Two More Days!

Some of the news feeds that I read daily are Lifehacker, Unclutterer, and Zen Habits. I find this type of stuff interesting, but as much as I have pretended to be all organized and such, I really haven't been lately. I realized how pathetic I was, so I decided to optimize my life and get back on track as a good student and a real human being. You can learn quite a bit from those web blogs, and instead of me usually going "hmm, that's interesting" I actually took some of the stuff I read and applied it (oooh!).

• Today I read about a neat trick on Lifehacker that allows you to embed a to-do list right into your desktop. I thought it was pretty cool and useful, so I tried it out. Much better than notes jotted down on random sheets of paper in my backpack that rarely see the light.
• For the past 5 days, I have gone to sleep at a consistent time. Though 5 hours of sleep isn't really adequate according to blah blah, its WAY better than the 1.5 - 4 hours that I'd been getting for the past month. Going to bed at 12 is still pretty difficult.
• In addition to going to sleep at a reasonable hour, in those 5 days, I didn't press the 'Snooze' button on my alarm clock. I found that if I actually wake up on time, and move at a reasonable pace, I won't have to rush to do everything in the last 5 minutes before walking out the door. I also found that my cell phone alarm is a minute or two faster than my alarm clock, so I often end up waiting for my secondary alarm to go off as a signal to "GET UP!"
• My backpack has been horrible this entire school year. I thought that cramming a semester's worth of work into 1 or 2 plastic folders would do the trick, but it failed miserably. The result was random pieces of paper in my book bag, getting folded, crushed, and lost. This afternoon, I found a binder, punched holes in everything that needed holes, and neatly organized all of the work that was in those poor folders.

It's a pretty refreshing feeling, being on top of everything and such, but there's still a ton more that I need to work on. I have a really huge problem with falling asleep as soon as I get home, and then I can't wake up until 7pm, and then I can't seem to do anything productive for 2 hours, and then it's like not until 10pm where I actually start working on homework. I wonder what's worse, staying awake and being cranky and tired from 4pm-11pm, or sleeping and being cranky for 1 hour, and then cramming in work from 10pm-1am?

This week is much smoother than last week. With like 4 tests yesterday (before the exams!) and a bajillion and 92 vocabulary words to cram, it didn't seem like this week would shape up too well. Fortunately, it looks to be going a lot better, perhaps because I brought my easy button!

The AP English Lang midterm exam wasn't really that hard. It was the test that I was most concerned about and now it's over! There were about 80 vocabulary words, 6 short-response essays, 6 grammar questions, 8 reading comprehension questions, and 2 essays--one from a passage, and then other from the 2006 AP Exam. I took her suggestion and started with the vocabulary, gaining stamina and whizzing through the 4 or so pages of just vocabulary. I got through the rest of the test with ease, until I realized that I only had the last essay left, with only 25 minutes remaining to read the essay that I was supposed to be analyzing and write my own essay on the rhetorical strategies used. For once, I knew EXACTLY how to write the perfect essay. Unfortunately, this perfect essay was only 3 paragraphs long because I ran out of time. Sucks. My heart was racing by the time the bell rang, because I squeezed in four more awesome sentences in like 30 seconds, but they're all to waste since the essay was missing about 3 more paragraphs to make it awesome. With 10 more minutes I could have finished it up, and in 15 minutes I could have done it beautifully. That was a lot for 2 hours.

One more day of exams to endure (tomorrow), another half-day of school (Thursday), and I'm free for Spring Break! I don't even know why they're making us come to school on Thursday, since that's when the teachers usually grade all of their exams if grades are due that afternoon. Nothing makes sense around here anymore...