Taxman

Well, those nasty, arrogant, momma's boys juniors accomplished their goal: Mr. Weber is no longer our physics teacher. Okay, yeah, a lot of the time he didn't really know what he was talking about, but he was nice and funny enough and tried to make the class a little interesting. And lots of teachers at school make mistakes and get confused. And just because certain people find it easy doesn't mean that other people aren't struggling (because half of the kids in my physics class find the subject genuinely hard and need to go slowly and get help). I wrote a scathing article for the newspaper about how sooner or later these kids (Jeremy Tatar, Ross Makulec, Craig Jakobsen) are going to have to realize that their moms aren't always going to bail them out of every situation. That's one of the main problems with the Academy: the parents are involved, which can be a good thing (example: at the school board meeting last night, Academy parents, students, and teachers succeeded in getting AP class grades weighted and factored into class rank, which should keep non-Academy slackers from making valedictorian), but it also can produce these arrogant jerks (Ross is my friend from a long way back, but he falls into this category) that think they can have their way anytime they want just by signing a few petitions and standing up at a few school board meetings. Reality check, guys: the world's not going to fall at your feet because you're smart and your mommy loves you. Grow up.

Other than that situation, things have been good lately. We have our first quiz bowl tournament tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing Brad'n'Kristen and Trevkeeper, but certainly not to getting up at five a.m. to drive to Champaign for this Earlybird thing. The car ride's probably going to be pretty unbearable, too: Ms. Greene, John Brown, Ryan, and Patrick. Oh, joy. I'll be sure to pack extra batteries for my CD player. The freshmen who are joining quiz bowl are quite good so far. Also, Lindsey Pearson joined, so I'm no longer the only girl. Not sure if this is a good thing or not; Lindsey and I aren't exactly pals, so it's not as if I suddenly have an ally, and I doubt that Ryan and Patrick will quit making fun of me. At least Donald graduated, so maybe they won't bring that issue up again.

And today was a nice day, just cool. Two tests, which should have made it bad, but psych was easy and Euro wasn't bad. I zipped through it, finishing way before anyone else, which was weird and a little unnerving. Like, did I miss something? But I'd written the essay all out in my TA hour, which is right before Euro, so I didn't have to think much. Key Club was canceled, so my sister and I went to the Cherry Valley library on the way home from school, and I got a stack of books and DVDs. And the best news was that Hayley finally found PageMaker, which we need to lay the paper out, and brought it to school: all is well. And Jackie Whitworth dropped off a disk with two long articles on it, so the paper should (crossing fingers) be ready to go by the end of next week. And from now on producing the paper will be so much easier. A load of worry taken off my back.

My mom and dad are having dinner at Hooters (I know, weird) tonight with some friends. When Maureen and I got home this afternoon, my dad had left a message on the answering machine that the babysitter had backed out, so we have to babysit for their friends' kid, Ross. He's two and extremely cute, and has been toddling around getting into everything. I slipped away to get online, though; there's only so long you can sit in front of a toddler, holding up different toys to amuse him for thirty seconds before he gets bored and needs new stimulation. That's not an exaggeration; you know what I mean if you've ever been around a kid this age.

Here Comes the Sun

Man, has my week been crazy. And beautiful. I've been looking forward to homecoming senior year for a while, but for different reasons than what actually happened. For example, I assumed that we, as seniors, would win the week-long spirit competition. That's just the way things are. But juniors won, which is, I must say, pretty horrible, considering they're already as cocky as anything, sitting in the commons and the like. At the time, however, no one cared, because right after they announced that, they announced homecoming king and queen. And Aashesh Verma was king.

I've been friends with Aashesh since sixth or seventh grade, and he's always been the awkward, adorably nervous Indian boy. The last few years in high school, Aashesh has become the icon of our class in the Academy, as Asians often do (e.g., Deepu Reddy for the class of '04), and last year Steering Committee made "Aashizzle" buttons that featured awkward little Aashesh in ghetto poses, wearing the ultimate Aashesh shirt, that red polo shirt with stripes. (If you know Aashesh, you know what I'm talking about.)

On Monday, all the English classes had to vote for homecoming court. Without any real organized effort, just about every Academy student, even several that don't really know him, voted for Aashesh, and he got on court. We were all excited, and tried to get everyone to vote for him for king. It was exciting even to have him on court; when they had all the class delegates walk in at the pep assembly, Aashesh was wearing a suit, a sight I'd never thought I'd see. I was privileged to be right up there both at the pep rally and at the game when they announced the winners, since I was taking photos for the school newspaper. I also got to hang out with Aashesh and his mass of groupies, several of which had painted their faces half black and half red (school colors) and had painted on their stomachs letters spelling out AASHESH and on their backs THE KING. Aashesh confided to me before half-time that he already knew he'd won, so the moment leading up to the announcement was one of happy anticipation for me, and I went crazy when they announced it, jumping up and down and screaming. I mean, it's a fairly big deal for an Academy kid to even be on court, let alone be KING, and here's this little Indian boy taking it away from these big, macho football players. Ross Makulec's mom said she overheard someone saying, "Who? Oh, must be one of those Academy kids." The perfection of the moment is indescribable.

