I'm cold.

(At least my hands are).

OSU lost to TX last night, 47-28 (if I remember correctly) - that wasn't too fun because my mom got really upset over the game (!). Usually we're like, bleh, but my mom and dad went to OSU for grad. school, and if it weren't for OSU, I wouldn't be here (in this form as a girl named Dani) :P so yeah. Was depressing... first half, the Cowboys were doing really well, but Vince Young ran x number of yards all the time, and yeah.

GA lost to FL 10-14 as well. Boo. Why doesn't GA ever win vs. FL? :\ Not that I like GA and/or FL, but just wondering.

Okay, off to work. Once again. I love Daylight Savings Time change o' clocks.

Oh no, the dangers of fall break: NOT DOING ANYTHING PRODUCTIVE. OR NOT GETTING EVERYTHING DONE.

Yes, I am a workaholic. It bothers me when there is unfinished business.

Hmm, so far I have:

-Gone to Cumberland Island to get eaten alive by mosquitoes, learn how divine the water feels on one's bare toes at the beach, write chinese words in the sand, listen to "fob" music, walk 3.5 miles or so, and avoiding horse poop left and right. Oh, and watched The Longest Yard... "I sucked at football... I got picked after the white kids..." or something like that. I'm not good at remember word for word quotes in movies.

-Volunteered at the Red Cross stuffing envelopes, whee...

-Bought 2389434 cans of food at Publix

-Went downtown to walk the Breast Cancer Walk with Ning-Fei - why are we not getting any closer... oh, and walked another mile at the park. Total? Probably 4-5 miles. Exercise is good.

-Went to Walmart - decided that the clothes aren't really that great... :P

-Finally beat the last levels of Soul Calibur II with cheap Link :P

-Started my "Why UPenn" essay and decided that it sucks, really badly...

-Learned some Chinese and realized how little I know...

-Practiced flute

What's left undone and what is bugging me right now:

-RESEARCH PAPER

-CALC HW (I'm going to get a bad grade this nine weeks XD)

-Other college stuff? I'm not sure

-Reading for UGA FF (I'm not going to get it... and I think my book isn't that great. I'm screwed)

-Recorded flute recordings. I need a better recorder.

-Bio photojournal??!?!?!? ...

-Beta Club T-shirt

-My, yes, "Why Upenn" essay

WHY CAN'T I JUST SIT BACK AND DO NOTHING? Why am I typing in caps? *frustration, anger, anxiety*

I'm still here.

Productivity: low/suffering

Desperation level: pretty high

I'm tired of this silly cycle - thank goodness no more band practices - I hate sleeping at 1+am almost everyday because all this work simply accumulates.

I hate being on the top.

I already have visions of cold weather and Christmas trees in my head - praying that I may hold on until then - It's the light at the end of the tunnel -

Maybe I should be content with just 90's. What does a 95 mean anyway?

I still have too much stuff to do.

Senior year is a lot more busy than junior year. Junior year was just bad because the contrast between that and sophomore year (at least, for us) was pretty hefty. Senior year is bad because there's AP classes, college applications, senior projects, extracurriculars... and we still need to find time to have fun because after all, we are seniors.

Uh, my "fun" factor is lacking right now, but I'll make it up this Thanksgiving/Christmas breaks. Oh yea.

:)

My Emory App is due next week - don't think I'll get Emory Scholar, but that's okay...

Sunday, I drove myself over to the nursing home with my flute and music at the ready. The people there weren't expecting me, I don't think. NHS does Elmcroft visits every last Sunday (or something like that, I don't remember), but I have a strange feeling that not too many people show up to these events.

Anyway, I timidly approached this lady who was having a late lunch (it was around 2pm), and she looked confused as to where to place me. Finally, she placed me in the Alzheimer's ward. The interesting thing is that they keep the ward locked with a special security system. The lady let me in, but if I wanted to leave the ward, and nobody was there to help me, I would be stuck in there.

Anyway, I digress. This is only the second or third time I've been at this particular nursing home, and although these visits make me sad, I still try to go every now and then. Making these senior citizens smile makes my day, even if I do have to play my flute for two hours. Although playing for two hours is rough- I tend to run out of things to play. I need to start commiting more pieces to memory. It comes in handy.

There was this man sitting on the couch in the corner. He didn't look too old - maybe around 70. Everytime I finished a song, he would always be the first to clap. I would look into his eye and nervously smile and mouth, "Thank you." Nice old men are a joy to see because most nursing homes are full of women... and most of them are kind of cranky.

The women who worked there were all smiles when I finished - I didn't realize that they were listening, as well. Some of them were hanging out in the back. They commented on how cute I was and how I should come back more often.

I should.

