actions, not words.

Today was a decent day, defined by decisions (hey look, alliteration!). I'm not entirely satisfied with either of them, but, as "Schuyler Defeated" explains, "sometimes that's how it goes." This morning was slightly less of a struggle than I had expected it to be, although that doesn't mean that getting up wasn't still difficult. I completely forgot my string sectional in the morning for the pit orchestra, so ended up arriving at school a little later than usual and doing homework. Before school, I had decided to settle my NSB vs. worlds misery with two coin flips. (They both ended up worlds.) Unfortunately, this did not end my misery. I continued to waffle during my first two class periods, and this made remembering what happened in them a little difficult. AP Psych was notes, I'm pretty sure, and Spanish involved a few relatively low-stakes projects that put my grade in the class back up significantly. I needed a tiebreaker, and that tiebre...

Today was shaky. It was good in some spots, bad in others, but all-in-all it was at least okay. I'm not really sure how I feel today, and I guess you'll see why soon enough. Getting up today was rough, as it has been the past few days. (I'm going to sleep early today to counteract that!) I got to school on track with when I usually get there, and I used my time to do...something. I remember activity took place—I don't remember what it was, however, and honestly I doubt that it matters that much. I took a test in AP Psych today, which was relatively easy (as far as I could tell), and proceeded to muddle my way through a relatively slow day in Spanish as well (due to a presentation). We also completed our AP Psych experiment on the AP Calc kids today, which was relatively fun. The data has been interesting so far. We conducted an ALICE (violent intruder) drill before Orchestra today, and then playing in Orchestra went well enough. We continued our observational study ...

There's always that day after a competition—especially those far out of town—where the days of adrenaline coursing through your veins come crashing out and you are left nearly paralyzed for an entire day. Usually, that day is Sunday, and you have to finish all of your homework for tomorrow in a single day. I've written about these kinds of emotions before in posts about "post-debate blues" and whatnot, and today they hit hard. Today wasn't the worst day I've had, but it certainly wasn't the best, either. I slept in hard today, which is never a great way to start off a recovery. My first act of the day was to eat lunch, around 1:30 in the afternoon, and eventually I got to work around 4 PM or so on actual homework. Surprisingly, my homework load wasn't quite as large as I thought it might be, so I had that going for me, but I would complete a single assignment and then go back to sleep, then do another assignment, and so on and so forth. I got my work...

This post is alter natively titled "Smells like team spir it " or "Bingo, baby!" Today was absolutely f—ing fantastic. Here's why. We got up around 6:15 this morning, which was less painful than it probably should've been, and I packed very quickly, making the process even easier. (As of yet, I have yet to find anything missing.) We left around 7:30, and before matches in the morning I was singing along to the stadium music as loud as I possibly could, damaging my already struggling vocal cords. This was a theme that continued throughout the day. Our first match was Quals 66, which we won against the third-ranked team, which was quite nice (although we didn't quite get a rocket and beat them by only two points). Quals 75 was another one where a rocket was a possibility, but we lost this one, as well as quals 82 (although we did get a ranking point). I was technician for quals 75, which was interesting, but mildly demoralizing (for the end of qual ...

Today was a great day, but absolutely exhausting. It's hard for me to remember all of it, because it was so. damn. long. I'm really happy about how today went, even though it was stressful. We are currently in a really good position, especially because of our performance in matches, and this is definitely the best regional I've been to, so that's pretty good. It was essentially non-stop from 8:00 AM all the way to 6:45 PM. I got up around 6:50 or so, and we arrived at the arena around 7:50. We started with chairman's, after some small pit maneuvers, and after a bit of practice the presentation went off with a few (apparently non-technical) hitches, which was fine. We moved through to matches—for me, sometimes cheering, sometimes tech-ing. Cheering was a lot of fun, and in general there were essentially no programming problems to really fix, so all of these factors in combination made the day a lot better than it otherwise would have been. That doesn't necessar...

All posts have been unpinned because things have changed, but I have not written about the changes deeply enough to warrant pinning a new post. Maybe tomorrow. Today was a pretty good day. Despite this, I am still kind of internally disappointed/stressed by the emotional rollercoaster I subject myself to sometimes. I think the problem is that I fail to properly label the things I feel—maybe the stress I was feeling about MIT was being displaced towards relationships (although I don't know why it would have chosen this specific direction). Maybe it's just that certain floods of dopamine override/wash out other emotions, and it might just fade with time. I'm not sure. In any case, today I successfully completed my goal of getting two out of the six schools remaining in the regular round (counting the Columbia likely), because I was accepted to MIT! There's not a 100% chance I end up going here, especially if I get one of Harvard or Stanford, or if I get really good fi...

This post was unfortunately pinned because of long discussion, and not because it was particularly good. Also, it contains a variety of self-disclosing elements which may sound narcissistic. They probably are narcissistic, but the author does not intend this, because he hates himself as much as you probably do by this point. This post also just generally contains more than I would normally put in a blog post, so it might get cut later if I read it again. Not sure, just needed a place to put all the feels. Snow day number one was a very mild success. Tomorrow, snow day number two, which will be exceptionally exciting, primarily because I will actually be rested enough to have the energy to catch up on all my AP Bio assignments (a task I am not exceedingly far from). I got up this morning relatively late and did, as far as I can tell from my time-tracking, about nothing until about 3 PM. This is because I was monitoring the snow situation (where dry air was holding off precipitatio...