levity | madness and irony and towers and fire

Only now do I understand people saying they can't post- or write- when they have the capacity to. It's different when you can't write since you don't have anything to write about, or you can't post since your computer slash Internet connection is broken.

I have everything to say and yet I can't say anything. I shall try my best.

Well, I'm not going to be the one to say that the past week was perfect. Rather the contrary, especially where Chemistry is concerned. Well, actually, only where Chemistry is concerned. And I'm supposed to be good at it... But it wasn't so terrbile it outweighed everything else. And for once in my life, Com. Sci. made me ecstatic.

Think of it this way. I'm the DL with the lowest average in my class, who got a 1.5 in Chem. and 2.25 in Com. Sci., and I- along with the rest of my class- was due to have two long tests one Friday. One of those tests was for Chem., and the other was for- you guessed it!- Com. Sci.. So I decided to concentrate on the Chem. test, since I wanted my Chem. grade to go up to a 1.25, and I reasoned that, based on experiment, no matter how hard I studied for Com. Sci. tests I ended up with scores that were just passing. As a result, I was hardly able to study for the Com. Sci. test.

I didn't think either of my tests would fare well. I forgot how to derive the formal charge of an atom, and I wasn't sure if my logic and syntax were correct, though they made sense to me (by "they" I mean my logic and syntax). I was partially right.

As of now, only two people in this world know of my Chem. score. That doesn't include me, since I'm not a person. One of those people is my Chem. teacher. The other is the classmate to whom all my scores are confided- you know who you are. Hi. And that's because I want to erase it from memory, I want that test to never have happened, as I always do when it comes to tests that don't score well, but this was very, very different, since I was supposed to be good at Chem., which meant I was supposed to get very, very high scores, which my score definitely was not.

And last Wednesday Sir Javier was saying that only three people in our class got the correct answer, and I was thinking, Oh great, that doesn't include me, of course, though it'd be nice if it did....

And Abby gave me my paper and I didn't want to look at it since I didn't want to learn that I failed yet another long test...

And I was one of the three. I got 10 out of 10 on that test, and yes, it was a long test, and yes, I still don't like programming, but that dislike has ebbed away a bit.Just a bit.

And for the first time! I passed two Algeb. tests in one quarter! For the past three quarters, I have been stuck with passing one test and failing the other. It's about time I broke that tradition. Though I might fail the achievement test, since I didn't study for it.

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We made a tower for Art, and when I say tower I use the term loosely. It was a crooked randomly-put-together weird-looking thing, and I was almost proud of it. We had spray-painted it blue the UB of the day of the contest- Friday- with help from Jan, and had gone through extreme pains (well, not really) fixing all its peculiar problems, with help from Sam and Jejo. No matter what we did, there was something wrong with it: the ping-pong ball always stopped in one area or another. We tried training the ball, treating it partly as a dog, partly as a human being. We taught it tricks (saying "play dead" always made it stop rolling, without fail), scolded it (that was mostly done by me), promised it things (it rolled all the way to the bottom of the tower with a time of 25 seconds when Abby promised to marry it)...

It was ridiculous.

I swear ping-pong balls have personalities. The ball I brought- the pink one with the design of a soccer ball- was rather like me: stubborn, untrainable, prone to stopping anywhere, and prone to taking shortcuts like jumping over the tower "walls" in order to finish quickly. Mina's ping-pong ball had no taste, according to Maricor. We had promised to marry it to different people in our group- Macoy, Chii, me- but it only worked when we'd said it would marry Abby. Then it refused to work afterwards since Abby said that under no conditions would she marry a ping-pong ball. I don't blame her- who would, and who on earth would agree to marry a ping-pong ball?- but did she have to say so in front of the ball?

My pink ping-pong ball ended up being passed around from group to group. It absolutely refused to cooperate with August (it is so awfully like me), and I had to lecture it in order for it to work when it was their turn. And Paeng's project was unique: it made use of hydraulics. It certainly made its mark: Paeng, Gabby, Bonggi, and Verge spilled water all over the flagpole area, kasi nabutas lalagyan nila ng tubig.

Sir Cipriano called our tower the Leaning Tower of Pisay. I'd pointed out that Galileo discovered free-fall motion with the help of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And I know I'm most likely no genius, but I can at least enjoy knowing physics, can't I?

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This week was also incredibly insane and at the same time annoying, thanks to August, and I can't say why since he doesn't want me to since he said it'd create controversy. I don't really care about what the general public thinks of me, but if he minds, then so will I.

I brought a box of matches to school, and kept threatening to burn stuff, and it was oddly nice to hear all the people telling me that bringing matches is "IR-able." It means they care.

I know what's wrong with bringing matches: I might set the school on fire. But I love fire. The way it dances around playfully and dies when you need it the most, the tricks you can play with it and the lives it can destroy, the way it can madly, mindlessly consume stuff, turning them into black dust that gives no resemblance to what it used to be. It is pure energy, fire is. It takes up no space and is not composed of any atoms, but its power is admirable.

"... my hopes are so high that your kiss might kill me.
so won't you kill me, so i die happy?
my heart is yours to fill or burst,
to break or bury, or wear as jewelry,
which ever you prefer..."
-Dashboard Confessional, Hands Down