It's probably not a good idea to publicly say everything I've been thinking about the AP US exam.  Let's leave it at a predicted 5 and condolences from all of my teachers (who kept asking me throughout today if I was okay after the test O.o).

Did anyone totally miss Teacher Appreciation Week?  And, does anyone know whose twisted idea it was to put it during AP week?  People are difficult to track down during any testing time.

Teachers: Blah blah blah blah blah...
Frezzo, to two students, sitting nearby and listening: Don't be fooled by his choir boy visage.
McKenna: What?
Frezzo: Oh, I said visage, not massage.
McKenna: What??
Frezzo: Up in New York, they say visage instead of visage.
McKenna: Oh.  *pause*  We aren't in New York right now...
Frezzo: No, but some of us wish we were.

Needless to say, I stayed after school in a desperate attempt to not-study for the US History exam.  I was totally honest about that, and since everyone else apparently has a life, no one showed up but Beth and I, that doesn't make for a very competitive round...  We discussed possibilities for the RM individuals tourney (as in, open to RM people to predict next year's teams) in which I felt like I was in a twisted math classroom, what with the little tournament seed drawings on the board.  We all made stupid suggestions and had trouble pronouncing words!  You have no idea how delighted I am that I'm not the only one having trouble speaking ordinary English these days.  Yeah, but anyway, Humza-- you're responsible for making sure all the It's Ac sophomores in your 7th period class (which is what, half?) can stay after for a 2-hour (-ish) thing on May 22 (that's a Thursday).  Remind them that there'll be pizza, too.

Hmmm... I know that I'm forgetting something... what is it...?

Click this link with IE.

...if your computer isn't dead from that, open that link in a functional browser and take a peek at the source code.

*is greatly amused*

What are you doing reading this?  Go cram and get to sleep early tonight, tomorrow's the last SAT testing day and AP US History students are probably frantic over a test on which most of them will do extremely well.  I suggest listening to "James K. Polk", helped me with two or three of the eighty questions on the AMSCO practice test, not too bad for a short, catchy song.

Oh yeah -- good luck on the tests tomorrow, if anyone reading this is taking any of 'em.  Try not to stare at the walls, stay at least partially hydrated, and don't fall asleep until you're done.

Congratulations to WJ on winning Beltway yesterday, and congrats to Churchill, Blake, and Whitman for beating us.

I missed the Gatsby question!!  And the Heller question (author of Something Happened), and the Taft question, and a crapload of math questions... the recognition of voodoo as a religion, the fifth nation to send something or other into space, the list goes on.

I swear, all the slowest buzzing people are intentionally being put on one team.  We'll see about that next Tuesday.  My AP/IB exam schedule (the DRAFT only) tells me that anyone taking Math Studies, Math Methods, HL Math, AP Eng Lang, AP French Lang, AP Span Lit, and IB Econ exams will be absent.  That's... what, all of the juniors?  It'll be rather empty for the next two weeks.

Best of luck to RM It's Ac this Thursday at WJ and to getting our best players to commit to the tourney.

"Richard Nixon means never having to say you're sorry."

When I used the rhyming dictionary and the thesaurus and the dictionary for my Macbeth journal-IV and it still didn't turn out the way I would have liked, I felt sort of cheap for resorting to reference books, but that's how things end up.  Again today, instead of rereading my SAP books or working hard on an intelligent thesis, I've been rereading Gatsby, and as beautiful as it is, I feel as though I'm letting Time slip by too quickly.  (Well... given the book, it's pretty difficult to not be bothered by time-related themes, as I learned when making a stupid collage earlier this year with a bunch of watches and rich looking people, but let's not get into that.)  Seems as though I'm shirking responsibilities when I procrastinate my regular homework and while away the day reading whichever texts I wish.

The deadline is soon, I must be at the post office by Thursday evening with the envelope sealed, so the stakes are raised: not only do you keep my eternal thanks if you help me figure out why I want to go William & Mary's summer program (0.5 - 1 pages, but I'm writing it myself), you'll also get money.

Ah, bribery never works as well as it ought to, does it?

Best obscure reference in recent memory.

I did my textnotes (good!) but proceeded to spend over two hours playing Animal Crossing (bad!) in a futile attempt to pay off my incredibly ugly character's debt.  You see, there is this awful little raccoon known innocently as "Tom Nook"; he rules the town of Blarg with an iron fist, as he holds a monopoly over all prices in every industry... as soon as you move into the town (i.e. start playing the game), he gives you a house in an appealing location but places you into debt, demanding you to work in his store for chump change.  As you work hard to pay your debts to a cranky bird at the Post Office (who knows how much she's been pocketing?), you struggle to make ends meet by performing menial tasks and running demeaning errands for other townsfolk.  When the debt is paid at last, another is implemented-- you've only paid for a small cottage, after all; don't you want to upgrade your house?  Of course you do!  This, then, leads to a new debt, larger than the first and even more impossible to get rid of.  After every struggle to give all your hard earned money to Mr Nook, the cycle begins anew, keeping all of the citizens trapped under his oppressive thumb.  In the meantime, why do you even want a larger house?  So that you can store all of your lovely possessions, of course!  Aside from the occasional travelling salesman (oh, the possibilities in this one), Tom Nook also is the sole source of these badly pixelated baubles.  How do you benefit from having a well decorated house?  A faceless organization known as the HRA (Home Rating Association, or something similar) enters your house without your knowledge or permission and sends mysterious letters to your residence, judging you based on your possessions and aesthetic sense in arranging your house!  Sadly, in this small town with no apparent form of government aside from the seemingly autonomous Post Office and the mild-mannered Police whose only task is to maintain a Lost and Found, there is no protection from Tom Nook's outrageous business practices... after all, once you've given his small shop enough patronage, what does he do?  He remodels the store!  That's right, he passes the costs on to the customer.

