There's a Hummingbird Outside my Window!
And you thought i'd never update this, didn't you??? Well...you're WRONG. haha. Wow, i had no ideathat we had hummingbirds here!!!They're so cool, and they flap their wings so fast and sip the nectar from the flowers on my deck...i wish i had a camera right here so i could take a pic of them!!! Anyway...i don't really feel like talking about school and nobody would really care if i talked about math, so that's it for now. Now that i've gotten my other blog working again, i'm too lazy to really put effort into this one.

School Makes Me Feel/Act Weird...
Note to everyone in orchestra: Rakesh will now be known as "the cute little freshman with the same birthday as me". And i get to play one of the solo parts in our piece! Go me =). So *surprisingly* enough, school is boring. In physics, we're learning how to use our calculators, as in putting numbers in the stat editor and plotting points.... only 176 days left to go! (At this point i'll stop counting down the days because it will most likely get depressing.)

What a Day...
I can't believe it's all happening again...today was ok i guess. i had a pleasant surprise when i saw that Tia and Nick were in my Brit Lit class, and the teacher seemed nice enough. Physics was kinda boring cuz all we did was take stupid measurements to find the density of things and the only person in my class that i can talk to is Elizabeth Lemoine. Hopefully it will get better. Calc was also kind of boring; Mr. Dan had us find the slope of a tangent line to a circle and the area under the circle...which was of course quite easy for me (we weren't allowed to use the pi r squared thing) cuz i just made a simple integral lol. Oh, what fun...not really. And Jim wasn't in my class after all, which made me sad, because i can't say i'm really friends with anyone else in that classs. I'm on good terms with most of them, but not really friends....Oh well. Orchestra was fun enough. We have 7 freshmen in it this yr (that's a lot)...certainly more than the 3 in my freshman gang last yr lol. I was happy that Joseph was in symphony cuz he's a cool guy, and Stephanie is certainly fun to hang out with, so overall my classes weren't that bad. I just hate the whole atmosphere at school...the noise, chaos, loud convos about nothing. I am afraid i won't be able to stand it much longer (surely, i will find a way to cope as i always do, even tho it gets worse every yr, but i can never actually enjoy myself at school. and that's a bad thing.) so i have to start thinking about what i shall do when i can't take it anymore. Oh well.... People are weird. When i went to the school today i talked to a lot of people, asked them weird questions and attracted a lot of weird looks, but amused myself quite a bit in seeing how their minds work. I got home about half an hour later than i should have, and when i entered my house, i realized i felt like crap. After that, i went to a violin lesson and that made me feel a lot better. It's amazing how the simple feeling of making beautiful sounds, making the violin cry (it sounds lame, i know, and i don't mean cry as in weep, but cry out in emotion) makes me feel wonderful. Yes, i delight in the artistic, the things that have much aesthetic appeal...in a sense that is what math is for me, with an austere beauty.... lol...i bet i'm scaring people right about now so i shall stop. Well, i'll prolly just go write this somewhere else! Hehehehehehehehhee. I had a crappy day, but i'm still happy for some odd reason =)

9:54 PM, August 10, 2003
I am online and doing a whole lot of nothing... Unfortunately, I am starting to lose my voice again, which always happens at the moments I want to have it most (ARML, math tournaments, days when I have to present projects, etc.). Just my luck. Hopefully i'll be able to talk tomorrow. And I'm getting fed up with the feeling that what I am doing right now is useless. Therefore, I should probably go downstairs and work on math and then go to bed.... I'll see some of you tomorrow ... and some of you in too long a time ... Hug a goat every day!

1:46 PM
Crap...in the last entry i had put "sarcasm" and "/sarcasm" in the little < > things to indicate that i was being sarcastic but it must have been interpreted as real html lol.

