actions, not words.

A thought blurs past the not-quite-black screen of my closed eyes and I struggle to stop it, interrogate it, as the vortex draws me in. It says simply "I'm going home," and my mind fades back to black, as the stream of consciousness slips away into a a dark cavern, somewhere far below. Today was a pretty good day. I had slight allergies that lead to me not being able to smell and hear high frequencies well, which was interesting enough. After some dragging my feet in the morning (I woke up early, but simply refused to get up), I mowed the lawn in the heat. The grass was tall, and this led to some struggles with our old push mower, but all of this is probably my own fault, as the amount of time I had waited to mow the lawn, both from a time-of-day perspective and a general perspective lead to these problems. Eventually, I finished the job, losing just under a pound's worth of sweat or so in the process, as well as a pretty heavy nosebleed which was a struggle. In ...

The rain is pattering away on the rooftop as I write this, lightly drumming its usual patterns indiscriminately onto the surface below. It is apathetic, and I only wish that I could wash away with its uncaring course and slowly, but surely, become a drop in the ocean, so insignificant that no one would know my name. Today was a pretty decent day. I don't remember doing very much, and this is partly a result of the fact that I did not, in fact, do much, if anything at all. I got up very late in the day (not quite RSI late, but getting close) and, after a light-ish breakfast, spent my time making my packing list for RSI and MIT, including the items I needed to buy here and ship and those I could buy there. Hopefully, this list suffices for both these six weeks and at least the next semester, but the benefits of living somewhere is that you can buy and keep new things there. That is quite a paradigm shift for me, but it helps nonetheless. Eventually, after lunch, my family and I w...

This  was inspired by an assignment for AP Lit last year, which was truly a valuable exercise, so I have repeated it for this year. Dear Alan from August 2018: If learning is defined by changes in behavior (as some of the figures from AP Psychology might have you believe), perhaps you haven’t necessarily learned much this year. Sure, you learn the surface-level things you might have expected to learn in school: vocab, grammar, and culture in Spanish; theories of human behavior, cognition, and development in AP Psychology; ecology and biochemistry in AP Biology; and so on and so forth. Your growth as a person seems to stagnate, however—perhaps this is a result of unsustainable growth between junior year and RSI, or perhaps it is simply a result of having found one’s identity. The question remains unanswered, although, with any luck, this hiatus in personal improvement will end this fall. Despite this stagnation, senior year may just be your best year in terms of literal achiev...

It's the end of an era. Today was a good day. I got to sleep in a little bit, and after a breakfast of cheesecake and some housing scheming with a certain friend I took my instrument and headed to the Civic Center. The first item on the agenda was running the song we were playing with the choir a few times for sound balance, before we headed to the room where we would be waiting before the ceremony. After some shenanigans and a whole lot of time it was eventually time to leave the room and shuffle single-file all the way to the actual room of graduation. We waited for a while in the halls, as the band worked through of some of its repertoire, but eventually we heard Pomp and Circumstance  begin and I felt a little swell in my chest as we entered. With a seat in the very front-right corner, I waited for quite a while for everyone else to shuffle in, and then the national anthem played, before we were finally allowed to sit down. One speaker came and went, and then another, and t...

Today was my second-to-last "normal" day of my high school career. Despite this, however, it was far from normal. For one, it is May 20th, and yet it is still snowing outside, and I woke up to see snow on the rooftop and the deck, which was discouraging, to say the least. At the very least, I got a little inspiration to write a pretty low-quality poem about it, based entirely around the imagery of "white dust on rooftops in May", which is the first and best line of the poem: white dust on the rooftops in May as gray clouds drive the sun away the traces of summer go to die as little droplets start to fly I guess that we will never know when the end of snow will show but for today I'll sit inside and from the weather hide. The first thing that happened this morning was a physical exam for MIT, which was much easier than I thought it would be but still kind of awful. First of all, I found out exactly how unhealthy my BMI is, in that it is below the 5...

Wow, today was a long day. I really want to get to sleep early, but the table of contents for this blog is clearly not going to allow me to do that. At the very least, it was a pretty good day, so I'm satisfied with that at the very least. I got up early this morning, at around 5:15 AM, and quickly got ready, making it to the park where the balloon launch was occurring at around 5:45. Unfortunately, it took a significant amount of time for the team launching to get the actual balloon launch, but fortunately I got to play a role I've never been able to do before because of the stress of previous launches (namely, stand there and help the balloon not fall over on to people or the grass). Eventually, the balloon launched somewhere around 7 AM, and I made my way directly to the school afterwards, where I spent some amount of time in the library until AP Psych, socializing with robotics kids and whatnot. In AP Psych, we went to watch AP Chem presentations, which were uninteresti...

This post is pinned because of discussion of the Highlands Ranch shooting which occurred early in the week of May 6th, located at the top of this post. "Normal" blog content is located below it. Its comparatively jarring tone is not meant, in any way, to be disrespectful—it was written first, and then moved below. I had some thoughts I wanted to share about the shooting at the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, which happened earlier this week, but seeing as it is nearing midnight, they will certainly not be as nuanced as I might otherwise hope them to be. The disgusting thing about American gun violence (and war and violence in general) is that the impacts often feel impersonal—other's people's lives in other places—and although the fear does sometimes strike that "that could be me" and the events do spur action to make a change, it doesn't feel as real as it probably should. The thing that struck me most about this shooting, then, was that it ...

I didn't post anything on Insta today for my birthday, but if I had, it would've been captioned "can't dance but still a dancing queen." Today was my 17th birthday, and it was an excellent day! I got up at a relatively normal time for once, and the adrenaline kicked in early, making getting up slightly less painful than it normally is. Breakfast was cake, which, surprisingly, also had MIT spelled on it with Fruit Rollup, which was pretty cool. After that, we actually had to go to school, and we arrived later than usual, although early enough to get a spot in 'A' lot. (On the way, I discovered that the time between windshield wipers going was adjustable on one of the settings, which is a complaint my mom has had for nearly a decade of owning the car, which was quite funny.) I worked on some Spanish homework in the library before classes, and the birthday wishes/harassment began there. AP Psych was no better, involving a brief stint of me wearing the som...

This post was pinned because of introspection which took a significant portion out of the day to write. Today was a pretty decent day, although the question does remain of whether the upcoming week can maintain that level of "goodness". I feel like I've written this far too many times, but, as usually happens on Sundays, the decisions made today sacrificed the sustainability of work in the upcoming days for having a good day. There are a lot of things I need get done in the upcoming week. Hopefully, all goes well. I'm going to do my best to jump through the mundanity of the day (of which there is a lot) so I can get to the introspection below. I got up today around 10 or so, and ended up mowing the lawn after breakfast. Usually, I really don't like this task, but today, being outside, listening to a podcast, pushing the extremely old mower back and forth across the front lawn, and then the back, seemed surprisingly satisfying. The age of the mower makes it har...

Today was a decent day. I did a lot less than I needed to, and I'm sleeping a lot later than I should be (especially because I have a nine o'clock meeting tomorrow), but on the whole the problems with my time management are most likely negligible in the grand scheme of things, as we tick ever closer to the end of the year. There is a rant in the following paragraph: tl;dr people believe too much in their ideals and not enough in affecting real, practical change for actual people. I got up this morning at a time that was slightly later than usual, still burdened by a lack of motivation which seems to permeate my everyday existence but especially in the "early" morning hours. I got to school slightly later than usual, but parking was not bad, per se, and I proceeded to go to the WISE meeting this morning, which was interesting. Yet again, I was struck by some form of strange idealism of the group that made the meeting very slightly distasteful to me (see 179A for a mo...