Chem, I'll See You Senior Year

This was written on my walk back home around 3:30PM

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I'm done with Chemistry! (For now anyways.) I just finished taking my last Unit Test and Final Exam one right after the other. I'm walking home right now listening to Glee. In other words, I'm in a very blissful state of mind (body, not so much). Chemistry has stressed me out so much this year but now it's over!!!

It's not that I hated it. I admit, I really enjoyed Chemistry. It was a love hate relationship. Sometimes I wanted to spend all night doing Chemistry while other days I wanted to rip my notebook to shreds and rip out my hair. Most of all it was the stoichiometry (aka the math part) that I really liked. Most of the times my answers made sense and were right but when they weren't I was sort of clueless. Dr. Newton was one of those teachers who didn't give you answers but made you go out and look for them. Which one day I might appreciate but when I'm constantly getting an equation wrong I'm just like grrr.

Thankfully though all I have to worry about now is Algebra 2 and my final French Exam. I can't believe this year is almost over. Even though the days seemed to drag on the months flew. However the next week better not fly by since it will be my final break before the end of the school. Tomorrow I leave for New York (!!!) an then come back just in time for an early release from school on Friday and then a 3 day weekend. Be jealous. =P

UYL,

Andre

Pet Peeves List #1

As you noticed this is the first off a series of installments of my Pet Peeves. Not that I'm in a pissy mood or anything but I'm too lazy to download pictures from last weekend and tell you how I spent it. So for now you'll have to stay in the dark about that.

I've been compiling this list on my iPod for a while and gave a lot of thought to whether it was really a pet peeve or not. So here's the list in a somewhat arranged order of most annoying to least annoying.

1. When People Cry: I don't know what it is about people crying but it really gets on my nerves and makes me feel super crying. I'm pretty sure it has to do with how ugly and contorted a person's face gets. I'm just like...ew stop that! Especially if it's on TV or a movie because you know that it's not really crying just acting and the faces actors make are just uglier than normal. Especially the guys! I know that everyone cries and I'm not going to lie and say I got my tear ducts removed (I really wish I could though) but when I cry I go to a room, think about why I'm crying and I calm down in less than a minute.

2. Children: I realize that's a very broad category and most of you think I'm abnormal for nit likeing children but I don't know how you can deal with such annoying things! Think about it, they go through so many stages of annoyance. Newborn-1 Year: These I can kind of deal with since they aren't doing much except for vomittying and crying (omg the crying!!! That is THE worst no doubt). 1 year-3 years: Oh no, they can walk! At this point little children are screaming and running around all the place and breaking things and saying the first thing that comes into their mouths. I'm getting energy drained just thinking about it. 4 years-8 years: These kids actually aren't that bad since whatever you say can easily scare them and their in that (what some people find) "cute" inquisitive stage where the ask questions about everything. 10+ years: They are pre-teens/teens and hormonal and rebellious and have created an infinite amount of ways to rub my nerves the wrong way.

3. Monosyllable Text: I'm pretty sure this gets on everyone's nerves but if I waste my time to send you a paragraph long text, PLEASE, for the love of God do not respond with an "OK" or "yeah". After I receive that I have zero interest in talking with you so don't text me 10 minutes later wondering why I haven't texted back.

4. When People Eat/Drink Something I Have Just Served for Myself: This is mostly something that happens at home but it is the quickest way to get on my bad side - especially in the morning. I take my time and put in effort to make myself my sandwich or serve myself a glass of water and if I leave it alone for FIVE SECONDS a bite will mysteriously appear or my glass will be half empty. BLARGANARGAROG!!!!! WHO ATE MY FOOD?!?!?! ROARRRR!!!!

5. People Who Park In All The Wrong Ways: I know I've only been on the road for half a year but I can assure you that if there's one thing I'm really good at, it's parking. The rest of the world? Not so much. And it isn't necessarily people who park crookedly or step on the white line at the supermarket, no, it's the people on my street. I REALLY don't understand what the purpose of your garage AND driveways is WHEN YOU DON'T PARK YOUR CAR THERE! I mean seriously why would you leave your car on the side of a two lane road making it difficult to maneuver around when I'm trying to get out of my street. I mean I understand that a lot of people fill their garage up with crap but that doesn't mean you can't use your driveway! It makes the street seem like there is a party at your house every night or it looks like you have 15 people living in your home.

Well I think those 5 are enough for right now. I'll make an effort to post something a little happier tomorrow don't worry!

UYL,
Andre

Scheduling (say it 3x)

Scheduling, scheduling, scheduling. Any readers out there who interact with me on a daily basis know that this is something that I talk about incessantly. It's on my mind all the time. When I talk about schedules I'm really talking about the coursework that I'll be taking for the next two years. In which case I might as well be saying IB, IB, IB (International Baccalaureate) since those are the only classes I will be taking. But I'm completely OK with that and I'm really excited. No joke, I have been working on my IB schedule since the 7th grade!!! That's partly because the private school I went to in the DR for the 7th grade was an IB school (the only one in the Caribbean!) Regardless though I have written and erased and rewritten and rearranged that dang schedule more times than I can count. 4 years of planing into something that last two years...sounds reasonable to me!

But I'm done. I few nights ago I sat down for the final time and said to myself, "this is it, there's no going back". and I wrote my final schedule for the final time. Here it is!