Last Day of Summer... (August 10, 1:39 PM)
Isn't everyone EXCITED about going to school tomorrow?? I know that I'm really looking forward to it.... oh wait...you can't make words look sarcastic. Hopefully this will be a good yr. Or, instead, i should say "this will be a good yr cuz i'll make it one." Maybe by the end of it I'll be decent at solving olympiad problems, maybe I'll do well on the usamo. But the important thing is that it's fun i guess. Everyone come to the Pope Math Tournament!!! (I hope it'll turn out well, and while I feel quite constrained, having to make the test for the average competitor, I'm looking forward to it.) Have a nice day everyone- and enjoy it.

8/6/03 8:16 PM
I just noticed that this thing doesn't display the date or time posted. Only 5 more days until school starts =(. Right now the people in my family are acting weird; my sister is calling me all kinds of names like "stupid" and telling me to shut my mouth (do all 3-year olds do this often?) and my parents are adamantly opposed to my going to marcia's birthday party because it is a sleepover, although there i will probably be getting more sleep than i do some nights when i'm at home. And yet despite the unfairness, i'm not annoyed about it anymore. It is now 8:42 PM and i have just found out Howard's screen name...i've been talking to...Howard and James about...stuff. I'd like to take this time to say that James is AWESOME and a great friend to me when i decide to start talking about stuff that noone cares about/start acting really weird...anyways, that's all for tonight.

Notice
For those of you who know the site, the "original" blog that this one is a continuation of is back up and updated! But the site i have it on still sucks. ANYWAYS...for those of you who happen to care, here is my schedule: 1st- Honors Brit Lit...2nd- Honors Physics...3rd- AP Calc...4th- Symphony Orchestra...oh boy what a fun-filled schedule that is. At least it's better than last year's.

3.14159265358979...
by the way, i have memorized the first ONE HUNDRED digits of pi. (maybe i shouldn't have said that- people might stop talking to me. but hey...my REAL friends think that's COOL because it is). people ask me why i memorize pi like that....it's not because i'm a math nerd (i have better things to do during my math-study time, like...study math, not memorize pi) or because i'm weird and i like to get attention like that. it's because- now get this- it's FUN and because i need something to do when i don't feel like doing anything! see, now that i'm in my own little world i'm already feeling better than i did at school.

Fall Madness
"Fall Madness" (which i still think sounds stupid) was today. actually, i was rather pleasantly surprised by how smoothly everything went; i had NO mistakes on my schedule (it seems that finally they know who i am and what classes i need to be in), the lines went quickly and we just paid for everything and left. however, it was depressing/amusing seeing my classmates for the first time since school ended last yr. it seems i've been living in a world very different from the real one- and one in which i have picked the people i want to hang out and interact with. when i got to school today it was somewhat of a rude awakening...it seems like everyone here is rich, white, and blond (well at least the girls are blond). a lot of them smiled at me with those superficial smiles and shouted "HEY LIVIA!!!" or gave me those cutesy little grins and giggled instead of saying anything. i was having fun watching them socialize. it makes me wonder how they can tell each other apart and how they choose their friends if they all look, act and think (or don't think) the same. but then again i will be having classes with these people (as few as possible of course; hopefully most of them won't be in honors/AP classes)...and then i remind myself that i DO have friends at school and that makes me feel a little better. i guess i shouldn't be complaining; i might have gone to a school with no math team (*shudder*) and have never gone to math tournaments or go to a school where people are even dumber than they are here (note that when i say people in general are dumb i am neither being ignorant by meaning this generalization literally nor including my friends in it. i should say that people in general are ignorant...but then again so is everyone. so when i say "dumb" i mean not necessarily academically dumb but empty as people- they look cute on the surface but when you look inside them there's nothing there). ANYWAY, i'll still be counting down the days until the next tournament. and working math in the meantime, of course =)

Free, At Last
Ah, finally, the first day after vacation when i have the house to myself! Yesterday was a very bad day for math for me, so hopefully today will be better. In fact, i think i will go do some math right now to see if it is! If i learn more stuff then maybe, just MAYBE i'll get a POSITIVE score on the USAMO next yr. Jeez that was so depressing...oh well...i guess that only leaves more room for improvement =)

Green Cheese, Yellow Laces, Up and Down the Marketplaces
yesterday i went to see Tomb Raider with Jim and it was certainly nice to get out of the house once in awhile...and now i'm trying to solve IMO problems. if i'm lucky maybe i'll get a good idea for one of them. nah, today is not a good day for math...oh well...i might as well try.

