Grades

Grades always give me trouble lately. I feel like I was kind of born with all the knowledge I needed up until 6th grade or something, because up until mid-7th grade, I never had to show effort. I'm lucky I wasn't like that up till 8th grade, because these last 2 years have given me time to straighten myself up. I've had to learn how to study later than everyone because I never had to study before this. So, high school should be a breeze up till sophomore year. During sophomore year I'm gonna be suicidal. It's probably inevitable. Every genius I know was suicidal during sophomore year. I don't know why. Maybe it's just the year that people kinda give up? I don't know. Whatever. I'll make it through.

We had English finals today. They were harder than I thought. I was a bit distracted. I used a story that I didn't study for, because I couldn't remember the name of the main character of the story I studied for. Of all the things I studied for the story "The Contender", themes, plot, etc., I never thought to memorize the main character's name. I had a few names in my head but was anxious and didn't want to botch the name and ruin the essay, so I used a story I didn't study for. The whole grammar stuff was easy. I'm a blogger, coder, and redditor. If I didn't have grammar, I would have almost nothing. I actually didn't read two of the books fully either, so I think my grades in the class are pretty awesome. Since the final counts for 1/5 of the grade and I got to choose what I used, I think I passed that pretty easily.

Social Studies finals tomorrow. It also happens to be the last day of school. Social Studies is too easy for me. It's just memorizing facts and memorizing them in chronological order. I'm good at memorizing things. I memorized 50 something digits of pi for pi day (3.14, March 14th) in math class. I almost won, but got second place because some curses go here girl memorized more than me. Still, no one came close to me. The closest was below half of my amount. I still feel accomplished.

So yeah, grades. They're important. They determine where people go, who they interact with, what they do, what they CAN do, etc.. Some people say, "oh, grades are just a number, they don't express anything about anyone." While I don't think grades can say how smart someone is, they do say something about them. They say how responsible a person is. How consistent a person is. Intelligence alone can't be measured properly, but consistency combined with responsibility are obviously the closest things we've figured out how to measure so far. The SAT score and stuff is different. That doesn't measure responsibility or consistency. It measures retention in my opinion. How much can a given student retain from an SATPrep book? How much vocabulary? Of course, that's all just a silly naive 13 year-old's opinion. If you know what I mean.

Genius

I once read a series called the "Genius Wars". It was great. There's very few books that include anything computer-related, and there's very few that include anything that's not first grade level computer stuff. This book suited me perfectly, but there was one part that I loved because it described me so much, and made me hate myself.

It was a point in the book where Cadel (the main character, who happens to be an amazingly genius teenage hacker) was feeling particularly sad because he was pretty antisocial. In the bathroom, there were two boys trying to make a small bomb out of something (nothing serious, something that would explode and liquid would fly everywhere). Cadel then showed them how to make it 10 times better. He should have just walked away and accepted that geniuses are not accepted in society. Instead, he basked in the glory of having impressed two people who were far less smart than him, and whose opinion would mean nothing to him for the rest of his life. So, while he was basking in this social acceptance/impressiveness, he realized that he could just keep impressing people and he would be socially accepted for the rest of his life. After he talked to his psychologist about it (who happened to be the protagonist, but also Cadel's father... it's a REALLY good story), his psychologist told him that true geniuses are not accepted in society, because no one understands them properly.

I feel the same way about geeks. Even nerds (yes, there is a DIFFERENCE) have their own little society. Geeks? They're few and far apart (at least, in my age/year/place/life), so there's no group. Geeks are the ones who have spent their whole lives online. I know a few semi-geeks at my school, but gamers don't count. Gamers are the ones who yell "l0l n00b!" at their screen after dying 4 times in a row in Black Ops. 13 year old gamers are the worst kinds of people to deal with. 13 year old PC gamers are a little more acceptable, but they need to have memorized the Fibonacci Sequence up to at least 144, pi to at least 3.141592653589, or semi-know a programming language and how to use it. Otherwise, they're unbearable too. Where was I...? Oh, yeah.

I know no real geeks at my school. I know wannabe geeks, I know /b/ros, I know gamers, nerds, etc. but no geeks. No one who can program, no one who enjoys a computer challenge, no one who has ever encrypted anything in BASE64, no one who has used a keylogger (sorry!), no one who knows what RAM is/does, no one who can tell what 1000 is in binary, etc. I'm not trying to say I'm the only geek, but what I'm insinuating or implying is that I AM THE ONLY GEEK.

Therefore, my level of social acceptance is really low unless I start basking in those moments when I impress people. I hate impressing people though, because then

1. They take you for granted sometimes. Oh yeah, he did that one cool thing, but he can't do anymore.
2. You start making a name for yourself, but you're still just that one kid who can do that one thing with the computer thingy
3. I realize, "Hey. This will mean nothing to me next week, next month, next year, next decade, etc. It only means something to me in this moment. Why am I trying to impress this stranger again...?"
4. Then I realize, "Oh, it's because there's no other way I can bring up a conversation with anyone because they talk about stuff like sports/normal people things and I just say "...k."
5. Then I realize, "If we had a geek here, I could talk about anything/everything to them, but we don't, so I can't."

