Wow. What a crazy day it's been. I think I need to clarify on a bunch of stuff I said last night... but first physics homework.

I am a failure. I am a failure to myself. I am a failure to my family. I am a failure to my peers.

I have failed to be honest with anybody, including myself. I've failed my parents' expectations, I've failed to acknowledge my capabilities, I've failed to be honest with my friends, I've failed to grant courtesy to some of my teachers. I've failed in many more respects, and so, I question myself, what have I succeeded at?

I really do wonder sometimes. I had a discussion earlier today with my father about my lacking grades, and I was trying to explain to him why I was getting bad grades. I had no good explanation. He however had a very good point. That was that it was the result of my own actions. And if it was in fact my own actions, yet I express no intent to do badly, why does it happen? Well, after a lot of screaming and prying interrogation, he (and now I think I as well) came to the conclusion that I’m basically doing it myself, because I don’t cope well in high pressure environments, and by doing badly, I set expectations of myself very low.

When I heard this, it was like a single sentence both providing deep enlightenment as to what’s wrong, but also, a scathing statement revealing how deep rooted my lack of motivation to work could be…

But even if that theory is wrong… why do let the logic chain below occur?

1) I have homework to do.

2) I want to have some fun doing something silly, such as playing a computer game

3) I have a study hall tomorrow in school before the assignment in question is due

4) I can just do it tomorrow in study hall.

5) Time to play games.

Ok, so why do I do that? Is it merely because I have no regard for my school work? Well, it seems so. I keep telling myself I need to do better. Both of my siblings and many of my friends, at any given time, can tell me what grade they’re getting, but I never seem to know my own. Is it because perhaps I don’t want to know?

I think he’s right. I can’t take pressure. I avoid situations that would put me into a lot of pressure. I also fear the consequences of that. No, I don’t just fear them. I dread them, and I truly hope to evade them. He explained to me… that by continuing to get the grades that I am, which are quite frankly dismal (more on “dismal” grades later), I will continue on a track towards low pressure situations. I’ll get into a college of some sort where I’ll be with a bunch of people far my mental inferiors, and I’ll do excellently, there. That will lead into a low pressure career of me doing stuff that isn’t too demanding, or rewarding. Simply put, low pressure is low ambition.

But the thing is, I don’t want that. I like the idea of a ambitious plan for the rest of my life. Get lots of money fairly young, stop working, and enjoy the world. But plans like that just don’t work for people without ambition and hard work. So what the hell am I going to do. If I continue to get shit grades, sure, I’ll have a fun time this year, but what about the rest of my life. A lot of my friends last year told me I shouldn’t be taking such an aggressive approach towards even the possibility of graduating early. They said that high school is a time to have fun. Fuck that. As much as it is that, it also somewhat sets the stage for the rest of my academic, and as a result, financial career.

Before I forget, here’s what I meant by dismal grades. To me, a dismal grade is anything lower than a B. A B+ is mediocre, at best, but really, I’d not only like to get only A- or better, but I’m undeniably capable of it. Sure, it might be a high standard for the “average” high schooler, but, regardless of what you the reader think, I’m not average. I have to face it, I’m being pretty stupid by slacking off, and doing badly, especially considering how little work it would take on my part to raise all my grades to at least above B.

Back to my pseudo-crisis. So here I am, at the crossroads of my life, in a manner of speaking. I’ve got plenty of “potential” all stored up… but I lack the discipline and mind set to utilize it properly, so what am I to do. As I said earlier, I’m not being honest with myself. I have a constant pseudo-self-delusion and at every progress report or report card, I end up surprised how badly I’m doing. Clearly there is something wrong, and there is surely a way to fix it. So why can’t I do it? For the past.. 4 years, 5 including this one, I’ve been dealing with the problem that I don’t get my work done in school. It’s not like it’s 4 years of bad luck and bad timing and therefore bad grades. It’s me, making continuous and compounding errors in judgment, and furthermore, doing badly in school.

So in school, I’ve got all these things that I didn’t do so well on in this last term for English. Some homeworks which I didn’t spend enough time on. Some essays I procrastinated until the last weekend on. The test I neglected to study for. Any one of these individually does not bring my grade from 90 to 72. It’s all of them compounded. Sure, there’s two zero out of 100 grades for discussions, which I plan on disputing because the grading rubric on discussions as I see it is somewhat flawed… but I don’t want to publicly criticize my teacher here. I did that once already this year in Math, something that I need to remunerate for because I’ve already angered him once. Hopefully this can be undone. I made a foolish move and publicly commented to him in a somewhat insulting manner.

So anyhow, I see that I could have fixed what I did wrong for English. What about physics… well that too is quite simple. I neglected to study for, or do most of the homework for one section, and on that section, we had a test that was worth more in total than all of the points accumulated this year up until then, and I bombed it. I got a 66. It dropped my grade to abysmal levels, outdone only by the D I received last year or the year before in Calculus or Pre-calculus, I do not recall at this time. Either way, it’s one of the worst grades I’ve ever received.

