Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Well, I'm definitely gonna be Luke for Otakon. But I'm really planning on going to Katsucon. It's gonna be in Arlington, Virginia next year during President's Day weekend...so maybe Alyssa can come with me and we can stay at our aunt's house. Or maybe we could go with some friends *hint hint wink wink* and convince our parents to stay at a hotel.

Oh well, whatever the case, the next time I go to a con after Otakon 2008, I'm gonna cosplay as Ema Skye from Phoenix Wright.



I've already got her hair. WHOO NO WIG. And you can find most of her clothes at Goodwill and then just take it from there! xd It will be much less expensive than my Luke cosplay...which will take a little over $150. @_@ I need to pay off my parents now and quickly put in my orders for my Luke cosplay and wig on eBay.

Hmmm...other news...I got frustrated during AP Stats today while working on SAT review and scratched the hell out of a problem until a classmate came up to me and said, "Angry at the problem?"

Frickin' hard problems. I need to nail them down. Well, not need...want. I can usually get the easy and mediums just fine, but as soon as I read most hard problems and see all that text and letters and symbols and gah! I just freeze up and get so confused. And then I always need someone's help to get me to understand what to do. Theeeeen I can take it from there. But I just get so confused so easily and make everything so much more difficult than it could be! And dammit, I need to learn to start plugging in numbers from the answers! I always forget to use the answers to help. xp

What else...I just finished Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations. Now I've gotta go get Apollo Justice...even though he sucks...oh well, Ema is in it! heart whee

Ewww I have a journalism research paper due next Monday and I only just started the grunt work of writing it today. gonk But we're gonna start laying out the long articles we wrote tomorrow! And I love mine so much. It's amazing. But I need to think up some headlines and sub headlines. Once I do the final fine-tuning, I'm thinking about posting it online somewhere. I wonder if I could get it published in the news post...nah, it's way too long for their tastes. xp

Oh well...WHOO I FEEL LIKE A GENIUS. I'm helping Alyssa with Phoenix Wright. And man do I SUCK at being a lawyer. xd Really, I'm way better at finding everything...maybe because you don't get penalized for randomly guessing when doing your investigating...you just investigate...whereas the evidence you present in court has to be relevant...and sometimes I just have no idea what I'm doing. sweatdrop But still, I figured out 2 things Alyssa couldn't. *dances*

...It might also help that I just finished that game. xd

[RANT]

I HATE standardized tests. I feel like they set me up to fail. They do not accurately portray my intelligence or ability to learn at all because I just CAN'T do them. I'm easily frustrated and prone to panic attacks. It's been that way since kindergarten/first grade and will probably be that way forever. I wasn't placed into the gifted and talented program because of that. They were all, "She gets too frustrated, so we don't think she belongs in the magnet program."

I honestly feel like I'm not going to do very well on the SATs except for the writing section. I'll probably do okay on the reading section, but I'd do better if I interpreted things like the test maker. It's not my fault that I interpret things different than stupid old, senile adults who have nothing better to do than write up test questions that are doomed to make us fail.

I haven't been doing my daily official SAT question of the day for about a week, so I just went through and did the ones I missed.

The results:

Reading and writing questions: 6/7 right
Math: 0/4 right

So...yeah...I'd say I'm just a BIT more than worried about Saturday. More like panicked, terrified, frustrated, and upset.

I hate that the SAT could determine my future. I NEED to get a good score if I want to go to the college I want. I really, really want to go to La Trobe and I need to show that I'm an amazing international student. And even if I weren't going to La Trobe, I'm not going to some dinky community liberal arts college--I want to go to a well-known state university for its academics. And to get into those, you need good SAT scores. And some of them don't even care about the writing section! GAH. That's my best ******** section.

The SAT does not measure your intelligence or your ability to learn or process information or even how well you take tests in general. It only tests how well you do on the SAT, which I feel like is just setting me up to personally fail.

And it doesn't help that I'm competitive by nature. I usually never show it and I try to keep it under control (especially during video games, but I'm such a sore loser xp ) and I get really annoyed over grades/academic achievements.

For example...I'm angry I'm not in the top 5% of the school. I think I'm ranked 40-something out of our 250 or something number of juniors just because I got a C in physics and I'm not taking a shitload of AP courses, since I've decided to not take any AP science courses and no more math AP courses after Stats. (NO ONE'S GETTING ME TO TAKE CALCULUS. EVER.)

I'm angry that Alyssa got this thing in the mail from the government about honoring her in some country-wide yearbook thingy for her good grades when she mainly gets B's and I get straight A's even in AP courses.

I'm angry whenever I hear someone who I don't think is all that smart talking about their SAT scores when it's high. It makes me very angry and I feel like they don't deserve that score. Hell, in this magazine thingy about colleges nation-wide my mom got me, there was this little portion about this kid who's going to Yale or Harvard or some stuck-up school everyone knows like that got a perfect score--800 on each section.

How the hell is that even possible?

I remember in 10th grade when we got back our PSAT scores and we heard that Melanie got a perfect score on the math section. I was kind of stupefied, but not entirely surprised since I know how she's really smart and helped me out during physics.

When we got back the PSATs this year I nearly cried when I saw my scores. I was pissed off. Not only did my scores decrease from the previous year (especially in math...) but everyone I knew did fairly well and some of my best friends scored very high in the percentiles...I think Tegan was in the 94th or something.

Yeah...I think I was in the 70th something.

I was furious when I went home that day. I think I might have ripped it up and thrown out my results.

******** standardized tests. They're absolutely a form of cruel and unusual punishment. At least with AP exams they curve the grades if too many people do badly.

[/RANT]