So, yeah. Basically my points are these:

• Social acceptance
• it's fucking HARD if you're a geek

DAHS.

DAHS = Division Avenue High School. Yeah. I'm going there. Soon. It's exciting. It's getting me to type in short, quick bursts (and talk the same way) whenever I talk about it. High school! I've read up on it, online. People have posted things like "you don't realize how much middle school sucks till you reach high school" and other stuff. That excites me, too. It's like, wow! High school! That's the place where things happen! That's the place! Anyways, I was visiting their website.

http://www.levittownschools.com/dahs/.

It looks terrible right now. Not gonna lie. I might work on it this summer. Even if I can't use PHP/JS that well yet, I might as well just make some new art for the pages in PhotoShop or something. More on that later, because I don't want to talk about it and then not do it or something.

So, yeah. High school! The journey starts soon. Feels strangely like the beginning of a Pokemon game. Where Oak gives you the first pokemon of your life and you're like "Holy crap!" and then you start your journey. That's what this feels like. I'm relatively happy with my life right now. You may or may not be able to tell by my choice of words and phrases and things. w00t. High school. Division Avenue High School. The Division Blue Dragons! Well. Back to fixing my computer. It's not booting up. Gonna reinstall windows. Hopefully this reinstalling of Windows will be better than my last time. Alrighty then. Back to work!

School + Whatver Else Was On My Mind When I Wrote This

Wow. Just found out my blog isn't blocked at school. May or may not actually make use of this. People behind me are playing cards and laughing. About 75% of the kids in 8th grade are on a school field trip, to Washingon D.C. That means

// okay. So I was in class, and apparently blogging isn't allowed.
// ( it is, but our substitute was kinda harsh )
// I'm gonna continue the story from my current perspective.
// it's half an hour after me getting kicked off the class computer.
// I asked to go to the library. I'm currently typing this on a school library computer.
// anyways, continuing story now.

That means people who didn't go on the trip got grouped together, and now we're going from class to class just chilling. Some are playing cards, some are cursing out the teacher (not gonna go too far into detail, but that was hilarious), and some are watching wrestling matches online (he got kicked of the computer for this too, at the same time I did). Our anonymous teacher (I'm not gonna call anyone out online) was a bit angry at some of the kids in our class, and she didn't seem to be very happy in general. That was possibly the most hilarious 42 minutes of my life.

I'm gonna go play some online games now (I don't know why I said go play, considering I'll still be sitting in the same spot and fully able to keep blogging), because I can't execute any code on these computers besides javascript in the browser (and that's only entertaining the first few times, and then you show it to one person who shows it to everyone and it's not impressive to anyone anymore :( ). The end of that last sentence was confusing because I had a frowny face and a close paren really close to each other. But yeah, most coding related websites are blocked as well (codeacademy is actually the only one that came to mind, because it's the only "coding" site I've tried to go on in school). Some people ask me why I don't just bypass security (it's actually really easy, the school doesn't know much about Tor or booting into Linux or web proxies (werll okay they know about them but it's easy to take the source code for one and upload it to your own website)), but I hate going through all the trouble when it takes 5 hours to load a page. If I just wait until I get home, I have unlimited access to anything on the internet which is amazing for me. I'm surprised my blog wasn't blocked (well the actual blog is, but the dashboard is fine, which is why I can post this.)

So this is probably my conclusion. I felt like writing one this time; normally I don't. I'm gonna think of a really deep quote to end this with.
"They don't think it be like it is, but it do." - Oscar Gamble
(Wow I can't believe I remembered the guy's name) (I promise I didn't google it this time)

GGWP.

High School

Hopefully I can look back at this in high school and be like, "Wow. I was naive, but I was right about a lot of the things." I also sent an e-mail to my future self. I recommend the site Future Me, I used it to send myself a letter one year into the future. Anyways, here's a few expectations for high school that I have right now:

• I'm not gonna like Piano. I currently think it'll be a lot more fun than Cello, but I feel like I'm gonna regret it the same way I regret Cello now. Hopefully, I'll like it better.
• Computer Programming I will be easy for the first few weeks, then start to get challenging. I have some experience with Computer Programming, but we might learn some of the more technical stuff in the class. Also, I have no idea what language/languages we'll use. If it's VB.NET, I'm dropping out of the class. Hopefully, Python or C (or Java, but that's unlikely).
• Math will be better. Geometry sounds easier than Integrated Algebra. That's saying something, because Integrated Algebra is pretty easy. I like Math, it's fun.
• A few of my friends will grow apart from me. It's inevitable.
• I'll make a few new friends, as well.

The Hobbit

We're reading The Hobbit for English. Good book, I like that we're reading fantasy and not something like Pudd'nhead Wilson. High school English sounds boring; everyone talks about stuff like "Ugh I have to read (book title goes here)."

High school. I'm gonna write a looooong blog post about that.