Ok, with regards to not being honest with friends, that lies on a much less sever level, but still. Just the fact that there have been all too many situations where lies have been used to portray false ideas as fact, and then using those to my advantage. The severity of the results varies in different cases… but for the most part, that’s all done and resolved now. As for peers, I just think it’s not good that I’m basically living here in a lie. In spite of my best efforts to dispel the nicknames I’ve unwillingly received, I get called things like Tacohead, Sherpa, Yoda and Big Russ. I really don’t care about Big Russ, and although ethnically slurred, Tacohead and Sherpa do bother me, but not quite as much as Yoda does. I guess this stems from the bit about me hating pressure and expectations. Yoda has a lot of connotations. The two that come to mind are little green wrinkly critter with funny eyes, and amazing knowledge and wisdom, with which come mind powers. Ok, so parts of those might apply to me. The “funny eyes” bit perhaps, I’ve been informed that I’ve got a not terribly distinct features, but very animated face, coupled with allegedly very large eyes. Ok, so that’s all fine and good, but when people start assuming that merely because I’ve got the nickname Yoda, that I’m going to be all knowing and super smart, I think that’s a terrible thing to do. I don’t know everything about everything. Sure, I took the Advanced Placement Calculus exam last year, and scored the highest possible, that being a five. Great. That doesn’t mean I know everything about math, and more specifically, I don’t know everything about geometry, algebra 2 and pre-calculus, all of which are classes I either barely took at all, or took 2 or more years ago. When I don’t know something, I don’t want to hear “but you’re yoda! You know everything!” Similar, are computers. I don’t know everything. If you have a question, sure, ask it, but again, when I don’t know… don’t be disappointed.

Ok, enough angry rambling. Moving on… I have yet to answer the question, what have I accomplished. So let’s see. Over the course of my life, I’ve done little that was terribly exceptional. I’m no Ani Ravi or Sean Ting (both exceptionally talented students). Sure, I’ve taken a lot of advanced math classes. I got to the state level of science fair competition with a project that looked like it belonged in a children’s museum (I built a trebuchet out of K’Nex, the plastic construction toy, and did some… “tests”). But what have I really done. I find it difficult to pinpoint something exceptional and distinguishing about myself.

Oh great. Now I’ve sunk into a depression and self-detesting mood.

So what am I going to do about all of this. I’m going to try a drastic lifestyle change. I’m going to do so as soon as possible, and it’s probably going to result in a huge decrease of enjoyment of my days for the next couple of years… but the end result should be better. Hopefully, I’ll be able to rework my thinking which has been thoroughly entrenched in my mind since probably before I even entered seventh grade, so that I approach my work much differently. People like Jen Hardy manage to get consistently good grades, and do exceptionally well in pretty much all academic regards. I even think that this year (although not last year, or the year before) I may be taking an easier course load. I’m going to make the assumption that she’s taking Pre-calculus and AP Biology, because the honors math course is Pre-calculus and the science course nearly every single other junior is taking is AP Bio. Anyhow, I’m only taking honors physics and AP statistics for math and science (English and social studies, as far as I know, are probably fairly similar, but again, I assume and guess). AP Statistics is becoming more challenging, but I feel that something like AP Calculus, as I took last year, is a bit more… hardcore math. As for physics, I think it seems somewhat silly that it’s being taught without calculus, especially this year, and considering the number of students who have in fact completed calculus. But anyhow, back to the point I was making. In spite of all that work load stuff, I’m almost guaranteed to be doing worse in the way of grades. I think I know why. I have this distinct recollection of some time where she got some grade which wasn’t all that low, but she was absolutely disgusted with the fact that she got it. When I get bad grades, I pass them off as insignificant, and think to myself “Eh, so what. I’ll just do better on the rest of the assignments…” A note to all those (still) reading… this is a bad approach and you are destined to do worse than you could have if you take it.

Alright, I would continue here, however I’m beginning to lose coherence in my thoughts, so perhaps I’ll continue this sometime this weekend. After all, it is around 10:20 at night, and I’ve spent a total of about an hour and a half writing this. Enough.

Curse my honesty. No. Curse my negligence. I've condemned myself until the end of the first term. I've condemned myself for more than that. How could I be so stupid?! Argh! I need to start getting good grades now. Not next year. Not later. I can't believe this. I could have preveted this all. One test, worth in total more than everything done up to now, and I bombed it. My grade up to now, in physics, assuming I count right, which apparently may not be something I can do, is somewhere in the 67-69 range. I'm not quite sure due to some grades I'm not quite sure of, but that's probably pretty accurate. Anyhow, becase of this, on my progress report in two days, I'm almost guaranteed to get grounded, or have my priveleges suspended or something, however even if I don't, I am forced to live with the fact that I may have just precluded the option of going to some college.

Even if it's not a specific one, the idea that because I screwed around, and therefore gave up the option of going to whatever college, I may have just ruined the opportunity to go to wherever I would have enjoyed most.

Anyhow, starting Wednesday, I wouldn't be suprised if I suddenly stopped doing much blogging, except for whenever I've got a study hall or something.