I'm going to the nursing home (another one) on October 1st. I think I'll bring my flute that day.

I'm so lazy... I never write in here, in my Xanga, or in my real journal (where it really matters) anymore. Lots of stuff happen, but I'm usually too tired/sad/HAPPY (?) to write about anything anymore. Mostly tired.

-_- Zzz... that's me...

Anyway, I saw all of my old middle school friends at the football game on Friday. My school lost miserably 25-0, but esta bien. I just wanted to see all my friends again, and yes, go through the heartache that I always feel after leaving this game.... it's my last one, and after this year, I probably won't see them again much.

As Todd says, "SEEN-YORZ!" 06!

Oh, how lovely.

Last night, I watched the last episode of this Chinese soap opera - it's about this angel who comes down from heaven to see if there are any good, righteous people left. A lot of the members from "Do Yu" were in this soap opera. Well, in my opinion, this soap opera was kind of weak because all the episodes were about daily life, and nothing traumatic even happened. The angel (played by this innocent Chinese guy ^_^) and the cute girl (from "Do Yu") are so pure, it's crazy :) I cried at the ending because it was, in a sense, bittersweet. Oh gosh, my sister proclaimed that I'm "emo." Okay, so I cry a lot, big deal.

Blah, I'm so tired and overworked- I need to stop doing so much stuff... ;(

I already missed 2 days of school this year - blahhhhhhhh...

I'm so proud of my heritage... call me a dork, but a lot of the weekends, this is what keeps me up at night when I should be a normal teenager that's simply sleeping. You know what I do a lot of the weekends? If it's not sleeping (haha), no, it's not partying and getting drunk like a monkey (like some of my classmates have a penchant to do), but it's learning Chinese. Translating words and phrases.

I wish everyone had the opportunity to grow up billingual. Since I did grow up billingual, indeed, I have no idea what the other side feels like, to only have a (somewhat?) command of the English language and nothing else. Parlez-vous francais? and Hola do not count. I know a lot of kids in high school French, Spanish, etc. are only in there for credit/college applications, and I know most kids don't even come close to "profiency" in high school foreign language. I know unless I do outside reading and speaking, there's no way I can survive in Mexico, or Spain, or Venuzuela despite my (now) three years of Spanish class. However, I have been exposed to Mandarin since I was born, really, and if you threw me in China or Taiwan, I think I could manage :)

Being billingual (or trilingual, or whatever) is a powerful feeling, and a useful one at that! :) Being able to communicate with relatives, businesspeople, and simply people from that country(ies) is a huge barrier people can overcome with another language. There's a lot of appreciation to be gained with the knowledge of another language, too. For your own background and the other country's background and culture. Okay, in my case, there are still a lot of words/phrases that I'm not sure what they mean, but with every sentence I translate, hey, I'm getting there. It's like decoding some "secret" message, only like, two billion people know, but you don't.

Which gives great satisfaction to me. :) Maybe I should be one of those cryptologists my physics teacher was talking about - breaking all this code. It's kind of the same, right? :) I love figuring out and deciphering stuff. Definitely the hard part, but the end result is almost always so rewarding.

I'm still alive.

I didn't go to school today because I woke up exhausted. Actually, I almost didn't wake up, I don't think... or get up, anyway. Bah. I slept from 8pm - 6am, 7am-11am ... what a day, what a day. I'm still not really okay because my health is perpetually just bad.

Anyway. I watched The Terminal w/my family this evening. What a cute movie - and it's not thy typical romance movie, either, which was fantastic. It didn't end the way I thought it would, but I guess that what makes movies/books stand out, eh? Bravo, Tom Hanks :) And first time I saw Diego Luna in action - ha ha ! :) He's still on my wall...

Okay, off to bed. Volunteering tomorrow. :)

I don't know if I should still do Early Decision to UPenn...

Hello.

Senior year is no fun... whoever said it was fun was probably referring to second semester. I always find myself sleeping at 12am at the earliest... this is bad. Am I procrastinating too much? Maybe I should step back and observe what in the world I end up doing after school, after band practice. Almost every day, two hours is lost due to power napping.... and then like, 1-1.5 for eating, showering, brushing teeth, etc. I wish I didn't come home at 5pm almost everyday.

LHS WON 12-0 TODAY! CONGRATULATIONS!

I'm so excited. My freshman year, our football team was 0-10 for the whole season. Since then, we have never had a winning football record, and we just got lost to winning like, three games and losing the rest. Now, I'm back in marching band (after a year hiatus) and excited that we're now 2-1, which is a miracle to everyone's eyes! We're seniors now, and I hope we can end with a winning record. That would be nice to be the class at LHS that actually has a winning record, for once. Let's break this dry spell.

