Horrible

Two horrible things are happening right now.
I'm working on my Quiz Bowl thing. It's not going well. It's taking forever, mostly because the internet is a very big place with lots of exciting things. Much more exciting than the Civil War.
I have an idea. It's one of those ideas that's bad enough to actually do. It involves the internet and painful writing related challenges.

Let's face it

My default blog post format is a list. This is a terribly exciting list of number one things. Because I'm a winner.
Number one thing that worries me-APUSH, because I don't think we're ever going to get through it all
Number one thing that I am excited about- NaNoWriMo, because my idea is such a win. And if it wasn't for it, I would have started the thing already, but it sort of needs more time to...marinate.
Number one thing that made my day-Connie coming to Physics with me!
Number one thing that made my day yesterday- Fred telling me that my input was useful in writing this article about camp.
Number one thing that made my day the day before yesterday- Realizing that I had 199 volunteer hours over the summer.
Number one thing that I must finish tonight-My quizbowl thing. I'm presenting tomorrow, and it's...barely started. Woohoo for procrastination!
Number one thing that I must finish before Friday-My failed physics lab.....
Number one thing that I must finish sometime, preferably in the next month- That horrible story that is sort of the bane of my existence, but will not get out of my mind unless I actually finish it, and "They all died. Scar."* is not going to cut it.
Number one thing that makes me sad- Debate this year. It's just...eugh.
Number one thing that I have a one track mind about writing a bill about-Farm Subsidies. They're really really bad. Well, they're bad in the form in which they're executed in America, making corn much too cheap to grow, which causes it to be a huge part of the American diet. And then we send food to developing countries, which makes us look good, but completely ruins their economies.
Number one thing that I want people to shut up and make a decision about already- The healthcare debate.
Number one thing that I know all the freshmen will write bills about-The healthcare debate. Or there's the classic abortion bill, but I like to think that that debate might be done finally.
Number one thing that I should not be doing right now- Blogging.
*If you get that, please note that we should probably be best friends whose conversations are laced with Harry Potter references.

Quote of the Month?

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."
Teddy Roosevelt
I actually took a picture to accompany this, but...let's just say that some ideas work better in my head than they work in real life.
Is it tragic that my biggest accomplishment in the past few days had been watching all of JK Rowling: A year in the life? And that I've written next to nothing on the story?
Yeah, that's pretty tragic.
I really need to blog about a bunch of stuff, but I'm not sure when I'll get around to it. There might be a braindump in the next week or so.

Back to the Future

I really do love the Back to the Future movies. But they're not completly relevant to this post. Deal.

I started school yesterday. It was fine, pretty uneventful. My first class was World History, which made me nostalgic for Euro. Euro was amazing, but I don't think World History will be as good. But we watched a video today that said "From the office of Charles and Ray Eames" at the beginning, which made me a little bit more excited than I should have been. I mean, Eames videos for school!?!? It wasn't as good as I expected, and it had nothing to do with their furniture, which made me a little sad. Next time, we are watching a video about furniture, not get my hopes up with the Eames intro and have it be about scale.

And then I went to French. I haven't taken French since I was a freshman, and that's a longer gap than anybody else in the class. Win, there. Actually, I'm worried. But we got French names, and mine is Margot. Sort of like Margo.

It's the little things that matter.

And then I went to APUS, which should be a good class. A pretty small one too, only 17 people. We did this activity about a house that is now in Greenfield Village. Apparently Henry Ford was walking around, pointing at houses that he wanted to buy and haul off to Greenfield Village, and this house was one of them. His people took some pictures of the outside, took the walls apart, and sent it to Dearborn, where it sat in storage for thirty years. Then, someone finds it and decides to put it back together to display it. They have no idea what it looks like on the inside, because they didn't take any pictures of the inside. THEY DIDN'T TAKE ANY PICTURES OF THE INSIDE. Why would you do this? They had cameras, at the very least, they could have drawn out a floorplan or something. What was wrong with these people?

Physics should be good. My teacher is really into the idea of our class being a family (yes, this reminds me of freedom writers. Not sure if that's good or bad.) I was sort of in awe today when he explained how much he loves physics. It started out like "You guys are so lucky to be taking physics. Out of all the sciences, what? Chemistry, it's all based around the atom, and the atom is just modern physics. Biology, that's just classifying stuff. But physics, physics is everything."

And then QuizBowl, where I felt completly out of it. Just all unmotivated and horrible. Ehh... I'm going again tomorrow, and it has to be better than this!