Back, At Last
it's all like a dream now... yesterday (all 24 hours) was quite unpleasant due to the fact that it was all spent either in an airport or on an airplane or in a car, but i must admit that charles de gaulle (terminal 2E) is the most beautiful airport i have ever been in! anyways, i'm not quite ready to provide a full account of the trip just yet, but hopefully i will be soon (it's probably gonna be long and boring anyways...we had an adventure each day that is worth writing about but i'll probably just be writing it just for the sake of me remembering every little detail that probably nobody else cares about). one day i want to take a picture out of an airplane window; i finally got a window seat and spent a good deal of time looking outside. that high above the earth, it seemed like we were somehow detached from everything on the ground. up there, i saw that the center of the sky was black, much darker than it is from down here and i felt like if we only flew higher we would pass up above the earth into the infinite space outside it. lol, i bet this is sounding really corny right about now. i'm not used to writing in english, let alone writing eloquently in english anymore, but oh well =). i'll try to keep it short: i guess it was just an entire change of perspective; the world at that moment seemed so infinitely wide yet infinitely small and insignificant at the same moment. but of course now it's all the same as it was before, with everything here before me, real and tangible... now that i'm talking to ppl on AIM my mind is going back into automatic mode. it's like when i'm around most other people i feel like i run on a program that tells me how to act and what to think. thankfully, that's not ALL other people, just most of them =) anyways...that's about all i feel like saying right now. perhaps later i shall attempt to expound on some of the subjects i have been thinking about during the past few weeks. one more random remark: dominant (that's the brand) strings are awesome and they make my violin sound great...well it would sound great if i could play it well lol. i haven't played for the past 3 weeks and my fingers are stiff! that's all for now =)

Greetings from Abroad
hey everyone!!! this is certainly interesting...i'm in danger of being kicked off the computer. anyways, france was awesome!!! and i'm in romania right now, on a computer in my uncle's office. so i'll probably provide a full account of the trip when i come back, but now i'll say i'm certainly enjoying myself, looking at people and places. and of course, i brought my math stuff with me =) i wish i had some deep thought or other to post on here but if i had one then i forgot it. this vacations is much better than i thought it would be, lol.

Parting Words
this shall probably be my last entry before i leave for vacation. so the next time i update will probably be on july 25th =( anyways...i have nothing else to say, because nothing is really happening!

Boringness
yesterday i went to the mall with my mom and sylvia and that was all nice and boring. and then last night i solved a good math problem (after i had seen the solution- i'm really not that smart)...and this morning i finally understood some of the solutions to this yrs usamo questions...i'm getting better. then this morning we went to the avenue and my mom bought sylvia yet another pair of shoes and after that we went to the park. jeez my life is so boring. i better stop now...this site should only contain worthwhile entries. and as entries come, this one was entirely pointless. at least the format for this site is coming along nicely =)

blah
hm...i'm feeling a little bit better today. at this time tomorrow it'll have been a month since i was on the arml bus...oh man this is depressing. i can't believe an entire month has passed since arml. and what have i spent it doing? well, some math, and i've improved significantly on olympiad-style problems although i still suck at geometry. anyways, today it's hot and yucky and i'm bored...well, this morning i solved some good math problems! i thought i was good at inequalities tho; yet i was proved wrong. i couldn't work ANY of the inequality questions on the files i had downloaded. maybe i shall go look at the solutions now in hopes of learning how to do them. blah.