In other news, I found out there are COLORED PICCOLOS and they are so pretty! The base is one color while the keys are another. There are pretty pairs like blue and silver, purple and blue, red and gold, etc. My piccolo is dead (you should see me trying to play it. I look so silly), so I am in search of another one. I don't know if I have time to play in college, but I would like to have the chance... perhaps it would be an outlet from all this studying I would probably be doing. YEAH! I love music.

I hate studying.

Yesterday... after spending two hours volunteering at a nursing home, I almost slept the rest of the day. Things have been rather hectic, and I've been getting not a lot of sleep. I think my health is failing, which is definitely not a good sign since I need to be really robust and healthy in order to get anything accomplished. I've downed like, 200 ounces of gatorade/powerade to replenish all that lost minerals/electrolytes from excessive sweating.

There is so much stuff to do, and so little time, but it is not even September yet. Am I worrying too much?

Sleep-deprived.

I never seem to get lots of sleep lately - around 5-6 hours/weeknight. The thing is, even if I do have time to sleep, I...don't. It's quite strange. I must have an addiction to reading, which, considering the alternatives (drugs, alcohol - read the Newsweek issue about meth), it sounds rather good and rather nerdy. Like, last week, I couldn't stop reading summer 2005 back issues of Newsweek (I wish I could write/have the knowledge of Fareed Zakaria), even though it was around 12am. Of course, there's the constant studying because I don't get home until 5pm three days a week and I have to leave two hours for nap (and shower, and a short dinner) because standing in the sun for two hours is really taxing on the body. Like my good freshman buddy Jaime says, I "sweat like a dog." Thanks.

I love my freshmen! They're so funny.

I just sweated about 10 pounds of of me.

Tonight was the first football game of the season. I am guessing the humidity index was like 2450% because I've never sweated so much in my life. Ok, how about this - all the practices I've been to so far amounted to this one game. YIKES. Not to gross you out or anything (I want you to come back), but I looked like I took a shower. Except, uh. I didn't.

Shuaib is awesome - when we band kids (dorks) were kneeling for the halftime show for the other band, I saw him and Vikas (these are my two brown friends, woot) walk by. I said hello and complained about the utter humidity (UGH), and he went and bought me a powerade, which I had to drink after the halftime show. Awww, thanks for spending $2 on me, that means a great deal, especially how I was dying of dehydration out there. :) I got to hang out with my Indian guy friends (and my girls, ZAHEERA and ISHITA) at third quarter, which was nice. I usually don't see all of them congregate in one area (I wish I had more Chinese guys my age/grade... cool Chinese guys anyway. The little we have I don't really associate with them). Ah, I love my friends, but why do I have to have this stupid antisocial part of me that seems to kick in at the wrong place, wrong time, everytime?

We played lots of cheers. I screamed a lot. I played an octave higher on the piccolo, and everyone knows that the piccolo is already high enough :P I misheard those cheerleaders' chants... they were spelling L A K E S I D E and I always caught the last part, but I didn't understand what they were spelling, so I thought they were spelling S T I C K E R. My friend and my sister almost died laughing. Eh. Funny things happen when one is delirious, tired, and dehydrated.

I finally stepped in the Lakeside bathroom for the first time in my four years there. Wow. Stadium bathrooms are horrible.

Well, to wrap it up, after many frustrating "so close, yet so far" moments, surprise surprise, we lost 20-10.

And now I'm going to eat something. :)

I love cheesecake.

When I was little, I was repulsed by the very idea of cheese + cake. One salty thing and one sweet thing? How in the world did they ever go together? I tasted some, and I thought what a weird combination it was. I felt like I was eating soft, sweet cheese... you know, some items just don't mix together, and I almost gagged.

I'm not sure what I was thinking because now, I'm addicted to that stuff! Maybe the strange sweetness of cheesecake finally grew on me. We bought this no-bake cheesecake that required just milk and mixing, and after freezing it to firm it up, I already ate almost 1/4 of it :D ... wow. The graham cracker pie crust is absolutely divine with it. You know how fat I am going to get? :D No wonder I'm so, uh, well endowed. I grew up with all this milk and good food, and I'm adding cheesecake to the list. If I grow up to be featured in one of those Success Stories in Shape magazine, that will be a sad day indeed. You know, the classic "she was skinny in high school but in college she gained 200 pounds and finally got back to a healthy weight" articles that are fun to read. I love the before/after pictures. I hope I don't have any drastic ones, though.

I can't believe I wrote for two minutes about cheesecake.

Marching band practices are hell.

They're so hot and blistering. Sweat beads drip down constantly from my face and neck. It is a most disgusting site. The grass and mud beneath my feet don't help, either.

