28 VIII 2002 - 16:11 - trivialis48

Allow me to gripe for a moment (which you've been doing ever since you began to read this regularly, all three of you.) Tomorrow will mark the end of my first week of school. Generally, it's been good, if I ignore several things.

1) We admitted too many people in this year's freshman class. Which means we have not enough classrooms and not enough lockers. (I, of course, have one of the lockers that results only in theory -- apparently we'd ordered some extra lockers, but they came dented, and so we shipped them back. It's been two and a half months and they haven't come again.) The physical education program, which used to offer an option (basically sitting in the weight room for 130 minutes a week) for people who hate the PE requirement, has turned that room into something serious. Yes, I know, fitness is important. No, I don't see how making me do something I hate for three periods a week is going to instill good habits in me.

Also, the freshmen hurt my fragile self-esteem by being too darned tall. But I can't help that unless I set up a bed in a classroom and do as Procrustes did.

2) My history teacher is the most boring history teacher in the department. It's a pity -- it's not that she's a bad teacher, it's just that she's got colleagues to be compared to and in the estimation of almost everyone comes up short. It might be that her class lectures reproduce exactly the textbook. So why go to class if I can read the textbook? We've got a lovely new attendance policy to see that we go to all our classes.

3) It's been a week and I still haven't managed to impress upon my brain the importance of starting my homework before midnight. Of course, this allows me to develop the good sleeping habits that I will maintain steadily through the school year.

Also, my eyesight is getting worse.

My English teacher is convinced I'm crazy because I'm only really articulate when I'm writing. (It's rather amusing, actually, just how stuck my brain gets when I'm trying to explain something.)

On the other hand, I've got Latin again, which is nice... I can feel the gears in my brain beginning to spin again. We began to look at Cicero's oration, Pro Caelio; what's wonderful is to look at a sentence and realize that it runs for a good twelve lines on the page before it finally ends.

Maybe I'll do some homework now. Some friends of my parents are watching a movie about an opera singer who contracts polio, and with the noise as distraction, it's getting increasingly harder to concentrate.

And one of the friends just burst out into a high F with incredibly wide vibrato. I think there's no way I can win the contest and keep my focus. Goodbye.