Besides the zombies staggering around, there are those cramming the info they should have been studying the last four months into one week. And the frantic panicking they're all in, and only too ready to talk to everyone they meet about it.
Well, that pretty much explains that. How has my week gone? Let me think...
Monday morning we had a style quiz in Basic Writing, and that was it. We got our final stories of the year back, I scored a 95, which was all right, considering we couldn't go back and fix our errors afterwards. Then I had to give a PowerPoint presentation. It was on peanut butter sandwiches. (I was hungry and it was the first interesting topic that came to mind when we picked them on choosing day.) Most of the people laughed, pretty sure I included all the required elements, and Mr. Shamblin said it was good. Went for a run afterwards, then went to the last BCM meeting of the school year. That was good, it was held outside by the fountain since the weather was nice. Talked to Amanda, and that was pretty much all the day's news. Fell asleep about one in the morning.
Tuesday was a very long day. Of course, just about any day when you get three hours of sleep is going to be a long one. So I woke up at 4:30 a.m. with a horrible headache, pretty sure I had a fever, and I felt like I was going to throw up. And I had a math test later that morning. Another cause of the zombie thing is that being so tired and stressed, even more so than usual, your body just can't handle it and it just forces you to collapse, thereby through the enforced resting, it starts to repair itself. And that's great, but it doesn't really help when you can barely sit up and have important things to do. And it's cloudy and looks like it's going to rain, which also doesn't help. But, anyway, I drag myself downstairs and across campus to the science building to take the test, on geometry-like things, dealing with right triangles. I stumbled through it, relatively positive I completely bombed, but...I tried to finish it as best I could. Then it was time to go to the library, because I hadn't printed off my essay on social media that was due in less than two hours.
Over to Seminary Hall, I pass the time waiting for class by finishing G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy and reviewing my AP Stylebook. Jason had our second essays back, so I was a little worried about that. But the fairy-tale paper(See previous post) turned out pretty well. The rough draft scored a 90, and the final a 96. I missed one in--text citation in the first paragraph. In the comments, he wrote: "Great job! Your writing is direct and stylish." Which I guess is a good thing. Anyway, his comments are much more helpful than Mr. Deiter's were. Because he actually wants to make us better writers, to more clearly present our arguments, in order to improve our powers of persuasion. Since he wants to improve our writing, he's ruthless in searching for errors, as all good editors ought to be. This is why I've enjoyed his class. And he's funny. Strange at times, but a good teacher.
Thought about going to CCF, but it was canceled, so I walked back to the dorm, read Agatha Christie's biography, and then went to bed pretty early, hoping I would feel better tomorrow.
Woke up pretty early Wednesday morning, the new janitors(who are neither as good or as friendly as Darrell, the previous janitor) came through about 6:30, making enough noise as they clomped through the hall to wake me up. The sun was shining brightly, and I thought about going for a run before getting ready for class. Didn't think that would be such a good idea, though, since I wasn't feeling completely 100 percent yet, so I did math homework, raising my total score on that, which will count as a test-grade, by one point. And then I got into one of those classic comment chain conversations with Jon and Amanda on Nintendo games we played growing up. And there was a new Stranger post to read, which was an especially good one.
Two more style quizzes in Basic Writing, and we found out that this week's news blogs were optional for extra credit, because Cassie had a ton of assignments from her photography class to grade and needed time for those. More presentations to listen to in Computers, there was a very good one on gun control by a guy I'd never seen before, a large sweeping look covering nearly all aspects of the topic before coming around to blasting its' deficiencies in his conclusion. (Most people in this class I have no idea who they are. Same with my math class.)
Practiced volleyball for a while, then thought I might watch a movie. Finally remembered Mom's Netflix password, so I watched "Captain America" for the second time. It's a very good movie, full of good quotes and with a great story and characters.
Then I went over to Louise and Harry's, which was great, as nearly all times spent with Lankfords are. We watched TV for a while, a show on specialty hamburgers, and then played hymns on the mandolins. It was a good day. Kind of a strange happiness, of the rare intentional forced "I'm going to do things that sound relaxing and interesting" variety, as opposed to the "Random events that turn out in a nicely surprising way" type. But it was a nice day. It was really hot, though, not used to 84-degree temperatures for a while.
This morning had a kind of odd-but-fitting symmerty to the first day of math class. In January I woke up at 10:34 and galloped my ten-minute commute through a cold windy rain to get to class by the starting time of 11, and on the final day in May I woke up at 10:37, galloped my ten-minute communte through a windy, cold morning that was threatening to rain. We went over Tuesday's test, which turned out to not be as bad as I'd feared. Mr. Shamblin, as exhausted of teaching as his students are of being taught, messed up the grading for the tests, realized it on the second-to-last one, and was too tired to regrade them all over again. So though I earned a 78, it goes down as an 89 in the gradebook, and I pretty much just need to score higher than 72(if our final is above our lowest test, that lowest is replaced by our final score, which will then count double) to get an A, I think. My math could be off there, but I think I have an ouside chance of sneaking by somehow with all A's again. Don't think it's likely, but there is a chance. Just need to try to do the best I can on the finals, and then see what happens.
Stopped by Morgan's, it was pretty crowded this afternoon. This guy in his early forties with his three young daughters asked me for advice on what to get. After his daughters ordered, he asked Emily the clerk, "Are you guys out of cherry turnovers?" She nods dejectedly. "We just sold the last one like fifteen minutes ago." He frowns. "Can I beat that guy up?" Everyone within hearing distance cracks up.
I had to give a presentation on my last essay in Comp II, which I survived, more or less. Still not feeling great, but at least I didn't throw up. We found out several interesting things about our class: We are very much pro-spanking, very much pro-hunting, and very much anti-child beauty pageants. There was a lot of writing on my rough draft of the social media essay...and then I get to the last page, where I find a score of 98, and a note saying this would be acceptable as-is for the final if I wished. There are a few words that I'll rearrange for my own liking, the only thing Jason could find fault with was the title. "I was trying to find something to improve in here...the only thing I could think of was to make the title more interesting," he told me after class let out. He described it as a "perfect academic-style paper, the kind that these fifty-year-old guys wish they could write."
The Internet was out for most of the afternoon, which pretty much killed the idea of getting one last news blog in. And I couldn't get started writing this post until a lot later than I would have liked. But I did get to read Agatha Christie, so that was good. As I've been typing this, I've been watching the Los Angeles-St. Louis hockey game, and there have been snowflakes landing on my window. In May. SNOWFLAKES????? REALLY???? The Blues have just won, like I was hoping, and that's basically all the news that's happened this week.
Up next is finals, which I'm strangely unconcerned about. They're important tests, but the world won't end if I do badly. I'll just do the best I can, and see what happens. Not really that worried about two of them, the other two I'll need to do a little more studying for. And then I'll get to move out(Yay!) and have most of the summer off to rest and learn before the
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