Two hours of hell... Three days a week... This had better be worth it.

Anyway, you are now reading the entry of a girl who got one hour of sleep last night. That's right. This idiot ended up taking four tablets of Midol. If you don't know what that is, it's an OTC pain reliever for menstrual cramps (in particular), and it contains 60mg/tablet of caffeine to perk up the average bloated, cranky menstruating woman (like me, except I might be above average when it comes to cranky). 60 x 4 = 240mg of caffeine for me in one day = no sleeping from 12:30AM - 5:00AM.

Wow. I had to turn on the rap station full blast this morning to wake myself from this dazed mode. So strange. Everything felt surreal. I had to chant (more like scream) vocabulary words and song lyrics to wake myself up on the way there. Thank God nothing happened because if I were any more tired, there could have been a serious accident.

Time to shower, nap (for once), and study, study, study.

I better get into a good college. Preferably with financial aid/money, too :D haha... unlike the rest of my school, I am rather anti-UGA.

This is the first time in a long time that I have gone without a personal website.

Granted, a lot of the pages I hadn't touched in awhile and were in need of major updating/touch up, but hey, they were still there, and I spent some hours typing (or c + p) the HTML coding and messing with Photoshop. Keeping a blog is fun, but it's kind of... well, empty! I've been so used to seeing "ABOUT SITE," "DANI," "GUESTBOOK," and so on, that with just the blogging in it (notice how my entries seem to vary in length?) is a bit unsettling. Nadine offered hosting to me, which I am ever grateful :) but I'm on "hold," sorta, due to school. Maybe in a week or two (or three), I'll get my life back on track and start HTMLing/Photoshop-ing once again! Haha, I've been doing websites since like, 2nd-3rd grade, however rudimentary they are/were. It has been awhile, yes indeed.

I looked at my list of prospective colleges. Most of them are very selective, and I'm wondering if I should put more good schools but for my profile, a "safety school," you know, in case I get rejected from everything except GA Tech and UGA. Ahhh. Am I just throwing $300 of fees down the drain? Well, if you hope for nothing, you will never be disappointed, so if you get something (good), then that's great because you weren't expecting it, and good surprises are usually, well, good! Sometimes, I don't know if I agree with that 100%, but what kind of mentality am I supposed to have towards this issue?

Ahh, everyday at band practice, I look upon the flute/piccolo section. Most of them are new freshmen, and when I see them, I sense the "innocence" and the, eh, vulnerability of being the youngest and the newest ones on the field. Yes, I was there once, and totally clueless :P but I ended up making friends and being commended for my playing (Erica, Heather, and Leanne, if you're out there, hey! I miss you all!). Quite an experience. I am not a leader, though, because I rejoined marching band a bit late in the summer, but I still feel, I don't know, protective of these kids, especially the three that are near me on the field and very awesome indeed. Except for my younger sisters, I have never really felt this kind of feeling towards younger people because I used to be one of them myself. Plus, I'm not too satisfied with leadership this year, but I don't want to, like, comandeer the position and upset some people. Maybe if there is an appropriate time, I will step in. Actually, I need to teach them some cheers/stands music.

AP Physics C actually requires thinking! It's not TOTALLY math. We need to get out of this spoonfeeding, cookie-cutter mold like people tend to be in math class. I just hope I don't fail Physics this year :P or make a *gasp* B.

So much on my mind!

Well, thanks to this 6.0 GPA dilemma, I've been wondering if I should take an online course. Registration is until August 20, so I have some time. I am wondering if I can throw in an extra "AP" online (I found Statistics, World History, and Psychology, for starters). I'm guessing it would be after school, but these websites and my own stupid board of education don't tell me where online students are supposed to take the classes! Am I supposed to go after school in a lab or in the comfort of my own home or a public library? The sites say "log on anytime during the day," but I am pretty sure that last year, kids had to stay after school. I don't know. Maybe I can get out of those horrendous (hot) band practices on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. No more sweat-soaked shirts, maybe? -_-

School hasn't been too terrible yet. To my delight, I got a, 84 on the way-too-long Macbeth quote test... although I think I should have gotten higher if I just went back and checked some answers. You know how it is. This is the first time I'm happy with a B! :O ... our class average was a 54.

Methyl - CH3 nonpolar
Amino - NH2 weak base, accepts H+
Carboxyl - COOH weak acid, donates H+
Carbonyl ketone - C=O not at the end, polarity
Carbonyl aldehyde - H-C=O At end, polarity

I thought we were done with orgo back in AP Chem. XD

Macbeth? Act and Scene? What?

I can't do quotes. Especially for those that require labeling of what act/scene they were located.

I think I'm going to fail tomorrow.