Aashesh's place on court and eventual announcement as king colored the whole week, but it was pretty fun besides that, too. On Wednesday, I got to skip physics (yes!) for the senior panoramic picture. Standing on crowded, rickety bleachers, staring into the hot sun, wasn't great, but once the picture was over, we got to hang out on the lawn for a half hour or so until the end of the hour; the administration didn't want us distracting the ongoing classes (in the past, seniors have yelled their class number and banged on lockers). My friends and I regressed to our childhoods with hand-clapping games ("Miss Susie had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell, Miss Susie went to heaven, the steamboat went to hell-o operator...") and memories of elementary school, as well as cheering wildly whenever our names went by on the digital sign for being National Merit Semifinalists (it was the first time I'd seen my name on the sign, so I was pretty excited). Then, when the bell rang and they let us back in the school, we screamed and yelled and clapped and made it difficult for underclassmen to get to class. It was undoubtedly a senior milestone.

Taste of Auburn, when all the clubs sell food at little booths and each class presents their lip-sync performance, is usually my favorite event, but this year it wasn't great. I had some good food and hung out with some fun people, but lip-sync was sad. For one thing, it was completely off to the side instead of smack in the middle of things, like it has been in past years, so a lot of people didn't even realize it was going on at first. The freshmen were cute; they did a song from Wicked, which goes with the Wizard of Oz theme, but that's just not what lip-sync is. The sophomores didn't have anything, and the juniors and seniors both had typical rap music-and-booty dancing performances. The seniors were disqualified for being inappropriate, so the juniors won. When I got home, I found that none of my pictures for newspaper had turned out. I'd noticed that they were extremely light, and had asked Tyler if he knew how to fix it; he told me after messing with it that the pictures should be adjustable on the computer. Well, they weren't. I was pretty upset, but I got enough pictures at Powderpuff, the pep assembly, and the game to fill four pages of the newspaper, so I'm okay now.

Powderpuff was, as usual, hot and crowded and smelly, being in the gym. The relay races featuring girls were pretty nondescript, and I got no good pictures of them. The male cheerleading, as usual, was entertaining. The freshmen--a bunch of nerdy kids like Siva Sundaram, Michael Jiang, Tobi Odusanya, Christian Zarnke, and Brian Bai--were dorky and awkward and got booed off, although they all told me later that they'd had funny stuff later, but couldn't finish their routine. I really like this year's freshmen; I've gotten to know many of them through Key Club, Quiz Bowl, and/or my TA hour, and most of them seem like sweet, funny kids. So far, they're much less pretentious and annoying than the sophomores or juniors, and I hope they stay that way. The sophomores were initially disqualified but appealed; they were really good dancers, although there were only four of them. The juniors were also good dancers, but I thought their routine was fairly generic: breakdancing, acrobatics, etc. Acknowledging my prejudice, I really thought the seniors were good. We had a huge group, who wore actual cheerleading outfits; they did little cheerleading things, like the "Alligator, alligator, eat 'em up, eat 'em up" cheer, which was funny, and then there was Brian Yi. Another small, skinny Asian, although he acts cool all the time, as opposed to Aashesh, who usually just looks confused. But when he started dancing...all the senior girls were floored. He was really good! He had a big solo and everything. It was exciting. Chris Yoon, often paired with Brian as Brian'n'Chris since they used to be together constantly, was also a male cheerleader, but luckily he was just as goofy and clumsy as always. I mean, I don't think I could take the shock of both of the Koreans being secretly awesome in one day.

Throughout the week there was also the whole saga of the days' themes. Last year, seniors wore togas on Friday of homecoming week. This year, they made Toga Day for everyone on Tuesday. In addition, they switched the colors for Class Colors Day, so that seniors were red and juniors were black instead of the other way around, which is what it's been for the past few years. Several seniors were mad, and some of them plotted to wear black on Toga Day and togas on Class Colors Day. As it turned out, most people just ended up wearing togas on Toga Day, and on Class Colors Day they wore red shirts that said "Red is the new black." It was funny, and it got a little rebellion in there without being too mean to the Student Council people who came up with the different days.

