happenings

Yesterday I walked into my math class and saw to my horror the nightmare of my life: Will A., my fellow debater who I thought I had finally escaped by signing up for math earlier and confirming a place in a quickly-filling class. Oh, the naivete! I will never escape him! He will probably follow me to college!

The combination of Will and multivariable calculus was quite akin to electric shock treatments. We are so ignorant! So many years of two dimensional graphing, fomented by Descartes' cartesian plane! Two variables, x and y, and oh-so-managable. Why did it not occur to me that physics, which describes math in a three-dimensional world, requires a multi-dimensional system, rather then the cartesian plane? Suddenly our graph is a chimera, with x's, y's, and z's sticking out all over the place and extending into all eternity. Why we could graph 11 dimensions if our minds could understand it! Welcome home, string theory. Anyway, it was a bit of a shock to me (a bit, ha) after all of these years to realize that the world is indeed three dimensional. That's what multi-variable calculus is. It's describing relationships with multiple inputs.

Our teacher (who was bouncing around and looked like a miniature version of Marcus)... er professor... did not waste time explaining test grading procedures and attendence policies. No, he thrust these Who-wants-to-be-a-millionar-esque buzzers into our hands and forced us into 3D graphing. I was very confused at first, as my planes were mixed up from the norm.

No one has found out we're in high school yet. Hopefully it will stay that way. In this math class, due to the fact that it includes people that want to go into things like engineering, actually has some kids in it that are quite good at math. I will just sit back and let them run the class happily.

I probably should have gone to class this morning, although I spent hours fighting with the tyrannical 3D homework last night, to ask questions, but I slept through it. Good thing Tuesday's are not required.

Last night after class I was consumed by bookstores. First I went to Aunt Bonnie's used bookstore where I found a Descartes book, a Sartre book, a Camus book, and a book entitled The Tao of Physics (take that for uniting the two cultures). In my car I opened the Descartes book and found that it was owned by the rival school's previous head debate coach. That made me laugh and laugh a lot. We are just recycling knowledge. My math professor threw Descartes out the window anyway.
Then I went to Waldenbooks and was attracted to a sale on books so I bought Crime and Punishment and Leaves of Grass. I have realized that I literally spend 99% of my money on books.

Then my mom took me shopping and I bought this awesome DC comics shirt, whose awesomeness speaks for itself:
I saw several shirts that I loved. The whole time my mom was saying, "But Trista said this is in style!" (Trista is my sister-in-law who could have walked out of some fashion magazine), and I realized that I like what I like, and I don't give a care what's 'in style.' I also told my mom I would buy clothes that I liked, not her or Trista, or it would be a waste of money. My mom got very upset at this, which I think is very irrational. It all made me relaize how far I have come. In middle school I was so desperate to fit in (mostly in sixth grade) that I bought clothes just because of the brandname on them. I tried to do everything that I thought was socially right. Now I really don't care at all what everyone else thinks; this is my awesome DC shirt and they'll deal with it whether they like it or not.
Anyway, after buying this awesome shirt I got these way cool shoes (I'm running out of adoring adjectives):
Then, to top it al off, we went to the sporting goods store and bought me a backpack that will hopefully survive through college and go where no backpack of mine has ever gone before (in surviving more than a year, it will already have achieved this):

And today, after sleeping through my math class (which will never happen again), I had to go to the school to pick up my schedule. It was really messed up at first, but we finally got it worked out so I can take all of the classes I wanted to, even creative writing! It's going to be hard for the first semester though because I will be missing large chunks of physics and AP government every other day. But I can go to orchestra for a half an hour every day, and I can go to music theory on tuesdays and thursdays because I'm taking the music theory AP test this year.

And if that wasn't the best news in the world (although it did require waiting in lines for over an hour to get that all fixed), my counselor told me that if when I finished all my homework for the Spanish class and I really wasn't doing well, or couldn't do well on the final, she would somehow 'lose' my records and it would mysteriously 'vanish' from my transcript.

YES! Creative writing, philosophy books, backpacks, plaid shoes, comic hero t-shirts, stress-free Spanish courses, and the painful return to calculus...

What more could I ask for?