25 March 2003 - 16:40 - brevis69

I console myself for my sudden inability (or rather unwillingness) to do any sort of work with the knowledge that after these three projects (application -- serious now!, English, Latin) are in and done with, I have a week of break.

Does it really help? No. At the end of the day, I've still got two projects and an application to do in addition to my regular homework. Did I do any work last night? No -- instead, I read A Basque History of the World and, uh, reopened the place on my fingertip where they'd done the prick test for iron (I'd forgotten, and I had a lesson, and I began playing a long pizzicato segment. I didn't notice anything was amiss -- that finger's been sore anyway -- until I noticed there was blood on my other finger. Hmm.)

I know I was going to write about something important to me, but I've forgotten whatever it was. Not much of note has been happening -- I missed the first two classes today because of a three-hour, fifteen-question math test (American Invitational Math Exam), which is the second of the qualifying tests to be on the *drum roll please* United States Math Olympic Team. A lot of it involved probability and math terms I didn't remember (and my growing suspicion is that I was never taught those terms, just as I never learned anything about probability. Still, the test was "strongly encouraged" by my school, or in other words, mandatory, as I'd already passed the first round.

Anyway, if I qualify I shall be quite surprised, as out of the fifteen questions I answered about six, guessing for the rest. Since the answers are integers from 000 to 999, that gives me a 1/1000 chance of guessing correctly for the rest of the test. Isn't it lovely how my schooling seems to have taught me best how to use math to serve me in my future test-taking? Somehow I can't help but feel that I've drifted far from the Ideal Path of math... if there really is one. I'm not quite convinced of it.

I'm cold and tired, therefore I shall go to do homework, or something like that. Because I really do have a work ethic the Puritans would have loved in their own. I just... it's buried very deeply right now. Almost smothered, one might say. I keep telling people not to expect to hear from me and then I just can't stop myself...