Brief thoughts on the day

April 15th, 2011 by ben Leave a reply »

I tried to get at those delicious school breakfast sandwiches again today. I’ve only ever had two in my life. The first was on the day of the USAPhO semi, and the second was during the all-school assembly on Tuesday of this week. I woke at 6am today — no, I didn’t wake at 6 just to get those sandwiches. I woke early to start my homework (Jenglish specifically). Tedious: finding five quotes from Gatsby chapters 4-6 that could be used to argue something about the American Dream, for our American Dream essay. I thought 1.5 hours would be enough, but evidently they weren’t. Good quotes were very hard to find. In the end I was only able to get down five quotes, and I wasn’t able to write the analysis (which would have taken like one more hour). Luckily Zurla is lenient when I need to finish homework occasionally (it hasn’t happened in a while, doing homework in first period).

I was considering signing up (at the last minute) for the AP Calculus BC practice exam tomorrow. My first thought on why I wanted to go was the fact that it’s free. Hey, it’s a valid argument. If you wanted to take an AP Calc BC prep exam at some Asian prep school or something, they’d charge you at least $90. But I decided not to. Seems like my desire to sleep in on Saturday overruled my desire to save $90.

It’s probably not really a big deal anyways, as I’ll see the problems when we go over them in class on Monday. Besides, it’s not like I need the points, and it’s not like I’d pay $90 for AP Calc practice exams or tutoring sessions in the first place. Overconfidence + sleep > Saturday morning calculus.

I’ll have enough of math on Saturday anyways: ARML meeting from one to four.

Today was Wear Purple day in memory of Alice, and I was amazed at how many people participated. Not nearly as many people dressed up in pink for Pink Day in protest of the pink slips (layoffs), although I suppose males would be less likely to have pink in their wardrobes.

I ate a lot of popcorn and pretzel sticks in Jenglish today while watching Gatsby. So much that I skipped lunch and did the weekend Jenglish homework on my netbook during lunch.

I used my netbook a lot today. It matches with Justin’s red Dell full-size laptop — the color is totally identical. In Chem, we had the whole period free, so I spent my time finishing all my Jenglish work and starting on my essay outline. Google Docs is brilliant. I can access my writing from any place connected to the internet. It’s amazing.

I also explored Google Cloud Print. It requires a server to be running, but my web server (the one you’re accessing right now :D) is always on 24/7 anyways, so I set it up right after I got home.

I’ll include a short blurb on yesterday’s interview. I prepared a list of all the questions I expected them to ask me, and a lot of them did get asked. I think I did well enough on the questions I expected, but for the questions I didn’t expect, I stumbled a lot while trying to think of my answer, and I delivered my answer with not-so-spectacular sentence fluency and confidence. It felt very awkward (I especially dislike not being prepared for things), but there are always questions I won’t be prepared for, so I need to practice my speaking skills and figure out what to do to stall for thinking time, and how to use my tone of voice to convey confidence and passion.

I also forgot to record the call. I was in a dilemma between whether to use my cell phone with bluetooth headset (comfort for a half hour phone call), or my landline (audio quality and no chance of AT&T dropping my call). I used my cell phone, so I might as well have used Samsung’s call recording feature so I can go over what I mess up on and better prepare for future interviews. It’s one of those things you’re too nervous to think about before or during the interview, but because extremely important to you after the interview. It’s just such a shame I didn’t get down a recording of it. It would have been so useful to me.

Oh yeah, back to the breakfast sandwiches. I wasn’t able to get one, even though I left relatively early. I got to that cafeteria window about right after the bell rang, and they wouldn’t let any new people get in line after the 7:54 bell. You know, I could never tell if it was a 7:54 bell or a 7:53 bell. It would make sense if it were 7:53, as that would make for a seven-minute passing period between zero and first, just like all the other passing periods, but I’ve always thought it was 7:54am.

EDIT: Eric didn’t make it past the preliminary elections for ASB Academic Commissioner. Shoutout to him.

Related Posts:

Advertisement

3 comments

  1. k says:

    Zurla never let me do anything in zero period, but maybe that was because I wasn’t doing well in the class.

    Yeah, blah, I don’t want to do Saturday morning calculus, but I need the points. At least we get 75/75 no matter what, so I’ll get the credit even though I’ll probably get a 2 or something.

    Yeah, I guess more people have purple, and probably even more people care about this than the pink slip thing. And of course, more people cared about these two than all those other stupid ASB ideas.

    lol, I’m terrible at being unprepared and answering questions and stuff too. I probably wouldn’t have listened to a recording of one of my interviews, even if I should, because it would be painful to listen to.

    I always thought it was a 7:53 bell. Why wouldn’t it be a 7:53 bell?

  2. Benji says:

    Yes 7:53 makes the most sense, but for some reason I’ve always thought 7:54. You’d know better because you were in zero period, so I’ll trust that it’s actually at 7:53.

  3. k says:

    I actually didn’t even think about zero period, I just never thought that it wouldn’t be 7:53. But now that I think about zero period, yeah, it was 53.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.