Come, Enter the Forest
argh...blogger sucks so i shall be moving my blog to this site and HOPEFULLY this will work out all right...only recently have i realized how dependent i've become on my blog and how much i need to update...it makes me feel like someone cares about my life =) anyways, here are a couple entries i wrote to be posted on blogger but didn't get to, from yesterday and today: Thursday 6/26 (i think) So today I met jim for lunch. ( I’m writing this in microsoft word which is correcting all my capitalization errors) and it was fun! So I actually got to Cox Hall (where I had arranged to meet him) about 15 minutes early, at 12:15 and sat on a bench and started to play blackjack. Of course, the cell phone won, 19-13, and by that time I was quite bored anyway, and the sun was getting uncomfortably hot. At 12:27 I received a call from Jim…of course, he was lost…I had told him that Cox Hall was on Asbury Circle. Unfortunately, Asbury Circle was a long road and he and I were at opposite ends of it. So he was like "which way do I go??" and I replied "go towards the bridge! Go West! Go towards the Whitehead building!" but he didn’t know which way any of those were so I ended up taking a 15-minute walk up to the other end of Asbury Circle, laughing because of the whole absurdity of the situation. I was talking to him on a cell phone (comment: it’s always weird when you’re talking to someone on a cell phone but that person is in your sight and not far away, like across the street as jim was right then. And it’s strange how you’re talking to that very person who’s standing right there; when I talk on the phone I always picture the person far away) and when I got to the intersection where he said he was I didn’t see him so I was like "uhhhh, jim?" Then he came to me from across the street and we started walking back to Cox Hall. By that time it was getting REALLY hot outside and I was beginning to wish I had worn a tank top and shorts instead of jeans and a t-shirt…and walking shoes too, lol. So then we ate lunch and talked about various things and people which was quite entertaining. Jim’s a fun guy to talk to! I mean, we never have really deep convos or anything but I feel like he’s a good friend and one that I can talk to and feel at ease. We discussed the pope math tournament (which is gonna be awesome!), math class in general, people we knew, colleges, other classes, how much school sucks, etc. then my mom called and asked me to get her some lunch so we had to walk all the way back to Cox Hall and then back to her lab to drop it off. After that we walked around, and jim spent most of that time telling me how he really didn’t wanna go back to the lab where he was volunteering cuz he didn’t wanna do any more pointless experiments that never worked. Eventually, we reached the building where he worked and he was like "bye…now I’m gonna spend the rest of my afternoon doing pointless stuff…." By THAT time, I was sweating profusely because of the heat and just wanted to get back inside a building with a/c. And then, foolishly, I took the stairs up to the 4th floor where my mom’s lab was, despite that fact that my feet were hurting badly and I was red-faced from the intense heat. So when I got back to the lab I sat down on the couch and stared into space! Then I worked some more math problems (I’ve spent 2 and a half hours on math today, all at the lab and solved 2 problems!) which involved some very confusing sums and weird vectors used in inequalities. We were supposed to leave at 3:45 to get to my 4:30 orthodontist appointment in time…but we ended up leaving at 4:20, lol. And the traffic was horrible, of course, so we ended up getting to the orthodontist at 4:55, supposedly 5 minutes before they were gonna close. Unfortunately, I did get a new retainer. However, I’m kind of annoyed that I have to pay for this stupid stinky piece of plastic and metal that I have no intention of wearing. No way I’m gonna wear that!!! My teeth have had a month and a half to move already, so they should be done by now…oh well. It’s only 180 dollars :D. Right now I am sitting at my computer and it is 10:10 PM and I know the first 78 digits of pi. 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208. I hope that’s right =) Anyways, that was rather…random. I’m getting pretty bored. And yes, I agree with tia in regard to my ability to tell whether or not a guy likes me; I am very very bad at that and I know it. But that’s just cuz of self-doubt. all right…blogger really sucks. They have this stupid new thing where they have an "improved" version of blogger which my computer can’t load. All I see on the page is html, no real website format…so of course there’s nothing to click on and no blog I can edit. This sucks! Only now have I realized how much I’ve depended on blogger to be able to let out my feelings without fear of having them discovered… oh man I am really really hungry right now…