post of its own, but I only have seventeen minutes to get my crap together so I'll get downstairs in time for house reruns on USA :P

I got a decent amount of work done during my frees.

I didn't completely fail the quiz I got back today.

I played bridge with the Nerd Club again (sorry guys. but you take nerd as a compliment. So w/e)

Tired, in a good way, I think.

Whoa, only eight minutes to go. :)

My school is crazy.

In my math class, we have rolling chairs (really nice ones, too!). The other day, my math teacher, who's absolutely brilliant and is actually good at teaching, was standing facing the board writing stuff down for us. Meanwhile, two guys were shoving each other around on their chairs. Suddenly, one of them slammed into the back wall. The whole class got very quiet and watched our teacher to see what his reaction would be. He didn't even blink, kept writing, and said "Gee, I wonder what's going on back there."

*****

In the hallway, I heard some girl yelling at a guy "I don't want to be your derivative!"

*****

Again, my math teacher: In class, he asked for suggestions on how to solve a problem. A kid suggested he express tangent in terms of sine and cosine. He grinned and said "That's a good guess, but it COMPLETELY FAILS."

*****

In AP Chem, my teacher who happens to be the chair of the admissions committee, was talking to us about how bs it is that colleges claim to look at the "whole student". He grinned and said "I always get that from parents whose children have mediocre grades and low test scores!"

*****

Yeah, we're weird.

Festudent

Remember how when I wrote about the debate, I mentioned how weird it was that McCain used the word "festudent"? Well, I looked at the transcripts, and it turns out he actually said "festooned". Either way, he is old and out of touch.

FiveThirtyEight now has Obama winning over 80 percent of the time. Ha.