Diary of an Asian Kid

24 Jan 2011

24 January 2011, Monday

Because I got up too late (after noon, as usual, yesterday) yesterday, I think I just lay there on my bed, unable to drift off into sleep, for a long time. Consequently, I went through much of today in a state of half-awareness.

There was an Earth Science test, half of last semester's syllabus, which, much to my horror, only got 73. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, seeing as I forgot to study for it. I thought I'd still remember most of it, but evidently I didn't. Sadly. I thought Earth Science was supposed to be easy. Aargh! Forget it.

First period was Math. We just did exercises, asked questions, and laughed at Mr. Xu. Pretty normal.

More interestingly/scarily was History during the next period. We did World War I today; really annoying. Why did all those stupid countries have to get themselves into a colossal fight? What really proved their stupidity was that, even after 8,140,000 people died, they went ahead and had another fight a few decades after, killing even more people. Ridiculous. At least we didn't have to take the topical test today, because there were too many things for the teacher, Miss Yang, to teach. But we're going to have to take two of those tests together tomorrow; everyone's dreading it. And there are two periods of history tomorrow.

I'd originally planned to go see Alice during the break after that, but Miss Yang was late dismissing us, and the break had been halved back to its original length of ten minutes, so I waited until after Science to go look for her.

I asked, genuinely curious, Alice how she did on the mock TOEFL. She groaned and said that she got over half of the questions wrong. I also found out that last Friday, she waited for me for half an hour, from four to almost four thirty. We only missed each other by minutes, but ended up wasting almost an hour altogether! She thought we let out at four, because that was when the library closed. Oh, well.

Both the third and fourth were Science. A bit boring, but we were doing Meteorology today, which wasn't hard.

I had lunch with Alice at the basement courtyard because it was still raining. Stupid weather. I misjudged the time because there was no bell, and got back to class five minutes late. Joan informed me that if I got back this late next time, I'd be marked late. I shouldn't have spent more than thirty minutes out, I know. Strangely, Miss Chen was absent today. We only saw her this morning; she didn't show up for the rest of the day.

I was sleeping quite comfortably when I vaguely heard the bell ring. I sleepily looked at my watch, which read 1:05. I heard David and Joan and someone else disagreeing over whether it was break or class time now. It ended soon when our Chinese teacher Miss Liang came in and told us to wake up and go to the toilet, refill your water bottle, and whatnot. It was cold out there in the corridor. I think there's been another cold front down today. Which accounted for the temperature and the rain.

There were two periods of Chinese, then another one of Math. Boring. After that was the afternoon test period; I got 92.5 on the World History test without even studying! It is the easiest part of History out of all the sections!

School let out early for a change, at 4:10. I'd waited at the front gate for a bit when I saw Alice on the island part of the pedestrian crossing, which passes under an elevated highway. I walked to her when the little walking green guy came out, and she told me that she'd been to the convenience store nearby for a bit to eat (she's actually hungry today! How unusual. Is she recovering?). She also said that she'd be going to one-on-one tuition for TOEFL later tonight; sounds scary. I walked home, for the rest of the journey, alone.

Today was my last Erhu lesson. Even though I knew that, I'd only practiced once before the lesson, which was a bit too little even for me. Gulp. Well, my teacher, Miss Wang, is really nice. Since it was my last lesson for the foreseeable future, she'd brought along a couple of Jo Hisaishi's sheet music for Studio Ghibli's movies (and I've seen most of them) for me to play. They were nice, although all in different keys, which was irritating. I kept forgetting which key was which.

Mom gave Miss Wang a goodbye gift consisting of tea leaves and a pair of heart-shaped teacups. I'd really miss her, I guess. But I do need to put some more work into my studies, and I can't hold onto two instruments at once. I'm already very special in my class because I haven't dropped piano yet (I don't intend to do that, however. Let's see how long I can last).

Dinner was later than usual today because, as usual, Mom didn't want to cook and procrastinated for as long as she could. I had the leftover spaghetti of mine from yesterday; well, it's one of my favorite foods (not that there are a lot).

Although I'd originally planned to finish my Chinese essay tonight (due on Wednesday. *sweat*), I ended up watching "3 Idiots" with Mom and Victor. We finally finished it; it's really good, and I highly recommend it. It's a Bollywood film, though, which meant that, sadly, I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying, except bits and pieces of heavily accented English.