That probably sounded kind of strange to anyone who hasn't played the game...

Ooooh!  Closing night of Hello, Dolly!

There were lights and sound (and oh, what sound, even I could hear every word in the play-- good job!!) and singing and dancing... the set was gorgeous, the singing was beautiful, the dancing was entrancing.  I have no words left after the play... during intermission I headed straight for the refreshments table to donate lots and lots of money (the table was in room A1, quite possibly the worst arrangement ever, but we'll overlook that).  The Black Maskers did a wonderful job as always!  RM wins so much.

(In case anyone missed my previous rant, I despised Blair's rendition of West Side Story.  RM's production has completely restored my faith in musicals.  So.  Much.  Fun!)

Hmm.  Opera randomly crashed.  Or, rather, Windows XP killed my internet browser.

For the uninformed, RM had a pep rally at the end of the school day today.  This means loud noise.  This means crowded bleachers.  This means time to consult people about totally irrelevant matters.  So.  After being told something that really ought to be common sense, at least to me, I'm more hesitant about applying at all to UPenn Pre-College.  I finally looked more closely at their site and noticed that the vast majority of classes are listed as being taught by a generic sounding "Staff".  A little doubt-inducing, at the very least.  William & Mary, on the other hand, has bio pages about all of their teachers on their web site.  Hmm.  My main issues right now are 1) I don't feel like writing the essay (bad excuse...), and 2) they only offer math and science classes in their summer program.  It's extremely (or excruciatingly?) small, which means both that it may be really difficult for me to be accepted and that the class sizes will be great.

Excuse me, I'm just babbling now.  I mean, I want to do something this summer, but my application essay is to explain why I want to attend the program.  (If anyone could explain to me in more eloquent words why I wish to attend this program, I'd appreciate it.  Then I'd write it in my own words and mail it in...)

This is mysteriously delayed by over a day, but this is my KMO post.  RM did it yesterday and got a score of 1680.  It's not bad... we're estimated 12th out of under a thousand participating schools, which is not too bad.  In fact, it's a lot better than our Fall 02 score, 1564.  I was wondering, if TJ and WJ and Blair and RM (maybe not RM this year) always place so incredibly high in the rankings, what is wrong with the rest of the country / world / pool of participating schools?

Um, anyway, everyone actually in the room at RM did very, very well.  (Yay Humza!!  You can claim credit for a great deal of our 100+ point increase.)  I did write down the questions that we got wrong so that I could panic over them at some later date, but Meg's got me in a bad position over this not-spazzing-out business.  Let's just say I do not want to have any panic attacks and have her find out.

Did I mention that Blair has the top score so far?  As far as I know, the official rankings haven't been released, but WJ (TJ?  WJ?  I can't remember which one!) is close behind in second.

In case anyone hadn't noticed, this is going to be one hell of a stumbling week.  I mean, I'm still at least half-awake, but don't expect too much thought in most of my words.  Everything's feeling slightly delayed; I suspect what mental capacity I previously possessed inconveniently fled at some point during Spring Break.

We had a fire drill today!  Those bleachers are strangely warm.  RM felt really cold (I mean temperature) and I'm thankful for my jacket-with-a-map.

Since we all know that nothing goes according to plan, I wasn't completely surprised when, lo and behold, RM will not hold the KMO after school during third and fourth period and during lunch on Wednesday.  [Er, oops.  That was one bad typo.  We will indeed have it after school.]  Drama people got excused for the 90 minutes (eek, so now we have to rush through the questions?) and now... I don't get to skip my French test, French presentation (but I'll likely get called on tomorrow, anyway) and whatever the hell we do in Chem these days.  I'm supposed to be memorizing my French presentation right now, but my resolve is slipping; I'll probably settle for being able to make substantial eye contact.  Everyone else has been reading straight from their PP presentation, I figure I'll at least look good in comparison.

Any generous people who have direct and influential connections at UPenn, tell me.

Stare intently at these two lists.

100 Best Novels

Rival List

I'd like to meet some of these people... how are four of Ayn Rand's novels in the top 10 of the reader's list?  And, especially, how is Catch-22 higher on the board's list than the reader's list?

After laborously eyeing over 120 HaloScan templates for the comments boxes, I've decided to just stick with this one.

What a waste of time.

I'm working on US History and will do Chem sometime later today.  I'm not dead and I haven't run away, I just haven't been able to get to the computer for more than a minute at a time, and today is little exception.  I archived the entries at 15 this time, not that this news holds significance for any of you.  Wait, it does, the Catoctin rambling is gone.  As theraputic as it was to think and write, it's rather boring to read, so it's not here.  I have other essays to think about at the moment, including what academic subject interests me most and why, in 200 words.

Last night I was thinking so much about the end of Spring Break that I dreamt my way through several imaginary classes as well as part of the KMO...

*cough*  Someone owes me some practice questions... you know who you are...