On Friday before the game, Maureen and I went to Key Club, and then we went out on the lawn and ordered pizza for the band kids who didn't have time to go out to eat between the meeting and the time they were supposed to get dressed and gather to practice marching. I hung out with Christian Zarnke for a while (he dropped hints that he wants a senior girl to ask him to Turnabout; quite a change from the Phil fiasco, don't you think?), and then when the band kids went inside I was talking to Will Mulford, Michael Jiang, and Kalah Polsean, all nice kids. If there's one word to describe Will, it's flamboyant. But he's fun to talk to; I can get along with him better than some of the other guys like that at Auburn. Michael's a bit grating after a while; he's just all over the place and into everything. For example, he came up to me while I was chatting with Christian and asked to zip my sweater. Uh, what? And he always has a camera with him; he takes pictures of everything. Yes, everything. He's sweet, though. Kalah is probably the nicest girl I've ever met, but she has a personality, too, and you never get the feeling she secretly thinks you're weird.

I suppose I'd better get some homework done. Tonight's the dance; I still have to figure out where we're eating and who exactly is in my "group." April, Sonya, and Ellen are givens, since they're the group I planned to go with since the summer, and then there's Maureen and her date, Syed, and their friend Imran, and Emily, who's going to tag along and take pictures for the paper, and Gloria and Adam, who are going together but don't know whether they're joining us (Gloria's too good for our at-one-time choice of Fazoli's, it seems), and Ross, who just decided, like, yesterday that he was going, and might go with Gloria and Adam if they go somewhere else, seeing as he's friends with them more than with me. So we'll see. The important thing is that I have my dress. And it is pretty. Yep.

If I Needed Someone

Okay, so we all know it's been far too long since I last posted. My mom's been limiting my time online (she claims it interferes with my schoolwork; last year I was restricted from AIM for half of second semester because of my calc grade), and I haven't even been on much to check my e-mail or read random Xangas lately. It's been busy.

Senior year hasn't been going as well as I'd hoped. Junior year was supposed to be the hard one, remember? We were supposed to pull all-nighters on the word paper and stuff like that. I think people had it wrong, though; Mrs. Longhenry doesn't really hit you until senior year. English is killing all of us, and there's daily Stats homework to complicate things. Besides the regular workload there have been other complications: my wallet got stolen from my backpack when I forgot to zip it to walk between the commons and the tech wing after lunch; I forgot to wear my ID one day, so I had to get a temporary one and deal with the hall aides again; quiz bowl started, and I can already tell that I don't care if this is our year to win State, as practices are the most mind-numbing moments of my life (besides Spanish last year. Notice a trend here?).

As I predicted earlier, I live for fourth hour, my TA period. The freshmen are nice and funny and cute. Annoying at times, yes, but mostly entertaining. And there's no work involved, not only outside class but also in it. I mainly just sit there and listen to lectures, which does get boring after a while, but there's lots of discussion and funny comments and so on. My other favorite class is psychology. I'm so glad I got to have Mr. McCoy; I took econ at Rock Valley, so I missed out on that experience, but psych seems more fun as well as easier. He's always going off on funny rants; the latest was about the futility of IDs as protection against school shootings. If someone's going to bring a gun to school, they probably attend Auburn and have an ID, so they can waltz past the hall aides with no trouble. McCoy pantomimed using the little rectangle of plastic to deflect bullets, which everyone laughed at. The sad thing is that an Auburn student really did bring a gun to school last year and showed it to several people; no one reported him until after school that day. He was wearing his ID.

Last night I went to Ellen's for her birthday party. She turned eighteen a couple of weeks ago, so there have been many jokes about buying cigarettes and porn. It was a little awkward with all the Guilford girls there; I've known all of them since freshman year and I like them all, so it shouldn't be bad, but somehow I've never been able to get to know them the way Sonya has. I had fun hanging out with Sonya, April, and Laura at the park, reminiscing about elementary school. We all feel guilty about teasing Derek Owens and Dylan Rambow, and carry a residual hatred for the people that teased us, like Ryan Nowicki. I have random, vivid memories of elementary school, like Mrs. Ginestra yelling at me for snickering when Little House on the Prairie referred to the "butt" of a gun, or Chris Vanmanivong drawing Star Wars characters all over my notebook in fifth grade, or me getting mad at Valerie Horneij when she had a lunchtime birthday party, complete with cake, for her stuffed moose, and only the cool kids were invited (needless to say, I wasn't one of them).

This week is Homecoming, which should be fun since we're now seniors. I'm actually going to the dance this year; I got my dress at Bergner's yesterday (note to self: avoid shopping with my family at all costs in the future). I really like it; it's mint green with black ribbon and a poofy skirt, so I don't mind so much that I'm going with my friends instead of a boy. I just hope I get a "real" date for prom. If all else fails, I'll ask one of my freshmen.

