Maths Is Actually Useful And Applies To Other Areas Of My Life? No WAY...

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Pre-Calculus was still a complete and utter waste of my time, but now at least I have enough maths skills to realise that the productiveness of my day is always indirectly proportional to the number of hours I sleep (fulfilment and personal sense of achievement goes up as sleep goes way, way down). Unfortunately I still can't seem to grasp the concept of addition, as I haven't been able to make my unconscious hours add up to the required 8 per day for about a week now. Although I'm using up three packs of tissues a day and the circles under my eyes make me appear more suited to a Michael Jackson music video than Spanish ab initio, I'm still finding it hard to justify actually going to bed when my days without sleep are as memorable as yesterday. I tied my alarm clock to the side of my head so that I would wake up instantly at 5 in the morning, allowing enough time to pile on four pairs of leggings under my flannel pajama trousers, prepare a feast of Nutella, biscuits, apples, Greek ygurt with honey, and hot coffee with the other five members of our groggy early-morning pilgrimage, squash on my huge furry hat to distract from my severe bedhead, and head up to the watch tower to celebrate Josh's birthday at the 6:28 a.m. sunrise. It was so incredibly more than worth the effort, and at exactly 6:28 a.m. by Eli's watch which means officially that the BBC weather reporters do actually tell the sun when to come up. It was so mesmerisingly beautiful that we would have stayed up there for hours, that is if it hadn't been so windy that two pieces of bread and -oddly enough - a spoon blew away and got stuck in the top of a tree, and if it hadn't been so cold that the Nutella froze. Seriously now, when the Nutella freezes the party's over. We went back to the house in a haze of sun- and sugar-induced euphoria, finding it impossible to sleep despite our complete happy exhaustion. After two hours of copying Chemistry notes for my first class tomorrow (life without Physics is all rainbows and baby lambs and butterflies whose acceleration per wingbeat no longer needs to be calculated!), Natalie and Rosie rescued me from Death By Seclusion Indoors On a Gorgeous Day by announcing their plans for a picnic on the second lawn. It was my second glorious sunny feast of the day, complete with ridiculous barefoot fencing matches with Nat's carrots and ultimate (ultiwheat?) Frisbee with a humorously stale slice of bread (hey. it didn't go to waste). Usually I'm good with transitions, but blame the lack of sleep - I cannot possibly find a way of connecting our epic food fight with playing the oboe in an experimental gamelan ensemble music workshop two hours later, which gave me lots of ideas on how to work around/avoid the demands of the Music IB. Write three five-minute pieces, you say? Well, I'm sorry, I can't give you the score for the last two Mr. International Baccalaureate Examiner, because you see they are 'experimental' and 'modern' and I believe that actually writing down the notes is really just another overused trademark of the past...either that, or I could just surprise them with some insanely catchy electronica dance mix, as the four hours of thudding bass from prom is still throbbing through my brain. Yes, prom, that defining American high school experience I missed which came back to haunt me in the best possible way last night, as I discovered that the only way to enjoy any deeply-rooted tradition is not to take it too seriously. Henrik and I gave each other corsages of daffodils from under the tree just outside the house and then proceeded to dance like absolute maniacs under the high 16th-century stone ceiling of the Bradenstoke Hall for about 230 minutes straight (again with the maths). They say that William Randolph Hearst used to have his huge Hollywood parties there (on the 4th of July, just to annoy the English) and all due respect to Charlie Chaplin and Bing Crosby but I'm pretty sure that St Donats has never experienced such a maelstrom of movement madness before. If we recognised a song we instantly came up for a theme for it - 'The Dying Ballerina', 'Wild Rave At The Mime Convention', and 'Racing Chipmunks' to name a few - and simply went crazy. The soles of my green suede stilettos are almost entirely worn through and the balls of my feet are still aching, but it was all worth it (however I'm still glad to be sitting at a computer for library service right now). Let e represent effort, t represent time, o represent unparalleled opportunity, i represent inhibitions, and J represent complete and simple joy, not to mention actual pride when I look back over my week to find that I do really have wonderfully memorable things to write about on my travel blog:

o(et- i) = J

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