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.