Lovely Rita

I probably shouldn't post on my blog after reading people's xangas, the reason being that most people's Xangas read like this: "school sucks. i dont want to do my homework so im going to go hang out with people. I LOVE ANIME." Etc. My writing is always affected by whatever I've just been reading; I usually get in a writing mood after reading something good, like Sylvia Plath or ZZ Packer. But lately I always browse the Xangas of people I know when I go online, having recently discovered the things.

Tonight my whole family is at the Auburn-Jefferson football game, where my sister is playing in the band. I was supposed to go, but my mom suggested that I stay home, and I always enjoy being home alone in the evenings, when I can eat a lot and watch TV and spend much longer online than I'm ever allowed to when my mom's home. It's especially nice tonight because I don't have to do any homework, although I probably could, maybe should, get started on that English fractal packet... I remember the seniors complaining about it last year, and now I know why. It's not particularly boring so far (I've done about half a page), but the type is small and it's about math. I've had enough already with physics and stats.

Today was a bit embarrassing all around; in psych I laughed inanely when Mr. McCoy asked me whether I felt my underwear (we were doing an activity on sensory perception), and later I made a fool of myself with Austral-Ian. I see him every day as I walk between the library and Mr. Harnish's room during C lunch (during my newspaper hour); he sits alone, drinking a Pepsi and staring off into space. My sister and her friends have that lunch, so I tried to make them welcome him into their group, but she said their table was full, and then these other freshmen from my world history class ruined my attempt at forging a friendship between them by calling poor Ian "gay" (in the middle-school sense of the word, roughly synonymous with "dumb"). Today I just kind of went too far; I was walking back and forth past the cafeteria a lot, since I was transferring the contents of the old newspaper room to the new one off of the library, and I kept waving stupidly, and then I realized how idiotic I probably was acting, and entered the cafeteria to apologize profusely. He just smiled, slightly patronizingly, but I'm sure I was being incredibly annoying. There were other, smaller moments of shame as well.

Speaking of incredibly annoying, I've always known I hated this year's juniors, the class of '07 (since sophomore year, when a huge crowd of those then-freshmen used to crowd the second-floor hallway by standing outside Mrs. Heisel's classroom in little clumps), but last year I was a bit more tolerant of them, having befriended various members of the class like Emily, Brittany'n'Megan, Jendaya, Mickey, etc. This year, though, they're driving me insane, especially in physics. I had expected physics to be pretty hard; so far, though, I seem to be one of the few people in the class who understands it, maybe because almost everyone else spends the entire hour talking and making fun of the teacher (who has the undesirable task of succeeding the beloved Mr. Keyzer). I should have known something was amiss. Apparently the class is too easy for some whiny idiots, namely Jeremy Tatar, who apparently called up a bunch of his friends to get them to call the school board and complain about this teacher! Okay, it's the second week of school. Ya think it could get harder? Right now we're just doing the basics, mass and distance and velocity and stuff. And physics is hard for some people; if it comes easily to you, that doesn't mean that you should attack the teacher! Stop being so self-righteous! I want to slap your pathetic whiny junior face!

All right, got that out of my system.

School really hasn't been so bad. I am looking forward to the weekend...but that's mainly because of On the Waterfront, Rockford's annual Labor Day weekend festival. I found out that you can take a shuttle downtown from Target for a dollar, which sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me, so I'm probably going to ride down there with Gloria and April tomorrow afternoon. Last year was my first year of attending the Waterfront, and it was marred by an embarrassing incident in which I met up with some boys from church, who pretended not to know me and ran away from me; in following them, I separated from April and Sonya, and had to call Sonya's cell phone to discover that they were, in fact, right across the street. Other than that, it was great fun. This year, I intend to reserve any greetings of people I know to a simple nod and smile, which can stretch into a brief conversation if they seem so inclined. No more chasing random freshman boys.

The highlight of my week was an incident in my freshman class (which is coming, I'm realizing, to dominate my year). There's this kid in there who's really greasy (literally; his hair is brown streaked with yellow, which looks disgusting) and always has a smarmy answer for every question. I think I already wrote that he typed a full page for an assignment that produced a handwritten paragraph at most from everyone else. The other day, while Mr. Longhenry was lecturing, a girl walked by and threw a bottle into the room, apparently aiming for the trash can, though it clattered to the floor. Mr. Longhenry said, "Different people, different historians, have different perspectives for the same events. Someone throws a bottle in here; I can go around the room and ask everyone what just happened, and I'd get twenty different stories." Greasy kid raised his hand. "Incidentally, someone threw a bottle in here just now." Cue pursed lips and raised eyebrows from Mr. L ("Uh, that's why I just said that") and loud laughter from Colleen.

By the way, if you're reading this, please leave comments...I love getting them. And try to leave your name or at least some clue as to who you are. Otherwise I'll be pestering people like Emily and April to see if they left random anonymous comments.