I feel like I'm adjusting to school much faster than I have before. It's the second day, but it feels like I've been here weeks. Huh.

Reasoning

I don't really want to go back to school. I mean, it's nice to be on a schedule again, to have concrete objectives and everything. I'd like to see everyone again, to be back at quizbowl again. Classes are going to be good, I think. This will be the first time in Hi! School when I haven't had English first semester, first block. Funny.
So it really does sound like I should like going back to school.
But going there every day exerts this negative energy over me. I ignore it for a while, but tonight, I started thinking about it again. The conversation started innocently enough, my mom was asking me when I was planning to work next week. I was going to work on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. She tells me that she's worried about me getting home at nine on Tuesday and not having any of my homework done. I tell her that it's the first day of school, the homework usually amounts to bringing back a signed syllabus and academic honesty sheet. Not too hard, I should be able to work. But that's not what I'm thinking. What I'm thinking is that no matter how much time I have to do it, I'll never do it well enough. Hell, I'll probably just procrastinate and not end up doing it at all, that's how you fail classes that you should be good at. It won't be as easy as everyone else makes it look, and even when I give it everything I have, I'll fall short. I'm the one who had all the chances, who had everything going for her, and threw it all away. I'm the weak one, the failure. And I try to stop it, try to tell myself that I can change, but I'm stuck on the downward spiral, negative after negative chasing me. There's always that point, when that one thing sets me off and I'm stuck thinking of how horrible I am at everything I try, no matter what I can find a way to fail, to fuck it up. That's me, the fuckup.
I wanted this school year to start out optimistic. That's what I do, I convince myself that I can change, then I go right back to my old habits. But now, that hopeful veneer is blown early on, and I'm stuck here.

So of course I'm excited to go back to school.

The funny thing is, I felt totally optimistic an hour ago. I could conquer the (value) world. I was looking at colleges. I was figuring out the rejection rate for City Year. I was making big plans, getting all nostalgic for the future, then this thing just hits me. I can't be here right now.

Swoon

This is amazing. If you are live near me and are my friend (and happen to be in the market for a limo) I strongly encourage you to buy this. And drive me around.

In which I am completly insane.

I have just written what I consider to be the greatest paragraph ever. Of course, my opinion of that paragraph may change if I dared to reread it, but we're going to refrain from that for now. It's very ranty. It reads the same as 80% of my blog posts. We may be seeing a trend in the tone of my writing and blog posts, but we're going to act like my writing has an actual style, not just that of me sitting down at the computer and ranting.
I went to the movies twice today. The first time, I saw The Time Traveler's Wife. It was cute. I read the book, and although the book was confusing, I think the movie made more sense having already understood the plot. The second time, I saw Julie and Julia. It was captivating and it made me want to cook something. Did I tell you that I made naan last week? I did. It was good. I took pictures, but I'm not sure about the location of my camera, and even if I was, I'm much too lazy to actually get the pictures off of it.
I watched The Prestige on Saturday, and the whole time I was thinking about storytelling. The movie tells it all very interestingly, so that you don't really understand what's happened until the end. It's given me a lot of concepts that should be applied to my NaNo, but that depends on which plot I use. Really, I should find a way to work them into my current story, but... when we edit. Because I will finish the beast, and then I will edit it, and then it will be lovely.
Registration is tomorrow, and the very thought of it makes me sick. I really don't want to go back to school this year.

I couldn't tell you how many times I listened to/sang/hummed this song today. This isn't the original, but he has a cute accent.
I'm thinking that Apollo may be my new favorite character. He's like Milton, only he seems to know what he's doing, and he's more of a leader. And he has a different past and different relationships with people.
I guess he's really not like Milton.
In other news, I did some brainstorming for my NaNo this morning. As in, I wrote out 13 story ideas. They range from completely ludicrous (inanimate objects with feelings) to vaugely possible. And there's a lot of metafiction ideas happening, which will end up being interesting or horrible.
Also, these pictures are absolutly delicious.

The Difference.

When I was twelve, I wrote an essay about how JK Rowling was my role model. A part of me still wants to be her.
I just hit 20k on Milton's story.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is 257, 045 words long. Because I'm the kind of person who can only measure success in 50,000 word increments, that's more than five NaNoWriMos.

Kazoo

I just had this idea for a wildly interesting thing. What if you wrote something and could have a bunch of famous writers (some of whom are dead) read and critique it? There could be some sort of computer program where you could tell it to review your work the same way Ibsen would, or Poe, or Milton, or anybody.
Yeah, I'm actually awake at 7 am without anywhere to be. I'm worried too.