Junior Year                                                     Senior Year

IB English I                                                    IB English II (HL Exam)
IB History of the Americas                            IB 20th Century Topics (HL Exam)
IB Physics I                                                    IB Chemistry II* (SL Exam)
IB Mathematics I                                            IB Mathematics II (SL Exam)
IB French I                                                     IB French II (HL)
IB Psychology (SL Exam)                             Senior Science Investigations*
Theory of Knowledge                                    Advanced Composition 2
Free Block                                                      Free Block

SL = Standard Level
HL = Higher Level
*Sr. Sci. Investigations: Basically another block for you to do the labs of whatever science you are taking, in this case, Chemistry. So not looking forward to that.
*IB Chemistry II: This is the only thing subject to change because since I haven't taken physics I don't know which science I'll like better. I definitely like Chemistry a lot more than Biology though!

So here's a public announcement about how I will not under any circumstances change my schedule again! Ms. Pizzazz you will never hear me deliberating about my schedule during class time again I promise!

Before I go to bed though I just wanted to say how much I have loved redoing my schedule though, it's so fun! And I also love doing other people's schedules! I have done more than 5 people's already and they always walk away just as satisfied as I am happy. I don't think I would ever become a counselor (hey, let's face it, not everyone is as motivated as I am) but maybe a college sounselor/admissions person would be a fun job for a while. I know for a fact that I want to study the college admissions process before I die, that's on my brand new bucketlist that I just started thinking about right now. Maybe I'll make that public some day. For now though, I'm off to bed where I will schedule tomorrow's activities! (I never said anything about not being able to schedule my day!)

UYL,
Andre, an IB Diploma Candidate

A Gross Post

There is no way to sweetly start this post. As if I didn't like children enough, yesterday one went and threw up his ice cream (among other chunky things!) at the ice cream parlor I worked out. My co-workers went out of their way to go and get me from the freezer in the back where I was looking for some nutty coconut to restock to tell me that I needed to clean up on isle 1. It was the grossest thing I have ever had to do (after scooping my doggies poop!) and I really hope I never ever have to do it again.

Which is annoying because I was no where near the scene of the crime or even helping the couple that decided to give birth to the (several) little monsters. Let's call those co-workers Alan and Sally and they are perhaps the laziest people I have ever worked with. Sally more than Alan to be honest with her stupid little pink iPhone. Sorry hun, but cleaning the same area repeatedly for 5 minutes at a time does not count as cleaning around the shop. But I'd rather not talk about those two lazy bums and how their unproductivity drives me crazy. Instead let's talk about the cool kids at work

My two (possibly 3) favorite co-workers have got to be Deidy and Autumn. Deidy is a 20 something year old studying to be an art teacher and is almost as crazy about restocking as I am. We work our butts of at the beginning of the shift making sure that everything is well stocked and then towards the end do all the cleaning we can with costumers in the store. Which is why we are out of the door 15 minutes after we are officially closed because everything is sparkling and well stocked. Autumn on the other hand is a restocker-wannabe but I still appreciate her effort. The thing I like about her the most is that she likes helping costumers (that's a rarity at my job as terrible as that sounds) and she is really easy to talk to. FInally there is Senayt who, to be honest, I've only worked with once in the two months (omg two months!!) that I've been working at the ice cream shop. But I really liked working with her PLUS she is (was? she's a senior...) an IB Diploma candidate which is amazing because I have a lot of questions for her and she's told me a lot already. She got accepted into some really good schools outside of Virginia but because of certain factors she will be attending Virginia Tech next Fall.

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(Anything written before the *** indicates that it was written the 16th of May)

So anyways those are the coworkers of mine that are worth mentioning. So yesterday I was working with Kelly and was restocking ice cream as usual when something really odd happened! I pulled off the lid of a tub of ice cream and look at what weird picture the ice cream residue left!

Kind of looks like me at the end of a long Friday night shift...

UYL,
Andre

Stupid Logarithms

I promise you I will not speak about anything too mathematical in this post but I just wanted to state how much I hate logarithms right now. Well maybe not all logarithms but the one that started a mess. It's midnight and here I am basically banging my head against the table trying to figure out why my answer isn't right.

You see at my high school you get a math textbook that teachers use to assign homework from. It's a great system because teachers will normally assign just odd problems. Why odd problems? Because there is an answer key at the back of the book for all the odd problems. So I was doing number 33 in my notebook, finished it and then went to check the back of the book. I quickly scan the pages only to see that I'm WRONG!!! "What??? But I am 100% sure I did the problem correctly!" I think, "Oh well, I'll just move on to the next one it's not like Mr. Nojuice checks to see if we have the right answers". So I go on to number 35, solve it and check the problem at the end of my textbook. WHAT THE SQUARE ROOT I'M WRONG AGAIN! At this point I want to bang my head against the wall because even though I thought I knew something I apparently didn't and I really didn't understand why I was wrong. So I circle that problem as well and move on to the next one. Guess what? I was wrong again! At this point I was about to start crying. Not out of hopelessness (I'm not that wimpy) but because I am tired and my allergies clogged my nose up and because I was so frustrated that I couldn't understand the homework. Well even though the third time is supposedly a charm (and it wasn't) I decided to persevere with the stupid logarithms homework only to fail for two more problems.

I decide I'm going to give up as soon as I try the 7th problem I tell myself. And even though I got it wrong I found out something very important.

I WAS CHECKING THE ANSWERS FOR THE WRONG PAGE!!!

FML is all I have to say to that. Good night.

UYL,
Andre