Diary of an Asian Kid

25 Jan 2011

25 January 2011, Tuesday

The first thing that Mom told me this fine gray morning was that my mug was broken/shattered (the whole bottom half had somehow separated from the upper half). Again. Between the two of us, we've broken at least four of my mugs! Darn it. And I liked that mug, too!

Ran into Leah at the school gate. We walked to our classroom together; I get along okay with her (though half the time she's asking me for food). We had an English test which, annoyingly, only got 92.5. And English is easy! At least I got in another quarter hour of sleep, which didn't actually help. I was still sleepy for most of the morning.

There were two periods of Chinese. We have to memorize a, thankfully, short poem by tomorrow's lesson.

Before the Civics (it includes politics, civics and moral education, economics, and more. I call it Civics for convenience.) teacher, Mdm. Hong, arrived during the next period, Miss Chen came in to check on us before going to her next class (914, right next to us). She saw that there were still people playing ping-pong in the corner, so she banned everyone from playing it during the winter break (of which there are only three and a bit more days). How will the boys entertain themselves? Actually, I know. They'll go back to playing cards.

Mdm. Hong was a bit surprised that almost two-thirds of us hadn't brought the workbook today, so she couldn't teach. She'd told Joan, her helper, to inform us yesterday, but evidently she didn't. And Joan was absent today, so she couldn't be questioned. Mdm. Hong sent me to fetch a paper from her office for us to practice on. Hmm, I usually only get sent to run errands for Miss Chen, but sometimes other teachers ask me too. It's an unfortunate side-effect of sitting in the first row for most of my school life (because of my short height, the farthest I've been from the blackboard is the third row. And there are six rows in all!).

Rest of the morning, double Science, was rather uneventful (boring).

I had lunch outdoors today because it had stopped raining sometime in the morning. The outside surfaces weren't exactly dry, though. I saw George and Andrew, a seventh grader, waiting at the back gate for their mom. Presumably for lunch, although I don't know what Andrew was doing in school that required lunch. Cleaning doesn't last past noon (Victor later suggested that he might have been there for martial arts practice. He's on the school martial arts team, as are his brother and Christopher and his sister).

For some reason, Alice was really slow in joining me, so I felt a bit like a fool sitting there by myself, eating, before she appeared.

First period in the afternoon was English. While Miss Chen was going on about the grammar section we're doing now, I mostly stared into space and/or my History notes. We had double History next.

Miss Yang informed us when she arrived that she was in a bad mood because 10 people in class 911 had failed to hand in their homework on time, and someone in 916 had actually lied to her (she said that she'd teach any kind of student except liars). After a bit of discussion, she told us to finish the Taiwan and World History sections of the 300 page-plus workbook by February 14 (first day of next semester. And Valentine's day. How cruel is that?), and she'd inspect every single one personally.

Even worse, we didn't pass either of the topical tests (at least half of the class has to get eighty or above, or Miss Yang'd get mad), so Miss Yang said she'll quiz us again during the next period. And we didn't get to have the break between the two periods either; she stayed in the classroom, told us we had no break, and said we have to study. Which, everyone being terrified (well, probably. She's the scariest out of all our teachers. The others are mostly quite friendly), we all scrambled to do. It worked! On the second test, over half of our class got full marks. This just proves that everybody's scared stiff of the History teacher, plus we're a class of cowards (we all agree on it. We're one of the classes that are always nice to teachers, unlike a few other classes that I've heard of).

Actually, two periods of History was really interesting. Miss Yang is a really good teacher, and I'm not actually that scared of her. I've done nothing wrong, right?

Leo, Ann, and I all got eighty on the Chinese afternoon test. Three in a row! Amazing coincidence.

Because Miss Chen was handing out our term report sheets (I only got two Bs, the others were all As. Not bad.), and we had to write down today's homework (a lot), I only met Alice at four twenty.

I made Alice come with me to a 7-Eleven to pick up a CD, Aphrodite by Kylie Minogue, that I'd ordered online. It's really convenient, because I mostly don't have to pay postage.

When I got back home, Mom was out. I messed around, eating snacks for a bit before going to practice the piano. Victor, the stupid little bugger, kept interrupting me by pressing loudly and horribly on the higher keys while I tried to play. And when I swatted him away, he had the nerve to say, "You hit me!" and punch me. He's the same size as me already, actually a bit bigger, and he's good at sports. That's why I hate fighting physically with him; we both wind up injured.

Finally, after dinner, I had to quit procrastinating. And actually finish my Chinese essay. The title is, 'What I learned from my schoolmates', which I was pretty sure I'd already written before. Sadly, I didn't remember anything that was actually of use. I detest writing in Chinese; I never know what to say. Unlike English, obviously. Chinese is my preferred conversation language, but English is my preferred writing tool.

When I finally finished the darned thing (I never get good grades on writing, anyway), I turned on the computer and started typing up yesterday's entry. It took me a long time, mainly because I kept getting sidetracked by the music I was listening to on Youtube. I've discovered that I quite like Rihanna's songs, and I'm planning to buy one of her CDs after Chinese New Year when I have money. I also 'ripped' the Aphrodite CD, to sync to my iTunes library.

I hate iTunes. The bloody thing is stupid and darned inconvenient. To spare a lot of complaints, it took me more than half an hour to get my and Victor's iPods and the iPhone synced properly. Plus the stupid thing went berserk and I had to re-type the names of all the songs in one of the albums on it. It nearly drove me insane. Happens every time, but I have to put up with it if I want to use my iPod. Sigh.