salve homines!

Today I’m going to talk about school for a change. Oh, wait. I always talk about school, don’t I? Maybe it’s because school occupies almost all my waking life. At least I’m never sarcastic or anything like that. ;)

Last time I posted, I talked about the first day of the PSSAs. Since then I’ve had the two writing prompts to fight. The first prompt was definitely biased towards liberals. My [conservative] friends and I all agreed that the way it was worded it all but told you to write about liberal environmental concerns. The exact words of the prompt were:

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread in it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves… All things connect.
“Write an essay that provides examples to explain this idea of the ‘web of life’.”

It was pretty hard to write on. Even my liberal teachers thought it was bad. I managed to beat it though. To get some conservative views in it, I even managed to drag in abortion and use it to illustrate how our actions affect others. The second one was much better. It was:

“At what age are people ready to assume the rights of adulthood?
“Write an essay persuading others that your view is valid.”

The past few days in American Lit., my first period class, we’ve been watching the movie “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” The acting is really good, and it has a couple insightful life lessons, but most of the story is really creepy and full of dark humor.

My economics teacher, Mr. Fish, was really out of it earlier this week. He did a bunch of odd things, the funniest of which was writing “Mall Wart” on the chalkboard instead of “Wal-Mart”. Thursday and Friday, we’ve had a sub in Econ because Mr. Fish is having a minor surgery. Today, we finished everything early and got most of the period as free time, but we ended up just watching the scenery out the window. While we watched, a really strong wind picked up. The clouds were racing across the sky, and we could hear a roaring thrumming sound. The American flag we could see was held steadily straight out from its pole. We saw a CV High School banner get ripped off a light pole along with one of the horizontal metal bars that was holding out from the pole. Then we watched a stop sign be blown over and run over by a Fed-Ex truck, which was wobbling in the wind. It really was quite a sight.

In one of my study halls, I’m getting help from a really cool Latin IV kid for my Latin III class. During my other in study hall, I was down the IMC (the Instructional Media Center aka. a school library with a big ego), and I noticed that the sophomore English classes are down there working on their bibliography projects. I pity the sophomores. Even though I got the bibliography stuff quicker than most of the kids in my class, I still remember how hard the project is because of the meticulous attention to details. (psst... Go perfectionists! ;) :P )

The trigonometric proofs we’re working on in my math class have been almost physically painful, and math comes easily to me. I think I did alright on our test today. I was the only person who seemed to be walking out of the room sure I’d gotten a 100%.

For Valentine’s Day, I didn’t get anything :( , but that didn’t surprise me. I did send valentines to a handful of friends to let them know they’re appreciated and on my own time did some research on the background of Valentine’s Day. Despite being as mean as I am, I’ll share some of what I learn with all of you. Valentine’s Day’s earliest roots lie in a Roman pagan festival to the god of fertility that was held on February 15th. Then, in first few centuries AD, there was a or were several Saint Valentines who died as martyrs. No one is quite sure if it was one associated with a couple different Roman towns and finally put to death for his faith in Rome or two or three Valentines who lived and died in different places.

Well, that’s about all I have time to write tonight. I have a lot more to say, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow… er… later today because I’ve just spent all my time talking to a couple of my regular readers. valete omnes amici!

Oh no! The full moon is coming out from behind the clouds! Augh!